Just Powers

I have heard a lot of people talk about the fact that when you have kids you become abnormally obsessed with their poop and love to talk about it with anyone who will listen.

Actually, not so much for me. My obsession is with Emma’s sleep. I think about it, worry over it, dream about it and talk to everyone about it as if it is the most important thing IN THE WORLD. Last week I went into a 20 minute description of Emma’s sleep issues with an unsuspecting but very nice mother at the park. Oddly, as I write this, I realize I haven’t blogged about it too much. Lucky you.

For the last two months, Emma has gone from being a model sleeper to my worst nightmare. She used to go into her crib drowsy, look at us as we said goodnight and left the room, and then roll over and go to sleep without a peep. We rejoiced, we high fived, we secretly thought we were the best parents in the world.

On the day she turned 15 months, she decided to make it very clear who is the boss when it comes to her sleep. Only once in the last two months has she gone to sleep without crying. Sometimes it is a quick, whimpering cry - those are happy times. Other times it takes us two hours to get her to sleep - those are the why-did-we-decide-to-have-kids-we-obviously-are-the-worst-parents EVAH times. We aren’t really sure what happened to cause her hatred of sleep. There have been a string of events that might be behind it - vaccinations, teething, sickness, travel, weaning from the nighttime bottle (which is uh, not going so well. Please don’t tell our ped…I plan on lying about it when we see him in a month.) If anyone knows about a 15 month old “screw this sleeping thing” phase that kids go through, I am all ears.

But maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Just now, not 20 minutes ago, my old Emma came back to visit. I put her down for a nap, she watched me leave, and rolled over and went to sleep. Aaaaahhhhh.

No doubt she will bring me back down to earth tonight - bedtime seems to be worse than naps for some reason - but I can always hope that the stage has finally come to an end.

And also, if anyone has any tips about weaning off a bottle at bedtime, please let me know. We have been able to switch her from the bottle to a sippy cup with milk at bedtime - but really isn’t that just cheating? Still milk, still the sucking action. I am torn about whether to go cold turkey on the sippy cup or whether to just go a little more slowly and trust that she will wean herself when she is ready. In the past we have leaned more towards trusting that she will do what she needs to do when she is ready, and it has worked, but I don’t want to set my kid up for future therapy centered around dependence issues just because I didn’t know how to take the bottle away. Which is not to say I am under any illusion that she will not already be in therapy for something else I have done to her…

Dear Interwebs -

I have been a huge slacker. I haven’t posted a real post in over two weeks. I have no excuse really, the time has just slipped away from me. Please accept my sincerest apologies and my assurance that it won’t happen again. For a while. Maybe.

In my defense, I haven’t been completely MIA. While I haven’t been writing, I have been reading. I know that Catherine at Her Bad Mother has been having killer false labor, and OH MAH GOD, I feel so bad for her (although maybe not so false as of today? Fingers crossed). I know that Doodaddy hit his 500th post, Jessica and A Parent in Silver Spring were featured in the Washington Post Express and over at My Merry Way June gets cuter every day. I have been hanging on every word written at Boobs, Injuries and Dr. Pepper, and have been holding Dawn at Alex Year One (Two!!) in my heart.

I’m gonna go sleep now and dream of all the posts I am going to write.

Talk to you soon.
Jen

Taking turns from Justpowers on Vimeo.

I took this video back in January and never got a chance to put it up. I remembered it the other day and decided the cute factor far outweighed how late I am sharing it with you.

I met a FellowMom today. I like to think that I am pretty outgoing and make friends easily, but honestly I have found the task of making new mom friends to be a little daunting. So when I connected via email and a local moms Yahoo list with the mom of two kids who attend the same day care as Emma, I was excited to meet her. We agreed that we might meet today when we picked our kids up.

I arrived at daycare and met FellowMom. She seemed very nice and her kids are great, which is always a good sign, although I, like a dork, was as nervous as the first time I asked Mike if he wanted to get together sometime. We exchanged pleasantries and when our kids got restless we made the “Well, I guess I gotta run” face and got in our cars to go home.

On the way home I was in a left turn lane at a stoplight - with an arrow that must be further away than normal or something, cause I have almost missed the light more than once - and when the arrow turned green the person in front of me didn’t move.

“Argh-I-hate-everyone-why-can’t-anyone-drive-can’t-they-see-the-light-changed-what-
the-heck-are-they-waiting-for-oh-wait-this-is-the-light-I-always-miss-maybe-I-will-just-
give-this-slacker-a-little-horn-action-and-then-they-will-finally-move-their-butt” I thought. I tapped lightly on the horn once or twice and the driver waved in the mirror and started to turn.

As we turned, I looked a little more closely and realized…well you know exactly where this is going. The driver was FellowMom.

Beautiful. Just beautiful. Way to go Jen.

And I wonder why I have trouble meeting people.

Breakfast with Emma caught on video using our new Flip camera and uploaded to Flickr’s awesome new video service.

We *heart* technology.

Oh, and Emma.

Emma turned 16 months old today. It was a tough, but exciting month for her.

She spent the first half of the month feeling pretty sick from the vaccines she got at her 15 month visit - I suspect it was the MMR that did her in. She spiked a fever of 103.4, had what I guess is the classic rash associated with measles (or is it mumps?), and was really really miserable for two full weeks. Around the same time, Mike was out of town and she seemed to really miss him, which only exacerbated how bad she was feeling.

Once Daddy returned and she started feeling better, the slide incident showed us that Emma is pretty much fearless, even if the same can’t be said of her parents. She continues to go down the slide on her belly, face first, any chance she gets, as this video documents.

The climbing she was just beginning to enjoy last month has become an obsession. She climbs up on the dining room chairs at every opportunity and once even pulled one down on top of herself. Luckily we were right there to rescue her and she didn’t get hurt. The incident did prompt a “no climbing” rule for the dining room chairs however. It’s a battle we are not likely to win, but we keep trying.

She also decided this month that going down the stairs backwards on her belly is for losers, pah! She now walks up and down the stairs holding on to the railing, if there is one. If a railing isn’t there, then Mommy or Daddy better be, cause she is going anyway. When we leave the house in a hurry and I have to carry her down the stairs to get her in the car, she screams in protest. As soon as we arrive home and I take her out of the car seat, she wriggles out of my arms so she can walk up to the front door.

As if sliding and climbing and stair-walking weren’t enough, just in the last week she has started *jumping*. She bends her knees and then jumps up by straightening her legs without her feet leaving the ground. She thinks it is hysterical. Imagine what she will do when she can actually get some air.

Even though she is fearless on the slide and the dining room chairs, Emma started showing some pretty classic signs of separation anxiety this month, which certainly wasn’t helped by how sick she felt during the first half of the month. She was tearful and clingy much more than usual and it tugged on my heart something fierce. I used to be able to leave her at day care and she would happily run off to play with the other kids without so much as a “see ya mom”. Now I can’t get out of there without lots of tears and a pouty lower lip and the arms reaching for me in desperation. This of course causes me to have my own tears and pouty lower lip all the way to work.

I know it’s just a stage, and a developmentally appropriate one at that, but it is a tough one. She wants me to hold her all the time and has lost any ability to entertain herself, even though she used to be great at it. One day I know she will grow out of this though and I will pine for the moment in time when she wouldn’t even let me put her down so I could go to the bathroom. I will grab her and sneak in a hug and a kiss in the nanoseconds it takes her to peel herself away from me to go play with her friends. So I am trying just to cherish the closeness that comes with her new neediness and not feel smothered by it.

She is still mostly just chattering, not a lot of intelligible words yet, although every once in a while we hear something that is unmistakable. Last week, she said…wait for it…”lasagna”. Yep. Lasagna. She also says “EJ”, a friend she plays with about once a week, although it sounds more like “Eej”.

Her sign language on the other hand is going great - she seems to pick up a sign after only seeing it a couple of times, something that has amazed me on more than one occasion. In addition to “more”, “finished” and “milk” which she has been signing for a while, she now signs “again” (to be fair, a sign that is pretty close to more, but she uses it in context which blows us away), “apple”, “bird”, “thank you”, “eat”, “raisin” (my favorite) and we are working on “please”.

This month she shared Easter with her Aunt Jocelyn (who doubled as the Easter Bunny with her rockin’ Easter baskets - yes plural), went to the Kite Festival at the Washington Monument with us and visited the cherry blossoms in full bloom with EJ and Bridget. She did some gardening with Mommy and was fascinated by all the flowers showing up the yard - especially the hyacinths and daffodils in the front.

She continues to eat almost anything, and this month discovered she loves berries of any kind. She also enjoyed fajitas for the first time, and wolfed down the aforementioned lasagna. Oh! And finally this month, she got really good at drinking from a cup. At the beginning of the month she could do it without my help, as long as I was there, hovering, to make sure the cup didn’t end up in her lap. Now she is so good at it that I can give her the cup and leave the room, feeling pretty confident that she won’t spill. Of course, now we are working on getting her not to tip the cup over when she has finished drinking, which is a favorite game…

The separation anxiety notwithstanding, she is quickly turning into a little girl which is so fun to watch, even if it makes us feel sad at how fast it is happening.

Jumping for Cherry Blossoms from Justpowers on Vimeo.

Emma, her friend EJ, his mom Bridget and I all went down to the Jefferson Memorial yesterday to see the cherry blossoms in full bloom. Despite the freezing cold wind whipping off the Tidal Basin all four of us stayed in pretty good spirits and were even able to find a sunny spot among the blooms to practice jumping.

Just for fun I went back to our pictures from last year’s blossoms - here’s Emma then. Big shout out to our friend Jack and his mommy Kate who went with us last year and moved away not long after. We miss them lots.

I found out recently via Just Up the Pike that the folks behind Arlington Cinema ‘n Drafthouse are opening a new venue in late Summer 2008, two minutes from me, in the movie theater at the Wheaton Mall. A night spot? Within walking distance of my house? Yippeeee!!

Montgomery Cinema ‘n Drafthouse promises first run movies, live music and comedy, sporting events and family friendly entertainment. The coolest part about the Drafthouses (besides the now incredibly close-proximity to moi) is that you watch the movies/comedy/sports/families in a restaurant setting. I saw The Business of Being Born at the theater in Arlington and had a great time eating dinner and drinking a couple of beers while I watched.

Now I definitely need to line up a regular babysitter, and maybe even keep her/him on retainer for a couple of nights a month!

Lunch with Emma from Justpowers on Vimeo.

I just took this video with our new Flip video camera, plugged it into my computer and got it uploaded to Vimeo almost before Emma finished her lunch. What a huge change from our other video camera that takes me what feels like hours to transfer from my camera, edit and upload to the web.

If you are interested, Amazon has the Ultra version on sale right now for $139.99 and an older model for $105.86

This could be seriously addictive…

This video has been viewed over 12 million times, so clearly all of YOU have seen it and just never told me about it. In any case, I just watched it four times in a row and started crying I was laughing so hard. Turns out AIG bought the video and made an ad out of it, AND it just won the 2007 Most Adorable Video in the YouTube video awards.

I’m gonna go watch it again.