Into the abyss

Well, our addendum was partially accepted (furnace yes, crawlspace no), and we decided to proceed with the purchase, so if we get the loan we applied for we should be on our way to owning a home.  The feelings I have about it are complicated and kind of contradictory; on the one hand, I’m happy that we’ll have something that’s truly ours and that we’ll be able to make into what we want, rather than always deferring to a landlord.  I’m really excited that we will have bedrooms for both of the kids, which may (may) help with some of the sleep issues, and which will certainly cut down on toys scattered around the house.

On the other hand, it’s all very terrifying in a way, and we still have some hurdles to get over.  We haven’t been approved for a loan yet (we were preapproved), and it looks like we have some stuff yet to pull together before that all happens.  Since we’ll be traveling to SoCal next Friday and will be gone for about 10 days, I’m a little worried about what will happen if we have to attend to some house-related crisis.  M.’s disability and the fact of not one, but two small children means that if one person leaves to take care of something, we all leave – there is no staying behind.  There’s also a LOT of work that needs to be done on the house before we move in, and I’m anxious about all of that – cost, family harmony (my dad is the primary contractor, and since we’re supposed to be joining him and my mom in Hawaii for a week not long after we’d probably move in, I’d like for us all to still be on speaking terms), design – you name it.

I guess I should just let go of my anxiety, make some lists of things that need to be taken care of, take a deep breath, and get to work.  Or concentrate on my more immediate project: tomorrow night marks the beginning of Babyweaning! – The Nighttime Feedings.  Wish us luck.

Baby is One!

So the baby boy turns 1 today, and this marks the 364th day I haven’t slept through the night (he slept through the night exactly one time, a few weeks ago when he was down for the count with a cold). He’s been nursing through the night (I’m talking 6/7ish, 10/11ish, 1:30ish, 4:30ish – he’s practically still on a newborn schedule, for the love of God) for what seems like an eternity, and I’ve decided that 1 year marks as good a point as any to learn about disappointment and change.

So, come Friday night, we’re sending the 3 year old away to my parents’ house and embarking on what will likely prove to be a very long night of baby anger (not so much tears – he just gets MAD if he doesn’t get his way, the little pi**er). Because I just can’t take it anymore. I know I should probably nurse him until he’s about ready to pack up for college, but my health is actually suffering from the chronic lack of good sleep, and it’s time for C. to contribute to – as I read another blogger mention somewhere – the family harmony.

(FWIW, I’m not asking him to go cold turkey. We just need to stop doing it all night long).

And today is M2’s preschool program. It promises to be an amusing and adorable 12-minute extravaganza.

Plans

I think I might try to start using this as a daily journal kind of thing, since I clearly don’t have the time/energy/inclination to spend time crafting meaningful posts.  I do find that blogs that chronicle daily ins and outs are interesting in their own ways, and give a nice picture of life as it’s really lived.  We’ll see.

In the meantime, just to bring everyone up to speed (“everyone” being, of course, the three people who are still reading here): M2 has recovered nicely from her (apparent) allergic reaction to amoxicillin, one ER trip later.  She had a miserable few days there, but once we discontinued the medicine she started slowly showing improvement.  Now she’s bouncing off the walls and getting ready for her preschool Christmas program (all two songs of it).

The house thing is ongoing.  We put an offer on a foreclosure, which was accepted.  However, there was one furnace issue (we knew about it) and one crawlspace issue (we didn’t) that we decided need to be remediated by the bank, not us (there’s loads of other issues with the house, but we’re prepared to take those on, since they’re largely cosmetic).  So we’re sending an addendum back today, and we’ll see what happens with that.  It would be a good house for us, I think – it’s basically the house we’re currently renting (same model, same layout), but with a substantial new addition in the back that makes it possible for every kid to have a bedroom.  But…we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m trying to scrape together Christmas presents and hoping that Amazon is serious when they say that the stuff I ordered yesterday will be here by the 24th.  Dissertation is currently dead in the water, but I’m still paying tuition and registering for diss credit, so I guess I’m still in the game.  Trip to in-laws on the 26th – wish us luck!

If anyone is still reading…

I will be amazed.  Grateful, but amazed.

We’re still here, but it’s been a hell of a few months.  We started the process of looking for a house to buy, but the vast majority are either bank-owned and trashed (intentionally or by the elements), short-sales (which is a ticket to nowhere on a very slow boat), or seller-owned and massively overpriced (the number of people who think that the market actually should sustain the absurd prices of the last few years really surprises me; homes that should have been, at this point, in the mid-200s are still being listed in the upper 400s.  And sitting, and sitting, and sitting.  The banks involved in short-sales haven’t figured this out, yet, either.

Miss M. started preschool in September, and it’s been one long, slow descent into Level 4 biohazard territory.  She got the plague about a month ago, and it’s turned out to be the gift that just keeps on giving.  $100+ in pediatrician copays later, we’re still trying to get rid of the damned thing.  It looks like she may miss her class Thanksgiving feast (that she was really exited about), and at this rate we’ll be lucky if we make it to the REAL Thanksgiving at my parents’ house.

So, still here, but dragging.

Still, still here

I’ve been a crap blogger lately, and I’ve even thought about just hanging up my hat a few times.  I’m not going to yet, though, because this all may pass one of these days and – who knows? – I might even get back into the swing of things again.

But, right now, life with the little people is kicking my ass.

Which isn’t to say they’re bad; I mean, yeah, the toddler is doing 3 by the book (and what’s the deal with “the terrible twos”??  Two was fine.  A total piece of cake compared to the hellfire that is three.  Three is wiping me out.  Defiance, check.  Ritualistic parroting of every stupid thing that comes out of my mouth, check.  Mule-like stubbornness, check, check, check.  I’m terrified of doing with with the baby when his time comes, seeing as how he’s got infinitely less patience as a baby than the toddler ever had – she was a paragon of patience, and right now she’s hell on wheels).

And the baby…will not wean.  I know, I know; if I was any kind of good mother I’d nurse him until he was packing up the car to go to college, but, dammit, I want my own damned body back.  I’m so, so, SO freaking tired of waking up in the middle of the night (because he simply cannot go without, don’tcha know), and I just want him to WEAN, DAMMIT.  But…no.  He refuses to take a bottle and can’t reliably drink out of much else right now, so I have to nurse just to keep him reasonably hydrated.  Which is especially important since he drools like a leaky faucet.  His teeth are taking the slow-and-one-at-an-excruciating-time approach, which means that he’ll probably stop teething sometime around his sixth birthday.  When they start popping out.  Sigh.

So, between those two, I’m down for the count.  Dissertation?  HA.  Oh, sure, I try to write here and there, and I do okay as long as I don’t ever, ever think about the bigger picture (ie: that I’m writing one paragraph or one page, and that’s a drop in the ocean relative to how long the damned thing’s got to be).  But every so often I think about it, and then I get paralyzed through the sheer weight of the thing.

There are good things, I suppose.  The toddler is finally, finally peeing in the potty.  Not pooping, of course – because that would just be too easy.  But she is peeing, and that’s something.  The baby is taking semi-regular naps now – he goes down, but how long he stays is still up in the air.  On good days, he does a good two hours in the afternoon.  On bad days, about 20 minutes.

But, they’re naps, and that’s better than the no naps he wasn’t taking before.

So, anyway, this is why I’ve been AWOL.  I’ve been entertaining myself to death with J-Network’s Japanese TV service (so much fun!  And since I never get out and have no social life, I can justify the money it costs), and M. just got us a Chumby to play with, too.  It’s a silly little contraption, but kind of fun.  And it helps me to wean the toddler off the TV.

Gorgeous day outside…I think we’ll all go have a walk soon.

Baby Borrowers II

I saw the episode with the toddlers…and all I can say is that after the day I’d had that day, I would have gladly sent my own along for the experiment.  As it was, I was oddly comforted by all the trouble the kids were having (when I wasn’t feeling really bad for them; one couple, in particular, who had done really well with the baby had their asses kicked by the toddler.  And it wasn’t that they were doing a bad job per se.  The kid was clearly really upset to be out of his own comfort zone and was ten kinds of miserable…and anyone who’s ever listened to marathon toddler screaming knows that it can push you very, very close to the edge.  I thought the mom who picked up the little boy was harder on them than she needed to be).

Anyway, it’s been more of the same around here, along with compounding frustration on most fronts.  I’m just feeling so overwhelmed by everything, and I could really use a little freaking validation – anything!  Acknowledgment that I’ve got a lot on my plate, that it’s hard to try to do it all without the aid of childcare or any appreciable assistance from husband/family.  I don’t blame them – or, at least, I’m trying not to – because, in the case of family help, I squandered what I had when I had it.  I can hardly whine about being overworked now, when I didn’t do the work I should have when I had help.  In the case of the husband, he’s in the middle of a part-time MBA program that I encouraged him to do, promising that I would take care of things on the home front.  I can hardly throw that back at him when the going gets tough.

So, yeah, all I’d really like for Christmas is some freaking validation that this is extraordinarily hard.  Maybe I’m just a whiny old thing (maybe?), but between relay naps between the kids (first baby – for maybe 30 min. – then toddler, after much crying and screaming [I'd say she's ready to give the naps up, but she's clearly tired come nap time], and then baby for a little catnap before we head into the pre-bedtime slog), and baby boy’s predilection for multiple wakings overnight, I’m running on fumes here.  By the time M. gets home – and this is usually 7 at the earliest, and frequently after 10:30 on school nights – I do not care anymore.  About anything.  Particularly my dissertation.  I have energy enough to read some, but no energy to write.  And I don’t know where to get more – at the energy store?  I’d better wait until a day when I’m able to have the car (ie: not a school day for M.) and hope they have a way for me to look around with a walking toddler and an immobile baby in tow.

I just want to find a nice place all my own, invite everyone in my life over, sit them down at a distance, and then take a box of breakable anything and just start hurling it at the wall.  I’d like people to get some sense of how desperate I feel sometimes – oftentimes – because I feel like I’m in this all by myself.  I don’t get five freaking minutes alone during the daytime, but I’m supposed to throw the kids in bed, assume they’re both actually going to stay asleep, and then immediately turn to even more work?

I dunno.  The kids are very safe with me, but I personally feel kind of desperate.  Which would probably be exhausting if I weren’t already exhausted.

Still here!

I’ve been trying to get back into dissertation writing mode and, thus, mostly AWOL here.  Children have been sleeping a little better; well, the toddler has, anyway.  Ever since the baby came into the room with her, where she can keep an eye on him, she’s mostly slept like the dead until about 6:30 am.  For those of you to whom this sounds early: it’s not.  It’s so late I could weep with gratitude.  It’s so much better than, say, 5:30 am that I count my blessings every time she wakes up and there’s not a “5″ glaring at me from the clock.

Baby Boy, not so much.  He’s been teething his brains out, complete with soaked shirt, for what seems like forever.  He’s the only kid I’ve ever had who actually went through a whole bottle of Infant Tylenol and moved on to the next one.  I feel for him – there are few other signs of teething other than the fact that he’s drooling like a madman, tugging his ears, not very hungry for solid food, and crying in pain.  At one point I’d decided that it must be an ear infection, but it’s not.  And he loves having his gums massaged…

But, for all of that, last night he actually slept from 7-ish until about midnight, and then he didn’t wake up until 5, ate, and went back to bed again until about 8.  Again, me, weeping with happiness and gratitude.  The only drawback is that with every bit of extra sleep I get, my body craves more with a vengeance.

This weekend is our local Obon Festival.  Parking is traditionally a nightmare, so I’m planning to have us there stupidly early in hopes of getting parking on the main road, rather than squeezing our car into tight little nooks along the back road where the temple is located.  It’s always been a fun time, but this year I’ve decided to forgo the pleasure of buying our food there (I know the money goes to the temple, but it’s a lot of money for fairly little food) and I’ll be attempting to bring it instead.  Traditional Japanese Father (he’s not, normally, but in matters of picnic food he’s Mr. Nikkei) wants onigiri and chicken teriyaki (breasts!  In this sense, he’s anything but Japanese; any fool knows that the only good teriyaki is made from thighs, but he’s a breast purist.  Bah).  So I’ll need to figure out how to do all of this sometime on Saturday…we’ll see what transpires.  Maybe I’ll take a picture or something.

But, I have outfits for everyone (except me, because I DO NOT do yukata) and so I’m as ready as I need to be.

Baby Borrowers

Normally, I don’t do reality TV.  And there are issues aplenty with this show, not the least of which is my inability to imagine handing over either of my own kids for a couple of kids to take care of.  And I know that participants on reality TV shows are generally chosen for their ability to incite strong emotions in viewers – usually annoyance.

But even so, there’s something a little cathartic about watching the kids trying to take care of the babies.  I’m closely related to someone who once mentioned something about wanting a baby because it would love her unconditionally (who then went on to have three and has taken those words back in spades), and I also remember feeling like I’d make a great mother at a young age because I loved holding babies.  I don’t think the kids should be ridiculed for being crap parents, since they basically have to hit the ground running, instead of having time to figure out each child’s personality.  Hell, there are times when I can barely figure out what the toddler is doing, much less what’s up with the baby, and I gave birth to them both.

But it’s still perversely satisfying to hear the kids make stupid pronouncements about their fitness as parents, only to see them crumble at the first sign of an all-nighter.  I especially liked how they partied the night before the babies came (I’m sitting here thinking “GO TO SLEEP, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!”…although that could be last night’s every-two-hours-and-he-still-wouldn’t-sleep-in-the-crib marathon talking).  I know I’m being manipulated by casting and editing, but it’s still weirdly validating to watch them stumble their way through the episode.

And one thing that’s kind of interesting is how sweet some of the guys are.  Surfer Dude, in particular, really seems like he’s trying hard to do the right things – reading the manual, listening to the baby’s father – and it’s kind of touching to watch.

——————–

So, yes, they’re sleeping…for now.  The toddler’s post-trip nighttime forays peaked with her waking up at 3 or 4 every freaking morning and wailing that she couldn’t sleep.  I finally let her go get her blanket and sleep on the sofa in the living room, where she invariably fell right to sleep (when she came into our bed she couldn’t sleep – too much potential for socializing, I guess).  But what seems to have finally done the trick is letting the baby sleep in the crib in her/their room.  I’d kept him out until now, since he still wakes up multiple times during the night (WHY???) and I didn’t want her disturbed.  But she started asking if he would sleep in there with her, and since they couldn’t possibly disturb each others’ sleep any more than they were already doing at that point, I said sure, put him in there, and she’s been sleeping soundly ever since.  Even when he wails in the middle of the night, she just mumbles to herself, turns over, and goes back to sleep.  I think it’s a surveillance issue; she wanted to make sure that he wasn’t having some kind of nighttime fun that she was missing out on.

And, weirdly, ever since they’ve been in the same room she’s also gone back to being very sweet towards him.

Right now she’s going through potty training issues – as in, she won’t.  She talks about it a lot, but so far we’ve had one mostly-accidental poop on the toilet and that’s been it.  But my impression is that she needs to decide she’s going to do it on her own.  I feel like if I push much, she’s going to become that much more resistant to the idea.  It would be nice if we could at least be headed in the right direction by Fall, since the preschool she’s enrolled in needs them potty-trained…but my SIL says they’re pretty mellow about the whole thing.  Here’s hoping.

And baby boy is teething.  And trying to learn to eat solids.  And these activities seem to be mutually exclusive.  He’s only kind of interested in solid food (which surprised me; I figured he’d be all about the baby food), but he’s also not very interested in the breast, either.  Not that he doesn’t have reserves – he does.  But still…

Just more misadventures in parenting.  Maybe they should put me on the show for people to tsk over, too.

But oh those days…

As I wrote below, the years go fast, but the days drag.  And drag.  And drag.  Particularly when they begin at 5 with tears and whining.

I really have to fight to remember: 1) that the toddler’s mood is not the direct result of my bad parenting; 2) the big picture; 3) her sweet, cute moments.  When there seems to be absolutely no reasoning with her (I know – what reasoning can you do with a newly-minted three year old?  But she invariably demonstrates, in actions if not words, that she gets a good chunk of what I’m saying, so I tend to give her the benefit of the doubt), the first thing I do is second-guess my tactics.  Especially when said tactics – which are usually of the “be calm and firm” variety – get punctuated with flashes of frustration and anger on my part.  But “anger” here is generally of the raising-my-voice variety, so I don’t think I’m inflicting damage here.

And the big picture is important to me.  I know that a lot of what’s going on is her own inability to express how she’s feeling adequately, and I know that all of this is unlikely to last in the long term.  In the meantime, I want her to know that, however frustrated I may get, I love her and I’ve got her back.  I make a point of telling her the truth about what’s going on with me, and I get the sense that she responds well to that.  And I do make a big deal of the positive things – the fact that she managed to pee one drop into the potty this morning, or that she got out of the bath this evening without pitching a fit like usual (I swear I don’t know how/why this happened; usually she wails and splashes when she has to get out, but today I told her it was time and that she’d get out when the water drained, and when it was gone she stood up and let me help her out without a peep).

And, in the end, she is my beautiful, funny girl.  The kid cracks me up – she talks like Bugs Bunny (no, seriously, she does.  It’s getting less pronounced, but she sounds for the world like she’s from Brooklyn) and intones like Christopher Walken (again, this is true, but you have to be paying attention).  She’s trying so hard to put her big thoughts into sentences containing nothing but the words she knows, which makes for some pretty funny stuff (it’s even kind of amusing – in a frustrating way – when she tells me that I need to stop feeding the baby when she’s feeling jealous).  The moods and fits cloud her charms a bit sometimes, but I do know that they’re there – I just have to remind myself sometimes.

With the baby…well, it’s easy with babies, isn’t it?  At least this one.  He’s stupidly good-natured and he laughs easily and a lot.  He whinges a lot, too, but he’s so obvious about it (both of them are – neither of them will ever be a good liar, I think) that it’s kind of amusing.  But I love the toddler’s complexity as much as the baby’s simpleness.  Usually.

My Big Girl

My first baby turned three yesterday.  We’d had a hellish week, since she was still coming down from the trip (with all the attendant jet-lag and pooping issues that go with it) and was whiny and screechy and just generally unhappy.  Our visit with diapers, budgets & paint on Friday (my first face-to-face with a fellow blogger, and we had such a nice time!) went a long way towards improving her mood, but what really made the difference was – TMI alert here – two poopy diapers late yesterday afternoon.  I didn’t think she’d ever poop when there was so much commotion (something like a bazillion cousins all under the age of 10), but she did and it was the best birthday present I could have gotten (seriously, I came too close to actually showing people the evidence, I was so excited.  The toddler is downright ornery when she ceases to be regular, and we’d already pulled out the big guns last week in CA when she didn’t go all week, so I was really reluctant to do it again.  She was too, judging from her asking to be allowed to do it herself – and I’m glad we waited for her to do it on her own).

Anyway, you’d think the only thing that happened yesterday was that the toddler pooped, but, in fact, it was a busy day all around.  She went with Daddy – their first outing together!! – for breakfast at Ihop in the morning, and then we gathered up our supplies for the party and headed to my parents (much bigger and more centrally located)  house.  Family arrived after awhile, presents were had, and then a very sweet Costco cake.  We had more food than we knew what to do with, but my sister and SIL graciously took a good chunk of it home with them.

I mostly just can’t believe it’s already been three years.  The days, they drag sometimes; but the years seem to be whipping by…