When you have a tough parenting day...

... How do you handle it?

Nap time to nearly-bedtime has been a bear. Without going into soggy details, sleep-potty-training the three-year-old is just not even progressing. She's doing great with the potty when awake, but she doesn't seem to wake up until it's too late, and as a result she still wears a diaper for overnight. Naps are the testing ground and today she woke up wet and mad about it. She wailed and wailed and didn't want to put on dry clothes and didn't want to get up and didn't want to go back to sleep and didn't want her sheets changed and didn't want them left on the bed and didn't want these Sofia panties and didn't want the Sofia panties she picked out herself and didn't want to put on the shirt I picked out and didn't want to stop making an unholy racket and she couldn't take a deep breath and so she wailed some more. Obviously she woke up her brother from his nap, pushing him halfway down the road to Meltdownville, population: 2.

Eventually I left her in her room with instructions that she could let me know when she was ready to be happy. Twenty minutes or so later, she got ahold of herself and we went on with her day, but she's been on a hair-trigger -- the second anything doesn't go her way she tantrums in a way that's really not like her. We've been giving her directions and she does the opposite.

I don't have a problem with my temper, honestly. I'm a pretty patient person, and I always try to keep in mind that three-year-olds are creatures of impulse and factor that into my reactions. But today...

Today, my patience is worn so thin. I am not an easily frazzled person, and I am frazzled to bits. She's about to go to bed and I'm dreading trying to get her to clean up her mess before we say prayers. I'm dreading prayers themselves because when she's feeling defiant, it's a war getting her to even say them.

At this point I'm going to have to start fresh tomorrow and hope Little Miss Oppositional-Defiant wakes up on the right side of her mood.

Unless anyone has any rockstar tips?

During a medical emergency, might it actually be better to panic a little?

Have you ever gotten a frantic call from your childcare provider? On Friday morning, I got that call.

I had literally just stepped out of the shower when I got a phone call from our nanny's daughter. Our nanny is Nepalese, and her English is pretty good but she's not that comfortable on the phone. Her high-school-aged, totally-Americanized daughter was home as schools here had been closed all week after we got 30+ inches of snow last weekend, and so she made the call for her mom.

"Declan's having a hard time breathing. Should we call 9-1-1?"

He had been fine in the morning. It was less than five hours since I'd seen him. These things ran through my head, along with "no family history of asthma," and so I said, "Please take him outside in the cold air and I will be there in fifteen minutes or less. If you think he needs help faster, go ahead and call an ambulance." I threw on clothes and left my house within two minutes, with soaking wet hair. I left the house completely insecure because our front steps never got shoveled from the huge snowfall, and my husband had taken our only one garage door remote with him and I had no way to close it behind myself.

When I got to my nanny's house, she was standing on her front step, in short sleeves, even though it had started to snow again. Declan was in her arms, gulping shallow breaths. I put him right in the car and called the pediatrician, already driving in that direction. The flurries that had been falling had metastasized into legitimate driving snow by now. Declan fell asleep before I was out of my nanny's neighborhood, but he was still breathing shallowly and periodically coughing. 

It took almost 20 minutes to get to the pediatrician's office, because the driving snow and the poorly plowed roads slowed everything to a crawl. By the time I carried him inside he was loudly wheezing. The doctor -- the only doctor in our one-man-show of a pediatrician's practice -- was in with us within two minutes. 

We opened up Declan's clothes and his sides were heaving as he struggled to take in enough air. Our doctor listened to his chest and told me he had bronchiolitis and would need to be given a nebulizer treatment immediately. After the treatment, the wheezing had mostly stopped and I left with my son, calm now, plus a prescription for an inhaler and a warning that whenever my son gets a cough or cold from now on, my first thought should be "albuterol." 

So we have a family history of asthma, now, for all practical purposes. 

He's doing really well. He's fairly cooperative taking inhaler doses, especially for a typically-frantic medicine refusenik, and we haven't heard any wheezing since early yesterday. The doctor said to listen to his breathing, but ultimately it's just a cold and we should treat him normally. I think he took five years off his nanny's life.

I can't decide, though, if I reacted correctly. I am, by nature, Not A Worrier. I'm a consummate coper and I try not to borrow trouble (which presents an interesting contrast -- and eternal source of conflict if we're not careful -- with my worrywart husband). Even though it worked out that he's fine, part of me wonders if I was arrogant not to have the nanny call 9-1-1. The loudest part of me just refused to think it was very serious. But a one-year-old struggling to breathe is serious, especially when I couldn't evaluate him myself over the phone. Once I saw him myself, I could see that he needed medical attention, but his need wasn't so acute that I couldn't drive past the nearest emergency room to our own doctor, which is what I did. Should I have been more worried? Slightly panicked? 

I'm going to be kicking this one around for a while. I don't know the right answer.

On nursing and failing to nurse.

I just finished reading about Haley's recent experience with downshifting her nursing schedule with her 14-month old, and it made me think about my breastfeeding experience with my now-21-month old and what I'm hoping for with #2, due in December.

I had a serious problem with low supply with #1. I have various hormonal issues which caused me to be infertile for years, and so I was dismayed but I wasn't very surprised when, four days after giving birth, my milk still hadn't come in. I was more surprised by the lack of support from the pro-breastfeeding community, some of which insists (with a stunning lack of compassion) that there is no such thing as an inadequate supply of breast milk. "Don't supplement," they insist, "Because if you do, you'll cause nipple confusion and tell your body it doesn't need to make milk."

Okay, well, four days into her life, my daughter was bright yellow. Bright. Yellow. Her bilirubin levels were rising and rising and it was all because she wasn't pooping. She wasn't pooping because she wasn't eating. She wasn't eating because I had no milk and the very unhelpful lactation consultant insisted that I not feed her formula.

Her pediatrician, who had initially encouraged me to "just keep at it" and not supplement, changed his tune. "She's going to have to go back into the hospital if we can't get these numbers down. Give her some formula."

If I hadn't been a brand-new, clueless, impressionable mom, whose own mom lives a couple of hundred miles away, I would have done that already. If it happens again with #2, everyone can give whatever advice they want and I am going to feed my child.

My poor baby sucked down two ounces of formula in about three seconds flat. She was so hungry, you guys. They told me to only give her 10 ccs at a time but it was empty, all 60-ish ccs, before I could stop her. I'm glad I didn't stop her because she was SO HUNGRY. She fell asleep within seconds, after four days of crying all the time, and an hour later pooped out so much meconium it overwhelmed her little newborn diaper. She pinked right up.

I continued to nurse her. I spent all my time doing something to do with nursing. I would nurse her, then give her a bottle since she hadn't gotten much from me, then when she fell asleep, finally satisfied, I would pump with the hospital-grade torture machine I had rented, collecting about a half-ounce total, and then I would wash the pump supplies, and then sit down for what felt like four seconds, and then she'd wake up hungry again and we'd start over. Meanwhile I was drinking gallons of water, plus that absolutely foul concoction called Mother's Milk tea, and eating oatmeal and doing every other folk remedy to increase milk supply that anyone's ever heard of.

The machine of my nightmares.

It was beyond miserable. Eventually I got to a place where I was able to satisfy her with exclusively breast milk during the day, and only had to give her a bottle of formula at night because I didn't have enough to get any length of sleep out of her by the end of the day. From the time she was a month old until I had to go back to work when she was three months, she was in this way (almost) exclusively breastfed. I never felt letdown once. I have a vague idea what that means, and I know it never happened to me. I never got engorged with milk.

When I went back to work and she went to daycare, despite my best efforts I had hardly any frozen milk for her. This is when my amazing sister-in-law came to my rescue. She had a baby five weeks and one day after my daughter was born and while I was bemoaning my undersupply, she was dealing with the opposite. She had so much milk that she couldn't nurse without pumping first because her daughter would gag and choke on her letdown. She had so much frozen milk they couldn't fit anything else in their freezer. So every time I went to Pennsylvania to visit, I would come home with a cooler stuffed with frozen breast milk, and so my daughter was able to go to daycare every day with breast milk instead of formula. At first it felt a little weird, feeding my daughter someone else's breast milk, but I was so grateful -- my sister-in-law eats a healthy diet and lives a healthy lifestyle, and I don't care whose breast milk it is, it's got to be better for a baby than formula. (And I'm not knocking formula; that stuff saved our lives. But you know what I mean.)

While Keira was at daycare, I was pumping four-to-five times a day, and getting diddly-squat for my efforts. I could and did pump for twenty minutes a side and collect less than an ounce. Total. When she came home and nursed, she seemed to get something, but pumping just didn't work for me. I propped a picture of her in front of me, hoping for some oxytocin stimulation from the sight of her, and nothing worked. I would nurse her in the morning before I took her to daycare, in the early evening when she got home, and during any night wakings.

I held her off of solid foods for as long as I could, even though she was so interested in watching Mommy and Daddy eat. My mom told me she hadn't given any of her seven children a single bite until they were at least nine months old because they didn't need it. I, again, was young and impressionable and stupid and tried to hold off for that long too but only made it to seven months, at which time she took to eating like an old pro and refused nothing (except mashed peas, which begs the question: can you blame her?). At this time, she self-weaned. She had given up the evening nursing in favor of food, and I basically dried up immediately.

Please ignore my voice in the background. "Num nummers," indeed. Good grief.

So, obviously, what I'm hoping and praying for with #2 is: none of the above. I pray I have enough milk to feed him or her but not so much that it's squirting from my eyeballs like my poor sister-in-law. I pray I have an aggressive eater with a strong latch and enough patience to wait it out. I pray I have enough confidence to do what's best for my baby without listening to medical professionals who haven't been listening to me. I pray I have the humility to ask God for the wisdom to know what's best for my baby and not make any rash decisions borne of frustration (I'm asking Him now, but I'm going to have to remember to ask Him then, too).

St. Giles, patron saint of breast feeding, ora pro nobis.

Help me, fellow mommies!

 The last couple of days have been a complete nightmare. Keira was sick over the weekend and as a result watched way too much TV. We know better because too much TV always has behavioral consequences, but when she's sick and just wants to watch Little Einsteins and we can't take her outside or anything, what else are we gonna do? Thanks to the fever on Sunday and state law that says she can't go back to daycare until she's without a fever for 24 hours, we had to scramble to make arrangements on Monday, because our family vacation starts on Thursday of this week and I have an epic amount of work to do before then.

My sister-in-law, who's recently sold her business and isn't yet working, graciously offered to come babysit. Unfortunately, Keira was a total beast to her and Michael had to come home from work at lunchtime, because I couldn't get away from my work. She was able to go back to daycare today and apparently she behaved fine while she was there, but from the moment she came home tonight it was wall-to-wall meltdowns.

She melted down about sitting down to dinner.

She melted down when Daddy asked her to put her toys away after her bath.

She melted down when Mommy took away her Sofia book in response to some unspecified other meltdown.

She melted down about nothing at all.

She smacked Mommy in the face and then sat in time-out, refusing to say "sorry," for fifty minutes. FIFTY. She kept trying to charm me into letting her out without her actually having said the word, because she's the most stubborn child who ever lived.

She had the mother of all meltdowns because Mommy said she had to say her prayers.

We had a couple of days of this a couple of months ago. We cut off the TV altogether and started saying her prayers before bed and her behavior turned around on a dime. But she hasn't had any TV since the fever died down, and we never, ever skip prayers. So now I'm out of solutions. We're big on follow-through so it's not that she doesn't know we're serious. But I -- and my pregnancy hormones, let's not forget that -- cannot take another day of this behavior.

So chime in. Let's hear your no-fail, can't-miss solution for absolutely miserable toddler behavior. Pleeeeeeeease?

"Rape Culture" or a culture of denial?

A reasonably good friend of mine, with whom I disagree almost always when it comes to politics, shared this on Facebook this morning.

And when the mother of a friend of ours from high school commented:

"I agree BUT, when a girl or woman is wearing shorts so short that everyone can see her butt cheeks and shirts so low you can almost see her nipples, I think she should expect to be objectified."

My friend replied, simply, "No." (Which... Dude. Rude!)

Now, I never wade into these debates on Facebook. I have a million things to say and anyone who knows me knows that I have very little fear about saying them, but just I don't do that stuff on Facebook. People get ugly, immediately, and presume the worst about each other, and I'm not on Facebook to get flamed by strangers who happen to know someone I know.

I'm tempted to break my rules and get into it this time. This is a departure from reality, and like all departures from reality just really bothers me.

Of course a fifteen year old girl, dressed provocatively, is going to be sexualized by the men and boys who see her. That's why she dresses provocatively. What other reason is there? Seriously: name one reason to wear short-shorts that dig into your crotch if not so that people will look at your legs?

This message from a teenager who doesn't understand her own power, her own worth, and the danger she's potentially putting herself in is almost understandable. She's fifteen. She may not have been raised by parents who taught her self-respect. She has a lot of growing up to do. She has a lot more to see of the world and the ugliness that's out there before she can hope to realize that covering herself modestly is best for everyone. She's been steeped in a radical feminist worldview that talks constantly about "rape culture" and yet ignores that the atmosphere of cheap, supposedly consequence-free sex is a major contributor to the fact of rape.

Ever-younger girls are parading around dressed like the Pussycat Dolls. Have you tried to shop for a modest bathing suit for a nine year-old recently? Best of luck to you, because clothing manufacturers seem to think that pre-pubescent girls need padded bra tops and string bikinis. Such things are available for toddlers.

{via}

Why is that even being manufactured in a size 3T? Is it really necessary for my daughter to be running around the beach in a bikini with her diaper sticking out? (Yes, my one-and-a-half year old is wearing size 3T bathing suits. She's a tall, solid, healthy kid.)

Look, there's nothing healthy about deciding to pretend that wearing sexy clothes to school should be a right for teenagers. My friend who shared the picture has two sons, and he and his wife have taken steps to ensure no more babies (which just makes me sad), and thus he will never know what it's like to parent a daughter. He's never been a woman. He's never experienced being leered at while wearing a maxi dress with no exposed cleavage, let alone while wearing a bikini, and he never will.

It's easy for male "feminists" to share these sentiments and even to think they mean them. But parents of daughters know better. Grown women know better.

It's not rape culture, it's reality.

Role models for Catholic children.

So this is making the rounds on my Facebook page: Catholic School Apologizes For Picture of "Poor Role Model" Ellen DeGeneres On Dance Invitation. It's been shared by several of my "friends," probably because Newtown, PA, is where I went to high school (I lived one town over). 

Some background: The school sent out invitations to the eighth grade dance with the tag like "Live from the Red Carpet" and a picture of Ellen holding an Oscar statue. When some parents complained, the principal apologized ("I was obviously NOT thinking.") and requested (or, according to BuzzFeed -- ugh -- "demanded") that the invitations be returned so that they could be destroyed, and new invitations sent out. The principal, without referring to Ellen's sexual orientation, said that Ellen is not a good role model because she doesn't live her life in alignment with the principles of the Catholic Church. 

Follow me so far? Good. Because the apology and the rescinding of the offending invitations are exactly right. It would have been better if the incident hadn't happened at all, but as that ship has sailed an apology was in order.

Now. If people I know were just posting this story, I wouldn't have much to say about it. But, naturally, they're posting with some of the most bigoted commentary I can imagine: 

"These bougie, over-privileged, low-life white moms and dads of Newtown don't have anything better to do than call the principal of their kid's Catholic school and say they don't like Ellen because she's gay?"

"Priest's [sic] are raping Children [sic] whom [sic] attend the Church." [The young lady who wrote this comment might have benefitted from some Catholic schooling, by the way, as her grammar is atrocious.]

... And more, but let's just deal with these two, shall we?

First: Those "bougie, over-privileged, low-life white moms and dads" -- because their race is relevant here, according to the over-privileged white guy I know who posted said comment -- are paying a premium for a Catholic education. Newtown, PA, is in one of the top school districts in the state of Pennsylvania. Unlike some places, a Catholic education is not the only alternative to failing schools, but a sacrifice that parents make so that their children can receive a Catholic education. A Catholic school has an obligation to present good role models to the children under their care. Ellen DeGeneres is an outspoken lesbian with a wife. She is not the person you put on your eighth grade dance invitation. I bet that some of the moms who complain watch and enjoy Ellen's talk show, but that doesn't make Ellen an appropriate role model for eighth graders. If I enjoy watching Modern Family, but I complain that my child's Catholic school showed it to my child, I am not hypocrite. I am a parent who recognizes that children and adults are not the same thing. I am unlikely to be influenced by the depiction of a gay couple in a way a prepubescent child might. We spend most of our time as parents deciding what is age appropriate for our children. 

I guess that makes me a bougie (ugh, that word appears here three times and it just makes me cringe!), over-privileged, low-life white mom. Because I would have called to complain.

Secondly: Can we cool it already "priests are raping children" meme? No priests were even mentioned in this story. I did a little Googling -- because for a hot second I entertained the notion of wading into the fray, only to decide not to argue with idiots, especially as it got uglier -- and in two seconds discovered that Catholic priests commit sexual abuse at a rate that is less than 100 times that of public school teachers. Furthermore, the Catholic Church did more to report and combat the abuse than did the school districts in question. The same 2004 Department of Education -- you know, that right-wing think tank -- report that is linked to above tells of 225 admitted cases of educator abuse in one year in New York. How many were reported to police? All of zero. ZERO. More facts about priest sexual abuse here.

To sum up: good for the parents who complained. Good for the principal for apologizing. And I should maybe think about pruning my Facebook friends list.

Prayers FTW!

... As if there was any doubt.

After a good two weeks of boogering it up big time, our little sweet face is (maybe -- no jinxes!) back to her old sweet self. We had been enduring wall-to-wall tantrums and hitting. (It's not that she was getting away with it; it's just that punishments didn't phase her. At all.)

We had fallen away from saying her bedtime prayers with her -- I know! Bad momma! -- partly because she's young and it'll be a little bit before she's able to say them with us, but mostly because we just weren't prioritizing it. Bad momma.

Last night, I plunked her in her crib after she smacked me in the face with both hands simultaneously at bedtime. I was so mad at her. Because she knew she was being punished, she refused all of her nighttime accoutrements: pacifier, lovey, stuffed lamb and monkey, and blanket. I put everything where she could reach it and left the room. I figured she would calm down, grab everything and go to sleep.

But it wasn't long before I started to feel bad. I hadn't given her an opportunity to apologize, I hadn't given her any nighttime snuggles, and I hadn't said her prayers with her. I went back in and picked her up. She kind of sniffled in my ear and said, "Sowwy, mama." I thanked her for her apology, sat with her in the glider, and we said her prayers. When the prayers were done, I gave her a kiss, gave her all of her stuff, laid her back down, and made the sign of the cross on her sweet little forehead. She peacefully went to sleep.

This morning was still a little bit rough. She did have a meltdown, but for the first time in weeks she calmed herself down. She played happily until Daddy was ready to take her to daycare. Her nanny reported a much happier kid. When she got home, we tried on her new tutu:

And she was just her old happy self for the rest of the night until bedtime.

You had better believe we said her prayers tonight.

You had better believe I am not going to let them slip again.

----------------------------------------------------

On a related topic, what version of "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" does everyone use with their kids? I have been using the one I grew up with:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

But when I just googled it, looking for a graphic, I came across nine million graphics that went:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
May angels watch me through the night,
And wake me with the morning light.

I don't think I want to switch from my childhood version. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to deal with the topic of death, and they'll be familiar with the concept from young childhood this way.

My sister switched to the new version with her daughters. I believe she did so after I was babysitting one night and putting the girls to bed. The younger one was just a baby, eight months or so, which means the older one was not quite four. She was saying her prayers and we got to that one, and she said the version from my childhood, segueing into:

O Angel of God, my guardian dear,
To whom God's love commits me here.
Ever this night, be at my side,
To light, to guard, to rule...

And then she looked me right in the eye and said:

And to DIIIIIE.

I almost died. It was creepy and hilarious. When my sister got home and I told her about it, she agreed it was creepy and hilarious, and then the next time I heard the girls saying their prayers they had switched versions.

True story.

Parenting. It is HARD.

Daddy's back from his trip and just in time, because Schmear* was sent home early from daycare yesterday with a fever, and state law says she can't go back until she's without a fever for an unmedicated 24 hours.

Since Daddy worked extra hours while traveling, and due to some ridiculousness with government contracting, he was going to be home today anyway. He had grand plans of doing some organizing in our garage, which is exclusively for storage, but instead he's on toddler duty because Mama gots work.

So Daddy and Schmearington (yeah... I'm a nicknamer) went for a nice walk and when they came back she came to my office to say hi to me and smacked me in the face. And then the poop hit the paddles: it took an hour and a half for her to say she was sorry. For an hour and a half, she was in time out in her crib, with either Mommy or Daddy stopping in at five to ten minute intervals to ask if she was ready to say she was sorry. She kept saying, "Ohhhhtay," but she would not say the actual word "Sowwy," so there she stayed. For an hour and a half.

About twenty minutes in, I started to regret choosing this hill to die on. But if I had let her out without her having apologized, she would never apologize again. She's so smart and stubborn. She tries to buy her way out of trouble with kisses and caresses on my face, because she just chokes on that word: sorry.

And now I need a nap. We won that battle but it felt like the whole war. But I know there will be another battle tomorrow or the next day!

How do you other mommies handle discipline? We are time-out-ers, primarily, because even though I occasionally resort to a smack on the buns, I just can't see the logic of trying to teach her not to hit by hitting her back. But it's not working; the only place in our tiny apartment to put her in time out is her crib, because everything else is either escapable or full of fun things to play with. But she likes her crib, and the whole "one minute of timeout for every year of their age" thing is laughable with a kid this stubborn. A minute and a half isn't even enough time for her to be even mildly annoyed by her incarceration. An hour and a half sounds abusive, but we went in frequently and talked with her.

I just don't know what else to do!


* Lest you think this is my cutesy way of nicknaming my child to avoid using her real name on the Internet, I'll point out that a) I have already used her name, it's Keira; and b) this is a genuine nickname that everyone on our side of the family calls her on the regular (except maybe my mom).

I'm never going to be the Cool Mom.

This commercial.

It made me a little mad. The moms are sitting on the bus trading "you know how I know you're not a Cool Mom?" barbs, and the kicker is:

"You don't let your 12 year old watch PG-13 movies!"

Oh, who can argue with that? That's practically child abuse!

This commercial basically seems to me to encapsulate what's wrong with modern parenting. Why are you concerned about being "cool"? You should be concerned about raising productive members of society, and that is never accomplished by ever-younger viewing of inappropriate subject matter.

Oh, and also, just because you can see the "juice" through a clear panel at the bottom of a Capri Sun does not mean that you can tell whether there's anything artificial inside. Just sayin'.

Notes from our (thankfully only temporarily) single-parent household.

Oh, y'all. My wonderful husband is traveling for work. Our little girl prefers her Daddy, as do many little girls, and she really knows how to push Mommy's buttons.

Night One: 
She toddled up to me and reached for me, so I leaned down to pick her up and... She smacked me in the face. 

She is eighteen months old and she wanted to smack me and she knew how to get my face within her reach. I know that sounds crazy but it is 100% true. 

So she got punished, as she knew she would, and indeed as I have not had to do in a while, and she cried but she eventually apologized ("Sowwy, Mommy."), so we went on our merry way through life. 

A little while later, a little before 7pm, she started asking to go to bed -- I know, it's weird, but she does it all the time; the other night she started asking at 5:45pm! -- and since it was late enough and she was seriously under-napped today, I got her traditional cup of milk before bed and sat her on my lap to drink it. She leaned back and I felt something wet. Girlfriend was dribbling milk down the side of her face, into her hair and onto me. I said, "Hey! Drink your milk, no dribbling!" She sat up, looked me in the eye and dribbled a HUGE mouthful of milk onto my arm, my leg and the carpet. 

To bed. Right now. Good night, sweet monster.

Night Two:

Actually ALL-DARN-DAY Two, because little sweet face has pinkeye and thus stayed home with Mama all day, and Mama took a sick day from work even though she had tons and tons to do. We got up around 6:00am sometime, which is of course about an hour and a half earlier than she normally wakes up, and then a couple of hours later we went to the pediatrician because my insistence that it was pinkeye went unheeded -- and indeed, her eye looked pretty good when we got there, of course, so the nurse was almost justified in looking at me like I was a loon -- and they wouldn't call in a scrip without seeing her. (I mean, seriously, Nurse Ratched. If I had Münchausen by Proxy or something, would this be the first time in her entire eighteen months of life that I've ever come in the sick side of the office?) After the pediatrician, we went to the grocery store to pick up her drops from the pharmacy and to buy her favorite macaroni and cheese because sick kids get treats.

We spent the afternoon playing and watching Sofia the First and Frozen until I wanted to cry. One of us took a great nap (even though both of us needed one), and one of us dealt with the noisy Orkin man who didn't care that I had a baby napping.

In the evening, Daddy called us on Skype and both of our hearts broke a little when he said, "Hello!" on the computer and she gasped, jumped up and ran to where she could see the front door. She was so disappointed when she realized he wasn't actually home.

And later -- sorry, I'm going to veer a little close to TMI territory with this story -- I had to use the bathroom and couldn't wait until she was in bed, so I made sure everything dangerous or spill-y was up high and went to use the closest bathroom, keeping the door ajar. At first she came to investigate me, then she went wandering back out to where Frozen was on -- again -- and then all of a sudden I heard Sofia the First instead. Now, this isn't a matter of just changing the channel and pushing one button. She had to change the input on the receiver and the TV and turn on the cable box. We have a universal remote but it sometimes stymies ME, because you have to hold it at the proper angle for longer than you think before everything changes inputs. I came out of the bathroom to find her sitting on the couch with the remote on her lap, placidly watching Sofia. I mean... WHAT.

Night Three: 

Daddy comes home tomorrow, hallelujah! 

She has been in a weird mood since I picked her up from daycare. I was chatting to the nanny about the fact that she chewed through a pacifier -- more on her beaver-like tendencies in an upcoming post -- and she was alternately hugging my neck and trying to discreetly smack me in the face somehow without getting in trouble. I am really not loving this return to the face-smacking.

Then we came home and she ate dinner with singleminded focus, and then we had a bath because she was getting crusty in the hair department. Love this toddler age where they will not be fed but their self-feeding is as messy as is humanly possible. 

After the bath, we Skyped with Daddy again while she kicked me to try to keep me from putting on her diaper. 

"KEIRA! Stop kicking Mommy! Do you want a smack on your bare buns?"
"Ohhhh-kay." 

Sigh.

UPDATED TO ADD: I don't know how any of y'all single mothers do it.