it’s late, and i’m tired, and you know what that means? a rambling, mopey depressed amy.

but talking (typing?) it out always helps. get the poison out of the system. yammer and yammer until i purge my brain of it and then i can move on to other things.

like sleep!

….

well, that didn’t work. the typing it out bit, i mean. trying to put words to the mopeyness just didn’t seem to happen. i think it means i’m just tired, and need to go to bed.

tomorrow is my baby’s birthday. She will be 2 years old. I still think putting them both in the freezer at night or maybe tupperware will work – can’t we just keep them babies for a little while longer? It is strange how when I look at baby pictures of Ethan, I can barely remember how it all was w/out overlaying the sweet little man he is now over the top of it.

And yet when I look at Jocelyn and think about how she is growing and soon even more of her personality will emerge, it’s hard to imagine how and what that will be like. And yet a year from now, I’ll look back at the cute things she does now, and see how it all started, how it all was just the little flower buds that I could just barely see the color of what was to come.

it’s late and i’m making weird analogies, you’ll have to forgive me. She has been doing a lot better lately with the tantrums and the screaming of, “MINE!” and “NO!” Often, she will holler once or twice, and then stop herself, and say “PEEEEASE!!” even though we’ll have no idea what exactly she is requesting.

She also has been saying a phrase that we can’t quite make out. She says it ALL the time, and it could be anything. Here are our guesses:

• “assignment!”
• “excitement!”
• “It’s Simon!”
• “eh’s find it!”
  or more likely,
• “Let’s find it!!”

Other things she says often, and with conviction:

• THERE it is!
• I found it!
• MINE!
• NO!
• Turn, pease! (as in, she wants a turn)
• 1, 2, THREE!!! (especially when you start)
• “PEEEEE!”, “GEE!!!” “ZEEE!!” (said at the appropriate pauses in teh alphabet song.
• VROOM VROOM!
• It’s flying!
• Hi! (Enter name of family member here)! Hi!

She also has a fit whenever one wishes to lay her on her back to change her diaper. I’ve found the best way to avoid the hammering kicking legs is to ask her where various body parts are. This also works for kisses. Lately, she doesnt’ want to part with any kisses, or be kissed. “Can I have a kiss?” is always met with running away while shouting, “NO!” So then I say, “Where is my nose?” and she runs over to poke me in the nose with her outstretched finger, and declares, “NOSE! MOMMY’S NOSE!” Then I ask if I can have a kiss on the nose, and she will lean in and her soft lips will squash my nose flat (I have a squishy nose with hardly any cartilidge) with a loud, “MMMMMWAH!!!!” and then she may bear to have me return the “mmmwah” in kind.

One thing we are going to have to remedy soon, even though I swore it would be YEARS before we did this, because Ethan’s was so disastrous, is get her a big girl bed. We moved Ethan out of the crib at about 19-20 months, and he did ok at nighttime, but he just stopped napping during the day pretty much completely. He would just get up and play in his room instead, and sometimes fall asleep in the closet. We transitioned him at that age because Jocelyn was going to be arriving and we didn’t want him to feel as if she was taking over “his” crib, so the idea was to get him a bed, hide the crib for the next 3 months, so that when it was needed, he wouldn’t feel like it was his anymore.

Jocelyn is already older than he was, but I still feel like we could hold off a while longer. She could probably climb out if she wanted to, but she hasn’t ever tried, except sometimes she puts her foot up when she wants to get IN. However, this girl is so enamored of beds. She climbs right in them, pulls up the covers, tilts her head to the side and shuts her eyes – not squishing them shut like you’d think a kid would do, but just closes them shut normally, and then says, “Sleeping mommy!” She loves Ethan’s bed so much, I know when she gets her own bed, she will be in HEAVEN. So, even though I swore we’d wait until she was 2.5 years old, we have been looking at beds with a little more than just the window shopping eye. I would like to get her a nice bed that she can use a long time. Toddler beds never really appealed to me because they are used for such a short time, though a full size bed can be quite overwhelming for a toddler. Ethan’s bed came from Ikea and was expandable, though we put a twin mattress in it right away. We have thought of getting HIM a new bed, and giving his old one to Jocelyn, but we’re not sure what we’re going to do yet. A quick check of craigslist showed a number of toddler beds for $30-40 bucks, so that might be worth it, even if it isn’t used for very long.

Speaking of Ikea, we went there tonight. It was such a fiasco. Our kids go to bed at 7:30 pretty much on the nose. We head upstairs around 7 for baths and stories and jammies, and they’re in bed by 7.30 or pretty close to it. Going to Ikea on a weeknight meant that we got home at about 8:30. Ethan was asleep in the car, and Jocelyn was tickled pink about it, “Ethan SLEEPING mommy! QUIET!!! SHHHHH!”

We picked up a kid sized table and 2 chairs, as well as some new shelves to go in James new office in the basement. Next time, I think just one of us will go, or we’ll wait for the weekend. Ikea has a little children’s area where you check your kid in, they label him with a sticker with his name on it, check his shoes, give us a beeper and tell us we have 40 minutes of freedom before they’ll beep us. Except that we don’t, because we have Jocelyn, who isn’t tall enough or potty trained and therefore doesn’t meet the criteria of Ikea SmaLand. We asked Ethan if he wanted to stay with us while we shopped, or go to the play area, and warned him taht there probably wouldn’t be any other kids in there. He made sure we were talking about teh same place, “It’s where the balls are?” “Yes, the play area with the balls you can jump in,” and to my surprise, said he wanted to play in teh balls.

“The balls are going to be COAL! And then I’ll JUMP IN!”
I don’t think James heard it clearly, but I know what he was talking about right away.
“You’re going to pretend it’s the Polar Express, and you’re jumping into the coal car?”
“YEAH!”

Turns out that shortly after we checked him in, another kid got checked in. When I picked him up, the attendant said that they latched on to each other and were having a grand old time playing together.

At times like these, I think, what fun it must be to be a kid. Then I remember when I was kid. I remember how disappointing some things can be – things that are no big deal to adults, that we shrug off as unimportant, but can be devastating to kids. I’m always conscious of how many times I have to deny something to Ethan.

“Can I come in with you to get Jocelyn?”
“Can we go over the bridge?”
“Can we go by the train station?”
“But we were going to fold laundry with my loader and dumptruck!”
“Are we taking a bath tonight?”
“But I don’t want to try the meatballs..”
“Can we stay home today mommy?”

Sometimes it’s asked or stated cavalierly and I know he knows that the answer is likely to be no. Sometimes he answers my denial with a simple, “Ok.” Sometimes it’s an exhalation of frustration/disappointment, “AWWWWW.” And sometimes the request or statement is nearly on the brink of tears because the amount of control he has over his own life and actions are so limited that I know it must be frustrating as hell.

As mimi said not so long ago, “I swear, we should give every kid under four a medal for keeping their shit together even 60% of the time, because they were BABIES just moments ago and now they have to do all this BIG STUFF.”

It’s so true. Just because they can walk around and talk in complete sentences and have a fairly good grasp of the day to day events, there is so much they’re still trying to gather information on and assimilate into some semblence of understandability (it’s late. shoot me.) and then having their choices controlled and monitored so completely.. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am not about to just let Ethan do or have whatever he wants, and I’m not talking about that sort of “control”. When I told him he had to have one taste of the meatballs the other night, tears actually welled up in his eyes, and not because he was going to have a tantrum, but because he just really had a hard day and was hungry and just plain didn’t want to have any meatballs.. and so sometimes I bend the “you must try it once” rules, and let him have 2 bites of noodles instead of 1 of noodle and 1 of meatball in order to get the bowl of yoghurt.

Oh my god have I rambled. I think you’ll all probably be happy when I go back to not updating for a bajillion years.

And with that, I think I’d better go to bed already. Don’t you?

-amy will try not to lay awake and be mopey.