Angel's Self Portrait

She drew this in preschool today.

If you feel like a bad parent, read this to feel better...

So it's an ordinary afternoon.  I'm breastfeeding baby and the girls have been playing a game together.  When Angel disappeared from the room for a few minutes, I didn't think anything of it.  I just figured she was getting another toy for their elaborate game (which seemed to involved as many different toys spread across the floor as possible).  I didn't get worried until she started crying, and even then I didn't think it was anything serious.  I could hear her walking back into the room with me, so I didn't even bother getting up at first.

Then she came in holding her eye.  "I was putting on make-up," she sobbed, "and it got in my eye and it hurts."  I looked at her and realized that she was not just putting on makeup.  She had found a bottle of sparkly nail varnish and had used it to try to do her eye make up.  That's right.  She had painted all around her eyes with nail polish.  Glittery pink nail polish, to be precise.  I did the obvious thing and started screaming for my other half to come help.

It took two of us, the sink, and a lot of wet wipes to get her eyes (mostly) clean.  Let me tell you---nail polish does not come out of eyelashes easily.  Also, stupid sparkly nail polish means that even if you manage to get the polish mostly off, your toddler still ends up with glitter all over them (and potentially in their eyes).  Since she had painted around her eyes, we couldn't use anything like nail polish remover to try to get it off.

Luckily, thankfully, miraculously she did not actually get any of the nail varnish on her eyeball (as far as we could tell). 

Sometimes I feel like I'm really on top of things and a good parent...then inevitably something like this happens.  The funny thing is that I am not a yummy mummy.  I don't normally wear nail polish.  I had just painted my nails for the first time in about six months, and so had pulled out the nail polish from its dusty hiding place in my bedroom.  I guess I'm going back to my normal, nail-coloured-nails again from now on.

Moral of the day: toddlers and nail varnish do not mix...or at least they shouldn't.

Big sister to be

My toddler is obsessed with cars.  Angel's the most beautiful little girl you've ever seen, and she loves anything on wheels.  In the garden, she loves to play with her little tikes car.  Her favorite toys are cars and trains.  When other kids her age get scared from noisy big vehicles driving by, she jumps with excitement and points, saying "Wow!  Big Car!" 

Having found out that she's going to be a big sister, my husband and I have thought a lot about how this will affect her and how she'll react.  The day that I took the pregnancy test, my husband was very excited to pull her up into his lap and tell her that she's going to be a big sister.

Her response?

"No Daddy.  I car."

He tried again, and she just kept insisting that she's going to grow up into a car.