O hai. We here before all dese ppl and Ceiling Cat sos cat 1 and cat 2 can has marriage.
cat 1 and cat 2, marriage iz commitment and all about luv, so if u marry wifout thinkin hard about it, ur doin it wrong.
Anyone has visible reason they shud no marry? No? Gud.
cat 1 and cat 2, LOLCat Bible sez, “Luv is pashient an kind and stuff, luv no has jelusy and no shows off. It not rude, it not say UR DOIN IT WRONG. It no aligned wif basement cat but only ceiling cat. Luv protectz, trusts in all teh stuff, hopes in all teh stuff, sticks wif u in all teh stuff. FAIL? Not luv.” Dis what luv shud be for u.
cat 1, what u here for? (cat 2’s paw for marryin)
What u promis for cat 2? (I can has u, cat 2, for bein all wedded an stuff. I can has, I can hold. We can has riches, we can has no riches, we can has helf, we can has no helf, I still all luv u until ded.)
cat 2, what u here for? (cat 1’s paw for marryin)
What u promis for cat 1? (I can has u, cat 1, for bein all wedded an stuff. I can has, I can hold. We can has riches, we can has no riches, we can has helf, we can has no helf, I still all luv u until ded.)
Marriage no jus two cats, it needz other cats for supports and luv. Srsly, all u be there for them? (Yes.)
I can has bukkit wif rings?
Rings are all round, they has no end jus like your luv. cat 1, place ring on cat 2’s paw and say: I maed u a ring and I no pawn it. Wif this ring, I are wedding u. cat 2, u do same and say: I maed u a ring and I no pawn it. Wif this ring, I are wedding u.
U both now all married. Ceiling cat will now watch u kiss.
Last night, when Eli again asked that we keep playing through Zack and Wiki instead of Mario Kart Wii, I realized that he’s most interested in games that involve some semblance of plot. My kid is going to be an adventure game player!
Of course, even when a game doesn’t have a story, he’s happy to incorporate elements of it into new stories of his own.
ME: I’m going to work! Bye!
ELI: Be careful! Watch out for missiles!
ME: I’ll watch out.
ELI: You can beat them with a fireball.
ME: Or maybe a turtle shell, like in Mario Kart.
ELI: Which do you want, fireballs or turtle shells?
did you find with liza that a “switch” went off and she started sleeping longer (my friends who don’t sleep train say that this will be the case at some point). I just wonder because we sleep trained Sean starting at 6 months, and it wasn’t as easy as all the doctors and books said it was going to be (3 nights crying, then you’re done). Eventually Sean has been more consistent at sleeping longer, but I’m not sure I would entirely attribute it to our training as so much as he was ready to do it himself. I was just wondering your thoughts?
Oh, ramona, how I would like to tell you that I did something right! And that with these three easy steps you can get your nighttime maniac to sleep through the night too! And also? We have Ginsu Knives to give away. (Knives not for use in putting baby to sleep.)
But I can’t.
Eli was our textbook cry-it-out sleeper at ten months. We let him cry it out for just under a week and then he was done and he slept like a champ. He’s never had a moment’s trouble sleeping since.
Liza? We tried just about every option I could read about and only a couple of them worked for short periods of time.
Here’s what I do know about when she started sleeping better:
1.) I weaned her. I officially did it because I was going to be traveling without her and it was close enough to her birthday that her pediatrician said I could put her on cow’s milk. So she started drinking Horizon Organic Whole Milk with DHA. (Why organic? It’s not because I think the only thing that should pass my baby’s lips should be organic. It’s because their whole milk with DHA added is the nectar of the gods. I’m not kidding, it’s like drinking butter. It’s all I can do to keep from guzzling it straight from the carton.) So she probably got a big boost of fat from that. And she started packing away the table food. Maybe her tummy is fuller now when she goes to bed.
2.) It got to be warmer weather. She’s sensitive to temperature while she sleeps and she got the last room in our house, which happens to be the coldest room in our house in the winter. Often I had the humidifier running in her room as well, which makes a cold room feel several degrees colder. So with spring time warmth, it’s much warmer in her room even when the air conditioner is running.
3.) I quit doing wake to sleep because often I was waking her and having to sit and rock her anyway. I don’t know if she was getting used to me coming in or if something else developmentally was happening but it quit working and before I found another thing to try she was sleeping better.
4.) I started having to put her in bed still awake. Up until very recently, I was rocking her to full sleep because any time she spent in the crib awake to her was about as pleasant as being flayed with those Ginsu Knives I was trying to sell you earlier. But about a month or so ago she started this flipping thing. Once I turned out her light and started singing to her, she’d turn on her back and then onto her stomach, then onto her back, then roll around so her head was on my knees, etc. After about five minutes of that I was exhausted and grouchy so I started putting her in the crib. Usually she’d cry for a while and I’d have to go back in and rock her. It was like she had to visit the crib, remember she hated falling asleep on her own and then call me back into the room to do the job for her. Eventually she started falling asleep on her own even with the grouching. Now I put her in the crib awake and she talks for a bit, plays with her doll and blankie and then falls asleep.
5.) Her separation anxiety got better. I don’t know if her SA got better because she started sleeping better or her sleeping got better because her separation anxiety lessened. Either way, WIN!
So those are the five things that all happened about 5-6 weeks ago. Did a switch flip and she decided to sleep better or did something among those five things listed above actually help? I have no idea. I can tell you, ramona, that it does get better. Just stay with it and be patient. Tag out with your partner when you can’t handle the nighttime stress any longer and before you know it, your little one will be rolling in at 11 after a night with his friends and crashing on the sofa. You’ll have to beg him to get up and go to school.
The other day I turned around and you were one year old. You’ve developed a personality, can say words you hear a lot like “dad” and “stinky”, and are nearly walking. You’ve grown from a lump of obligation to a speedy blur.
Seriously, I had no idea how fast you were going to be. For the longest time you stayed where I put you. One day I put you down, looked away, and when I looked back all I saw was your leg as you vanished down the hall, headed for the bathroom so you could pull up on the toilet and lick it.
Crawling is so fast and so fun that I’m surprised you’ve started walking. You take hesitant, stiff-legged steps like a tiny pink Frankenstein’s monster. A lot of times you find it easier to take sideways steps, which makes me think there was a crab somewhere on your mom’s side of the family.
You’ve got a gift for mimicking people that’s only gotten stronger in the last few months. When we got back to town after visiting everyone for Christmas we went out to eat. At one point you lifted your hands over your head, so I did it too. Then you did it again. I did it again. We were trapped in a loop of imitating each other. You don’t really care who you imitate. Two weeks ago, our neighbor was walking Saber, her German Shepherd, and stopped by. Saber sat, tongue lolling out and panting. You looked down at her, cocked your head, and panted “hah hah hah” in sympathy.
Your ability to mimic has helped you learn sign language. You have some twelve signs you regularly use. You’re also working on spoken words, though only your mom and I can understand them. “Bap tah” is bath time; “tayn ooo” is thank you. “Stinky” is by far your best word. You wrinkle your nose and say it forcefully, then giggle.
Of course, you’re always ready to fall back on your old standby of screeching. You have very strong opinions, and waving your arms and saying “bop bop!” sometimes isn’t enough. Your screech means anything from “I’m tired” to “you won’t let me eat that poisonous plant” to “I see that yogurt! Put it in my mouth right now!” Your cries shatter glass and make steel girders melt and run.
Your two favorite things right now are being outside and listening to music. The next time there’s an outdoor music festival here, we’ll drop you off and come back to get you when it’s all over. Surely drunken festival-goers will take care of you. Until the next Big Spring Jam can introduce you to the latest incarnation of Foreigner, we make do with CDs and with the swing out back. We strap you into your string and push you higher and higher as you giggle and throw your hat to the ground. Whenever you hear music you dance and sway. If you’re standing, you stop your feet and lean as far to each side as you can. Right now your favorite songs are the top-40 songs “Liza has a silly hat” and “Tractor, Tractor, Harvesting the Wheat”. The best part of “Tractor, Tractor” is that we can change it to match whatever is going on, like “Liza, Liza, spitting up on me.”
After dealing with your brother, who has trouble breathing if no one is watching him do so, I didn’t expect you to be so independent. In the mornings, all we have to do is dump a pile of books near you and you’re happily entertained until it’s time to sneak off and lick toilets or eat plants.
Even though you’re independent, you’re still enough of a ham to want other people to watch you. Whenever we’re out, you choose some strangers who aren’t paying you any attention. You stare at them, willing them to notice you. As soon as they do, you duck your head and smile before looking back to make sure they’re still watching. Clearly you have your mom’s performer personality.
It’s not all fun and poisonous plants. Since Thanksgiving you’ve fought sleep, and in turn we’ve fought you fighting sleep. You had a serious of colds and ear infections that disrupted your schedule. It doesn’t help that you’re very sensitive to changes in your routine. If we swapped your sheets for ones with a lower thread count, you’d probably be awake all night. It got to the point that we were all so short of sleep that our main entertainment was sitting around being angry at each other. We did eventually find a solution. Right before we went to bed, we’d sneak into your bedroom and shake you until you were nearly awake. Then you’d settle back down and sleep well. Honestly, when your aunt Joy suggested it, it sounded to me like fixing someone’s stomachache by punching them in the gut, but it worked for you.
I tell you about your sleep issues, which took around eight years to get better, to make sure you have enough guilt. Goodness knows, parenting has so much guilt built in that I need to spread it around a little.
I’m always worried that I don’t spend enough time with you, and that’s made even worse because I need to spend time with Eli, too. I do better these days — I’ve realized that this isn’t a zero-sum game, and that I really can spend time with you both without robbing either of you.
I’m always having to leave you to go to work, or to give you to your mom for bedtime. You soon learned to say “bye bye” to me in this chirrupy voice, opening and closing your hand to wave at me. I always pick you up and give you a hug and a kiss. Recently you’ve started hugging back. The first time you turned your head and pressed your face against my neck, I wanted time to stop.
Liza is now walking. She stiff-legged it into the kitchen from the living room tonight and was all, “O Hai! I jus walking.”
Better news: I’m now officially announcing that her sleep problems are over. We’ve gone for around a month with multiple nights in a row of uninterrupted sleep. We’ve had a few nights of waking, but those were due to travel or sickness, so I’m not counting those. Most nights she sleeps from 7:30 until 6:30. It is a thing of beauty to sleep through.
Best news: Eli is reading. We’ve been checking out books from the library that are first readers and tonight he sat down on the couch beside me and read a book to me that I’d never read to him before. Very cool.
It’s been a serious week for us, so in case it’s been serious for you as well, let’s have some fun. And when I say “fun”, I mean “YouTube links to prog rock”. And when I say “prog rock”, I can only mean one band: YES.
I’m a fan of the band, but even I laugh at their spacey lyrics and 70s-tastic costuming. Here, take a gander at a performance of their song “Roundabout” from 1973.
Rick Wakeman’s wearing his sequined cape, Chris Squire has turquoise wings, and the lyrics! “In and around the lake / mountains come out of the sky / and they STAND THERE”! “The muses dance and sing / They make the children really ring”!
And this awesomeness goes on for over eight minutes.
Pick just about any Yes song and prepare to be bowled over by the lyrics. Don’t believe me? Here, try 1978’s “Don’t Kill the Whale”. It weighs in at barely over 3 minutes long, an aberration for a band better known for eight-to-thirty-minute epics.
“If time will allow / We will judge all who came / In the wake of our new age / to stand for the frail / DON’T KILL THE WHALE / dig it dig it”.
This lineup, Anderson Squire, Howe, Wakeman, and Bruford, which actually only lasted for one year, from August of 1971 until August of 1972, is generally considered the best of all the Yes configurations, and the strongest incarnation of the band.
How can you not love a band whose best lineup lasted for less than a year? That’s less than 3% of the band’s life!
Speaking of that lineup, the apotheosis of the band wasn’t actually called Yes, it was called Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. The bassist Chris Squire had the rights to the name Yes, so when the other four members of the “strongest incarnation of the band” got together in the late 1980s they couldn’t use the name. But they certainly could use the same approach to writing music and lyrics!
Every time I hear Jon Anderson plaintively wailing, “Nothing can come between us, you’re a sister of time” I smile, and wonder why the new Doctor Who didn’t use this as their theme song. Who wouldn’t want ten minutes worth of intro credits?
I wrote this in the car this past Monday. We are home now and glad to be back in our own place.
Stephen and I are driving on this bright beautiful May day. It reminds me of summer days spent at my dad’s parents’ house.
In my mind’s eye I can see so clearly the enclosed front porch of their house: windows on three sides and every window filled with shelves of my Granny’s bright glass bottles. There was a tall iron-framed bed at the far end where I would take naps or just lie there and gaze at the hanging plants fluttering in the breeze.
There were always puppies or kittens or piglets or rabbits or ducks to play with, and once a week while I was there, I helped her run laundry through the ringer washing machine and then hang it on the line to dry. When chores were finished, we’d make cookies.
At night I slept in the tiny bedroom off the kitchen with two photographs of my long-gone great, great grandparents on the wall over the bed. I nursed a secret, much-loved fear of the photographs since it seemed their flat painted eyes followed me around the room. That peachy pink room housed me womb-like in the center of the house. My grandmother greeted me every morning with many loud smacking kisses and declarations that “Granny loves you,” just in case I’d forgotten with the passage of the night.
As I got older I quit doing the grand tour of my grandparents’ houses in the summer and my visits with them dwindled to once a year at Christmas.
When my parents divorced, his parents decided that their divorce was so wrong they felt they had to cut him off completely. My own relationship with my father was so strained, I barely noticed that loss on top of all the others in my family.
While I was in college, my dad and I attended their 50th wedding anniversary party. I remember dressing on purpose to appear as bizarre as possible to their tiny town. They were so glad to see me that my ultra-short white blond hair with the weird thread braid hanging down and my hippy clothes didn’t faze them. And while the rift between them and my father wasn’t healed, there was at least an uneasy truce.
The next time I saw them was after my son was born. Through a serendipitous turn of events, they were visiting my dad while we were in Little Rock to attend a funeral. They were so excited to see three month old Eli. My granny squealed and rubbed his baby fine hair. She held his cheeks and insisted that, “Granny loved him.”
Two years ago at Christmas, we visited with them and I noticed she repeated her stories often. She confused me with my mom and couldn’t remember Eli’s name from conversation to conversation.
Two weeks ago, Dad called with the news that she had had a massive stroke and that time was short.
Stephen and I are driving from Little Rock to Thayer, Missouri today for her funeral. It feels like winding the hands back on the clock. In two generations my family has gone from farmers to city dwellers. The gaps that separate my dad’s family and my own seem so much more than the standard generational ones.
One of my second cousins performed the service for my Granny today. He opened it with his memories of her. I was both astonished and gladdened that some of the memories that he listed where the same as some of the ones I listed above. I came away feeling blessed that I had those times with her when I was a child and happy for those others whose lives she touched.
Today was much harder than I anticipated but for different reasons. It was hard to watch my dad deal with the loss of his mother. His unexpected grief was tougher than I ever dreamed. I saw some of the small town mentality (both good and bad) that he’s dealt with his whole life. I met family that I had forgotten I had and realized that, while my life has gone on, so has theirs. That the emotional distance is the dividend of physical distance, if you let it be. Stephen got to meet some of my family for the first time. Sometimes funerals are the best family reunions.
After we finished at the cemetery we stopped at Mammoth Spring, AR, so named for the very mammoth spring some 50 feet from the side of the road. The water is just as beautiful and clear and cold as I remember. The geese gather at the edges, waiting for bread offerings from tourists. I wonder if my Granny got to visit there often. It seemed her sort of place with beautiful trees and animals all around.
This trip has turned into our summer tour of AR, a bit early. We had dinner with my Dad and my step-mom Linda. We’re headed home now to see Eli and Liza. In the morning, we’re going to meet Dad and Linda for breakfast so that they can see the kids. Then we’re headed to spend the day and night with Stephen’s folks. After having the past week with my mom, this bonus time with almost all of our immediate family seems comforting after the fullness of the day.
Mumsy bought Eli Hungry, Hungry Hippos while she was visiting this last week because he said he wanted that game specifically. After I assembled it and played a couple of rounds with him, I took a break and Mumsy took my place.
“Is that all there is to this game?!?!” she asked after she played.
“Yep, that’s it. That’s four-year-old game play for you.”
A few days pass.
More hippos are hungry and are frenetically fed.
One afternoon Eli’s door is accidentally left open. Liza zips in and when Mom and I find her she is clutching hippo marbles in both hands. She takes one from her mouth and passes it happily to Mom.
We are one marble short from the full 20.
The next two hours are full of us dumping out every bucket in Eli’s room. Every item is picked up and shaken. Every container is opened and peered into. Every cover is shaken out. Eli is questioned and questioned again about the possible location of the missing marble.
I looked up object swallowing on the internet. I felt better after I read that once the object is down, if it’s down, then you should only worry if it’s pointed or acidic, like a battery.
Mumsy was frantically tossing Eli’s room like a burglar looking for jewelry. I took pity on her and called the doctor so she could hear that there was nothing to do for now but wait.
The next morning found us sifting through Liza’s diapers looking for the missing marble. Too bad I haven’t been able to provide as much attention to posting here lately as I’ve given to looking through Liza’s diaper for that marble.
Sometime after lunch the next day, Eli pulls out his scooper truck to play with. I hear his shout of discovery from three rooms away:
“Mumsy! I found the marble!!”
This is the part of the story where I hang my head in shame since tiny things have been “lost” in the scooper before and I forgot to check there when we were going over Eli’s room with the proverbial fine-tooth comb the day before.
For once the giant sigh of relief came from someone besides Stephen or me. Mumsy collapsed on the couch and declared it Happy Hour.
