Soldiers and trains

Here's Cora enjoying a Daddy-made dinner/snack of soft-boiled eggs and "soldiers" - this is a food Stace grew up on.

You soft-boil eggs, put them in egg cups and cut open the top. Then you dip "soldiers" - strips of buttered bread or toast - into the yolk. Yum! Cora liked it a lot.

Stace has been in charge of a lot of dinners lately.
This morning-sickness thing really stinks. Our normal life has come to a complete halt; we haven't been to Stroller Strides in weeks, and it's hard to imagine getting back soon. Even though I feel better now than I did two weeks ago, I still feel awful about half or two-thirds of the day. I'm lying down a lot, and just trying to get through each day. I'm also taking zofran every day, a very expensive drug for chemo patients to keep you from throwing up. They are helping in that I'm not actually throwing up as much as I remember with Cora, but they don't really help with the nausea.

I did manage to make it to our first MOPS meeting of the year this week, and I've taken Cora to her art class yesterday and will take her to her "My Buddy and Me" class today. We'll see how that goes.

Cora, for her part, has been wonderful. She offers me her blankie when I'm in bed, and brings books for us to look at together. She asks if I'm feeling OK, or if I feel sick, and tries to give me water or my "Preggie Pop" sweets that are supposed to ease the nausea.

Even better, she loves playing with her trains, and will play happily for hours each day. Also, she is watching an hour or so of her Thomas DVDs each day, so that helps get us through the morning until it's time for lunch and nap. She's never watched so much TV in her young life, but we're in a special season of life.

I'm so grateful for my little self-reliant girl! There is a reason we didn't get pregnant any earlier, because I knew with my morning sickness I couldn't deal with a young toddler. Cora is really at a great age for us to get through this together.

The next two photos show the good behavior chart we've made for Cora. My mom, who works in early childhood education, gave us the idea - rather than just correcting Cora for misbehavior, we wanted a concrete way to encourage good behavior. We've written around the chart "good listener," "loving," "polite," "helpful," "kind" and "friendly," to remind Cora of the behavior we want to see.
When she gets five stickers, she gets a treat, and we take a photo of her with her treat to paste into the last box.

The last photo here is on her chart - for her first reward, we went to Toys R Us and let her pick out a new train. This kid is amazing with her Thomas trains - she knows all their names and the songs, and reenacts what she sees on her DVDs on her train table. She told me yesterday that she needs new trucks, to hook on the back of her current trucks, and maybe we can go buy them. Also, this morning, she told me she could have Toby the tram, and we could go buy him.

Lastly, on the Cora front, I'll note that this week she's been using the question "why" a lot. I always thought that was a 3-year-old thing? But no, I'm hearing it about all sorts of random things.