Author: Kristi

Day break

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I think I may have broken a record for the longest inhale in the history of the world today. It started four hours ago when I woke up and I have only just released that breath, here, at my desk, in my first second of quasi-repose.

Mornings are hard. Some are harder than others. These days they seem impossible. When I take a moment to float above the universe we inhabit and gaze down at our three beautiful babies and my beautiful wife, I sometimes wonder: how are people physically able to do the things you must do in the duality of being a human being who works and being a human being who is trying to lovingly care for offspring? The part where you rise early to feed, clothe and cleanup yourself and children each day and then exit the house with some combination of them seems to especially defy physics.

Our twins are at that precious age of babyhood where they don’t want to be in arms but they also don’t want to be out of them. Most of their time in Darry’s presence and even mine involves whining and hollering to go “up” and then whining and hollering to go back down. Their preferred state is for both of us to sprawl on the floor so they can just crawl all over us at will.

Serafina is on the precipice of being a threenager, which, I think, means she is aware of herself on the threshold of bigger-kidness and, in full view of her sisters in babyhood, her exit from that phase. This morning she demanded she sit in one of their high chairs (her old chair) with a bottle full of Darry’s pumped milk and the remains of her breakfast, cut into miniscule bites safe enough for an infant to gum. Seconds later, she insists she wash the dishes “all by self.” We chose to honor these requests today, but there are others like this that we can’t, for lack of time and patience, and there is some protest that I am trying very hard to see and support, but somehow not feel.

Did I mention we’re all in our second round of (thankfully, mild) coxsackie virus? Which sounds either adorable or vile, and this time has brought a crop of mouth sores for me and Darry (not just the kids), a general sense of blech and a fresh veneer of grumpiness to our family dynamic.

When the morning chaos peaks, I feel like I actually might die sometimes. Scene: Both babies are at my feet while Darry is in the bathroom, Serafina is demanding I hold her. I have to poop and maybe even take a shower and get dressed, but how? And then so do all of the children, but how? In my head there is a long stretch of many more mornings like this and cartoon speed lines flying off a history of so many mornings already lived, just like this. There is the epic list of things I haven’t completed at work, still waiting there for me to start, and all the people who will ask my questions as soon as I arrive.

I don’t know what to do with this feeling of impending death, and today, throwing a spoon into the sink for the satisfaction of metal crashing against metal would have to suffice. It’s not my best moment as a parent or person, hurling a spoon from the counter to the sink. But it feels essential to my survival right now.

I start all of my days as a servant to our tiny creatures. But five days a week, I start my day again, in service to my job. I am waking up again, breathing regularly now.

Seeing and loving a serious child

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IMG_8780My kid can’t fake it.

When she encounters new people, Serafina is quiet, cautious and observant. She is not the kind of child that leaps into a new social dynamic with abandon or dashes off to see what distraction has captured a group of children. She sticks close by, silently and seriously, and often stays put. Parents and big kids can cajole her, try to lure her or bribe her to participate, but she’s resolute and so solid in her resistance, that they often give up, feeling deflated or even offended.

I sort of hate it.

I sort of hate it because this is not the child I know. At home, Serafina is an exuberant goofball who races around the house and screams with delight when she is surrounded by the people she knows and loves best. She is a downright boss, demanding with such force that we follow her precise orders when we play, eat or read books. She loves to hold court, performing her “ballerina,” singing her own songs or speeches she’s memorized from Daniel Tiger.

I have felt a sting, a sense of judgment when we get together with a group of parents and kids. Everyone else’s offspring is running through a sprinkler while mine is trying to fuse her body with me again. The other kids will giggle if you tickle them, but mine will scream “nooo” and scowl at you. (On two separate occasions, kids in her pre-school cohort have asked me, without any prompting, “why does Serafina only ever say ‘nooo!?'”) Are people asking what I did to make her this way? Are people liking her less because she will not engage?

But she is my child, after all. And this is very much who I was in my young life and now, after years of therapy and reflection, who I still am but now with the capacity to understand it and see how it appears to others. I could never do small talk easily or comfortably. I had no pretense of glee, but when it was real, it was very apparent. I was an introvert in new environments and an extrovert in my comfort zones. I thought for a long time that this is just how I was because I was queer and didn’t “fit” in most spaces neatly. Maybe that was true, or maybe it is/was just who I am. Today, I am a 38 year-old woman married to a woman with three daughters and thanks to brushes with life and death, I have a clear picture of what matters. It is easier now to be who I am than it ever was. The dark, weird, tall girl who did not smile is still there, but she is happy to meet new people and curious to interact with the world.

In this way, I have not loved the praise we give exclusively to the more “outgoing” traits a person might have, especially in children. We celebrate the kids who “flirt” with everyone (a descriptor for kid behavior that I, maybe in my weirdness, feel very funny about). We find it easy to love the kids who are puppy-like and bold. Why don’t we adore introspection and reserve in young people? Sensitive children are brave in their honesty and their vulnerability. Serious children are unique in their thoughtfulness. They are harder to get close to, but they are that much more wonderful perhaps because of what they hold back.

Part of why I love Serafina’s school and her teachers is because they are very intentional about seeing children, listening to them and loving who each child is. Her teachers have helped me feel better and even feel good about her assertiveness (screaming “no!” at boys twice her size) and her deadpan. And Darry too has reminded me that Serafina comes from a long line of spicy, brazen and in-charge ladies, like my fierce Nana, my mom, my aunties and maybe even me.

I want to be so careful to not impose character on Serafina, because her character (like everyone’s, really) is a such work in progress. I resist the way some parents might say “she loves this! and she is *this* way!” because I think children will respond to what we perceive in them, and tell ourselves and tell others. I don’t want to put any pressure on her. I want to work hard to see clearly what she is showing me and to love the wonder of discovering her unique self, every day.

Dining haul

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Sitting down to share food together. This simple, beautiful, essential act was the thing that defined my relationship with Darry in all of the years that we were together before children. It is how we found and nurtured our most important relationships with our dearest friends. Nearly 10 years, this twice daily act (always breakfast, always dinner)  grounded us, kept us healthy and in the moment for the duration of each delicious meal.

We are working so hard to keep that foundation present now that we have three children. It was challenging but manageable when Serafina arrived. Every day of her first two years was reliably book-ended by a hot meal at the start and finish of each day with both of us next to her. In the mornings, she would nibble on our eggs. In the evenings, she would often crawl into my lap and gobble up a bit of whatever we were eating. She was a remarkably tidy eater, even in her baby phase, and the post-bedtime cleanup was minimal. In this way, she was a weirdo and she fooled us.

Needless to say, mealtime these days is not the luxurious, deliberate and often artful act that it once was. We are still eating twice daily, always breakfast and always lunch, with all of the children together. We are still preparing hot meals, miraculously made from mostly whole foods. But the time spent seated at the table is now a total fucking circus that generates up to an hour of cleanup after every meal.

When it’s time to eat, Serafina gets a head start on everyone else and often vanishes mid-meal to collect toys from another room, make mischief somewhere, demand that she is tired and ready for bed, etc. The twins cease their clockwork pre-meal whining (they are very conditioned) while finally stationed in their chairs — always with food already placed on their trays so they don’t attempt a premature escape. (At 9 months, Mairead started standing up in her chair and it was terrifying.) Darry and I shuttle all the necessary accoutrements to the table, attempt to sit down, both of us with one eye on the children as they start to inhale food. And then, instead of eating, one of us is continuously tearing up and throwing more and more food to the babies, who are consuming it faster than we can keep up. Meanwhile, the other is trying to keep Serafina engaged and present, and making sure she eats at least a couple of bites of the more important parts of the meal.

When we are done, usually 15 to 20 minutes later, the space around the table is a crime scene of food waste, suggesting that the twins did not actually ingest anything we gave them and that, instead, 100 percent of the tiny pieces we lovingly ripped up and tossed to them, were redirected to the floor. The babies themselves are covered in food, with bits of stuff somehow penetrating their onesies and digging in deep into their cloth diapers. (These will spill later on the bathroom floor, when they are stripped for a tubby.)

I know many families have their kids nibble on their own kid food separately and wait until after bedtime to eat in a more relaxed way themselves. I appreciate that, but I honestly don’t know how those parents can wait so long to eat dinner or when, if at all, they eat breakfast. Darry and I are also very conditioned and always very hungry.

But we are hoping the investment we are making at our mealtime circus now will nurture the same love and graciousness Darry and I have with each other, and the same love and gratitude for food. I like to fantasize about years from now, when the girls count on their time with us in the morning and the evening as a space to share how they’re feeling about the day ahead and about the day behind them. I also like to fantasize about them cooking entire meals for us, many years from now.  And I am proud of us for persevering and committing to the hard work required to procure good food, to prepare it and to share it, religiously, around the table as a family.

Not staying at home and parenting

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“I stayed home because I didn’t want someone else raising my kids. That’s not why I had children.”

I overheard a mom saying this once at preschool drop-off. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard other mothers saying it in other places too. I may have even said something like it myself, before I had kids, though I am not sure what the hell I was thinking if I did. Because the truth is, and always has been, I am a working person.

I work because it is compulsory, because it is crucial to my survival. I do not have parents who support me. I do not hve a safety net. Everything I have, I have because I had to work (and so I did) and the same is true for Darry. And even though we, too, don’t prefer to have someone else raising our kids, it’s not presently an option, given our mortgage, modest standard of living and desire to build some semblance of long-term security. Also I work because — and here’s a tricky bit  — neither Darry nor I want to be home full time with three children. We both know that is the hardest job of all and we’ve been over this scenario and feel certain it would disrupt the sense of balance and equity we have in our relationship and in our co-parenting.

I don’t think all proud stay-at-home moms make “I wanted to raise my own kids” claims self-righteously, and I seriously question how many stay-at-home moms are resolute about their decision to stay home. But I do think statements like “I wanted to raise my own kids” over-simplify what is probably one of the most complicated and heart-wrenching realities a person can ever experience: being a parent and being a person with a job at the same time.

It is a fundamentally incompatible thing. Working and raising children, at least the way I personally conceive of both roles. Since Serafina was five months old, and I slowly and sadly and certainly made my return to work, my heart has been broken in a million tiny ways, pretty much every time I say goodbye to her. And especially on those days when the goodbyes are difficult.

This summer Serafina is in camp for the month of July. She’s with her beloved teachers and her buddies from preschool, but in a different setting, which is outdoors for most of the long, hot day, and the transition from school to camp has not been perfectly smooth. She’s the youngest kids attending, one of the few kids who still naps and arguably it’s a little too much for her. She comes home pretty beat and most mornings she says she’d rather stay at home. (That was never the case during school.) And every morning for the past week, she has panicked when it’s time for me to say goodbye and howled as I walked back to the car.

This is basically the worst sensation a working parent can experience. Leaving your child in someone else’s care as they look you in the face and beg you to stay because they want to be with you. This is not a scenario that plays out in your head when you decide getting pregnant is a good idea and that, when the time comes, you’ll work out some kind of child care plan so you can keep your income flowing. But here we are.

We are lucky our kids have amazing, nurturing care from wonderful, loving caregivers. We are lucky we have jobs that compensate us fairly. So much luck makes it seem wrong somehow to still complain that this combo of good fortune is hard, all the same. But right now and for the foreseeable future, every day is a circuitous path of exhaustion (getting up and getting out “on time”), grief and guilt (handing the kids over to someone else while they sometimes protest), anxiety (racing from one thing to the next, most especially to pickup), relief (when we finally get to see the children, happy and in tact at the end of the day) and more exhaustion (when we get a couple more hours caring for them while they are tired, often grumpy) and gratitude (when they go to sleep and give us the sweetest hugs imaginable as we’re tucking them in).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Secretly healthy homemade pouches

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As first-time parents, we were militant about keeping fruit and veggie pouches out of Serafina’s hands. When visiting with friends with kids, it could get awkward. They would generously offer a pouch while their child sucked one down, and one or both of us would politely decline, not wanting to say out loud, “hey, we think those things can go rancid and they will never touch our baby’s lips.”

Fast forward to a 2-year-old Serafina, who is able to ask directly for a pouch, and articulate very clearly that she knows exactly what they are and how to use them. When we asked how, she explained that her grandma buys them for her sometimes. Joke’s on you, mommy and mama.

We’ve been more lax with babies #2 and #3 — they’ve had a couple of pouches, and we’ve even bought them. But we still have reservations about the shelf life, the sugar content and the packaging. Thus, we’re experimenting with our own, reusable pouch.

It still strikes me as weird, kind of gross and the antithesis of the kind of eating habit we hope to establish — a long, slow, luxurious appreciation of all flavors, shapes, colors and textures — but the fact is, kids seem to like their food when it’s delivered in plastic. And for the moment, it’s still a challenge to get certain (green) vegetables in Serafina’s diet and a desirable balance of fat, protein and fruit or veg.

We ordered the Little Green Pouch on Amazon (a 4 pack). They are actually easy to clean, though the spout is a bit tricky and requires a narrow bottle brush. If these are a hit with all three kids and we find we need to order more, I’m going to try the WeeSprout brand, because the loading zone on these looks wider.

Here are our first two recipes:

Protein pouch

IMG_7110
Serafina, naked and happily sucking down a protein pouch.

1 medium sweet potato (roasted)
1 medium ripe banana
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon chia seeds
1 1/2 tablespoons of peanut butter

^ This one was surprisingly tasty and the right consistency (not too liquid). It filled two pouches.

Green pouch
1 cup of (raw) spinach leaves
5 strawberries (we used frozen)
1/2 cup frozen mango
1 banana
2/3 cup Greek yogurt
1 tablespoon of peanut butter
1/2 cup water

I’d recommend going lighter on the water and heavier on the peanut butter, to make the end result thicker. This one was tasty, basically like a smoothie. It made enough to fill three pouches.

 

 

Babyshit blues and greens

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We are one week and two days into the Epic Shitfest of 2017, the endless party where the twins have produced a wet, loose, greenish poop for _every_single_diaper_change since last Wednesday, all day and all night.

We’ve googled furiously and flipped through all of our baby books to try to understand what might be happening or “when to worry” — so far it seems like we are still in that endless horizon of bizarre things that can safely come and go in the life in an infant. Which is to say, we are not alarmed yet, just really really tired of cleaning up shit and fairly certain there is a thin layer of this watery goodness coating every surface of our house, certainly the entire bathroom and all of the clothes that we have worn in the past week. Also the inside of our noses, because no matter how far I travel from the babies, the smell of their poop stays with me.

I woke up at 5am today to find myself in bed with Rowan. She immediately started squirming uncomfortably, but because it was early and because the house was quiet — presumably Darry was still asleep somewhere with Mairead — I got up and tried to rock her back down for a bit longer. It was hopeless. She was hellbent on waking up so she could fill her diaper with another enormous crap. There was an impressive spillover on this one and pretty soon the back of her onesie was filled with shit too, and I knew it was  time to give up on more sleep and bring her downstairs for a change and maybe some breastmilk.

Just as I got to the living room, where Darry was sleeping on the couch with Mairead, Serafina started moaning for me to come get her. I handed Rowan to Darry, which woke up Mairead, and went back upstairs. I told Serafina it was too early to wake up (she whined but obliged to sleep more) and then returned to the living room. Then Darry went upstairs alone to try to get a little rest and I moved into the playroom with the babies to clean up another round of diapers and start the day with the birds once again.

The twins wear cloth diapers, just like Serafina did. That fact is rather irrelevant when you’re in the midst of a shitfest, except that we’ve had to do more frequent rounds of our diaper laundry. Just as we avoid disposable diapers, we also avoid disposable wipes. So most of the cleanup during Shitfest, and indeed all of the time when the babies poop, has taken place in the bathroom sink.

Thankfully these babies are very flexible and don’t mind when we fold their legs up, turn on the taps, and awkwardly dip their ass and vulva under the running water and slough off the stubborn chunks of poop with our bare hands. Meanwhile they’re reaching out for whatever they can grab: toothbrushes, toothpaste tubes, hair clips. Some of these items have been casualties of Shitfest, getting tossed under the tap by a baby at the precise moment that poop is being washed down the drain. Some of these items have been quietly rinsed off and returned to their spot on the edge of the sink like nothing ever happened.

This past week the babies have also had some severe diaper rash, a delightful side effect of so much diarrhea, and we’ve had to bring in the big guns (desitin, another thing we generally avoid). But you don’t want to put desitin on until a baby’s bottom is completely dry, so I let Rowie air dry in the playroom, butt-naked, and decided it was a good time for me to download some new audio books.

I was browsing the titles available under a general “buddhism” search, because now seems like a good time for me to explore a spiritual practice, when Rowan squatted and released another puddle of poop directly on the playroom floor. I grabbed a towel and mopped it up seconds before Mairead crawled up to the puddle for a little exploration. I have lost track of the number of times this has happened in the last week while one or both of the babies has been air drying, diaper free, in an effort to resolve this rash.

An hour later, I’d cleaned up three baby shits, tidied the mess I made while cleaning those up. Serafina woke up at 6am, I called Darry down to take care of the babies while I tended to her and soon we were all making breakfast.

I went to open the sliding door in our kitchen to breathe in some fresher air and stepped in something wet on my way. I didn’t think of it until Darry stepped in the same something wet a few minutes later and wondered out loud what it could be. What was it Darry had said when I handed a baby to her first thing this morning? Oh yeah, that she had just heard the cat puking somewhere. Guess we found it.

 

Secretly healthy homemade gummies

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IMG_7047

When Serafina was first exploring solids, we were fanatical about making everything ourselves, procuring only the purest, priciest ingredients and carefully exposing her palette to a broad range of subtle flavor differences. Of course.

The twins’ first foods were primarily from (organic) jars, and though they have rapidly graduated to table food — whole slices of pizza, why not? — they’re getting far more processed (“healthy”) snack food geared towards infants and toddlers and so is Serafina. We are eating those words we once uttered about how a pouch would never touch our child’s lips.

It is a serious job to keep up with the food needs of our family as part of everything else, and we are plagued by the guilt of seeing our kids eat stuff out of plastic, primary-colored wrappers. These homemade gummies were born of that guilt.

I bought everything I needed to make these from Amazon and used mostly fruit and veggies we already had in the fridge. If you google homemade gummies, you’ll find a bunch of starting points. I riffed off this recipe for our first try.

Here are the ingredients we used in ours:

  • 7 strawberries
  • 1 red apple
  • 1 carrot
  • Handful of cherries and grapes (we had some left in the fridge)
  • 1/2 medium sized beet
  • A glug of grape juice (which we also had in the fridge)
  • Raw honey
  • Grass-fed gelatin. (The packaging on this prescribes a few tablespoons a day, dissolved in water or juice, as joint support.)
  • Cod liver oil, this is the particular brand we have right now
  • Kid safe elderberry syrup

    The goal here was to achieve a rich red color and make 1 1/2 cups of juice.img_7046.jpg

And here’s how we made the gummies:

  1. Cut fruit and veggies. Serafina was especially useful during this portion.
  2. Juice them all. Serafina was moderately useful here — she wanted to drop everything in our juicer very methodically — one grape at a time.
  3. Measure the juice to make sure we had the right amount. Pour it into a medium pan and add 4 tablespoons of gelatin. We let it dissolve for a few minutes. When it appeared to have “bloomed,” I put it on medium heat and mixed it well to fully dissolve the gelatin.
  4. Once dissolved (really just a minute or two), I turned off the heat and added 3 tablespoons of honey, a 1/4 teaspoon of cod liver oil and a 1/4 teaspoon of elderberry syrup and stirred again.
  5. We used a dropper to put the liquid in the molds and refrigerated them for an hour or more. This was Serafina’s favorite part.

*note this amount of juice, filled all 4 of the molds that came in this package.

We could have made them sweeter. After the initial bite, the earthiness of the beet really came through. But it didn’t seem to deter Serafina. She ate half of them today without complaint. She did seem to prefer the smaller bites of the bear mold; the other shapes are pretty big by comparison. We’re going to make green gummies next time, sneaking in kale and spinach.

 

 

Lying about lying down: Something about sleep

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I am trying to write something about sleep, but holy crap am I tired.

The thing about baby sleep is that it’s a nightmare. And everybody experiences it differently, but also exactly the same, and almost everyone lies about it — as it is happening, in retrospect and even projecting into the future about how they will wrangle a yet-unborn child. They lie to you, they lie to everyone they know and they lie to themselves.

For example:

“We just put them down in the cribs awake and they went out without making a sound.”

“We hit the jackpot. She only ever cried when she was teething. She was sleeping through the night pretty much right away.”

“We did some gentle sleep training. He didn’t ever really cry, just fussed a little for a couple of nights.”

“We used the Ferber method. It really wasn’t that bad. Just a night of crying and then a few minutes and then nothing.”

We know that everyone lies about baby sleep because, for some reason, we have been incapable of lying about it. We suffered through 10 long months (give or take) of extreme torture from Serafina very publicly and we are now on month 8 (though honestly, only 4 of those have been brutal) with our twins and everyone that knows us knows this.

If you really start to scrutinize the stories other parents are telling you about their perfectly sleeping children, the holes will become more apparent. If you spend time with those families — time that corresponds with when their children are napping or going to bed — you will gather tangible evidence that what they mean when they say “she never cries” is a very different thing than how you interpret that statement.

For example, you will hear that “never crying” baby shriek for a solid 20 minutes like she’s being eaten alive when she is put down for a nap while her parent calmly makes a sandwich and settles in for a chat with you.

For our part, we start most of our days before 5am. Sometimes we start them, like I started this one, at 3am. We get out of bed a lot in the night, taking turns trying to rock a baby back down, removing a crying baby from the room where another one is sleeping or, back when we only had one child, escaping to the couch for a couple of “off” hours. We are often ripped out of sleep by the sound of crying or a sleep-talking (sleep-shouting) toddler. Sometimes that happens at the precise moment that we have finally, after a long day of caring for 3 children and working full-time, dropped off into our first stretch of “rest” for the night — and that there is the very worst of all. And we know we could have it so much worse.

We do some combination of bed-sharing and crib sleeping with the babies, just like we did with Serafina until she was about 15 months. We have no regrets, especially about the bedsharing. It is wonderful, sweet, cozy and heaven for reconnecting with your babies as a working parent.

We’ve also done our share of sleep training. We can make ourselves feel better about it by qualifying it was “light” or “gentle,” but the fact is, there has been crying. Cumulatively, among our three babies, there has been more crying than we would prefer — which, of course, is none at all. But we have come to understand that around four months, all babies will stop sleeping “like babies” and shit gets real. They have lost the involuntary sleep that defines the newborn period and, instead, have to be taught to fall asleep and then to stay asleep.

There are a million ways to go about this, as one broad Google search will reveal, and small fortunes have been made in preaching some of these methods, but what we believe is that you must go about it, one way or another.
You can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, oh no, you gotta go through it. But this is one of the things people will lie about too.

These are not lies people tell with malice, I think. But maybe as an exercise in assuaging their guilt or fear that they’ve done something, or that there’s something wrong with their child. Or perhaps it truly is a reflection of how we are all functioning in our own unique interpretation of reality, with our individual tolerance level for the pain of sleep deprivation and the sound of our baby’s cries.

As survivors of Serafina’s reign of terror, we know these things will work themselves out. Sometimes that makes it easier to manage what happens during the long, hazy nights we’re having with the twins, but we have no illusions that this is going to be easy or a thing that passes without some work.

To the dangerously exhausted mother of a 5-month-old, sputtering miseries about the way her son won’t stay asleep for more than 30 minutes to the child-free friend she just bumped into in line at the coffee shop: we hear you, we recognize you and we salute you. Thank you for keeping it real even if no one seems to care or understand.

Feeling terrible / negotiating with terrorists

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Mamas make mistakes too?

Yes, mamas make mistakes, I tell Serafina, as I wipe the poop smear from her butt because on this day she has *not* decided she can do it “all by self,” which has left the task to me.

I don’t know why she is asking me if mamas also make mistakes, but there are many words and phrases and thoughts erupting from her these days of unknown origin, most of them demonstrating a more sophisticated handle on the English language than I would have guessed a 2 1/2 year old should be capable of. But I am learning, now that I have a 2 1/2 year old, that they are mighty capable some times.

“Look, Mommy, it’s a whale!” Serafina says to Darry, pointing at an illustration in a book they’re reading together.

“I think that’s a fish, sweetie,” Darry replies. “A mama fish and a baby fish.”

Actually… Serafina replies carefully... I think that’s a Mommy fish. The Mama fish is dead, but the baby fish is happy to be with its Mommy.

We have entered the era a former boss once described to me as the “acid trip” of parenting. The age when kids start vocalizing the reality in their heads: it mostly reflects the reality you also occupy, but some fundamental aspects are askew and the most important priorities rarely line up.

I am hopeful Serafina has at least a small grasp on what a mistake really is and that what matters is that you can recognize when you or someone else has made one, and then talk about it. Each day I die a little when I recognize a mistake that I have made, which usually involves me hollering or losing my patience, often at the same time. But I feel strongly that the best work I do with her sometimes is in the repair from those mistakes.

Last night I was tortured by a battle I unwittingly engaged in when Serafina got out of the tub. It was a blazing hot day and we’d spent most of it outside. I gave her a tepid bath to cool down. It was still stifling in the house, even as the sun was starting to set, but she insisted that she complete her bathing routine by putting on her very thick, very cozy bathrobe.

“It’s too hot to wear this right now, love. I don’t want you to overheat,” I offered.

“I need it! I need my baffrobe!”

“Serafina, listen to mama. This bathrobe is for winter time. We need to get you one that is nice and light for summer. You don’t want to feel too hot, do you?”

“My baffrobe! BAFF-robe. BAFFROBE! I need it now, Mama!”

And after a few more moments of this type of thing — while my caffeine headache raged (because I’d forgotten to make that second cup of tea), while the babies were still whining themselves to sleep over the monitor and while the post-bedtime relief was so near I could taste it — I gave in to the madness and snapped.

Fine, wear the damn bathrobe and if you’re too hot, remember what I said.

We wrapped up in the bathroom, I stationed Serafina in the guest bedroom, where she gets her nightly dose of “Dan Tiger” and walked away for a moment alone to fully realize how useless that interaction was. I did a mental scroll through all the parenting advice I’d encountered recently, mostly in headlines in Facebook, and the Buddhist talks I’ve been listening to on my commute to work.

  • You hold their hearts in your hand.
  • Don’t focus on the content, look at the root of your itch.
  • Make evenings and mornings less stressful by just letting your child guide you.
  • The real work is in the repair.
  • Lovingkindess is key, most especially for yourself.

I sat down next to Serafina a few minutes later and said I was sorry for getting upset and yelling at her, and I told her I loved her very much. It was difficult to know if she heard me, because the lure of Daniel Tiger was so great. So I said it again. She leaned on my shoulder and said “mama…” very sweetly, and a then beat later, “Dan Tiger hurt his leg! He went to Doctor Anna to get it fixed. Katerina was there.”

The flat earth of right now

KristiLeave a comment

It’s a bright and beautiful Saturday morning in June and I am sitting in a bed typing next to my feverish toddler, watching her sleep off whatever evil thing is making her feel ill. Again.

Two weeks ago she was knocked out by the very worst virus of her 2.5 years of life. It was Memorial Day weekend. She was incapacitated, burning up and scaring the crap out of me with hallucinations in the middle of the night. We missed an epic neighborhood party (with bouncy house) across the street. We missed grilling with our friends. We missed everything, most especially restful sleep. And then we missed three days of school and work because this virus lingered so long.

I am trying not to worry too much about what this relapse might mean right now while she snoozes peacefully. I am trying instead to absorb life as it unfolds in each complicated but sweet moment.

But I’ve been up since 4:30am, when one of our 8 month-old twins — the one I was sleeping with in our bed — started whining her way out of sleep. It stirred my wife, who was downstairs sleeping on the couch with the other twin, who had started her whining wake-up routine at 3am. Darry came upstairs, we traded babies and I went down to the living room, standing and rocking Rowan so she’d remain asleep. Finally I was able to sit and spent 90 minutes in relative quietude, staring at Rowan’s perfect face and making mental lists of all the things I want to do but have no time to do.

I don’t know who coined the phrase, “the flat earth of infancy,” but I like it. It’s helped me recast my current despair about our situation, most particularly the sleep part — which is not sleep, exactly, but a bizarre routine we engage in each night in various spots around our house, usually with one baby in arms, but sometimes two, or sometimes with the impossible combo of one baby and one toddler. We rest in short bursts of two or three hours before it’s time to relocate, swap kids or stand up and lull a kid back into dreamland with the slow, steady rocking motion of a person losing their mind.

We are awake for the sunrise each morning. This sounds romantic but I cannot recall seeing the actual rising sun ever. I can only remember the sensation of my muscles constricting when the first “mama” floats over the monitor from Serafina’s room, seconds after I’ve finally just gotten a baby back to sleep on top of me. Somewhere — where? I don’t know, somewhere in this house — Darry has likely just done the same thing. Who makes a move to fetch the older kiddo? Whose sleep is more sacred? Some mornings we all start the day in our king sized bed, all five of us. Babies crawling around. Serafina hollering at them to not steal her beloved Giraffsie from her clutches. Me and Darry delirious and in love but also murmuring quietly in our internal voice (well, just me anyway?) “fuck my life, I need to sleep past 5am so badly.”

We *will* sleep past 5am again, I know this. In that brief window of time, between when Serafina was about 17 months and when the twins were born, just before her second birthday, we slept beautifully. We enjoyed evenings after bed-time, engaged in adult conversation, chores, binge watching two (sometimes more!) episodes of something. We thought life was complicated then with one child and I guess that it was, but really, it was not.

Serafina is awake now, next to me. Still warm, but her brief nap seems to have revived her energy and spirit, at least a little. She wants to “snuddle” with me and she does not want to get out of bed. She wants to sleep, but is playing little games with her dear Giraffsie and gazing out the window happily. She wants to lie here forever, I guess, in the flat earth of our lives, where we are chained by the tyranny of childhood colds, viruses, nap times, sleeplessness and snuddles. Here we are on this planet, making wistful lists of things we will do one day when the earth is round again, holding tiny creatures who know nothing of the difference between life then and life now.