Choose life

It's been a busy, busy couple of weeks, with life taking the place of blogging. Casa Robmaliam has experienced one too many life cycle events this summer, and I'm getting emotionally strung out, waking at 3-4 AM nightly in a whirlwind of panicky thoughts. I have an idea that blogging about it will help me organize these thoughts, but really, I have to organize my days because right now midnight blogging doesn't hold a lot of appeal. Unless I want to try just going to bed at 3-4 AM to see if that stops my night waking...

MZ is doing marvelously, she's speaking in phrases fairly often, and visibly concentrates on her pronunciation when we don't understand her. She repeats words for us, as often as it takes till we get it, finally raising her voice at us the way we grownups are known to do with people who don't speak our language. She's learning Please and You're welcome, and unfortunately, I'm sorry, a phrase Robert and I use too frequently.

On Saturday we visited the toddler farmers market, dubbed thusly for the high toddler ratio, the presence of street chalk and kid-friendly performers, and the isolation from the actual street. MZ is accustomed to being handed fruit as we stroll through a market, but she doesn't really get the difference between the sample containers we choose from and the gorgeous array of produce out for sale. Shortly after she bit into a not-sample tomato, she spied the grapes. She dove for them as I asked if she could try one, but she was faster than me, and seized one before the farmer could answer. I'm sorry, I told him. Not sorry! Not sorry! I heard her exclaim below me.

I'm looking for daycare for MZ, and that is also exhausting. I'm going to take on some paid work, and I would not, could not take away her days with her grandparents, so she only needs two days/week, but I think the socialization will do her good. Or at least I did, until I started looking. So many people said, "Trust your gut, you'll know when you find the right place." But for a week of visits, nothing moved me. Nothing was terrible, they were all just Eh. Do I really have to settle for eh?

But finally I've found two places I really love, and if they can accommodate us, I'll be very happy with either. And proving that gut has nothing to do with objective spreadsheet rankings (because yes, there are those), these two places are wildly different. More on that when I know where we're headed...