Higher Highs, Lower Lows

…you find the second spider in three weeks crawling around inside your current bra.  You know, the nursing bra that has gone from pristine white to a terrifying shade of grey since you first bought it.  The one you wear because it feels so much better than your old normal bras – more like a gentle hug than a poky punishment.  The one that apparently attracts spiders to call it home, causing you to yelp, jump, and flail like a psychopath in front of your neighbors while casually checking the mail.

That one.

From the archives.

I have a dear friend who finds acronyms particularly hilarious, so I’d like to start this post with a giant

OMG.

We are leaving for Idaho to visit the grandparents tomorrow and have I packed one single item for the trip?  No.  Have I folded clean laundry from several days ago which has accumulated in a gruesome pile at the foot of our bed?  No.

What, pray tell, have you been doing then, Jaime?  That’s an excellent question, beloved reader.  Try this on for size: Seabass has stopped napping.  YEAH.

It all started about three weeks ago with a missed nap here and a missed nap there.  Pretty soon, there were two missed naps right on top of each other, and then three.  And then Seabass’ name changed to Mr. No-Nap-Grumpy-Pants and I had to up my dosage of antidepressants, just to make mental ends meet.

Fellow mothers, I ask you: Is there anything more glorious, more necessary to sustaining sanity, more indulgent, and more downright expected than an afternoon nap from a toddler???  Because the world takes all types of kids, I know that some of you will say your child has never taken naps, or doesn’t need a nap, or whatever.  But for the rest of us – the vast majority of us – getting a nap from our kids feels as good as a deep tissue massage or glass of wine.  My friend Ginger calls it her chance to “smooth out the wrinkles in my mind.”  I have really clung to that description.

Especially, now that the naps are fewer and farther between.  Oh, and that’s not all: the nighttime sleep is a mess too.  One night, in the middle of a screamfest at 3am, Jake rolled over and groaned, “Email the consultant.  I don’t care what it costs.  Just get answers from her.”

I wish I could say that the consultant solved all of Seabass’ sleep problems, that I have had a good night’s rest and a couple hours of smooth-brain-time every day ever since.  But no.  Much as I love Deb the sleep consultant, her advice hasn’t quite panned out.  The fact that child sleep is a cycle in which bad nighttime sleeps infects the daytime sleep and vice-versa has become like a torturous SAT question that has no right answer.  If I put Seabass to bed at 5pm (the earliest recommended time for seriously sleep-deprived kiddos), he wakes up at 5:30am, if not before.  Then he’s exhausted by late morning, but I can’t put him down at 11am because then he’ll wake up at 1:30pm, which means bedtime has to be 5pm again, and then we’re back to square one.  So I do what Deb strongly recommends against, which is I kept Seabass up after a 5:30am wake-up time until noon, at which point he overtired and only slept for an hour and a half, and was back up and at ’em at 1:30pm.  Then I tried to extend his wake time some more to “wear him out” and didn’t put him down until 6:30pm.  Then he overtired again and woke throughout the night before permanently getting up at – what else? – FREAKING 5:30am.

Look.  I know how boring that last paragraph was, ok?  I’m bored just typing it.  But these are the kinds of thoughts I have to think when Seabass isn’t sleeping well because it affects every fiber of my being.  Even if I leave him in his crib and shut the door during supposed “nap time” (i.e. he’s wide awake), even if he’s happy and cooing in there, I can’t relax.  I can’t get work done.  I can’t take the edge off.  You may be thinking, So what if he’s awake?  Just let him be and do your own thing.

That’s good advice, except…if you are thinking that, I know you’re not a mother, because every mother understands that unless their child is asleep and dancing through dreamland, there is no shutting off.  It’s like a curse.

He’s asleep now, which is why there is anything of value to read on this post.

Jake and I watched the movie Inception for the third time last night, and I was once again moved by the fantastic film score by Hans Zimmer.  (I loved The King’s Speech and all, but I still feel that the Inception team – Zimmer in particular – was robbed at last year’s Oscars.  Just sayin.)

Anyway, I’ve had the main theme running through my head all day and decided to look it up.  But what good is such an epic theme as this without an epic tail to match?  Hence, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present: SEABASS SEE FOOD.  It is a tale of mashed potatoes and a silly little boy eating his Christmas Eve dinner.

Enjoy.

Grin

I already had this nagging feeling I wasn’t doing enough to keep Seabass’ teeth clean.  (Can we use toothpaste?  How often do we brush?  Is this just the practice round until he gets his real teeth?)  But then I saw it: A brown, dead molar.

He was in the swing at the park, feet dangling and mouth open wide with glee.  At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me.  That couldn’t be a dead tooth, I thought, but then he swung forward again with his mouth open, and my certainty faded.  Upon stopping his swing and prying his mouth open to look, I knew we were dealing with something serious.

A friend of mine once had to have her 20-month-old daughter’s tooth pulled because it already had a cavity.  Thoughts of a dentist’s chair cradling a sedated Seabass entered my mind.  And the expense.  I called Jake at work.

“Jake, Seabass has a dead, brown tooth.” [Beat.]  “Hello?!?!?”

“Yes I’m here.”

“Well? I mean, do we have dental insurance for him?”

“Uh, no. No we don’t.  Are you sure there’s something wrong with his tooth?”

[Exasperated.] “Yes I’m sure!”

“Did you touch it?”

“No.  Should I?”

“Yeah, touch it and see if he winces.”

I looked down at Seabass’ happy little face and asked him to sit still so I could touch his moss tooth.  The instant my finger made contact, something brown and slimy slid off.

Banana.  From breakfast.

“False alarm.”

No one has ever accused me of being easygoing.

What do you get when you combine a curious toddler, water, glass, electric lights, a daddy who’s anal about his hardwood floor, and a faulty Christmas tree stand?

The Horizontal Christmas Tree Incident (HCTI)

Actually, the scene I walked into this morning can’t be blamed on Seabass.  He was an innocent bystander.  No, this was the fault of our pathetically underperforming Christmas tree stand: You know, the one we bought for something like $0.75 ten years ago at a Rite Aid in Berkeley, swearing we’d buy a “real” one next year and next year and next year?  Yup, that’s the one.

While what we’re calling The Horizontal Christmas Tree Incident (HCTI) wasn’t technically Seabass’ fault, he sure managed to make clean-up impossible.  Try asking a 19-month-old little boy to sit down and watch as you sweep up shards of glass and glittery water (from the shattered snow globes ornaments, natch), and you’ll get the picture.

Our friendly neighborhood disease-spreader.

Seabass puked for the first time the other night.  It was late at night – all we heard was a cough and then a scary choking sort of sound coming from his room.  Sure enough, he was on his back ralphing up the pasta he’d eaten for dinner, and…well, sort of swallowing it again.  Needless to say, he was a little disturbed.  So was I.

After I removed his wet pajamas and wiped his precious face free of barf, I held him in the rocking chair while Jake stripped the bed and remade it.  (Thank God for a loving husband who willingly shares the burden of parenting, even at 2 AM on a weeknight.)  As Seabass settled down in my arms, I caught a glance of a mouse scurrying across the floor, down the hall and into the kitchen.

What is this, medieval England?  Vomit, vermin…what’s next?  Scabies?

Setting: Baileyana Winery in San Luis Obispo’s Edna Valley

Time: Sunset

Backstory: The company I work for recently acquired some new staff members, so we needed some new group photos for our website.  Instead of hiring a professional photographer as we’ve done in the past, we went with a friend who had a nice camera and a little spare time.  I warned my colleagues that I had no childcare coverage for the shoot, so Seabass would have to come with me.  Expecting him to be a flaming nightmare, I was shocked that he was contented to munch Chardonnay grapes and observe our shoot from a picnic table.  Before everyone arrived, the photographer tested the light on shots of me and Seabass while my colleague Chanae made faces at him.  The result is a photo that encapsulates what it’s like to be mama to a precious boy of 18 months.

I don’t know what it is about the drive home from Thanksgiving at Grandma and Grandpa’s mountain cabin.  Maybe it’s the fact that Seabass has been so spoiled from all the attention over the holiday, or that our minds have grown weak from all the overindulgence.  Whatever the reason, it is now an official tradition that we make a pit stop somewhere in Southern California and look as much like a circus as possible.  Keep your eyes peeled for our show at any fast food joint between Calabasas and Oxnard on the Sunday after Thanksgiving each year.  You won’t want to miss it.

I went into the In-N-Out Burger to pee and wash my hands of traveling grime while Jake stayed behind with the truck.  You see, we borrowed a friend’s truck to haul back a dining table and chairs we inherited.  Since we had the truck, Jake decided to load up on some other fun items like his dad’s old belt sander and hand truck. All of these were rather precariously secured with duct tape and dental floss in the truck bed, so someone had to stay behind wherever we stopped.  When I returned, the child I had dressed for mountain snow just that morning was stripped down to nothing but baby cowboy boots and a diaper.  Welcome to California, land of diverse weather and freaky road-tripping families.

I recently came across a recipe for Tater Tot Tacos.  Yup, you heard me right.  Tater Tot Tacos.

It’s from a website called “Moms Who Think.”  Always trying to keep the dinner hour fresh with new ideas, I sent the link along to Jake with a note to tempt him:

Guess what’s for dinner….

His response:

Don’t even.

And this is on a site called Moms who Think?  Think what?

Now, I’m sure someone put a lot of time and effort into drumming up ideas for quick and easy dinners that moms can use throughout the week.  I’m all for quick and easy – having kids necessitates it, and I appreciate the recipe author’s care in considering my busy schedule.

But this is not a “win.”  Please, Moms Who Think, take this one back to the drawing table, for all of our sakes.

I have a persistent cough that is sucking my will to live.

Okay, wait. It's not quite THIS bad. And by the by, what the heck is going on in this scenario? It's not so much a cough as a rocket launching out of his throat.

Seabass, thankfully, never got this cough.  He is running circles around me lately, especially in the morning.  He wakes up fresh and ready to pummel the snot out of the day while I am dragging along after having been up all night coughing.

Jake isn’t feeling tippy-top either, but he gets to take Nyquil for it while I, the still-nursing-mom, am toughing it out with some all-natural so-called medicine crap that does nothing.

It was pretty funny, actually.  I went up to the pharmacy window at Rite Aid and asked if I could take such-and-such medicine while still nursing.  The pharmacist said, “Hold on, let me get my book.”  When she came back, she was flipping through a little book about breastfeeding-safe drugs.

“Yup, that one’s okay,” she said.  “I can tell because it has a little boobie and a thumbs-up next to it in my book.”  She showed me the page for verification.  Sure enough, there were lots of entries with little boobies and thumbs-up.  Glad to know it’s that sophisticated.

Speaking of me nursing still: I have lately received a couple of comments along the lines of “Isn’t Seabass a little old to be breastfeeding?”  Despite the fact that I keep my breastfeeding private at home, it still comes up from time to time for whatever reason.  I suppose I’ve just never thought of a reply to the question “Isn’t he a little old?” so my default response has been one of defensiveness (me? defensive? shocking!):

“In Europe, people breastfeed until their kids are, like, twenty-five!”

“Breastfed kids are super smart!”

“It’s the only thing I can do to calm Seabass down!”

And that last one is absolutely true.  I spent my first night away from home last weekend for a work event in Monterey.  When I walked in the door after having been gone for 24 hours, I anticipated a big smile, a slobbery kiss, and major snuggles from Le Seabass Extraordinaire.  But instead, the first thing he did was gesture like he was furiously milking a cow – the universal sign for “milk.”  He couldn’t even look at my face.  It was just “YOU. BOOB. NOW.”

The night away was nice, but my cold was blossoming, so I didn’t much feel like wine tasting.  But work is work (like I have any right to complain!) and those wines needed drinking.  After a three-hour tasting and a five-hour dinner that included four bottles of wine, my head felt like it was caving in.  Of course, the part of my first night away that I was most excited about was sleeping in, reading the paper in bed, and drinking coffee the next morning.  My male readers will wince to discover that I paid $24 for a bran muffin and a cup of coffee from room service – $24! – but it was worth every penny.  Treats like that don’t come along too often when you’re a mommy.  So zip it.

And happy Thanksgiving!