Little Voice

Some moms get all bummed about their babies getting bigger. I myself am guilty of looking at C's baby pictures both with fondness and a certain longing.

But his increasing shoe size and growing body don't make me sad. What I want to never change is his little voice.

It's the best thing in the world to hear him talk! Today, he's walking around saying "ocurt aisins" (yogurt raisins). Last night I laughed and laughed as I was putting him to bed, because he flicked his hand at himself and said "Poof! Egg!" (because his Nana and Tata tell him "want me to make you an egg? Poof! You're an egg!"). I called him "silly" and he got serious and said "Tata!", like he was saying "not me, it's Tata."

I love to hear the way he says his numbers and letters, how he tells me his "car go past (fast)" and how red and yellow are finally starting to get consonants at the beginning ("wed" and "wellow"). Also, every animal either goes "eee awww" or "moo", except dogs, who definitely go "woof" and roosters, who go "cockadoo".

I am trying to get all of this on video, but every time he sees the red light come on the Vado, he says "pone" (phone) and tries to grab for it.

So, can't his little voice just stay the same forever?

~Nichole

Stay.

I think my favorite times of day as a mother are the polar ends of my child's sleep: the waking and the falling.

When C wakes in the morning, I run to him – in whatever state of dress or undress I find myself in at that point in my morning routine – and I say “hi!” and snuggle him and hug him and kiss him. He leans his head against me and snuggles me. Everything is right and perfect in the world for those few small minutes before the busyness of the day snatches us from each other.

After his diaper change this morning, he set out to play with the upturned wheels of his topsy-turvy wagon and say “turn wheel” a few times before it was time to go. I heard his dad’s final boarding call – the snap of his lunch box closing shut – and announced to C “it’s time to go to Nana & Tata’s!”. He looked at me and said “here”. I told him it was time to go, and he countered by sitting down and saying “stay”.

Oh wouldn’t we all just love to “stay here” all day long! His feet kicked in wild protest when I picked him up, told him mommy has to leave too and it’d be awfully lonely in the house all alone. I wondered if he thinks I stay home all day without him, since I’m there when he leaves and there when he gets home.

Just before I passed him to his dad, I shoved a cheese stick into his hand and reminded him to say “thank you” (he did). I said “I love you!” as they walked out the door and as I bent to grab his backpack, he said it back. So, I followed them out the door like usual – only this morning I was nearly nekkid (thank goodness for garages!) – and said “I love you” a few more times just to hear him say it back.

Afterward, I stood in my bathroom feeling stunned. We all know I’ve had tough days where all I wanted to do was stay home and be with him, and that I have prayed more than once for a way to make that happen (It’s coming! We have a plan! It’s in the works!). But I hadn’t prepared myself for the day when he would want to stay home, when he would be asking me for a reprieve. And you know what? It was flattering and frightening. But mostly, it stung.

I reminded myself of the thought that occurred to me when I was trying to convince him to go about his day: tomorrow is Friday! Tomorrow is our reprieve day! And, for now, it’ll have to do.

~Nichole

She Says, She Says

HAVE NOT Emails: "I know when I have a child I will find it positively adorable when they learn how to say “hi” and do so to everything and everyone. However, at this moment in time, the small child out in the lobby saying “hi hi hi hi hi” is driving me CRAZY!"

HAVE Replies: "They are ALWAYS cuter when they are your own. It’s a protection mechanism built into the species so humans don’t eat their young. Higher order, and all that jazz. It also makes it practically impossible for us to see the extent to which our “cute” kid is making others wish they could eat (or seriously maim or injure) our offspring.

~Nichole

My Kid. My Life.

My kid is my favoritest thing in the world right now. He walks around gibbering some version of gobbledygook that sounds oddly like an Asian language. I stare in awe at new daily tokens of his developing language skills.

When he wakes up, he lays there and sings or talks until the sounds of his little voice hail me from the deepness of my sleep. Yesterday he awoke practicing intonations of "No" (Nononononono No! No. No!) and his newest opposites (open/closed and on/off).

He's a fantastic mimic! Today when he went down for a nap he said "Dad fix it fan!" Right now he is standing at the window saying "Nena (dog) whay ahyou?" (where are you). When I say "You know what?" he answers "I uhview" (I love you) and when I tell him he's my best boy, he says "buddy" and I say "that's right, you're my buddy".

He is 21 months now (!) and still loves to be worn. I recently bought an Ergo and wear it at the grocery store and sometimes while making dinner. He snuggles up next to me and squeezes me and just plain loves to be loved.

He loves jeeps and cars and buses and lights and shoes. He LOVES stools but we've had to take them away and hide them in the laundry room. He loves to be surprised and I often jump out from behind things to oblige him. He giggles at the funniest things and I am pretty sure his laughter is the best sound in the universe.

Most of the time he is very well-behaved and doesn't do much that a little redirection and a request to "go play with your toys" won't handle. He listens well to requests (most of the time) and I think we're doing pretty well in the discipline department, but I still read the books.

Every time I read a book that talks about extinguishment of a behavior by letting my kid cry (or scream) for hours on end, I get a bad taste in my mouth and have real trouble taking anything after that point seriously. The most recent book I read talked about bedtime routines in the second chapter and how a child will probably scream for 3-4 hours the first night. . . how on earth do I even go on to chapter three after a comment like that?

Especially when what I am mostly trying to avoid is the place of panic my heart retreats to when he is being particularly challenging, like yesterday when we were at a mall bookstore and he was straining against his stroller straps saying "Out!" and it was nearing bedtime and he was just done. I told him he was not getting out and then tried to readjust him in his stroller. While doing so, I hurt his leg and he starting crying in earnest. Instant heart panic rose up (was I going to have to go back on my word?), but in the end, we struck a compromise that allowed me to stick to my guns and him to be happy for another 10 minutes.

Being smothered is a delicate balance between trusting yourself and being open to learning new ways to handle things. But mostly, it's just awesome!

~Nichole

The Worst Day Ever. Until Today.

Sometimes you just think so long and hard and overmuch about things that they leave an indentation on your brain that only time can resolve.

Which I why I never thought overlong about being a working mom. It’s what I have to do, so I do it.

But that doesn’t mean it is easy.

On Mondays, while I drive to work (and often on the drive home from work), my Heavenly Father gets extra long phone calls from me asking for His help for me to be patient and have faith that He’s working on the blessings that will make it so I can stay home. He hears from me all day long too, any time I miss my boy.

And lately? My Tuesdays and Wednesdays haven’t been so good either. Tuesday, I crunched budget numbers in Excel spreadsheets and made plans in my head. By Wednesday, perhaps because so much of my husband’s telecommuting day morphed into the embodiment of chaos theory, perhaps because, even though my mother-in-law meant only that I was the mom and the call was mine to make when she said “if you want to be with your boy, come get him,” the words beat my heart into pulp, perhaps because hormones and lunar cycles and maybe even the damn barometric pressure all combined against me, I was a fully dysfunctional, sobbing, crying, praying mess of a lump sitting in my car during my short lunch break.

This week was like that quote from the movie Office Space: “Ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, it's the worst day of my life.”

Wednesday night, I arrived home with a purchased dinner to find my kid had crossed the strike line to join up with the Grouchies. I told him, after I forced him into his high chair for dinner, that he didn’t have to be so upset, that he could actually choose not to be upset. I told him he could choose to be happy. He stopped fussing and looked at me, curious as he considered this new information for a while. And you know what? After that, he was happy.

We both learned a lesson that night. I am choosing to be happy!

Thursday was marginally better, but I could have done without the hunger, fatigue, and grouchiness (mine, this time, not the boy's).

But today? Today is Friday! The day I get to play Stay at Home Mom. And even though my kid woke up at the crack of stupid after a rough (rough!) night, and I am so tempted to trade our Grand Day Out for a Great Day In, I am going to make the best of today!

~Nichole

With a Will

I've written before about how nap times and Sunday schedules are like oil and water around these parts.

We moved into a new ward that is a whopping half hour earlier than our former ward, so the fact that my kid's nap time falls before and during church was not helped much.

BUT, I am happy to report that with prayer and effort, we have found a way to make it work!

We have gotten to where we just push his bedtime out a little so he sleeps longer and push his nap until later (i.e. keep him busy and occupied right up until church). We are able to make it through sacrament meeting without any major meltdowns. Then we rush out and get him into the car. Some days he is so tired, he falls asleep before we are out of the parking lot. Other days, he lasts until we reach the top of the hill before turning left for home.

One hour is not nearly enough, but it will do for now. And the experience has helped me re-realize that praying about something and being willing to put in the effort to make it happen really are a powerful combination!

~Nichole

The Shoulds

Have you ever met the Shoulds?

The Shoulds are a malicious bunch. They like to hold me hostage, back me into a corner, and squish the shreds of parenting dignity I have left beneath their crusty leather boots. Then, as a more acute and awful form of torture, one of them reads a list of my parenting transgressions: not paying enough attention to my kid, saying "damn it" when his octopus arms are busy grabbing my piles of freshly folded laundry, letting him slip underwater while I try a few acrobatics in the pool. . .

Then they stand around and recite their creed: "he Should be night weaned by now!" "he Should be in his own room!" "you Should be using time out!" "he Should be watching less movies and reading more books!"

Just when I feel about to succumb, my kid does something great like eat chicken (we've been convinced he's vegetarian!), or learn all his primary colors (plus black, purple, and orange), or recite 15 letters of the alphabet (out of order), or sit nicely through church (eating raisins).

Such things intimidate the Shoulds the way a patronus does a dementor! And they make me feel way better, too!

~Nichole

Crafting with Cephalopods

Here's the thing.
I don't quite know how it happened.
I don't know quite when it happened.

But sometime between 18 and 19 months of age, my son left babyhood behind and went into full-on toddler mode. He walks with a very purposeful toddler walk. He acts like he's the boss of everyone. (And everything.) I have never seen a person more self-possessed than a toddler!
Recently, I read a blog post that compared flying on a plane with a lap child to trying to hold an octopus still for a few hours.

Did you know that that is exactly what trying to do a craft project with a 19 month old running around is like?

I did the nice version of my tutorial here. Here's the real story.

We started in the morning. When he was extra wiggly. And prone to climbing every climbable surface on the planet.
He "helped" me measure and mark my button holes.

He climbed on the table about eleventy hundred more times. He modeled my fabric.

He grabbed all my tools from me, injected himself into every task I performed. He "helped" me make the buttons.

He ran around and generally caused a ruckus all over the household. Insert break for going to buy foam - during which the heat of the car and the noonish hour brought on a (too short) nap - which made the day all the more interesting.

Insert second break for lunch and chasing and redirecting and pulling a kid off all sorts of high-ish surfaces.

My octopus used his tentacles to grab and shake loose the legs of my once-sturdy table, at which point this octo-mom lost her patience and started using my own tentacles to pull him away much too forcefully and impatiently.

I called reinforcements in from outside (i.e. made his dad come and watch him while I operated the compressed air stapler).

Finally, about 12 hours after I started, I finished. We couldn't get one of the four corners of the legs to seat correctly thanks to the vigorous octopus shaking it received.

Oh, and it took about 4.5 seconds for my kid to stick his little tentacles under one of the tufted buttons and snap it right off. See for yourself:

Just keeping it real, folks. This is the side those cozy online tutorials won't tell you.

By the way, if ever I am tempted to attempt a project like this again with a toddler underfoot, remind me of this, will ya?

~Nichole

Toddler Discipline

Parenting a toddler is what I imagine being bipolar to be like. You're never quite sure how much that bump will hurt and whether it will elicit a cry, and at what point redirection will cease to work and major meltdowns will ensue.

To be sure, with each new developmental stage, parenting (and disciplining) a toddler feels most like being out at sea, never quite sure exactly which direction you should be heading in next.

Look up toddler discipline, and you'll get all sorts of directions. Brazelton has his way. Sears has his. There are time outs (which I honestly can't imagine for this age). There are "secret" methods. But all agree that consistency is key.

My approach, before I had kids and before my kid was a toddler, was simple. It involved a two-pronged attack of Redirection and Choosing Your Battles.

But, as my son tries harder and harder to gain independence, he has stopped listening. He has started testing limits. And I have started raising my voice and not wanting to get up 50 times to redirect (both of which I am working on).

With potentially dangerous and gross things like toilets and the fireplace, I've tried smacking hands or his butt. With the hands, he is completely unphased. And he is fascinated by his butt, so he thinks it's funny and when I say "I'm gonna spank your butt" he puts his butt out, pats it and says "butt". Which I think is funny.

I am learning right along with him. I try out one tack to see what works and even though I am supposed to speak with some sort of authority, some days I feel completely at a loss for what to do next - totally in the middle of the ocean.

How about you? What do you do?

~Nichole

19 Months

19 months!

And we have entered the stage where he's so adorably cute one second (that little voice singing in the back seat or trying to say every thing I say - you should hear him say his name. or haircut. or the letter "F".)

And then the next moment, you're out to dinner and he's an unholy whirlwind of terror, threatening to hit his head on every living surface in the restaurant (glass tabletop! tiled walls!) or pierce the ears of fellow diners with his fitful crying.

But mostly, the cute thing.

I love love love love this kid! I love love love love being his mother. It's the most awesome job in the whole world, crazy bits and all!

~Nichole