Kaelin threw her hairbrush in the toilet today. It was like an epiphany.   I think I heard her gasp in gleeful amazement.
Gone are the days of leaving the bathroom door open, or sitting down without first inspecting the contents of the bowl. Sigh.

Well, I got my project.   Boss wants me to put a website together.   Do I have the first idea about how to create a website?   Not so much.   I mean, I tinker with templates in WordPress, but an actual website?   I have only a basic knowledge of HTML and no editing software.
This could get interesting…

Approximately 25% of the people in my blogroll* suffer from some form of depression. Those are the ones I know of because I’ve seen them write about it. It’s possible that statistic is higher.

So I want to be clear about something because it’s easy to read a post about someone in a slump and think “depression.”

I do not and have never suffered from depression. So don’t try to medicate me.

That said, I’m in a slump right now.

For the most part, I live my life in anticipation. I’m constantly looking forward to something, in the middle of accomplishing something or searching for something specific. It motivates me. This characteristic reveals itself in the myriad of projects I undertake for the sheer delight in producing something. Whether it be via work, online, crafting, whatever…there is always something I’m planning, researching, undertaking, creating, whatever.

I don’t have anything going right now. I don’t have anything that has sparked my interest enough to say, “I want to do THAT.”

And it’s kind of depressing. In the non-clinical sense. I’m missing the spark that usually drives me through life so quickly. And suddenly things are…dull. And I’m not motivated. And I’m bored with the things that usually interest me.

Sigh.

Here’s hoping my next scheme/idea/project/desire will pop up soon.

*BTW, take a look at my new blogroll – I’ve made some changes!   I got tired of the boring and nonpersonal nature of blogroll lists.

See the box in the sidebar under “Guest Blog”? Go click there to visit my latest guest, Sparks & Butterflies.

She works for a movie studio in California and has lots of run-ins with celebrities. She’s also very good at articulating the recent weight of emotion she’s been going through with the passing of her somewhat estranged birth mother. Her experiences in life that have led her to the present have been very different from mine, and probably different from yours.

Click over, give her a read and send some good wishes. You’ll be glad you did!

I’m probably jinxing the situation right now, but the CIO method over the past couple of days has worked like a charm. In fact, I’m hesitant to even call it Cry It Out because Kaelin does very little crying. I listen to her to be sure she’s not working herself into hysterics, because that would be counter-productive, but she hasn’t even come close so far.

Once I leave the room, she’ll fuss for a minute or two – pretty half-heartedly. Then she goes to sleep. And she’s been sleeping very well. She still wakes up once in the middle of the night for a bottle, but she’s been waking up later than usual, which is nice. And in the morning, she wakes up happy and rested.

I think it has a lot to do with her age. She’s old enough now to feel secure that we’re going to be there for her, so the prior hysterical panic attacks don’t come. If we had tried this when she was an infant, it would have been a disaster and probably a scarring experience for all three of us.

We’ll see how tonight goes, but I’m very encouraged that we’re doing the right thing.

And in other news, I totally forgot that I put my blog up for rent and let a few offers expire.   Doh.

PatientKitty

There are times when I think that the single purpose of parenting is to destroy preconceived notions.

Yesterday I reached an all-time low in masochistic self-humiliation. I entertained my daughter by jiggling the fat on my belly. My belly has never recovered from pregnancy, and makes a very good “bowl full of jelly” illustration. Apparently this is quite entertaining. For some.

Yesterday I committed another act that, prior to this week, I would have told anyone would never take place in my house.

I let my child cry herself to sleep.

I have always been anti-Ferber. Not to the point of raining judgement down on other people’s parenting choices, I am well aware that I am not in a position to decide what’s best for someone whose circumstances are not my own. But for MY house, for MY CHILD, I knew that Ferber was not the answer.

Kaelin has never been particularly difficult to put to bed. We rock her, give her a bottle, turn on the music and put her down. Usually when supplied with her music and her love monkey, she’ll go to sleep without too much resistance.

She has, however, always been one of those babies who increases tension through crying (as opposed to releasing it). That’s the main reason we knew we could never do the Cry It Out method, because she has never been able to cry it out. She works herself up into hysterics to the point where she’s gasping, panicked, and physically can’t calm down. We have never let her get to the point of throwing up, but have no doubt that if we left her long enough, that would be the next step, followed shortly by permanent emotional damage.

So once we put her down, if she was unable to get to sleep on her own and started crying, I* returned to her and held her, rocked her etc. until she was sleepy enough to put down without realizing that we were putting her down and leaving.

For some reason, everything has changed in the last week. No matter how tired, she refuses to go to sleep. Instead, the minute she senses me moving out of the room, she stands up and starts crying. So I would go back in, calm her down, lay her on her back and stay there until she commenced with the finger-twirling-her-hair-routine that precedes sleep. I’d sneak out of the room and make it half way down the stairs before the screaming began.

After several nights of repeated rounds of this, it became quite clear to me that something wasn’t working. So I put my best 11-Month Old Thinking Cap on to try to figure out what it was, and I saw the following issue: She relaxes, I leave. She cries, I return. And suddenly, it became quite clear that I was unwittingly encouraging the behavior that I find so frustrating.

So I made a new executive decision. At night, I will read her a story, rock her for a few minutes and put her down. I will tell her I love her and kiss her good night. And then I will leave, shut the door, and not return.

I am theorizing that this will help solve the problem because:

• She will have a predictable bedtime routine
• She will know that I’m leaving the room, so she won’t suddenly realize that she’s alone and think she’s been abandoned.
• She will have to un-learn the idea that crying brings Mommy back and delays bedtime
• She will have to learn how to put herself to sleep

At least, that’s what I’m hoping for. I listened to her cry last night for probably 5-10 minutes before she quieted down. I only got through that because by the time I came up with this plan, I had already been back to her room 12 times and was too damn frustrated to get all soft about the crying.

Tonight I tried it again from the start. I put her down, said good night and walked away. She cried for under a minute, and it never reached the level of distress that indicates the point of no return (where she is unable to calm herself down without help/comfort). That gives me hope.

It’s a very strange feeling when you begin to realize that you have to move toward the more structured phase of parenting. Where you have to do more than just love the child…you have to train, discipline, teach. There’s a lot more pressure there. And it seems to be mostly trial and error.

I’m hoping for less error.

* For some reason, the bedtime routine has become MY duty. J says she won’t sleep for him, that she only goes to sleep when I put her down. That might change with the new routine.

I have a mole on my stomach that looks like this:

Actually, I guess you could call it 5 moles. But it used to be one. And even though I could be considered young for this sort of thing, I’m fairly certain that isn’t normal behavior for your every day joe schmoe mole…so I’m thinking I should have it checked out. Along with another one on my leg. Both of which have appeared/changed since college.

So I spent the morning talking with insurance brokers and trying to figure out what my best options are, considering the following:

1. I’m not currently insured.
2. For the most part, it’s cheaper for me to remain uninsured and pay full price for my prescriptions and doctor visits, than to pay the monthly premium for insurance (which for some reason is unusually high in Texas).
3. If the moles are a problem and need to be removed, it will cost me a bunch of money…but will it cost more than I would be paying in insurance premiums?
4. If I have the moles diagnosed and they ARE problematic, I will get labeled with a “preexisting condition” if I’m not insured beforehand.
5. Preexisting conditions are bad when trying to obtain insurance later.

So I don’t really know what to do. I have no idea if these moles are going to be a problem or not. I did get sun exposure during my childhood and teenage years. But how much is too much? I’m fair skinned but tan easily. I’m adopted, so I have no information on my family history. I have a mole on my nose that I’ve had since birth. If they want to remove the others, they’ll probably want that one to go as well.

I do know which insurance broker I’m NOT going to give business to:

“So, now that I’ve given you all the information, can I get your information to start filling out this application?”

“Well, I’ll need to wait on that. I need to do some comparisons and talk with my husband about it first.”

“So…what, you can’t make a decision on your own?”

I pointedly informed him that I had enough respect for the person I share a household and bank account with to discuss this kind of thing before “making a decision.”

* * *

After dealing with insurance brokers, I went to court to make some headway in clearing up the big fat mess. The judge moved my pretrial for the deferrment violation case to be the same day as the pretrial for the ticket that caused the mess, since, in theory, if I can get that stupid ticket dismissed, the deferment violation will be a nonissue. In theory.

He did make a point of telling me, however, that just getting the other dismissed did not guarantee that I would not be held accountable for the deferrment violation, since the verbage in my probation agreement states “must not receive” another ticket during probation period.

Great. They’re holding me accountable for something out of my control. It doesn’t matter whether or not I was actually DOING anything illegal. All that matters is that a cop issued me a ticket for something. Some justice system we have.

* * *

This evening we were making dinner when J says, “What did I do with that Pepsi I just opened?”

We both look up, just in time to see Kaelin in the living room, pouring the last remaining drops of the can into a 3-foot puddle on the carpet.

Just in case you were wondering, there is a deceptively large amount of cola in a can of Pepsi.

* * *

She’s teething again. The first tooth finally broke in today and hasn’t seemed to bother her at all. But tonight she is unable to sleep for a period of more than 10 minutes unless she’s doped up on formula and tylenol. Unfortunately, the doping effect wears off long before we can give her another dose. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night.

Throughout my 5+ years of married life, I have found neighbors to be a consistent source of entertainment. It seems the people I work with, the friends I have, they are often no match in pure degree of character to the people I happen to find myself living near.

When we were first married, we lived in an apartment across the hall from Retardo Cat. He was the largest beast of a feline we had ever seen, and his eyes didn’t point in the same direction. He would sit outside the door for hours waiting to be let in. He owned Mumbling Drunk, a man who would come home in the wee hours of the morning and loudly fuss with the lock on his door, unable to find the coordination it takes to insert the proper key into the keyhole.

Our first house was a duplex, and we shared a wall with Streghetta, a full-blooded Italian grandma with really bad teeth who could cook like a god. She spent her days cooking, cleaning and yelling. At any given moment during the day, you could hear her yelling, vacuuming, or yelling over the vacuum. It wasn’t all angry yelling; she yelled her daily conversations with her husband.

NO, I THINK THOSE ARE MY SOCKS! MY SOCKS HAVE BLUE STRIPES ON THE TOES! YOUR SOCKS HAVE RED TOES! WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR DINNER?

We liked he well enough, but made a point to avoid her if possible if we saw her standing outside. The woman could talk the limbs off a tree. And she was never lacking in opinion.

“Why do they let them into this country if they don’t speak Engalish? This is America. We speak ENGALISH! If they can’t speak Engalish like everybody else, they should not be here.”

“Did you speak English when you immigrated?”

“Of course not. We didn’t speak Engalish in Italy!”

Streghetta‘s husband was Bionic Man. I’m guessing her constant yelling (and incessant talking) had a negative effect on his health, but he was a trooper and kept on trucking…through 13 heart attacks, 2 strokes and 2 car accidents that resulted in back surgeries.

On the other side, our neighbors were Boo and Monstar (real names), a lesbian couple that liked to walk around their house naked. Their large dining room window was approximately 5 feet from our large dining room window, and neither of us had blinds.

When we moved to Texas, we pretty much avoided our neighbors as much as possible in the little duplex we rented for a two years. But we couldn’t avoid checking the mail, which resulted in the meeting of another talkative old woman, Nosey Chatter, and her dog, Walking Automan. I think WA was supposed to be a Welsh Corgy, but it was as wide as it was long, and you really couldn’t tell the difference when it sat down because its stomach touched the ground when it was standing up. It wheezed. A lot. When it walked, its fur rippled.

Nosey Chatter would tell us what the vet had warned her about, that she had to quit feeding Walking Automan table food. “But she likes ice cream! I can’t just deny her!” Dog killer.

Among other things (yawn), we learned in no uncertain terms from Nosey Chatter how the growing Asian population in the area was ruining the neighborhood because “they don’t make good neighbors.”

Now we own a house in another city, where we are once again the only white people in the neighborhood, aside from our neighbors on the left. The neighbors are no less interesting though.

There’s Old Guy Down the Street, who is constantly standing in his front yard staring at his car. See, even though the garages are in the back of the houses, we’re the only people on the street who actually use the garage to PARK IN. Everybody else parks on the street. Sometimes I just want to walk up to him, grab him by the shoulders, and SHAKE HIM.

“WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? It’s the same car – it looks the same as it did FIVE. MINUTES. AGO. And the same as it did YESTERDAY. And the DAY BEFORE!   Is somebody leaving you cryptic messages scrawled in code on the side of your car?   WHAT ARE YOU DOING???”

Every once in a while he’ll switch things up on us and stare at the OTHER side of the car.

Yesterday, we had a conversation with Ghastly Growth Guy and his wife, our neighbors across the alley. Dude has a MULLET growing out of the MOLE on the SIDE OF HIS NECK. I am so not kidding, I had no idea it was even POSSIBLE to have that much hair grow out of a mole. It’s way longer (and thicker) than the hair on his head.

What, is his mirror too high on the wall that he can’t see the tail sticking out on the side? And what about his wife…why on earth would she let such a thing go unattended? Is it some sort of cultural status symbol that I don’t know about?

Anyway, that’s my rundown of neighbors. I guess I could consider it a lesson in … diversity? Do you have weird neighbors too?

I refuse to believe that my daughter is almost a year old. It’s simply not true, stop telling me that it is, I’m not listening, LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

We went to the park yesterday and she had the time of her life, clomping around in her new shoes. Though she’s been walking for over a month now, shoes are a novelty – being completely unneccessary until now.

See, we don’t DO “outside” unless the temperature in the shade is UNDER 3600 F …so no need for shoes until recently. But now that we’re approaching fall, it’s getting to be a bit more reasonable, and we can venture outside without the risk of getting stuck to the pavement.

She’s getting more talkative. She’s had her own language for a while now, but we’re really getting the idea that she’s starting to assign specific words to specific meanings. Bah-Bah is bottle. Mah is Light (which we only know because she points at the light on the ceiling every time she says it). Her latest additions are “Dot” and “Dude.” I don’t think they’ve been assigned meanings yet, she’s just enjoying the sound of them right now.

“Wow, Kaelin. That’s some wild hair you have there.”

“Doooooood.”

She’s able to understand a lot more words than she can say. I can ask her where her duck is and she’ll go to the toy bin and retrieve it. When asked, she can point to our eyes, nose, mouth and ear…but her favorite is nose and she’ll often start pointing it out without the suggestion. She also really likes pointing to all the babies in a book or magazine.

She’s trying to grow out of her morning nap. I don’t neccessarily mind this if it means with certainty that she’ll sleep for at least 2 hours in the afternoon. On the days when she DOESN’T do that, I can feel the pigment in my hair start to fade.

She’s starting to understand the concept of “NO” and insists on testing us as often as possible. She’s more than willing to tow the line at every oportunity, to see EXACTLY where that line is. When I make her lay still and quiet in her bed at night, she’ll try rolling over. When that doesn’t work, she’ll try flinging her leg over. When that doesn’t work, she’ll look at me and TWITCH. I’m beginning to fear the teenage years.

She’s still not sleeping through the night. Or rather, she has not RETURNED to sleeping through the night since she started teething several months ago. It’s like a bad joke to get a taste of sleeping through the night and then have her suddenly quit doing so for an indefinite period of time. Last night she slept until 4:00am, which was a miracle. Actually, at 2:30am, I got out of bed and went to make sure she was still breathing, thinking surely something MUST be wrong. By 2:30am, she has usually woken up at least twice. But no, she was sound asleep, doing just fine. Kaelin, if you want to make a habit of that again, I’d be in full support.

She’s teething again, which we only know because we can see the little nub of a tooth poking in on the top. It doesn’t seem to be bothering her at all, which is nice. And she hasn’t had the drooling symptom that accompanied the last round of teething. Also nice.

We finally had to give in and purchase a new vehicle when she grew out of her car seat, since the next size up didn’t physically fit into our 2-door coupe. We ended up with a Hyundai SUV and I’m absolutely LOVING it. I think I will probably never go back to 2 doors. It’s also nice to be able to fit more than just the stroller in the trunk. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone grocery shopping, lugged the huge cart full of my purchases out to the car, and opened the trunk to find that I’d forgotten to remove the stroller and had no room for the groceries.

Speaking of groceries…she’s eating more solid foods now, including finger foods. Which I fear may be leading toward the seemingly inevitable disaster in my near future: the neccessity of cooking.

I don’t cook. I never intended to start cooking. In my book, cooking is a complete waste of time.

You spend all this time and effort preparing a meal, and standing over it for an hour just makes you so ravenously hungry that you can’t wait to actually get it all on the table before consuming it, so by the time every part of the meal is complete, you’ve already eaten 90% of it and don’t get the chance to just sit down and eat for a few minutes (even if you’re good and resist the temptation of eating it before you get it to the table, you still don’t get the chance to sit down and enjoy it because the kid – who has had to be otherwise occupied during the hour you spent preparing the food – is now tired of whatever you’ve managed to distract her with previously, and requires full attention). And then you’re done and it didn’t taste nearly as good as it would if the restaurant made it and now you have to spend the rest of the evening cleaning up the kitchen.

But it’s hard to come up with healthy finger foods for a toddler that require no preparation, yet aren’t just sodium & carbs (yes, Cheerios, I’m looking at YOU). Child cannot live on Cheerios, string cheese and dried fruit alone. Though the more I imagine cooking on a regular basis, the more I’m considering pushing the limits of that theory.