Maura is Two!

Yesterday morning, one hour and 9 minutes after the time change (would've been only 9 minutes except for the time change)... Maura successfully turned two years old! That two years flew by quickly - in a haze of sleepless nights and minor traumas. Having kids is an experience that will perfect you. There is this idea in Orthodoxy that the process of being married helps enact your salvation but I think most of this comes into play when the children arrive. It's like rubbing your soul with a pumice stone. Except there are truly funny and enjoyable bits along the way, too. And now that our youngest is past her first two years I'm looking forward to the ratio changing so that we have more and more funny and enjoyable bits.

When Emmelia turned two, I made a huge list of the things that defined and described her at this age. It's a magical age. At two a child is something she will never be again. There are pet names, likes/dislikes, and mispronounced words that from this point onward begin to slowly disappear into distant memory. So I'd like to do the same for Maura - a big list with things like "you are just beginning to say your sister's name, but you still prefer to call her 'Eye-ah' most times"; "your favorite song is 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'." Things like that. I fully expect it to be as long as Emmelia's list, but completely different. It's amazing to me how two children with such similar genetics can have such different (but cohesive) personalities. God truly is amazing.

Since I don't believe in 2nd year birthday parties (have you ever been in a room of hyper 2 year olds where only one is the birthday child? {{Shudder.}}), we celebrated yesterday by bringing food and cake to coffee hour at church. First of all, it's Lent. Poor Maura is always going to have to have her birthday during Lent - there's just no getting around that. But I do my best to make it festive. So not only did I stay up late making a huge batch of my famous meatless meatballs (always very popular), but I tried a new recipe from my vegetarian slow cooker cookbook for vegetarian pate. Yes, pate. With the accent over the "a" that I'm not sure how to type. The Deac liked it. Most of the parishioners were polite about it (some were hilariously convinced the Deacon's wife actually brought MEAT to coffee hour during Lent). I came to the conclusion that some things were not meant to be made vegetarian. I'm just saying tofu and lentils is not a good substitute for chicken livers, that's all. Everyone sang "Happy Birthday" to Maura in English and Arabic - this frightened her so much that she dug her face into my shoulder and refused to blow out the candle. But at any rate, the day was fun and relaxing. We enjoyed calamari at Carabbas for lunch and spent the drive home watching the huge expanding smoke cloud of the wildfire that broke out west of Denver. Both girls very much enjoyed the AquaDoodle we got Maura for her birthday. We were shocked that it only came with ONE pen. Come on! Do they seriously think that one pen won't be lost within the first week? My kids share well, but one pen is hard to share so we took a family field trip out to Target after opening presents. Later, I enjoyed doing dishes in our new dishwasher - yes, enjoyed it! It is amazing what a difference quality appliances can make in your level of enjoyment of mundane tasks. All in all, a celebratory kind of day.