‘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.

There Is Another

Fox will release the original unaltered theatrical versions of the first three Star Wars movies on DVD on Sept. 12, despite statements by series creator George Lucas, USA Today reported. […] The individual DVDs will be taken off the market on Dec. 31, a strategy that Disney uses on many of its classic releases.

Yay! And yet, more proof that the Lucasverse can’t stick to a single story.

Whatever. At least we’ll have Lapti Nek back, and Jedi Rocks can be an “it never happened” in this household again.