heaven forbid!

So there were all those July 4th pictures of Josephine, and the pictures before those posts were from mid June. Which means I missed a couple weeks of photos in between!!

(gasp)

How are you SLEEPING at night not knowing what she looked like in transition between being 2.1875 and 2.25 years of age???

As I care vastly about the ability of each and every one of you to sleep well at night, here's some nighty-night tonic to put your mind at ease.

Some pictures of Josephine at the end of a "quiet time" (which transitioned a while ago from being in her bed, when it was first replacing her morning nap, to being a contained play time in her room for an hour).

In this case, she's essentially torn the room apart and pulled the seat cushion down in order to rest at the end. It's funny to me how some days her play is so destructive seeming, and the other days, like today, she didn't pull out anything, dump out any blocks-- NOTHING-- she just played music with her piano and harmonica along with CD the whole time. No matter where she falls on the destruction spectrum each day, it's a pretty funny time to eavesdrop on, and of course it helps that she can climb up on the window seat and watch the world go by out front. I'm thankful that we've got a pretty good set-up for her quiet time, as it does wonders to restore my sanity mid-day.

It's always been the case that as she grows older I have to introduce more freedoms to her routine. When I realize she's growing systemically bored, it's a real challenge to rework what she has access to and decide how to structure things anew, but it always pays off. I enjoy adding the newness into her life and watching her relish it and take it very, very seriously.

Early in June we were reaching that point again, heightened of course by how drastically hot it was so early this summer, and the resulting fact that Josephine didn't want to play outside as much. This meant that she was getting bored with indoor options, and the whining was wearing me down as I couldn't go to stores, parks, and playdates all day every day and I really didn't have any new rooms to open up to her or toys to offer, etc. So we were reaching the point that if I wasn't playing with her directly, I was attempting to field her whining about it. Not a livable situation.

I looked seriously into Mother's Day Out programs to see if there were any nearby that still had vacancy for the summer; we ended up on a waiting list that didn't pan out, unfortunately. I had my fingers crossed that she'd be able to play with her friend Zanna at her program twice a week (while giving me 9-10 hours of uninterrupted house project time every week). Would have been an awesome deal to get us through these hot months, but I was too late in realizing we'd have this need.

So instead I had to get a bit more serious about our daily schedule. I've always given her regular meal times and rest times, but it seemed she needed more predictable one-on-one time so that she wouldn't nag for it endlessly. So we instituted a Table Time and a Sports Time and a Music Time and other such options. I have [sort of] regular times each day where these directly supervised and interactive activities take place, and I think it's helped. It took her a while to get used to it, and I still struggle at keeping up with the new routine (I am intrinsically NOT a routine type person-- I love my autonomous freedom)... but everyone's happier having these facilitated times with designated activities. As long as I'm faithful to work them into our day, her independent play is much better.
By far, her favorite is Table Time. It's when we break out the colors, paints, homemade play dough (which might not be toxic, but I'm pretty sure would kill her via dehydration if a crumb of that salt-ridden stuff made it to her mouth), marbles, markers, colored pencils, or my awesome set of bb-sized magnets that are fun to pull on and style. It's all the stuff that I didn't really want her carrying around the house, as it's either unsafe for a toddler or would lead to me finding an unintentional crayon mark here or there if I let her color on her own. We both like having a set place and time for it.

Anyway, I'm rambling too much. I have way too many posts to catch up on to be writing all this. And besides, you were losing sleep at night because you were wondering what she looked like those two weeks, not what I was thinking about!