• I hurt myself from yawning too big.  I think I overstretched the tendon that connects my jaws or something.  I know.  I’m now in competition with Sammy Sosa for lamest injuries.  I wonder if Workers Comp covers that kind of thing.  It was the boredom brought on by my job that forced me to yawn, after all.
• I dreamed that I had an affair.  With J.  No idea who I was actually married to in the dream.  But J’s conscience got the best of him at the last second and he backed out on me.  So I woke up guilty, bummed, grumpy, and horny.  I hate dreams.
• After 4 years, my dog has just discovered that he has a penis.  He has been licking it for 48 hours straight.  It’s driving us crazy, especially since he sleeps in our room and he’s decided that licking himself is more fun than sleeping.
• Don’t buy hair dye that costs less than $10.  Especially if you use white towels and don’t want to see it bleeding onto your towel 4 days after you’ve colored your hair.  Just saying.
• Also, don’t believe the stuff on the box of cheap hair dye that says it comes with highlights and lowlights and multi-faceted color that doesn’t damage your hair.  Bollocks.
• Tomorrow we close on the house we’re selling.
• Tomorrow we’re supposed to close on the house we’re buying.
• Yesterday we found out that the house didn’t appraise for near what we had agreed to pay for it, so now our financing is messed up.
• The appraiser totally discounted the sunroom, which would have made up the difference in the appraisal price.  He refused to count it as part of the square footage of the house (as a previous appraiser had done) because it didn’t have duct work or something.  But since nobody else in the neighborhood has a sunroom, he couldn’t find “comps” so he just didn’t give it any value at all.
• Because, you know, if nobody else has one then it must have been free to install.
• Apparently if you can’t find one just like it then it’s easier just to pretend it doesn’t exist at all than to do some more research and assign a value based on an educated guess.
• Lazy ass.
• So we’ve asked the relocation company to lower the price on the house because it doesn’t make much sense to pay more than a house is actually worth.
• But it’s a relocation company and it will probably take them a week to get back to us because when you have 150 middlemen, things don’t move too quickly.
• And we don’t know what they’re going to say.
• So we don’t know if or when we’ll be closing.
• Annoying, since we’re supposed to move out of our house in 2 days.
• Regardless, we have to disassemble and pack up our computer tonight or tomorrow, so I’ll probably be offline for a few days.
• Bummer dude.

Y’all, I signed up to be a BeautiControl consultant. Say what???

Was I suffering from a bout of insanity? Probably. It was kind of an investment. I didn’t do it as a moneymaking opportunity (as someone who works in the corporate office of a network marketing company, I get enough of that on a daily basis). I don’t want to be that friend/relative.

I signed up just so I could get the discount. And since I’m not planning to make money with it, I don’t have a problem passing my discount on to anyone around me so my friends and family are actually excited that I’ve signed up. It probably helps that they don’t have to be afraid that I’m going to ask them to host parties every week.

***

I had an appointment this morning for a slimming body wrap. I’ve always wanted one of those and have never been able to afford one - but a gift certificate to a local spa actually made the body wrap an option.

So I showed up this morning for my appointment and was told the body wrap lady wasn’t in today and since my appointment was at the same time they opened for the day, they weren’t able to call me beforehand to let me know.

I don’t know why, but that really irritated me. I don’t have any idea what thought they should have done about it. It was just frustrating to show up and then have to turn around and go back home.

***

After the cops left last night (/early this morning) INWOCA finally managed to control his malfunctioning alarm. We were all too pleased to witness this final golden silence, but after listening to repetitions of 6 different alarm tones approximately 40 times over almost an hour, we were pretty much awake.

Fortunately, I was able to go back to sleep relatively soon, only to be awoken again by a screaming Little Button at 3am at which point I made my recent habit of migrating into her room for the remainder of the night. I noticed at that point that J had still not returned to bed after being wakened by Idiot Neighbor. An improvement, really, since until last night she had been waking up at 2am. But still.

I don’t handle sleep deprivation too well. One thing J has learned about me over the last 5+ years is UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS IT APPROPRIATE TO DISTURB MY SLEEP. A sleepless night leaves me grumpy, angry, depressed, grumpy, mean and grumpy for the entire next day. Fortunately for everyone around me, Little Button decided to lounge in bed with me from 7-9am this morning and we were both able to get some sleep. By “both” I mean me and Little Button - J was never able to catch up on his sleep due to an extremely busy workload today. I don’t know how he does that.

***

Little Button’s vocabulary is increasing every day. I asked her to say Grandmommy the other day and she said it. Once. Then it became “Gummy.” And then it became “Dummy.” We stopped there.

Current words now include (variations of) Mama, Daddo (her word for J), Jon, Iris, Papa, Grandpa, cheetah, puppy, kitty, diaper, butt, bee-bo (belly button), all done, baby, ball, bee, bupp (passifier - don’t ask), butterfly (sort of), hot, moo, duck, up, hi, bye-bye, please, eye, kiss, touch, button, banana, brush, blue, two and uh-oh.

There are probably more, but they’re not coming to mind right now. It’s harder than it looks to actually sit down and list out all the words your child says on a daily basis.

I’ve read about it happening to other families. I’ve heard the horror stories, the agony.

My heart went out to those who suffered and yet… there was always that part of me that thought it would never happen to me. Not to my family. This kind of tragedy was just too removed to ever affect me personally. I suppose that feeling of invincibility is natural.

It comes on suddenly and without warning, tearing into the unity and routine of peaceful family life. In an instant, the relationship within the core family unit is disrupted as the one you care so much about transforms into someone you hardly know. Weeks, months go by without relief, without respite.

The constant pain to your loved one is torturous to you both and seems especially to rear its ugly head at night. In the most heart wrenching of ironies, your loved one stubbornly refuses the very medicinal treatments that could alleviate the pain (even if only for a short time) as though you were trying to offer pure arsenic. As sleep evades you night after night, the frustration rips at the very fibers of your being and you find yourself mourning for the way things were.

The life you previously knew and had under control has been ripped from beneath your feet like a slippery rug. What once was is no more and you are now sprawled on the floor, desperately trying to grasp to any small fibers that may remain of the life you once took for granted. But it is no use. What is done is done and there is no hope but to wait out the storm that seems to ravage your dwelling for eternity.

The monster has a name, which will evermore send shivers down my spine: Molars.

Little Button has two that have broken through, and several more on the way. My predictable, cooperative child has completely forsaken her amiability when it comes to sleeping. She is unable to sleep unless I am in the room. And I don’t mean go to sleep (though that is the case as well). She is unable to stay asleep. Even if she’s snoring, she wakes up the second my presence is no longer in the room, and starts screaming hysterically. This vicious cycle starts at about 11:30pm and continues until morning.

As you can imagine, our household hasn’t exactly been overdosed with sleep as of late so, um, I make no guarantees about the coherence of this and/or future posts.

Just sayin’.

Today was a somewhat difficult day in the SMIT household. Button has come down with a cold (right on schedule, 3 days after spending time in the church nursery), so neither of us got as much sleep last night as we should have.

Said cold has come complete with runny nose, which she insists on smearing all over my clothing at every possible opportunity - especially during the half-second while I’m reaching for the tissue. My clothes are now decorated with various lengths of dried snot snakes. Pretty, isn’t it.

She follows me around the house every waking moment and YELLS. Not cries. YELLS. I pick her up, she yells. I put her down, she yells more. Don’t call me during the day because I WILL HAVE TO SHOUT MY ENTIRE CONVERSATION TO YOU OR MY VOICE WILL BE LOST IN THE BACKGROUND YELLING AND I STILL! CAN’T! HEAR! A WORD! YOU’RE! SAYING!!

If any of you have a child with a tendency to yell when she’s feeling down, and have therefore been through the several-consecutive-hours- of-background-yelling experience, please leave me a comment just so I know you survived with your mental capacities in tact.

Fortunately, she napped a lot today (3 times, as opposed to the usual 1 nap per day). She wasn’t really sleeping the whole time, as I discovered when I went in to put a blanket on her and she immediately popped up and wanted out of the crib. But she was willing to rest when I put her down and shut the door. This provided me with 3 much-needed breaks in the day, which I was exceedingly grateful for.

Also, she is attempting to wean herself off the bottle and has completely lost interest in baby food. You know, the mushy stuff that comes in jars and is immediately accessible upon demand, requiring no preparation or thought process in order to appease a hungry infant? Yeah, that’s the stuff she refuses to let touch her lips anymore.

This metamorphosis has completely caught me off guard, so mealtimes are a bit of a challenge. I’m suffering from a total lack of creativity on toddler-appropriate finger foods. So far, each meal consists of various combinations of the following:

• Cheerios
• String cheese
• Organic Crunchin’ Grahams
• Snack cheese
• Yogurt
• Canned fruit (it already comes in little pick-me-up pieces - LOVE THAT.)
• Fresh fruit - banannas, strawberries, grapes, plums, pluots; she doesn’t like avocados and that breaks my heart.
• Chopped carrots (I’m putting that one in so that you know I at least attempt to feed her vegetables. It doesn’t really count though because she won’t eat them)
• Deli meat - chicken or turkey
• Pasta
• Green beans (this is a rarity - I have a hard time getting them soft enough that she’ll eat them…but she loves the mushy green beans from BBQ joints)
• Vegetable crackers (She won’t eat those either - apparently we can’t trick her into eating a vegetable even if it looks, feels and tastes like a cracker)
• The occasional bread - pieces out of the middle of a loaf, tortilla pieces, etc.
• Boiled eggs

So that’s about it. It gets monotonous after a few meals. I’m looking for ways to expand her diet. I should include here that I don’t cook, so I’m looking for non-complex ways to expand her diet. If it requires more than “open and serve” you’d better include (very detailed) instructions.
Any ideas?

There are times when I think that the single purpose of parenting is to destroy preconceived notions.

Yesterday I reached an all-time low in masochistic self-humiliation. I entertained my daughter by jiggling the fat on my belly. My belly has never recovered from pregnancy, and makes a very good “bowl full of jelly” illustration. Apparently this is quite entertaining. For some.

Yesterday I committed another act that, prior to this week, I would have told anyone would never take place in my house.

I let my child cry herself to sleep.

I have always been anti-Ferber. Not to the point of raining judgement down on other people’s parenting choices, I am well aware that I am not in a position to decide what’s best for someone whose circumstances are not my own. But for MY house, for MY CHILD, I knew that Ferber was not the answer.

Button has never been particularly difficult to put to bed. We rock her, give her a bottle, turn on the music and put her down. Usually when supplied with her music and her love monkey, she’ll go to sleep without too much resistance.

She has, however, always been one of those babies who increases tension through crying (as opposed to releasing it). That’s the main reason we knew we could never do the Cry It Out method, because she has never been able to cry it out. She works herself up into hysterics to the point where she’s gasping, panicked, and physically can’t calm down. We have never let her get to the point of throwing up, but have no doubt that if we left her long enough, that would be the next step, followed shortly by permanent emotional damage.

So once we put her down, if she was unable to get to sleep on her own and started crying, I* returned to her and held her, rocked her etc. until she was sleepy enough to put down without realizing that we were putting her down and leaving.

For some reason, everything has changed in the last week. No matter how tired, she refuses to go to sleep. Instead, the minute she senses me moving out of the room, she stands up and starts crying. So I would go back in, calm her down, lay her on her back and stay there until she commenced with the finger-twirling-her-hair-routine that precedes sleep. I’d sneak out of the room and make it half way down the stairs before the screaming began.

After several nights of repeated rounds of this, it became quite clear to me that something wasn’t working. So I put my best 11-Month Old Thinking Cap on to try to figure out what it was, and I saw the following issue: She relaxes, I leave. She cries, I return. And suddenly, it became quite clear that I was unwittingly encouraging the behavior that I find so frustrating.

So I made a new executive decision. At night, I will read her a story, rock her for a few minutes and put her down. I will tell her I love her and kiss her good night. And then I will leave, shut the door, and not return.

I am theorizing that this will help solve the problem because:

• She will have a predictable bedtime routine
• She will know that I’m leaving the room, so she won’t suddenly realize that she’s alone and think she’s been abandoned.
• She will have to un-learn the idea that crying brings Mommy back and delays bedtime
• She will have to learn how to put herself to sleep

At least, that’s what I’m hoping for. I listened to her cry last night for probably 5-10 minutes before she quieted down. I only got through that because by the time I came up with this plan, I had already been back to her room 12 times and was too damn frustrated to get all soft about the crying.

Tonight I tried it again from the start. I put her down, said good night and walked away. She cried for under a minute, and it never reached the level of distress that indicates the point of no return (where she is unable to calm herself down without help/comfort). That gives me hope.

It’s a very strange feeling when you begin to realize that you have to move toward the more structured phase of parenting. Where you have to do more than just love the child…you have to train, discipline, teach. There’s a lot more pressure there. And it seems to be mostly trial and error.

I’m hoping for less error.

* For some reason, the bedtime routine has become MY duty. J says she won’t sleep for him, that she only goes to sleep when I put her down. That might change with the new routine.