Mendolonium

This is my first week where I have days alone with three small human beings to care for.  It went better than expected; partly because I live my life by the mantra of “Keep your expectations low and you won’t be disappointed.”  There was a day where everyone under the age of six decided to poo in their pants (and at this point Anna’s the one for whom that is acceptable).  The cat, not to be upstaged by mere humans, also decided to poo on the living room floor.  But this week also saw Thomas be phenomenally helpful, Theodore give me a spontaneous “I love you” nearly every day, and Anna actually go to bed two nights in a row without crying.

Thomas knows that I keep a journal for each child that I write in periodically.  He also knows that I “do some writing on the computer”.  (Something tells me that he will be a blogger one day; if we aren’t all socially networked to each other by chips in our brains by the time he is a teenager.)  Tonight as I was putting the boys to bed Thomas asked me to write about him (and then added that I should write about Theo too) so I thought I would oblige.

Thomas…

Thomas has consistently been winning the on-going contest of “most challenging child in the family” for the past several weeks.  This week’s bad behavior highlight:  telling me to “shut my mouth” when I told him to put on his shoes for a walk (oh the cruelty of forcing my child to walk three blocks with me to the mailbox in 80 degree weather!).  In return for his disrespect he had all sweets taken away for one week.  And he was treated to learning a new word “grounded”.  As in if he ever says that to me again he will not go anywhere but school for one week and when he’s at home he will not get any TV and will have to go to bed directly after dinner.  I am 100% supportive of him expressing his feelings, but he will do so in a respectful manner – or else.  In another transgression Thomas lost the use of his Legos for a week.  Perhaps remembering the consequences of bad behavior, the rest of this week has been pretty darn great.  He has been incredibly helpful with Theodore – for the most part, playing nicely with him while I comforted the ever-fussy Anna.  At lunchtime yesterday Theo finished eating his beloved Snappea crisps before Thomas (a rare and favorite item in our house) and threw himself a tantrum when I denied him more.  I told Theo that I had given him and Thomas the exact same amount (I counted) but he was not to be consoled.  Thomas sighed and very generously handed Theo his last two Snappea crisps.  Thomas is now reading to Theodore which is utterly adorable.  And during a rare and beautiful half hour where both Anna and Theodore were asleep at the same time I sat down and taught him multiplication which he picked up quickly.

Theodore…

Theodore, my amazing, perfect, sent-from-heaven, sleeper has been waking up the middle of the night yelling about needing help with his blanket.  Because although he is quite capable of climbing into my bed and pulling my covers over his head to play hide and seek he is, apparently, incapable of pulling his own blanket over himself in the middle of the night.  Under the category of awesome Theo has developed a passion for “bake with Mama?”.  I am not sure if it is the one-on-one time together or the opportunity to lick the beater that has suddenly ignited his culinary fires, but I am having a lot of fun with my new baking buddy.  Theodore has also, for a couple of months now, been complaining that he misses me while at school.  So in what might prove to be insanity I decided to pull Theodore out of school one day a week so that he is now home with me three days a week.  (Thomas will still go to school three days a week.)  The truth is I miss him too.  I also know that as my middle child Theodore gets the short end of the stick when it comes to one-on-one time with me.  He is more talkative and creative when he is the only child around and I want to enjoy that side of him.

Anna…

In addition to “Sunshine” Anna’s other nickname is “Fussypants”.  We joke constantly about her fussypants as if they were an actual, pair (or pairs) of attire.  Mocking our baby’s fussiness with rather juvenile humor helps keep us sane when we’re swaddling and walking her to sleep for the tenth time in a day.  I particularly enjoyed this exchange:

Jeff:  How was she today?

Me:  Well this morning was great; she was smiling and talkative for about 20 minutes; her fussypants were in the laundry.  But then they came out of the dryer and she put them on.  Apparently they had shrunk so she was extra fussy the rest of the day.

Jeff:  Nothing’s worse than a tight pair of fussypants.  Why are you letting a newborn choose their own pants anyway…why don’t you just put a pair of happypants on her?

Me:  We didn’t get any.  And they don’t sell them at Target.

We also call Anna “the baby stick” because when she’s all swaddled up tight (which given her fussiness is most of the time) she seems to me like a little stick with a cute baby head attached to the top.  Despite her general crankiness I am actually finding her quite awesome.  When she’s awake and happy she is very chatty and gives me that adoring smile that babies often seem to reserve for their mothers – the one where they look up at you and grin at you like you are a god.   Finding out what my kids are thinking is absolutely one the highlights of parenting older children.  I’m excited at the idea that it won’t be too long before Anna tells me, vociferously I am sure, what her thoughts on life are.

Me…

I love being on maternity leave.  My days with Anna alone are actually very relaxing.  I suspect that Anna might be a night-owl like her Mama and her biggest brother.  Most days after we finally get her to sleep; she sleeps and nurses all night long without much complaint, finally waking at the deliciously late hour of 9:30 am or so.  As long as I stay in bed with her and nurse her on demand she stays happy and content and I am getting eight hours of (interrupted, but hey I have a newborn – I’m not complaining!) sleep every night.  It has also been surprisingly helpful to my sanity that Jeff bought me a one pound box of See’s chocolates for Christmas.  I hid said box in my nightstand and whenever I start fantasizing about running away to a land without children I sneak into the bedroom and eat a chocolate.  And you know what, that helps quite a lot.  Do you have any secret coping mechanisms when life gets rough?  I promise I won’t tell.

As I was recovering from childbirth, nursing a baby a dozen times a day, potty training a two and half year old, and trying to figure out where to send a five year old to school I thought:  my life is simply not complicated enough, what I need is an unprecedented natural disaster to add a little excitement to my day.  Well, Mother Nature obliged and this happened:

That would be most of our 72 year old redwood tree lying directly over our bedroom; you know, the room we sleep in with our newborn nestled between us.  Wednesday night saw what I have seen the local newspapers call simply, “Wind 2011″.  A few days of strong winter winds (Santa Anas) are typical here in Southern California.  In fact, 10 years ago, one such set of winds capsized the boat that Jeff was in thirteen miles offshore, resulting in him and his research colleagues narrowly escaping death in the frigid waters before being rescued by the coast guard.  The winds this past Wednesday night started innocently enough.  As the winds picked up throughout the evening Jeff made multiple trips outside; first to put away a few of the boys’ toys, then to turn over our patio furniture and secure it against the house, then to turn over the garbage cans so that they wouldn’t take off.  By the time Jeff came inside the final time, I didn’t think it was safe for him to be outside.  The winds were coming in fiercely from the north, the side of the house with our bedroom and living room with a large bay window of untempered glass.  We nervously hung out on the south side of the house making occasional forays to look out the windows and see trees convulsing violently in the wind.  And then there was a boom and the house shook.  Jeff jumped up and through the haze of blowing branches saw a huge trunk of our redwood tree lying on our house.  This was a new problem for us and we weren’t initially sure what to do.  We then heard the wind rolling the tree trunk around the roof of our house; a very disturbing sound.  I started by calling the police non-emergency line which was busy.  Then I moved on to 911 which transferred me to the fire department.  The dispatcher asked me if we were all ok and whether or not we could leave the house.  I told him that we could leave, but that it certainly didn’t seem safe to go outside!  He told us that as long as the tree wasn’t actually in the house or the house was on fire, then we should stay in and they would get to us as soon as they could.  Minutes went by, then an hour, and through the power of our neighborhood facebook page, I realized that the fire department would probably not be coming as people began posting pictures of trees that had actually come through their roof!  The police department sent out emails and text messages asking residents to stay home and off the streets.  Most of the streets in Pasadena were now blocked by downed trees and power lines, while transformers were sparking all around us.  We could hear sirens and realized as bad as a tree on our house was, others had it worse and we didn’t have a choice but to wait and hope that our roof would hold.  Much of Pasadena and all of the neighboring cities of Altadena and Sierra Madre were without power.  We called our insurance company and started a claim; they had already declared Los Angeles Country a “catastrophe” area after receiving more than 1000 claim calls in an hour.  Given that we still, for the moment, had a roof we were told that it would be days before our damage could be assessed, to take care of what needed to be fixed, and save our receipts.  There wasn’t anything more we could do at 1:00 am, but there was no way I was going to sleep with a tree poised over my head so Jeff moved our mattress into our windowless dining room and we hunkered down with Baby Girl.  I think I literally hovered over her tiny body all night trying to shield her from anything that might invade our house.  In the wee hours of the morning the wind died down and we finally slept marveling as we awoke at how quiet the world could be without the fury of the wind.  Seeing the devastation in the morning light was surreal; our lawn was green, not with grass, but with redwood needles.  In a stroke of amazing luck I called a tree service company  just as they opened and they said they would come by with a crane.  They warned that they wouldn’t have time to do much else, but would remove the tree from our house.  The schools were all closed and normally we would have stayed home given such a disaster, but in case of very bad timing we had a long arranged court date at 8:30 am sharp to finalize Theodore’s name change.  It was comical, getting three kids up and dressed properly for court, traipsing out to our car via our side door (the front door was blocked with debris), me in high heels stepping around huge branches.  The drive to the courthouse, only two miles away, was slow going.  The major streets in many spots had only one lane open with cars in each direction taking turns around huge downed trees.  Streetlights and traffic signals lay broken.  There were pieces of roof everywhere.  In the end, we made it to court and Henry William officially became Theodore Gregory.   When we arrived home, the redwood on our roof was gone and our front walk was even cleared and swept clean.

Besides the wind apocalypse it hasn’t been an easy week.  While not truly colicky, Baby Girl is going through some significant newborn fussiness.  Theodore is sick with some evil daycare germ and actually threw up on his baby sister (and me) today.  And Thomas is just plain moody and difficult.  But one of the most wonderful things about being a 33 year old mother of three children, rather than a 28 year old first time parent, is that nothing much phases us anymore.  As long as our family is safe and healthy, everything really is ok.  I was a little shaky the night after the wind storm, vividly envisioning what could have happened if that tree had crashed through our bedroom with us in it.  But the fact is, that it didn’t.  Our 72 year old house is, apparently, made of pretty strong stuff; as is my love for our perfect Baby Girl.

*The title to this post is in reference to the “Holy shit bees!” in last week’s post.  And yes, the tree service company,  told us that the Holy shit bees were, amazingly, still in the tree (surviving 100 mile per hour winds and a fall!) section that fell on our roof.

Perhaps the most useful piece of information that we learned when we first became parents was the concept of “developmental leaps”: the idea that a child’s emotional, cognitive, and physical development is not at all linear but rather, proceeds in exponential leaps, generally in a time frame that is common to all children.  The book “The Wonder Weeks” details this phenomenon for children up to age two and the child psychologists Ames and Ilg mention the concept frequently in their excellent, if a bit humorously dated, series of books.  You can’t stop developmental leaps – and you wouldn’t want to – but I find it incredibly helpful to know approximately when my child is likely to go insane with trying to figure out a new skill and to know that said insanity is always temporary.  Even though I know it is going to happen I am always amazed at how our kids’ behavior can turn from cranky working on a new skill to mastering that skill and a sunny disposition literally overnight.  It’s been quite clear to us for the past few weeks that Theo was undergoing some sort of major developmental leap.  Our normally very even keeled little guy has been bursting into tears at the slightest provocation.  He’s been stuttering to the point of turning red in the face and shouting in frustration trying to get his words out.  His school reported that he was lethargic at times (I didn’t think that Theo was capable of lethargy) and asking for me during the day.  One night this week he even woke up several times sobbing inconsolably but without any good explanation for what was wrong.

Finally tonight we heard exactly what Theo has been up to in his brain.  First a bit of background:  Theo’s verbal development was, for a long time, far slower than that of Thomas’.  We try very hard not to directly compare our children – they are both clearly smart but also very different people and I don’t expect them to develop in the same way.  We also know that Thomas, who was speaking in complex paragraphs by age two is not a “typical” data point to compare to.  However, around age two we (and our family doctor) began to become more concerned with Theo’s verbal skills (his receptive language and ability to understand a follow a rather complicated set of instructions – when he wants to, of course – has always been excellent).  At that time Theo had a great deal of trouble pronouncing certain consonants and had a very limited vocabulary.  We had a hearing evaluation done and just as I was asking around for good speech therapists something seemed to click and in a matter of a couple of months Theo’s speech caught up with that of his peers.  Theo is still less verbal and much more soft-spoken (which is actually rather nice) than his brother was or is and I still sometimes find it challenging to find out what is on his mind.  But then tonight happened.  We sat down to a family dinner of build-your-own burritos, Theo ate a few bites, and then as if he had a great secret to share announced “Tell a story!”  At first I thought he wanted me to tell him a story but then I realized he had a story to tell us.  And so he began, “One day, a man fell down.  He broke his water bottle.  He broke his fork.  He was sad.  It was a mess.  The end.”  There were several more stories about the man that fell down and then “One day, a man walk into his house.  His house fall down!  He build it again.  He paint it.  Then he walk in and it fall down again.  The end.”  Then we heard about “One day, a girl walk into her house.  There were bad guys!  She take out her gun and shoot them.  One bad guy, two bad guys, five bad guys! [Here making lots of shooting noises and holding up increasing numbers of fingers to show the bad guy body count].  Then all done and zero bad guys [and with that he collapsed all his fingers to show the number zero]!  The end.”  It was awesome.  I don’t think we’ve ever heard so many words from Theo in one sitting.  And I had no idea that he understood the concept of zero nor have I have seen him count on his fingers so accurately.  And while I don’t relish the idea of my two year old talking about shooting the bad guys, I have to love that in his story it was a girl doing the shooting.

Apparently all of Theo’s angst was related to his new found ability to speak in paragraphs and understand numbers in a more concrete way.  Yea for my Theodore!  I am so looking forward to all the stories he has to tell us.

It’s still a bit surprising to me how parenting comes in waves of challenge and ease.  I somehow didn’t anticipate that just like everything in life there are times when the stars seem to align and other times that it seems that the universe is conspiring against you.  Conveniently, a few weeks before their sister is due to arrive the boys seem to have both entered a period of downright reasonable and cooperative behavior.  Perhaps spurred by the realization that despite their age difference they are both “big kids” when compared to Baby Sister, they have turned into more than just brothers, they seem to be truly friends.   When we try to have one-on-one time with each boy Theodore while, certainly having fun and becoming more talkative (without someone constantly finishing his sentences) will proclaim that he “misses Thomas” and look a bit sad.  Thomas will ask what I think Theo is doing?  Whenever one of the boys finds or creates something interesting they now usually summon each other first (rather than me) with a gleeful “Follow me!”  I trail behind to figure out if the object of amazement is a dead beetle or perhaps pellets of raccoon poop.

Thomas, who is now reading actually storybooks on his own such as Widget and Hop on Pop, delights in reading Theo his bedtime stories.  A few nights ago, after a quiet few minutes spent reading stories on the couch, I got up and as I walked away saw Thomas put his arm around Theo and then heard Thomas softly say “I love you Theo.”  The  next morning as I struggled to wake up I heard both boys emerge from their room.  I expected Theo to come and pounce on me but instead Thomas guided him to the bathroom where I heard, “Theo we need to go potty…Here let me take off your diaper…Now sit down on the potty…Good!  You did it!…Now let’s pull up your pants.” Not only is Theo now mostly potty trained, but for the times he is not (night time) his brother is helping to lead the way!  I couldn’t ask for more independence from a not quite five year old and a two and half year old.

Hearing the two of them interact with such care and kindness is one of the absolute highlights of parenting.  When I found out that Theodore was a boy at 19 weeks pregnant I literally cried so hard that I had to leave in the middle of my doctors appointment to go home and sob.  Not because I was disappointed that Theo was a boy but because I was terrified that having two brothers close in age meant that we were doomed to a lifetime of aggression, competition, and animosity between the two of them.  I don’t know what the future holds, but I don’t worry at all any more about the boys relationship as children and later as adults.  Although they are still so young, they fight (often physically) on a daily basis, and they know how to push the other’s buttons like no one else ever will, I see such fierce loyalty and caring for one another that I wholeheartedly believe that they have set a foundation for a good relationship for the rest of their lives.  With baby sister arriving in a few weeks I puzzle over how exactly to get three kids in and out of car seats smashed in the back of a Prius and I contemplate private schools and then multiply that number by three and practically fall into a coma but I am not worried about sibling rivalry and relationships.  It is such a nice feeling to have.