Tag: toddlers

Toddler Life, Chapter 76: Infants Are At War With Our Sleep Schedules

PavowskiLeave a comment

I believe I’ve written before about the sixth sense the babies have about the plans adults have made in the house. In short, if you are a parent of a kid under… mine are only 2, so I’m going to extrapolate a little bit here… 7, that kid will inevitably find a way to unearth your plan, smear it with his slobbery little fingers, then shatter it into tiny little pieces, then eat the pieces and poop them out all over the oriental rug in the living room. The priceless one you inherited from your grandmother. The one valued at over ten thousand dollars, because somehow a rug can be worth more than a car.

They know. They have brains the size of baseballs, but they can smell a plan forming, and the smell is abhorrent to them. They don’t have sophisticated language skills yet, or the ability to set a booby trap or actively create a mess for you to clean up at the expense of whatever thing you were thinking of doing, but what they do have is the knack for becoming unignorably needy and unbearably obnoxious.

Case in point:

Morning runs have been getting dodgy of late. My wife is exhausted from the wee hours wake-ups with sprout #2 (justifiably so) and has asked me to help out with some mid-night changings and feedings. (Mid-night is hyphenated, because oh, if only they happened at midnight. No, were they at midnight, they would fall in between REM cycles and allow for a nice long stretch of sleep unbroken before sprout #1 wakes at half-past waaaaay too early. These happen at 10:45 — roughly an hour after we head to bed — and 3 AM — just a few hours before we’re going to wake up.)

There’s a corollary here which neatly encapsulates the Catch-22 that takes place in my house every night (and here, were current events different, I’d quote Bill Cosby’s Himself routine about how “the same thing happens every night”, but the world is an ugly place and I can not currently quote Bill Cosby without feeling a little bit skeevy). Sprout #2 begins crying at oh, whatever time she damn well feels like it. My wife sleeps much more lightly than I do, so she wakes up immediately (I can sleep merrily for at least ten minutes of infant fussing). So she’s awake anyway, but I’ve promised to help out, so wife starts poking me in the ribs to wake me up. I get up. Go downstairs to warm up a bottle. Bring it back upstairs and begin to change baby’s diaper. By the time I get the bottle in her mouth, about twenty minutes have passed since she started crying. It’s a funny trick of the universe that twenty minutes is about the amount of time it would take for my wife to hear the crying, get up, change the diaper, stick a boob in the kid’s mouth, and be back in bed. But I dutifully feed the kid. Sometimes she accepts the bottle, sometimes she doesn’t. Either way, it’s about 40 minutes from the time she originally started crying before I can have the little bundle of joy laid back in her bed; 40 minutes which my wife cannot sleep through because of first the crying and then the slurping and then the singing and fussing and finally the walking around as I soothe baby back (hopefully) to sleep.

If that was too much to follow: it takes my wife 15-20 minutes to settle the crying baby back down with roughly a 95% success rate, and it takes me about 45 minutes to settle the baby with more or less a 30% success rate, because even though the girl can take a bottle, what she really wants is a boob, and to a lesser extent, her mother. But I am trying to help, so I soldier on anyway.

Right, back to the point. Baby wakes up at 4 AM this morning. I have the brilliant idea that I’ll put the baby down, and, since I’ll be awake anyway, I’ll suit up and go for a run, then come back and go to sleep if time allows, and if not, well, the run will have woken me up.

But the baby knows, and she won’t take the bottle from me. I’m determined to pull my weight and let my wife get her last two hours of beauty sleep before she goes to work (she’s making bank while I’m home for the break), so I keep at it. Baby fights me for twenty minutes, drinking about two swallows of milk and drooling half the bottle down her onesie, which then needs changing. Changing the onesie makes her cold, which wakes her up even more. Then she poops, so I have to change her diaper, which makes her even colder.

Now it’s 4:30 AM, and the baby is wide awake. Sometimes she can fake me out and appear to be awake but actually be very very tired, so I lay her in the crib and decide to give her a few minutes to see if she falls asleep while I suit up for my run.

She doesn’t. She begins squalling louder than before. I trudge back in and try the bottle again, but she demonstrates surprising forearm strength and nearly swats it out of my hand. There’s nothing for it: she’s awake, but I’m going to insulate my wife from having to get out of bed, so I take her downstairs and watch her flerp around on the floor for a while. (“Flerping” is that uncoordinated rolling, scooting, flopping and stumbling that only a baby who’s surprisingly mobile but not yet able to crawl can accomplish.) This she does for fully an hour without showing any sign of getting tired.

So I can’t run, because the baby is awake and will cry like I’ve stolen every cookie from her entire life if I lay her in the crib. And I can’t go back to sleep, because if I close my eyes for an instant while the baby is flerping in the floor, she’s likely to pull the Christmas tree over, or gag herself on the tail of a cat, or somehow set fire to the drapes. This infant — brain the size of a baseball, remember — has not only pooped on my plan for a productive early morning, but destroyed my fallback plan of going back to sleep, and has made me feel like an idiot besides for now being stuck on the couch watching her flerp at 5 AM.

5:45 AM comes, and I hear my wife stirring upstairs. I take the baby up and relate the events of the morning, and share my opinion that the baby is probably still hungry since she hasn’t actually eaten in nine hours. My wife takes the baby into the nursery and within two shakes of a cricket’s whisker, the baby is asleep, drunk on breastmilk straight from the tap.

I go for my run anyway at this point, because I’m stubborn like that, and spend the rest of the day in a mind-fog that can only come from … well, from a sleep-deprived night with an infant who is, apparently, smarter than all of us. Or at least smarter than me.

The only rational course is to plan to wake up in the night to feed her. That way, when she foils my “plan”, she will play right into my trap of letting my wife and I sleep through the night.

This will work.

Please, let this work.

Quarantine Zone

Pavowski2 Comments

It’s a well-established fact that children are essentially walking germ repositories. You combine an uncontrollable urge to grab and play with any- and everything that drifts in front of their maniacal little eyes with an inability to remain upright for more than thirty seconds at a time that results in a lot of contact with the ground and top it off with the mental lack of development to know that hand-washing is a good thing, and it’s no surprise that germs stick to them like lint on my nice pants. (Seriously, I have never had pants that attract lint like these navy slacks. I feel like a candy cane on the lawn and the ants are swarming.)

This time, though, it was my wife who brought the bug home. One of those feels-like-a-cold-but-it’s-not-really-a-full-blown-cold things, with the stuffiness and the sore throat and the general feeling of weakness and impending doom that these things bring. Regularly I ask what I can do to help, and regularly she responds, “kill me.”

She’s been miserable for almost a week, and when you couple that with the fact that the babies are regressing and waking up in the middle of the night, well… let’s just say it adds up not to be fun times in the house of Pav. Trouble is, my lovely wife wakes up if a mouse farts in the house, whereas I can sleep through crying kids, howling wind in the trees… hell, I could probably sleep through a shootout in the cul-de-sac. So naturally, she wakes up way before I can hope to when the kids wake up in the night, so I have virtually no chance to beat her to the punch on handling the kids. In short, she’s been not only miserable but also exhausted, and there is precious little I can do to alleviate the trouble.

Contagion was a horrifying film that came out a few years ago about one of those super-bugs that comes out of nowhere and wipes out the better part of the population in the space of a few months. Fantastic viewing for times like these in its own right, but it taught me a word that I wish I could unlearn: Fomites. A fomite is any otherwise inanimate or harmless object which is tainted with the infectious microorganisms from a doomed person, and the film brilliantly illustrates the concept by showing closeups of fingers touching elevator buttons, lips sipping from cups of coffee, hands passing cash back and forth, shoulders brushing through revolving doors. In short, GERMS ARE EVERYWHERE AND YOU’RE DOOMED.

Somehow, strangely, I was laying low and avoiding the disease. But when you’re a jerk like me you can only avoid fate for so long. Also, my wife and I share a lot of the same hoodies when we lounge around the house (yes, we can afford heat, but no, that doesn’t mean we use it all the time, do I look like I’m made of money). She used one of my favorites for an entire day the other day, coughing and spewing her dread spray into its shoulders and elbows and didn’t tell me, then I wore said hoodie while doing laundry this weekend. Essentially I was wearing the Queen Bee of the fomite colony in the house.

So now I have it.

And my wife is a lovely woman, but she takes a disconcerting pleasure in the fact that I have succumbed to this plague after she’s suffered with it for a week. I don’t know, I’d think there would be a little bit of sympathy or something given that she knows both the drear dankness I’m feeling and the creeping death in my future. But no. With poorly-masked glee she asks me how I’m feeling. Trying not to grumble too much, I mention the goopy drip in the back of my throat. She grins and claps with delight and tells me that the stuffy, my-head-is-full-of-slime feeling is coming next, and I wake up the next morning and there it is: my head feels like it weighs an extra five pounds with all the snot I’m piling up. And I look to her for pity as we wake up and she only laughs.

To her credit, I usually resist these things and she usually doesn’t, so I guess I can excuse a bit of schadenfreude. But that doesn’t make things any easier to swallow when my throat feels like garden gnomes have been going after it with a potato peeler and my skull feels like it’s crammed with cottage cheese.

The only hope at this point is that the kids don’t catch it. If the kids catch this bug, abandon all hope.

The Thunderdome of Ideas

Pavowski7 Comments

How do you make sense of the ideas that occur to you?

I’m talking here about stories, lyrics, visions, hell, even blarg ideas. They come from somewhere, and whether that source is some external stimulus like a news story or a fantastic article or a brilliant film or a gripping novel, they all end up getting filtered through the mire of neurons and synapses inside your skull. Which means that from the time an idea first strikes, it gets tossed into the Thunderdome that’s raging inside your head at any given moment.

Maybe I should step away from the second person (pardon me, second person) and stick to the first (oh, hi, me). It’s a Thunderdome in my head. Many ideas enter. Few survive to be acted upon.

Seriously. It’s a wonder I can get anything done. I’m as scatterbrained as they come, so when a new idea strikes for me, it’s thrown into the arena with the other millions of things I’m thinking about, which include, but are not limited to:

  • My kids and whether I’ve remembered to feed them / change their diapers / change their clothes / clean up their messes / set a good example for them / actually know where they are at the moment / OH GOD WHERE ARE THE KIDS
  • The dollars and cents flowing through all the metaphorical holes in my metaphorical pockets (because money isn’t real anymore you know, it’s all just ones and zeros on some bank program and okay this is not a conspiracy theory blog) and all the stress associated with that.
  • The fact that it’s winter, and in the four winters we’ve weathered in this house, we’ve had pipes freeze and burst in the walls twice despite our best efforts, so does winter number five mean that nightmare is coming around again…
  • The kids have been quiet for a while, WHAT IS MY TODDLER DOING
  • The scent of burning that’s coming from somewhere and I can’t isolate it… is it the neighbors burning leaves? A car burning oil? The wires in the walls spontaneously combusting and preparing to burn the house down?
  • The theme song from Thomas the Tank Engine just keeps bouncing around in there for no good reason; it certainly isn’t helping me to focus. (Sidenote: “shunt” is a fun word that sounds dirty but isn’t–meaning to shove aside or divert–try using it at parties!)
  • How the balls did my kid dump an entire two pounds of dog food into the water bowl without me hearing it?

And that’s just the past, say, thirty seconds.

So any idea I’m trying to have, whether related to my current novel or any other prospective novel I may ever conceivably get around to writing if I ever finish this one, has to step into the steel cage death match with these other thoughts if it wants to win my focus long enough to be pondered, let alone written down and saved for later. And these other thoughts take no prisoners. They have nailbats and rusty crowbars and spiked shoes. That Thomas theme song carries around a friggin’ garrote in its pocket and will dispatch an interloping idea without batting an eye.

Somehow… somehow… some ideas make it through the riot of distractions and make it into the novel. I’m working on weaving in a particularly good one that occurred to me a few weeks ago while I was writing a blarg post about how I was stuck for ideas about how to improve my draft. Did it arise out of need? Was it the strongest of a series of weak, malformed conceptions of various other plot points I could have used instead, and the strongest survived? Or did it blunder through, catching the toddlers during a nap and catching that Thomas theme song looking the other way long enough to escape into daylight?

I have no idea where the ideas come from or how they get processed. I feel like if I did I’d be a tremendously better writer, and I could therefore avoid unnecessary and cumbersome adverbs in my prose, like “tremendously,” to choose a particularly egregious offender completely at random. Also egregious offenders: “particularly,” “completely,” and “egregious” (not an adverb but still offensive).

See, the idea to sidetrack into all that nonsense about adverbs came from somewhere, I decided it was a good detour to make and I made it. Somebody (even if that somebody is me) sent that message, and somebody (probably me) received it and acted on it.

Where does that impulse come from?

Is that my authorial text-transcending through-line? Is it an undercurrent of subconscious thematic tendency? Or did whoever’s pulling the strings in my writerly Thunderdome take pity on the adverb idea and give it a set of poison-tipped spiked brass knuckles to help it in the fight?

I fear this is one of those unknowable things that philosophers might struggle with through the ages, though they’d perhaps do it more eloquently than with Thunderdomes and brass knuckles. And they’d certainly steer clear of Thomas the Tank Engine and any associated theme songs.

This post is part of SoCS. This week’s prompt was the diabolical homonym quartet of “sense / scents / cents / sent”, a series of words which basically describes why anybody learning English as a second language might end up banging his head against a wall. Because I’m a fool for pain, I used them all.

Shunt.

Toddler Life, Chapter 171: Covered in Poop

PavowskiLeave a comment

My children know when their daddy is holding them. They say that the mother releases chemicals that calm her child when she holds them, and these chemicals strengthen the bonding instinct, encourage the child to relax, and so forth–all the things needed to foster a good relationship. I’m convinced that the father emits pheromones of his own, and these pheromones encourage the child to evacuate all of his or her fluids as soon as possible.

I know, I know. I’m the parent of a toddler and an infant, of course I’m going to encounter my share of poop and barf and pee.

But this is more than that. If they were capable of rational, malicious thought, I’d swear it was deliberate. A conspiracy, even. But they’re not. Which means it’s chemical.

  • Exhibit A: My son is three weeks old, and spending another (thankfully) uneventful day in the NICU. At about one in the afternoon, I’m burping him after a feeding and he has a rather violent projectile vomiting incident which bounces off my shoulder, splashes down my back, and splats satisfyingly on the floor. That’s not a big deal; he had digestive issues and spit-ups were all too common. Then an hour later, I’m rocking him in the chair and I feel a warm patch on my stomach. He’s peed through the diaper and soiled my shirt for the second time that day. Okay, that’s a heck of a coincidence–pee and barf on the same shirt in the space of an hour–but it doesn’t mean anything. Until I’m changing his diaper about another hour on, and a fountain of poo erupts from his tiny little butt and sprays out to a distance of four or five feet on the hospital floor, in a horrible messy line up my pants and across my shoes. I take to calling this the trifecta, a day which will live in toddler poop infamy.
  • Exhibit B: My son is about a year and a half old, and he has the stomach flu. If you’ve had a toddler with the stomach flu, you know the pain. If not, I’ll spare you. Anyway, he’s got a happy strain of it, which gives him no ill effects aside from explosive diarrhea, so he’s merrily gallivanting around the house, then he turns to me and says, “stomach!” So I scoop him up and run for the tub, because I know what’s coming, and to my credit, I got him there, but he and I were both doused in poop as he went into the tub. Sigh.
  • Exhibit C: It’s two days after Exhibit B, and we are having a lovely day on a weekend. Mom’s in the kitchen, cooking or doing whatever moms do in the kitchen on a weekend. He’s in my lap and we’re watching an episode of something awful. Barney, maybe, or Yo Gabba Gabba. With no warning at all, his stomach erupts and blankets me and the sofa in a thin film of white, curdled, toddler spew. To his credit, this scares the hell out of him, and he starts crying, which makes it even worse. That couch has never been the same.
  • Exhibit D: We fast-forward to two days ago. I’ve been at work for an extra-long day (soccer practice is starting up after school, so I’m pulling 11-hour days) and I arrive home to find my wife exhausted and frazzled, so I gladly take my five-month-old daughter off her hands so that she can go do whatever moms do in their bathrooms on a weeknight. I’m cradling the baby and cooing and giggling at her and she rips loose with a projectile vomit that ricochets off my shoulder, douses her and me, and covers the bottom half of my face with a fine mist of baby barf. This child never spits up. She chose to have her inaugural barf-your-brains-out movement all over daddy. This moment makes me glad we replaced the carpet in that room with laminate last year.
  • Exhibit E: FINALLY, DADDY CATCHES A BREAK. It’s yesterday. Friday night, and everything’s allllllll right. Baby girl gets grumpy every night in the five o’clock hour, and the best remedy is putting her in the Baby Bjorn carrier, better known in our house as the Daddy Caddy (since I used it the most with sprout #1, though mommy sure gets her fair share with it as well). I think that’s important to point out, because my smell is ALL UP IN that thing. Anyway, mommy’s got her in the Daddy Caddy, and all of a sudden asks me if I smell poop. Well, I don’t, but I do see the poop stain creeping down baby’s leg and the bottom of mommy’s shirt. I’m trying not to laugh but inside I’m turning somersaults because finally, FINALLY, mommy got pooped on instead of me. She even got it on her hands while she was trying to clean up. Life is good.
  • Exhibit F: But payback is a beesting. It’s today. I’ve got baby girl in the Daddy Caddy, and it might as well be a shot-for-shot remake of Exhibit E, except it’s me this time. Poop all over the baby, poop all over the Caddy, poop all over daddy. It’s on my hands as I clean her. I might even have touched my face in there by accident–I couldn’t even tell you. It’s all a haze of wet wipes and orange goop.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I can’t even recount all the times I’ve been sneezed on or drooled on, unsuspectingly touched pee or poop, ended up wearing barf or spit-up. Of course there was the great tub-turd incident back in July. My point is, this is all too much bodily fluids to write off as the by-product of toddler interaction. Either the sprouts are actively targeting me, or, as I posit, something about me causes them to swell to bursting.

The only natural course is to buy a hazmat suit for all future interactions with the kids. For their protection, not mine. And the house’s. And, yeah, okay, also mine.

Parental Exhaustion

Pavowski11 Comments

When you’re a parent, the exhaustion creeps in by degrees.  You don’t even notice it.

I’m not talking about when the sprout is first born and you go from sleeping 8, 9, 10 hours a night to catching three hours at a stretch and being supremely thankful for it.  No, everybody knows parents of newborns don’t get any sleep.  I’m talking about a few months, if not years, later.  The tantrums, the waking up in the middle of the night, the stampeding around the house for hours on end, it’s just a part of life.  You don’t notice it.

Somehow, you find yourself subsisting on less and less sleep.  You get by on five or six hours and you think you’ve won the lottery.  The raccoon rings under your eyes look less like black circles and more like stylish pirate eyeliner (to your mind at least).  On the weekend, you sleep until six AM and it feels like the angels have delivered you to a downy bed of heaven feathers.  You’re still shambling through the day like a hamstrung zombie, but you feel almost normal.  This is your life, and it isn’t so bad.

What you don’t realize (because you’re too tired to realize anything that isn’t whacking you over the head with a pool noodle, despite the fact that you don’t own a pool to necessitate a noodle) is that that exhaustion is piling up like collectible whatzits in the closet, and there comes a point at which the exhaustion you’re sweeping under the rug is now seeping out through the edges like so much asbestos particulate.  And as much as you develop an ability to power through and function on minimal amounts of sleep, the time comes when the exhaustion can no longer be denied.  You find yourself resting your eyes at traffic lights, resting your entire body on the couch during the third episode in a row of Power Rangers, and dashing to bed at the hallowed hour of eight o’clock because you just can’t take it anymore.

The sprout’s bedtime routine has become a little bit more manageable in the past few months.  He’s gone from demanding three or four stories and two songs to just two bedtime stories and a bit of a cuddle, followed by five or ten minutes of me lying in his floor so that he doesn’t have to fall asleep by himself.  This is not a bad arrangement.  He gets the comfort of his big bad daddy being there in the room with him as he drifts off to sleep, and I get a few blessed minutes of quiet to recharge for the sprint to bedtime.

But tonight the exhaustion crept in by another degree.

I read a Dr. Seuss double-header, tucked him in, turned the lights off, and stretched out on the floor, and the next thing I knew my wife was poking me in the back in the dark.  In the space of about thirty seconds, I’d fallen into a deathlike, dreamless sleep and logged nearly a full hour of blissful naptime right there on the carpet.

I used to wonder how my dad could sleep anywhere in the house, at any time of the day, for any amount of time.  I think the picture is becoming a little bit clearer.

This post is part of SoCS.