BrooklynGirl

Rules

I'm a pretty rule-oriented person (courtesy of Tertia I recently learned that I am an ISTJ personality type, also known as The Inspector--you betcha).  I do what I'm told, when I'm told, how I'm told.

And yet with The Boy sometimes I seem to be Rebel Mom.  Refined sugar?  Check.  The same episode of Wonder Pets three times in a row?  Why not? Refusing to wear your hat outside?  It's not thaaaaaaaat cold.  Etc.

At the playground this morning, The Boy was playing a game I like to call Kicking the Metal Beams On the Playground Equipment.  It may not sound that fun, but The Boy seems to like it.  It seems pretty innocuous.  I mean, they are metal beams.  And he does like to kick.  I don't let him kick things that he might break (like the stroller) or hurt (like his sister) so what's the harm in this?

Except this morning, another kid saw him playing the game and decided he'd play too.  Again, it seemed fine: two boys standing at parallel metal beams and kicking them over and over and over again, pausing occasionally to look at one another and giggle.

But then the other child's mother came over and whisked him away, telling him sternly that kicking was wrong and treating playground equipment with respect was right*, all the while glaring at me for enabling this bad behavior.  I started to explain to The Boy that maybe this game wasn't the best game we could play, but I just didn't have it in me. 

Fortunately, he decided all on his own that he'd rather play on the slide.  He walked directly past the stairs, gripped the bottom of the slide tightly with both hands, and proceeded to crawl up, celebrating like he'd scaled Everest when he reached the top.  Next to me, I heard a mother explain to her child that slides are for sliding down, not climbing up.

And I smiled.

*Is the kicking disrespectful?  It doesn't so much as leave a mark on the beam.

On Being Scared

Recently, The Boy was playing with my cell phone  and--unbeknownst to me--wound up calling a number I hadn't called myself in over a year.  Twice.  I learned he'd made the calls when the owner of the number--who I don't actually know (I used to work with her husband)--left a somewhat hysterical message on my voice mail saying that she'd gotten two staticky calls from me, but she didn't recognize my number, and it was scary (she used some variation of the word "scared" 3 times in her message) to get calls from someone you don't know.

Of course, I was mortified, so I risked scaring her again by calling her back and leaving a message  that identified myself and explained and apologized for the calls.

And then I found myself thinking: scared?  Inconsiderate, surely.  Annoying, absolutely.  But scary?   Maybe The Boy left behind not static but blood-curdling toddler shrieks.   Certainly it's possible, but phone calls from people I don't know doesn't make my list of scary things.

Lately, here's what does: loose change.  It seems to be that every coin has a will of its own and is determined to lodge in a child's throat.  Coins on the floor send me into a dither.  Seriously.

What scares you?

Best Laid Plans

It was all going to be  so easy--a little freelance proofreading to do at night or while The Girl napped and The Boy was in school. 

But, as often happens, life got in the way.   The  project was late in getting to me  so there was no school, and the sitter who would have otherwise covered for me left town for Thanksgiving.  But that was all going to be okay because even a freelancer deserves some time off to eat turkey, right?  I planned to max out my productivity after Thanksgiving by booking the returned sitter to watch The Girl while The Boy was  in school, thus eating into my profit margin--a reasonable investment, I figured, since this was my first job for this client, and I wanted to make a good impression.

And then Sunday, The Boy's eye started  to ooze--thick, yellow, nasty ooze.  His eye was a certain undeniable shade of pink--you know, that particularly contagious looking shade of pink--and so the plan fell apart.   The time that was to have been spent working was instead spent at the pediatrician getting the inevitable diagnosis of pink eye, which means The Boy will not go to school again tomorrow. 

I am lucky that the sitter has agreed to take The Boy (pink eyes and all) and The Girl tomorrow so all is not lost, but of course her rates go up to take care of two kids instead of one,  which I believe means that, if I'm lucky, I might just break even on this project.

Feh.

Thank You to the Good People at Pixar

I'm unbelievably thankful for just about everything in my life, but I resent the obligation somehow to demonstrate that thankfulness on one particular day of the year.  And I don't especially like turkey.  So Thanksgiving doesn't really do it for me.

However, I did have one particularly hilarious moment at this year's celebration: a group of folks happened to be looking at a large photo of the Sydney Opera House for reasons that defy explanation (no one in the group is Australian nor had recently traveled to Australia).  Eager to see what everyone was looking at, The Boy muscled his way in and started yammering about "home" and "Dad" and "sharks," and I thought he was just cashing in his chips and demanding we leave for home immediately when I heard him say,  "Dorie."

Uh huh.  He recognized the Sydney Opera House from Finding Nemo.

Best parent ever.

The Cycle of Doom

The sleep situation with The Girl has gotten no better.  I would say it was worse, but once you've reached the ninth circle of hell, further details feel like quibbling.

It comes back to this: I think we need to let her cry to figure this whole sleeping thing out.  However, she still has a touch of her brother's cold and I don't feel comfortable dabbling in the darker sleep arts until she's better.  But I don't think she's getting better because she's so damn tired that her immune  system is shot. 

*****
Just to make things more interesting, I decided to take on my first freelance project this year.  It's not much really--just some proofreading, which requires the attention to minutia that is so very easy to provide on a couple of hours of non-consecutive sleep.

I was supposed to start the project yesterday morning and so had my post-its and sharpened red pencils all lined up next to my Chicago Manual of Style, but when nothing arrived by the end of the day, I emailed my contact to ask if there had been a change in schedule.

I got a reply this morning, "No, no change in schedule.  The document just hasn't arrived yet."

Well, that clears that up.

Update

You NaBloPoMoers impress the hell out of me.  I can't even get it together in post once a week.

In my defense, I offer the following:

1)  The Boy has been felled by his first ear infection of the season.  Fa la la la la la la.  The only thing that soothes him (besides liberal doses of Motrin) is watching Finding Nemo (fast forwarding past the scary bits) over and over again on the DVR.  Why is maternal demise so common in Disney movies?  Why, why, why?  I remember writing a paper about this in a women's studies course back in the day, but now that I actually am a parent, I find it even  creepier.

2) The Girl's sleeplessness is epic.  Truly.  It's a rare night that sees two consecutive hours of sleep.  I don't know what to do about it.  She's teething and fighting off her brother's cold so I'm trying to cut her some slack, but....well, ugh.   She was sleeping terribly before these two events, and I've wondered about relux or a milk allergy, but besides the nighttime caterwauling, she doesn't display any real symptoms of either.  I have been pussyfooting around CIO (which I naturally won't do while she's not feeling well) because I just can't figure out the logistics of it: we can't put her in The Boy's room because she'll wake him; she'll probably even wake him in our room, which shares a paper thin wall with The Boy's;   we can't put her in the living room/family room/dining room because that's  smack in the middle of the apartment and is a difficult area to leave undisturbed.   Perhaps we just won't sleep until we move to a 3 bedroom apartment.

There's more--I know there's more--but my short-term memory is shot. 

How are you?