Seasons of Kid-dom

(note: I wrote this post several weeks ago and never got around to posting it)

Kids go through phases. One week they’re kind and sweet and their favorite sentence is “I wuv you.” The next week they’re screaming and hollering “NO!” and throwing their (and your) possessions across the room. Sometimes they go in and out of these phases in the same day. Sometimes you think maybe they’ve got bipolar disorder. But really they just have another disorder, one that is more common: Preschooler.  Or Human. Whatever.

One day a couple of weeks ago the hubs and I were remarking that we really love the phases that both of our little cherubs are in at the moment. Our three-year-old is silly and adventurous and super fun. Our nine-month-old is the same, but with fewer words and more drool. Both zoom around the house with alacrity and tenacity. Fun.

So you can imagine my dismay last week when my sweet, kind, loving son turned into some kind of self-obsessed, entitled, dramatic, crazed stranger. Maybe it could, at least in part, be attributed to his bout of Hand Foot Mouth (which, by the way, CAN GO AND DIE). The poor guy was home all. week. long. I’m sorry, did I say poor guy? I meant poor me. Because he was having the time of his life eating frozen yogurt every day and playing freely with all of his toys while Emma was at the nanny’s. But at some point he seemed to have decided that “No” was no longer in his vocabulary. Now, while he was ill, he got the cold treat for his mouth sores. But other than that all rules continued to apply. It’s not like he got whatever he wanted. But for some reason he felt like he ought to.

So it seems we have entered the Boundary Testing Phase (or as I like to call it, the I Double Dog Dare You to Still Love Me by the End of the Day Phase).

I was pretty excited about going to work last week. Not going to lie.

But we stood strong, and the battles do not last as long at this point. He may not yet have accepted that he cannot bring all of his earthly possessions to bed with him, leave the house naked, jump off the coffee table, ride his bike in the living room, eat candy for breakfast, or leave every toy in the house out on the floor forever. But he understands what it means when the trash bag comes out. 

Also: please add to my I Promised to Never Do This When I’m a Parent but I’ve Gone Ahead and Done It list “Utter the phrase ‘Because I said so.’” 

It’s a good thing he’s so darn cute and has those big blue eyes. 

Ten Months Old!

This actually started out as a nine-month update. But it’s taken me a month to write, so now it’s a ten-month update. So there.

The other night I went through some old-ish posts. It’s really hard to believe that just three months ago Emma was seriously a completely different baby. At seven months she was just transitioning to her crib, just (kind of) beginning to sleep through the night, transitioning out of swaddling, barely eating, and only just starting to kind of be fun and happy. The crazy feels like a distant memory. Vivid. But distant. That feels good. It’s nice to feel some semblance of normalcy. It’s nice to be, at least for the moment, outside of the sleep-deprivation, anxiety, and depression that consumed our family for seven months. It’s akin to coming out of a dark cave and into the sun. Sure, she’s a baby, so she’s still needy and she still cries. She still has reflux and a tendency towards respiratory issues. But seriously. She’s fantastic. Everywhere we go she charms the pants off the world. She smiles and laughs and gets the entire population to stop what they’re doing and smile with her. Given her spirited disposition, I’m thinking this is probably some kind of power play. She’s wooing the world in order to dominate it. But that’s cool. She’d probably do a pretty good job.

 

 

 

 

 

It also occurred to me while reading her eight-month post that she’s changed quite a bit in just the couple of months. She claps and waves and jabbers on and on in her little baby nonsense. She is super social, clearly. So nothing like her parents. Where did my children come from? But I’ll take it. She’s still very independent. And since she can now crawl and pull herself up on the nearest surface and walk alongside it, she’s mobile. And she's quite adept at pushing her walking toys. Look out, world. We’ve got a girl on a mission. To search and find and eat. So if you’re looking to find out whether you’ve adequately baby-proofed your home, look no further. Two minutes in your house and Emma will direct you to all of the spots you missed. She will also help you finish vacuuming and sweeping your floors. With her mouth. Babies are gross. Speaking of hands and mouths, she has an affinity for grass. It used to be fun to take her outside and put her on a blanket with some toys while Ben played. Now it’s not fun. It’s work. Because she laughs at such attempts at boundaries. She simply crawls right off, grabs a handful of grass, and aims it for her mouth. Then she crawls to the pavement. She loves the pavement. Crazy daredevil.

Other stuff she does: she loves the swings, loves being outside, loves her brother, makes a super funny "angry face", blows kisses, and says "yeah" all day long.

At 18 pounds and 28 inches, she’s in the 25^th percentile for weight and the 50^th for height. So she’s doing great. As long as I give her her medication (which, as I’m typing this, I realized I did not do this morning), her reflux is more or less a non-issue. Her breathing problems seem to have abated for the time being. She is a happy, personable, busy, healthy baby girl.

I dare you to not fall completely in love with her.