art, astute, anarchy

Today it’s three, three, three posts in one:

ART

I’m sitting in my bedroom, meditating. Scott is on Jonah duty. It’s morning, so that involves light surveillance while making coffee, breakfast.

I hear a prolonged series of thudding, scratching noises in the hallway outside my door.

I KNOW without having to look that crayons are probably involved. It’s just a matter of where.

I hear him pause.

And then he says, “Sign it!”

You see, he has this book called The Dot. In it, a child who thinks she can’t draw is encouraged by her teacher to make a mark on a piece of paper. So she jabs her pen and makes a dot. The teacher says, “Now, sign it.” And the next day, the drawing is framed in swirly gold above the teacher’s desk. The child launches a successful art career, drawing and painting dots. She has a gallery show. A little boy approaches her, says he wish he could be an artist but he can’t even draw a straight line. So she says, “Show me.” And he draws a squiggly, and she says, “Sign it.”

I go out into the hallway, and sure enough, the child has covered the glass in our french door at his eye level with sweeping red crayon vertical squigglies. Which he obviously feels are signature worthy. Been meaning to photograph it, so we haven’t washed it off yet. Assuming he was using the washable crayons…

ASTUTE

Today, Jonah was refusing to nap. More on that later. Around 1pm, when he seemed tired and cranky, we took him to the grocery store. I put the necessary items in the cart while Grandma Judy pushed cranky boy in the stroller. We hardly even saw each other while I was shopping, really. Though I did hold him up while the checker ran the items through the scanner.

Next stop, the bank. Grandma and boy sat in the car while I ran in to deposit checks. When I returned, I learned they had been playing a game of remembering what we’d just bought. He remembered a surprisingly large number of  the items, Grandma reported to me upon my return.

“He’s so astute!” I said, proudly.

And the voice from the back seat said:

“I’mahhhh… Stute!”

Yes, he is a Stute. Don’t you want a stute for your very own?

Since I’m vaguely on the topic, other Jonah cute-isms of late…

He says “howbout” as in, “howbooouuut Fence?” meaning, how about if you sing me that fence song you always sing when it’s time to go to bed. “howbooouuut Loverly?”

He’s already figured his way around the choices game. At the supermarket today, I said, “Jonah, you can sit in the stroller, or the cart.” And he said, “Or, Up-Mommy!” meaning, I totally get this game and I’m adding option three which states that I may choose to finish out this grocery trip held in your arms.

Of course I had to give in on the grounds that he’d completely outsmarted me.

Recently, I taught him how to help me shell fava beans. It’s a really fun toddler activity, actually. Tonight as I was taking the strings off of sweet peas: “Fa-Vah! Beanz!” he pronounced, toddling over to inspect the bowl. I tried explaining to him that these were different. “They’re much smaller, see?” I said, pulling apart a pod for his inspection. “TAI-NEE FA-VA BEANZ,” he declared in response.

Got me there.

He’s getting more and more articulate over all. The cute mushy pronunciations of the day before are sharper and more distinct. He finally called a butterfly a “Butt-urr fulaiye” rather than a “Buh-laiye.” But even more than that, the full length words he’d already mastered are getting clearer. His sentence structures are getting more orderly, rather than being clusters of related words, sometimes jumbled together, or the end stuck in front of the beginning. He’s also using articles more. It’s a… is a popular construction of late.

I wish I could remember more, but I’m pretty sleep deprived at the moment and should be going to bed soon, speaking of late. Which leads me to…

ANARCHY

Let’s see. Three days ago, no nap. That night, 8:00 asleep-time (you know, after about 2 hours of the bedtime “routine”), 6 a.m. waking. Yesterday, three hour nap from 1 to 4, though the middle hour was spent on my chest because he’d woken up crying after the first hour. Asleep that night at 8:30pm, 5 a.m. waking (are you F-ing kidding me???). Then today, no freaking nap until, at 3pm, the kid conks out on grandma’s shoulder mid-conversation practically while they’re outside in the back yard picking plums and talking to the dogs next door. He naps till 5pm.

Now what?

We decide that we’ll try all having dinner together. Maybe he’s moving on to a later bedtime. Maybe he’s spontaneously, out of nowhere, switched to a super late nap time. None of this makes any actual sense, based on his behavior, but what the heck. The kid is so manic in nature, it’s a little tough to parse regular manic from overtired manic anymore.

He loves it.

We’re all sitting at the table, eating together (see, normally, we feed him, put him to bed by 6:30, he’s asleep by 7, and we eat dinner after). He keeps pausing his meal to look around at us, smile, and announce, “Ha-ving Dinn-urrr.”

When was dinner over? 8pm. And for the next hour, we keep trying to put this dang kid to bed. But he’s like a jack-in-the-box, not so much springing up to vertical, but rather seemingly falling asleep and then waking up again as soon as we leave the room and crying and screaming. We take turns, putting HAND on his face, singing to him, whatever, creeping out, lather rinse repeat call suicide prevention.

Finally, at 9:22pm, it’s my turn to go back in. He’s cried for about 10 minutes this round, maybe he’s worn himself out by now. I’m certainly sick of leaning over the crib, putting my hand on his face, tummy, wherever at this point in the “routine”. Sick of him lying there with his eyes open, like he’s waiting for a bus to arrive only it’s sleep that’s not arriving.

So I take him out of the crib, hold him, rock him in the rocking chair.

He. Finally. Falls. Asleep.

<start rant>We’re at our wits end. No ideas left. Nothing is working. We can’t afford a fancy sleep consultant. We aren’t sleeping enough ourselves to make sense of anything.

Right, okay, so he’s suddenly got a 9:30pm bedtime and no nap or a two-to-three hour nap three hours later than he took it last week? Yeah. Please stop telling me that.

Will the rocking work at 7pm tomorrow night? Ha! He used to let us rock him to sleep but he put a stop to that. Demanded to “Lay Down” as soon as we’d try it. But yes, I’ll try it again earlier tomorrow.

Teething? Yes. He’s G-d fricking help me I’m going to tear my brain out through my ear and eat it teething. And his brain is developing. Fine. He’s walking more, talking more as previously discussed.

And you know what? I’m having a very hard time not using curse words in 30 pt font to express how angry I am at this situation. How betrayed I feel by every sleep book, article, piece of advice, whatever. I’m screaming here people. I just can’t turn up the volume loud enough on my keyboard for you to hear it properly. How much work we put into effing BEDTIME ROUTINES. How all that sh*t WORKED once. It USED TO WORK. What the FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF?

Oh yes, and isn’t it funny how we’re all going to look back on this and laugh. Ha ha.

I’m throwing a tantrum. It’s my blog post and I’ll cry if I want to. </end rant>

* * *

Update: This morning, he pointed to his “Art” on the French door and said, “For you.” Now I’ll never clean it off.

Also, to follow up: He woke at 6am today. At least it wasn’t 5.