The Winter When I Didn’t Completely Lose My Shit
Rowan slept through the night last night. This is not a drill. I repeat — Rowan slept through the night last night. This is the first time in many, many months that he has slept all the way through. On those occasions, my body was so used to waking up 29384029348 times in the night that I did not sleep well, anyhow.
Last night, I remember going to bed and I remember my alarm going off. I do not remember anything in between. I slept through the night for the first time in at least two years. If that keeps happening, I will be caught up on sleep sometime in 2019.
LOL NOPE NEVERMIND
I didn’t get a chance to finish writing this the other day. And now that “last night” is almost a week ago and the magic has not been repeated, thus far. Why do my kids refuse to sleep? Lorelei sleeps wonderfully now, but it took many years.
My best way of coping is laziness and a general lack of extracurricular activities for any of us. No lessons. Definitely no clubs. No standing scheduled anything. Until…
Help me, but I am now a girl scout mom
She has the uniform (I keep accidentally calling it a costume) and everything. Her first meeting was this past weekend and she is madly in love with the whole concept. I am madly in love with dropping my precious child off for an hour and a half every other week and getting some writing done. This will be good for her – she has friends in the patrol already, which will help ease her in – but I think it is going to involve some going outside of her comfort zone, which is not a place she is generally willing to go. One of the leaders is a friend and also a school psychologist, so I trust her ability to help L deal with the anxiety of those situations.
Tomorrow is the intake appointment with the person who will hopefully be Lorelei’s new therapist. I’m not sure there has ever been a child as eager to start going to therapy as Lorelei. She is asking me about it almost daily. Most nights, as we are cuddling at bedtime, I ask if she has anything she wants to talk about. This is a fantastic time for her to tell me about the things that are bothering her or to ask completely random questions — you just never know which it will be. The last couple of weeks she has alternated between wanting to hear every single thing I know about girl scouts and every single thing I know about therapy in general and her therapist, specifically.
I’m holding my own against winter
Seven days into February and I am still mostly my normal anxious but not overly depressed self, though sometimes little cracks of light get through and make me aware that there is definitely room for improvement. I am so grateful that this winter has not been that bad since it is also the winter when I have no therapist. Some combination of light box, a b-complex vitamin, 2k IUs of vitamin D, and the relative warmth of this season has come together into only a mild sense of dread. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I am enjoying it, or even that I am generally happy — but I have spent less time this year considering what it would be like to just stay in bed for three months straight.
Rowan has entered the pain-in-the-ass stage of toddler-hood
I had forgotten about the stage where they are both very mobile and completely lacking in any self-preservation instincts or respect for the personal property of others. By which I mean, not trying to pull my computer off the desk onto his head 2809349028349230x per day. He has learned how to climb into the dining room chairs and he long ago learned to move objects around the house to use as a stool. So now he has effectively raised the “height of safety” by another six inches or so. This means he can get to the kitchen counters. Suddenly, I find myself having to remember to push knives all the way to the back and to use the back burners on the stove whenever possible.
We have also lost a big portion of what passed for a “pantry”… really it is a bookshelf / entertainment unit sort of deal. Rowan’s new favorite game is to pull things off the bottom few shelves and throw them violently to the ground.
He’s got lots of new words! Thank you, ear tubes! Off the top of my head, he can say nose, ear, shoe, book, up, milk, all done, more, cool, all right!, yay!, yeah!, nooooo, kitty, puppy, gentle, ow, uh uh, mama, daddy, and lots of other words that he will repeat, but not necessarily use by himself.
Oh. And “poopy.” The other night he came up beside me, pulled the back of my pants down, looked in, and asked, “Poopy? Poopy?”
I assume next on his list will be “damn it” and “oh for fuck’s sake.”
