So I forced myself to leave the house today, mostly because there’s been a check stuck to the fridge for almost a week that really, really wanted to be deposited. We had a perfectly fun time running errands, Happy Fun Baby and me, but the poor kid was worn out after a trip to the bank and the toy store (because, hey, toy store) that I did not drag him to the Fabulous Jackpot Records store and instead brought him home. Where he so did not fall asleep, opting instead to get more and more hyper and frenetic until I finally had to bodily hold him down in order to get him to take a nap. Now I feel like the world’s worst mother, since I was not exactly a bundle of cheer and good humor while convincing the kid to sleep. Another quarter for the therapy jar. Ping!

Most of the reason I’m so cranky is that I’m trying to find a Flash app for a client’s site, and I *think* some of the ones I located will work, only – and hey, minor detail – I don’t know Flash. I don’t even have Flash, exactly, except that the kind people at the Adobe booth at Voices That Matter gave me a CS3 Web Premium trial disk so I could install it on this computer, assuming a) it doesn’t cause my system to explode and b) I can get a real copy by the end of the month. Which c) I have to do anyway since it’s the last time I’ll be able to use my student discount, without which we would be somewhat less able to afford it. But, so, I’m trying to figure out Flash now, and it isn’t exactly a piece of cake. Especially with a frenetic toddler in the background. (Yes, we’re back to the beginning again.)

I’d like to write, because I had the BEST IDEA EVER while waiting for the bus, but unfortunately it was for the book I’m not currently working on. Dilemma: waste precious NaNoWriMo time on the other book, or risk losing inspiration? Or scrap them both for today since I have to figure out how to program in Flash?

I signed up for NaNoWriMo. Why? Because I am a crazy person. Seriously, I have time for this? Between kid, work, school, visiting relatives, and Thanksgiving? (I probably don’t even have to mention that I have one, maybe two projects that are on a tighttighttight 30-day deadline.) Yes, clearly I can also write 50,000 words. Who needs sleep?

I fully intend to do it, though, because it will be good for me. I think too much. I plan too much. What could be more therapeutic than 30 days of enforced brain-dump? At worst, I’ll have some prolific sludge; at best, the bare-bones beginning of the Mommyfiction novel I’ve been making noises about for the last year. (My actual work in progress novel – er, one of them, anyway – already has 30,000 words, so it’s out of the NaNo running.) C’mon, it’ll be fun.

Speaking of “fun,” I’m leaving in two days for a web design conference. I will be away from my kid for five entire days. Days in which I will not be able to snuggle him or kiss his head even once. I think I might die.

Remember how I used to be all “Yeah, my kid might not go to bed until 11pm, but at least he sleeps until 9:30 or 10!” Remember that? Because wow, was I wrong. I mean, not then. Then I was right. But now? Now we are up, awake, bright-eyed, etc. at the ungodly hour of 8 in the morning.

8, people. It’s just not right.

Still, I’ve started to actually get things done in the morning, which is novel. I went for another jog yesterday, and still managed to get emergency file changes to my client by 10am. And we finally, finally made it to the library in time for Storytime, although – ha! – the librarian didn’t, so Storytime was cancelled. Figures. (Maybe we’ll try again next week.)

It’s not as satisfying as sleep, mind you. But it’s not that bad.

My sleep’s gone to hell anyway. I blame the meds. SSRIs have a rep for causing very vivid dreams, and that’s definitely true in my case. Not that I didn’t have vivid dreams already. So there’s that, and there’s the middle-of-the-night anxiety, and there’s the kid, who hogs the bed like no one’s business. Yes, we’re still cosleeping, and no, we don’t have any concrete plans to move him into his own room…but the idea is starting to sound better to me, mostly because of the early-morning wakiness. I mean, if he gets up at 8 every morning and then wants to lay around and snuggle for a half hour…that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

I already know what bed I want to get for him (it’s from Ikea, natch) and we got the bedlinens already, since Not So had this great idea about the kid having his own pillow, so that when we move him to his own bed it’ll already be familiar. Great, right? Except: where do we keep an extra pillow on our bed? We have a full-sized bed. A “double,” as it used to be called. “Double,” because only two people fit on it. (Don’t get me started on the whole “Why didn’t we get a Queen?” thing. Because I SO WANTED ONE, but SOMEBODY thought it would be too big and “not as friendly.” Somebody who now has his kidneys kicked regularly by our lovely child, who apparently dreams of soccer.) There is no room for an extra pillow. There is barely room for our heads. So the kid’s bedding is hanging out on his crib mattress in his room. The cats think it’s great. They will have no problem transitioning to a new bed.

I do miss sleeping in, but somehow it’s hard to feel like a slug when you’re up and about at a decent hour. Maybe that’s the meds talking, who knows. But it’s not all bad.

It’s 9:15 pm, and the baby? The baby is sleeping.

This is unusual enough to prompt a whole blog entry, as is the fact that I’m typing merrily away on a laptop which actually connects with the internet (it belongs to Not So, but still). So, yes. 9:15 pm. Baby sleeping. Me online. Me online and not working. Has the world gone mad?

The secret to getting my kid to sleep at a reasonable hour is twofold, apparently: put him to bed early, and put him to bed with mama. The first part is something all the sleep books insisted upon and which, at first, I brushed off. My kid? Night owl. I couldn’t possibly put him to bed at 7:30! Which…I still can’t, but if we get him to bed at 8:30 he’s out like a light at 9. Whereas, you know, if we put him to bed at 9, he’s bouncing off the walls at 11:45 and mama is losing what little mind she has left. Because, oh my god, woe betide anyone besides me who thinks they can lure the child into slumber. Not So attempted to put his son to bed tonight, and it was only after listening to an excruciating 15 minutes of hysterical screaming that I came in…and the kid calmed right down. It was like flipping a switch. And then, you know, there was sleep, and can I argue with sleep? No, I can not.

It’s weird, though, having him sleep so early and so seamlessly. I feel like I should be Doing Something. Celebrating, perhaps?

Some friends of ours who just bought a new house confided that they’re giving themselves a year before they start feeling bad about the things they haven’t unpacked yet. An immensely sensible attitude, says I, and one I would love to share, except for one thing: we have no place to squirrel away our unpacked-ness. A two-bedroom apartment, as it turns out, does not so much accommodate three bedrooms worth of stuff. I know! I am shocked too.

We’ve been here for, what, two months? And I have clearly wasted an inordinate amount of that time on working, sleeping, and bathing, because our house is a disaster. Do you see? Do you see the disaster that our house is? (Do you also see the crappy excuse for a webcam? Clearly no competitor to the lovely iSight, which is currently on the office computer.)

I’m feeling particularly downtrodden about the state of the apartment since my inlaws are in town. I love the lovely inlaws, but I cringe every time I picture them walking into our house and being confronted with…this. These are civilized people. The sort of people who rinse plates the moment they’re finished with them and place them carefully in the dishwasher, and vacuum on a daily basis. They are not the sort of people who realize, after living somewhere for two months, that they still don’t know where the lint rollers are (said realization being sparked by the fact that there is a blanket-like layer of cat hair on the cream-colored glider in the baby’s room). They certainly don’t consider simply covering said chair with a blanket rather than tearing apart boxes to find the lint rollers, which might not even be there, since we threw so much stuff away, and given that we threw so much away WHY DO WE STILL HAVE SO MUCH CRAP? (Note to self: do not open hall closet and furiously contemplate stacks of boxes full of things Not So meant to sell on eBay and did not, and then meant to toss and did not, which means we moved and are inexplicably keeping four or five boxes of stuff we do not want, while having no place to store stuff we do, and yes, that sentence is rambling, and OMG do I have any more Calm pills? Do I?)

Hmm. Yes. So today, today is all about the cleaning. Well, the cleaning, and the school, and the work, and the babywrangling, and the lunch-making, and the not flying into a shrieking fit and tossing all our belongings out the window. Because, did I mention? We are probably having the inlaws for dinner on Saturday. Tomorrow, for those keeping track.

Wish me luck.

Blogged with Flock

Happy Fun Baby did not nap yesterday, exactly. He dozed on me while we were on the bus back from our playdate at Urban Grind (and Urban Grind = my new favorite place anywhere ever, and we had a blast) but historically his transit naps have been somewhat unsatisfying. I kept trying to entreat him to snuggle with me on the couch, but he was having none of it…which was really too bad, since I needed a nap too.

It wasn’t until nighttime that the full ramifications of He Who Will Not Nap were in evidence, and they were not pretty. Meltdowns! Tantrums! Hungry! But not hungry, why are you trying to make me eat food, I HATE FOOD! And then a nice, long interlude in which the baby was in the bed, and yet not so much with the sleeping. A long stretch. Did I mention long?

At 12:30am, the kid finally fell asleep. 12:30am. Need I mention that I had to be awake that whole time too? Awake, and immobile, lest my slightest twitch disturb his already nonexistent rest? By 12:30 I was completely stir-crazy and not at all tired, and my hives – which I thought were on the mend, after popping Benadryl like a crazy Benadryl-popping person the night before – were back with a vengeance.

Not So was snoring next to the baby, so I left them both there and got up to do some work on the couldbe studios site. See, because I’d been working on it earlier despite Not So’s indifference to the TABLE-BASED LAYOUT OMG and UNTHRILLING GRAPHIC SCHEME and LACK OF LICKABILITY, and the only thing he’d expressed a definite, emphatic opinion on was the one thing I wanted to avoid: the illustration. Says me: okay, so. A photograph would be fine, right? Says Not So: Oh, an illustration. We need to show that we can do custom illustration, right? Plus, so much cooler! (I’m paraphrasing. Or am I?)

Illustrations take time. Lots of time. Time I currently spend trying to convince an eighteen-month-old that he does, in fact, need to sleep sometimes. However, now that the toddler was sleeping and I was, to put it delicately, not, I figured I’d take advantage of the evening by seeing how far I could get on the illustration before my eyes started to cross. I surprised myself; I was done in two hours. (Amazing how much faster I work when no one is pulling on my wrists or helpfully clicking buttons on my mouse.) So, couldbe site done, yay!

Except boo, because my hives were all hivetastic and so itchy I could cry. I went to bed, but kept waking up to find that I was scratching like a mad fiend, which didn’t help the itch but added a nice, bracing sting. When Not So’s alarm went off at 7, I gave up on the whole sleep thing.

The good news is that the hives seem to have faded, again. The bad news is I’m hopelessly behind and pretty tired, to boot. And the kid?

Hasn’t napped yet today.

Sigh.

Unsurprisingly, the longer I am solo parenting, the harder it gets. Actually that’s not true. Some things are actually easier when I’m the only one around. Sleeptime, for example. When the kid’s tired, I put him down. If I’m tired too, we both go to sleep, in a bed that suddenly feels spacious and accommodating. I don’t need to worry about whether the lights are off or the door is locked. I don’t need to feel bad that I’m not dividing my attention. I can just…sleep.

Other things aren’t so smooth. Happy Fun Baby threw not one, not two but three marathon tantrums in the last three days, which isn’t that unusual since he’s 18 months old. What is unusual is that afterward there was no one to watch him while I took a desperately needed mental health break. Even things like taking out the garbage became a big deal: the garbage cans have temporarily been relocated to the first floor while the elevator is being upgraded, so taking out the garbage means going down two flights of stairs. Sounds simple, right? Except how do you wrangle garbage bags and a toddler? In the Ergo, that’s how, but you’d be surprised how long it took me to figure that out.

Yesterday was…challenging. We went to Saturday Market (yes, I know it was Sunday) and the kid insisted on walking so I didn’t bring the Ergo. People! Learn from my mistakes! When your child is younger than, say, twelve, you must provide an alternate method of transport! Anyway I foolishly went out with a walking kid, and it was actually fine for the first bit. We wandered, we chatted with our friend Chyna, we had some lunch at Mother’s, and then we went home. This is where the problem started. Mother’s is just far enough from the MAX that I stupidly thought “We can just walk from here.” Stupid decision #2: “Oh yeah, we need diapers! I’ll just pop into Rite Aid on the way home.” And guess who started refusing to walk after three of the nine blocks? Guess who needed to be carried? Guess who would not stand still in the drugstore even though mama had her hands full? Guess who screamed when we handed the diapers to the cashier? Those were the longest nine blocks of my life, and several times I was very tempted to just sit on the curb and set up camp. The homeless people like us, for the most part, and the kid is very friendly.

I was lucky in that I was able to take a mini break from work the past two days, and the new school session only starts today so I didn’t have homework, either. Yes: my vacation is a weekend of solo parenting during which I only had the kid and the housework! You totally wish you had my life.

Not So gets back today, and it’s a good thing. My poor beleagured brain is so distracted with kid stuff that when Chyna said “You look cute today!” I didn’t even consider that she might not be talking to the baby. It was only when she followed up with “Do I recognize that skirt?” that I realized she was talking about me.