For some reason, around day 9, my mental state with the whole cleanse went downhill.  All of the sudden I was thinking about chocolate, cake, cookies, tacos, eggs, coffee, cheese, yogurt, and candy nonstop.  Seriously, all day long I thought about food.  I desperately missed eating a solid dinner all of the sudden, where the first week I didn’t crave anything and I didn’t miss dinner.  I don’t know why things changed.  I thought about quitting a lot too.  The frustrating part for me was that I was feeling great.  Full of energy, rarely tired, etc.  Yet I was grouchy because I was missing things from my diet that I thought I really needed!  So why does our mind crave the foods that will reverse the great feeling that I am having (which is the entire point of doing the cleanse)?  Why would I want to go back to that crappy feeling that I get from sugar and processed food for just a few moments of happiness while it is in my mouth?  I still can’t figure that out and it is annoying to me that the cravings were so intense during week 2 when I was feeling so much better.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I could be doing differently so that I would feel more satisfied during this final week instead of living in another week of misery.  My plan of attack for week 3 is to do a better job planning my lunch meal – my only solid meal of the day.  I was pretty good about this in week 1 when I was fine with the cleanse.  Then I got really lazy with my lunches, and I started to crave more and more real food.  I think that the boring, lazy lunches were not nearly enough to keep my mind happy with the cleanse.

So Sunday evening, I went to the store and got all sorts of different things to make delicious, satisfying lunches.  I didn’t have a specific plan for my meals, but I got lots of fish and some ground turkey so that I have to actually cook my lunch.  I also got loads of veggies.  I had convinced myself that cooking a meal in the middle of the day would be such an inconvenience.  I didn’t want to clean up the mess.  I didn’t want to come up with a game plan.  I didn’t want to do any of it.  But this week I am realizing that it doesn’t have to be something complicated to be satisfying.  I just need to put in a little effort.  Yesterday I made seared Chilean sea bass and roasted zucchini, onions, and asparagus.  It was sooooooooo good and so easy.  Clean up was minimal and I finished lunch completely happy.  Made the rest of the day much more enjoyable.  Today I put in a foil tent mushrooms, zucchini, and salmon tossed with a little olive oil, salt, pepper, and dill and baked it for 12 minutes.  It took about 5 minutes to put this together and there was basically no clean up.  The meal was excellent and again, I left lunch happy and completely satisfied.  The past two days have not been easy, but compared to last week, they were definitely easier.

Last week I added a snack in every day.  I am kind of annoyed by that because I wasn’t having a snack because I was hungry, but because I was thinking about food nonstop.  The snack was always an apple and almonds.  My evening smoothies were definitely bigger in week 2.  Again, not necessarily because I was hungry, but because I was obsessing over food in general.  I wasn’t consuming a single unhealthy or unapproved thing, I was just eating more in an attempt to make my mind happy.  I am annoyed by this.  The purpose of the cleanse and consuming much less is to give your intestines time to heal and do detoxifying work instead of making them work hard on digestion.  I was definitely not pigging out by any stretch, but I was eating more than I needed to be for no reason at all other than my mind was freaking out.  I started drinking a lot of herbal tea, too.  Again, this is perfectly acceptable while cleansing, but for some reason I thought the tea would make up for something I was missing.  My mind and its relationship with food is very bizarre.  Very, very bizarre.

One thing that I am VERY excited about is that my desire to cook and try new healthy recipes is at an all time high.  I have been compiling lists of recipes that I want to make when this is done.  I plan to stick to a mostly paleo diet when I come off of the cleanse.  I am giving myself a day or a few days to enjoy the things that I have been missing – hopefully in moderation!  But then I can’t wait to start cooking healthy meals for me and the girls again.  There are certain things not allowed during the cleanse that I will be adding back into my diet – coffee, eggs, red meat, pork, and nightshade vegetables.  I am going to really limit my dairy and sugar intake.  I will start using almond or coconut milk in my coffee instead of half and half.  I am going to cook our dinners dairy free because eliminating cows milk from Annie’s diet has done wonders for her digestive system.

Another bonus to the added energy that I have is that I have been highly motivated to get stuff done!  I have completely reorganized the kitchen so that I can easily find the things that I will use regularly to prepare meals.  I have also done some organizing in my closet.  It feels great to get these little projects done.

Something I will be excited to be done with is the fiber/colon cleansing powder.  It hasn’t bothered or upset my stomach at all, but having so much fiber in my diet has made my stomach extremely bloated.  I am ready for that to go back to normal.  When I pat on my stomach it sounds hollow.  Really weird.  My stomach doesn’t hurt and hasn’t been crampy at all, it is simply very bloated.

So there it is, week 2 in a nutshell.  It was not fun.  I am VERY glad it is behind me.  And I am VERY glad that I only have 5 more days of doing this.  Oh yeah, I went in and did the Tanita scale on Monday again.  I will do that again next Monday morning when I am done with this – Sunday is my last day.  Last Tuesday I weighed 127.2 with 21% body fat.  This Monday I weighed 126.4 and had 20% body fat.  With this scale, you put in information about yourself in a computer program – your height, age, activity level, etc.  Then it measures your weight and body fat percentage and it gives you all kinds of information based on the data it has about you.  Guess what my metabolic age is given the information that it has?  13!!  I definitely liked that!

5. More. Days.  I can do this!!!

I thought I would give an update on something I am currently doing, which is the Clean Program by Dr. Junger.  I am following his detailed program of detoxing my body and healing my digestive system for a 21 day period.  I am not going to go into the details of exactly how the program works here, but I highly recommend you looking around the website and reading his book.  It is really fascinating when you get into it and I must admit, I never really understood the point of detoxing before now.  What I did understand was that I was extremely unhappy with how I was feeling on a day to day basis and I was going to do something to change it.

I chose this program because it works for me.  No way could I just juice fast for even a few days.  That is just not realistic or healthy for me based on my activity level.  I needed much more substance than that.  With this program, I have a smoothie for breakfast and dinner and a solid lunch that follows a pretty strict list of what I can and can’t have.  To give you an idea of what I can’t have while I am doing this, here is a list of common things – caffeine, dairy, soy, gluten, wheat, red meat, eggs, alcohol, nightshade vegetables, and some particular fruits.  You are advised to eat as organic as possible, but it is especially encouraged for your lean protein source at lunch – chicken, turkey, lamb, and wild fish are the best choices.  For all of my fruits and vegetables, I have bought organic and I am buying all meat from Whole Foods as it is definitely the cleanest choice for me.

I did not actually buy the kit that you can buy with the program.  The kit includes your brown rice protein powder, fiber, and all of the probiotics/enzymes that aid in the healing and functioning of your digestive system.  I found a list online where someone had broken down all of the supplements that you take when you do buy the kit so that I could buy them individually from vitacost.com and a few other places.  It saved me some money and I have enough of the probiotics and enzymes to continue taking for about a month instead of just the 21 days.  I take a lot of pills right now!

My goal of doing this cleanse is quite simple: I want to feel better.  I want more energy.  I want to sleep better.  I want to restart my body because I was eating so much garbage during the last part of this year.  I am not doing it for weight loss, but I am happy about the few pounds that I know will come off because of it.  Before I started, I was tired all day long.  I had no energy.  I was moody from being so tired.  I was tense and stressed most of the time.  I wanted to work on all of that.

I feel like I should give a little background on what the past year was like for me.  In January of last year I started Crossfit.  Within a month or two of starting, I was the leanest I have ever been.  I was eating strict paleo during the week with a free cheat meal on Sundays.  I was very healthy.  I weighed just under 120 pounds.  Well, late spring of last year, when life got really stressful, my body went into full panic mode.  I started gaining weight and developed full blown acne.  Despite the fact that I was working out really hard a minimum of 5 times a week, I kept gaining weight and my face would not stop breaking out.  I can’t even begin to describe how frustrating this was to me since I have been almost exactly the same size since I was a sophomore in college.  Sure, stress was definitely making me eat more than I had been, but honestly, I have gone through phases where I have eaten more than normal and never gained more than a couple of pounds from it.  This was definitely different.  My body looked like it never had before and it was not something I was happy about.  And nothing I did seemed to help – not eating a certain way or working out more.  Nothing.  By the end of the summer, I weighed 138 lbs.  I still cannot believe that.  It was close to a 20# swing from where I was just 6 months previous.  I eventually went to my doctor and insisted on blood tests.  I was sure there was something wrong with me.  He knew it was going to come back normal but to appease me, did the tests.  Of course, they were all normal.  He explained to me just how strong of an effect stress can have on your body.  Looking back, I am still shocked at the toll it took on me.  By late fall, I could tell that my body was finding its natural rhythm again all on its own.  I had ditched any sort of diet.  In fact, I was eating whatever I wanted versus following a strict way of eating, like paleo.  I was still working out the way I had been the entire year.  And one day the weight just started coming back off, just as mysteriously as it came on.  Even though I was eating loads of crap all throughout the holidays, I could tell that it was still coming off.  I don’t own a scale anymore because I had developed such an unhealthy relationship with it, but I know my body well enough to know that it was leaning back down.

The problem now was not my weight, it was how eating so poorly was making me feel.  My stomach was upset a lot of the time and again, I had no energy.  I just felt terrible by the time we got to January 1st.  I knew I couldn’t start before January 8th because the Cotton Bowl was the 6th and I knew I would be partaking in a lot of fun that whole weekend!   So, on Monday, January 9th, I started.  I jumped right in.  I didn’t do 3 days of just the elimination diet.  I was too anxious to just get started.

Going into it, my biggest concerns were that I would be starving all of the time and not getting enough calories to keep Crossfit in my normal routine.  I knew I would get the caffeine withdrawal headaches, but mostly I was worried about feeling hungry all of the time and not being able to exercise.  I was completely shocked on day 1 when I wasn’t hungry one single time throughout the day.  Prior to starting, I did email the extremely helpful people that run this program and asked them about exercise and doing this.  They told me that I should supplement my smoothies with things like organic raw almond butter, avocado, or coconut oil in order to get more calories in them.  I do this everyday.  I am on day 9 and I have only really needed a snack 1 day because I was hungry – I had an apple and a couple of carrot sticks.  I did have a snack one other day but it was not because I was hungry, but felt kind of shaky.  Eating a little something fixed that immediately.

On day 9, I am feeling a million times better than I was prior to starting this.  Despite my never ending struggle with sleep, I am full of energy and feeling great.  It took several days to get to this point.  In the middle of the night after my first day, I woke up with a headache that I thought might kill me.  Then I was tired and out of it for a few days.  But now I am in a groove and feeling much better.  If I could just get some sleep, I can’t even imagine how awesome I would feel.  I have maintained my schedule of working out 5xs a week and I am having no issues with that at all.

Eating a smoothie for breakfast is no big deal for me.  I did that most mornings already.  I just used to use whey protein and now I am using brown rice protein.  Whey tastes MUCH better, but I have grown accustom to the rice and it tastes pretty good to me most of the time.  My smoothies usually look like this – large handful of spinach, frozen organic mango and blueberries, flaxseeds, supergreens powder, rice protein, colon cleansing powder, almond milk and water.  At night, I put a whole, small avocado in.  Sometimes in the morning I put a scoop of almond butter in.  It just depends.  These are very filling and while they certainly wouldn’t be my go to meal, they are fine.  For lunch I have been having organic chicken and vegetables, salmon, lamb chops, etc.  It is weird to cook a big meal for yourself in the middle of the day, but I am getting used to it.  To simplify, I have tried to make things that will last me two lunches and feed the girls – like a roasted organic chicken and a big portion of veggies that can be reheated.  They eat it for dinner and I eat it for lunch.  It actually works really well.

On the first day, I used this fancy scale thing at my gym that records all sort of data for you.  At the beginning of the cleanse I weighed 130.2 and was 21% body fat.  I am going to see how this changes weekly.  After one week, I weighed 127.2 and my body fat was the same, which shows that I have shed 3 pounds of water and who knows what else.  I think my ideal weight is around 125 since I have added so much muscle over the past year.  I feel much less puffy and bloated than I did when I started, which is nice.  I used to be that girl that would never discuss my weight, and I weighed 10 pounds less than I do now.  But I realize now that it is simply a number.  My number is higher now than it used to be, but I am in better shape than I have ever been in.  So screw that dumb number and don’t let it define you.  I just told the world what I weigh and I could care less.

Here are the things I have noticed since starting this:

1. I miss coffee more than anything else.  Not the caffeine from it, just the shear enjoyment that I get from it. I will definitely be drinking coffee again and I can’t wait to have my first cup from Pearl Cup.  Herbal tea comes no where near giving me the happiness that a cup of coffee gives me.

2. I have not craved sweets at all, which is COMPLETELY SHOCKING to me. I usually have a ridiculous sweet tooth.

3. The further I get into this, the more delicious weird things seem to taste – like the greens powder and unsweetened almond milk – both of which I would have told you were so disgusting just a few days ago.

4. I know that I was telling myself before that I was much hungrier than I actually was.  This is proven since I have not been hungry from this at all and I am consuming much less.

5. My girls even like the random smoothies and will gladly drink them with me.  During this process, I have gotten Annie off of cows milk and onto almond milk and I bet I see her get some help in her digestion issues too.

6. It is very expensive to maintain a very healthy lifestyle.  I have spent a lot of money to do this cleanse correctly, but I think it is totally worth the money because my health is worth a lot.  It was especially expensive to get started doing this because supplements are not cheap and I now have a whole lot of supplements.

7. I can’t eat out at all while I am doing this.  Mainly because I feel the need to be in complete control of exactly what is going in my mouth right now but also because it would be torturous.  I have followed the rules very closely and I don’t plan on screwing that all up by eating a meal that is out of my control.  I have been bad lately about cooking and this has gotten me going again.  It feels great to be in the kitchen again.  With that being said, there are a few of my favorite restaurants that I cannot wait to eat at when this is over!

8. If you are wanting to do something like this, I highly recommend doing it with a friend, or several friends.  I have 2 out of town friends that are doing this – Emily and Deb – they are a few days ahead of me.  I love to check in on them and see how they are doing.  And then I have a local good friend doing it on the exact same schedule as me.  We check in with each other every night and are encouraging one another.  It is very helpful to have people to talk to about it.

So, those are my thoughts so far.  I plan on doing an update next week and then when the cleanse is completely done.  Feel free to ask any questions if you want to know specifics.

Raise your hand if you think you are looking good today…… This picture is sooooo Annie.  When she gets really excited she always puts her little hands up by her mouth like this.  Also, I want to someday remember that Annie has to have a band aid on her right hand at all times.  This mysterious boo boo has been here for months and we just can’t quite get rid of it.  And she is quite dramatic if you mention it.  It is only visible in her eyes, but it is a very serious ailment.

I said in my last post that last year was a very difficult one for me on a personal level.  I am still not ready to put it all out there for anyone who wants to read about it.  But there were a lot of changes in my life.  It has not been easy.  On me.  On the girls.  But I find myself where I am on January 1st, 2012, and I feel excited and hopeful for the new year.  For every year from here on out.  I am choosing to not focus on the past.  I cannot change any of it.  I wouldn’t change any bit of my life.  Because if I changed any of it, I would not be exactly where I am today – which is a mom to the two most amazing children in the world, a successful business owner, a person that is deeply loved by her family and friends, and a healthy, strong woman that doesn’t really have a reason in the world to complain.  Sure, some days are harder than others, but in the big scheme of things, the girls and I are healthy, we love each other with all of our hearts, and we are finding our happy little place in this world.  I plan on spending a lot more days this year smiling and laughing than being sad, frustrated or angry.  I can’t really say the same for 2011, so the future feels bright for us.

As always, I have goals for the year.  I like to write them down for accountability.  Here is what I have come up with:

1.  Continue to find a healthy balance between home life and work.  I am great at this until the last 4 months of the year when work becomes absolutely insane.  I just want a better handle on how I spend my time with the girls during this particular time.  I know me having to work ALL OF THE TIME is hard on them.  I need to be more present in my time with them.  As my dear friend Kate just said in her amazing new years post, there is never anything for work that is so time sensitive you can’t stop and play with your children for 10 minutes.  I need to write that down and tape it to my fridge.  It is important and I definitely told the girls a lot of times that I didn’t have time for something.  I know I will regret that someday, so I am going to do better.

2.  Be a better friend.  I isolated myself this past year.  It was almost like I was hiding from the world as I tried to figure things out.  Despite all of that, my unbelievable friends and family still managed to rally around me and make me smile absolutely any time that I would allow it.  I am so blessed.  I truly do come from the best family and the friends that I have made in this lifetime, both old and new, are incredible.  I don’t know what I would do without any of them.  I want all of my friends and family to know that they can count on me the way that I know that I can count on them.  Thank you to each and every one of you that has loved and supported me.  I love you all.  I treasure you all.  I don’t always act like it, but I couldn’t live without you.  I will be more present.  I will be more caring.  I will be quicker to actually show you this.

3.  Continue getting healthier and stronger every single day.  January 7th will be my 1 year anniversary of starting Crossfit.  NEVER have I come even remotely close to sticking with any sort of workout plan for an entire year.  NOT EVEN CLOSE.  I am soooooooo thankful for finding Crossfit.  For getting healthy and strong.  For giving myself 1 hour every single day to focus on me – my health, both mental and physical.  I love my gym.  I love the people there.  I love what I have been able to accomplish in the past year and I cannot wait to see what I can accomplish this year.  As a side note, I have a blog post written about how my mindset has changed since starting Crossfit and getting in shape.  It is a post written for women about how we view ourselves and beauty.  I have literally worked on it for about 8 months.  The post is written.  I just want to have a video to go with it and that is going to take a little time.  I am extremely passionate about this topic now and I really can’t wait to share it.  Hopefully sooner rather than later because it means so much to me.

4.  Be less quick to become frustrated and annoyed – especially with the girls and my family.  My poor mom, who is quite literally a saint, has taken a beating from me this past year.  I think because I feel more safe with her than any other person in the entire world, I felt like I could just let loose on her because I had to hold it together for the rest of the world.  I love my parents so very much.  They are incredible.  They would do anything in the world for me or the girls.  And just like a small child is with their own mother, it was like I was acting out towards my mom because I needed to vent it somewhere and I knew that she would always love me no matter what.  Mom, you are the best mom I could ever ask for.  Thank you for unconditionally loving me no matter how ridiculous I act.  I am sorry I have been such a grump so much of this year.  I love you and every other member of our family more than I could ever make you understand.

5.  Take more pictures of the girls.  I have been AWFUL about this the past two years.  Absolutely awful.  I am vowing right now to do better.  I got two really cool books at Urban Outfitters this year.  One is a one line a day journal that goes for 5 years.  I have it by my bed.  I think I can handle writing down 1 line about my day everyday.  I started today  I hope I can do that.  I think it will be so neat to have.  I also got a photo album that has a spot for a printed image for every day of the year.  I love this.  I love it because they actually need to be printed and there is room for a little caption.  I am not focusing on the images being perfect – rather an actual representation of what a year of our life looks like.  I’m excited about this.  And, to get motivated, I treated myself to a bad ass point and shoot camera so that I don’t really have an excuse of not wanting to take my big camera with me everywhere.  This one fits beautifully in my purse and my goal is to have it with me everywhere I go.  I certainly won’t be blogging every image, but I promise to post my favorites.

So there it is, my top 5 goals.  Certainly nothing earth shattering or all that different from what the rest of the world hopes to accomplish in a new year.  But they are honest, manageable, and they mean a lot to me.  So here’s to us all having a great year!  I am not just hoping for a great year, I plan on living my life to give me that great year.  Happy New Year to each of you.

Here is a mixture of pictures from over the holidays.  I know this is my business blog, but it is my personal blog as well.  So my personal images aren’t about the perfectly focused and edited photograph, instead it is about documenting our lives exactly as I see it.  That is what these are.  Annie still won’t sit in Santa’s lap.    She talks a big talk, but when the time comes to actually get up on his lap, she is outta there.  The tub pictures are from today, so I am doing better already about taking more real life pictures.  When I looked at them tonight, I realized exactly how much I love images like this and how sad I am that I have so few of these from the past 2 years.  No longer!

It has been a while since a picture of the girls together has made my heart as happy as the next one does.  Oh, I love them so much.

For all of you that used to love to follow my darling girls’ daily adventures, you will be thrilled to know that I am going to give you a full update on both girls.  As you all know, it has been QUITE some time since I have done this.  Here goes.

Lucy.  My Lucy Goose.  She is 5 now.  Turned 5 on August 1st.  No clue how this happened.  I feel like she was just a baby in my arms that I would have to rock for hours every night to get to go to sleep.  Lucy has always been mature way beyond her years.  Even as a baby people would comment how she didn’t act like a baby.  She is still like this.  She is elegant, graceful, beautiful, kind, caring, artistic, smart, and still loves to be my baby.  She indulges me when I need to just sit and snuggle with her.  She is a very intuitive child and she doesn’t miss a beat.  She knows when something is not right or someone is feeling sad or upset.  She wants to help with everything.  She is very much the first born in that she has that bossy gene and wants to control most situations, especially ones that involve Annie.  She is a child that adores routine and structure and rules.  She almost never breaks any rules.  This makes her a definite teacher favorite at school.  At her teacher conference they actually asked me if she ever gets out of line at home.    And of course she does, but she will not ever be the kid acting up in class because she does not like to be in trouble or feel like she has disappointed anyone.  I pray that this strong sense of structure and need to always follow the rules doesn’t hold her back from things.  As a younger child, it often stopped her from playing with other kids because I think she was so concerned about how they were acting.  She has definitely loosened up over the years, and I love nothing more than for her to jump in the car from school and tell me all of the games she played that day with her friends.

Her favorite things in the world are painting, drawing, coloring, reading, and dressing up.  She is sitting right next to me at this very moment diligently coloring a picture and making sure to stay right inside the lines.  She loves projects that involve intense concentration and fine detail.  She will sit quietly and work on something for hours as long as Annie does not get in her way.  She likes things just the way she likes them, and can be quite short tempered with Annie when she messes with her stuff.  We are working on this.  She is very neat and tidy and she will get out every single toy in her room but will also clean up every single toy in the room when it is time to clean up.

She adores princesses and “fancy” things.  Her current favorite princess is Belle.  She loves jewelry and high heels.  Her imagination is amazing.  She is really learning how to read.  It is fascinating to watch.  She went from not being able to string sounds together herself to being able to sound out 5 letter words over night.  It was seriously so cool to watch her little brain figure that out.

People are naturally drawn to Lucy, but she is not naturally drawn back.  She is reserved.  She takes her time with most people.  She is cautious.  She prefers to watch from afar and then, if she feels comfortable, will slowly start to open up to others.  Again, this has become much less severe as she has gotten older and has become more confident in general, but she is still my girl that assesses every new situation with a hand on my leg and a cautious eye.

On her Christmas list from Santa are only three things:  Belle costume from Disney store, Smurfs movie, and the American Girl doll Julie, who is Ivy’s best friend.

Annie.  My Annes Banans.  She is now 3.5 years old.  Her third birthday was April 1st.  I also feel as though she should still be my spiky haired teeny tiny baby girl that loved her bottle so dearly and would rock to sleep in about 2 seconds every night.  But instead she has decided to get big on me, too.  She started her time with us as a baby that did not know how to be loved.  Her little body didn’t know how to relax and she didn’t know what it meant to be comforted when she was in pain or upset.  Well let me just tell you, she now LOVES to be loved and she loves even more to love right back.  She is an absolute love bug.  She has the most infectious smile of any child I have ever been around.  I have always said that she smiles with every inch of her body and she still does that.  She can completely have her back to you and you still know the second she starts smiling.  So so so sweet!  Annie has the most gorgeous features.  A perfect little nose, the most darling lips, and those huge dark eyes.  I could eat her up just thinking about her little face.

Annie is my wild child.  I always describe the girls as complete and total polar opposites.  Everything that I described about Lucy above, take the exact opposite and that is Annie.  She is boisterous, energetic, extremely opinionated, full of life and adventure.  She is a free spirit.  She plays by HER own rules.  She does not like structure or routine.  She does not appreciate being told what to do and she will just flat out ignore you or pitch a fit if I insist she does something that she doesn’t think is a great idea.  You know, like brush her teeth or get clothes on.    I would not change one thing about her.  I adore her spirit and know that some day it is going to serve her so well.  It is that spirit inside of her that got her through her first really difficult 7 months of life.  With that being said, that little spirit can be exhausting to chase around!

If I ask Annie not to do something, there is a 100% chance that she will do it.  All while watching me with the most ornery look in her eye that you could ever imagine.  That is just how she rolls.  I have been known to describe her as naughty because, well, she is often quite naughty!  She is a mess.  Literally, a mess.  She could care less if she is covered in drool, snot and food.  She just smiles away, happy as lark.

She is on her own path for development.  She is in speech therapy and we are definitely seeing progress in her talking.  I think her school and being around bigger kids is helping.  She still has only a few phrases that everyone would recognize, but I know her well enough to know what she is talking about most of the time.  Not always though and I know that is frustrating for her.  I pick up on new phrases every week though and I love it when she says something new.  I pray for her speech to continue to improve every day.  And it is, just slowly.  Because of some of her oral issues, she is still a drooling machine.  I mean, the girl can DROOL!  I would love for this to improve a lot more over the next few months.  I just hate it now because she is a bigger child and so people notice it more.  And let’s be honest, it is a huge mess.  I am so used to it now that I just wipe her mouth with my hand and wipe it on my own clothes.  I know, I know.  Gross.  But you do what you gotta do.

Annie’s favorite things are baby dolls (she is a very excellent and attentive mother), painting, cooking in her play kitchen, dressing up, and watching movies.  She would watch tv all day if I let her, so I really try and limit this for her.  And movies are her favorite – Beauty and the Beast, Gnomeo & Juliet, Strawberry Shortcake.  She is obsessed with anything that Lucy is doing and in true younger sister fashion, she loves to intentionally push Lucy’s buttons just for the reaction.  I can relate.  I am the second born as well.  I may or may not have been a little annoying to my sister from time to time.  The good news is, they have recently realized how much fun it is when Lucy lets her play and Annie doesn’t try and drive Lucy nuts and they will play together really well.  Like right this moment.  Nothing makes me happier than hearing them in their room giggling together and making up little games.

As wild and crazy as Annie is, she will honestly sit and snuggle with me for hours at a time.  She loves to be close to me.  And I love having her close.  Sometimes it makes it very difficult to get much done, but I really love that she is such a lover.  She is hilarious and I can’t imagine not having her in my life.  She makes life so much more fun and colorful.  For every difficult moment I have with her, she makes up for it with many more amazing moments.

Annie’s Christmas list from Santa:  Dora Fairy Princess Doll and an Aurora costume from the Disney

I will continue to thank God every day for allowing me to be the one that these two girls call momma.  The one that they come running to when they get an ouchie or need a snuggle.  The one that gets to steal as many kisses a day as I want from their sweet lips.  The one that tucks them into their beds at night and sings them their favorite songs as they fall asleep.  Being a mom is not always easy or glamorous by any stretch of the word.  But I would not trade a minute of any of it for anything in the world.  I am so blessed.

And now what I know you all really want to see, the girls in all their glory.