stomp it out

Unrelated to photo:

Doing Max's bedtime in my bed turned out to be a not-so-very-good idea, but getting him to go to sleep in his crib again is proving to be quite difficult for us all.

just one thing

as adults, there are many things we need to accomplish on any given day. as parents, that list increases exponentially, and as working-from-home parents, the number of things-to-do seems endlessly growing. because everything is at home, you never get a break like you do when leaving things at an office. when you are trying to stay afloat in this scenario and are living with Depression, it's a whole lot harder.

my own energy for concentrated attention in the few free moments i get during the day is very limited. it's like you're standing in the middle of a hurricane of noise, activity, and emotional need (produced by two toddlers), and all of a sudden everything stops and you expect yourself to get right to work. the house is in a shamble, and there are a hundred uncompleted tasks piled up everywhere, and your mind and body are still humming with movement. since i started working at home in the winter, the amount of visual, mental, and physical clutter has mounted and now has finally overwhelmed me. the boys seem to be echoing the lack of calm back to me, as in the past several days there has been a huge upswing in toy-throwing. i have taken to eliminating the toys one-by-one from our play space as they are tossed around.

this has all resulted in a decision. for the next month, i am going to drastically simplify things around here. even though it feels like a huge responsibility i am failing to uphold, i am going to put the cloth diapers away for one month. washing has become something for me to avoid, and has led to a lot of stress for me.

rather than telling myself that today i will (for example) be present for the boys, reply to emails, bake, sew, do wash, hang clothes on the line, screen print, and package and mail orders from my shops, i will force myself to do just one of the non-parenting things on my list. it's actually incredibly hard for me to work in this way - i'm much more of an impulsive do-er. i am going to have to do a major cleaning and somehow box and organize all of my in-progress projects. i have to be ready with everything i need for my artisan booth at opening day of our farmer's market on 6/13, and i actually feel fearful that by putting things away, i won't get anything done at all.

the reality is, though, that i am already in way over my head and feeling ineffective at accomplishing my tasks.

we'll see how it goes. please send your prayers and helpful energies my way - i really need some calm and support!

five

five things about today

1 - i cut shoghi's hair.
in the end it came out ok, but wow, it was really challenging and required one lollipop and two popsicles per kid.

before

after

2 - bedtime usually takes 30 minutes. tonight, it took two hours,
probably because of all that sugar.

3 - we finally, blessedly, had a day without rain:

shoghi and ruby, hangin' like big kids

4 - we took our inaugural walk in the new wagon our friend passed on to us:


5 - i really wish i had a pint of ice cream to devour right now.

bedtime

this week, max made it clear to me that he no longer was willing to go to sleep in his crib - instead, he tearfully insisted on going to bed in my bed.

max sleeps in my room, his crib next to my bed, while shoghi has his own room. this arrangement happened during last year's sleep training, and a later failed attempt at putting them in that room together in the fall. they just wake each other up too much to be sleeping in the same room.

so, every night at 11 or 12, max wakes up and i pull him into bed with me. do i have conflicted feelings about getting this extra daily snuggle time with only one of my boys? yes. i have to remind myself daily that this is a thoughtful choice, based on what each of them shows me he needs. and the fact that we don't have another room to offer max for a room of his own.

he has been so completely *joyful* at getting to go to sleep in the big bed, it takes him a little extra time to settle down, and the added difference is that during this transition, i am having to lay down beside him to get him to relax and go to sleep. i imagine after a few more days of adjustment i will edge my way closer to the door each night so we can get back to him falling asleep on his own. honestly, this came up so quickly, i didn't even do any reading about transitioning into beds - i don't really know how else to do it.

since the bed is on the floor, i haven't had rails, and it seems to be working to box him in with the body pillow so i actually have room to lie down on the outside of the bed by the time i go to sleep.

what a big change! i had imagined at one time that we three would all sleep in the same bed, but now with new developments in him rolling all over the bed at night, i seriously don't know how people sleep with more than one kid in the family bed. he and i are in a king, and i am being pushed off the bed nightly!

the good with the bad

it's been a really rough 24 hours. a hard bedtime last night, and then a 2:30-4am waking for shoghi that was colored with screaming tantrums, if you can even call it a tantrum. he has these horrible wakings when he's teething, but this was by far the worst. kicking, scratching, back arching, screaming and crying, for 90 minutes in the middle of the night before he finally fell asleep in my arms. i'm so grateful max didn't wake up.

today both of them skipped their nap for the first time, so the afternoon was terrible, and shoghi's bedtime was again emotional and hard. poor boy. damned molars.



but there were a few fun things today, among which was my very first mama haircut for max - in fact the first haircut i've ever done without clippers. it was just a spontaneous thing after seeing his bangs bother him. i put him in his high chair, put on "click, clack, moo" and set to work. it's noticeably amateur, but that kind of makes me love it even more. i think i'll do shoghi's tomorrow!

rain rain rain

i didn't think i'd be much affected by the rain of the pnw, but this year's soggy spring is getting to me.

this afternoon we were out back between showers for about 30 seconds before it started pouring, and my weak efforts to get them to come in the house were ignored. they played in the pouring rain for about 10 minutes before i brought them in, soaked to the bone. they had fun, and we all got some much needed fresh air.

there's max in the photo, signing "rain"...

sleep and remembering

shoghi is getting another 2-year molar.

he's a hard teether, so this new molar is kicking all of our asses. he's also in a big developmental shift, so impatience and new-found avenues for aggression towards his brother (pushing! hair pulling! scratching!), combined with the ache-provoked moods of teething are all conspiring to make days challenging, while nights are peppered with sad wakings, one after another all night long.

this morning i did something i've only done once before - i used my babysitter time to go back to bed, and i slept until 10:30. i would love an entire day of sleep, even if it meant just lying in bed with the sound machine on staring at the ceiling. being a mom of two toddlers is exhausting!

***

the other day i was looking in an old photos folder and came across this still i took from a video of the boys last spring. being so saturated in the present with these little munchkins, it's easy to forget that not long ago, they were really just little babies!

gorillas and pins

yesterday i dusted off one of the boys board books i had rotated out a few months ago, and we enjoyed a revival of "my friends" by taro gomi. hysterical antics ensued after they remembered my top notch karate kicking when demonstrating the page "i learned to kick from my friend the gorilla." i was surprised to see shoghi actually get one leg up as he tried kicking, and max managed to do the same in our reenactment today. fun times and laughter!



today i finally pinned clementine's baby quilt. i'm going to start knotting it tonight while we watch the series finale of lost.

words and photos

for mother's day (which also happened to be the boys 21 month birthday), my sister gave me a "mom's one line a day" journal. this has been a nice spot to focus in and remember a little something from each day, and has inspired me to exert a renewed effort here. truth be told, life has changed a LOT in the past 3 months, and i just have very little free time now. i've been very busy with gardening, sewing up a storm for my new shop 70s home (which is doing really well!), and staying on top of the whole new level of antics the boys are now able to accomplish with new climbing skills. i feel like facebook has really taken over as my form of online expression.

so here we go: just a couple of lines and one photo a day.

***********

Sunday:

today i bought the boys some playdough - we needed a fresh activity after a week of rainy days, and i knew there was no way i was going to have time to make it. shoghi was so taken by it - he held a ball of "dough-dough" in his hand for about 4 hours, and cried bitter tears when i tried to put it away. i'm not into tough do-it-my-way parenting. if it's not hurting him or someone else, why force my will on him? i let him carry around that playdough as much as he wanted, though i will admit i was relieved when he dropped it outside so i didn't have to pry it away from him at bedtime!

and: we had a little baby carrot harvest from our garden! things i have learned about gardening: don't listen to the person at the nursery who tells you you don't need to thin out the seedlings. every cell needs to be divided to give the individual plants room to grow. stunted carrots were the evidence (the ones on the top of the pile were the ones that had room to grow). fortunately it's early enough in the season that i can re-plant a lot, since now we have many of the veg that aren't growing well. :)