Well, it finally (and I mean finally) happened.  Lucy pooped on the potty today.  Samantha only beat her to it by three days.  Yes, Lucy is 3 1/2, but we decided early on that we would not force potty training, but let it happen in Lucy’s own time.  At some point I made a foolish prayer for patience, and God has his own way of answering it.

It took a little longer that we were hoping.  She has a strong will-she’s been physically ready as far as we can tell for a long time, but always claimed that she wasn’t big enough yet.  But today she dissappeared into the bathroom, shut the door, and a few minutes later was shouting, “Mommy!  I pooped!”

Which usually does not bring joy to a mother’s heart, but today, it was wonderful.  We’re going out for ice cream as soon as Samantha wakes up from her nap to celebrate.

So there is some faint hope that I will have no one (or at least only one) in diapers before the next baby arrives.

And no, that doesn’t mean we’re pregnant.  Yet.  But hopefully that’s only a matter of time.  🙂

Meanwhile, Samantha hates her diapers, and urinated on the floor three times today.

You win some, you lose some, and some get, uh, “rained” out.

Well, five years ago today I was sharing a bath with my brand-new husband in romantic St. Francisville.  (Sorry if that falls in the TMI category, there is a reason, I promise!)  We had neither den nor nest for sleeping, nor little else except the Buick.

Tonight I was giving a bath to two beautiful little girls in our own house (sort of – I hesitate to call it “ours” until the mortgage is paid).  What a difference five years makes!

My dear husband, by the way, is canoe-camping with his Justice Walking boys.  You romantical-types may feel free to send him shaming emails, but it was an honest mistake.  He didn’t forget the date, he just made all the camping plans without ever once looking at the date he was planning.

At any rate, I think all this calls for some chocolate cake from Gambino’s.  Who’s with me?

But seriously, I did want to thank all of you who were there for us five years ago, and all the rest of you who have supported us since then.  We could not do it, I’m pretty sure, without the help and prayers of all our friends and family.

And one of these days, I’m going to get around to planting the sunflowers that little morning rain shower promised!  Somebody remind me early next spring!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mommies out there.  I hope you have a peaceful, love-filled day.  Here’s a Lucy quote to brighten (or not) your day.

Lucy: “Tell me about the chickens.”  (By which she means, the slightly gory story of how a chicken goes from the farm to our table.

So I do.  And I ask, “Does that make you want to eat a chicken?”

Lucy: “Yes!  I want to eat a chicken.”

Me (prepping her for the *eventual* move to a farm): “Would you like it if we raised chickens and killed them and ate them?”

Lucy: “Yes!  I want to kill a chicken!”

My grandmother lives on in this child.  Although, I’m not sure that she butchered chickens with quite this sort of relish.

Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day!

Lucy: “You sneaky little sister!”

as Samantha climbs on top of her in bed

It’s funny the positions you can be put in by little ones.  But it just shows why I prefer to do my grocery shopping early, when the store is empty, even though we usually don’t do it that way any more.

Samantha has added a number of words to her vocabulary lately, including cracker.  And she really likes crackers.  So when we went down that aisle on Tuesday, thank God at about 8:30 in the morning, she got very excited, and started shouting,

“Ca-ca!  Ca-ca!  Ca-ca!”

Happily, I’m not the only one with these sort of experiences.  Craig’s parents’ neighbors have a daughter right between Lucy and Samantha – she’s about 2 1/2 now.  And Jasmine’s dad took her to the store one afternoon, and she started shouting, all through the store, and could not be bribed or threatened to stop, “Daddy, I suck!  I suck!”

When he got out of the store (swearing that he would never bring her shopping again), he realized that she had gotten her hand stuck in the cart.  She was trying to say “stuck”.

And thus the running jokes begin.  Anyone care (or dare!) to share similar stories?

For once, the pause in posting wasn’t my fault!  Last Saturday Craig put insulation in our attic, and bumped something that killed the electricity in the room with the computer.  So that was finally fixed yesterday, when Craig was home in the morning when it was cool enough to get up in the attic again and fix it.  But now we’re functional again, anyway.

We’ve been busy in the garden, and I’ll have to put up some details and pictures sooner or later.  But the exciting thing, we realized last night, is the variety of foods we’ve had this week.  Almost all of which Lucy has at least sampled.  Many of which are things I’ve only started eating recently myself.  Here’s the list, at least what I can remember, from the last week:

radishes (and their greens) dipped in vinegar

head cheese

frog legs

sushi of various sorts

her first icee

fava beans

I think those are all the interesting things, but I thought it was an impressive list for a three-year-old.

I love the Latin with the double u’s.  And we had occasion over the past weekend to find out the real reason that we get Easter Monday off of school.  It’s to allow people with small children to recover from the Triduum.

Or not, since I think that’s probably just us.  But we survived it – two hours on Holy Thursday with an un-napped three-year-old, two hours Good Friday, and over three hours on Holy Saturday.  Here’s the blow-by-blow.

We arrived late for Holy Thursday, because we came straight from New Orleans at rush hour, straight from Craig’s FoodFast retreat at school (that means 50 or so high school students fasting and learning about poverty for 24 hours).  I cooked the closing meal, Hatian red beans for 50.  That is getting to be my specialty, if anyone needs catering in the near future.  (We made it for about 200 the Friday before – that’s another story!)

But anyway, we got there, parked in the boonies, and planted ourselves and our tired babies in a pew.  I’d been prepping Lucy for a couple of weeks about the people getting their feet washed and such, but we couldn’t see very well, and she was really too tired to care.  Samantha alternately climbed, fussed, and nursed the two hours away.  Then it was home to Nana and Papa’s to collapse, except collapsing doesn’t happen at grandparent’s houses, at least not right after you arrive, so we were up for  a little longer.

Friday brought sleeping relatively late and the (traditional?  I’m not sure) Good Friday fish fry at the Bakers’.  More fish, hush-puppies, fries, and the like that we could eat.  Then on to the Veneration of the Cross.  Samantha was very, very fussy, and I finally ended up nursing her in a side chapel.  Unfortunately, it was the crucifix chapel, and rather than bringing up a cross to the altar like I expected, the liturgical plan was to circle everyone through this very chapel to reverence the cross.  When I saw the altar servers and deacon headed my way, I had to very quickly detach sleeping Samantha and run for the pew.  As much as a person can run with a surprised, yet thankfully still sleeping, toddler in her arms, anyway.

But my close-escape was not the end of our trials.  As Craig came up to the chapel in the line (behind me unfortunately, so I didn’t get to see the festivities) Lucy, whom he was carrying, latched onto the wall with both hands and refused to let him enter the chapel.  (I don’t think “chapel” is really the best word for this space, now that I think of it, it’s really more of a nook, but that sounds funny to me.)  Lucy was apparently afraid of the crucifix, which was strange because the night before she had wanted to stay later so Craig could “show her Jesus”, but that was not about to happen during the silent watching after the Holy Thursday liturgy.  Anyway, Craig returned to the pew thwarted.  But yet, we survived and went home (well, to Craig’s parents’ home at least), again, to bed.

Holy Saturday dawned.  We made one excursion, then made sure there were naps all around.  (Lucy has been successfully avoiding them lately, but that was just not an option.)  We got all dressed up after a later-than-planned dinner and headed out.  Mass started at 8 PM.  We were as prepared as parents can be for such a thing – books, a lacing card for Lucy…but no snacks.  Well, we were almost as prepared as we could be.  The bonfire went well enough.  Lucy was interested, but Samantha was fussy.  But it wasn’t a big deal since we were outside.  The procession inside calmed her down for some reason, and God be praised, she nursed to sleep as soon as we got to the pew.  And slept through all the readings, the lights coming on, the Alleluia-ing, the Baptisms, and even the applause that went with them.  I didn’t get to see much since I spent the whole time sitting down, but I was so glad she slept.

Of course, she did wake up, as usual it seems, in time for the Eucharistic prayer, and so we spent the rest of the evening back and forth, in and out of the building.  There isn’t anywhere to hide a screaming infant in that church.  The final outburst, in the liturgical silence just before the closing prayer, was the loudest.  Father (apparently, I couldn’t hear it with the screaming in my ear as I rushed -again- for the door) mentioned that it sounded like a broken record, at which Samantha promptly changed her tone.  So she showed him.  Or something.

But we celebrated with cake and cheese cubes and broccoli and punch afterwards, and slept late on Easter morning.  We were tired.  It was so worth it.  I love the Easter Vigil.  I started going in middle school (or earlier?) when my mom was doing RCIA for children.  I got to hand the brand-new neophytes (is that redundant?) the towels after they were Baptized one year.  I have always loved the liturgy for this night, the fire and water, the litany of the saints, the lights coming on in the middle of the service.  The oil and the smiles on 10-year-old faces afterwards.  (And Fr. Tom does not spare the oil.  He slathers.  Even after they changed, the poor boys all had holy-oil cow-licks.)  St. Jean does beautiful liturgy, and it was a blessing to me, screaming baby and all, to experience it this year.  It was that little taste of the Holy that I miss sometimes now that I don’t get to daily Mass, or adoration, or those other quite times that I used to so often.  It was totally, entirely worth it.

Easter included an egg hunt at one neighbor’s house, and then Mrs. Mary Lou’s feast at the other neighbor’s house.  Many, many desserts were sampled.  A bunny had his tail straight-pinned on.  There was a pinata, but I missed that part.  Monday Craig and I had a movie date (finally cashing in one of our Christmas presents) and we drove home.  And today I finally finished unpacking.  We are nearly recovered.

Happy Easter!

Ah, Lucy.  Lucy was very wiggly last night.  She didn’t particularly want to go to sleep, but she laid down with Samantha and me and proceeded to wiggle her self to sleep.  After flopping, flailing kicking, blankets on, blankets off, and repeating it all several times, she curled up in a ball.  Then she pulled her head towards her knees.  And again.  Finally she was backwards in the bed, and she stretched out on her stomach.  I laughed, thinking she would right herself soon.

The next time I woke up, she was not only still backwards, but her feet were the only part showing out from the blankets where her head should have been.

And finally, this morning, there was a rustle under the blanket.  “Help!” weakly from near my feet.  I laughed again, and freed her from her soft prison.  And she went back to sleep, which is why I have time to write for the second day in a row.

Did I mention she still sleeps in our bed quite often?  Sometimes it’s worth the crowding.  I’d hate to have missed that.

Craig was pretty excited about his Whole Foods deli purchase. We brought it all home (going to Whole Foods is like a pilgramage – it’s forever away and only done on occasion when we’re feeling rich) and I heated up the roast. We started to eat, and Craig wondered out loud if it was cooked through when purchased, or if we should have cooked it more than the quick nuclear reheat. I asked him if he was sure this was meat.

Of course it was meat!  It was “field roast”.  What could roast be, besides meat?  Probably meat which lived in a field.  What kind of meat didn’t matter, it had looked good in the deli window.

I dug out the wrapper.  Field roast.  See for yourself: http://www.fieldroast.com/index.htm

And we laughed.  Well, I laughed.  Craig plotted his revenge, musing over whom might be the most likely victim for a mock-meat trick.  So watch out, all you carnivores, when you dine with us.  Consider yourself warned.

In an attempt to make up for the long, long silence, here are some pictures.  First, the “man pit” that Craig build over the old (dug out hole in the grass) fire pit.  It is now an oven and stove.  I picked up the brick off the curb, in my church clothes, no less.  Dad would be proud.

The roasted (in brick oven) vegetable quesidillas (cooked on brick stove) were really, really good.

We have done a little planting.  We’ve had several dafodills bloom, and the tulips and iris are ready to bust.

In other garden news, an orange bell pepper, orange mint, dill, lemon balm, dill, and chives are in the ground.  The lettuce which over-wintered is going crazy, and some of it tastes like bacon.  I don’t know what it is, because it’s from a mixed lettuce seed packet, and process of elimination hasn’t worked it out yet.  But it’s bacon-lettuce.  Who knew.

In Lucy news, she is fiesty as ever.  Wants to watch a movie every day, and rarely gets to.  But she likes “writing” scribbles and “reading” books she has memorized, or just looking at the pictures.  And she loves the zoo.

In Samantha news, she is getting the last four pesky teeth through.  She is running.  And she has a nice long list of words now, including Da, dog (which also means cat), doll, bowl (which also seems to mean spoon and basket), Papa, Ma, banana (which is sometimes “ba” and sometimes “nana”), ball, no, diaper, book, door, open, hot…those are all that come to mind at the moment.  She has been walking around the house “reading” books out loud over the last couple of days, which is really, really cute.

So that’s the update.  Craig’s working a lot, and I spent the day baking.  Which reminds me, happy St. Joseph’s Day.  Here’s the bread I made:

It’s supposed to look like St. Joseph’s beard.  Judge for yourself.  I also made egg-free chocolate chip cookies (surprisingly delicious, once you make it past the cookie dough that acts like toasted bread crumbs), vegetable broth, two pans of bread pudding, and dinner today.  I wish I could say days like this were the reason I haven’t written in so long, but it’s really been more a combination of distraction and laziness.  So hopefully more interesting things will happen soon for me to share with you, and I’ll feel like sharing it.  In the mean time, here’s a pic of the girls with their friend Cylis to hold you over.