Coffee with Jack

Dude.

6 months of interrupted sleep is starting to make me angry.

I sniped at Ben all morning and realized my face was screwed up in a perma-frown as I took Jack to school this morning on my (late! always late!) way to campus.  I saw him looking a bit furrowed in the back seat, holding his lunch box with 2 mittened hands, so I knew an immediate trip to Starbucks for some sugar was in order (the baby weight!  why won't it go away?)

At school, he wanted to take a walk to finish his doughnut (which is still in my car waiting for the post-lunch ride home because, as you will see, he got cold).

My coffee date with Jack:


I felt much better after that.

Double parked

 This morning we grabbed some snacks and walked Harry to school a half an hour early, so the kids could blow off some steam on the playground.

 Harry was excited, but it turned out that he didn't really want to play on the toys-- he wanted to stand by the fence eating a chocolate chip granola bar (without arsenic, thank you very much) and waving to all of his classmates as they came off the bus and looked a little enviously at him.

 Cooper was totally fascinated by the entire trip.

 Look!  Jack used to be a blondie, and now he's brown as can be.

Cooper, like Harry, spent his time staring at the bus riders.  In real life, Cooper is blond and bald, but his fuzz is red in pictures, huh?

Harry went inside, and Jack and Cooper and I went home.  I had high hopes for Cooper's morning nap because he woke up at 5:30, but it barely lasted 30 minutes.  Luckily, he fell asleep on the way home from Little Gym and stayed asleep until 2.

After school, we hit up the park again because we literally had NOTHING TO DO today.

Well, that's not totally true.  We tried a new dinner recipe and wore the Ergo on my hip.  

 Don't know what he was doing here.  Making fun of me?

 Looks kind of reddish brown in this picture.

So, listen.  You might be reading these posts and thinking WTF?  Why is she even writing?  NOTHING is happening in her life.  And that's true.  But if I wait for something exciting to happen, I'll never write again, and I do like reading my own archives.

Made this tonight, and it was delish-- I recommend.

I have been up until midnight reading shitty thrillers (although Lisa Gardner's Catch Me, which was last night's late read, was fantastic, not shitty at all), and I have to go to bed tonight because I need to get to my office on the early side of my Cooper-imposed 2.5-hour limit and write a criticism exam.  Glam, huh?

Productive day

Oh my goodness, you guys.  I got stuff done today.  I haven't been this productive in at east 6 months (6 months on Friday to be exact).

I finished grading the pile of project proposals from my rhetorical criticism students I have been working on-- and a stack of discussion questions, meaning I am totally up to date on my grading if you don't count the response papers they turned in today, and I for sure DO NOT because I am not grading them or feeling guilty about them until Thursday morning before class.  I even recorded a huge back log of grades on my school's online grade center.

Class was great today, and we did a new thing with some Obama speeches that I have never tried before, and it WORKED.

I came right home to feed Cooper, who was having a bit of a no sleep day.  He helped me write an exam for the smaller of the 2 public speaking classes I direct.

I went back to campus for a meeting and made some really good connections. One.  But it was good. On the way home, I gave myself an excellent pep talk about finally publishing the shit I need to edit and send out.  We'll see how that goes.

After dinner, I made baby food, cleaned the kitchen, and jumped on a conference call all while wearing the baby.  Multitasking FTW!

sleepy, sleepy baby

 I thought I would have a little more physical autonomy now that Cooper is almost 6 months old, but he will not drink bottles, so he and I are joined a the hip.  I did sneak away for a couple hours of grading at a coffee shop yesterday, and it made me remember all those afternoons spent writing in a cloud of that thick coffee smell.  I need more of those.

An even worse case of the Mondays

You guys, what the hell?

We had another rotten morning.

Cooper woke up at 4 am (after also waking at 12:19, an hour after I went to to sleep-- and do you know how hard it is to sit up and be awake-like for a few minutes after that first hour of sleep-- hard, really hard) and would not go back to sleep.  This is a neat little trick he has been doing from time to time since he was a newborn-- no rhyme or reason to it, but totally annoying, especially because the night before last, he slept from 7pm-3:45am and from 4am-7am.  At 5, I gave him to Ben and went back to sleep for an hour or so, and when I woke up, Ben said he had a fever (Ben, not Coop, but Coop may get one now after an hour of feverish snuggles).

I almost had Cooper asleep at 6:50, but Harry started SCREAMING at Jack.  I almost had him asleep again at 6:58, but Harry came running into my room to tell me Jack had a bloody nose (He didn't).  I tried again, but at that crucial drifting off moment, Jack bellowed from the bathroom that he needed me to wipe his butt.  I am a lucky, lucky woman.

Cooper fussed with increasing urgency for the rest of the morning while H and J trashed the playroom and family room and practiced for the word dawdler competition that I know they could win because it took 17 minutes for them to put on the coats, boots, hats, and gloves that were already laid out for them.

Now the bigs are at school, and Cooper passed out on the home-from-preschool drive and stayed asleep during the kindergarten walk-to-school, although I noticed he is barefoot inside his car seat bundle and smells like poop.

I immediately sat down to waste time on the internet and have a snack, but it is slowly occurring to me that it's time to buy spring clothes, and I am still fat.  Way back when I bought my first round of post partum fat clothes, I told myself that I would be skinny and wearing Anthropologie by spring, but I still have a case of the Old Navy ass, so it's off to the the elliptical for me.  I am sure the baby will wake up before I can even touch this giant pile of essays that needs to be graded by tomorrow (not really very giant, as I only have 20 students, but STILL) because why wouldn't he?   It's a Monday.

Up to speed

Today was so unremarkable it's barely worth blogging about BUT WHEN HAS THAT EVER STOPPED ME?

 Cooper, as you can see above, had some nap problems.  Actually, that kid has a lot of nap problems.  We are working on naps, and they might be getting better (longer, more predictable), but to really facilitate that change, we need to be home more, and that just doesn't happen all the time.  We have also been doing cry-it-out, which we never did with the others because Cooper will.not.nap and then by the end of the day, he is unrecognizable he's so tired.  If we feed him, change him, give him his paci, and put him in his bed, he'll lose his shit for a few minutes and eventually fall asleep. I don't want to make him sad, but I also want him to go the &*%$ to sleep, you know?

 Harry and Jack helped Ben blow snow, and then they came inside for cuties, cocoa, and cookies.  Harry also had raisins, and he was making a face out of cuties, raisins, and marshmallows.  It was pretty adorable until he made his marshmallows into a caterpillar that crapped raisins.  Ah, boys.

 We went out to lunch.  Salads for Ben and me, hamburgers and applesauce for Harry and Jack, spinach dip and veggies for all of us.

 Harry is way into drawing The Cat and the Hat exactly like his teacher showed him on any surface he encounters.

I brought pureed apples and pears, but Cooper slept.  I think I would too if someone carried me around in a plush little cocoon.  Ben should get on that.

After lunch, we went to an organic home and baby store to buy our special snowflake Jack a mattress pad, and we wandered around a craft fair (a step up from your usual craft fair, though-- beautiful pottery and some really, really cool jewelry) that Ben said was like walking through Etsy.

I started to get really crabby and demanded to be taken home for a nap (you just got really jealous of Ben who gets to spend the rest of his life with me, huh?).  I woke up, refreshed, to see Ben who had been manning all the kids popping Tylenol and swigging coffee.  We went to Whole Foods and spent twice our grocery budget on half a week's worth of food, swung by Panera to feed the kids, and as soon as Harry goes to bed, Ben and I are going to eat appetizers and drink wine and watch Contagion or Planet of the Apes or Crazy Stupid Love, all of which we got for Christmas, none of which we've watched.  Although if Harry doesn't go to bed in the next 5 minutes, I am just going to eat oatmeal raisin cookies.  Or my arm.  Whatever is closer.  So my arm, I guess.

BUNK BEDS!

I love a cookie formed with an ice cream scoop.  Too bad I can't eat chocolate.

 We had quite an annoying burst of winter weather today in the form of a pretty-much blizzard.  But we didn't care!  No need to leave the house when you are (im)patiently waiting for BUNK BEDS!

Sent Harry off to school with those green eggs and bacon candies that are floating around Pinterest in honor of Dr. Seuss' 108th birthday, and then Jack and I rushed to the grocery store to make it back in time for BUNK BEDS!  Jack was such a happy little elf today.

The whole reason we got the beds is because I used to look at Legos as a fun way for the boys to exercise their creativity and work on their fine motor skills.  Now I just see 1000 ways for Cooper to choke to death.  So, we needed to get the Legos out of the playroom.

Jack is totally confused to have toys in his little room.

A dresser that holds real-sized clothes unlike the little plastic cabinets we used to have

Playing Legos (or maybe just falling off the table)

Lego storage in the bed's stairs!

Also room for all of the random assorted super heroes and binoculars Jack likes.

More storage that I am sure will soon be filled with totally useless stuff that, because it has a place, will seem VITAL to our lives.

This guy?

Looking all innocent a the camera?

You'll never believe what he did today

Tried to CRAWL

And had some genuine forward motion.  WTH?

I think the BUNK BEDS!  are a success

At least for tonight.

Library Day

Last week, Harry brought home the best library book he's chosen all year.

Actually, he brought home 2 library books because his class has recently been given a responsibility upgrade at the library.  By the time they are in 3rd grade, they'll get to check out 5 books a week, which seems like way too many books to me, especially after I saw a friend struggling under the weight of her 3rd grader's backpack.   Harry is ready for the responsibility of an extra book-- he is so gentle with these books, so careful.  He always puts them back in the back pack cabinet by the front door, so he never has to look for them, on library day, and he has never forgotten to return one on time.

We, however, are way better at handling one book.  His super cool book that I am going to tell you about in a minute?  We had to check it out twice because we just didn't get around the reading the whole thing last week.  In our defense, it is a long book.  Oh!  And yesterday morning, I read a chapter to all 3 kids valiantly trying to keep Cooper from eating the pages, and when I was done, I absent mindedly turned down the corner of the first page of chapter 5.  When Ben and Harry started reading chapter 5 after bath, Harry went white when he saw the dog-eared page.  "Okay," he told Ben calmly.  "I will just tell the librarian what happened.  I'll tell her right away, so I don't get in trouble."  I have met his lovely librarian, by the way.  She's not like Mrs. Gorf from Sideways Stories or anything-- she's very, very nice. I also know that lots of kids in Harry's class have forgotten their books or damaged them-- Harry is just super, super cautious with his library books and takes his borrowing privileges so sweetly seriously.  I wrote  note on a Post-it and confessed to the page folding, and he felt much better,

Anyway, the book.  Jack has been studying dinosaurs at preschool, so Harry is also way into dinosaurs, and for the last 6 weeks, he has been expanding our knowledge of them with his library books-- hence our trip to Rockford a month ago to see their tiny T. Rex.  Lat week, he brought home A Dinosaur Named Sue: The Story of a Colossal Fossil: The World's Most Complete T. Rex.   I am linking the title so you can read it yourself-- it's that good.  It;s about the discovery and assembly of the ginormous T. Rex at the Field Museum in Chicago (I smell another field trip in our future), but what Ben and I love so much about it is the way it problematizes everything we think we know about dinosaurs:  what they look like, how they moved, what they used their limbs for, how they might have died, what they ate, how they experienced the world, etc.  Sue, the book argues, might have had cancer.  Dinosaurs, it tells us, could have been covered with feathers, not lizard skin.  T. Rexes, it says, might not be the predators we have built them up to be-- how could they kill live prey with short, muscular arms that couldn't reach their mouths.  How could they defend themselves against attack? We'll never know anything about dinosaur sex categories, the book reminds us, or about how T. Rexes reproduced.  Scientists think eggs?  But they've never found one.

Dinosaurs and everything we know about them are rhetorical, culturally influenced stories we tell based on their bones.  We fit their skeletons into our own worldviews, but we know very little about the circumstances of their actual lives.  65 million years?  What does a number like that even mean?  How can we imagine it outside the bounds of modern America and our culturally dependent narratives?  We can't.  We have no idea.


Harry and Jack, by the way, did not react well to these kinds of questions, did not like standing on the fuzzy precipice of what might be, could not make the leap from the black and white information they've gleaned from PBS kids and their teachers.  "This book is stupid," Harry told us.  Jack offered a more mild view.  "One dinosaur had feathers," he said.  "I saw it on Dinosaur Train."

How can we compete with that?  What they know is absolute.  Maybe they will be historians, studying how things were, or scientists, studying how things are, instead of rhetoricians, studying how things come to be, how things might not be things at all.