juthwara

longstrider to K: "Your pants are on backwards, kiddo."

K: "No! They're on sideways!"

I got K a book the other night which has a two-piece jigsaw puzzle on each page. She's been ready for puzzles more complicated than one piece for a while, but it seems like most puzzles seem to leap from one piece directly up to eight, and I don't think she's quite ready for that (although she's doing incredibly well with shape matching these days, so she might be up to it). So this book seemed like a nice intermediate step.

It's a big hit. She'll go through and pull out all the pieces, and then pick up a piece, open the book and say, "Does it go here? Noooooo. Here? YES!"

And then you hear the thud of her parents dying of cute.

*****

I talked to my mother the other night and learned two things:

1. My cousin is getting married in Colorado this July, so she suggested that my brother and I go out with her. It's blowing my mind a bit, that the cousin who was a tiny baby at our family reunion in 1984 is getting married. Isn't she still a baby?

I'm looking forward to seeing that side of the family. I haven't seen most of them since, lordy, 2001. I'll get to see my favorite great aunt, Aunt Doris, who is just about the nicest great-aunt ever. She's 90 and still going strong. I'm looking forward to introducing K to her.

Part of why we're all going out is so we can spread Dad's ashes. He spent part of his growing up years in Colorado and he's always loved the mountains there. My uncle will be able to join us as well if we do it there. He said that he should be able to find us a back road to some out of the way place where we can scatter the ashes without running afoul of the law. The thought of going someplace like Estes Park is nice, but we don't want some friendly ranger wandering up to find out what we're doing.

"Oh, just spreading human remains, sir!"
"Yes, this is my husband. We're throwing him off a cliff."

2. My mother is contemplating buying a condo. It makes sense. One person doesn't really need a five bedroom house, especially since she can't get into half of it. She wouldn't have to worry about hiring people to plow in the winter and take care of the yard in the summer.

I can't say it's not a wrench to think about losing my childhood home, though. And the thought of shoveling out that basement - ai-yi-yi. Pardon me while I curl up in the fetal position here for a while. Thank goodness my brother and I have been progressively working over the years to chip away at Stuff Mountain when we're home for the holidays.

I'd like to pout about this, but it turns out I'm too mature to demand that my mother stay in a house that's too big for her just for my sake. Adulthood is inconvenient sometimes.

*****

I have to say this very quietly, in case K hears me and decides to never sleep again in a fit of toddler contrariness: bedtime hasn't been too bad for the past several days. Friday, K fell asleep early, woke up around ten and stayed awake for a while, but was clearly sleepy and content to stay in bed until she drifted back off on her own. Last night, she played quietly in her room after I put her down and was asleep by 9:30, then proceeded to sleep until nearly 9 this morning. Tonight, well, she was still awake when I went upstairs 20 minutes ago. But she's quiet and in her room. I really can't ask for anything more.

Do I dare hope that the nighttime chaos is coming to an end? Or have I just cursed us to seven more years of bad sleep?

Dear Daylight Savings Time,

I hate you. Please go away. Nothing personal.


Daylight Saving Time came at a very poor time for us while we're still trying to deal with K's sleep problems. Because of course, when you have a toddler that's already staying up far too late, what you really want is to shove time back an hour so her body thinks it's an hour earlier than it actually is, giving her the stamina to stay up another hour, right?

The sleep avoidance is also harder to deal with in our new house. At the old house, one of us was usually in the room next to hers while she was going to sleep, which usually kept her in her room. Now, we're in the basement, which has led to a toddler running around upstairs at will and getting into any manner of trouble. We've finally resorted to a gates across her doorway. Actually, this is our third gate. The first was a classic tension-mounted gate which she was able to push down (she could have just opened it on her own if she were a little stronger). The second was a gate-type, which she figured out how to open within fifteen minutes. Mind you, we used both of these gates in the old house with no problems. The problem with children is that they keep getting smarter.

So now we have a hardware mounted swing-gate, with four boxes of books in front of it to prevent her from crawling underneath (if we had mounted it lower, she would have been able to climb over it). Does four boxes seem like overkill? Not after Monday night.

We had heard some thumps, but didn't go up investigate right away. When we did, we discovered:

1. She had pushed the top box, filled with magazines, over, spilling magazines all over the place, and then pushed the bottom box out of the way.
2. She had pulled half of the contents out of her dresser. Not unusual, but it added to the atmosphere.
3. She then went to the refrigerator and got two bags of shredded cheese, apparently wanting a snack.
4. Which is why her carpet, the rocking chair, her bed and the top of her low bookcase were all coated in cheese.

It's not like we've never gone up to her room to discover a mess before - the time she got ahold of her diaper cream comes to mind as a particularly memorable moment (as a point of interest, it is very hard to get cream meant to be waterproof out of carpet. And a room with Burt's Bees diaper cream smeared all over it is very pungent). But I think this goes down as the worst.

It shouldn't surprise that the child who was able to get out of a sleepsack put on backwards with a safety pin through the zipper has a talent for getting around gates (thankfully, she doesn't strip any more - she just changes her clothes if she feels like it). I don't care if she plays in her room until she's ready to go to sleep. But when she runs around upstairs to keep herself awake and then rampages through the refrigerator like a teenager, some sort of containment strategy is needed. It's been two nights since we added the extra layer of boxes and she hasn't gotten out yet. I hope this is the box that can finally trap Houdini.