Scenes

Jake took Milo up to his parents' house for a few days.  The weather was already starting to turn cool, which isn't unusual that far north. Milo still had fun, though.

Jake got a couple of afternoons of sailing in, despite the cool weather. Here's his boat after they took down the sails. Jake has had this boat for a long, long time.

Even though we're in the midwest, Jake's parents live so far north that it sort of reminds me of where I grew up in Washington state. There are pine trees all over the place up where his parents are, unlike where we live. It's rarely humid up there. His folks are in the woods and everything is green and quiet.

I like it for holidays, but I don't like that climate enough to live there. Instead, everything I like reminds me of college. Here is an old picture I had on my computer of my college campus. It must have been early fall when I took this. I know exactly where on campus this scene is located, and can immediately conjure up what it was like to walk down that path on my way to the math building. I adore that campus. I love the enormous trees and the gorgeous architecture, the old buildings with the tile floors and the bizarre gargoyles sitting on top of doorways. I simply love everything about it. I wish that I had taken more pictures when I lived there. Pictures of the campus, of my apartment, my neighborhood with the brick streets and the old stone buildings and the corner store. Pictures of my walk to school, under towering trees. I must still miss it, since I can remember it like it was yesterday.

Here is one of only two pictures I have on my computer of my old neighborhood when I lived in San Diego for grad school. It's so different:

That scene is a park near my old student housing apartment. I liked my apartment complex and used to take daily walks or runs to this park. Everything is pretty because it is green and manicured and watered, the way stuff was around there. My student housing was nestled into condos in what was a pretty nice neighborhood.  I could walk to three different grocery stores, lots of restaurants, and a movie theater.  The weather in this picture is how the weather always is there. The sky is always blue. There are never any clouds. It is always 75 degrees. It is kind of nice, and it is especially nice in January, but it doesn't thrill my heart.

This next picture of the other side of the park reveals why I never liked California vegetation:

See, it's just a desert. You can see the brown in that hill in the distance. That brown ground is the natural part. All of the green is the unnatural, watered stuff. San Diego is a desert that people turned into a paradise by important trees and watering things. But it's still deserty and scrubby and that natural scrubby vegetation always has been and always will be ugly to me. As wonderful as my time in San Diego was, and it was great in lots of ways, it was never...right.

This is right:

That is home. Give me the midwest, or the east, or parts of the south. Give me the big trees that change colors in the fall and the sound of cicadas in August (I can hear them right now). Give me languid, humid summers and big fat snowflakes at Christmas. This is home.

Parenting Doubts

Honestly, sometimes I wonder about our parenting skills. Especially after this weekend, when the children were frankly incorrigible, especially a certain girl child.

I have been slain by Nora's illness and have been up sick all night, miserable all day, in a cold sweat all weekend. Nothing a little rest and maybe some 7-up with crushed ice wouldn't cure (where the hell is my mother?). But I don't get to rest in bed with 7-up and crushed ice, because if Nora knows I am in the house but not playing with her, picking her up, and doing all of that sheer physical stuff involved in parenting, she goes ballistic. Seriously, we're talking standing at the bottom of the stairs, banging on the gate, screaming and crying "Mama, Mama, Mama" over and over again.  Which is not very restful for any of us.

Poor Jake.

Nora's histrionics get Milo going, and the next thing you know it's a weekend of two kids yelling and screaming and crying nonstop.  Are other people's kids like this? Do our kids yell and cry an unusual amount? I just don't have the energy to deal with it this weekend. 

Today when Nora woke from her afternoon nap I could hear her crying (unusual) and saying "Mama, where'd Mama go? Mama, Mama." So I went in there, and Nora just proceeded to lose it. For an entire hour. Seriously, she spent an entire hour screaming and crying, sometimes outright tantruming, kicking and flailing. She wanted me to hold her that whole time and damn it, I did because I had this weird suspicion that Nora was freaking out over me being unavailable most of the weekend. Like she'd reached the end of her rope and she just couldn't handle it anymore, she hated that I wouldn't walk around holding her, she hated it every time I wanted to sit down or lie down, she hated not having me be normal like she wanted me to be, and I feel like maybe she was testing me by being as horrible as she could possibly be to see if I would stick around or not. So I held her but every second I was second-guessing myself, wondering if I was doing the wrong thing by indulging this behavior, teaching her to be an absolute pill. Like maybe I should have put her in her room and told her that I would hold her when she was done crying?

I had this flashback to this one time when I was in the car with my dad and stepmom and my younger sister was about Nora's age, and my dad was going on about how the reason a child cries is not the first thing to attend to. The first thing to do is correct the inappropriate behavior (stop the screaming), the reason doesn't matter, what matters is that the child is screaming, which is inappropriate. Only when the child has calmed down is it then okay to deal with the reason behind the screaming. At the time this struck me as cruel but now I think, well, that sister is now all grown up and is a perfectly lovely person. So maybe he was right -- what if I am doing it the wrong way and Nora is going to turn out to be a giant jerk because I am overly permissive?

20 Months

Milo & Nora are 20 months old and I'm going to dispense with the introductory comments because I just have to write about the crazy thing that happened with Nora tonight. It was so weird. 

So the kids recently got a puzzle (on loan from the twin whisperer) that has fruits: apple, banana, pear, cherries, and grapes. The kids are familiar with a number of different fruits because many of their books introduce pictures of fruits (i.e. "baby colors", "happy baby colors", and "baby words"). Each of those books, by the way, Nora identifies by name. So she knows about bananas from these puzzles and books even though she would scream and arch her back and writhe in agony if you suggested that she actually, you know, eat a banana. (Pureed is okay.) 

So this evening I got a package with some clothes. One of the items was a blue dress with a tag on it. The kids love tags so Nora came up and held the tag in her hand and then said "banana!". And I was all, oh silly Nora, that's not a banana. The tag isn't even yellow. This is frankly very unlike you because you've never before in your life incorrectly called anything a banana, and now you're called this decidedly non banana-like tag a banana? And then I looked at the tag. There were 2 words on the tag: "banana republic". 

!!!

I kid you not. We had not been discussing bananas. I looked at the tag, just those 2 words. No pictures. I looked at the box. No pictures anywhere. It was totally a Little Man Tate kind of moment. It was so strange. The kids' books do have the word "banana" below the picture sometimes, so maybe she recognized the word somehow? Or maybe it was just an incredible, incredible coincidence. Jake and I both witnessed this so I know I'm not crazy.

Phew.  I feel better for getting that out.  I just had to share it, that's how weird it was. Later Jake was holding the Neosporin tube, which we are using for lubing up Nora's hugely scraped knee, and Nora identified the N, the E, the O, and the R from the tube. Jake was about to ask her about the other letters and then Milo came up and grabbed the thing and ran as Nora yelled and gnashed her teeth in mighty agony.

Nora has more or less recovered from her feverish puking illness.  It was rough going for a few days. She whimpered or cried constantly, would not let me put her down, and discussed everything in what Jake calls her late-years Katherine Hepburn voice. Think wobbly and frail. We have done a lot of laundry, and I am tired of being puked on. On the up side, due to this illness 3 out of our 4 sofa cushions ended up in the wash and I've definitely been meaning to wash them, so that's a chore to check off the list!

Check out how fashionable Nora is in her glasses:

Nora is starting to turn a corner with the separation anxiety stuff. I can sometimes leave the house and she'll say "bye bye, Mama" more or less happily without screaming, crying, or clinging to me. This isn't always the case but it is more and more. She's also okay with the twin whisperer leaving. Nora does seem more interested in Milo's whereabouts these days. When I take her on an outing she repeatedly asks where Milo is. When all four of us are out together Nora will keep a running tally on where we all are, marching around pointing at each of us saying "Daddy, Mama, Milo, Nora! Nora, Milo, Nora, Milo!"

The kids now know what it means to pose for a camera which is kind of nice. They will even smile, and when Nora gets her picture taken she'll say "More please? More please?" Here is Nora posing on the chair, and the second photo shows her fake camera smile.

When it is humid Nora's hair springs into curls. Sorry about that, kid. 

Nora still doesn't eat worth crap, and it's gotten worse since the illness. According to our scale she hasn't gained any weight in the last 2 months either, but we still have 4 months before the dreaded check-up so hah! Who cares. Tonight she ate a meatball piece, said she liked it, and then spit it out because she couldn't handle its texture. But the point is that she tried it and that's progress. 

Nora has a favorite shape, which is circle. Her second favorite used to be triangle but these days it is trapezoid. She is okay with squares and rectangles, and will identify them but won't typically ask me to draw them. With Nora it's all circles and trapezoids. We have some sidewalk chalk and after adhering to Nora's frequent shape requests our driveway looks like a mad geometer's. Who knew a kid would have favorites when it comes to shapes.

Milo hasn't done any super freaky things lately, other than avoiding the family illness which I found quite impressive. Nora was busy puking her guts up right and left and Milo learned how to say "Nora threw up! Nora threw up!" Milo was fine. He's still eating things like lentils and rice and pancakes and smoked salmon and bell peppers. He still throws stuff at dinner though, usually while saying "No throwing food!".

Milo still loves balls more than ever. He can now catch a ball, so we can play catch back and forth. I can get him to catch it by saying "one, two, three, catch!" and then throwing the ball. That little extra delay is all he needs to react to catch it. Milo now wants to play catch with Nora, which she will sort of do (although she can't exactly catch a ball, and has no interest in throwing either, but she humors him). When Milo does anything, like catching the ball, stabbing a piece of meatball with his fork, or getting up on the sofa by himself, he triumphantly announces, "I did it!"

Look at that earnestness! The kid is so earnest. He is also sensitive. He will start to cry if I yell at the cat to get off the counter. Recently we went to a party at a bouncy castle place and the kid's dad said hello to Milo, which caused him to burst into tears. So Milo still has some shyness. However, he is very interested in men now, who he calls "guys", and he'll look for the "guy" in every book and magazine we have. The other day I took him to the store and every time Milo saw a man or a woman he'd say "Hi guy! Hi lady!" 

The twin whisperer brought the kids a book by Richard Scarry, called the best little word book ever. I am pretty sure I had this book as a kid. It is very familiar to me and I loved it. Milo also loves this book. It has a house scene, a grocery store scene, a farm scene, a vehicles scene, and so on and so forth with tons of different words to identify. Milo can seriously look at this book for half an hour. He loves Lowly Worm and will find him on every page. He likes to do things like find the grocer on the commerce page and then turn the page and say "Where's grocer? Where'd grocer go?" and then turn back and triumphantly say, "Here he is!"

Here's Milo looking cool in his glasses:

Milo can also smile for the camera but the next two pictures are weird ones because he insisted on sitting on my lap for picture taking time:

Milo has an amazing sense of hearing. He can hear an airplane or a dog barking seconds before I can. He always announces these things. Milo also loves music, especially the really awful kind with little kids singing in high-pitched voices and whatnot. I hate that crap but Milo truly loves it, so we play it. He can sing just about all of the words now to Twinkle Twinkle, Baa baa black sheep, the ABC song, and that song about the duck with the feather on his back.  Speaking of Baa baa black sheep, I didn't want to use the word "slave" in there so I was struggling for another word. I came up with "one for my master, one for the train", which I thought was pretty good because it rhymes with "lane". But Jake insists on singing "one for my master, one for the thane". What is a thane, anyway? It sounds like a made up word. Huh -- I just looked it up, and apparently it is a real word for a man who held land granted by a king. So I suppose thane is pretty appropriate after all. Which is good, because that's what Milo sings.

Milo can slide down the slide all by himself now. He can also go up stairs on his feet, instead of on his hands and knees, as long as he holds onto the railing. He's really turning into a kid. I think that I often see Milo and Nora as younger or more toddler-like than kid-like because they just look a lot younger than their peers. I think this is mostly due to their size and in Milo's case, his general baldness. His hair is definitely growing but it's a very different look from a kid who has a full head of thick hair.

Here is a shot of Milo smiling nicely for the camera. What a cutie! His head has rounded out quite nicely:

It's interesting to me how generally similar Milo and Nora are. I see all of their differences, in eating, sleeping, aggression, shyness, etc but as soon as we get around another kid I see how much more similar they are than different. Both kids are so verbal. They're also developing some sort of creepy twin language. They make up words, repeat them back and forth, and laugh uproariously. It's kind of disconcerting, but at least they're amusing themselves.

Milo and Nora actually interact with each other quite a lot these days, which I love. They fight, of course, but they also pretty much get the concept of taking turns. If I say "it's Milo's turn" Nora immediately gets that and will stop trying to grab the item. She'll wait and then say "Nora's turn!" The most interesting thing is that when I give the object to Nora, she'll then pretty quickly say "Milo's turn!" Each kid takes a "turn" that lasts about 2-3 seconds. They're quite good at passing an object back and forth, though. Tonight Nora passed something to Milo and he said, spontaneously, "thank you Nora!".

Next week Jake is taking Milo to the lake again, and it'll be interesting to see what that separation is like for them this time, 2 months down the road. I think they will ask after each other much more than they did last time. Honestly I'd enjoy having some Milo time to myself, but I don't think Nora could do the trip without me without freaking out, so once again Jake gets Milo and I get Nora. I'll definitely enjoy my one-on-one time with my girl, and will be anxious to give my boy some giant hugs when he gets back.

Jake has slowly crawled his way back from death's door. I feel kind of bad making fun of him since he got so sick in the end. This morning as I put Nora down for her nap, I thought she was quite hot. It seemed like she had a fever. I went to work and Jake gave her medicine when she woke up. However, she didn't want to eat anything for dinner yesterday, and neither kid wanted to eat much at any meal today. Nora had about a third of her normal meal at dinner tonight and I could tell she was sick.

Nora kept walking around for the hour before dinner telling me that her mouth hurt. This is entirely possible since she still only has 4.5 teeth so at any given time she could be going through some serious teething, but I wonder if saying her mouth hurt was really her way of saying that her tummy hurt, or she felt sick or something. About an hour and a half after she went to bed she suddenly woke up and immediately threw up. Poor kid.  

As we were changing the sheets, mattress pad, crib bumpers, and washing the wall Milo cried and cried over the strangeness of it all.  And...I hear her crying again.  Better go.

Jake seems even sicker today. He has no energy and is super weak. I don't understand how the same virus could have affected us so differently -- I might make him go to the doctor tomorrow, that's how sick he is. Maybe he will need some help to get his fluids back up. Our doctor's offices have a special room with an IV and an easy chair for those dehydration situations. I've been in that room many times.

Meanwhile, because Jake was in no shape to leave the house today, I took just Milo to the splash park. Today is a hot day and I knew Milo would like the fountains. So we went and I found it really interesting and kind of strange how...different he is from all of the other kids. Every single other kid there immediately took off running and shrieking through the water. Milo, however, spent a lot of time just assessing everything very seriously. He just stood there, watching all of the fountains and the people, and then he would cautiously go up to a stream of water and gingerly reach out to touch it. Meanwhile big kids and the 1-year old babies alike are busy running circles around him and throwing their heads into the water with abandon. Next to all of the other kids Milo almost seemed, I don't know, like an old person with his calm deliberate assessment of everything. It was almost eerie. 

He did have fun, though, and as we left he said "bye bye splash park" about 30 times in a row.  Milo is still pretty much willing to roll with the punches, which is cool.

Just another cruel 4 a.m. It never changes around here.

The other night I had dinner with a friend who gets up every night with her 7-year old. He has nightmares and night terrors. His older sister is 9. My friend hasn't slept through the night in 9 years.

Milo and Nora are so different. When Nora wakes, she starts crying almost before she is fully awake. It's just her standard mechanism. Wake, cry. Wake, cry. When Milo wakes, he almost never cries unless there's a problem. In fact, I can hear him right now. He has apparently woken up, no doubt thanks to his dramatic and angst-plagued sister, and is quietly humming a little bit to himself.

This is just a blog about how my kids don't sleep. It's an "I never sleep" blog. First it was a "holy crap it's hard to never sleep" blog, and then it became a "I can't believe I'm still not sleeping" blog, and then it morphed into a "it looks like I might start to get some sleep soon" blog, only to quickly devolve back into a "I thought by this point I'd be getting some sleep" blog. Now it has become an "It's been so long since I've slept that I don't even remember what sleep is, in fact if I met sleep on the street I doubt I'd even recognize it and we would probably pass by one another without even stopping or saying hi or chatting about the weather, that's how long it's been" blog.

Fortunately Jake is the one member of the household who hasn't woken tonight. The poor guy is really quite sick and needs his rest.

Hopefully the lesson here will be that a person can survive without any of the major parts of her life completely falling apart even if she never gets enough sleep. 

Man Virus

A little virus seems to have visited our house that caused me a bit of intestinal upset yesterday. Come to think of it, I had a headache for a couple of days too, and felt kind of crummy, but chalked it up to the never-ending sleep deprivation. I thought that was the end of it until...

(Cue ominous music)

It attacked Jake. He was fine this morning but this afternoon he called me at work to inform me of his ailments. He wanted to know if I'd been sick too, because I think he was on the brink of throwing everything out of the fridge on suspicion of food poisoning. I confirmed that I'd had the same symptoms the day before. I hung up the phone and thought that was the end of it. But no! When I got home poor Jake was really, really sick. What had been a minor inconvenience for me was a major illness for him. At some point he even mentioned the possibility of dying. I am not making this up. I told him to take a nap and I would watch the kids for the rest of the afternoon, which I did. Later he got up and drank some vegetable broth and seemed to feel a little better.

Tonight after the kids were asleep I sat down at my computer, in my office. Jake sought me out, sprawled out on the futon, and proceeded to moan, grunt, and sigh in agony. I realized the error of my ways. I figured Jake had the same thing I had, a little virus. But no, I underestimated the gravity of the situation -- Jake has a MAN virus:

It's Sad Because It's True

Scene: Amy drags herself out of bed early, even though it was Jake's morning to get up with the kids, because said kids are screaming and yelling nonstop, and it is impossible to sleep through that shit. Amy walks downstairs where the kids are going at each other nonstop, fighting like a couple of savages.

Amy: Dealing with these kids is like reining in a couple of wild animals. Seriously, I'm worried that we're going to end up with a couple of uncontrolled, spoiled jerks here if we're not careful.

Jake: It's like Lord of the Flies here. And I'm Piggy. And they're going to drop a rock on my head.

It Doesn't Matter Anymore

Dooce has an incredible series of posts up about her natural labor and childbirth with her second daughter. She writes a good story and this story is amazing indeed. It makes me wonder when I am ever going to get over my non-birth of a birth with the twins, and how much ambivalence and sadness I still feel about it. I spent most of my pregnancy seriously preparing for a natural birth only to get sidelined at the end by a stubbornly breech Milo. It felt deeply wrong to go into the hospital without a single labor pain and get gutted like a fish so quickly that I was suddenly a mother before I even knew what happened. I am grateful for the c-section because of the outcome. I am grateful that Nora & Milo were born healthy and alive. Of course I am grateful for that, of course. But I am also sad about the way it happened, even as I recognize how lucky we all were that everything turned out fine.

It gets better and better as the kids get older and I no longer have to rely on my body to do stuff. My body is now irrelevant, and my crappy pregnancy and my crappy milk production skills don't matter anymore. I can use my brain now to parent, and slowly forget how my body kept letting us all down. 

Today was a nice day. After the kids went down for their morning nap I walked to work, and finished the methods section of a paper I'm writing. On to results on Thursday.  This is the first of my two "signature pieces" for tenure.  I have to write those papers this year and get them accepted. Before that happens, I won't be ready to go up for tenure.  (So it might take a while). I came home early, getting home at around 4. It was hot today, finally, and we decided to turn on a mini sprinkler and let the kids play with the water. Milo and Nora had a blast playing with the water. Milo especially loved it, putting his face in the water, trying to drink it, getting his belly wet, and then shivering and shivering but not wanting to come away from the sprinkler. I got a towel and wrapped him up and held him, and the kid was icy!

Then we noticed that our neighbors with a toddler close to M & N's age have now returned from their year in Japan! They were in the park with their daughter, so Nora and I walked over to talk to them and catch up. We all wandered back to our house and their daughter took off her clothes and ran through the sprinkler with Nora and Milo while we chatted about Japan and tenure stuff (they are also professors). Then another neighbor I know came by with her 2 kids, and they started running through the sprinkler as we all sat around and talked. The next thing I knew it was dinner time and we had magically avoided the typical late afternoon crankiness that often plagues our house. Instead the kids had had a great time running around outside with their friends and I thought once again how terrific this neighborhood is.

Sunday Afternoon at the Arboretum

Picky Eaters

Yesterday I made some grilled vegetables with korma sauce, and rice, and Milo lapped it up. The kid ate potatoes, tomatoes, grilled peppers, onions, zucchini, and asked for more. There is something that is just so satisfying about being able to feed Milo the same food that we eat! It's like, I don't know, I only have to make one dinner instead of two!

Except, of course, for Nora.

So I'm kind of wondering about Nora and her refusal (absolute) to try any food that is not crackers or toast or cheese. I mean, seriously. She won't try anything. In fact she has started refusing to eat foods that she used to eat, like pancakes and meatballs. She won't eat any fruit. She won't eat any vegetables. She won't eat pasta. She won't eat rice. She won't eat mashed potatoes. She won't even eat, my God, ice cream, cake, or brownies. She won't even try it. Honestly, here is the non-baby food that Nora will eat: Toast (we can put peanut butter, honey, and cream cheese on it), french toast, cheese, and crackers. That's it. 4 things.

A person cannot live off of 4 things, especially as those things don't actually contain any fruits or vegetables, so we're still giving her pureed baby food. But I'm starting to wonder how long this is going to last. Today the twin whisperer said that she could imagine us sending Nora off to kindergarten with her pureed lunch. Is it going to come to that? The kid is remarkably stubborn. Every single meal, I offer stuff, she says no and turns her head so far away from the offending food that she looks like one of those owls who can rotate its head 360 degrees, and I say "okay" and drop it. I don't push the issue or try to make her eat stuff. I'm just wondering...how do you get a kid to try things? Is she doomed to a toast and cheese diet for the foreseeable future?

Hiding

The kids are like our cats -- they think that if they can't see us, then we can't see them. So they try to "hide" behind the flap on the front of the sofa. It reminds me of when our cat Sam will hide her massive bulk behind a tiny wrinkle in a rug. 

It's a Milostone!

I'm so proud. Today, for the first time ever, Milo at a full dinner of actual people food and no baby food at all.  He ate almost an entire meatball, 1/3 of a banana nut muffin, corn on the cob (well, sliced off the cobb by me), grilled red peppers with bits of quinoa stuck to them (and he asked for more and more red peppers and ate them until we ran out), 1/2 of a banana (off a fork), and a small bowl of ice cream.  Hooray!

(Out of all of that stuff, the only thing Nora would try was muffin, and she did eat 3 or 4 bites of muffin).

Even if I can just downsize to buying baby food for only 1 baby instead of 2, it'll be a nice change.  Milo is now to the point where he takes an interest in what we eat, hence the red peppers with quinoa and the corn on the cob, which is awesome. After dinner the kids ran around playing peek-a-boo with each other (Nora calls it "peek to you") and didn't even need us to play with them. Awesome. 

Manners

This evening I handed a piece of cheese to Milo and out of nowhere he said "Thank you, Mama!" Awwww!

Guy and Glasses

This morning we had the chimney people come to do some work, and at one point they had to get into our attic. So this guy came into the living room and Milo started crying a little bit. As I came down the stairs he ran up to me, pointed at the chimney dude, and said "Guy!" I didn't even know he knew that word, although lately Nora has been referring to a tiny police officer figurine as a "guy".

Both Milo and Nora have a weird fixation on glasses. They love glasses and want to point it out when anybody is wearing glasses. When the twin whisperer has her reading glasses on the top of her head, they'll say "Glasses on? Glasses on?" until she puts them on her face. When it's time to draw, Nora will ask me to draw a circle and then half the time she'll then say "Eyes and nose? Eyes and nose?" As soon as I make the circle into a face both kids will demand that I draw glasses. Then they are happy as a clam to look at the face with glasses.

Comparison

Today I was cleaning off my desk and came across doctor's records from my babyhood. The last one I have access to is at 18 months when I was 18 lbs 5 oz, and 31.5". At 18 months Nora was 18 lbs 11 oz and 30.5". So she weighed more than I did, and I was also skinnier when you look at the height to weight ratio. But I don't think anybody was worried about me back then, so it seems like Nora is just expressing her genetics.

Yawn

Yesterday I took some time off work and Jake and I took the kids to the home improvement store after lunch. We had a 10% off coupon that we needed to use by the end of the weekend so we went ahead and bought all of our tile for the basement bathroom while both kids sat in the shopping carts and plaintively asked "Down please? Down please?" about 100 times a row. Home improvement stores aren't great places for running around -- they're full of hammers and saws and giant forklifts and things.

Today we decided to go to the zoo after lunch. I figured it would be a good day because it was cold and cloudy. (Seriously, like 65 degrees out. This has been the coldest summer ever!) But the zoo was so packed that we couldn't even get a parking spot and had to bail. Apparently in the recession the zoo's attendance has doubled. So instead we went to the arboretum, which was quite empty, and the kids had a blast running through prairie fields and gardens. They smelled flowers, watched some planes going by, ran on the grass, and got attacked by mosquitoes. 

I think Milo and I might be fighting off a cold or something. I wake up and feel like I have chronic fatigue syndrome, or maybe acute fatigue syndrome, because I'm just so tired and only want to sleep all the time. I've felt that way for about 2 years now, though, so maybe it's not a cold. Maybe it's just parenthood. Anyway, Milo's been feeling the same way and has been sleeping a ton over the past 2 days. 

Tonight at dinner Milo ate some sushi (the rice part). Both kids ate french fries which I actually deep fried in order to pack in the calories, and then pureed turkey with rice, and sweet potatoes. Nora's favorite thing right now is pureed sweet potatoes, which she will ask for by name incessantly. Then Milo was eating some left over toast with peanut butter from lunch, and Nora asked for some, so I gave her a piece. But it was stale and she gagged on it, and then she threw up her ENTIRE dinner. And then wouldn't eat or drink a thing.

I HATE sending her to bed on an empty stomach. Hate it. I went to the local frozen custard place and got a banana milkshake, hoping she might drink some and banking on the likelihood that it would be packed with calories and fat. Nora had a little, but not enough to make up for dinner. And so it goes. On the bright side she hasn't done any night vomiting since we resumed the "stay upright for at least half an hour after eating or drinking" rule. 

Today we've been dreaming about our future kitchen remodel that is on our "someday when Amy gets tenure and Jake graduates and gets a job" list (also inludes: iPhone, back patio remodel/landscaping, new sofas). My dream remodel includes getting rid of the chimney that runs through our kitchen, eliminating the bar, and turning it into an island. But even just getting rid of the yellow linoleum and tiles would be a nice improvement. The more we put into this house, the less I see us ever leaving. It is an imperfect house but really, what is perfect anyway?  Its location is 100% perfect, and that's a thing you can't improve in a remodel.

Jake taught Milo to say awesome. Now the kids have this conversation:

Nora: Totally radical!

Milo: Awesome.

Done

Uploaded and submitted this morning!

-- Project description, 15 pages
-- Project summary, 1 page
-- Project references, 5 pages
-- Cover sheets and certifications, 5 pages
-- PI biosketch, 2 pages
-- PI current and pending support
-- Project budget (big, but not as big as I originally wanted it to be)
-- Project budget justification
-- Department chair's letter of support
-- School district's letter of support
-- External evaluator's letter of support
-- 5 advisory panel members letters of support

All in all, 50 pages, all done and accounted for. I have no intentions of submitting any more grants in the next couple of years, other than a re-tooled version of this grant next year if I don't get it the first time around. Submitting NSF grants is a bit of a pain and I'm glad to put it behind me for a little while!

Over the last 5 years I have submitted 8 national grants (NSF or IES), one independent consortium grant, and 2 small internal grants. Out of those 11 grants 6 have been funded, 2 are pending (don't know yet), and 3 have been rejected (actually it was the same grant 3 times in a row, and then we finally gave up). Preparing national grant proposals is a lot of work, work that is time down the drain if it doesn't get funded, but having grants get funded is really nice! It definitely changes the tenor of my work in positive ways. Fingers crossed for this one: I'll probably know by Jan or Feb.

Now onto AERA proposal, signature paper #1, signature paper #2, and collaborative paper! I hope to get 2 of those 4 tasks done by the end of the summer, in between all of my committee meetings, student advising meetings, thesis defenses, etc. going on in the next couple of months.

Our Town

As the dusk turned into darkness this evening I listened to a bunch of kids running around outside playing hide and seek and other summer kid games. They gathered under a tree in the park and some of them were chanting "One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock rock! Four o'clock, five o'clock, six o'clock rock!" as other scattered. I'm so glad I live in a neighborhood where kids still roam free on summer nights. So, so glad.

19 Months

I didn't realize until this morning that today the kids are 19 months old. Last night was another sleepless night, which is so boring and endless and whiny and dramatic that I'm boring myself with it. The sleep thing is currently as bad as it was last summer, which is kind of unfathomable to me. I know we'll get through it, it's just hard right now. Hard hard hard hard hard. Wait...was it ever not hard? Let me look back a year to see what I said when they were 7 months old...

Huh. I was describing the kids as mellow and able to roll with the punches. Wow. What a change. So it hasn't always been like this. And that tells me that it probably won't always be like this, either. What I mean to say is that there will be some point in the future when spending time in the house with the kids will not involve near-constant protestations of unbearable agony over the fact that the cat walked away from me!

This time last year I was describing Nora as having more energy and moving around more, and I talked about how Milo was content to just sit there and not move around much. Now Milo is always on the go. He runs to and fro, to and fro. He throws things and cackles and is a constant blur. Milo is capable of sitting down and playing with something for extended periods of time, so I think his high-energy ways are completely normal. This past weekend up at the lake Milo was in disposables because it's hard to use cloth when traveling, and so the diaper was so slim that his pants weren't really staying up. At some point his pants started riding lower and lower, and then as he was running across the room we could all see a plumber's crack as his diaper started slipping too. But Milo just kept running, and the next thing we knew his diaper and his pants had fallen completely down around his ankles, exposing us to the Full Milo, if you will. Amidst everybody's hysterical laughter Milo just kept running, even though it's hard to run with your pants around your ankles.

Milo's favorite book right this minute is one called baby colors, and he can name almost all of the pictures in there, including dolphin, chocolate, eggplant, and grapes. His favorite is the dolphin and he'll ask over and over again "where'd dolphin go? Where'd dolphin go?" as he flips through the pages. Then he'll find it and say "there it is!"

Milo continues to wake at night. Sometimes it seems clear that it is his teeth. Other times it seems like he gets spooked or scared. When Jake comforts him, Milo will sometimes cry once Jake prepares to leave the room. Then I go in and comfort him and he'll ask me "where's daddy?". Once I tell him that daddy is sleeping, he seems to accept that and he'll lie down and go to sleep himself.

Milo is getting a lot more hair on his head, although he still looks generally bald because his hair is so white blond. He is also getting big enough so that he can crawl up on things, like the futon and the rocking chair. The other day I walked into the bathroom and found him standing in the (empty) bathtub. Milo can almost climb up on the sofa, but not quite unless he's got something to grab onto as he yanks himself up, like the cat. He loves getting up on the sofa so he'll ask me "up, please?" breaking out the please because it's something he really wants.

Milo got spoiled up at the lake with lots of grandparent junk food, so much so that last night at dinner he eschewed the meatball I was trying to get him to eat and said "ice cream?" Like he thinks he can order up what he wants! Then he asked for berries and crackers. The good news is that he's eating more and more people food: broccoli, red peppers, cold chicken, several different kinds of fruit, and the occasional piece of pasta. He also likes his sweets, which he discovered with glee at the grandparents' house, like ice cream and brownies. My goal is to have these kids on 100% people food by the age of 2 and feeding themselves entirely. This seems like a reasonable goal for Milo, at least. (Nora won't eat a single thing on the above list. Not even ice cream.)

Tonight Milo said a 4-word sentence. I cannot, however, remember what it was. This is probably the result of ongoing sleep deprivation, the likes of which are truly unfair to inflict upon a geriatric 38-year old such as myself. It was a good one, though. The kids are smart and funny and especially fun to hang around with directly after meals, when they're all energized and cheerful.

Today Jake taught Nora to count to 5. She's been walking around saying "One two three four five! One two three four five!" Obviously cardinality and ordinality are beyond her, but Nora does know when she has two of something rather than one. Nora can also now recognize the letters N, R, and A, which unfortunately brings to mind the NRA, but O is tricky because it looks like a circle. I can draw a circle, triangle, square, and rectangle and Nora will name them all. Today we played with a wooden puzzle that their grandmother picked up at a yard sale. It has lots of shapes and Nora learned some more shape words like "trapezoid" and "hexagon". It's almost as funny to hear her say "trapezoid" as it is to hear her say "totally radical".

The separation anxiety thing is getting worse rather than better. Today Nora broke down and sobbed and cried "Mama, Mama" several different times even though Jake was right there. She's also doing that at night. Developmentally, I imagine this is the peak time for this sort of thing, and in time it'll lessen. I do feel terrible for her, and of course leaving the house is a difficult endeavor. Nora also cries sometimes now when the twin whisperer leaves, saying her name in a tearful, pitiful voice. Honestly Nora's ability to use her little voice to the utmost sympathy-eliciting power is truly stunning. The other morning I took her out of her pack and play and we dropped the pacifier into it (they're only allowed to have pacifiers during sleep times). Nora then wanted it back and started saying "Pafier? Pafier? PAFIER?" with her voice literally quivering, on the verge of tears, her face contorting in pain and agony. It was so endearingly dramatic I wanted to give her an award.

I've noticed that we've really lightened up on the eating thing. Milo looks noticeably skinny to me, especially with his shirt off. Nora doesn't look quite so bad. Part of me has been thinking, eh, they don't have to go back to the doctor until December so that's tons of time to fatten them up. Also, I think I have decided that since the kids seem to be cognitively normal, physically healthy, and growing (albeit slowly), then it's time to stop torturing us all over the eating thing and just let them decide how much they want to eat. I offer all the time, and then they choose what to accept. Nora won't try a darn thing. Just in the past week she's refused to even taste chicken, bananas, strawberries, nectarines, meatballs, pasta, broccoli, red peppers, roasted potatoes, macaroni and cheese, ice cream, and brownies. I mean, honestly. Nora's still strictly a toast and purees kind of girl. Oh, actually I take it back -- Nora did taste a strawberry, actually several times. She would take it into her mouth, sort of, lick it a little bit, and then push it out of her mouth. She'd say "I like it" but she couldn't bring herself to actually chew it. I was proud of her for giving it a try.

Nora's umbilical hernia is noticeably decreasing now. I can tell it's going to close up on its own. This isn't exactly interesting information but it's the kind of detail that maybe I would want to remember for myself 30 years down the road. In other physical developments, Nora's hair is curly and wavy, and is kind of growing in in weird ways so I'm not exactly sure what I should do, if I should cut it, or let it all grow in on the top and just start cutting the bottom until it all reaches the same length, or what. Or maybe put it up in some little pig tails? Right now her hair is kind of in a boy hairstyle.

Nora's a weird nut to crack as she's simultaneously very social and shy. Whenever we see anybody new she clings to me like a monkey and buries her head. But she loves to talk, and when she's around people she knows Nora will carry on nonstop conversations with herself. On the car trip home the other day Nora did this for 3.5 hours in a row. She just talked and talked and talked. It's kind of cool because it's like a window into her mind. Nora is also the one who loves to imitate, so I hear my words coming back when we're at dinner and Nora suddenly says "no throwing!"

The sleep thing is messing everything up so much right now that I'm just trying to get from one day to the next. I'm kind of mad that this is still happening at this age, which seems outrageous, but I'm also sort of accepting of it, in a sad, defeated way. One thing I've realized lately is that good parenting is not just a matter of knowing what to do, it also requires having enough energy to actually go ahead and do it. Sometimes, these days, I don't have that energy. Oh, you want to play with those firecrackers, sticks of dynamite, and giant anvils? Eh...looks safe enough to me. It's not like there are any matches around. Just play quietly for a few minutes while Mama rests here on the sofa.

Toddlers are tiring but they're loads of fun. I love seeing how Nora and Milo think, and learning new things about them every day. We can talk now, and play games together, and the kids can also play games with each other, and in those respects I'm loving every minute of it and wouldn't trade 19 months for 7 months, no matter how mellow they were back then.

Core Dump

So for the first time, really, I was actually embarrassed today as a parent because my kids were being so horrible. 

To back up, Nora & Milo liked all of the excitement of going up to the lake at Grandma & Grandpa's, but it was also really hard for them. G & G have a big dog and Milo and Nora were scared of the dog the whole time. So any time the poor dog (who was actually quite well behaved) even so much as looked at them, the kids would cry. Nora freaked out any time she walked 3 feet away from me and lost track of where I was. Nobody wanted to eat all weekend long, although to Milo's credit he did discover a true love of nectarines and strawberries. 

On the second night, Nora woke up over and over again. We were all 4 in the same room and once she clued in that I was in there, Nora couldn't sleep. She wanted me to hold her, but of course when I held her, or took her into bed, she also couldn't sleep. So she was up and down, up and down, and up pretty much for good by 4 a.m. That disturbed Milo, so he got up too, and we tried to get them to sleep in bed with us, since nobody wanted to be left out from Mama and Daddy cuddle time. But of course that didn't work, because Milo and Nora just kept cracking each other up, and jumping around, and making tons of noise, and I think it was around 5 or 5:30 when Jake remarked that it felt like we were in bed with a sack of crazed weasels. They finally fell asleep at around 6:30 for about an hour and a half.

(If somebody is thinking "just let them cry", we've tried, and Milo will cry for 2 or 3 minutes and fall asleep. But Nora is the opposite. She doesn't release tension by crying, she builds tension. So she'll just cry harder and harder and harder for longer and longer, and it makes the situation worse instead of better.)

As a result of the sleepless night and all the stimulation Milo and Nora were extremely cranky today. They whined constantly. They cried, they didn't want to eat, they freaked out if the dog looked at them, they demanded to get out of their high chairs, it was horrible. We were there with some childless friends of ours and I can just imagine how I would have felt about that whole scene before I had kids. I felt like apologizing over and over again for making them eat lunch while listening to whining, crying children. At one point Nora wanted to sit on my chair with me, but then she wanted me to get off so she could have the chair to herself (to stand up in no doubt), and I had had it with her and told her tersely that no, she can't play on the chair, it's dangerous and I'm going to sit down and eat my lunch, damn it. Then Nora cried for like the 5 thousandth time and her Grandma was all "oh, poor Nora, you can come sit here with Grandma, I'll rock with you on the chair", like I'm evil, and I notice my friend seems kind of cold towards me, and I'm all, that's great, not only are our kids driving everybody nuts but now I can tell that my parenting is being judged too, and give me a break you would get terse too if you'd just listened to non-stop whining for the past 6 hours after a night of not sleeping!

Jake's parents -- well no, scratch that, Jake's mother -- keeps offering to take the kids on her own for a weekend or a week so that we can take a vacation or something. But I just think, am I crazy to think that's a crazy idea? Because Nora is not cool with her Grandma holding her when Mama goes to the bathroom. She still cries the whole time if I step out of the room. She wakes at night and says "Mama" over and over again, and whenever anything freaks her out in a new environment she demands to be held so that she can bury her face in my shoulder. It's not all that different with Milo -- just substitute Jake for me. Am I being overprotective in thinking that just dropping the kids off at the lake with the giant scary dog and the two Grandparents and not even daddy seems a little extreme during this separation anxiety phase of life? 

Jake and I haven't had a night to ourselves since the kids were born. I would of course love to have something like that, but the proposed scenario just doesn't seem feasible to me.  It seems...mean, like we'd be ignoring what the kids need at this time in their lives. But I know other parents do this, so maybe I am being overprotective. I don't know. When my mom is here or when the twin whisperer is here helping out Jake, the kids are okay with me taking trips. 

There were, of course, good things about our trip: the kids loved the lake and riding in a boat. They even tolerated their life jackets. They loved being outside. Milo discovered nectarines and cold chicken. Oh, and Nora did something I found quite clever. She wanted to tell me that she did not like whatever it was I was trying to get her to eat, so she said "No I like it". Also, in the car both kids enjoyed reading book after book and telling little stories to themselves as they looked through the books, which was adorable.

Miscellany

Eating: Milo recently ate a bunch of raw bell peppers and loved them, asking for more over and over again! Go Milo! He also ate two pieces of broccoli last night. And one kidney bean! Hooray! Predictably Nora wouldn't try any of that stuff. I still can't get her to even taste any fruit.

Talking: Yesterday Nora said her first four-word sentence. She said "Milo's eating Nanny's apple!" This story came from the twin whisperer, who appears to think that the kids are mini Einsteins, so I'm taking it with a grain of salt.

Behavior: At some point I'm going to have to figure out when and how to start disciplining these kids. Is it too early for consequences like time outs? I need to learn more about where they are right now developmentally, whether they are old enough to have any impulse control, whether they can understand the concept of a consequence, etc. Milo's current thing is to push Nora. He just gets excited and he's so physical with everything and everybody. Nora isn't exactly bothered by it, but I don't want them to think it's okay to run around pushing people. I keep telling him not to push her and instead I'm trying to give Milo an activity he CAN do as an alternative. So I've come up with waving, as in, you can WAVE at Nora! Wave at Nora, don't push her! But it's not really working. 

Child care: I have convinced the twin whisperer to stay with the kids until January. At that point they'll be two. I have a feeling that it might even be possible to then get her to stay until May or September, but today we got a call from one of the university child care centers that they might have a spot for the kids in January. They're going to call us in early December to let us know. So that could work out. We've been on a waiting list since May '07.

Sometimes I think that maybe I should be exposing the kids to more variety and action, that maybe being at home all day (granted with trips outside to the park and whatnot) isn't providing enough stimulation for them. They can't attend any of the toddler storytime/music/gymboree/whatever classes yet because they still nap in the morning, and all of those classes take place during nap time. I can tell when they kind of get bored after too much of the same. So maybe going to child care once they're two will be good for them. Or maybe Nora won't be ready and she'll totally freak out, much like she does when I try to, say, go to the bathroom. We'll see.

This weekend we're heading up north to Jake's parents' house on the lake, along with some friends. My main goal is to remember the monitor. And sleep sacks, since it'll be cold up there at night. Hopefully they won't fall in the lake, fall off the 2nd-story deck, fall down the steep spiral staircase (with an open banister and no gate), run into the fire pit, or get bitten by the dog. Fingers crossed.

Then and Now

My how quickly things change.

Today I visited a friend and held her week-old baby and he was so tiny. I couldn't believe Nora and Milo had ever been that small. The crazy thing is that this baby was 9 lbs 2 oz at birth which made him exactly twice as big as Nora was at birth. The fact that Nora was actually half as heavy as this baby just blew my mind.

Milo is starting to eat all kinds of people food, which is just fantastic. Today he actually ate some of the pasta from my pasta primavera dish! He also loves strawberries and watermelon. And cake. Nora won't let any of these foods come anywhere near her mouth. I know that if she tried them, she'd like them, but I can't get her to try them. It was music to my ears to hear Milo saying "More pasta? More pasta?" 

Nora's current phrase that cracks us up is "totally radical!" It's only a small step from there to big shoulder pads, pegged jeans, and Wham.

Paradox

Why is it that after a week of healthy eating and lots of exercising I will only lose, at most, half a pound, but after a week of lounging around and eating restaurant food and birthday cake I will gain THREE pounds? It doesn't seem fair that it will take me 6 weeks of healthy living to recover from a mere one week of gluttony. Ugh.

Signs of the Times

Our state legislators have decided that every state employee must take a number of furlough days over the next two years. This applies to me as a professor, but there are some complications. The first is that our job descriptions and responsibilities aren't changing. There is no reduction in teaching responsibilities, no reduction in service responsibilities, and no reduction in the research requirements to get tenure. We can't take furlough on instructional days. So the furlough isn't actually a furlough, because I won't work any less than I would otherwise. It's just a pay cut.

This isn't all that unexpected but the weird part is that I will have to take extra furlough days in comparison to some of my colleagues because I work in the summer. We are paid on a 9-month salary, so the number of furlough days we will have to take are 3/4 of what full-year salaried state employees take. They will take 8 days each year, we will take 6 days each year. Unless we work in the summer, which I do, so I will have to take 2 extra furlough days and give up some of my summer salary. So just like the year-round employees, I will have to take 8 furlough days each year for the next 2 years.

The reason this is dumb is that my summer salary is not paid by the state. It is paid by the NSF entirely, so my summer salary comes from out-of-state funds. So the state legislators, in an effort to balance the state budget, are requiring me to take a paycut from a salary source that does not come from the state. There are some university employees whose entire salary comes from out-of-state funds, and yet they still have to take the same furlough days as everybody else. Not only does that not make sense, but the state is actually going to lose money from this move. They will lose the state income taxes that I and others like me would be paying on that money, and they will lose the sales taxes and other revenue generated from people spending that money...the money we will no longer be making, because we have to take furlough days. Efforts were made to rectify this part of the budget, since this rule will actually cost the state money rather than save money. Those efforts failed for reasons I don't really understand. I know somebody said something about solidarity and making everything the same for all state workers regardless of income source, but -- huh?  It just doesn't make sense.

What a messed up state. At least we're not California.

Career angst

I am in the near-final stages of working on my grant proposal, making revisions based on internal reviewers' comments. I still need to do final work on the budget and the budget justification, but I've got my narrative, summary, advisory panel letters, external evaluator letters, 2-page bio, and chair's letter ready to go.

I have never experienced the kind of writer's block and anxiety that I'm having with this grant proposal. Part of it is because I am applying for an NSF early career award, which means a number of things, one of which is that I can be the only PI on the grant. So it is my baby, all the way, and I feel very attached to it. Part of it is because I have just learned that one of my colleagues in my department, who is a total superstar, is also applying for this very same grant. In fact, this is her second go around because she applied last year and didn't get it. They're much more likely to award a second try than a first try, so I have a feeling that her proposal will be funded. (Also, my colleague is brilliant. She does incredible, innovative work that regularly makes it into the popular press. She's the kind of researcher who constantly travels around the world to give keynote speeches. That is not me.) The chances of NSF giving two career awards out to the very same department in the very same year seem low, so at this point I kind of feel like my own proposal is doomed. My colleague will get it, not me, and what I'm submitting now should just be considered practice for the next time.

I'm having a hard time with this because for some reason I really, really want this. I feel deeply invested in it. I don't want to not get it the first time around. I feel ready to do this study. What I have written is a 5-year study that I couldn't have written a couple of years ago. I wasn't ready for it then. I feel like what I have produced is the culmination of what I've learned over the past 5 years as a professor. It is much more sophisticated than what I would have written a few years ago. I think it would be an awesome study and it's something I really want to do. I can just tell, as I'm crafting it, that this is the study that will launch the next phase of my career. It is exactly what I want to be doing and I am excited about the work. And, of course, having a grant like this has personal meaning too. It means course releases and summer salary, and the latter is a really big deal for our family's finances. (A huge deal).

So I am simultaneously excited about this and yet doomed, too, because now that I know about my colleague's proposal, I am afraid that mine won't get funded. I've decided I just can't really do anything with that information. I have to forget it and move on and honor the work I am doing. Last year, I sat in on a review panel for this particular award. Out of all of the grants I reviewed (I think I personally did 18), there were only 2 that I rated as "excellent". This summer, I went and checked to see what actually got funded from our batch. The two that I rated as excellent were the only two that got funded (from our group of 30 or 40). So that tells me that my instincts are good. My instincts tell me that my proposal is solid. But it still feels doomed. Argh.

Potty related note -- tonight Nora wanted to sit on the toilet again, so I took her diaper off first before sitting her down. And lo and behold, she peed on the potty! I couldn't believe it! She seemed pretty psyched about the whole thing. We clapped and cheered. Maybe this will be something she enjoys doing before bed, who knows.

Action Shots

Nora sliding:

Milo bouncing a basketball:

And yes, that is an actual bounce!

I also wanted to make a record for myself about what Nora did tonight at 18.5 months. Recently our toilet seat broke so we went and bought a new one. The new one has a small child seat attached to it, and you can put it down so there is a smaller hole for little kids to use the toilet. Nora wanted to sit on the toilet so I sat her down on it (fully dressed), which she thought was great fun. She then proceeded to say "poop" and then pooped while sitting on the toilet! I swear these kids are something else. 

Amazingly Beautiful Creatures Dancing

I wish this were available on iTunes, or anywhere. It's so great. I played it for Nora and Milo tonight and they're really getting into the ABC song. When Milo watches this video he says "quack quack!", but I can't see any ducks in it.

Today we went to Jake's aunt's house out in the middle of nowhere for a Father's Day lunch. There were some other little kids there, Nora and Milo's second cousins (or is that cousins once removed?), and great aunts and uncles and grandparents and their great grandfather. Jake's aunt and uncle have a small farm with sheep and chickens. The kids got to see the animals and run around on the grass. Milo was in heaven, spending the whole time carrying around a ball as big as he was. Lunch was...lamb.

Nora has picked up a bit of a habit. She likes to run through her series of exclamations, all in a row. It sounds like this: "Oh my! Oh shoot! Oh dammit!" The first expression definitely comes from the twin whisperer. The second one is my fault (it was originally oh shit but I wised up). Jake takes responsibility for the third. Maybe I can get her to convert it to "oh darn it"...

I am tempted to take down that 2 a.m. post because it is so dramatic and whiny in the way that things can only be in the middle of the night, but I'm going to leave it there. But I should also write a reminder to myself here that today wasn't that bad, despite getting less than 4 hours sleep, and it truly is never as bad as I think it's going to be. I wasn't super exhausted, I was able to work and focus, and I finish the draft of my grant narrative. And it's Friday, so life is okay. So of course I can do this, and it's never as hard as it seems in the middle of the night.

According to the twin whisperer, Nora came up to her today with two balls in her hands and said "two balls". I have not observed this behavior. I have seen Nora say "too", though, in the sense that when Milo is climbing up on the bed, Nora will try to climb up on the bed and say something like "Bed? Bed too? Nora too?" She has also taken to saying "Nora's turn!" when she wants to play with whatever Milo's got.

I am trying to teach the kids manners.  Right now we are working on please and thank you. Nora is doing well with please and, interestingly, she might ask for something 5 times in a row and then throw in a "please" when she's not getting her way. Up? Up? Up? Up? Up? Up please? I can't really get either kid to say "thank you" yet. Then there is Milo and please. It is almost impossible to get him to say please. At first I thought he couldn't say it, because with any other word, if I say "can you say _____ ?" he'll say it, but not with please. Can you say blueberries? Blueberries. Can you say thunder? Thunder. Can you say demilitarized zone? Demilitarized zone. Can you say please? (Silence). Please? (Silence). It is so weird. Why won't the kid say please? He did say it once, perfectly, and we clapped and cheered, but he totally refused to say it after that. It is patently clear to me that Milo is deliberately refusing to say please. He does not want to say it. But why? He can't possibly already understand what it means, right? Maybe he's more precocious than I think. 

Well, everything's better in the morning.

When Milo loses track of me, he says "Where'd Ma go?"  So cute.  Milo made it through the night unscathed and woke up at 6:30. Poor Nora at least slept until 8.

It's 2 a.m. and Nora has been up for 4 hours. She has thrown up once. She has destroyed me. I can't listen to the sound of her crying anymore without going insane, which is where I've landed now. 

Other people, when met with desperate times, will take their baby into bed with them. What do you do when that doesn't work? When she will not, literally can not, fall asleep with you? But if you leave her by herself, she also cannot sleep? You're left in a cycle of insanity in which you're awake for 4 hours, going slowly insane and doing everything in your power to avoid screaming at her, or throwing things against the wall, or destroying the house.

A few times Nora asked for milk so Jake gave her some milk, which she guzzled. Nora did eventually fall asleep for about 15 minutes or so after that, and then very suddenly woke up crying hard. I pulled her into bed with me (she was in the pack 'n play in our bedroom), then some instinct caused me to whisk her out of bed and into the bathroom, where she threw up all over everything. I still smell like vomit. The milk must have triggered her reflux.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to finish the draft of my grant narrative and give it to some internal reviewers. I've got the background and rationale done, I've got the methods and the plan of work and the analysis done, I've got the intellectual merit and the broader impacts done, I've got the education plans and evaluation plans done. I just have to write the personnel section and the results of prior funding section and read over everything and edit and change some things, but how good of a job am I going to do on this with no sleep?

I'll tell you. I'm going to do a crappy job on it, just like I've done a crappy job on everything for the past year and a half. If I had known that a year and a half in I would still have sleepless nights from hell, I wouldn't have done this. I wouldn't have opted to destroy my career, which is what this is doing to me. I never sleep, I am always exhausted, and I cannot handle the pressure of being both the mom and the dad and having all of the responsibility of the family's well being on my shoulders and all of the financial responsibility on my shoulders at the same time. I cannot do both anymore. It is killing me.

I am trying to be strong, and tell myself that I am strong, and that I can keep doing this for another few years, and that I don't need sleep and the day never seems as bad as I predict it will be when I'm up all night. But I am probably shortening my life by releasing all of the stress hormones every night. The kids cry and Jake wakes up and then immediately goes back to sleep. I wake up and then I am awake for another hour, because my body has been flooded with adrenaline, with dread, wondering if this is going to be another one of those nights when Nora throws up or Milo is up 6 times. I constantly feel like I am dragging a giant rock around in my chest and it is growing bigger every day. I cannot handle this pressure.

I know why women with kids don't get tenure. All that stuff about discrimination and not being taken seriously and work-life balance, whatever. It's really the sleep deprivation that makes you not get tenure. The sleep deprivation makes a person stupid and slow and unproductive. 

Conversation with a Student

Me: So how's the thesis coming?

Him: It's coming along slowly...I took a little time away from it last week because of my race. (My student is a runner).

Me: Oh yeah -- how did that go?

Him: Well, for the first 70 miles I was doing really well, and on track to finish in my goal time of 22 hours, and -- 

Me: (Wait. Did he just say the first SEVENTY miles?)

Me: So this race was...

Him: 100 miles. So yeah, but I got a cough about 50 miles in, and by 70 miles I was coughing pretty badly. Going up any hill I'd have to cough and cough to catch my breath, it was really bad.

Me: Uh...but uh...100 miles...

Him: So yeah, I did actually finish about 10 minutes faster than my previous time --

Me: (Wait, he's run a 100-mile race BEFORE and he did it AGAIN?!?)

Me: So how long did it take you?

Him: I finished in about 22 hours and 45 minutes.

Me: Like...straight?

Him: Well, you know, we stopped here and there to eat and stuff...

Me: Holy cow. I just can't believe this. 100 miles. Holy crap.

Him: Yeah, I've never had that coughing problem before. I mean, when I run short runs, like only 30 miles or so --

Me: (Head explodes)

I swear, we've got the most insanely athletic graduate students around. It's unbelievable.