Always Another Windmill

Zag had a rough night last night–sort of half woke up several times, distressed about something that I could never quite work out. I just settled and calmed him down, tucked him back in, and went back to bed myself.

This morning, he woke up upset and crying again. When I went, I asked if he had been having some bad dreams, and he said no, it was real. I asked what was wrong, and I finally got a clear answer:

“I don’t like miso soup on my cereal!”

Well, who would?

He was fairly interested when I explained to him that most people have milk on their cereal, and a few people like orange juice on their cereal, but that I didn’t know of anyone who had miso soup with their cereal.

Also: who’s been going around tormenting the kid with cereal with Miso Soup? Have you no decency?

Zag wakes up in the morning and comes in and snuggles with us for a while. Then he gets up and goes back to his room to play with Lego. He has to be pried away–sometimes physically–to get his diaper off. I dress him alongside the lego table most mornings. He must be coaxed away to eat breakfast. Then he goes back up.

This morning, I got him to play a different game with me for almost 15 minutes. He wants to eat his his snacks at the lego table. He wakes up from nap, takes off his diaper, gets pants on, and goes–you guessed it–straight to the Lego table, where he stays until WB comes home. Unless he just stays up there and calls for us to come up and play with him.

Everyone he meets gets assessed for their level of interest in Lego. And invited to come play legos with him.

I guess I know longer have to worry about how to keep him occupied all winter.

This is probably the first time in my life I have ever said this: Sometimes, I think, maybe, I might be starting to get just a little bored of playing with Lego.

When Dr. Sears & all the rest have got you down, this looks like a promising antidote.

The Telegraph, Idle parenting means happy children:

“There is a way out of this over-zealous parenting trap, a simple solution that will make your life easier and cheaper. It will make your kids’ lives more enjoyable and also will help to produce happy, self-sufficient children, who can create their own lives without depending on a Mummy substitute. I call it idle parenting and our mantra is: ‘Leave them alone.’ “

(snip)

I will confess my many parenting errors. I am a disaster-prone, chaotic layabout and so should warn you not to listen to my advice. Certainly my friends say the idea of me advising other parents on childcare is absurd.

With that caveat in mind, let us go forth, throw away the rule books, forget what other people think and enjoy family life and all its joys and woes.

My approach to bedtime increasingly resembles this approach. I secretly suspect that the moment I really no longer care when he goes to bed or if he puts himself to sleep by shouting and singing loudly for 2 hours will be the moment that he starts falling asleep in 15 minutes.

Coversation at bedtime tonight, as I’m leaving the room to let Zag work out his squirming/kicking/thrashing/singing thing out on his own for a little while:

Zag: Don’t go!

Me: I’ll come back when you’re ready to stop fighting with me and you’re ready to try and go to sleep. I don’t want to lie in here and fight with you about going to sleep.

Zag (with a slight hint of incredulousness): You don’t want to fight with me?

Me: No.

Zag: Why not?

Me: I don’t like fighting.

Zag (really incredulous now): You don’t like fighting?

Me: No.

Zag: I like fighting!

Me: Yes, I had noticed.

We somehow ended up done with dinner about an hour earlier than usual tonight–usually I whisk Zag straight from dinner to toothbrushing and getting ready for bed. WB and I decided that it might be fun to watch one of the Wallace & Gromit shorts, “A Grand Day Out” in which W & G build a rocket to take a vacation eating cheese on the moon. It should be just Zag’s kind of thing–there’s a dog, tools, cheese, a space ship, and a robot–what’s not to like?

Especially as Zag has been really into rockets and spaceships lately. When we play with his assorted people, we almost always end up with at least one of them flying around in a space ship. He even had me build him a space ship out of his Duplo (pictured above), which he loves.

And robots he’s liked forever. Every now and then we go through phases of having to be robots quite a lot. And sometimes, Zag will suddenly turn into a robot, which happened briefly while we were eating dinner tonight. (This always calls to mind a short TMBG song, the entire text of which is “Here’s hoping that you don’t become a robot! Clang clang clang clang , whoops too late!”)

But despite all this, there was one problem. Somehow, some time ago, Zag became convinced that he doesn’t like Wallace and Gromit, or that he will like them later, when he’s bigger. To the point where even suggesting watching one can push him right up to the brink of a tantrum, shouting that he wants to watch something else.

Well, with some gentle coaxing along with the promise of a family evening together with the added incentives of popcorn, we finally coaxed a first reluctant agreement, and then I got him to help me get out the DVD and put it in the player. Whew.

So we start. And he’s sucked in instantly, of course. It was fun talking with him about it as we watched together.

A few minutes in, he exclaims joyfully “I like it! I like it! Daddy, Daddy, I like it! I like it, Daddy!”

And when we reached the end, he instantly burst in to tears, sobbing “I really like it. I REALLY REALLY like it. I want to watch it again.”

We eventually managed to pull him away, promised we could watch it again soon, and moved on to reading a few books before bed.

He sang the theme music while we got ready for bed.

Playmobil Security Check Point

I’m finding a new love for Amazon based on customer comments like the ones for this product.

(Via a long complicated chain of sites I can’t began to reconstruct)

It’s a classic story of power and privilege: starting from nothing but piles of bricks, eight builders build a sprawling metropolis over several months. They develop systems of exchange and trade for valued resources, and, when the growing city starts to generate interest, they close ranks and use their consolidated power and control of resources to prevent the entry of additional builders, even while competing for resources among themselves.

But then tragedy strikes, leveling the city. Eventually, a new, more egalitarian community arises out of the ruins of Legotown.

Read the full account of lego construction in a grade-school level after-school program, and how the classroom teachers used it as an opportunity to examine issues of class, privilege, power, and hierarchy with 25 kids between 5 and 9 here: Why We Banned Legos.

(Via Geekdad.)

The technical term is apparently sleep regression. I have no idea why the parenting books all more or less totally fail to mention that there are recurring points at which any routine or regularity you might have had with your child’s sleeping pattern will disintegrate entirely, leaving you tearing your hair out in frustration.

Well, actually, it’s probably because parenting books largely make money selling people answers, and there’s a lot more money to be made by subtly implying Probable Parent Error than there is in saying “sucks, huh? But not much to do except ride it out.”

Fortunately, where the parental guilt publishing industry fails, the internet steps in with sanity and sympathy, if not salvation. Although Moxie comes pretty close, sometimes. For all you other newish parents out there:

Start here:

Ask Moxie: Q&A: What are sleep regressions, anyway?

Then proceed through these as needed:

Q&A: 9-month-old’s sleep has gone into the crapper

Q&A: 18-month sleep regression

The 2 1/2-3 year sleep regression

We are currently in the middle of this last one–I hope not literally. I really want it to mean that this sleep regression happens somewhere between 2 1/2 and 3, not that it lasts for six months, but sometimes that seems wildly optimistic.

He’s just not even remotely tired at 7 anymore.

Time to shift strategies, and bedtime, again.

Update: After finally falling asleep sometime after 9 last night, (taking me with him until 11) he was wide awake before 6 this morning.

This too shall pass.

Zag scowls over at me the other night at dinner and says, totally unprovoked:

“I don’t like you very much, Daddy.”

While I’m still reeling from that blow, he tries to land the sucker punch:

“I not your child.”

but he’s trying too hard, and he misses the mark. It comes off as funny.

Mostly.

Seriously, who writes his material? We have no idea where he gets some of these lines. None.

Or perhaps, to borrow a line from the book in my last post on the subject, a very sleepy boy who will not sleep.  I thought I had found the sweet spot, and he certainly seems tired, right up to the point where we turn out the light.  We’ve tried moving things even earlier–Weirdbird had dinner ready tonight at 6:15, we were starting bedtime at 6:50.   No good.  I still end up lying next to hime, and then he starts singing quietly to himself. “Try to be quiet,” I say.  “Okay.”

A minute later, he’s playing a little breathing games, where he breathes in and out in rhthmic little puffs–probably singing another song to himself.  “Try to be quiet,” I say.  “Okay.”

A minute later, he’s tapping me lightly in rhythm with his toe. “Try to be still,” I say.  “Okay.”

Remix, replay, repeat.

Maybe this is just what he needs to do. I don’t really mind that.  What is driving me crazy is having to lie there next to him, for an hour to an hour and a half, while he does it. In the dark. With nothing else to do except notice every twitch, every noise, and wonder how long it will take for him to finally fall asleep this time.

Sometimes I can get away for a while, tell him I need to go check something, feed the dog, clean up in the kitchen, whatever. Tonight he’s not buying it, wants me to stay there with him.  I can’t.  I’m crawling out of my skin.  If I stay, I’m just going to end up yelling, making things worse.  I finally left, and he was upset about that for a little while, and then settled into moaning quietly to himself, and then more breathing games, and now, at last, I think he might be out.

So what I need, dear readers, is suggestions.  What could I do, in my head, in the dark, to keep myself occupied for up to an hour? Can’t take notes, can’t read, can’t listen to anything, can’t do anything that might be distracting to the falling asleep process. Tonight I worked on the first draft of this blog post.  Maybe I can keep that up.  But what else could I try? Some kind of contemplative practice? Topological transformations? Work out polyrhythms in weird time signatures?  Calculate the Fibonacci Sequence? Bonus points for suggestions with any kind of practical utility at all.

And I’ll work on not needing to be there the whole time.

Zag is all full of question these days, working hard to figure out how things work. The other night at dinner, after a thoughtful pause, he asked us:

“Do I come apart?”