growing lots of teeth
Two sweet sleeping babies lay upstairs. One tired gum-chewing tea-drinking mama sits downstairs in front of her computer zoning out.
Today was quite a day. Katya is getting her two-year molars. (She let me look in her mouth with a flash light!) She is crazily vacillating between playing cheerfully and whining intolerably. She even had about 30 minutes when she was just crying inconsolably. She asks for all kinds of snacks, but doesn’t eat them. She wants to sit up at the table for lunch and dinner but only to play with her food. She is contrary and has tried everyone’s patience by dripping cereal on the table and floor, mixing up Myamya’s embroidery threads, throwing toys on the floor, sticking leaves in her mouth, crying over everything, constantly demanding “new” water or juice or snack, and then sinking back into Myamya’s chair pale and tired saying “I don’t feel well, mama. Pick me up!.”
We took a walk to the park this morning. When we got there, she wanted to walk. So we helped her out of the stroller. She hadn’t gone five steps when her (new) pants started falling down. In the summer time when that happened, we just took off her pants. But today it was cold. So, we stood there racking our brains for something to use as a belt. I scavenged around through the diaper bad while Katya was standing there crying like she had lost her best friend. The only thing I could find was a plastic bag. So I tore it down the middle and wadded it up and bent down to loop it through the belt straps on Katya’s pants. She started shrieking “NO! I don’t want the bag. I don’t want the bag.” and crying hysterically. It took us more than 5 minutes and every ploy we could think of to get her to calm down and accept the bag as a belt for the time being. I think the winning ploy was that she could hold the bag of popcorn that we were taking to feed the ducks.
Needless to say, I am quite tired tonight.
Peter is in Austria. He has been there for 6 days and I miss him terribly - not just because of the relentlessness of being with two kids all day long. He is my relaxation. When he’s home, we relax in the evening together - whether we go see a concert (extraordinarily rare these days) or watch House, MD (very common) or just talk for a while and then go to bed early. He is my relaxation even when it stresses me out to be doing nothing instead of something. He will be home tomorrow.
Vanya is teething too. But his teething is regular “wah wah mrhhmmmm mrhhmmm mmmrahhrahh rah mrrr mrrr rahhhh” constantly all day long type of teething. You know, the Dab of Orajel, Drool Profusely, Fall Right Asleep kind of teething.
Otherwise, he is an extremely cheerful little guy. He loves to put stuff in his mouth: his toys, his hands, your hands, his clothes, his burp clothes, Katya’s toys, your toys, diapers, wipe-ees, papers, pencils, tubes of Desitin, plates, whatever he can get his pudgy little hands on. He also loves to keep rhythm. He has a little rocking chair and he knows just how to move his legs to keep it rocking for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour. He can rock himself across the room. He is just learning the same thing with his new johnny jump up. He is beginning to bounce in rhythm, up and down, up and down, up and down, no higher, no lower, no higher, no lower, up and down, up and down. He is eating solids already. He eats cereal happily, squash less happily and pumpkin somewhere in the middle.
AND, he is learning to sleep through the night. He sleeps about 10 hours a night now, which is great! In fact, I am going from this e-mail to the shower and then to bed with the possibility of sleeping for seven hours straight. (I haven’t realized this possibility yet because Katya started to wake up at night just about the time that Vanya started sleeping through them, I think because of her teeth. But, even if I don’t realize it, going to bed with the potential for sleeping 7 hours straight is much better than going to bed without that potential).