Category Archives: Words Words Words

Sunday

We spent a fabulous afternoon with the ADZO family yesterday. They fed us, which was unexpected but not unwelcome because they always create wonderful food, and Liam got to play with TAZ and her toys, and in general we all got to relax and share good company. It was remarkable to see Liam interacting with someone who is seven months older than he is; we can see how advanced he is in some respects, and the areas in which he’s definitely an eleven-month-old. He had an excellent nap in the morning and one in the early afternoon, and those allowed him to be sociable all afternoon and let us stay till past six o’clock. When we got home, he had some milk and passed out for twelve hours, with no wakings.

(Yes, we’re rather happy about it as well. Plus he went down for all naps and bedtime without a fuss. Two days of stress seem to have smoothed things over. Cross your fingers.)

We got to share in a first at the park: TAZ climbed the stairs to the slide, sat down at the top, then pushed off and slid down all by herself for the very first time. Liam’s first was much less impressive, but something to celebrate nonetheless: he climbed up the single stair from the sunken playroom into the dining room all by himself. And it looked at one point like he was playing peek-a-boo with TAZ across the wooden chest, because he was trying to mirror her actions of bending down behind it to hide and standing up to reveal herself.

Liam also consumed the most Cheerios I’ve ever seen him stuff into his mouth over dinner. Of course, a lot of them ended up in the seat of the high chair, but he ate tons of them despite that.

Once Liam’s morning and afternoon naps are solid (and they seem to be settling in well) I’ll be able to count on two blocks of an hour to an hour and a half of work per day. Oh: and Mousme is writing a swan story based on the Bonny Swans folk ballad too! I am very amused, and also very excited. I opened my Swan Sister file the other day, but not a single word was added because of the Invisible mp3s on the playlist. It was all good, though, because I played the cello instead, and Liam woke up fifteen minutes later, so I would have just been settling into the writing flow when I’d have had to stop.

I’ve been invited to a local BNI meeting in a couple of weeks, so I have to overhaul my business cards and recreate my handout literature. It’s interesting that this invitation came from someone whom I’ve never met (HRH has spoken to her on the phone once), who thought of me off the top of her head, and at a time when I’m ready to start taking a couple of freelance jobs on again. I’m looking forward to it.

A Good Thing

There are two more positive reviews up on Amazon, one for Power Spellcraft and one for Solitary Wicca. Each of them focuses on something I tried hard to do in the book reviewed, namely to be non-path-specific and to not preach love and light in Spellcraft, and to encourage the reader to modify and write their own rituals to express themselves in Wicca.

I feel all warm inside, like I did something right.

(I know, I know. But still, positive feedback from people I’ve never met, reassuring me that I got my point across: It’s a good thing.)

‘Not What We Give, But What We Share’

Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone who came out to the potluck BBQ t!-and-ai731-are-getting-married party last night. Tal, HRH and I truly appreciate your time and energy. The food was wonderful, and the company most excellent. I’m only sorry that I missed a lot of the party due to sitting in the baby’s room trying to get him to/back to sleep, or sitting in my bedroom next to the monitor so that I could hear him if he woke up yet again. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the guests who wandered in over the course of the evening to hang out with me and bring me drinks and lemon buns. (At one point the entire membership of Invisible was in my bedroom with me, save for the bassist. Of course, the bassist has been in other bedrooms of mine plenty of times, and besides, it was his own getting-married-party going on in the other rooms.)

Ironically enough, Liam woke up at eleven once everyone was gone. Go figure. Maybe it was the cessation of white noise. But apart from the initial rocky two hours of very-hard-to-get-him-to-sleep, he only woke up at eleven and again at five-thirty, each time for about fifteen minutes for soothing, then another five or ten minutes of grumpy complaining alone before falling asleep. That’s an improvement already.

We now have a plethora of hot dog buns in the fridge. No hot dogs, but plenty of buns.

HRH picked up a new barbecue yesterday morning in honour of the event, as we realised that there were between twenty and thirty RSVPs and there was no way that our mini camp BBQ was going to handle that kind of dinner traffic. We’ve been wanting a full-size one for some time, of course, and we found a really great one on sale for just under one hundred dollars, down from its usual price of one-forty-ish. Hurrah!

We also had a wedding rehearsal yesterday, and it’s going to be wonderful. t! poked gentle fun at me for getting choked up when I read one of my lines, but I think I have every right to get teary because it’s one of the lines he read at my own wedding six and a half years ago. The circle is now complete. Or something like that.

Band practice Saturday morning confirmed that the wedding gig will be more of the non-stress event we want it to be. We’ve temporarily removed two of our songs from the set in order to rework and polish them some more before reintroducing them in the fall.

Today: a lovely social afternoon with the ADZO family (once we ascertain the time)!

Just A Hedge

Wow. What a completely miserable night.

And this morning hasn’t been much better.

On the more humourous side of things Liam ate live grass, dead grass, a dead leaf, an ant, and a handful of sand at the park yesterday, on top of his rice rusks, apples, and water.

Brick Wall

So. I’ve been tense lately, and here’s part of the reason why.

Things are difficult over here. Liam’s been doing the waking up in the middle of the night thing, and the resisting naps thing. Sometimes he naps a full nap with no problem. Other times he doesn’t; the nap doesn’t happen at all, or he wakes up after the first twenty-minute cycle. Every now and again he sleeps through the night, a full twelve hours, and we rejoice; then he’s back to the waking up for an hour to an hour and a half in the middle of the night. He’s having what professionals call disturbed sleep, and we’ve been trying trying trying to teach him to self-soothe so that if he wakes up from bed or nap he doesn’t spring all the way awake and go ballistic for someone to be there with him. It’s not his teeth. We’ve determined this. He just likes company.

This morning I’d had enough, and I started to play hardball. Nap time? Well, after your regular nursing session, you go into the crib and you stay there for the duration of what should be your nap. Whether you sleep or not is up to you. I can’t hold you while you lightly doze for an hour or more, trying over and over to slip you into your crib without you figuring out what’s going on and waking up to cry. You weigh too much, and you need to be able to fall asleep on your own as the rest of the world does. You’re eleven months old, kid, and you have to acquire this skill.

He’s now passed out after a bottle, because he was so exhausted and so worked up that I knew he wouldn’t sit for solid food. He spent the time he should have been taking his morning nap standing and screaming in his crib, because I couldn’t take him screaming in my arms any more; he was resisting the soothing as much as he was resisting the sleep.

It’s frustrating for everyone. It’s reached a point where nothing works: if we let him fall asleep in our arms, he wakes up crying; if we leave him to fall asleep on his own, he cries. We’ve tried various methods of soothing at intervals, adjusting bed/nap times, scheduled nap times, the responding-to-cues nap times, the works. If all it’s going to take is a week of this, then we’ll do it. No one’s going to be happy, but it will happen. And once he can fall asleep on his own, then he won’t be so exhausted that he can’t sleep.

It’s so very upsetting that to do the right thing — namely, to teach someone how to fall asleep on their own (of course with aids such as music, loveys, etc) — it has to hurt all three people involved so much.

Please note: I’m venting, not asking for advice. In fact, I’m going to turn comments off because I don’t want to get into arguments about parenting techniques. I’m writing out some of my stress in my journal, and that’s that. If I’ve been short with you lately, chalk it up to the lack of unbroken sleep and the fraying of nerves.