Summary: had a long nap Sunday, things are better, gained some insights.

More forthcoming, I hope.

xo and thank you so much for the encouragement.

Oz has discovered his ability to keep himself up at bedtime and what used to take 10 minutes is now taking 2 hours. It’s got me in a low, low place. I don’t know why I judge myself so harshly in this one dimension but I’ve observed this in myself recently – that how I feel about myself as a parent hinges greatly on the kids’ sleep patterns. I feel like if they’re taking good naps and going down easily, then it’s because I’ve judged their need and the best timing for sleep correctly, and created the right structures for them to have healthy sleep patterns. When they won’t go down… I’m the worst mom in the world. Last night at 11, after yelling at Illyria to just go to sleep already, and then she cried herself to sleep clutching her bedtime book, I was too angry to go to sleep myself. It’s just not worth it, I kept thinking. I should tell everyone considering TTC don’t do it! It’s just not worth it. I felt differently this morning… mostly… I’m still exhausted and feeling like a shit mom though. Gimli said ok, we need to get you some sleep. We’re going to try putting both kids in one bedroom, and Gimli will stay with them as long as needed while I sleep alone in the master bedroom (my mom is in the other kid’s bedroom – Illyria has been sleeping with us – well me, really – while Oz sleeps half the night in his crib and half the night with Gimli in the twin bed in that room). But it feels like circular reasoning to me. I’m not able to parent well right now because I’m so tired and sleep-deprived, but the REASON I’m tired and sleep-deprived is because I’m a crap mom who has ruined her kids’ sleep cycles through ineffective parenting. So what’s the point? It’s never going to get any better. I thought it was but it’s not.

I’m blogging from inside an irrational hole right now, and part of me knows this, but most of me just wants to give up and sell them to the gypsies.

My mom is here. Right now she’s playing puzzles with Oz and Illyria while I play hooky from my Albanian lesson. This morning Illyria saw her, paused, and then broke into a shy smile of recognition as she climbed into my lap. Oz was very suspicious, until my mom began to play a game of peek-a-boo and then did a little dance step – he was charmed.

I’m bottomed out in my sleep reserves; her flight came in around midnight and I went to the airport to pick her up. It was strange to be out so late at night by myself. Then of course Oz greeted the dawn at 5:30 a.m. even though he didn’t fall asleep last night until after 10. Very unusual for him – I think both kids sensed something was afoot because neither of them went down easy. So I only got about 3 hours of sleep and am just counting down until nap time.

Over the past few weeks, I didn’t let myself believe she was coming. I never said “my mom is coming,” I only said “my mom is planning to come… is supposed to be coming…” It wasn’t up until the very last minute that I even began to behave as if she was coming – making up her bed, finding clean towels to lay out, buying extra house slippers. It was like how you hold off on buying baby thing until the 9th month (or even later).

It’s so good to have her here.

Finally this morning he woke up with a gleam in his eye and a smile on his face, and I think we’ve turned the corner. So I left the kids with Dhurata and went to my Albanian language lesson and am now determinedly working through the backlog. I need to go grocery shopping and catch a nap though – Gimli went to Rome for work meetings on Saturday and doesn’t get back until midnight tonight and none of us slept well while he was gone.

Thanks for the lovely comments on my last post – it was so much fun to do, I want to do another one in a few months!

This is from Wordgirl’s meme – go check it out!

I’m not quite sure what to make of this, or how to help her grasp these grammatical structures. I really want to have her evaluated by speech and developmental specialists when we get back to the States – another factor to put into the what-should-we-do-with-our-lives mix – so I can get a better idea of where she actually is, developmentally, and what I can do to help her more effectively.

She is finally starting to use articles, at last. Her speech and pronunciation are becoming clearer. Her grandparents report that even since September, they can understand her much better now than they could then. And in other ways she’s very quick to grasp concepts – she can read two-digit numbers and also count up to 100, and she’s very good at memory-matching games. She gets very involved in pretend play (as evidenced by her alter ego, Winnie the Pooh). She calls Dhurata “pretend Owl” (Dad is the real Owl). She has started drawing with markers, making happy faces with long arms and legs and flying hair. She adds big mouse ears to make them into cats. She knows the colors of the rainbow in order, knows upper case and lower case letters, can spell (both produce and recognize) Pooh, cat, Val, mama, sun, Dada, Babi (“dad” in Albanian), and others. She knows all the basic shapes, including the pentagon. It all seems amazing to me but at the same time I don’t know what kinds of things she is supposed to know at almost-four.

The bottom line is that I don’t know whether or how much I should be worried. What I should be researching. What I should be doing to help her get on track, so she won’t be behind when she starts school. And of course the social aspects are also a concern to me – particularly empathy. I don’t know how much of her selfishness is typical toddler ego and how much is indicative of potential problems down the road.

I’m still sort of mulling over in my mind the requisite retrospective on 2011, meanwhile penning multiple (albeit short) lists of resolutions.

Yesterday morning at 7:45 I headed down the hall to wake Gimli up for work. Oscar was stomping along in front of me in his sister’s shoes, and I scooped him up in one arm and swung him into my hip so he wouldn’t make quite so much noise. As I straightened, the walls tilted and spun and I caught myself with the other arm against the wall to keep from falling over.

It scared me.

I took a deep breath, then hefted myself away from the wall, took two steps and had to find the wall again. The word “swoon” comes to mind as the perfect word to describe the feeling of the room spinning around me, the way gravity went out of balance/alignment, the way my head felt. Vertigo.

I waited a little longer this time, and when I stood up again I was fine.

I’m not sure if it was from lack of sleep, dehydration, or wonky blood pressure – or all of the above – but it scared me and scares me still when I think about it, especially because I had Oz in my arms.

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This year, my top resolution is to lower my blood pressure and cholesterol through diet and exercise. I don’t want to become dependent on medications to keep my bp low, although I will if I have to. I’m too young for that (so much for aging gracefully). One of my college frenemies has become an ardent vegan, and thanks to his persistent posts and links on FB I’ve decided that my second resolution is to decrease consumption of meat. I don’t think I’m ready to go vegan, or even vegetarian at the moment, but I’ve realized that my favorite 3-4 dishes to cook are, unintentionally, vegan. But I still enjoy the occasional steak, and we can’t get stuff here like tofu that would make me feel better about the kids getting enough protein (Oz won’t eat eggs or cheese so that kind of limits us as well). So I’m not sure where I’m going to fit the exercise in – ideally I’d like to work in a combination of yoga and pilates somewhere – but I think the first two resolutions do dovetail nicely. And will hopefully preclude any further dizzy spells. Because that – did I mention? – was scary.

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I sat down this morning (back at Cheers! Yay!) and added up my work hours over the past year, working out the monthly average for the year, and quarterly. The encouraging result is that from the first quarter to the last I more than tripled my monthly average of work time, and overall showed a steady increase. My best month was August, when we didn’t go anywhere and didn’t have any visitors. I have an abstract to write for this year’s professional conference in November, and I HAVE to finish transcribing my interviews so I can do some proper data analysis. I have about 7 hours’ worth to go. And I realized that I really should start thinking about job applications… it’s early, to be sure, but I need to be in a position to start interviewing at the conference in November. Gimli has said he’s willing to relocate to any place I can find a job, and is encouraging me to look outside the US (of course). But on the other hand, a friend of ours who teaches at the big state university in our city in the States sort of gave me a tip that there are plans afoot to dramatically expand the humanities and social sciences programs there in the coming year or three, and my specialization would position me extremely well for a strong application there. So there’s that. Lots to think about in both the short and long term.

I was mulling over Magpie Days’ post on goals (she’s an American poet living in Switzerland), and what it made me think was that even though one might not have reached or exceeded one’s goals for the year, there is still value in setting the goals – let’s say you only achieve 60% of your goal; what if you hadn’t set the goal at all? Or what if you had set a much more modest goal? 60% of a more modest goal would be much less than you actually achieved, and 60% of zero is zero. So maybe it doesn’t matter if I failed – by a really long shot – to meet my original goals for 2011. I did a lot more than nothing, and I am a lot closer now to my ultimate goal of a PhD than I was last January. So I’m choosing to think positive about this one and not beat myself up about it. At least for today.

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And I do have another goal for 2012 – to read every post on the 2011 Creme de la Creme list (and the 2010 one because I missed that one almost entirely).

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Best to all who stop by here, for 2012. May your deepest wishes come true.

So I was going to use some of this time to write but I’m in such a blissed-out zone right now that all I can really come up with is this little meditation on my day.

Red Hot Chili Peppers and Roxette. I love this cafe.

Deep thoughts.

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Here’s something for pure entertainment – the new trailer for The Hobbit! I get chills every time I watch it, hearing the dwarfs sing (I didn’t nickname my husband Gimli for nothing) Though I might have to change it to Thoren Oakenshield now

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In a similar vein – you know that thing where someone in a committed relationship will pick out a celebrity (or five) who they supposedly could have sex with and their partner/spouse would give them a guiltless “free pass” if this would to occur (supposedly because it would never actually happen in this reality)? When I actually think about it in literal terms – like if it actually COULD happen – I find it totally creepy and gross as an idea. But if it’s just an exercise in rating relative hotness, then it seems ok. But my top three all seem kind of icky to me now, I wonder why? And those would be, in no particular order, Jon Hamm, Robert Downey Jr, and Johnny Depp. Jude Law used to be on the list but since the whole nanny cheating thing he has fallen from grace. And Jake Gyllenhaal, or alternately Joaquin Phoenix, but somehow that spark has died as well. I don’t know why I waste brain and blog space on this ridiculous question.

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Since Gimli left for Cyprus on Sunday, after spending 24 hours with us at the close of his time in Armenia, the kids have been exceptionally cranky and clingy. EXCEPTIONALLY. I can’t wait til he gets back.

Which is weird, because I’ve realized it’s a pattern – I am way more tense and stressed interacting with the kids when he’s around than when he’s not. And I can’t figure out WHY. I can sort of partly figure it out – the same reasons we absolutely could not co-teach a college course together – but it’s awkward and inconvenient, because we can easily avoid co-teaching a course, not so easily avoid parenting together. It seems like when we divide the labor in certain ways (like taking turns watching the kids so we can each get some time off by ourselves) things go smoothly, but anytime we try to do something fun all together – even at home! It’s not just when we go out! – I get really tense and he gets frustrated with me. I need to get this sorted out somehow.

I have not bought or made any gifts for anybody whatsoever. I’m thinking of making a full English breakfast for the family on the morning of the 26th and letting that be my gift to them all this year. I dunno – my family has never been much into gifts and I have a hard time getting up the energy to get into it myself. If I plan way ahead and can knit everyone socks, that feels satisfying to both me and to the receivers, but I no longer make time for knitting anymore. Maybe next year.

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If you had to find one word to describe 2011, what would it be?

It terrifies me, this responsibility to stock their toolbox. In some ways it is simple and obvious, and having two children means that we have a daily arena for teaching things like not hitting, and sharing, and taking turns, and acknowledging and honoring the humanity of the other (although we could achieve this also if we had a singleton by creating social situations where she was forced to interact with other children her age). But I am so afraid that I’m missing something big and huge and important that will become clear only further down the road as they descend into truancy and delinquency – or just simply unhappiness and self-hatred.

When my parents dropped my sister off at college, I went with my mom to a prayer meeting for parents that was scheduled as part of the orientation activities (yes, it was that kind of college) and my mom broke down in tears during the small-group sharing part, suddenly feeling that terror, that fear of having failed her daughter and it now being too late to make it right.

One time recently (maybe even last year) my sister said of our mother, “she’s been hurting me my whole life, why should it be any different now?”

During our hesitation before TTC, I thought about this a lot – I saw the tremendous conflict and pain between my sister and my mother, between my SIL and her parents – and I had to wonder whether having children was worth the risk. What if it should come to this, with my own children? This distance, this pain, this horrifying power and ability to wound each other to the core?

I think this fear has shaped my parenting style a lot. I err on the side of indulgence, rather than discipline. I know this is not always what is best for them. I don’t limit screen time as much as I should. I give in to too many of my toddler’s demands – or perhaps I should say commands – like when she doesn’t want any of us to stand and join in the singing at church, for example. I know that I shouldn’t let her control me, but sometimes I do. Of course there are non-negotiables – like holding my hand when crossing the street, or getting her hair washed, brushing teeth, and the aforementioned not hitting or pushing her brother.

When I was in grad school the first time, in 1999, it was a year after my cousin had committed suicide, and because I felt like I hadn’t done enough to help him during life I volunteered as a crisis counselor for a suicide prevention hotline. It was one of the best and hardest things I’ve ever done. A major component of our training was on reflective listening, and it stuck in my mind when one of the trainers mentioned that this skill had made her relationship with her teenaged children much better. Her ability to reflect back to them what they were feeling diffused tension and opened the door to communication. So I try to do that with our children, and I think it helps them a lot, to understand and release their emotions. I remember what someone said to me once (was it my therapist?) that emotional needs that are ignored or suppressed will never go away – they’ll just come back, sometimes in difficult or even dangerous ways. I’ve also been holding in my mind what Lori said in an interview about being in the moment, about feeling and releasing the emotion over and over again, and how physical movement can help in this process as well. So this is a big part of what I try to do as a mother – build up their emotional health and their tools for coping with strong emotions in healthy ways. So it’s frustrating when my MIL tells my daughter “Now don’t get mad,” or “don’t cry,” because, well, I think this is actually pretty harmful. I tell Illyria, “it’s ok to be mad, but you can’t hit your brother.” Usually then she requests to go to another room and “have a little talk” with me or another caregiver – it’s her way now of removing herself from the situation that’s frustrating or stressing her out. So we go away, and talk about sharing, or about whatever pissed her off, or just play for awhile in a different space, until she’s ready to go back and try again.

I long to be the kind of mom whose house is a haven of clean and tidy peace and serenity, who has Montessori-ed her home, who can make cake pops, who just generally seems to be competent and well-organized (Raspberry Chip, I’d link to you but you’re PWP!). I’m just not that kind of mom. I’m too overwhelmed by the quotidian. And I think I set the bar too low.

I’m gonna rock at homework help someday though.

The thing is – my mom didn’t TRY to make mistakes. She didn’t set out to hurt my sister. My MIL doesn’t hate her daughter, she loves her. They both did what they thought was right; they did their level best. I don’t fully understand what went wrong, why my sister and my sister-in-law have felt compelled at different times to put as much physical and emotional distance between themselves and their parents as possible, and why for each of them in different ways this seemed to be a move for self-preservation. So how can I know that I’m not going to end up in their position someday?