Category: parenting

for crying out loud

You know what? I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in well over a year. At 19 months, Theo still does not sleep through the night.

I could probably count the number of times on one hand that I have gotten a stretch of sleep that is longer than 4 hours. (Theo does sleep longer stretches than that, often from about 8:30 to about 2:30. If I could bring myself to go to bed at 8:30, I could probably get a 6-hour stretch…) Mostly, I go to bed too late, wanting to have time unfettered to get on my laptop and tend to other things. As a result, I rarely get to bed before 1 or 2.

Theo is still sleeping in our room, in a portable crib. At least for the first part of the night. After he wakes up in the night, I take him to bed with me. I don’t typically sleep all that well after that. 6:15, when the alarm clock goes off, comes all too soon.

What this means is that I am not getting enough sleep, and not nearly enough deep sleep. As a result, I have felt like I have developed a cognitive impairment. I have trouble focusing. My memory is leaky. My head is foggy. This does not lend itself well to making progress towards a PhD.

Something’s got to change.

I really didn’t expect Theo to still be sleeping in our room at this age. I think Phoebe started sleeping in her own room around 6 months old. When we were getting ready for Theo’s arrival, we got Phoebe a toddler bed so that the crib would be available. The plan was to move Theo in there, into Phoebe’s room, once he started sleeping well at night. (No sense in waking Phoebe in the night, right?)

So…that hasn’t happened.

It amazes me how different Phoebe and Theo are with respect to their sleeping patterns. Phoebe started sleeping through the night really early. Too early, even. We had to wake her to feed her in the night her first few months. It was a relief when she was gaining weight steadily enough that the pediatrician gave us the go-ahead to let her keep sleeping.

And then there’s the whole sleep training business. With Phoebe, she used to fight us at bedtime. It got to the point, maybe around 7 months, where we would be spending over an hour rocking her and singing to her to put her to sleep, and she’d spend most of that time crying, not wanting to go to bed. It made it easy for us to decide to try some “cry it out” sleep training. She was already crying anyway, and we were exhausted.

With Theo, we could put him down in his crib, and one of us would just need to sit near him a few minutes and he’d be asleep. There didn’t seem to be much urgency to change things, and things were so calm and quiet, with nobody crying. Now that he’s older, it’s a bit more variable, and sometimes he needs someone to sit with him longer to fall asleep.

But he still wakes up.

We even gave sleep training a brief go. 3 exhausting nights, with one angry baby screaming for over an hour. And no real progress. I think we’ve missed the optimal window for that.

I think that maybe if he’s out of our room, he’ll sleep better. Maybe having Phoebe in there will help him fall asleep without one of us needing to sit with him. On the other hand, he may just disrupt Phoebe’s sleep.

We’ve come really close to moving him out of our room several times. But somehow I always find reasons to put off the transition. (I hate transitions! I’m tired enough as it is, thankyouverymuch.) There were some practical concerns, too, though. Like needing to move the crib away from the lamp. Now the furniture is finally rearranged. And once we figure out a secure way to cover the outlet that is within easy reach of the crib (he pulls out the little plug things), I think I will be out of excuses. Theo will be moving in with Phoebe.

I just wish I knew how all of this was going to work out.

Theo, still not sleeping in the crib.

Today’s forecast

Hour-by-hour forecast for Thursday, January 21

2:00 a.m. 95% chance of baby wakefulness
3:00 a.m. continued baby wakefulness with intermittent parental snoozes
4:00 a.m. continued baby wakefulness with intermittent parental outbursts
5:00 a.m. 85% chance of fitful slumber, punctuated by dreams of wakefulness
6:00 a.m. 99% chance of beeping alarm clock, chance of snooze button 100%
7:00 a.m. Blustery tempers and high-speed chases, chance of toddler eye precipitation 98%
8:00 a.m. Frosty windshield combined with hot tempers lead to isolated storms
9:00 a.m. 80% chance of showers skipped
10:00 a.m. 75% chance of feeling snowed over

Mood likely will continue to be partly cloudy throughout the day, with scattered thoughts and intermittent storms of crankiness.

Image from wpclipart.

Cabin. Fever.

It’s been a looong, looooong, loooooooong week. The kind of long week that induces me to add extra letters to words. Exxxxtra letttters.

There hasn’t been anything particularly bad going on, so I really shouldn’t complain. But I’ll complain anyhow.

Daycare was closed. Seeing as I am crazy about my kids, that shouldn’t sound like a bad thing. However, I am so not cut out to be a stay-at-home mother. I guess much of the problem was in how much we stayed at home. We had various plans for various days, but many of them fell through for various reasons. For another thing, I still had some work obligations to tend to, so it wasn’t actually vacation time.

We did get out on Wednesday for a bit, which was before all this snow started falling. After being out and about for a while, I thought it would be nice to go somewhere for a snack. I found myself hankering for a latte (a decaf soy latte, mind you), and the only place to find such a thing in the towns near our home is a large chain bookstore. That particular endeavor ended in me leaving the bookstore in disgrace with a crying baby, one newly purchased $4.99 Dora book which I had tried to read to Phoebe, but which we couldn’t finish due to said crying baby, and a little less dignity. I did at least get to have my latte first. (Though I burned my tongue on it, and had to wait what seemed an eternity for it to cool, and then had to chug it anyhow when Theo ran out of patience at being stuck at the table after hours of largely being strapped in to a carseat or a stroller. Good times.)

I looked forward to the weekend, when John would be available so we could all go out together on some fun excursion. Friday things were mostly closed for the holiday, so we didn’t try. We made plans for Saturday, but then it snowed, and it set us back. We thought we try for Sunday, but there was more snow. And somehow, we never managed to go anywhere. And while Phoebe likes to go out in the snow, Theo, so far, does not. (Also, I can’t for the life of me find his snowpants. Our house eats things.) The result is that I have not actually left the house in days. I can’t actually tell you where the time has gone. I know I did some baking. I made apple sauce (from baked apples) and a pumpkin pie, and Phoebe and I made bread again. There have been some movies watched. There have been some toys played with. Some phone calls. I’ve had very little time on my laptop, other than late at night, and much of that was for work. I check in for brief spells during the day, but Theo has this tendency to come over to the couch and close my laptop whenever I open it.

I have to say that I am really looking forward to Tuesday, when Phoebe and Theo go back to daycare. It’s not that I don’t like spending time with them. It’s just that I appreciate spending time with them more when I get to have a bit of time when I can focus on other things.

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And speaking of focussing on my children, here are some pictures I took.

undesirable

Almost done with my antibiotics

I’m pretty sure I haven’t mentioned it here, but I found a tick on me a few weeks ago. Talk about undesirable.

It was pretty surprising to find a tick in November, but we’ve had some pretty unseasonably warm weather up here in the Northeast of the US. We live in a heavily wooded area, so ticks are pretty common. I was pretty skeeved out, but not too concerned otherwise. I thought it was a small-sized dog tick, and not a deer tick. (Deer ticks can carry Lyme Disease, but dog ticks don’t.) I also thought the tick had only been on me for a few hours anyhow, and apparently ticks need to be attached for at least 36 hours before they can transmit Lyme Disease. However, about a week and a half after removing the tick, and well after the initial trauma from the tick removal had healed, I started to get a rash at the site of the bite. So either the tick had been on me longer than I’d realized, or our clumsy removal of it had caused the tick to transfer the bacteria faster.

My doctor prescribed a 2-week course of antibiotics for me. I just took the preantipenultimate pill. I’m happy that I’ve only got another day left to go, because the antibiotics have done a number on me, and I have been feeling pretty wiped out and was actually pretty sick for a few days. On the other hand, I’ll gladly take 2 weeks of feeling awful over the longer-term feeling awfulness associated with full-blown Lyme Disease. The rash cleared up right away, so it seems that the antibiotic is working.

But you know what? It really sucks taking care of 2 small children when you are feeling awful. I have found myself being (even) crankier than usual. It’s hard to be patient and cheerful when you just want to curl up in a ball on the floor. I don’t know how I would have coped if I hadn’t been able to take the kids to daycare some of the days, or if John hadn’t been around. (How do stay at home parents manage when they are sick? Or single parents?)

It was such a relief when I felt better, but then Theo has been sick the last few days. I’m not sure whether he’s got the intestinal bug that a couple of other kids at daycare had, or whether he’s also reacting to the antibiotics getting passed on to him through me. (He’s still nursing.) In any case, he has been sleeping worse than usual. And now it seems he’s getting a cold. Phoebe has seemed a bit under the weather, too. Or perhaps she’s just been more needy in reaction to my crankiness.

Life has generally been more than ordinarily crazy the last couple months. John has been working pretty much around the clock, 7 days a week. I’ve had work deadlines, too. And did you know that there’s some sort of major holiday coming up soon for which we’ll be expected to do things like decorate and purchase (and even mail) presents? We as yet have no tree, and I haven’t even started Christmas shopping.

(If it’s any indication of the craziness of our household, I took the above photo on Saturday for the PhotoHunt theme of “undesirable,” and started drafting the post. And I still have yet to get it finished. I decided not to actually submit this as a Photohunt entry, anyhow, because I doubt most people participating in that really need this much detail about my life. But I figured I might as well still use the title.)

A Toddler’s Guide to Tantrums

Preface – The Fine Art of the Tantrum

Chapter 1 – Know before you Throw: Planning ahead for Optimal Tantrums

    1.1 Timing: How to choose when to have your tantrum
    1.2 Motivation: Why should you consider having a tantrum?
    1.3 Location: How and where to get yourself noticed

Chapter 2 – Warm Up: Revving Up for a Tantrum

    2.1 Whining: A time-tested precursor
    2.2 Pouting: using the lower lip
    2.3 Tears: when to let the waterworks start

Chapter 3 – Vocalizations: what to say, and how to say it

    3.1 “I WANT,” “DON’T” and “NO”: Three standards of tantrum verbiage
    3.2 Repetition: No matter what you say, make sure you say it a lot.
    3.3 Repetition: No matter what you say, make sure you say it a LOT.
    3.4 REPETITION: No matter what you say, make sure you say it a LOT.
    3.5 Wailing, Shrieking and Howling: piercing or eardrum shattering, you’ve got to be LOUD

Chapter 4 – Throwing yourself into things: using your body

    4.1 The Limp Noodle: perfecting your boneless body
    4.2 The Flail: using arms and legs to express your feelings
    4.3 The Foot Stomp: a classic expression of anger
    4.4 The Throw: Tossing objects for greater impact
    4.5 The Throwdown: Throwing your whole body down for added affect

Chapter 5 – Personal Style: Making the Tantrum Your Own

    5.1 Lessons from the Greats: The Tantrum Hall of Fame

Chapter 6 – Consequences: What will happen when I have a tantrum?

    6.1 Frazzled Grown-ups: a guaranteed outcome
    6.2 Time outs & Loss of privileges: What have you got to lose?
    6.3 Will I get a puppy? Debunking the myths of tantrum outcome

This post is for the Monday Mission, hosted by Painted Maypole. This week’s assignment was to write a post in the form of a table of contents.

baking bread

Last month, Magpie wrote some posts (and even a nonet) about baking bread. I left a comment saying that she had just about inspired to give bread-making a try, as soon as I got some yeast. She replied by sending me a link to Laurie Colwin’s recipe for oatmeal bread.

The idea with this recipe is that you can fit the steps of baking bread into a busy schedule, investing only 15 minutes of active work. You make the dough at night before going to bed, do a bit with it in the morning, and then bake it when you get home in the evening.

Once I finally got around to remembering to buy yeast at the grocery store, and after an additional wait for another shopping trip because I’d forgotten that the recipe also called for wheat germ, we were good to go.

I thought that making and kneading the dough would be a good activity to do with Phoebe, since she really likes to help. (I’m eager to train the kids for hard labor, which should free up more of my time for blogging. Or maybe I should just train Phoebe to blog for me.)

The recipe suggests that the whole process should take only 15 minutes. I figured that the first step shouldn’t take much more than 10 minutes. With my cluelessness, I planned to tack on another 15 to 20 minutes. And then with Phoebe’s help, we knew to expect things to take at least an extra half hour.

I’ll let you decide whether Phoebe liked the process.


Phoebe smiles for the camera. (“That was a really big smile,” she said afterwards.)

The next day, I “knocked down the dough,” which was a new expression for me, and split the dough. The recipe said to use 2 loaf pans. We have only one loaf pan, so I figured I try to make a “boule” on a cookie sheet. (As the dough spread more than rose, I think the shape of the bread could be better described as a “frisbee.” )

The resulting bread was tasty, but not quite what I expected. It was very dense. The recipe called for leaving the dough out to rise during the day, covered with a tea towel. My guess is that the air in our house is too dry this time of year for such prolonged exposure. It did seem like there was already a bit of a crust before I even put the bread in the oven, so I wonder if once that crust formed, the dough stopped rising. (I wonder if the tea towel used to cover should have been damp. I’m open to other suggestions, too.)

We had the “boule” (or “discus”) for dinner. The loaf bread, also quite dense, worked really well for slicing thin to make toast.

The flat-topped loaf, which worked to make tasty toast.


What was left of the discus could have been used as a weapon the next day.

hellfire and dalmatian

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Hellfire and dalmatian.

As I mentioned, Phoebe wanted to be a firefighter for Halloween this year. Her costume turned out to be a cinch. She’d gotten a freebie fire hat at a recent daycare field trip to the firestation, and then our daycare provider had some other firefighter costume gear to lend us. A totally free costume.

Seeing as he doesn’t yet have a say in the matter, I figured I would dress Theo to go along with Phoebe’s firefighter. (As you may have noticed, I’m all about going with themes.) At first, I thought, “Theo can be a fire!” As I thought about the costume, however, I realized that there was a good chance that he would end up looking like a baby on fire. Um…perhaps a tad more disturbing than I had in mind.

So, the plan was to go with a dalmatian (the traditional firehouse dog).

For the pre-Halloween party on Tuesday, I hadn’t managed to get a dalmatian costume together. Theo went as a (very cute, and still black and white spotted) cow, instead. On Wednesday, I stopped by a used children’s store (where they sell used things for children, not actual used children). I had plans to get some white clothes, a white hoodie if possible, to which I would affix black spots, a tail, and some ears.

As it happened, the store had a rack of Halloween costumes. Which were additionally marked down. And there was a dalmatian costume. In Theo’s size. For $4.00. Suddenly, the whole home-made costume idea seemed like it would be a big ordeal.

Apparently, though, I still had a hankering for assembling a Halloween costume, because I decided to put together a costume for myself. I would be the fire to go along with the theme. I wore a red shirt layered over an orange shirt, along with an orange and red swirly-patterned shawl that I happened to have picked up for 1 euro at a Sevilla flea market. I fashioned a hat out of fleece left over from Theo’s carrot costume from last year, and attached flames of red and orange tissue paper to it with staples. (I was in a hurry. I made the hat this afternoon while Theo napped.)

I was quite pleased with the end result, especially considering that I bought nothing new to make my costume.

Of course, wearing this hat around our neighborhood reminded me of something: the fact that I have no dignity.

John, on the other hand, has some. He totally ignored my suggestion of a costume for him. Because you know what would have gone really well with both the firefighter and the dog costumes? A fire hydrant.

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getting carried away

Last Saturday, we went to a music festival, and met up with a couple friends. It was a great festival, and I really enjoyed the time with my friends, wandering around taking pictures, listening to music, and just generally being at a festive event.

There was one brief event, though, that leaves me feeling unsettled, even a week later.

We were sitting around in a little park where one of the festival’s many stages was set up. The last set for that location had finished, and lots of people were just sitting around enjoying the late afternoon sun. Our group had more-or-less camped out at the foot of a statue, the large stone base of which provided some much appreciated shade and a cool place to lean against.

After having been strapped in to a carseat and then a stroller all day, Theo was happy to be crawling around the grass in the park. He’d take off in one direction or another, and one of our group would follow along for a bit, then scoop him up and bring him back to our base. Theo got a lot of friendly smiles, and we’d get the occasional casual question about Theo’s age and whatnot. So I didn’t think much of it when a smiling man walked towards Theo as he was gleefully crawling away from me. I scooped Theo up, held him up high, smooched him on the cheek, and smiled at the stranger who was admiring my baby. The man stepped closer and asked about Theo’s age, and we started the usual chitchat. Then he reached for Theo and lifted him out of my arms, exclaiming over how friendly he was. I was completely taken aback by this. Then he started joking that he would take Theo home. Even though he was joking, I wanted to scream “give me back my baby!” I reached for Theo, and the man, still seeming to joke, made as if to walk away with him. I kept my hands on Theo and said, “I need to take him back. I was just going to change his diaper.” The man got a sort of blank, sort of startled, look on his face. “Really?” he said. He loosened his grip, and allowed me to reclaim my baby. I walked quickly back to our little group, and the man walked off another direction, disappearing fairly quickly into the thinning crowds.

I found myself quite shaken. It all happened so fast that John and my friends, who were sitting with Phoebe, didn’t even see the exchange. While the man seemed to be joking, it wasn’t clear to me how far he might have carried his “joke.” Would he have really walked away with Theo? Clearly, there must have been something somewhat off with this man’s mind, as most people know that it’s not okay to pick up a stranger’s baby without permission. He didn’t seem drunk, though he may have been. He may have been mentally ill. Neither of these possibilities is particularly reassuring to me.

In retrospect, I’m really glad I mentioned the diaper. I think it cut short the exchange, which already had gone on too long for my comfort. Perhaps it reminded the man that babies are not just smiley, cherubic playthings, but that they involve work and messiness.

I’m not one to spend a lot of time worrying about protecting my children from predators. I tend to focus on worrying about keeping them safe from cars and household accidents, worrying about how much they eat and sleep. But this incident, minor as it was, reminds me that there are people out there who will take advantage of that moment when you let your attention drift.