2013
Nine Months Old Plus Eternity
Fox, you are nine months old and I…HOW? How did this happen? I still haven’t sent out a big stack of your birth announcements (I shall hie me hence to Etsy and order an envelope-sized stamp that says “BELATED” and that shall make it all right, right?) and yet somehow that valiant act of procrastination didn’t keep you in the squirmy wormy newborn stage any longer than was your due, and certainly not long enough for me to get used to it. Would it be too much to have my babies stay babies long enough that I’d eventually achieve a state of equilibrium such that I’d be able to respond to the coos of strangers with nonchalance, all, “Oh. Yes. This old thing? We’ve had this baby forever. We’re quite used to him. No biggie.”
Instead, you’re suddenly nine months old and lolloping around the house (or more often your caged area because YOU MUST BE CONTAINED), slap-sliding across the floor on four fat limbs, mowing over baby stuff like dumb rattles and stupid crinkle books in pursuit of enthusiastically wedging yourself between the toy bin and the side table because that’s where the Hot Wheels are. The Hot Wheels with their tiny, delectable chokeable parts and delicious radioactive metal-alloy fillings. This week you’ve also spent a fair amount of time sitting in a bin full of wooden train tracks while you use a maraca handle as a tongue depresser and a miniature steel drum as a jaunty beret, and I hardly know what to say about that. Baby, you are drunk.
Other preferred toys at nine months: remote controls (but not the old one with no batteries, the NERVE!), car keys (but only when I need them to drive), Wombat’s artwork left within two feet of the ground, a plastic bear head (named Bear Head), Duplos (best if built into something already), and anything in the t.v. console, because that’s not where you’re supposed to be, young man.
(Yes, that’s him saying his first word. Although he’s since used it in similar contexts several times–”No, NO climbing on the fireplace grate”; “Yes!”–it’s not what I’d call consistent, which, honestly, is FINE considering he’s using it to sass. Nevertheless, what is consistent is the attitude. Here is a child who knows what he wants and when he wants it and quite literally won’t take no for an answer. I’m…scared.)
Fox, you are a challenge. Discipline is a challenge, sleeping is a challenge, eating is a challenge when it’s anything other than boob or ingredients pureed into the silky-smoothest slime. (Seriously with the gag-barfing on mashed banana?) As second-time parents, we’re newly learning to walk the tightrope between, on the one end, enforcing our family structure (we obey our parents! we eat food! we sleep at night! all night! try it, you’ll like it!) and, on the other end, working within our newest member’s preferred methodology (e.g., my home office is the front seat of the car, because you’ll only nap in the back seat and I need to get some work done, some time, somehow). Life these days is…interesting. I’m…learning. I’m figuring out how to reframe the way I think about working, about not working, about parenting, about not parenting, about so many things I didn’t think I’d have to think about, or at least not yet. Yes, you’re nine months old (enormous! ancient! big enough to stand straight up in the middle of a room and clap your hands in self-congratulations!), but you’re also only nine months old. You want your mommy. You want your milks. You’re an itty-bitty baby, for crying out loud. (So sit down and stay put, why dontcha?)
According to the official officials, you are 18 pounds and 28 inches, making you short and skinny for your age, of all unexpected things. Your cheeks lie. Your thighs lie. To my eyes, you are a roly-poly classic baby, a wind-up caricature of what all babies are, with peaches-and-cream skin and sapphires for eyes, and I kind of want you to stay this way forever. Would you mind?
At nine months old you like to play peekaboo under blankets, get tossed in the air, and stroll outside (as long as you’re facing forward and not back at the cruel woman who won’t pick you up right now now now). You like when Dad brushes your four whole teeth with the squishy blue shark toothbrush, and you like turning the pages in your board books during bedtime stories. You like your brother so, so much. (Just wait until you get to know him even better. He astounds.) You like the cats too, although sometimes more than they would like you to like them. You bite when you nurse (HOLY HOLY), but I’m still so glad it’s something we can do. I’m proud of it even, just like I’m proud to strap you into the carrier and show you off at the grocery store, and like I’m proud to post too many photos and videos of you online, and like I’m proud that you can do all the wonderful, amazing, perfectly normal baby things that, in your doing them, feel to my heart like the first time any baby has done them ever.
More than proud, though, I feel lucky. You are cute beyond measure, strong[-willed] beyond reason, and funny in a way I never could have expected you to be. Your face is a small round filigree handmirror of how happy we all are to have you with us, and your smile reflects the beam of our love so bright that it lights up the hemisphere.
I am exponentially more busy now than I have ever been in my entire life, and that’s why although we spend all day together, I always feel like I’m running after you with a butterfly net, my feet tangling in the overgrown grass and the sun blinding my eyes as I try to capture your fleet-winged babyhood, so exquisite and unique that I can’t help but want to pin it down under glass and keep it on my nightstand. Will I ever catch up? I’m chasing you, I’m chasing deadlines, I’m chasing tea with tablespoons of straight-up sugar and sometimes wishing it were something a little bit stronger (don’t do drugs, kids!), and it’s exhausting and humiliating and not what I signed up for and also thrilling and invigorating and just exactly what I never knew I wanted. My heart quickens just thinking about it.
Now listen close because here’s the kicker: I don’t think I’m particularly good at being your mom (yet), but oh, I’m having the best time. This, coming from a girl who rejects pretty much everything she’s not naturally good at, is quite out of character. In fact, I hardly recognize myself anymore some days. In a way, I’m getting to know the both of us at the same time, which I guess is what you’re doing too. Together, we’re figuring out each other and ourselves and the world, one snuggle, one glee-shriek, one naughty “yes” at a time.
You are as big on the inside as you are little on the outside, as vast as the universe, as tiny as the twinkle of a faraway star. You are one part mischief, one part mystery, one part eyebrows, and one part little blonde Superman curl right in the middle of your forehead. That’s the recipe for you, the Big Bang that brought into being life as we now know it.
What’s next, my boy? What’s next? Not even the sky is your limit.
2013
To Sleep or Not To Sleep
I had a fairly significant epiphany a few weeks ago in regards to the never-ending saga of Fox not sleeping, and although I’m afraid the epiphany did not include any pass-alongable advice about actually getting my child (or yours) to sleep through the night, I feel like it’s worth mentioning because (a) it still might help someone and (b) I have a feeling I’m going to have to learn this lesson again and again, so I might as well learn it from myself.
Here it is:
I don’t just want Fox to sleep, I want him to sleep how I want him to sleep. Rookie mistake.
The corollary/solution to the above is that if I…er, if we can rein ourselves in and give up the fantasy that it’s possible to completely override this [crazy] infant’s biological set-up, we can actually get him to sleep just fine, provided he’s doing it the ways he can and does best (swaddled, in motion, in small increments, and stuffed with a pacifier made out of boob and attached to yours truly). This arrangement isn’t ideal for the rest of us but it is, nevertheless and all things considered, still SLEEEEEEEEEEP SWEET LIFE-AFFIRMING SLEEEEEEEEEEP, and we’re at the point now when that singular goal trumps all else. I don’t know whether I’d call this shift of paradigms resigning, giving up, coming to our senses, or letting the baby win, but you can call it whatever you like so long as it significantly reduces the incidence of hour-long crying jags at 2 a.m. while we try to convince each ourselves he’s totally just seconds away from soothing himself back to sleep even though he’s got a death grip on the crib rail and is bouncing up and down on the mattress like a caged chimp hooked up to electrodes.
Ideal: I want him to sleep from 8ish at night to 8ish in the morning without waking up. I want him to sleep in his own bed the whole time. I want him to sleep unswaddled. I want him to nap in the afternoon for at least an hour at a time, in his bed, unswaddled. Currently we’re 0 for 6 on most days, and it’s keeeelling meeeee. (“Why can’t you be more like your brother?”) That we keep shooting for these goals is what, I’m slowly coming to realize, is making the process feel like a nightly bout of shooting ourself in our collective parenting foot like morons. It has to stop.
Now…if I just want the baby to sleep, no conditions attached? That’s accomplished easily enough. In fact, it’s so simple it’s stupid. He likes the swing, he likes the swaddle, he likes the car seat, he likes our bed and its roll-up all-night open bar. We’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty, whoozits and whatzits galore. Thingamaboobs? I’ve got two. That’s all he really wants.
A month or so ago I was sent a review copy of Harvey Karp’s latest book, The Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep (but this is not a sponsored review!), and as I read it (in random parking lots during Fox’s car naps) I kept waiting to find something useful about getting the kid to stay asleep without help. It seemed to be more about soothing than sleep training as I knew it (we Ferber-lited Wombat for three days before he claimed his the spot as the Best Sleeper Ever), and talking to people on Twitter confirmed that yeah, the Happiest Baby method is more about soothing and therefore contains lots and lots of soothing tricks and advice (and I recommend it to anyone who needs help in that area, especially if you’re having your first baby), but unfortunately we don’t need soothing tricks and advice, and that’s why I once shattered a parking lot nap by shouting “Baloney!” at a book. In short, I want to train my kid to not need me to soothe him to sleep, and I certainly don’t want to train him to expect it, you know? At one point the text said something like “You may have to do this technique fifty times in a row in one night,” to which my response was a less polite version of “Fuck that shit!”
Ahem.
Anyway, I already know how to soothe him. (Boob.) I know how to get him to sleep without any tears. (Boob.) I know how to make him go right back to sleep if (WHEN) he wakes up in the middle of the night. (Boob.) After weeks of twenty-minute crib snoozes that weren’t long enough for me to check my email let alone accomplish other pressing tasks like take a shower, do the dishes, or organize the entire house, I even finally figured out how to get him to take a decent afternoon nap: drive him around the greater Bay Area or let him sway to sleep in the swing he’s way too big for. (When he’s awake, he can rock back and forth in the swing with such force it shimmies across the hardwoods like something out of the Jetsons, which I’m guessing falls under the WARNING: DANGER section of the manual and not the SPECIAL FEATURES one.)
Today he took a two-and-a-half-hour(!) nap in his car seat while I sat up front and read a book just for fun. Here in the land of post-sleep-epiphany, I’m glad to say that now, instead of driving home and taking the car seat inside, which inevitably wakes him up and dashes all hopes of getting something productive done, I’ve learned I’m better off just letting him sleep in the car while I take advantage of that forced “me time.” A different kind of person might even use that opportunity to take a nap herself. (I’m writing on a new campaign for CafeMom, and one of my first posts is about how I ignore all advice to sleep when the baby sleeps because naps make me ragey. If this is you too, you are not alone.)
Anyway, that example is the perfect illustration of the New Way of Things. If the baby wants to sleep in the car, I’m going to let him sleep in the car, and I’m going to try reeeeeally hard not to be bitter about it. It’s exhausting not getting uninterrupted rest at night, but it’s even more exhausting spending every day (and night) negotiating sleep when the monologue goes, “Is today a good day to be an Enforcer, or do we really all just need to take the easy way out and get some rest however we can?” That kind of inconsistency will obviously kill any kind of training plan, and besides, the answer is pretty much always that we really all just need to get some rest however we can. Neither of us is never like, “Nah, tonight feels like a fine time to just let him cry and fuss and whine until we feel like digging out our eardrums with a grapefruit spoon!”
It’s a bummer that our non-sleep-trained kid is making us miss out on certain things (we can’t really go out on a date, and we’re probably cancelling our trip to the Mom 2.0 conference over my birthday weekend because we can’t leave a baby overnight with anyone we don’t hate, and I’m not keen on leaving my children with someone I do hate), but it’s also a bummer to keep applying sleep strategies that aren’t working, even though they were easy and magical for our naturally easy and magical first kid. And here’s where I’d like to say that if I ever assumed the cry-it-out technique only failed for parents who were doing it wrong, I was wrong to assume that. I still think Ferber is worth a shot (when it works, it tends to work FAST and MIRACULOUSLY), but if you have a baby like Fox who doesn’t cry it out but cries it up to 11, I guess all we can do is try our best to do our best, which is what all of us are already doing anyway, isn’t it? Fifty gold stars and sympathetic back pats for everyone!
2013
Between the Lines
My blogging fingers have been itchy while I’ve been busy doing other things like hosting parties, dusting my home and everyone I love with glitter, attending a child’s birthday celebration with twenty-six kids and their parents with my fly down the entire time (winning!), putting heavy things on Fox’s head to keep him from just standing up in the middle of the room like an actual biped or something (losing!), and composing blog posts dominated by nervous laughter as I reveal I’m, ha ha ha, OMGPREGNANTAGAINNOOOOOOO, hee hee hee?, although I’m happy to say that one stopped as soon as I could confirm it was a false alarm (OMGOMG). I’ve been doing a book project for work, sneaking in freelance blogging here and there, and trying to be very patient with the schizo spring weather, which is easier said than done some days, as I’m sure you can relate, even those of you whose “good” spring weather means the icicle hanging from the end of your nose is melting rather than embiggening. Although it never feels like the best use of my time to steal the baby’s naps to journal here when the dirty dishes are stacked eyebrow high and the cat box has actual cartoon stink lines wiggling off it into the air, I never, ever, ever, ever regret it. That whole bit about “warm family memories are more precious than a clean kitchen” (I made that up) turns out to be true (and not just because I made it up). I’ve been thinking about what has changed in the way I write here now compared to how I did a decade ago, and although I think the realization that it might have made more interesting reading when I was pulling significant stories from my past instead of just recounting what we did last weekend, and the one before that, and the one before that, I also know Future Me will be happy to have whatever it gets out of this tangle of brain translated into pixels, and you can bet your butt Present Me is happy to have these minutes of downtime put a pretty frame around the scenes that aren’t always so picture-perfect as they’re being created.
Wombat’s on Spring Break from preschool (margaritas by the pool bar at 10 a.m. wooooooooo), so I only have a few minutes before I have to go rescue him from Netflix (mini-plug for the new WiiU, which has a touchscreen, so four-year-olds can navigate the movie menu themselves!). I’ll wipe the drool off Miserable Teething Baby’s nap-wrinkle face, put on some pants, and then take the boys out for some old-timey Vitamin D, the kind that doesn’t come from the bathroom cabinet via medicine dropper. I can’t think of a better way to avoid the dishes and the glitter and the packing list for our impending road trip than to spend the afternoon in a park (unless there’s a real possibility of having a margarita by the pool bar, in which case I choose that).
Here are a few photos from our life lived in between the lines.
Deshaggifying:
Red, read:
St. Patrick’s Day:
Chick nest:
Simon almost worked here:
First school playdate (hi, Jessica!). They found some abandoned cake pops and were this close to eating them, although something tells me if I hadn’t stopped them the girl in the background would have:
“Gardening.” Well, digging in the garden, at least:
Spring:
Gratuitous munchfaces:
You know you have a true friend in the person who will spend Sunday morning reading to your bony-butt boy from the dictionary while he tries not to spill cafe au lait on her lap:
And, finally, a shameless promo of what has quickly become a beloved craft blog: here’s how we’re doing Easter eggs this year.
What have YOU been doing? (This is not a lame way to end the post–well, it’s not JUST a lame way to end a post–I really do care what you’re up to. Seeing how people spend their springtime is always a kick because some of you are buried in snow and some of you are walking on sunshine (whooooaaa) and some of you are having margaritas by the pool and I will try not to hate you. So please do share [your margaritas].
