Tomorrow will mark the end of my third week of six hours per week of yoga. I'd seen a lot of bodily improvements in the three months prior to that that I'd been taking weekly yoga classes (to the tune of 11 lbs) but I started feeling like I wanted more. I'm addicted. I'm in the best shape of my life (7 lb below my pre-pregnancy weight!) and I've never felt better. But it's not just the weight loss or the increased strength or the incredible difference in my flexibility. I'm so much more relaxed. I have so much more patience. I'm far, far happier. Than I've ever been in my life.

I love Fridays. My mom watches the baby while I do my shopping and running around, and sometimes I even get a chance to have lunch with my (future) SIL, and then I head over to Second Cup to have a latte and immerse myself in whatever I happen to be reading at the time. Then I come home to spend a few hours just enjoying my daughter before her dad comes home. Then we usually spend a couple of hours visiting with his family, either at our place or his parents' house. Then I have a 7pm Hatha class with one of my favorite yoga teachers. Then I come home and soak in the tub for a bit before a fantastic sleep (yoga is great for sleep quailty). Then I have another Hatha class to look forward to on Saturday morning.

I'm so sore from cleaning today, and probably from a fairly intense ashtanga class last night. It sure feels good though. I always vacuum at least once a day, and wipe down the high chair after every meal, but today I scrubbed all the cupboard doors clean and wiped off all the hardware and scrubbed the floors and the walls and the light switches and the windows and the baseboards and wiped off all the appliances. I love the feel of a super-clean kitchen. The baby was having a fairly whiny day and she followed me around making pitiful sounds. She was just so pathetic, it was hard not to laugh at her. She has taken to pushing her high chair around the kitchen (we have laminate floors - ugh) like a walker. When she runs into an obstacle, she cries.

Our house was built in 1973. We bought it about a year and a half ago, and although it has plenty of, let's say, room for improvement, it was never so bad that it needed work before we moved in. However, there is oak everywhere. The baseboards, the cupboards, the floors. Everywhere. I hate oak. Oak is my nemesis. The plan is to make it look nice, increase it's value, live in it a few years and sell it at a profit. I'm confident in our ability to do this (we bought it cheap) and on one hand I can't wait to move forward with this. But on the other hand, I've kind of fallen in love with the place. The house was a rental in the years before we bought it, and in a lot of ways it shows, but underneath it's not hard to see that it was once a beloved place. It's most obvious in the care that was taken in landscaping the back yard. I have three lilac trees that bloom beautiful white in the spring, an apple tree and a mysterious oak tree that doesn't belong in this climate (we call it the ugly tree). The front yard boasts three very tall trees that I think are poplars and a lovely weeping birch. The front flower beds have been neglected, although pansies and roses pop up in the summer.

It's just a little house, but now I don't want to think about leaving it (though we have no certain plans to right now). So much has happened here. I didn't feel this way about my first car or my first condo, but I've planted such roots since then that my whole dynamic has changed. I loved my second condo, but I never felt quite the same way about it that I do about here. I've been out of the house a lot lately, and coming home to our little house gives me a lot of joy. The whole house is my sanctuary. I don't know that it's such a good thing to feel that way about a place you don't plan on settling. Moving has never been hard for me; I've always loved a change of scenery. But right now I'm loving what I have. Wait, why am I complaining about that?

After a month of having a very miserable little girl, I woke up this morning to some relief. It's so nice that she's happy again; it's made this grey day quite beautiful. So I'm very glad. Also, she slept through the night. She nearly never sleeps through the night. Normally she gets up only once, but there are nights when I'm up two or three times with her. A solid night of sleep is such a rare gift, I won't soon forget it.

She had Cheerios and pieces of apple and banana and toast for breakfast. I can't believe how much she eats. We recently switched her from baby formula to whole milk, but I ran out last night so I had to make her a pitcher of formula. It was hard to convince myself that it was ok to switch to cow's milk, since we're so by-the-book with her. I wish I could say I was a really laid-back parent who just rolled with the punches, but that's not really the type of person I am. I'm so protective of her. I'm afraid Layton's worse. I know she's only ten months old now, and these aren't going to be actual concerns for a long time, but I can't even imagine letting her walk to school by herself or putting her on a bus. I hope I loosen up eventually. I'm sure I will.

On Saturday, on a whim, we decided to take the baby to the Muttart Conservatory. Layton had never been, and I hadn't been since grade eight, and I love taking pictures of flowers (I'm a dork, I don't care) so we just packed up and went. It was a lovely way to spend the afternoon. We ended up going through one or two of the pavillions twice. There was an african violet event going on there, and I considered buying one, but I'm really running very low on room for plant life in my house. After we were done there, we decided to head over to the Royal Alberta Museum. Layton hadn't been there either. A police officer followed us most of the way there, which was irritating since we were driving below or around the speed limit and had an infant with us, but that's how it goes I guess. He left us alone when we parked. The museum seems like it's gotten a lot smaller, as everything from childhood does. Nonetheless, it was a lot of fun. We bought the baby a fridge magnet from the gift shop as a souvenier. I took a tonne of pictures. It was a lot of fun. We're going to try to do things like that more often; with me at yoga several hours per week and him at Muay Thai, it's so tempting to spend our time together on the couch. On the other hand, we're both getting in such good shape that it's hard to sit around and do nothing. We walked to his parents place the previous weekend. It's not far, but we took the dog and the stroller and it didn't occur to him that the stroller's not meant for off-roading (don't buy the Graco travel systems, they're awfully cumbersome and way too expensive for what they are) and I don't know my way so well, not being from here, and he led me through the most ridiculous path along the school's football field. On top of that, I forgot that it was summer and didn't wear sunscreen and ended up with a nasty burn just around my collar. That's always humiliating.

Ok well the baby's throwing a fit (the terrible twos have started REALLY early in this one) so I should go attend to her.

I've begun taking 4-5 yoga classes per week. I was taking only a Wednesday class for a few months, but started to feel like I needed more. I'm glad I did. On top of all the physical improvements I've seen, I love the peace of mind yoga brings. I'm happier than I've been in years. Life is great right now.

I came home to a vase of antique white roses on Thursday. What a nice surprise. In wish I could have flowers all the time, but instead I mostly settle for houseplants. I now have two pots of ivy, two bamboo plants, a "money tree", a strange lilly from Ikea, a little plant that once had orange blooms, an african violet, and three orchids, two of which bloom continuously and one that I can't get to bloom at all. On top of that, I've been caring for two of my sister's houseplants while she's staying here.

I can only hope that my outdoor plants will fare as well as the indoor ones. I didn't have much time for my garden last summer, though all but one of my shrubs survived the winter, but this year I hope to have a lush front garden. Our house is south-facing so it shouldn't be hard. I've been buying plants for the front garden as I see them, and I've planted two that wer given to me as gifts. They're kind of random right now, but hopefully they'll fill in.

I've really developed a taste for hot baths lately too. Nothing compares to sinking into the hot, bubbly water with a good book. Life is really amazing lately.

I'm reading a book called The Forgotten Garden and it has been making me so sad that I don't even want to read it some days. I'm about a third of the way through and it's just heartbreaking; the story is very convoluted and I'm not really interested in giving a synopsis, so read it if you're really curious. There's a little girl in the story and she's four, and she's so alone that it just makes me want to cry. I don't think any book has ever touched me this way.

I drove my sister to the airport this afternoon. She's going to Vancouver for a few days to shop for schools. It's not a long flight, and it's national so I thought she'd want to be there a half-hour or so before the flight. We left the house at 1:30 and stopped for a Slurpee and then I missed the exit on the Henday and then too the wrong exit off highway 2 and she started freaking out on me a bit. I felt bad because I was worried that she'd miss her flight and by this time it was a quarter after two and then she told me that her plane doesn't leave til 3:30. I couldn't help but laugh. I'd have to get pretty lost in order for her to miss that.

My sister and I were not close growing up. We didn't get along very well and didn't have anything in common. As we got to our late teens, we stopped bickering and fighting a lot, but we weren't great friends or anything. I think the first time I spent any large amount of time with her was when I went to Thailand with her three years ago. We had a really good time. I would have been totally lost there without her. She has an amazing talent for making her way around the world without speaking a word of the language of the country she's visiting. I'm very very proud of her.

Life really gets in the way of writing sometimes, despite my effort to make writing a vital part of life. My daughter has been quite sick. On Friday night, the doctor at the after-hours care centre told us, as curtly as possible without being overtly rude, that she would stop vomiting within the next 24 hours and listed all the signs of dehydration that we could look for "next time". Well, she didn't vomit on Saturday, but she did on Sunday and then again today, but I'll be damned if I'm going to go in again and be told to just wait it out, and sent away again. What's the point?

Her miserable little attitude the past two weeks got me thinking for a while that maybe I wasn't spending enough time rolling around on the floor with her. She's so happy with her dad just laying next to her, but I've tried it and she wants something different from me. She wants me to listen to her. Yes, that sounds a bit silly since she doesn't talk, but she's happiest with me when I'm giving her my undivided attention and responding to her waving arms or ridiculous babbling, but not by saying ridiculous things in stupid baby voices. She wants me to take her seriously. Then she's happy. I understand that. Parents are so prone to duplicity with their children, and it starts in infancy, and probably becomes a deeply ingrained habit. I care a lot about how I'm treated and how I'm spoken to, so the least I can do is not be a hypocrite.

Well, back to trite activities like doing laundry and cooking dinner.

Oh the joys of motherhood.

I finished the Harry Potter series last week, after tearing through it at a lightning pace, and then finished Shutter Island yesterday, for book club, and now I'm reading The Fountainhead, which I got almost halfway through a couple of years back, but abandoned for whatever reason. However, I'm just not as gung-ho about reading it as I was the Potter books. When I was reading them, I'd dive right into my book the moment the baby went down for a nap. I devoured them. It's been less than a week since the last one was over and I'm still mourning the series a bit. So I'm not reading so prolifically right now and it feels a bit strange. Baby girl has been sleeping more than an hour (thankfully - she's miserable lately) and I've just been putzing around on facebook, playing Farmville and whathaveyou. Strange.

Bailey and I took our girls swimming today. It was great - the facility we went to has a wading pool, so the girls got to just hang out at their own level, though neither of them walks yet so they couldn't really go anywhere. They seemed to enjoy it a lot. I know we did. I have a great picture of the two of them in the playpen in the changeroom with their suits on, all ready to go.

Bailey and I got to talking about going back to work, which she's done already and I will be shortly, and I was complaining about all the horrible shiftwork I'll be doing and wishing I had some way of bringing in money from home. She thinks I should start hiring myself out as a photographer. I'd love to, but the thought makes me a bit nervous. Of course, it's easier now with digital photography than it ever was with film because you can take a million pictures and not worry about it, but I am still not really confident that I'm good enough to do it. I don't want to screw up people's memories. I've seen a lot of "professional" photography websites that don't exactly produce even acceptable pictures, but on the other hand I have some good friends who take incredible photos. I think I just need more practice.

So, I want to try doing it for nothing. If anyone out there wants maybe some family photos taken, or portraits or whatever (and this would all have to be outside since I have no studio) please comment or email me medusa@telus.net and I'd love to do it for you, just for practice. I will take the photos and edit them as need be and give them to you on a disc or memory card and you may print them as you like. :)

Ok, I broke my own rule and didn't blog for a couple of days. I could come up with excuses, but there's really no point. Rules get broken all the time. I'm not saying rules are meant to be broken, oh no. It's just that they do.

Finally spring has sprung and my birthday is threatening right around the corner. Many years we're still under a foot of snow for my birthday, so I'm pleased that it's all melted for this year, of course. One year Ashley and I went to the cabin to celebrate. It wasn't an overly warm year and we spent most of it bundled tightly up in the porch. Last year I had my first 3D ultrasound on my birthday. The year before, Layton threw me a surprise birthday party. Yes, they've mostly been very good, and I'm not really apprehensive about getting older, so I shouldn't act like I'm unhappy about my birthday coming up. That's not what I'm dreading.

Two and a half months are left of my mat leave. I've accepted that. There's no way around it and no point in stressing over it; there's no way to make the year last forever, no matter if you waste your time or make it precious. I've spent nearly every minute with my daughter, so I'm sure I'm not mistaken when I say it's been many precious weeks. I've also gotten myself into fairly great shape through a combination of healthy eating and yoga. I've made a few unexpected friends. I've learned a thousand things I'd never even thought of before. I've read the entire Harry Potter book series. It's been some really great months so far, and I've faith that it's only going to get better.

It's nice to be able to go outside, but fresh air really takes it out of me.

My birthday is next week. I don't really hate getting older as much as I probably will when older involves regular mameograms, but it's still not the best feeling in the world. When I was younger, in my early twenties, I felt like time was running away from me and it seemed like 30 was some huge deadline that was fast approaching. But that time was a lifetime ago, and 30 is still quite far away and I still feel very young. And it seems like time has gotten longer, the possibilities endless like never before. When I was younger, I didn't want to go back to school because it seemed like everything I wanted to take would just take too long. Now, I'm much more open to the idea, and a few extra years doesn't seem like a big deal.