Thursday, July 7, 2011

Awww, the Sound of Quiet

Not to be confused by The Sound of Music, which I also love.  In fact, there might be a video out there with a slightly impaired Leslie (Fiorcet isn't the greatest medication for me) yodeling along to The Lonely Goatherd (and it's a good one), but I definitely love this a little more.  It gives me a little more time to think and set a game plan for the day.  Mine's going something like this.  Try to go for a run, get the kids breakfast, put Noah on the potty, do the laundry, put Noah on the toilet, wash the mirrors, put Noah on the toilet, fold some laundry, place Noah on the potty, put dishes in the dishwasher, put the poor kid on his toilet.  You get the pattern by now. If there was a way to fast-forward through potty-training, you betcha, I'd find it.  It's a miserable experience.   He got a large Spongebob popsicle yesterday for missing the toilet completely but at least still staying on the thing while he went.  We have to celebrate the small victories in life after all.  Nothing more rewarding than cheering on a three-year old naked kid as you scrub up pee.  It really is hard to muster enthusiasm when you're down on the floor with bleach and scrubbing away.  People aren't joking when they said boys are a lot harder to train than girls and look at me, I have another one waiting in the wings to train in the next couple of years.  Maybe Ammon can stay in diapers until he's 20 and then potty-training can become the responsibility of his spouse, or at the very least, his missionary companion.

I'll be truthful, I'm not much of a morning person so the fact that I'm awake and blogging at 6:45 a.m. is an accomplishment.  The fact that Ava is still asleep is an accomplishment.  Oh, that child.  Don't get me wrong, I love her to pieces, but as children go, she's as high-strung as they get.  We're currently getting the ADHD testing out of the way, but until then, the doctor went ahead and suggested giving her melatonin to help her sleep at night since sleep just wasn't happening.  At least it's only melatonin, right, and not something like Ambien?  She'd be the hallucinating type and I'd be in her room trying to explain to her that her walls were not attacking her and the blankets were not, after all, breathing.  Cough, cough, that might have been my experience with the stuff.   Anywho, back to the melatonin....only it's wasn't easy to persuade her to take her the pill.  So I lied.  Awesome parenting at it's finest.

 She's ADDICTED to Scooby Doo.  She would watch it all day if I let her and she goes on hunts to find clues with poor little Noah.  Noah isn't affected by it, but apparently, Ava is, because before the melatonin, we'd find her in the oddest places in our room....stretched out across the top of our pillows, burrowed at our feet, balancing on the edges of our mattress, or more likely than not, on the floor, huddled in a ball.  She has never caught on that the ghost is never a ghost at all but a bad guy in a really bad mask.  Even after six months of different episodes, she's never caught on.  We've tried taking them away but she loves the thrill so she finds them and the whole thing starts over.  I'm not going to lie.  I'll admit that I love her to pieces but I'll never be the parent that claims my daughter is the special snowflake that will be ready for an Ivy League school at the age of 13.  I'm only praying that she's done peeing in her closet at that time.  This too is a recent revelation when we realized her room had an unmistakenable urine smell.  *Sigh*. So, back to the sleep issues....at the age of five, she had bags under her eyes from not sleeping that riveled, well, my own and my severe insomniac ways.  We could both be an extra on Twilight without make-up about 90% of the time, that is if we were both good-looking and sparkled.  I don't do either.  Thus, the magic pill.  I didn't say anything too bad, but I know that one day, I'll have to answer to the "do you remember when you told me that melatonin was really a magic pill to chase away ghosts and all bad things?"  Yes, folks.  That is exactly what I said.  She's five.   She bought it up and now asks for it every single night.  Nothing more refreshing than to hear a child come running into the kitchen around 7:30 to ask for a magic pill, especially when we have company.  She's adorable which will thankfully take her far in life because if not, she's the type you'd send to the store for food and she'd return with magic beans.

Oh man, Little Miss has discovered that I'm awake and is now sitting on the cat.  Yes, the cat.  Forget that stuffed horse that we had to have since "it would come in handy", she has captured her cat and is trying to ride her around the living room.  This, THIS is why she doesn't have a dog.  Her poor cat is tortured enough.  At least the cat is fast enough to get away. 

I laugh at the day that we found out we were expecting this child.  We wanted a baby so badly.  We had been trying for a long time, four years to be exact, but hadn't really discussed our infertility failure with anyone.  When one of our best friends told us she was pregnant, I was happy for her, but the green monster of jealousy was very much on my shoulder.  Two days later, between shifts at work and on my way back to bed between said shifts (oh, the things you can do without kids, like uninterrupted naps when you aren't working), I thought, what the heck, I have a pregnancy test.  I might as well use it.  So, I peed on the stupid thing and headed to bed.  I had had so many negatives in four years that I almost forgot to check it.  But eventually I remembered and returned to the bathroom to see two glaring pink lines staring back at me.

This is where it gets bad.  Know the elation, the excitement, the feeling of wanting to "shout it from the rooftop?" that should have accompanied this special moment?  That sure didn't happen.  In fact, I held that pee stick in my hand for a good five minutes trying to make sense of it all.  I mean, I couldn't really be pregnant, right?  It had to be a mistake.  Which began what I will call the Tournament of Testing that day.  I peed on a half of a dozen sticks while David was at work, getting the same result each time.  I got a digital test eventually because those can NEVER be wrong, right?  It popped up "PREGNANT" almost immediately and I fervantly began shaking that thing like an eight-ball waiting for the "NOT" to join it.  It never did.  Even an "Ask Again Later" might have been nice.  Oh, the memories.

I walked back to work for my afternoon shift, shell-shocked.  I was the first one back.  In my dazed state, I hadn't realized I was an hour early.  I never even got my nap.  It didn't matter since I had paperwork that needed to be done.  However, I think I climbed into my cubby instead and cried for a good 45-minutes instead.  I should have known that if it took her 4 years to decide to join us, she was going to be a handful. 

Now that I have two children awake, that special moment where it was just me and my thoughts has escaped.  I guess it's time to put on my Mom hat for the day and leave this, where I think my world is fascinating and I actually have something to say.  It's time instead to start that list I began an hour ago and hope that maybe, just maybe, we have better luck than yesterday with Elmo's potty and a little boy who doesn't want to be there.

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