Cerin Amroth

My quality of life has taken a definite upswing lately.  Two main reasons:

Ella is now able — and takes delight in — opening the door on her side of the minivan, closing it behind her, and buckling herself into her booster seat.  This halves the amount of opening, closing, buckling, and unbuckling that I have to deal with whenever we drive anywhere.  That may seem like a small thing but it turns out to be huge.

Dominic is now falling asleep by himself in his crib, and going back to sleep on his own when he wakes up in the middle of the night.  (The past couple nights he hasn’t even woken up at all.)  For the past eight months or so we’ve been putting up with him ending up in our bed with us at some point during the night, procrastinating the inevitable long weekend that it would take to Ferberize him like we did with Ella.  Last weekend we finally decided to do it, and braced ourselves for several long nights of lots of crying and not much sleep.  And there was a little of that, mostly on Friday night.  But he’s old enough to understand the deal — that we want him to fall asleep by himself and to stay in his crib if he wakes up at night — and after some initial protest he basically decide to play along.  If we had known it was going to be this easy we could have slept a lot better this summer.  Then again, it might not have been this easy earlier.

Uninterrupted sleep and an thirty seconds shaved off the vehicle entry ritual — good times!

Times when Dominic would like a cup of milk:

For breakfast, when he gets up

Along with morning snack

With lunch

With afternoon snack

With supper

And again before bed

Whenever anyone else is having milk or a beverage that could possibly be milk

Whenever he suffers any bump, bruise, or scrape

Whenever someone says the word “milk”

Whenever someone SPELLS the word “milk”

Whenever he wanders near the refrigerator and doesn’t have anything else in particular on his mind.

Milk is $3.80 a gallon hereabouts.  YOU do the math.

No doubt I’ve scraped myself on some occasion in the past while keeping Ella or Dominic (OK, probably Dominic) from dashing into an empty street or parking lot.  But yesterday I took it to the next level, both in terms of the danger averted and the injury sustained.

We were at Dutch Village in Holland, and Ella and her cousins and Suanna were riding on one of those twirl-the-swings-in-a-big-circle rides.  Dominic was hanging about the periphery and I was taking action shots of Ella squealing with delight as she whirled higher and higher.  There was just one strand of chain blocking the entryway to the area beneath the ride, but Dominic was respecting the barrier, and seemed content to just watch what was going on.

Then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t and he wasn’t.  Without warning he darted underneath the chain and toward the swings, which were spinning well above his head at that point, but still.  What should have been a straightforward lunge-and-crab was complicated by the chain, which I managed to snag as I vaulted over it, landing hard on my knee in the gravel and reaching out to snag the D-man’s ankle before he could make it too far.  The wound, while not serious, was gauze-worthy as opposed to bandaid-worthy.  Dominic, of course, found the whole thing quite hilarious.