I’ve tried never to make this blog about the trials and
tribulations of parenting. There are enough blogs out there dealing with these
topics and I think people are getting a bit sick of it all. My facebook feed is
all about reasons peoples’ toddlers are crying, links to the youtube video of
that admittedly-hilarious comedian talking about life with kids, and videos of
kids crying to songs on the radio or discovering rain for the first time.
But I would be kidding you if I could pretend to write about
other stuff right now. I’ve got nothing happening on the home renovation front,
work is a bit of a slump despite moving to a brand new building, family life is
stable, and I haven’t been to the cottage since September. Meanwhile, Gennyland
is busy - Nora is as hilarious as ever, and I am expecting number 2 (a boy) in
June. I don’t want to bore people with the mundane specificities of my days,
but Nora and I are having a good time enjoying each other’s company, laughing,
crying, learning stuff. I could spend a
few paragraphs listing the indignities that my aging body is withstanding
through this happy unexpected baby surprise (Namely, a lot of constipation,
gas, grey hair and peeing) but I don’t think anyone’s interested in that stuff.
There is one issue that pops up here and there in response
to all the mommy-blogging going on: I read an article earlier today saying that
it seems like parents do nothing but complain on the internet about how hard
their lives are. I would like to chime in on this one, because I do feel it’s
relevant in my situation.
Where I work, in my particular field and division only one
other person (out of 16) has a young child. Most of the people in equivalent
positions (program officers) are either childless or are men with grown
children. In the mornings they come in
and tell me about the movies they saw the previous night, the trips they’re
taking on the weekends, the hip evening activities they have taken advantage of,
all the travel they look forward to doing for work, and the fabulous elaborate
meals they cook on Saturdays with friends. I think that’s great. I really do –
I remember those days fondly. I keep my lips sealed and nod and pretend that I
can relate to their fabulous carefree lifestyles. But when they start asking me
“why don’t you ever travel for work?” (I am supposed to*) and “what are your
plans for the weekend” and I start to answer honestly, their eyes glaze over.
I have also recently
seen a few colleagues take a day off or a morning off here and there because
they’ve “been having trouble sleeping lately,“ and not to seem like a bitter
old crone, but by that logic I should NEVER COME TO WORK AT ALL. For real. I
haven’t slept a stretch longer than 4 or 5 hours since about November.
I have decided not to share with them what it’s like to work
three shifts. I call my day a three-shift day, and the shift in the middle (the
one for which I am paid handsomely) is the most relaxing and stress-free of
all. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s all horrible because it’s not – at
the time some of the things that I do seem kind of unreasonable but it has become
the new normal in my world. It’s just when it’s thrown up against the
lifestyles of others less entangled than I that it becomes a sore spot.
My day usually sort of starts around 3 a.m. though I’m not even
sure where one day stops and the next one starts anymore. Nora is a great one
for talking/shouting/crying/screaming in her sleep, but never actually waking
up and walking into our room, so that I have to get up and go get her to see
what’s going on so it doesn’t escalate. One late-night/early-morning screaming
session was caused by a dream she’d had wherein I had cracked an egg on top of
her head. “YOU CRACKED AN EGG ON MY HEAD!” Me: “no sweetie, shhh shhh, it’s ok,
I would never do that to you.” Nora: “YES YOU DID! YOU DID IT JUST NOW!” (How
do you explain that conversation to a coworker when they say “you look tired today”?)
She is a wonderful, imaginative, interesting and smart child, with a really
vivid imagination and a lot of energy, but her one fault in life is that she is
not a terrific sleeper. I long ago reconciled myself to the fact that she will
never in her life go to bed early and indeed, she goes to bed easily but very
very late for someone under 40” tall. There’s no yo-yo-ing back and forth for
endless glasses of water, and she is super reliably dry at night. She’s just –
active. The brain never shuts off. She
has full conversations in the dark, complaining about some minor indignity she
suffered at daycare that day, worrying about lost toys or parents who crack
produce over her head. She doesn’t like sleeping in her room because she claims
she can hear loud cars and trucks all night (we live in the country – once in a
while she hears the admittedly-very-loud snowplow around 6 a.m.) so she tries to
spend each night in our bed, which as another very funny viral cartoon has
illustrated can be incredibly disruptive. (He has a book. Of course he does.
See it here . Nora is a fan of “H is for Hell.”
Anyway, so my day usually starts with one of these such
interruptions. Then I’m awake. Then I have to pee. I make my way to the
bathroom to do the deed (thank god we renovated and included a bathroom
upstairs. Thank.God.), then I go back to bed where hubby is snoring loudly. I
roll him over onto his side again, and try to settle in. He keeps snoring on despite
the nose strip and double pillows and repeated jabs to the back. Then the dog
has a dream and starts running in her sleep at the foot of the bed. “Oh” you
say. “You let your very large rambunctious dog sleep in your bed, no wonder you
get no sleep.” Yes, yes I do, because if I don’t, she paces all clickety
clickety around the bed all night and her nocturnal twitchings are LOUD against
the floorboards and surrounding furniture. At least the bedding is quiet. Plus
our bedroom is unheated and I like to stick my toes under her when it’s minus
100 outside. After I kick the dog (gently, more like a nudge) to discourage her
dream-twitching, I try to settle back in but now that I’ve awoken, so has Squid
(the fetus) and he starts booting me in the belly. Not hard, just noticeably
because as Babycenter has told me, he’s only the size of a banana. If I can
ignore all this and get back to sleep, I usually have three hours max of sleep-time
before either my biological clock or my alarm clock wakes me up.
I haul myself up, shower myself, shuffle to the kitchen,
feed the cat, and make Nora’s breakfast to bring to daycare. This is 6:50, I am
chopping up fruit while the cat crunches away, which I actually kind of enjoy. I
finish this and head upstairs to choose outfits – another tiny pleasure. I
dress myself (usually in the dark), then try to gently awaken Nora, dressing
her as she sleeps/wakes up. This is easiest because she has no opinions on what
she wants to wear when she’s still asleep, except sometimes socks are
contentious. I pick her up and bring her downstairs and we snuggle on the couch
for 5 minutes while she wakes up. This is my favorite part of my day. Then it’s
time to bundle into winter coats, snowsuits, boots, hats, mitts, poured coffee,
bags by the door, haul it all up to the car, stuff all the bits into the carseat,
start the car, warm it up, drive to daycare, drop her off (unbundle), then
until very recently I would have to make two or three separate stops on the way
to work to pick up carpoolers. I then drive to work – enjoyable. I listen to
the radio and drink coffee. This now represents my only real alone time of the
day and this subtle change in my routine makes me feel free as a bird, sadly.
Then I park in my new spot and briskly walk the 1km to work. Thus begins my
second shift.
After the second shift is over (and it is a quiet shift,
full of adult conversations and decent food), I bundle up, walk back to my
parking spot, and start shift #3. Sometimes I have to run a quick errand on the
way home to pick up something for dinner. I then pick up Nora at daycare at 5 –
bundle her up, ask about the day, what was for lunch, did she eat her
breakfast, light chat with the other parents, wait while she crawls to the car
through the deep snow. Pick up the mail, drive home. We get home, unbundle, and
I let the dog outside, feed the pets, get Nora a wee snack (especially if it
was soup day at daycare), and try to re-light the fire in the woodstove. I have
about 30 minutes of play time before I have to break to make dinner, which is
usually a difficult break with Miss Nora. She hates it when I go make dinner.
While I am making dinner (usually a full dinner, and I’m not afraid to brag
here: my family is LUCKY), hubby gets home and takes over the playing-with.
This is a real skill of his; he can dress and undress and redress stuffed
animals until the cows come home. Then I call them to dinner and we eat
together. Sometimes this is easy and great fun and Nora eats like a horse, and
other nights she’s not into it. Sometimes she sits with her back to us and I
get tense. We finish dinner and if it’s Monday (or Tuesday if I gave up and fed
her Cheerios for breakfast on Tuesday morning), I usually have to bake
something for the week’s daycare breakfasts – a loaf of some sort, usually
banana bread or blueberry-oatmeal loaf (cut down the sugar, add flax and chia
and other sneaky mom stuff). I can now almost do this in my sleep. Hubby cleans
the kitchen. I lay on the couch and ‘play’ or just sort of lie nearby like a beached
whale while Nora creates scenarios where various toy penguins have blended
families and have pet cats and like to eat sparkly pompoms.
We do this, unless it is bath night, where I (or hubby if I
can trick him) have to sit in the bathroom and watch Nora pour water over the
heads of various toy animals for an hour. It’s tough to sit crunched up on the
bathroom floor when you are 5 months pregnant and have just eaten dinner. So that’s
why Nora only has two baths a week. Plus our water supply is kind of low and
her skin dries out easily. She plays, she plays with me, she plays with daddy,
until it’s time to brush teeth and go upstairs, where we put on jammies and she
plays a bit more in bed. Sometimes we draw pictures, sometimes we read stories.
Then I say “it’s time to turn out the light”, she goes pee one more time, has a
little cup of water, and scampers back to bed where she snuggles next to me and
falls asleep within 2 minutes. I love this time. Sometimes I am asleep before
she is. If it’s before 10 p.m. it’s a good night, but sometimes it’s a bit past
10 p.m. and I’ve learned that that’s ok too. Everyone is different.
Hubby comes to bed at 12:30 or 1:00, and moves Nora to her
own bed. Sometimes we have small conversations and I have to try to get to
sleep again. And so ends my third shift.
So childless people might think that that all sounds horrible
or bland. I remember when I was pregnant the first time, I had no idea how I would
fit it all in. But you do. Somehow it works out. Things happen gradually. And
you have no way of telling your childless coworkers that you didn’t really do
anything of note last night, but man you laughed so hard when your daughter
informed you that her baby dolly’s name is “Jeff,” and that you woke up this
morning to her looming over you whispering “Mama. Mama. Rosie’s licking her
butt.” You can’t really explain how wonderful
it is that the three-and-a-half-year-old ate more salmon at dinner than you
did. How you and your 42-year-old husband and your daughter played the
recorder, the keyboards, and a broken guitar for 2 hours the other night
without going insane. How wonderful and creative and meaningful Pingu is even after seeing them all 48
times. How something as simple as Nora’s new haircut has made me feel like I
have fallen in love all over again.
And so I nod and smile and ask about the movie and the
dinner and the weekend away. And I know that while I am somewhat freaking out
about having two kids, it will also all work out, as it does, and there’s just more
adventure ahead, and that I wouldn’t trade places with anyone for anything in
the world.
But I am totally taking tomorrow off and blaming it on lack
of sleep.
*for the record, the last time I travelled for work, I was away for two nights and because of it, Nora peed the bed for two weeks. I am having a hard time seeing the value in it.
