Postcards from the Mothership

Simon, at the grand age of 28 months, has decided to go from one three-hour nap in the afternoon to no nap. In a classic case of bad timing, this is coinciding with Beloved being home with the boys almost full-time. I’m not even going to bother with a description – you can imagine what it’s like.

Saturday and Sunday, I tried all the tricks in my arsenal to get him to take his nap. A tiny, childish part of me figured that Beloved just wasn’t trying hard enough to get Simon down, that’s why he couldn’t get him to nap. Right. Not so much.

For at least two hours each day, Simon was in his crib (yes, we’re still dragging our heels on that transition, too – give me a break, we just retired the highchair yesterday) in varying states of wakeful agitation. He would lie peacefully for stretches, which I realize in retrospect was to lull us into a false sense of accomplishment, and then move through the spectrum of annoyance all the way to raging tantrum and back again.

Sitting on the top stair, listening to him pitch a wailing tantrum on the other side of his door and hoping it was a short-lived prelude to an actual nap (idealist to the end, I am), I was thinking back to the early days, and the first times I had to let the boys cry themselves to sleep. Letting my tender, innocent ten month old baby cry for five minutes seemed like such a horrendously hard thing to do, but in retrospect teaching the boys to fall asleep on their own was one of the best things we could have done. (Hmmm, best choice = hardest road. Who knew?)

Tristan, always my good sleeper, was outraged at being left to cry for the first few nights but was happily falling asleep on his own within a week. Simon, who taught me what sleep deprivation really means by not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch well past his first year, was a lot more reluctant to be ‘sleep trained’. The first few nights that he cried himself to sleep, he continued to do that post-hysterical-crying hitching thing long after he fell asleep, and it took many days of heart-hardening resolve to convince him to fall asleep on his own.

I give a lot of credence to our eventual success with the infamous “cry it out” method to Richard Ferber’s classic sleep book, Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems. I hated the idea of letting the babies cry at the time (anybody remember that episode of Mad About You on this? I thought they were nuts.) but after reading everything on the market at the time, Ferber was the only thing that made sense, and it worked for us.

The weekend Citizen carried a great reprint from Slate magazine (click through and read it, it’s a great piece) about the re-issuance Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, where Ferber clarifies his position on sleep training. I loved this article, mostly because it perfectly encapsulates everything I learned from Ferber. And I’m hugely relieved that he has not, in fact, recanted his original advice. In retrospect I realize that my own personal discipline style is strongly rooted in his “you might not like it but I’m the boss and I know best” style. From Ferber I learned to stand up to my children’s willfulness, and that’s probably one of the most valuable parenting lessons I’ve learned.

When I heard Tristan upstairs ‘reading’ to Simon, I thought I’d creep upstairs with the camera and catch the moment. I should have known it wouldn’t last, but it was cute for the half a second or so before they started misbehaving.

Or click through to view it on YouTube.

Actually, it’s a good capture of life with the boys in a microcosm – adorable blending seamlessly with mischevious, until they get caught. The book they are ‘reading’ is, appropriately enough, Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.

Have you heard about Project Gutenberg? They’re one of the oldest purveyors of free online books on the Internet, and to celebrate their anniversary this year, they’ve teamed with the World eBook Library Consortia to create the World eBook Fair. Starting in July, they’ll be providing free (FREE!) access to over 300,000 e-books.

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, “The Gutenberg books, typed and scanned into computers by thousands of volunteers, mostly are those that are no longer protected by copyright. They include fiction, nonfiction and reference books and will be available for worldwide readers in about 100 languages.” You can also download audio e-books read by a human or computer, and (for some reason I love this the best) digitized sheet music.

The Gutenberg site lists the top 100 downloaded books and authors in the last day, last week and last month. Here are the most downloaded books this month (parentheses are the actual number of downloads):

1. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete by Leonardo da Vinci (16365)
2. Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great – Volume 01 by Elbert Hubbard (9540)
3. Hand Shadows to Be Thrown upon the Wall by Henry Bursill (8950)
4. Kamasutra by Vatsyayana (8649)
5. Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases by Grenville Kleiser (8637)
6. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (7589)
7. Great Britain and Her Queen by Annie E. Keeling (7463)
8. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (7457)
9. How to Speak and Write Correctly by Joseph Devlin (6534)
10. The Art of War by 6th cent. B.C. Sunzi (6163)

While I think the whole project is most excellent in theory, I’m not sure about the whole “e-book” thing. I’m a very tactile person. I judge a book not just by its cover but also by its font, by its paperweight, and its heft. And the idea of reading through a palm pilot or a crackberry or on the computer monitor doesn’t have much appeal to me. I may, in fact, be the most tech savvy of the Luddite clan.

What do you think? Have you tried e-books? Would you pay for a subscrition or for access to e-books, or like me, are you suspicious of even the free kind? Could lying on the beach with an e-book ever rival doing it with a tattered paperback? And if we all move to e-books eventually, where will I stash all my Canadian Tire money – my summertime bookmark of choice?

Talk to me about babysitters.

The only babysitters we’ve ever left the boys with have been my mother, our daycare provider, the daughter of my cousin (while her mother was in the house) and once, I think, an adult friend of ours. I’ve never hired the teenager from down the street, or even used a (fee-based) referral service like www.canadiansitters.ca. While the boys love to visit their Granny, I am always afraid of imposing, or that they are too much to handle. (Sidebar: how strange is it that we get to a certain age and begin to mother our parents?)

The eleven year old girl next door told me about five times last summer that she had completed her babysitting course, but I’m just not confident in her ability to keep my boys out of trouble, let alone do something like put them to bed. There’s a family situation back story, too, but mostly she just seems so … so… so young!

This seems hypocritical even to me. I was babysitting at that age. Heck, when I was 13 I not only babysat a two- and four-year old sibling set for the March break, but brought them downtown on the bus and bought some shoes for them, all at the mother’s request. I was maybe 11 or 12 the few times I babysat a six-month-old baby down the street – I remember calling my parents because no matter what I did, that baby would not stop crying.

Even though we live in a family-friendly community, aside from the young girl next door I don’t know anybody in the babysitting demographic. I guess I could put up a poster on the mailbox. How do you find a babysitter?

And then there is the minefield of compensation. The registration page for the Canadian Sitters service says, “A three month subscription to access the Canadiansitter.ca database costs $39.95. This approximately equates to the expense of a baby sitter for just one night.” Yowza! Is that right? Forty bucks just to get a babysitter for the night? Sure, it was 20 years ago, but I used to get two dollars an hour!

(Pardon me, I ‘m still reeling a bit that my babysitting days are 20 years behind me. Crap, I’m old.)

I’ve heard of babysitting cooperatives, where the parents trade nights out, but I don’t really know too many families with kids in my neighbourhood. (Yes, we live in the most family-friendly neighbourhood in the city. Yes, we are social recluses. All my friends live in the computer. I’m hoping being part of Tristan’s school community will forge at least a few new ties for us.)

What’s it like where you are? What’s the right age for a babysitter and how do you find one? How much is this going to cost? Should we just resign ourselves to waiting for the new releases on DVD until the boys are old enough to fend for themselves?

Yesterday was just so jam-packed that even with two posts, I didn’t have a chance to reflect on everything worth saying. Consider this the spill-over post.

Thank you for your votes on how we should spend our summer vacation. Ya know, living my life according to Interweb plebiscite has a certain appeal. I’ll be consulting you for input on our life decisions much more frequently.

In the end, Beloved and I decided to skip the road trip to St Thomas and TtFTE in July. I am, quite frankly, hugely relieved. If anybody out there would like a deal on four great tickets to see the sold-out Thomas the Tank live in St Thomas (20 minutes from London) on July 22, drop me a note.

Yesterday was also a day of weird coincidences and convergences. Some funny, some profound, and some a little sad. For instance, you have to laugh that the calendar date for the first time I wandered back in to a church since (thoughtful pause, head scratching…) well, in at least a couple of years, was 6-6-6. Snicker.

Poor Tristan. In my ongoing crash course on God for preschoolers, I was explaining to him that we were going to the church, and the church is where you talk to God, and that we were going to talk to the priest about making Tristan and Simon a part of God’s family. Then we left him with my parents while we went to the ‘how to have your child baptized’ seminar. Poor Tristan wasted no time telling my mother that he liked his old family, and didn’t want a new one. Oops!

So then we’re driving to the church high school, and you know what song is on the radio? ‘Counting Blue Cars’ by Dishwalla, with this lyric:

And ask many questions
Like children often do
We said,tell me all your thoughts on god?
cause I would really like to meet her.
And ask her why were who we are.
Tell me all your thoughts on god,
Cause I am on my way to see her.

And you know what the strangest part is? By the end of the night, I was feeling pretty keen about the whole Catholic thing. I was relieved to see that for the boys’ baptism, we will be in the company of lots of other lazy and / or indecisive parents of toddlers, preschoolers and even a seven-year old – in fact, not a mewling newborn in the lot.

The priest, Father John, was one of those kindly, soft sorts of fellows to whom you really do want to entrust your spiritual upbringing. I got to thinking maybe we’d even go to church every now and then, and maybe I’d even (gasp!) sign up for one of their committees. I left the church high school feeling warm and fuzzy, but I just about fell out of my shoes when Beloved turned to me and said, ‘You know, maybe I’ll take my confirmation sacrament one of these days.’ You think I’m cynical about the church? I’m PollyAnna compared to him.

And then I wake up today and I hear that yesterday the Catholic Church issued yet another sweeping condemnation of abortion, birth control, same sex marriage and … reproductive technologies like artificial insemination and IVF. More weird convergences – day one of my frostie mock cycle happens the same day I think that maybe I will give the church another try or at least an open mind, and is also the day the Church issues this closed-minded, archaic and out-of-touch epistle.

All I can do is shake my head and shrug my shoulders.

Beloved and I have a hot date tonight. We’re dropping the kids off with my parents and going to – church.

Actually, we’re going to a pre-baptism information session, because we’ve finally decided to go ahead and get the boys baptized this summer. I’ve gotten over most of my initial concerns about the whole Catholic baptism thing, and grappled with other minutia like actually finding out where our church is physically located (in a high school gymnasium, apparently, so I don’t feel so bad about not finding it earlier) and deciding on a set of godparents.

The godparents thing was an easy choice, once we thought about it. We asked our very dear friends Jojo and Jaimie, mostly because we love them so much but also largely because when Joanne’s mother heard about our struggles with infertility, she went to her church and lit a candle for us to ask the Big Guy to bless our IVF. We often joke about Maureen’s magic matches. And when I asked Joanne if she and Jaimie would honour us by being the boys’ godparents, she said, “Will they pour water on the boys’ heads and do the oil thingy? If not Jaimie and I will bring water guns and fill them up with holy water and we’ll chase the boys in and out of the pews”, which assured me that we had made the right choice.

The more this whole baptism thing crystalizes into reality, the more I’m realizing that having your two year old and your four year old baptized is not so much like having your four week old baptized. First off, what are they supposed to wear? Beloved, pious soul that he is, has decreed that they should wear ornate white Christening gowns in the traditional style. Hmm, I’ve got a wedding dress or three I could sacrifice for the cause – it would be worth it just to have the pictures for blackmail purposes in later years.

And suddenly I have a vision of baptism day. We’re in the church high school auditorium with the other dozen or so families whose newborns are being baptized this month. The babies are tiny and fresh, and the tired but blissfully happy new parents are beaming with pride at perhaps the first major social appearance of the new family. All the families are sitting patiently and respectfully, absorbing the solemnity of the occassion, and even if one of the babies cry, it’s that lovely mewling sound that only newborns make.

And then there’s us, trying to corral Simon and keep Tristan relatively engaged, surrounded by a mountain of dinky cars, books and playdough that are doing absolutely nothing to distract the boys from the pursuit of mischief. And it’s beginning to occur to me that Simon absconding with a hymnal is perhaps the least of our worries, because maybe the priest might even try to TALK to Tristan on this most sacred and auspicious day, and not even the Lord knows what might come out of his mouth. I’ve been working on a crash course version of Catholicism for Preschoolers (lesson one: God does not buy his car at the corner store, nor is he something to be shouted in traffic) but it may be too late.

I get it now. The Catholics baptize their new recruits when they’re pre-verbal and the Baptists wait until they are adults and have social skills and functioning self-edit features. There’s a reason no major religion indoctrinates preschoolers!

Leave it to us to make it a uniquely memorable, if not sacrosanct, occasion.

It’s been a week since Beloved’s semester finished, and he’s been home with the boys almost full time.

It’s hard for me, being in my cube and knowing they are off playing somewhere together without me, but I think it’s a lot harder on Beloved. He’s getting a little twitchy, and I can see just a little bit too much of the whites of his eyes. It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy being with the boys, it’s just that the anti-sleep conspiracy coupled with Simon’s relentless mischeviousness would tire even Super Nanny. On evenings and weekends, we tag team rather effectively, but when the day begins at 5 am, finding enough stuff to keep them occupied is an ongoing challenge.

I have lots of holiday time this summer – being in my 16th year with the government has its advantages – and I’m taking my first of three weeks off at the end of this month, so they only have to get through another couple of weeks on their own.

What do you do to keep your kids occupied in the summer? Beloved is just getting comfortable with bringing them both to the library or the mall, but anything that requires intense supervision (i.e. a wading pool) might be a bit much. They all love going to the “new bookstore” to play with the train tables, and the grocery store has a little play zone where you can drop your kids for an hour of supervised play for free, so long as you stay in the store. (I wonder if taking a nap on the hammock display in the garden centre counts as staying in the store?)

I suggested the sprinkler, and our little inflatable kiddie pool with ten centimetres of water in it. We have an annual pass to three museums in town, including the science and technology museum and the experimental farm – both favourites of the boys. I just found out you can get free passes to some of the other museums in the city through the library, and we spent this past Saturday morning discovering the absolutely fabulous Children’s Museum in town. (Can you tell I’m a road-trip kind of mother? I hate staying in the house when I’m home with the boys. Beloved is the opposite – he’d rather stay in, but acknowledges the boys get a little squirrelly if they spend too much time in the house. Just like their mother, they are.)

So bloggy friends, help preserve Beloved’s tenuous grip on his sanity. What’s your favourite summertime distraction for the preschool set?