What Bedtime Looks Like - Right Here, Right Now

When Saren was very little, 2 and 3 and 4, I would put her to bed at a certain time every night, in her own bed, by herself. We would do a bath, a story, kisses and hugs, drinks of water, turn off the light, say goodnight, and then I would expect her to stay there until she was asleep. That was a hilarious joke that the world played on me (on both of us), setting me up to believe that such a thing was possible. Through trying to make our lives fit into the mold that society had made of children's bedtimes, I ended up with a bedroom door with a big splotch of orange paint on it (why stay in bed when there's decorating to do?), baby oil poured all up and down the hallway carpet, and worse, tears and anger and frustration, from her and from me.

Interestingly, during some of those years, I had a baby (Harper) and then toddler, whom I always helped to go to sleep when she was sleepy, through the magic of nursing, and who slept in a crib (as opposed to in our bed with us) maybe twice in her entire baby career. I think our experiences with Harper and sleep had a huge influence on how we approached sleep with all our kids. With her, I realized it didn't have to be a battle. But it took a while for me to apply the same principles that I was using with Harper to Saren. I don't know, I guess I had this stubborn feeling that since she was older, there was some further point along the bedtime/sleeping path that she should be on, damn it. Poor Saren, always bearing the brunt of my parental learning.

In the years since then, bedtime has mellowed out considerably. There is not anyone in this house to whom we say, "Now is the time that you must sleep." When people get sleepy, they go to sleep. When someone has an issue surrounding sleep, we work to resolve it.

Not that long ago, I think when I spoke about whether or not we had bedtimes, I did so apologetically, saying, "Not really, but we sort of do because everybody has to be in bed by such and such a time because Pat needs to be able to get up for work." Apologetically because I was worried that it wasn't "unschooly" enough, that I wasn't following the "radical unschooling bedtime guidelines." Even though my kids were in bed with me, where they wanted to be. Even though we had found the compromise of Saren playing her gameboy until she was ready to go to sleep so that her wakefulness wouldn't keep Pat from getting the sleep he needed in order to wake up in time to go to work. I wasn't realizing that not having arbitrary bedtimes doesn't mean free-for-all when it comes to sleeping and waking. It means you come up with something that works for everyone, that makes everyone happy, that's respectful of everyone.

And of course, at different times in our lives that's going to look different. Here's where we are right now. Silas, Pat, and I sleep in the "big" bed (king size, on the floor, no frame). Right next to our bed is Irina's bed (twin size, on the floor, no frame). Harper has a full size bed in her bedroom and that is where she sleeps. Saren has a twin bed in her room and that is where she sleeps.

At around 10pm, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, depending on lots of different factors (how tired is everyone, are we engaged in something like a game or a tv show or a movie), we all head to our various "bedtime" spots. For Pat, that's bed and immediate sleep (seriously, the man is practically snoring before even lays down). For me and Silas, it's bed with nursing, then sleep for him; reading, then sleep for me. For Irina, it's her bed and playing quietly in the light of my reading lamp until she's tired enough to settle down and go to sleep. For Harper, it's her room and usually reading until she's ready to turn off her light and go to sleep (sometimes she's not reading, but instead playing quietly). For Saren, it's the computer in the playroom, with the lights off and the headphones on, until about midnight when she goes to her room to read until she's ready to sleep.

Of course, there are lots of variations. Sometimes those of us who like to do things before we go to sleep are too tired and we just want to conk out immediately. If I'm asleep and the older kids are awake doing their thing quietly, no biggie. But if Irina is still wakeful and I'm ready to go to sleep, I usually just tell her that I'm too tired and to please turn off the light when she's ready. Then I'll doze for a while as I don't really have the ability to sleep deeply when my little ones are still awake, even if they are right next to me. When that happens, she never really stays awake much longer than I do anyway. She likes to go to bed next to me and she's usually pretty tired around the time we all go to bed, so there are never huge differences in when the two of us are ready for slumber. Much of the time, she likes to go to sleep holding my hand. Despite the contortions I sometimes have to perform to get my hand to hers, over the top of Silas's head, I think that's sweet and I know that sort of thing will not last forever. I'll enjoy it while I can.

With Saren, I ask her to be off of the computer by midnight because the clicking of the keyboard can be somewhat irritating when one is trying to sleep. In the future, we might be able to solve that with a second computer or by moving this one, but that's how we're working it for now. After she gets off the computer, she usually reads in her room for a couple of hours.

The other night she stayed up all night because she couldn't sleep due to it being too hot in her room. I spent some time being grumpy about it because the next day was a park day and I thought our chances of going to it were pretty much shot. At the end of the day, I realized that what I assume is the case (out of grumpiness) is not always the case. I thought either she would need to sleep the whole day and we wouldn't be able to go or that we could go, but that she would get sick from lack of sleep (it's happened before). What ended up happening was she took a short nap during the day, we went late-ish, and then she went to bed at 9pm and slept for about 12 or 13 hours, completely catching up on what she needed. After it was all over, I realized that I really should have just relaxed and let her deal with it in her own way.

So that's how sleep looks right now in our house, late June, 2010, with an almost teenager, an almost double-digit kid, a 5 year old, and a still nursing baby. Um, and two grown-ups, one working outside the home.

Silas Likes to Play Too

Horseplay

The Silases That Weren't

It's been 13 months and 3 days since Silas was born. When I look at him I can't imagine him as anyone but Silas. Here is a list of names that were top contenders from before he was made his big debut. He's so not any of those!

*Nathaniel - I really liked the idea of a Nate or Nathan, but Pat didn't like either, so we compromised with Nathaniel.
*Spencer - Nowadays I can only see Spencer Shay from iCarly when I hear this name. It was Pat's favorite though.
*Asher - We would have made it Ash (gotta catch 'em all), but every time I said it in my head, I immediately thought "ass" so that was a hindrance. Asher was not much better in that regard, actually.
*Miles - Definitely my favorite and before I found Silas, it was the final boy pick. Yes, it came from Lost. And actually, it has a similar sound to Silas, so we must have known we were on the right track.
*There was totally another boy name and I can NOT remember it.

*Lillian - Oh, man. Now I can't remember for sure if our original top pick for a girl's name was this or not. I'm pretty sure it was. It would have been Lillian Hazel.
*Lira - Eventually we rejected Lillian for Lira and I'm not sure why. Lillian was getting too popular? I don't know. Still would have had Hazel for a middle name (my grandma's first name), so Lira Hazel.

Wow. Now that I don't have an actual person's identity on the line, I really like all those names. I should have six more children so that I can use them all. Of course, as soon as there was a real bun in the oven, none of them would be right.

Happy Father's Day!

Here is a picture of my father. On his lap is my baby brother. He's been around for five months and I've never mentioned him. What do you want from me?

In other news, we got Patrick Super Mario Galaxy 2 for Father's Day. That and the rat cage were probably poor choices, financially speaking. What do you want from me, internet?

Happy Father's Day!

The cats are very impressed with the ginormous new rat cage.

Marbles + A Familiar Scene

More Silas Stuff!

Silas has said his first word. Cat. From him, it sounds like "cah" or "gah", but we're sure of what he means because he only says it near the cat. I know that Saren's first word was "hi". But for the life of me, I can't remember Irina's or Harper's first words. Thinking of that makes me think of how people always say that the first child gets a fully filled-out, beautiful baby book, with photos and the dates of all the firsts (words, teeth, rolling over), but as you have more and more kids, there's less and less done in their books. Totally true. Silas doesn't even have one.

He still likes climbing. And our playroom is still a mess.

Things I Did

One: Harper, Irina and I made some butter using the put-cream-in-a-jar-and-SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE method. It was amazing and spectacular! Or maybe just really cool. Also delish.

Two: I made two loaves of bread, by hand, that turned out pretty good I think. I remember trying to bake a loaf of bread several years ago and it turned out like a loaf of rock, so there was definitely some improvement to be made. This bread I just made was pretty good, but I think it could be better.

Three: I made cold brewed tea and it was yummy. I don't drink a lot of tea, but I should because it could help me kick the Pepsi habit. So could lack of money, but I don't really want to talk about that.

Four: I made tacos and burritos for dinner, but that wasn't anywhere near as new and interesting as the rest of that stuff.

Unrelated: Here is a photo of a weird little spider found on a zucchini leaf.



Also unrelated: Here is a photo of a smiling climbing boy.

Gardening Update

For a long time nothing was happening with our little garden except for unhappy things.

We had only teeny strawberries from the strawberry plant and only one every few weeks at that. One day we had one that looked a bit bigger than the others had been and I was excited about picking it and cutting it up into teensier slivers to share with the girls. I decided to wait one more day for it to get a bit redder and when I next went out to check on it, it was gone, stolen by a bird. Nothing much from the strawberry plant since that fateful day.

The cucumber plant is all dry and sad looking.

There's a red pepper plant that does a whole lot of nothing all day long, lazy thing. I think maybe it's the wrong season. Or the wrong climate? Do you see how much I know about gardening? I am a whiz.

Zucchini! I learned something new from the zucchini plant, more than one something even! We were getting a lot of flowers but nothing else and then a whole batch of new, bigger, greener leaves came up, along with some new flowers. And then, lo and behold, some actually zucchinis! I looked up the whole bigger, greener leaves thing and found out it's totally supposed to do that. Who would have thought? One of my very own plants, doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

But! The zucchini story is not over. Because there were bugs. I looked them up and they are called squash bugs. The only things I could find telling me what to do about them without reaching for chemicals, was to pick them off by hand. *shudder* Eventually I started taking them off one by one with a long stick and then squashing those squash bugs on the ground. Evil, evil little things. The first zucchini we had growing on the plant eventually started turning yellow at the end and shriveled up some. It only got to be about two inches or so before its untimely death. I will assume it was the bugs. There is another zucchini on the plant right now that has reached about 2 and a half inches and it's starting to turn yellow at the end. Sigh. There are a few more after that. I'm hoping that at least one of them will make it to full growth.

And the tomatoes. The tomatoes haven't given me much problem at all. There were some caterpillars on it in the early days. We took two of them off and put them in a jar and watched one of them turn into a moth (the other died at the chrysalis stage) and the others just got squashed. Yesterday I was going to pick our ripest tomato and found that a bird had gotten there first; it had beak marks in part of it. (It's the reddest one in the picture above.) Today I decided to pick some of the riper ones before they became too enticing for the birds as well. I guess it's just a matter of experience in finding the perfect time for harvesting. Saren, Pat, Silas, and I shared the non-beaked part of the red tomato today and it. was. so. good. Best tomato ever. I'm going to put the less ripe ones (they're in the photo too) in a salad tomorrow.

There have been lots of times when I wondered if it was even worth it to bother with this whole gardening thing. But today I'm looking at it differently. I learn something more about how to do this as each day passes. So, obviously, next year I'll have a little more experience under my belt to apply to a new garden. I've been interested in gardening for a long time but I've never done anything about it because I've had so little confidence in myself. But I can see that all the reading in the world is worth very little in comparison to actual experience. And the way that tomato tasted is enough to make me want to try it again next year.

He likes to climb.

We really do clean the playroom, actually quite a lot. It's just that it can only stay clean for between 8 and 29 seconds. It's an unwritten rule.

To Remember

When Irina wants to do something herself or is proud of something she's just done, she says, "I am a good job!"

Instead of upside-down, she says, ups-down.

Our Baby is Allergic to Las Vegas

I took Silas out this morning (10:30 am) with me to water the plants. He was in the sling and it was a billion degrees. When we came back inside the spots were back. Even worse than the first time I saw them, when I got all worried that he had chickenpox. All over his back, his chest and belly, his arms and legs, and his face. We were only out there for maybe ten minutes total. The good news is the spots do fade away just fine and they aren't raised or pimple-like, they're just flat discolorations. I am worried about going to the park on Wednesday, though, with the Life Learners, as it is supposed to be another super hot day and we'll be out in it for more than ten minutes.

Internet, Diagnose My Son

So, remember the other day when I wrote about Silas having a fever and screaming a lot and I thought he was teething? Today he woke up with spots on his face and back, with a few on his chest and arms and legs as well. I took a picture while he was sleeping (finally, after a very grumpy unhappy morning). What do you think? Chickenpox? Or just a heat rash (BECAUSEITISHOTHELLOLASVEGASIHATEYOU) after a coincidental teething fever? A heat rash would fade away though, right? I think it's chickenpox.



Update: When he woke up, most of the spots were gone. In my defense, he's been REALLY grumpy and upset lately and I can't figure out why. Just teething, I suppose. And he is still a bit splotchy. And there were spots all over, not just on his face. I am guessing that the screaming combined with the heat are making him a lot sweatier than normal, which makes his skin prone to spottage. Here is a picture from after his nap.



This post is brought to you by Maternal Over-reaction.

Self-fixing Camera

So, I went to take a picture of this yard art that Saren made in the backyard (awesome, no?) when I notice that my camera doesn't have those black spots in the picture anymore. Man, I love this camera so much!



But I hope it doesn't self-un-fix.

Orajel doesn't work

Silas is getting some more teeth (numbers 7 and 8, I think?) and it's making him miserable, which is making the rest of us fairly miserable as well. He spent all of yesterday with a fever and it looks like he'll spend all of today screaming. None of my other kids had this much trouble with teething. Or maybe I've just blocked it from my memory.