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I wanted to photograph Sophie’s adorable pigtails, but she wanted to watch from behind the camera. So we used a mirror. And our cooperative self-portrait turned out okay.
Sophie has reached the age where she invents new games. Three new games in the bath yesterday alone: a look-up-the-drain-spout-game, a splash-hands-while-humming song, and a submerge-one-toy-inside-another challenge.
She’s especially intrested in make-believe, lately. One of her favorites is make-believe peek-a-boo, in which she half-hides something (for instance, draping a blanket over her daddy), then asks me where it is with a dramatically exaggerated shrug (“Where daddy?”) and when I pretend ignorance and concern, she gets to pretend to discover the hidden object, revealing it with a flourish. She has played this game in many variations: pretend-hiding herself, her doll, her marble. This morning, she even managed to pretend-hide the cat, despite many disgruntled looks from that cat, who didn’t appreciate being hidden over and over again.
Another favorite: she cooks pingpong balls in her toy pan, declares the balls “Hot,” then waits for me to blow on them, to cool off her pretend-food. She can keep up the ask-mommy-to-blow-on-fake-food game for almost an hour. It’s adorable and tedious.
And that’s the hardest part to write. I love Sophie ferociously, I scare myself with my love for her, I love even her smell (she smells like sunshine and cotton and cream and a very light whiff of ginger). I’m delighted by her, obsessed by her (as this blog probably reveals) and yet also exhausted by her, sometimes bored by her. Motherhood is less boring now that she’s become more able to talk and create and express her independence, so I love all these new games that she’s inventing — but I also become bored after forty-five minutes of peekaboo.
That part is hard to write, because I don’t want to imply that I dislike motherhood, or Sophie herself.
I think my blog-readers understand. I hope. Recently, two older women have separately told me that the biggest difference between my experience of motherhood and theirs is that I can say, out loud, “Sometimes motherhood is boring.” In a previous generation, that sentiment was too transgressive to admit to.
I’m glad I can say it, and blog it, even if some other people probably still misunderstand.
The New York Times has this article arguing that dirt, worms, and parasites are actually good for young children. They help develop young immune systems, preventing allergies and auto-immune disorders. Thousands of years of evolution have actually taught kids to stick dirty things in their mouths. Kids who grow up on farms or in large families (where they’re presumably not watched as carefully, so they can eat more dirt) are healthier.
That’s good news.
But I’m still going to wash Sophie’s face and hands.
I’m just feeling a little less guilty about being chastised, this morning, for allowing Sophie to sneak forbidden small toys into her daycare. She’s obsessed with a marble she found at the park and wanted to show it to her best friend — but her best friend has a habit of eating small things. I knew that, so I pocketed the marble at the daycare door. Apparently, yesterday, I missed a tiny toy-car that Sophie had acquired from our neighbor’s bookcase.
Yes, Sophie not only snuck an old, probably-toxic, full-of-chokable-parts tiny toy car into daycare: it was also a semi-stolen car. Not fully stolen, really, because when she took it from the neighbors, she grinned and danced so adorably that the elderly couple who live next door declared that she could keep it. That girl is just too cute for her own good.
But apparently her habits will give her a strong immune system, if these same habits don’t choke her best friend first.
I post so much about the less-pleasant side effects of parenting (sleep deprivation, principally, along with this odd sense of guilt at not achieving Perfection, Enlightenment, and Buddhahood of Momness). Anyway, I decided it was time to post about the more glorious side effects of parenting, the fringe benefits I didn’t even expect.
I get to be the pied piper at the playground. Sophie and I often play at a little cafe-like window built underneath the slide at our local playground. She pours sand on the counter-like surface, I ask for something ridiculous like Pickle Pizza please, she passes me some of the counter-top sand, and I pay her with more sand. Other kids gravitate around. The other day, one girl started making us sand-strawberry-pies, another boy declared it was a sand-juice-bar, and a slightly-older boy announced that he was calculating the percentage of sand-tip owed on the juice. It was adorable. These kid’s own parents are often sitting clear across the park or else interfering far too much (“No, you have to make your strawberry pie round, not square!” ordered the grandpa of the poor girl making that sand pie.) I get to feel like the coolest parent around. The kids often ask me for help tying a shoe or blowing up a balloon. Sand-cafe sometimes segues into Dinosaur-Dig (if anyone has brought toy dinos, we get to bury them and then pretend to be archeologists), or just tag, or some other fun game. Parenting can be lonely, but not when the Pied Piper affect kicks in at the park. I really like kids who can talk in full sentences, and without Sophie around, I would never get to play with them this much.
I have astounding arm muscles. Better than when I was rock-climbing twice a week, almost better than the summer I spent planting 800-pound trees: simply carrying around 23-pounds of Sophie on a regular basis has done wonders for my arms. They don’t look as good as in my tree-planting days (I suspect my body will never look that good again), but they feel stronger. I can now do handstands in yoga class, no problem.
I know most of my neighbors. Sophie used to require a walk around the block before every naptime, and even now that she has more efficient ways of getting to sleep, Sophie still likes walking. She asks for a walk after almost every meal. She likes to check out the seasonal decorations, the dogs, the birds, the moon, and especially the trash-truck. She is one of the stars of our neighborhood. Without her, I would never have met Donna or Kelly or many other friends, and that’s not even counting the mom-friends that Sophie has brought me.
I get to keep in touch with people with this blog.
I get to do Sophie’s hair in pigtails. Even better, she doesn’t much care about symmetry. Yesterday I gave her three pigtails. The day before, four. I’ll try to upload photos soon. I know that she’s not a doll to decorate, but, sheesh, doing her hair is fun.
I get to dance as goofily as I want to. Sophie doesn’t judge my dancing. Yet. She just joins in, then invents new arm-flapping knee-flexing goofiness moves.
I get to be insanely proud of Sophie’s little accomplishments. It is a twisted kind of displaced-narcissism, I think, but every parent is entitled to it. Sophie learns a new word almost every day! Sophie actually covers her mouth when she coughs! Sophie likes to run up to our adult guests and offer them her toys! I think she’’s adorable and sweetly generous, and I’m immensely proud, even if not every guest actually wants a plastic dinosaur.
I get to feel Sophie’s hugs, with her little hands wrapped around my neck. Yesterday at the local bike shop, Sophie decided that it was best to get a running start, tilting down the aisle before leaping into the arms of her favorite bike mechanic, DanB, who agreed that she does indeed give marvelous hugs.
I get to stop and smell the roses. And the mailboxes, and the palm-fronds, and whatever else Sophie gets interested in. It’s not just an olfactory slowing-down: it’s the glory of watching Sophie discover a strawberry, experimentally turning it around, investigating the best way to eat it. At its worst, all this rose-smelling can make me impatient, but at its best, parenting keeps me in the present moment, awake and delighted.
I get to cure almost any problem with a kiss and a hug. I know this won’t last, I know I won’t always be superwoman in her eyes (in fact, I already feel guilty for not being Omnipotent Supermom), I know there will be injuries that can’t be simply kissed away, but for now, it feels pretty darn good to solve so many things with a kiss and a hug. Sophie, in her beautiful independence, has starting trying to kiss her own toe whenever she stubs it. I’m so proud. This post could quickly loop into a cycle of corniness.
So I’d better stop. Tomorrow I’ll be back to writing about the incessant necessity of wiping snot from her nose — but today I’m not apologizing for my sentimentality.
Sometimes there are three Sophies on the playground at once. It was only the 89th-most-popular name last year, which seemed safely out of the mainstream, but we didn’t fully consider that “Sophia” is 6th-most-popular, and, in the state of California, “Sophia” is the 3rd-most-popular name for baby girls. (I found that all out here.) Here in our town, it feels like the most popular. It is the “Meghan” of our time. We had no idea we were so trendy.
Being trendy makes me uncomfortable.
When Sophie refers to herself, she calls herself “Baby.” She’ll turn around when we say “Sophie,” but I think that to her “Sophie” only means “Hey, you, pay attention,” while “Baby” is her true name. Her possessions are “Baby,” her room is “Baby,” and anything small and cute is also, to her, “Baby.”
So we’ve started experimenting with nicknames.
Before Sophie was born, before we even knew whether she was a girl or a boy, we called her “Jupiter,” to name the planet growing in my belly. I know that in Roman mythology, “Jupiter” is a male god and a kind of martial one, but still, somehow, it fits. Or “Jupies” fits. At least for now.
Any other suggestions, dear readers?
After posting about Sophie’s terrible sleep patterns, we decided we had to let her learn to put herself back to sleep on her own, whenever she wakes in the middle of the night. Apparently, according to all our sleep-books, everyone wakes every few hours at night. Most adults just toss their pillows, turn over, fall back asleep, and forget all about it by morning. Babies, on the other hand, yearn for whatever put them to sleep in the first place, which in Sophie’s case is usually rocking in the rocking-chair with me. She had to learn to put herself back to sleep like a big person. Getting up to soothe her six times in one night wasn’t doing any of us any good.
She is brilliant. We know this because, when she wakes at night and her crying doesn’t bring me running, she sometimes switches to giggling, to see if that will lure one of us. Then she tries her words: “Ma-maa, Ma-maaa, Ma-maa.” Usually, I hear her slowing down sleepily while she says that.
The real evidence of Sophie’s brilliance is that if she manages to stay awake, she’ll experiment, trying out other phrases that she thinks might lure one of us. “Daddy.” “Uh-oh. Uh-oh.” “Mamaa?” “Boo-boo. Baby boo-boo.” Baby Sophie is not actually experiencing a boo-boo injury or an uh-oh accident, of course. Sophie is simply cleverly attempting to see what words will best get our attention.
I had hoped for a clever daughter, but I’m already beginning to regret what I wished for.
We have stayed firm, for the past week, not going to her until we hear panic in her voice. And for six of the past seven nights, she has managed to make it through the night without us. Lately, her sheets aren’t even tangled in the morning. Lately, she doesn’t even stand up in her crib, just shifts, sighs a few gentle “Ma-maaa”s, and gets herself back to sleep. She wakes up in the morning more cheerful than ever.
Knock on wood. I hope this lasts.
The next step, I think, is weaning her from breast-feeding. I always insisted on not judging parents who breastfeed toddlers (up to 2 years, maybe two-and-a-half. Honestly, I did judge anyone who breast-fed a five-year-old, except in circumstances of dire emergency when there’s no other food available.) Anyway, Sophie is still a few months away from her second birthday, but I’m starting to want my body back to myself.
This evening, Sophie was playing with her Dad’s old cell-phone while breastfeeding, and, you see, that’s just a little weird. Picture it: a little person, pretending to talk on a cell-phone, but also sucking away, and occasionally accidentally banging that cell-phone on my bare chest. It’s just wrong, you see.
Maybe I’m secretly more judgemental than I thought I was. In any case, no longer breastfeeding Sophie in the middle of the night has been the first step. Second, I’ll stretch out the time between breastfeeding in the day. “Don’t offer, don’t refuse,” is the breastfeeder’s mantra for kids over age one, but not refusing with Sophie would mean feeding her every hour, sometimes — so I’m starting some gentle redirecting, giving her lots of other foods and other things to be interested in.
I think this will take some time to do gently, but it’s slightly less urgent than the sleep issues. For now, I can report, I have gotten to sleep through the night for almost a week. I accomplished more at work today than in a whole week of the sleep-deprived time. It feels good. I hope I haven’t jinxed it by posting about it here.
What a speech! Yo Yo Ma, Aretha Franklin, and a speech I can believe in. Ahhh. I’m going to work harder on teaching Sophie Jupiter to say “O-ba-ma.” She can say it, but only when I encourage her to – and of course she has no idea what it means, except that it rhymes pleasantly with “Mama” and “Llama.” Maybe what I’ll really work on is teaching her how to say, “Yes we can.”
At twenty months old, all she understands about this morning is that she desperately wanted chocolate ice-cream for breakfast and I wouldn’t let her have any. Maybe that’s somehow symbolic of the inauguration, but I hope not.
I let Sophie fall in the ocean today. I feel terribly. I was holding her, helping her toss rocks into the waves, when we tripped and fell over another toddler, landing in a huge wave that caught us all by surprise.
I had been happy that Sophie had been running on the beach, picking up pebbles, and asking me to carry her to the water’s edge so that she could toss them in and admire their ripples. Sophie has been shy lately, in public. Yesterday, when we went to the beach, she would not step off my lap. She was afraid of sand, afraid to get dirty or wet, afraid of all the other people around there. So today, when she started laughingly running in the sand with a gorgeous pair of sister, ages three and five, I was happy. I have been trying to respect Sophie’s shy, cautious stage, but I also keep inviting her to enjoy the beach.
But playing with that three-year-old meant that it was hard to move when we had to suddenly run from a wave. The three-year-old and I got tangled up together and fell. I let Sophie down as gently as I could in the accident, but the wave washed over her. The three-year-old’s dad actually picked her up to keep the water from her face. She ended up with sand in her eyes, sand in her mouth, sand coating her hair, sand covering all her clothes, sand inside her earlobes.
I myself got my jeans and leather shoes soaked by ocean-water, but of course that doesn’t matter as much as poor Sophie, who wasn’t expecting this affront.
I rinsed her off in the chilly beach-showers, put on her reserve-clothes, and took her home for a warm mid-day bath, where she ate three bowls of cheerios in a row and then happily went down for a long nap.
Really, she was a trooper. As soon as I hugged her, she stopped crying, just shivered there with her blue lips, trying to spit the sand out of her mouth.
It’s not a disastrous accident, really. It’s the ordinary risk of playing at the edge of the ocean. But it could make Sophie revert back to shyness and sea-phobia, and it does make me re-assess all the risks I regularly expose Sophie to.
I have made the decision not to be a paranoid parent. I let her eat raisins — and I know that might sound mild, but other parents get shocked that I expose Sophie to a choking hazard. I let her pet dogs we meet, even though other parents tell me I should be worrying more about sudden dog-bites. I let her play at the beach.
And I think I’m going to keep on letting her play at the beach, but now I have to make sure we have a towel in the car.
Putting trash in the trashcan. I think sometimes she asks me to peel a clementine just so she can take the peel, declare it “Trash,” and carry it to the can. This makes her incredibly happy.
Naming body-parts. She is especially interested in confirming that everyone else also has a bellybutton.
Watching motorcycles. I don’t know why. Trucks, buses, and airplanes also thrill her. She is still interested in birds, the moon, and all bicycles, but I’m afraid that in her view, they don’t make quite as satisfying a noise as motorcycles.
Watching other children warily, then, once she feels comfortable, running around aimlessly while giggling the cutest giggle ever.
Putting her dolls and stuffed animals to sleep. She tucks them in, kisses them, then turns to me and says, “Shhhh. Baby.” A minute later, she’ll be making some rambunctious noise, just so she can pretend to tuck them in again.
Doodling.
My first blog post ever was about Sophie’s sleep issues. They’re so endemic that I haven’t mentioned them much since. But in case you don’t recall: Sophie didn’t sleep through the night until she was eleven months old. By “didn’t sleep through the night,” I don’t mean just one or two night wakings. I mean up every three or four hours. I mean up so often that I never got to enter deep REM sleep. Up so often that I began to forget words, like a senile senior. Up so often that I watched “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” with disturbing sympathy (it’s a movie classic from 1969, really worth watching, even if you’re not sleep-deprived).
After eleven months, I finally got deep sleep. Now, Sophie is usually up only once or twice a night. Once a month or so, she actually sleeps through the night. Still, her sleep is fragile.
Our Christmas travel threw off her precarious sleep. A few nights ago, she woke up at 1 am and didn’t get back to sleep till 4:30. She was screaming crying most of that time. I cycled through my bag of middle-of-the-night tricks: hugging her, rocking her, nursing her, showing her the dark trees in our backyard, helping her say “nighty-night” to everything in sight, singing lullabies. Then I would leave her alone again, to try to fall asleep. We had a half-hour of soothing, then a half-hour of sobbing screaming and sometimes even head-banging, repeated for most of the wee hours of the night. In the morning, I felt like a battle-survivor.
The next night, she was up every 3 hours.
If she were a newborn, I might endure this, but she’s nineteen months old. Last night was actually much better: she woke up only at midnight and 1 am (which is really just like one long waking), and then when she woke up at 6am, she actually went back to sleep and slept in till 8. That’s an incredibly good night for us. I felt so happy today, it was like the sun was shining more brightly. Parenthood was more fun. Sophie kept on making me laugh, today, delightfully. I think I had forgotten how easy it is to enjoy life when I get more than 5 hours of sleep.
I wish I knew what to do to help her sleep better. We read every sleep-book in our library. We have good routines, a comfortable crib (not too many toys, but not too stark), good blankets, a fairly consistent schedule. She goes to bed easily at 7:30pm – that’s not the problem. It’s staying asleep that’s the problem.
Even her brilliant Daycare Teacher struggled to get her to put herself to sleep, and even DT can’t get her to stay asleep with the other kids. DT has compromised by teaching Sophie that when she wakes up, she must quietly play by herself until naptime is over. DT has done this so well that watching Sophie after a nap is actually one of my favorite things. Today, when she woke up at home, she quietly tucked in her teddy-bear, elaborately kissing the bear good night and shushing me, before exhuberantly attempting head-stands in her crib. She was in no hurry to leave that crib. It’s as if she doesn’t remember the middle-of-the-night screaming.
After we tried everything else, we even tried a modified cry-it-out method, but we can’t bear to let her cry for more than about 45 minutes. So I still soothe her most of the time, most nights, and keep hoping that this will pass. If any of my blog-readers have any suggestions, I’m all ears, and bleary eyes.
