So, it was definitely a premature evaluation when I said that Emma wasn’t missing the bottles. She’s woken up for the past two days, her little face full of eager anticipation, and then erupts into tears and screeching when I hand her a sippy cup. After about an hour of the “I’m-a-starving-baby!” look, she’s taking the sippy cup, which I knew she could. In retaliation, she snatched a piece of bread away from me as I was fixing grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. I had no idea what had happened to it until I saw crusts in her hand and her little cheeks brimming full. Maybe she was starving!

We had dinner with a family from the church last night, and Ana got to help fill up their bird feeders. She ran around for a while, exploring the yard, then saw something near the feeder that caught her eye, and yelled, “There he is!” Sure enough, there was a bird. She was thrilled! (The bird, totally freaked out about the exuberant hands waving his direction, flew away.)

I’ve decided that I’m done comparing my children to other children. (And to each other!) I know this is a normal thing for most moms to do, but I literally obsess over how fast they’re crawling, how soon they’re standing, when they start walking, etc, when… you know, I don’t think it’s nearly the big deal that I make it out to be. It’s not fair to my girls for me to hold them to some other child’s standard or to use my children’s successes to make another mom feel inadequate. (I really don’t think I’ve done the latter, but in my heart, I’ve probably at least considered doing it. A mom I know was just recently bragging to me about how she didn’t have PPD when her babies were newborns, as if it was some neurotic illness less fabulous mommies like me invented… and I had to stop myself from saying some rude things about how Ana is obviously more intelligent than her kid. I mean, really? Does that help anything?) I’m stopping it NOW so that my girls never, because of Mommy’s bad example at least, feel that they need to value themselves based on how they compare to others. So, that’s it! No more!

The C25K continues to go well. This week is a continuation of last week, so while it seems to get easier every day, I know it will get more difficult next week when we increase the running time. We used two single strollers yesterday, instead of the double, so that we would both have some resistance for our workout. Wes took the expensive, extra tall, easy to manuever stroller with Emma… and I took the short, cheapy, runs like a jalopy stroller with Ana. (Em needs the stroller with the shade since her hair is not nearly as thick as Ana’s and needs more protection from the sun.) Ana couldn’t have cared less and spent the entire outing cheering and clapping her hands. But it made me miss the incredible jogging stroller I had in Okinawa. I couldn’t bring it back with me and didn’t see the point anyway, since it was a single stroller. I ended up passing it along to another mom in the church, who, if you’ve read Marla Taviano’s fabulous book, Changing Your World One Diaper At a Time, you’ve read about as the mom-to-be who told me that breastfeeding was going to take care of all of her baby weight in just a few weeks, which I clearly wouldn’t understand since I “didn’t want” to nurse my destined-to-be-overweight children. Well, believe it or not, breastfeeding (which she decided wasn’t for her after just a few weeks) didn’t take care of all that baby weight, and I, as the only horrible formula-feeding mommy in our church, was ironically enough the one most sympathetic to the end of her idealistic dreams. Does it count as petty that I mentioned all of this? It does? Totally not my intention, as no one understood where she was coming from more than me! Okay, moving along then…

All that said, I think we have a double jogging stroller out in the garage that needs some air in the tires. I’m hoping it will be better than Ana’s jalopy but not nearly as huge and bulky as the regular double. Yay!

And with that, I should probably take care of some chores. I think Ana just shut Emma in their bathroom. Sigh. Actually, it sounds like they’re both in there. What is the fascination all of a sudden with shutting and opening doors?!