with a tiny baby in my care, micah has made leaps and bounds in the things she's able to do for herself - out of necessity, i suppose. such as getting herself dressed and putting on her socks and shoes, using the bathroom, getting a snack out of the fridge, picking up toys and books and putting them where they belong. these are things i mostly did for her, or at least helped her do, before i started caring for baby lina. it's neat to realize she can handle these tasks on her own! she is getting so big. i did not imagine what a huge help she would be to me with lina. she gets lina's bottles out of the fridge for me, she brings me diapers and wipes, and she sits and smiles and talks to lina in her swing while i'm nursing or changing rowan. she's amazing! these are things she couldn't do for me when rowan was born, because she was too young. micah is coming up on 4 years, which is how old i wanted her to be when we had our second child. i realize that would've been easier in many ways... but i still wouldn't change anything about our family. : )

i've been working really hard with micah on not telling us "no!" when we ask her to do something. we ask her to say "okay, mama" or "okay, daddy" instead, and do what we've asked. we tell her, she can always ask us why, and we'll gladly tell her. sometimes this backfires, though; we'll ask her to do something, or to stop doing something, and before actually doing/stopping... she wants us a thorough explanation of why we're asking. we try to be patient and give her the best explanation we can, without ever resorting to "because we said so!" so far, it's working. once she hears our reasons, she complies. a little later, we'll tackle the issue of doing it right then.

the other thing i'm working on really hard with her is not pushing, hurting, or grabbing from rowan. just a little while ago, he started to walk off with her art notebook, and she pinched the skin on his chest so hard that she drew blood! she gets an immediate removal from the room and anything fun for that. i've been making her time-outs super short, about 30 seconds. i pick her up, take her out of the room to a time-out spot, get in her face and talk to her very sternly about what just happened. i ask her to say "okay, mama" if she understands, then we get up. she has even started walking towards me to be picked up as soon as she does something she knows is worthy of time-out. this seems to work for her, right now. for the minor offenses, i just hold her in my lap for a bit and talk to her.

at the grocery store last night, they did not have haagen-dazs dulce de leche ice cream. i almost cried. so i got my second favorite, coffee.