Watersports, Birth Control, and It Looks Good on Paper

Childcare, it seems, is just like everything else. A good plan makes things go a lot smoother. Last night I had an agenda and it eliminated television, which eliminated tantrums, and both LMJ and I got a good night’s sleep. She woke up looking for Mommy again this morning, but unlike yesterday, I had an answer she wanted to hear. I told her we were going to the beach and Mommy would be there. I had planned on putting her in a pretty pink and white dress that MJ had requested, but LMJ said no, beach equals swimsuit and water shoes. This was fine. I packed her dress instead of her swimsuit along with some breakfast for LMJ and we were out the door. We got to the beach without incident and were hanging out in ME’s condo when I realized I had forgotten my swimsuit. MJ decided we needed to make a run to Target to get me a new suit because EVERYBODY had to get in the pool. Jump forward to a half an hour later and I was the only person over eight in the pool. It rained for the last two days so the pool water was very cold. It was funny watching LMJ try to get in. She desperately wanted to swim but every time she got past belly button deep the cold water would take her breath away and she would have to turn around. The rest of MJ’s crew had no intention of getting in and said so in as many words. I think she started to feel guilty that she made me get a new suit and I was the only one in the pool, so after about twenty minutes she took the plunge. I was having fun, but the best part of the day was watching all the kids interact. Two five year olds make a lot of noise, and helped tip today’s balance in favor of LMJ being an only child. The problem wasn’t that they behaved badly; it was that they were acting like normal five year olds, and I don’t know if I’m up for going through that twice. MJ and her friends are planning a Disney cruise trip in five years with the kids: a thirteen year old girl, a ten year old girl, a ten year old boy, an eight year old boy, a seven year old girl, a six year old girl, and a five year old girl vs. four women in their forties. WHO YA GOT? I’m really bummed that I’m going to have to miss it, but I’ve got that thing at work that week.

The Rest of The Night

Holy mother of fried chicken! The baby girl woke up looking for her mother at 1am. She had about three and a half hours of sleep. I had about twenty minutes because I missed her mommy too. Every time LMJ stirred I jumped to make sure she wasn’t plunging to her death. When her tossing and turning became “I’m up” I tried to console her that Mommy would be back tomorrow. She didn’t care about tomorrow. She wanted her here, now. I sort of distracted her from that, but not really. I think she decided I was completely incompetent in producing a Mommy for her slumbering ease, and decided to wait it out. So for the next four hours she made the rounds of her five or six entertainment stations in the house, getting more and more frustrated and fatigued every moment. I was overtired as well, and just wanted to make the problem go away. On the plus side, I found out my baby girl can handle an inhuman amount of tequila, especially since she only weighs twenty-eight pounds – just kidding HRS. I let her watch television and podcasts (I now hate Mickey Mouse). I read to her, but nothing calmed her down. We were both starting to lose it as 4am rolled around. She would doze off for a second, getting my hopes up, and then jerk herself awake. No matter what I did she wouldn’t let herself fall asleep. She was waiting for Mommy, dammit. At 4:30 I’d had enough and told her she it was time to go to sleep, and I wouldn’t let her watch anymore Mickey Mouse. She had the worst tantrum of her life. I gave up and told her she could do whatever she wanted to do, which is meaningless to a two year old and completely ridiculous for a 38 year old. I was on the verge of calling Grammy. I googled “What to do when your two year old has a tantrum” while my two year old was having a tantrum and trying to drag me out of my chair. I followed the instructions, well the first one. I calmed down and let myself realize that I’m an adult and she is a toddler. I picked her up, told her that I loved her, that it was time to go to sleep, and that I would read her favorite book, Busiest People Ever, to her (again). Strangely enough, she started to settle down. Maybe it was my demeanor because she didn’t like the exact same idea five minutes before. She sat still while I read to her and finally fell asleep at 5am. I think what worked this last time is I didn’t make the reading interactive. I didn’t stop to ask her what she thought. I ignored her comments and just read the story. Live and learn. She woke up at 8am, and fueled on adrenaline, went to sleep about twenty minutes ago. I bet being a single parent is just non-stop fun.

I Love This Game or Why You're an Only Child

I don’t know if there’s any literature on the subject or if any formal studies have been done, but two year olds like routines, and if their routines are messed with they don’t adjust well. I started putting LMJ to bed tonight at 8pm and I spent the last ten thousand years listening to her scream because something was off. She half-heartedly accepted the answer that Mommy was going to come home tomorrow. She doesn’t really understand that concept, so I knew she couldn’t deal with the day after tomorrow or Sunday. I didn’t want to lie to her and tell her Mommy was at work, and have no where to go when she wakes up tomorrow morning and Mommy isn’t here. That would start her down the inevitable path of not trusting her Daddy as a go to guy for pertinent information a little bit earlier than I would hope. It’s my fault for expecting her to give in to fatigue. Her nap got cut in half today and she started getting cranky at about 6pm. Grammy took her to the park while I updated JSG’s blog, and got screamed at by a two year old for the effort. When we started operation shut down with massive yawns between the sobs during the bath I thought she’d be asleep by 8:30. Man was I wrong. She screamed while I read the books she picked out while screaming. I turned on Mickey Mouse, which distracted her to the point of her head nodding, but she would snap out of it and roll over on the bed to wake herself up. That lasted for half an hour, and then I turned off the television. Guess what she did. I decided to let her cry herself to sleep but she wouldn’t sit still, so I carried her around telling her everything was going to be alright – I could be a back up singer in The Wailers. Every time she would start to put her head down on my shoulder she would shake herself awake. Although I do understand her reluctance since my shirt was drenched in the blood gushing out of my ears from her banshee act. It was only through providence that I had left the living room television on the NBA channel and there were talking heads speaking in a monotonous drone while the Lakers practiced behind them on. I sat her on the couch and the rhythm of the practice lulled her past the point of no return and she said, “Back. Bed”. Thank God.

I'm Getting Old and I'm a Snob

Beth wrote about taking her older boy to get a haircut and forgetting that the barber shop was close to a military base. The Reader’s Digest version is he walked out with a high and tight, jarhead style. It’s funny in a good way. What I saw Tuesday night in Target wasn’t funny. A little boy who was eight years old at the absolute oldest had two little blue stud earrings that were the same color as his blue t-shirt and his blue crocs. Maybe I’m old, but let’s try mixing in a “no” or two. LMJ and I watched him, and he wasn’t coming across as a future friend of Dorothy or a future fan of Oscar Wilde. He was just a victim of bad fashion. Now back in the good old days, the late 70’s, we would have teased him, and bullied him, and threw rocks at him, until he changed his wardrobe or died. That’s Darwinism and it’s natural. We’re pack animals and if the parents won’t keep Paddy Wagon (named after where he was conceived) in line then it’s up to his fellow pups. No one is a lone wolf at eight. Not even real wolves (canis lupus), at eight they’re past their prime and have probably been dead for two years. I digress. I think my biggest problem, after the jewelry to clothes color coordination, is the crocs. Little kids should wear shoes they can run in because that’s how they get places, and you can’t run in cheap clogs. The earrings make me sad. Why? Who thinks that looks good? Little boys clothes should consist of crap their moms make them wear and stuff representing their favorite teams and toys. That’s all. Parents should know this. I just hope the earrings were a result of a lack of parenting by letting little PW get his ears pierced and not a result of mom and this weeks boyfriend thinking it would look cool.

Oh Shit!!!

I got home early today and was able to give CG a little bit of a break. When I left this morning she was being berated by LMJ.

LMJ: GO! ZOO!

CG: It’s not open yet. We have to wait until it opens.

LMJ: Yeah, GO! ZOO!

CG: Sweetie, it’s not op…

LMJ: GO! ZOO! GO! ZOO! GO! ZOO! (This was an order not a cheer)

After they got back from the zoo LMJ took a nap that was interrupted by some gastrointestinal distress. When I got home CG let me know LMJ was a little bit short on sleep, so I was prepared for her to be a little bit cranky. CG went home for a more than earned rest. LMJ and I played and read and watched a little Mickey Mouse and were having a grand old time when she started shrieking like she’d been shot. I got scared because I had no idea what it was. Did she get shot by a baby sniper – a sniper who shoots babies and not a toddler assassin? Did her appendix burst? What could it be? Then she started screaming, “Diaper change.” Great! this I can handle and I cleaned her up. She started doing the same thing about forty-five minutes later. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I asked her if she had to go poop, and she, of course, lied and said no. We were on the way to the potty when she started shrieking about “Change diaper” again. Well, I had wrapped up the first – for me, second overall - poop filled diaper in a plastic bag and put it in the kitchen trash, which I wrapped up and was getting ready to take outside when she started up. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a plastic bag ready for this, hopefully, final poop filled diaper before I started changing her. As I was getting a new plastic bag LMJ pulled the poop filled diaper out from under her and flung poop onto her chest. Uh-oh! She felt something on her chest and tentatively touched it, figured out what it was, completely freaked out. I was a little bit angry because she couldn’t just sit still for two seconds while I got a plastic bag, but I was mostly amused because she reacted exactly how anybody else would react if they had found a big turd sitting on their chest. All of this happened within the span of a heartbeat, and I cleaned her up as I explained to her that everything would be alright but that she needed to sit still sometimes and listen to her daddy. Lots of learning and lots of hugs, it was an after school special

Doom and Gloom

EJG is in the hospital recovering from brain surgery, it seems from lifting something heavy, and it may affect the way he lives the rest of his life. There are a couple of steps from moving some risers to getting holes drilled into his skull, but not nearly as many as one would hope. I think I would be able to better understand it if something had fallen on him, but no. He tweaked or torqued a little bit awkwardly and bam. Fate is feckless, at best. She’s mean spirited and capricious. He has life plans professionally, and more importantly, personally that may have to change because he was trying to get his classroom ready. He teaches music. He’s not a cop or a fireman. It makes me angry that life is so flimsy. This situation makes me think intelligent design is the pinnacle of arrogance. What kind of superior being would roll out this crappy model? Is Bill Gates God? It’s ironic that EJG didn’t “start up” correctly when they were done with the surgery so they “rebooted” him, and it worked. I don’t handle these things well. My basic response is “This is bullshit!” like they overcharged me at McDonalds. But that’s all my brain will process at this point. I know this is incredibly selfish, but I hope I go before MJ. I’ve tried to run through some rationalizations about how I’d cope if she died. I’ve been lucky enough to spend twenty happy years with her already and that’s twenty years more than most people get, but that’s all crap, which is why I try to cherish every moment I’m with her. I fail miserably. I surf the internet too much. I’m so glad that television is so bad. I’m glad that we are working hard at having fun more than we used to. The G’s work very hard at having fun, and at the end of the day I think it will help.

Road to the Iron Man

EJG had emergency brain surgery last night - as opposed to elective brain surgery, I guess. I’m not ready to write about that yet, maybe tomorrow. Sometimes, real life isn’t fun. MJ is guest posting about it here. Instead I’m going to whine and complain about how hard it is to run in the Florida heat – again. I’m going to finish my first triathlon before I’m forty and the training started last week. I’m trying to do this right. I swam this morning, which is insanely hard because my technique is horrible, but I can already tell I’m getting better at it. After the swim, I ran for an hour. It was 92 degrees, even though it was ten o’clock in the morning, and I was really having difficulty keeping my heart rate under 150. That’s the new goal. I need to control my heart rate. That’s how endurance athletes endure. Everything was going fine. I even set my watch to only show my heart rate. Unfortunately, I was listening to my iPod and a really cool song came on. I sped up without even knowing it and by the time the song was over my heart rate was over 170. My fat ass can’t dissipate that kind of heat in this kind of weather, and even though I was feeling good, I slowed down, ultimately to a walk, so my heart rate would drop. It took almost fifteen minutes to get back into the 120’s. A lot of that had to do with some hills. I had a real problem walking when I wasn’t tired, but everything I read says my approach of pushing it only leads to injury. I didn’t fuel or hydrate correctly either, which frustrated me when I started to cramp a little bit near the end of my run. Doing dumb stuff because I’m dumb is fun, but I hate doing dumb stuff because I’m lazy. Changing training philosophies after more than twenty years is tough, but I swam 500 yards and ran almost six miles in the sweltering heat, and the only downside was a little dehydration, which can easily be corrected. I’m on my way to being Tony Stark. He’s Iron Man for those who don’t know.