Selfish

This past few months, I've gotten into a certain rhythm with my schedule. I teach on two days of the week, and I have two and a half days of research, and I have an afternoon that is either for running errands or as what I like to call 'mommy time,' which usually means a trip for ice cream and a pedicure.

That 'mommy day' is usually Friday.

This morning at 6am, I got a text from our daycare provider. One of the risks of using an in-home daycare is this: my childcare is really reliable and somewhat flexible except when there is an illness in the sitter's family. Apparently, she was up all night with food poisoning and so the Bug had to stay home today.

On the surface, this doesn't look like that big a deal. After all, I didn't have a single appointment or formal obligation today. I had two planned tasks: retrive Teddy the Very Important and Irreplaceable Lovey from Mother's Day Out and pick up a postal money order to try to get out of a traffic ticket. Beyond that, my plan was to write my weekday quotient of 500 words and then get a pedicure. So my disappointment at discovering that I could not have the day I had intended would seem a bit selfish.

But. My research is a job, even if I'm the only person I know who really thinks so. It is job number two.

The pedicure? Honestly I need it to remind myself that I'm more than a sociology-reading, gibberish-writing, paper-grading machine.

Some Thoughts on Toddler Sleep

Children's sleep is different than adult's. As adults, we cultivate sleep, we seek it out, we seek out optimal conditions for it. Or we put it off, trick our bodies, and attempt to control it. After we've slept, we evaluate it, categorize it and discuss it. When it isn't going right, we see doctors who specialize in it to help us fix it. In other words, sleep is something we do.

Children, particularly toddlers, don't view sleep in this active sense. For them, sleep is something that happens to them. It sneaks up and gets them Indeed, the average two-year-old doesn't even get that the bad mood and difficulty completing simple tasks is a result of needing to sleep.

I'm sure this has to do with brain development or something. I suspect that a milestone we never talk about us when the wee little people can recognize physical causes to their unhappiness.

Think about it, you never hear a toddler say 'please may I go to bed' and with a few exceptions, you never see an adult slumped over their dinner plate snoring.

But until the Bug reaches the developmental stage wherein she recognizes her own need for sleep, what is there to do? As best as I can figure, the wise course of action is to create optimal conditions for sleep to overtake the Bug. My goal with this is to make going to sleep not scary, and waking up somewhat pleasant. I try to make sure she's warm and clean and has a full belly, that she's calm and knows she's loved.

This is why I'm suspicious of the entire concept of sleep training. If their little brain isn't ready to actively go to sleep, then all the training does is alter the conditions in which sleep happens to the child. I think if she's warm and happy and not totally alone, sleep will develop comforting, happy associations. If she's alone and crying, it will become a scary thing that sneaks up on her.

So, while parenting her to sleep is time-consuming in the short run, I'm hoping it makes for a happier sleeper in the future, when I can say 'go to sleep,' and it will have some meaning for her.

Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should

(or How To Parent a Toddler)

So. The Bug just turned 2. And she is soooooo 2 years old. A favourite phrase at the moment? 'I do.' Another one? 'Mine.' The final favourite communication tool? Stony silence in response from a request from one or both of the parental units.

And of course, although she is huge for her age-- 36" tall and 30 pounds-- I can still just pick her up and put her where I want her to be. But that ends badly. It also doesn't teach her much other than that the people in her life who are bigger than her will simply bend her to their will. This is not the lesson I want her to learn about the world.

So, like something I learned a long time ago about the techniques I learned in martial arts is this: just because I can do something, does not mean that I should. That is, even though I know how to properly punch someone in the throat, the occasions where that is appropriate are few and far between. As with Kung Fu, so with parenting. There are absolutely times when I need to pick her up and move her to where she needs to be. However, most of the time, no matter how crazy-making it is, I need to work with her to convince her to decide to cooperate of her own volition. Because I want her to learn that sometimes she has to do what she is asked to, even if she doesn't really want to.

So I spend a lot of time enforcing this... getting her to obey or cooperate, and enforcing consequences when she doesn't. This is, in fact, way more time consuming than just picking her up and making her do whatever it is that I've asked her to do.

But I think this will help her grow into the sort of adult I would like her to be.

And her independent streak? It will be a great quality when she's 14 and punches that boy in the throat for whatever it is he did that she didn't want him to.

Less Than Perfect

So I'm really good at my job. That is, I'm really good at the job for which I go to a place and spew knowledge at the masses. I've been slacking at the one where I'm an attentive and interested mom and the one where I finish my graduate degree before the apocalypse. But for the teaching gig, I'm in the top 5% of my peers. (Before you make this into me being a great educator, my competition includes an individual who makes presentations interesting by including animated gifs of cats shuffling cards.)

So I've come to a conclusion. I have to stop being so good at job C to be better at jobs A (being a good mom) and B (Ph.D before social security kicks in). I think I'll still be in the top tier of my fellow adjunct instructors of random class that kids take to fill up requirements, but I just can't keep acting like this role is more important than the other stuff. Because if I do that, it may lead me to never finish my degree and for my daughter to wind up on the pole, because she never got enough attention from her mom. She already sometimes calls the sitter Mommy.

I was a teen in the 1990s. Slacking should come way more naturally than it does.

Whatever.

Christmas is Awesome!

So last year, the Bug was sort of indifferent to Christmas. She got that we went somewhere other than our house, she got it, sort of, that she got some new stuff and that people paid a lot of attention to her, but mostly she just got a bit over-stimulated.

This year, she doesn't really get the whole thing... I mean the whole Baby Jesus and Santa and Practising Commercialism with Reckless Abandon thing, but what she does get is OMG!!!!!! TOYS!!!!! (Also, the Caillou Christmas Movie... if I have to watch it one more time... but that's an entry for a different day, as is the goody bag she brought home from her Mother's Day Out from Baby Jesus' birthday party.)

She got her first gift of the Holiday Season today (that is, except for the Baby Jesus goody bag), and she wanted to play with that doll RIGHT NOW so I opened the packaging. The doll and accompanying pacifier, bed, blanket and pillow were secured in the packaging (shown postmortem) using no fewer than 4 different types of fasteners, at least one of which required a blade to get it undone, and all but one of which is a choking hazard.

Since I'm packing for our Christmas travels (pray for us... 500-ish miles in the car with a toddler), I'm making lists, and I have included the following Important Tool on my list:

My Mom's old Swiss Army Knife. Seriously. How else will I get through the presents? 

(It might be interesting to mention that none of the toys we got her have this sort of packaging on them. Further proof that I'm a damn dirty hippie.)

Toddler Food

So the Bug has hit a picky patch when it comes to eating. She subsists primarily on milk, air, and peanut butter smeared on the carb-de-jour. She will also eat tortellini, and so, inspired by the Noodle and Doodle TV show, I invented this recipe for the whole family.

Tortellini lasagna

1 20 oz package tortellini (I used Buitoni herb chicken tortellini just to get some extra protein in the child)
2-ish cups fresh baby spinach
1 32 oz jar pasta sauce
2-ish cups part-skim mozzarella cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F

Prepare pasta according to package directions. Drain.

Lightly grease a 9'x9 or equivalent baking pan. I used my olive oil mister to accomplish this task. Layer about half the tortellini, half the spinach, half the sauce, and half the cheese. Repeat.

Cover dish with foil, place in oven for 15 minutes. Remove foil and bake for an additional 5 minutes or until cheese on top is melty and goey. Enjoy. Assume toddler will reject immediately the spinach as though it were arsenic or toxic waste.

Oh, and I'm not a huge fan of Noodle and Doodle, because while the link I put above is right that it encourages cooking and crafting together, it also features a dude in a bus (awfully similar to a van), riding around with a puppet and a dog inviting kids to come do crafts in his skeevy van double decker bus, and eat the yummy food that his puppet helped him prepare. The dog's life is so miserable that he has a vivid fantasy life in which he is the owner of an all-dog diner and creates beautiful meals for a variety of interesting clientele. It was, in fact, one of Doggity's creations that inspired this particular creation.

A Parent's Perspective

We're watching 'The Wiggles' in the MomSnark household this morning, and I got to thinking about the mother of the guitarist in the group, Murray. I rather imagine that at first she was disappointed when he told her that he wanted to be a rock star, and then she was torn between being glad he had a paying gig and completely weirded out by the whole concept of The Wiggles when he told her he got that gig. Unless, of course, he set out to be a musical children's television star, then she was just so bloody weirded out by it she didn't know quite what to do.