Raincity Mama

For the past cou­ple of nights get­ting my daugh­ter to go to sleep has been ridicu­lously hard. Our usual rou­tine is to fin­ish up din­ner, brush teeth, change dia­pers, get into PJs and then read a book or two. Some­times we don’t even read a book. My son usu­ally drifts off to sleep with­out much effort. We nurse and he ends up asleep within min­utes. My daugh­ter nurses, unlatches, flaps her arms, kicks her legs, talks, sings, any­thing to keep her­self awake. Tonight I had had enough. I had been try­ing to get her to sleep for over an hour and she wasn’t show­ing any signs of giv­ing in any­time soon. I told her that nurse had gone to sleep and that she needed to go to sleep too. She whined and com­plained and I told her over and over again that nurse had gone to sleep and that she could have nurse once she woke up. Then she started telling me “up, up, up” to let me know that she was up and that she wanted to nurse.

I stood up with her and swayed and rubbed her back and shushed. She’d put her head down for a few min­utes and then start com­plain­ing again. I con­tin­ued to reas­sure her that she was fine and that she needed to go to sleep. Within min­utes she stopped lif­ing up her head and I heard her breath­ing slow and she melted into me. I stood there with her in my arms for a few more min­utes to ensure that she was indeed asleep and then shuf­fled over to the bed and gen­tly laid her down. I glanced at the time and it took 27 min­utes to get her to fall asleep. I’ve been reluc­tant to start this but over­all it was fairly painless.

After I left the room I felt a jum­ble of emo­tions. Happy that I got her to go to sleep. Exhausted from lack of sleep. Guilty because I don’t like refus­ing her requests. Sad because she is no longer a tiny baby that needs me as tiny babies do. I look for­ward to hav­ing my body be my own again. This is the first step on the path to wean­ing her.

I’ve been pretty laid back about dis­ci­pline. I am anti-spanking. I use time­outs. I try to redi­rect the kids before they get into a sit­u­a­tion that requires that I dis­ci­pline them. I know that up until now the kids haven’t really had much impulse con­trol, they may know that they shouldn’t bang on the TV but when Grover is on and he is get­ting ready to “move and grove” it seems that they just can’t help them­selves. I am com­ing to real­ize that I need a cou­ple of strate­gies to han­dle dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions. Deal­ing with annoy­ances, like throw­ing food off the table, and real dan­gers like stand­ing on the back of the couch, need dif­fer­ent approaches.

In deal­ing with the annoy­ances, I try to redi­rect the kids and have them do some­thing else. Throw­ing food off the table usu­ally means that they are done eat­ing. I get that. Telling them that when I see them throw­ing food, I  think that they are done just seems to rein­force the idea that throw­ing food is an accept­able way to get down from the table. A stern, “we don’t throw food” just doesn’t seem to reg­is­ter. Ask­ing them if they are done at that point is usu­ally met with a no and once they are given some other food it’s a fairly good chance that they will just throw it too. We try to ensure that they don’t get too much on their plate so that they aren’t over­whelmed by the amount but there are nights where as soon as they are seated they are throw­ing their plate and there isn’t any food on it yet. At that point I excuse the child from the table and the rest of us carry on eat­ing. The point isn’t to shun them, if they change their mind they are wel­come to come back, I just don’t see the point in keep­ing them at the table when they are clearly unin­ter­ested. I’m try­ing to go with “ignore the behav­iour that bugs me and reward the behav­iour that I want to see”, and so far it works half the time.

When it comes to dan­ger­ous behav­iours, like stand­ing on the back of the couch or run­ning into the street, I tend to be quite loud. The prob­lem with loud is that even­tu­ally they will tune me out, it is already start­ing. The first cou­ple of times I yelled it star­tled them and yes, they did stop what they were doing. Now, they glance over in my direc­tion, usu­ally grin­ning and give me a look that says “aren’t I cute?” or “check this out!” Yelling is pretty inef­fec­tive. My par­ents yelled, and I got really good at tun­ing them out. If the sit­u­a­tion is immi­nently dan­ger­ous I phys­i­cally inter­vene. The prob­lem is that if I have just plucked my son off the back of the couch he gig­gles and wants to scram­ble back up there. I think he thinks it’s a game. I don’t want to spend the rest of the after­noon pluck­ing him off the couch. Part of me wants to just let him climb. I think that he just wants to explore the room and see­ing things from higher up is excit­ing. But another part of me wants to tell him to stay off the couch! How do I explain to him that I worry about him falling? Or, that I don’t want the couch dam­aged? He cer­tainly isn’t con­sid­er­ing either idea when he is climb­ing up there.

I don’t want to default to “because I said so”, but how do you let the kids know that some behav­iours just aren’t accept­able with­out it becom­ing a debate? While hav­ing per­fectly obe­di­ent kids would be nice, it isn’t real­is­tic, plus I wouldn’t be doing them any favours in the long run. I don’t want to raise unthink­ing fol­low­ers who do what­ever every­one else is doing. I want them to be curi­ous. I want them to ques­tion what they see. My friends that have kids all have kids the same age as mine so we are all try­ing to fig­ure this out at the same time. I guess I can start read­ing par­ent­ing books or I can just keep fig­ur­ing this stuff out on the go.

I’ve been think­ing a lot about what my “dream home” looks like. It will be jointly designed by my hus­band and me. It will be “eco-friendly”. Some of the must-have ele­ments are:

• four bed­rooms
• an office
• an open plan kitchen over­look­ing the liv­ing room
• a mud room
• heated tile floor in the bathrooms
• a laun­dry sink
• a liv­ing wall
• rain bar­rels
• a veg­etable garden
• a green­house that is attached to the kitchen

I want to start build­ing a file to store ideas so that when the time comes to design our house I can bring it out to show the archi­tect. What ele­ments does your “dream home” have?

Lately the kids have become more and more inde­pen­dent. They are typ­i­cal tod­dlers that want to do every­thing for them­selves. Usu­ally I just let them have at it. I try to sit back and let them puz­zle out how to do what­ever it is that they want to do but there are times where I feel like I don’t have the time to sit and wait for them so I bull­doze ahead.

The kids are get­ting really good at feed­ing them­selves. We usu­ally stick to stuff like pasta, chicken, pizza and salad and they man­age quite nicely. Admit­tedly they usu­ally just eat with their hands but they are get­ting bet­ter at using uten­sils. We have salad almost every night and now the kids expect that we will pull their chairs close beside us so that they can eat salad too. Some nights this means that they just push stuff around with their forks and other nights it means that they are grab­bing fist­fuls of greens or toma­toes and either eat­ing it or attempt­ing to feed us.

Since the kids have become more pro­fi­cient with using uten­sils we have avoided eat­ing soup for din­ner until tonight. We went to a friends house and he made pea soup for din­ner. When we arrived before we even entered I could smell the soup, it smelled amaz­ing. He had crusty loaves of bread for dip­ping and my hus­band whipped up a salad. All I had to do was wran­gle kids until the meal was ready.

We got the kids in their chairs and started to eat. I picked out car­rots and pota­toes to cool and then pile on the kids’ plates. My daugh­ter was con­tented to clutch her spoon in one hand and grab car­rots with the other. My son was upset almost from the start. He didn’t want any of the food I put on his plate. He pointed ani­mat­edly to my husband’s bowl of soup and brushed away any attempts I made to feed him soup from my spoon. Our host said it didn’t mind if the boy ate from our plates so I moved my bowl over in front of him. He clutched his spoon and I thought he was just going to fish around once he saw that it was soup but he man­aged to get some on his spoon and nav­i­gated it up to his mouth. About half the time it slid off and landed on his pants but the rest of the time it got most of it in his mouth. This made him extremely proud and I have to say that I felt pride swell up in me too. There is some­thing about watch­ing my kids feed them­selves that makes me happy.

By the time we were fin­ished my son had soup smeared all over his pants, shirt and his chair was splat­tered with it too. But my son ate an amaz­ing amount of food and I was happy. Yes, we have a lot of laun­dry to do, but he won’t be this messy for long.

I am notic­ing that both kids are not so con­tent with their spe­cial plas­tic plates and cut­lery any more. They want to eat off our plates and use our uten­sils. I think I’m going to have to find unbreak­able dishes like Corelle and then we can all eat off the same plates.

I find stuff like this to be bit­ter­sweet. I am so proud that they are grow­ing up but I do miss them being tiny babies. I need to find some­one with tiny babies so I can get a fix of that new baby smell.

The premise of Nablo is to post at least once a day for a month. I decided that I wouldn’t stress about my posts, I just wanted to write about what came to mind and post it. Look­ing back, it shows. I can’t say that my posts were at all spec­tac­u­lar. I’ve learned that I need to pick a topic, write a draft, save it and come back to edit and flesh it out some more. I feel like I should be more witty or enter­tain­ing or something.