No matter how great of a camera you have, you will miss tons of moments you’d like to record and never forget.

Last night, I had trouble getting C to sleep. Usually, that’s Katie’s job, but since she had to be elsewhere, I stepped in. I was less than thrilled to do it, frankly, because I’d spent an hour yesterday afternoon trying to encourage her to have a good nap. I’d had enough of it. But I ended up glad to be there.

C is usually pretty easy to get to sleep. You read her a book or two, turn off the lights, and hand her a boppy. It usually only takes fifteen minutes, and you can get up and get on with your day (assuming the fifteen minutes in the dark weren’t enough to put you to sleep, which they often are).

But last night she refused the boppy. I couldn’t believe it. Instead of drinking her milk, C sang and chatted, chatted and sang. She rolled around and played with my beard. And she laughed. In short, she was insanely cute.

But after a while, I was getting tired and ready to move on. I guess C was, too. She crawled up on my chest, like a newborn. I unconsciously started rubbing her back, and within a minute or two she was fast asleep.

I almost called Katie to bring in the camera, but I knew it just wouldn’t work. She’s growing up fast, but she is becoming more and more wonderful every day.

I got a new camera this morning, and I am absolutely psyched. I take a lot of pictures, and my old camera was on its last legs. But mostly I’m excited at the advances in technology since the old camera: no more rotating images by hand! And the new camera is *much* better at red eye reduction. But that’s just for starters; I can’t wait to try out the video capabilities (once the battery charges, and Murphy’s Law says that C will be asleep when I get it running again). Anyway, I got a new camera. W00t.

I am sad that C is turning two in two weeks. Of course I am; every parent is sad that their children are growing up.

But I’m not sad because I want her to stay a baby. Let me make this super perfectly clear: I want C to grow up. I want her to achieve milestones. I am glad that she can now walk and speak in entire sentences. I am glad that she brushes her own teeth (sort of), and I look forward to the day that she is potty trained.

Being sad that she is growing up doesn’t mean not wanting her to grow up.

It means being sad that I won’t get to do it again. I miss her tiny baby fingers not because I want her to have them still but because they will be the last tiny baby fingers of any baby I get to have.

I am not sad for her, I am sad for me. And that’s ok.

When you own an old house – especially one like ours (a 1910 Queen Anne) – there’s always something that needs to be fixed. And if you have a toddler who takes up most of your time and attention, it’s even worse.

The list of things we want to do to our house is massive, although I keep reminding myself that we have done quite a lot of good to the old place in the last three years. It’s true that of the five bedrooms in our house, we have renovated three since we moved in. But C’s room is far from shovel ready, and if we’re perfectionists, it could really use a new ceiling. Then there’s the dining room, which is an embarrassing ancient variation of used-to-be-white. And most of the rooms that have been painted need to be painted again.

But my highest priority this year is the front porch. The house is clad in siding – fortunately or not – but the porch ceiling, rails, columns, floor, and trim need to be painted two months ago, and we’re talking “high priority,” not just “it sure would be nice.”

So today I bought the paint for the ceiling, destined to be slapped on first thing in the morning. But when I got home this afternoon with the paint, before I could even get out of the car, my sister-in-law had to point out the obvious: “before you can paint it,” she said, “you know you’re going to have to get rid of the mildew.”

Argh.

This is C asleep on the way home from work Wednesday. She doesn’t usually sleep in the car on the way home (she usually spends most of the trip begging for more boppy), but her sleep schedule has been off this week. A few weeks ago, I dismantled her pack-n-play, where she usually sleeps at the office, in favor of being able to lie down with her. Now whenever she sees the bed, she says “lie down with me? daddy lie down with me?” and sometimes we relent and she sleeps, even if it’s hours earlier than her usual 1 o’clock nap.

She seems to go to sleep a lot earlier at night when she naps earlier in the day, so I’m thinking we might have hit upon something here.

I’ve been writing lately about C’s boppy obsession, so I thought I’d post a picture of her first ever boppy (taken in September of 2007, when she was about eight weeks old).

I’ve written before about C’s love for her bottle, which she – and everyone else in our family – refers to as “boppy.”

The earlier post was about how I don’t get the appeal of milk in a bottle on a hot summer day. This post is about how flat out tired I’m getting about the boppy in general. And excuse me if I seem a bit cranky or if something doesn’t quite make sense; I’ve spent the better part of an hour trying to keep C asleep for her afternoon nap, boppy in hand (hers, not mine).

And my shirtsleeve is absolutely soaked from milk dripping out of the side of her mouth and onto me as I held her. At the first cold drip, I tried to take the bottle away from her, but she clung to it in her near-sleep, and it was ten minutes of lovely cold milk drippings before I could get it from her and stop the flow.

So yeah, I’m tired of the boppy, and I’m tired of how easily it spills and leaks. And I really don’t want my sleeve to be cold, wet, and smelling of milk.

But I’ve got to admit something: I think I’m less ready for her to give up that little bit of cute babyness than she is. As much as I’m ready for boppy messes and expenses (disposable bottle liners) to go away, I’m really not ready for the end of the boppy.

And I doubt I’ll ever be.

C hasn’t figured out how to use a straw quite yet.