One Thousand Words

We have a pretty simple bedtime routine. Around 7:00-7:30 (ideally, sometimes later) Nesko or I start herding Niko toward the back of the apartment. After brushing teeth, he gets his night time medication and then he changes into pyjamas OR opts to sleep in his clothing (a battle I am willing to surrender, who gives a fuck, seriously) and we make sure he has his lovey du jour and his water. Then he selects two stories and whoever’s putting him down cuddles up with him and reads two stories and then, if I’m the bed time parent, I sing him a special song which is as follows, sung to the tune of “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady:”

Nikola my Nikola, oh my sweet Nikola
Oh, my pretty baby.
Nikola oh Nikola, my funny Nikola,
joking, laughing baby.
Nikola my Nikola
arms and legs Nikola
growing bigger baby.
Nikola oh Nikola
I love you Nikola
Because you are my baby.
Na na na nana na
Na na na nana na
Na na nana nana
Na na na nana na
Na na na nana na
Na na nana nana

Sometimes I also sing him “twinkle twinkle little star” or “london bridge” or “wild rover” or “lord randall” or “greensleeves” or “crazy train” or something. Lately he’s been requesting “peanut butter jelly time.” WHATEVER, CHILD.

Then it’s snuggles time. Nesko usually falls asleep because he is a HUGE JERK who I am HUGELY JEALOUS OF, who can fall asleep pretty much anywhere in about five minutes LIKE A JERK. I, on the other hand, am very good friends with Insomnia. We play cards together nightly. Anyway, sometimes, to help Niko wind down, I ask him little questions like “what are 3 fun things that happened today” and “where are 3 places you’d like to go” and “if you could swap your tata for anything, what would it be?” (answer: a big fluffy bed. LOL WHAT.) (he would swap me for a pillow.) (he would swap baba for a big giant dump truck.) And we generally talk about his day, his week, what’s going on, etc.

Sometimes, while reading or afterwards, he asks ME questions.

The other night, we were reading “The Runaway Bunny” and he asked me a very important question.

“Mama,” he asked, “why is her butt in a pot?”

I started laughing, because seriously. That is a funny question and it tickled me that all these years we’d been reading the book he’d just assumed that the mother bunny was sitting in a pot or something in the middle of the river. I explained to him about really tall boots but I don’t think he believes me. In his personal head canon, that rabbit’s just fishing while sitting in a pot.

Insert pot to piss in joke here, I guess.

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Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

William Makepeace Thackery said that but if you’re anything like me you might remember it better from “The Crow.”

Niko is still in that stage where he thinks I know everything and can do everything. If he asks me a question and I don’t have an answer, he thinks I am holding out on him and gets angry at me. I gave him some blueberries and didn’t pluck a dried bit of leaf off one of them, and he was offended. “Why would you even think I like this?” He asks me to draw an Ornitholestes and takes it personally if I draw it “wrong” (holding an egg/not holding an egg/too big/too small/too happy/not happy enough/dancing/not dancing/etc). He had a hilarious looking pratfall the other day out of NOWHERE (usually you know why a kid falls down. They slip on a piece of paper or step on a floppy sock or stumble over a toy or slide on that slippery patch of floor they’d rubbed butter into earlier or something. He just flew right down.) that ended up fairly serious, with a badly bitten lip. He clung to me, sobbing, upset that he was crying so much and unable to stop. Then he blamed me. “You should have SAVED ME. You should have CAUGHT me.” It was my fault he fell, you see. Because I should have intervened. Like lightning. Like god.

I can’t save him. I can’t read his mind and make him happy. I can’t make everything all better. He’s still grappling with the idea of mortality, of death; with the idea that some day he might not have a mama and a tata, that he’ll be alone. I can’t just make that better.

He has nightmares, and night terrors. Maybe this is the side effect of a medication he’s on, or maybe it’s just his age or his relation to me (I get nightmares frequently, as in several times a week… during times of high stress they can hit every single night multiple times a night. It’s… not restful.) He screams and cries and thrashes and he’s seriously upset, and it just kills me that I can’t make everything right. I hold him, I try to calm him down. One particularly bad one I tried to reassure him that he was in his own little bed and he was safe. “I’m not safe. I’m not! I’m not safe anywhere!” he wailed. It was like a knife through the heart. He didn’t remember it at all the next day.

“Why didn’t you save me? You should have saved me!”

I’m trying, kiddo. I’m trying.

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Niko’s been having a hard time lately.

He’s been really wild and out of control, ignoring us quite a bit, temper tantrumming, insisting on sleeping with us, speaking in a baby voice/refusing to speak and just pointing at things, and having pants accidents. The kid who’s been potty trained for MONTHS is suddenly soiling himself. It was a pretty big, and worrisome, regression. He’s also been refusing to try to do things like look at letters, count, etc. This is the kind of stuff kids do when there’s something huge and new in their lives: when they move, when their parents divorce, when there’s a new baby, when zombies attack, etc. But nothing is going on!

Last night I sat with Niko as he sobbed and cried, after over an hour of walking him (or carrying him) and his pillow back to his own bed. I told him it was time to sleep. His brain needed sleep. His body needed sleep. He sobbed out that he didn’t WANT to grow up.

Well.

Let’s look at that, shall we?

I asked him some more questions. Why doesn’t he want to grow up? Is he afraid of growing up?

He told me that he didn’t want to grow up because that means I’d go away and he doesn’t want me to go away ever and leave him all alone.

Oh, sweet child.

So we cuddled and we talked about growing up and parents and how mamas and tatas always love their kids and we talked about how Nesko and I are still close to our parents. We love them and they love us. He calmed down and fell asleep and slept soundly in his bed all night.

This morning we had another talk about growing up and I reassured him that growing up is a gradual process. You don’t just wake up one day grown up, it takes a long time. We talked about how long it would take. He demanded to know an exact age when one is grown up and I told him 25. I promised him that I would always love him and would always be his mama. He said he didn’t want to have kids instead of a mama. I told him he could have kids AND have a mama, and I would be his kids’ baba, but that he didn’t have to have kids if he didn’t want to. He could choose not to have kids. He said he wanted to choose to have kids and also have a mama. He told me that he wanted to be a mama and have kids.

IF YOU ARE CURIOUS: the difference between a mama and a tata is tatas have DEEP VOICES and mamas have high voices. He demonstrated for me, including doing a pretty spot on impersonation of Nesko.

He’s been a little less clingy so far today, although the day is still young. We’ll see how he does tonight. I’m really tired of him joining us in bed. He pulls my hair and tries to push me out of bed. He jams his feet up under he and scrapes his toenails along my body. I hate it. I HATE IT. So hopefully he’ll sleep in his own little bed tonight.

IRONICALLY a few days ago he got super pissed and fired me, told me I wasn’t his mama anymore and I needed to go away and find a new home because a new mama was coming to our home. I told him I’d wait until his new mama got here. “NO DON’T DO THAT” he said. “YOU WILL BE HERE FOREVER. YOU WILL NEVER GO AWAY.” My firing offense? Not letting him eat candy for breakfast. WORST. MAMA. EVER. Later that day he forgave me and rehired me, though. And, yes, this current behavior regression predates this event.

Technorati Tags: 3 years old, parenting

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I was reading on the couch when Niko grunted and huffed and carried a big box over toward me. He set it carefully on the floor, draped it with a blanket, and arranged two short pieces of string in an X across the top.

“Mama, mama, do you know what’s in this box?”

“Uh, what?”

“It’s…” he threw off the string and blanket, dashed off the lid, and scooped up a double armful of beanie baby dogs “PUPPIES!!!” and tossed them joyfully in the air. Then he gathered them up and made them swarm all over me, “kissing” me.

Oh, be still my heart.

“The Great Mouse Detective” is vying with “The Aristocats” for ultimately place of love within his heart and he’s proclaimed many times that he wants to be a detective when he grows up and is big. We’ve talked about some of the different mysteries detectives solve, including fighting crime and doing police work, being a private detective, being a historian, being an anthropologist, and being a paleontologist. He’s decided he is going to solve the mystery of how dinosaurs lay their eggs and take care of their babies. Right after he takes his space ship to the alien planet Minnebonie, which is where aliens (also known as “slide bugs”) live. It’s a far away planet that nobody knows about yet and it’s where aliens live. DUH. Also he’s going to visit Mars.

He’s got a busy future ahead of him.

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Niko, like me, grows hair and nails super fast. So we trim his nails frequently or else he claws us up, and we cut his hair and then like two days later he looks like wolves have been raising him. He was fretting over being “chupo chupovee” (a hairy man) recently and kept asking for a haircut. At one point I went into the bathroom and someone had removed the bathmat (draping it over the garbage can in the kitchen) and put Niko’s little pink chair in the middle of the floor. WHO COULD HAVE DONE THAT. Why, Niko, of course! Preparing for his haircut. So Nesko finally took him in there and trimmed his hair. I tried to slip in there to use the toilet and the floor was entirely covered in hair and Niko was shirtless and I pretty much had a glimpse of what he will look like when he is 40: a dude with a hair sweater. It’s your destiny, dude. Sorry. Or maybe you’ll like being super hairy and bask in the glory of never being fully naked even when unclothed, I don’t know.

Nesko’s gotten pretty good at cutting Niko’s hair, but the problem remains that Niko has my hairline. Namely, his hairline almost reaches his eyebrows near the temples. It’s the opposite of Nesko’s hairline, which is very high up, giving him a smooth high intelligent looking forehead, as opposed to my brutish almost Neanderthal look. It’s like I married a dolphin, y’all. And Niko very obviously takes after me. I expect his unibrow will start coming in when he’s 12 or so.

Anyway, he’s all groomed now and looks like a tiny human and not a feral beast child, so that’s a great change. Unfortunately, he’s still acting like a feral beast child roughly half the time. It’s less than ideal.

Technorati Tags: 3 year old, parenting

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One of Niko’s favorite books right now is this coffee-table like book that’s full of photos of Chicago. It’s about fifteen years old, so there’s some photos of Marshall Field’s, and the Carson Pirie Scott building isn’t a Target, etc. Niko likes to look at the buildings and Nesko and I talk to him about what buildings we’ve been in, and he likes to look at the skylines and try to find CTA trains and buses.

We drove down to visit my parents and their dogs yesterday, and on our way back we detoured through downtown Chicago. It was night and the buildings were all lit up, and Niko could pick out the John Hancock building and the Sears Tower (fuck you, “Willis”) and looked for the CNA building but couldn’t see it. He kept enthusing “Oh, oh! This is just like my Chicago book! This is just like being in my Chicago book!” so that was really cool. And now we have a list of places he wants to walk around and visit when it’s warmer, including the Buckingham Fountain and having a picnic on the green grounds outside of the Shedd Aquarium, and going on a boat tour on the river.

We had plans to go to the Aquarium or the Museum of Science and Industry today (some glorious angel gave us a family membership to it) but it’s cold as hell out, two of us are recovering from illness and one of us is tiptoeing in illnesses direction, etc so we’re staying in and spending some family time together instead.

Technorati Tags: 3 year old, chicago, parenting

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Are you familiar with Candle Cove, that brilliant bit of horror by Kris Straub? It’s a relatively short piece of fiction in the format of an internet forum dedicated to old tv shows. Some users reminisce about a horrific low budget kids show called “Candle Cove” that was pure nightmare fuel in the most literal sense possible. It’s atmospheric and creepy in the best possible way, the unease and horror build slowly.

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Ugh mike, I got a chill reading that. Yes I remember. That’s what the ship always told Percy when there was a spooky place he had to go in, like a cave or a dark room where the treasure was. And the camera would push in on Laughingstock’s face with each pause. YOU HAVE… TO GO… INSIDE. With his two eyes askew and that flopping foam jaw and the fishing line that opened and closed it. Ugh. It just looked so cheap and awful.

You guys remember the villain? He had a face that was just a handlebar mustache above really tall, narrow teeth.

“YOU HAVE… TO GO… INSIDE.”

Niko frequently creeps me out. FOR INSTANCE, there was the time he stared solemnly up at the sky and then told me “there is a storm coming and we will never see the day again” or the time he informed me that he ate the sun and we would thus be in eternal night.

Today he stood in the middle of the living room and intoned in his spookiest voice “YOU HAAAAAAAAAAAAAVE… TO GO… INSIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE” while waving his arms ritually, a blank look on his face. He crawled under the coffee table. “YOU HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVE… TO GO… INSIIIIIIIIDE… THE CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVE.”

JESUS GOD.

And then he started talking about picking up a cargo load of coal and making chugging and puffing noise because he was a train.

I mean, talk about your Occam’s Razor moments, right? The most obvious solution is the correct one. He’s never heard of Candle Cove, but he HAS read/watched a lot of stories about trains going into dark, spooky caves. Also he seems to delight in fucking with me and being creepy on purpose. <3

I told Nesko about this and he said “Well, we’re going to have to leave the television on AT ALL TIMES NOW so he can’t find any static to watch.”

<3 <3 <3

What’s the creepiest thing YOUR kids do? What have you done that royally creeped out someone else, all unintentionally?

Technorati Tags: 3 year old, creepypasta, parenting, three year old

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I tried to put Niko down around his regular time and he was riled up and fussy and kept popping out of bed and wanting just one more thing etc. His negative behavior ramped up until I was standing outside his door returning him repeatedly to bed as he escalated his screams. He begged me to stay with him, said he needed me, begged me to let him sleep “in the big bed” (our bed) etc. He finally insisted that he needed to tell me something and I relented.

“Don’t get lost!” he begged me.

“What.” I said.

“Don’t go into the woods and get lost!”

We discussed how I wasn’t going to go into the woods, I wasn’t going to get lost, I wasn’t going to sneak out in the middle of the night while he was sleeping, I wasn’t going to run off with wolves or get eaten by wolves, I wasn’t going to get hugged by a hug wolf and turn into a hug wolf and go on a hug wolf rampage. I wasn’t going to leave him.

“Are you going to die like the seal’s mama did?”

Mother.

Fucking.

Caillou.

I don’t normally let Niko watch “Caillou” because the protagonist’s whiny voice is irritating and I don’t want to model that tone, or negative bullshit behavior, for Niko. But yesterday I was elbow deep in sprtiz cookie dough and using a new press I wasn’t as familiar with so I was having some few problems and hiking out to the living room to change the channel wasn’t at the top of my priorities. It apparently should have been, as an otherwise innocuous trip to the zoo involved meeting a baby seal who’s mama died so it was being hand reared. And apparently that concept soaked in Niko’s brain for awhile only to surface tonight in a fit of terror and screams and neediness.

So I hugged Niko and kissed him and promised him that I would never die. I would never leave him. What if I get sick? I’m not going to get sick. What if I get hurt? I’m not going to get hurt. What if I get old? I’m not going to get old. I’m never going to die, I’m never going to get old, and I’m never going to leave.

These are promises I can’t back up.

I have no way of keeping these promises.

And it was utterly useless to try and soft shoe around the issue, to make vague claims that I simply would never leave, that I would always love him. No. He wanted the full deal, the full promise.

I will never die.

I will never age.

Jesus, I can’t keep that promise and it’s tearing me up.

Technorati Tags: 3 year old, death, parenting

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Niko’s overnight at his grandparents’ went well, to a degree. He ate all the clementines in the entire world, so if you’re having trouble finding them in your kitchen or store, it’s because of him. He ate a bunch of other fruit and veg as well. Child acts like that stuff is candy. <3

He missed his nap on Friday, didn’t get to bed until after 9:00 pm, and missed his nap on Saturday as well as again going to bed later than usual Saturday night. Now, he slept all night long on Friday, he cooperated with bedtime and slept well. But he’s running on a sleep debt and that caught up with him last night (Saturday night). He woke up screaming and sobbing several times. Well, I say “woke up” but at least at first he was still asleep.

The first time he woke up he was sobbing and screaming and thrashing around. I asked him if he was awake and he said no. I told him he was in his own bed in his own room in his own home and he was safe, and he sobbed that he wasn’t safe, he wasn’t safe at all. He demanded to touch Nesko’s hair and then cried because he wanted Christmas presents from Santa. He was really out of it. I picked him up and held him and then Nesko took him, and he woke up and was very different, calm, awake. We eased him back down and left.

He woke up again about an hour later, screaming and thrashing. I got him resettled. He woke up again and I dragged myself out of bed, glassess-less, to resettle him again. He woke up again and came into the bedroom to scream at me for having taken something out of his bed (he was unclear what) (I hadn’t taken anything).

So we took him into our bed and he cuddled in and slept like a log all night.

He is very beautiful while he sleeps. I mean, he’s a good looking kid when he’s awake but when he’s asleep in the pearly light of early morning he just looks luminous and still, perfectly carved, the ideal of a child.

He woke up smiling and alert, laughing, cuddly. I asked him how he slept. “Very well!” he said. Did he have any bad dreams? “No, only good dreams!” He was all bouncy exclamation marks. “You woke up crying a few times. What happened?” “I don’t know, but I stopped crying and I’m not crying now! I’m hungry. Can I have some cereal?”

It’s not even 11:00 now and he’s complaining that he’s tired and cranky and needs a nap, in between singing songs about the CTA (namely, the red and brown lines, and how they thunder down the lines). I think he’ll sleep long and hard this afternoon, and hopefully tonight we’ll all get some peace. My head is killing me.

Technorati Tags: parenting, pre-schooler, sleep

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We have a mantel.

Don’t get all excited. We have a non-functioning fireplace and the mantel is a catch-all for junk. Like a junk drawer, but all out in the open where anyone can see it. Also there’s some photo albums, a porcelain “Rose Of Tralee” statue from the Franklin Mint, only slightly chipped, and a massive pile of guitar song books. And dust.

There’s also two houseplants.

I was cleaning off the mantel today in preparation for INCOMING CHRISTMAS and I moved one of the two small watering cans into the kitchen. This, as it turned out, was a mistake.

When Niko dragged his little stepstool over to the mantel, watering can in hand, and informed me that he was going to water the plants I chuckled indulgently and assumed it was all just pretend.

HA!

HA HA!

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

No. He’d put water in the little plastic watering can. And, while trying to water plants that were above his head, he poured all the water onto the floor behind him.

The hardwood floor. Which is about 100 years old.

OH!, I said as the water pattered musically onto the floor.

Then we cleaned it up together.

This poor floor.

IN MORE DISGUSTING NEWS, my child has really bad gas and also has figured out how to blame other people for it. He’s got a whole list of individuals to blame, which includes his stuffed animals. His current favorite fallguy is a red dog known as Red Dog. “But it’s ok, Red Dog doesn’t have to poop. That was just a just because toot. He keeps them in his butt. His butt is attached to his leg. Sometimes he poops on his leg like a cow all over the floor.” He’s still obsessed with cows and their torrential craps.

Technorati Tags: 3 year old, cleaning, parenting

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