Author: EmPoweredMama

I’m a 33 year old first time Mama of a Gorgeous baby girl named Sadie Greta Schofield. This blog was born when she was born, and it will cover all sorts of messy, beautiful, terrible, awful, wonderful elements of labor, postpartum, parenting and all sorts of living in between.

Time Capsule- One Year Old

This blog was forged as a way to document my experience as a Mom, but also as a time capsule that I hope Sadie can look back on one day. That being said, today’s post highlights Sadie’s life at one year old (and almost a month in).

Prior to being Sadie’s Mom, I didn’t really like babies. I thought of them as giant, personality-less blobs. Would way rather play with a dog than a baby :)-

But now that I own one of these blobs, I am truly amazed by what Sadie can do/loves/can say/is learning at 12 months.

Without further ado, here are some highlights of one-year-old Sadie.

Her favorite things to do are:

  • Putting on and taking off her collection of 15 different plastic necklaces
  • Putting on and taking off her collection of hats
  • Putting on and taking off her collection of shoes
  • Climbing into and out of any box she can find (her rolling wagon, milk crates, diaper boxes, camping coolers, her old Baby Box)
  • Watching people walk by our house out her open window and saying ‘Hed-Do!’ (Hello) to them just as they’re out of view so they have to look around and wonder who said that
  • Presenting her plastic bath toy animals to you and making you put them all in a new spot in the room so that she can go get them and make you hide them all again
  • Pulling off her socks and shoes while she’s in the stroller and wiggling her naked toes in the air
  • Pulling down her shirt and pointing to her boobies and then looking expectantly at you to do the same (one day she wore a really stretchy shirt and spent all day pulling it down and admiring her chest; it launched a habit)
  • Pulling up her shirt and looking at her bellybutton and then looking expectantly at you to do the same
  • Lining up all of her toiletry products from her diaper change table in her windowsill and making you say the product names (gets particularly excited about sunscreen and makes fake grunting noises when trying to pick up the too-heavy Vaseline jar)
  • Practicing her letter sounds with foam letters in the bath (every sound is ‘AAAAAA’, apparently)
  • Giving pinecones to Mom and Dad on the front lawn as presents (each parent gets an equal amount of pinecones; very equitable with the sharing)
  • Pretending to pulverize pinecones in her little hands (paired with grunting noise for emphasis)
  • Passing you every single stuffed animal in her crib to name as soon as she wakes up (there are 7 of them)
  • Opening up her board books to certain pages that she likes and then sitting on them
  • Climbing up her learning tower like a spider monkey and then screaming excitedly as she tries to topple herself over in it
  • Driving her wheeled wagon into walls and then saying ‘Hep’ when she’s stuck against a wall somewhere (doesn’t know how to reverse it yet)
  • Pointing at birds out her bedroom window and saying ‘Bur’
  • Seeing birds from within her stroller and cawing at them
  • Seeing dogs from within her stroller and barking at them
  • Flushing the toilet while Mommy is still using it
  • Singing ‘THUN-DER’ (it sounds more like DUN-DER) when Daddy or I sing the intro to ‘Thunderstruck’ (pretty funny party trick)

That’s what I can think of for now. She surprises me every day, my little blob, with how funny and entertaining she is. I can’t wait to read this blog post back to her one day and have a laugh.

For now, though, thank YOU for reading this summation of who my little person is at this moment. We haven’t gotten out too much these days with Covid, so now you have a better idea what Sadie has been up to these days from afar. She is most definitely Not a blob!

XO, Em

I Woke Up To a Toddler Today

I had always wondered how that worked.

How long was a baby a baby? When did it become a toddler? What was that process like? Was it gradual- a long, drawn-out affair? Or did it pounce on you like a lion from tall grass?

Well, this morning, I woke up to a toddler.

I had seen the signs coming for weeks. It has teeth now, 7 of them in fact, and they’re all garishly large and disorderly.

It has a pot belly where it used to have a flat tummy, and its fingers are of the chubbiest quality that Hansel and Gretel’s witch could only dream of.

It says a few words here and there, or iterations of words that its parents can understand, such as ‘Buh’ for bird. ‘Ah Duh’ for all done. ‘Daddo’, fairly self-explanatory. It even does an adorable fake cry when it’s angry sometimes.

I have seen all the parts coming along, but today Sadie become the whole.

The whole toddler package, in all of its glory.

She woke up at 8:30, and I was exhausted by 11:00 am.

It started with the back deck.

Babies can wait. When you have a nice little baby, and you need to pressure wash the bird poo off the deck after the winter, and finally take down your Christmas lights adorning the deck rails, and put up a baby gate so the baby doesn’t fall down the deck stairs, and patch up that one rotten board on the deck that broke last summer that can now fit a size 10 shoe through it… the baby has no goddamn idea these things exist, and when it naps, you can fix them.

This morning, Sadie saw sun, and the dog, on the deck, and she wanted to be there too.

Baby Sadie would have been content to sit at the glass door and watch the deck from inside.

Toddler Sadie stood up and banged on the door repeatedly, and being 100% bored of my house’s interior, I acquiesced.

How bad could it be?

First, she dragged her cute little jeans all over the bird poo/dust on the deck and dirtied ’em up real good.

Then, she made a beeline for the size-10-shoe-sized-death-trap-full-of-jagged-wood-splinters hole in the deck boards.

I lovingly steered her towards her water table on the opposite side of the porch, where she splashed around for 6 minutes and thoroughly soaked her cute little shirt.

As soon as I glanced down at my phone, she made a beeline for the death trap again.

And again, and again, and again, until I dragged her water table over it and covered it.

Then she discovered the baby-gate-less stairs down to the yard.

So we practiced her going up and down the stairs about 14 times (there are 10 stairs).

Every time I tried to lovingly redirect her away from the puddles of mud at the bottom of said stairs, I got one of those adorable fake cries I thought were so cute, before today.

Finally got her back on the deck, dragged our patio furniture storage trunk across the top of the stairs and blocked them. Makeshift baby gate, and a perfect fit! Voila!

Then I turn around.

See that toddler Sadie is busily unpinning all of the Christmas lights on the porch railings one by one and wearing the string of lights as a giant necklace. Creative- and helping Ryan and I with our outdoor to-do list! Nice!

After some more crying, she had a nap and it was time for snacks and a walk.

I’ve always said there’s a certain way I’m Never going to dress my child, and I’m Always going to use washable Norwex cloths to wipe her face and hands after she eats, Never with diaper wipes.

And then I fed angry toddler Sadie an open-face peanut butter on bread and tried to wipe her face after with a Norwex cloth. Much squallering. I gave up. Came at it later with a diaper wipe when it was crusted over and she was happy so I got a quick chance.

For the walk, it was very sunny, so I put Sadie in an SPF 50 long-sleeved shirt from Walmart and the only sunhat she won’t rip off her head.

Somewhere along the walk, I turned around to look at my baby girl in her sunscreen-stained hideous pink train conductor hat with peanut butter smeared all over her face, her little potbelly jutting out of her brightly colored hideous Walmart shirt that says ‘Purr-maid’ on it with a cat dressed up as a mermaid, her dirt-stained jeans, and her hand-me-down ripped up sneakers- and I thought ‘this is it.’

She is officially a toddler, and I am officially a toddler Mom.