Lilia’s little hannies had been getting so cold on our walk to daycare in the mornings and the other week they turned blue so we picked up a hat and mitten set and she’s pretty smitten with her mittens!

Lilia started a new gymnastics class a couple weeks ago. This one is cheaper, closer to home, an hour later and on Saturday instead of Friday. It has a lot more kids and a really exciting circle time at the end of each session which I think may be Lilia’s favorite part. We do miss some of the equipment, especially the giant trampoline and the one on one attention we got from our awesome instructor Jessica, but Lilia is still having lots of fun, so that’s all that matters.

Lilia has been enjoying eating Japanese Udon Noodle Soup and drinking green tea out of a real tea cup.

I’ve been drinking a lot more tea in this cooler weather and to cope with my never ending cough and Lilia has been wanting to join me. So off to the Japanese dollar store we went to get her a tea cup just her size that I wouldn’t cry over if it broke.

She’s quite tickled with it!

I’ve been using a lovely tea pot I’ve had for ages, Sarah gave it to me back in college when we were living in the house together. I’ve really only used it for decoration until now but it’s been nice to brew a full pot with just one bag of green tea so it’s not too strong and it stays warm while I give her small amounts so it doesn’t spill. It’s like a real life tea party!

Lilia has been the biggest little helper lately. This morning I decided to make and freeze double batches of whole wheat waffles and whole wheat pancakes to help speed up our morning routine. I usually have one or the other frozen and ready to go for quick breakfasts, but we’d eaten through our supply and needed to restock.

Lilia came in and made it clear she wanted to help. I sorta thought I’d have a few more months, if not a year, before she wanted to help out in the kitchen, but I decided to roll with it, and I couldn’t believe what a great helper she was.

She listened and followed directions so well, and the only real mess that was made was my fault, not at all Lilia’s-go figure! I can be a bit of a control freak, so as proud as I was of Lilia for being such a great helper, I was also proud of myself for letting her get in there and not stressing about making a mess or ingredients being measured perfectly.

She was so proud of herself for what she could do and kept saying Lilia did that! She also ate at least 3 waffles and then had a couple pancakes for dessert, a lot even for my bottomless pit. They must have tasted especially good since she knew she had helped to make them.

So, we’re still working out the kinks with my new work schedule, but hey, it’s the first week, what did we expect? Wednesday’s are a work from home day. The plan seems great in theory. The nanny comes to pick Lilia up just before 8, I log on and work from 8am-2pm. Lilia comes home at 2pm for stories, a mommy snuggle and her nap. She sleeps for a couple of hours giving me some time to work on things around the house or even relax for a bit. Then Lilia wakes up and plays with me for a couple hours before Daddy gets home at 6 and I log back in to work from 6-8pm.

Did I mention most of my direct team is located in Cape Town, South Africa so my hours are a little wacky? It seems difficult right now, but I honestly believe these odd yet somewhat flexible hours (i.e. I have some wiggle room to alter them if they just aren’t working) will work well for our family. They are, after all, the reason I only needed 6 more hours of child care when transitioning from a part time contract position to a full time position.

But I digress, now you know the plan, here’s what really happened. Our nanny showed up about 15 minutes late on her first day (ack!!), between 7:45 and 8:15 Lilia pooped 3 times, in 3 different diapers. I kid you not, she literally crapped all over my morning.

Work went smoothly until about 1:45 when the one other team member on duty with me found a big issue that was affecting the community, and the rest of our team wouldn’t be awake for another 6 or 7 hours.

The nanny brought Lilia back about 15 minutes late, I assume to make up for her late arrival, but she had fallen asleep in the car which is a near guarantee with my kid that she will wake up in the transfer to her crib and will not take a nap.

As suspected, she did wake up in the transfer, we could not find her sleep loves while she was still groggy and it did look like a nap was doomed. Oh well what can you do?

We played for a bit then read stories and she went into her crib easily where I listened to her sing and talk to herself for two hours. She wasn’t crying and was at least getting some good rest time so I left her. I was about to go and get her around 4 when she fell silent. She napped, and napped, and napped. At 6pm, she was still napping. At 8pm she was still napping. By 9pm, she was still asleep and we decided we better get ourselves to bed cuz there was no telling what time of the night she’d be up. At 5am we heard her singing and talking in her crib. She carried on like that for about an hour on and of until I went to get her a little after 6am because I missed my kid. When did she turn into such a self soothing, sleeping beauty?

Today I started a new full time job with Yola. I’ve been so privileged to work part time as the community manager for Songbird for the past year. I enjoyed becoming a part of their community and the flexible schedule allowed me so much more time with my little bug. It is time I will always cherish both as a mom and as a period of career growth. It helped me to understand my strengths and marketable skills as well as confirming for me that I can strike a strong balance of motherhood and career, but it does take some work.

Yola supports my desire for work life balance and will allow me to telecommute two days a week. Lilia will stay in her current daycare 3 days a week, and will have a nanny 1 day a week. She’ll still have 3 days a week with her mommy or daddy, and on Sunday, she’ll get us both! Not too shabby a ratio, right?

I had my first day with Yola today, and I’ve never had a warmer welcome at a new job. Everyone seems so genuinely enthusiastic about their position and the company and the energy is contagious. I know this is the perfect place to move back into a full time role and I can’t wait to see where it leads.

Several months ago we sat Lilia down with a couple pictures of costumes and asked her to pick what she wanted to be for Halloween.

We were sorta rooting for the bee, and in the end we got what we were looking for but in retrospect I have to admit her initial selection was the pixie and if we had paid more attention to her we might have had a smoother Halloween.

She seemed totally behind the idea in theory but when it came time to suit up the day before Halloween for an event at the El Cerrito Community Center, she looked more like an angry hornet than a bumble bee.

I figured if we wanted Halloween to be any fun at all I needed to come up with an alternate costume and fast. We got her a cowboy hat as a souvenir at the Louisiana State Fair that she’s been really into, so we whipped her into a cowgirl and she was a much happier camper. Yee Haw!

I should preface this by saying, we made it home safely, hooray! We had a wonderful visit but there’s no place like home <clicks heels>!

After a three and a half hour drive through pockets of pouring rain and a quick lunch with one of Adam’s old school friends (thanks again Ameen!) we arrived at DFW. We dropped off our rental car with ease, caught a bus to the terminal, breezed through airport security and got to our gate with plenty of time to spare only to find our flight was delayed an hour. Not the end of the world, and nothing our super trooper, traveling toddler couldn’t handle. We ran down her battery as best we could and when they finally began boarding our flight we got her all strapped into her handy dandy traveling car seat and waited for the pre-boarding of people traveling with small children.

We waited, and waited and waited.

Not only did they never offer a pre-boarding option for people with small children we were the last group to board. The flight, thus the overhead compartments, was completely full and the boarding agent and flight attendants were rude and anything but helpful as we tried to squeeze our way to our seats with Lilia passed out in her car seat and find a place for our bags without completely stopping the flow of traffic through the aisle. Somehow she managed to sleep through it all and we finally got someone to help us find a place for our bags, though she was clearly put out.

It’s possible we may not have been so put off by the experience had we not just had such an enjoyable trip on our American Airlines flight from SFO to DFW last week. On that flight we were pre-boarded allowing us to get Lilia and ourselves settled without affecting other passengers boarding and thus were enabled to be the savvy, self sufficient parents traveling with toddlers flight attendants dream of. Still the flight attendants on that flight were sweet and attentive and I’m confident they would have given us a hand had we needed one.

So American, what’s up with that?

In between meeting lots of relatives, we took Lilia to the Louisiana State Fair where she got to check out all sorts of cool animals she’s never seen before like camels, wallabies, alligators, a kangaroo and a zebra. We enjoyed some of her old favorites like goats, giraffes, and an elephant, and we were able to pet and feed a llama.

Still the highlight for her may well have been the agriculture display. There was a coloring station where we rubbed crayons over plates to create leaf art and matched them to leaf posters of native trees.

A bin was set up with potatoes, carrots and onions buried in the “ground” and scoops were provided for the kids to dig them out as you would if they had actually been growing there.

They also had several vegetable bins where you could see what lettuce, green beans, tomatoes and other vegetables looked like growing on the vines. We were all particularly impressed by the broccoli display. Lilia is a fan of broccoli “trees” so I pointed it out to her and she checked it out excitedly. I was trying to get a picture of her with it, so I went around to the other side of the bin and she started to follow me so I asked her what it smelled like to get her to stay a moment longer. She sniffed it and I asked her if she liked broccoli and next thing I knew, she took a big ol’ bite of broccoli right off the display stalk, chewed it and swallowed it! We were all a bit too far to stop her, besides, she was fast and as Adam pointed out I was more concerned with getting the picture than protecting the display. Oops! Sorry kid, but don’t eat the broccoli!

Lilia has met about half of her southern family, eaten her way through lots of barbecue and enjoyed both rain and shine. She is in love with her older cousin Jacob, and her baby cousin James is quite taken with her. Aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins are all pretty smitten too.

The weather forecast led me astray when it said 70’s and sunshine all week. That’s what we had for our first day but it rained all day today, and hard. Apparently that’s what we have to look forward to tomorrow too. Sadly I didn’t pack for inclement weather so we just had to run back and forth between the car all day and found Sci-Port, a really fun Children’s Science Museum, in downtown Shreveport that kept us both occupied and dry.

We had big family dinners at Aunt Debbie’s house the last two days. Sunday was so much fun and so delicious, we just decided to do it all over again today, thanks in large part to a butternut squash. I went to the store our first morning here to get some things for Lilia like milk, cheese, fresh fruit and veggies. One thing I came back with was a butternut squash and just about everyone who laid eyes on it said what in the world is that, and what are you going to do with it? No joke everyone came back for dinner tonight to see what I could do with that darn squash. No pressure. I tossed cubes of the squash with red potatoes, red onions, red, yellow and orange bell peppers, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and roasted it all in the oven and they just loved it. They told me afterward, we were skeptical because we don’t like [fill in any of the vegetables listed above] but gee that was good. Score one for vegetables!