I just want everyone who reads this to know that I have not lost internet access, or gotten desperately ill. I'm just busy. I hope to post more after I get through finals next week. I have all sorts of interesting topics, like "Just How Much Content Can A Small Child's Bowel Hold?" - stay tuned for next week!

One More Photo

This is what happened after the Thanksgiving festivities. Asleep at 6 PM. We did take her out of the carseat and put her in the bed.

We Had a Great Thanksgiving. How Was Yours?

Logorrhemail

One weird thing I've noticed in my return to academia is that my writing style has changed substantially. I write an occasional thankyou note with a real pen and paper (and yes, Farmor, I'm going to sit down with Dutch tomorrow to write those late thankyous for her birthday extravaganza), but otherwise all my writing in the last 6 years has consisted of emailing (and now blogging, which for me is just email writ large). Now I write everything as if it's an email. My essays and "memos" for school are meandering and full of chatty contractions and cheap wit. I have to go over them repeatedly to formalize the language, impose structure and extract the jokes. Luckily, one of my professors is an email-friendly sort of person, and she likes my writing fine. The other professor is more formal and academic, and I have to work much harder to organize and tighten up my writing for him.

The same style drift affects the people around me. My new boss writes sloppily, and she also writes her emails all in lowercase. I do that when I email friends, but she does it even when she's emailing a stranger for professional reasons. One of the people who applied for her job actually sent me an email with about six smiley-face emoticons in it. Not just the regular punctuation emoticon :) but an actual smiley face. Ugh.

Well-Intentioned Parenting Gone Wildly Astray

At dinner tonight, Dutch said this:

"Daddy, don't let me drink too much juice. If I drink too much juice, I will get fat, and then I will die. And I don't want to die today."

The BigTattle-tale

Dutch weighs 37 pounds and is 39 inches tall. She truly is a giant; I'm not just making this up. She also appears to have a crush on her pediatrician and lounged casually on the exam table, making idle chitchat about how her mom doesn't exercise enough, while the doctor prodded and peered at her. The saddest thing we learned at the appointment is that Dutch no longer likes getting a shot.

I was actually pretty impressed with Dutch, who managed the whole event with virtually no verbal or physical support from me. I did help out and tie her little gown in the back for her. (Those little gowns with the cartoons on them are so depressing - they inevitably make me think of kids who spend a lot of time in the hospital wearing them.) But otherwise she was pretty much in charge - she answered questions, she followed directions. She even learned a new vocabulary word - "otoscope"- and drew a very nice face on the chalkboard for the doctor. When asked if she poops in the toilet, she changed the subject very deftly.

Big Girls Wear Ponytails

Mean Mommy

Dutch and I spend the afternoon and evening together today, and I was not being patient with her. She was dawdling and taunting me (she has a knack for suddenly launching into deliberately provocative behavior RIGHT before we're supposed to be leaving for somewhere) and I was pissed off. My good-parenting reservoirs were dry. She was traipsing lightheartedly down the stairs, while I fumed at the bottom, waiting for her (AS ALWAYS!!!!!!), and I said "Come on, honey, we have to go" (in my mean angry voice, so that "honey" didn't sound endearing at all), and she said "Mom, I am COMING" in a very calm, firm voice, like she was my mom and I was a bratty impatient child. It caught me offguard, and tipped my angry mood enough that I had to smile at my goofball daughter, and she said, her voice full of astonishment, "Mom, you're smiling!". Like it was an incredibly rare and improbable event. I can't believe my daughter is surprised when I smile at her.

I made the resolutions I've made countless times before. I am going to be patient. I am not going to indulge my anger at her. I am going to give myself timeouts. I am going to smile more. I am. I don't think choosing to be a parent means signing away your right to be angry, to make mistakes, to be resentful and mean, and generally to have bad moments, but I think it SHOULD involve making an effort not to make your child suffer for your own problems. I am overwhelmed right now, and I feel that it's okay for Dutch to see that I'm grumpy and tired and having a hard time, and that it's part of life to feel that way sometimes. But she should never feel like any of it is her fault, and I think I do sometimes make her feel that way. Not that I would ever say anything like that, or consciously think it. (Which is not to say that I don't think daily about how much easier it was to be busy before I had a dawdling child in tow.) But sometimes I let my general stress and anxiety pump up my small frustrations with her, and she must feel it. So I have to find a way to work out my feelings without having to involve her. Also, apparently we need to start getting ready about an hour before we actually need to leave.

Sleep Dreams

By the way, Dutch isn't sick anymore. She got nearly 15 hours of sleep in about 18 hours that night, though, and woke up more cheerful than we've seen her in weeks. Which brings me to the main problem we're having now - she's chronically sleep-deprived. She has not napped at home for a year (except when she falls asleep in the stroller/bus/car on the way home from somewhere, and sleeps through the transfer to her bed), but she was napping (short naps) at her daycare all summer, 4 days a week. When we switched to the new half-day daycare, we thought she'd just go to bed earlier and that would be that. She is getting to bed about an hour earlier, but she's also having to wake up earlier on the new schedule, and she's clearly missing the nap time. We're not sure if it's just the quantity of sleep, or if it's the timing of the afternoon nap. But she seems to be exhausted all the time, and we think (and hope) that her crankiness these days is due to that rather than a personality trait. The other day she fell asleep on her bed at 6:30 PM, about 2 minutes before we were planning to get her into the bathtub, in a weird kneeling prostrate position, like she was praying to the gods of sleep (Somnolia? Oblivius?).

Anyway, just as we started worrying about this, a study came out indicating that children's sleep deprivation is tied to likelihood of obesity. There's plenty of other data indicating that most American kids need more sleep than they're getting, to make them happier and healthier. We've got to figure out a way to get Dutch some rest. Come to think of it, we could all use some rest.

Big Kids Are Greedy

Parenting a kid in daycare/school has a whole new layer of pitfalls. I'm accountable now to a large group of teachers and other parents, and I have to demonstrate to them that I am a decent parent, and a decent person. I just learned that when a child has a birthday, the parents are expected to provide "a healthy snack" for the whole class. This is even worse than having to provide cupcakes, which I might actually enjoy making and eating. I'm not even sure what exactly I should be making. Celery sticks? (Without peanutbutter - the building is a certified Nut-Free Zone, which is an excellent policy.) Can I go so far as carrot cake? With organic ingredients? With molasses instead of sugar? I'll have to inquire tomorrow. Maybe they have a list of guidelines.

Dutch is just excited about the prospect of wearing The Birthday Crown. She also told me this morning that when she's three, she's not going to share anything with anybody. (She seems to think this will be a big change from her oh-so-charitable behavior now.)

Dis Ease

Dutch is sick. She has a fever, and she took a very long mid-afternoon nap. Just the fact that she fell asleep at home, without any effort on our part, is a major signal that something's wrong. She seems okay - she's playing in her room now - but she's blazingly hot. Dutch doesn't get sick very often. Every time she gets sick with anything but an ordinary cold, I act pretty casual about it, and I truly do believe that most childhood illnesses are no big deal, but in my secret parent-heart I am convinced that she's mortally ill, and that this is the beginning of a rapid decline leading to certain death. She had a scary vaccination reaction once (at least it was scary to us, and made me pretty mad at a medical establishment that dismisses as a "mild side effect" the experience of having your floppy and fiery-feverish 15-month-old vomit repeatedly in the middle of the night) , and I was absolutely convinced she was going to die within hours. Perhaps I should not read parenting magazines.

Family, Music, Late Nights, Mortality. Etcetera.

Last night after class I went to a club. This is a shockingly out-of-character thing for me to do, which I did because my brother's band was playing. I had a really good time, which was also kind of shocking. Not that I don't love my brother (I do) and not that I don't enjoy his company (I do), but I have always been in many ways a boring old lady, and lurking around a venue late at night with musicians drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, and then listening to loud music, isn't exactly my cup of tea. A cup of tea, actually, is my cup of tea. Also listening to quiet music.
But I did have fun. I really enjoyed seeing my brother. I had a lot of thoughts while talking to him and then watching him perform... I'm too braindead (as usual, these days) to put them together with any kind of coherence. None of these thoughts were new, but they were still nice to review.
1) He's getting old. He looks like a grownup now, and all his bandmates do too.
2) He's been playing in bands for a decade.
3) He's really good at the whole thing - the music part, the social part, the management part, and all the other parts I don't know about. If I had thought about it when he was five and determinedly practicing his breakdancing moves in the living room, I would have realized then that he would be really good at the whole thing. He's pursued this career with impressive commitment and competence.
4) We're totally different people (with different cups of tea), and that's not only okay, it's really good. I'm glad I have him.
5) When he's concentrating, he looks an awful lot like Dutch when she's concentrating. I think it's something about the mouth.

These thoughts all, of course, led to many thoughts about ME, because that's what I mostly think about. My aging, my mortality, my career (and lack thereof), my choices, my family plans, etc.

Anyway, I really enjoyed it. I tagged around with him for a while (and learned that musicians on tour are dreadfully boring, just like everybody at work, and mostly smoke, talk about where they've been on tour, try to remember if that venue with the weird bar was at the show in Albuquerque or Denver, and strive to procure food and drink, including tea, which one guy brewed using a little electric kettle he takes on tour), and then I watched his set. I stood in the audience (I got a lot of weird looks, since I was alone and dressed in my very best frumpy semi-professional outfit, due to a meeting earlier in the day) and felt terribly excited and proud of him, like a weird cross between a parent and a groupie. My brother, the rock star.

Cook stayed home and put the kid to bed while I was out frivolously enjoying getting out of my rut, seeing my brother, and contemplating life. But I got him a t-shirt.

Scholarly

Today I took vacation time so I could spend the day at school. I feel so Student-y. I came to the department, pondered my class schedule for the next three years, met with my adviser for the first time, found my student mailbox (yes, halfway through the quarter - it was empty), wrote my takehome midterm, and made an appointment to meet the Dean (on the advice of Big Papa Cook, who has already schmoozed the Dean for me - I expect he will offer me a job on the spot). I'm using the computer lab for the first time! I put a document on my little piece of the university server! I am a Student! And I have so much time! I can work on my midterm, take a break, walk around, visit the drinking fountain, explore the building... I love it.

I forgot! I finally have a boss! She started yesterday, and I have already passed her a huge heap of stuff that was dumped on me, which makes me feel terribly lighthearted and also contributes to today's general feeling of reckless hedonism. Now we have to negotiate our working relationship while I train her to do stuff I sort of know how to do - it's going to be really weird. But who cares! I only work 25 hours a week now!

So I was glorying in my leisurely academic life this morning, and then my adviser informed me that unless I plan to take five years to complete the degree, I really ought to take 9 credits next quarter, and 12 credits in the spring, making my measly 8 credits this quarter look like a walk in the park. These are the considerations I have to consider while mapping myself a course through the degree program:
1) Do I want to make the effort to cram in all my core courses before next winter in order to be able to take the practice workshop along with my cohort rather than wait a whole extra year?
2) What concentration do I want to do?
3) How will I manage to spread things out so I'm averaging 18 credits a year in order to keep Dutch at the wonderful and cheap university daycare until she starts kindergarten in fall 2010?
4) How will I fit in a 400-hour internship?
5) When on earth will we have a second kid?

So many questions, and all subsidiary to the big one - What Am I Going to Do With My Life?

Maybe the Dean will know.

Catching up

I woke up at 5:11 AM, courtesy of the time change, and decided to go ahead and start my day, in order to get a wee bit of free time to myself. We have to get up earlier now in order to maximize our limited daycare time, so we're taking advantage of the time change to train ourselves to be the early risers that we naturally aren't.

There are all kinds of things I haven't been writing about.
1) If all goes well, I'll get a new boss sometime in the next week or two, and things will get less hectic.
2) We're trying to jumpstart our social life, particularly the kids-and-parents part of it, partially because we're going to need playdates and babysitting swapping, with Dutch home in the afternoons, and partially because Dutch's birthday is coming up (this is NOT a sneaky bid for presents, by the way - that kid has more stuff than you'd think any non-home-owner would need) and we realize we don't have any invitee prospects to a kid-based party. So we're quickly reviving some friendships from last winter's Indoor Park adventures, in the hopes of being able to assemble a critical mass of invitees to satisfy Dutch's desire for "a BIIIIIIIIG party!"
Also, we're lonely.
3) Dutch's new daycare is fantastic. The only problem with it is the part-timeness of it. Otherwise, it's like (nearly) any parent's fantasy of a daycare. Bright, cheerful, colorful, stocked with books and the fixings for interesting activities, staffed by loving teachers with lots of student teacher support. Cook says it smelled like gingerbread when he walked in Friday morning, and he really wanted to spend the day there himself. The part-time kids (second-class citizens that they are) are removed from the classroom at lunch time and taken from the library to await their parents. The LIBRARY! Which is stocked with books and a dollhouse and comfy spots for reading! The teachers say Dutch is doing great, and she seems perfectly happy to be there when she's there - she never cries when we leave, and she never wants to leave in the afternoon. (She's the oldest kid in the class, and substantially more verbal than the rest of them, but she likes being in charge.) Overall, though, she's definitely sad about leaving behind her friends, and cranky about the change. I expect she'll settle in fairly quickly, and then we intend to keep her there until kindergarten (three long years away!), but she's had a lot of transition for one little introvert.

Working Child

Today I took Dutch with me on a bus trip to do a land use inventory (this involves filling out a form for each parcel of land - we had about 85 parcels to inventory), and she was heroic. The poor kid. She's chronically under-rested and under-attended these days. After bravely sitting in the stroller for an hour and a half, looking for streetlights and inquiring loudly whether passersby were homeless or not, while I very slowly inspected many many ugly houses without sidewalks (what's WRONG with these people?!), she finally started vigorously complaining "Mama, you're taking TOO LONG!!!!!" and only cheered up when I took her to an Asian mall and let her hang out for a while in one of those terrific trinket stores filled with Hello Kitty pens and teddy bear Kleenex box covers. I bought her a $3 sheet of dressup stickers that are like paperdolls, except not reuseable. I figured that was cheaper than paying a babysitter.
Then we went home, and Cook took her to the grocery store while I typed up my inventory. A never-ending whirl of fun for this kid!

A Long Month For Everyone

Today was a very long day for all of us, coming at the end of a string of long days. Today Dutch started her new daycare, which is only part-time, so she comes home for lunch, and doesn't get a nap. (Not that we're denying her naps - it's just virtually impossible to get her to nap outside the peer-pressure-zone of daycare.) Today, after an early wakeup and an exhausting morning adapting to a completely new place, she fell asleep in mid-draw on the kitchen floor at 6, while Cook was making dinner. He tried to wake her, and thought he'd succeeded, but she fell asleep again when he left her so he could save the burning meal. She's asleep on the couch right now, with a very full bladder and an empty belly. We're not sure what exactly to do with her.

However, I know exactly how she felt. I'm pretty sure that I would fall asleep if I lay down on the floor. But today I turned in a grant proposal, made it to class, and left work fairly sure that I will have a new boss come Monday, which will mean that I can cut my hours back and stop doing two jobs (both badly). So if I can just make it through the 8 billion pages of reading, the takehome exam, and the land use inventory I have to do this weekend, everything will be okay!