Signs That You're Crazy

By about 3:30 today I could barely keep my eyes open. My bones hurt. I couldn't think about things today, about anything important, because I just didn't have the energy. I was ready to take a catnap at my desk, but I had a student coming in at 4 so I propped my eyes open with toothpicks and told myself I'd make it up by going to bed early.

Time for bed, which somehow turns into 11, instead of 10 or 9 when it should really happen. Bones still hurt. I know, let's lie wide awake for over an hour because I think I have a tiny hair in my right nostril. I mean, I know I have lots of hairs in my nose, but this one seems...in the way. I blow my nose. I rub my nose. There is some hair or piece of fuzz in there and I cannot relax or fall asleep.

Which makes, like, complete sense for me to lie awake over something imagined after being so exhausted and fantasizing about sleep all the time. Very logical.

Finally drift off and get a decent half hour or so before Nora's crying wakes me right back up. Now she's finally quiet. What are the chances I'll be able to go back to sleep now? I teach tomorrow, which means I need to be rested, so the chances are probably slim.

I really need to see a doctor and get a prescription.

21 Months

Another month older, already. Time's a flying. This month, actually this past weekend, we finally shifted the kids from two naps to one. We probably could have eeked out two naps for another month or so, but their afternoon nap kept shifting later and later, and things were getting wonky. So on Saturday we went cold turkey and spent the morning at the arboretum, ate lunch, and then the kids crashed. Not bad!

Sunday we also kept super busy and the kids spent the afternoon outdoors at a birthday party, playing in a sand box, a tent, with balls, and running around with a bunch of other toddlers. There were cupcakes. There was lemonade. They went wild. They're growing up.

In another not-so-big change we're putting the kids on the potty every day. We're kind of late to the game, I guess, mainly due to my laziness but I finally wised up when I read a little about potty training and how the average age to train used to be under 2 years back in the day. The idea is that if you get them used to sitting on the potty when they're younger and more amenable to doing whatever we want them to do (no power struggles or battles at this point), that is a good thing. Sure enough their little friend down the street who is only 18 months is now out of diapers as of this week! Oh well, I'm a bit of a slacker, but that's okay. Nora and Milo looooove sitting on the potty, so we're incorporating it into our routine. In theory at some point they'll actually do something in the potty, but we'll see.

There are certainly times when Milo & Nora seem more like kids and less like toddlers to me. This past weekend they both figured out how to go up and down shallow stairs like a big person, with their feet, not on their hands or their bottoms. There was something about that image of both kids walking up the stairs like...people...that struck me. I can see their future kidness in them. I can see them running around and riding bikes and climbing all over everything like a couple of little monkeys. Oh wait. They already do that last one.

What has Milo been doing lately other than evoking the ire of neighborhood felines? Well, his other hobbies include saying hi to all of the ladies and guys he encounters (with that language: "hi, lady!"), declaring that he likes-a the music, dancing, looking out the window for planes and helicopters, and identifying birds and insects.

What a happy guy! Milo has finally recovered from his cold. It took over a week. He also appears to have moved beyond his phase of waking up in the middle of the night and crying piteously until Jake holds him. I won't do. It's all, daddy this, daddy that, daddy pick-you-up Milo, and when I go into their room in the morning, the first thing he says is "Where's Daddy?"

Milo's really awesome at greeting people, though, so it's hard not to feel great when I walk through the door and he comes running up to me saying, "Hi Mama!" He's so enthusiastic. He'll even say "bless you, Daddy!" when Jake sneezes.

Boy do these kids love being outside. Milo loves to swing, play with the tetherball, watch bubbles, throw inappropriate objects like sticks and rocks, run everywhere, and the other day he even asked me to help him climb a tree. (I didn't). Milo constantly has two skinned knees.

Milo continues to be adventurous with food. Any time he sees either one of us eating something he'll immediately say over and over again "Need some? Some? Want some? Need some?" I don't think he knows what "need" means, especially when it comes to something like a brownie. I'm so glad at least one of my kids will eat stuff. Real people stuff. Nora's unwillingness to try anything irritates me almost as much as people who still use internet explorer. Milo will eat from any of the food groups but he does seem to have a particular penchant for anything involving sugar. Finally, something letting me know this kid is mine. What with all of the sporty ball behaviors, I wasn't quite sure at times.

Milo is a bright guy. He knows letters and shapes and numbers and can draw a circle, sort of, which the twin whisperer thinks is a 10th-grade skill, or something, so I'm pretty sure she is ready to sign him up for Mensa at this point. I feel kind of bad because Nora has been saying and doing funny stuff lately, which I share with people and then my friends go on and on about how clever she is, while Milo is just there in the background practicing at throwing the ball over the rocking chair 800 times in a row. But he can do all of that stuff too. And his ball skills, while perhaps not traditionally valued by No Millionaire Child Left Behind, are pretty sweet. This weekend he saw an older kid head butting a soccer ball, or whatever you call it (okay, so I'm not sporty...what is the antithesis of sporty? Couch potato? Nerd?), and by that evening he was doing the same thing.

Milo's favorite thing now, picked up from Nora, is the kiss as bump healer. A kiss on the elbow, the knee, the head, the ear, or the back will make it all better. "Mama kiss it" is something I hear at least a dozen times a day. It's so great to still have the power to cure what ails him with a simple kiss. Milo also thinks I control things like the airplanes flying over or the sirens sounding in the distance -- I guess at this age, we parents are omnipotent. Oh, the power. The glory. The adulation.

Nora's latest thing is to take off all of her clothes, and sometimes her diaper. She is interested in putting her own clothes on, too, but that's more difficult. It's handy, though, because I can give Nora a sweater and then buy myself at least 10 minutes of free time while she entertains herself by trying to put her arm through the armhole over and over again.

The nakedness, though...sometimes it's cute. Sometimes it's a pain, like when a steaming hot pile of crap is sitting on the floor. Nora mostly likes to take off her shirt and then run around patting her belly, sticking it out, and declaring "I have a naked belly." Actually, come to think of it, Nora is pretty interested in all things body these days. She likes to inform people that she has a bottom. She also likes to inform people that she possesses a certain piece of anatomy that belongs only to Milo, but we're working on it. She can now state that Nora is a big girl, and Milo is a big boy. She also knows that Mama is a girl, and Daddy is a boy.

Oh, we still struggle with sleep. We struggle and we struggle. I think that I am an eternal optimist because each time that it gets better for a couple of days I think that we must be turning a corner. Then each time it turns bad again I am surprised all over again, as if this has never happened before. The other night I firmly told her it was time to go to sleep and walked out of the room and listened to Nora yell "Mama open the door", "Mama turn on the light", "Mama get the bunny", and "Mama pick you up!" Boy, was she mad. It actually seems like Nora might think she can make these things happen by saying them. Or maybe she is just vocalizing her internal desires all the time, and night time is no different.

Nora just narrates everything that pops into her mind, but the cool thing is that she and Milo both have recently begun to tell me things that happened in the past. So Nora will tell little stories about how she went outside, she went to the park, she went on the slide. Nora saw an airplane (airplanes are big with her too). Nora switches between using "I" and calling herself "Nora". She can say "I like it", or "I did it", or "I want to go outside." But she'll also say "Nora's turn", or sometimes "Nora did it!", or "Nora go downstairs."

Nora's getting into wanting to do things by herself. Go downstairs by herself (which takes about 20 minutes what with all of the dawdling), get up into her chair by herself, put on her shorts by herself, and so forth. It's natural. I have a hair clip and sometimes I'll put it in her hair, and she'll snatch it and say "Nora do it", and then she'll carefully balance the hair clip on top of her head.

I can now mostly, thank God, leave the house without Nora having a conniption. She'll just cheerfully say "Bye bye Mama!" as I leave for work. Nora still wants to be held when I cook, and in the night time her clinginess peaks, but it is generally decreasing.

Nora's big thing these days is colors. She loves to identify colors, and is pretty consistently correct with yellow (apparently her favorite), red, orange, and pink. She is pretty good at purple and green. She just can't get blue most of the time, it's weird. I think she likes to say yellow (which she pronounces "lellow"), and so any time she sees anything yellow she'll mention it.

Nora has a habit of wiggling her hands and doing a prancy little dance when she is excited or happy. She wears everything on her sleeve. Both kids do, I guess. That is the nature of kiddom at this age. They don't yet realize that we have thoughts and ideas separate from them, and they have no self consciousness as a result. That lack of self consciousness is awesome. There is no embarrassment yet, no reticence. Just complete, utter openness.

Only 3 more months until they're 2. Bring it on!

Injuries

Poor Milo! He has been through the wringer lately.

This week he went up to Nora when she was in her booster seat, grabbed onto her tray and gave it a big yank, and ended up pulling Nora and her chair on top of him. Big bruise on his head. Nora didn't fare too well from that accident either. This was the first major accident on the Twin Whisperer's watch and she felt awful. But it happens.

Then later on, that very night, Milo was happily running through the house, as he does, and he tripped and lobbed himself forward...right onto our step. He fell face first onto the corner of the step and cut himself right below his eye. It looks terrible! I was standing right there and watched it happen, but there was no way to prevent it. These thing happen so quickly.

Then this evening I was outside with Milo and Nora, and the neighbor's cat wandered into our yard. I saw Milo start to follow him and meanwhile Nora was heading towards the street. I grabbed Nora, turned towards Milo, and right at that moment the cat hissed and attacked Milo on the face. Milo wasn't even touching the cat when this happened. It happened so quickly that I couldn't tell if the cat bit him or scratched him. The whole right side of his face is cut up with 4 or 5 little cuts from this fucker of a cat.

I cleaned him up and worried about it being a bite (because cat bites are notoriously infectious). I found out who the cat belonged to, thanks to our neighborhood listserve, and talked to the owner and she said that he's been known to scratch but she's never seen him bite, so I'm feeling better that it was just a scratch. (Just. It still hurt the little guy, though). Later this evening another neighbor called me up and told me that this cat has attacked several children, and they are always hassling the owner to not let him out. Tonight the owner told me that they're going to reinforce this with their kids in a family meeting tonight, so that's a good outcome I guess.

So it's been a rough week for poor Milo man, his face looks like he's been in a fight! I swear a lot of what we do these days is just trying to keep the kids from killing themselves.

Tenure, tenure, tenure

Last night was another 4 hours of sleep night.

Things have been hard lately. 

I think I am sort of deciding to go up for tenure in fall 2011, i.e. 2 years from now, not 1. It is related to a complicated series of events, for instance, I got invited to write a book chapter due in a couple of months, but if I write the book chapter this fall then that will delay my second signature piece, which is needed for my tenure case. (Book chapters don't count for tenure here, but this one would be good for non-tenure reasons given the other people involved, who the publisher is, the amount of exposure it would get me, etc). If my second piece is delayed, I won't get it submitted and therefore accepted in time to go up next fall, and so on and so forth. In reality about 3 different things, all super unlikely (I have statistics for it -- each thing would have about a 5% - 10% chance of happening), would ALL have to happen this year for me to be ready to go up next fall. I've had enough probability courses to know the chances of all 3 happening.

Anyway...if I give myself my full 2 years extension on the clock, it means I could relax a little. I could keep working hard and pushing to get a paper written for the chapter, then write my second signature piece, then write a 3rd piece I'm jointly authoring with somebody, but know that I have time, an extra cushion built in.

But more importantly I think it would help me through the nights. I got so angry last night. I am so, so tired of being tired. I am sick and tired of feeling like shit all the time, and then constantly worrying about how my exhaustion is messing with my writing and publishing pace. Taking a step back and taking the time I need might help me say to myself, during those hopeless moments at night, "It's okay, you've committed to raising these kids, you don't have to get everything done all at once, you have time."

Today as I walked home from work I got to my street and stopped to talk with 2 neighbors, both professors here on the tenure track, and they both kept saying "Why not take the time you've been given? It's your right, take it! Make it so that you can have a sane life over the next 2 years instead of driving yourself crazy constantly." I don't know, it helped. They're not in my department but they know my kids, they know the mom side of me rather than the work side of me, and for some reason, it helped.

My tenure committee chair helped too.  Tonight he sent an email that included this: "Tenure can wreak havoc on one's psyche that's for sure. The bottom line (and most important line) is that YOU WILL GET TENURE." That kind of support and reassurance does help.  

Sometimes the pressure to keep my job, to be the sole financial support for the family, to be the one up with Nora night after night, to do a good job raising the kids, to control myself so that I don't slip up and yell at 3 a.m., to figure out their childcare each semester, the pressure to do all of this mothering and working simultaneously is just more than I can take. Lately I've been feeling like I'm not strong enough to handle it and I am reaching some sort of breaking point. So maybe mentally giving myself my full 2 years' extension can be a way to lighten all that pressure a little bit. If all of the necessary things did magically happen to fall into place this year, we could still reconsider next fall and put me up in the spring. But if not...that's okay.

Also maybe taking the full 2 year extension is a way of saying to myself, this mothering thing is actually a big fucking deal. Stop pretending that it is just some side hobby that doesn't really interfere with my work. It is wholly consuming, and it matters, and what I've been doing with my time over the past 2 years is important, and is worth acknowledging.

This is what I have been doing, and this matters:

Fall foods

Since moving to the prairie I've become much more in tune with seasonal eating. Fall is on the way and I am looking forward to eating some of these quintessential fall foods:

- Apples, apple cider, apple pie

- Squash -- first will come butternut squash! Pasta with squash is great, but I also love to roast it in the oven and eat it out of the shell.

- Brussels sprouts. Strangely enough I don't think I ever ate these before moving here. My first year here Jake brought a bunch back from his grandparents' garden, and boy are they delicious! I love to steam them until they're bordering on soft and then briefly pan fry them with butter and salt.

- Nuts, like chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts.

- Thick stews, hearty soups, and of course, risotto! We make risotto all throughout the fall and the winter. It is a 2-person job because of all the stirring it requires, but risotto is one of my favorite things. It is too hot to stand over the big pot through the summer, and it's too hearty for spring and summer meals, but it is perfect for fall and winter. I especially love wild mushroom risotto and smoked salmon risotto. 

In a few weeks it'll be farm visiting season and this year the kids will be old enough to take a trip to the farm, go through the corn maze, and pet the animals. I love living here. Summer is great here but I think the season in which I appreciate this town the most is fall. It is so beautiful in the fall, and the food is so fresh, and it smells good, and I love the weekends when we have football games and you can hear the crowd and the band in the distance. I hope that Milo and Nora have great childhood memories of stuff like this, like jumping into the middle of giant leaf piles and carving pumpkins and making drawings of turkeys by using their hands. It's so homey here.

(I took these pictures in 2006. It still looks like summer here, and hopefully will for a few more weeks).

Revelation

I figured something out just now, at 3 a.m. I figured out that for the last year and a half I've been trying to solve an unsolvable puzzle. I keep trying to figure out how to get Nora to sleep through the night, or even just how to prevent her from holding the entire family hostage some nights, as is her whim, but tonight I finally realized, there is no solution. There is just no solution to this problem!

Take tonight. Nora wakes up at 10:20. I soothe her for a while. Put her back down. She never really goes back to sleep so at about 10:30 or 10:40 or something, she's crying again. This wakes up Milo. He cries too. Both kids are upset now and Jake takes Milo out of the room. I soothe Nora and put her back to bed. But now she can't really sleep because Milo's not there. She fusses and moans and makes a racket. I give up, get her, and we all pile onto our bed, which Milo and Nora think is the greatest thing ever. They start an imitation game in which Milo says "Fa fa!" and pats the bed three times. Nora repeats this and then they both crack up, and do it over and over again. I'm pretty sure this is one of their secret codes. Like before they go to bed they agree to this: "Okay, if I say 'fa fa' and pat the bed 3 times, that means we torture the 'rents all night long. You do the same if you agree."

Now that the kids have been "reset", so to speak, we put them back to bed and miraculously they submit to that, and everybody goes to sleep.  I sleep from 11 to 2, at which point Nora is up and crying again. I go in and hold her for a while. She relaxes, I put her back to bed. This usually works...except for when it doesn't. Like tonight. She doesn't want me to leave. I go to the bathroom and she starts crying again, so I go back in there, comfort her from the crib, and Nora is happy and wide awake, jumping up and down in her crib. She thinks it's play time. 

And THIS is the situation for which there is no solution.  I can:

a) Spend my entire night appeasing her every whim, getting no sleep and ensuring that she gets no sleep.  Not acceptable.

b) Not do that, which means she will cry. But the problem is, Nora will scream hysterically for hours. Without stopping. Without winding down. Until Milo is up and the cats are up and Jake and I are ready to claw our ears off. 

So that's it. No solution. Either option sucks. Tonight I told her it was time for sleep, not for play, and I walked out of the room and she immediately started tantruming. She was very angry. I went to the basement (where we can't hear her). Jake joined me. We stayed down there for half an hour. I came up here and she was going stronger than ever. I gave up, as I always do, because I just don't have the stomach for it. Nora is stronger than me. She can scream longer than I can endure it. Much, much longer. I held her until 3, put her back to bed. And I thought all was okay but now it's 3:15 and she is crying hysterically once again.

So...no solution.  From what I've heard kids like this don't sleep through until they're 4 or 5.  So another 2 or 3 years of this, I suppose.  

The Pleasure of the Mundane

At 20.5 months the kids still take two naps. We're getting ready to start the transition to one nap, but for now, they still sleep from about 9:30 - 11 in the morning and from 2:30 - 4 in the afternoon. This means that big outings, like to a fair or a festival the next town over, are generally off the table. When you factor in meal times and nap times, our time out of the house is spent in brief 1-2 hour chunks.

Next summer I bet we'll be taking all sorts of trips all over town, and doing holiday weekend type journeys, visiting the state fair and the local arts festival and that kind of thing. This summer, we've stuck pretty close to home, and that's okay with me.  This weekend has been a nice, easygoing weekend.  We've been playing outside and on the back patio, enjoying the sunny, warm weather.

The kids like to play with the sodas in the cooler, left over from last week's party. Milo's got his trusty ball under his arm:

Yesterday one of the neighbor kids came over to visit with Milo and Nora. She's 6, and Milo was thrilled to have her visit. He was so excited that he ran around and around, showing off for her. This is why the poor kid always has two skinned knees. Also, I think his diaper is falling down one of his pant legs:

Here I display my magic hair, in which I can apparently get different parts of it to swing in different directions simultaneously.  

Last winter I made a ton of soups, because the kids will eat soup. Also, soups are convenient to make over the weekend.  They take a lot of time but you can do it ahead of time and then let it simmer all afternoon, so I can cook while the kids nap. This weekend we had beautiful, warm weather but the nights are getting cool and you can feel fall approaching. All of that meant that it's time to start breaking out the soups again. This morning I made a homemade chicken stock that will provide the base for lots of different soups. Chicken parts, onions, carrots, celery, leeks, peppercorns, and fresh thyme and parsley simmer for a couple of hours to fill the house with the most delicious aroma. This is the kind of thing I love about weekends and family: music playing in the background, kids' voices happily chattering away, and the aroma of chicken stock on the stove. It is such a homey feeling.

Then this afternoon I used some of the stock to make a Thai chicken lemongrass soup with coconut milk, lime, basil, and cilantro. Using the homemade stock was so worth it. This is a spicy soup, with red pepper and jalapeno pepper, and as it was cooking I tasted it and thought it was too spicy, too harsh. But just as the recipe promised, adding lime and fresh herbs amazingly cuts the heat. The result is an incredible blend of flavors, with a spicy, garlicky taste up front which then mellows to something sweet and citrusy with the taste of coconut, lemongrass, and lime. Seriously, it was so good.

Jake's review: I could eat this entire pot. Seriously, I can't stop eating this soup. 

Nora's review: No, I do not want to try it. No! No no no no no!

Milo's review: I like it! More please?

I couldn't believe Milo ate that soup. It really was quite spicy and I served it to him over rice and he ate it right up.  Amazing.

Afterwards the kids did some reading of The Very Hungry Caterpillar:

This lasted until they heard the music of the ice cream truck. What is that? Milo had to check it out:

I love this next picture because if you look between the kids, through the window screen, you can actually see the ice cream truck driving down the road. The truck has been hitting our neighborhood hard lately. The ice cream man was brilliant to drive around here tonight because tonight was one of our movie-in-the-park nights. It was the last one of the summer. The parents string up a giant sheet, and everybody from around the neighborhood comes and sets up blankets and picnic baskets, and somebody plays music until it gets dark. Then when it is dark they play a children's movie, and all of the kids watch (although half of them fall asleep before the end). 

Once the kids were in bed, we lit a fire out back and enjoyed the sound of the crickets and watched the stars. Here is Jake enjoying a beer by the fire. I got this picture with no flash:

Tomorrow it's Labor Day but it's back to work for me, since Jake has no classes and can stay home to watch the kids. There are no 3-day weekends for freaked-out professors barreling down on tenure. It's been a good weekend and I love being at work, so I'll enjoy going there tomorrow, getting (I hope) a lot of good writing done without any distractions since the building will be empty. 

Good weekend, hopefully a good week coming up. I really enjoy fall.

Vignettes

1) Milo is so excited these days because I got him a nerf football. He throws it and says "Throw Nora! Throw Mama! Throw Daddy!" Nora is the one who does not return the throw quickly enough to meet Milo's desires, so he'll start instructing her, "Throw Milo, Nora! Throw Milo!"

2) Yesterday Jake came into the house with his bike helmet on.

Nora: Daddy's hat!

Me: That's Daddy's helmet. We wear a helmet when we ride our bikes.

Nora disappears, scurrying into the sunroom mumbling to herself about hats and bikes. Then I hear her shouting to herself in the sunroom, "Nora riding the bike! Nora riding the bike!" We walk in there and she's got one of her hats jammed onto her head, all off kilter, and she's riding her little trike cart.

3) Nora likes to administer things to Milo and Milo always lets her do it. She'll carry a cup around and then she'll put it up to his lips, saying "Milo drink it!" If she has a brush, she'll brush his hair. Nora's latest thing is to carry around an empty nose spray bottle and occasionally shove it up Milo's nose, saying "Here you go, Milo." At mealtimes now, Nora will sometimes take her spoon and feed Milo. Milo allows this and will open up his mouth and eat whatever it is Nora shoves at him.

4) Dancing:

Nasty Surprise

I am paid on a 9-month contract and the university doesn't pay me to work through the summer.

Sometimes people have grants and get paid for doing grant-related work during the summer. This is the case for me, and I have recently been a co-PI on three grants. Two just ended yesterday, and the third one just started up in January. I was signed up to get summer salary for the month of August from grant #2, whose PI is a professor in the psychology dept. here at my university. So imagine my surprise this morning when I saw that I have not been paid for August. The paycheck I was supposed to get today didn't come.

I emailed the PI about it. Actually I had tried several times to contact her throughout the summer and she has been AWOL. I think this is because she has breast cancer, and she has been struggling with her treatment and understandably is not very focused on work stuff right now. So I didn't want to pester her too much, and just went ahead and filed my paperwork to get paid. This morning she emailed me back to note that, whoops, actually, the grant has run out of money. She forgot that I was supposed to get paid this summer, and there is no way I can be paid because there is no money left in the grant.

This is a nasty surprise to have today, but I'm trying hard to take an easy come, easy go attitude about it. There will be other grants and other summers when I can get paid. I got some unexpected consulting work at the beginning of this summer, which was a landfall I hadn't anticipated. So that was easy come, and this is...easy go. We have benefited a great deal from the generosity of family and friends over the years, too. And last year when I was secretly worrying about how I was going to support the family and pay for Jake's grad school tuition, at the last minute he was awarded a fellowship that covered his tuition. So these things have happened that have helped us out tremendously and we have been lucky.

Today's snafu really sucks, and it's hard to suddenly not have a paycheck in my bank account that I was counting on, but in the grand scheme of things lots of people have next to nothing and I know we're very fortunate. It'll all work out.

I know that Jake and I will never be wealthy because this is my attitude towards money. I am not aggressive about it and I'm just pretty conservative and content with the status quo. I don't do the smart investing stuff I should be doing (we just have the standard retirement and savings/college plans). I don't put a lot of mental energy into it, and I know it's kind of dumb, but I also don't want to be the kind of person who thinks a lot about money in order to have a lot of money. I don't know. This isn't really making sense, and today I'm just trying to make myself feel better about this lousy thing that happened. I don't see any point in getting mad at the PI over this mistake, seeing as how she is battling cancer and all...things could be worse, right? I am healthy, and my family is healthy, and it's okay. It's only money.

Weekend

On Saturday we had a big party and Milo & Nora did pretty well, sort of dancing around and showing off for people. Nora likes to prance around on her tiptoes when she is excited. Milo got everybody to play ball with him. The kids went to sleep without a problem despite the loud talking and music of the party. I wandered around with the monitor attached to my belt so that I could see it light up if they made any noise. I looked like my father with his blackberry permanently attached to his belt. The only thing missing was a fanny pack.

Milo has taken to waking sometimes in the middle the night and crying for daddy, and then crying stormily if Jake tries to stop holding him or put him back in his crib. Saturday night was one of those nights, and it was a long one.

Today we went to the zoo but didn't take the stroller since it is nearly impossible to get the kids to stay in the stroller for any length of time. I do not understand how all of these other families go around with their kids in strollers like they do, even kids who are 2, 3, and 4 years old. How do they get those children to stay in the stroller? Ours struggle mightily to break free of their constraints, like the Hulk, rending their shirts in rage. Anyway, Milo was totally fascinated by all of the animals. He could have spent an hour just looking at any one animal. He had to be dragged away each time, crying to see "giraffe again" or "seal again", placated only by the promise that next up he gets to see a bear, or an ostrich. 

So Milo just stood there at each fence, mesmerized by the animals. In contrast Nora didn't really care a whole lot about the animals. She looked at each one for about 10 seconds and then would say "down please?" and just wanted to wander aimlessly, running directly into people's paths, looking at the grass or the bark or the rocks, just endlessly walking, walking, walking. Taking a walk with Nora is like observing a particle in brownian motion. 

Later when Milo woke from his nap he talked about how he saw goats and the ostrich and the brown bear and sheep (there were no sheep, so who knows where he got that). Clearly the zoo made a big impression on him. Tonight at dinner Milo ate several of my creative efforts including herbed leek tarts, crackers with pesto cheese spread, barbecued honey chicken, and pasta salad with tomatoes and avocados. What a champ! Nora ate...none of those things. If Milo were our only kid I would probably be an insufferable parent prattling on about how all you have to do to get kids to eat good food is make sure that you fill the house with good food.  HAH.

Trying to keep them from crashing to the ground

School starts back up next week!  I'm looking forward to it.  I have a ridiculously small methods class this year -- only 8 students (our typical cohort is 15-17). I don't know why we have such a small cohort this year, and it'll be interesting to see what that is like in a class setting. I hope they are 8 talkative people.

We really need to find some back-up childcare, and quick. And yet I am strangely paralyzed about this and don't really know how to go about doing it. Which is silly, because all I need to do is send a few emails.

Milo & Nora like to put on the horrible, horrible kid music these days and "dance" to it. Why is it that the music they like is so grating to the adult ear?

A former student who once took a doctoral seminar I taught is now running a program on campus for high-achieving students of color and 1st generation college students. The students have scholarships and participate in a number of activities throughout their college years to support their success in college. She has convinced me to participate in a mentoring program in which I get matched up with an incoming freshman and mentor her/him for the next 4 years. It's like academic big brothers and sisters.  I wonder what this will like, as I don't really know how to be a mentor in this capacity. But my own graduate students seem to like the way I mentor them, so hopefully I can do a decent job with a freshman. I have had (and continue to have) a number of really really awesome mentors of my own, both formally and informally, so it's time to turn the tables a bit.

I have 8 advisees right now, in various stages of thinking about / starting / collecting data / analyzing / finishing their theses. It feels like I've got 8 plates spinning on 8 sticks. With some of them, I just have to give them a fresh spin every now and then and they keep going and going and going on their own. With others, I have to constantly keep spinning them to keep them going. So far I have graduated one doctoral student, and my second one is set to graduate this year (fingers crossed).  It is an exciting and time-consuming aspect of the job. 

Nora's latest thing is that she wants me to kiss her finger/head/tummy or whatever hurts her. Sometimes she'll intentionally bang her hand on the floor so that she can then come over and have me kiss it. Milo's latest thing is to hand something to somebody and then say "here you go, Nora!" He's also saying "thank you, Nora" or "thank you, Milo" and half the time he gets the direction wrong. It is very cute.

It is currently 8:27 p.m., the kids' bedtime was 7:30, and yet just this minute I just heard somebody singing in their crib "ashes, ashes, we all fall down!"

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