Enough Cheese, Time For Some Whine

Please excuse the mushiness (as Alexander called it) of my last post. But, it was my baby’s first birthday for crying out loud, what did you expect?! And so, as promised, here’s the whine…

I tried blogging a few months ago, with mixed results. I really enjoyed sending my thoughts out into the big nowhere that is cyberspace. However, it began to seem like a lose-lose situation. Either I lost time with my kids during the day or my husband at night, and always with fairly traumatic, home-front calamity type results (I believe it was during this time period that Lij decided to climb up onto the counter only to fall off flat on his back. Fortunately, the kid is made of rubber, and after sobbing hysterically for a few hundred seconds, he was fine). So with family visiting and the holidays approaching as an excuse, I quietly slipped away from the world of the blog. (Not a difficult task, considering my readership was up to about two at the time – and I’m not sure my husband even counts, as I made him read everything right after I posted it).

But with the start of a new year and some encouragement from one daring young mom, I started to think about giving blogging another shot. So this past weekend, I picked a new address, a new title, a new template and started afresh. And so did the home-front traumas. A log:

Sunday: Dylan woke up at 12:01am screaming. (Technically, this happened very early Monday morning, but as I was awakened from my sleep and it was still dark out, I count it as Sunday). Unless he was being held, he screamed constantly, and over the next hour woke up the entire house. We managed to get Lij back to sleep around 2:30 and Alexander headed downstairs to spend the night on the couch with Dylan. I have the hardest time a.) getting back to sleep after being woken up in the middle of the night and b.) falling asleep without Alexander in the bed. I forced myself to stop looking at the clock at 3:00, so I can only say I believe it was well after 3:30 when I finally got back to sleep.

Monday: I come downstairs to find Elijah perched on a chair beside a counter in the kitchen. He is furiously stuffing loose change into his pants pockets. Seeing this as a potential chocking hazard, I go over to stop him and discover that his hands are covered with about five or six different colors of marker. As I look around to see where he acquired the markers from, I discover my son’s true calling – he is a muralist. Because I’m relatively new to the blogging world and was frankly more concerned about saving the kitchen than about saving an image for posterity, I did not think to take a picture. But if you have a good imagination, then I trust you can visualize the strokes of purple, red, black and blue sharpie markers accompanied by fluorescent yellow highlighter covering the better part of two walls, the counter top and all cabinetry surfaces within the artist’s immediate vicinity. It should probably be noted at this juncture that we just purchased this home last month and it was a new build. Yes, that’s right, my almost three-year-old chose a brand spankin’ new canvas for his graffiti (which fortunately has come off everything but one wall – and that’s paintable)!

Tuesday: Late this afternoon, after putting Dylan down for a nap (and immediately after he stopped crying and actually fell asleep), I heard the sickening sound of body hitting stairs and then heard Lij start screaming. I don’t know how far he fell. It couldn’t have been more than half a flight, since we have stairs that turn halfway up (a silver lining – if falling down the stairs is a cloud that can have one). Amid sobs, I ascertained that nothing was broken (and you thought I was kidding about the rubber thing). Then my chief concern became quieting him down before he woke the baby. However, Lij is a ham. He’s always been able to produce tears on demand and so he continued to bellow until he was sure he’d milked every last ounce of sympathy out of the situation. And woken the baby up from his half hour nap. After I rescued Dylan from his crib, we all sat down together and had a good cry. It’s amazing how much better that makes you feel.

So it’s been three days since my return to blogging and an equal number of family crises have occurred. Coincidence “or are the darker forces at work”? (Name that film) Since I’m determined to give my blog a decent second try, I suppose only time will tell. Ironically, our pediatrician gave me the number to poison control on a handout at Dylan’s one year check-up on Monday. Just in case, I think I’ll have it laminated and hang it by the phone.