A morning in the life of Hannah without mommy...

Since becoming hormonal, nauseous, and varying degrees of tired to exhausted...Hannah has had the chance to spend many "unsupervised mornings" on her own in the past month while mommy is "passed out" in one way or another somewhere...(either napping, still sleeping, zoned out, nauseous, etc.)

This morning was another one. They've varied from her watching DVDs of various Baby Einstein or Elmo or Disney (namely Nemo), or her being taken care of by daddy before he goes to work, or her crawling all over me and suckling on me until I hurt, or her diligently trying to drag me out of bed to ask for this or that or mornings like this morning...where something "interesting" happens (aka Hannah gets into something or wreaks havoc on something).

After a crazy night of Hannah waking up and getting up 3 times screaming and crying through the night and then also waking up early (she had a early bedtime from not napping the day before)...and daddy putting her back into bed (instead of sleeping through the night and having an early morning or even sleeping in)...
she finally woke up and wouldn't go back down, and dragged mommy out of bed for her morning soymilk and breakfast (which she insisted on nilla wafers - which I didn't fight - instead of the usual oatmeal with raisins or oat cereal).

I left her in the kitchen to eat, and lay back down in bed. Sometimes she'll come with me to the room, and drink her soy there or flit back and forth, but always jabbering or singing. I dozed off a bit, but then woke up to the disturbing lack of noise from Hannah. I called her name and asked "What are you doing?" no answer, silence. Usually she replys with a noun on the subject of what she's doing and then responds with her own question, "Mommy, doing?" to ask me what I'm doing.

Due to the lack of reply, I was immediately brought to alertness, and got up to see where she was. I looked into the kitchen, the pantry door was open, and the light was on. As I approached, I could see she had pushed the stepstool into the pantry (as she's discovered this past month). As I approached I saw an Andes mint chips bag, and as I got closer I saw that there were Hershey's kisses wrappers all strewn about in a pile on the stool. There were a few unwrapped kisses all lined up on the stool and some in her hand. There were some chocolate smears on her face and a huge smile. Once she saw me, she quickly stuffed the chocolate in her hands into her mouth, and also very very quickly grabbed the remaining kisses on the stool and stuffed those into her mouth. All I was doing was repeating "oh no Hannah, oh no."

She had found a chocolate stash.

I picked up the Andes Mint bag to check that it was intact, a sigh of relief escaping when I saw it was still sealed. I looked around to see where the other chocolate was, and it was in larger bag with other unopened bags of chocolate chips, baking goods, and an opened bag of Hershey kisses.


Daddy had rearranged the pantry.

Whereas the chocolate and baking goods used to be high up on a shelf and behind some items where Hannah could never reach nor see, they were now clearly accessible to her. She had taken advantage of unsupervised "mommy is passed out" time and found the chocolate and had happily gobbled down who knows how much sugar!

I asked her to pick up all of the Hershey's kisses foil wrappings and throw them away. She happily obliged. I removed the chocolate bag and moved it up high. I removed the step stool from the pantry, sighed, and closed the pantry door.

I called Hannah's daddy to vent my frustrations and inform him of the bad choice of bad relocation, and he laughed and laughed as I told him the story.
The 1st thing he asked was, "Did you take a picture?"
"No." I replied. "I cleaned it all up already. (sigh) I didn't think to take a picture."

Hannah was happy and wired for quite some time. Mind you, this was not Hannah's first encounter with chocolate. That would have been sometime last year a little bit after her 1st birthday. We had been ever so vigilant at keeping her away from sugar and candy...

So...flashback to April of 2008. I was at Hancock Fabric's with a friend to buy curtain material for our new house. I was getting the fabric cut when I noticed that Hannah was nowhere nearby. Hannah had run off. When I found her, she was at the front of the store by the cash registers happily helping herself to Lindt truffles from the candy displays. There were half eaten truffles strewn on the ground, truffles in her hands, in her mouth. She'd chewed through the wrappers and smooshed the chocolate. I was completely aghast! Our friend had a camera on her and took a photo afterwards for us. The ladies at Hancock's were nice enough to clean up the mess and not charge us for all of the chocolates that Hannah had mauled.

I don't know if you can see from this photo, but she has chocolate smears on her face, and you can see some of the truffles strewn about in the bottom corner of the photo.


photo from Spring 2008 when Hannah was just one yr old.

So you think I'd end the post here...seems like a good place... but last thing to add.

We were at the local "Sunharvest Market" in CC this afternoon with another friend (the only organic place for miles around). Hannah had been pretty good sitting, but then she wanted out. We were in the produce section. As I was looking at produce, I noticed Hannah not next to me. I turned around, and a worker from the store was staring at me. I then noticed Hannah next to the blueberry display and little dots all over the floor. In her efforts to help herself to some berries, she'd spilled half a container all over the floor. I was again aghast and rushed over to her. I picked her up and said, "no no," and started to pick up the mess. Another worker helped and the one who was initially staring was just laughing. Hannah kept on repeating "Ah-ma, Ah-ma" and I then realized she thought that one of the workers (the staring and laughing one) looked like or reminded her of my mom (b/c she was Asian-ish, petite, had darker skin, and a short haircut).

Okay finally...the end of the post. I could post about more Hannah "wreaking havoc" stories from this past month...but I'm tired. and can't remember them all.