Bits of Time

One of the funnier things about my recent asthma attack was its timing. I had decided to start tracking my time again, to help me with a project I'm working on. I decided to start last Wednesday, despite the fact that I had an eye doctor appointment in the middle of the day. I figured that doctor's appointments happen, and it would be interesting to track how I absorbed that into my schedule. My plan was to add up my weekly totals from Wednesday to Wednesday, which, by a strange coincidence, is what I did the last time I did a timetracking exercise.

But then the asthma attack hit, and my week went to hell. I considered going ahead as planned, because after all, illness happens, too, and you have to absorb that into your life just like anything else. But then I discovered that I'd made a mistake in how I set up my tracking spreadsheets, and decided it wasn't worth the effort to fix that retrospectively. So I'll consider these five days of timetracking to be a trial run of sorts, and start tracking "for real" tomorrow, in a newly fixed weekly spreadsheet.

The last five days' worth of data won't be completely wasted, though. They confirmed that I have my categories essentially correct. The non-work categories were still relevant, despite the fact that I made no changes from my previous exercise, and the new work categories seemed to capture my time well. I also noticed some interesting things, particularly about my weekends. As I tracked my time this weekend, two things jumped out at me:

1. My time is very fragmented- which explains why I have plenty of time to write short blog posts, but struggle to put together the time to tackle some of my larger projects.

2. I spend a lot of time doing things that could be put in multiple categories. Some I remembered from the last exercise. Watching TV with my husband could either be "watching TV" or "spending time with my husband." (I usually categorize it as "spending time with my husband," because left to my own devices I'd probably watch very little TV- I'm watching it because he likes to watch TV together.) Others took me by surprise. For instance, on Saturday, Petunia insisted on taking a walk for nap, so I put her in her stroller and decided to push her over to pick up the dry cleaning I'd dropped off a few weeks ago and then forgotten about. I was out walking for about an hour. Was that exercise (the walk), child care (the nap), or laundry (the dry cleaning)? I decided to call it exercise, even though the only reason I headed out for a walk during the hottest part of the day was that Petunia wanted it, and I didn't want her to throw a tantrum and disrupt Pumpkin's Chinese lesson.

I'm not sure what I think about these two observations. I'd certainly like my time to be less fragmented, but some of that is just a function of the age of my children. However, I've noticed that my husband's weekend time is less fragmented than mine, so perhaps I either need to emulate his methods or negotiate some time when he's the "go to" parent for the kids. (And all of you other parents of toddlers can start laughing now at the idea that Petunia might show the slightest bit of respect for who the adults think should be the "go to" parent at any given time.)

I'm less concerned about the multitasking, although I do want to keep any eye on that and make sure that I'm not multitasking too much when I spend time with my children. I don't think I am, but discovering the actual truth of how you spend your time is why you do timetracking exercises, so I think I'll just wait and see what the data show after a few weeks.

Also, I have an advance copy of Gretchen Rubin's new book Happier at Home, and I wonder if I might have some different insights into how I'm spending my time at home after I read that book. No doubt, I'll be back to write more about this subject later.

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In other time-related news here at Chez Cloud, it appears that Petunia is now sleeping through the night. Or at least she's slept through the night for the past couple of weeks- which is about a week and a half longer than her previous record. If she is now going to sleep through the night more often than not, she arrived at this point just like her big sister did, namely, when she was ready, without any active encouragement from us, unless you count the wishes and sleepy thoughts I'd been sending her way.

She is, for the record, just two months shy of three years old. Pumpkin hit this milestone closer to two (an event I apparently failed to document at the time), but as I've mentioned before, Pumpkin's first year of sleep was far tougher on the adults in the house than Petunia's was, so I think we can consider them even in the sleep disruption department.

Now that we're here, with Petunia sleeping through the night in her own bed, I find that I'm glad we were able to wait and let her get to this place on her own terms. I remember having similar thoughts after Pumpkin finally started sleeping better, too. It fits with how I think about attachment and security in young children- another topic I think I'll come back to later, after I've had time to digest some of the stuff I've been reading in Mother Nature recently.

And of course, what I think on this is just my opinion, and is relevant mainly to my own choices, not anyone else's. I don't have a shred of judgment in me for people who decide they need to help their child learn to sleep through the night on his or her own far before three years have passed. In fact, up until Petunia just magically started sleeping through, I was frequently convinced that I should be doing just that. It is easy to be zen after the fact, and much harder to be so when you're struggling through another exhausted day thanks to a wakeful child.

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I had thought that I'd find myself with a lot of extra time once Petunia started sleeping through the night. I don't. I find myself with a lot more energy, but having been through essentially non-optional sleep deprivation, I am in no hurry to volunteer for more, so I am still going to bed earlyish.

We have gained some extra time in our evenings, though, due to a change in how we're doing bedtimes. We're reading the kids their stories together and then splitting up to get them both down at roughly the same time. We've told Pumpkin that this slightly earlier bedtime is in preparation for kindergarten, which is true. She doesn't need to know it is also a way to grab some time back for the grown ups in the house. The only downside is that we've had to put the chapter books we'd started reading to Pumpkin away for a little while, but that seems like a small price to pay for the extra 20 or so minutes one of us gains each night.

The new routine also makes soloing the bedtime routine a little easier. That will get even easier- and we'll grab back even more time- once Petunia starts going to sleep on her own. Based on the info in Bedtiming and our experience with Pumpkin, we'll probably start working on that not long after Petunia turns three.  And no, I can't explain why I am perfectly happy to "work on" teaching Petunia to go to sleep on her own and not on teaching her to sleep through the night- I'll have to think some more about that and see if I can come up with anything interesting.

But right now? It is time for bed.

Sparse

Posting may be a bit sparse around here for the next month or so.

I could say that I'm really busy at work, and that we have a vacation coming up, and we promised Pumpkin a new big girl desk to match the new big girl computer we got her as a late birthday gift, and that requires some serious thinking about how to rearrange her room. Also, that will free up her "little girl" desk for Petunia, and getting that into the oversized closet that passes for Petunia's bedroom will require even more serious thinking. And all of that would be true.

But the real reason that posting may be sparse is that Petunia has decided that bedtime is a quaint tradition that perhaps other 2.5 year olds still observe, but that is quite beneath her now. Last night, she did not really go to sleep until sometime between 11 and 12. I'm not sure, because I'd dozed off by that point. Lights went out at 8:30, at her request- she usually tells us when she is done reading stories and settles herself into bed. Back in the old days- you know, roughly a week ago- the adult in charge of her bedtime would then turn on her music and her bedtime turtle nightlight, snuggle her for 15-30 minutes, and then leave the room. No more! My husband has been able to get her down if he snuggles her for 1-1.5 hours. Last night, I snuggled her for over an hour, was convinced she was in deep sleep, so rolled out of her bed, only to be called back immediately by a plaintive "Mommy!" She is quite patient. She will snuggle me peacefully as long as I stay. She does not demand to get up unless I try to do so. So three of the last four nights, I have just given up and gone to bed with her.

Now, I know we could just say good night and walk out and let her cry. (I will note, however, that she has figured out how to open her door, so this approach would require an adult to continually return her to her room.) Or we could try moving her bedtime later (which we may do). But I also know that she has had phases like this many times before. They usually last until I am just about to lose my mind, and then she goes back to sleeping well.

Also, I am inclined to be patient with sleep issues. I figure that for most of evolutionary history, a toddler whose mother tried to leave her alone at bedtime would quite rightly scream as if her life were being threatened. Because it was. So I am sympathetic to the deep instinct to insist on my presence, and am actually pleased that most times, she will accept a substitute, allowing my husband and I to take turns snuggling her. I know, from my experience with her sister, that she will slowly but surely learn to go to sleep on her own and stay asleep all night. I also know that although I may think the sleep disruption is killing me, I, too, will survive.

So we're working through this patiently. We're trying to get her more exercise, both physical and mental, because we know that helps her sleep. My husband and I went out to lunch today, so that we could actually talk to each other about the various things that we're trying to get done.

But blogging will be difficult until this phase passes. I'll see you when I can!

Tying Up Loose Ends

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! This year, Pumpkin was supposed to write her own valentines. She has eleven classmates, plus she wanted to give cards to two of her teachers. We started off strong, completing nine of the valentines over the weekend, most of them in one sitting on Saturday. The last four were quite a trial, though. Pumpkin wanted them to be perfect, and would erase anything that didn't meet her standards. There were many rest breaks with her head on the table. I exhausted my patience, and went off to get Petunia to bed. Hubby managed to convince her to finish up, but the experience clearly took quite a bit out of him. After Pumpkin was in bed, he decided to relive the highlight of last year and replay the New Zealand-Australia semi-final from the rugby world cup.

The holiday was rescued, though, by how excited Pumpkin was to give us all our valentines this morning. She had made one for Daddy (with my help), written one for Petunia, and dictated one for me (clearly, she'd run out of steam). Petunia was really excited, too, when she saw the little Cinderella card inside her envelope. She kept it next to her all through breakfast.

This evening, Pumpkin was most excited by the candy, pencils, and stickers that had come with her valentines at day care. Petunia, though, just wanted to go through her cards, repeating who each one was from. Very cute. I'm not sure if this was worth all the hassle with getting Pumpkin's valentines done, but at least it ended the holiday on a high note.

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The song from which I lifted the title of my last post was an obscure 80s song- Having It All, by Eighth Wonder.



It was on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, which my sister had- on cassette. For some reason, it has stuck in my head all of these years.

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I did finally draw another winner for the Jeanne Baret giveaway. I've notified the winner and she's sent her contact details, so I guess that's that.

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Remember back in November/December when I was trying to wean Petunia and she wasn't cooperating? Well, I gave up, and now she's weaned. OK, technically, she's almost completely weaned. She still sometimes asks to nurse, but when she does she rarely nurses for more than a second or two. I think the last "real" nursing was last Tuesday (Feb. 7), and the last time before that was probably around January 24th. I've decided that she's weaned enough for me, and I'll let her decide when to stop asking to nurse. Unless she's still asking when she's in kindergarten or something- which seems unlikely.

I knew that I just needed to chill out on that one and wait, but my god, that was hard to do.

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Petunia's sleep is also improving. She's sleeping through until 4 or 5 in the morning most nights now. I like it best when she wakes up at about 4, comes padding down the hall, climbs into bed with us, and then snuggles in and sleeps well until we get up at about 6:30. This doesn't happen that often, but I'll also take her sitting up at 5 a.m., screaming for me, and then snuggling and kicking me in her bed until 6:30. It is a vast improvement over the status quo at the end of the year (which saw me spending half of my night getting aggressively snuggled/kicked).

Of course, last night she woke up at about 2 a.m. and I ended up spending the rest of the night in her room because every time I woke up and thought I might move back to my own bed, she was restless. We're not to sleep nirvana yet, but we're getting closer. (Sleep nirvana = both kids sleeping through the night most nights.)

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My boss is still a bit freaked out over my outburst in that meeting- which is funny, because, really all I did was raise my voice a little bit and then leave the room, and as one of my team members pointed out, he yells more than that in roughly half of the meetings he comes to.  He's stopped trying to deflect work from me, so I think things are going back to normal. We'll see how all of this plays out at review time. I suspect that if I can bring my projects in roughly on time, all will be forgotten. If I don't bring in my projects on time, I guess we'll see how much he really blames himself for the situation. But I have every intention of bringing my projects in on time.

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Pumpkin has discovered that the hair on the LEGO Friends figurine comes off, and has swapped hair/hats among Olivia, the dude that came with the house, and the castle guard.

So, I continue to feel absolutely no angst about the fact that we bought one of the LEGO Friends sets.

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We won't hear about our school choice until April or May, but it is still nice to have the choice part done. We were at a birthday party on Sunday, and everyone was talking about schools. It was interesting to hear what other people chose. A lot of Pumpkin's day care classmates will be heading to private school in the fall- but there are a few others who chose public school, including the two sets of parents with whom we get along the best. It will be interesting to see if we manage to stay in touch once the kids go on to kindergarten- we all chose different schools, mostly because we live and work in different areas.

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Anything else I've left dangling? Ask in the comments.

Weaning, Exercise, and Other Updates on Things That Aren't Going As Well As I'd Like

Thanks for all the sympathy and ideas on my last post, everyone. The cold is receding, albeit slowly, so things don't look quite so grim. But I still don't feel up to writing any of the "real" posts I have queued up, so I'll give you some updates on a few things.

First- weaning. As you probably guessed, I am too adverse to being screamed at to go hard core at this. I also have noticed pronounced effects on my mood as I drop feedings, so I go very, very slowly for my sanity, too. You'd think this would be easier the second time around, but I weaned Pumpkin when I was about three months pregnant with Petunia, and I was probably helped by the changes in milk supply and composition that brought on. Certainly, my resolve to wean was helped along by the fact that nursing exacerbated the queasiness I felt almost constantly in the first trimester. Even so, I remember having to back off for awhile and then try again. When I did try again, weaning was very easy.

I have no real reason to wean Petunia right now, other than that I'm ready to do it. I've set myself an arbitrary goal of being done by the end of the year. We'll see how it goes. I started following the "don't offer, don't refuse" method about four months ago, and now I'm in the actively distracting/trying to substitute method- but I'll usually go ahead nurse her if she won't be distracted, except when I physically can't do it, such as when I'm trying to cook dinner. I've substituted a bowl of her favorite cereal (Oatmeal Squares) for the after day care nursing, and mostly that is working out OK, particularly if I start a DVD or TV show ("Doh!" in Peunia-speak) right as she finishes her cereal.

The first thing in the morning nursing looks likely to be the next one to go. I am intrigued by the fact that she's following the same pattern Pumpkin did as far as dropping nursing sessions. I'm hoping that means she'll drop the middle of the night one soon, too....

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Next- exercise. A couple of weeks back, I realized that even if I succeeded in convincing Petunia to let me go for a decent run on Thursday nights, it was soon going to be dark by the time we got home, and the thought of running in the dark just didn't appeal to me. So I needed another plan.

I've never been a big fan of exercise DVDs (or videos- this aversion goes way back, although I do remember doing Jane Fonda's workout with my Mom and liking it). But I was out of other ideas, so I went looking for a likely DVD on Amazon. Petunia likes to dance in her cute toddler way, so I searched for a dance workout. I settled on 10 Minute Solution: Fat Blasting Dance Mix. It came over the weekend, and I was planning to try it out tonight.

I stuck with that plan, even though I'm still not 100% over the cold and even though I got home late thanks to the extra traffic that the Chargers-Raiders game provided. I started with the simplest workout. It wasn't what I was expecting- I thought there would be actual songs and we would dance/exercise to those. Instead, there was just a techno/dance beat. Still, Petunia was intrigued- but then decided that she wanted me to hold her while I did the routines (we often dance with her in our arms). So that didn't go so well. Then she decided she wanted more cereal, and I decided I wanted a chance to get some exercise more than I wanted her to wait for her dinner, and let her have the cereal, which allowed me to do the second half of the 10 minute routine unencumbered. It wasn't bad.

When the first 10 minute routine finished, Petunia decided she wanted to watch another routine, even though I thought I would turn it off and get our dinner heated up (hooray for leftover night), so I put on the abs routine, and even tried a little bit of it while I shuffled dishes in and out of the microwave. Also not bad.

So the jury is out on this one. I like the 10 minute workout idea- I'm already scheming about how I could maybe squeeze one in on one of the nights when Hubby is giving the girls their bath- and the workouts I tried weren't bad. But it is still an exercise DVD.

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Next- big girl bed. Remember way back in August, when I said that I thought we should get Petunia a big girl bed? Well, we finally did it. The one we'd bought for Pumpkin was no longer available (both the store we bought it from and the manufacturer are now out of business), so we had to shop for a new one. This was a major undertaking- Hubby doesn't make furniture decisions lightly. Unfortunately, we couldn't find many beds like what we wanted: with a bookcase headboard and under-bed drawers, but not a tall captain's bed, since Petunia is not that big. We finally ended up ordering the bed and headboard on Amazon. (Why not? We buy everything else from them...)

They arrived last week, and we set the bed up over the weekend. When I say "we," I really mean Hubby. I took the crib down and eventually put the sheets and duvet on the bed, but he did all the hard work. Petunia LOVES her new bed, which is no surprise, since (1) she likes to get on everyone else's bed and (2) she likes anything that her big sister has. I had hoped that the bed would make bedtimes easier, and maybe it will. So far, though, it hasn't. My plan was to continue to rock her to sleep in her rocking chair, and then lay down with her and thereby do away with that annoying thing where she's asleep, but then wakes up when we put her down. She won't have anything to do with her rocking chair, anymore, though. She insists on climbing into her bed- by herself, thank you very much- and going to sleep that way. The first couple of nights were disasters. But then I thought to tell her that Pumpkin goes to sleep by getting her back patted. I asked Petunia if she wanted to try that, and she said yes- and amazingly, that is working. Our bedtimes are back down to 30 minutes, which is a big improvement.

The bed is definitely making it easier to get her back to sleep when she wakes up in the middle of the night (I just lay down next to her), but has yet to work the magic that Pumpkin's big girl bed worked, and do away with those night wakings altogether. Its still early days, though, so I continue to hold out hope.

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Finally, an update on something that IS going as well as I would like- Pumpkin's reading. My Mom came over when Petunia got sick last week and stayed for the weekend. She took Pumpkin to the library to pick out some new books to try reading. Our library didn't have most of the things that you all recommended, but they still found some good books. Pumpkin really likes reading Hop on Pop right now. I'll probably order some of your recommendations soon, either from Amazon (of course) or via interlibrary loan, but for right now she's happy with what she has. She definitely prefers to read one book over and over until she basically memorizes it, which is fine with me- it gives me more time to get my act together and get some more early readers on hand.

That's all the updates I have right now. Is there anything I missed that you're wondering about? Ask away in the comments.

Trouble with Transitions

We have a problem with transitions in this family. It isn't the kids- they actually handle them OK, although modifications to Pumpkin's bedtime routine are never easy. No, the real problem is with the grown ups.

For instance, it is probably time to move Petunia to a "big girl" bed. She asks almost nightly to be put down in our bed. Her bedtimes have become a bit of a nightmare. We'll rock her to sleep, only to have her wake up screaming as we try to lower her into her crib. When I cave and bring her to our bed to put her down, she falls asleep fairly easily as long as she's been rocked almost all the way to sleep first (which doesn't usually take all that long), and then I can roll away and leave her. I'm fairly certain that once she has a big girl bed, her bedtime routine will be easier. We'll still rock her until she's sleepy, but then we can snuggle her in bed for a bit and then roll away.

But Hubby isn't on board yet. He was similarly slow to get on board with getting Pumpkin a big girl bed- a move that ultimately coincided quite closely with her finally sleeping through the night in her own bed. To this day, she does not get up at night and roam the halls, which was what he worried about. If she wakes up, she sits up and yells for one of us (usually me). I suspect Petunia would do the same.

To be fair, I'm dragging my feet on this one a bit, too. I'd like to use the transition to the big girl bed as a trigger to stop bringing her into our bed when/if she wakes up at night. Instead, one of us would go snuggle her back to sleep in her bed. But... we're going on vacation in September. She will almost certainly be sharing our bed for most of that vacation- we're not rich enough to get hotel rooms big enough to avoid that. (Although I am intrigued by the idea of tossing both the girls into a bed and seeing if that helps or hurts in the sleep department....) So part of me thinks that we should wait and get the big girl bed when we get back from vacation. But another part of me isn't sure I can take another month or so of bedtime struggles, so I may yet argue to go ahead and get the bed now.

Regardless, that is hardly the only transition that we struggle with. I dragged out the end of pumping both times around. Every time one of the girls moves to the next room at day care, I get all wistful. They, for the most part, are happy to move up. I had another bout of this recently when the center's associate director told me that not only would Pumpkin be moving to the next (and last!!!!) room, but that Petunia will move up to her next room as soon as she turns 2. Pumpkin is thrilled with her move, which happened on Monday. I can't believe that my first little baby is a bona fide preschooler now. Nor, for that matter, can I believe that my second little baby is a bona fide toddler now.

I don't think I can do anything about my cliche "oh, they're getting so big, so fast!" feelings about the day care transitions. But I should probably fight down the mixed feelings on the big girl bed and just get the damn thing bought.

A Rambling Post about Sleep, Lessons, and Our Collective Need to Snap Out of It

I sometimes think that people parenting kids with lower than average sleep needs and people parenting kids with average (or, wonder of wonders, above average) sleep needs are occupying parallel universes. Our experiences are familiar to each other, but not quite the same.

For instance, I was talking to someone the other day who casually mentioned how she gets so much done in the evenings, after her kids are in bed at 7:30, since she can go to bed as late as 11 and still get a full night's sleep- the kids don't wake up until 7 a.m.

I just nodded and smiled, because what could I say? My toddler doesn't go to bed until 8:30, on a very good night (on a bad night it is after 9 before she is asleep). My preschooler's light goes out at about 9, and our bedtime routine is done at about 9:15... but sometimes, particularly during the week, when she naps at day care, it is close to 10 p.m. before I am sure she won't be calling me back in. At least she sleeps through the night- the toddler is usually up once. And they both wake up at about 6:30 or sometimes 7 in the morning.

(And before anyone lectures me about how much sleep they need, and how I'm depriving them of sleep... no, I'm not. They show absolutely no signs of sleep deprivation (which is more than I can say for the grown ups in the house), and they generally wake up on their own with no help from us. Actually, they generally wake us up.)

Anyway, to get anything close to a good night's sleep, I basically have to go to bed as soon as I'm done getting Pumpkin to sleep. Which doesn't really work, since there are also dishes to do, and every once and awhile I'd like to talk to my husband. (Blogging generally happens during the 15-30 minutes of "on call" time while I wait to see if Pumpkin's really down, or after everything's done, as way to unwind and "shut down" the day, usually with a beer, and usually only if Hubby has to do some work and is therefore not available for chit chat or The Daily Show.)

This means that we have started to find ways to grab some time to ourselves when the kids are still awake. For instance, tonight I did yoga while my husband put Petunia down for the night. I just had to do it with Pumpkin. She keeps up a running commentary for the entire DVD and doesn't really do the stretches, but she loves to do yoga with me. So I'm adding that into our weekly routine, because I really want to do more yoga.

I find it funny that I get a vestigial twinge of guilt about this, as if some part of me thinks that we should be doing a more enriching activity instead.

This is wrong on a couple of levels.

First, I find yoga to be an almost miraculous way to decrease stress and increase my sense of well-being. If my kids pick up a yoga habit from me, that is probably a good thing, as good as picking up a love for reading or an interest in science.

Second, when did we as a culture decide that our kids need so much of our attention and focus? Yeah, yeah- newborns do. But a 4 year old? It is probably good for her to start seeing her parents as separate people, with their own agendas. To start coming to the slow, and hopefully gentle, realization that no, she is not in fact the absolute center of the universe.

I alluded to the fact that I think modern kids get a lot more focus from their parents than kids did in the past in my weekend reading post about how mothers have always worked, and the comments on that post included some really interesting thoughts on that subject. I have some half-formed thoughts on this, which, if I had more time, I'd love to research and turn into a carefully crafted blog post. But that's not going to happen anytime soon, so instead, I'll just type them out in all of their half-formed glory, and y'all can tell me where I've gone off the tracks.


I look around me, and even the sanest of the other day care parents have filled their kids' schedules with at least as much stuff as we have. We're all discussing kindergartens as if we actually had a bad choice in front of us (for the most part, we don't- we almost all live in areas with schools that are at least decent, and frankly, some of the most worried parents I've talked to live in areas with downright awesome schools). When we go to someone's house on a play date, the toys on offer always include a fair number of educational/enriching options- and they would think the same about our toys. I know at least two parents who don't let their kids watch any TV at all, and we all limit screen time.

All of these things are fine, and even good. But I can't help but think that we've gone a bit off our collective rockers. It is like we all see our kids as having been born with almost infinite potential, and think that it is our job to try to keep as much of that from "leaking away"  due to suboptimal activities as possible. Watching Yo Gabba Gabba instead of an educational DVD- or better, doing a science experiment in the backyard? There went some of that precious potential, gone forever.

Since I've clearly bought into this to a certain degree (hence the Chinese lessons, and our own ever-evolving rules about what constitutes acceptable screen time), I can't judge the other parents. And I don't want to.

But I do wish we could all give ourselves a big Moonstruck slap and snap out of it.

The way I see it (in my saner moments), the human brain is this amazing plastic thing. It is adapted to learn from experience, but also to give us second and third and even hundredth chances, and to learn the most from repetition, not from casual encounters. For centuries, humans have passed on the skills their offspring needed just by making those kids a part of their daily lives. My kids are going to live in a technologically rich world- so of course I should let them learn about technology the way human children have always learned: by using it. It makes no sense to try to pick and choose what things they need to know- how would I possibly be able to predict that? I can take my best guess, and that is what school and any enriching classes will cover. But I won't get it all right. And even if they learn some frivolous things, so what? If all Pumpkin learns from Yo Gabba Gabba is what "break it down" means, is that such a bad thing? Some day, that knowledge might smooth a social interaction and spare her a awkward moment of feeling like a clueless geek.

I'm not arguing at all that we should stop giving our kids lessons in various things, or just sit them down in front of the TV all day. But I am arguing that we should take this parenting thing a little less seriously. There are no guarantees, no matter how we do it. We rolled the genetic dice when we conceived our kids, and all we can do is try to give them a fair shot at living up to the potential set by the genes they received.  It is not our job to shelter that potential and make sure that it is never harmed, because that is just not possible. It is our job to introduce them to our world, and try to give them the skills they need to go out and enjoy it. While also maybe giving them an obstacle or two to overcome, because we all have to have the story we tell at cocktail parties, about how we overcame such and such and went on to achieve so and so. We wouldn't want to deprive them of their chance to look noble and heroic by making things too easy for them.

And now my beer is gone, and it is past time for bed. I can already hear Petunia shuffling around in her crib. If I want some time in bed without a toddler bedmate, I should hurry. So I'll just ask you- what do you think? Should modern parents loosen up? Or is our current state of affairs a perfectly reasonable response to a society in which most families only have a few kids who mostly live into adulthood, and therefore we should invest more in our kids than our forefathers and mothers did?

The Little Things

Petunia's bedtimes have gotten... unpredictable. She's usually pretty easy to get down. We read stories, turn lights out, rock for 10-15 minutes, and put her in her crib. But occasionally, it all goes haywire and she's a bear to get down. This no doubt coincides with some developmental leap- the glory of the second child is that these random sleep freak outs don't freak me out, so I haven't researched it obsessively and don't really know whether we're at a particular milestone or not. All I know is that suddenly, we're rocking her for 30 minutes, and then she's arching her back, whining and shaking her head no (all with her eyes closed, of course), when we stand up from the rocking chair and head towards her crib.  So we've started just taking her into our room and lying down with her.

Normally, we're partial night cosleepers. Petunia goes down in her crib and then joins us in our bed when she wakes up. The first time around the sleeping casino, I would have fought this change to being a full night cosleeper. This time, I've just shrugged and let it happen. And noted that sometimes, when she's in our bed from the start, she doesn't wake up in the night at all. Bonus!

So we're rolling with things on the sleep front. Until last night, when she changed things up again. She didn't want to go to sleep, full stop. If I took her into our bed, she thrashed and kicked and played and giggled. We tried watching some TV with her (that worked the last time she went through an "I don't want to go to sleep phase"). No dice. Finally, two hours after her usual bedtime, I put her in her crib, wide awake, and walked out of the room. She cried a very little, then started talking to herself, and then fell asleep. Hubby, who thinks we should try this more often, gave me a look of triumph.

But then tonight, she fell asleep in my arms after 10 minutes of rocking. So who knows? I think we just need to look at every night's bedtime as a new adventure.

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Aside from the bedtime fun, Petunia is pretty darn cute right now. She's talking more and more, although she is not always easy to understand. The signs she knows help- otherwise there is no way I would have deciphered her pronunciation of "cereal". But there is still no guarantee that we will understand what she wants. Frankly, I think she knows more signs than we do. So when we do figure it out, and get her what she wants, she gets a big grin, bounces a little, and says "yeah, yeah!" That almost makes up for the screaming when we don't figure it out.

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She's also started giving out kisses. She leans in, and smacks her lips together right next to your cheek. A sweet toddler kiss cures many woes, let me tell you.

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Speaking of sweet kisses, Pumpkin has been handing them out, too. She'll throw a massive tantrum about something that is trivial to us but very important to her- like whether or not she has to share her baby doll stroll with Petunia (the answer is yes, if she is going to leave it in the living room)- and then a short time later come give me a hug and a kiss and tell me she loves me. I suspect this is fairly normal four year old behavior, but the hug and kiss never fail to make me forgive her for the tantrum.

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Pumpkin is a snacker, much like me. She eats small meals, and needs her snacks (she gets a morning, afternoon, and before bed snack). Petunia is not so dependent on the snacks. She eats far better at meal time, and snack time is hit or miss with her.

We still always offer snack, though, and she'll often accept a few bites, especially if I'll hold her on my lap while she eats. Tonight, she ate a cracker and a few yogurt melts, and then arranged the rest into canapes that could only appeal to a toddler:

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When Pumpkin was roughly Petunia's age, my sister gave her a Seek & Slide in the Desert book. The premise is simple- there is a small amount of text, and then pictures of animals found in various deserts, hidden behind a sliding piece of cardboard with the name of the animal on it.

Pumpkin loved that book, and now Petunia does, too. Like all books they love, it has grown a bit stale for the parents.

Luckily, our copy has a doozy of a typo on the Australian Outback page:

It feels like something from a Monty Python sketch. I chuckle to myself every time I see it. It is the little things that keep you sane as a parent.

(By the way, the animal that is actually hidden behind the "Goldfish" text is a kookaburra. That just makes it funnier to me.)

Missing the Time to Do

I have a pretty good life. If I try to tell you differently, don't believe me.

Sunday, we took the girls to our favorite beach on Mission Bay. It is over on the side of the bay nearest to the ocean so the water is fresh, if a little cold. Sometimes there are gentle waves- big ripples, really- but it is mostly a calm and protected beach. Pumpkin can splash in the ankle deep water while I play with Petunia in the wet sand.

We had a great time at the beach. Petunia wasn't too interested in the water this time, but she had fun running between me and my sister, giving us hugs. Hubby got a wonderful movie of that. There is one frame in particular that I like. Pumpkin is digging happily in the sand near us, and Petunia is coming towards me. I have a big smile on my face and my arms open wide, ready to accept her hug. My sister is off to the side, smiling. Really, we look like an advertisement for San Diego.

And Sunday's weather was perfect. In one of the brief moments during which I was sitting on our beach blanket without a child demanding my full attention, I had a flashback to our time on the beach in Thailand. I think it was a combination of the warm air, sun, gentle breeze, and sounds of the water. But then Pumpkin wanted me to come see the "cake" she was making out of wet sand (chocolate) and dry sand (vanilla), and the flashback was over.

So, yes, I have a great life.

But there is one thing that is driving me nuts right now: the imbalance between the time I have to think and the time I have to do. By nature, I'm a doer. I make lists, I get things done. Right now, though, I am stalled out on my to do lists (at least at home- at work I'm making excellent progress). The reason? I can't put together solid chunks of time to get things done.

After my last post, someone I know if real life asked me how I find the time to think about such complex issues. I told her that I have lots of time to think these days- I have the 10-15 minutes that I spend rocking Petunia before she goes to sleep every other night (Hubby and I take turns). I have the duration of the four songs that I listen to with Pumpkin every night before she goes to sleep. I have my afternoon commute- Pumpkin wants to listen to her music and inching along in traffic doesn't take too many brain cells. I have the time I spend doing dishes when it is my night to do them- that's something else that doesn't take too many brain cells.

So I have time to think about complex issues, and dream big dreams about my career aspirations. I have time to write umpteen blog posts in my head and mentally review the items on my "at home" to do list. But I am struggling right now to grab a solid 30 minutes to make any progress on that list, or write those blog posts, or take any steps towards making my career dreams a reality.

The problem is two-fold: work and kids. I have a big deadline coming up at work in a couple of weeks, so I am spending a lot of the time during which I am "typing in the guest room for a lot of minutes" (per Pumpkin's parting instructions to me at bedtime) on work. This has been exacerbated by the fact that Petunia has had a lot of doctor's appointments recently, as we continue to work to figure out what is causing her recurring fevers and persistent congestion. Hubby and I trade off on those, but the time away from work has only added to the time working after the kids' bedtime.

And then there are the kids. Petunia is in an extremely mommy-centric phase right now. It is at its worst in the middle of the night, which unfortunately, we're seeing a lot more of due to her persistent congestion. Hubby is happy to take his turn holding her, but she objects. Strongly. And loudly enough to wake up her big sister. I don't see the point in having four tired and grumpy people the next day, so I've been sucking it up and doing most of the middle of the night work. This means that most nights, I want to go to bed as soon as I can, not work on my to do list.

Even during the day, Petunia wants me if I'm in her sight. I've been sneaking off to the back room to do some work or just get some space- but she's figured this out, and now comes toddling down the hall to stand outside the closed office door, crying. This interferes a bit with my concentration, so mostly I've just given in and spend my time playing ring around the rosie or building block towers, instead.

I know from past experience that this clingy phase will end, and I'll get a little more space. I am hopeful that we'll figure out what's going on with Petunia's health soon, and maybe then her sleep will improve- she is actually a pretty good sleeper when she's healthy. I'm still new on my job, and I know that it will settle down, or I will find a way to prioritize things so that I don't have to work nights and weekends.

So I know that I'll get time to do things again soon. And then I'll complain about how I never get anytime to think.

Weekend Reading: The Tired Working Mom Edition

You're getting your weekend reading post a day early this week because I have it ready, and because I have a strong suspicion that Petunia is getting sick again, so blogging will probably not be in the cards tomorrow night. 

This week, Liz at Mom-101had two excellent posts on working moms. Her first was about how lonely and hard it can be to be both a mom and the main breadwinner in your family. I'm not in that exact situation- I make more than Hubby, but his salary could have supported us if we'd made some different choices (particularly about housing). But still, her post resonated with me, because now that we have made the choices we made, my salary is not optional, and this meant that I had to make some decisions in my most recent job search that were not necessarily what I would have chosen if I had a little more flexibility. (Wow, that was a long-winded way to say not much. But my current thoughts on my career are complicated, and warrant a post of their own. Which is on the to do list.)

Anyway, the second post was on the things that she doesn't do- because no one really does it all. Read the comments, too, on that one, to see how much those of us who get asked all the time "how do you do it all?" really aren't doing. As I said in my comment there, and have said here before- parenthood is a big filter on your life that will show you what is really important to you, because those are the things you'll keep doing. Also, I loved the point one of the comments made, that there is a difference between having it all and doing it all.  I don't think you can do it all, but on good days, I feel like I do have it all- or at least all of "it" that I really want.

Ginger over at Ramble, Ramble had an interesting post on this topic, too. It is nice to see an honest, respectful conversation about the truths of being a working mom going on- so far, none of these posts has been overrun with "mommy war" type comments.

I also came across two sciencey sleep articles, which caught my attention because sleep has been in short supply around here lately.  First, badmomgoodmom sent me a link to a summary of a twin study on sleep. The general idea in a twin study is to look at a set of traits or behaviors and compare the differences seen in fraternal twins with the differences seen in identical twins. If the differences are bigger in fraternal twins, then the data support a hypothesis that the traits or behaviors have a genetic component. Through a bunch of statistics, the researchers can even estimate the portion of the trait or behavior that is under genetic control. According to the summary, this study found that genes play no role in whether or not the families are co-sleeping, and only a partial role in other sleep behaviors.  I have a problem with the conclusions as described in this short summary, because I think that a twin study is not actually going to be a good way to tease apart genetic and environmental influences on co-sleeping. I suspect that if one twin has some sort of genetic sleep issue that leads the parents to decide to co-sleep, they will probably co-sleep with both twins, and not just the twin with the issue. So the data would not show a genetic difference even if one existed. Unfortunately, I can't access the original article without paying for it, and I wasn't curious enough to pay to see if the authors attempted to address this issue- because I also don't think co-sleeping is a "problem" that needs solving.

The other sleep article is from Gwen Dewar, of Parenting Science. She has an interesting post up about the "sleeping through the night" milestone, arguing that it is a cultural construct and not a biological imperative.  I've posted at length about the sleep issues in our house and how I eventually learned to think of them as my sleep issues, not my kids' sleep issues- neither of my children has ever shown any indication of being sleep deprived. Just me and Hubby do! So I found her perspective interesting.

I have one other random article to recommend: the article about how Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, thinks that we're in a higher education bubble. I don't agree with all of his conclusions (he would say that is because I'm in the elite who is threatened by those conclusions), but it is an interesting read.

And finally, this video was so funny that I laughed until I cried. (Fair warning, though- you probably don't want to watch it at work, and you certainly don't want to watch it with any kids around.)



(As usual, credit to Hubby for finding the funny stuff online.)

I Know Why the Tired Mom Sings

I've been doing a lot of singing lately, which may not be a great thing for the people who have to live in the same house as I do, because I am not noted for the lyric quality of my singing voice. But a couple of weeks ago, I discovered something. Or, more accurately, I remembered something: singing cheers me up.

This (re)discovery was prompted by my decision to pull out Won't Give In, by the Finn Brothers (which is my favorite song about marriage) to pull myself out of the funk caused by my extended argument with Hubby about chores. As I was listening and singing along, I realized that I was suddenly in a very good mood.



And then I started to apply this to the rest of my life. I've been feeling a bit run down lately. At first, this really worried me. I've just started a new job that on paper is a perfect fit for me. If I'm not happy now, then maybe I really do need a major life reorg.  And maybe I do, or at least some significant life tweaks. But last night, I got a pretty good night's sleep- a total of 7 hours, 5 of which were uninterrupted- and I felt really good this morning.

I'd forgotten about the insidious effects of long term sleep deprivation, and how they pervade the rest of your life. Petunia's sleep is unsettled and unpredictable. At least one night per week, she wakes up in the middle of the night and just will not go back down for a couple of hours. Even on the nights she is not throwing a middle of the night party, there is a more than 50-50 chance that she'll be up enough to ensure that my sleep is fragmented, at best. Some of this is the long run of illnesses, some of this is her age, and some of it is bad luck. Heck, some of it may even be the payoff from earlier sleep decisions we've made. Who knows. All that matters is that I'm tired, the sort of tired that falls like a big fog bank over the rest of your life.

I can usually shake the fog off at work, but by the end of the day, I feel like my synapses are firing, but not connecting. And that leaves me feeling a bit down, and prone to taking things a bit too seriously. I don't see Petunia starting to sleep through the night anytime soon, and since we don't play the lottery it is unlikely that I will suddenly find myself at leisure and able to take long naps during the day. So I've been cranking up the tunes, and singing along.

Now, if only I hadn't decided to install my iPod in Petunia's room to play the ocean sounds that provide the white noise while she sleeps....

Maybe Not Overwhelmed, But Definitely Fully Whelmed

My husband and I spent a full month in Thailand in early 2006, as part of our big "Circle Pacific" trip. This was really only a little over a year after the earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. We stayed a couple of nights on Ko Phi Phi, which had been hard hit by the tsunami. There was construction everywhere, as the locals worked to rebuild their tourism infrastructure and therefore their economy. It was a moving testament to the human will to pick up and move on and the warmth of the welcome we received on that island (and really, everywhere we went in Thailand) is one of my favorite memories from that trip.

One of the "must do" things when on Ko Phi Phi is to take a boat trip to see some of the surrounding small islands. You go on a small longtail boat, driven by a guide. The water is warm and clear, and the snorkeling, even after the destruction to the coral from the tsunami, was amazing. (This zenbit picture was taken on that boat trip.) Our guide was as friendly and welcoming as the stereotype for Thais in the the tourist industry promises, but his eyes were profoundly sad. We guessed he had lost someone in the tsunami, but felt too awkward to ask him about it. One of the other tourists on our boat apparently did not feel the same way, and asked the question. Our guide said that he had lost his wife and young son.

I've been thinking about that man lately, as I've been following the news from Japan. To be honest, I haven't been following the news that closely. My memory of the sadness in that man's eyes tells me that I cannot really comprehend the anguish of the people in the affected areas right now. I'm not sure that I see the value in trying. As I said in a comment on Liz's excellent Mom-101 post about her reaction to this tragedy, I don't think we should feel like we have to take all of the tragic news in. It doesn't help anyone for me to do that, not the people in Japan, not my family, and certainly not me. I've taken to just checking in with the site the nuclear engineering students at MIT put up (because I swear that most of the mainstream media is more interested in scaring me than telling me what is actually going on) and scanning the headlines on BBC or CNN once a day. Even that can send me into a tailspin at times.

But mostly, I am just continuing on with my daily life, caught up in the petty troubles that I'm honestly very lucky to have: I'm in my third week on my new job, and have entered the phase where I have enough projects to keep me really busy, but I don't feel like I have a handle on them yet. They are amorphous and complicated, and resisting my attempts to add structure and to comprehend them. I don't feel like my to do list is correct yet, so every day when I leave, I wonder if I will walk in the next day to discover that I've forgotten to do something important.

I know that this phase will pass, and soon I will be happily busy but feeling mostly on top of things. But I hate the unsettled, slightly panicky feeling that I have during this phase. Having to go through this phase at the start of each new job is perhaps the worst thing (for me) about the employment volatility inherent in my chosen field.

Meanwhile, at home, we're struggling to get back into our "two working parents" groove. Dinner is often late, and "ignore toddler tugging on your pants and crying to be picked up while signing that she wants to nurse (even though you just nursed her 5 minutes ago)" is apparently a step in every recipe I make. I can't get my morning routine worked out, and am therefore always rushing out the door, and arriving at work a little later than I want. We're trying to get our chores schedule updated and in place again, but can't seem to get that finished off- which would be funny in an ironic sort of way if it weren't causing us to snipe at each other about stupid little chores and who is doing what.

Pumpkin is throwing at least one tantrum a day, and although I know that this is developmentally normal- or at least not hugely abnormal- and I see that she is managing to avoid melting down over many things throughout the day, the slammed doors and screaming always make me feel like I've some how failed in how I handled whatever situation set her off. Petunia is in a weird place with sleep where she's sleeping for longer stretches, but seems to need to spend at least an hour awake in the middle of the night. I'm debating whether I prefer that hour to be at 2 a.m. (like Monday night) or 4:30 a.m. (like this morning), and can't decide. Luckily, my opinion doesn't matter on this one. She has also been hard to get down for the night. She wants to be held and rocked, but she twists and squirms and head butts until I'd swear that I'm trying to rock a wild animal to sleep.

But, despite the tantrums and the sleep issues, the kids are my sanity saver right now. If I make the mistake of reading a tragic news story at work, I click over to the site where we keep our family photos and smile. At the end of the day, both girls greet me with big smiles and open arms, and my worries about any forgotten work are themselves forgotten. Just tonight, I watched Petunia stand on her tiptoes, trying to reach the books on her bookshelf. I went over and held her up so she could choose a book. Then I put her down, and sat down cross-legged on the floor in her room. She walked over, book held out at arm's length in front of her, carefully turned around so that her back was to me, and then backed into my lap so that I could read her the book. I kissed the wispy hair on the top of her head and was thankful for all that I have- troubles and all.

I've Had Better Days

I took Petunia to her immunology appointment today. The immunologist/allergist was very nice, and good at explaining things (he even adjusted well when I told him I was trained as a biochemist- some doctors either can't switch off their super simple explanations or switch to "expert in the same field" level explanations. He switched to "reasonably knowledgeable lay person" level, which was perfect for me).

From her history, he didn't strongly suspect an immune deficiency (phew!) but did want to run some tests. He ordered an x-ray of her sinuses and some blood tests. She's had far more x-rays than I'd really like at this point, with the checks on her hip for dysplasia (due to her breech birth; she showed some signs of this but it corrected without intervention), the chest x-ray during the first health scare, and now the sinus x-ray. Rationally, I know that this is really low risk, i.e., not something I need to worry about. But it still seems like a lot of x-rays for a such a little kid! Petunia wasn't too impressed with the lead apron they put on her for the x-ray, so I ended up having to hold her down for it. Still, it was worth it- the doctor called my cell phone while I was waiting for the blood draw and told me that the X-ray showed mild to moderate thickening of the mucosal lining on one of her sinuses. This could be a sign of a chronic sinus infection, so we'll probably be off to see an ear, nose, and throat specialist before too long.

Petunia didn't like the x-ray, but she hated the blood draw. The doctor had recommended that I take her to the lab at the office that houses my pediatrician, because those technicians see more babies than the ones at the lab at the office where he is located. But I didn't think I'd have time to make it there before they closed, and I didn't want to have to take her in tomorrow. So I decided to try at the office I was at. Wrong decision. They tried. Petunia screamed, and kicked, and shook her head no. And they failed to get any blood. They called the lab at the other office, and it was open until 5:30, so I did have time to go there. I calmed Petunia down (big, shuddering sobs. Ugh.) and drove to the other office, where she screamed, kicked, and shook her head no again, but they were able to quickly pull the blood they needed. I felt like such a jerk for not listening to the doctor in the first place. Poor Petunia! She calmed down fairly quickly, though, and was all smiles by the time we got home.

We won't hear back on the blood tests for a week or so, so now we just wait. Petunia's been healthy for a week and a half, although she is still congested. Her sleep is getting better again, causing me to hope that we might get back to the one wake-up per night schedule we had back in November.

The extra stop meant that I wasn't even leaving the doctor's office until 5:30, which is when I would normally need to start dinner. I knew that the meal I had on the menu plan was not going to work. I called Hubby, hoping to tell him to put some water on for pasta when he got home, and discovered that he was still at day care, where Pumpkin was taking a lengthy potty break. So we decided that he'd stop at the local fast food place on his way home. Pumpkin was excited about the idea- she views a meal from that place as a huge treat- but I felt even worse, because today was Hubby's birthday. Instead of the nice meal I had planned, he got a greasy fast food hamburger. I should have put a candle on it, because I didn't have a cake, either- I had hoped to have time to stop at the store after the doctor's appointment.

Then, Pumpkin melted down at snack time because I wouldn't let her watch videos on my computer during snack (it disrupts Petunia's snack, and she hadn't eaten much dinner). Pumpkin tantrumed in her room for a good 15 minutes before she finally calmed down and ate her snack. Then Petunia melted down when Hubby tried to get her down for the night, and I had to go take over. Miraculously, Pumpkin accepted that change (it was my night to read her stories, but Hubby had to do it instead). However, it is now 45 minutes past her bedtime and I'm not sure she's asleep yet- I was recently called in to turn her pillow over. And Petunia woke up 20 minutes ago and needed to be resettled.

So yeah, not the best day. I think I'll crawl into bed now and hope that the night isn't a continuation of this disaster!

Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish List

Bonus geek points if you catch the reference in the title. (I'll explain it in a comment right before I put up my next post.)

I have a bunch of things rattling around in my head, preventing me from settling down and focusing on today's to do list. So I'm going to write them down here. One of the things rattling around is an idea for a "real" post- maybe I'll get to that later today, maybe tomorrow.

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Thank you all for the kind comments on my post about Saturday. Sunday was indeed much better. Petunia slept better Saturday night- although Hubby held her for some of that time. He fell asleep holding her, though, so who knows if she actually needed to be held the whole time? I don't care. I got some sleep, and that was all that I cared about at that point.

Petunia was in a wonderful mood all day Sunday, until the very end. She got whiny, and squirmed out of our arms when we tried to comfort her, and just generally seemed uncomfortable. Sure enough, after her bath, she disappeared into her room for some privacy. I'd go in from time to time and ask "are you ready for me to change your diaper?" and she'd shake her head and say "noooo". The funniest part was that she was looking at her books while she worked on her diaper. I guess that tendency starts young?

She eventually finished up, let me change her diaper, and was MUCH easier to get down for the night than she had been the previous two nights. She also slept really well. So, now we have a solid theory for what messes with her sleep. But there isn't a darn thing we can do about it, other than delay bedtime if we suspect she needs a little more time to, um, work things out.

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I've heard that the interview last week went well, and that an offer is probably forthcoming. But no offer has yet showed up, so I wait. And try to decide how much time I should invest in applying for a couple of other jobs I've seen that would do, but aren't great fits for me, and how much time I should invest in clearing things off our household to do list. 

I'll probably spend time updating the personal website that I would use if I were to start to seriously pursue contracting gigs- if this job falls through, I think short term contracts may be my next best option.

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We took the girls down to a park at Mission Bay in the afternoon. Pumpkin ran around and had a lot of fun. Petunia practiced carrying sand on her shovel, and then finally figured out how to climb up onto the play structure on her own. They were both so happy. It was one of those moments where you remember why you're glad you had kids.

On the way home, I looked at Hubby and said that I thought it was time to get down the little percussion set we'd bought ages ago and hidden. He agreed, so we did. Pumpkin was ecstatic. Petunia liked the maracas. The three of us marched around the house making noise like a demented hare krishna group while Hubby made dinner.

And life was good. Until Pumpkin decided that she wanted a turn with the maracas.

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Hubby and Pumpkin are both loving the CD Santa brought the family this year: Snack Time, by the Barenaked Ladies. Pumpkin sings along in the back seat, and we all enjoy the respite from the Chinese CDs she had fixated on previously.

My favorite song on the CD is "Pollywog in a Bog", because of the little rap section, which makes excellent use of the refrain "jump, jump!" and just cracks me up.

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Petunia slept well last night, but I did not. First of all, I was sure she'd wake up between 10 and 10:30, so I stayed up reading waiting for her. She did not wake up until 11:30. I had turned the light off at about 10:40, and was just falling asleep when she woke up. (Yes, Pumpkin's slow to turn off brain is probably a genetic gift from me. Hubby usually falls asleep as his head hits the pillow. It takes me 30-60 minutes.) She nursed and went right back to sleep. Great! But she still has a cough from her last cold, and every few minutes or so, she'd cough. Meanwhile, Hubby (who has finally caught the cold) was snoring. I would have gone to the sofa to sleep in peace, but that generally wakes Petunia up. I finally propped Petunia's head up on my arm, which made her stop coughing, and slept the first part of the night snuggling her.

So, I'm tired today, and debating the relative merits of taking a nap after lunch and trying to cross lots of things off of my to do list so that I feel productive. A short nap would be the perfect compromise, but I'll bet that if I fall asleep, I'll sleep for two hours, and wake up feeling disoriented and groggy.

What I really want is a decent night's sleep. Naps are great, but no substitute for actual sleep.

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Pumpkin is having trouble with "B" at day care again. Things had improved after I spoke with the center's assistant director last time, and we thought everything was fine. But at drop off one day last week, Hubby witnessed B bullying Pumpkin, so he went and talked to the assistant director again, and then sent me a cryptic email about the event. Luckily, I called him and got the full story, because later that day, the director called me to discuss the problem. They're taking it seriously and I'm happy with the center's response. I don't know whether or not B's parents are responding well- the center's director implied not, but Hubby and B's dad had a little chat at the birthday party on Saturday, and all seemed fine to Hubby. I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt- I think dealing with B's behavior without squashing her natural leadership tendencies would be difficult. Her parents are trying to walk a fine line.

It is already so hard to monitor what's going on out on the playground. I imagine it is only going to get harder as the kids get older. Luckily, Pumpkin is playing more with some of the other kids. I'll be setting up a playdate with one of the other little girls ("K", for those following along at home)- I spoke with her mom about it at the party, and she's up for it, too. I also bought a book on bullying for my Kindle. I picked The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander, by Barbara Coloroso, because it promised to talk about preschoolers. I also looked at Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman, but it seems to be aimed more at tweens. I'll probably need that, too- but not yet.

The entire situation just makes me sad. So far, Pumpkin still seems like her usual happy self. But I know that it bothers her that B is mean to her, so I want to try to figure out how to help her respond.

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In news that is probably unrelated, but feels linked to me... Pumpkin is entering a "meltdown at the slightest provocation" phase. We've been through these before, and they drive Hubby bonkers. I can sympathize a bit more. After all, I have been known to meltdown into tears at inappropriate times, too. Still, I think we need to work with her on responding to disappointment in a less dramatic way. That should be fun. But her future colleagues will thank us for it.

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Despite all my worries about Pumpkin, I think she's turning into a delightful little girl. K's mom told me that she was so happy when her daughter and Pumpkin started playing together more, because she thinks Pumpkin is just the sweetest little girl. Now, I know that she wouldn't exactly tell me if she thought Pumpkin was a brat, but she didn't have to say such nice things. So I'm taking her words at face value and feeling happy about them.

I also love watching Pumpkin play with Petunia. Petunia doesn't quite get the "playing together" thing yet, which frustrates Pumpkin. But she has learned how to take a step back, look at what Petunia wants to do, and help her with that. Just yesterday, Petunia was trying to get up on a chair to play with Pumpkin's computer. Pumpkin saw this, and went over and helped scoot her chair up to the little desk with the computer. Then she turned on her computer for Petunia, and selected a game that Petunia could play.

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I'll end with a picture. Here is Petunia, practicing for her future in the rodeo and/or circus:

Down. But Not Defeated.

Today whupped me, simple as that.

The trouble really started in the middle of the night last night. Petunia, whose sleep has been screwed up because of a string of colds, had been sleeping better this week. Thursday night, she slept from 10:30 through until 4:30 without waking up. Sure, that was in our bed, but I didn't care. That was 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep for me!

But last night, our luck turned. Petunia woke up at about 11, and I brought her into bed and nursed her like usual. She went down again, but was restless. She woke up at 1, and all hell broke loose. She screamed. She tossed and turned. We tried rocking her. We tried watching TV with her. She was clearly exhausted. So were we. But she just couldn't settle in and go back to sleep. Finally, I sent Hubby out to sleep on the sofa so that one parent would be semi-coherent in the morning, and I settled in for a rough night. At about 3:30, I got her to stop screaming and snuggle to sleep- but only if I held her against my chest while I sat upright. If I laid down, the screaming started again. And of course, I had to keep trying that because when you're that tired your rational brain shuts off and you can easily convince yourself that this time will be different. At about 5:30, she nursed again and let me lie down with her. She slept fitfully until almost 7, as long as I kept her head on my arm.

I blamed the lingering congestion from her cold and the snot that always comes when she teethes. (She's getting at least one canine in right now.) Hubby pointed out that the congestion was not new, and suspected that she needed to poop. Annoyingly, it turns out he was probably right. She woke up cranky and stayed cranky until she filled (and I do mean filled) her diaper. Then she was happy as can be.

Which was good, because we had a birthday party to go to! We all piled into the car for a morning party at an indoor jumpy place. The girls both had a lot of fun, until it was time to go and Pumpkin wanted to hold the bucket of party favors she'd received in her right hand, but Hubby wanted to hold that hand while they crossed the parking lot. He either didn't understand her or didn't think it should matter, and got mad at her for refusing to hold his hand while we crossed the parking lot. I had my hands full with Petunia, who was insisting on walking across the parking lot, too, so I could only watch from several paces behind them as Pumpkin melted down and Hubby got stubborn and we were fated to listen to a screaming preschooler for the entire ride home.

Hubby can be wonderful with Pumpkin, and talk her around when she stubbornly wants something insane. But he can also get mad at Pumpkin's irrational behavior sometimes, and dig his heels in and just start saying "no" to everything she wants. And given the poor sleep we'd had, I guess it is no surprise that he did the latter today. Somehow, despite her proximity to her sister's fire alarm like wailing, Petunia fell asleep in the car on the way home. I carried her in to her room to put her down in her crib to finish her nap. That took about 10 minutes. By the time I came out, Pumpkin was wailing again because Hubby wouldn't give her the favor bucket (he said her behavior was too bad) and was saying she couldn't watch Cinderella because she needed to eat lunch- she had refused to eat the pizza served at the party, so we were making her a quesadilla.

By this time, I was sick of listening to Pumpkin wail. I'd had a grand total of 3.5 hours of sleep the previous night- from 11-1 and from 5:30 - 7, and that last 1.5 hours were pretty poor sleep since I had to hold Petunia for all of it. I was pretty sure that if I had to listen to Pumpkin's continuing meltdown for another five minutes my brain would leak out of my ears. So I decided that we could have a picnic on the floor and watch Cinderella while we ate lunch. Hubby glared at me, but then Petunia woke up from her nap and he took the opportunity to go try to nap with her. And most importantly, Pumpkin actually ate her quesadilla and some snapea crisps, and her mood improved greatly. She is like me- if she gets hungry, she gets cranky and irrational. Hubby knows this, but for some reason, while he can recognize the symptoms in me and calmly suggest that I eat a cracker or two, he has a hard time differentiating between hunger-induced craziness and your run of the mill preschooler craziness, and doesn't usually realize why things with Pumpkin are spiraling out of control.

Unfortunately, Petunia would not go back down, so I brought her out to watch Cinderella (really: walk up and down the hall with her sister's baby stroller while we watched Cinderella) and let Hubby nap. The deal was that when it was time for Pumpkin's nap, I'd nap with her and he'd wake up and take Petunia. So we each got a nap, and the day improved... for awhile.

Hubby is supposed to cook dinner on the weekends, since I cook all week. But he doesn't plan ahead very well, preferring to just wing it on the day (this drives me bonkers, but marriage is about compromises, right?) He never got a chance to figure out a dinner plan, so I ended up making the applesauce-oatmeal pancakes that Pumpkin likes for dinner.

Or I should say, the applesauce-oatmeal pancakes that Pumpkin liked, because she took one bite of her pancake and declared that she doesn't like them anymore, and never will again. At which point, I realized that the day had whupped me.

I am now waiting for Pumpkin to stop calling me back in to her room to flip her pillow over (she apparently prefers a cold pillow) or to give her ideas of nice things she can dream about to chase away the bad dreams. And then I am going to bed, where I will chant my mantra about how I take a long term view on eating habits and how all babies sleep eventually.

And tomorrow, I'll get up and try again. Because in parenting, you always get to pick yourself up off the mat and go in for another round.

In Which Petunia Has a Good Laugh at Me

Since I had the temerity to post about how Petunia's sleep has been getting better, she decided to throw me a curveball last night. OK, rationally I know that she has no idea what I posted on my blog. But boy, was last night weird.

I went to bed at about 10:30 and was just falling asleep when I heard someone crying. I'm always pretty disoriented if I get woken up just as I'm falling asleep, so for some reason, I thought it was Pumpkin and went barreling into her room asking "what's wrong?" Amazingly, she didn't wake up. But the crying didn't stop, either. So I went down the hall and found Hubby sitting in the rocking chair in Petunia's room, trying to calm her down. She was having none of that- she only calmed down when I took her. It was only 11 p.m., but I knew that she was too worked up to settle down and go back to sleep without nursing, so I took her into our room and nursed her. I figured that she'd go to sleep, wake up again in three hours, and we'd have a so-so, but normal, night.

I was wrong. She rolled away from me, which usually means that she's falling into deep sleep. But instead of going to sleep, she lifted up her feet and kicked them onto the bed. Over and over and over. She tossed and turned. Every once and a while, she found her thumb or rolled toward me and settled down for a bit, but it didn't last, and soon she'd be back to kicking her legs. She wasn't crying, but I certainly wasn't going to sleep with her doing her workout next to me. So I'd try to snuggle her. She'd calm down for a few minutes, then roll away, and the whole thing would start over.

Honestly, it was sort of cute and would have been funny, except I really, really wanted to go back to sleep. I suspect this is related to the fact that she's recently started walking more. I've read about how babies will process new skills in their sleep, and how developmental leaps (cognitive or physical) can disrupt sleep. We saw it a bit with Pumpkin, but her baseline sleep was so bad that we never really knew if she was going through a developmental leap, teething, getting sick, or just not sleeping.

Anyway, after an hour of trying to get little miss restless to settle down and go to sleep, I got up and took her into her room, and rocked with her for about twenty minutes, after which she finally went to sleep. And slept through until about 6:30, giving me a solid five hours of sleep.

I wonder what will happen tonight?

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UPDATE: Petunia got sent home from day care with a slight fever at about 4 p.m. So she officially has the cold that I caught from Pumpkin. It was really short and mild for Pumpkin- here's hoping for the same for me and Petunia. Was the start of the cold the cause of last night's shenanigans? I doubt it, but who knows. I still don't know what to expect tonight. But it seems like Pumpkin is done calling for me, so I think I'll go to bed and just see what the night brings!

Can You Be Zen about Not Being Zen?

I think babies can tell when you are about to crack and do something that they won't like. Anyway, that is the only way I can explain the fact that every time I start to get tired enough to consider doing some sleep training with Petunia, she shapes up on her own. She had been waking up for the first time in the night as early as 9:30, which most nights is just ten minutes or so after I'm sure that Pumpkin is finally asleep, and not going to call me back in to flip her pillow over or something. The lack of time in the evening was driving me nuts. I told Hubby that I was going to start a new regime, in which I would go in to her, but not nurse her or bring her into bed with me before 11. And that night, she slept until 11:30.

I also told Hubby that I was going to start trying to delay the second nursing in the night, to see if we could get back to her old routine of waking once, nursing, and then sleeping solidly until morning. So that night, she nursed twice in quick succession, and then slept until morning. (That, unfortunately, only lasted one night, but she is stretching the time between the first and second nursing out, and I suspect that if I'm just patient, we'll be back down to one nursing soon.)

I'm struck by how I'm responding so differently to Petunia's sleep patterns than I did to Pumpkin's. I was always trying to improve Pumpkin's sleep. I always had an idea to try out, or a new plan to implement. I believed the sleep advice that told me that if I let her co-sleep we'd "never" get her out of our bed, and I was sure that I must be doing something wrong, because her sleep was so bad. People kept telling us to let her cry, but I didn't think it would work with her- the one time I let her cry at bedtime (because she woke up while I was in the bathroom, and Hubby was out that night), she worked herself up to the point that she threw up, leaving me with a wide awake baby who was now freaked out about throwing up, and a bunch of laundry. So we didn't try to let her "cry it out", but I harbored guilt about that decision. We did successfully partially nightwean her, getting her down from five wakings to one or two. She always resisted dropping that last night feeding, and we didn't get rid of it until she was about 21 months old or so, when we started partial night co-sleeping with her. It was an unorthodox but very successful method of nightweaning.

Things are very different this time around. Every once and a while, I think I should come up with a plan to help Petunia learn to sleep through the night. I might even start implementing it... but then her sleep gets a little bit better, and I get less tired, and I just drop it. I started bringing her into bed with us after her first wake up during the sleep disruption that accompanies the advent of separation anxiety at about 9 months, and she's been sleeping part of the night in our bed ever since. I actually think a cry it out sleep training method would work on her, but I don't want to use one, so we haven't. I feel no guilt at all about that, and I'm pretty happy with the co-sleeping arrangement, as long as she waits until midnight or so to wake up and join us.

Part of the reason for this difference in approach is the difference in the baby's starting point- Petunia's sleep has always been much better than Pumpkin's, since her first week home from the hospital. The situation we're at now with Petunia (waking once or twice in the night to nurse) took us a lot of hard work to reach with Pumpkin- although I wonder if we might have gotten there without the hard work if we'd just started partial night co-sleeping at ~9 months with her, too. I'll never know, and it doesn't matter.

Another factor is that a truly helpful book on sleep came out right around the time Petunia was born- Bedtiming, by Isabel Granic and Marc Lewis. The authors are developmental psychologists, and they explain the course of a baby's cognitive development, and highlight points in that development that might be particularly good (or bad) for working on sleep. Understanding why your sleep has suddenly gone to hell makes it much easier to deal with- or at least it does for me. I also use the book to guide me in picking times to try interventions. In fact, I used the advice in this book to help me decide when to finally extricate myself from Pumpkin's going to sleep routine.

But I think the biggest reason that I'm so much more laid back about sleep these days is the difference in my starting point. We followed our guts and did a bunch of things that the sleep experts label as "wrong" with Pumpkin, and things turned out OK. She moved out of our bed well before graduating from high school. She goes to sleep on her own, after an involved but manageable routine. She sleeps through the night (most nights) in her own bed now. I know that Petunia will get there, too, so I don't worry about doing the things that the sleep experts say will "ruin" her. We rock her to sleep- and most nights, I like that. I think Hubby does, too. It is nice to hold a snuggly baby! We co-sleep, and again, most nights I like it. When it works well, and I get woken up after a decent amount of sleep by a smiling baby who is patting my face and babbling, I think I'm the luckiest woman in the world. I know that she'll start sleeping through the night eventually, and she will move out of our bed eventually, and then eventually I'll miss having my snuggly baby.

I was congratulating myself on reaching this level of parenting Zen this weekend. This, of course, was a sign to the universe to remind me that I'm not as Zen as I think I am, and that I don't have this parenting stuff all figured out. I was talking to my friend after our girls finished their Chinese lesson, and she asked me if we were planning to start Pumpkin in any sports or other activities. I shrugged and said I didn't know. I hate to fill up our weekend schedule, and she's still so young. My friend agreed, but offered a cautionary tale about her older child (who is about eight). He is trying out ice hockey and is really discouraged by the fact that all of the other boys on his team have been playing since they were three and are therefore much, much better than he is. She has decided that it is best to expose her younger kids to a bunch of different sports and activities when they are preschoolers, to see what they get interested in. That way, they won't be intimidated out of doing something they really like just because the other kids have a five year head start on them.

Um, wow. I remember feeling the intimidation her son is experiencing... when I was in college. A lot of the other students at the college I went to had gone to expensive prep schools. I had gone to a so-so public school. They were way ahead of me in the introductory courses. I almost quit, but didn't, and in the end I pulled off an A- grade point average in a really tough major. I have always credited my success to the fact that I had to put my head down and really learn how to study in the first year of college. By the time we hit the more advanced courses that no one's high school had prepared them for, I knew how to study and a lot of my peers did not. Which is all well and good, but I'm not sure that applies to an eight year old who is realizing that all of her peers have been taking dance or playing softball since they were three.

Of course, my first instinct was to panic, and think about putting Pumpkin in some more activities. But then I remembered my original reason for not doing that- that it would cut into our family time on the weekends. So clearly, Hubby and I need to talk about this and figure out what our actual parenting approach should be. Whatever we do, I'm pretty sure some expert will think it is "wrong". So I guess I need to find my parenting Zen on this, too.