Wednesday, November 02, 2005

I’ve been getting my ass kicked on a daily basis

I haven’t had much constructive to blog lately, I don’t like to use this format to just complain, but what are you going to do, I’ve been getting my ass kicked on a daily basis. My three year old has started having nightmares since he started pre-school, he says, “Daddy the ‘dreamers’ come and scare me.” I’ve tried to teach him about “controlling” his dreams to varying success, stuff like, “Turn yourself into a giant like Shaq and smash the ‘dreamers.’” He also has complaints about this kid or that kid hitting him, or trying to eat his snack and in kind he tells me about his trying get retribution by eating the kids snack who tried to eat his and how he joined in with some other boys hitting one girl, which has me picturing bad frat scenarios circa 2021.

So I have to teach him to defend himself without encouraging too much aggression, so he doesn’t pull George W. and become a preemptive striker.
I told him to first tell the hitter to stop, secondly tell a teacher, and then lastly physically defend himself if the hitter doesn’t stop hitting him.
As for the mob mentality I tried to impress upon him that you don’t do something just because others are doing it, and you never hit someone who hasn’t hit you first. It’s really hard having one’s child go through these potentially socially / emotionally damaging situations and not being able to be right there to do damage control.

So my kids and myself still have lingering congestion, coughs & sore throats, for over a month now, which has made for frayed nerves, it’s really taking a toll on all of us. Add to that the month before we were sick we spent somewhat displaced because we spent at least one day of each weekend we made the hour and a half trip to my Grandmother-in-law’s who was dieing and has since passed away. So my wife has been going through a lot and the rest of us were tired and eating poorly, no wonder we all are sick. My nine month old has four teeth coming in so he’s extra cranky, which is understandable, BUT my wife doesn’t breast feed him in the middle of the night any more, partially because fracturing her sleep ever night was making her fuck up at work, so now I’m the fractured sleeper and I’m loosing it. Sometimes all I can think about at 3:37 a.m. is “shut it up, make it stop making noise,” then I get a little more cognizant and my normal caring instincts kick in, but I’ll admit that my initial reaction to being woken up is rather frightening. I won’t go into detail, but it’s like a number of things where I’ve been like how could a person react to situation X like that? And then you live through some new experiences and see how if a person weren’t stable or moral or whatever that they could react in a totally fucked up way to certain stressors.

If I haven’t made it clear, lack of sleep is one of the biggest challenges facing the parents of newborns to one year olds.

The following are a few blog entries that I jotted down in my Palm Pilot over last few months but haven’t had a chance to post until now:

A) Have your second child be the same sex as the first kid is great for recycle clothes, particularly if you weren’t “banking” on having the second one. If your kids are born in different seasons a large percent of the summer and winter clothes won’t work out for the second child, but hey you still have to buy way less new clothes than if you had a different sex child.
My second child is way larger than my first so I’ve learned to go one size up for every age milestone passed.

B) I use to really need, appreciate and enjoy getting outside of myself, as far outside as i could, weed, meditation, tripping, contemplation, etc. Being a parent i really need to fully present at seemingly all times, its tough for a person like me, i need a few hours a day alone with my thoughts to function correctly, or at a higher level. So I wind up staying up way too late trying to wrap my mind around everything going in my life, politics and unfortunately sometimes my mind wastes time dissecting disappointing sports results and the plots to LOST and Rome.

C) A couple of days ago I thought, “I’ve got a half done project or chore on the floor or counter of every room in this house.” We’ve managed to get things a bit more picked up around here so now I’m able to notice all those baby and cat vomit stains that I missed the first time around.Another gross picture I can paint for you is that recently I’ve notice that my baby has been spitting up a lot less lately, which is of course great, so I couldn’t figure out why I still was getting stains on the shoulders of all of my t-shirts. I’ve come to realize that my son has been using me as a giant tissue. So now after he sneezes I turn him around and or pull him away from me and he gets totally pissed-off and kind of freaks out because he doesn’t know where else to wipe his nose, and of course he hates me to wipe it with tissue, so half the time I just grin and bare my handkerchief status.