Joy, pt 3: Little Moments

It’s been intense in our house this last week for unrelated reasons, so I wanted to take a few moments to celebrate the small moments of joy that motherhood has brought recently:

A is obsessed with saying ‘happy birthday’ to everyone! Even if it’s not their birthday lol. It all started a month ago when we were in San Diego. One of the pandas at the San Diego zoo has the same birthday as A, and I must have said something about it in front of him. Ever since, he absolutely LOVES saying happy birthday. Luckily, we have a lot of birthdays in our extended family coming up so we can channel his birthday energy to making videos and sending them to people. He has also rediscovered How do dinosaurs say happy birthday? on his bookshelf, which is adding to the whole birthday extravaganza.

He’s started waking up at 6:15am again. I’m laughing at myself that I’m calling this a joy…this morning at 6:15 it did NOT feel like a joy. But what I’ve noticed is that we’ve been able to spend more time together in the mornings because of his early rising. A few weeks ago, when he was waking up at 7:30/7:45, it was a rush out the door to get to daycare in time for breakfast. But now, we get to read books and play with toys and cuddle. It’s actually great. It probably helps that its spring time, so the sun is coming up and the birds are chirping by 6:15. If it were pitch black and cold out, I would probably be less amused by the 6:15 ‘Anne! Baba!’ (mom and dad, in Turkish) screams coming from his bedroom.

The era of Dr. Seuss has well and truly hit our home. Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham are his favorite right now, though Hop on Pop and Oh, the Places you’ll go! are up there, too. (I know Dr. Seuss isn’t a perfect—some of his work is quite problematic. I gotta think through that more still)

Hope you are finding little moments of joy in your week—

Happy wiping, Olivia

P. S. See Joy, pt 1 and Joy, pt 2 here!