Hokey pokey

Lately Otter is becoming more and more fluent in his singing and dancing. He still omits some words, but he has a beginning sense of rhythm and melody.

During the day at random times, and at night getting ready for bed, he often sings to himself: the ABC song, Ring Around the Rosie, and (my current favorite) the Hokey Pokey. When singing the Hokey Pokey, he likes to take a stuffed animal and make it act out the spinning around, just as with Ring Around the Rosie he makes the animal fall down.

It's hard not to smile when you have a toddler dancing in your living room with a stuffed blue-green-yellow cow clutched to him singing "hokey pokey... turn self around... all about!"

The perils and joys of daycare and home video

Otter goes off to daycare five days a week so that I can revel in researching and writing my dissertation. Woohoo.

He loves his daycare, and on the weekends, I am sometimes a bit uncomfy when he asks for one of the kids or caregivers at his daycare. I'm thrilled that he's attached, pleased that he has those extra adults and kids in his life to care about and to care about him--but still it's a tiny bit insulting when after 24 hours of "just" Cat and G and Otter, he's clamoring for someone else.

Many days it's hard to let him go, hard to leave when I see him amongst the other kids. Many days--sometimes the same days--it's pleasing to get back home to a quiet empty house to start work. Today has been one of the days that I miss him madly.

My mother-in-law videotaped Otter on Mother's Day at her house, and then worked up the video with some editing software, adding a soundtrack and titles. In the 90 second or so video, Otter mainly wanders back and forth in his grandmother's living room, peering and calling up into the loft where his grandmother's cat Loki has retreated (smartly) to avoid close contact with the small toddler; in a few shots, Loki sits calmly bathing and looking down at Otter calling up to him.

So periodically all day when I've missed Otter too much, I pause in my work, load up the video on my screen, and watch it.

Then, I run it a couple more times, in a background window where I can't see it but I can hear his small voice saying, "Loki! Loki! Loki! Kitty! Loki! Up dere!" and giggling.

Otter clearly isn't the only one who loves repetition.

(and P.S.: thanks, Joanne, for the lovely video.)

Repetition for Otter: bathtime

Part of what makes Otter happy (and me, too) is a sense of pattern, routines that we follow. If you haven't noticed, I'm sort of boring that way. I like to do stuff I like over, and over, and over. This makes for someone fairly suited for monogamy, home-body-ness, and parenting a toddler. If there is anything a toddler loves more than doing something three or four times in a row, it is doing the same thing ten or twelve times in a row--even, in a pinch, if it's something the toddler really loves, thirty or forty times in a row.

Or maybe it's not all toddlers. Maybe other small children crave variety not repetition in their daily life. Not Otter.

Last night, while bathing him, G filled a plastic beach-toy cup with water, as he slowly raised it a foot in the air, he said, "it's com-PLETE-ly full, it's com-PLETE-ly full, it's com-PLETE-ly full, it's comPLETE-ly full..." then, while dumping the water out quickly, "OHHHH... not anymore."

Otter found this delightful, so delightful that he said "again, Daddy... again?"

So G repeated his fill-raise-dump-the-cup trick again, using the same words. Much laughter from Otter. "Again, again?" G repeated again.

Now, if I were truly to reproduce the bathing experience, I would cut and past that last paragraph about twenty times in a row. After a few paragraphs, you'd need to add in a soundtrack of G and I laughing too. With each repetition, Otter's delight and giggling increased.

We were only able to stop when we sang the Row Row Row Your Boat song three times (our cue to Otter that bathtime is ending), and then let him push the lever to drain the water from the tub, pulling up the duck-covered bathmat to watch and feel the water go away.

I suspect that during his next bath, no matter when that is, Otter will insist on the new "completely full---not anymore" game again.

And again. And again.

You get the picture.

Elephants have nothing on otters

Otter never forgets a request he's made. This morning, he was standing next to the bed with his drum, banging on it, and asked for a drumstick: a red drumstick.

In theory, we do have a red drumstick, a plastic one that goes with his piano/xylophone toy. He hasn't used that drumstick in weeks, and I have no idea where it is. I did know where a wooden drumstick was (on the kitchen counter in a jar of pens--organizational strategies at our house are as much pragmatic than logical: because the drumstick is a similar shape and will be visible in the pen jar, I will see it frequently and know where it is when Otter asks for it). So I told Otter that I would bring him back a plain wooden drumstick when I got him a clean cloth diaper from the living room diaper basket.

When I returned five minutes later with the diaper, Otter immediately looked up from his play with his father and said: "Drumstick!"

Oops, sorry, I went and got the wooden drumstick from the kitchen.

When I handed him the drumstick, he looked at me, made a displeased fussy cry, and said, "RED drumstick, RED drumstick."

Regular readers will know what I said: "The red drumstick is on an adventure, honey."

What I want to know is, will he keep this focused memory thing, where he can seem completely occupied with something else for quite a while--sometimes a whole day--and then immediately retrieve his requisite demand at the earliest moment when it can be fulfilled?

And if so, will this be a way for me to finally have a personal assistant who can keep track of all those details I forget?

Otter: the traveling child

Otter did very well in the car yesterday with G, sleeping large chunks of the time both en route to and from his grandmother's house.

Five minutes or so from home, he began to fuss. "Out of the car, out of the car, out of the car--MAMA--out of the car, out of the car."

He's mastering prepositions, or at least 'preposition', singular. I'm sure that was much comfort to G while he listened to the "out of the car" chant from the backseat.

Mmmm--lox, anyone?

Okay, I am truly grateful to be pregnant, and to be able to breastfeed. I do know that many many people would love to have those chances.

So please take this with that grain of salt.

If you include the time during which I have been 1) trying to get pregnant, 2) pregnant, 3) breastfeeding, and 4) breastfeeding and pregnant simultaneously, I have been avoiding various foods since mid-2001.

And, assuming I am lucky enough to breastfeed this new coming child for another couple years, I'll be avoiding ingesting anything that's unwise for my children to ingest for quite some time.

Throughout this time, I have given up:

• caffeine and thus real coffee--I know, you can have a cup or so a day, but I am just NOT good at having SOME coffee but not much... I am a coffee-binger. During my first pregnancy I refused to walk down the coffee aisle in the supermarket because the smell made me crave coffee, really really really crave coffee.
  
• virtually all alcohol--under five drinks in the past four years, all of them while not pregnant, though I was breastfeeding--not right at that moment, people, but in the general time frame
• any high-mercury fish--which as I am often unsure of the list means I eat fish pretty rarely
  
• virtually all tuna--as I can't ever remember which tuna is the safer one and I can't keep track of whether I took my prenatal vitamin in the past 24 hours, never mind how many OUNCES of tuna I ate in the past week.
  
• peanuts and peanut oil and peanut butter--as fetuses and breastfeeeding children who have a family history of any sort of allergies are thought to be at higher risk for peanut food allergies if they are exposed to peanut products in utero or vias breastmilk or anything else in the first three years of life)

And also, while I could eat the following while breastfeeding, I shouldn't while pregnant:

• soft cheeses... brie, goat cheese, blue cheese, feta cheese...
• smoked seafood
  

Sadly, as I didn't psychically know I'd get pregnant, I didn't spend the breastfeeding-but-not -pregnant months eating as many types of soft cheese as I could as often as I could.

I think at the hospital post-delivery I'm going to ask G to bring me a full deli-style plate of his bread-machine oatmeal bread and an assortment of soft cheeses and smoked salmon.

And the day I stop breastfeeding, sometime in 2007 or 2008--assuming that we don't miraculously conceive a third child in my forties--I'm going to have a cosmopolitan with a peanut buuter sandwich. And I'll chase it down with another cosmopolitan.

Then for a week I'm going to have a tuna sandwich every single day. Maybe two a day.

Woohoo, I'm clearly a force to be reckoned with, huh? Just wild, I am.

They grow up so fast

Today, when we told Otter that he and G would be going off to see Grammy Jo (and her cat Loki) and Great Grampy Z and Great Nana, and that it would be a LONG car trip and that Mama wouldn't go....

...my child let me put on his socks and his purple shoes and then went over to the gate and said "Go. Go. Go! GO!" and called for G.

He waved goodbye cheerily from the bottom of the stairs, held by G, with his Milo purple baby doll clutched to his chest and two Fisher Price Little People, one in each hand (both with mustaches).

Then, when they got to Grammy Jo's (over a two hour drive), G called to tell me they'd gotten there safe, and I asked to speak to Otter on the phone.

Now, the other night, when G went out to friends for dinner, G called me and when I handed the phone to Otter, he heard G's voice, pressed the phone to his head, and giggled continuously for several minutes at hearing his dad say hello, then didn't want to reliquish the phone to me. He kept trying to yank it out of my hands to listen to his dad again.

So today, when G said to him: do you want to come say hi to Mama? what I did not expect was for Otter to say: No.

At least I know he wasn't too discomfited by my absence.

Oh yeah sure... it'll be easy

G points out that I "outed" myself as pregnant when I noted here that we'd appreciate toys safe for small infant/toddlers to mouth... so here's what we've been thinking about lately.

G has been worried that this is going to be very very very hard. He is more worried than he was the first time around waiting for Otter. I think this is because, when you have zero kids, you know (and if you don't, EVERYONE, including strangers in restaurants) will tell you that it will be harder and more work than you can imagine. (People actually appear to take great joy in telling you this. But that's a whole separate entry.)

But once you have one kid, you do see how much work a kid is, and now, as we see Otter moving through toddlerhood and we search our sleep-deprviation-dimmed memories of his infanthood, we realize: oh my. Oh my. All that AND a toddler at the same time. (and if you are G, you think: ACK! Help! How on earth will we manage?)

However, if you are me, you think:

hey, what the hell. My dissertation will be done by then, or over, one way or another. I'd rather juggle a baby and a toddler than a dissertation and a toddler.

I'd even prefer the baby plus toddler plus teaching, though I confess I perform all that beautifully when I went back to teaching--first part-time online when Otter was six weeks old, then "fulltime" (not fulltime at campus, but in theory forty hours a week of work) for the school year when Otter was three months old.This time I am praying we can scrape by enough for me to stay out of paid work for three months. (And hey, if any of my readers can somehow bring US maternity/paternity leave into line--or even vague proximity of--the parenting leave policies of the rest of the world, please, feel free!)

I am not sure this is an argument everyone would agree with, but personally I think I prefer the uncertainty and work of parenthood to the uncertainty and work of writing 200 or so pages of stuff that I pray a committee of professors (all non-parents!) will accept as deserving of a doctorate.

Of course, I have only parented one child at a time. Perhaps parenting two will be so radically different that I will realize how woefully wrong I was in my own preferences.

I just can't get all freaked out by it. I have friends and family now who have recently had their second children, and some say: not as hard an adjustment as the first--while others say that two are way more than twice the work.

I end up back where I was when we had Otter:

• I LIKE doing laundry (one of the household chores I somehow find very satisfying),
  
• I am way psyched to re-experience happy relaxing nursing chemicals (which, if you're wondering, GO AWAY when you're pregnant, even if you keep nursing, as I have--but they come back when the baby comes!)
• I like my family and my in-laws, so family visits are a plus
• I cocoon quite well, so not going out much is fairly copacetic by me
• I enjoy the long long long hours (eight plus hours a day!) of nursing a newborn when all you can reasonably be expected to do is sit there and lactate--and if you can figure out how to hold a book or reach the Tv/DVD remote at the same time, no one can call you lazy--at least no one I'd listen to
• I enjoy taking little tiny naps while the baby sleeps.
• I have fabulous daycare for Otter that will continue as long as we can afford it, probably cutting back to part-time for money reasons sometime--thought NOT immediately--after the baby is born
• I have a toddler who thinks helping is fun--helping to hand me towels for folding from the laundry pile and helping by carrying clean cutting boards from the dishwasher to his father to put away, that type of stuff. It's stuff that's not lots of help in getting more things done but is lots of help in prepping for when he gets older and in keeping him occupied while we get things done.
• I have a partner who does TONS at home and is a great cook and who makes me laugh.
• I like small children.
• I think Otter is the coolest toddler in the world today (just as my nephew is the coolest preschooler in the world today). Sorry, but if your kid is cooler than they are, I'm just not objective enough to see it.)
• I love kids' books and kids' music and kids' shows... not the schlock-y Power Rangers ilk, but good quality stuff
• I'm used to my house being a mess (this is KEY: my ability to relax and ignore chaotic domestic clutter; no dust and pile phobia here or I'd already be locked up somewhere industrially lit and disinfected)
  
• I have had disrupted sleep for going on two decades now due to PTSD.

I really believe that my low low standards for my own non-parenting household achievement is key here. All those stay at home moms and dads out there who think they need to have clean and organized homes are just anxiety attacks and guilt fits waiting to happen. If my family and I mostly eat food that is fairly healthy and satisfying and our home isn't actually a biohazard, I feel fairly content--provided, of course, that I have no additional non-domestic professional repsonsibilities.

Which brings me back to that dissertation thing.

I missed my in-laws Mother's Day celebration today (G and Otter went without me), and stayed home and did research for over four straight hours for my dissertation. Now tonight I'll try and write more, then write and read more tomorrow. I should go work now. Bye--

(but I still think a newborn, even with poopy diaper, is a heck of a lot more soothing work than squinting at PDF files of education articles and working to fit them into the lit review chapter of my dissertation.)

You can wait and hear if I'm wrong in August.