Name game

I painted some new designs last week and got them on the web this weekend. Enjoy. I think my favorite thing about this product line - the name prints - is that I get to use all the names in the samples that I would have wanted to use for my own kids had I married an American. I was never the type who had elaborate plans for my wedding day nor dreams about having babies. But I will say that I did play MASH as a girl where you draw a square and pick future spouses and future cars and future kids and you had to pick one clunker for every category. MASH stood for Mansion, Apartment, Shack and House (please tell me other people played this game...). The clunker in the car category was always a "pool man" car, whatever that was. (a camino maybe?) So I definitely had kid names in my head for a to be determined future date when I'd have a few to name, not realizing I'd be marrying an Israeli with his own ideas about baby names. Or anyone for that matter who might have ideas that were different than mine. Preposterous!

Anyway, these fun little drawings let me finally use my names. Lucky me!

Respiracy Theory

I have a theory.
Follow me for a minute.
I was listening to NPR, which is where most of my theories begin including the one about how Rene Montagne, Michele Norris and Carol Wertheimer are all the same person. But I digress...

They were talking about sleep apnea in kids and how one persnickety kid didn't know he had it until he was twelve and then they took out his enlarged adenoids and his personality changed entirely. Maybe because it was the first time he'd slept a full eight hours ever. They said his only symptom was snoring and waking up tired.

Well my daughter doesn't wake up grouchy, not in the morning anyway, but she does wake up often at night. Not fully, but enough to either mumble or get out of bed or catch her breath and make a snarfle. Last night she came into our bed (big shock) and proceeded to swing at me half the night. And she snores. Loudly. She's basically had a cold since she was born, but even on the rare occasion when she doesn't have a runny nose, she still snores. She's like an 82 year old man. AND she doesn't talk. I know she can hear but I don't know how well she can hear. She says words but her pronunciation is crazy. I'd say she has about 25 words which is probably normal, but my theory is that she has enlarged adenoids and tonsils and all of it has to go. Then she'll be able to sleep and hear and she'll stop snoring and start talking and then we'll really be in trouble.

I should have been a doctor. Except that when I had a mole removed on my belly recently and had to change the band-aid, I almost passed out.

I'll stick to writing.

Darling daughter

My son came over to me the other day and gave me the low down, very proud of his baby sister's developmental progress.

Aviv doesn't scratch me any more mommy. Now she only bites and hits.

This is my daughter. This is the girl who for nearly two years could do no wrong. Even when she pooped in the tub, we thought it was funny. She'd have a tantrum, we'd have a giggle. But increasingly she is becoming my nemesis. Last night she only wanted to put her pajamas on by herself. More specifically she wanted to put her feet through the neck hole of her shirt and wear it as a dress with the sleeves whapping below by her feet. She was adamant. And when she's in one of her violent moods, she just goes right up to her brother or anyone and starts swinging. And of course we've given up on the sleep training. We missed the window and now we have to live with our mistakes. But at least we're taking advantage of daylight savings to get the kids to go to sleep together at a mutually beneficial bedtime.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that this blog may have a new antagonista. And she packs a punch.

Sleep straining

Last night, without any premeditation or strategizing, I decided to sleep train my daughter. About a year ago we had begun our journey down the slippery slope of early morning snuggling in our bed. She would wake up around 6:00 and one of us would get her and put her in the bed. And she would snuggle and giggle and usually fall back asleep for another hour. Then at 7:03 she'd wake up and make my husband take her to get a banana for breakfast. We enjoyed it. She was like a little early morning radiating butterball.

But then 6:00 turned in 5:00, then 3:30, 2:30 and so it went. And she grew bigger. And developed some annoying habits. Like digging her heals into the space where my back meets the mattress. It was like she was trying to burrow. And she had to share my pillow. And she snores. Basically it became intolerable. She had also forgotten how to fall asleep by herself. We got in the habit of putting her to bed in my son's twin (she refuses to go to sleep in her crib) and when she's asleep, we sneak out. It only took minutes and she was so cute and cozy to sleep with. But when she wakes up at night she can't fall asleep again unless we're with her, which is why she comes into our bed. And since she shares a room with her brother, we can't just let her shriek until she falls asleep. And anyway, at this point she's on her crib mattress on the floor next to her brother's bed, so she can just get up and roam into our room at all hours.

So you could say, we made this bed and now we're lying in it. And the thing is we were so diligent with our son. Vigilant even. And he is a champion sleeper. I remember reading an article in some parenting magazine about how a family of four kids had four different sleepers and I wondered how can that be. Now I know. The second kid is very different than the first. The second has to share a room with her brother. We have exponentially less energy now for middle-of-the-night discipline. So many factors.

But last night I'd had enough. So at 2:00 am when her majesty came into our room, I brought her back to hers and she started to shriek. So I grabbed her blankets and made her a bed on our floor and for the next two hours she got out of her covers and tried to gain entry to our bed and I put her back on the floor. Back and forth. 97 times. I made my husband take a shift and then my daughter got disoriented and went stumbling around the house looking for me unaware that I was just hiding in the far corner of our bed. Then my son woke up so I pleaded with him to go back to bed and my tone must have been sufficiently urgent because he just turned back around and hid under his covers. But we heard him whimpering so I sent in my husband and I snuggled with my daughter on the floor for a few minutes. That calmed her down but when I got up she started to shriek again. And then she got up and we repeated our exercise a few more times. At this point she has started banging into the bed and tripping over everything because she is so exhausted. I feel like I've been hit by a truck but we remain steadfast. She makes one final effort but I put her back on the floor and tuck her in tightly. Her whimpers subside to aggressive thumb-sucking. And then…silence. We have won the battle.

This morning everyone woke up an hour late. My daughter was unusually grumpy. But it took her about a minute to snap out of it. After breakfast she came into our room and looked at the heap of blankets on the floor and started wagging her finger and saying sternly, no no ni ni, which I can only infer to mean, no sleeping in mommy's bed. You have to go ni-ni on the floor. Poor thing. We'll see how she does tonight. She's a persistent little bugger. But she gets that from me.