On Choosing Your Battles

Admittedly, I can be pretty intense with Cate. She goes to a quiet room by herself, not the foyer to play, when she misbehaves at church. She sits in a regular chair, not a high chair, at restaurants. And, until recently, she didn't sleep with anything because I didn't want her to need a crutch to fall asleep.

I'm big in to her doing what she can for herself, which at this point includes being in charge of putting the dish towels away, getting her own dishes for meals, putting her used dishes in the sink, wiping off the table after dinner, putting her clothes away in drawers, emptying the trash from her room, bringing the brush and dustpan when I'm sweeping, and keeping track of her own shoes. More recently, she's learned to Swiffer (seriously, I showed her once and she did the whole front room!) and she's taken on a whole host of chores on Peter's behalf, including pacifier monitor, bottle picker-upper, and post-burp face wiper (not to mention chief entertainer).

But for a whole variety of reasons my own childhood was essentially void of whimsy, and I'm determined that will not be the case for Cate and Peter. We dance almost every day. We clap and squeal when the postman delivers our mail (Cate gets all the window envelopes and advertisements, her "paperwork"). We make silly faces. I can hardly wait till Cate understands sprinkles so that we can put them on everything. I've got big plans for finger painting with pudding and popping popcorn in the middle of the room with the air popper lid off and eating dessert first sometimes. And for a surprise hookey day during the school year when they each get to skip school and have their own all-day fun-packed date with Mom and Dad. We're big in to applause and giggles and high fives and tickles and hiding and chase.

And ... I let her spill her water pretty much wherever she wants. It's just water. We live in Houston, where it's always hot. We only have carpet in one room, and a tiny bit of water isn't going to hurt the carpet. When she spills it on linoleum or hard wood, she immediately gets a towel and cleans it up herself. I can't resist her squeals of delight when she pours it on her head. It's so cute when she splashes her hands in her tiny indoor puddles. And for all my intensity, in those moments when we are both splashing our hands in that tiny bit of water on the floor, I get to be my low-key Cool Mom alter ego. We both think this is great fun.

I had never given any thought at all to how this might play ... at someone else's house ... or with another toddler over. Until today. When I had a mom friend and her toddler over and I gave each of the girls about a three tablespoons of water in matching cups and Cate spilled a little. "Eh, you choose your battles, and that's not one I fight..." I said cheerfully, showing as much low-key, go-with-the-flow Cool Mom aloofness as I could muster. My low-key Cool Mom friend shrugged and smiled and I thought how nice that were both so totally, you know, Cool. And then Cate got the look of anticipatory delight she gets on her face every time just before she dumps the water all over herself. And then she dumped it. "Whoa," my low-key Cool Mom friend said, "that was totally deliberate, wilful spilling!" "And," she said, turning to her own 20-month-old, "We are not going to copy that, are we?"

Uh, low-key Cool Mom fail.

But here's the thing: I'm pretty sure one of the purposes of parents is to give the next generation something to stay up late talking with college roommates about, or to pass the time chatting about on a long road trip with a future spouse, or to pay a therapist $150 an hour to listen to sometime in their late 20s when self awareness and discretionary income hit their first peak simultaneously.

And for all the stuff we'll undoubtedly give her to talk about, there's one thing my Cate won't be saying: "I wish my mom had let me have a little fun. You know, I just wish she would have let me spill some water on the floor and play in it every now and then!" Not on my watch.

A minus

Cate had her 1-year check up Friday and she passed with flying colors. She is 30 1/4 inches long (80 percentile) and 22.5 lbs (67 percentile). She got an A+ from the doctor and I got something closer to an A-.

Doc wanted to know if Cate is sleeping through the night. No, she's not. Why not? Well, because Sam and I snuggle her and feed her when she wakes up. Yes, we know it's a bad habit. Yes, we know that she's not going to start sleeping through the night if she knows she can have a snuggle and a snack in the middle of the night. Yes, we know that children like boundaries.

Well, doc says, I will tell you a couple things to help talk you out of nighttime feedings. First, now that she is drinking whole milk instead of formula she is going to get real chubby real fast if you feed her 8 oz of whole milk every day in the middle of the night. Second, it is good for her brain to rest from eating for 12 hours. "Oh," I say, "So you are telling me that if I stop feeding her at night I'll help her be smart and skinny?" Well, yes, basically, says the doc.

Now, honestly, what better gift could a mother give her daughter?

And so, that's what I'm going to tell myself over and over when she wakes up until she gets the hang of it and starts sleeping all the way through. Truth is, I could use some sleep before Peter/Elisabeth arrives so hopefully doc's encouragement plus that thought will help me (us) resist the urge to snuggle her.

Post-post: Last night was our first night on the new program and guess who slept 12 hours and 15 minutes without making a peep? Cate Major.

It's Been a Year

There are a few things I swore I'd never do when I was a mom, and here are a few I still haven't done:

1. Smell Cate's bum to see if she has a dirty diaper (It's a show-her-some-dignity thing; she's small, but she's a person.)

2. Taste baby food (Ick. I just can't stomach the thought, even if it's organic and even before I was pregnant.)

3. Lick a pacifier after it fell on the ground (Cate wasn't much for pacifiers anyway.)

4. Sanitize a grocery cart before putting Cate in it (She's been sick one time in a year and I swear it's because she gets plopped right into those carts with no wipe down.)

One year down.

Rookie

Tonight I made dinner for a couple we know from church who just had a baby girl. Because Sam was working and Cate and I had no other plans, I made a fairly elaborate dinner. Nothing fancy--but it required a lot of chopping and a sizable collection of pots and pans. My sous chef is still not much for slicing and dicing and as a result I typically pull the Pack n Play in to the kitchen where she hangs out while I prepare dinner.

The immobile Cate of old actually seemed to like spending a few minutes in the Pack n Play each day. The turbo-mobile Cate of today does not. Never has that been more apparent than tonight.

For better or worse, the third prong of my very sophisticated parenting strategy (see previous post about first two prongs: speak to her like she understands English and give her lots of kisses) is: Do not respond to hysteria by caving. Never has that been tested like tonight.

Cate cried her little head off for longer than I'd like to admit while I prepared dinner. In my head, I imagined myself giving her a pep talk: "I know you don't like it in there. Sometimes we have to do things we don't like to do. You have your favorite toys and I am right here. You can choose to be miserable or you can choose to manage how you feel about this hard thing. I love you." But there was no pep talk. I just continued preparing dinner.

I finished dinner. We both survived. I swear she was glaring at me for an hour. We delivered our dinner and admired the new baby and the new baby's nursery. We stopped by the store, which is basically Cate's favorite thing in life, so I think I earned some points back there. We came home. And it was time to do the dishes.

To clarify, once she's in the Pack n Play I am all about her toughing it out. But I have a brain (and a heart). When we got home, I put her down on the floor in the room adjacent to the kitchen and got to the dishes. Within about 10 seconds she and a toy she had managed to lug along were in the kitchen at my feet.

And you know what? She crawled around in there checking stuff out the whole time I was doing the dishes.

And she's still alive.

She didn't open the door of the fridge, crawl in, and close the door on herself.

She didn't climb into the dishwasher, grab a knife, and cut herself.

She didn't find some quarter-sized piece of something on the floor, put it in her mouth, and choke on it.

She didn't claw her way on to the counter top, turn on the stove, and burn herself.

She didn't open the cupboard, unscrew the Windex, and drink it.

Shocker.

What a rookie I am.