Squidbits

His comprehension grows by leaps and bounds. He understands so many things - the cycle of trash from our kitchen to the landfill, the way lizards run, what a hydraulic ram looks like, how engines work, and how to negotiate for what he wants.

Due to the garbage truck obsession, he's very interested in squishing and mashing things. He crawled between his Daddy's legs when Himself was standing in the kitchen. "Can you compact my head?" he asked. His Aunt Kathy gave him a model tractor with a bulldozer blade attachment, and it has smashed his blanky, his plastic animals, and his cars. I want to give him something better to scoop and push and play with - I tried rice, but then spent the next three days cleaning rice off the floor. I'm thinking maybe navy beans, and dye them some bright color so I can find them.


Squid pretends to be asleep (this photo is mid-"snore")

Birthday comes next month. I'm thinking I'll invite his special friend Alejandro and his parents to a morning at the Aviation Museum and have some cake with them and the neighbors and the Fan Club. No big fuss, though I will challenge myself with the cake; I'm going to try to shape/decorate it like a garbage truck this year. \o/ Birthday parties proper just seem like...I don't know. The politics of who to invite and how best to entertain them have fifteen more years to be difficult. We can take it easy this year.

His sniffles kept him from coming with me to LA to visit my grandmother, the Grammy we call "the little Grammy," even though she is the same size as my mother, because that is what we called my great-grandmother (who was quite petite) when I was small. 96-year-olds with fragile immune systems do not mix well with snotty, wheezy toddlers. But he did get to see the fan club on the way back, and they stepped in to "sit" him when I had to be in meetings and Himself was taking a woodworking course. Squid was ecstatic! He was so excited when they first came in the door he couldn't get a whole sentence out. Grandpa is the best thing on earth. Luckily, the admiration is mutual.


Squid and Grandpa play tractors

We finally have causal links, which means incentives can work! \o/ There has been regular toothbrushing with minimal fuss for weeks because we give him his gummi bear vitamins after his teeth are clean. We got him to eat the rest of his dinner last night by eating dessert in front of him and refusing him any until he ate his dinner. He snarfed it right up, even telling the other kid who was protesting the same trade-off, "Don't be sad! It taste good!" Bribery is awesome.

He's picked up a few more cute linguistic tics - when he wants a lot of something, he'll say he wants a "big" one. "I want a wewwy big milk!" he informed me this morning. "Wewwy" or "Vewwy" is also in constant use, with a drawn-out pronunciation that mimics the import of the word itself. "I vewwy sad." "Bwanky vewwy cold." I don't think he has trouble with his"l"s or "r"s - not that I've noticed, anyway - "garbage truck" and "hydraulic ram" come out fine. But "sandwich" is "swammich," "wheelie-wheelie" (the family name for the ATV on his grandparents' farm) is the "weewy-weevilly," and "granola," for some reason, is "granana." Tricksy phonemes and how they go together, I tell you.

He went through a miserable anti-Daddy phase, in which he said things like, "I don't like Daddy" and "Go away, Daddy" and refused to let Daddy hold him or read to him. This both saddens me and perplexes me, as Himself is certainly an easier parent to spend time with than I am. I am the parent of structure and toothbrushing and scheduling and rules and multitasking and lack of patience. Himself is the parent of fun games and careful listening and adventures and yummy foods out at restaurants. I am the parent of exasperation. Himself is the parent of patience. I have no idea why Squid goes through these phases; thank God, the latest one seems to have faded.

Mostly, though, he's been a sunny, awesome, fun little guy, lately, and I'm enjoying being his mom so very much. I am very, very lucky to have such a great kid, and I am grateful for him every day.


Squid enjoys the Asian Art Museum

Squid is done with the museum

Resolve

Things I have done in the last month, in line with my NYR to push myself a little more:

• Met up with an old friend I hadn't seen in more than a decade.
  
• Exercised all of twice. Um. But hey, that's twice more than I do most months...
  
• Tried seven new recipes (bok choy with cashews, pasta with chard ribs in cream sauce, collard greens/beet greens with bacon and apple cider vinegar, tomato vodka sauce, sauteed chard, kale with smoked paprika).
  
• Learned to love four new food items I had never really liked before (chard, beet greens, bok choy, kale.)
  
• Taken public transportation to work (for a meeting in SF - there's no public transport to my regular office).
  
• Flown to Los Angeles instead of driving, and took the bus to the airport.
  
• Gone to a protest in the city with the Squid (against Israel's actions in Gaza).
  
• Put down the genre fiction and picked up the Joyce again.

Put all together, not so bad for a start. I've been chiding myself for not doing enough and thinking about how I wrote so much more in 2007 than 2008, and thinking I was making poor use of my time. But then I realized that I started my medication in late 2007. Which means that 2008 was a much better year - I cried less, was more stable, was a better mom, enjoyed my work more - but also means that I now need 9-10 hours of sleep a night.

Oh, everyone says to me, how delightful to get so much sleep! That must be so nice! Er, no. That's how much sleep I need, now. So, for example, if I get a solid 8 hours (more than plenty for most people) - I'm tired like I'm running on a 1.5 hour sleep deficit. If I get 9 I'm fairly functional. If I get 10 I'm really functional. Basically, when I started these meds, I lost 1-2 hours of my day. That's ten and a half waking hours a week - two-thirds of a day. 45 waking hours a month - three full days. 547 waking hours a year - more than a full month of time lost. It's worth it, on balance, but adding it up makes me realize what a loss it truly has been. I'm going to need to forgive myself for not doing everything.

So, I'm not giving up my resolve to push. But I'm realizing that pushing is probably not going to involve taking night classes (I can't stay awake past 9:30!) or doing a lot of time-intensive volunteering, or writing a novel. I don't know when I'll be able to do those things, if ever. I'll have to push in more quotidian ways, and I look forward to discovering them. The line between healthy pushing to expand boundaries and a healthy understanding of personal limitations is one that still confuses me, and I do a lot of thinking about it. I hope you don't mind the updates; they'll help me remember what I've done and think about what I might do in the future, and I'm going to try to remember to do them.