Little Miss Observant

We are learning that we are living with a small person who is taking copious notes on everything we say and do, and everything anyone who visits us does. It’s like living with Big Brother, if he were two, giggled a lot, and had cute blond pigtails.

Thursday was my morning to wake up early with Kate. Last weekend we had The Ruzich/Johnson clan visiting and Kate was enthralled by everything related to Baby Vivy (something we hope she keeps up when her own little sibling comes ’round). This meant inspecting the diaper changing process, sticking her nose into the baby food jars, and standing two inches away from Daryl’s breasts in order to monitor the nursing process.

So the other day I took her for her morning potty sesh, and while sitting there, PJs down around her ankles, she held her stuffed doggie up to her breast. “Doggie drink milk from my nipple,” she explained while pressing it’s nose carefully onto her. She held the animal there for a minute or so, then announced flatly, “Other side,” and moved him to her other breast.

Thankfully she’s being careful to nurse evenly on each side. La Leche League would approve.

On Friday we were driving away from the movie rental store and the car in front of me was going all of 15 MPH. I sighed and hit the horn, causing Kate to exclaim from her car seat, “Come on, dude!” This, a clear Mark-ism.

Evidently, picking up on parental road rage is in Kate’s genes, since as the story goes, some of Mark’s first words were, “Oh shit!” when his mother had to slam on the breaks.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise to us that Kate is picking up on things that she sees adults do and say. It’s got me thinking that we should be trying harder to leverage it somehow. So in an effort to improve our parenting, as of tomorrow night, Mark and my dinner conversation will be centered around a recitation of the multiplication tables.

Project Managing the McCluskys

Turns out that my past life as a project manager has served me well for parenting. At least in terms of the schedule management. Or so I thought.

So in 11 weeks or so New Baby arrives. Got that down as a milestone. There are a few dependencies associated with that, such moving Kate’s room into what’s now the office to free up the crib for the young’un. And to do that we need to move the office downstairs into this weird little basement room, which means that Mark needs to move all his bike stuff from the weird basement room (multiple bikes, a bureau of cycling clothes, cases of Gatorade, bike tools, helmets, shoes, and a gazillion water bottles) along with tents, beach towels, and sleeping bags, into the the garage.

Mark has already started the bike stuff migration, but the office is still very much intact, and very much teeming with bookcases, books, computers, file cabinets and a bunch of musical equipment.

Every project manager worth their MS Project Plan knows that it sometimes takes completion of one task to spur on the onset of another one. And as it happens I got a flyer in the mail announcing that a huge kid-stuff store is having a furniture warehouse sale tomorrow. So Kate and I are going big girl bed shopping. A field trip which, if fruitful, will result in more urgency around the need to make way in the office for Kate’s new swingin’ big girl boudoir.

And, of course, in my manic state of nesting, I can’t wait to obsess over what all I’ll need to get and do to make Kate’s new room appealing for her, but moreover cute as the Dickens in my own eyes. The potential for endless runs to Ikea and Target to meet this objective makes me giddy with delight. This because I have already overhauled and or re-organized almost every other room in the past two months due to Crazy Lady Nesting, and it seems silly to do them all over again. I need a new outlet for this beyond-my-ability-to-control animalistic phase.

Back on my gantt chart of What Needs Happenin’ Before Bay Comes, is the issue of Kate and preschool. At one point a few months ago, in the productive early morning hours of prenatal insomnia I realized with intense clarity that what I’d need more than anything was for Kate to have a place to go (a nanny share or preschool) 2-3 mornings a week when I was tending to the new baby.

And driven Mama that I am, I somehow took that middle-of-the-night self-assigned action item and made good on it. So now Kate is in preschool. And since no sudden moves can descend on the project plan of family dynamics, we were lucky enough to get her started with plenty of time to acclimate before her little sibling started sucking parental attention away from her like a vacuum cleaner.

And initially it seemed Kate was going to oblige us neatly with little to no transitional issues or new school trauma. But then the “outside time” at the school started to overwhelm her. The kids from her classroom and a couple others pour into the school’s playground all at once and the mayhem and unstructured time seems to throw our Little Miss for a loop.

Give her noodles to glue to a paper plate and she’s fine. But in the wilds of the outdoors she’s been coming undone.

One of the teachers has told us when Kate starts bumming out outside, she takes her in and they hang out and play in the classroom. And at the end of the day when you ask Kate about playing outside, she cheerily reports, “I cry outside,” as if she’s telling you, “We had muffins at snack time.”

Hearing about this has been heart wrenching for Mark. But, especially with the unemotional way she reports this to us, I wasn’t too concerned. By all other reports Kate seems to find preschool pretty groovy. And to be honest, it seemed to me that it wasn’t in the plan for Mark to get waylaid by this little development. It will work out! We will move on! I will buy new curtains for the basement office room and everything will be okay. See how well we are moving through our tasks?

Today the nanny is on vacation. (Selfish.) So I blasted out of the office at noon, feeling a certain amount of work-neglect guilt, to fetch Kate from school. Surprisingly for the time of day I got enmeshed in traffic and drive 15MPH for a solid 30 minutes. I realized I’d be late to get Kate. All the kids who spend the full day there would be lying down for their naps. Then the gas tank went from kinda low to the red light going on. I decided the traffic hold-up left me no time to get gas, but the longer I sat in traffic the lower the indicator needle moved to the bottom of the last white line. (It’s never a good sign when you find yourself rationalizing about where on that last line of tank emptiness you are.) Add to this my desperate need to pee.

Suffice it to say I wasn’t feeling at one with the universe when I skidded into Kate’s classroom 10 minutes late, and then saw she had a big scrape on her nose and a bloody upper lip. When I asked the teacher who was with her what happened it seemed like she was on a slow record speed responding to me. I mean, I think she just said hello to me or something before starting to tell me, but I was already in Crazy Mode and just wanted to know right away what the $^%(# happened to Kate?

The fact is, Kate was fine. Yes, she’d fallen off a log, and sure she cried for a while afterwards, but she was over it. But for me, I felt a disturbing inner lurch as I went from feeling great about our latest foray into preschool into a mode of “wait, this might not all be perfect and settled in my mind after all.” There are some things that I’m going to need to get used to here.

I’d heard that after a couple good weeks an otherwise “adjusted” preschooler may backslide into some transitional issues. But no one prepared me for the fact that that could happen to me as well.

When Kate registered my presence, she started to wimper and demanded a kiss on her owie. And the teacher, after finally sputtering out what happened, decided to launch into details of how she comforted Kate and then what they did, and this is how she was the rest of the day which was really very happy and doing well for the most part blah blah blah, which I suddenly had no interest in hearing about. I just wanted to get Kate and get out of there. (And I wanted to pee.) The thought of Kate having had a bad experience outside, which was already the Bad Place for her, just seemed unbearable. We needed to go home home home.

I struggled down the sidewalk holding the car seat Mark left me when he dropped Kate off against my big belly, and trying not to drop my keys or Kate’s sweater and extra pair of pants. Ten paces behind me Kate dawdled along, dangling her lunch box and looking like a pathetic waif with her barrettes sagging in her hair and her face scraped up and bloody. It seemed like miles to the car and worlds away from our dear sweet home, as Kate announced she wanted to walk on the “crunchy leaves” and slowed down even further. It was all I could do to not sit down on the sidewalk and bawl.

In any given project there is always the unexpected unplanned for snafu that jumps out at you, invariably when you’re also having a bad hair day. And no matter how much of a bad-ass you are, you can’t always rally on the spot and regain your firm grasp. For some project managers the lack of control is probably a fairly familiar feeling, but for others, knowing it could have been avoided devours us.

In all my transitional strategizing and well-laid plans to ensure everyone moved through all there is to do before the new baby arrives, I totally overlooked the potential for me to put a kink in the plans. Without expecting it, and certainly without wanting it, it became apparent that it was going to take me a little longer to adjust to preschool than I’d planned for. It’s not that I suddenly felt like it wasn’t a safe place for Kate to be, or that I even really had any misgivings about the place. It was just its utter newness.

Finally at the car, I heaved the car seat in and was preparing forlornly to climb in with my big belly and crouch over it to install it. My internal dialog was chanting “Home, home, home.” When I looked out at Kate to make sure she was staying safely by the car, she peered up at me and said “I don’t want to go, Mama. I want to stay preschool!”

Toddler Fashion Commentary

Last night Mark put on his red long-sleeved AIDS Ride t-shirt when he came home from work.

Kate: “What that say, Dada?”

Mark: “Ride to end AIDS.”

Kate: “I love it! That is so cute!”

Keep an Eye on Your Snakes

When I was pregnant with Kate I had the usual spate of irresponsibility nightmares. You know, the garden variety leave-the-store-and-forget-the-baby-in-the-shopping-cart type nightmares. Or the, “Where’s your new baby?” question that the kindly neighbor asks and you think, “Oh shit! That’s right! Where is she?” I also had one in which the baby was very small and I kept her in a Tupperware (before you judge me, I didn’t put the top on it–duh), and then I realized I forgot to give her water for a while–not something one generally gives an infant, but in my Dream Land it was appropriate. Oops!

Last night I woke Mark up in the middle of the night. “The snakes!” I implored him. “I forgot about them and they are loose!”

The situation being, that I was caring for two very large white snakes and realized that I was forgetful about ensuring they would stay in their bag or crate or whatever. I’d woken up from my dream, but was still certain that those snakes needed corralling before God knows what happened. (Sure, these snakes aren’t a baby, per se, but the lack of tending to them made me feel they ranked with the hapless mother dreams.)

Mark didn’t seem to care so much about this dire scenario. In fact, I’d categorize his reaction to the news as more annoyed than anything. “What?! I was asleep! It’s 1:45!”

Weird. If someone told me there were some huge loose snakes lurking around I’d hardly be feeling sleepy.

Anyway, ten minutes later after I assume we both dozed off, I woke up once more feeling an even more hellbent on imparting to Mark the extent of the danger I’d put us were in. I’d been irresponsible with these snakes–which it seemed were somehow the property of work, kinda like when you could sign up to take the classroom hamster home over a holiday–but with Mark’s help I figured we could get out of this pickle.

“Mark!” I called out to his side of the bed again. “The Sunset snakes! They are loose. I let them loose!” Again, Mark expressed apparent disinterest, and an even more ardent desire to sleep sans my reptilian jibber-jabber than he did when I first woke him up.

This morning after his alarm went off Mark informed me that I was talking in my sleep to him about snakes. “Oh, I was totally awake,” I assured him. Sure, it all started out with a dream, but when I woke up, the urgency I felt to get him to intercept the consequences of my irresponsibility was very real.

And he really didn’t seem to care much. Maybe I should scream out “Fire!” in the middle of his REM cycle tonight, just to see how he reacts.

Anyway, in the breaking light of day we laughed for a good ten minutes about it. But I still looked around good and hard before reaching into my closet for my shoes.

When I got to work I saw a woman whose family lives in San Diego, and realized where this whole snake thing hailed. She’d just told me that her parents are back in their house after the wildfire evacuation, but they have 6 inches of ash in their pool and throughout their yard. If that’s not bad enough, there are rattle snakes that have come down from the mountains (biblical, no?) that are lurking under the ash, so they’ve got to be vewy vewy careful when they walk anywhere outside.

Um, iiiiick!!!! A perfectly good plot line to inform my night’s dreams, no?

On NPR I just heard a sleep expert saying that pregnant women report having lots of weird dreams. It might be hormonal, the guy said, or it might just be because you’re sleeping less soundly and remember more of your dreams from waking up a lot. In which case you are always having freaky dreams, but just don’t remember them.

I think I’m just doing my part to ensure that my sleep–and God knows, Mark’s–takes on the restless and unpredictable pattern that having a newborn in your house presents. Just trying to ease the transition. And reinforce in Mark that as the man of the house, he has a responsibility to protect us women and children from whatever evils, real or imagined, dare to disrupt us.