She looks so peaceful, doesn’t she? My camera would have taken a different picture last night, though. At 11:45, when I was just filling my water glass to head off to bed, Breanna woke up. This would not be a big deal in and of itself, except that she then inexplicably wouldn’t go back to sleep. I never talk to her when she wakes up, beyond “shhh” and the occasional “it’s okay” but she woke up completely nonetheless.

She then proceeded to keep me up for hours into the middle of the night. I have no idea what it was all about, but it wasn’t all that bad, really. She wasn’t crying and she wasn’t squirming to get out to play. She was quiet and snuggly and she would lie beside me, smiling, then she would sit up and rest her head on my stomach and just look at me. We talked softly to each other, me with words and her with coos. Every so often I would say, “night night Breanna” and she’d lie down and turn her head away, but then she’d start over again.

Eventually at some point I said please a few times and she finally laid down one last time, curled up in the crook of my arm with her back against me, and she drifted off to sleep.

During those hours lying on the bed with her, more awake than I really wanted to be in the wee hours, I realized that as long as a night like that feels, those moments are so fleeting. I don’t know when she’ll stop needing me in the middle of the night but it will be sooner than I think. Some day she won’t want to snuggle with me and she won’t smile up at me with so much happiness just because I’m there. And some day I’ll read this entry again and remember how much love there was in her eyes one November night and I’ll probably cry and be grateful than instead of being frustrated, I just enjoyed the quiet darkness with my baby.

Do you want to know a secret? Every so often I go looking for sites with samples like this free stuff site. You can find freebies for baby products, pet products, coupons, almost anything you can think of. It’s so nice to get something other than bills and junk mail in the mailbox once in awhile. Go check it out and see if anything catches your eye; personally I love getting shampoo samples because I was always a hair product fan, and fancy schmancy lotions because I know I can’t afford to buy them so at least this way I get to try them out.

Some day when I feel insane I might try to make Pablo Cake for Hayley; he’s her favorite Backyardigan.

Neat crafts to make with your kids.

Laughter IS the best medicine. Watch the baby in this video and just TRY not to laugh. (Thanks Karen!)

There are three types of clothing for kids that I always loved best of all. Yes, I love footed pajamas and pretty little dresses and whatnot (and I had one moment of ovary-aching “oh, if only I had a boy too!” when I saw a little itty bitty grey suit in a baby store yesterday), but the three things I love best are jeans, overalls, and jogging suits.

You can take the youngest baby, fat rolls and jiggly cheeks and drooly faces and the second you put a pair of jeans on them they look like miniature teenagers. I don’t know what it is about jeans, but it’s true. With both the girls I remember dressing them in jeans for the first time and then thinking, “no no no, no more jeans, she looks too grown-up!” Of course, I do it again the next day because it’s just too cute not to.

Meanwhile, overalls somehow seem to help keep them looking small. Even when you take a really tall four-year-old, somehow those overalls make her look just a little smaller than she really is, and when you’re blinking in confusion and wondering how time has flown by so quickly, that’s kind of nice once in awhile.

Jogging suits are just hilarious and cute. Jogging suits look normal on Hayley but they make babies look like little puffy creatures. It’s like having a marshmallow with legs walking around. I have four jogging suits that fit Breanna right now and I love putting them on her.

Jeans and overalls and jogging suits are definitely easier to deal with than the clothes your average teenager wants to wear, if the mannequins at the mall are any indication. I wandered around a mall with the girls for a couple of hours yesterday (both were wonderfully well behaved) and any time I passed one of the geared-for-teens boutiques, I couldn’t help but wonder if my mother had ever felt the same horror when she walked past the stuff that was in style in my youth, though admittedly, at least it wasn’t super revealing and it didn’t include stuff like g-strings peeking out of low-rise jeans and t-shirts that say “sexy” or “slut” on them; it was the late 80s and early 90s, our stuff was just ugly.

And then I wondered when I got so old.

Hayley is so good about sharing food that it’s unbelievable. We didn’t really go out of our way to teach her that but she picked it up anyway. She’s far more likely to give you some of her food than share her favorite toys with her sister.

Every morning she shares her breakfast, occasionally asking me if the piece is too big (though she almost always does it right anyway without my input). Here she was sharing some toasted bagel with margarine. Breanna the carb queen was more than happy to help Hayley eat it.

When Hayley was born, I got to spend so much time with her. George would leave for work before 7 am and get home around 5:30 or 6 pm, which left me with full days where I could just watch her and play with her and observe her as she grew.

When Breanna was born, I didn’t have that same luxury. Hayley wasn’t in pre-school or daycare so I didn’t get to have the same constant alone time with Breanna. I still got moments here and there but it wasn’t the same because I had two people who relied on me and I was kept pretty busy – and that hasn’t changed.

On the weekend, George’s sister was out this way and Hayley left here at 12:30 on Saturday afternoon. She was whisked off to the shopping center and then back to his parents’ house for supper. I wasn’t very surprised when I got a call asking is she could sleep over so I packed an overnight bag for her and his sister picked it up. It wasn’t the first time she had spent the night there.

I missed her. I always do. But the one nice thing about it was that I got a lot of time to just hang out with my youngest daughter. She has such a funny sense of humor already and we had fun. I played the new Justin Timberlake CD (it’s really starting to grow on me, it has some pretty good songs) and she danced happily, then she kept on dancing when I switched over to the country video channel. I wish I could have gotten her on video while she was dancing wildly to Jason McCoy’s “Born Again in Dixieland”.

She enjoys playing with anything Little People-related so we played with the school bus, the ark, all the people and animals, and a house and barn set. She played her own little game where I hunch down on the floor in a ball, and she comes over and smacks me on the back. Then she pulls my head up by my ponytail and I bark at her like an angry dog; this causes her to run away laughing. Then we do it all over again and if I don’t get back into a ball fast enough, she’ll impatiently push me down.

In between that she napped quietly and then woke to play some more. Sometimes we just hung out on the floor together and relaxed.

I know it’s sort of obvious that people are different, that siblings are their own people but it’s still so strange sometimes to know that the same two people could produce two different children. They have many things in common but they are definitely each their own person and I love seeing their personalities grow.

I’m glad I got to see Breanna’s personality up close this weekend.

The awesome earth album uses Google Earth and Flickr to allow you to pull up images from specific countries. It is fantastic. (Thank you Izzy!)

I had sort of forgotten the insanity of having a kitten. I sort of remembered in a vague way (kind of the way you forget the fine details of that newborn-sleep-deprivation haze) and I had read Amanda‘s numerous posts about how crazy her kitten was when she first got him. Still, when Angel first arrived here in our home, she was so sweet that Sunday. She snuggled and slept with Hayley, she played in that cute kitten way with a ball of aluminum foil, and she was the epitome of a happy yet serene kitten. I actually thought about how I wished we had gotten a kitten when we brought Breanna home because it might have helped Hayley cope a bit better.

Then the next day she showed how the name “Angel” is a bit of a mockery. She’s not terrible, she doesn’t do anything horrible. The only thing that really drives me crazy is trying to keep her off the damn table and the fact that she constantly attacks my feet. Mostly, she’s just a regular kitten being a kitten. Still, I’m really glad that we didn’t actually get her when Breanna was a newborn because I probably would have had a lot less patience with the shenanigans.

I do have to admit, she is one of the most tolerant cats I’ve ever seen. Hayley loves her more than anything but she sometimes forgets that she’s just a kitten and she picks her up awkwardly or squeezes her a bit tighter than she should, but Angel always comes back to her. Breanna is learning to be gentle but sometimes she gets a little over-enthusiastic and she trades in gently petting Angel’s head for happily smacking her or grabbing her by the fur; all Angel does in retaliation is a bit of playful biting of Breanna’s leg, purring the whole time.

While we have an Angel, I used to have a devil, a fluffy black cat named Satan. My parents got him five years before I was born. My mom always loved to joke that she was glad neither I nor my sister was allergic to cats because she would have hated to have to give us up for adoption. Satan was a great cat.

He was an indoor cat all his life and although we didn’t live on a main street, our intersection was with a very busy one. We lived in an upper duplex and so we would answer the door bell and open the door at the top of our stairs and the people coming in would open the door at the bottom. Although he occasionally managed to sneak into the backyard at my grandmother’s house (so he could eat grass), Satan never ever tried to slip outside at our place.

Then one day Jehovah’s Witnesses came by. My mother hated when that happened because she’s one of the least confrontational people on the planet so although she would turn them away quickly with a “no thank you” she always felt really bad about it and she always wished they would just stop coming.

That day, for reasons that no one knows, our cat tried to escape when the top and bottom door opened. The two Witnesses at the bottom looked up to see an enormous black cat racing towards them; when he saw two strangers he raised his fur and hissed. Meanwhile, my mother was terrified he was going to get out and run the half block to the intersection and get run over by a car so she did the only thing she could do.

She screamed, “Satan! Satan, come back!”

She screamed for Satan to come back. To a black, hissing, puffed up cat. In front of two very religious, God-fearing people.

They tripped over each other backing out the door and yanked it shut as they left. Satan stopped at the bottom, his escape foiled. It was only after my mother got him back up the stairs that she realized what she had just shouted. “Oh god,” she said. She was stricken. The rest of our family was pretty amused by her faux-pas.

Jehovah’s Witnesses never came to our door again. Ever. True story.