rivka

Colin has been going through such a rough patch lately. He's had a cold for a couple of weeks. Even before the cold he had been ramping up his nursing, and with the cold it has been pretty much nonstop. He hasn't been eating more than a few bites of solid food; he makes up for it by constantly.wanting.to.nurse.

And his sleep, oh my God. Alex slept through the night starting at ten months. At Colin's age she could be put into the crib awake, and she'd put herself to sleep and sleep for twelve hours straight. Before the cold Colin was waking around 4:30 and then coming into my bed around 5:30-6 and dozing/nursing/dozing until it was time to wake up. For the last two weeks he's been up every few hours every night. The last two nights he slept no longer than two hours at a stretch, and each night there was a period of 90 minutes in which every time I put him in the crib and went back to my own bed he woke up and cried. I cried too.

What I need to do, and have needed to do for a really long time now, is nightwean him. The thing is that it's incredibly hard to do something that means even less sleep in the short run, when you are already getting so little sleep that you can barely function.

Thursday night was awful and I was wrecked all day yesterday. Last night was awful. Today Michael took Alex to the Rennaissance Faire, which means that I am on my own all day with Colin. I am so exhausted and angry and fed up.

So I'm doing the best thing one can do in a situation like this: I am pretending to be a naturally good mother. I took the kids to Alex's ballet lesson this morning and while she was in class I fed Colin healthy little snacks and pretended to be excited to read his train book again and promised him he could take ballet too someday. (He is jealous.) Then I brought them home and made myself some strong black tea and let Colin have half my breakfast when he asked for it. I felt a little desperate when Michael walked out the door and Colin also didn't have Alex to follow around all day, so I packed him into the stroller and took him to the park and we wandered around in the sun tossing a little neon-green toy football and playing "hide and seek" the only way you can play it with a toddler, which involves hiding slowly in very obvious places while talking to them the whole time.

I took him to the Italian deli and got some fresh hot bread and prosciutto and smoked mozzarella for our lunch and listened to him meow at the cats on the cases of Gato Negro and engaged him in conversations and fingerplays while we waited in line so he wouldn't ask to get out of the stroller. I let him sit in Alex's big-kid chair for lunch instead of his high chair.

I am pretending to be an excellent mother with all of these outings and interactions, but really my goal is not so much to nurture him and enrich his day as to keep him off me and minimize his need for my attention, and especially to keep him from asking to nurse. Because I have HAD IT.

He's napping now, so I should go lie down too. Because when he wakes up I'm going to need to be able to pretend to be an excellent mother again, because if I am my normal kind of mother there's no way I'll be able to get him to leave me alone.

I am crazy exhausted and overwrought.

Something is up with Colin. He hasn't been eating much and has been sleeping like an amphetamine addict on payday. Last night he went to sleep promptly at bedtime, and then was up mostly screaming from 10:30-11:30. I still haven't the faintest idea what was wrong. He was just miserable.

He is still going strong with the night waking. I am going to have to come up with some sort of plan for nightweaning and/or sleep reprogramming, because This Is Not Working for me.

Also, he figured out how to take the childproof cap off a pill bottle. Fortunately we were all right there in the same room and he didn't get any of it in his mouth before we noticed that there was Claritin all over the floor. But WTF, if he's going to be this awful couldn't he at least be dumb so I have a chance to stay ahead of him?

He was up at 6:30 this morning. I'm supposed to get to sleep in on Sundays, but it was Easter and Alex woke right up excited about egg hunting so I had to get up or miss Easter.

Colin has been clearly exhausted all day. He went down for a nap at 9:45 and I said I would just miss church and stay home with him but then at 10:15 Alex decided to play the fool and run away from Michael, who was trying to get her dressed, and then she jumped out and yelled "Peekaboo!" at top volume right at the foot of the stairs leading to the baby's crib. And he woke up, and I couldn't get him back to sleep.

This is of a piece with Alex's general heedlessness and disobedience, lately. Friday night I said "anyone who isn't working needs to get out of the kitchen now." Alex: "But I'm working!" She kept on with what she was doing, which turned out to be trying to pick up a jar of baby food with my long-handled kitchen tongs. A glass jar. Guess what happened.

I know she's only (almost) five, but for God's sake why can't she just do what she's told for once without looking for goddamned loopholes?

Anyway, back to today: I missed most of church anyway because Colin was on the move, and too noisy for the sanctuary.

I tried twice this afternoon to get him down for a second nap. He is so, so tired. He almost drifts off, and then pick two of three: screams/bites/laughs, and he's up again.

I have no patience for either one of them, or for anything else in my life right now.

I keep thinking that surely more sugar will make me feel better. Surprise surprise, it isn't working. But I keep trying anyway because I am not very bright.

Michael took them out after the second failed afternoon nap attempt. They've been gone for an hour and a half. It's absolutely silent in the house. I am enjoying being quiet and not touched and responsible for no one too much to go to sleep. I am starting to regain some sanity.

ETA: Michael just came back. Colin fell asleep on their way home from the playground, just a few minutes ago. The parents here will know just how fucked a 5:30pm nap is going to make us. But he's basically unrousable.

I don't know. At least they're cute?

When I got home last night, Michael wanted to show something off. "Colin, do you want to go to Mama?" he asked. Colin's head bobbed up and down in an enthusiastic nod as he reached for me.

I said I'd noticed a nod or two myself, and Michael proudly described how Colin had answered several questions (e.g., "Do you need a diaper change?") with a nod. We discussed how useful this was going to be from a communication standpoint, and how Colin's receptive language must be much better than we'd realized.

Then I asked Alex a question. (I think it was "How was school?") And felt Colin's nursing head go nod, nod, nod.

Oh.

We tested it out a few more times. And yep, Colin will nod in response to anything said in a questioning intonation.

I suppose that the helpful, nurturing thing to do would be to now give him lots of concrete experience with being offered something, nodding, and then getting it. But frankly, we'd have to be much, much better parents than we are to refrain from using this new skill of his for our own entertainment, instead.

Okay, actually, upon sober reflection it's not as bad as all that.

She cut it at school. She didn't give herself a full "haircut" - she just took a big chunk out of the right-hand side, just below the shoulder. She claims that she was curious about what it would be like to have shorter hair, but I think it probably had more to do with the dangerous combination of scissors and poor impulse control.

It will have to be cut. But, you know, it was going to have to be cut at some point anyway. The bottom is straggly and uneven and the lower half is prone to developing horrible tangles which are awful to pick out. And she sheds all over the place.

If she really wanted shorter hair, at any point, I would have been perfectly willing to take her to a salon for a haircut. It's her hair. She is old enough to make decisions about how she wants to wear it. But I'm sad that she chopped at it in a moment of half-assedry, because I don't think she really wanted it to be short. Every time we've talked about it (and I have offered her the opportunity to get a haircut), she's said that she wanted to keep it long.

So I'm shocked and a little sad, but, you know, it's just hair. And it really is one of those iconic childhood moments. My mother once cut off her entire braid at the root.

Michael tells me to let this stuff go, but I can't.

( anti-vaccination people elsewhere on the net )

It's bedtime. I tuck Alex in and reach for last night's bed companions: a stuffed mermaid and a doll named Everest.

"I don't want to sleep with them," Alex says. "They don't think a girl can get married to a girl. They think a girl can only marry a boy and a boy can only marry a girl." She picks up a tiny stuffed loon. "But Ducky believes that civil marriage is a civil right, so I'm letting him sleep here to honor him."

"...Okay," I said. "But I hope that Mermaid and Everest change their minds."

"They change their minds every day."

"Good."

...Tell me again where we draw the line between raising children with a strong sense of justice, and pushing our political opinions on our kids.

We're talking to a few different nanny candidates. I helped Alex make her own checklist of qualities she is hoping for. This time I'm getting most of my questions out of the way over the phone, so that the interview can focus more on actual interaction between the prospective nanny and each of the kids.

In the meantime, Michael is running down the possibility of hiring a temporary sitter to look after Colin until we hire someone permanent, which should take some of the pressure of the search. We'd keep Alex at school full-time in the interim, because she's a lot more likely to be bothered by changes in caregivers than Colin is.

Colin is at work with me today. Right now he is taking a nap on my desk. I've got his changing pad underneath him, and he's tightly swaddled, and between those two things he is perfectly happy napping surrounded by binders and folders and my tape dispenser. I wish I had a camera.

Alex brought home a card she'd made at school. Her handprint is on the front in fuchsia paint.

"Mom," she said earnestly, "our hands are on there so you'll always remember when we were three or four, how cute we were."

Obviously that came from a teacher explaining the craft at school. But then Alex took it a step further. She ducked under my arm and gazed up into my face.

"Mom, when I'm a really really big grownup and you don't ever see me again, you'll always remember how cute I was."

"You don't think you'll visit me when you're a grownup?"

"Maybe not."

Every snarling, angry teenager screaming obscenities at her mother was once a three- or four-year-old presenting a handmade Mother's Day card. Every adult distant and alienated from his parents was once a cute, loving preschooler.

If you read things written by parents who don't have good relationships with their teenage or adult children, there's always an overpowering sense of bewilderment. How did the sweet, trusting little kid grow into the angry, resentful adult? Before, reading, I always thought that there must be something they'd done wrong and weren't mentioning. But now I think that a lot of the time parents just don't know. They think they're doing well enough. Not perfect, right, but adequate.

I called Alex in to me just now. "Honey, even when you're a really big grownup, I hope you'll always want to see me and be with me sometimes."

"Mmm," she said sympathetically. She let me hug her. Then she twirled away from me to tell Michael something about a plastic egg she'd filled with coins.

I go back to work on Wednesday. I'll be working three days a week; that represents a 20% reduction in official hours plus eight hours a week working from home.

We've hired a nanny, a 30-year-old psych major named Beth who seems very nice, gets glowing reviews, appears to get our parenting style, and has 11 years of experience. Starting in June, Alex will come home from school at lunchtime and be with Colin and the nanny (or Colin and me, on Fridays) in the afternoons. She'll still have her Wednesdays entirely at home.

This part is really hard. What makes it even harder with Colin than it was four years ago with Alex is the whole nursing-and-pumping issue. I don't know if I'll be able to pump enough milk. I don't know what "enough" is, even, because although Colin has practiced drinking from a bottle he has never had a full feeding that way, so I don't know how much he'll take or how long it will last him.

Fun times.

As I did when I first left Alex with a nanny, I've made up a short field guide to my kids - one page per kid, plus extras about Alex's diet. Boy, it's all a lot more complicated when there's a 4-year-old involved. It's posted under the cut in case you're curious or have feedback. ( Read more... )

Here's the "If I could..." edition. You guys ask good questions.

kazoogrrl: If you worked at Colonial Williamsburg, you would be what kind of historical reenactor, and why?

If we are fantasizing that I would have any skills I might need to obtain such a position, I'd like to be in the dressmakers'/milliners' shop, preferably focusing on fine embroidery. When we were there in November, there was a woman sitting in a sunny window embroidering the most stunning piece of white-on-white lace. I really enjoy fine needlework, but I don't have much time (okay, any time) to work on it. It would be pleasant to have a lot of time to develop those skills and share them with others, in a mellow and conversational setting.

If we're thinking about positions I might legitimately be qualified for, I'd probably wind up doing historical dance performance. Which is funny, because I'm about the least athletic or graceful person ever, under ordinary circumstances. But I've done quite a bit of English Country Dancing, and I love it, and I'm good at it.

pameladean: What are three things you'd do to your house if you could?

0. Buy it. I would love to own this house instead of renting it. But I know that's not what you meant, so I'm making it #0.

1. Put decking on the porch outside our bedroom, so that it can be walked on without damaging the roof surface. I understand why our landlord never did that - that short short railing would create a massive liability risk, and you couldn't put a real, safe-height railing in because the historical preservation people would throw a fit.

2. Insulate the kitchen and the pantry. They're just kind of hanging off the back of the house, with nothing underneath them and nothing around them, and they get so cold in the winter that for a while the olive oil congealed.

3. Rip out the 70's-era paneling and dropped ceiling in the third floor guest room. Then, eventually, we could convert it to our bedroom and turn our gorgeous current bedroom, with its floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves, into a study for the whole family. Right now our desks are crammed into the dining room instead.

moobabe: If you could do anything (job/hobby/etc) that you can't or don't do right now, what would it be?

Homeschool. This is in the works for a year and a half from now, when Alex is scheduled to start kindergarten. Michael and I hope to both work part-time and both share in the homeschooling. I'd kind of like to get started sooner, although I recognize that the older Colin is when we start the easier things will be. (Oops, here I am bringing in kids/parenting again, and violating the purpose of the meme.)

duanekc: If you had unlimited time and budget, would you travel? Where, and why? With or without family? Are there places you would like to see just by yourself, or is traveling without family unthinkable?

Oh, gosh. I haven't traveled that much, and I have a long list of places I'd like to go. I would love to go on safari in Africa. I'd like to see Egypt and Petra. I would like to do a rain forest/beach/snorkeling trip in central America. I would like to go on a cruise. I would like to cross the US and Canada by transcontinental rail. I would like to visit Vietnam. I would like to take the kids to Disneyworld.

I don't like to leave my kids for longer than a few days - at least, I can't imagine doing that until they're much older. So although I see definite advantages to familyless travel that'd be pretty far in my future. I think it will start being feasible for us to do significant travel when Colin is about the age that Alex is now. I have this family adventure travel site bookmarked, and it is a frequent stop for fantasizing.

castiron: What craft skill (where craft could be anything from sewing to blacksmithing to origami to small engine repair) would you most like to learn?

Quilting.

johnpalmer: Is there any one thing that you wish you had blogged about, but even if you were blogging, it's been *way* too long, so you can't blog about it now... but oh, it was *important*, and you really wanted to say something about it!

What was it? What did you want to say?

I wish I had finished my series on physician-assisted suicide, because it's a topic that I think many, many smart and ethical and well-meaning people are misguided about. I may be getting back to doing some writing on that in the near future.