Oops, we did it again!

(No, nobody’s pregnant.)

It’s happening again. I realized this last night when I found myself setting out a blueberry-banana muffin on the kitchen counter and pouring a small glass of milk, which I then stored inside the refrigerator. For easy access. For Isaac’s 5 a.m. attack of the munchies.

Yeah, we’re doing it again: segueing out of one ridiculous sleep (or lack thereof) situation into a different, also ridiculous, one, which I am sure we will maintain until we can no longer delude ourselves that it’s “okay for now,” followed by a week or so of strategizing and the imposition of said strategy, for better or for worse. Whether it’s walking around the basement with Isaac in a sling, or coming up with reward charts for Rowan, or me and Rachel alternating nights in the basement, or playing musical beds, it’s always something. Something ridiculous.

Right now, it’s this: boys have bedtime together, cuddled up for stories in Rowan’s double bed. Then Rowan decamps for our bed, where he starts the night while Isaac “settles” in his single bed (with its safety rail) in the brother room. This practice started when Rachel and I decided that we could no longer lie next to Isaac for an hour and a half each night while he took his sweet time going to sleep and screamed if we left. Four days later, we had broken him of that habit, but in the process engrained a new one in Rowan, who is still starting the night off in our bed because, as he puts it, “I don’t like toddlers sleeping in my room with me.”

Which is fine. I mean, me neither, mostly. We just move Rowan to the bed in what used to be Isaac’s room before we go to sleep. Why not back to his own bed? Because Isaac, although he now goes to sleep beautifully, has taken to waking up at 4:30 or five in the morning and screaming, “Mufffffffffin! Miiilllllllllllllllllk!” I’ve discovered that if you take him downstairs, feed him said quick snack, and keep all the lights off, he will sometimes consent to being taken back up stairs and cuddled with you in Rowan’s bed for half an hour or so. Come over! Try it! If you’re really lucky, he will actually fall back asleep, and if you are astonishingly lucky, blessed by the stars and fortune, Rowan won’t wake up only moments after that.

This is dumb.

I mean, it’s dumb because it’s just a dumb system, in the sense that in the larger scheme of things Isaac — and everyone else in the family — needs more sleep than a 4:30 wakeup call allows for. But it’s also dumb because we are repeating our own history, caught up in this seemingly endless treadmill of almost-solutions out of which spiral new problems. And new almost-solutions. Welcome to parenting, I suppose.

Do I sound bleak? I think it’s more that I’m weary: a summer cold plus seasonal allergies have added to my general fatigue. At least I’m not so far gone that I don’t take some pleasure in snuggling with the boy, who has now taken to singing “Twinkle twinkle” quietly in bed as the sun comes up. If you have to be awake at 5:30, I suppose there are worse ways to be awake.

Radical acceptance? Denial? You decide.

The end of an era

These things are so much harder to put together than to take apart, aren't they? Or maybe I've got that the wrong way around.

Sleeping around

Field study notes: The sleeping habits of the suburban queer family

Location: Detached, two-story family home in northwestern Ontario.

Subjects: Occupants of house: Two adult women (codenames: Buttercup and Sausage), parents of one four-year-old boy (codename: Quiggy Quoggy Quoo), one toddler (codename: Pwink).

NOTES

March 2009: Buttercup and Sausage have alternated sleeping on the futon in the basement in order to slow their child-induced, sleep-deprived descent into hell.

April 2009: In an effort to make bed- and night-times smoother, Buttercup and Sausage set up a single bed in Quiggy Quoggy Quoo’s room (hereinafter referred to, with varying degrees of success, as “The Brother Room”) for the thrilled Pwink, who has been longing to share in the bedtime festivities. After some initial bumps, the new system takes hold and all four family members resume sleeping through the night, on one level.

Buttercup, in a flurry of optimism and determination, hauls the double futon up from the basement to Pwink’s former room and declares it “The Spare Room.”

Nothing lasts.

Some highlights:

Wednesday, April 22, 7:30 p.m.: Pwink yells, “Love you!” over and over as Buttercup descends the stairs at bedtime. QQQ complains that Pwink is too loud and decides to sleep in Buttercup and Sausage’s bed. They will transfer him back to his own bed later on in the evening.

4:10 a.m.: Pwink wakes up and announces, “Mama, cuddle!” As a result, QQQ also wakes up and requests cuddles. Sausage climbs in with QQQ and Buttercup hauls the duvet off the parental bed and bunks down with Pwink. She must have slept, because she knows she dreamed (of weddings), but it doesn’t really feel like it. Sausage, whose bed is now duvet-less, sneaks out of QQQ’s bed and goes to sleep in the spare room.

Thursday, April 23, 12:40 p.m.: Pwink goes down for his afternoon nap. Spurns his single bed in the “brother room” in favour of QQQ’s bed. Two minutes in, decides that the futon in the spare room would be best and traipses across the hall to sleep there, exhorting Buttercup to join him. They settle down, he sticks thumb in mouth, and 10 minutes later he is asleep. Buttercup leaves. Later, she may regret not napping with him. But regrets are for the weak. She is not weak. No.

Thursday evening, 8:22 p.m.: Buttercup finds herself lying next to Pwink for 45 minutes until he is completely and utterly asleep. Each time she tries to leave, he wakes up and says, “Mama, night night!”, patting the bed beside him. If she continues to tiptoe out of the room, he starts to cry, forcing her back in so as not to wake up QQQ. Pwink has Buttercup’s number.

Friday morning, 3:30 a.m.: Buttercup wakes because her right arm is COMPLETELY ASLEEP and numb to the touch. This happens more and more frequently of late, and while it has nothing directly to do with the children, it never happened before they arrived and so must somehow be their fault. She turns over and uses her left arm to haul her right arm into a less compromising position and wonders, as she always does, whether the recurrent pins and needles are doing permanent damage, and what would happen if she didn’t wake up: amputation? She goes back to sleep.

5:22 a.m.: Pwink wakes up. Calls out, and in so doing wakes up QQQ. Sausage attempts damage control by bringing Pwink to sleep with Buttercup, except that QQQ follows them both into the parental bed and cannot be persuaded to cuddle up in his own bed with Sausage. All four lie down. Much squirming ensues.

5:32 a.m.: Just as everyone relaxes enough to make Buttercup think that just maybe, sleep might just occur, someone snores. Pwink sits bolt upright and announces, “Noise!” QQQ grumbles about Pwink being awake. Sausage absconds with Pwink to QQQ’s bed to stave off the possibility of all four having to get up. Pwink cries.

5:35 a.m.: Buttercup tells QQQ she will be “right back — don’t move!” and delivers lost blankie to Pwink and Sausage. Pwink continues to cry

5:42 a.m.: Buttercup tells QQQ she will be “right back — don’t move!” But she is lying. She instead climbs into QQQ’s bed with Pwink and Sausage, who immediately stops crying and snuggles. Sausage leaves that ungrateful Pwink and climbs into bed with QQQ. Buttercup, her arm trapped beneath Pwink’s head, stares at the open door and tries to will it closed with her eyes. It doesn’t work.

5:46 a.m.: Pwink asks for water.

6:10 a.m.: QQQ decides it’s time to get up. Buttercup is fairly certain — based on previous experience — that Sausage has coached him on keeping his mouth closed (“Like this!” and mimes buttoning her lips together) and being extra quiet as they descend the stairs. By virtue of the open door and his hawklike hearing, Pwink hears them anyway. Insists on getting up. Insists that Buttercup come with him down the stairs. Buttercup delivers Pwink to Sausage in the kitchen and returns to sleep in her own bed, because it is officially her morning to “sleep in.”

Friday evening, 7:23 p.m.: Sausage finds herself lying next to Pwink until he is completely and utterly asleep. Each time she tries to leave, he wakes up and says, “Mama, night night!”, patting the bed beside him. If she continues to tiptoe out of the room, he starts to cry, forcing her back in so as not to wake up QQQ. Pwink has Sausage’s number. Sausage fall asleep next to Pwink and stumbles downstairs two hours later.

Saturday morning, 2:11 a.m.: QQQ appears in the parental bedroom because he is cold, and insists there is room for all three of them in Sausage and Buttercup’s bed. He climbs in. Buttercup decamps for the spare room.

6:12 a.m.: Pwink wakes up, ready for the day. Buttercup gets up too.

1:04 p.m.: Pwink goes down for a nap. Buttercup who is tired and oddly besotted, take him upstairs and lays him down in QQQ’s bed. When he says, “Mama, cuddle,” she lies down. One day, they will have to break him out this habit, but right now the thing she wants to do most is snuggle up with her baby boy. She’s a sucker. He has her number.

Tuesday night: For a variety of reasons too tedious to detail here, Buttercup spends the night on the futon with Pwink’s feet tap dancing in the small of her back. She does Not Sleep Well.

Wednesday morning, 2:13 a.m.: Pwink appears in the parental bed.

Wednesday morning, 5:15 a.m.: Pwink wakes up, hysterical. Sausage suggests to Buttercup that she should just suck it up and get up with him. Buttercup counters that Pwink will indeed go back to sleep in a few minutes. Sausage decamps for the futon, but is waylaid by QQQ, who has woken up because of all the screaming. Sausage bunks down with QQQ.

Wednesday morning, 5:23 a.m.: Buttercup sucks it up.

---

And so it goes. I haven’t bed hopped this much since ... aaaaaaaaand, you know? I’m not gonna finish that sentence.

Heads you win, tails I lose

Isaac in 100 words or less: Asks for water, but does not want the water in his glass. The water in his class must be poured into my empty glass before judged acceptable. Then proceeds, repeatedly, increasingly aggressively, to offer me his water, holding the cup to my lips and refusing to be fooled by my pretend sips. Finally, to placate him, I drink some. Whereupon he screeches, “My water! Mine!” Whereupon I tickle him.

What's springing up around here ...

One of my favourite Bizarro cartoons depicts two kids, dressed in shorts and T-shirts on a summer’s day, staring quizzically at a snowman on the front lawn. “Okay,” says one, “I’ll give it one more week but if it hasn’t melted by then I’m tearing it down. It’s starting to give me the creeps.”

Witness the fossilized pile of snow-cum-dirt in the northeast corner of our front yard. I smacked it viciously with a shovel the other day and barely made a dent. Everywhere else, spring has sprung: the crocuses are budding and the snow has gone. Warmth spreads, but this one, intransigent lump remains. I imagine I will look out the window in July and shrug: “Still there. Hey, are the neighbours performing another exorcism?”

Can you see where I’m going with this? All these flowers and light vying against a hard little heart of stubborn iciness? Exorcisms? Of course: the terrible twos.

They have arrived, the toddlerific moments of ridiculousness. Almost overnight, it seems. Yesterday, during what is ambitiously known as “sharing time” at Rowan’s Kindermusik class, Isaac sat in the centre of a circle of bewildered four-year-olds, desperately grabbing at each instrument and shrieking, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” As I played an alphabet game with Rowan, Isaac kept up a steady chorus of, “My T! My Q!” Last night at bedtime, he insisted on pulling up my shirt to play with my (taut, taut, washboard) stomach. When I tried to get him to stop, he screeched, “My tummy! My tummy! More tummy! Mine!”

And, just in case we weren’t sure that he is hell-bent on world domination, this morning, he looked out the window and shouted, “My moon! MY Moon!”

Oh, honey.

I won't deny that this new season of aggressiveness has its tiresome moments. But I feel for him. He's just capturing his first glimpse of the vastness of the world and his relative insignificance compared to it all — not just his big brother or the hidden treasures of the kitchen cabinet, but the entire damn universe, moon and all. It must be a bit overwhelming.

But, like winter, it too will pass. I'm sure there will be moments where I wish I could take the back of a shovel to the two-year-old attitude. But one day I'll look up and think, “Hey — where did that go?” Assuming, of course, that I have not been entirely beaten into the ground with four-year-old attitude. What do they say? Hope springs eternal.

It’s always something

That face just about says it all, doesn’t it? The heavy eyes, the sheen of snot on the upper lip, the petulant mouth. Someone little is sick, and tired, and some bigger people are sick and tired of the sick and tired.

Just to complicate things, we’ve begun the transition from the crib to the “big boy bed” — in Rowan’s room, no less. Ideally, I would have waited until our nights and our health were a little more stable — until, say, Rachel and I were actually sleeping in our bed, together, instead of trading off peaceful subterranean versus potentially chaotic upstairs nighttimes — but these developments have a way of choosing their own times. Isaac screams if we put him in the crib, but settles happily in a bed in Rowan’s room, and so be it.

“Settles happily,” does not mean, however, “settles in for a long, refreshing, full night’s sleep.” Which is why I had a toddlerific companion in my bed (Rachel, of course, was in the basement, nursing a sinus infection) from about 11 p.m. to six this morning, with a bonus visit from Rowan, requesting cuddles at 2:30.

And, you know, I tried to be all “glass half-full” about it. But the best I could do, as I lay quietly on my third of the bed, stifling my coughs and subtly repositioning myself in order not to wake the boy, was wry amusement and acceptance. I mean, he’s cute. And, I asked myself, how many more times in my life will I have the sweet, sleeping body of a tiny, trusting boy next to me in bed? Gotta be precious, don’t they, those times? I willed that great big overwhelming well of love to rise up and wash over the two of us, drenching us in perfect, solid, blissful sleep.

But mostly, I just thought, “Meh.”

Rude awakenings

For a brief, blissful, period sometime in January, I thought that we had become one of those families. As in, those mythological families where everyone sleeps past 7 a.m. Whose members look at you with a mixture of polite sympathy and horror when you mention that your children like to get up at six. Or earlier.

“Us?” I imagined saying, casually, nonchalantly, at a playgroup full of tired parents. “Oh, we get up around 7:30 or so. Yes, of course the children sleep through the night. Don’t yours?”

In other words, I got smug. And it has come back to bite me in the ass. And, I’m just going to come out and say it: it’s all Isaac’s fault. No, really. It is. Don’t let that adorable face fool you for a second. He’s a stinker. A stinker who, for the past three weeks, has either woken at 5:30, raring to go, or at 3 a.m., soaked and inconsolable. Or both.

We go to him, we change him, and then, at his insistence, we take him on a small guided tour of the darkened house in order to prove to him that, really, it is still night-night time. And then, if we’re lucky, he yawns and agrees that it is in fact night-night time and falls back into bed and immediate sleep for anywhere from three hours to 11 minutes more.

If we’re not lucky, he continues wailing. And, eventually, we put him back into the crib anyway, and wait him out.

And then there’s Rowan. Who is much more rational — no, wait, I take that back: anyone who comes into your room three times in one night because “the monsters came in” is not really rational — who is much less hysterical but no less demanding in his quest for comfort.

The nadir so far (that sounds so ominous) was Saturday night, when Isaac woke at 11, Rowan at midnight, one, and two, Isaac at 4:30, and then at 5:45 for the day. When I went in to get him, he had figured out, for the first time, how to climb out of his crib and was standing on the floor, wailing. Good morning to you, too. I delivered him to Rachel, whose turn it was to sleep in the basement in order to ensure that at least one parent in the household would be semi-functional, and slept a couple of hours on the vacated futon.

This, of course, is irritating.

But what tips it over from irritating into — what’s the word? — heinous is the fact that, once the children have, at least temporarily, gone to sleep, I can’t. I lie awake as 3 a.m. turns into 4 a.m., then 5, as my brain rampages. It hums Kindermusik songs, makes lists, gets into imaginary matrimonial disputes, whips its head around at any tiny sound, and generally tortures me with wakefulness until I can finally convince it that it is night-night time — just about 45 minutes before one or the other of the kids gets up for the day.

I’m so tired. I know that a couple of hours of lost sleep per night is nothing compared to what the parents of newborns are going through. I know I shouldn’t complain, that it could be worse, but I’m sucky like that. In any case, I figure that I’ve racked up a total of about 40 hours of sleep deficit in the past month. That’s an entire workweek. Just think of everything I could’ve accomplished in that hypothetical week. I want that week back. I need that week back. And I don’t think I’m getting it any time soon.

He’s just not that into them

It seems that Isaac has weaned. Every so often, I give it one last shot, just to make ABSOLUTELY sure that he has completely and irrevocably sworn off the boob. “Oh, come on,” I’ll say, offering him the breast just one more time. He has humoured me by halfheartedly latching on for a few seconds before squirming away. And then, last week, he took my nipple between thumb and forefinger, inspected my breast carefully, and said, “Ball.” And asked to read Goodnight Moon.

So, we’re done.

Which is fine. I’ve always categorized myself as somewhere in the middle of the spectrum when it comes to breastfeeding mothers. As in, I’m generally of the opinion that breast is best, unless, for a variety of reasons determined by individual mothers — and not, say, formula companies, governments, employers, relatives or doctors — it isn’t. And those reasons? None of my business.

For my part, I’m quite happy to have been able to nurse both kids. It was an immensely satisfying experience on many levels, even if I never felt the need to go to meetings to talk about it or write poetry on the subject. (Kind of like I never felt the need to make a cast of my pregnant belly. Because, really, it’s just not the kind of thing you can throw away in 15 years.)

I’m guessing that Isaac has similar outlook (about the breastfeeding, not the belly cast, about which his opinions remain inscrutable). Unlike his brother, who was quite passionate about them, Isaac has never regarded my breasts as anything much more than an efficient food source. Rowan, on the other hand, nursed for comfort and sleep as much as he did for food. And boy, did he nurse for food. We had a rough start, which I attributed both to our collective inexperience and the fact that my C-sectioned, Demerol-soaked body seemed — deservedly — in no hurry to produce milk right away. Still, we resisted the nurses’ efforts to give him formula, and persevered. Once he got the hang of it, though, Rowan was a champion nurser. In the first six months of his life, we fought for every calorie: I was ravenous constantly, couldn’t eat enough, and was thinner than I’d ever been in my adult life. And thirsty! The second he latched on, my mouth went dry, as though he was sucking the fluid out of my very pores. When he switched to mostly solid foods, I abruptly gained 20 pounds.

I weaned Rowan at 20 months, mostly because I wanted to get pregnant again, and breast-feeding was still messing with my cycle. Rachel took him on a trip to Vancouver Island without me in order to distract him, and when he came back, the milk bar had closed. I got pregnant the next month.

When Isaac came along, I looked forward to another period of Ferocious Eating Without Consequence. Sadly, it never materialized. Oh, my milk came in immediately and he latched on easily — which I attribute at least in part to his eleven-minute-long, drug-free home birth. But, from the get-go, Isaac seemed to eat just enough to take the edge off, and when he wasn’t hungry, he wasn’t particularly interested.

It took me a while to get used to his particular brand of moderation, and to the fact that nursing this time around wasn’t going to be the gastronomic free-for-all I’d been looking forward to for nine months (or, at least once I stopped barfing). For a while, I was convinced he wasn’t eating enough, despite his regular weight gain and constant output. And, for a while, I was convinced I wasn’t eating enough, stuffing my face while waiting for the baby weight to simultaneously, magically, melt away. It did not. After a while, I sulkily succumbed to my own brand of moderation. It’s true: each kid is different. Rats.

And now, again at 20 months, we’re done. No hoopla, no fanfare, no slow winding down, no trips across the country. Just, for the first time in five years, no small being, in utero or ex, relies on my body for nourishment. At least, not literally.

And while I wish I could say that part of me finds this bittersweet, I don’t, really. I don’t lack for physical contact with the kids, who crawl and cuddle and climb over and nudge our bodies constantly. I don’t mind dropping this particular aspect of indispensability — in a thousand other ways, I am still crucial. But the nursing, she is done.

And now, I am going to go get me some kick-ass bras.

Take the toddlers bowling, take them bowling

We took the kids bowling on Saturday morning, part of an ongoing quest to quell cabin fever and fill the yawning chasm formerly known as the weekend with wholesome activity. I’ve taken to mentally dividing up the weekends into quadrants — Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon; Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon — and things seem to go smoothest when at least three of the four have some kind of activity booked.

And this past Saturday morning was bowling.

Every so often, on a whim, you do something you don’t usually do and you realize that there exists an entire world of people who live to do that thing, who have created entire communities and languages and art forms and T-shirts devoted to that thing. For me, bowling is one of those things. Naïvely, I expected Mario’s Bowl to be fairly quiet on a Saturday morning in Thunder Bay. As we pulled into the only vacant space in the parking lot, I realized I would have to rethink my assumptions.

We managed to snag the only available five-pin lane left in the entire, buzzing, place. Children’s bowling leagues were practicing in the first twenty-odd lanes, while adult leagues took up the bulk of the ten-pin alleys. We came with a school friend of Rowan’s, and his little sister, who is the same age as Isaac, and their mom. The two older boys played (and, let me tell you, little is sweeter than a four-year-old boy in bowling shoes) while the toddlers ate Goldfish crackers and stuck their hands up the gumball machine chutes and then, in Isaac’s case, discovered the bowling balls.

While Rachel bowled with Rowan (who was, I must say, a model of turn taking and cooperation), I was in charge of ensuring that Isaac harmed no one — himself included — by, say, lobbing a five-pin bowling ball into the path of an innocent junior bowler, or dropping a ball on someone’s foot. In essence, we formed a miniature assembly line: he picked up a ball, and I immediately relieved him of it. Repeat a million times.

In an effort to distract him for at least a little while, I took him on a forced march throughout the rest of the bowlerama, placating him with said gumball machines and the exploration of the bowling ball lockers. (Again, who knew? Who knew that dozens and dozens and dozens of dedicated bowlers would need lockers to store their balls and shoes and gloves and the like? Of course, now it all seems obvious in retrospect.)

We sat for a while at a table above the lanes with two women and a boy who looked to be around ten years old. I guess that they were grandmother, mother, and son, watching what I guessed were grandfather and father roll a series of strikes and spares oh so casually down their lane in wide, graceful arcs. Isaac climbed into a chair and smiled at the women, who obliged him by cooing. “Are you a busy boy?” asked the mother. “Are you? Yes?”

“Yeah,” said Pres., laughing, as I rolled my eyes and nodded in agreement.

The mother laughed too, and pointed at her son. “Oh! He was all the time, back, forth, back, forth," she said in accented English, her index finger swinging left, then right, then left again to illustrate. “I never sit down. Oh! When he was year, year and a half” — and here she drew an imaginary knife across her neck — “I want to cut off my head.”

I love it when people say things like that.

But I’m glad that I didn’t cut off my head, because then I wouldn’t have seen a tiny, tiny boy in grey sweatpants gets to pick up his own bowling ball — finally! — toddle up to the foul line (under Rachel’s careful tutelage), gently set the ball down, and push it with all his might towards the pins. It rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled toward its destination. For all I know, it’s rolling still.

Literary breakthrough

I’m sorely aware that I don’t blog nearly as much about Isaac as I should. I suspect it has something to do with language, and with the complexities that language brings. Isaac is talking up a storm these days — I recently tried to make a list of his words and stopped counting at 50 — but he is not, say, telling stories. Mostly, he is emptying cupboards of pots and stacking empty yogurt containers on top of each other and harassing you to lift him higher so that he can set a final one on top. He is repeating the phrase, “Good job!” over and over, patting his own self on the back each time he makes a move, leaving us confident in his burgeoning self-esteem. He is obsessed with all things tea-related, particularly teapots, proving that he truly is Rachel’s boy. “Tea!” can also mean, however, that he wants to brush his teeth, and we also occasionally mistake it for cheese. Which can also mean the camera. And so on. For all his words, he is still a bit of a shriekyhead, a habit I am trying to discourage by telling him to — what else? — use his words. To which he responds, sweetly, “Beep beep!”, an approximation of, “Up, please!”

But Isaac is definitely becoming more complex, language and all. And one of the ways that’s becoming apparent is that he will actually permit us to read him a few pages at a time of a book these days.

Which is a kind of exciting. Unlike his brother, who loved being read to from Day One, Isaac has never been interested in books. I would describe his attitude towards reading as, perhaps, hostile. He shut books if you tried to open them in his presence. Pushed them away. Occasionally threw.

But maybe, just maybe, he’s on track to discover the joys of classics like Harold and the Purple Crayon and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (which is even funnier once you’ve grown up and see just how exhausted and put-upon the parents look). In any case, last Thursday, I think I even managed to get through three quarters of the abridged version of Hands, Hands, Fingers, Thumb. And, this morning, he actually pulled a book off the shelf (My First Shabbat), carried it over to the couch, climbed up, and began leaf through it — if “leafing” is a term one can apply to board books.

(There have been other milestones of late, which I will duly note here for posterity’s sake: the Sleeping Until 7 AM. The Sitting in a Chair at the Dinner Table. The Gradual, Self-Imposed Weaning. The Fourth Molar. The Cuddling of Rachel in My Presence. The Beginning of Imaginative Play — on Sunday, we spent a good half-hour ferrying stuffed animals into his crib; he kissed each one and told it, "Night night!”)

All of which is by way of saying: Internet, I expect you'll be seeing a lot more of Isaac in the next little while.

A million little washcloths

Get out your Shop-Vacs, your Hazmat suits, your chisels — the toddler has discovered cutlery and wants to feed himself. Will accept no help. Will in fact strenuously reject help. We are reduced to sitting quietly by, keeping one hand as subtly as possible on his breakable pottery bowl — this being the month we wisely chose to rid the house of plastic dishware, bless our earnest green souls — washcloths at the ready, while he shovels food into his pie-hole.

His expertise is — literally — hit or miss, mostly a function of the food’s solidity. Yesterday, he daintily polished off an entire piece of French toast, handling his fork with dexterity that would rival the Queen’s. This morning’s oatmeal? Not so much.