2013
Sleep Train of Thought
Is Sleep Train a national chain? If I sing “Sleep Traaaain,” do you follow with “The ticket to a better night’s sleep?” I hope so.
Well, Fox is almost six months old (here I gasp), and having successfully sleep-trained infant Wombat in a mere three days at eight months old, we always said we wish we’d done it earlier (specifically before he learned to pull up on his crib rail and rattle it like an incensed Kong), and so poor little second child, the time is upon us and YOU WILL SUBMIT OR SUFFER THE WRATH. WRATH FOLLOWED BY APOLOGETIC SNUGGLES. We do a kind of Cry-It-Out Lite™, which involves the proper amount of hand-wringing and hard-assedness to make us feel smugly triumphant over a 15-pound baby without also feeling like total monsters. If you do any form of CIO, my tip for you (and, uh, for me) is to use a timer because otherwise five minutes of whimpering and the occasional shout can feel like an hour of distraught garment rending. (Had I not clipped Fox’s nails earlier this morning, I’d fear waking to find his little blue gingham jammies shredded in a jagged patch at each hip, where his hands are pinned in his swaddle.) Now, we never actually read Ferber, just skimmed the book while Baby Wombat crawled around the no doubt perfectly clean carpet at Barnes and Noble, but I’m certain the section titled “But What If My Baby Rends His Garments?” was very short and consisted solely of the sentence “UR DOIN IT WRONG,” so we’re trying to avoid that.
Anyway, tonight is the first official hard-core–yet caring!–foray into teaching Fox how to stay asleep and put himself back to sleep if he insists upon waking up every three or four hours, and oh, although these waters are familiar and we charted them not four years ago, it’s actually quite a different experience sailing again when you’re attempting to steer a–surprise!–completely different kind of boat, go figure. [Insert joke about the poop deck here.] Wombat’s trouble was falling asleep in the first place, but once he was down he was down for good; all this new-fangled wake-up-in-the-pitch-dark-and-start-rooting-for-boob nonsense is, uh, nonsense up with which we will obviously not put.
So, hey, have you heard that you can figure out (to an extent) how to parent your first kid but then the next one will come along with a whole fresh list of issues and demands and you’ll be back at square one, or possibly square two if the kids are similar and/or you’re smarter than the average parent and/or you’ve sold your soul for a little extra bit of luck? This is nothing new, of course, but by god, what about parenthood ever is (answer: not a thing), and so isn’t talking about it with other parents mostly just swapping war stories? Instead of ‘Nam and Korea, we talk about surviving Aiden and Sophia. We are heroes, you guys. Heroes with medals splashed across our chests in milk-barf and who knows what else. (Don’t smell it to find out.)
The shared trauma of parenthood brings us closer together, TROOTH, and this, incidentally, is what our holiday crew (my family of four + Simon’s sister’s family of four + my MIL and her beau) were saying after the three-ring circus that was taking four small children to Shogun, where it’s fun to watch a trained chef do a little show as he cooks your food on the grill right there at your table and absolutely no one swirls her chopsticks in her Shirley Temple or gets loose and almost ends up in the koi pond or opens the meal with screams of “Fire! Fire! No fire! It’s too hot! I’m melting!” and then has to be put in time out behind the rubber tree plant for flagrant high-sticking in the vicinity of his mother’s wage-earning eyeballs. (Guess which one was Wombat?)
Yes. Shared trauma. We can now say “Shogun” and widen our eyes with a look of knowing terror and all adults present that night immediately pale and understand and back down from whatever “fun” proposition was so foolishly put forth moments earlier. But please compare this with that week’s earlier trip to Disneyland, which was NOT a Shogun, as the kids were good as little long-limbed gold nuggets. They waited patiently in lines, they loved some rides and declared others “too scary for me” but without any bat-shit freak-outs, and we stayed with the four- and five-year-old until midnight(!) and not once did either of them have to bare a forearm inked with his or her parent’s phone number after (a) he or she wandered off and got separated from the group or (b) his or her parents shouted “Look over there!” and then took advantage of the moment’s diversion to run in the opposite direction. In conclusion, Disneyland = good, Shogun = bad. Even then, when asked which they preferred for an afternoon of rollicking good times, the kids concurred that Disneyland was great and all but the bouncy house place in the mall, was even way super better. Do not ask me how much they loved the $1 carousel at the mall. Sigh.
Anyway, I seem to have broken down any hopes of a coherent narrative in this, my first post of 2013 (weird!), so I’m going to go crawl in bed and cross my fingers and toes and eyes that Fox doesn’t fart himself awake juuuuuust as I’m finally going to sleep. (I shouldn’t have had that Oreo right before bed, and yes, I’m totally getting back on the healthy-eating bandwagon in the new year but I can’t start until the Oreos are gone, so STOP JUDGING ME.)
(Can you tell my brain has been on vacation too?)
Happy New Year to you!
2012
One Small Happy Family
Merry Christmas, blog friends and blog family!
Thanks for being awesome all year long, and may the new year bring you much happiness, more peace, and copious amounts of the beverages of your choice. (I’ll start with some black tea, make the switch to ice water, have a bit of Diet Coke around 3, check out how the G&Ts are flowing after work, and then finish the night with a tall glass of pink champagne. Can I get you anything?)
2012
Springloaded
Okay, this is kind of funny, although I don’t know whether to laugh or submit it to that “I Believe the Children Are the Future and Also Truly Bizarre” website that I just made up.
In honor of the solstice, please to be enjoying Wombat’s artistic study on Spring:
See how the golden sun shines down from above. See how the ground bursts forth with flowers. See how it all looks so…innocent and not at all borderline obsessive.
So, the next day: Spring! Again!
Lovely. Just lovely, isn’t it?
The next day:
And the next:
And the next:
His teacher was kind enough to label this one:
Saaaaaaay, I’m sensing a pattern…
You guys. This has been going for about THREE MONTHS–not every day, but two or three times a week and accounting for 90% of all artwork he brings home. Not included here is his first Spring, a large-scale painting in washable acrylics; his third Spring, on paper too big for the scanner; and all the other versions I didn’t scan because (a) he’d written his name across them in really big letters or (b) my scanning arm got tired because, damn, that’s a lot of Springs.
Now, as a former borderline-obsessive child who had no drawing skill and therefore only ever drew one of three tried-and-true scenes (a flock of birds over rolling hills, a caterpillar in a flower garden, and a scarecrow in a corn field) because what’s the use in doing something if you can’t do it PERFECTLY, I get what’s going on here. It’s comforting to repeat and repeat and repeat something you’ve proven you can do well (hello, my entire professional career), and I mean, yeah, he’s obviously a weird kid, but trust me that this isn’t even the half of it.
I started dating these daily exercises in early December, when my parents visited and my dad, who shares my sense of humor and love of order (or rather I share his) said I had to date them if they were to be properly preserved as the priceless family artifacts they undoubtedly are. “You’ll want to be able to track the progression as they change and get more complex,” he said. So I started dating them, and whaddya know, you can flip through them and see when the sun developed its sun spot (after Wombat saw one on his flashcards of outer space), and when the flowers started comprising many smaller flowers (drawn from life) and, when, behold!, we finally got a rainbow arcing gracefully dangling awkwardly in the sky, like the one we had seen two days earlier.
“I can make the rainbow any colors I want because I’m in charge.”
It’s spring…at night! Stars and brown moon and all. One of his polygamist preschool wives drew the fancy flower.
I shouldn’t be worried, right? I’ve seen him draw other things too–a smiley face, a Christmas tree, a turkey-style tracing of his hand that he turned into a red fire-breathing dragon that will “burn your face right off if you don’t watch out, Mom.” Tooooooootally normal.
