Dylan Thomas

At 18 months, James is still a devoted breastfeeder, and has been generally polite enough about it that I haven't had a problem continuing. But then last night he spent literally all night nursing. Not just that he nursed a lot, but that he wouldn't sleep without being latched on the entire time. Suddenly nightweaning, which I've been contemplating for a while now, seems a lot more attractive. I'm pretty sure that he was sick last night, possibly a sore throat or he's been grabbing ears today. But I'm pretty sure that at 18 months, he can make it through the night without a couple snacks and as lovely as it is to cuddle a nice warm baby, I'm willing to endure missing him if it means he'll sleep all night.

The only question is as to when. There's no point right now, since he's in the middle of the 18 month developmental spurt and he's going to sleep like crap no matter what we do. But by the he's over that, it's going to be close to the holidays and travelling, which may well screw up anything we accomplish. There's also the small detail of finding at least a couple days where we can afford to go without sleep. The main reason we haven't attempted nightweaning before now is because James sleeps just well enough that continuing to be a bit tired seems more attractive than a few days of utter exhaustion. And while he will accept cuddling from to go back to sleep for a while, at some point in the evening he decides it's nursing or nothing, and if we try to delay that too long, even if I do breastfeed him, he'll have woken up enough that he's going to be awake for the next two hours. This is... unattractive at 1 AM. I've tried putting him back in his crib on a few of these occasions and he would eventually go back to sleep after much crying, only to wake up after half an hour. At which point I would just pull him into bed because it was usually 4 AM at that point and his never-say-die attitude was just stronger than mine.

Which is all to say that I am quite confident night weaning is going to be a painful, sleepless process and I have no idea how we're going to find a couple days when we can afford not to have any sleep.

Pod people

Although we're a lot closer than we would have been before we moved, it's still about a 20 minute drive to Katherine's school. Add in dropping Alec off at preschool two days a week and taking B to work and I've been doing a lot of driving lately.

Since listening to the news lately makes me want to swerve into oncoming traffic, it's to all of our benefit that I bought an mp3 player for the car this summer. I've been enjoying being able to carry a large percentage of music collection around in one tiny package again, something we haven't been able to do since we bought the Vibe 8 years ago, with its one disc regular cd player made in Outer Mongolia. In the fourteenth century. Anyway, I've been reacquainting myself with a lot of music I haven't listened to in a while, which is nice, and also discovering some new music. But I'm also missing the NPR news shows I used to listen to, before all they talked about was news that makes me want to drive the car directly into the ocean. The solution? NPR podcasts. My favorites are:

Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, which is probably the only palatable way to hear the news these days. It's a very funny panel quiz show about the week's news. It's also been around for 15 years, so I have a hard time imagining anyone who listens to NPR on the weekend at all hasn't heard of it, so I won't waste more time describing it beyond that.

Ask Me Another is a much newer NPR quiz program which is brainteasers and trivia, plus Jonathan Coulton providing music. I read an article about it recently that said it was part of a new breed of NPR program where they were developing experimental programs on the cheap, and it certainly doesn't sound like they're spending much money on it. The grand prize for the winner at the end (there are a bunch of quizzes between two contestants, then the winner of each quiz goes to the final round for a spelling bee-style playoff) wins a custom Rubik's Cube, plus whatever prize furnished by the g-list celebrity of the week, which has included things like "the things we found in his bag."

Anyway, if you like brainteasers like, "Add the chemical symbol for copper to the chemical symbol for boron to get a bear's child," plus Jonathan Coulton, this is the program for you.

Pop Culture Happy Hour is four NPR writers sitting around talking about pop culture. They're all geeks in the best possible sense of the term - people who enthusiastically analyze things with thoughtfulness, humor and passion. Listening to them brings back the best memories of sitting with friends at our table in the college dining hall. And I've added all sorts of new tv, music and books to my list of things to check out when I have the time because of them.

The Alton Browncast isn't as much of a favorite, but I do enjoy it more often than not. I had some hesitation about this podcast, because while I love Alton Brown's tv shows, he strikes me as the sort of person (usually male) who is very... firm of opinion in a way that I find very irritating after a while (here's a sign: if they end some declaration with "Just my opinion," which is usually an attempt to inject faux-humility into an arrogant, narrow minded rant). And while the format of his tv shows haven't lent themselves to general opinionating, an hour-long podcast leaves a lot of room for bloviating.

Fortunately, the format of his podcasts haven't lent themselves to that either. He answers questions through both phone and e-mail and a large portion is given over to an interview. As it turns out, he's an excellent interviewer. There have been some unfortunate moments, like the first podcast where he was interviewing the maker of a particular Southern delicacy and decided to eat a bag of them throughout the interview, SMACKING AND CRUNCHING INTO THE MICROPHONE THE ENTIRE TIME. By the end, I wasn't sure if I wanted to punch him in the nose or just claw my ears off. There's also been the rant about how the solution to industrial egg production is for everyone to have their own backyard chickens, and the occasional somewhat misogynist comment (so the reason you like the movie 2001 is because you've never met a woman who likes it? Do you and Calvin watch it together in the G.R.O.S.S. clubhouse?). But he does give good advice, is usually spot on when talking about food and has done some very interesting interviews, so I'm still listening.

Long week

* It has been a long, long week. Alec didn't have preschool on Tuesday and Katherine didn't have school on Wednesday, which shouldn't have been so horribly taxing but somehow made life feel very crowded. I've gotten spoiled by having a kid in full-time school awfully quickly.

* Today was the first day in a week James and I had alone together, and we celebrated with a lovely nap together. At some point soon, we really need to work on getting James to sleep independently, but in the meantime, it's lovely to sleep cuddling a nice warm toddler who is finally taking a nap of decent length because he's being cuddled.

* This weekend, though is something I'm looking forward to so much I can practically taste it. Sunday is the first day off together B and I have had in nearly two months aside from Columbus Day (I never dreamed that I might find myself looking forward to Columbus Day...). But then Monday is Veteran's Day and another day off. Two days off together in a row! I don't think we've had that since our vacation last June.

* I've been doing a Bible study on Romans at church for the past few weeks. I've been hesitant before to sign up for these classes because with the sheer number of college and graduate level Bible classes I've taken, I worried that I would either be too bored or be an obnoxious know-it-all. The class last spring, for instance, was on I Corinthians, on which I did my senior thesis. But I've been pleasantly surprised at how well the class manages to be intellectual enough that I'm not bored, but focused enough on spiritual aspects that we're really talking about different things than we did in academic Bible classes, no doubt helped by the vagaries of my memory from it being nearly a decade since I took a Bible class. Mostly, it gets me out of the house, talking to other adults and engaging my brain. All the rest is pretty much gravy.

PSA

* For the Sondheim-inclined among you, you might be interested to know the recent production of Company starring Neil Patrick Harris and Stephen Colbert is showing on Great Performances this weekend.

* My children spent the afternoon bringing fallen leaves into the yard from the yards of neighbors more tree-rich than us so they could make a leaf pile to jump in. I always feel a little weird when they run through other yards, but 1) the neighbors could hardly object to having fewer leaves to rake and 2) our entire block of houses has small backyards completely open to one another and all of their children run over them freely. If they objected to that, they would have built fences by now.

In any case, my children built a nicely large pile in an impressive display of industriousness that I'm sure I could never harness for my own nefarious purposes. Then they took turns sliding down the slide into it in a display of idyllic childhood. Then we found the dead rabbit, which put a bit of a pall over the entire afternoon as we had to put the frolicking on hold to await dead body removal. But they did fall asleep remarkably easily from the exercise tonight.

Showmanship

Poor James. He didn't nap nearly enough today, then was kept up an hour past his bedtime because we had to pick B up from work in the evening. Add to that the fact that his body was under the impression it was an hour later still, and the poor child didn't know whether to run riot or simply lie prone on the floor.

On the plus side, he was so easily frustrated that he figured out how to fling himself on the floor in despair without hurting himself. The first couple times he had to express how the world was ending because I wouldn't let him play with the window blinds, he hit his head on the floor. But he soon figured out how to sit down first, then carefully lay himself down so as to avoid undue pain while expressing his deep woe over the great injustice of the world and mothers who won't let you pull an entire shelf of cds onto the floor.

I'm impressed. At this age, his brother was deliberately banging his head on the floor to express his pique. Clearly James is made of more practical stuff.

The longest day

About halfway through grocery store this evening, I found myself thinking that it seemed like it had been a very long, moreso than I would expect from reasonable night of sleep and a not terribly onerous Sunday afternoon of child care. Then it occurred to me: well, it has been a long day.

This is the easier end of the Daylight Savings Time switch, even if you have small children. It mostly consists of parents of small children whining that they don't actually get the extra hour thanks to kids getting up at the same time, then having to chivvy your children through the evening so you can get them to bed at something resembling the normal time. James was climbing up in my lap and plastering himself against my chest at 6, but a bath managed to get the boys through to their normal 7pm bedtime. Now we'll see when they get up tomorrow morning.

For perhaps the first time, I'm seeing a little bit of the benefit of our government's sadistic desire to let us experience jetlag without ever having to leave the comfort of home twice a year. The increasingly late sunrise has been making it harder to wake up in the morning, and combined with last week's toddler insomnia fest, Katherine was late to school twice. We're not in the habit of needing an alarm clock because 1) I rarely need an alarm to wake up on time and 2) James is typically up by 6:30 and the wakeup call of a toddler running across your head is usually pretty effective. But when said toddler decides to be awake for hours in the middle of the night and then lie down on the job by sleeping in the next morning and I've only had two hours of sleep, suddenly I find myself waking up at about the point when we should be leaving.

Obviously we're going to start using an alarm clock, but I also think that more light in the morning will make the morning up and at 'em rush and drive easier.

I am scintillating tonight

Mostly very tired and grumpy, really. The last day off B and I had off together since the middle of September was Columbus Day, not counting the days when one of us was sick enough for B to take a sick day. Since we have absolutely no help, that's a lot of days of solo childcare, especially when Alec brought a fever home from preschool to give everyone, then got better enough to go back for one day and bring home a cold.

Aren't you glad I decided to post every day? It's far too early to be tapped out, but I just don't have it in me tonight. So, um, here - have a picture of a messy baby:



You know you want him to hug you.

Bloggus Interruptus

So I never write, I never call - what's been going on around here lately?

- James has turned 18 months, one of my less favorite ages, and hit the massive sleep regression that comes with it. Our little Dylan Thomas (Do not go gentle into that good night, rage rage against the dying of the light) has made for an utterly exhausting week, which featured one night of only two hours of sleep for me and last night, when he decided to wake at 2am and nurse and doze until he was up for the day at 5. Not coincidentally, Katherine has been late to school twice this week.

On the other hand, last week he climbed into my lap, wrapped my arm around himself and said "Hug." So maybe we won't put him out on the corner with the recycling just yet.

...And now James is awake for the second time after I spent an hour getting him back to sleep. I give up. I'm going to bed so he can spend another night sucking me dry and will try to write more tomorrow. Sigh.

Whither NaBloPoMo?

Given my rate of posting over the past year, it seems foolish to attempt NaBloPoMo this year. And yet I truly want to post more, so I'm going to try it anyway.

I've actually been meaning to post for most of the past week, but instead, I've been working on Katherine's Halloween costume:



She's a musketeer. I'm a little conflicted about it, because she got the idea from a movie she watched. Afterward, she was asking me about historical Musketeers, practicing her fencing and even told me she thought she was over princesses. Great, right? The problem is that the movie was Barbie and the Three Musketeers, and she may be over princesses, but now she's into Barbie. Something of a lateral move, I think.

Anyway, I'm absurdly proud of the costume, because the long skirt is detachable and can be turned into a cloak, while there's a short skirt underneath more suitable for swashbuckling. Here's a very bad picture of it:



With the amount of work that went into Katherine's costume, I didn't have it in me to do any other sewing, so the boys got store-bought costumes. James was an elephant:



James currently has a passionate love affair with elephants, and aside from dogs which bark properly, all animals trumpet like an elephant as far as he's concerned. Meanwhile, Alec loves clothes with monkeys on them, so his costume was a natural fit:



And now I'm going to save the rest of my words for tomorrow, when November begins. More anon.

School vignettes

* Katherine's school had a Parents' Night on Tuesday. We went and saw her large, comfortable classroom that she shares with a class of eight other children. We learned about their daily schedule, where they intersperse individualized academic instruction with ample breaks, group activities and physical exercise. We listened to how all of the students came up with the values they want the school to promote (honesty, kindness, etc.) and came up with rules based on those. We heard about the PTO, which has plans to raise money for things like a new swingset and field trips that don't turn our children into miniature Willy Lomans. Heading home, we retrieved Katherine from happily socializing with a group of kids ranging from 6 to 12.

* Last week, at pickup Katherine's teacher met me to tell me about a meltdown Katherine had had over wanting to be able to pick a partner for a schoolwide game when everyone's partner was randomly assigned. She eventually got with the program, but to my surprise, I wasn't being told this to report misbehavior, but simply to let me know why Katherine might be upset (she was fine by that point. While Katherine's need to work her way through dealing with the fact that things aren't going to be the way she wants them with the emotional equivalent of a force 10 hurricane is... aggravating, she at least has the virtue of getting over it when she's done). My reaction to these fits after weathering a few thousand of them is more along the lines of "Suck it up, Buttercup," but I'm glad she has a teacher who cares so much about her feelings.

* Over the past several years, Katherine has had some health problems that can result in embarrassing side effects. While they aren't the reason we chose to homeschool, it was a factor in not sending her back to school. I had absolutely no faith that the public schools would do anything to protect her from the potential social fallout. We were willing to risk sending her to camp because we had faith that a Quaker school would protect her from bullying, and we were lucky enough that there were only minor issues.

Well, after a year of only a couple infections, Katherine has managed to develop an infection that has made it through three rounds of antibiotics, and the side effects are definitely there and quite noticeable. And while I'm grinding my teeth with frustration over how rotten our luck has been (really, we haven't dealt with anything this bad in over two years), the school is dealing with it just fine. We've had several concerned conversations where it's clear their concern is her wellbeing and that they've been doing their best to keep the other kids from noticing.

When we were telling people about this school this summer, I was cautious, saying that we had liked everything we had seen so far and that they were saying all the right things. Because, of course, the gap between what an organization says and their execution can be wide. It's only been four weeks, but so far I can say we're extremely happy with how they're living up to their ideals.