Current life snapshot
This is not a comprehensive update. More of a snapshot of how things are right now. It was prompted by Kael coming out of his room a couple nights ago after I thought he was asleep, crying "I don't want to die!". Geoff and I comforted him and tried to reassure him he ought not die for a long, long time. Then we shifted towards reminding him of happy things, which was more effective. Anyway, it struck me as a quintessential parenting moment, and I wanted to make note of it. I figured while I was at it, I could talk about the kids and life more generally. So here you go.
Kael is about to turn 4. I think 4 is the age that I really start thinking of kids as kids, as opposed to toddlers/overgrown babies. Not that he's been acting like a toddler for some time now, but still. Kael is still often difficult, but we have had occasional skylights in the roof of the tunnel (I don't think the tunnel has an end). He sometimes delights in pissing Geoff or me off, and he'll get into these moods where it is clearly his goal to be as contrary and upsetting as possible. It's not that he's having fun doing something and chooses not to listen to us asking him to, e.g., go to bed, it's that he's deliberately doing what he knows we don't want him to do just to get us to react. You'd think knowing that would make it easy to not react. You'd be wrong. Anyway, we're all still alive, and nobody seems too traumatized by anybody else's instances of snapped tempers. I try to focus on the positive and learn from my mistakes (like stop interacting with Kael when it becomes his express goal to push my buttons).
On the plus side, Kael does have a lot of worthwhile qualities. He loves to bake with me, and will sit on the counter where he can dump in measured ingredients and occasionally stir things together. He loves to cuddle at night, frequently showing up in our room at some weird hour to snuggle up next to me. We've moved Juniper to the crib in Kael's room, so this works out better than it used to. I'm sure I sleep better without Kael, but he's so cute that I find that little lost sleep a worthwhile sacrifice. Especially when things have been rough and I'm starting to wonder if we are raising a sociopath, it's good to see that underneath it all he still loves me (in his way) and wants to be close to me. Kael is very stubborn, and will get on these kicks of what he thinks is right based on often semi-inconsequential things Geoff or I will say. E.g., he asked for juice one time, and we told him we'd rather he drink milk or water, because juice has a lot of sugar in it and is consequently not great for him (leading to cavities and other bad things). Apparently he now frequently turns down juice at daycare because it's bad for him. He's also "decided" to be vegetarian. I would be lying if I said I didn't offer any encouragement in coming to this decision, but I really did let him decide, and I don't push him to not eat meat if he asks for it, beyond a single reminder that it is meat. But he's been sticking to it surprisingly tenaciously. To be fair, most meals are vegetarian in our house, of course, but even when we go out to eat, Kael's been consistent.
Kael is picking up reading, though he's more resistant than I thought he'd be. 6 months ago he'd ask to "read" books to himself, and would cooperate with trying to identify letters or maybe do a little sounding out. Now he often balks when I ask him to try sounding out a word, or he tries for a little bit and then gives up almost immediately and asks me to do it. He has more enthusiasm for signs outside, though, and will try to figure those out on his own. Sometimes it can be hard to tell how much he's able to read and how much he's able to guess from context or memory. We went to a restaurant the other day, and he saw a ketchup bottle and appeared to sound it out. But he did so more quickly than normal sounding out, and came up with the answer on the first try. Just to check, I asked him to read the Tobasco sauce bottle. Kael looked at it for a moment and said "pepper" :-) I did subsequently get him to sound it out, though it was kind of a mean trick, seeing as he doesn't know what Tobasco sauce is. In any case, I don't feel a pressing need for him to be reading before he's even turned 4. It will come at some point. In the meantime, I can be pleased with his skill with numbers. He seems to be working on basic addition (this is pretty much entirely on his own, unprompted by me and Geoff). So that's fun :-)
Kael is pretty high-energy (typically so, I gather), enjoying running around outside (and inside), but he also is enamored of video games. He likes to "play" Mario Galaxy, but usually loses patience after he accidentally kills Mario several times, and then he insists that Geoff or I play in his stead. He has more success with some of Geoff's tablet games, like "Where's My Water?" and "Angry Birds". It's fun watching him figure these things out, though I worry about how much time he spends in front of a screen. Fortunately he does enjoy other forms of play, and to my delight, seems to have a pretty active imagination. He'll make up little stories and characters using anything that comes to hand. Wood blocks, pieces of plastic fruit, twigs on the ground, handfuls of sand, sometimes the food he's supposed to be eating... I suspect the stories are heavily inspired by shows he's seen on TV, but I'm still glad to see him applying his knowledge creatively.
Kael's starting in a co-op preschool 3 days a week starting next week. It's just 2.5 hours each day, so he'll still be going to daycare most of the time. I think it will be a good way to transition from a fairly unstructured daycare environment to school, plus being a co-op means Geoff and I need to volunteer one day a week (we'll alternate weeks). That means more challenging work schedules, but also means we get to spend a couple extra hours with Kael each week. There's a lot of work involved in being part of the co-op, so I'm a little nervous, but I'm hopeful as well.
Juniper is almost a year and a half old, and though she still looks like a baby, she's pretty firmly in toddler territory. She walks around, climbs on things, loves to dance to just about any kind of music, and is learning to talk. Her vocabulary seems to be exploding lately, which is fun to watch. Er. Listen to. She is also learning how to throw temper tantrums. She's unfortunately picked up the bad habits of biting and hitting when she's angry :-/ But more often she'll just storm off and cry if you upset her. Upsetting her is accomplished by taking anything she's holding away from her, taking anything she's thinking about holding away from her, or as often as not, me leaving the room. I'm working on weaning her (deadline of early December, which is about when I weaned Kael, age-wise), so it's possible she will become less mommy-centric when I've finished doing so. I admit, I sometimes kind of like how attached she is to me. But I also feel badly when she gives Geoff crap because he's not me.
Juniper does still have some babyish tendencies. She still loves to put things in her mouth. We recently took a trip to Cannon Beach, and Juniper spent the first day shoveling (almost literally - I think it was a rake, not a shovel) as much sand into her mouth as she could. Sign of parents of second children: we didn't even bother trying to discourage her. I figured it would go through her system soon enough, and we'd have to fight with her constantly to get her to stop. And while Juniper was chowing down on sand, Kael was melting imaginary enemies by throwing clumps of sand at them. We're so proud. She appears to have survived, in spite of one pretty unpleasant diaper change, and she stopped eating sand (mostly) after the first day. Parental laziness for the win!
Speaking of eating, I've given up (note a trend?) and let her have a fork and a bowl of whatever we're eating, with the frequent end result of mess everywhere. This is a big step for me. I don't handle messes very well. I suppose it's a big step for Juniper as well, but it's not like that matters ;-) Actually, when the food is sufficiently solid, she doesn't do a bad job of it. Sometimes, at least. Kael's occasionally more difficult about eating than Juniper is, either refusing to eat outright, or spending more time playing with his fork than eating. We've instituted the rule that he must try a bite of whatever we're eating before concluding he doesn't like it, and maybe if he's gracious about explaining that he doesn't like it, we might get him something else. But usually he declares it's yucky before he's even tried it, so more often than not he's stuck with what he has, with no snacks later. I have sympathy for finding tastes unpleasant, but I don't have sympathy for being contrary just for fun. He does not yet appear to be starving as a consequence of this policy, so I can't get too concerned.
Juniper and Kael still love each other, though they fight more now that Juniper has an active interest in toys. But mostly they're very cute together.
I suppose I could provide an update about myself, but there's not a lot to say. I'm having a lot of self-confidence issues with work, and I'm trying to fix that. I'd love to both be and feel successful again some day, and I'm working on getting there. I've continued to be kind of crazy with exercise, and I think I've gotten stronger over the past year or so (I can do kinda cheating pullups now!). My weight's never fully recovered from being pregnant with Juniper, but I'm at most 5 pounds up, and it's hard to stay worried for too long. I'm healthy, I look fine, so I really don't have much to complain about. Plus some of the extra weight is hopefully muscle.
Geoff seems to be doing well. Work is stressful, but he's (from my perspective) indisputably successful. He posts to Google+ periodically, so I don't feel compelled to speak for him :-) It's been a rough year for all of us in terms of deaths in the family/pets and other bad news, but things could always be worse.
Kael is about to turn 4. I think 4 is the age that I really start thinking of kids as kids, as opposed to toddlers/overgrown babies. Not that he's been acting like a toddler for some time now, but still. Kael is still often difficult, but we have had occasional skylights in the roof of the tunnel (I don't think the tunnel has an end). He sometimes delights in pissing Geoff or me off, and he'll get into these moods where it is clearly his goal to be as contrary and upsetting as possible. It's not that he's having fun doing something and chooses not to listen to us asking him to, e.g., go to bed, it's that he's deliberately doing what he knows we don't want him to do just to get us to react. You'd think knowing that would make it easy to not react. You'd be wrong. Anyway, we're all still alive, and nobody seems too traumatized by anybody else's instances of snapped tempers. I try to focus on the positive and learn from my mistakes (like stop interacting with Kael when it becomes his express goal to push my buttons).
On the plus side, Kael does have a lot of worthwhile qualities. He loves to bake with me, and will sit on the counter where he can dump in measured ingredients and occasionally stir things together. He loves to cuddle at night, frequently showing up in our room at some weird hour to snuggle up next to me. We've moved Juniper to the crib in Kael's room, so this works out better than it used to. I'm sure I sleep better without Kael, but he's so cute that I find that little lost sleep a worthwhile sacrifice. Especially when things have been rough and I'm starting to wonder if we are raising a sociopath, it's good to see that underneath it all he still loves me (in his way) and wants to be close to me. Kael is very stubborn, and will get on these kicks of what he thinks is right based on often semi-inconsequential things Geoff or I will say. E.g., he asked for juice one time, and we told him we'd rather he drink milk or water, because juice has a lot of sugar in it and is consequently not great for him (leading to cavities and other bad things). Apparently he now frequently turns down juice at daycare because it's bad for him. He's also "decided" to be vegetarian. I would be lying if I said I didn't offer any encouragement in coming to this decision, but I really did let him decide, and I don't push him to not eat meat if he asks for it, beyond a single reminder that it is meat. But he's been sticking to it surprisingly tenaciously. To be fair, most meals are vegetarian in our house, of course, but even when we go out to eat, Kael's been consistent.
Kael is picking up reading, though he's more resistant than I thought he'd be. 6 months ago he'd ask to "read" books to himself, and would cooperate with trying to identify letters or maybe do a little sounding out. Now he often balks when I ask him to try sounding out a word, or he tries for a little bit and then gives up almost immediately and asks me to do it. He has more enthusiasm for signs outside, though, and will try to figure those out on his own. Sometimes it can be hard to tell how much he's able to read and how much he's able to guess from context or memory. We went to a restaurant the other day, and he saw a ketchup bottle and appeared to sound it out. But he did so more quickly than normal sounding out, and came up with the answer on the first try. Just to check, I asked him to read the Tobasco sauce bottle. Kael looked at it for a moment and said "pepper" :-) I did subsequently get him to sound it out, though it was kind of a mean trick, seeing as he doesn't know what Tobasco sauce is. In any case, I don't feel a pressing need for him to be reading before he's even turned 4. It will come at some point. In the meantime, I can be pleased with his skill with numbers. He seems to be working on basic addition (this is pretty much entirely on his own, unprompted by me and Geoff). So that's fun :-)
Kael is pretty high-energy (typically so, I gather), enjoying running around outside (and inside), but he also is enamored of video games. He likes to "play" Mario Galaxy, but usually loses patience after he accidentally kills Mario several times, and then he insists that Geoff or I play in his stead. He has more success with some of Geoff's tablet games, like "Where's My Water?" and "Angry Birds". It's fun watching him figure these things out, though I worry about how much time he spends in front of a screen. Fortunately he does enjoy other forms of play, and to my delight, seems to have a pretty active imagination. He'll make up little stories and characters using anything that comes to hand. Wood blocks, pieces of plastic fruit, twigs on the ground, handfuls of sand, sometimes the food he's supposed to be eating... I suspect the stories are heavily inspired by shows he's seen on TV, but I'm still glad to see him applying his knowledge creatively.
Kael's starting in a co-op preschool 3 days a week starting next week. It's just 2.5 hours each day, so he'll still be going to daycare most of the time. I think it will be a good way to transition from a fairly unstructured daycare environment to school, plus being a co-op means Geoff and I need to volunteer one day a week (we'll alternate weeks). That means more challenging work schedules, but also means we get to spend a couple extra hours with Kael each week. There's a lot of work involved in being part of the co-op, so I'm a little nervous, but I'm hopeful as well.
Juniper is almost a year and a half old, and though she still looks like a baby, she's pretty firmly in toddler territory. She walks around, climbs on things, loves to dance to just about any kind of music, and is learning to talk. Her vocabulary seems to be exploding lately, which is fun to watch. Er. Listen to. She is also learning how to throw temper tantrums. She's unfortunately picked up the bad habits of biting and hitting when she's angry :-/ But more often she'll just storm off and cry if you upset her. Upsetting her is accomplished by taking anything she's holding away from her, taking anything she's thinking about holding away from her, or as often as not, me leaving the room. I'm working on weaning her (deadline of early December, which is about when I weaned Kael, age-wise), so it's possible she will become less mommy-centric when I've finished doing so. I admit, I sometimes kind of like how attached she is to me. But I also feel badly when she gives Geoff crap because he's not me.
Juniper does still have some babyish tendencies. She still loves to put things in her mouth. We recently took a trip to Cannon Beach, and Juniper spent the first day shoveling (almost literally - I think it was a rake, not a shovel) as much sand into her mouth as she could. Sign of parents of second children: we didn't even bother trying to discourage her. I figured it would go through her system soon enough, and we'd have to fight with her constantly to get her to stop. And while Juniper was chowing down on sand, Kael was melting imaginary enemies by throwing clumps of sand at them. We're so proud. She appears to have survived, in spite of one pretty unpleasant diaper change, and she stopped eating sand (mostly) after the first day. Parental laziness for the win!
Speaking of eating, I've given up (note a trend?) and let her have a fork and a bowl of whatever we're eating, with the frequent end result of mess everywhere. This is a big step for me. I don't handle messes very well. I suppose it's a big step for Juniper as well, but it's not like that matters ;-) Actually, when the food is sufficiently solid, she doesn't do a bad job of it. Sometimes, at least. Kael's occasionally more difficult about eating than Juniper is, either refusing to eat outright, or spending more time playing with his fork than eating. We've instituted the rule that he must try a bite of whatever we're eating before concluding he doesn't like it, and maybe if he's gracious about explaining that he doesn't like it, we might get him something else. But usually he declares it's yucky before he's even tried it, so more often than not he's stuck with what he has, with no snacks later. I have sympathy for finding tastes unpleasant, but I don't have sympathy for being contrary just for fun. He does not yet appear to be starving as a consequence of this policy, so I can't get too concerned.
Juniper and Kael still love each other, though they fight more now that Juniper has an active interest in toys. But mostly they're very cute together.
I suppose I could provide an update about myself, but there's not a lot to say. I'm having a lot of self-confidence issues with work, and I'm trying to fix that. I'd love to both be and feel successful again some day, and I'm working on getting there. I've continued to be kind of crazy with exercise, and I think I've gotten stronger over the past year or so (I can do kinda cheating pullups now!). My weight's never fully recovered from being pregnant with Juniper, but I'm at most 5 pounds up, and it's hard to stay worried for too long. I'm healthy, I look fine, so I really don't have much to complain about. Plus some of the extra weight is hopefully muscle.
Geoff seems to be doing well. Work is stressful, but he's (from my perspective) indisputably successful. He posts to Google+ periodically, so I don't feel compelled to speak for him :-) It's been a rough year for all of us in terms of deaths in the family/pets and other bad news, but things could always be worse.