This afternoon I was telling some friends in an email about the difficult morning we’d had with Annalie and how seven is going to kill me ded when I realized: she’s seven and a half.

We’ve been here before, with Annalie testing her boundaries at this time of year. The halves always seem to be a challenge. I know of no research or developmental theory to back this up, just anecdotal evidence. I’ve discussed with friends many times how it always seems like kids go through something developmental around their half-birthdays that turns them temporarily insane. Realizing this made me feel immediately better. Not only am I not imagining it, but there is an end in sight. Also, Madge and Bonnie both assured me that eight has been one of their favorite ages so far with their kids.

Thanks to all of you who commented on my last post about your own woes. It makes me feel better to know I’m not the only one who finds life overwhelming from time to time. I hope we all get a break soon!

Sleeping face-down on Mom’s crossed legs is SO two days ago. Face-UP is where it’s at.

This afternoon Elliora fell asleep in the car on the way home for a few minutes, which normally doesn’t affect her napping. But today when I brought her inside and nursed her, she didn’t fall asleep like she normally does. She was wide-awake and happy. I mentally shrugged, figuring she’d go to bed a bit early tonight, and we got up to play.

When her slightly-earlier-than-normal bedtime came around, she happily nursed and easily went to sleep, not even making a peep when I put her down in her bed. I went off to meet a friend at Starbucks for some companionable side-by-side laptopping, confident that she’d stay asleep…only to text my mom an hour and a half later and find out that she had awakened ten minutes after I left and had been awake ever since.

So I wasn’t surprised when she had a hard time going to sleep after that. I wasn’t even surprised at how hard she was fighting sleep; Elliora is very strong-willed and has been able to keep herself awake since she was born. What did surprise me was that when she flopped into a position face-up on my crossed legs, she relaxed and immediately went to sleep.

Nothing regarding this kid should surprise me anymore when it comes to sleep, though.

I’ve been gradually cutting down her night-nursing for a couple of months now, working my way up to eight hours without nursing. I did the same thing with Annalie, who was much more interested in nursing than Elliora ever has been, at about the same age. After a couple nights of her waking up and being denied a chance to nurse, Annalie just kinda went, “Oh, I won’t get fed if I wake up? All right then, I’ll just sleep,” and she stopped waking up at night almost entirely. The times she did wake up, it was easy to settle her back down by just patting her on the back and whispering to her.

Elliora, on the other hand, shows no sign of being even close to sleeping for eight hours without waking up, or of being willing to settle back down with just a touch and a reassurance. She does go back to sleep without nursing, so I don’t feel like she’s missing that. It’s more like she just isn’t a big sleeper. Annalie is like me: once we’re asleep, we’re out for the count and it’s hard to wake us up. I think Elliora just might be more like my brother: he has a hard time going to sleep and a hard time staying asleep, waking up more than once most nights. He’s been like that since the day he was born.

Elliora will sleep from bedtime (usually between 7-7:30) till around midnight without waking up about half the time. (The other half of the time, she might wake up once between bedtime and midnight, or she might wake up every hour on the hour. We never know which it will be.) She wakes up almost every night around midnight and usually takes about 10-15 minutes to settle back down with one of us picking her up and cuddling her. Just to keep things interesting, on some nights nothing on God’s green earth will calm her down for an hour or more.

Regardless of when or how often she wakes up, if we don’t pick her up, she will stand up in her crib and screeeeeeeeam and wake Annalie up. If we try to leave her in the bed and just pat her on the back, we have to physically hold her down to keep her from getting up, which makes her scream more, which wakes Annalie up. Annalie, very understandably, gets grouchy when a screaming baby wakes her up from a sound sleep.

The rest of the night is pretty unpredictable. Elliora usually only wakes up once between midnight and 4am, and can be settled back down with 10-15 minutes of cuddling. Or she might wake up every hour and need 10-15 minutes of holding each time, or she might just wake up and be awake for an hour or two.

Elliora has slept entirely through the night, from 8pm to 7am, exactly once in her life, on a night when we hadn’t done anything differently from any other night. So we know she can do it, but we have no idea how to make her do it again.

I would happily let her sleep with us and cuddle all night, but if she’s in bed with me and I won’t nurse her, she gets monumentally annoyed and will scream her annoyance for a long time. She’s also quite strong for her size, and trying to hold onto her when she’s struggling is difficult and exhausting. The times I have stuck it out and let her cry in my arms without giving in and nursing her, she’s screamed for two hours or more. Usually if I nurse her, she’s fine and will go to sleep eventually, but if I nurse her in bed I’ll probably fall asleep, and since she’s learned how to crawl we don’t feel safe leaving her in bed with us all night while we’re sleeping. She’s an explorer and she takes every chance she gets to wander off.

What it all comes down to is that Elliora is incredibly strong-willed. She isn’t a sound sleeper and she isn’t very flexible about her sleeping habits. She’s very good at letting us know how she’s feeling, and when she’s mad she screams about it.

It’s already gotten so much better than it used to be with her, sleep-wise. But there still isn’t much consistency, and that’s both baffling and frustrating at times. We know it won’t be this way forever, and we’ll deal with it like grown-ups and do our best to gently teach her, when she seems ready, how to sleep through the night without the all-night milk bar or on-demand snuggling. But we’ll still be really happy when she’s sleeping through the night consistently.

What about you? Does your kid have a sleeping habit that mystifies you, or drives you crazy? Or do you have one of those mythical kids who sleeps beautifully?

I’m SO close to 10,000 comments on this blog! Will this post be the one that gets the 10,000th comment!? I think it could be…and that 10,000th commenter will win a piece of custom-painted pottery, or something crocheted, or maybe something else entirely. It’s just my way of saying “thank you” for all for the great comments over the past four years. So gimme your two cents, and YOU could be lucky #10,000!

Tonight, we didn’t get going on bedtime till an hour later than usual. Elliora was overtired and resisted sleep for an hour or more, with much whining and crying and squirming around. She nursed and then got mad when I tried to snuggle with her. I put her down in her bed, and she relaxed for a few seconds before getting mad, and sitting up and crying. I tried putting her down in the pack’n'play and rubbing her back while singing to her, and got the same reaction.

After about an hour of going around and around in this way, I was so exasperated that I did something completely ridiculous. I sat with my legs crossed and laid Elliora down on her tummy across my lap, her head on one knee, and patted her back. She calmed down almost immediately and was asleep in less than a minute. My reaction could be summed up thusly: What the–!?

BABIES.

Remember, I’m not far away from 10,000 comments (real ones, not counting spam) on this blog, and the 10,000th commenter is going to win a prize—maybe a piece of pottery of their choice, or perhaps something crocheted, or maybe something else entirely—just as a “thank you” for all for the great comments over the past four years. Keep commenting, and YOU could be lucky #10,000!

Just for kicks and out of curiosity, today I kept a log of my day.

Today I spent 698 minutes between 7am and 1am caring for my kids. And today was pretty easy, aside from the fact that Troy didn’t get home till almost 8pm. Neither of the girls were overtired or sick, and my cough is almost gone and I’m feeling better. Everyone was in a pretty good mood all day. There were no tantrums or lost tempers.

Still, I spent nearly 12 hours nursing Elliora, preparing food, cleaning up after meals, changing diapers, attending Annalie’s gymnastics class, getting Elliora to sleep at various points during the day, encouraging Annalie as she did her chores, and just playing and talking and being a mom.

I’m taking two big things away from this exercise: (1) No wonder I’m so flipping tired all the time! That’s a lotta hours for an extraverted introvert like me to be on duty and around people, even two of the people I love most; and (2) I’m never feeling guilty about not blogging* or not getting laundry done again, not while my kids are little. Clearly I have more important things to be doing.

*That doesn’t mean I still won’t wish I had more time to blog, though. Just today I had great ideas for two blog posts—even took photos for one of them—but didn’t manage to download the photos to my laptop or write a single word of either one. Oh well.

Elliora was so smiley during a middle-of-the-night diaper change that I grabbed my camera to document it as a happy thing. Then I realized I was in the photo too (faintly, but I’m there) and it was after midnight. Boom, Day 6.

Yawn.

Happy baby is happy to see you! Even at 1am. To answer the question many of the Flickr commenters had: yes, Elliora went back to sleep pretty easily after this, even though it looks like she was wide awake. She usually goes back to sleep quickly as long as she can nurse.

Annalie said, “Ever since I was one year old and started walking, I’ve run to my Gramaw at the airport.”

Annalie took this alternate self-portrait in the mirrored side of the moving sidewalks at the airport.

My friend Bonnie decided on her birthday this year that she would take a picture every day of something that made her happy, to remind herself in the midst of a difficult time to Find the Happy. She decided to create a Flickr group so her friends could share the happy too.

Finding a bit of Happy each day.

The rules:

1. Find some Happy and photograph it each day. You could choose to do it less often if that works better for your life but my theory is that the more often you look for the Happy, the more the Happy helps.
2. Do it for a year. Or less. Or more. Or as needed.
3. No Unhappy allowed. That also includes self-abuse if you miss a day or lots of days. Hippie voice: Go with the flow, man. Everything is as it should be.
4. Rules are for breaking. Except Number 3, it’s best not to upset Hippie Voice.

My heart has been heavy lately, thinking about Samantha. So I’m reminding myself of some happy things.

I don’t know about you, but homemade black-and-white cookies make me very happy.

So does the cool way the sun was reflecting off this dotty coffee mug. Like little bubbles of sunlight!

I happened to glance at Annalie’s calendar a day or two before Troy’s birthday and was tickled to realize that she had drawn a miniature portrait of our family on that date, complete with him in a party hat.

I love it when I get a teeny painting of a harried-looking coffee-drinking cat in the mail. Thanks, Brenda!

French toast with powdered sugar on a sunshiny dottery plate.

Keeping a baby alive and homeschooling a 7-year-old are both time-consuming pursuits (duh), but while I barely have time to shower and I don’t seem to have time for housework, I manage to cook dinner almost every night and write emails and blog posts (sort of) and I’ve been crocheting a lot. So I guess it’s true that you do make time for what you love. And crocheting makes me happy.

I’m sure that in a year or so I’ll be hearing many cries of “Mo-ooom, make her stop touching my stuff!” So I try extra hard to enjoy the sweet moments like this, when it’s clear how much Annalie loves her little sister.

On one of Troy’s Navy deployments years ago, he happened to go to a wine festival in Cyprus, and he brought back two of these little glasses. They’re the perfect size for a shot of juice or taking a packet of Emergen-C, and it makes me smile each time I use one. It’s such a random thing to have in my cupboard, small wineglasses from a Cypriot wine festival, yet there they are.

I went to high school and college with Rainbow Rowell. (I know, awesome name!) She wasn’t someone I hung out with, but we knew each other. We had mutual friends, and when we went to the same university we occasionally ate lunch together. I’ve been reading Rainbow’s writing for two decades now, mostly in newspaper-column or blog-post form, but now I’ve read something way more exciting: Rainbow’s very first novel, a romantic comedy called Attachments. The night I started reading it, I actually got out of bed at 3:30am, feeling compelled to send Rainbow a message to let her know I was loving her book and was genuninely happy for and proud of her. (I’ll be interviewing Rainbow soon and doing a giveaway of her book in a blog post, so stay tuned for that!)

The sun was shining into Annalie’s room just right one afternoon so that her bright fuchsia sheets were reflecting a pink glow onto everything else in the room. A few days later, Annalie picked this bouquet of wildflowers, leaves of grass, and a wild strawberry from our yard for me and arranged them in an old vanilla bottle.

The first Saturday that Sonja was here, Karyl & her girls came up to spend the day with us, which was super fun. We started with brunch—aebleskiver and home-fried potatoes and bacon and fruit—which made me very happy because I love brunch. Also, I made the aebleskiver with almond milk and coconut oil and maple syrup (in place of cow’s milk and butter and granulated sugar) so Sonja could eat them, and they were totally as delicious as usual. It was a Very Happy Thing indeed: brunch everyone could eat!

Sonja-safe brownies, made with coconut oil instead of butter and honey instead of sugar. And they tasted good! Yay! I had fun meeting the challenge of cooking without ingredients I usually rely on while Sonja was here.

I love it when naps end like this, with Elliora waking up in the Ergo and smiling when she sees me.

If I have to put up with hot and humid summer weather, at least I get to eat perfectly summery meals like this: grilled mini burgers, strawberries, and marinated cucumber salad. Yum.

After seeing Lauren’s Doctor Who necklace on Flickr, I stalked this Etsy shop until she listed more so I could buy one for myself. I like how the high-top sneaker is a reference to the Chucks habitually worn by both the Tenth Doctor and Chuck Bartowski.

We often make popcorn with the very air-popper that I used when I was a kid, and eat it out of the exact stainless-steel bowl I used to eat popcorn from. (My mom was getting rid of the air popper and asked if I wanted it; I basically swiped the bowl because I loved it so much. Both these things are 30+ years old.)

Trader Joe’s dark chocolate bar with caramel bar and black sea salt. Enough said.

We live near a good bakery and stop there on a regular basis for treats. Every time, Annalie carefully surveys the variety of lovely, fancy cookies and pastries…and then requests a plain butter cookie. I love that.

I believe we’ve mentioned before that our neighbors across the street actually own a bounce house? They put it up for birthdays and parties and random weekends just for fun. And they are happy to share it with the neighborhood kids.

Rain always makes me happy.

Neon aquamarine polish, and bare feet outside, and green grass, and bits of sidewalk chalk. Basically, summer’s here!

Elliora has tasted teensy amounts of applesauce and bananas before. She always seemed to be thinking, This stuff in my mouth is interesting—not grossed out but not overly intrigued either. Recently, though, she’s been very extremely interested in what we’re eating.

The other day at Spaghetti Works Annalie let Elliora taste a little bit of applesauce off her finger, and Elliora went bonkers. She loved it and kept diving for Annalie’s plate.

She was even lunging and grabbing for my plate of pasta. I thought, Hmm. Perhaps even though she is only five months old, Elliora is ready to start eating solids.

When we went to Trader Joe’s I grabbed some bananas and some organic applesauce with cinnamon. The bananas weren’t quite ripe, so later that day we offered Elliora some applesauce. Predictably, she hoovered it up. I only intended to give her a tablespoon or so, but I think she ended up eating more than twice that much and would have eaten even more. I didn’t want her to get a stomachache, though, and she still needs to get most of her nutrition from breastmilk.

But I’m glad she’s ready to start eating real food. Introducing a baby to the world of flavors and textures is my idea of a good time. Does that make me weird?

And where she lost her first baby tooth, right next to the new gap, the new adult tooth is coming in. This tooth just fell right out as Annalie was wiggling it. She and Elliora and I were just lounging around on the bed, hanging out, and suddenly Annalie said, “Hey, my tooth just fell out!” She actually had to search for it on the bed because it fell right out of her mouth.

In other news, we have not dropped off the face of the earth. We’re still here, still chugging along. How about a list?

• Elliora is growing and changing every day—she will play happily in the exersaucer long enough for me to get Annalie’s lunch made, and she flips herself over like it’s nothing and can almost hold herself upright in a sitting position.
• Annalie is extremely glad spring is here at last and tells me at least once a day that spring is her FAVORITE season. She spends a lot of time outside these days, wearing whatever she wants.
• Troy is still working crazy hours and getting home just in time to put Annalie to bed most nights. When he isn’t working he’s awesomely doing all the laundry in the house or unloading the dishwasher or doing our taxes.
• I am spending lots of time reminding myself that I am not just spending hours nursing and holding a baby when I could be doing something “more useful,” I’m preparing Elliora to meet the world as a secure, confident person, and even managing to get a bit of crocheting done occasionally. I’m also trying to figure out how to parent two kids without losing it or driving one of them to a life of crime. So far so good, mostly.
• Troy and I have gotten about halfway through Season 1 of Fringe—a show I’ve been meaning to watch since it premiered—thanks to Carrie lending us her DVDs! We are quite enjoying it. I actually know some of the stuff that’s coming down the road because I’ve watched a couple of random episodes at my parents’ house, and it’s interesting watching these early episodes knowing about the weird stuff to come.
• I really do intend to care about blogging again someday; it’s on my long-term to-do list. For now, though, eh. It’s just on the back burner. I think about things I want to blog every day, I just don’t quite get around to it. I miss it though. If you miss hearing from me feel free to check on my Flickr, which gets updated a bit more regularly.

Wow, this post was all over the place. Sorry about that. I’m also sorry if you’ve commented on this site recently and not gotten any reply from me even if you asked me a direct question. WordPress has decided to stop emailing my comments to me again. Probably I need to update to a newer version. Who knows.

What’s new with you?

It’s ironic (or is it?! I’m always fuzzy on the definition of irony, thanks to Alanis Morissette) that the day after writing a post about how much easier our lives could be if I just remember to be more playful, I am writing a post about how my parenting report card today would be stamped with a great big FAIL.

Today I lost my temper at Annalie over something kind of stupid. She threw a fit over having to leave the house for dinner, then got mad because she had to put on long pants (a fight I have with her EVERY SINGLE DAY, every time we need to leave the house, oh my goodness does this kid ever need to live in Southern California). Then it went even further downhill, probably largely because she was hungry, which was why we were leaving the house to get some dinner.

I was hungry too, and I have the same tendency to be 300% more irritated by life when I’m hungry, so it took a lot of effort for me to stay calm. But by golly, I did. I spent 20 minutes patiently, calmly talking to Annalie. I reminded her she was hungry. I pointed out that 45F isn’t warm enough to go outside in a skirt and tank top. She was not entirely happy but had simmered down and even put on tights and was ready to leave.

And then she changed her mind. I don’t even know exactly what it was, but something set her back to square one and she told me, in that hmmph-so-there voice that is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, that she wasn’t leaving the house ever again and I couldn’t make her. Then she laid down on her bed and grabbed the headboard like I was going to have to pry her off.

I saw red. I yelled at her. I pushed her down the hall towards Troy and stomped into my room to count to 100. I rested my forehead on the wall and took deep, shaky breaths. I listened to Annalie wailing, to Troy talking to her, to poor Elliora strapped into the infant seat, crying her head off. I hated myself just a little bit.

I pulled myself together and joined my family. I took Elliora out of the seat and comforted her. I hugged Annalie and asked her how much better she thought I felt now that I’d yelled at her. She said she didn’t know. I told her, “Not better at all. I feel worse. How do you feel?” She admitted she felt worse too. We all calmed down and talked and apologized and forgave. We went to dinner and came home and Annalie went to bed happy and serene while I laid on the couch and nursed Elliora and had a good cry.

I think what’s going on right now, mainly, is that Annalie is dealing with not having me to herself anymore. She is understandably frustrated at having to share my time, and that it often seems like the lion’s share of that is going to Elliora these days. Lately Annalie has been unusually snippy with me and angry at me. I know it’s all part of the process of learning to deal, and I’m glad she is taking it out on me and not the baby (with whom she is unfailingly gentle and loving), but it’s still trying. And today we were both hungry and I was tired and breastfeeding hormones probably played a part and just arrrrrgggghhhh.

On top of that, school has been challenging. I’ve been trying hard for the last month to get back into a routine with school, and Annalie is fighting me every step of the way. For every hour of school we do, I spend easily another hour convincing her. It’s exhausting.

Part of me thinks it’s no big deal. She is in first grade; putting the curriculum on hold and unschooling for another month or so won’t hurt her. We still read books every day, and she reads and writes plenty on her own. We talk about time and dates and prices and measurements every day, in real-life situations at the store, while cooking, while planning a trip. Now that the weather is warming up, and Elliora is a bit older and doesn’t hate the car quite as much, we can start going to the library regularly and hitting the museums again. We can keep plugging away at our year’s curriculum right through summer if we want to. We’re going to start using Time4Learning as a supplement (thanks, Yara!) and I’m hopeful that it will be a good fit for Annalie’s learning style and our needs right now.

[I am a bit apprehensive leaving the negative stuff about homeschooling in this post because I've gotten some pretty negative responses from people about this kind of thing in the past. Please know that I am not saying homeschooling is too hard for us, because I'm not; I'm saying that right now homeschooling is challenging but we are persevering because I want to teach my kids about perseverance and flexibility just as much as I want to teach them how to read and write. If I honestly thought homeschooling wasn't working for us anymore we wouldn't be doing it. It's as simple as that. And I want to be honest about our struggles because if someone else is struggling in their homeschool at least they won't read my blog under the erroneous impression that homeschooling comes easily to everyone else in the world but them.]

On top of everything else Troy’s job is crazy busy right now and he’s basically leaving for work before we get up and getting home just in time to tuck Annalie in at night. As you can imagine this is stressing all of us out for various reasons.

I’m truly okay now. I talked to Troy and my mom and Brenda and Madge. Brenda and Madge both told me that when I lose my temper at my kid, it’s an opportunity for me to help her learn how to deal with anger and angry people, and also a chance to teach her about how even her parents aren’t perfect. (Gasp! Shocking but true.) My mom and Troy both had good ideas for ways to help Annalie learn to deal with her frustration. They all reminded me that things will get easier and I know they are right. I am stretched pretty thin right now, with nursing a baby and homeschooling a first-grader and attempting to keep the house in some kind of order on days that are too cold for Annalie to play outside, and I need to be as kind to myself as I would to anyone else in this situation. So I’m trying.

Sarah commented on the last post that Annalie’s vocabulary is so good for her age that it’s easy to forget she’s just a little kid. I confess I have the same problem sometimes. Annalie is so mature and smart and empathetic in some ways, but in other ways she is still very much six-going-on-seven. I am guilty of expecting too much of her at times. Especially since Elliora was born, I think, since in comparison with a four-month-old Annalie seems impossibly grown-up. But she’s not. She’s still a kid in need of snuggles and silliness and reassurance and guidance and tons of patience and understanding and love. Though really, what adult doesn’t need those things too?

Tomorrow is another day. It might bring more temper tantrums, it might not. Either way, we’ll handle it and I will attempt to remain calm and remember that we’re all doing the best we can under the circumstances, knowing it will get easier eventually. Or I’ll get stronger in the process. Probably both.

How are you today?

This afternoon I was nursing Elliora when Annalie asked me if I would play Candy Land with her, the special big-kid version where you pick two cards per turn and decide which one you’re going to use. (The rules mention that it helps kids hone their decision-making skills; we like it because it makes the game go faster.) I said I’d be happy to do that, if she would put her laundry away for me first.

“Eh, never mind,” Annalie replied. “I don’t want to play Candy Land then.”

“You still need to put your laundry away,” I told her.

Now, this is where it all could have gone south very quickly. Annalie crossed her arms and told me she wasn’t gonna put her laundry away, and I couldn’t make her do it anyway. She used that half-whiny, half-haughty tone of voice that reeeeally gets under my skin and causes me to lose a little bit of my cool.

But today, I was magically inspired. I looked at the yellow plastic laundry basket sitting on the floor half-full of folded clothes and said, “Uh-oh, the Laundry Basket Train is leaving the living room! Toot toooooot! All aboard! Next stop, Annalie’s Room Station!”

Annalie went from petulant to gleeful in half a second. She grabbed her bear Mint and plopped her in the basket, laughing and shouting, “All aboard!” and making train noises as she pushed the basket down the hall. I called out that there was an obstruction on the track as I moved a box out of her way. When she reached her room, Annalie made the appropriate train-slowing-down-and-braking noises, and I helped her put her laundry away.

The train returned to the living room and we played a game or three of Candy Land while I pondered the Laundry Basket Train and told myself that I could probably make my life a lot easier if I would just remember how much more cheerful and enthusiastic Annalie is about ANYTHING if it’s made into a game.

That doesn’t always come naturally to me. I am more of the just-do-it-and-then-it’s-done persuasion. Okay, okay…really I tend to use the procrastinate-the-unpleasant-tasks-till-the-very-last-minute method, but I want to be the just-do-it type. And I often am, much more than I am the hey-let’s-make-a-game-out-of-this type. But I can learn to make things playful if it means less whining from Annalie, less losing my cool, and an easier, funner life in general.

Tonight after we got back from our evening out (Annalie went to her gymnastics school’s parents’ night out while Troy, Elliora and I went to see The Adjustment Bureau), Annalie’s little table and chairs were still sitting in the middle of the living room where she’d been playing restaurant earlier in the day. I asked her to please move them back to the wall. She started to get mad, but I quickly said, “Oh no, the table-and-chair monster is coming to get them, aaaahhh! Quick, let’s get them over here where they can hide!”

Yeah, I know. Totally lame, but I was tired and it was the best I could come up with on short notice. I half-expected Annalie to roll her eyes and stomp off to her room, but she grinned and quickly helped us carry the table and chairs back where they belonged. Like magic.

Make it playful.