It is nice to be back at work. My office needs to be cleaned, I need to finish a memo, but hell, I just got through half of my email, and I think a break is in order!

Travel with an almost 3 year old is hard. Luna was, well, a fricken lunatic on this trip. Sorry, must be blunt to save my sanity. We went to the Cleveland Zoo on the 80 degree day. She LOST it leaving because we didn’t see the tigers. When I say lost it, she bit me twice, leaving bruises (although that is not that hard to do, I bruise if you look at me the wrong way), she cried so hard that she threw up three times, twice on me, once on Jay. We were leaving the zoo with a screamer and all of the parents are watching us (yeah, that does wonders for your psyche!). I kept telling her the animals were tired and needed to eat dinner, and go to bed. She kept screaming "No, the sun is up. The animals are NOT sleeping" Oy! For the record, once we got her in the car seat, she was asleep in 30 seconds. No joke!

The trip back to Boston was just as fun! The first three hours were Luna screaming that she wanted Grandma and Grandpa. Lovely. Again she screamed until she puked. Thank you for vomiting 1 mile from a parking area! That way we could clean up. A pleasant bit of luck is that Luna just trained herself for potty. Worried that we might not make it, I put a waterproof crib pad under her in her car seat. That absorbed most of the vomit…

I suppose the trip was good. We had fun, and for 3 days Jay and I got to sleep until 9am! Bliss! But the girls are still young enough to want Mommy all of the time and I ended up being the primary caregiver. Then when we got home, I was able to send them to daycare 1 day, and then the 3 day weekend (I don’t work Mondays).

Luna is going through changes. She just moved from toddler to preschool at daycare. In our state, at 2y9m, a child can enter preschool, which has a higher student-teacher ratio. She had been told for 3 months that she was going to move up and she knew preschoolers go potty. So the girl put incredible pressure on herself to train herself.
One day in March, she decided to wear panties. That was it. We had 2-4 accidents a day the first week. Then 1 or less a day (mostly poop). Now she will go to the bathroom on her own to poop and come out with her pants between her ankles and proudly announce that she pooped! She is trying her hardest to be a "big kid" and this is causing multiple meltdowns as she is still not 3.

I find this stage of parenting to be very difficult. The changes between 2-3 are large as are the changes between 3-4. However, the independence and the need to feel like a larger kid is there more in the 2-3 stage.

For myself, this is an exercise in restraint. It is hard and I am looking forward to the 1 hour massage that my ILs bought me for my birthday present .

(I was planning on a massage on the day before the trip BUT Soleil got cereal in her eye(DON’T ASK) and I ended up dragging her halfway across the state to see an eye doctor as the ped thought she had scratched the cornea. She didn’t, but it threw all of my plans into a blender!)

I  hope to recover in relative calm and relaxation the next week. Work will be fun as our instrument had a major anomaly on Saturday during a Target of Opportunity, and my bosses (both of them) are away at a meeting starting today. But at least work isn’t going to strip off all of its clothes and piss on the floor like Luna did Sunday when she got mad at me….