Nummas.

All of the blog posts I start (and fail to publish) here lately are just descriptions of the new stuff Hank is doing. But I keep stopping myself, because, well, it’s hard to get perspective on whether Hank’s exploits are remotely interesting. I am taken by him, for obvious reasons, but, as you’ll see in the following anecdotes, what he is up to these days is so ordinary. Mind-blowing to me, the one who’s watched him daily transform from inchoate bundle of basic needs to a…person. But nonetheless mundane, I would suspect, to outside observers.

In any case, since I seem allergic to recording anything in the baby book that I never started, this space serves me as a record of my son’s early years, and so onward to such riveting accounts as, “My kid knows the difference between a dump truck and a garbage truck! Call M.I.T.!”

So. Henry has been counting objects and counting his way to ten for awhile now, and recently he’s been recognizing printed numbers. So, hey! Henry can read numbers! I mean, recognize them. Not “read.” Well, I guess they are similar. But it’s like saying “Henry can read animals now!” because he can recognize that a circle with two ovals attached to the top 70 degrees or so is meant to be a bunny. In any case, it is still kind of a shock. I suppose it shouldn’t be, because it’s not unlike other forms of recognition (see bunny example above). But because we (adults) assign particular cultural meaning to numbers (hint: they are the hallmark of geniuses!), a toddler counting objects and pointing at numbers appears as a sign of intelligence. I suspect, however, that it is not.

Which isn’t to say that Hank isn’t very bright. He is. He’s a bright toddler. Which is not unlike saying he is an active toddler, though these statements tend to be approached with different levels of (wrongly assigned) determinism. That he’s an active toddler doesn’t mean he is going to get a football scholarship to Ohio State. You can guess the extensions of the analogy to brightness. Sure, he’s a precocious learner, but one might better say “picker upper.” His job, his life, is learning right now; but not learning in the way we describe it at school-age–he is learning every second of the day because he’s essentially a foreigner in our code-filled world.

I’ve written about the “gifted” designation before, in this post, which that has a superb comment section (both because of the conversation around schooling and educational opportunities for our children but also the peek into the lives of some of my favorite bloggers). While I’m aware of how tiers of opportunity are open to children identified early on as “gifted,” I am deeply suspicious of the way our culture divides and categorizes the potential of our young.

Hank was just about a year old when I wrote that post; he had a word or two and had taken only a few steps. It was easy to downplay milestones, because we hadn’t really seen the transformation from baby to person yet. We hadn’t yet gotten to the explosion of words and skills and awareness that hit around 15/16 months, and we didn’t even know what would be happening here, at almost 19 months, with the pointing at letters* and numbers and coming up with his own language for concepts he doesn’t have words for (example: “sick butt!” apparently means “I just had a raging bout of diarrhea in my diaper, guys”).

It’s really hard, during the rapid growth of the toddler stage, not to take everything your kid does as a sign of his genius. And I mean everything. Partially because (in our case) SO MUCH IS HAPPENING. Hank’s vocabulary is uncountable, he uses new words and phrases every day, picking up a new concept and immediately wielding it. His sentences are becoming more grammatical (he’s very interested in the concept of “and” right now–”Banana AND yogurt AND toast, mama. AND!”). He acts and interacts more socially every day, he does more things spontaneously, becoming his own agent rather than simply responding to suggestion. His imaginative play is more complex, and hilarious (he turns a cup over and puts it on his hand, giggling and saying “Hello guys!!!” in a voice that is clearly meant to be other than his own; without prompting, and with what examples to draw from I can’t tell you, he’s made a puppet).

Because the loaned and gifted baby books that we have are all focused on the infant period, I’m not exactly sure what’s “normal” and what isn’t for the around 18 months age group. So when I declare Hank’s genius when he puts on his own shoes or fills in the words as I read him more narratively complex books, it’s not exactly a comparative statement. He’s a genius not because I assume what he is doing is necessarily ahead of the curve, but just because he’s doing it. He’s a genius, in essence, because he’s mine.

And we are so proud, so so proud, of every new thing he does. This is a parent’s impulse. This morning, Hank woke up and banged on his door for me to come get him, and when I opened his door he told me: “It’s stinky. Stinky butt. Wipes.” And indeed, he was carrying quite a load. To start to identify his own soiling of himself is just a normal step toward, well, full humanness. But I swell with pride; look at my child’s ability to communicate his needs! And that pride softens the eyelash curling stench of his truly stinky butt. Our kids amaze us, whatever it is they do, whether it’s identifying shapes or instructing us to mop up their feces.

My narration of Hank’s new skills might sound a bit defensive, or couched, or insincerely downplayed. What I’m trying to capture here, perhaps poorly, is my genuine amazement at Hank’s abilities but my awareness of new parent solipsism. All of this is mundane, ordinary. It doesn’t mean much. I hope we don’t come across as braggy competitive seeming parents when we regale people with boring tales of Hank’s play kitchen concoctions and brilliantly original mash-ups of nursery rhymes.

But while it doesn’t mean much, in that we’re not calling M.I.T., it still means a lot. To me, to his father, his caregivers, to our friends and family.

He’s amazing, this one. And, come to think of it, not just because he’s mine. Because he’s him.

*Henry points at text and says “lettahs!” excitedly, but no, he doesn’t recognize individual letters. He surprised me the other day, though, as I started singing the ABC song to him but trailed off as I concentrated on merging in traffic, and he happily continued the song for me, rattling off letters like it was no big thing, something I was totally unaware he could do. Again, the ABC song is memorization–it might as well be Twinkle, Twinkle, they share the same tune after all–but as one of the precursors to literacy it’s given special importance.

Every little thing he does is science fiction.

I know I’ve mentioned here before my feelings about pregnancy. That for something that might be arguable THE most natural process going (aside from shitting, I suppose, which is a bit more democratically applicable to various sexes and species), pregnancy sure resembles science fiction. This is not pregnancy’s “fault,” of course, but rather science fiction’s invention–if you’re hoping to ride the cusp between the spectacular and the believable, as science fiction must need do, there are few bodily processes more suited. If you are trying to find that abject in the mundane, you needn’t go much farther than human reproduction.

This was unsurprising to me while a pregnant person, as I was cynical and prone to inappropriate humor when referencing my unplanned-for situation. As biology marched forward (despite the original child-free plans of a heretofore intellectual drunkard) I would announce “This week the baby is busy swallowing his own urine!” to well meaning folk who attempted to fawn over me. Even long after inter-uterine bonding, there is acute strangeness in housing another body inside one’s own. In the days leading up to delivery, the ability to locate limbs and feel the hiccups shaking his back, through my own skin, made me think of Cronenberg movies. Or the usual clichéd reference–that scene from Alien (which is inaccurate, in my case, as I’ve never seen it, so I’m really referring to the parody in Space Balls).

Then the genre switches dramatically–the futuristic gives way to the primal. My birth scene was thankfully not directed by James Cameron. I nearly gave birth in the shower, in the car, in the elevator (I suppose that would have placed me in a sitcom), so I was dimly aware of being in a hospital as I had Henry so quickly, in low lighting, without drugs, the machines still tucked away in their adjacent closet, without really caring or noticing much who was assisting (a midwife I’d never met). And then you’ve got the warm tiny human on your chest. And we spent the next few months holed up in our house, confined by a forbidding midwestern winter, nursing and swaddling and sleeping next to one another. Even with all the pregnancy and newborn and sleep and development books piled next to me, I had a feeling I was experiencing something from before narrative.

But of course that’s part of its own story–the mythos of the nurturing earth goddess flowing with milk. I’m not knocking it (okay so I sort of am) and I’m not saying I didn’t try it (because I lived it, to a degree). It’s funny, that. Those early moments with your offspring, which necessarily recall to you every single image of Madonna and Child and make you reevaluate every sappy movie where you’ve seen the unsurpassed bond of parent-and-child-hood trotted out and think Yes! That’s it! THIS is it! I didn’t see before! And yet they are all shabby imitations because there is no other story, other than your story, there is no love like this love, no baby like this baby. (And no sleeplessness like this sleeplessness, and no rash like this rash that certainly means your newborn is DYING or something).

You find yourself plugged into a narrative that you don’t see, or don’t want to see, as a narrative. Because narratives are trivial–this is real life, because, dear god, you can actually point to it and change its diaper. LIFE! A concentrated bundle of ≈6-10 pounds of it!

But then, after that first chapter where a reviewer prone to cliché would say  you are “completely engrossed,” you find yourself reading ahead. Trying to orient yourself in the master-plot. When the gripping of toys or sitting up or–hopeful and impatient flipping of pages–sleeping through the night happens.

You are insatiably drawn to the narratives of others (parent bloggers, I’m talking about you) now because the little inscrutable poop-machine you spend the whole day clutching is, well, inscrutable. Unreadable. How else are you going to figure out what comes next? What’s even happening now.

And then for a good long while you are living what a good story abhors–the repetitive, boring stuff that happens between scenes. Un-photographable mealtimes and changings and bathings and stretches of tedious hours and moments of unspeakable despair and resentment.

There is a place, after that initial bout of primal lovesickness, and once the life-giving, super-nurturer crown loses its shine (which happened, for me, when the pie chart became less dominated by time breastfeeding and more split between trying to make vegetables appealing and endless naming kinds of construction vehicles), where day-to-day life is so uninteresting that it’s hard to tell stories (hence the lack of content on this blog). And there is lowering of the desire to read them (my blog reading has gone waaaaay down in proportion to how old my child is–in fact, I’d bet that the hugest portions of parent-blog readership are expectant parents, then very new parents, then the rest of us).

Think about the parenting section of a bookstore. Pregnancy, two shelves. Newborn, one and a half. Toddlers, half? Preschoolers, a half of a half? School age and teenagers and beyond? A few? The books beyond those very early months and years become very specialized–special needs, high-spirited, how to talk to your kid about drugs, etc. etc.

Where am I even going with this? My extended metaphors are all mixing and the line between fiction and non-fiction totally ignored. What is this post even about?

Oh yeah, science fiction. So, for me, the whole sci-fi alien hosting thing really disappeared when that thing–that crawling thing!–well, crawled. Because even during that time-before-stories-cavey-newborn-period there is a lingering sense of the alien. You don’t know this person. What does it want? Even while you are communicating and nurturing on a primal level the infant is this leaky spewing thing that sounds like a pterodactyl half the time. But your baby becomes more and more human every day. You stop reading books and you start reading him. You start communicating through symbols. He learns social cues. You read him books, he becomes aware that beyond the world of milk and warmth there are…stories.

And, despite this growing humanness, the toddler period takes a turn back toward science fiction. Your kid is, like, really talking to you. It’s like D.A.R.Y.L., where you sometimes find yourself astonished that something comes out you don’t recall putting in.

You continue to talk over and around your child because you’re not used to his being a full participant in social life. And you’re jarred by his pushing himself into the conversation, by his recognition of complex logic, his ability to point at the number 2 and say, “Numma! Twoooooo!”

Or, you find yourself crying in the car. Sobbing. And your little boy is struggling with the little language he has to figure out what’s going on. “Crying? Crying? Mama crying? Mama no cry. No cry. What? What? Stop, mama. Stop.”

The cynical side of you, the storyteller, wants to take away from his some joke about the little HAL 9000 walking around your house who’s gone from chewing on blocks to slowly adapting, learning your ways. You want to creepily whisper, to no one in particular: He’s aware.

But in that moment you feel very far from the elaborate stylings of science fiction, where unknown technology and alien worlds can distract from the simple (if awful) truth of losing your shit in your car with your kid strapped in the backseat. It’s arresting. Knowing that you and he don’t operate on separate planes of existence–not as much as you thought, anyway. That he’s coming in. You have to let him. He’s growing up.

But you kind of wish you were in science fiction, so he could just spend 5 minutes hooked up to your laptop and learn the whole of human history and host of human suffering from it, rather than from you. Or by living it.

I heart the peanut gallery.

It’s a boring truism that every blogger loves comments. I don’t think my appreciation outstrips anyone else’s, but it’s worth saying that I love getting the emails from wordpress, then re-reading the comments at the original posts, then following the links back to your blogs, if you have them. I always compose responses in my head, but most of the time I’m checking email/reading blogs on my phone (usually while rocking a kid to sleep), and its tiny interface proves a barrier to promptly responding to you. It’s no excuse really–you took the time to give me advice or say nice things about my offspring, and I’m already carrying on a fictive dialogue with you in my head–why not tap a few words back?

Well I am going to try to be more responsive, not that you’re holding your breath. I’m not too savvy, so I’m not sure if wordpress notifies you of my-comments-on-your-comments, or if you ever even check back. In place I might just start commenting more on your blogs, if you have them, so you can get the lovely emails from your blog services.

Continue, please, to give me your advice, even your assvice, because I am in constant need. We run the gamut of parenting styles chez Accidents, so you should never worry that I will rear up in some sort of “Clad my super-special snowflake in a polyester? Feed him non-organic foods? Let him…how do you say this word, “ker-eye”? Allow him to watch Yo Gabba Gabba*? I AM INSULTED BY THE SUGGESTION, MADAM.”

The young need to be protected by the herd, certainly. But I’m so sick of the Internets convincing parents, mothers not least among them, that every choice they make that is not the absolute “best” (who decides?) is a bad choice. What I’ve been most thankful for in reading blogs and hearing from blog readers is the the helpful knock out of my guilt spiral. Blogs have helped me give myself a fucking BREAK already about various things, and encouraged me to live in practical moderation rather than chase after the ideals of various small, vocal, minority groups on the Internets that are otherwise telling us that relatively benign choices are ruining our children. Keep in mind I refer to extremists here–people who would like to give your McClaren a slash of red spray-paint, who think your extended breastfeeding is breeding a sexual deviant, or who want to slap the Avent out of your baby’s mouth. No one like that reads here, of course. Or possibly anywhere–seeing as this stripe of hyper-judgmental parent likely does not exist outside of caricature. (But we’ve seen something very close, all of us, haven’t we?)

At various times this blog has covered cloth diapering, organic baby food making, the use of a clothes line, even elimination communication. It’s also covered sleep training, even of the C-I-O varietal, which is consistently the most popular post–just ahead of my post on using cloth toilet paper. If that doesn’t make for a study in arbitrarily formed parent-blogosphere-stand-offs I don’t know what does.

This blog I hope shows that kind of diversity (even as it screams FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS) rather than appearing to be hardline-anything. Looking back, though, I groan at my new-mother angst. I’ve guiltily opined about giving my son formula, living and dying by my output at the pump (ridiculous! what was wrong with me?). I remember my worrying about putting my son in childcare, obsessively adding “part time” to every mention of it here, in a protest-too-much bullshit move, whereas now I would like to sing from the fucking hilltops, if Madison really had any, that I LOVE DAY CARE WITH ALL OF MY HEART. What’s left of it, of course, since I’m already busy loving my son with all of it. But guess what? Not mutually exclusive, those two loves. I’ve wondered a-blog if I should be stimulating my son’s brain more, if I should be doing this or doing that. I’ve written (possibly self-righteously, I’m not going back to read at this moment) about not allowing my son screen time, etc. Oh, and I might as well resolve that asterisk from above here: *We discovered yesterday that Hank FUCKING LOVES YO GABBA GABBA. We never made it to the AAP’s 2 years (we started doing some TV a few months ago), and though I encourage you if you are following that path, I’m also totally down with you if you never even tried.

What I like about you, Dear Readers, is that you come from the broad spectrum of parenting styles and choices (both terms seem so stupid, don’t they? as if this is really what we are doing–choosing and styling–instead of just surviving and loving) and offer me advice and commiseration from where you are at. I, in turn, hope, if you stick around, or look back into my archives, that you grant me first-parent-naivete and don’t find judgment in the explorations of parenting topics and themes and experiences chronicled here. Groan with me, rather than against me, is what I am inviting you to do.

What I’ve loved about comments here are the honest and non-preachy tips and tricks. I am hungry for the advice that comes from quarters of parenthood I haven’t yet experienced, or strategies I hadn’t thought of (or, as it sometimes that case, hadn’t allowed myself to consider, see above: Ideals of Rigid Parenting Camps). And to not over-emphasize the practical knowledge traded here, I’ve loved your anecdotes and your small (but huge, in impact) compliments or any of your comments on my or Hank’s or our little family’s goings-on.

This is somewhat unrelated and tangent-y, vague and probably unnecessary. But the last few weeks (and months, and years, probably) of parent-blog and twitter buzz have made me want to say a few things, take from them what you will:

We all need reminding that we aren’t incubating our young in a Domino’s oven when we feed them pizza, homemade or otherwise. We ARE NOT, even as we grant the smarminess of Big Formula Incorporated, giving our children BPA-Free bottles of Fast Food when we take advantage of formula’s LIFE SAVING qualities. Staying home with our children is not a step-back for feminism nor is the sweet, sweet embrace of childcare that far a step away from traditional motherhood.

Okay, sorry. Just needed to get that off my chest. All of this is to say: comment on, good people. Give me your tired (dispatches on sleep deprivation), your (tales of) poor (eating), your huddled missives on the occasional suckitude of parenthood, yearning to seethe free!

And I swear I’m reading, I’m following, I’m laughing and considering. I may not have as much time to read your blogs and comments and tweets these days now that the semester has begun, but I’m coming to find you when I can (insert link to whole blogroll), controversying in my head if not on this blog, and missing you while you’re gone.

18 months.

I think I’ve destroyed the tradition of keeping track of Hank’s stats at each well-baby visit, but consider this a return to the formula.

Henry Stellar

18 months

28 lbs 8 oz (84th percentile)

34.5 inches (96th percentile)

49.8 cm headsize (93rd percentile)

I quoted these stats on the telephone to various people incorrectly. In my head, he was 95th percentile for weight. I think it just feels that way to my arms, now that he’s learned to shout “UP! LIST [his pronunciation of "lift"]!” when he doesn’t want to walk. And I, noddle-y weak-armed as I am, oblige.  In any case, the difference between 84 and 95 is…well, not much, I would imagine, and he’s still a giant. Always has been.

Because of his size and obvious thriving-ness, the pediatrician laughed off our tales of food battles and fears that he’ll never tolerate vegetables. Diagnosis: toddler. Plan of attack: put nutritious food in front of him, let him do what he will.

At each appointment, the pediatricians’ practice we go to gives you, along with some handouts about milestones and whatnot, a new book. A lot of research goes into these choices and it shows–the book is always a huge hit with Hank. Up until now, the books have been pretty straightforwardly developmental/educational. Baby Faces, Shapes. This time, it was a weird book in a series the name of which makes me giggle (“Classic Books with Holes”). But within 24 hours of bringing home the most recent board book, The Farmer in the Dell, Henry had the book essentially memorized. The next night, as I placed him in his bed, he crooned, “Fahmar Dell. Cheese ‘lone.” One of the verses reads “the nurse takes a dog,” which just happens to pair two of Hank’s absolutely favorite things in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. RIGHT THERE ON ONE PAGE. OMFG. I’ve tried to explain to him that our language provides multiple meanings for any given word, that the etymology of the word “nurse” is actually fairly fascinating, when you think about it, and…well, for now he is not interested in nuances, but is pretty fucking stoked that someone has seen fit to combine two amazing concepts into one line of verse.

And: CHEESE ‘LONE, y’all.

Of course, the image of a group of women, waiting patiently, combined with the phrase “The farmer takes a wife” is strange, and when you get to the idea of “taking a child” and the corresponding illustration of a pool of playing children on that page, the whole scene starts to seem all CODE ADAM! but, you know, cherished nursery rhymes/games, folkways, blah blah blah.

When we got down to business and the pediatrician asked us parents, “So, what’s new?” Henry, sitting in Baby Daddy’s lap, supplied “NEW BOOK!” and leaned dramatically toward her to push The Farmer in the Dell in her face. It’s a well-established “kids say the darnedest things!” category–a sweet literalness of interpretation. And if you will allow me a moment of pure parental hearts-for-pupils indulgence: my kid is THE AWESOMEST.

[A side note on Hank's verbal and social precociousness: today, on our now multiple-times-daily walk down the street to ogle at the construction vehicles, Hank bounded up to a woman on the street, saying his breathy "Haaaaie" and putting out his hand to demand she hold it. "Hand!" he snapped. He then pulled her, in his 28 pound way, toward the curb. "Look, diggers! Yellow! I see...rock breaker!" As I caught up to them, we exchanged smiles and pleasantries. And then I got roped into 15 minutes of confusingly intentioned conversation due to her status as a certain kind of...witness...and, listen: she was very nice and I mean no disrespect, but I'm made very uncomfortable by evangelism. So yes, yes, he's cute and funny and has no sense of danger, oh the innocence and wonder, but, ugh, having a friendly and talkative kid is rough when you yourself are a crippled by social anxiety and your bizarre version of small talk tends to make people think you either are or need to see an analyst. In any case, I left with some literature I didn't want and it was increasingly awkward as I made a hasty excuse but had to literally drag Henry away from her as he continued to try to hand her the "nine" (read: two; his count is usually as inflated as my sense of his awesomeness) sticks he had gathered while I tried to politely decline said literature.]

[Back to the main thread] It was annoyingly one day too early for his last 12 month vaccination (we spaced the 12 month vax over 12, 15 and 18). I was a little miffed that they allowed me to make the appointment at all, then, but whatever. So, yay! I guess, no shots. But we needed to do another blood screening (he’s had these done at 12, 15 and now 18 months) because his iron is always low. So we went to the lab for full on needle in the arm blood draws from both arms. He didn’t shed a single tear, even as they poked and poked one arm before giving up and switching to the other. He sat still and remained happy the whole time, bizarrely, while his father fumed in the corner and gave the blood-drawers the evil eye. Baby Daddy’s reaction when Henry is poked with needles is endearing, though totally out of proportion.  He just chattered on about his NEW! BOOK! and gestured suggestively at the sucker waiting for him on a nearby table. “Sucker? Sucker? Mine sucker? Yellow sucker?” It was orange, actually, but he was trying. The kid has had a total of three suckers in his life, but you bet that word is in his vocabulary.

I have to say, his enjoyment of suckers is so rapturous that I get excited before appointments where he’ll be getting shots/blood drawn, knowing that it’s going to end so well for him. Baby Daddy would likely divorce me for admitting this.

Luckily we’re not married and he rarely visits this blog.

The results from the blood screening came back as within normal range. So, overall, kid is in good health. I am very thankful for this. Having had a terminally ill and variously disabled brother, diagnosed at an early age, I am, while surprisingly not prone to grandiose fears about Hank’s health, certainly aware of how absolutely fucking lucky we are that Hank is average and healthy. Of course, my experience with my brother and my general values don’t make health or typical development prerequisites for happiness, gratefulness or pride. But I do want to say to the universe, thank you for this boy. This thriving, hilarious and loving boy.

If I was being pressured to hug a statue of a dinosaur, I’d probably make that face, too.

Toddler (not) sleeping, girl drowning.

So. For the past two weeks, Hank has been waking around 4 a.m. Once it was 3:30 a.m. Mostly it’s been just after 4 a.m. One morning it was 5 a.m. and I thought we had turned a corner. But the next day was back to 4:12 a.m. and I wanted to die again. This is not a 4 a.m. wake-up as in he goes back to sleep after some cajoling. No. No amount of soothing or nursing or ignoring changes a goddamned thing about the situation. And the situation is that he is UP. FOR. THE DAY.

I’ve read much about 18 months and its great big FUCK YOU to all gains in the sleep department (and its other challenges) on Ask Moxie, and it seems I have a sister-in-suckitude over at Jonniker. So I know this is just the way it is. And I’m starting to think it’s pointless to look much further on these old Internets for advice or solutions or anything like that. We’re convinced we’ll just have to ride it out.

Not that we haven’t tried a few things.

Let’s see. We’ve tried putting him to bed later. But Henry has always been a kid that the early bedtime really worked for. Like, putting him to bed at 5:30 p.m. back in the days of absolutely no sleep was the first step toward getting him to actually sleep for more than 45 minutes at a time and to a decent hour in the morning. Seriously, the early bedtime saved our ASSES. Over time it’s moved later and later, as late as 7 p.m. (I know! burning the midnight OIL, y’all!) But 6:30-7:00ish has really been his sweet sleep spot. Once the 4 a.m. wake up for the day began, however, we of course second-guessed our early bedtime. Maybe he’s trying to tell us we’re expecting too much sleep out of him overnight? Maybe he’s ready for a later bedtime?

NOPE. The nights we put him to bed at 7, 7:30 and 8 p.m. resulted in 4, 4:15 and 3:30 a.m. That’s right. The night we put him to bed at 8 he woke up an hour EARLIER than the EARLIEST OF WAKE-UPS.

So we tried putting him to bed earlier. This has maintained the status quo. Putting him to bed at 6:30 p.m. has resulted in him still waking at 4/4:30 a.m., but at least he’s getting a good amount of sleep, rather than staying up and then also rising early, and being cranky all day. So he goes to bed early, gets the sleep he needs, and I get some time to myself in the evening, you know, for all the alcohol I NEED. But the earlier bedtime has not changed a thing about the pre-dawn assault on our REM cycles.

Though we knew it was a long shot, it was convenient one day to try eliminating his nap entirely. And, as an extra bonus, to run the fuck out of him. We had a pool party and grill out in our backyard over the weekend with a few friends who also have children, so Hank spent the entire day running after the older kids and swimming in his plastic pool(s), swinging and sliding on his play-set (one look at our backyard and you’d think: spoiled, but really I’m just a craigslist MASTER), and generally getting his toddler ya-yas out. No nap. He was out like a light at 7 p.m. and woke up the next day…at 4 a.m. We eliminated his nap the next day and he fell apart in the afternoon, and we put him to bed at 6:30, and he work up the next day…at 4 a.m.

Because the 4 a.m. risings have usually been accompanied by uncharacteristic crying and/or confusion (I open the door and he’s in the corner of the room mumbling, won’t come to me right away, sometimes resists being picked up or is hesitant to follow me out of the room, sometimes gets hysterical if I don’t do exactly what he wants me to do at the moment, the details of which are never clear, etc.) we tried out a night-light last night. He’s up till now been an extremely light sensitive kid, leading us to cover windows in tin-foil at home and anywhere we’ve stayed overnight. At childcare he naps in the room that can be made darkest. But again, we thought, maybe he’s changed. They are always changing, these children, otherwise we wouldn’t be in this mess. So last night we added a night light to the mix. He accepted its presence with just a little curiosity and feel asleep easily. And woke up the today at 4:18 a.m. But he didn’t seem as unhinged, and I credited that to the night light, which seemed necessary as there was no natural light to be had, since it was 4:FUCKING:18 in the morning.

So no fix, but maybe an improvement? At least in toddler morale? But then tonight, night 2 of night light, bedtime failed. I put him to bed and came downstairs and poured myself a glass of wine. Baby Daddy and I went and sat out on our back deck for just a bit, chatting about–what else? Henry’s sleep habits! We’re obsessed! You would be too. You might already be, with the habits of your own children. We came inside after about ten minutes, and we heard Henry banging on his door crying. When I went in he was pointing at the stupid night light and crying “Dark? Dark? Night night?” So apparently we are not okay with night lights in our room, whether they calm the early morning confuseys or not. I pulled the plug and got him resettled.

You’ll notice that crying it out is absent from our list of experiments, as is any sustained strategy–we haven’t spent more than two days in a row on any given alteration to his schedule. One or two nights of “maybe this will work?” does not a solid methodology make. But I think we’ve know from the beginning that nothing we do is going to change this current phase. And dear god, I hope it is a phase. Even if it last for four months, let it be a phase. Because of this, we know crying isn’t going to get us a damned thing so we haven’t gone there. Plus he’s AWAKE. Like really, really awake. If it was 1 a.m., we’d have gone straight to letting him cry, after maybe taking him to the doctor to check for an ear infection or something. But 4-6 a.m. has always been that iffy zone for us with crying it out–because he goes to sleep early, it’s reasonable (though horrifying) that he’d have had enough sleep by 4 and want to be up and about. Knowing this, it would seem like the best strategy was to keep him up later, counting the hours he seems to need and shifting the whole schedule. But it’s a total shit show if we try to keep him up, so we’ll continue to put him down early, and just deal with the dark, frustrating, blinkingly exhausting mornings.

It takes him many pre-dawn hours to look this good.

Typical day.

I didn’t, at least this week, participate in Ginger’s Wonderful Wednesdays, because, though yesterday was not a bad day, I wasn’t feeling particularly wonderful about anything. I appreciate the meme’s potential for reminding me that there are wonderful things in my life (and there are) but this week I’m being a humbug about it. Instead I’m going to rip off another of Ginger’s ideas and post about my own “typical day.”

A typical (week) day.

• Somewhere between 4:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m.: Wake up wondering why I’ve woken up, because there is no baby crying. Revel in the notion that I can go back! to sleep!
• Somewhere between 4:32 a.m. and 6:32 a.m.: Start to doze off just in time to hear Hank shuffling around in his room. Realize that mama bear instincts are still unsquashed despite horrifically-cruel-brain-damaging-sleep-training. The kid coughs in his sleep and I wake up. Consider trying to go back to sleep since he’s technically giggling at Mark rather than crying for me. Never do, because I miss him, and despite all that supposed sleep training, I still go to him the second he wakes up, even if it’s 4:30 a.m., which these days, it often is. Like, TODAY, for instance. And yesterday. And the day before.
• 4:33 a.m.: Pee, usually, because I’d rather not do so with a kid standing next to me alternating high pitched little chants of “POTTY!? NURSE?!”
• Um, it’s seems weird to try to estimate how long it takes me to pee., so 4:33 a.m.: Open the door gingerly, as it opens in and he’s usually standing directly behind it (he’s not 18 months yet and he’s in a toddler bed, remember?). There is lots of “pardon me buddy, move out of the way honey” to actually get into his closet of a room. As it is inevitably long before sun-up, blink eyes to locate baby if the door hasn’t already pinpointed his location by smacking him in the face.
• 4:34 a.m.: Delight in whatever hilarious string of toddler-ese comes out of his mouth the moment he sees me. Usually it’s something to do with whatever he’s brought to bed with him the night before, which could be a plastic horse or a puzzle piece or even a piece of junk mail. He is always VERY full of energy at this point, and will run to our bed (only a few feet away from his doorway, we live in a tiny house) and wake up his father.
• 4:35 a.m.-5:00 a.m.: Nurse in bed trying to keep him from kicking/hugging/kissing/shouting at his father so that at least one of us can continue to sleep. Read Twitter on my phone (in the dark, thank you backlighting) or simply nuzzle his soft baby hair. Sometimes resentfully wish we were all still sleeping, as it is, you know, often 4:30 in the morning.
• 5:00 a.m.: Announce to Hank it’s time for him to play with his father! Hooray! Give your daddy a big kiss! H wakes Baby Daddy up by climbing over him to offer his love. The two of them go downstairs to play while I get another hour of sleep.
• 6:00 a.m.: Wake up to the alarm, so thankful for the last hour, usually ready to start the day without complaints. Usually. Usually shower. Usually. Get ready and all that, doesn’t take me long because I’m lazy and don’t own makeup or brush my hair and have about five outfits that I like/actually fit me. Glamorous, this one.
• 6:15 a.m.: Come downstairs to much excitement from Hank, who is so used to the parental sleep shuffle that he will, upon seeing whichever of us is taking second shift, push the first shift parent toward the stairs saying “BYE! NIGHT NIGHT!” Baby Daddy heads back up to sleep until he has to get up for work, I start getting Hank ready for school. (Yes, we call his day care “school” in general conversation. Because that’s what we call it when speaking about it to Henry, which just seemed to make more sense that calling it “day care.” So it’s not out of any pretension. I know it annoys some people, like substituting “film” for “movie.” I get it. We do not call it “school” to convince ourselves or others that we aren’t farming out raising our children to strangers. It’s a continuity thing. Plus Henry’s pronunciation of “shooool!” is pretty damned adorable.)
• 6:15-7:30 a.m.: Convince Henry that his street clothes are not made of fire. Try to get some breakfast into him (he’s a bruncher, never wanting to eat until he’s been up for hours), throw together day care bag of a few labeled sippy cups and cloth diapers. Smile that the days of packing up bottles of breast milk in freezer packed lunch-boxes and purees and just oh so much stuff are behind us.
• 7:30 a.m.: Drive Hank to school. Listen to audio book on the way, turning it off when we hit the construction on the highway because I can’t hear it over the cries of “Oh WOW! CRANE! TRUCK! DIGGER! LOOK! SEE?! CAAAAAAR. OH WOW!” Piteous cries and frantic signing for “more” when we’ve passed the construction. Try to explain to child that I can’t make steamrollers appear out of nowhere.
• 8 a.m.: Drop off. Chat with wonderful caregivers. Kiss Hank, who never cries or clings. My ego is unbothered; I love that he loves to be there.
• 8:30 a.m.: Arrive home. Cheaper to spend the money on gas to drive all the way back to the east side than to spend it on café sandwiches on the west side or spend half the gas but all the parking on campus so I can be in my office. At least for the summer, I’ve been working from home.
• 8:30 a.m.-3:00 p.m: Read, write, research, email, twitter, pull out hair, take notes, re-write. Despair.
• 3:00- 3:30 p.m.: Exercise. Just started the 30 Day Shred, which seems like a reasonable home program, I’ll let you know.
• 3:30 p.m.: Drive out to get Hank from school. Grumble at traffic, but enjoy the half hour of time where I can’t be expected to do anything (other than drive and listen to audio book or podcasts). No parenting, no dissertation writing, no teachering. Just driving.
• 4:00 p.m.: Pick up Hank. Chat with wonderful caregivers about Hank’s day, about whatever’s going on in everybody’s lives. Reflect on how much I love these people and how they are completely worth the drive and gas money (on top of the comparatively reasonable but still shockingly expensive child care costs).
• 4:00-4:30 p.m.: Chat with Hank on the drive home. He’s got too much to say, generally, to listen to the current audio book at this time. Listen as he tries to express his day with his mainly limited one and two-word sentences and underdeveloped concept of narrative. “School! Baby Macey! Mazie puppy. Black dog. Eric.” Translation: He was at school, with his caregiver Eric. One of the new infants was there, her name is Macey. Which is conspicuously close to the name of the neighbor’s new black lab puppy, Mazie. But he knows the difference! One day there was apparently an incident with a little girl named Bella, who had, probably mostly accidentally, hit Hank in the face with a cup (I was given a briefing on the incident before heading home, as if I would need to be told about such a non-event, sweet people). The entire ride home Hank repeated combinations of “Oh no Bella! No Bella, cup! BELLA! CUP! OH NO! NO NO NO NO NO. OWWWW.” I thanked him for the dramatic reenactment.
• 4:30 p.m.: Arrive home. Nurse immediately, or pay the consequences in complete epic meltdowns. Enjoy the physical closeness after a day apart. Except that right before hopping in the big rocking arm chair to nurse Henry had to gather up every one of his current favorite toys, so a plastic bison figurine is poking me in the side, I’ve got a few different shapes of blocks under my ass, something or other is being waved in my face as we rock back and forth and Henry is still managing to whine about why Captain America’s shoes don’t come off with a breast in his mouth.
• 5:00 p.m.: Convince (or don’t) kid to stop nursing already so I can make him dinner. This usually does not go well. He wants to make up for lost time. I throw together some sort of healthy dinner that he won’t eat while he “plays independently,” i.e., stands at the baby gate separated the dining room from the kitchen (he still hasn’t been given full access to the kitchen, our dishwasher has no bottom plate so there are wires and shit everywhere) and shouts about stuff. And throws toys into the kitchen (not at me, just over the gate, and good naturedly, at least, though we’ve asked him not to throw toys into the kitchen about a million times). Then he whines about wanting the toys back. I do not fetch them. I may not be able to stop him, but I’m certainly not joining the game. I do dishes and such while his rice is cooking or veggies steaming or whatnot, he sometimes does wander off to put together puzzles or build towers with blocks.
• 5:30 p.m.: Dinner! Oh god, I don’t want to talk about it.
• 5:50 p.m.: After all his clothes, fully encrusted with dinner, are off, he usually runs around naked for a bit, enthusiastically shouting “POOPOO” and “PEEPEE” and running to his plastic potty where he will sit for 2 seconds then look expectantly into the bowl. He knows that if he goes we will take it to the “big potty” and he gets to flush the toilet. He fucking LOVES to flush the toilet. But since we have returned from my mother’s, where he pooped and peed on the big toilet in Arizona like a pro, nearly every day, he’s been less interested. Or rather, he’s been very interested in being naked and sitting, but this hasn’t produced any real results.
• 6:00 p.m.: Bath time. We started out as once a week or whenever bathers when Henry was a newborn, moving up to every few days when he started eating solid foods and producing real human shits, up to every other day when he started being really mobile and playing outside, to every night since summer began and he is periodically spackled in sunscreen and bug spray throughout the day. He adores baths, so we have sucked it up. As adorable as he is with his post-dinner swollen belly and enthusiasm for dumping a cup of water over his head, I will admit I have always found bathing my child a chore. The kind of parental chore that can be enjoyable while you’re doing it, but right before you begin it each and every time you really don’t wanna.* Sorry Hank. I put on a happy face and shout “bat dime!” along with you as you scramble up the stairs. *Sundays-Wednesdays Baby Daddy usually does the bathing of the kid for me, if he’s not in the middle of cooking gourmet meals for us adults, so, can’t really complain.
• 6:15-6:30 p.m.: Reading time. Either we read one book over and over or we read every single book in his collection.
• 6:30 p.m.: Medicine and teeth time. Hank takes a liquid multivitamin with iron (he consistently has low iron at checkups) and then we struggle through teeth brushing, which has become unbearably difficult.
• 6:35 p.m.: Sing “night night” song, kiss and hug daddy if he’s home, go upstairs.
• 6:35-7:00 p.m.: Snuggling and nursing in the rocking chair in his room. Put him down awake, usually clutching a comic book or whatever else he’s brought to bed with him. Say goodnight and close the door, clenched teeth because even though he’s a champion of going to bed I’m always afraid it’s going to fail.
• 7:oo p.m.-1o:00 p.m.: Sweet blessed adult time. If Baby Daddy is home we have a delicious fresh meal full of goodness. If Baby Daddy isn’t home I either skip dinner (I know, bad) or do something disgusting like crack open a can of refried beans and eat sad-sack plain bean burritos. Or hummus on crackers. I enjoy making food for Henry but cannot be bothered to cook for myself. This summer much of this has been divided between chores and watching Mad Men from the beginning with newbie Baby Daddy, or watching netflix or reading by myself if he’s working. Starting next week I’ll be grading, lesson planning, and making up for lost writing time now that my work days will be partially taken up by teaching and tutoring. I’ll likely be working a few nights a week tutoring, which will certainly help out our finances since I wasn’t employed this summer, but will destroy my free time.
• 10:00 p.m.: If Baby Daddy is home, I’m likely passed out on the couch by now, after trying to stay awake to spend quality partner time. If he’s not home I’m trying to convince myself to go up to bed, but failing because I have crazy intruder anxiety and find it hard to go to sleep without Baby Daddy home. So I likely end up falling asleep on the couch or reading until he arrives home from work, then, as soon as he enters kiss him good night and sleepily fall up the stairs. I’m sure he loves the romantic and tender “Oh great, you’re home, now I can ignore you and go to sleep” greetings.
• 10:00 p.m.-12:00 a.m: Oh no! I didn’t go to sleep at 10. Now I’m somehow overshot my ideal sleeping time and won’t be able to fall asleep until midnight or after. Why are sleep windows some sort of precarious Choose Your Own Adventure fuck around sometimes?
• 10:00 p.m./12:00 a.m.-4:30 a.m.: Sleep like the dead. Wake up to the dulcet tones of a small voice mumbling “Poopoo, Mark, airplane.” Start over.

Holy shit. This overlong post reveals that the days are long. Even when you don’t seem to actually DO anything.

Cry for kelp.

I need help with food. Again.

We have moved on from the kids’ table troubleshooting patch, as Henry has shown he can stay put in a highchair. I do think it best to eat meals at the family table, and to encourage sitting still while eating, but I stand by the time we spent with him eating every meal at that table. It kept us sane, and Henry’s skull intact. The launching-self-from-highchair antics were too much to be subdued when Henry really discovered the joys of being bipedal, and we worked with it rather than against it. We moved him back to the highchair after a month or so and the novelty of sitting at the table with us and in the super-awesome-because-he-forgot-it-existed highchair has worked so far to keep him still. How many times can I say highchair in one paragraph? Highchair. HIGHCHAIR.

Moving on. Henry has a lot of weird food behaviors that I’m sure are fairly common if not plain normal but nevertheless have thrown us for a loop. Back when first giving table/finger foods, we started out offering him one food at a time, on some advice from somewhere I’m sure, about giving the kid time to explore or something. Then we had a problem on our hands–anytime I gave him two foods at once he would act overwhelmed. Or immediately scoop up one food and get rid of it. Off the side of the highchair or onto the floor off the table. Wasteful and annoying, but more distressful to me because it was something of an immediate response, a habit and I’m completely terrorized by habits. Or if he preferred one food he’d eat all of it and though he might normally eat Food #2, it became, I don’t know, tainted by its comparatively inferior position to Food #1 and he’d refuse it entirely. Whereas if I offered them separately all would be well. So, easy solution, right? Just offer the less preferred food first, so it gets eaten, then the favorite foods last. Done. But I became convinced I was creating a monster who would never eat foods on the same plate, never eat foods that touch or foods that mix. You know those kids exist. You may have one. You may have been one. And this attitude may be completely unpreventable, BUT it felt like I was glimpsing the very origins of such food phobias. Must prevent!

So I’ve decided to just give up on trying to mastermind food order and give everything on one of those toddlery melamine divided plates. He really likes the plates, provided each section is accompanied by a spoon or fork of its very own, not because he won’t reuse a utensil on another food but rather because he just loves spoons and forks. He hoards them, and will point to a section and say “spoon? fok?” if there isn’t one for said section. That’s right, when your toddler starts to say the word fork it may also happen to YOU that it comes out fuck. Good luck to you. He also adores chopsticks (my partner specializes in Chinese/Taiwanese cuisine and so we eat with chopsticks often), and sometimes manages to somehow actually eat with them, though usually making a huge mess even by toddler standards. There are some plastic cheater chopsticks in my Amazon cart right now.

Where the eff am I going with this? Okay, so he’s eating at the table. He’s eating a well-balanced meal presented all at once on a plate (dessert, which is usually just fruit, though sometimes when I’m ambitious a fruit muffin, or fruit cobbler, or some otherwise homemade fruit dish, is kept off until the end, as Henry loves fruit and will fill up on it alone if I offer it with the meal). But he’s not exactly eating. Like, at all. Like often dinner is a bite of rice and only the peaches out of a peach cobbler. Like all of them, from the whole cobbler, because he was hungry and wanted to eat some goddamned peaches. But none of the crumbly brown sugar stuff, oh no. And certainly none of the savory homemade pasta dish or delicately sauteed organic veggies that were meant to be eaten before the cobbler.

[Ed. note: for this discussion I'm mainly talking about dinner, btw, as he's in childcare most of the week]

Our solution to Hank’s pickiness has been to continue to offer balanced meals, both balanced in food groups and balanced between foods he rarely refuses and foods he does (or new foods). I try, I really try, to just let him approach the food on his own, as I have observed my overly eager “want to try this????!?!?” usually turns him off. But I will admit I often resort to elaborate attempts to get him to try new things. I don’t force him to eat, however, as if that was even possible, since it just gets spit out if I manage to trick a bite in.

For awhile, I got very zen about everything and just made the food, put it in front of him, he ate what he ate, and I cleaned up afterwards, with no stressing, not even about the waste. And if he only ate a bite, no problem. I trusted him to eat what he needed and that was that. But that was when he was sleeping through the night. Lately he’s been eating next to nothing at dinner and then waking up at 4:30 a.m. begging to nurse or eat. So my calm attitude about his intake at dinner has disappeared. And been replaced by the terror and dread that is very quickly delivered by the memory of a year-plus of not sleeping.

So I’m now worked up again about the pickiness. Mainly because I selfishly worry about his sleep being affected by his caloric needs, rather than the caloric needs themselves.

And because the kid won’t eat meat, or most proteins that would take the place of meat. So far we have one solution to the protein problem, and that is that we make chicken and beef stock regularly, freeze it in cubes, and he drinks it out of a cup or with noodles. But so far we have no solution for our biggest problem, which is that he won’t eat vegetables. He won’t even eat potatoes for christ’s sake. Or tomatoes or tomato sauce (tell me it’s technically a fruit and I will nod obligingly but also roll my eyes at you). He rarely eats anything complicated, like pasta with many ingredients or sandwiches or pizza or anything mixed into his rice or noodles. His list of accepted foods is painfully short.

I’m looking for help. What foods will your toddler eat, from whatever category, whether a whole food or a meal? Particularly, how do you get your kid to eat vegetables? How do you prepare said vegetables? It doesn’t have to be all sneaky-chef or anything, any ideas would help. Sweet corn is about the only veggie Henry will accept, and corn is not exactly a super food.

And though I prefer to make all of Henry’s food myself (or watch Baby Daddy make it while I have a cocktail), are there any prepared foods that save your life? Any veggie snacks that I can buy at Trader Joe’s or something that are particularly exciting to the toddler set? Should we investigate vegetable juice?

Please leave me some food-related comments. Any tips or tricks related to feeding your kid, aged 6 months or 5 years, picky or foodie. I need to get unstuck.

Of course I'm relishing a time when bananas with plain yogurt is considered an exciting dessert.

Every baby says I love you.

Unbelievably busy, so for now another video. This was taken a few weeks ago, when Hank first started to mimic the sounds of “I love you.” We are, annoyingly, coaxing him to say it. Also featuring some of his new favorite fellows. Bonus paused Wii game in the background, so as to lay bare our parental sins.

He nows says “Iron Man” more articulately, which is a shame because a) I am not so stoked that he’s obsessed with Iron Man, of all people, despite it being cute/funny, and b) “IamMam” was pretty adorable. I suppose we may always have “MERKA!!” as Captain America is pretty tough for a 17-month-old to pronounce.

Wrastling Arizona.

Henry and I spent last week visiting my folks and sister in Tucson, Arizona. We made a nearly identical trip the year before, this time with many pleasant differences (this time Henry slept, for the most part, though napping was a particular challenge). This trip we barely ventured from the house, because I’ve become such a baby about the heat, so there was little nostalgia for my youth. Just lots and lots of watching Henry delight in his Grammie, Auntie, and PopPop (hey, we tried out a few Grandpa names and that’s the one that stuck), with some trips to the zoo and children’s museum and various Tucson eateries thrown in.

Exposure to three “new” (it had been a year since he’d seen either my mother or father) influences skyrocketed his vocabulary to new and precocious heights. Though I cannot recall anyone chastising him (or each other) with these adjectives, “messy” and “noisy” became his new favorite descriptors. In fact, it was an adjective heavy trip, as “big” made its first appearance and he began to wield numbers (well, number, since the kid has a great handle on “two-ness” but otherwise is about as aware of integers as any 17 month old) and colors (still only black and yellow) with more confidence.

Why a bowl of whipped cream, larger than the rest of the food on the plate combined, should come with a children’s breakfast is beyond me. What’s wrong with a dollop? I’m not going to take it away once it’s presented, so we just rolled with it. Henry set about consuming it and nothing else on the plate. When his aunt gave herself a little cream moustache in solidarity, Henry pointed to her and reproached: “messy.”

The inadequacy of the two board books I’d packed became glaringly apparent on the 12th reading of Have You Seen My Cat? the first night (have you ever been bored by an Eric Carle book? If so, approach this book with extreme caution, or rather, avoid this book at ALL COSTS). So on day two we headed to local used book empire and cobbled together a decent library for the visit, seen pulling double-duty above. My favorite find there was P.D. Eastman’s Go, Dog, Go! a book I’d actually never encountered, that Henry now adores. He now hilariously advises me to “Schop!” with accompanying hand gesture, open palm raised gravely, when he sees a red light.

Up to this point, Henry has lived a sheltered and deprived existence, in that his second trip to Arizona included his first real trip to a mall (not counting a quick dash to the Apple Store in Madison). He was very impressed by the play area but even more so with the coin-operated cars. As is typical of toddlers, he was taken over with terror when they noisily (ah…that was probably the primal scene for this vocabulary word) groaned and vibrated. We sat in a few and saved our quarters. He made sure to say “Hiiiiiiiii” and hug every improbable passenger he encountered.

My aunt gifted a storage unit’s worth of outgrown toys, with which Hank played busily the entire week. He’s never been much for independent play at home, but that week he was content to mostly remain in the living room surrounded by new-to-him delights while my family and I visited. I’m going to have to get him some Duplos or Megablocks stat, though we already have a giant box of satisfyingly chipped and well-loved wooden blocks in all sorts of shapes and colors that the snob in me wishes he preferred to the plastic. (News-flash to current and future parents: they always prefer the plastic.)

Click to enlarge the GORGEOUSNESS of my child, seen above with his Aunt. Note also that that is a PERSON’s hat, ie, from the general population, not the toddler, section. I think it might be an adult small. My kid’s head is gigantic. This is from the Reid Park Zoo, where the highlight was the giant tortoise. If a (non-giant) desert tortoise could survive in Wisconsin, I would have snuck one into my carry-on.

The Children’s Museum was a joy and a trial, in that Henry was unwilling to relinquish any props when we left a given section.

Seen above puppy-napping in vet exhibit.

Leaving the train exhibit, and leaving the trains in the exhibit, proved too much for his toddler-brain and we left amidst a full on fish-flopping spaghetti-legs screaming tantrum.

Though I think he would have been content to stay in the “Teeeen” room (his pronunciation of, and devotion to, the train is so precious I can feel it in my fillings), he was pretty taken with the dinosaurs (excuse the angle and darkness of the video, and my incessant baby-voice).

All in all, it was a lovely week. Seeing my family is a rare treat, and I am already missing spending that kind of time with Henry. Now that we’re home he’s back in school three days a week, and the other days seem to disappear in a flurry of housework and nap-battles and errands. He became a nursing addict while we were in Tucson, possibly a combination of increased need for comfort in an unfamiliar environment and straight up desert dehydration, and we spent a lot of time cuddling. I’m glad to be home, back to work, back to Baby Daddy, but I’m so, so glad we went, and I’m missing that house and that chair and those lovely people.

(You can take the girl out of Wisconsin, but you can’t take the blindingly pale hue from her legs.)

Dissertation v. Blog.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but when I’m *actually* writing my dissertation I seem to do very little writing here. There are many obvious reasons for this. Though if we’re going for some kind of ideal logic: it would be nice if, when the dissertation is actually coming along, the rest of my life was also fitter, happier, and more productive. It makes so much sense! The dissertation cripples me with anxiety and depression, so when it is going well, should not I be able to enjoy living? Want to embrace my partner more often, play more enthusiastically with my son, delight in small chores and activities of everyday life–in that I’ve completed enough work to not feel guilty about doing them? The sad truth about dissertation writing, in my experience, is that every moment of your day seems like it should be spent writing your dissertation, so you feel anxious even showering or eating lunch. The only escape from that pervasive guilt, I find, is parenting, because it isn’t–primarily–”for me.”

All that said, I’m working on it. I’ve been trying to set better limits, both for work and for “play” (“work” being either on-duty childcare and dissertation writing, and “play” sadly designating everything else, thus categorizing cleaning toilets right alongside watching streaming netflix on our Wii, which based on the titles on offer, is about as thrilling as cleaning toilets, sometimes). To remind myself that it is OKAY to not work on the dissertation in the evenings after I’ve put Henry to bed. If I make good, honest use of the hours that I have other people caring for Henry, it is acceptable to use my evenings for chores, life-management, and even underwhelming streaming-netflix programming. With the exception of preparing for a meeting with the advisor or if I feel “on a roll” (ha–that happened, like, once) and want to finish something up from earlier in the day, I have stopped trying to work on academic stuff in the evenings. I’ve started reading for pleasure for an hour or more before bed, to wean myself of said programming, and it has been glorious, actually. Right now I’m reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. S’ok.

So this has been a pretty mundane and off-topic (for a mommyblog) “check-in,” but I feel like I need to put something up here, with the ideal outcome being starting things up again. Here is an assortment of family-related items for your trouble:

• Sleep has improved. After a long run with the early bedtime (which we loved, which I recommend) things have settled a bit later than we’re used to, with Hank going down between 7 and 7:30. He’s sleeping through, and waking up between 5:30 and 6:30. After nearly a week of starting the day between 4 and 5 am, we are more than happy with this schedule. I do find that putting Henry down at 7:30 rather than 6:30 *drastically* drops my potential productivity in the evenings, by a factor disproportionate with the mere 60 minutes difference, but hey, I know some of you put your kids down at 9, so save your tomatoes, I’m not complaining.
• Hank says “I love you.” He imitates the sounds more than the words, so it comes out differently every time, which is somehow more adorable. “I hub doo” or “I luck ooo!” etc.
• I have caught myself pointing to the sky and saying “Airplane!” when such is audible overhead. WHEN HENRY IS NOT EVEN AROUND.
• After breaking a wineglass, I used an expletive. At the sound of the dishwasher door clanging a moment later, Hank gleefully chimed: “Shit!” Toddlers! They’re just like us!
• Hank and I, sans Baby Daddy, are flying to AZ on Sunday to stay the week. I am dying to see my family. I am not dying to see what happens to our still precarious sleep situation, but I feel better equipped to deal than I did when we made this same trip a year ago. If you read back then, you might remember that Hank was 6 months or so, and reverted to absolutely hellish newborn sleep patterns with day/night confusion, cat napping, and lots of screaming. It was so bad I swore we would never, ever, travel without Baby Daddy again.
• I guess I love my family too much to keep that oath.