The other side of almost 4.

A lot of people talk about "the halfs" being the worst - for example, it's not the terrible twos, it's the terrible two-and-a-halfs.  Three is great, but three-and-a-half is hard.  Charlotte loosely follows that, but I would go so far as to say that it's not really every six months, but just every now and then we go through a really rough patch.  The benefit of having an almost 4 year old, and a blog, is that I can remind myself of how it happens and how we come through on the other side.

Another thing that gets talked about is how there's always a backslide before a growth spurt or intellectual leap.  Again, that's something we've seen for ourselves, too.  (I don't know what to call this "people say" thing - it's not quite an old wives' tale, or common knowledge, or whatever, but it's just a thing.  As the Dothraki would say, it's just "It is known.")  I'm hoping that Charlotte is building up to something, because here's what the last week has been like:

• At Gavin's birthday party this weekend, she had a really hard time understanding "No" and "Those are Gavin's presents."  She did fine with this at the last few birthday parties we went to, so it could be party fatigue, or something different.
• Charlotte has fallen on her face more in the last week than in the last 6 months.  
• Sleep issues.  She was up for 4 hours in the middle of the night last night, and up at 8:30 am this morning.
• Increased arguing and "talking back."

This is all a phase, this too shall pass, etc, etc.  It makes me feel better, though, to find a pattern and reassure myself that this is all going on with a purpose.  Charlotte's impulses are wacky because her body is changing or her brain is processing, and our girl will come out on the other end, in a month or so, and blow us away with what it means to be the parents of a four year old in pre-school.

How many hours of sleep does an almost 4 year old need? 7 sounds good, right?

I blog heaviest when Charlotte sleeps least, it's unavoidable.  This week has been a massively effed sleep schedule.  Summer's rhythms have thrown her off, and she's waking at 5 am with the birds.  This means she's tired enough to actually sleep at nap time, but then she's not tired enough to sleep at bed time.  Last night she fell asleep around 1:30 or 2 am, after hours of interventions and one consequence (she was chewing on her dresser instead of sleeping, so got her stuffed animals taken away for today).  She was up by 9 am this morning, and I'm not sure if she had been asleep the whole time.  I refuse to let her nap today, no matter how big the circles are under her eyes.

Then, when in I went in at the 1 o'clock hour, I was singing.  She won't put up with a lot of lullabies, but occasionally I can squeeze one in.  Unfortunately, it's often when I'm too tired to remember the words to any songs, so I fall back on my extensive list of church songs, musical soundtracks, patriotic songs, things I learned for 4th grade chorus, and "Piano Man" by Billy Joel.  If you woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me to sing the first song that came to my head, it would be either "Piano Man" or "Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," which are apparently the screensavers in my brain.  After Charlotte requested "sing Piano Guy again," a few times, she then requested by name "Edelweiss," which pleased me despite my total exhaustion.  I also pulled out "Fifty Nifty United States," the main body of which is the 50 states sung in alphabetical order.  This reminds me of teething babies, because I sang those 50 states over and over to the baby I was nannying when I was 20, not to mention every sleepless infant I ever babysat when I was a teenager.

A sweet moment, though - one of the things Matt does with her during her bed time routine is to talk about happy thoughts, to help her fall asleep.  Last night (at 11:30 pm or so) I asked her to think of some happy thoughts, and these were the things she was thinking about:

* Going to a zoo and seeing a giraffe.  With spots.  And riding on its back when it runs fast.

* Maybe seeing a tiger at that zoo.

* Looking up at trees, that's a happy thought.

* Going for a long walk.  Going for a long walk to the library to get books.

* Playing with special clay. [that's what we call Model Magic]

* Going to bed and waking up and it's Christmas.

January, continued.

* Charlotte had a great time today playing with some Model Magic that had been handed down to her from her cousin.  Seriously, she played with it for well over two hours.  I made a number of little things, and supposedly they are completely dry in 24 hrs.  We'll see how this stuff works out, but I think we are going to get more, since Matt likes it infinitely more than Play-Doh. 


*  We are now working on night-time potty training, where we have Charlotte going to bed in underpants and we're waking her up a few times a night to sit on the potty.  She's doing GREAT.  We had one really good day and then one really bad day, so Matt was ready to despair, but things have been going very well since then.  It has kind of changed our sleeping schedule, which brings us to...

* Sleep.  Charlotte has been having so much trouble sleeping, ever since her birthday.  She's had coughs & colds, we've seen a few different doctors at her pediatricians' practice, and eventually we came up with a plan that involved a 1mg tablet of melatonin to help her sleep, and a FloVent inhaler to reduce the inflammation in her lungs left over from her back-to-back colds/allergies(?) which were causing her to wake herself up coughing every night.  In the whole months of October & November, I don't think she ever slept more than 3 hours in a row or more than 8 hours a night.  December with the melatonin & inhalers we got the sleep back to about 8 hours a night, but we had weeks of her waking every other day or so at 4 or 5 am and not being able to fall back asleep.  I counted it in the win category, though, because at least she was getting 8 hrs of sleep a day, and that was better than it had been.  However, (KNOCK ON WOOD) we seem to have turned a corner in the war for better sleep.  Cranking the thermostat DOWN at night & cranking the humidifier up have cut down on the coughing (since she's done with the inhaler) and somehow waking her up to pee seems to keep her from waking too much on her own.  Maybe it was that the wet pull-up really was bothering her?  Who knows.  I am not particularly amused to be back on the very young baby schedule of waking one to two times in the middle of the night, but it does seem to be doing the trick, and the toilet training is coming along excellently.

* Spring is not yet in the air, but Charlotte & I planted a hyacinth bulb about 10 days ago, and she's enjoying observing it and making notes in her little Science notebook.  She's illustrating and I'm writing notes and asking her questions.  I think we are going to be starting some more plant projects soon, both for her and for me.  I'm very interested in succulents & terrariums for myself, and she's interested in flowers and food plants.  We are definitely going to try the garden thing again this year, even though last year it didn't work out so well.

* Speaking of Spring, and the lack thereof, Charlotte is loving winter, ice & snow, just like Madeline.  She has great boots from her shoe-store managing grandfather, and lovely outerwear, so she has some crazy stamina outside.  I, sadly, do NOT have snow pants, so after about half an hour or so, I get a little chilly.  Charlotte, meanwhile, is rubbing her face in the snow and digging around with her bucket and rake.


* Charlotte's new favorite TV show is on The Cooking Channel. It's called Everyday Exotic, and she ADORES it. The host's name is Roger Mooking, and we do a lot of talking about Roger.  In fact, this week I plan to make avocado pudding, because Roger makes it in Charlotte's favorite episode, and she & I are both very curious.

* "What do you do first?"  Charlotte loves to watch us cook, and everytime Matt or I go into the kitchen, or talk about a recipe, she always wants to know, "What do you do first?"  She is very interested in knowing all the steps to making something, or at least how to get it off the ground.

* The current favorite movie is Tinker Bell, which I had requested from Netflix.  It's a lot better than I expected, and Charlotte loves it.  She's kind of sliding into the princess/girlie thing, and I'm resisting pretty hard.  That warrants its own post, and I'll try to get around to that soon.  I am okay with the Tinker Bell thing, though, and the fairy thing is pretty cute.

Sleep, any time but night.

Charlotte got her flu shot today; pray for us.  Last year she was sick for a week after it.  This year she was sick going into it, but I called the nurse yesterday and asked if we should reschedule.  The nurse said that as long as she isn't running a fever, she can still get it.  When Matt brought her in today, he told them about her reaction last time (fever, puking, sick for a week) and they gave her the shot rather than the nasal spray.  Charlotte had to get a combo with the H1N1, though, since she never got the second dose of the H1N1 last year.  They actually ran out of it when I had called them to schedule her second dose; they also hadn't told me at the appointment or in the literature that she needed a second dose, that was another thing I figured out from the news/internet.  Sigh.  What a rigmarole that all was.

Charlotte slept through the night last night; we've had 3 days of that in the last 2 and a half weeks, and it's starting to really take a toll.  I'm grateful that she slept last night, though, because I suspect that tonight is not going to be great.  If she reacts to this flu shot at all, it's gonna be a problem on top of her current cold (well into day 10 at this point).  My goal is to get my work done for the day and get into bed as close to midnight as possible, and hope like hell Charlotte sleeps until 4 am at last.  Matt talked to the receptionist at the pediatricians' office about maybe trying to make an appointment to talk about this sleep thing, but she wasn't sure how to schedule that kind of consultation, and she was gonna get back to us.  I'll call tomorrow and see if I can sort it out.  I also have an idea that I need to implement this week, but it involves tweaking my schedule, which I am not so great at.  This is big though, the sleep thing impacts us all pretty dramatically.

A Mother's Curse

It's a cliche, but it's happened to me.  You know how at least one point in your teenage existence you are screaming at your mother and she comes back with, "When you grow up, I hope you have a daughter just like you!"?  Well, that is, apparently, the story of my life.

I am talking, again, as usual, about sleep.  Or lack of sleep.  Ever since we instituted a bedtime routine at 11 months, going to bed has not been Charlotte's problem.  It's been falling asleep at bedtime, or waking frequently, or staying up once she wakes in the middle of the night.  I am continually grateful that we can put her to bed at bedtime and she stays in bed, and (usually) falls asleep quickly and without fuss.  (Dudes, I am knocking wood SO HARD right now.)  Every now and then she'll have trouble falling asleep at bedtime, and we recently took all the books out of her room and moved them to a bookshelf in the hall, which helped immensely with that.  She was staying up to read, rather than going straight to bed. (*cough*justlikehermother*cough*)

Once we took the books out, we thought we were golden.  Every so often Charlotte will go through a cycle where she wakes frequently in the night.  But this past week it's been BRUTAL.  She will wake up and then be up for HOURS playing, bouncing, making lots of noise.  If we didn't live in an apartment complex (luckily her room shares a wall with a laundry room and we're in the basement, meaning we have just the neighbors above us) I would probably just be able to ignore it, but as it is, she really can't be shouting at 3 am.  Even if she's kind of hilariously shouting, "I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date!"

I think the next step, as much as I'm dreading it, is to take the extraneous toys out of her room, so if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she falls back asleep out of sheer boredom.  Charlotte is not going to like this plan, but she needs to sleep!  If she won't take a nap, then she needs a solid 12 hours at night.  A kid her age really needs to get that much sleep.  I told my friend Morgan last week that Charlotte has bags under her eyes like a college freshman during mid-terms week.  And I wasn't exaggerating.

Not the best way to start a Friday.

Charlotte was up from 2 am to 6:30 am.  Some of it was cheerful, "Mom! Mom! Mom! Can you wrap Tigger*?" and some of it was tearful.  I got up the first 4 times (it was a trade-off long ago that I'd get up with Charlotte at night if Matt would be 100% in charge of the litterbox), but I started kind of falling apart around 5 am.  I couldn't separate my dreams from my awake time.  At one point, I thought Charlotte was shouting through the baby monitor, "Mom! I need more Tim Gunn!"  When I begged Matt to go in and help her, I finally realized that she was saving, "I need more Velveteen Rabbit!"  I guess I was feeling guilty for DVRing Project Runway and then deleting it before Charlotte watched it.

Now it's 8:46, and Charlotte's still asleep, and Matt's leaving for work.  Usually, no matter how little sleep she got, we wake her when Matt leaves.  We have found that Charlotte flips her lid if she wakes up and Daddy is already gone.  It totally messes with her head for HOURS.  Today though, she's only been asleep for about 2 hours.  There's gonna be hell to pay when I finally DO get her up, but I'm not going to wake her intentionally until at least 10:30.  If Charlotte wakes up before then, so be it, but I can't really look forward to a day of no television and that little sleep.

* Sometimes her best buddy Tigger likes to be swaddled. He's still a very young Tigger, you see, and he finds it comforting.  I guess.

I really hope this is a fluke...

Charlotte does this thing where she sleeps great for a month, or maybe 6 weeks, and then she spends a week or two waking up at in the middle of the night or at 5 am, and taking forever to go back to sleep.  I'm grateful that she sleeps so well at night the majority of the time, but her disrupted nights are always timed REALLY badly.

Last night Charlotte woke up at 4:45...or at least, that's when I heard her.  I went in and put her in a dry pull-up, got her a sip of water, and rubbed her back for a few minutes.  At that point, it was pretty clear to me that she was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and totally perky for waking up 3 hours early.  I went back to bed in the faint hope that she'd fall asleep easier if I wasn't there to talk to.  HA!

She finally got up at 7:30 this morning, but the time between 4:45 and 7:30 was the same as it usually is - Charlotte was in bed and talking, and I was dozing in my bed and going in there every so often to ask her to PLEASE stop kicking the wall/bouncing on the bed/laughing so loud.  On the one hand, it is awesome that she can amuse herself so thoroughly using just her imagination and her stuffed animals.  On the other hand, OMG, she needs to sleep.  Plus, *I* need to sleep, and I always have these weird dreams when I'm dozing that feel like I've been asleep for hours, when really it's just been 10 minutes.  I think Charlotte finally conked out from 6 to 7, but was up and chattering again by 7:15.  I went to bed late last night, and I think that I really did only get 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night, with another 2 1/2 hours of heavily interrupted sleep.

Is it any wonder I measure my coffee consumption in pots, not cups, these days?

M-O-M-M-Y needs C-O-F-F-E-E *

Every now and then we get on this sleep thing...three days this week Matt has forgotten to set the alarm clock, and three days this week Charlotte has woken up in the wee hours of the morning and stayed awake for over an hour (almost two, usually).  It's a horrible combination.  That means that today I was up from about 3:45 to 5:30, with just a few minutes of dozing in there. And then woke up late and groggy when Matt realized that he just had time to shower and run.

I'm not so much bothered, developmentally speaking, by Charlotte waking up and staying up.  There's a couple reasons for it - she wakes up and remembers something exciting to do, or she wakes up and can't find Tigger, or she wakes up and her diaper is too full of pee for her to comfortably go back to sleep.  It's hard for her to fall back asleep once she wakes up, for whatever reason, and who can't relate to that?  Or she wakes up and is too overtired to fall back asleep, which, for her, is a big issue no matter what time it is.  It's hard for her to fall asleep at bedtime if she's overtired and she practically never naps unless she is belted into the car seat.

I understand all of this, and it doesn't bother me, per se, but god, I gotta tell you, this lack of sleep is killing me.  I was brushing my teeth this morning and berating myself for not losing weight, when I really started to think about it.  I already have very little time during the day.  I go to bed, say, 12:30 am after working until midnight, then get up about 7:30 am.  If I spend 2 of those 7 hours falling asleep, helping Charlotte fall asleep, making sure she isn't trashing her room, laying awake listening to the baby monitor trying to decide whether or not she's going to fall asleep/break something/work herself into a frenzy....well, I think I can be a little nicer to myself for not waking up at 6 am to work out.  I'll figure out something, but this is just hard right now.  As is obvious by this rambling, disjointed blog post.  Whoops.

...and then Charlotte crawls into my lap this morning and says, "I'm your best buddy, Mom!  I love you, Mom!"  It's like she's got a sixth sense about these things.


* Ralph's World song

Got it!

Here's the picture we're using on Christmas cards:



I think it's pretty cute, if I do say so myself.

I am also discovering - cue dramatic music - that I need more sleep than I thought I did. I know this may seem obvious, like, "Hello, you have a TODDLER!", but I've gotten by on very little sleep for almost my whole life. I started being afraid of the dark after I saw the movie E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial when I was four or five, and I didn't really sleep well again until, oh, say, college. You know, when I started drinking. I used to stay up reading sitting under my desk by my nightlight when I was 8 or 9, reading with a flashlight when I was older, listening to the radio on my walkman, watching late-night TV. I have seen many more episodes of The Patty Duke Show, Dobie Gillis, Mr. Ed and The Twilight Zone than a lot of other people my age. I also remember infomercials for such long-gone products as DidiSeven (a stain remover) and of course, the ThighMaster.

I felt like I had trained myself to cope on very little sleep as a kid, 6 hours a night at the most, more like 4 or 5 all through high school, and then college it's the same thing. Go to classes, go to work, stay up writing papers and reading and studying (and partying, and drinking and smoking, and staying up late talking about existential crises). Then real life with it's work and email and phone calls and grueling TV watching schedule, roller derby practice and knitting Christmas presents. Then baby, and feeding and changing and trying to keep your house and job from falling apart around you. Finally we've reached the point where Charlotte pretty much goes down to bed at 8 and sleeps through until 7:45 or so in the morning (knock on wood! knock on wood!). And then I'm working all day, taking care of Charlotte all day, and I don't finish work until midnight, and hopefully am in bed by 12:30 or 1 am. To me, sleeping from 12:30 to 7:30 seems like it should be more than enough sleep - dude, that's almost 7 hours! But last night I just could not cope and went to bed at 10:30. I woke up at 7:00, when the alarm clock went off the first time, and I didn't feel any resentment at all! I just thought, "Wow, I'm refreshed, I guess it IS time to get up!" That's so bizarre to me. I've always hated getting up, had to drag myself out of bed, exhausted and miserable.

It's weird to think that maybe my problem is not that I'm "not a morning person" and just that maybe I need to sleep more. Huh.

Unfortunately, that revelation is not exciting in any useful sort of way. I went to bed last night needing to do two more hours of work that I will have to make up later this week, and with a sink full of dishes that need to be washed. I also didn't shower, knit baby booties, or do anything else that needed to be done. So while I have concluded that I do need to sleep more, I've also concluded that I don't have time to sleep more. Oh well. That's the story of everyone's life, right?

crazy train.

We are moving on Saturday. SATURDAY. Today is Monday - needless to say, it's a little crazy around here. Sleep is practically non-existent. Hopefully I'll post about that, eventually. Matt wants me to do a recap of 10-11 months, but that's gonna have to wait. For now, here's a picture from Charlotte's 11 month birthday, yesterday. Will post again when I am less crazy.

The next step is sleep.

I have been wanting to post something else because, frankly, that last post is kind of upsetting. However, I haven't had much time to post anything because, once again, our sleep schedule is out of wack and Charlotte isn't doing a lot of napping or easy bed times, which means most of my non-Charlotte time is spent either working or making sure this house doesn't devolve any further into chaos.

So, in lieu of an actual post, let me now list the things Charlotte would rather do than sleep:

* Stick her arm out the side of her crib and scream because she can't roll over.

* Sing to her toys and stack Ikea faux-Tupperware.

* Scream "ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma!!" Not in an upset way, in a "hey-can-you-hear-my-voice?" way.

* Suck on Tigger's ears.

* Suck on Tigger's paws.

* Throw binks out of the crib.

* Pull the tag of the playpen up from underneath the floor and twiddle it with her fingers.

* Pull herself up in her crib.

* Pull herself up in her playpen.

* Pull herself up in her crib, let go of the rail, fall on her butt and applaud wildly.



* That's my sister in the video. Little does she know that she's on the internets.

Conflicted.

I got some strange news this week - my most recent place of employment, that laid me off just over a month ago, would like to recall me. I'm very pleased about this, because I desperately need a job, and I would be working from home again, with no loss in pay or seniority. This is great, and I'm very relieved.

However.

I am sad that I'm going to be working again - I've loved this time off with Charlotte so much. It's been amazing to just hang out with her every day, to play and be silly and go for walks and just be together without worrying about making up the time at 11 o'clock at night. But kid needs to be fed, and we need to keep a roof over her head, so back to work it is. Starting next week.

Charlotte's been growing in leaps and bounds. In fact, I suspect that she's in a growth spurt right now, or at least I hope it's a growth spurt and not some new, permanent sleeping pattern. Prior to this week she's been going to bed around 8 to 8:30 pm and waking up between 6 and 7 am. Perfect, I really can't complain. But over the last three days she's been waking up between 3 and 4 am for another bottle. Which is, frankly, not a huge deal since I'm not working. It might start being a problem next week if this is a new schedule and not just a temporary thing.

I can't really complain about *how* she wakes up, though. Charlotte is such a cheerful kid! I wake up to hear her babbling to herself and rolling around playing with her blanket or dolly or pacifier. One thing she just started doing is kicking fiercely with both legs on her bed. It's surprisingly loud at 2:30 in the morning.

New food of the week - watermelon. She's been eating it in her little mesh feeder bag, mostly just sucking out the juice. Which is funny and incredibly sticky.