fridays with finley

There are lots and lots of wonderful things about Finley, but one of them is that she plays really well by herself. She has such an imagination already and quietly goes from one thing to another, spending short amounts of time on each thing, like a typical toddler. The other night, while she played for awhile before bedtime, I glanced over at her to see what she was up to. She was placing her baby (My Baby Shivers from when I was little; I remember getting her like it was yesterday.. oh, the excitement!) on top of a Rubbermaid container, then proceeded to tell her “time out!” and walked away, leaving Baby Shivers behind. I about died. She gave her baby a time out!

Sometimes, I think it’s easy to forget just how smart out little toddlers are. They are watching and observing everything we do as adults. (So, yesterday when I hopped in the car to go to work, realizing I was on empty, maybe “shit!” wasn’t my best choice of words?)

As if I couldn’t love her more than I already do, last night as I talked to her at the end of one of her own time outs, she poked me in the cheek and exclaimed “cheek!” and then poked her own cheek and said it again, then said “Cheers!” as she pushed her cheek against mine. Cheers-ing isn’t only for cocktail glasses, in her little mind. I think I like this girl’s imagination…

Cheers!

a magical forest

“Stop looking for the magic. You are in it.”

Whether you’re a little girl in the foggy woods, I mean, a “magical forest”, in Minnesota on a 47 degree November day, or the mommy to that little girl, take a look around — stop looking for the magic, because you are in it! Not every day with a toddler seems magical, especially the days when she tugs at your leg every minute and wants “uppia”, but only if you are standing, or when she fights a diaper change for ten minutes right before you were walking out the door in the morning for work, or when she demands “fishies” the entire 30 minute car ride, but you don’t have any left and can’t make her understand that. Just when you think you are at your wit’s end, you are overwhelmed with happiness when you go into her room in the morning and she greets you with a smile and sweetly says “in! in!” until you get into her crib with her for two minutes until “all done!” and she kicks you out, or when she points to the card on the fridge with a fox on the front and proudly blurts out her newly-learned word, except it doesn’t exactly sound like “fox”, but sounds more like the F-bomb, or when she answers with “Owwh-kayyyyy” (in a British accent) instead of “yes”, and what may be the sweetest thing to every mommy’s ears; hearing her say “lah-youuu, mommy” and puckering up her sweet little toddler lips for a kiss!

That is the magic.

This “forest” was pretty magical too, but I think that’s because she was in it… ❤