Then I think, “An object at rest, stays at rest”.  This never goes anywhere good.

I’ve been at the gym this week and last, walking the dog more, making a point to run after RR in the park instead of walking quickly (which, let’s face it, is necessary to avoid catastrophe).  I’m not exhausted like I thought I would be, but I’m more aware than ever of the time crunch I live in.  I’ve felt the limits of it before, of course, but the gym is testing them and it’s unpleasant in ways.

We carpool to daycare and then work together.  We eat together when we get home and then RR is in bed shortly thereafter.  Take my word for it that there is no wiggle room there.  D can get to the gym over lunch, which is awesome but, unfortunately, practically impossible for me.  Also, she can be at work later and leave earlier than I can.  This makes me wonder how I got the short end of the stick but also when I can carve out time for myself.

So I go to the gym after work; escaping a little early by shaving off time from lunch or arriving earlier.  This means I miss baby pick-up.  I walk the dog when we get home so that both he and I are happier.  Often, this means we don’t eat dinner with her.  Since this is pretty non-negotiable for me, I can’t wait until we can push her mealtime-bedtime back just a little more.  I find I’m constantly struggling to spend time with her and spend the time I need to at work while also being able to walk the dog and get some exercise that doesn’t involve getting more cake.

God, I love cake.

I don’t have a solution to this except to tell myself (usually right before “An object in motion stays in motion”) that “I’m demonstrating good habits” or something motivational and forgiving like that.  Cheesiness aside, this mostly works.  Except when she refuses sitting with me, or cuddling or anything in favor of D, which seems to be happening a lot more than it was before I was taking this time.

I suppose I’ll tell myself, “You can’t win for losing” right before I go back to, “An object in motion…”  But I’m not sure if it’s worth it.

Compared to RR, I cavalierly rip through books devil-may-care.  I’m a librarian.  She carefully turns each page, never missing one, giving it a good scan before moving to the next.  The books are never upside down, the pages aren’t crumpled.  Once she saw another child rip a page and she very nearly died.  Even if you give her a magazine, she is careful with the flimsy pages.  It’s like she’s a page-turning savant.

We’ve recently borrowed Olivia from the library and sometimes we catch her reading quietly in the living room (instead of running around with her radio like a rock star on crack).  Other favorite books with grown-up pages include the entire Llama Llama series (this one in particular) and some crazy thing about the noises a bunny makes.  That said, she still reads board books just as meticulously including the masterpiece seen here “Please Baby Please” .  I love this book.

Right.  There’s a video below but if there was a click-through agreement box here it would tell you that absolutely nothing happens in the first 50 seconds (of 55) in this clip except baby babbling.  There’s a brilliant smile at the end that pretty much just captures our kid in two seconds flat.  Read on RR, read on.

If I have any resolution at all, it’s that I’m trying to worry less about what I should be doing since most of the time it’s an artificial standard.  For example, D probably doesn’t care if I walk the dog instead of hovering around with her watching the child.  If I’ve asked how she feels once and she says it’s okay then I probably don’t need to keep harassing her.  Is it okay?  Really?  Are you sure?  I just won’t.  It’s okay.  God, I’m so fun.

The point here is that RR uses the same word for bunny, monkey and Maggie (also rabbit, but that’s cause she’s a child genius.  obviously).  All of them sound like a nasally, swallowed “mahn-ye”  She can say other consonants but these words elude her.  I console myself with the fact that when I ask her to say rabbit she points to herself and says mahn-ye.  We call her bunny (and sometimes rabbit).  The fact that she knows she is both bunny and rabbit is sort of awesome and I’d like to preserve the illusion that she knows those are interchangeable words for the same concept.  Let me have my dreams.

Shouldn’t she be getting better at this?  We’ve been carefully enunciating for weeks and trying to get her to say “gie” or “ni”.  It’s not happening.  This form a child who has mastered the words, appropriate timing and hand motions for whoa, oh boy, uh oh and oh no.  The last is particularly adorable since she accompanies it with a perfectly rounded o mouth and hands on both her cheeks.  It totally makes up for the 2:15 wake up call.

Also, I realize that’s my one use of adorable in reference to my daughter for the year.  Worth it.  So what’s up?  At 19 months, is it just kid speak?  Got any cute pronunciations to smooth over the shoulds?  I’ve been consoling myself with a co-workers effalump/elephant.

I’m deeply worried that by having so many toys in the house that she will grow up expecting a large christmas every year and that we will buy her anything she wants.  I know that she’s a year and a half old.  But as she gets older, there’s all this stuff around.  And grandma brings her even more every year.  Hate me for saying it, but how does she learn the value of the first robin of spring when she’s distracted by her (no doubt blinking and princess-dress-clad) doll?  Oh that’s right.  They call it parenting*.  Who knew this would be so much work?!

*No sarcasm intended.  Just me mocking my own complaining.  Carry on!

Obviously, I didn’t learn anything from last year’s toy angst. Yes, I’d like her to play with these two sticks and this roll of cheesecloth, but I’m probably not going to win that battle.  I’m not even sure I want to.  We jest around here about the different childhood I had growing up from my sisters.  Those four critical years or so when it was less about toys and more about pots and pans.  But, I think my parents gave in to it all a little when my sisters and I got older.  We did get toys and we did get trendy things.  Cabbage Patch kids that one year.  And an in-demand early Furby type toy in another.  Somehow though, I grew up with a Wooden Blocks mentality.

Things that light up, buzz, move on their own, talk, play drums, etc. are not on the list of things I’d like her to play with at my house.  I worry they’ll stamp on her imagination.  Keep her from making up words for them and begin relying on them to play with her rather than her having to do a bit of work to play with them.  She’s going to spend her entire life bedecked in technology.  I want her to know that there are options that don’t include batteries and I want her to know how to interact with those things.

But that’s just the whiz-bangs.  There is also the early branding kids get.  There are Elmos on her diapers, for pete’s sake.  Look, I grew up watching the Electric Company and Sesame Street, I’m not going to deny the kid a little Elmo.  More importantly, as silly as it sounds, I want her to be part of the conversation when she’s in college and her friends are talking about the important icons of childhood (although they’ll be saying “omg did you watch elmo when he sang that one song?!” instead of childhood icons).  She doesn’t sleep in a beige room with black and white toys and neutral music to entertain her.  She has things.  Some of those things have Elmo.  I wish he wasn’t passively lurking in so many places, but a little Elmo gets a pass.

What doesn’t pass are the princesses.  It’s true, those special snowflakes are getting the blame for all the pink but they (and their redemption/swept-away stories) go too far.  This was the first year that the princesses crept in and I don’t know how to stop them.  I don’t want her to grow up surrounded by zillions of pink, Belle and Cinderella bedecked toys.  I don’t want to skip right past dreaming and into Disney dresses.  If she comes to it on her own (and she will) it’s okay with me.  I just don’t want that subtle message creeping up on her.  I’m not saying this well at all, but Riley is.  Here’s her take from the “girls” asile of a toy store.

Stay tuned for The One Where I’m That Person, Part 3: the Expectations Edition

I’ll bet they get mad at home or have had to learn how to let it roll off.  That when they get misquoted by someone who should know better it’s okay to call bullshit and move on.  That brings us here.  I was misquoted once by someone who claimed that I had, in my capacity as a professional, supervisor and teacher, told that person not to blog when in fact I was doing it myself*.

Hypocrite, you cry!  Well not you, maybe you, but definitely that person.  How can you tell me one thing and then do that very thing yourself?  How dare you mislead me!  Now you have an axe to grind and you’re going to do it in every public forum you can find.  She told me not to do this.  She told me I wasn’t allowed.

Not allowed.  Really?  Me?  A blog is freedom of speech.  Go ahead and do it.  If you libel someone, you may pay the consequences, but you go right ahead.  Even if I wasn’t doing it myself, I would still support your right to do so.  I’ll even forgive you, a little, for hearing someone else tell you not to do it and assuming I felt the same, probably because I didn’t stand there and rush to assure you that I was doing it.  I was!  And no harm done!  In this case, I’d only just met this person, three weeks at most.  Why would I say, “Oh!  Read my blog!  We totally, like, have SO much in common!”  Maybe you felt betrayed.  But, since it has been five years or so, I’d expect that you’d stop dragging this misinformation around and waving it at anyone who will watch.

The quote is always anonymous, but there are hallmarks that give it away to folks who were there.  It would be different, maybe, if it were just my reputation.  Unfortunately, it maligns an organization I feel passionately about and you’ve stapled your signs, your incorrect signs, to every telephone pole and every bulletin board and you’ve told anyone who will listen that something is very wrong about a program that is, in many ways, so very right.

You’re no better than the Enquirer or the Women’s World Weekly.  I’d like to tell you that you don’t deserve to speak but you know what?  I never, ever, would do that.

*Clearly, Counting Chickens isn’t the blog we’re discussing here, nor is my current profession.

And I promise, a cute picture to make up for this person’s poor behavior.

Here are some links that I found for us.  I was thinking of you, instantly, because really – who deserves french toast in a mug more than you? First though:

The 3 Rs of Toddler Discipline Oh, I know. You died just a little reading that title because you are here for my near constant grasping for reality and something so awesomely academic as that has burned your eyes.  Skip, obviously, if you don’t have (or are going to have) a small person needing encouragement to live right.  On the other hand, this also might work in particularly difficult break-ups, with obstinate ferrets and your headphone-clad teenager.  That said, repetition, reaction and reassurance really resonated with me (see what I did there?) and, though I haven’t clicked on everything, there seem to be a number of valuable links.

99 Ways to Say Great Job and 96 Phrases You Can Use During Sex.  This is linked from the previous page, but I thought it deserved its own spotlight.  I mean, we’ve all been caught up in that terrible good job argument time and again - I mean really, can we just have sex without a value judgement for once?

Jason Good has given us 365 days of laughter and now he’s abandoned us.  No matter if you missed days 1-364, you can check out the archives and discover the Saturation Experiment, days 241, 248, and 283 yourself.

And now, because I think you are the rose-gold sun of a sumer morning, here is French Toast in a Cup.

Reception: Sure!  How does this sound?

Three years ago I never, ever would have thought I’d be calling myself anyone’s mom, let alone that I’d be worried enough about that tiny person’s naptime to overcome my doctor’s office anxiety and call them day-of to try and reschedule.  I love my life.

So I’m the italics here.  They symbolize the swoon I fell into when I saw the number of gifts my mother-in-law brought for RR.  Actually the swoon started when I found out that my family members would give RR a gift in addition to what we’d gotten her (that’s 4 more).  Or maybe it started when D and I started discussing gifts and I realized that I wasn’t going to get away with nothing.  Or one thing.

Maybe some backstory?  I grew up with enormous Christmases.  Well, in retrospect, they were nothing like some kids had, but the present opening rolled into the afternoon.  Also, it isn’t my favorite holiday and it’s one where traditions can be confusing for kids (and adults!)  It just all seems like…a lot.  A lot of food.  A lot of gifts.  A lot of family.  A lot of lights and noise.  A lot of everything.  I know RR won’t have that as a comparison, but I wanted to give her a bit less of all that.  Tone down the excess.

I could have called this post excess, I guess.  That’s what gets to me.  To be clear, it’s excess as I define it and I’m that girl who would move to a commune in a heartbeat if I didn’t think I’d have to explain myself to my family.  I also fret (in my head, most of the time) if I can’t reuse the foil and I get all sorts of flustered when I have to buy something new.  I know.  I’m this much fun to be around all the time.  While I try keep this to myself, Christmas is one of those times where I’ve been insistant.  Gift giving, yes.  The entire Fisher Price catalog, no.

Tack on our minimalistic approach to toys in general (more on lights, noise, movement, talking later) and I just expected to see, well…less, for RR.  I don’t think I realized how deeply this would/could affect me or my extended family.  Midway through the Great Unwrapping that commenced when RR’s grandmother and cousins joined us on the 26th, I felt my throat close up and the room dim a little around the edges.  I know you know my ways.  I exaggerate greatly for your benefit (after all, RR is not eaten by wolverines ALL the time) but in this I am truthful, I almost fainted.

There were so many toys.  The wrapping paper buried us.  RR sat like an automaton (better than I expected her to, frankly) while toy after toy was pulled from wrapping paper and thrust at her.  She’s not a ripper, our girl.  She reads big kid books delicately and had not ripped a page.  Until, of course, last week.  But the look of horror on her small face (and ours) stopped her from doing it again.  I’m a librarian, for pete’s sake.  Her cousins did more of the thrusting/unwrapping, reveling in her toys far more than she did.  Her grandmother’s face lit up as RR let her fingers drift over each soft thing, each plastic contraption, each shard of my soul dissolving into dust. Her aunt, to my horror, gleefully ripped open each box and removed each toy, forever sealing the door on returns or “unwrapped new toy” donations.

The delight on their faces was evident.  Had I scrooged them into moderation, I would have taken some of that joy and bitterly pushed it back to them.  Our relationship is often strained and besides deepening our divide, I would have slipped from them the opportunity to spoil a little girl, to buy things they never would, to watch for moments of surprise and delight when she saw each new thing.  I may have given them small gifts of cookies and candy, but I am considering my other gift to them on par with their gift-giving display for RR.  I kept my mouth shut and I didn’t faint.  Merry Christmas.

Stay tuned for The One Where I’m That Person, Part 2: the Whiz-Bang Edition