Punishment for competence

I got beaten by the children in the middle of the week. We're past the up-all-the-time phase, which is accompanied by lots of hormones and adrenaline to keep you going. We're before the rare-wakings phase (which I define as once or twice a night) which was where we were with Turing before Huxley which, while not ideal, provides enough rest to function. Instead, we're in the awkward middle phase where some nights we'll only be woken up twice by Huxley and not by Turing and be feeling AWESOME. Then there will be a night that Turing needs us twice and Huxley feeds three times and decides to practice his pilates at 4 in the morning and it is killer because we were used to the twice-a-night business.

Excuse me, it isn't that we were used to the twice-a-night business, it's that I was used to the twice a night business.

It isn't that Trouble isn't willing to help at night, because he is. It is that it is far more efficient for me to deal with the night things. If Trouble were up (like with Turing) and could get the bottle ready when Huxley starts to rustle around, it might work. But it is more restful for me to simple nurse Huxley when he demands it than lay in bed listening to Trouble heat up a bottle for a crying baby. And Huxley falls asleep in bed instead of needing to be rocking/walked to sleep.

It is a similar problem with Turing. Trouble has a different parenting style than I do* which makes it more efficient for me to deal with Turing at night. My perception of night waking are that he either had a nightmare or woke up and wants to make sure we still exist. I go in and give him a big hug until he falls asleep on my shoulder (less than 10 of my breaths, usually, which is how I count time), then lay him back down and give him a "big hug right here" in his bed, he's usually asleep when I leave his room and I'm back in our bed in less than 3 minutes. Trouble has set up a system where he's out to fix some problem - they change Turing's underpants, go to the kitchen and get a drink of milk, come to bed to give mommy a hug . . . and before you know it Turing is hanging out in our bed, ostensibly to sleep there. After listening to all this for however long, I'm suddenly hauling him back to his bed for the hugs and wondering why I just didn't do it in the first place.

The result of all this is that Trouble has mostly turned his brain off to nighttime noises - Huxley can be screaming at me in the bed and Trouble will be snoring away right next to him. Jerks.

And then, after a few killer nights which turned me into a crabby bitch, the children magically got it together again and slept better and I'm suddenly in a better mood. Trouble made me go to bed earlier, too, when he finally asked what my issue was. I forget it is not obvious to someone who sleeps through it.


* Trouble and I have fairly different parenting styles. While mine is somewhat calmer, it certainly isn't better. But, then, I personally find calmer to be better and I have to keep myself from criticizing (or pretending my criticism is offering advice advice about) his methods. Really, why am I criticizing someone who does his fair share with a different style? We coordinate some rules and regulations, but having exposure to different attitudes is probably good in the long run. And Turing totally gets his opportunity to get his angry two-year-old emotive self worked out.

T-day

We had a proper Thanksgiving over at E and K's house - there was a long table, lots of good food, and an obnoxious conversationalist. I know it's bad when the nicest thing I can think is "maybe they've just had a lot to drink." And with >1/3 of my brain taken up with child wrangling at any time, I didn't have the focus to shift conversation. So, I ate.

I made pies. The apple cranberry was awesome, the pumpkin was pretty good, the pear/almond tart was OK. It was nice to have a reason to actually bake. I still remember how to make crust.

Life just keeps ticking along. I can't quite believe it is the end of November already. I'm getting course materials set up and that is crazy. And taking longer than I thought it would, of course. But I officially have the first lecture done for my first class! woo!

I'm doing some lecture-prep and getting some papers cleaned up for submission and hanging with the babies. Turing just keeps doing new exciting things. He's starting to make jokes ("arlo eat dishwasher!") and play pretend. We spent some time yesterday cleaning up "milk" from his babydoll's shirt. Huxley is still a pretty easy baby, as far as babies go. He still doesn't like to cuddle - he'd rather sit and look at me - but has some awesome neck control and can get his arms to swing in the general direction of his toys.

Now, if I could just see some more of Trouble. We've both taken this long weekend off and it is strange to have both of us around the house at the same time. Turing doesn't quite know what to do with us both. Oops.

Eep.

I keep getting these emails in which people are asking to enroll in a course and I am the consenting instructor. It's like this is really going to happen.

I logged into my school account and instead of having "student" everywhere, there was a whole lot of "faculty" going on. Huh.

So far, there are 7 people enrolled in "my" new class and 2 in my advisor's old class. Except I have to stop saying that because it is going to be "my" class here pretty soon.

I also need to cut out my flippant jokes about the material.

And I need to start putting lectures together. I started on the first one for the first class this past weekend and I bet I've already burned 6 hours on it and it is only half way together. Ack.

I want my cycles back

I generally believe that Trouble burns far fewer cycles on noticing things around the house than I do. For instance, the cobweb that was hanging three feet above his computer for the last month that I finally knocked down - I doubt he ever saw it. These are the sorts of things that I walk into a room an automatically notice - I have some sort of check and cross-check thing going on in my head quite a lot, though if I could have designed myself better I might have spent those cycles on something else besides checking the baseboards.

But I didn't quite realize that he could walk into a room and miss something like this:



When I mentioned it later that day, he had no idea what I was talking about. And he had to go in there for diapers at least once.

Turing is very good about staying in his bed. Too good, perhaps, so that he'd rather stand up in bed and tear down wallpaper than go get a book off the shelf in his room? I mean, I'm sure we appreciated the extra 10 minutes of sleep we must have gotten that morning . . .

Advanced plastic bag technology

After at least 4 years of putting my wet swimsuit back in my gym bag and soaking my cloths, I finally remembered to put a plastic bag in my gym bag. Go me!

Manual labor

I've been slowly but surely converting Turing's old blog entries into Blogger entries. I've gotten through the hand coded ones (two months) and will soon start the other ones. Turing sure was cute. Good thing we get all lazy about taking pictures after that first flurry, so the next two years shouldn't be too painful to do by hand.

I'm really liking the new camera we bought - it takes nice pictures and video all in one! go us!

I'm also really liking the sewing machine. I'm almost done quilting Huxley's baby quilt and I'm having issues because it is too fast and my lines aren't particularly straight. I'm riding on no one else looking at it as closely as I will . . . but it is smooth and fun to use and is doing some cool detailing that I would not have done with the old one.

In other spending, I bought new glasses today. My vision took another hit with another baby. I'm keeping my boring professional frames with new lenses and I got myself some crazy new frames. I almost chickened out and just got hipster glasses (nicely designed, kinda crazy color scheme, but not crazy) and then decided that if I'm getting myself a fun crazy pair of glasses, I should get the crazy ones. Go me!

Since I've been going through the old pictures, I've been going through the old pictures. It turns out we used to be young and thin. Oh, dear, that now makes us . . .


I've made it to the bring-your-kids-class at the gym down the street once a week for the last two weeks. It is good for me to get some proper strength training (though it is a fine line between working hard enough to work and working too hard and then struggling to haul small children the next day) and have someone encouraging me along. I think it is also good for Turing to see other kids as he is clueless about how to interact. It isn't that the other kids play together all that much, but they kind of stick together using some sort of dynamic pack decisions and imitate each other a bit. Turing sits across the room and stares for ten minutes before getting anywhere close to them. I would avoid little kids, too, because they can be jerks, but I suspect the exposure is probably good for him at this point. At least once a week.

This isn't to say that I'm much more social during the gym visits. I see the opportunity to jump into conversation, and then I just ignore it. Ha.

I've also hit my working groove. I'm fitting work in around my life instead of life around my work and I'm actually getting things done. One paper went out to a coauthor today, I'm going to put together my first lecture this weekend, I've farmed out a bunch of lectures on other people (which is like getting work done!) . . . I am actually focused when I work. Go me!

Right, forms

Returning to medical school will be all about paperwork. Of course, how could I forget?

Gah.

sigh . . .

Today, I sent off the email about returning to medical school in the summer. Keeping people informed early and often is a train I want to be on, since we returning MD/PhD students then have more control over which rotations we get (as opposed to zero control when you show up late and everything is full).

I am dreading it a bit.

I think I will really love medicine, and I am not dreading being clueless or at the bottom of the heap or any of that - I'm a big girl now and can handle it. I am dreading the hours and lack of control over my hours. My babies will still be babies and we're going to miss each other.

Right after Huxley was born and the hormones were surging and I was falling in love all over again, I really thought I wanted to try to extend my "break" another year as if leaving a two-year-old would be easier than leaving a one-year-old. Since then I've realized that it is going to be hard no matter what or when. I have some vague idea that it might be easier once the kids are in school and rather than missing their entire day I'm "only" missing after-school time - and that by then they'll have other friends and interests.

It would be nice to be able to do my training order independently of time. For instance, if I could just be the clinican/researcher starting next year with a semi-flexible schedule through their preschool years, but then complete my training that I need to do that when the kids to off to college or something . . .

No such luck.

I have resigned myself to knowing that I will return to clinical rotations in eight months. I sent the email today.

Can I just get the option to see my kids for a few hours each day? No such luck. How much will I have to leave before they get up and come home after they go to bed? Too much.

No stress until the new year?

I am finally listening to my advisor, I'm sure he'd be glad to know, and I'm going to try to have a stress-free rest of the year. Well, low-stress rest of the year.

This is going to be hard work on my part. Really. I have gotten into the very bad habit of using stress and deadlines to motivate my work. I have work to do for the next 2.5 months which requires that I work steadily, but I really don't have to be stressed about it. I'm trying to retrain myself.

I did a good job of not being particularly stressed this past week. Except that I'm have some weird brain farts, which I presume are due to hormones or sleep deprivation or my brain rewiring itself (brains supposedly shrink about 6% in pregnancy, though this is all based on ventricle size and . . . well, I'm not the sure the science really stacks up. But it returns by 6 months to pre-pregnancy size). I have always had a problem accessing words while speaking, especially nouns, but it has become ridiculously bad recently and I'm having difficulty writing - I'll think one thing (like, "the best") and type something entirely different ("these") which is really slowing down my writing. I'm making a concerted effort to reinforce words - I'll explicitly look up terms I've forgotten but wanted to use, for instance.

I've decided one strategy is to refocus my primary objective for the next few months. It should be "hang out with babies and enjoy it," but that really is most enjoyable when balanced with other things. I've decided my primary objective for the next few months is to be good to my body post-pregnancy and post-dissertation - I got aerobic exercise 5 days this past week and managed to eat salad 3 days. Go me! How can I always forget that exercise makes me a nicer person?

My other plan is to set reasonable work goals for each week and then spend my energy doing random other stuff that is not work. So hard. The hard part is just getting it done and not screwing around so that it suddenly becomes a deadline. And when I get the week's tasks done, I am supposed to just do other thing. Turing did help me steam clean the couch last week (disgusting!) which hasn't happened for two years and I've been playing with my fancy new sewing machine.

One of my tasks for today is to get the 6-9 month sized clothing out the basement. Ack. Stop it, Huxley! You're growing up too fast already!

Bins

I did not get Turing anything for his birthday, making me the worst parent ever*. I had actually gone to the store to get something, but failed. Everything was either:
1. Boring and aimed at the adult buyer, not the child
2. A little too complex for right now - better in a few months (like a train set)
3. Involved small parts I don't want to keep away from Huxley
4. A variant of something we already have.

It was really number 4 that got me. We have two puzzles, for instance, so we don't need another. Turing has a "laptop," stuffed animals, puppets, baby dolls, big legos, trucks, trucks, trucks, blocks, crayons, some musical instruments . . . we have very limited space, so getting a variant on something we already had seemed wasteful in a lot of ways.

Tonight, my task is to split the toys into two groups so we can put half of them away in his closet and rotate and the number of toys won't seem quite so out of control (the amount of floor space one can see has drastically been reduced since the reappearance of all those baby things: a bassinet, a carseat, the playmat). As I split things apart, I'm not sure if I should put like-things together or in separate piles. The babydoll and the Diego doll in the same pile or separate? the golf clubs and the hockey stick? The two puzzles? The two laptops?

I'm going with separate at the moment.

*not actually true - I organized his birthday party and he's still talking about the farm, now, made cupcakes, and knit a hat that way waaaaay to large. And we figured out what to get for xmas - a kitchen play set and a train set. phew.