.Because I don't want to forget.

The purpose of this blog has always been twofold: first, to let friends & family that we don't get to see enough stay updated on our lives. Second, I'm terrible at keeping an actual journal and I always have so much going on in my head that if I don't record things about my child {soon to be children} here I'm afraid that I wont remember them with the same detail. Does that second part make sense? Do you ever do that?
Well, anyway, I know I've had quite a few small Amelia anecdotes recently and perhaps they're only amusing to a very select few {my mother in law & granny for example} but she's at such an interesting stage that I want to record as much of it as I can so that I can reference it when she's an obnoxious hormonal teenager screaming "I HATE YOU" at the top of her lungs because her curfew is too early.

I woke up with a jerk in the predawn hours to Amelia crying in her room. Up until the last few months if she woke up in the middle of the night it was bad news. Little babies and young toddlers simply don't have the vocabulary or patience to let you know why they are upset and it almost always leaves both parties miserable and sad and often ends with the frustration of the cry it out method. At least that's how it went in our house. I'd like to say that it's pretty darn rare that Amelia wakes up between 8:15pm-7:30am so that you don't get the idea that this happens a lot and so that you can perhaps understand why pure dread went through me when I heard her cries this morning.
Cheyenne turned the alarm clock around and muttered "oh no, it's 5:00am...do we just let her cry and hope it was a dream and she'll fall back asleep?" as this is what we would have tried as a first resort a few months ago.
But I thought no, she's a big girl now and she doesn't just cry in her bed for no reason, I'm not going to let her cry herself to sleep if there's something that can be done. So I climbed out of my nice warm bed and into her room.
She was sitting upright in bed crying but not hysterical. I asked her what was wrong and she sniffled out "blankie" and I noticed that in her sleep she must have kicked her blanket clear off the bed taking her baby doll and book with it {yes, my kid uses books as lovies to help her fall asleep}.
I picked up the blanket, doll, and book and asked her to lay back down then I covered her up & tucked her in with the doll and book next to her. I gave her a kiss on the forehead and stood up to leave and heard this in the calmest sweetest voice:

"Thank you Mama, thank you blankie, thank you baby, thank you bookie." Then she went right to sleep without another peep.

And then my heart burst right out of my chest onto the floor because the human heart cannot contain that much love without an explosion.