Sep
25
If you saw an entry get posted earlier today then mysteriously disappear, that was my fault. I wrote something short and quick about Riley being fearful about random things lately, especially noises, and shortly after I hit publish someone commented about the possibility that he may have Sensory Processing Disorder and maybe I should consider getting him evaluated — and I had this knee-jerk reaction of feeling like I had portrayed my child superficially and falsely, like I’d painted only a tiny part of his whole enormous picture. Like I’d left the door open for his mental health to be analyzed based on five slapdash paragraphs.
I’m fairly certain the commenter meant her suggestion in the same way that people suggest cradle cap treatments and potty training methods and anything else — which is to say, it was surely meant out of kindness, just an idea for my consideration. And it’s not an out-of-line suggestion at all, especially when you consider the things I’ve written about Riley — hates loud noises, is a picky eater, roils with suspicion. But that’s the problem, I think I tend to turn people into a sort of caricature of themselves when I write about them here (JB, the fence-leaping, nuts-grabbing, constantly leering husband!) and I don’t want to do that with my children. As Riley gets older he’s getting so much more complicated, he’s such a faceted little person now instead of a baby who spends their day engaged in mostly the same activities as all babies do.
The other day I was watching Riley play in our garage and he had picked up this piece of wood and was brandishing it ferociously, shouting about how he was chasing goats out of Daddy’s shop. Over and over he would run from one end of the shop to the other, waving his stick and yelling for the goats to GO, GET OUT OF HERE! And at one point he bashed his stick down all cave-boy-like and I started feeling like things were getting maybe a little too aggressive, so I said something about how he didn’t want to hurt the goats, did he? And right away he got all contrite and changed the game entirely, now he was picking up invisible baby goats that fit in his palm, holding his hands up to me tenderly for me to see the tiny goats, they’re just babies Mommy. Next he wanted to build a home for the baby goats, so he took pieces of wood and made a square frame outside in the grass for the baby goats. At one point I said let’s call the goats in to their new home, and I (stupidly) said “Here they come!” while pointing across the lawn and his eyes grew wide and fearful and suddenly he was kind of frightened and wanted to go inside.
So you see, depending on what part of that (incredibly thrilling!) story I chose to tell, you might think Riley was kind of violent (the stick, the chasing), sweet and loving (the goat home), or just kind of a wuss (the being scared of the, uh, invisible goats that he had invented).
Anyway. After 6 years of this, I feel like I’m blindly groping into new territory blogwise. I just want to do right by my kids, and I suppose I’m still trying to figure out what that means when it comes to this website.
Sep
24
In order to deal with my crabby state of mind this week, I have taken the following actions:
• Baked various things featuring white flour, sugar. Took turns licking giant spoonfuls of uncooked dough with Riley.
• Booked a hair appointment. Fuck you, roots.
• Hired my smart web coder friend to help me build a new website that is going to be so totally awesome I swear to GOD you guys.
• Watched this video, like, a LOT. Ditto this.
JB’s parents leave tonight and I am bummed. It’s not that I wish they, you know, lived with us or anything (!), but they have been home with the kids while I’ve gone to work and Riley has been so incredibly HAPPY as a result. I leave in the morning and they’re all having fun, getting ready to go for a walk or whatever; I get home at night and the kids have had their dinner and Riley’s chattering at me like a cracked-out squirrel about how he and Grandpa made a FORT, come look RIGHT NOW MOMMY.
I’m sure JB’s parents are more than ready to get back to their normal, non-baby/3-year-old-centric lives, though. It’s probably been a rewarding, but exhausting few days for them — I can personally attest to the fact that caring for two small children all day long is, well, a real bitch sometimes. They think I’m insane for putting Dylan in a swing to sleep and so they’ve been putting him in his crib all week, and he’s responding by not napping for shit, so they haven’t even had any decent breaks.
(Oh man, I so don’t want to deal with the swing/crib issue. I know I’ve got to just cowboy up, move him into the crib and handle the fallout, but people, he just started sleeping through the night — he stays down from 7ish PM until 4:30 or 5 now. I feel enORmously whiny about a regressed sleep schedule, which is sure to happen, but of course I can’t stuff him in the swing forever. He already looks sort of ridiculous in there, like a Sumo wrestler driving a Mini Cooper.)
I’m going to take the kids to daycare tomorrow so I can run some errands and finish my freelance work for the week, but I’d also like to take a few hours to pursue the act of Chilling the Hell Out. What would you do if you had a little free time to yourself, in order to help de-stress and recharge your batteries?
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