Toddlers | Goddess in Progress

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Comedy of Errors

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (11)· June 7th, 2010

It sounded like such a good idea. A somewhat impromptu weekend getaway, just the four of us. M took a day off of work, we made reservations for a hotel in New Hampshire right near Story Land, a little-kid-friendly amusement park. Brilliant! You know, in theory.

First, we couldn’t go until Saturday evening. Between swimming class, a quilt guild meeting (shutup!), and a baby shower, followed by a quick visit to a friend, we didn’t hit the road for the 3-hour drive until after 6PM. But we made liberal use of the in-car DVD player, and all was peaceful for an hour and a half, until we decided to stop for dinner.

And I realized I left my purse at our friend’s house. With my wallet in it (blessedly, not my phone) and the travel potty. Hopefully no mid-road needs to go. Ah well, we’ll survive.

Arrive at the hotel after 10, our room has a separate alcove for the kids with two twin-sized beds. Huzzah! Except Rebecca has an over-tired new-place meltdown and absolutely refuses to sleep in her bed. She will only sleep in Daddy’s bed. Good thing there were two queen-sized beds, so I got to sleep in relative peace while M got kicked in the shins all night.

Wake up in the morning and look outside. It’s raining. Not misting. Not drizzling. POURING BUCKETS of rain and 60 degrees. No matter, the hotel has a heated indoor pool. That’s closed for renovations.

OMFG.

OK, OK. All is not lost. The sister resort down the road has an indoor water park, which they will give us complimentary passes to. Whew. We get in the car and head there, only to realize it’s 10:25 and the park doesn’t open until 11.

Drive around. See lots of super cool, fun activities that the kids would love. If, you know, it wasn’t pouring fricking rain. Find a toy store. Why not? Shop owner says this is one of her best days in the shop, ever. Rain is great for business. Lovely.

Get to the water park. Despite not liking getting splashed or water in their faces, kids have a blast.

Late arrival the night before meant a late start to the morning, a late lunch, and a nap that didn’t start until after 2:30pm. At least this time Rebecca agreed to sleep in her own bed.

They didn’t wake up until 5PM. We gloomily peered out at the continuing rain. M and I weakly tried to come up with a plan for dinner, and then exchanged pitiful looks. I don’t remember which one of us said it first.

“Maybe we should just leave.”

We had only planned to stay until the following morning or early afternoon, anyways. At this point, it seemed ridiculous to bother sleeping in strange beds another night. We thought about it for a couple of minutes, and then started throwing our crap back into our suitcases. Cut and run.

The front desk people were not only friendly and understanding of our desire to leave early, but were even kind enough not to charge us for the second night (thank you, Fox Ridge Resort! We’ll be back, someday!)

Back in the car, more winding northern New Hampshire highways. Most of our weekend closely resembled this, except with a lot more water on the windshield.

On the up side, it started to break up, and my kids saw their very first real rainbow.

Stopped for yet another fast food meal, put in Mary Poppins for the last stretch on the road. Didn’t even bother with the headphones, and we all sang along.

Did I mention how my van reacted to all this driving? Aww yeah, not one, but TWO warning lights.

Anyways, back home, safe and sound. Felt good about the decision to leave. Woke up to a beautiful day at home. A beautiful day with no milk or breakfast food in the house. No worries, Daniel and I will just climb into Daddy’s car and head to the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru in our pajamas for some milk and bagels. Got halfway there (and, mind you, there is no place in Massachusetts that is greater than half a mile from a Dunkin Donuts, so we hadn’t gone far), and M called my cell. “I need you to turn around right now, work called, data center is down and I’m the closest. I have to go fix it.”

Nevermind that this was still his day off. His boss forgot, and called him anyways. So he went to work.

And that was the straw that broke this camel’s spirit.

Honestly, I had maintained a relatively good sense of humor throughout this entire fiasco. It was still an adventure, something different, and we were together. Wohoo!

And then he had to get called in. No big morning outing to the zoo or the Children’s Museum or something else fun that you might do when Daddy’s home on a weekday. Just me & the kids, solo again. The comedy of errors just plain stopped being funny.

Fine. We’ll go to the grocery store.

Except I still don’t have my purse. I used the last of my in-car cash stash to get breakfast.

Screw it. Back to the same playground we go to every freaking week.

M came back after a few hours, thankfully. So, you know, I could drive the hour (each-way) to my friend’s house to go pick up my purse and hope to not get pulled over on the way. At least I got to do it with no kids and the Glee soundtrack blaring the whole time.

This Griswold Family Vacation is now over, and let’s all be grateful for that.

Comments (11)

Categories : Family, Toddlers, Travel

Big Kid Beds

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (15)· May 31st, 2010

Immediately after walking downstairs, M launched into a near panic attack, the likes of which I haven’t seen in quite some time. What if they’re scared? What if they’re lonely? What if we’ve done the wrong thing? OH MY GOD, just think of how poorly we’ve childproofed!

It was Saturday night, and we had just put the kids to bed. In their own rooms. In toddler beds.

We took full advantage of the fact that my dad and stepmom were in town. When we put the kids down for their last nap in the cribs, we immediately went to work. The bedroom that has been “the changing room” for the last three years had to become Daniel’s room. (Neither of the bedrooms were big enough to hold two cribs AND dressers.) Loveseat went downstairs. Bookshelves of miscellaneous crap were emptied and put in the garage. In went the new bed, the new rug (chosen by Daniel at IKEA). Some decorations from Target, and now it’s a frigging adorable room.

When the kids got up, we let them explore the new space in progress for a minute, and then sent them down to watch Toy Story while we disassembled the cribs. Of course, I had to bag up all of the hardware, since it turns out the darn things were recalled a year ago. Whoops! Cribs to the garage, bookshelf to the hall, armoire in. And a little girl had her own room.

The first night went well. Rebecca was a little apprehensive at first, but eventually settled in. She did manage to roll out of bed around 3AM, but recovered quickly and went back to sleep. Didn’t hear a peep from Daniel, though when his Good Nite Lite turned yellow at 7:30AM, he marched right into our room to say good morning.

Naptime was a little hairy, but that’s not really much different from how it’s been in cribs lately. There was some getting up, some insisting that they weren’t tired. But eventually both went to sleep.

The second overnight was great, completely silent. Second nap was mixed. Rebecca went down reasonably quickly, but Daniel sang to himself for an hour or more, and pulled off all the vinyl stickers that were within reach. Eventually, after a diaper and sticker intervention and a stern look from Mommy, he did go to sleep.

The truth is, they seem to love their new rooms and new beds. They’re excited about them, they’re proud of them. They don’t seem bothered in the slightest by sleeping in different rooms. Rebecca is tickled by the fact that she’s allowed to get up and use the potty all by herself, and sent M back into our room when he went to help her one time (she then walked past our door without so much as a glance, into her room, and closed the door – Miss Independent). I still worry about what kind of trouble Daniel is going to manage to find, and that he may end up dropping his nap before he’s truly ready, but overall he’s doing well.

I had always thought I’d keep the kids in cribs until they were three, but with all of the travel and transitions coming up over the next few months, I figured two years and ten months was close enough. I know there will be more testing of boundaries over the next few weeks, and that I have definitely lost a big aspect of control that I had in the cribs. But it was time.

Goodbye, cribs. I don’t have babies anymore. I have big kids.

Comments (15)

Categories : Home, Preschoolers, Toddlers

Tags : crib transition, separating twins, sharing bedrooms, toddler beds

Dad About Town

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (9)· May 23rd, 2010

All I said to my husband this morning was, “I would really like to get a break sometime today.”

It’s been a long couple of weeks. As the morning person in our relationship, I have always been the one who gets up with the kids. I’m pretty much on-duty by myself from the time they wake up until dinner. Thankfully, M usually gets home for dinner time and does the vast majority of bath and bed by himself. I’m grateful for that. But still, the days can be long and repetitive. At least on the weekend I usually have some sharing of responsibility, so I look forward to it.

The last two weekends, unfortunately, have not been so restful. M was taking a professional development course that met Friday night (so no relief when I’m burnt out at the end of Friday) and all-day for two Saturdays in a row. Did I mention that the kids take a parent/child swim class on Saturday mornings? Doing that by myself was nerve-wracking, to say the least, though they did well. Plus, last weekend, my in-laws were in town. And while that meant some extra hands and eyes, I don’t have to tell any of you about houseguests not being exactly relaxing. This weekend, solo swimming again, followed by a birthday party. Fun activities, but I’m damn tired.

So I really wanted my husband to just take care of the kids this morning so I could climb back into bed, and generally be off-duty for a little while.

He’s a good guy, of course, so he got his lazy butt out of bed and went downstairs. The next thing I know, Rebecca is running back upstairs to me.

“Mommy, mommy! We’re going to go see Dora!”

Lord only knows what he Googled to arrive at this choice, but he discovered that the Nickelodeon Live stage show was in Boston, today is the last day, and there was a show in an hour and a half with tickets available.

I helped get the kids dressed and stocked the man bag with a potty and some snacks, and off they went.

My house is quiet.

I think that guy is a keeper.

I can complain about him sometimes, of course. His inability to wake up at a normal hour of the morning, for instance, will drive me nuts until the day I die. Everybody has their “thing” that bugs the shit out of their partner. And when it comes to outings, sometimes I hate it that he seems to have no sense of timing, as far as how long it takes to get somewhere, how that fits into our schedule, and how long a shower he can take before I go stark raving mad.

But sometimes, man. Sometimes he goes big. He wants to do something special and fun that the kids will love. He doesn’t have as much experience going out solo with the kids as I do, of course. And he’s a worst-case-scenario worrywart by nature. So driving downtown and going to a theater by himself with two not-quite-three-year-olds makes him a little nervous. But damn if he didn’t see my need for some quiet time and turn it into something great.

Comments (9)

Categories : Family, Good times, My beloved, Out and about, Toddlers

Full-contact siblings

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (6)· May 13th, 2010

Forgive me, those of you I’m about to offend. But I’m going to take a moment and be grateful that I don’t have two boys. As it is, with my comparatively mellow boy/girl pairing, it’s a miracle we’ve made it this far without major injury. [knock on wood, turn around three times and spit]

My kids have gotten increasingly physical in their play in the last couple of months. Grabbing and pushing in the name of toy-stealing aside, even their made-up games have started to involve a lot more wrestling and tackling than I might have guessed.

Just the other day, we were at a local indoor playspace. The “game” they came up with was that Rebecca would go first down the (rather fast) slide, and dramatically tumble and roll when she hit the bottom. Usually with an incredibly fake “ouch!”

She’d then giggle uncontrollably, lying on the floor, calling “help, Daniel, help!” And so he flies down the slide and rolls right on top of her.

If you’ve been picking up on her personality over the last two years, I somehow think the last thing you’re going to do right now is feel sorry for her and berate her “bigger” brother for picking on her. HA! You know she’s the aggressor 95 times out of 100. Daniel might be slightly more likely to get carried away as the game snowballs on itself, but not by much. She’s definitely the one who is more likely to put him in a choke hold and wrestle him to the ground.

Oh, there is a broken something coming. I can feel it. In the meantime, I’m going to take deep breaths and focus on the calmer moments, like a shared snack in between games of full-tackle Ring Around the Rosie. Ohm…

Comments (6)

Categories : Behavior, Toddlers

Tags : play, roughhousing, siblings

Potty Training, v.2.0

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (7)· May 6th, 2010

That’s right, I’ve gotten back on the horse that so violently threw me off a few months ago. I’m taking another pass at potty-training Daniel.

The recap, in case I never quite finished the story here, is that we did a “boot camp” with him about two weeks after Rebecca’s. He did quite well for the first week. Minor accidents, but plenty of success. Wohoo. And then a week passed, and it all fell apart. It was like he simply stopped caring, or stopped paying attention. He’d have a success or two in the morning, and then it would be all downhill the rest of the day. After more than a week of that nonsense, I decided it wasn’t worth the stress/power-struggle and put him in Pull-Ups full-time. Mainly because they’re easier for the times that he actually did want to use the potty. Which, as it turned out, he did not. Zero interest. And when there’s absolutely NO potty usage, Pull-Ups are just a very expensive and messy pain in my ass. So we went back to diapers.

Anyways, some time has passed, and changing the diaper of a nearly-three-year-old is getting rather tiresome.

I asked Daniel yesterday what he would think about wearing big-boy underwear and using the potty. Previous questioning along this line has been dismissed with an uninterested “no.” Yesterday: “Oh! Yes! I would be very happy!” Um, OK. And up he ran to the dresser to choose his big-boy underwear.

And, so, we have begun again. For the moment, I am not going the boot camp route. We’ll do underwear when we’re at home, diapers when we go out and when he sleeps. I don’t trust him in the slightest to tell me that he wants to go, so I’ve been setting the timer on my phone, and he knows that when it “boings,” it’s time for a potty break. In a day and a half of being part-time in underwear, we have had no pee accidents and one poop accident. That didn’t phase him in the slightest. He did not feel the need to mention it when it happened (on M’s watch, I might add), nor did he seem like he was trying to hide it in any way.

That’s the biggest potty-training obstacle for Daniel & me. As excited as he is to wear big-boy underwear, and he is quite excited, he just doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about the accidents. With Rebecca, her accidents got her quite distressed. Daniel? Meh, whatever.

At Target today, we picked out some special Lightning McQueen stickers that I plan on using for a special potty sticker chart. He’s a big fan of ice cream, so I’m thinking 10 stickers and he can get a treat from the ice cream truck or something. Just in case, I got the 2-lb bag of M&Ms, too. [As a side note, Rebecca wanted her own Tinkerbell stickers. Trying to think of a sticker-chart-worthy behavior for her, since she's already got potty training in the bag, but is clearly perturbed at the sudden focus on Daniel.]

On tomorrow’s shopping list – a few bottles of wine for Mommy.

He won’t go to college in diapers, right?

Comments (7)

Categories : Behavior, Child Development, Toddlers

Tags : boys, potty training

Monday Mash-up

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (8)· May 3rd, 2010

I’ve got a billion half-thoughts swirling around in my head. Most of them not quite worth an entire blog post. So here’s a little gumbo for your Monday (lucky you!).

We started a new swim class with the kids on Saturday. It’s meant to get them gradually used to swimming without mom or dad in the water, so each week we’ll (attempt to) get out a few minutes earlier and leave them with the teacher. First class, we stayed in the whole time, and the kids absolutely loved it. Rebecca bragged for the rest of the day about swimming “all by myself!” And she did, a little, too! Here’s to hoping that bodes well.

Saturday evening, we went to a cookout at a friend’s house. And reminded each other that we seriously need to do this all summer long. We all have 3-ish-year-olds who know each other well, so the yards are appropriately-equipped and everyone knows each other. What could be easier than throwing some hot dogs on the grill for the kids and letting them get absolutely filthy? And then everyone leaves in time for preschooler bedtime! Absolutely brilliant.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that they have an excavator in their yard at the moment. There are few things more exciting to the 3-year-old set. Though attempting to get seven kids in the same picture was probably quite the entertaining sight for the neighbors.

Operation: Purge is starting slowly but well. Six big bags of clothes were dropped at Goodwill, and more are to follow. Many boxes of books are loaded into my car for donation. And we’ve done our best to involve the kids. Rebecca got it in her head that the clothes and books are going to “a baby,” and she likes adding more things to the box. She did a great job helping me sort through her old clothes and books and was quite generous in what she elected to give away.

The focus of the purge, at the moment, is the room we usually refer to as “the changing room.” There wasn’t enough space in the kids’ nursery for two cribs plus dressers and things, so they sleep in one room and their clothing lives in another (we have four bedrooms, but none of them are very big). The plan is to make the changing room into Daniel’s room. But because it was a room in which no one actually lived, a metric butt-load of crap has landed in there. So we have to get rid of it to make space for Daniel to move in. Exciting stuff, long way to go.

And to cap off this bucket of random-y randomness, some photos. The first is from a few days ago. It was rainy and I was taking the dog out into the yard. When I turned around to come back in, this was the sight that greeted me at the front door:

My dear Daniel, love him though I do, may not have a stellar athletic career in his future. Hand-eye coordination is just not his forte. Don’t even get me started on trying to ride his tricycle and the fact that he has absolutely no concept of steering.

Comments (8)

Categories : Learning/Classes, Toddlers

Tags : cleaning, swimming

Photo slowdown

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (6)· April 27th, 2010

As I was composing a post for HDYDI last week, I went looking for a picture of my kids to use. I wanted one of the two of them together. I had to go back six weeks to our Disney trip to find an even remotely acceptable one.

I had heard that the intensity of documenting everything on (digital) film would drop off after my kids turned one, but for me, it held out until about two and a half.

I have noticed that I am not carrying my camera around nearly as much as I used to. Could be that I got a little burned out. Could be that the travel potty takes up space in my purse so I don’t have as much room for my bulky camera. Could be that the kids move a lot faster these days and, while fairly cooperative, are just that much harder to capture. Could be that the ways in which they’re developing are not as easily visible and photographed as back in the days of learning to sit or walk or climb. Could be the dreariness of being indoors all winter and the photographic challenges of shooting in low light. Could be just plain laziness. Even when I do have my camera, I don’t seem to have the pull to snap away with the frequency that I used to.

Regardless of the motivation, I am hoping that the relative improvement in weather and increase in outdoor play will result in more, better pictures coming soon. In the meantime, the iPhone is there to capture things like Rebecca’s insistence on hanging upside-down on the monkey bars, “mama, don’t hold me!”

And I jumped on the Hipstamatic bandwagon, making this phone shot of Daniel (sitting in the sandbox lid) appear way more interesting than it might have otherwise been.

And I haven’t neglected my camera completely. Sometimes I manage to capture something in the moment. The shot isn’t perfect, but who can argue with the double-daddy pony ride?

Comments (6)

Categories : Photos, Toddlers

Portrait of the artist as a young girl

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (7)· April 11th, 2010

One of my favorite things to sit back and watch, recently, is the way Rebecca approaches drawing. I am certainly not claiming she’s any kind of artistic prodigy. But from a developmental standpoint, she is showing a lot more detail and precision. When she first got the hang of crayons and markers, of course, it was your typical scribbled mass. Finger paints, in particular, always ended up a big brown-ish blob.

Then she started to move from scribbling back and forth to a more circular motion. Round and round and round she went. She loved making circles.

Now, though, I’ve noticed that she has been drawing more small, separate shapes. Even with finger paints, it’s a dab here, a dab there, a line here, an arc there. A strategically placed handprint.

She’s also started actually telling me what it is she’s drawing. Sometimes, I think she makes a mark and then decides it looks like an oval or the number 7 or something. But the other day, out at lunch, I saw her draw something intentionally for the first time.

She had made a small, loopy shape that started to look like a face. M picked up another crayon and made two marks for eyes. Rebecca, then, made a round mark on either side of the circle for ears, and scribbled at the top for hair. Narrating her intent as she was doing it.

I love watching this shift as it’s happening. And, if I can be so bold as to make a prediction, I wonder if she is going to really gravitate towards learning to write when she starts school in September. Being a Montessori program, of course, she’s free to choose her activities as she likes. And I’m sure she’ll like the drawing and painting things. But even now, she will sometimes tell me that she’s drawing letters and numbers, so I wonder if she’s going to seize the opportunity to figure out the real deal. Time will tell…

Comments (7)

Categories : Child Development, Crafts, Toddlers

Tags : art, drawing, finger paint

Respect the Classics, Man

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (8)· April 7th, 2010

I am proud to say that my children are developing delightfully eclectic taste in music. They certainly enjoy children’s music, of course. We sing “Wheels on the Bus” pretty much every single night at bedtime, and they like their Music Together CDs. Slightly more enjoyable to me (though maybe not the 45th time in a row) is the Barenaked Ladies’ album, Snacktime. As I’ve mentioned before, Rebecca can sing along with about 75% of the album. It’s impressive.

On the list of odder favorites is a version of “I Am the Pirate King” from Pirates of Penzance. I frigging love hearing a toddler singing “it is, it is a glorious thing to be the pirate king,” and she requests it OVER and OVER. The newest addition is their first Beatles tune. They’re positively nuts for “Yellow Submarine.” As with anything they fixate on, they just want to hear it on repeat.

They love it so much that yesterday, I had to go get all stern with Daniel at naptime because he’d been shouting the song as loud as he could for nearly 25 minutes.

Tonight, they requested it at bedtime (they also sometimes request Queen’s “Bicycle Race,” don’t even ask…). Apparently I did not start singing it in a timely enough fashion, because Daniel started belting it on his own. Blessedly, the video camera was already upstairs and had just barely enough charge for me to capture it. The lighting stinks, but all parents know what a miracle it was that he didn’t immediately stop singing the moment I went to grab the camera. So I’ll take it.

Enjoy.

Yellow Submarine from Goddess in Progress on Vimeo.

Comments (8)

Categories : Music, Toddlers, Video

Tags : singing

On and on and on

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (13)· March 29th, 2010

I’m having one of those times when I feel like I work at an insane asylum for very small people. I’ve been trying to write a post about it for three days, but can’t manage it. And, so, I present three video clips that remind me of my life right now, and why my darling boy is driving me up a fricking wall.

1. He has switched from calling me Mommy to calling me Mama. Turns out this is actually the more annoying version. Especially when you say it once every 15 seconds. “Mama! Mama? Hey, Mama?”

2. He never, ever stops talking. This is largely very cute, and his memory for detail is alarmingly good. But he has to tell you EVERY detail. And he’s 2.5, so sometimes it takes about 5 minutes to get a full sentence out.

3. We haven’t hit the “why” phase yet (and, believe me, I am grateful), but he is constantly asking questions. Weirdly obvious ones, sometimes, as though asking questions is a new way to tell a story. “Mama, where are we going?” “Where are we going after the gym?” “What are we going to do after we leave the post office?” “Mama, where are those guys going?” “Mama, what is that lady doing?” “Mama, are you peeing?” “Mama, do you have a placemat?” “Mama, are you eating dinner?”

Again, like many (most?) things this age, it is simultaneously adorable and enough to make you rip your hair out.

(This video is hilarious in its entirety, but skip to 7min for the bit I’m thinking of. Language is not really suitable for work, or for little pitchers with big ears.)