Almost certainly overshare

When I was getting dressed this morning, K pointed to my nipples, which as is very common in pregnancy have darkened considerably, and told me they were poopy. Ah, the sophisticated humor of the preschooler.

Of all of the myriad indignities of pregnancy, I have to admit that this is one I've never read in any of the books and websites.

I'm still trying to decide if this is better or worse than last year when she would poke a finger into my nipple and say "Beep!"

Contrary (and quite possibly physically impossible)

B to K: "Your pants are on backwards, kiddo."

K: "No! They're on sideways!"

She'll be wanting to borrow the car next

A couple times in the past few days, K has gone upstairs and come back down with a sandwich she had made - two slices of cheese and pepperoni neatly sandwiched between two slices of bread, which she then put on a plate and sat down to eat. When I went upstairs later, I discovered she had put all the ingredients neatly back in the refrigerator. Then she announced she had to go potty and went and took care of business.

Goodness child, are you planning on perusing the apartment listings while you're feeling so independent?

Still here

I never mean to go so long between posting. I usually just get caught up in the mundanity and busyness of existence. In this case, I've been dealing with some last Ebay orders, going through training for the new job and fretting about same training, which seems to take up more time than the training itself. This fretting isn't necessarily justified; my actually starting this job does depend on my performing well enough on the final assignment, but my performance on my homework so far indicates that I shouldn't have a problem with that. I just tend to panic a little when I suddenly experience being judged on my performance if it hasn't happened for a while.

So I'm attempting to chill, while still putting the necessary amount of work in. And I think I'm just feeling a bit quiet at the moment. I don't have a great history with the month of July, between my mother's car accident and my father's death. I'm not lying on the couch mired in the deepest depths of despondency, but it contributes to my feeling the need to retreat, my main defense mechanism in times of stress. I'm just curled up in my little mousehole, Shy Sheldon stuck in my shell, waiting for this month to be over.

In completely unrelated news, I lightly bopped K over the head with some plastic flowers tonight. She looked indignant and said, while rubbing her head, "Stop hitting my head." Only in her three-year-old pronunciation, it came out "Stop hittin' mah haid."

My child speaks lolcat. I'm not sure what to think about this.

Why I'm wearing my husband's deodorant

(Disclaimer: not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach)

It's not because I didn't like mine (although I wasn't too sure about it - it was a scentless natural kinda thing from Trader Joe's and I wasn't convinced it was doing a great job).

It's not because I've decided to throw off the shackles of conventional societal mores on scent and hygiene and let my stink flag fly.

It does have quite a bit to do with the ticklish operation we had to perform tonight. You see, K has a new habit: taking off her diaper after we put her to bed. I wouldn't mind so much if this new compulsion were accompanied by an interest in potty training, but no such luck. Just a sudden desire for exhibitionism.

So tonight, we went into her room and found her asleep, without pants or a diaper. In her laundry basket. Incredibly cute, but not exactly an ideal sleeping situation. The ticklish operation was getting her into her bed and a diaper on her without waking her up, since the risk in waking her up is that she often can't go back to sleep for two hours. So we had to move her veeerrrrry carefully, but ultimately successfully, as she's now peacefully sawing logs in her bed, safely rediapered.

But back to the deodorant. A few days ago, I went upstairs and discovered K, holding out her poop-covered hands saying "Ewwww." I completely agree with you, kid.

She had woken up early from her nap, pooped and then taken her diaper off. This actually has happened more than once in the past (giving rise to a phrase you never want to have to say, "Where did you put the poop?"), but she's usually pretty neat about leaving everything in the diaper and putting it in a fairly logical place. This time, however, I found the offending diaper in my bedroom. And next to it, smeared with poop, was my deodorant.

I could understand why there was poop on the outside - she had poop on her hands, ergo, there was poop where she picked it up. But there was also some poop on the actual deodorant part as well. Did she try to rub deodorant on her butt?

So I threw that sucker right out, after putting the kid in the tub. I haven't had time to go to the store since to replace it, which is why I'm smelling rather manly these days (because I'm using men's deodorant, that is, not that I'm building up a sweatymanly odor by the end of the day).

*****

We've been downloading Dr Who, so I saw tonight's episode a couple weeks ago. But I had to watch it again (actually, we've been rewatching all of them when they show on American tv, because we're just that geeky) because it was such a delightful episode. And what a joy to see Felicity Kendal, who starred in one of my favorite Britcoms of all time, Good Neighbors, the hilarious series about a couple who decide to quit the rat race and take up farming in their yard in suburbia.

We're the uninvited loud precision band

I got K a book the other night which has a two-piece jigsaw puzzle on each page. She's been ready for puzzles more complicated than one piece for a while, but it seems like most puzzles seem to leap from one piece directly up to eight, and I don't think she's quite ready for that (although she's doing incredibly well with shape matching these days, so she might be up to it). So this book seemed like a nice intermediate step.

It's a big hit. She'll go through and pull out all the pieces, and then pick up a piece, open the book and say, "Does it go here? Noooooo. Here? YES!"

And then you hear the thud of her parents dying of cute.

*****

I talked to my mother the other night and learned two things:

1. My cousin is getting married in Colorado this July, so she suggested that my brother and I go out with her. It's blowing my mind a bit, that the cousin who was a tiny baby at our family reunion in 1984 is getting married. Isn't she still a baby?

I'm looking forward to seeing that side of the family. I haven't seen most of them since, lordy, 2001. I'll get to see my favorite great aunt, Aunt Doris, who is just about the nicest great-aunt ever. She's 90 and still going strong. I'm looking forward to introducing K to her.

Part of why we're all going out is so we can spread Dad's ashes. He spent part of his growing up years in Colorado and he's always loved the mountains there. My uncle will be able to join us as well if we do it there. He said that he should be able to find us a back road to some out of the way place where we can scatter the ashes without running afoul of the law. The thought of going someplace like Estes Park is nice, but we don't want some friendly ranger wandering up to find out what we're doing.

"Oh, just spreading human remains, sir!"
"Yes, this is my husband. We're throwing him off a cliff."

2. My mother is contemplating buying a condo. It makes sense. One person doesn't really need a five bedroom house, especially since she can't get into half of it. She wouldn't have to worry about hiring people to plow in the winter and take care of the yard in the summer.

I can't say it's not a wrench to think about losing my childhood home, though. And the thought of shoveling out that basement - ai-yi-yi. Pardon me while I curl up in the fetal position here for a while. Thank goodness my brother and I have been progressively working over the years to chip away at Stuff Mountain when we're home for the holidays.

I'd like to pout about this, but it turns out I'm too mature to demand that my mother stay in a house that's too big for her just for my sake. Adulthood is inconvenient sometimes.

*****

I have to say this very quietly, in case K hears me and decides to never sleep again in a fit of toddler contrariness: bedtime hasn't been too bad for the past several days. Friday, K fell asleep early, woke up around ten and stayed awake for a while, but was clearly sleepy and content to stay in bed until she drifted back off on her own. Last night, she played quietly in her room after I put her down and was asleep by 9:30, then proceeded to sleep until nearly 9 this morning. Tonight, well, she was still awake when I went upstairs 20 minutes ago. But she's quiet and in her room. I really can't ask for anything more.

Do I dare hope that the nighttime chaos is coming to an end? Or have I just cursed us to seven more years of bad sleep?

Zest for life

I was folding laundry the other day, and K, clearly aching to be helpful, decided to sit down on top of the clothes in the laundry basket. Since I knew from experience that her next move would probably be to try and fold clothes I had already folded and then arrange them in her own special arcane taxonomy, I asked her to look for socks in the basket and put them in a pile for me.

I'm a little surprised at how big a success that was. It's not just that she did it, and kept at it for quite a while. But she got incredibly excited every time she found a sock - "A sock, a SOCK!"

I think if I found laundry that exciting, I would have to be medicated. But life would definitely be more fun.

The escape artist

Dear Daylight Savings Time,

I hate you. Please go away. Nothing personal.


Daylight Saving Time came at a very poor time for us while we're still trying to deal with K's sleep problems. Because of course, when you have a toddler that's already staying up far too late, what you really want is to shove time back an hour so her body thinks it's an hour earlier than it actually is, giving her the stamina to stay up another hour, right?

The sleep avoidance is also harder to deal with in our new house. At the old house, one of us was usually in the room next to hers while she was going to sleep, which usually kept her in her room. Now, we're in the basement, which has led to a toddler running around upstairs at will and getting into any manner of trouble. We've finally resorted to a gates across her doorway. Actually, this is our third gate. The first was a classic tension-mounted gate which she was able to push down (she could have just opened it on her own if she were a little stronger). The second was a gate-type, which she figured out how to open within fifteen minutes. Mind you, we used both of these gates in the old house with no problems. The problem with children is that they keep getting smarter.

So now we have a hardware mounted swing-gate, with four boxes of books in front of it to prevent her from crawling underneath (if we had mounted it lower, she would have been able to climb over it). Does four boxes seem like overkill? Not after Monday night.

We had heard some thumps, but didn't go up investigate right away. When we did, we discovered:

1. She had pushed the top box, filled with magazines, over, spilling magazines all over the place, and then pushed the bottom box out of the way.
2. She had pulled half of the contents out of her dresser. Not unusual, but it added to the atmosphere.
3. She then went to the refrigerator and got two bags of shredded cheese, apparently wanting a snack.
4. Which is why her carpet, the rocking chair, her bed and the top of her low bookcase were all coated in cheese.

It's not like we've never gone up to her room to discover a mess before - the time she got ahold of her diaper cream comes to mind as a particularly memorable moment (as a point of interest, it is very hard to get cream meant to be waterproof out of carpet. And a room with Burt's Bees diaper cream smeared all over it is very pungent). But I think this goes down as the worst.

It shouldn't surprise that the child who was able to get out of a sleepsack put on backwards with a safety pin through the zipper has a talent for getting around gates (thankfully, she doesn't strip any more - she just changes her clothes if she feels like it). I don't care if she plays in her room until she's ready to go to sleep. But when she runs around upstairs to keep herself awake and then rampages through the refrigerator like a teenager, some sort of containment strategy is needed. It's been two nights since we added the extra layer of boxes and she hasn't gotten out yet. I hope this is the box that can finally trap Houdini.

The essence of a two-year-old

A conversation with K tonight:

Me: K, can you say snow?

K: Nooooooo

Me: K, can you say kitty?

K: Noooooo

Me:, K, can you say antidisestablishmentarianism?

K: Nooooooo

Me: K, can you say no?

K: *silence, with a grin and a sly look*

Clearly, she's getting too smart for me.

The inexorable passage of time

Periodwatch 2008: no signs yet, four weeks past iud-removal. I thought I had some hopeful symptoms this weekend, but they turned out to be from *ahem* adjacent areas. I had been hoping that my body would interpret the iud being removed as the beginning of a cycle, but apparently it's taking its time working the extra hormones out.

It feels a bit counterintuitive after years of infertility to actually want my period, but nothing is going to happen until my cycle comes back, hopefully before I turn 80.

***

It's occurred to me that if we want to send K to preschool next fall, we need to start thinking about it now. Eep. I'm not ready to think about sending my two-year-old to school, but given how much she loves daycare*, I think she's more than ready. Philadelphia has a free preschool available through the public schools, and while I've heard bad things about the public schools, the preschool has gotten some good reviews. Since I'm not worried about how well they prepare K for college, I think it's worth checking out (and it's hard to argue with free). My main concern is that it might be too academic - preschool should be about socialization and working on developmental skills, not getting a head start on reading. Their website is remarkably unspecific regarding curriculum, so I will have to make sure to ask for more materials on it when we call for information.

Or I could stick my fingers in my ears and refuse to think about my baby getting old enough to go to school. That could work too.

This boring post brought to you by my sieve-like memory that promptly expels every single fascinating topic I think of during the day the moment my fingers touch the keyboard.


*She does a little dance when I tell her it's a daycare day and cheerfully closes the door behind me when I leave. I don't want her to be horribly upset when I leave, but does she have to be so happy about it?

Crime and punishment

So no doubt because I took the time to complain about it, for the past two nights K has gone to bed cheerfully with no protests. B has been working late, so I've put K to bed and left her with the lamp on. She's played quietly until B got home and went in to say good night (I don't care if she doesn't go to sleep right away after we put her to bed as long as she stays in her room and is quiet), at which point she voluntarily turned out the light and settled down to sleep. After two nights in a row, I think we can officially mark the Passing of the Phase.

And as I predicted, she has a new way to drive me crazy - bothering the cats and pulling their tails. So far, our approach to discipline has been either removal and redirection or using natural consequences (e.g., if she deliberately makes a mess, she has to clean it up). But for the life of me, I can't think of the natural consequence of pulling the cats' tails, and then deliberately doing it again when I tell her to stop. Well, I can think of a natural consequence, but I don't find it acceptable (letting her attack the cats until they bite or scratch her).

Hurting the cats is an offense that requires swift action and immediate negative consequences, but I'm having trouble coming up with what that should be. I don't want to spank her, although I'm starting to really understand people who do. There's nothing like yelling at a toddler and having her laugh at you to make you want to do something to wipe the smile off of her face and get her to take you seriously. A timeout was certainly punishing for everyone involved, but since it was basically a two-minuts wrestling match to get her to stay put, I didn't really care for it. I'm not sure what other effective, non-violent punishments there are for two-year-olds.

So for those of you with two-year-olds (or former two-year-olds), what's your approach to discipline? What do you do when it's too late for prevention and the offense doesn't have a natural consequence?

You'll know me by the gigantic bald spots

No matter how much I'm normally able to serenely endure the vicissitudes of my toddler's mercurial behavior, patiently chanting the mantra "Like a kidney stone, this too shall pass," every once in a while a phase comes along that totally kicks my ass.

We're in another bad sleep pattern. K will periodically go through phases where she wakes up in the middle of the night and is awake for two hours. I've more or less gotten used to it, and at least this time she usually just hangs out in her room and plays, which much better than crying for two hours or keeping me jumping in and out of bed for two hours starting at 3am. The insomnia isn't really the problem. It's the trauma at bedtime that seems to have come with it. She doesn't want us to leave the room after we're done with the bedtime routine, or I should say she doesn't want me to leave the room since she's also in a "all Mama, all the time" phase. If I stay to cuddle her, she wiggles and flops and doesn't fall asleep, but if I harden my heart and leave her, she cries pathetically and I can't stand to listen to it. When she was a baby, she needed to cry to release enough tension to fall asleep, so I didn't have a problem leaving her to cry. It was a very distinctive, pathetic tired wail that meant "I want to be asleep! Why aren't I asleep? I need sleep!" But this isn't that cry now, and it's more complicated now that she's older. I'm less willing to let her cry now that she's older, when it's more likely there are emotional issues behind it, not just being overstimulated. All I have are questions:

Is she experiencing separation anxiety from the move? Maybe, although she was fine the first two weeks after moved.
Is she afraid of the dark? We've tried leaving a lamp on and it occasionally helps, but not always and after a couple nights when she turned the lamp off, it really makes me doubt that theory.
Is she just manipulating me? Possibly, but I have no idea how to tell.
Is she trying to drive me crazy? Almost certainly.
Is she ramping up for another developmental leap which is completely screwing up her sleep and making her emotionally discombobulated? It seems likely, and there's nothing much I can do about that except hunker down and wait it out. And maybe take up recreational drugs.

That last one is the key, of course (the waiting, not the drugs). She was fine being left to fall asleep on her own two weeks ago, so I'm sure if I wait another week or so, she'll be going to bed just fine and finding some other way to drive me crazy. She's two, after all. It's her job to keep me from getting complacent. I just hate going through the emotional wringer every night when I'm just about to finally get some free time. My patience is very thin by 8pm.

We'll get through this. I'm just not sure how much hair I'll have left by the time it happens.

Om...This too shall pass...Om...This too shall pass...

The textbook definition of "mixed blessing"

The other day, K took off a wet diaper and put it in the toilet. There's a certain logic there, but I don't like to think what a large cloth diaper would do to our plumbing.

However, she wasn't able to flush the toilet because the handle has been broken for the past two weeks and the only way to flush is to lift the lid off and yank the chain, which K isn't nearly storng enough to do.

Do you think I should send our landlord a thank you note for his negligence?

Two

(and a half)

I've been terribly negligent in keeping up with the K updates. The combination of a chaotic summer, depression and grief, too much work and the fact that her development just isn't as dramatic from month to month any more have all conspired to keep me from writing all of her incredible changes down.

I know for many people two is a challenging age. And we certainly have our share of tantrums, defiance and a very definite, yet capricious idea of how the world should be ordered. But I have to say (and don't hate me for this, fellow parents of two-year-olds), two is an absolutely fabulous age for us. Because we had all of those negative behaviors before she turned two, but we also had screaming and bucking when we tried to get her in her carseat, a desperate need for instant gratification and a hair-trigger whine. All that is a lot better these days, and two is a walk in the park compared to 21 and 22 months.

Mental development:

I think the improvement in disposition can be traced to a few leaps forward in brain development:

1. She has a much better understanding of sequences, and therefore understands that, for instance, to go to the library we first have to put her shoes and coat on and then get in the car, so she will do all of those things willingly. And she recognizes that I have to go through certain steps to make her lunch, so as long as she sees me doing those things, she doesn't need to wail until she gets the food she wants. I can't begin to say how much more pleasant this makes life.

2. She can talk better and get across a lot of what she needs verbally. I was worried about her speech for a while - it seemed odd that a child that had a vocabulary that big didn't seem to talk much. As it turns out, she was talking, just not intelligibly. But she's more understandable and I'm listening more closely, so we're communicating much better now.

It feels like K is losing so much of the randomness of early toddlerhood. She goes about her play with so much purpose. She plays with her trains and cars, builds towers with her blocks, uses her doctor kit to listen to our hearts and look in our ears, makes pretend cookies out of play-doh, makes her dinosaurs roar and takes meticulous care of her baby doll. What she does these days is a lot more recognizable tasks of imaginative play and a lot less random playing with physics (shaking and banging things, taking things in and out of other things, ripping things up, etc).

She recognizes some letters, can count objects at least up to ten, recognizes shapes and colors and knows her body parts. She can unhesitatingly match shapes.

I am doing my best to provide her with a wide variety of potential interests that ignore stereotypical gender lines, and so far it seems to be working. She loves her blocks and trains, her toy toolkit, dinosaurs (why, oh why do girls' clothes not have dinosaurs on them?) and running her cars down ramps. But she also loves to help me cook and do housework, try on new clothes and is absolutely, passionately baby-obsessed. Lately, her baby doll is her favorite toy and we can't go anywhere without it and its bottles just in case it gets hungry. She dresses it and tenderly straps it into its stroller.

That seems like a nice balance of interests to me. Right now, she has no idea that there are certain things she should and shouldn't like because of her sex, and I'm hoping to keep it that way for a while.

Physical development:

I'm in awe of how far her gross motor skills have come from last spring when I first started taking her to the playground to now. She started the summer crawling up stairs, teetering across the bridges and was more likely to try to step out into thin air than to successfully sit down at the top of a slide to slide down. Now, she walks up and down stairs holding onto the rail, runs confidently, has mastered slides and is obsessed with ladders, which she has mostly figured out.

Her fine motor skills are just fantastic. Recently, she picked up a jar of tiny beads and I found her successfully threading them onto a cord. She uses silverware well and has figured out a way to use chopsticks in a very clumsy, yet somewhat successful fashion. She can put on a shirt, pants and socks (she's been successfully stripping naked for nearly two years now).

K is currently 35.5 inches and 29 pounds. Her arms and legs are getting longer and she's almost lost her toddler potbelly. I can't believe how much she's grown up in the past few months. I can see her babyhood slipping away, almost gone, with this child emerging in her place. Sniff.

Because I'm sure you're as enthralled with my child's bladder as I am

K has been flirting with the toilet for the past several weeks. She's never shown much interest with sitting on her potty, but I got one with a lift-out lid that could be used as a toilet seat insert while the base could be inverted to use as a stool, and she just loves sitting on the toilet. And I love the idea of not having to clean out a potty on a regular basis, so hey - kismet!

But with life's general chaos, we hadn't been pushing it much - we sit her on the toilet if she asked and occasionally asked her if she wanted to sit on it (usually no if it wasn't her idea). The other week, we woke up and heard her in the bathroom, and discovered that she had put the toilet seat on by herself, stripped naked and sat on the toilet all on her own. The only success we've had before today was when she was dancing around the bathroom naked and started to pee, and I quickly grabbed her and put her on the toilet to finish.

It's clear she gets what the toilet is for. She'll sit on the toilet and sing about pee*, and when B had discovered her on the toilet, she said "Poop!" There wasn't any mind you, but she knew where it went. She always wants her own toilet paper when I'm using the toilet and either wipes herself (outside her clothes), or tries to help me wipe myself (I typically decline her kind offer). Then she throws it in the toilet and waves bye-bye to the pee as it gets flushed.

Today, however, she had her first success. I suppose with the amount of toilet sitting she's been doing, it was mathematically likely that she was going to pee while sitting on it at some point. Everyone was very proud of her anyway, and she had the bonus of a grandmother here to admire her great accomplishments the way only a grandmother can.

I'm still not going to push much though. We're moving in the next month and taking a plane ride at Christmas, and all of that is going to be easier if we don't have to worry about getting a small child to the toilet on time. Also, the new house will have a toilet on each floor which will be much easier than our current house where I would have to hustle her upstairs every time she needed the toilet.

But still, our first potty success! Another milestone for the baby book.

*The lyrics usually go "Pee, pee, pee, pee, pee..." Stephen Sondheim she's not.

2000 words

New pictures up here.



And a new movie. K started dancing a lot more recently and I finally got it on film. Sadly, it's really dark due to the bad lighting in our living room, but you can still tell what's going on:

Moments of unbearable cuteness

K is trying to learn how to jump. She crouches down, then raises her arms and leaps upwards, saying "Jump!" Only her feet never leave the ground. But she keeps trying. The other day at the playground, she saw some girls playing jumprope and nearly died of the excitement of trying to jump along while she watched them.

We were having dinner with a friend last week, eating outside on the sidewalk at a restaurant. K started climbing up on a step and then jumping off in triumph. "Jump! Jump! Jump!"

I think I'll be disappointed when she can actually get off the ground.

****

Every night, we read K three or four books before bed, depending on how long she can manage to lengthen the bedtime process. Lately, when we put her in her crib, she has been demanding a book go in with her. Since it hasn't prevented her from falling asleep yet and the alternatives is a full-bore toddler tantrum, we give it to her. Satisfied, she lies back, gathers her baby doll in the crook of her arm, and proceeds to read the book to her baby.

****

Tonight, K insisted that I lie down on the couch, insistently pushing me back and then patting the end of the couch where I was supposed to put my feet up. Once I was settled, she put a blanket over me, tucked a pacifier at my side in case I should want it, and then proceeded to apply a screwdriver to my hip to give my joints a tuneup. Every time I lifted my head, she would sternly push it back down, ordering "Head down!"

I know toddler behavior involves a lot of modelling of what they see. But for the life of me, I can't think of when we modelled the behavior of putting her to bed and then poking her repeatedly with a screwdriver.