the bad news and the good news

(edited to add pictures at the bottom)

The bad news is that as soon as I wrote the last entry, she had a horrible night. The night before last she was up several times. I went in the first time, but didn't pick her up and rock her like I had been. She kept asking, "chair?" and wanted me to sit with her, but I told her no, that she needed to go back to sleep. The second time I just went to the door and talked to her from there. The third time I let her cry....and cry....and cry. It was awful. Worse than when she was a baby because this time she was crying, "Mommy, mommy, mommy!" I felt like I was abandoning her. She cried for 20 minutes, was quiet for two minutes, then started again. I let her go another 20 minutes, then went in to calm her down, but didn't pick her up, though every inch of me ached to hold her and comfort her and tell her I was sorry for letting her cry. I just reassured her, rubbed her head and cheek and told her it was okay, but it was time for sleeping.

She finally went back to sleep. It took me a long time, though, to get back to sleep, and I was exhausted yesterday.

The good news is that last night, without the help of any medication at all, she slept all night! And she's still sleeping at 7:30 AM, which is well past the time she normally wakes up. I'm rather amazed, since I completely expected a repeat of the previous night.

So hopefully we've turned the corner and are back on track for normal sleeping.

And on another bright note, I've been meaning to take pictures of my flowers. I've never had a green thumb. I manage to kill about every plant that's ever made it's way into my hands. But despite my failures, I've had a few success stories.

1) One summer when I first lived on my own I decided to put some flowers on the patio of my apartment. I was skeptical, but for some reason, they did great!

2) I received a plant as a gift from my school when I was in the hospital after our little one was born. Two years later, it's still alive and well--and it's even grown so that a year or so ago I had to transplant it to a larger pot. And it's still thriving!

3) Last summer I tried my hand at a "garden" (I use the term garden loosely, because really all it was was a few tomato plants that I started from seeds last spring). I didn't know you were supposed to get a little metal cage-like thing for it to grow up, so they grew all over the place on the ground, but we did get plenty of tomatoes to eat! This year I tried it again--I started seeds a month or so ago and just a couple of weeks ago I transplanted them outside. Five of the six look pretty healthy. This year I'll know to put the cage things up and hopefully they won't be sprawled all over the ground. (I probably should also add that I tried planting broccoli, basil, and carrots, too, but those all died! Only the tomatoes have lasted--I told you I don't have a green thumb!)

4) Last but not least, here's my most recent attempt. For mother's day my mom took me to buy some flowers. I didn't trust myself to plant them in the ground, so I opted for a planter and a hanging basket. So far I've remembered to water them. I don't know what will happen when we're gone next week.

And these are our roses! Last summer we did a lot of landscaping and one of the things we got was three small rose bushes. They were pretty pathetic last year and we wondered if we had made a wise choice, but this summer they're turning out to be beautiful! I guess we did something right!