Mixed Emotions

For those of you that know us probably know that for us at this point we are done with three kids (knock on wood). We always said 2 or 4 and so when we went for the third we had every intention of evening the numbers with that 4th kid. We love Maddy. She's quite the little person and she brings a tonne of laughs and smiles into our lives ... BUT ... she's enough for Ryan and I to look each other in the eyes during a serious conversation and say "three is enough."
I'm excited to be done with diapers. To move onto that next stage of our lives. I guess selfishly it's to gain a little more freedom back. With Brayden and Sydney as independent as they are Ryan and I seem to find more time to sit down together and talk or do our thing. Lately I've been kind of thinking about a 4th child. When we end up in North America again Brayden will be back in school all day for grade 2 and Sydney will be in kindergarten. For half the day it will just be my little baby girl and I. Maybe I do have time for one more? But these thoughts quickly disappear and pushed away. Ryan and I have talked about it and the beautiful thing about is that we're on the same page. Maybe when things settle down and we aren't travelling around as much this topic might be open for more discussion but I don't think our travelling adventures are quite over yet. Especially for Ryan and his future with Focus, it includes quite a bit of travel as far as it stands right now.

SO, with that being said. Maddy is our baby. But lately we've been looking at her and really realizing she's no baby. She's 2 years old in just under a month. The kick in the gut is that she doesn't want to be our baby anymore. She's rejected her high chair and demanding more and more to sit in the big chairs with the rest of us. She's started to give me attitude about cups with straws or sippy cups. She wants a real cup and thankfully she drinks out of it perfectly. A month ago she started to give me attitude about the play pen. It's what we've used as a crib here, one less piece of furniture to buy over here. So now she sleeps in her big girl bed. I've gone out and bought her a potty and it's being introduced although verbally she isn't quite ready for that yet but I can it's coming. She's starting to sit on it and say 'poop' and she knows when she's poopin' but I'm not sure she know's when she needs to pee before it happens yet. So in an exciting and sad way we don't have a baby in our house anymore and no baby on the way. Just three 'kids' or four if you count Ryan, hehe.

I thought I'd post some pics of our baby little girl in her big girl bed: