18 Months

It's summer, as you can see. Isn't it beautiful? Summer is beautiful.

Today I was making up a little song for the kids to mark their half birthday, but didn't get very far. Nora's part goes like this:

Nora Nora, we adore ya...

Then I needed something for Milo, but not a whole lot rhymes with Milo. Jake suggested,

Milo Milo, you're a pile 'o...love

But somehow, "pile 'o" just doesn't sound too great, even if it's a pile 'o love. Eventually I came up with this:

Nora Nora, we adore ya

You're a sweet and feisty gal

Milo Milo, you're a philo...dough

You are sweet and tasty now

Hmm. Needs some work. The only other word I can think of that rhymes with Milo is "silo", and it's hard to work that into a song.

Because the kids are now 18 months we've come up across the absolute deadline for getting rid of bottles. According to their doctor, if they keep drinking bottles after this, they will get tooth decay, deformed mouths, brain damage and scurvy. Or something like that. So this weekend we got rid of bottles cold turkey. It hasn't been pretty. I can only imagine what it's going to be like when we toss the pacifiers. 

Today I looked carefully at Nora's mouth and I could see the whites of both of her top front teeth starting to poke through her gums. Hooray! Lately she does seem to have been feeling a bit better. It's only 3 or 4 times a day that her head starts spinning around 360 degrees and the demons from hell escape through her mouth. Once these teeth poke through Nora will have 4 teeth, and I'm psyched about that because having teeth on the top and the bottom of her mouth will hopefully allow her to bite things off, which she currently cannot do.

Nora never holds still to get photographed, especially when outside. This next picture shows Nora's extremely annoyed face, because I was grabbing her hand and trying to get her to stand still for a second so that I could take her picture.

Nora is making up weird versions of words these days, which is awesome. For instance, her word for pajamas is "jamamas". Itsy bitsy spider is "bitsy bellow". This is not to be confused with pretty flowers, which are "pretty bellows". Pacifier is "pafier" and Cheerios is "cheetos". Most of Nora's words are well pronounced, though. Today she learned "fountain" and got it right the first time. Nora learns lots of new words every day and is putting together words like a champ now, like "more bubbles" and "outside park" and "I got you, Mama".

Nora has gotten over her dislike of sand and now likes to play with the sand table. The only problem with a sand table, as I have learned, is that 18-month old kids do not keep sand in the sand table. They like to spill it onto the ground. Nora also likes to carefully place little piles of sand onto her shoulders and onto her head. It's like she's preparing to carry as much sand as possible using only her body as a vessel. Combine this with sticky arms from the sunblock and you have delightfully sand-covered everything. It's like a day at the beach. 

We spend a lot of time outside right now. Nora's favorite things are bubbles (popping of), playgrounds (slides and pea gravel pile making), and other people (fascinated but slightly rude staring of). Yesterday we went to the park by the lake and there were two men sitting on a bench reading books. This bench was right at the edge of the playground. Nora walked right up to them, pointed at one, and said "Glasses!" (She feels the need to announce when anybody is wearing glasses. In the summer, that's a lot of people). The man just glanced up at her, annoyed, and then went back to his book. Nora just stood there, staring at him. And staring. And staring. Finally I said "Nora, do you want to go down the slide?" "No?" "Do you want to go on the swing?" "No?" (Staring, staring, fascinated by this creature who refuses to be charmed). She pointed at him and said "What's that?" I said "That's a bench and two men, Nora" and then scooped her up and carried her away. Awkward.

Nora carries on a more or less constant monologue, and it's funny to see how some of it is just a reflection of what Jake and I say to her, down to the tone. "Sit down, Nora", or "Careful, Nora" are common ones. Also "I got you, Nora!" and somehow recently she picked up "Okay" and "All right". Nora is either talking or singing, and the songs continue to be mostly Nora-focused. She does, however, like an old song by the Police: "do do do, dah dah dah". 

At least once a day Nora will say something that will make Jake say, in awe, "She's so smart." Nora has a great memory and makes all sorts of impressive connections. For instance, we have the book Goodnight Moon which involves a bunny who is trying to go to sleep. He has a grandmother who sits in the rocking chair and says "hush". Then today I was reading Nora a different book about Nicholas the bunny and what he likes to do during the different seasons. At the end of the book it is winter and he curls up in his hollow tree to sleep until spring. (Bunny hibernating? Do bunnies do that?) Nora saw that and said "Sleeping! Hush." She just comes out with these things!

Here is the elusive, hard-to-capture Milo:

He runs and runs and runs. Unfortunately, he also runs down hills and trips and skins his knees. These days Milo is looking more and more like a little boy to me, and less and less like a baby. He has long legs, taking after his dad.

Yesterday while we were at the park Milo spent a full half hour playing soccer with Jake. He just kicked the ball back and forth the whole time. I'm pretty sure he could have kept doing that for hours. It was Jake who tired of it and took Milo over to the tetherball area, where he found another paradise! A ball on a rope! Milo played with that for 15 minutes straight until we finally picked him up to go home to dinner. He screamed the whole way. He did not want to leave that tetherball, which is pretty impressive because I'm fairly sure I saw him swing it and then hit himself in the face with the ball a couple of times.

Milo is a very physical kid. He likes to climb on things and in and out of things, he likes to fling himself face forward onto the bed and then laugh, and he likes to be held upside down. Sometimes he likes to push Nora, which isn't cool, but he also likes to hug Nora, which is adorable. Milo loves to be tickled these days, and he's a sucker for slapstick.

That's Milo climbing in and out of the cart attached to the back of a trike. He's always doing dangerous stuff like this, and he's always got a few scrapes and bumps to show for it. I swear, the kid is all boy, through and through. There's the physical rambunctiousness, there's his never-ending love of all ball sports, and...well, I guess that's it. But still. Where'd he get this from? 

Milo is really starting to speak in some recognizable sentences now. Tonight every time Nora left the room he said "Where'd Nora go?" Milo still calls everything and everybody "it", so when he's looking around for, say, Jake, he'll say "Where'd daddy go?" Then he'll say "Where is it?" and when he finds Jake he'll say "There it is!"

I am so pleased that Milo is starting to branch out with what he'll eat. He is more adventurous than Nora and will try things, like a green bean or a noodle. Milo is not a fan of these items, but he'll at least try them. I, the non-beef eater, have taken to getting meatballs at Trader Joe's (120 calories in just one meatball!) and Milo loves to eat pieces off of a fork. Even better is if we make a noise when stabbing the meat with the fork. Milo loves sound effects and this will humor him into eating. 

Milo is still daddy's kid, through and through. He inherited Jake's sweet nature. He also got a touch of the goofball, which makes him an easy-to-enjoy kid. Milo can be frustrating because he'll use that goofiness to throw stuff onto the floor or purposely spit out his food (and then laugh in our faces as he does it). One of the hardest parts, though, is not laughing myself when I know that I should be stern. The kid is just so darn funny.

As time passes Milo and Nora are playing more and talking more with each other. They fight like hell, reminding me of how we humans are, at our most basic nature, aggressive jealous creatures who don't like to share. So, like every kid, Milo and Nora need to be socialized into polite society, and they have lots and lots of opportunities for practice as they negotiate who gets to play with the car at any given moment. I'm trying to teach them that negotiating means, say, taking turns and not, say, leaving bite marks on the other person's forehead. Progress is slow. But more and more there are the times when they find some secret joke that has them cracking up, and I start to be glad that we did this crazy thing of having two at once. 

Friday Afternoon

The summer after my first year here I got my first solo-authored manuscript back from review, about 7 months after I had submitted it. The decision was revise and resubmit, and I was pretty crushed because it wasn't an outright accept. In fact, I think I even cried about it.

(These days, being much more jaded, I'm pretty happy about a revise & resubmit, because I know the chances of the paper getting published eventually are high. I also know that the changes I will make to a paper after a revise & resubmit will probably make it a much better paper. That first paper was eventually published and it all worked out in the end.)

Anyway, like I said, I was crushed. It was a Friday afternoon and I had spent all week in the hot city working hard on something, I don't remember what, probably a different manuscript or something, and I was tired and feeling defeated and like a total failure. As luck would have it we were scheduled to go up north to Jake's parents' house on the lake that afternoon, so shortly after I got the revise and resubmit decision we packed up the car and drove north for 3 and a half hours. And by the time we arrived there, in the cool woods, I was feeling a lot better about life. We walked into the house to a chorus of "Hey!" from everybody, and soon a drink appeared in my hand, and chips and salsa were nearby, and I sat there listening to happy chatter and watching the boats on the lake. A feeling of peace settled over me as I realized that work is not the end all be all of life, and it was okay.

Today was kind of stressful, not in a horrible way, but in a low-grade way. My friend is going up for tenure in the fall (actually, a lot of people I know are) and we spent a couple of hours poring over her research graphic, which is a visual representation of her research trajectory. It is actually a brilliant graphic and communicates well her different research strands and foci, but it still merited discussions about which of her papers to put into the graphic, where to put particular titles, how to orient this and that, etc. The research graphic is one of only about eight hundred documents she is creating for her tenure case. The thing is huge and by the end will represent about 6 months of hard work. Six months. What goes into getting tenure here (just creating the case to submit to the committee) is crazy. It's not even the work, per se, it's all of the worrying and the strategizing and the agonizing about whether to use this word or that word, and how to orient one's teaching statement, and how many people to solicit for external letters, and when to do that, and how to craft a good department letter, and on and on.

Once I left her (with dread in my heart at the thought of going through this process myself in the near future), I returned to work on my grant proposal, with renewed anxiety about how much I suck and my work sucks and I don't have enough publications and I am going to die alone and poor in a van down by the river.

I'm not going up north this weekend, but now I am going to shut down the computer, walk home, hang out with the kids and Jake, and sit out back on the terrace and watch the flowers and listen to the birds and remember that work is not the end all be all of life. Thank you Jake and Milo and Nora for giving me that perspective.

Check-Up

Well, the kids are still freakishly skinny at 18 months, weighing 18 lbs 11 oz and 19 lbs 15 oz, but their doctor has apparently decided that this is just what they're like, so we're not really doing much about it anymore. Both of them have growth curves that have been remarkably consistent despite our best efforts to shove more and more calories into them, so I don't think there's a whole lot I can really do to affect this. Their heads are a good size (50% for Nora and 35% for Milo) and their heights are fine (25% for Milo and 18% for Nora), so they'll never be amazons but at least they're on the charts for height and head. At least their brains are growing!

Nora was starting to fuss a little as the nurse charted their growth so I asked her if she wanted to sing a song, and she started singing "A B C D A B C D" (she just repeats those 4 letters). The nurse thought that was the greatest thing ever. 

We are ditching bottles this weekend and moving to cups and meals and big-kid type of eating, all the way. The more and more they can learn to feed themselves, the better it'll be, I think. (They seem kind of behind in the feeding-themselves area, which is probably our fault for not letting them practice as much as they should).  I hope it'll help them learn to enjoy mealtimes a little more.

I still remember as a kid and even a teenager dreading mealtimes over at other people's houses. Parents would load up my plate way beyond anything I would be capable of eating, and I would dread that inevitable moment when I wouldn't be able to keep going and I'd still have a giant plate of food sitting there, which I thought was rude and unacceptable. (Because you're supposed to "clean your plate"). I would eat as fast as I could, trying to get as much in as possible before the uncomfortable fullness would set in and I would be certain I couldn't eat another single bite without getting sick. This was still a problem for me even in high school. Sometimes I wonder if that is how Milo and Nora feel at mealtimes. 

The more independent they become at eating, the more they can decide how much they want to eat, and I'm looking forward to that day.  As long as they don't decide to starve themselves.

Contrasts

I'm stressing myself out over this grant proposal to the point of inaction, almost, so even though it's only 9:30 p.m. I think it's time to stop working and do something else.

(I think the experience of having been on an NSF review panel for the specific award I'm applying for is making it harder for me to write this particular grant. I have seen how solid proposals can get killed over kind of idiosyncratic things based on who happens to be on the review panel.)

Having Milo back has made me notice how different M&N are in their personalities. Milo is such a goofball. He gets all riled up very easily, and runs around laughing and flailing his arms everywhere and cracking himself up. He is super cheerful most of the time and usually has a huge grin on his face, unless he's upset about something. Nora is more serious. She isn't constantly goofy the way Milo is. She can have fun and laugh, but her general demeanor just seems to be...serious. She's a serious person.

Nora is eager to please. She wants to do the right thing, she just has to figure out what that thing is. Once she learns what to do, she'll do it. I have listened to Nora tell herself "sit down, sit down", mimicking what I say when she's in the bathtub. The other day I asked her to find all of the books scattered about the room and bring them to me, and she did it, bringing them one by one. Nora was so tickled by this task that she started giggling in glee. In contrast, I have told Milo not to do something, like throw his food on the floor, and then I have watched him look me in the eye, deliberately pick up a piece of food, and then very slowly and deliberately throw it on the floor, staring at me the whole time.

Being here with just Nora made me realize how much crying and whining we listen to on a given day due to sibling rivalry alone. Without Milo here, suddenly there were no fights over toys, there was no pushing, there was no freaking out because one kid has something and the other one suddenly must have that exact. same. thing. Having Milo back means everything is louder again, but at the same time, it also means being able to sit on the couch and just watch as Milo and Nora run back and forth across the living room, chasing each other and laughing. 

Day 2

Both Nora & Milo slept 12 hours straight last night without waking at all.  Hmmm. I wonder if sleeping apart suits them. Or maybe they were both just so worn out that they slept well. Milo is reportedly having a good time up north. It is too cold to do lake-type things but he is playing with new toys, walking in the woods, and playing with the dog.

Nora has started narrating things to herself in a way that mimics how I talk to her. So today she was walking around on the sidewalk and she started down the driveway towards the street. Then she stopped before she got to the street, said "no no", then turned around and went back to the sidewalk and said "good job!" 

Nora likes flowers and calls them "pretty belows". 

Today was grey and rainy and cold so we only spent a total of about an hour outside, and Nora has not been having an easy time going to bed tonight. Unbeknownst to me she also pushed some buttons on our dishwasher changing the "heated dry off" to "heated dry on" which would explain why 10 minutes ago I had to open up the kitchen window to clear out the room from smoke. The heated dry function on the dishwasher is seriously broken. As that was happening one of my cats started to choke up a hairball, so naturally she ran to a rug so that she could puke on the rug. Our house is all hardwood floors and the cat has to run around to find one of the few rugs to puke on.

Day 1

After 1 day under my belt, hanging out with just one baby is SO easy! It's awesome! There is nobody to freak out and cry when I change a diaper. If somebody falls down, I can immediately give comfort without baby #2 freaking out from jealousy. Also, it is so easy to go places in a car. I can just put the baby in and then hop in myself. No rigamarole involving getting baby #1 into the car while baby #2 cries and freaks out, thinking s/he is being abandoned, then getting baby #2 into the car while baby #1 cries and freaks out, thinking s/he is being abandoned, no need to put a stroller in the trunk just to get babies from point a to point b...I can just CARRY Nora myself! Also, feeding time is much easier with just one baby. 

However I'm not inclined to go far in the car because I'm not sure the car seat is in all that well, and it's Jake's old 2-door car which is a bit of a pain to get Nora in and out of. Today I took Nora to the zoo and the park for a couple of hours and got her good and tired out, which was great. She doesn't really seem to have noticed that much is different, although she has said "daddy" a few times. At one point at the zoo she approached another baby and said "Mino". Otherwise, though, it's business as usual. I think it's harder on me than it is on Nora having the boys gone, because it's kind of quiet and monotonous without Jake & Milo around.

Last night I watched a movie called "Smart People" and early on in the movie there was a scene that took place in a dorm and I immediately recognized the entrance to that dorm and I was all, holy crap, I used to live there! It was Donner hall from CMU where I once lived for a summer. Sure enough the story took place at CMU and was filmed in Pittsburgh. That was a really weird moment.

Going Fishing

Tomorrow Jake is taking Milo up north to his parents' house on the lake for the weekend, leaving me with Nora. Tomorrow night will be the first night in Milo & Nora's lives that they won't go to sleep together. 

I don't know what it's going to be like, just me and Nora for two days. Hopefully Nora will enjoy having so much uninterrupted Mama time and Milo will enjoy having all of that Daddy time. I'm more worried about Milo than Nora, because Milo will also have to cope with new surroundings and new people. But at least he'll have Daddy, which makes him very happy.

Milo is so Daddy obsessed that every person on the street is "Daddy", and the other day we were looking at a picture of a woman in a catalogue who he identified as "Daddy". Often when I'm out on my own with the kids, Milo will see a man pass by us on the street or the bike path and he'll call out, delightedly, "Daddy!" It's made for some awkward moments and some double takes as random men start sweating and looking over their shoulders.

Oh no

Nora threw up again, which makes 3 night-time vomits in the last week and a half. I'm worried. Calling the doctor tomorrow and hoping she can get seen. Maybe she still has reflux?

Language

Milo likes to say, over and over again, "where is it?" when he's looking for something. Then when he finds it he'll say "here it is!" I haven't really considered these sentences because he learned them all as one phrase, so it's different from putting two words together on his own, like "hi kitty" or "bye bye daddy". Yesterday morning both of the kids were playing with a puzzle and Milo can name most of the animals in the puzzle. He was looking for the duck piece, which he calls "quack quack" instead of duck, and he said "where is it?" But then he said, "where is...quack quack?" I thought that was so impressive! It is amazing to watch the kids slowly put together words and make language.

Nora is also putting words together, usually to describe what people are doing. So she will say "Mama...dishes". Or "daddy...coffee". And of course, there's her old favorite, "kitty water". Both kids like to use possessives so they will say things like "mama's water". Milo has a current fascination with belly buttons so he'll come over to me, and say "mama's...where is it?" and then lift up my shirt. Nora will inform Milo that the correct phrase is "belly...button!"

Yesterday afternoon Nora wanted to go outside so she went into the sunroom, found her coat, and brought it to Jake, saying "On? On?" So he put it on her, then she went and found her hat, and brought it to Jake saying "Hat...on?" So he put it on her, and then she triumphantly said "Outside? Walk walk?" I think she figured that since her hat goes on before she goes outside, then if she puts her hat on, then she'll go outside. So, okay, she has a little work to do on formal logic, but I still thought it was pretty cool.

Stay at Home

Right now is a great time because the school year is over and Jake's summer class hasn't started up yet. So I am now free of teaching and service responsibilities, mostly, and can focus hard on writing, and Jake is free, period! It is so awesome because he has so much time right now and has been doing all of the weeding, and lots of cooking, and of course a lot more childcare too. I guess this is a little taste of having a stay-at-home spouse. Our house is cleaner, our yard looks nicer, and things are just a little slower paced.

It is such a treat and I feel lucky to have this situation right now. I have been able to get so much more work done with Jake taking care of things more at home. It gives me a sense of the kind of advantages that people with stay-at-home spouses get to experience, and I know it's a real privilege. 

That is just part of why I am so disappointed with the recent article in Slate's new xx column, which is supposed to provide a feminist viewpoint, but really, really doesn't. Dayo Olopade, in trying to explain a NYT piece (in which the economics reporter for the New York Times chronicles his descent into unpaid bills, mounting credit, and ultimately the inability to keep up with his mortgage), places all of the blame on the guy's first and second wives. She refers to stay-at-home wives as arm candy, trophy wives, and little better than mistresses.

It's ridiculous and insulting. Stay-at-home moms are not gold diggers sitting around doing nothing all day. They actually (surprise, surprise) work. Taking care of kids all day is work. It is really hard work. (At least, I personally find it hard). Men benefit enormously from the unpaid work that wives do. Men get ahead in their careers because they are supported at home, because they don't have to worry about how the kids are doing during the day, because they have somebody to take care of the house, the kids, the dinner, the laundry, the shopping, and the thousand other details that make a household run. Having another adult making sure everything runs smoothly at home allows a person to focus on work, advance in his career, and climb the ladder. Meanwhile the stay-at-home spouse is willing to make a very real sacrifice by not spending those years building up her career.

I dislike the stay-at-home / work-out-of-the-home debates because from what I can see, moms everywhere are working their asses off, regardless of whether they stay at home. Taking care of kids is difficult, valuable, important work. People talk about the costs or benefits to the kids as if that's all it is about but guess what, the husbands benefit too. 

I have fantasized about being able to stay at home for a couple of years (which, in academics, is not an option), but I know that I probably wouldn't be very good at it. I kind of have a bad personality for it, which is something I didn't know about myself before I had kids. Jake doesn't think it would be good for him to do long-term either, but being able to do it on a shorter term is really nice. I know that I am really grateful for his ability to take care of the home front this month. We lucked into a situation where Jake could go back to school because I bought this house when I was a single gal, only taking on a mortgage that I could afford on my own. We have one more year of flexible dad time and then he'll probably be back to normal 9-5 work hours, assuming there are jobs out there in a year. So I'm trying to enjoy this now while it lasts. I think Milo and Nora are enjoying it too!

It's a Phase

They say that 18 months is a time when sleep regressions occur. For the first time ever, Milo is also struggling to sleep as well as Nora. Nora has really been struggling lately. Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that I said it seemed like we'd turned a corner? HAH!

Wednesday night Nora was up for 2 hours, then she threw up, then I took her for a drive to get her to finally fall asleep.  I thought she had overstuffed herself at dinner (it was a very calorie-rich meal full of tons of dairy) and had a stomach ache. 

Thursday night and Friday night she was fine. I also happened to be out of town Thursday night and didn't arrive on Friday until after they had gone to bed. Hmmm...

Saturday night she was up for another 3 hours, and could not fall asleep. She reaches a point of no return after which she is just too overstimulated to sleep. I was afraid to put her down and walk away for fear that she would throw up again. Jake took her for a drive in the car and she did fall asleep. I took her out of the car and she stayed asleep, and then halfway up to her room she suddenly woke up and started crying. I walked into the nursery and she kept crying and then she threw up all over herself and me. That woke up Milo and got him upset and crying. Nora finally fell asleep around 11 and Milo was up until midnight, which has never been like him.

On a likely unrelated note, the neighbor kid across the street has the swine flu. 

Sunday night both kids woke up, tonight already both kids have woken up. Maybe this is the 18-month old thing. Maybe Nora has a little stomach bug or something. I don't know. I think we are all getting nervous because the 18-month check-up is coming up in a few weeks and I dread getting them weighed and finding out that they don't weigh enough, once again. I hate that.

I also hate meal times, for anybody who is counting, and am also generally not a fan of waking up in the morning and seeing, in the harsh light of daytime reality, a smear of crusted puke on my chest. 

Prescient

Wet Shirts, Curly Hair, Stairs

OMG I am so tired of writing about quadratic transformations, systems of equations and inequalities, common student errors, and how to create good lessons about these topics. I'm working every night and weekend but the good news is that I should be all done by Monday! I am really earning the new basement bathroom we are going to install...someday. I guess there are things like building permits and design decisions and product purchases that make installing a new bathroom a kind of lengthy process. Who knew? But I feel good and motivated to do my consulting work. Every time it sucks I think, bathroom, bathroom.

On Sunday afternoon there was a bike race around the Capitol. Actually it lasted all day, beginning with a little kid race in the morning and ending with the pro race at 4:30. We went to the pro race with the kids and watched the bicyclists whizz around the Capitol in tight clumps again and again. It was very exciting. Meanwhile Milo and Nora had a blast running around on the grass. Then Milo, who I should mentioned was being shadowed by Jake, not me, ran out onto the sidewalk. Then he tripped up a curb and sprawled face first onto the cement. It was a real face plant and he got road rash:

I took this picture tonight, after 2 days of healing. It looked a lot worse on Sunday night. The poor kid had road rash just like the racers! My colleague organized the race and later he told me that we should have taken Milo to the medical tent because there were 6 doctors just sitting there waiting to deal with road rash cases and other mishaps.

You might also notice how Milo's entire shirt is wet. Nora's is too actually. They both thought it was a lot of fun to slurp water out of a straw cup and then let it spill out of their mouths all down the front of their chests. I didn't even realize what they were doing until I took off their bibs and saw their wet shirts.

Curly hair:

Climbing up the stairs:

I am really struggling with Nora right now. When I'm not around, Jake and the twin whisperer report that she's pleasant and cheerful. But when I am around she literally has to be on me all the time. I mean all. the. time. If I am not holding her, she whines and cries. If I leave to go to the bathroom, she whines and cries. If I have to make dinner or wash the dishes, she whines and cries. This morning I let go of her for 10 seconds to rub my eyes, and she whined and cried. I cannot do a single thing without incurring the wrath of Nora. It is a lot of whining and crying to listen to. It is very, very wearing to listen to all of that. When I get tired of holding her, I sit down and she just crawls all over me and climbs all over me. She might venture out for 30 seconds or so to get a book or a toy, but then it's right back to my lap.

I'm starting to worry that maybe Nora is not getting enough time with me or something, and that is why she is so clingy. I wonder if she would be less clingy if I were with her 24/7? I feel like I am with her a good amount of the time, but maybe it is not enough for her? I feel kind of guilty about this. I hope it is just a normal phase and not a sign that Nora is not getting enough of me. 

Sunday Afternoon

Over the past week and a half I have written about 75 pages of material for a consulting job I'm doing, which constitutes half the job. Tomorrow my colleague and I begin the second half, which should be about the same amount of writing. The second half follows the format of the first half so I hope it'll go more quickly since I now have a template to follow. I have exactly a week to get it done, on top of grading eleven 20-page papers and oh, squeezing in a short trip to Ann Arbor.

I have been so busy, working every spare minute on this thing. When it ends, I'll then have to devote all of my energy to quickly pounding out a grant proposal that is due in mid-July, so I don't anticipate any relief until July 15.  Then I have 4 papers that I need to write and submit before the semester starts up. One of them is really minor and will be quick, one is medium sized and shouldn't take too long, and two of them are major papers and will hopefully constitute my signature pieces for tenure, if I can get them accepted.  They will take a long time. This is the summer when I should be doing my big push and working 24/7, but the kids don't let me do that, so I guess I will just do the best I can.

There are things I am letting slide because I just can't do it all. Like weeding. And diligent levels of cleaning. And re-staining the deck and the fence and the patio table and chairs. When I have free time, I have to spend it with the kids (or cooking for the kids, or grocery shopping). So I think this summer our house and our yard will just have to be a little scruffy, getting by on what Jake can accomplish. He's got his own stuff going on, so he's busy too.

In order to spend nap times working, I'm now taking the kids with me on my shopping errands and things. Milo seems to like it more than Nora. Nobody likes to be the one left at home. We're also going outside a lot, which both kids love to do. It is so nice to have good weather and be able to go out and do stuff now. When I'm with them, I'm trying to focus on being with them instead of developing a panic attack over everything else in my life. I feel like I am trying to push a giant boulder up a never-ending hill. Every year, as I inch towards tenure, the boulder gets bigger and heavier. I need to remember that this is only going to last another couple of years. It won't last forever.

17 Months

The kids are 17 months old today, and I'm outta material. But they're still cute:

I like the pictures from this past month because they chronicle a transition from winter to spring. It's finally nice outside. I haven't had much time to do, well, much of anything lately because of work insanity, so I don't have a lot to report, but I did want to mark this monthiversary. 

Nora has gone through some changes in the past month. She has really developed in her singing. Nora can hold a tune now and can sing lots of different songs. In addition to her standard Noona-focused repertoire, Nora is also a fan of "twinkle twinkle little star", "itsy bitsy spider", and "sun, sun, Mr. golden sun". Additional progress has been made in the areas of turning in circles, talking on the phone, drinking out of a big-girl cup, and taking off clothes.

I feel like we really turned a corner this past month when it came to sleep. Before I went on my two trips, Nora's sleep was still sporadic. Sometimes she would sleep through the night, but just as often (or more often) she would wake once or twice. Then I went on the trips, and when I came back, Nora was waking less. A lot less. For the past month she has slept through the night more often than not. This is the first time I can really say that since she was born. I hesitate to say that we've really come through this, but the sleeping pattern has been pretty stable for the past few weeks so I am optimistic.

Nora continues to love climbing stairs, being held by Mama, playing with the calculator, and going outside. Yesterday I told some folks about how Nora's word for calculator is "calculalolalolalo" and my grad students started cracking up over the fact that she even knows the word for calculator. "What does she have, baby's first calculator?" I said, "no, it's just an old TI-83" (it's not like I gave her a new calculator to play with, sheesh). Nora loves things with buttons, and calculators and cameras hold a special draw. They're almost as fascinating as my computer.

This picture above is one in which Nora is triumphant because she managed to beat us to the bathroom and plunge her hand in the kitty water. Nora wins again!

Nora is getting definite ideas about how things should be. In the morning when I come into her room, she wants to be picked up and held and given her bottle...but it has to be on her terms. If I try to just pick her up right away she'll say "No!" and fall down, scrambling away from me. I have to sit in the glider, with the bottle in my lap, looking all cozy until finally she invites me to pick her up. If it's not her idea, it's not going to happen without some tears.

Nora continues to reject 90% of the foods we offer her. She must have inherited this inclination from my side of the family. Maybe she is a super taster, who knows. It continues to frustrate me. She's got her own opinions about thins, what can I say.

I will say that Nora does new things every day that impress me. For instance, just today she got really angry at Milo, took a block and whaled on him, banging him on the head over and over again. Okay, that didn't impress me in a good way, but it was definitely a surprise. She also surprises me on a daily basis with all of the word associations she makes. She sees me putting on my glasses and hat and she'll say "bye bye mama". Or she'll notice something from a book and then mention it again in a different context later on, causing me to have to pause and think through the connection. Nora notices every little thing. It's fun to watch her grow and learn every day.

Milo's favorite interests continue to be, in order of importance to him, 1) Daddy, 2) Ball, and 3) Kitty. He also enjoys outside. Look at this perfect throw that Milo has perfected! He is getting really good at the overhand throw and he loves to toss the ball back and forth.

Below Milo is wearing some red boots and having fun clomping around in them. 

Milo has developed his own set of new skills in the past month, which includes knee walking, belly button locating (on all of us), and food tossing (at ever greater distances and velocities). 

Milo continues to be very interested in the kinds of toys where you fit shapes into holes. He is pretty good at it, but when it is hard he gets frustrated very easily. I totally see myself in him at those times. Milo works hard with his toys. He sticks out his tongue and concentrates and solves problems. Milo is a problem solver.

Today Milo solved a common ball problem that he experiences, and he was so proud of himself. He has two favorite indoor balls and both are pretty large. He cannot pick them both up at the same time, and this really bothers Milo. He hates having to choose. So today Milo got frustrated because he wanted to take both balls at once from the sunroom into the living room, and he couldn't do it. Finally he got down on his knees, tucked the smaller ball under his arm, and then walked on his knees into the living room, rolling the larger ball with him as he went. I wish I had a video of this moment because his grin was enormous and it was so obvious that Milo was just thrilled with himself over what he had done. 

It is hard to emphasize properly how much Milo loves Jake. The kids have definitely decided that I am Nora's and Jake is Milo's. Tonight I was alone with the kids as Jake was off doing something, and I swear Milo must have asked for Daddy about 30 times. 

Milo has developed an interest in the potty.  He likes to watch as we dump poopy diapers into the toilet and then he'll say "bye bye poop" as we flush it. Both kids can tell us that they have pooped, but neither one seems to announce it before the great event. Milo does enjoy talking about the potty and sometimes sitting on the potty just for fun. I suppose at this point I should start to do something about this, like buy a bench for the large potty and buy a small potty just for them (yuck), so that he can continue to indulge in this interest. I don't expect it'll lead to any actual potty training for another year or so, but there's no harm in letting him have some fun with it.

Milo continues to be a little ham. When his grandparents were here, both kids had great fun pretending to be little babies and crawling instead of walking. Milo just cracked himself up over this. He likes to show off for people, once he is done being afraid of them. He's a social little guy, I think (who knows where he got that from). 

All in all the kids are becoming simultaneously more fun and more difficult every day. They do new things all the time, they learn new words, and they develop new games and jokes that are great fun. At the same time, they fight like the dickens, they run away from us and refuse to do things they don't want to do, and they thrash about and yell when they don't get their way. It is challenging and tiring, but man am I glad that it is now and not this time last year. It's way better now.

Bucket List

Kid-related remark: I read that cheerful, outgoing 12-month olds can turn into shy, clingy 18-month olds. At Christmas Nora & Milo hung out with their paternal grandparents and they were fine. Yesterday and today, however, was a different story. Both kids cried like crazy every time their Grandpa came into the room. Nora wasn't too thrilled about either one, actually, and she stuck to me like a barnacle the whole time. She was like one of those monkeys that ride around clinging on their mother's back. If I tried to lift her off of me, my shirt would come with her, stuck in her tiny grip. Milo eventually got to the point at which he wouldn't cry around Grandpa, but he watched him like a hawk the whole time. He was incredibly wary. In time, the kids warmed up a little, but it was definitely different from how they were 5 months ago.

The rest of this is non kid stuff, so if you're here for M&N updates, you can stop reading.

So our neighborhood has, like, tons of actual neighbors and stuff who are fun to hang out with! There's always stuff going on, like block parties, and weekly softball games, and on Sunday morning there was coffee and doughnuts in the park for Mother's Day.

In this vein of community connectedness, one of my lovely and delightful neighbors has organized a regular gathering of 5 of us women, all who live within a block of each other, to get together and read a book about creativity and being an artist and getting unblocked and all that sort of thing.

Yeah, my head did kind of cloud up at that point because honestly I don't think of myself as remotely artistic or creative in any way. I am practical. I am literal. My feet are on the ground and my head is busy making 5-year plans and extended budgets and calculating exactly how many hours of consulting I need to do to build a basement bathroom so that my mother can stop having to brush her teeth in the midst of cobwebs and the lack of actual walls surrounding the toilet.

Jake is the artistic one. He's the one with an eye for design and beauty. One time he rejected a potential car due to the lines created by the rear passenger windows. Apparently they were ugly. It sort of boggled my mind that anybody would a) notice something like that, and b) care. It's a car, for crying out loud. Who cares whether it's pretty? What matters is how well it will run and how reliable it is and whether we can fit two carseats in it and how much it will cost. Jake is the one who draws and paints, or he did back when we actually had hobbies. Jake's the one who takes about twice as long to get ready to go out as I do, and as a result he generally looks twice as good as me. He's the one with the artist's eye and the creative spark, and I'm the one who is apparently fine driving ugly cars around, because honestly, it's just a car, it's not a painting.

As a child I always hated the directive to "be creative". To me that meant that I had to think up something that nobody had ever thought up before in the history of time, and that's a lot of pressure. I always felt like I was bad at being creative, and that's how I see myself to this day.

So at first I thought that this creative circle idea was not for me, but then I started thinking about the ways in which I am actually creative, even if I don't identify as such. The work that I have to do for my job is deeply creative, especially the research and writing part. I am not writing stories or poetry, but I am writing about the knowledge I've developed as a result of designing studies. So I think that kind of work can count as creative work...at least, it feels like it is. It definitely feels like I birth every article I write.

Of course I have this blog too. I don't really count it for anything, partly because I'm writing for an audience of, like, 5 people, but even if it were just a journal for my own eyes it's still a creative act. I guess. Like I said, it doesn't really feel like it counts, but I guess I can decide that it counts, right?

In that spirit I headed enthusiastically into the Creative Circle tasks. One of our tasks was to create a list of 10 things we wanted to do before we died. Piece of cake, I thought, and I started writing immediately.

1. Get tenure. (Duh).

2. Run a marathon.

3. Uh....

At this point I got totally stuck! I couldn't think of anything else that I felt like I really wanted to do before I died. I mean, there are lots of things that would be nice to do, pleasant to do, but I was having a hard time thinking up things that I would regret not having done in my life. This was something of a revelation.

I think this is pretty great actually because it reflects my general feeling of contentedness about things. I've always been pretty driven and goal-oriented and I had a lot of goals to achieve, and at this point I've actually done those things and it turns out it's pretty awesome! I'm pretty much set. I don't really feel like there is anything missing. Even if I don't get tenure, I think that'll be okay too. There are other things in life besides this job.

Eventually I forced myself to come up with 8 more things, some of which are pretty lame, but hey, it's good to have goals in life.

3. Watch my kids grow up. (Kind of a cheating one.)

4. Celebrate my 50th wedding anniversary. (Another cheating one. These are lame. Better come up with some better ones.)

5. Get to know my sisters better. (That'd be nice.)

6. Get published outside of math-ed. (In other words, write something for publication that's not a professional piece but a personal piece.)

7. Re-learn the guitar. (This was something I loved and sacrificed on the alter of academia and parenthood, which is silly.)

8. Live abroad again. (This is one of those "it'd be nice" things but I don't feel like I'd be hugely disappointed if it never happened. But I learned so much from my time in Japan that it'd be cool to do it again. Not necessarily in Japan, just anywhere.)

9. Try drugs when I'm 85 or 90. (This sounds like a joke but I actually think this is a good idea. I would kind of regret never having experienced the amazing things that can come from hard core drugs, if people's stories are anything to go by. It sounds pretty awesome. I've never done it because I don't want to take the risks, particularly the risk of screwing up my brain. But when I'm 85, honestly how much will there be to lose? At that point I'll be heading downhill anyway.)

10. Accept my body. (Mental energy spent on worrying about how I look is such a waste. This is one of those obvious ones, I guess, that is easier said than done.)

So that was my list. We also had to make a list of 10 things we would do if we won 100 million dollars. One thing that struck me was that we all talked about how we would improve our houses but nobody talked about moving out of the neighborhood. There are neighborhoods nearby that are fancier with bigger houses, but I'm pretty sure they don't have softball in the park every Wednesday night. Community must make us all happier than big fancy houses.

Little Things

Other people have told me that they wish they had stopped to record the little things their kids did when they were young, so here are a couple that I want to make note of.

-- Yesterday Nora and I were looking at a book of shapes and we came upon a diamond. I said "diamond" and she started singing "twinkle twinkle". It took me a minute to figure out the association!

-- Milo likes to say "oh shoot" and then laugh like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard. I know this came from me occasionally saying "oh shit" when I drop something or make a mess, so it's definitely time to clean up my language. (I've been converting it to "oh shoot" for him. Are kids allowed to say "shoot" these days?)

-- We have a bowl of water for the cats in our bathroom. For some reason the cats don't like to drink water from their bowl in the basement, and they MUST have the bathroom water bowl. The kids love to dunk their hands in that bowl or dump the water all over the bathroom, so we usually place the water bowl in the bathtub. Whenever it is time to go upstairs, Nora will excitedly climb the stairs saying "kitty water, kitty water!" over and over again. It is so funny that you can see their nefarious intentions because they're narrating their plans to themselves.

-- Milo loves to do "tricks" where Jake will turn him upside down and flip him over. He'll say "trick, trick" over and over again until we do it, and sometimes he'll flip his head backwards in anticipation of the trick. Milo's other new amusement is to walk on his knees. Nora will watch Milo do this and then say "walk walk...knees."

-- Nora calls her bunny "buddy" and her word for butterfly now is "buddy...fly." There's always a pause in between the buddy and the fly.

-- Milo is starting to get the hang of possessives. Last night he kept grabbing for my drink and I said "that's mama's drink" and then he said "mama's. mama's. mama's" over and over again. Then this morning Nora was playing with a car and Milo said "Noona's." Nora does it a little differently. If Milo is playing with the car Nora will say "Mino...car."

-- Both kids are starting to want to take off their clothes now and then. They can get their socks off and sometimes their sweaters or sweatshirts. We haven't gotten to pants yet, thank goodness!

Bananas!

Tonight I let Nora feed herself some pureed bananas with a spoon and this was the result. The picture actually doesn't capture the true mess, the fact that her entire face, both arms, and all of her hair was covered with bananas. At one point Nora actually seemed to be using her spoon as a comb, smearing bananas all through her hair. When the spoon wasn't effective enough, she switched to her hands (which she had dunked in the bowl).

This was way beyond any washcloth, so after dinner we just hosed her off in the sink. Admittedly, Nora was not a fan of this approach, but it got the job done.

Touch

I remember back when the kids were mostly portable lumps who didn't move around very much, I would carry them places in the sling, and total strangers would come up and ooo and ah over them and then do things like touch their hands and their faces. This used to bother me, especially if the toucher had a cold, but even in general I didn't want random strangers touching my babies. I think I even wrote about it here once.

Well, time to eat my words. A couple of weeks ago I was at a professional conference and I gave a talk as part of a symposium organized by a colleague at another university. He and his wife have a 6-month old boy, and his wife is also in our field, and so they were able to bring their baby to the conference and trade off baby-minding duty.  (As an aside, oh, the luxury of having one baby, where you can do things like that.) 

Anyhoo, I was talking to the mom after our symposium and her baby was there in the stroller and he was soooooo cute. He was definitely an extra-cute 6-month old. Most 6-month olds are cute, anyway, and he upped the cute factor by a notch or two. In the course of a 5-minute conversation I had to actually physically restrain myself about 8 different times from touching him. Each time I made an almost involuntary move to maul that cute little baby, like maybe I would just take his entire fist and shove it into my mouth, that's how cute he was, and each time my hand was halfway to him when I remembered not to do that. I was like that former Nazi from Dr. Strangelove who had to use his left hand to restrain his right hand from making the sieg hail gesture. 

So now I have a little more understanding of those rude strangers who used to touch my babies. I guess it's natural. It has me thinking about how we all love to do this to babies, to touch them and cuddle them and kiss them. We're not allowed to do it to other adults, we've socialized those impulses away, so the very natural human urge for touch and contact is largely forbidden in polite society. But we're allowed to break those rules in certain circumstances, like for babies, or if everybody is drunk. Not the babies, of course. They're not supposed to get drunk.

I Like It!

Oh, so tired. My entire day at work was filled with meetings and teaching, with no time left over for actual tenure-achieving work. My colleague and mentor landed a potential consulting gig, and because he is very generous he got me in on the deal. I have had a number of consulting gigs on the side over the years and every one has come through him. So anyway, today we finalized the contract and the tasks we'll do and it adds up to a ton of stuff over the next 3 weeks. It's going to be intense but the money is very good, so it's worth it.

This weekend was gorgeous so we spent most of it outside with the kids. I bought a sand and water table and we put it together and then put sand into it. Milo is somewhat interested in playing with the sand, but not all that into it, and Nora won't even go near the sand, much less touch it. She hates getting stuff on her hands. Also, every time she falls down or sits down when she is outside, she calls for me to stand her up again. She won't get up by herself because that would require touching the ground with her hands, which she doesn't like to do.

Both kids love to splash water so I will have to fill the other side with water once I caulk it. It currently leaks.

Last night I was feeding Nora something new, and she was really into it, so I said "you like it!" She then repeated back to me "I like it!" Both kids are putting together more and more words to make phrases. Milo has said things like "mama's umbrella" a couple of times. He's also constantly saying "where is it?". This morning one of the kids' toys was singing a song about bread and Nora heard it and then said "Bread? Bread?" She then ran over to her booster chair, said "eat!" and "up!" and then proceeded to enthusiastically eat a whole bunch of pieces of those cheddar bacon muffins I made a week ago. The very same one that she has refused and thrown overboard oh, 50 times in a row.

Kids are fickle. That's all I can figure out.

Here are some action shots. Nora is taking a stroll and Milo is doing an interpretive dance with the ball. 

One Step Back

Nora threw up again tonight. I didn't see it coming. I don't think I overstuffed her, because it was only at the end of the meal that she decided she didn't want any more, and I stopped feeding her at that point with a couple of spoonfuls left. She had some banana bread, some broccoli and cheese soup, spinach and potatoes with brown rice, and some pureed bananas. Then I gave her a cracker which she didn't want, and I gave her some Cheerios which she happily ate. Then I was eating a chocolate cookie again, like the other night, and I gave Milo some, and so Nora wanted a piece so I gave her a little bit. It was right after she ate that piece that she suddenly started crying and then she threw up her entire dinner.

Le sigh. It is impossible to fatten up this kid if she throws up her dinner. So she went to bed with an empty stomach, of course not wanting anything else after that. I don't think I overstuffed her, because I just offer her finger foods at the end of the meal and if she's full she won't eat it. 

The other time that Nora threw up was also after I'd given her a little piece of some chocolate something I'd been eating after dinner.  In fact that was a couple of months ago and tonight was the first time since that other time that I had offered her anything like that again. So I would say she is allergic to chocolate but she has had things like bread or muffins with chocolate chips in them and been fine. So maybe it is this store-bought paraffin type chocolate that is the problem? Or maybe it's just a coincidence. Obviously I won't be offering her anything like that again any time soon. 

It is hard to fully convey how completely defeated I feel when one of the kids throws up their dinner. All that work down the drain. They're never going to gain properly at this rate.

Typical Friday Afternoon

This afternoon, as in 4 p.m. on a Friday, I had one of the most annoying meetings ever. We have these meetings about once a month and it involves me and my colleagues and a bunch of old guys from another department who wear pocket protectors and blackberries on their belts, and we have to sit around for an hour and a half and listen to them go on and on about content knowledge and how smart they are and how dumb everybody else is and basically by the time these meetings are over I want to rip somebody's head off. Today was especially like that. 

Oh, it is such a breath of fresh air to come home after all of that nonsense. Milo and Nora both wanted me to identify everything in the world to them once I was home. What's this? What's this? What's this? What's this? Fridge. Knee. Trash can. Wall. They just kept searching for things to point to or touch, asking me "what's this?". When that got boring the just started identifying things themselves, showing me the stuff they knew. Eye. Nose. Socks. Belly. Pants. Sweater. Button. Backpack. Etc...

Then at dinner, I couldn't believe it, but Nora actually asked for more of something! She was eating peanut butter with yogurt, and wanted more. She was actually hungry! It was awesome. After dinner I had a cookie that was kind of melty (chocolate) and Milo got interested in it, so I gave him a piece, and he went wild over it. He totally loved it and got chocolate smeared all over his face. 

Here's a picture of the kids, I don't know why Milo looks so weird in it, but anyway Nora is reading a book about shapes which is one of their favorites. They can identify some shapes. Milo likes to bring books over to us and tells us "read!" Then he'll walk away and pick his own book, and sit down with it. He likes to read his book while we are reading our books at the same time. 

When it was time to go to bed I said "who wants to go night night?" and both kids raced to the stairs, laughing with glee.  I have no idea why that's their favorite thing ever, but they love to go upstairs and get ready for bed. Hopefully this weekend it'll be nice enough outside that the kids can play on the patio while Jake and I start to get it ready for spring and summer. It's been a cold spring so far, so I'm getting a late start on planting things.

Amen

I was going to write a post about National Infertility Week and how infertility changed my life forever. But then I read this one, and I don't have anything to write because Alexa has already said it all for me.

Cleanse the Palate

Here's a cute picture.

Today Milo ate 15 little bits of Kiwi off a fork. Once he had help stabbing it, he could use the fork and thus didn't have to actually, you know, touch it. Nora did put it to her mouth briefly before making a face and spitting it out.

One thing I've been somewhat surprised by recently is the kids' use of "I". I've been saying "you did it!" and they will repeat back "I did it!" Tonight I said something like that, I can't remember what it was, but some new phrase like "you found it" or "you dropped it", and Nora repeated back but replaced "you" with "I". I think this might mean that the kids are geniuses (so says every parent).

Nora and Milo have also been trying to make trades with each other, which I also find pretty smart. This morning Milo had a toy phone that Nora wanted, so she went and found a different toy phone (I think we have 3 different ones), brought it over to Milo, and handed it to him, saying "Mino". She then tried to grab Milo's. Milo didn't fall for this, and thus ensued a giant rabid fight over the coveted phone, but sometimes this strategy does work. I've seen Milo do the same thing with Nora. 

The kids have also taken to playing chase with each other, running back and forth and cackling with glee. I know this sounds mundane but after so much time generally ignoring each other, or being near one another but not actually interacting, it is very fun to see the kids directly playing together.

Guilt Blogging

The things that I thought would try my patience with toddlers have yet to really bother me. If the kids fight or cry or act like jerks to each other, I can re-direct them, calm them down, and deal with it without it being a problem. Tearing the toilet paper off the roll, sticking their entire hands in the cat's water bowl, basically wreaking a giant path of destruction that I must constantly reign in, those things are cool with me. I can understand why they do that stuff, because mostly they're just exploring their environment and being territorial. When the kids throw tantrums it does not bother me. I find it easy to empathize with how they must be feeling, and I just comfort them.

There are, however, two things that can really make me lose it. One is getting woken up by a crying baby 10 times through the night. I remember one time I was so angry that I told myself that once Nora was back to sleep I would allow myself to go down to the kitchen and destroy something. Which I did. (It was a cheese grater). So that kind of behavior was obviously nuts, and now that it's behind me I can kind of breathe a sigh of relief that it's over.

Except there's the other thing that really, really tries my patience, and that is problems with eating. 

I'm sure the whole underweight, extra doctors, extra pressure issues has made this worse. I don't worry as much now as I used to but I do remember worrying all the time about Nora's weight and then getting very, very frustrated when she would not drink her bottle. A couple of times I had to put her down and walk out of the room because otherwise I just wanted to scream. These days it's all about the solid foods, and sometimes the kids have good meals and sometimes they have crappy meals, and usually I'm okay with it but it is definitely a constant annoyance. I hate mess and I hate wet and slimy things. I hate getting anything wet or slimy on my hands, which is too bad because feeding a toddler is akin to putting a vat of soup into a blender, leaving the top off, and then turning it on. Every meal involves wet slimy things all over me, all over them, and all over the floor, the chairs, the table, and sometimes the wall. It means spoons full of pureed food chucked onto the floor, splattering everywhere. It is really obnoxious. Honestly I would rather change 100 diapers than deal with that.

Plus it's just never easy. Just about every spoonful has to be slipped in while they're distracted with other things. I have to employ 20 different tricks within the span of one meal just to get them to eat anything. It's always a struggle, every single meal.

Today in addition to pureed foods I made the following things for the kids: sausage, blueberry pancakes, toast with cream cheese and preserves, potato and leek soup with tons of cheese and cream, and cheddar bacon muffins (full of fatty goodness). Milo tried all of that and Nora tried none of it. None. At dinner, after having spent the day cleaning the floors, making food, doing dishes, and  pureeing avocados and bananas, we sat down and she took those muffin bits and said "No!" and immediately threw them on the floor. This mirrored lunch behavior (for the toast with cream cheese) and the breakfast behavior (for the pancakes and sausage). Seriously, oh my God, just TRY it. Then it was soup time, and this is soup that both kids love. Except not tonight. Both kids basically have to hold their own spoon and practice feeding themselves these days while I feed them, or else they will turn their heads and refuse to eat. It is a giant, messy, mess. But tonight after throwing the muffins overboard, Nora would not eat a bite of that soup. Instead she got a giant glob onto her spoon and then instead of putting it into her mouth (which she can do, and usually does), she threw the spoon at me, splattering the soup all over my clothes, the floor, and somehow, inexplicably, the wall.

And that is when I lost it, yelling "arrrrrghhhhh!", I mean, a real yell of frustration. And then both kids immediately started screaming and crying in terror, and Milo practically choked on the muffin he'd been happily eating. 

So, to sum up, I am a total asshole, I scared my kids, and I suck at parenting. 

Transitions

Some of my favorite times in the week are Monday mornings and Friday afternoons. After a long weekend with kid-related antics and mishaps, never being able to finish a thought, turning around from folding the laundry to wipe a nose only to re-discover the unfolded laundry hours later, I am thrilled to return to the simultaneous calm and excitement of work. 

By the time Friday afternoon rolls around I'm often already home in my mind, thinking about how we can go outside for a while before dinner, anticipating that delicious moment when I come through the door and Milo and Nora run through the kitchen to see who it is.

Being with the kids is so much fun. They're a crack up. Nora constantly says her own name now, walking around patting herself on the belly crooning little songs to herself that go like this "night night Noona, night night Noona, night night Noona, night night Noona." Then there is the popular variant, "bye bye Noona." Milo is having a lot of fun with two- and three-word phrases. He loves to say "Hi, daddy!" I have to put the exclamation point in there because that's how he says it every single time. Hi, daddy! Holy cow, it's you again, after just 30 seconds! Hi, daddy! Another favorite of Milo's is "where is it?", and both kids are saying "I did it!" 

But I hope it doesn't make me a bad parent to say that the fun parts are only part of it, and frankly, kids in general can be a) a pain in the ass, and b) boring. I mean, they just can. Adult brains are not equipped to handle the degree of repetition that small children inflict on them. Because you know what, after the 800th time of helping them put those two giant lego blocks together and take them apart again, my mind is going to turn into jelly. That's just what it does. The next thing you know I'm softly singing "night night Noona" to myself as I wash up the dinner dishes. And that's part of why Monday mornings are so fun for me. I need to spend some time thinking about conceptual analyses of spatial reasoning tasks, and then when the evening rolls around, I need to read "Goodnight Moon" three times in a row. Each half of me gives more meaning to the other half. And maybe over time this is how I will cobble together my currently fractured mama/professor identity.

Above is a picture of Milo stuck in a painful conundrum. He wants to stand up, but he can't let go of either ball. But he wants to pick up a ball. But if he picks up a ball, he'll have to stop touching the other ball. Which is not acceptable. Thus he crouches, grappling with the agony of imperfect choices.

When the Cat's Away, the Paternal Grandmother will Dress the Children in Gender-Stereotyped Clothes