Hiatus over

Know how hard it is to exercise when you haven’t exercised in a long time? How it just gets harder and harder to get motivated the more you put it off, and then it becomes this vicious circle that you can’t break. A long break from blogging is the same kind of thing—the more I didn’t do it, the easier it was to forget about it. And to tell the truth I was getting a little disenchanted with blogging and especially blogging parents who use their blogs as soapboxes or adult popularity contests. I was writing, but I sure wasn’t reading (who has time?) because when I did I started to feel the same insecurity I do when I see some mom whip out those crazy anti-germ shopping cart/high chair activity bags at Target: should I have one of those? No, of course not, that’s crazy. But what if she’s right? No, she’s crazy and overconcerned with minutia—you aren’t that parent. But maybe she knows something I don’t. No, it’s OK to make different choices. But…. OK, maybe it was just the impending holiday and accompanying insanity. Work was crazy the week before Turkey Day, and I took the actual holiday week off in its entirety to hang out with my little family unit. We had a blast.

So now I’m back in the saddle at work and trying like hell not to bore my lone employee with all the tales of a week with an almost-15-month-old rascal, whose world and vocabulary I could actually see getting bigger. Here’s what I’ve heard her say in the last week (chime in, Nate, if I’m missing anything):

Mama
Dada
shoes
duck
tattoo (I’m so proud!)
yogurt
Baxter (her favorite dog)
Dizzle (as in Uncle Dizzle—she’s not confused about whether or not she’s Snoop Dog)
K (as in Aunt K)
Hudson (her best pal)
fish
more
milk
yoga
yay!
yeah
Santa
vroom vroom
all done

She’s also signing like crazy, and I’d worry that she seems to sign for “eat” constantly, except that she’s such a skinny Minnie I’m happy to do anything to plump her up.

Since I’ve been an off duty blogger forever, there’s no way to catch up on all we’ve been doing. We survived our first kiddie music concert (Dan Zanes) and had a blast with Clementine’s friends Maya and Hudson, we hosted my sister and her family for a weekend of chaos (four adults, three kids and no sleep), and we had a week of amazing late-November weather. We went to all kinds of parks, including one on Belle Isle that might be my all-time favorite in Detroit, visited a nature center, saw the floats from the Thanksgiving parade, ate a lot of turkey, took great family naps, colored, hung out at Cranbrook and did yoga. We didn’t shop or go to a mall at all. We also didn’t have any family in town to plan around, but we didn’t get too lonely or stir-crazy—I think that’s mostly thanks to the weather. Last year it was miserable and by Sunday we were ready to crawl through the walls of the house in desperate escape.

Some pics:

At one of the dozen parks we hit:

Doing yoga (which she apparently loves to do)

Setting up her Christmas tree:

Checking out the floats:

Oh, and of course, visiting the world's largest cast iron stove at the Michigan State Fairgrounds:

But really what's better than rocks?

I took an offensive number of photos over the course of the week, so click away if you want to see the many faces of Clementine. I can't figure out which is more addictive--leftover stuffing or taking pictures of her sweet, sweet face.