Avoiding Baby Faces

Second night in a row that had to get up in the middle of the night because one of our children started screaming. Congestion one night. Too hot the next night. Also the second morning in a row getting up before 5:30 am to feed our baby.* I'm sure mothers reading this, especially those we know with multiples, have no sympathy for me. But they should. I've heard mothers have a hormone that allows their bodies to cope with lack of sleep. There is no such hormone for men. Either way, my day began feeding our baby before the crack of dawn. Normally, she lets me set her down in the bouncy seat so that I can make her bottle. I can't do it with one hand. I don't have that hormone either. Every time I tried, she cried. It was so frustrating that I couldn't look her in her cute little face, because it would ruin my anger. That set the tone for the morning.

Getting frustrated with my baby girl made me frustrated at myself. Then, on the way to catch the bus, I ran across the busy street between me and the bus stop when there was a large and safe gap in the traffic. But the bus driver didn't think it was safe, and he proceeded to give me an embarrassing lecture on safety at no extra cost. Work went well, and gradually the frustration and embarrassment of the morning began to subside. By the time I came home, I was ready to look my kids in the face again and let them cheer me up. It was touch-and-go for a little while during the chaos of dinner. Then, my wife and I finished the night looking through the 6-month old pictures of the same baby girl I was mad at this morning. I was right, her little face dissipated any remaining grumpiness.

*I should mention that my wife always gets up in the middle of the night with the kids and has forbidden me to get up before 5:30 am, but I have been doing it for two reasons: (1) I wanted to help because she had a busy week, and (2) it's a natural reaction to hearing one of our kids cry (or scream) at night. Issue 1 is now resolved. I don't want to help anymore! Issue 2 is much trickier. On the one hand, my concern for my kids is becoming more tempered at night now that they are older. On the other hand, I can't shake the fear that one crying child will quickly lead to three crying children and a long long night, and I don't want to give up the rare moments when my kids let me comfort them. They're so tired, they may not even know it's me. But I'm okay tricking my kids into needing me sometimes.

Life or Death

Our son refused to put his Sunday shirt under his sweater, so I took the opportunity to apply what my wife has been telling me from her parenting book. I decided getting dressed was a must, so I offered him the following choices:

-"You can either put it on now or go into time-out until you're ready to listen." My son swipes at my hand holding his Sunday shirt, and I say, "Okay. You chose a time-out."

-My son resists sitting in the time-out chair, so I say, "You can either sit here or in your room." He continues to resist, and I take him up to his room and say, "Okay. You chose your room."

-He tries to leave the room, so I say, "You can either have time-out with the door open or closed." He leaves the room again, so I say, "Okay. You chose door closed."

-He tries to open the door, so I say, "You can either have the door locked or unlocked." He tries to open it again, so I lock the door and say, "Okay. You chose locked."

He calmed down, and we went back downstairs to talk and get him dressed. At that point my wife said, "Just let him try it his way and learn for himself." Sure enough, by trying his clothes on the way he wanted he decided to reverse many of his strong opinions. I felt that all of my effort to successfully employ the choices tactic was wasted, and it really turned out to be a miserable failure. I later confessed to my wife that I mostly felt disappointed in myself for getting so easily frustrated. I said, "Sometimes I just don't know which battles to pick." She wisely responded, "Sometimes you should only pick the battles that are life or death, and what our son wears to church isn't life or death." Once I got over my wounded pride, I benefited a lot from her advice.

Cause and Effect

This morning my wife made one of our favorites for breakfast, a delicious, thick, blue berry, strawberry, black berry, and banana fruit smoothie to go with our German pancakes. My son and I drink every last drop within minutes of starting breakfast. Our little girl typically doesn't finish hers, so we look forward to devouring what she doesn't finish. After turning my head away for only a second, I heard my son yell, "No!" I whipped my head back around to find fruit smoothie all over my little girl, the table, her booster seat, and the floor. The look on her face was one of fascination, rather then guilt. I immediately cleaned her off and put her in time-out. How could she waste something so good! I told my wife that it was a dumb thing to do. Like any good mom, she immediately jumped to her defense: "It wasn't dumb. She was experimenting. Kids that age love to learn cause and effect. Don't stifle her creativity!" I let our daughter out of time-out and responded, "Now she knows that the effect of dumping her food is a time-out. There will come a time when you'll want me to stifle that 'creativity' of hers." As luck would have it, we had spaghetti for dinner tonight. Our little girl's "creativity"--which apparently  is a euphemism for messiness--sparked up again, resulting in noodles all over the table and floor. My wife and I looked at each other knowingly and laughed. Although I helped get her to stop, I had to fight hard to suppress a compelling urge to say, "I'm not going to stifle her creativity!"

Good Night Moon

Before we had kids, I imagined what the bedtime routine would be like: baths, books, prayers, songs, and bed.  As they've grown older, the bedtime routine has begun to include things I never foresaw. For example, sometimes our daughter feels the need to "honk" my nose before bed, which is fine with me if that's what it takes for her to go to bed happily. But the latest craze is going outside to say goodnight to the moon. They beg for it. They could care less how cold it is outside. They run out and look for it. Once they find it, it enraptures them.  Once they leave it, they're heartbroken. But I love watching them do it. Their faces are filled with innocence and wonder at the moon, even conveying a strange familiarity with it. This new element of our bedtime routine has really been inspiring.

Playing Ball in the House . . .

. . . I highly recommend it, if the alternative is to put off a promise to play together. The day tends to pick up speed in the evenings, and promises to play together tend to get harder to keep. Before we know it, we're in our pajamas, ready for bed, and much too tired to play. Interestingly, Emerson said that we remember most the things we love the most or hate the most. I think kids love nothing more than a meaningful promise and hate nothing more than an empty one. So, whether we keep them or not, kids always remember our promises. Having already bargained with my son to postpone a game together once, we went downstairs after the girls when to bed and played soccer in the living room. One might argue that this was a bad idea given the risk that careless 3-4-year olds would break something. Putting aside the fact that we own nothing of value, I disagree with that argument. I've noticed that when my son has my undivided attention, he takes great care to maintain my trust, make me proud, and even mimic me. Sure, there is a risk, especially if I'm careless, but it diminishes significantly when playing ball in the house means keeping a promise to spend quality time together.

Turning Back the Pages

I am not speaking metaphorically. This is really what happens whenever I read to my little girl before bed. She turns the pages back so many times that we set the world record for the slowest finishers of a board book. She obviously doesn't appreciate the amount of effort that goes into reading to her! To fathers, nightly reading is not merely a way to sedate children before bed, it is a medium for developing a love for reading and learning, a habit of finishing what you start, and, in our case, a familiarity with a second language. The sad irony is that pushing the second and third goals to hard may seriously undermine the first. But, focusing on the first enables the second and third. As with everything else, this dawned on me only recently. So, as I read tonight, I let my little girl stop me, turn back the pages, and show me "moon," "house," "cat," and "food." We did that throughout the book, and with each word she would show me, I would repeat back the Spanish translation.

Biter Biscuits? I Don't Get It.

I would like someone to explain to me the concept of biter biscuits. We've used them with all three kids, and giving one to our baby girl before dinner reminded me why they make no sense. They are for babies who can't eat solids. Yet shortly after coming into contact with their saliva, large pieces break off in their mouths. They gag and choke until I stick my finger in my baby's mouth to get the chunks out, but it usually comes at the cost of some crunching on my finger. On top of being life- and finger- threating, they are a mess. They melt in your hands, not in your mouth. The explanation I get for why we use them? They keep babies quiet and happy so that we can eat. Big problem: babies don't have the motor skills to keep hold of them for very long. Dinner is spent playing catcher while our daughter involuntarily plays pitcher.

Going Out to Dinner

We've done it before, but the older the kids get the more complex going out to dinner gets. The following is a chronological break-down of events:

5:50 pm - family picks me up at the train station
6:00 pm - arrive at the restaurant
6:01 pm - assigned to a table, not a booth, we both worry that we won't be able to contain the kids
6:02 pm - host struggles to sets highchair upside down for infant seat but can't figure out how to secure it
6:05 pm - we request a booth
6:06 pm - infant seat doesn't fit, must set it perpendicular to bench between the bench and the table
6:08 pm - baby girl gets restless, starts wrestling with toddler boy in the bench (won't seat together in future)
6:10 pm - infant girl starts to fuss for dinner, begin feeding cold peas sideways to infant, she won't touch it
6:11 pm - baby girl begins to scream for no apparent reason
6:12 pm - I take baby girl into hallway to talk, we decide on sitting her in a high chair
6:15 pm - baby girl calm in high chair
6:20 pm - we order, thankfully our toddler can actually tell us what he wants
6:25 pm - genius restaurant brings kids' food right away
6:30 pm - blessed adult food!
6:31 pm - toddler eating happily, baby bored and wants out, infant tired and hungry, both cry again
6:35 pm - baby wrestles toddler again, knocks his head into wall, he cries (forgot to keep them separate)
6:36 pm - infant gets baby's leftovers, crumbles them all over me bench and floor (table remains unblemished)
6:40 pm - adult food gone, not sure where it went, but we think we ate it
6:45 pm - both adults standing and rocking the girls, while toddler finishes food
6:50 pm - ice cream! toddler eats it up, baby girl loves feeding it to me and my wife and saying, "Dat nummy Mommy? Dat nummy Daddy?", I'm bouncing fussy infant on lap
6:55 pm - pack up, pay, and leave
7:00 pm - kids climb steps and have some fun outside restaurant
7:05 pm - race to the car, toddler runs into the sliding door and hurts his arm
7:06 pm - my wife calms the toddler, while I try to catch and buckle in baby girl trying to get into driver seat
7:10 pm - bed time routine

Although things seem to have happened in rapid succession, it did not feel that quick to us. We had several moments where we were relaxed, laughing, and enjoying each other. Perhaps having children speeds us up, so that while we perceive time moving naturally, outsiders looking in see us moving like hummingbirds.

I'm also looking at these 5-6 minute increments, wondering what parents would make if they billed like attorneys. No down time, very productive, very long hours. I think we'd make millions.

Retaliatory Parenting--By the Kids!

There are times when I feel like I have to make a sudden noise to recall the kids back to this world from whatever world hypnotized them into forgetting their own names and believing that whatever they were just doing was okay. My daughter was swinging her spaghetti noodles around like a lasso and would not respond when I repeatedly called her name. Needing to get her attention quickly to prevent a disaster, I quickly slapped my hand against  the surface of the dinner table. Apparently she thought this was an effective technique because, only a few minutes later, she did the same thing to me when trying to get me to let her down from her booster seat during dinner. She looked very stern. My first thought was, "Is that what I looked like?" My second thought was that I should immediately comply before she hurt me.

Thankfully, I snapped out of it and remembered that I was the parent. I think a new attention-getting technique is in order.

"It's Okay. Daddies Make Bad Choices Sometimes"

Our Saturday didn't turn out as planned. Part of the problem is that we weren't sure what our plan was. As a result, I was bit grumpy for part of the day. At dinner, I apologized to the kids for being a grump, and my son replied, "It's okay. Daddies make bad choices sometimes."

To make it up to them we laid out all the couch cushions, popped some popcorn, and watched "The Land Before Time."

Picking Up a Cheerio

After a typical day at work, I came home and sat down to family dinner. Our baby was beginning to fuss, so my wife handed me some Cheerios and suggested that the baby might be ready to pick them up with her fingers. For most of dinner she pushed them, pulled them, smacked them, and flung them, but did not appear to have the motor skills to pick them up between her fingers. Then, to our surprise, she did it. She could not get it to her mouth, but she finally picked it up. Such a little thing, but it excited us, because it was a big sign of her growth and development.

Picking up that Cheerio affected the rest of my night as well. I began to notice little things with each of my kids that told me they were growing. My son asked, "May I be excused?" at dinner. He also buttoned his own shirt buttons. I also caught him helping our little girl up and teaching her how to dust herself off when she fell outside. Our little girl told us she needed to go potty and sat on it by herself (though she remained in her diaper and fully clothed). She is also beginning to use small sentences like, "Pease see da moon?" And, in addition to picking up her Cheerio, our baby sat up on her own for a few minutes.

My wife's question to my son when tucking him in tonight sums up my feelings about all of this. She asked him, "Can you please, please stop growing?"

The Transition Home

Work is like a stray dog. It is a homeless thing that we might look at it lovingly and enjoy, dispassionately and endure, or spitefully and taunt. But when we're finally done with it, it tends to follow us home. At least that's how I felt on the bus this evening. No matter how much I tried to "shoo" it out of my mind, it kept coming back. It's especially difficult mid-project to snap out of it when I get home and give my wife and kids my full attention. When my mind is split between the two, I'm naturally distracted and impatient. But, I can't say I wasn't warned. Prior to law school, I worked at a law firm and was told that one of the biggest challenges I would face as a corporate husband and father is leaving work at work and being home when I'm home. The transition from work to home would not be easy, and there would be times when I wouldn't be able to sever the two, perhaps even choosing work over home. But, the ability to do it would come if I made a conscious daily effort. It starts as a choice, develops into a habit, and finally becomes an aspect of my character.

I took that advice as a challenge, and set a goal prior to law school to be home for family dinner every night (with exceptions on rare occasions, subject to my wife's veto power). Keeping that goal has made it easier for me to switch gears when I come home or to decline unnecessary distractions from family dinner and evenings together (a practice I'm confident helps professionals draw appropriate ethical lines as well--a post for another day). However, I've still got a long way to go before I would consider it a character trait.

Get the Bad Guys

My wife needed to go to the grocery store, and, consistent with our "divide and conquer" approach to parenting, decided to take our toddler while I put the other two to bed. Our son was jealous, resulting in some bribery involving ice cream and a promise to play "get the bad guys" together in order to convince him to stay (apparently, time alone with me isn't very appealing without these kinds of incentives).  But, as frequently happens, time got away from us. He got his ice cream (so did I), but by the time I finished bathing, feeding, and tucking in the baby, it was too late to start a game of "get the bad guys." Then, the memory of a lecture I recently gave my son about keeping his promise to eat dinner flashed through my mind. Though time at night to get personal things done is truly valuable, a promise kept is even more so. So, armed with a stuffed sword and a construction helmet, I teamed up with my son, who wielded his trusty green recorder and a foam shield, and together we fought the bad guys. It was actually a lot of fun. There's nothing like winning a battle to help you sleep well at night.

Give Them an Inch . . .

. . . And they'll probably surprise you. The terms "self restraint" and "three-year old" don't usually go together, but when our toddler started wrestling with our three-year old, my wife and I decided to sit back and see how our three-year old was going to handle it. He could easily throttle her if he got angry or just too excited. Instead, he let her climb all over him. When he did wrestle back, he was surprisingly mindful of her limits. It wasn't fair to him that she would dish it and not take it, but I think he'll find that the additional trust we have in him will more than pay him back for it.