Today:
It was a pretty good day.
So you’re all on the edge of your seats wondering how the birthday thing went, right? I kept you waiting out of sheer wickedness. Wickedness, and the fact that I am both lazy and sick with a cold. What’s up with all these damned colds? They’ve been rotating through our house like some sort of white elephant gift, passing from one person to another and, frankly, making me rather pissed off. I AM THROUGH BEING SICK, DO YOU HEAR ME? Also, I am running out of tissues.
Anyway: the party was a success, if a little under-attended (one group of guests had apparently been sure it was the next weekend, at which point they e-mailed me going “Um, did you know that your party was a week ago? You probably did.” Which was funny, and I may have LOLed, but only very quietly and to myself). The kid had a fabulous time. He helped me decorate the littlest cupcakes (which he decided were meteors). No one else had any idea what the cake/cupcake spread was supposed to be, which was fine. I guess.
Also a (qualified) success: the rocket softie. I made some modifications to a pattern I found in One Yard Wonders (which is a pretty fabulous book, if you’re into that sort of thing) and it turned out kind of awesome. The kid likes it, which was the important part.
In other crafty news, I finally slipcovered the Fabulous!Rocking!Glider! (the exclamation points are to emphasize the fact that I love the lovely glider and am not going to get rid of it despite the increasing impracticality of having it in our house). A favorite snuggling spot for both kid and cats, the F!R!G! was sort of disgustingly stained and matted with cat hair, and since the cushions were both a) cream-colored and b) upholstered, cleaning it was a pain. ENTER CRAFTY MAMA, with her IKEA fabric and her barely-passable sewing machine skills! Given that I don’t have the first clue what I’m doing, I think it turned out pretty well.
All those other grand ideas I had? Not going to happen. I was totally going to make garland, and ornaments, and stuff. But what did I do instead? I caught a cold. (I did make gingerbread men. I’m not dead.)
Today I dropped off the paperwork for Ellison’s preschool. Paperwork, I’m telling you. It was somewhat unsurprising that I had to make an exhaustive list of the kid’s immunizations (which are thankfully up to date), but then there was this parental survey in which we were to wax lyrical about “things you appreciate about your child” and “what makes your child joyful?” Dude. When I was in school, no one gave a damn what made me joyful. (Hint: it was reading.) They just cared whether I showed up on time and sat quietly during class. This whole new-age preschool thing is nuts.
Even so, I can’t wait. Ellison is so excited he can barely stand it. I have a feeling preschool is one of the things that is going to fill my child with joy.
I keep finding myself trying to describe what it feels like to get depressed. Which is ridiculous, if you think about it, because it’s not like I sit around trying to find the words to explain not being depressed – and, let’s face it, if you look at the averages that’s how I spend most of my life. But the Prozac (you knew I’d talk about the Prozac again eventually, didn’t you?) has been working, so there has been much less of the doom and gloom and somewhat more of the hey, look at that, things don’t suck entirely! which is a very nice change and I hope it stays that way.
But.
So I just snarfed a huge piece of really gross cake and I feel elephantine and miserable and I really want to sit in a quiet room where I have no projects (over)due and no one is demanding that I console them while they pee on me,* for christ’s sake, and maybe, just MAYBE, I can sleep for more than two hours at a stretch, please, yes?
*The kid is having a slight potty-training relapse. I mention this in case you were entertaining notions of a more adult nature, which, ew.
If I could have given my new-parent self one piece of advice, it would be this:
Don’t worry about it.
Seriously. I started worrying pretty much the second I found out I was pregnant (am I gaining enough weight? What does that pain mean? Am I gaining too much weight? Is he going to be born with both legs fused together? Did all that kicking dislocate one of my ribs?) and it only ramped up from there.
First there was the milk situation, and the fact that mine took like 4 days to come in and the lactation people were making me feel really, really bad about it, like I was deliberately starving my baby or something (note to lactation consultants: I would tell you to suck it but you’d probably take it the wrong way).
Then there were the milestones that did not correspond with established charts: clapping (oh, how I worried about the clapping), jumping, talking.
We got walking out of the way relatively early, what with the taking his first steps at 8.5 months, but he didn’t really talk until well after he was 2 and still has some trouble with pronouns. And I think I may have mentioned how worried I was about potty training (but we all know how that turned out).
But for all my fretting and teeth-gnashing and late-night scouring of the internet, the kid did just fine. He reached all his milestones when he was ready to reach them, with relatively little input from me. It’s like – gasp! – I don’t have total and complete control over my child’s development! It’s like things happen when they happen no matter how much I worry about them!
He might not be reading super early like some of his friends, or drawing recognizable pictures like other friends, but I’m not going to worry about it. My kid is who he is, and I can’t imagine him any other way.
Except maybe he could eat more. That would be okay.
Now that I have a potty-trained kid, the world is suddenly opening up to me in the way of an oyster or something similar. Oh, the things I can do: at the store, for example, I can stride blithely past the diaper displays without obsessively checking to see if they have his size. I no longer have to worry that I’ve ventured out into the world without a diaper tucked into my purse (I ditched the diaper bag when he was about six months old so this is more of an issue than you’d think). And the best part?
I can now use the childcare center at IKEA.
(Honestly, it was the first thing that occurred to me when we realized he was potty trained. But I have yet to do it, since they’re remodeling. Remodeling! Damn them and their delicious meatballs!)
On a larger scale, we can actually actively consider sending the kid to preschool, the thought of which fills me with a giddy sort of glee. Not that I don’t enjoy spending every second of every day with a small child climbing on me and yanking or poking some portion of my anatomy, but since I’m usually trying very, very hard to get some work done during those seconds, I think the kid is often bored. I’m a firm believer in boredom as parenting device, mind you, but I also like the idea of the kid learning to play nicely with other children his own age and listen to authority figures who aren’t his parents. Plus he’s seriously awesome, and why would I want to keep that all to myself?
So, we’re looking. Preschool hasn’t even been on my radar, so I have no idea if other parents are reading this and laughing hysterically at the idea of me thinking I can just waltz in and enroll my kid all willy-nilly. Go ahead, laugh. I can’t hear you over the sound of my own denial.
I’ve been dreading potty training the kid, but it turns out I had nothing to worry about: he did it on his own.
Yes. You read that right. He potty trained himself.
About two weeks ago, Ellison announced that he wanted to use the potty. Nothing new; he’d been doing that periodically for months, but last time I hunkered down and tried to get him to use it reliably resulted in nothing but soiled underpants and tears. So, sure, he used the potty, and then I went to put his diaper on and he was like “No! No diaper!”
Okay. So I let him wear some big-boy underpants, thinking what the hell, we don’t have to be anywhere.
And he wore them all day. And didn’t have any accidents.
And then his diaper was dry in the morning. And he wore underpants all that day, too.
And then all of the next night.
And it’s been two weeks.
DUDE. If I had known potty training would be this easy I would never have stressed out about it. This parenting thing is a piece of cake.