Cat's Parenting Journal

Saturday, May 07, 2005

Among the lies I tell my kid...

Maybe lie is the wrong word.

When Otter is settling into bed, he often finds he desperately needs a particular stuffed animal or doll. Plaintive cries of "Lulu! Lulu!" or "CHAH-lie Dohhg!" suddenly issue forth from the crib after we (by which I mean me or G or both) hope we have gotten him all comfy and ready to sleep.

Or sometimes he wants a particular comfort shirt or blanket. ("PURR-ple one! PURR-ple one!") (Did I mention purple is his favorite color?)

Now, ideally, G or I would reach over to the bin of stuffed animals and produce Otter's latest requested love object. However, given that anything Otter really wants is something he's likely to have been playing with, and thus to have left just about anywhere--usually, it seems, underneath or behind something--the requested object is often not immediately apparent. The bin of animals is full of the ones he hasn't played with recently.

So sometimes, either after looking in vain, or more often, after deciding in about two nano-seconds that I don't know offhand where the love object of the evening is, I will say:

"I'm sorry, Otter, Charlie Dog is on an adventure. Here's Milo--or Bumpe, or Hat Bunny, or Sophie the Hippo" (not to be confused with Sophie the Rabbit, both named by Otter, both of whom jingle).

And Otter will say "BENN-ture," and I will say, "yes, Charlie Dog is on an adventure. We can see him tomorrow."

Some of this is, I would argue, smart (or at least time-effective) parenting: Otter has learned to be fairly accepting of a range of comfort objects. And fairly tolerant of small disappointments.

Some of it is bedtime laziness on my part; I don't want to rummage through everything, including the laundry, the bedding, and the car, in search of something.

Divide it up as you like.

Friday, May 06, 2005

What Hallmark leaves out: thoughts on parenting and falling/being in love

As Mother's and Father's Day get closer, as well as G and my wedding anniversary, as well as Otter's second birthday, I keep thinking about the Hallmark approach to how love should be.

It always seemed to me that the myth was that you'd find that "perfect" person and they'd somehow "complete" you; meaning, I guess, that you were incomplete without him/her.

Parenting myths aren't that different; people who are childfree (by choice or not) are supposedly missing an essential piece of life.

Well, I think that's crap. Yes, I adore being a parent (most of the time) and love being a partner (pretty much all of the time).

But that means giving up lots of other stuff. I'd have much more time to read, time to cook, time to SLEEP, if I didn't have a kid. I'd have the freedom to travel (assuming I could become far more fiscally smart than I am) and explore the world in very different ways if I were single.

If I didn't have Otter, I would've been off to visit my friend in Staten Island sometime in the past two years, instead of spending my nights ready to soothe the child when he wakes and my early mornings breastfeeding him. If I didn't have Otter, or even if I didn't have my partner, I'd probably have finished my degree already and would have a professional position that paid a true living wage. I'd have made it to NY to meet my friend that I met online and her partner and her child, who is now a toddler and who I've never seen in real life.

Of course, I also might not have many of my met-online friends, the ones whose combination of infertility and progressive values brought us all together for support and research and comfort whiel we negotiated the struggle to get from an infertility diagnosis to something else.

It's all trade-offs. I won't ever know what exciting things I won't do because I'm a parent, or a partner, or both. And that's okay: I can more than live with that. I chose these paths, and I'm happy with them, even knowing that there are costs, some foreseen and some unforeseen.

But it's just silly to act as if this set of choices is the essential one, as if people who aren't in partnerships or who don't have children (or both) are somehow missing something but I'm not missing anything.

Of course I'm missing things--starting with a lot of sleep and free time, but not just that. It feels disrespectful to me to buy into the Hallmark-style myths that suggest my life is somehow completed by parenting and partnership, disrespectful to the complicated give and take exists in any life. It's not as simple as saying "now I am fully me."

No, I'm not. Now I'm me-who-I-was with some things subtracted and some added. I'm less professionally successful (though not yet less ambitious; still working on getting those in sync), I'm not as attentive and considerate a friend, I'm not as aware and active in the larger public-sphere political world.

I also feel more settled, less emotionally up and down, less purely self-centered and more centered on my immediate family. (My intimates might argue with those characterizations, but it feels that way to me.)

That said, today I was reading an advice column in theWashington Post online, and the columnist, Carolyn Hax, said about falling in love:

If the only way to get his attention is to be perfect, then a big display of cool perfection wins you the chance to be under constant pressure to remain perfect lest you lose his attention again. Whoopee.

The right person for you is someone you feel no need to impress because you're so comfortable that you forget yourself -- and you have no need to impress the wrong person. Dance badly, eat spinach, enjoy.

That feels much more true to me than the Hallmark version (though this mini-excerpt makes it sounds as if there is one "right person" for each of us--and I'm not sure that's a useful idea; some of us have many right people, some of us are right on our own--some both.) Being with G, having Otter, doesn't make me any more perfect (as G would, I'm sure, testify), doesn't make everything all wine and roses and cherubic babies glowing and smiling in the bathtub. In truth, I don't much like wine or roses, and, as our bathtub is not quite as clean as it could be and our local tap water reeks of chlorine due to water purity issues, so toddler baths are not a daily affair "Chez Cat".

But I am free to dance joyfully in our kitchen (badly or otherwise) whenever I like, in front of G and Otter, and often do. Having G and Otter there makes it more likely that I want to dance and sing and do laundry and wake up in the morning occasionally cranky but still glad my family is here (even when Otter is talking loudly about trains at five am).

This is the right life for me, not because I couldn't be happy with some other life, but because I choose to be happy with this one. (Of course, being a poverty-stricken single mom with a serious health issue isn't a life I'd say I'd be so happy in, and having G and Otter and also having somehow achieved serious financial security plus some extra cash would be a nice change from this.)

It's not that things couldn't be better, or that I coudn't imagine worse. It's that the mythic version of happiness doesn't seem to me as rich and interesting as my own messy life.

Maybe that doesn't fit easily on a greeting card, but it works for me.

You can never get enough

Time never lies heavy on Otter's hands. He can always do one of his favorite things:

  1. Run in circles around the living room giggling saying something that sounds like "hiccup" or (bizarrely) f**k-y.
  2. Take everything off the second shelf of the living room toy-laden bookcase and cram himself into the space he's made.
  3. Make tunnels out of books opened and stood on end, put his Fisher Price Little People in cars and send them through, and back, and through, and back.
  4. Pull down the yellow plastic bucket of his socks, dump them out on the floor, stick his feet in the bucket, and sit down, saying "Fit!" until he overbalances and falls over.
  5. Play his wooden drums using two of the plastic knives from his dish set as drumsticks.
  6. "Read" his Maisy train book to himself.
  7. Empty his sippy cup drop by drop onto the rug (preferably while his parent-on-duty is otherise occupied), then say "uh-oh! MESS!" and ask for a washcloth to wipe it up.
  8. Pile all the socks from the laundry on his kidsize green armchair.
  9. Search the floor for stray cereal from times he's had snacks in the living room; find one, say "taste it?" and pop it in his mouth.
  10. Push his Fisher Price Little People into the tubes of his Tomy Ball Party toy, so that they slide down the tubes.
  11. Pretend to cut up all his pretend food with his dish-set plastic knives.
  12. Point to indeterminate (to us) things high upon the DVD bookshelf and ask "what's that?". Repeatedly.
  13. Wave at his shadow (must have appropriate lighting conditions to play this one)
  14. Lean on the gate to his father's home office and ask for something he thinks is in there. whether it is or not... the big guitar, the music toy, or, most recently, a mysterious dog.
The dog is mysterious because, to our knowledge, there is not (and never has been) any dog in Greg's office, stuffed animal style or live. However, to keep the peace, after telling Otter repeatedly that there was no such dog, I finally told him, no, he could not have the dog in the office, because the dog was sleeping.

Don't judge me until you've answered a toddler's questions honestly at least twenty times in a row with no signs of progress.

Sunday, May 01, 2005

11 things Otter especially likes to eat

  • banana
  • spinach pancakes
  • raw red onion
  • lemon
  • cottage cheese pancakes
  • fizzy water (seltzer)
  • steel cut oatmeal with golden raisins and soy milk
  • pretzels
  • strawberries
  • plain yogurt with applesauce and rice cereal
  • olive spread

Sorry for the interruption

Several people have asked us for ideas for birthday gifts for Otter's upcoming second birthday. I have fumbled in response and didn't have much in the way of suggestions. This of course is because the most honest answer is this child is beyond blessed, materially speaking, thanks to his many generous friends and family, and needs nothing. Plus our house is flat out overstuffed (our fault, not his, but we're working on it).

That said, for those of you who are asking, here's what he loves right now:

  • the alphabet,
  • counting (okay, yes, he skips eleven. G thinks Otter thinks it's seven again, and why include it twice? But otherwise he count count and gets lost somewhere between 14 and 18.)
  • books,
  • music,
  • and trains.
So he'd be likely to love:
  • any books you see that you like about any of those subjects
  • any music you love--we have some Dan Zanes and a couple kids' Putumayo CDs but not that much else in kids' music, or in jazz, ragtime, and world music, all of which he likes lots
  • any DVD (not videotapes as we have no VCR in the living room) about trains or music, especially nonfiction
We're avoiding Thomas the Train stuff (all the engines except one are boys! Bleah!) and we have lots of Sesame Street and Scholastic DVDs, so that's covered.

He has a lovely wooden train set (I think it's Brio) from his dad's mom's family, and his favorite part is the tunnel, of course. He's getting pretty good at assembling the track himself (better than I am, I think).

He has a wooden drum, a tambourine, a xylophone, and so on; he does love the kids' bongos at our local toy store--I think they might be Remo brand?

Because of the new small one on the way, even though Otter's approaching 2, it's easier if you avoid anything that says "choking hazard" or "small parts; not for children under 3."

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