Tag Archives: kids

No stockings

Leave a reply

The boat sucks. Transparent International sucks. Putting our stuff in storage for months sucks. Our stuff supposedly arrived nine days ago but the company on this end hasn’t contacted me. Either customs is taking absurdly long (it generally takes 48 hours) or it didn’t arrive for the second time. Or the company who is delivering it just… doesn’t feel like working effectively and quickly. Who knows.

A whole bunch of the stocking stuffers are on that damn boat too. Well… I guess some of them can wait for Easter? Others will just be given late. We will still have magic. Frankly… the kids will get plenty.

The trip to Edinburgh went fine. We did our paperwork. Now some bits have to be mailed off. I think that will happen tomorrow. Every day a bit more gets done, we take a few more steps towards being fully settled. I’m told that once our stuff arrives we will be offered compensation for how terribly over-estimate this has gone. If it takes till after Christmas (looking likely) it will be more than 18 weeks, on an 8-12 week estimate. Awesome.

I’m starting to feel scared they lost our stuff and just don’t want to admit it yet.

I’m trying to find joy though. Today a tree surgeon came and took out some non-natives and we now have a giant pile of stumps and tree chunks and wood chips. We will have a lot of fun with that. I am really looking forward to setting up a proper mud kitchen out there with rough materials instead of something store bought. That makes me feel… really happy. That speaks to my values.

It’s weird figuring out what things are part of your values. I want my kids to be happier playing with a pile of logs than sitting and watching a screen and I teach them that this is the way to be by going out and doing it with them. I want my kids to turn to me when they have emotional distress instead of eating their feelings or hurting themselves or finding awful romantic partners and so far… they do. They talk about the things that upset them and they try to find ways to solve their problems that are fairly constructive for little kids.

I want my children to be doers, not people who sit around being entertained as a lifestyle. I model that. I live that. And so far… they are running into slight troubles at school because they are not people who sit and wait for life to happen. They get up and do things. Will this make them suitable for every job? No. But it will help them find the right one for them someday.

A long time ago I was drawn to people who were very certain of their own “rightness”. I was like a moth to a flame. I wanted to be near people who felt confident and sure of their own path. I became that kind of person and it makes some of my old connections trickier. I am absolutely certain that those paths do not work for me. Is there anything wrong with them? No. We all get to be however works for us. I’m just grateful that (so far) my children have very complementary personalities to my own.

When I go check on Youngest Child lately, she is more and more often in the lounge sprawled out reading a book. She’s going to fit right in. She talks up a storm. She demands to go outside and play. I like her so much. Sure it’s going to take her a few weeks to wean off of demanding the iPad every single time she opens her eyes… that’s a hazard of travel. We can’t bring books with us in large quantities. E-readers are not the same in the eyes of a toddler. I am buying books. Not tons. Well… a fairly surprising amount considering we have been here three months. I think if I include Christmas presents I have bought 6-10 books for each person in the house already. Once the boat arrives that won’t feel as important. We already have books… we just don’t have our books and the pain is becoming unbearable. We are readers and our books have been in storage for a year. We have all used e-books… it’s not the same. It doesn’t fill the same need in our souls.

I found the local used book store and I’m already making friends with the proprietor. I think we will get to know each other quite well.

The guy who did our tree removal asked about getting our families together for dinner. He wants me to hurry up and make more friends locally. I think he sounds delightful. He spent several decades riding his bike around foreign countries. We will have lots to talk about.

I have a whole bunch of tendrils out into the community. The beginnings of beginnings… but I’m not following through very much yet. I talk to people when they touch my life incidentally but I’m not following up with more close contact. I’m still so tired. I still feel so overwhelmed. I don’t know how long it will take me to feel like I have anything to give a real relationship but I’m not there. I still go to sleep and wake up feeling so weary I want to fall over. I still feel like my days are completely packed with chores… I don’t know when this will change. I don’t know if or when this will ease and until it does I should not lead anyone on with the belief that I have something to give.

My bucket is empty.

I haven’t had 24 hours of down time in over two years. I know that is pretty par for the course for parents… but not many parents do continual travel and interact with their kids 24/7 the way I do. Shorter breaks don’t feel very refreshing because my level of over work is so extreme.

If I get four whole hours off in a week… it feels like a drop of rain in the ocean. I don’t notice it. I don’t settle or relax. I have not yet figured out how to recharge, not really. I just keep pushing through.

I am reading the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence that is the basis for all of their education theory. It’s really quite refreshing and more in line with my overall belief system and educational theory than I would have expected. I really hope I can help MC pop a wheelie and get over the hurdle of school feeling just that teensiest bit too hard (fucking handwriting) so that she can go back to full time school next year. This is about the best school is going to get.

I’m going to make “lines” with sticks and then we are going to shape letters with wood chips and talk about why the proportions are the way they are. Why do you space things this much. Why do you need the arches and the curves in these places. Why do you need these kinds of gaps between words to be readable.

Kinaesthetic education, yo.

Because when we are all done we can use a broom and sweep up the results and then try again. It’s perfect. I’m actually really excited about this.

I have so much confidence in my children that it sometimes feels unreal to me that anyone can feel this way about anyone else.

The other day I was wandering somewhere with EC and we saw some of these abstract statues of a mother curled around a child. She said that when we get the house more properly settled she wants to find something like that for us to have in the house because that is how she thinks of me. My heart exploded. I had so many feelings at once. I wanted to create children who felt tenderly held. I wanted to create relationships where my children felt adored and respected and appreciated… I did it and I will keep doing it. I said, “Ok. We can do that.”

I kind of love that my baby will say her name all day long “_____ hat. ______ bear. ______ shirt.” but when a stranger asks her what her name is… she smiles at them and refuses to answer. It feels like she only wants to share her identity with us. I know that isn’t it. I know this is just a normal developmental stage… but it feels really lovely anyway. This baby feels really lovely in general.

On the train home last night a guy was sitting at the table next to ours. For the first hour or so he kept his airbuds in and I worried about disturbing him. Then we ended up in line at the snack stand together and he started talking to me. He told me that he has rarely ever seen three children as well behaved as mine. Yes sir, I’ll take your random approval… Our train was over an hour delayed and we just talked and played and read and drew and had a good time together without being fussy. Even though we arrived home more than two hours past our bed time. My kids are tough cookies. They rarely whine and when they do it is generally a sign that something pretty serious is wrong. I trust them.

That’s part of why I am going to listen to MC and flexi school for the rest of the year. She is good at telling me where she needs to be and what she needs to have happen for a given period of time. She has sure changed a lot over the course of her life. She has tried out some pretty intense things… but she tells me when she needs me to shift and that’s the best I can ask for.

We will figure out this journey together.

This is where I want to be. I am with the people I want to be with. Sure, there are bumps and inconveniences… that’s because life is an adventure. And sometimes adventures make you cry.

Souper impressive

2 Replies

Tonight EC asked to make dinner. She started with a base of turkey stock and water (I make my bone broth super concentrated and diluting it is wise) then she added in tomato, beets, carrots, and potatoes. Herbs and spices followed. She cooked that for a bit and decided it needed a bit of something more and added sausage followed by cream. It was faaaaaabulous.

She’s so big and capable. I’m absolutely thrilled.

Puuuuuuberty

Leave a reply

Eldest child keeps waking up in the morning really sad. She’s crying a lot and she can’t figure out why. She’s complaining about some parts of her body hurting in symbolic ways. I think puberty is hitting us like a freight train. This is going to be entertaining. I keep telling her that it’s OK that her emotions feel so big and out of control. It’s not her fault. She’s not doing something wrong. This is a normal process. It just really sucks and is hard for everyone. I hope I get to see what it is like for a kid to go through puberty without hating themselves.

Reinventing yourself

Leave a reply

People who have known me since I was a kid tell me that I don’t seem like the same person any more; I have changed so much. I changed a lot in my time in the scene, then being a teacher was a huge shift, being a parent has kind of forced me to complete a lot of huge seismic level differences in my life.

For the first few years I had kids I went through a Madonna/whore problem where my body stopped wanting sex or bdsm. It was the way that my brain managed to pick a path through my personal history of having no healthy boundaries around sex. It wasn’t a healthy response because it was bad for my marriage.

But I grew up watching all of the adults in my family have sex. I needed to have some kind of shift in my brain that ensured that my children would not see me have sex. My kids have still never walked in on me having sex and I’ve been doing this gig almost a decade. It is a huge accomplishment for someone with my background.

I think that my libido partially shut off because that was a lot of what I saw happen to my mom’s life. She had a few boyfriends (all of whom I saw her have sex with) and she realized that I was acting out a WHOLE LOT and she… shut it down and to the best of my knowledge has never had sex again. I think she stopped when I was around 10. That was a quarter of a century ago. I’m pretty sure my mom has been celibate because she decided she didn’t know how to have a healthy sex life.

She might be right. She picked some awful people.

I feel this kind of long drawn out pleasure and shock that the vast majority of people I slept with are really awesome people and they are still all invited to my house if I have a Christmas party. Only a few people have fallen off the list because mostly… gosh I picked good people.

I read in a book about postpartum recovery that it takes a body 4 years to fully reset after having a baby. My libido came back like a sledge hammer about 5 years after having kids. 4-5 years is a natural child spacing in nomadic societies so it isn’t that shocking that my body picked that window for saying, “Moar seks please.”

It’s been complicated since then. My poor husband has adjusted from the extreme hypersexuality I experienced when we first got married and before our marriage to me shutting down completely to me being a bitch and fucking lots of people as my libido exploded and… now I’m pregnant again.

What is going to happen next?

I don’t know but healthier sex has to be part of this experience.

It is complicated for a masochist to stop something because it hurts. But there are kinds of pain that are positive/emotionally expressive for me and there are kinds of pain where I shut down my brain and go to a bad place. There are kinds of pain that increase my general feeling that I should die because I have no other escape from pain in this lifetime.

My kids and my husband tell me all the time that they want me to live for A VERY LONG TIME and I’ve tried to change how I live to reflect the fact that they don’t want me to die young.

I have to figure out how to convince my body that I can be in less pain. (Fibromyalgia makes this super complicated.) I have to figure out how to stop shutting down my self-protection mechanisms during sex. Because the specific pain I have during vaginal sex sometimes (it’s not all the time) is a problem. It is directly tied into the abuse from my father. It is a mainline to my internal reaction that I was born from rape; I was born to be raped; that is all I should deserve to expect until I die.

I have changed so much about my destiny. I didn’t think I would ever have a forever home. I didn’t think I would ever be part of a family.

I have a really cool family. I mean, we are all flaming weirdos… but we like each other a lot and we spend a lot of time together and it is all so intensely positive…

I didn’t think someone like me would ever get this far, let me tell you. But I did it.

My current shrink is probably the most bdsm aware/positive shrink I’ve ever seen. They suggested that I’m going to have to face my dissociation head on and in their opinion I am going to have to do it within the structure of my M/s relationship.

Now that’s some awesome feedback to get from a shrink. I’ve never had a shrink talk so specifically about the difference between therapy and therapeutic and bdsm can be so very therapeutic…

I know. I used to not be able to set any boundaries at all with my body. Bdsm taught me how. My beautiful friends and play partners taught me how. Very therapeutic.

It is complicated on so many because having my husband hit me a lot is different from having my lovely friends hit me a lot. My husband is the only person on this god-forsaken planet who has given me any real safety. It’s complicated when he hits me. It isn’t that I never like it. It’s that there are so many layers of psychological events that happen around the physical events that… it’s hard to manage that and bounce back into my life.

My life is very constrained. I have to “behave” and project a kind of behavior that is very hard for me. I believe that children learn primarily through modeling and if I want to show my kids making good choices I have to make good choices and I’m really more inclined towards being a fuck up and doing everything wrong.

But the children. Sigh.

My kids are the reason I get up in the morning. My kids are the reason I put breathtaking amounts of effort into being a healthier person. My kids are the reason I’m trying to learn how to stop hurting myself so that I can handle being alive long enough to watch them grow up.

I haven’t cut myself in over half a decade. I have burned myself in longer than that. I haven’t beat my head on concrete in a bit longer than that. I have made a lot of progress on my self mutilation.

I really want to know what happens to my kids. I think they are so neat. I feel so lucky that I get to have another child. These people are the best people in my life. I wake up and go to sleep seeing their smiling faces.

I did not believe that my children would like me. I expected to be the recipient of contempt and apathy. Instead my children adore me like I adore them. It feels like magic.

Is it magical enough to propel me through figuring out how to stop allowing more pain into my body that damages me?

friends-only on lj isn’t *exactly* public…

93 Replies

I have been internally struggling with how much I want to write about the kids. Privacy and all. I've set my privacy bar at a very non-standard place. It's not transitive. So it's awkward.

I was watching a movie on Netflix about a beauty school in Afghanistan. It's kind of interesting. Then Calli woke up. I could hear her knocking softly on the door and saying, "Mama." When I got there and opened the door (carefully so I didn't hit her in the dark) the first thing she did was sign "milk". Yeah.

We settled in on the rocking chair. She nursed on both sides and then fell asleep on my chest. From start to finish of picking her up until I laid her back down in her bed was twenty five minutes. I saw the clock as I left and returned to the garage.

It felt like a lifetime. I think that a lot of my physical nursing discomfort with Calli has been anxiety around the pot. I feel bad that I smoke pot and nurse. I have done a lot of medical research and I have consulted with a number of medical professionals on this topic. It's not great but it's better than any of the other drugs I could be on, honestly. There is still this miasma of shame and guilt. It makes me tense. At this point I don't have a lot of milk left anyway. She's nearly two.

It is going to be hard to finish weaning. She's not ready. She only nurses once or twice a day but it is very important to her. If she doesn't get to nurse at those crucial times she feels really bad. She cries and cries. It breaks her heart. Nursing is a very complex experience on both sides. It still provides enormous health benefits to both of us. (My risks for various cancers and diabetes goes down by the year.) It is very good for both of us to do this.

And when I sit down and nurse her I focus on her in a way I don't the rest of the time. When I sit down and nurse and trace her face with my finger I see how much she has gotten from me.

Shanna feels like a mini-me in a variety of ways that bring me great joy. I feel like if I got to go down a list of traits that describe me and pick which ones to give to my kids Shanna got the things I would pick to give away. Shanna makes me very happy. Seeing her move around the world convinces me that there is good to come and I have to be here to see it.

Calli is a different experience. Calli is a lot like me, don't get me wrong, but if I had to pick the traits to pass on I probably wouldn't have selected quite the list Calli got. Calli is like a lot of the parts of me I struggle to accept. But this morning as I nursed her I found peace with that.

Instead of feeling bad I felt joy that she was there to remind me that even the parts of me I struggle with are good and worthy of emulation.For better or worse this tiny person sees me and sees someone good and wonderful. Someone she wants to be just like. So she picks things to pattern off of. If I don't like the patterns she is picking up, maybe I'd best watch my behavior-hey?

They are so different. Calli's birthday is next month. I asked her if she wanted to have a party for her birthday. She said yes, adamantly. I asked her if she wanted a big party or a little party. That took a little negotiation and explanation. Shanna campaigned hard for a huge party. She started listing off names of people to invite. Calli vetoed almost everyone.

Calli wants the woman who comes to our house every two weeks, her Godmamas whom she sees every month, and the family that has provided the most care taking for her since birth. She strongly vetoed every other name we could come up with.

Shanna invites every person she talks to on the bus and the train to her birthday party. It's hilarious. I'm starting to think I should reserve a spot at Lake Elizabeth and start letting her hand out business cards. If she wants that, she can have it. Calli doesn't want that.

Calli likes quiet small groups. She's overwhelmed by sound and too many people. She doesn't enjoy it. She likes having the few people she is comfortable around visit and that's it.

They mirror very different parts of me. I like it. I like watching them. I feel really good about the ways in which they are different. I feel like they embody the extreme ends of my personality. I feel like a constant peace keeper. "Shanna, don't pressure Calli to do things. If she says no you have to respect her wishes." They are both persistent. It's really wonderful.

I thought about all the things I love about Calli while I was nursing her. Including the fact that she continues to need me so intensely and viscerally. I thank anything that will listen for my children. To my children I am the most important and wonderful person in the world. They are probably going to be the only people I ever feel really comfortable around. They are the extent of my clan.

I haven't weaned Calli and I don't know when I will. It's one day at a time. Some day she will no longer need this from me. I hope I can continue to meet her needs for a while longer.

Apparently I don’t want to track.

8 Replies

I got busy. Then we decided to use a lot less electricity for a while (no artificial lights and no computers during darkness) and my computer time went down. I'm cheating today because I am in a bad mood. 

I went and saw my therapist on Thursday and that was a good thing because I was having a lot of intrusive suicidal ideation all week before that. Over the weekend I just didn't have the thoughts and that was restful. But this morning Calli had a hard time sleeping and I wasn't very patient with her and I feel quite guilty about it and here I am. Noah tapped me out because I wasn't being very patient. Shanna didn't have this many sleep interruptions. This is hard. I don't handle many of them–Noah does 90% of them. Once in a while I try to tap him out around four so that he can get a little sleep before work. I did that last night and I shouldn't have. Turns out she had just barely woken up and he had slept most of the night. Dang it. That's what I get for trying to be nice. He came back at five and told me I could be done. He's very nice. It's going to be a long day and I will be nicer to the kids all day if I have some time when I am not being kicked or having someone scream in my ear. 

Running continues. I have missed a couple of days of training due to tripping. I feel mixed about that. It just means I need to be more careful, right? I don't think that long term it will be a problem that I lost a total of three and a half miles more than five months before the marathon. I will still get enough miles logged. It will be fine. I'm struggling with my attitude about running. Some where in tracking I stopped thinking about it as "just get there" and started thinking "I am a loser for being this slow." I am not a loser. I am not an athlete. I do not have a history of running. I'm doing fucking great. My attitude isn't great and I'm trying to work on it. I wish I could just feel happy with myself for what I have done so far. I don't know why I feel so little pride in the half marathon. I suppose because I was bitching and moaning in my head the whole time. I cried through a lot of the race and felt self-pitying. Why should I feel pride in spending three hours feeling that way? Running is extremely emotional for me. I think about my siblings a lot. I think about my brothers and how they used to run. I think about being told all my life that I was not athletic and never being given space to try. If I wasn't going to go out and be the fastest person on a track team tomorrow I shouldn't bother to get off the couch. 

I think about how I want my kids to perceive exercise. And I think it sucks that my experience of running is that it triggers a lot of crying and very sad thinking. I wish to God that I had memories of my family that made me happy. I want to be able to think of something that has happened to me and not cry or feel bitter. How do I turn things like a half marathon into something to feel kind of lame about? I know I didn't "enjoy" running it. So it doesn't count. I sure as heck wasn't that fast. I feel like there is no point in me doing things. I think that at least part of me believes that because no one will be there at the finish line whether I am the first person or the last who gives a shit about me so why bother? It doesn't matter what I go do when I am alone in a room by myself. I don't really exist.

I go see a therapist because I need to have an "authority" who I can come back to time and time again who I can come back to and get continual reassurance that I am doing the right thing. I need to be seen. I need to have someone I can trust witnessing my life who isn't going to allow me to be invisible. I have had a few good therapists in my life. They have all been able to present a neutral facade no matter what I am telling them about until I ask them for feedback. Then they react a great deal. I can't handle working with a therapist who flinches and pulls away from me when I talk about the things that are going on in my head. I can't expect neutrality from Noah or my friends. I have gotten to the point in my therapy career where I talk about that on the first visit with a new person. "I need a blank wall. I will project all of my shit onto you if you give me any reaction." My current therapist has a wonderful presence. She radiates comforting. I like her.

Last week we talked a lot about what it means that having panic attacks and feeling suicidal is my normal. What do I do about that? How do I go about living my life knowing that it is true? I have yet to have a stage of life where I have gone more than a year without thinking about suicide. I didn't think about it for the first year of Shanna's life. Then I had a miscarriage and a bunch of issues with my mother. 

If I wasn't someone with a panic disorder what would my life look like? How would I interact with people? What would would I do with my time? I have to construct this story out of whole cloth. I try to guess. I switch social groups so often because I don't feel like I guess well and then I am afraid to see people again. I won't be able to duplicate the same "character" I was trying for the last time I saw them. A lot of how this is manifesting is I just don't talk as much any more. I feel like I only have bad things to say so I shouldn't say anything at all. Sometimes I get into a blurty stage because I have so many words in my head and I don't have very many appropriate places to put them. 

I want my kids to have a different relationship with exercise than I have. So I pretend that running is awesome and I do a lot of it. I like that my kid thinks nothing of the mile walk to the park. She would much rather walk to the park than drive because she thinks car seats are annoying. We have a different sense of time than most people. We have long days to fill. We don't do much and we don't have very many obligations at specific times. Well, we do a lot. It's just all decided at the last minute and most of it is in or near our house.

How would I live if I didn't have panic attacks and suicidal ideation? I'm not really sure what would be different. I wonder what my life would be like if I didn't waste so much physical energy on being afraid. Terror is hard on the body. My body feels terror a great deal of the time while I am doing common every day things. I wish I understood how much it was taking away from me, although I'm not sure I need more reasons to be resentful. I don't like my body for being maladapted in this way. I wish my body understood that it is ok to be safe here. I kind of feel like part of it was being mailed the letter. People who are mad at me aren't even going to limit telling me that I'm bad to the internet. They are going to mail shit to my house so that I can't avoid knowing that I'm bad even if I avoid the internet. Well, fuck. 

I want the voices inside my head to be kind to me. I want to know how to change those tapes. I'm tired of feeling like I loathe myself. I'm tired of feeling critical of my accomplishments. I really and truly am safe. I feel like I need to get to the place where I can really trust that Noah and Shanna and Calli are probably always going to like me. They will get mad at me as well. Other people need to be not my problem. I need to stop caring if other people think I am bad. I need to stop rehearsing these tapes that confirm that people think I am bad. I need to not care that what I am doing is not good enough for other people. That isn't my job. I don't need to be good enough for them. Three people. What would my body feel like if I really understood that I only need to expend energy worrying about three people instead of untold numbers? I think I should make up that story in my head. That should probably be my story all the time. Then I won't have to worry about remembering a new one. This is my family. I care for them and they care for me.

Instead of hearing my brother criticize me I need to hear Shanna telling me that I'm the best mom in the world. Shanna has already declared that she is running in a race with me as soon as she is big enough. I guess I will have to keep running. I need to get the wheels fixed on her bike so she can ride while I run. 

I had to have kids or I probably wouldn't have made it to thirty. I have been suicidal for a very long time. My will power needs rejuvenation. Right now my job is to teach my kids how to be functional, happy adults. That means I have to figure out how such a person behaves and act like that in front of them all the time. So I cry when I run. Maybe I should stop feeling bad about that. Maybe it's really awesome that I have space in my life where I am alone and I get to vent those horrible overwhelming emotions. Maybe a skinned knee isn't the worst thing in the world. I do need to pay more attention when I am running. I want to show Shanna how to be competent and that means being at least minimally attentive. Injuries suck, yo. 

More kid musing

1 Reply

It’s kind of weird writing this stuff here because the internet is forever. How will my kids feel about so many random people being able to find so much about them? Kind of an interesting thing to think about. But, here’s more anyway. 🙂

I think that nursing is a skill and Shanna was good at it and Calli is kind of awful. Seeing as I just read a chunk of The Birth Order Book yesterday that’s kind of funny. Apparently it is completely standard for second children to go the exact opposite of the older child. Fair enough. Calli seems to have a really hard time regulating my milk flow. She has one nursing speed: full bore. (Is that the right spelling? bore? boar? Darn Noah for not being awake yet!) This means she coughs and chokes and sputters. Still. She’s six months old. She should bloody well have figured out this nursing thing by now. (said lightheartedly) She also yanks really hard as she whips her head around. She can’t lie still on my lap. At all. Ever. She is either waving her arms or her legs or rolling her head back and forth or tapping her foot or… On my best days I think this is the coolest thing in the world. She has so much energy to burn it isn’t funny. I think that is a positive thing. On the worst days I can’t stand having her on me to nurse and I contemplate supplementing with formula. This thought kind of horrifies the lactivist in me. :-\ I’m actually nervous about giving her a bottle though. Yes I know I could pump, but I kind of suspect she would love switching to a low flow bottle and never nursing again. I don’t think I am up for committing to another couple of years exclusively pumping. That is my nightmare. It’s complicated. So far I am just working constantly on nursing manners. I believe in letting kids nurse full term.

Shanna is being restricted to one nursing a day because she doesn’t seem to be able to stop biting. I think her mouth has changed and biologically she’s ready to be done. Emotionally she totally isn’t. *sigh* It’s hard because nursing is her biggest comfort in case of something awful happening or if she is feeling particularly insecure but it wicked hurts and puts me in a horrible mood. :-\ Not a great plan then. I feel like completely weaning at this time would be a bit much for her. She’s had enough adjustments lately–new bed in a new bedroom (alone by herself for the first time in her life), potty training, new sister, extra vaccines lately because of the travel, I’ve been having a hard time all on my own and she notices. I seem to have given up on complete sentences. Interesting. So I feel like I’m trying to give Shanna a bit longer before I force weaning. We are talking about it and leading up to it. I think her birthday will be the cut off. Eek. Poor baby girl. 🙁

And I really don’t have time for more. ack

So I got dumped yesterday.

3 Replies

Not by my husband, by one of the women in my mom group. I got sent a rather hurtful email. To be defensive, because I always am, the hot sauce comment was not even vaguely serious. I would never do that. It was an unkind thing to say at all, but I don’t think this level of response was appropriate. And the ‘cold baths’ were tepid, just not warm and fun. I took zero pleasure in them and I don’t feel they were cruel. They were business like and not *fun*, but Shanna was not harmed in any way and despite not being fond of them she doesn’t seem traumatized by being in less than super warm water.

Continue reading →

Sleep deprivation

Leave a reply

Calli woke up at 3:30 for a diaper change. That woke Shanna up. Shanna wouldn’t chill out and let Calli go back to sleep. So I’m up for the day and fiercely cranky about it. Especially because both children are now asleep on top of me after ensuring I’ll get no more rest.

Bitter. That’s how I feel.

Who in the hell okay’ed this project?!

3 Replies

We have a little board book called First Rhymes. Most of the rhymes are the old favorites everyone knows (Little Bo Peep, Little Jack Horner, etc.) but there is one that uhm… who decided that this was a good idea (for a book published in 2005)?

I Love Little Pussy

I love little pussy,
Her coat is so warm,
And if I don’t hur her
She’ll do me no harm.

*cough* Totally innocent, I’m sure.

{milestones} and those other things

Leave a reply

I haven’t seriously babbled about my kids in a while! Such a tragedy. *cough*

Calli is awesome! But she’s awesome in that way that babies are awesome so it’s pretty generic. I think she’s an easy sleeper (certainly compared to Shanna) so that makes things easier. She is trying really hard to get more clingy and I am resisting with every fiber of my being. I was astounded throughout Shanna’s infancy that I didn’t really hit ‘touched out’. I now live in Touched Out. I would kind of like to have an asbestos suit so that no one gets too close to my skin. I do carry Calli around but when she has the days where she starts fussing the minute I lay her down for a nap I end up having a stern conversation with her then holding her hand while she fusses for a while. I’m still opposed to “Cry it Out” but I am much more ok with fuss-it-out-while-I’m-holding-your-hand. I just cannot do the 24/7 in contact with the newborn thing this time. I will lose my mind. But she eats a lot and she’s vigorous and very interested in the world around her. Since the most recent pediatrician visit (dear god do we need a new one) I am aware that she is a full pound less than Shanna was at this age and almost an inch shorter. This child will not be larger than average. Apparently she is right on the 50% line for height and weight. So in fact she is… dead average. 🙂 Despite the ped telling me to get ready to start her on iron fortified rice cereal, I don’t get the impression she is going to be the most food-ready kid at 6 months. It’s kind of weird how different she is from Shanna. 🙂 She’s rolling over, but only on soft surfaces. The floor is still too hard. The couch or the bed is super easy. Sitting up this morning was surprising. I set her down and expected her to immediately collapse but she didn’t. Yay! She sat up for quite a while as I tended to Shanna.

Shanna continues to develop at an amazing (to me) pace. I don’t have much experience with other kids so it’s kind of weird to have an intellectual understanding about child development and them come against an actual kid who isn’t following all the normal curves perfectly. I was looking at the milestone chart this morning (someone asked me when sitting up was normal… I don’t know…) and I looked at the bits for Shanna. Holy Milestones she is asynchronous. The average kid her age is mastering their second adjective?! Oh. She’s speaking in 10+ word sentences using several $2 words at a go. Her favorite right now is ‘diatomaceous earth’ because we have been using it to deal with our ant problem. If you have ever heard the word before you can understand her. If you’ve never heard of the stuff she sounds kind of muddled. 🙂 I’m pretty impressed though. She is also being increasingly helpful in the kitchen. Like this morning she helped with a large portion of breakfast. She scooped out the granola, helped cut up the apples (her little kid knife did a better job than I expected), and she helped pour out the yogurt. Yay! Simple, but she’s trying so hard. She can also almost entirely make a pbj by herself. By 3 she will be able to make herself simple meals. I’m thrilled. But her physical development is… spotty. She’s a total klutz. And she also shows very little inclinations towards artistic stuff. I’m trying pretty hard to provide access to such things, but it’s not my thing… so I kind of suck at helping her. I’ll keep trying and she’ll keep doing her thing. I don’t actually mind that she would rather spend 30 minutes cutting up a piece of paper than color. 🙂 Oh! And she’s making more progress towards potty training. At this point my approach is to just leave her alone. When she makes comments complaining about diaper changes I tell her that she can avoid them by using the potty and she often asks for panties instead of a diaper. We aren’t having many accidents in panties because when she isn’t in the mood for the potty she asks for a diaper. Although I do give her candy for using the potty. 😛 I am trying to be mellow though.

Balancing the two of them is… interesting. Luckily they are both easy going and mellow so they wait their turn extremely well. It helps if I keep on a constant stream of, “I can see that you really need me to ‘x’ but right now I am doing ‘y’ for your sister. I know it is hard to wait, but please try to be patient for another ‘z’ minutes.” If I can keep that up in a patient, kind voice waiting up to 15 minutes is not a big stretch. 30 minutes can be very hard for both of them. Which uhm… is ok. They’re kind of young. 🙂

I feel like we have hit the ‘terrible twos’ and yet… if this is the worst I see we’re doing GREAT! Shanna doesn’t ‘tantrum’ much at all but she does cry a lot. She has a lot of really intense feelings and it’s hard for her to figure out what to do with them. I feel like as long as she is well rested and not hungry she does better than a lot of adults with her strong feelings. It’s kind of hard to console her if she is hungry or tired though. It gets hard. The crying sound makes me feel homicidal.

Because I’m exactly this kind of full disclosure person… I’ve lost it a couple of times. 🙁 When we were driving to Disneyland and she was really really sick of the car she started kicking the drivers seat on purpose pretty hard. I reached back and hit her feet. 🙁 I know it wasn’t the right decision and we’ve talked about it. She’s pretty happy to lecture me for a long time about how hitting is wrong and I shouldn’t do it so she enjoyed the hell out of that conversation. (so my daughter) I’ve smacked her hands a couple of times purely as a reflex when she is doing something that makes me twitch. Every time I do she begins her lecture again about how hitting is wrong. She tells me to apologize and I do. She cries and we cuddle and kiss and then feel ok again. I am trying really hard to increase my patience level but it’s hard. This is part of that ‘there are no perfect parents’ thing. I try to not spend much time feeling bad but instead put my energy towards doing better next time. It’s hard to not get into negative self-talk. Given how much stress these kids add to my life (it’s incredible in a kind of scary way) I’m aware that I am actually doing phenomenally well. It helps that I now self-medicate. The next step is to increase my exercise because that will help a lot. I informed Noah that I was going to the gym today. Period. He’s supportive. 🙂

Guess I’m willing to leave this kid before 6 months. Ha.

Don’t know what to do with these feelings.

3 Replies

I need to tell Shanna no when she asks to watch birth videos. Every so often I kind of freak out and sob because I feel so much grief over the fact that I will never have a son. Every birth video I see where they have a son I sob and feel so envious I can barely see straight. In no way shape or form do I wish either of my girls away. I’m actually enjoying having a girl a little bit more this time because I feel less self-imposed-inhibition about enjoying the more ‘girly’ clothes.

But I have dreamed of my son for so long. It hurts so much that I will never get to see what that person would be like.

Well that was an unpleasant experience.

3 Replies

Yesterday I had my worst outing ever as a parent. I tried to take both girls to Dickens Fair. Not a big deal, I take them all kinds of places by myself. It was a total nightmare. Something there bothered Calli. She screamed almost nonstop from when we entered the building. The few times I managed to get her to calm down were followed by crying fits from Shanna. She rode the carousel and the guy who runs it helped her off her animal and she lost it. She started crying hysterically that she didn’t want him to touch her. I can’t tell for sure but I suspect that he was slightly rough when he picked her up. She was really freaking out though so I didn’t question it too much I just comforted her. She was then not ok with walking and wanted to be carried. You see how this is going?

It was awful. We were there for maybe an hour and I spend most of that time ravenously eating or trying to get one (or both) kid(s) to stop crying. So I left pretty quickly. Just not worth it this year.

So independent

1 Reply

Sometimes I don’t know what to make of Calli’s self-sufficiency already. She freakin loves the swing. We could leave her in it for hours until she has a dirty diaper or needs food. She laughs, smiles, plays with the mirror baby, and thinks the mobile is awesome. Shanna sorta tolerated it when she was tired. She likes just hanging out on her blanket (when I can keep Shanna from injuring her).

I’m not complaining! It’s just… weird. Frankly I’m delighted and grateful. It allows me to get stuff done. 🙂 I have probably already accomplished more in Calli’s lifespan than I did in the first six months of Shanna’s life. 🙂

And she’s so cuddly and sweet. She has a very serious face most of the time but then she smiles and she lights up like a roman candle. I feel so blessed in my children.

My good deed for the day.

2 Replies

One of my awesome former students came to visit me today. I took her to lunch and we chatted and moved closer towards being friends instead of teacher/student. She told me all about her excitement about joining the Navy. I sent her home with The Gift of Fear and told her that she should sign up for an Impact class before she heads to basic training. I am completely supportive of her joining the military but I also think she needs to learn to take care of herself. She was extremely enthusiastic and supportive. I’m glad we got to spend the day together. 🙂

Interesting point of view

2 Replies

Before people jump down my throat I AM NOT POSTING THIS BECAUSE I AGREE WITH EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF INFORMATION IN THIS POST. Did I say that clearly enough? Please don’t start lecturing me because I am stupid enough to believe something like this, thanks.

But anyway! With that lead up! Here is an article that says we should be grateful to the Duggars because their kids will be paying for our Social Security: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574413792994350108.html

Wow, this is going to be complicated

11 Replies

Shanna was talking about her vulva this morning and acting questioning (this is where her language skills get a bit muddy) and I said, “Yup all girls have vulvas.” And then I stopped. Actually, no. All girls don’t have vulvas. But most girls do. And very few boys have vulvas. Man. I think things are going to be complicated to explain to her.