A Little Better

Last night, Jack slept in his crib all night!  Woo!   He was restless and cried out a lot, but it never got to the point where we needed to go in.  Chris peeked in to his room just before and 8 and was greeted with “Dada!”

This morning he ate his breakfast and we went to the grocery store and things were pretty good til we got back, and he refused his snack.  Then he cried and cried when it was naptime.  Finally he went to sleep, and woke up 30 minutes later!  Ugh.  Lunch was a little painful but he soldiered through.

I think he’s on the mend, but not quite back to his old self.  This afternoon we’re going to a playdate.  I think I will enjoy it more than Jack; I have certainly been missing adult company.

Tough Week

And it’s only Wednesday!  With Jack’s being sick, we’ve been cooped up at home all week so far, and his night-sleeping has gotten even worse.  Tonight I did get out of the house:  I went to a 3-hour neighborhood association meeting.  Well, it was nice to be out with rational adults for a bit anyway.

Jack’s fever has gone down, but the tongue blister is still there and makes him really not want to eat.  I’ve actually been spoon feeding him… it’s like he’s a baby again!  I don’t know why his sleeping has been so awful; is it the blister?  Does he have other ones I can’t see?  Is his throat sore?  Who knows.  Last night he just wouldn’t sleep in his crib, no matter what.  He’d fall asleep fine on one of us, but put him down in the crib and he’d leap up and start crying hysterically.  In the end, Chris slept on the floor with him in his room, but Jack still didn’t sleep much.  Tylenol did not seem to help.

There have been times over the last few days where I’ve felt like a great parent, and times where I’ve felt like a terrible parent.  On the great parent side, we’ve been spending hours and hours just playing or hanging out together, reading books, coloring, singing, stacking blocks, and just plain cuddling.  I’ve rocked him and sung the same lullabies over and over.

On the terrible parent side, today I was speaking to him like he was a jerky adult, not a sick 19-month old.  He didn’t nap long today, and I was exhausted, and trying to eat some leftover pizza for lunch (haven’t been to the grocery store, either) and he was wailing and wouldn’t eat and wouldn’t play and I said, “What?  Now I can’t eat?  What about me!!!!”  It was kinda pathetic.  I hear myself saying things and at the very same moment I’m thinking “Give me a break, YOU are the adult here!  He is 19 months old and SICK!” but sometimes things just come out.

Earlier he wanted me to color and I said “Jack, I am just too tired to color,” and he had a little tantrum.  He threw each crayon on the floor, then all the paper, then started shaking his head back and forth and pounding the table.  It was kind of cute, actually.  When you’ve been stuck in the house three days, this is what passes for entertainment.

Poor little guy.  I wish he could tell me what was hurting.  I am crossing my fingers he’ll sleep a little better tonight.

The Naptime Dilemma*

Jack naps once a day, anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours.  Usually, it’s an hour and a half.  I wish that somehow I would know how long it was going to be beforehand.  Then I’d know whether it was worth trying to lie down for a nap, or get involved in a project that might last more than 45 minutes.  So many times I spend the first part of the nap doing chores/eating lunch/reading email, that when it comes up to a little after an hour, I am unsure of what to do next.

If I think, “Maybe it’ll be a long nap today.  I’ll start working on something that will take me an hour,” no doubt he’ll wake up in the middle of said project.   If I think, “He’s going to wake up soon,” I end up surfing the web or wasting time while he sleeps another hour.  Decisions, decisions!

*I think The Naptime Dilemma would be a good title for the 13th book in Simon Hawke’s TimeWars series.

Topics, anyone?

If anyone has anything they want me to post about (whether it’s related to parenting or not), leave a comment or send me an email and I will be happy to oblige.

Jack update:  he had a very restless but long nap.  He woke up quite upset, and I noticed he had a white blister on the tip of his tongue.  Poor guy was pretty miserable and wouldn’t eat.  I gave him some more Tylenol and he felt better after a while and was ravenous, but because of the blister, eating was painful.  He’d shove food his mouth, start crying, then shove in more food.  It would have been funny if it weren’t so sad.  His fever went down, but was back up to 101 before bed… we’ll see what the night brings!

Yawn

Last night was rough.. Jack didn’t sleep very well, kept crying out.  I got up with him a few times, but mostly he was in his half-awake state, not really stirring, just doing the on/off “wahh”.  So I’m pretty tired today!

He still had a fever this morning, so I gave him some more Tylenol.   He doesn’t have any other symptoms yet that I can see.  Poor little guy.  He’s down for his nap now; hopefully it will be a long one!

SAHM, again

(That’s “Stay At Home Mom”..).  Just read an interesting article called “Mother of all recessions:  As the Bay Area’s stay-at-home moms crash to reality, Diana Kapp wrestles with a provocative question: Can the financial meltdown do us all an enormous favor by forcing career women off the mommy track and back into the workforce?”

She’s a little ticked off about how so many career women have dropped their jobs in favor of being stay-at-home-moms, and how it allows the men to go off and pursue their passions/dreams while the women stay at home just taking care of the kids.

As I’ve written about before, I have a lot of mixed feelings about this.  In an ideal world, we’d have a lot more flexibility with working, and it would be much more common for people to work part-time.  This would allow both moms and dads to spend time with their kids (or, if you didn’t have kids, doing other things in life besides working).  But the truth is, it’s hard to get part-time work, and you don’t get health insurance that way, and the bigger truth is:  it’s still almost always the woman who stays home.

Some people argue that it’s a waste for someone to get a high-level degree and then stay at home with the kids.  I don’t know what to say to that.  I do see their point….. but most SAHMs still work before and after having kids.  Wouldn’t it be nice if parents could take turns staying at home, without damaging their careers?  Wouldn’t it be nice if it weren’t the default for the woman to stay at home?

There are things I miss about working.  Some of them are related to the work itself; some are related to the more social aspects of hanging out with work colleagues.  I have no idea what the best solution is; I am sure it’s different for different people.

In other news, Jack has a fever of 102 tonight.  So it’s one of those times when I’m glad I DON’T have a full-time job, so I can stay home with him tomorrow.

Babysitting

Tonight, Jack had a non-family member put him to bed for the first time.  He knows the sitter; she has babysat him a lot before (during the daytime) and he is very comfortable with her, but tonight he had a hard time.

When we left he was crying and saying “Mama!” but I figured he’d be happy soon enough.  When we came home he was asleep, but the sitter said he’d cried a while after we left, and was very sad during his bedtime routine.  Apparently he kept saying “Dada” tearfully through every part (book, toothbrushing, etc).   It makes my heart break thinking about it!

I know he’ll be fine, and I think it’s good for other people to take care of him sometimes, but it still makes me sad when I imagine him feeling sad.

Fame

Jack and I were on TV the other day.  Our agent said he should be in commercials, so we’ve enrolled him in acting classes, and it’s really paying off!  Um, not really, but we were on TV.

We were in downtown San Carlos, and I was going to the quilt store to get some hangers for the quilt a friend made for Jack.  There was a film crew in front of the store, and when we came out, the woman doing the interviewing said “Quick!  What’s your favorite guilty pleasure TV show?”  I said “The Millionaire Matchmaker,” and she said “Great, come over here and let us interview you.”

We crouched down on either side of Jack’s stroller and she asked me some questions about the show and what I liked to eat while I watch TV (I said “Candy,” and when she asked what kind I had to pause, not because I didn’t know, but because there are so many options!  I finally went with Heath bars.)  Later she asked, “What kind of candy does Jack like to eat when he watches TV?” and then I really did pause, because a) he doesn’t watch TV and b) he hasn’t had candy yet.

It was for a local show called Best of the Bay, and it features various businesses and interviews of local people around the Bay Area.  We recorded it on our DVR, and I was hoping they’d put it on-line, but so far they haven’t.  I have to figure out a way to get it off our DirectTV DVR and onto the computer.

Now what?

When Chris and I left the hospital after Jack was born, I thought, “How can they let us walk out of here with a BABY?  We have no idea what we’re doing!”

I read a lot of blogs/journals by people who have kids, and oftentimes they’d write things like “Susie’s favorite food is Greek yogurt,” or “It was time to switch Jimmy from two naps to one,” and I’d think……… How do they know?  How will I ever learn these parts of parenting?

I’ve read some parenting books, but on the whole I don’t think they’ve guided much of my behavior.  Talking to my mom and sister, and my friends who have kids, certainly has influenced me.  But a lot of it just seems to happen of its own accord.  It turns out a lot of my opinions about how to raise Jack, and how our daily lives should go, was already in me.

I certainly don’t mean to say I have it figured out, or that I never think “What the heck are we going to do about this?” or “Boy, that was the wrong thing to say.”  It’s just that some of those little things that filled me with anxiety before I had Jack, have largely been non-issues.  We learn as we go.

How did I know when Jack needed to go from 2 naps to 1?  He told me, I guess.  He stopped taking his afternoon nap; he had trouble falling asleep for his morning nap; we tried some 1-nap days and it seemed to work out.  It didn’t happen in one day, and there was back and forth, but it happened.

Thankfully, so far Chris and I have been pretty much on the same page about the day-to-day raising of Jack.  I imagine that we’ll have conflicts as the years go by, but that’s ok.  We’ll learn it as we go!

Contrasts

Yesterday Jack and I went down to my friend Lisa’s for the day.  Her son, Jon, is 4.5 months younger than Jack, and we try and get together once a week.  Jack was fine in the morning, and I kept reminding him we were leaving soon.  When it was time to go, he helped me put his crayons away, and then when I asked him to get his shoes and socks, he started freaking out.

He was shrieking and crying and hanging on to my legs, didn’t want to put his shoes on, tried to stop me from going out the door to the garage.  I finally had to put him into the car seat forcibly.  That’s no picnic for either of us.  I figured once we got on the way he’d be fine, but he cried on and off the whole drive down.  When we got to Lisa’s neighborhood, he calmed down, and after I got him out of the car, he ran to meet Lisa when she opened the door.  He was perfectly happy all day, then cried again off and on on the drive home.

I thought he might be so upset because he was afraid we were going back to the gym childcare!  But maybe that’s just me projecting.

This morning he was good as gold, even helping me put on his diaper.  We went off to preschool without a hitch, but he was unusually clingy there.  Most of the time he doesn’t even look back, but goes off to play.  Today he kept coming back to find me (I was on the art station) and was crying a couple of times.  He didn’t want to do a handprint.  He did play by himself eventually, but it was just a different Jack.