Sleep

Sleep is a little unpredictable around these parts. Miles has been sleeping through the night sporadically, but on other nights he still wakes up a thousand times and/or rubs my ears for hours. He is also officially NOT napping, at all. He’s tired, but he won’t nap. Now we’re at the point that he won’t even take a car nap – he can even fight that, all bleary-eyed and sleepy.

The non-napping isn’t as bad as I expected, considering how much I adore my free time during naps, because he actually tends to stay in a pretty good mood all afternoon and – BONUS! – goes to bed early.

But then… the night wakeups. Sigh. I plan to talk to his doctor about it at his 24 month well visit – I really don’t know if he can actually help us, but I’m going to ask – because this really is exhausting FOR ME. I have been pretty patient about not forcing my kid into a schedule that’s convenient for me, but two years is definitely WAY beyond what I was anticipating in terms of waiting for him to sleep through the night!

And of course I’m concerned about having the next baby on the way and what the heck I’m going to do when I have two kids up half the night. And no way to move Miles out of our bed because he still wakes up eleventy billion times a night. Ironically, we tried for & conceived another baby in the little window of time when Miles WAS sleeping through the night, so I was all, THIS WILL WORK OUT GREAT! SO EASY! WHEEE!

Speech

Miles is not exactly advanced in the speech department, but not delayed – so I don’t worry about it much, but I do get excited when he makes clear leaps forward. Recently he put together his first phrase (or short sentence): “Noooo bath!” Hahaha. For a while he’s been repeating phrases that we say, like, “let’s go,” “come on,” “stop it (ha!),” etc., but to me these are really more like multisyllabic words since he hears us say two words together and will also say those same two words together. I was impressed that he took essentially two simple concepts that he knows – “no” and “bath” – and put them together, to answer me as I was asking him if he wanted to take a bath. The next night, in the bath, he did it again by answering “let’s get out,” with “noooo get out!” Hehe.

Potty

We had been doing a little preliminary pre-potty training by letting Miles pretend to pee in the toilet, flush, wash his hands, and also watch us pee (one of the things I didn’t know before having a child was that I would one day have an audience every time I used the bathroom). We bought him a little stepstool so he could climb up himself and “use” the toilet and sink (while supervised of course). But the thing about Miles is, you give him an inch and he takes four hundred miles… if he likes something, he’s going to do it SO MANY TIMES CONSTANTLY FOREVER AND WITHOUT END AND WITH SUCH INTENSITY that you are pretty much guaranteed to get violently sick of it looong before he does. So a few minutes of pretend potty time turned into 15 minutes every night before his bath turned into multiple times a day going into the bathroom to SLAM the toilet lid down 40,000 times in a row and run the sink for an hour and OH MY GOD ENOUGH ALREADY. I can’t even let him watch me pee anymore (what a loss) because he’s just going to go crazy running the sink and the thing is HE WILL NEVER STOP and I have to pull him out of the bathroom having a raging tantrum about it several times a day.

So. Potty training is on hold indefinitely.

Obsession

Miles has been obsessed with lights and ceiling fans for some time, but as with everything (see above), he has taken it to an absurd extreme. We now have EVERY light on in the house at all hours of the day, including two porch lights, the light over the stove, and the oven light, I kid you not. If we try to even sneak around turning off lights, tantrums ensue. One morning as he was seated at the breakfast table in the dining room I turned off the living room lights, since, you know, IT WAS DAYTIME, and he burst into hysterical screaming complete with real, brokenhearted tears. Sigh. I don’t want you to think I’m a permissive parent, because I DO have rules and I do try to employ discipline when needed, but I can’t fight EVERY battle EVERY second of the day so for now, I just have to apologize to the Earth for wasting 1.21 jiggowatts a day satisfying my son’s need for LIGHTS.

Daycare

We recently made the decision to take Miles out of daycare, to save money. He was only going two days a week (not even full days – about 6 hrs), and it was nice to have those two days to myself, but we’re a bit squeezed at the moment and it will be helpful not to pay for daycare at all. It will be challenging, because I am also planning to really ramp up my efforts to get E Custom Cards off the ground from here on out, while having Miles here every day not taking naps… but I can do it. It will mean managing my time better, wasting less time on Facebook (!), using the mornings that Mike is here, and working after Miles goes to bed. I CAN DO IT! And if I do start to get so busy that I can’t handle it, I should then be making enough money to hire a mother’s helper type person as needed.

It’s a little sad, because J has watched Miles almost since he was born and I see her as more than just an employee; but as it happens, she is looking for a full time job right now because it wasn’t working out for her financially either. And we will certainly stay in touch and hire her for babysitting sometimes.

There’s another upside to this arrangement, which is that I feel like the more I spend time with Miles, the better I become at parenting him, even through the tough spots. The week that he was sick and didn’t go to daycare at all was a little grueling, partly because he was sick of course, but I dug deep and found reserves of patience that I hadn’t accessed before. Lately I am really working on balancing getting my stuff done and giving him the attention he needs, performing the trick of giving my FULL attention to each in turn rather than constantly being distracted and divided no matter what I am doing. But that’s a tangent I should probably write a whole post about another time.