motherhood, politics, faith & whatnot

heading to bed. need sleep to fortify myself to do battle with my 3.5 year old again tomorrow. phew. it’s exhausting. seriously.

The church service was just beginning. Our star soprano was just beginning her solo when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see a friend motioning me to come. I hesitated not wanting to jump up during Leslie’s solo and not wanting to crawl across the older couple seated next to us.

“Is everything OK?” I stupidly mouthed to the friend who had come to get me. Why else would somebody be summoning me at that moment.

“It’s Andrew,” he mouthed. At the back of the sanctuary, he said that Andrew was having a nose bleed and wouldn’t stop crying.

I hurried to nursery to find him sitting in one of the caregiver’s laps as she tried to hold his nose to stop the bleeding. I plopped down on the floor and scooped in him up in my arms. He settled against my chest immediately and stopped crying. The bleeding slowed. He was OK.

He’s prone to nose bleeds and has had several in the last week. It’s a little scary to see that much blood coming out of your little one. That one was probably worse than usual because he wasn’t easily consoled since we weren’t there. But nose bleeds in little guys are rarely indicative of anything serious.

He’s got a check-up coming up, so we’ll mention it to the doc again.

Meanwhile, Daniel was really pissy today. Time-outs galore. I’m hoping he’ll sleep it off tonight.

At what age, can you expect kids to follow directions when you ask them to clean up? My 3.5 year old knows how to clean up, i.e. put toys away, even if is not always cooperative. My almost 2 year old — I can’t quite figure him out. He will refuse to clean up, just flat out refuse to pick up one toy, but I’ve seen him do it enough at other times to know that he knows what it means. If we put him in time-out like five times, he’ll eventually do it. Is this a developmental thing, where maybe he really doesn’t quite get it or is he being super-stubborn? And if he’s super-stubborn, how in the world do you motivate a kid like that?

squishy sweet

Originally uploaded by Suze3000.

how much my heart would ache when I looked back later on.

Both boys have been sick this week. No preschool. No parents-morning-out. No Bible study with childcare. No trip to the gym with childcare. No playdates.

Lots of TV-watching. Lots of whining. Lots of “mommmmeeeeeee!”s. Lots of “No! I don’t want that!”s. Lots of mommy pulling her hair out. Lots of heavy drinking in the evenings.

Actually, it hasn’t been too bad. I have made great strides in learning to let the kids figure out how to entertain themselves. We have tons of toys. There’s no shortage of stuff to do. I don’t have to always be the program director. I really wish I had figured this out early on with Daniel. But with your first child at least early on, you are so susceptible to everything that tells you that you need to interact with them, be talking to them at all times. Heaven forbid that you not entertain them for one minute. And now and I have one who is constantly wanting to be engaged with me, while the other one happily (for the most part) just bee-bops around the house.

But it’s hard to complain when it feels like maybe we are finally going to turn a corner in this country. I’m kind of in awe about how this whole democracy thing works. Pretty amazing. And now Rumsfeld is going, there are more pragmatic voices in the administration, a Republican refuses to go along with Bolton’s nomination.

And, it’s a balmy, sunny 79 degrees outside right now.

Rainy, rainy, rainy day here today. J says that’s not good for the Democrats, but we hope not. I voted this morning. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t educate myself about any of the races, except the DA’s race, so I did the old “that name sounds like the name of a competent civil servant worthy of my vote.” My voting experience was a bit odd actually. Our ballot was an oversized piece of cardstock like paper which we were given along with a ball point pen. We could stand in one of those voter booths to color in the bubbles besides the names of the people we wanted to vote for, but most people were sitting at tables filling out their ballot. You could vote straight party ticket for the first part of the ballot which included the DA race, which I did. Anybody in there who was familiar with the ballot could’ve been able to tell with a glance who somebody had voted for. After coloring in the bubbles, you handed it to a lady who fed it through the machine. I’m pretty sure that she could probably tell you how Mike*Nifong was doing among the voters at that particular polling place. I don’t know what she would do with that information, except maybe relay it to the campaigns.

In other news. . .

Both boys are sick now. Made a trip to the pediatrician this morning because Daniel woke up with a nasty, wet cough and having a hard time catching his breath. He’s OK, but started on an antibiotic. To add insult to injury, they got their flu shots while we were there.

We took a quick trip to the beach over last weekend. We were right down the coast, well, by a bunch of miles, from Sarah. Did you see us waving?

This was Andrew’s first trip to the beach. Actually, that’s not really true, because we were at the beach over Christmas, but I don’t think he really noticed that much all bundled up in the stroller.

We got to the beach on Saturday afternoon. After putting all of our stuff down, we were walking towards the water. Andrew was just puttering along, not really looking where he was going. After a moment, he looks up and sees the waves. He turns and looks at up at me and exclaims, “WATER!”

We took him in and he was not amused. We’ve been to the lake a couple of times this summer where there are no waves, so I don’t think he was expecting the water to come rushing up and it knocked him off balance. After that he would try to come down to whoever was standing in the waves, but then run back away from the water, when it started to come up on the beach. He’d get really mad if both J and I were in the water. (We were with friends, so he wasn’t alone on the beach.) His favorite thing to do was pick up wet sand and throw it — on the ground, on the sand toys, on me or on whoever else was close by.

Daniel, however, was crazy in love with the waves. Last summer when we were at the beach, he was so afraid of the water and hated/hated/hated it. But this summer, it was 180 degrees different. We had to watch him like a hawk because he’d run in on his own without us seeing him. His dad took him out into the bigger waves some, which scared the crap out of me, but he seemed to like it, all the while holding on very tightly, but still. He loved to just sit and the edge of the surf and let the waves come in over his legs. Every once in a while, a bigger one would come and knock him over, and he didn’t even care. He hated leaving.

I managed to take a few pics, not as many as I wanted, between worrying about getting sand in the camera and trying to make sure my kids weren’t being swept away. I’m trying to just resign myself to the fact that until they are a little older, I’m not going to get to take as many pictures as I’d like to. Will upload some in a bit.

All in all, a good trip. It was sooo nice to travel with friends because the kids played together and entertained each other, and we could take turns watching them. I highly recommend it.

I got the boys this giant stuffed duck right after Easter. It’s as tall as Daniel. Today, Daniel was fixing me pretend dinners and I was stuffed, so I told him to fix something for Ducky who was sitting over in the corner of the room. He did and then he announced that Ducky was going to take a nap with him. The three of us read a story together, and Daniel whispered to Ducky to “not talk and just listen to the story.” I think Daniel’s heard that a few times, maybe. Heh.

Then we headed upstairs for naptime. I put Ducky in Daniel’s bed and Daniel crawled in beside him and curled up to him offering him some milk from his sippy cup. “Ducky, here’s some milk. It’s OK. We’re going to take a nap now,” Daniel said softly to the giant yellow stuffed animal next to him in bed. I just about melted. It was so sweet. I think it was particularly sweet because Daniel doesn’t talk quietly very often. He’s a loud talker, so to hear him whispering quietly to Ducky was a beautiful moment.

Sometimes my heart aches for this child. He is high maintenance and we spend a lot of time yelling at him or trying to discipline him. He tests every boundary that you have and then some. When I picked him up from preschool on Wednesday, his frustrated teacher, or teaching assistant, rather, said that he just wouldn’t be quiet even after time-outs and that it was disruptive because he’d get the other kids going as well. I know exactly what she’s talking about, but what am I supposed to do. Except just love him. We work with him to be a better listener and follow directions, but there will be days when he will annoy the ever-loving daylights out of everybody around him. He had not slept well the night before and his stomach was upset later that day, so I think he wasn’t feeling right, so any impulse control that he might normally have was not there. I feel badly for him because he’s always going to rub some people the wrong way. We all do, for that matter. It’s our job as his parents to help him figure out ways to manage his behavior the best he/we can and to accept his limitations.