Four Hours with a Three-Year-Old

For about four hours today, I tried to write down every question the Dragon asked me (as I simultaneously tried my best to answer said questions). In addition to the 54 questions below, there were about two dozen plain old “Why”s that I didn’t bother to write down.

Besides providing a peek inside the energetic and curious mind of a preschooler, I think this list also serves as the basis for a good explanation of why parents are so tired all the time. Because, as any parent knows, the 75+ questions I fielded in a four-hour period – not all of them simple by any means – were really just the running commentary to the actual activities of the day: cleaning the kitchen, making lunch, doing prep work for dinner, cleaning up after lunch; playing puppeteer, shooting baskets, building an imaginary boat, helping engineer sandcastles; reading books, coaching lowercase letters, helping with the potty, changing clothes at least twice … and so on.

Anyway, for the record, here are the questions I answered from about 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. today:

1. Mama, what does “giving up” mean?
2. Can I watch Word World?
3. Can I have a pancake, and can you put it on the small table?
4. How many sides does a square have?
5. How do we spell “stage”?
6. Do we need to go shopping today?
7. Is there coffee or water in there [i.e. in the coffee pot]?
8. Mama, can you tell me a story?
9. What’s the little boy’s name [in the story]?
10. Mama, why the magical deer ran away before the boy could say thank you [in the story]?
11. Do we sit on this [wedge pillow]?
12. How do we sit on it?
13. Are these clothes clean [in the washing machine]?
14. Can you get my kitty stuffed animal for me?
15. Mama, wouldn’t it be more fun if we had four arms instead of two arms?
16. Are you packing up sandwiches to go to the park?
17. I forgot my list of what I need to bring [on his imaginary boat ride]. Can you bring it to me?
18. Can you come here?
19. Can you sit by my boat and my basketball so I know it’s there?
20. Can you write “basketball” on my list?
21. Mama, could you find me a crayon to color my list so it doesn’t wash away?
22. Could you keep a watch over my stuff while I go to work?
23. Are you done making our peanut butter sandwiches yet?
24. Why you’re having salad?
25. Where did that spider come from?
26. Why is it dead?
27. Want to play in the sandbox with me?
28. Would you like a toy to play with?
29. Did I scrape you, Mama?
30. Why did you find that book [Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears] when you were a little girl?
31. Who was the librarian?
32. What was her name?
33. Why Daddy doesn’t hear us right now?
34. Did he close the door?
35. Why he doesn’t open both doors so he can hear us?
36. What does “focus” mean?
37. Mama, why everything looks different from far away?
38. What’s that kind of bug?
39. Where did it go?
40. Is that enough water to make a sand castle?
41. Why is water coming out from underneath the cup?
42. Can I put a little bit sand in the pond?
43. Why my swimming suit is too small?
44. Is it June?
45. What’s a month?
46. Why I can’t stand in the sand table?
47. What are ankles?
48. Can I watch Word World?
49. Is this dinner?
50. What’s an hour?
51. Mama, how high do you jump when Big Grandpa sneezes?
52. Why are you biting your popsicle?
53. Why do we need sun and rain to make a rainbow?
54. Can I sit on your lap, Mama?

After that last one, he crawled up in my lap and we both fell asleep.

Christmas 2008

My goodness it has been a long time since one of us entertained the Internets with our wit. So in order to kick off 2009 with a bang I give you these:

Fist off is a little video which illustrates how our family comes together to work out a problem.



This next short feature shows us taking advantage of the Seattle Blizzard of Aught Eight. The Dragon was very sad when the snow finally melted, the adults were mixed. OK, only Alan was sad when the snow melted...



More to come in 2009.

Tension of Opposites, Family Style

Another recycled post by Kathy from an earlier blog of ours. I think these are too good to leave fallow there so I brought it over here. From April 2007.

Although it was only two years ago, my Master’s degree in depth psychology now seems like a foggy lifetime ago. But one phrase from those days keeps tracking me – quick, elusive, grainy, like wolves in shadow.

Tension of opposites.

There was a time when I could have told you what exactly Carl Jung meant by this delicious phrase and expounded on the nuances of psychological thought that have spun out from the extreme truth of those three small words.

But now, instead, we are living it, Alan and I and the little dragon.

It has something to do with the intolerability of having two contradictory feelings or drives at the same time, for example needing to be financially responsible while wanting to be lazy and selfish and spendy, or needing to be socially normal while wanting to rip your clothes off and dance in your front yard during a thunderstorm. These seemed like reasonable examples of tension at the time.

I had no idea.

It seems our entire life since the little dragon came is one colossal Tension of Opposites – not those fleeting id moments when you know you should be heeding the call of the superego, but pervasive, insidious opposites you learn to live with long-term.

The most obvious is the tension between working and parenting. We traipse off to work every day in a tall building with windows that don’t open and interact with adults who stand upright and don’t cry when it’s naptime (though they might want to) – but we both long with all our bones and blood to be spending the day instead with our toddling, blabbering, chortling boy, draped in sunshine and mud and oatmeal and even, yes, as today, poop gushing up out the backside of his diaper. What we do clashes so violently with what we wish to be doing that we find ourselves trapped in the prison of opposites.

Another such tension is our persistent effort to balance the sudden triangle of need we are faced with: to be together as a family, to be together as a couple, to be alone. How very much we love the little dragon and want to spend time with him; how very much we love our marriage and want to spend time with each other; and how very much we long for time to ourselves, to attend to that elusive I who seems so neglected now. Time has become such a precious commodity that I sometimes feel ashamed that I’m looking forward to the dragon’s naptime, or hoping Alan will have other plans so I can just be with myself for a while.

But Alison McGhee, author of the children’s book Someday, hit the bullseye about the Tension of Opposites, Family Style, in an interview with NPR (March 13, 2007):

Once you have a baby, you’re filled with … overwhelming love and you’re also filled with fear, all the time, because you love something so much. And maybe [writing the book] was a way for me to understand what John Keats called “negative capability” – that ability to hold contradictory thoughts in your mind simultaneously. You know: I love this child more than anything, I want to keep this child safe. In order to keep this child safe, this child needs the strength to go live her own life fearlessly.

Aah, McGhee hit on the most frightening tension of opposites for parents – the real tension at the core of being a mama or a daddy: the constant, excruciating coexistence of unfathomable love on one hand and unbridled fear on the other.

Because from the moment of conception, your primary energy changes. Suddenly every breath is laced with The Big Question: What if something happens to him? Followed immediately by the obvious: And how can I stop it? Followed immediately by the much less obvious: I can’t.

This is the Tension of Opposites, Family Style.

I can’t stop the course of the little dragon’s life. He is here, subject to this world. Already, at 19 months, his life is his own, not mine. Most decisively not mine. And yes, I can plug electrical sockets with little plastic thingies and lock the front gate when we’re playing outside and cut his hot dogs so small he could inhale them through his nose if he wanted to (and believe me, he sometimes appears to want to). But wanting desperately to control what happens to him runs right up against the reality of the naked opposite, which is that I can’t. I can’t control, and that is heartbreaking and frustrating and scary.

And yet ultimately it tempers the I that I think is getting neglected but, I realize, is really just being run through the wringer in a way that therapy could never hope to do in 50 minutes a week.

Happy Father's Day!

Alan and I met in 1995 and began our relationship under rather unusual circumstances -- we lived two days' travel apart in a third-world country and had to ride in clankety buses with chickens and sheep in order to see one another.

But despite the odd situations in which we sometimes found ourselves -- hiking eight hours round-trip in hundred-degree weather, for instance, to buy a plastic bag of moonshine through the side window of a mud house -- none was more surreal than the morning we found out we were going to be parents.

Until the day this photo was taken, after the Dragon had been in NICU for six days, and we finally got a chance to hold him.

I remember watching Alan carefully for signs of what he was feeling. The last time he'd held his son, the boy had turned purple. We still weren't out of the woods here, but things had definitely looked up. Though you can't see much of Alan in the photo, you can definitely see some relief, but more than that, unbridled joy in his expression.

Alan has fulfilled the promise of this ecstatic smile every day since this one. Seeing him with the Dragon -- whether they're playing, talking, cooking, walking, napping, gardening; whether Alan is comforting his son or teaching him or simply being with him -- has become one of the greatest joys of my life.

Sometimes I feel utterly humbled just to be able to witness the unfolding of their relationship. And in a world replete with stories of deadbeat dads and absentee fathers, their obvious love for and enjoyment of each other also heartens me to no end.

You're an amazing and talented dad, Alan. Thank you.

Bed Sores

Sometimes -- no, all the time -- I wonder where we went so horribly, horribly wrong.

Everyone else we know whose kid is 2 years and 9 months or thereabouts old has loooooong since conquered the sleep demons. But our kid, nooooo, our kid continues, at the mere suggestion of sleep, to put up blood-curdling screaming fights that leave the whole family angry, depleted and psychically sore. And probably the whole neighborhood on the phone to DCFS.

This doesn't happen every night, but frequently enough to let us know that it -- is -- not -- okay -- to leave him alone to fall asleep. So most nights we resignedly stay with him, rubbing his back and singing a lullaby until he drifts off 15, 30, 45 minutes later. We creep out of the room like we did at six months, 12 months, 18 months, barely breathing and hoping the floorboards don't creak. And wondering when the hell the torture is going to end.

We never believed in cry-it-out of the extinction type, and for the record we still don't, though I can't say it hasn't crossed our desperate minds. We have, however, made several attempts to "wean" him from us slowly, to help him learn to self-soothe, in the currently-most-recommended fashion. This almost worked, just once, when Alan went solo with the process for three weeks straight. But when we brought me back in to try it, WHAM!, back to square one, and it hasn't been so promising since.

Moxie has a great theory that crying causes some kids to increase tension and others to decrease it. In her view, the increasers generally don't respond well to cry-it-out because they get too overworked by crying to settle into sleep. The decreasers, on the other hand, need a bit of fussing before they can doze off, and many of them get too stimulated by the very things that soothe the increasers: nursing, patting, lullabies.

Moxie had 99 comments on her post positing this theory. The vast majority were from parents saying, "Thanks so much! You've unlocked a great mystery for me! Now I get why X or Y solution didn't work for us!"

Alan and I, however, had different views on it. After two hours of trying to get the Dragon to sleep tonight -- one hour of me patting and singing to the Dragon; one hour of Alan going in and out as he (the Dragon) cried -- I described what I'd been reading.

Then, I said definitively, "He's an increaser. He only settles down with lullabies and patting; whenever we've let him cry a bit, he gets more worked up. It's hellish."

"No, no," said Alan, "he's a decreaser. Every time I go back in, he's settled down a little bit more."

I looked at him like he was an alien, then realized that our intelligence is completely fucked up. We need a spy -- some objective spook to lurk in a corner and take notes while we beg, bribe and cajole the Dragon to sleep, so we can get our story straight, so we can grow a real solution, so we can finally have some time to share work gossip, watch our backlog of Lost and fall into bed at 10:00, tired but perhaps finally sane once again.

Two New Things

As regular readers know - wait, do we have regular readers? - we have written about our sleep issues before. We now have a whole new website dedicated to kids, parents and sleep.

The Children's Sleep Project

Built in part to act as a clearing house for information that we found scattered all over the internet, we thought there need to be a place to try to bring it all together so sleep deprived parents could find as much information as they can in one place, and share and console each other as well. Please do check it out.

In other news, Kathy has relaunched her Astrology blog into a full fledged website.

Depth Astrology

Check it out. See if there are any workshops you might want to go to, read her articles and maybe even get in touch with her to see what she knows about you and your life. Folks really have found it interesting and helpful.

Thanks, The Management.

More on Why Parenting is Awesome

Another recycled post by Kathy from an earlier blog of ours. I think these are too good to leave fallow there so I brought it over here. There's something very exciting about being with someone who has no baggage.

It happened yesterday when my friends-sans-child were watching the little dragon, and he drooled, and just kept right on doing what he was doing, no mouth-wipe or embarrassment or heh-heh-heh or anything. It was no big deal to him or, frankly, to me -- drool happens all the time in our house -- but they all laughed with delight, commenting on how wonderful it must be to have no inhibitions.

Indeed.

One of the most awesome things about parenting is getting to watch that inhibitionlessness up close and in action day after day. You could try to impose your own sense of meaning and realization onto it, but truly there's nothing really to realize about it. It's just cool. It's cool to see what we'd all be like without the stress of conformity and social anxiety. It's cool to be with someone who's so self-confident without being cocky, so comfortable in his own skin all of the time. It's a relief to know that there's one person in the world who's pretty okay with pretty much everything he says and does -- and, even better, with pretty much everything I say and do.

You realize that he accepts you completely because he accepts himself completely.

I know that will all change -- that no matter how hard I try, someday just being me is going to result in baggage for the little dragon. But in the meantime, being in the presence of total acceptance, and total self-acceptance, is pretty awesome.