Changing the Paradiggum

There was this commercial several years ago in which a bunch of people are sitting around in a conference room and one guy is all gung-ho and trying to get everyone else on board and he says “Sometimes you have to change the paradigm [which he pronounces paradiggum]...think outside the box.” And that has become part of the Blah Blah family lexicon, that “changing the paradiggum.”

And yet fixing one problem sometimes creates another.

Case in point: Miss Celie has been having sleep issues for some time. A (not so) brief history:

Stage One: We started out as co-sleepers. This was very sweet when she was an infant. I would just scoop her next to me and we would sleep with our heads close together all night long. I set up the Co-Sleeper next to the bed, more as a bed rail than anything since she didn’t actually sleep in it, and I slept in between Celie and Sweet Dub. This worked just fine until…

Stage Two: At some point she learned to roll over and keeping her on the side of the bed, even with the Co-Sleeper, wasn’t working. Sweet Dub was no longer worried about rolling over onto her and squishing her in the middle of the night, so we would then go to sleep with her between us. This worked for a very short time, because:

Stage Three: She began crawling and then walking, and would practice in her sleep, flopping around and kicking Sweet Dub in the head. He would wake up, irate, and stomp to the couch and sleep there for the rest of the night, while I would sleep like a rock, oblivious. Not very fair to him, and yet because she was still waking up to eat in the middle of the night, I was too tired to do all that much about it. However, eventually we moved on to…

Stage Four: We’d put her into her crib in the room she shared with Viva at the beginning of the night. At some point she would wake up, I would feed her and/or change her, and because she is a high-need baby (read: loud), I would have to remove her from the room so as to allow Viva to get some sleep. At that point I was so drunk with sleep deprivation that I would stumble to the couch and lie down with her there or just take her back to bed with me. In the latter case, within 30 minutes or so Sweet Dub would get kicked in the face, exit the room and go back to the couch. And I would continually wake up because I was getting kicked and banged into by my very active sleeper. All was not well in Blahville.

Stage Five: Last week, we committed to sleep training Celie and moved Viva across the house into her own room. Bought a rocking chair and hunkered down to battle. The first two nights were rough. She woke up every couple of hours howling. But then…the heavens parted and the sun shone down and she began sleeping through the night. Regularly. For the first time in her nearly 19 months of life.

And now, we are paying the price. She is furious with me. She follows me around screaming at me. She cries, she throws things, she hits. I was reading a pamphlet yesterday for something I’m writing for work and I came across a list of typical behaviors for young kids who have experienced trauma (I am not making this up):

Difficulty sleeping
Excessive tantrums
Defiant, won’t cooperate
Difficulty staying still
Aggression or acting out
Depression or anxiety
Low self-esteem
Inability to trust others
Separation anxiety
Cries a lot and won’t be easily consoled

I could put a check mark next to almost every single one of these. And last night I had to go to an event after work and didn’t get home until after she went to bed. This morning she was a mess, falling apart every five minutes and screaming when I put her in her car seat. At day care, she was fine sitting on my lap on the floor as I talked with her caregiver. I asked if she had been acting out at all. No, she is as she has always been at day care – she’s one of the easy ones, they wish they had 15 kids like her. And then when I got up to leave, Celie fell to pieces. She clung to me screaming. All of the teachers looked shocked. “I’ve never seen her like this,” said her beloved E, who has been her primary caregiver from the beginning. She had to pry her away from me and walk outside with her to wave goodbye. It was not a good way to start my day, to put it mildly.

So I get it: Celie misses her mommy. A lot. And it makes her angry and sad. We have been very much on the go these days, even on weekends, what with T-ball games and birthday parties and going up to visit my ailing grandmother. Celie’s not getting a whole lot of one on one time, and now she’s not even sleeping with me. Where we used to wake up all snuggled against one another and she would pat my face and give me kisses, now she wakes up alone. One of us goes to get her and cuddle her immediately, but it’s still a loss.

And now I have written this epic post, is there a resolution? Sleep issues solved, separation issues drastically heightened. There are no easy answers except take some time off and be with her. This, during a busy season at work when my husband has just been laid off. I need my job. But my baby needs her mama.

For the record: I know I am a good mom. I know I am doing the best I can on this hamster wheel of modern life. Today I am buying a lottery ticket and hoping for the best. Maybe I could stay home with her for a while.

P.S. She is very sweet when she's not mad at me:

Back from the Doldrums

Well! I just dropped a bomb on you and then skedaddled away, even though so many of you so kindly took the time to comment and commiserate.

That’s not cool, and I apologize. What’s happened is that Sweet Dub got laid off and that very same day, our modem decided to die. What with one thing and another (oh, the intricacies of health insurance and COBRA and such, and by the way: SUMMER CAMP! You gotta start thinking about it! And by the way: cell phone! Sweet Dub’s was a company phone, so he suddenly didn’t have one and lost all his contacts! And hey: pinkeye! The baby got it! And T-ball! We are smack in the middle of T-ball season! And sickness! Sweet Dub and I are both neck-deep in phlegm! And exhaustion! And, scene.) – well, what I’m saying is, I’m pretty invested in keeping my job right now, so I’ve not been blogging at work, and I’ve had no Internet access at home, and I don’t have a Smartphone, so I’ve been somewhat off the grid in terms of blogging.

But here we are, and ten days post-layoff, we are managing to stay positive. I am trying to avoid thinking about health insurance because it makes my eye twitch, so I won’t go into that, but just know this: the Blah Blahs can’t ever catch a break with something like that. Every avenue I tried came back to this: I must pay through my employer for health insurance, and it is $1,100 a month. COBRA is not cheaper, and we don’t qualify for the federal subsidy because Sweet Dub is eligible for health insurance through my job.

But enough about that. (Already I can feel my blood pressure spiking and my heart rate increasing, just in writing those few sentences.) At least one of us has a job. And we have some severance pay and we have some savings (partly for the hypothetical house which is impossible to buy in Los Angeles anyway) and if worst comes to worst, we have credit lines that are not being used. But I would hate for it to come to that.

Here is where I should insert something pithy and somehow poignant and inspirational. But instead I want to tell you a silly story, because it’s finding the humor in the everyday that’s keeping me going right now, and maybe it will make you laugh, too.

Earlier this week, I discovered that if I said, “Ready, set –“ to Miss Celie, she would say, “GO!”* But she would say it with such force that she would literally rock forward on her toes and the vein in her neck would stand out. And then she would break into a huge grin, as pleased with herself as could be.

Last night, I was talking to my mom on the phone and I figured this was a perfect “show off to Grandma” moment, so I said to Miss Celie, “Ready, set –“ and she said, “No.”

Ready, set – NO. It’s kind of appropriate, I think.

* And she doesn’t pronounce it plainly, “GO,” it’s more like “Goh!” which for some reason is more endearing and harder to convey on the page.

Sleep: The Last Unicorn*

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.
- Leo Burke

I was reading about sleep deprivation last night. And although I was reading a book** about child development, the book mentioned as part of its chapter on children and sleep that studies performed on adults who were averaging about 6 hours of sleep a night functioned similarly to individuals who had not slept in 24 hours.

I can’t remember the last time I had a full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. I feel that I am irritable, prone to weepiness, and not ever functioning at optimum capacity. Not surprisingly, it’s not a good feeling.

One of the best ways, I have read, to ensure that you get enough sleep is to establish a bedtime for yourself. Before I became a parent, I pretty much just went to bed whenever I felt sleepy. This meant that some nights, I could get ten hours of sleep, or, if I was feeling particularly peppy, that I could stay up late and get by on five or six hours. Right now, with my sleep debt, the concept of eight full hours of sleep seems like the most heavenly thing imaginable. I told Sweet Dub last night that we need to get to bed by 10 PM. He thought that was really hilarious, and not really helpful, since we are being awakened every night in and around the 2 o’clock hour by Miss Celie. It takes at least 20-30 minutes for her to get back to sleep in the middle of the night, so even so we will not get a full eight hours of sleep.

We are the Crabby Blah Blahs. Hear us whimper.

P.S. it looks like Miss Celie may have another ear infection, so we’re heading back to the pediatrician this afternoon. (The screaming you hear is just inside my head.)

* By which I mean: it's rumored to exist, but has proved elusive. Have you ever read that book? I went through a Peter S. Beagle phase when I was about 15, but that is a tangent which I am cutting short --hmmm, right now.

** The extremely popular NurtureShock! Read it and weep! No, actually, it’s really fascinating, in the “I know I should go to bed but I just got sucked in to read the next chapter” kind of way. It pokes holes in a lot of assumptions we have about modern parenting. I’ve been wanting to read it for months, was waiting for it to come out in paperback, and finally just gave in and bought the hardcover. I regret nothing!

Skinny Mini

At our last pediatrician visit a couple of weeks ago, we discovered that Miss Celie had a “raging” ear infection (the doctor’s words, not mine), and that although she’d grown two inches since her last checkup five months ago (yes, we’re off schedule), she actually weighed less at 17 months than at 12 months. I know Celie is a horribly picky eater, and I had been dreading the appointment, because the list of foods she will eat is quite small, and lately she had begun rejecting certain foods that she previously would eat.

Dr. H said we might need to take her to an occupational therapist to work on her food aversion. (This is an actual thing, this food aversion!) But then she conferred with one of the other doctors in the practice and they came up with a plan whereby we are to offer Miss Celie food once an hour while she is awake. We are only to offer her foods which she actually likes, although they do want us to try giving her PediaSure or Carnation Instant Breakfast as a supplement. (It turns out she hates PediaSure and will only tolerate about one tablespoonful of Carnation Instant Breakfast in her milk.)

If she doesn’t gain weight on this plan, by April 21st, they will send us to jail. No, no, I kid. They will refer us to a nutritionist and possibly also an occupational therapist, who will re-teach her how to eat. (I am serious.) I don’t know if this comes through in my regular blogging, but we are actually pretty healthy, balanced-meal eaters. Viva has even commented that her teacher says she is the only kid who brings healthy snacks to school. (That is rather alarming and fodder for a whole post of its own.)

We are educated, middle-class, blah blah blah, which I hate even writing, but I feel like we have all the tools at our disposal for our little one to be healthy and flourishing. Is our kid failing to thrive? In all honesty, I walked away from the appointment with a giant lump in my throat, feeling like a terrible parent.

Sweet Dub’s reaction was similar: “I feel like we let her down,” he said.

Celie doesn’t look underweight. She has a layer of baby fat, and she has curvy little arms and legs. She has a little potbelly, as most healthy kids her age do. She isn’t fat, but her genetics are going to predispose her to that. Sweet Dub and I were both skinny kids and we are not large adults.

She’s also been teething, this time with molars, and she’s caught every cold that’s come down the pike. Her appetite has not been great. At the moment, she eats most kinds of fresh fruit*, cheese, some yogurt, applesauce, peanut butter, crackers of all types, some pasta, and that’s really it. Oh, and air, in the form of any kind of puffed veggie-type food item like Pirate’s Booty or Snapea Crisps. She won’t eat baby food, she won’t eat potatoes (except the occasional French fry, her one food vice), she won’t eat rice or bread, and she won’t eat any kind of meat. She also won’t eat tofu. She eats green beans and sometimes broccoli.

It’s tough. Sometime she will eat things they offer her at daycare and then she won’t eat the exact same thing at home. Months ago she tried peas from a classmate's plate, and ate a bunch of them. She would eat them at home, but then one day she refused and hasn't eaten a pea since.

She is often crabby, and I am quite sure she is just hungry. But if you offer her a food she doesn’t recognize she will turn her head away and screech until you remove it from her sight, or at least from her highchair.

Someday I will look back on this and shake my head at how overly concerned I was, as I watch Celie eat a bowl of ceviche or something. But for now, I’m in the thick of it, and feeling pretty bad.

P.S. My doctor even suggested feeding her ice cream to fatten her up. Not sure that’s the road I want to take – first of all because of the sugar, and second of all because I don’t want her to grow up thinking of ice cream as a food group. Talk to me in a couple of weeks if she still hasn't gained weight.


* Except bananas. What kid doesn’t eat bananas?

Still Snarky, Still Sleepy

Wow, so here I am, off to a raging start with this blogging thing in 2010. It’s February already and I’ve posted only 3 times this year. Three cheers for mediocrity!

I meant to post, really. But I am being eaten alive by work, have been semi-obsessively watching the catastrophe in Haiti, and had horrible medical news about two people I am very close to (okay, one who I am very close to, and one who I work with – we are friends, but not like we vacation together or anything. But still I wouldn’t wish what he’s going through upon anyone.)* Oh, and Sweet Dub has taken on a new project outside of work which necessitates a commitment of more free time than he has, and I have these two small kids (have I mentioned them to you, ever?) living in my house who seem to need me for things like food and laundry and cuddling. When I have a moment to myself I like to maybe read a book or go for a walk or even watch TV. So there’s that then.

Last night, Viva had a total meltdown when she was told she needed to stop playing Wii (which she never does on weekdays, so it was a special privilege to begin with) and go take a bath. She said some things! She stomped her feet! Sweet Dub said some more things in a loud and angry tone! She was sent to her room! Much loud crying and screaming commenced from behind the closed door!

And then Sweet Dub came to me, where I was feeding our pajama’d Cily her bedtime bottle and said: “You know, we didn’t think about this before we got married. Your mother and my mother? Oh my God, we have fused them together to get the perfect drama queen!”

Yikes. We are smart in so many other ways.

P.S. Do you remember this post? About the Overnight diapers? And maybe that’s why Cily wasn’t sleeping through the night? Yeah?

No. No, that wasn’t it. It was just a fluke. She still wakes up Every. Flippin’. Night. at sometime between 3 and 4 AM. You can call that morning if you want to be technical, but to me, it falls very squarely into the time when I want to sleep, hence NIGHT. Gahhhh. When 6 AM rolls around, I am too through!


* My grandma’s tests came back even worse than before. Her lung cancer is not operable; it has spread too far, which is a very bad sign, because even a couple of months ago doctors thought that if they could just get her healthy, they could perform surgery where they would resection her lung. Since it has spread that quickly in just a couple of months, I am very scared that this means her time here on earth is much shorter than we anticipated. Never mind the cancer in her stomach and whatever the hell is going on with her liver (inconclusive).

As for my work friend: his newborn baby has a one-in-a-million type of disorder for which the only solution is brain surgery. My heart breaks for him. I can’t even imagine. This is going to be a long and difficult journey and I can’t even crack any jokes about it, which is my default way of dealing with things when things are not going well. So you see the situation I'm in.

It’s the Economy…

Okay. So in reading here and there about my work life you may have surmised that I work in the nonprofit sector, and I do my best to raise money for the organization that employs me. In the down economy, this has been none too easy. The head of our department is preparing to be out of the office for a couple of weeks, and this morning he fixed me with a Look and said, “I was going over the numbers last night, and we’re in trouble.”

“I know,” I said. “We are in the hole.”

“No, we are really in trouble,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “We have been doing well raising money in certain areas, but for our annual fund [which provides general operating support], we are way down.”

“We need to get some more requests out,” he said. “And can you give me a list of everything that’s pending?”

I feel like we have been knocking ourselves out to prepare well-thought-out requests for support to funders who have an interest in what we do. Yet we keep getting declined.

Am I concerned about my job? Well, yes, I guess so. Common sense tells you that they’re not going to keep paying someone to TRY and raise money. They want to pay you to actually raise money. The past year or so has been disheartening to say the least.

So that’s where I am today. And I’m working on about four hours’ sleep. Dub and I stayed up talking until 11:30, Cily woke up at 11:50, and I didn’t get to sleep until close to 2 AM. And then, at 4:50 Dub came out and found me on the couch snuggled up with Cily and woke me up, insisting that I should come to bed. Can you imagine? How can I be married to this person?

My fury at being awakened was such that I could not get back to sleep for nearly 30 minutes. Dub woke me again at 6:25 to say he was leaving and I should get up or I’d be late. I wanted to hit him in the head with something but it was just too much trouble to move.

I miss my imaginary fantasy life, in which I’d get a full eight hours of sleep and wake up looking fabulous, to a clean house and children who would eat anything I put in front of them before we hopped into the mom-mobile and drove merrily off down the road, singing in perfect unison.

Did I mention how much I miss sleep? And how I’d like to keep my job? I guess those are the themes of the day.

Feliz Ano, Internets!

So I'm posting. Anything to get the basset hounds off the screen!

Well, hello. Let me share with you the marvelousness of 2010 that has thus far overtaken me. For quite some time now, I have been sleep-deprived. I attributed my baby not sleeping through the night as not eating enough solids during the day. She wakes up because she's hungry, I thought. So she would wake up at around 3:45 or 4:00 AM every day, and I would change her diaper and feed her a bottle and put her back to bed, and I would eventually fall back to sleep and then when 6:00 AM rolled around I could not get out of bed to get to work on time. This went on, this ridiculous pattern, for eons of time.

Yesterday, I broke down and bought some Overnights diapers in despair. Lo and behold, the baby slept from 8:30 PM to 5:30 AM. Hey, guess what - she was waking up because she was wet, and cold from the wet! Poor thing.

Now that I have had one night of uninterrupted sleep, there's no telling what I might get up to. I have all kinds of ambitious plans. I might blog more regularly, even (though I won't recap my holiday season for you, because I just won't do that to you. There was family drama and that's all I wish to say.).

Consider yourself forewarned, is all. And to all a good night!

But Not the Flu

Today I am sick.

Darling Sweet Dub is sick.

Precious Cily is sick.

Viva: healthy as all get-out and raring to go. What adventure awaits her today?

I am at work, having come in just to make edits and print and mail out a project so I can cross it off my “to do” list. It is quiet here today – about half the staff in our department are out at a conference. I am enjoying the calm.

Soon I will make phone calls, and I will sketch out my next assignment, and I will leave here and pick up Cily from the lovely and loving women who care for her all day. Cily, sweet Cily gives kisses to all of us without pursing her lips. Sometimes they are open-mouthed kisses, and she chews a little bit on your face, kind of thoughtful-like, before moving on to smear her spit on your cheek. I am guessing this is how both Sweet Dub and I got sick, since who can resist her?

I will try and work from home for the rest of the day. Cily, I know, may not cooperate. But I will first make my phone calls and see what avenue to take next, and then maybe once we get home she will nap. And I may sneak some pictures of her because she is so scrumptious.

And that other girl, Viva, will come home victorious from whatever she has done today and declare that I am the best mom ever because when I make myself a cup of tea I automatically make her a cup of hot cocoa. And I will try not to give her my germs, but it will be hard, because who can resist her?

And maybe for Sweet Dub, I will make some chicken soup to share. He too is at work. (What a crazy life – we all have “too much to do.”) So he will come home and all of us will collapse in bed together and he will be so sweet with the children as we all loll about that I might have to kiss him and share his germs too, because how can I resist him?

So that is the plan for the day. Be well, my friends.

365

One year ago today, I posted this:

I've been having contractions since 5:30 or so this morning. They have been intensifying but are still not at the magic "every 5 minutes, 1 minute in duration" level. Nonetheless, we've kept Viva home from school while we wait to see what happens and we've got all local family members on standby. I am cramping, hips are extra sore, back is killing me. It feels like this is it.

Happy 1st Birthday, Celia, my love. You are tremendous and I love you even more today than 365 short days ago when we first met. I am sorry that you woke up on today of all days cold and wet and with poop in your pants. Hopefully, each birthday will be better than the last!

Cily, about 10 minutes after waking up cold and wet (her diaper leaked) and with poop in her pants. Approximately 5 AM today.

Monday, Melancholy

It’s October. Work and home life insanely busy. I barely remember September. Recent news:

Cily: top two front teeth have come through. Stomach flu this weekend. Will not stop crawling and cruising and moving and wiggling and where did the baby go?

Viva: late trip to the lake last month. Took up waterskiing. How is it that I, the klutziest, most uncoordinated and most accident-prone person alive, gave birth to this?

(Look, it's the teeniest water-skiier in the world. Why do you do this, Blogger? I'll have to try this again later.)

Sweet Dub: my love. Yesterday was our 8th wedding anniversary. Between the diarrhea-laden baby and both of us coming down with the latest ailment, we spent the day bumping into each other occasionally and saying, “Happy Anniversary,” rather mournfully.

Nanna: Cancer in her lungs and stomach. Awaiting biopsy of her liver. Doctors want to do surgery, say she will live another two years if they do it. “I’m 84,” she says. “Two more years isn’t bad at 84.” The twist: the last time I saw her, she asked me how old Viva was: “Two or three?” (Viva is 6 years old.) Moral of the story: I’m questioning whether my grandmother can genuinely make this decision about surgery for herself. She is sometimes lucid, sometimes not so much.

I’m having weird dreams about Nanna and my grandfather (deceased) going on a trip and moving to a new house, leaving behind a house filled with all kinds of baggage. Sometimes your subconscious isn’t all that subtle, is it?

Meanwhile, I am sick and my throat is on fire. I crave a big steaming bowl of homemade minestrone soup. Maybe I’ll make some…here in my office, where it is about 35 degrees. Happy Monday.

Vague and All Over the Place

That was a very long hiatus.* For those of you who might be concerned, nothing was wrong aside from the everyday life with an infant (sickness every other week! Explosive foul-smelling poop! Curse you, gastrointestinal skullduggery!) and craziness at work. Seriously, taking work home and working until 1 AM and then the baby waking up at 5? Not my favorite thing ever. Probably one of my least faves. Yeah.

Yesterday was the culmination of weeks of work (mostly not mine, despite what the previous paragraph may lead you to believe) on a huge event at my job. There was a lot of sugar and caffeine to get us going, and then a lot of rich catered food afterward to thank all of us for working so hard. Today, I feel really “fat,” and I put fat in quotes because I know I’m not actually fat but I feel bloated and just – I don’t know, overdone. I don’t look cute today, my clothes don’t fit right, etc.

For lunch, I decided to have a salad and iced tea while working at my desk (I know, stop me, I’m crazy! What will I do next?). And I was feeling pretty good about that, typing away, until I heard a buzzing noise and turned and saw a fly in my food. I am on the third floor of a high rise with windows that don’t open. How on earth?

That ruined everything. I picked out a whole section of the salad where the fly had landed, along with a good 1-inch diameter around it. It’s my favorite salad. I went out of my way to get it. I managed to eat most of the rest of it. Nonetheless, now I’m feeling a little queasy. Damn you, Musca domestica!

Time for a little Internetly investigatin’! A brief search reveals that the common house fly is “often a carrier of diseases, such as typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and anthrax. The fly transmits diseases by carrying disease organisms onto food. It picks up disease organisms on its leg hairs or eats them and then regurgitates them onto food (in the process of liquefying solid food).”

Oh my precious God. I think I just threw up a little in my throat.

In other world news, Sweet Dub is out of town for a few days for business. His job has really accelerated and one of the reasons I have been so busy is that he has been so busy. At any rate, it’s weird being home without him (more on that in another post – I feel like I am a much worse parent when he is gone). But one benefit to him being away is that both kids sleep with me in a big snuggly warm pile when he is gone. There are few things on my all-time List of Wonderfulments that are better than sleeping in between my two girls, with Cily’s forehead pressed right up under my nose, and my legs entangled with Viva’s. Ah, the love.

I envisioned this time as a great opportunity for Sweet Dub to get some time to himself, which I don’t begrudge him in the least. Nonetheless, in the morning, I’m packing up the kids and driving to Palm Springs to join Sweet Dub in the hotel (with multiple pools! And room service! And miniature golf on site!). He says he misses us. He says he wants to drive home tonight and pack us up and take us back with him. He is sad and lonely. I laughed at him when he called this morning at 6 to say all this. “I wish I had time to miss you,” I teased.

But you know? I have a feeling that I would feel the same way, waking up alone. And I just realized he’s never spent a night away from Cily since we brought her home from the hospital. Maybe he’s going through withdrawal.

What do you think, Cily?


Yes, definitely.

* In retrospect, not really. It felt like I hadn't posted in a couple of weeks, and then I discovered that I had. So...I think the sleep deprivation is translating into general absent-mindedness, which in the overall scheme of things is, I think, kind of a lovable trait, yes?

Gratuitous Cuteness

Hey, guess what? My “newborn” will be seven months old tomorrow. She’s awesome:

I like to squish her and kiss her and all sorts of unspeakably embarrassing things. My voice gets very very high, because that makes her laugh. Here is what she is doing now: lots of talking (even in her sleep), rolling over, sitting up on her own for increasingly longer periods of seconds, grabbing everything within reach, and screaming with frustration when she’s on her stomach – because she clearly wants to crawl, even if she doesn’t know what that is. She adores her big sister, and if I haven’t mentioned it yet, let me say how impressed I am with how much Viva loves her baby. A few weeks ago, we assembled the long-awaited crib and located it in Viva’s room, and now – minor miracle – Cily spends most of the night there. Viva is thrilled, because now it's two in one room and two in the other* (until the 4 AM feeding. I am lazy and cold and sleepy at 4 AM. Did you know that baby experts consider sleeping 5 hours straight “sleeping through the night”? Yeah. What do they know?). Viva wants Cily in her room. She wants her in her bath:

She wants to read bedtime stories with her, and sing to her, and she wants to watch the NBA playoffs with her:

At any rate, as we all know, babies grow. And they grow quickly. And we're all just enjoying having her around, so small and warm and sweet-smelling. So huggy. She bounces into little spasms when she sees me, and beams. It is like a drug. I have to be around her. As does Viva. And her daddy? Also has a pretty bad case of Wrapped Around Her Little Finger. Seven months? Pretty damn near perfect.

* You know, she likes things to be even. And fair. And prior to Cily, Viva would often protest loudly that it was unfair that Dub and I got to sleep together, while she had to sleep in her room all alone. Now all is right with the world...for five minutes.

Day Ten. Belatedly.

Grace in small things:

1. Cily’s been healthy for a few days.

2. Had a great meeting with a VP at work – we brainstormed about a new creative arts program we want to offer to foster kids. He really knows his stuff and is excited we’re trying to do this, and was happy I asked his opinion. I was happy because he really knows his stuff and is excited we’re trying to do this, so he gave me a lot of great ideas. Now I just have to write them up and hammer out a budget. Sweet!

3. Talking with some work friends about massages and pampering yourself and discovered one of our work friends has never been to a spa. (She is only 27, so I’ll cut her a little slack.) The rest of us (there were three of us, late-30s and age 40-moi) were taken aback and insisted she learn how to pamper herself. I then went online and sent her the link to this. You look, too. It’ll relax you just to look at it. Once when I went there I had such a good time talking with my masseuse that she gave me an extra half-hour and then comped the entire massage. And she wouldn’t take a tip! Ah, good times.

4. Vietnamese take-out for dinner. No dishes to wash. Pho sho!

5. Sick, but I can still do push-ups. In sets of ten! Rrrraarrrh!

Banging My Head Against the Wall

Update on the day care situation:

The director of the center did not read my email. She heard from Cily’s caregiver that I had emailed her, so she called and left a message saying she would rather just speak with me in person.

When we spoke, she had the nerve to argue with me. Incredibly, she seemed to think that if Cily wasn’t crying, there was no reason to think she might be hungry. “We feed on demand,” she said.

“I understand that,” I said. “But if a child goes five hours without eating anything, wouldn’t you just offer her something?”

“Well, she wasn’t crying,” she said.

“No, sometimes she doesn’t,” I said. “But—“

“Well, usually she lets us know if she’s hungry,” she interrupted. “Believe me.”

“What I would like to see happen is EVEN IF SHE IS NOT CRYING, offer her a bottle every three hours,” I said. “If she isn’t hungry, she won’t eat it. But she should never go five hours without being fed.”

“Okay, we’ll do that,” she said. “But you know usually a baby will cry to tell you they’re hungry.”

Deep breath. “Okay, L. – let me tell you what I am trying to do here. I am trying to avoid having my husband come down here. He is not happy. You do not want him to come down here. Can we just agree that from now on you will check to see if she wants to eat every three hours or so?”

Agreed. Jesus Lord, give me strength.

Day Eight. Vinyasa Blah Blah.

1. Relieved to read “Renting still beats buying.” Sweet Dub and I have an ongoing conversation about this since we’re not convinced that a 30-year-mortgage is something we should be struggling to obtain.

2. Today is workout day and I’m actually looking forward to it! I think today might be a yoga day.

3. I discovered this new (to me) singer through the magic of NPR and today I created a Pandora station with similar-sounding artists.

4. My boss called me in to her office today and shut the door. Yikes. No, it turns out people where I work are actually fighting over me and approached her to ask if I could work on a project. She is reluctant to let me do it, but agreed I could work with this other department on one creative project a month. (Backstory: I worked with them on occasional projects as a favor until they hired someone new. Now it turns out they like my writing better. Nice!) I am more than happy to get a break from my routine to do something fun.

5. Despite (or maybe because of) the dire economic news, Sweet Dub and I have been talking about taking a REAL vacation this year. “I’ve been working for twelve years and I’ve only ever taken one real vacation,” Sweet Dub says. You know what? Yeah, life is short. Let’s hit the road!

This Parenting Thing

Have you noticed, you who have children, that this parenting thing is um, kind of non-stop? As Exhibit A, I give you this:

Dear [name redacted],

I would appreciate your immediate attention to this matter. I spoke with [AM childcare person] this morning, and wanted to follow up with an email. When I picked Cily up at around 5:00 on Friday, her chart indicated that she had not eaten anything since 12:10. You may remember I asked you about it, and you said perhaps she was fed and no one recorded it. When I dropped her off that morning, I left her with three 4 oz. bottles. One was completely full when I picked her up – consistent with her not having been fed.

Cily does not always cry when she is hungry. I noticed she was sucking on her fingers loudly in the car on the way home. When I fed her, she drained the bottle (4 oz.) and wanted more. I then changed her and noticed her diaper was really heavy.

Looking back at the chart, it looks like she was asleep from 12-ish until 3:30 or so. In the time between her waking up and my arrival, she did not have her diaper changed and was not fed. This is the second time since January (when Cily started at [daycare]) that I have arrived to discover Cily hasn’t been fed for several hours. This is absolutely not acceptable.

Cily should get a diaper change within five (at most ten) minutes of waking up, and should be fed every three hours if possible. She shouldn’t go five hours without eating anything, even if she is not crying. If this is not feasible, please let me know.

It’s difficult to leave my child in someone else’s care. It’s really upsetting to be paying a premium for care and feel she is not being attended to.

Yours truly,
Lisa Blah Blah

I think it speaks for itself. Will let you know what response I get at pickup today.

GIST – Day Seven. Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY!

1. I can not tell you how much I am enjoying Big Love this season. The plot twists are ingenious and completely believable. Only two more episodes until the season finale! Criminy! (When is Weeds coming back?)

2. Cily laughs now! I nuzzle her under her chin with my nose and she chuckles and chuckles irrepressibly. If you heard it I think your heart would swell up and burst out of your chest. So yeah, maybe you should stay away.

3. Called my sister and although we chatted for only a few minutes, I automatically felt better when I was talking to her. This is not to say I was feeling bad when I called her, or that we talked about anything particularly noteworthy. I think it is just a sensory thing, hearing her voice.

4. Weeded through Cily’s clothes and put a whole bunch of outgrown outfits in a bag to give away. Pay it forward.

5. Viva put together a rather complicated paper bag puppet show version of American Idol, with a frog, lion, elephant and cow squaring off. She told me she disqualified the elephant because it was a girl. I gave her a pretty stern (for me) lecture about how it’s not right to treat someone differently just because they’re a girl, which she rolled her eyes about. And then for the rest of the day I had “Suffragette City” playing in my head. I know, but that is just how my brain works.

GIST – Day Six. The Weekend Edition.

1. Took Cily for her 4-month checkup and all is well. “What a perfectly shaped head!” her doctor exclaimed. Yes, she is a perfect child. I have the photos to prove it and maybe I’ll post them someday.

2. At the doctor’s office, as we were leaving, we ran into a new mom who gushed fountains over Cily. Her stroller was completely covered and I asked if I could peek in. OH. My. GOD. Her baby boy was only 5 days old. How teeny and sweet and red! It made me all melty.

3. Thai veggie fried rice and fried tofu for lunch. Completely satisfying.

4. Had a “sleepover” with Viva in my room Saturday night. At one point woke up with my big old girl all draped over my right side. She is still a little girl – sometimes I forget that because Cily is so tiny in comparison.

5. We booked a venue for Viva’s birthday party next month. It will be a bowling party with eight other kids. Cute because they have these bumpers that go up so kids can’t roll gutter balls. While I am not crazy about bowling shoes, I do so love the sound the pins make when the ball hits ‘em.

A Fraction of What I Have to Say

So many things to blog about, so little time:

Cily is much better, just about at 95% I'd say. We have battled the Croup and won!

Viva is having issues with school. As in, not being challenged by the curriculum. I hate to say it, but I can only imagine this would be worse if she were in public school. At least with private school you have some leverage, as in "we are paying you folks a lot of money to educate our kid - let's figure out what we can do to keep her motivated, shall we?"* Last night we were reading a chapter book before bed - alternating reading pages aloud to each other. Whenever Viva would come to an unfamiliar word, she would pause, work it out carefully and then move on with the rest of the sentence. This was both exciting, since she's suddenly at warp speed with the reading, and at the same time, not really odd to me. I know she is very bright, and it's reminiscent of how I was at her age, so it seems pretty normal. Then I was looking at the book today and found it's listed as Grade 7 and up. No wonder she's bored with kindergarten...

Sweet Dub and I are both working out pretty regularly these days. He is on this kick to lose weight (!! if you knew him you would laugh, but I think he only wants to lose ten pounds) and get in shape for the spring, which is on its way faster than ever since we live in Los Angeles. I am trying to lose my baby pooch and generally firm up all over. I feel pretty good, and I'm enjoying making my work friends laugh with my overexaggerated-for-comic-effect hip-hop abs moves. "Everybody dance y'all!"

If I were to talk to you on the phone right now I would rattle on like this for about twenty minutes straight and tell you I have to go but I have so much more to tell you and then I'd apologize profusely but hang up. That's just how I roll. Always leave 'em wanting more. Thank you and good night!

* Why is it as taxpayers we don't feel entitled to demand the same level of service? Am I not now paying twice for education? I sure as hells am.

Squeakers

Cily has the croup and it has resulted in laryngitis. She coughs so hard she vomits, and then she cries in the most pathetic heartbreaking squeak. Needless to say, Sweet Dub and I have been taking turns taking sick days to stay home with her. She is intermittently feverish, but surprisingly not very irritable at all. A little fussy, but snuggly and sweet fussy rather than “O My God nothing is making her happy” fussy.

Today, Sweet Dub went to work from 6AM to 11AM, and then came home so I could go into work in the afternoon. Of course, now that I am at work (and it's almost time to leave) I can’t concentrate. Hence:

Grace in Small Things*

1. This morning I was tickling Cily on the sides of her neck and she really started laughing – which, since she has laryngitis, was not very loud, but nonetheless really turned my heart into a big gooey mess.

2. Last night, our neighbor from around the corner came over to introduce herself and to let us know of the deadline for a local charter school (next Wednesday). I guess she’d been talking to our next door neighbor and he told her of our school issues. We had a nice chat and I found out that not only does she have a 7-year-old daughter who is into a lot of the same things Viva is, but there’s a 5-going-on-6-year-old girl living next door to them as well. You mean Viva might actually be able to play with little girls her age, a mere stone’s throw away? Sweet!

3. Today I am only working a half-day! Granted, that is because Cily is sick, but hey, a half-day on a Friday? I’ll take it!

4. Today an old classmate of mine from college emailed me unexpectedly – found me through Facebook – and she is just as I remember, funny and on point.

5. At work today someone dropped off a bunch of free pies. I just had a slice of blackberry pie heated up in the microwave and it was heavenly.

* Hat tip to Journeymama for her blog posts which led me to the Grace in Small Things Website. If you haven’t read her blog, take a look – she and her husband moved last year from the States to India and I love to read about their transition. They have four very small children and you’d think their lives would be nuts, but Rae is always kind of inspirational and peaceful. Her kids are beautiful, too.