the squibix family blog

Dan did the design, naturally, and I made the t-shirt and appliqued on the pieces. After I ironed on all the bits it looked so good, I liked it so much, that I couldn't bear the thought of any parts fraying in the wash. So I hand-embroidered around all the pieces. It was 11pm when I started. I went to bed very very late.

The t-shirt got a lot of positive comments at the weekend's BBQs, although we had to explain several times that the fist was black and not red because we're anarchists not communists. And yes, that may be confusing vis-a-vis black power, but no one would ever accuse this little toe-head of having very much black power.

Happy Labor Day!!!

That's funny, because I've met some 3 year olds and they don't need easy-to-hold won't-break-apart-in-your-mouth crayon substitutes. They just play with crayons.

Lenore Skenazy says it better in her book, but here's my quick take on the hazards of childhood.

Every year the number of children who chokes to death is in the hundreds. For the year 2000 it was 160 children ages 14 years or younger. I'm too lazy to find a more recent stat the doesn't float to the top of Google, but you get the idea.

The number of children in the US that year was 7.24 million. That puts the risk of your child dying "from an obstruction of the respiratory tract due to inhaled or ingested foreign bodies" at... wait, let me open up microsoft excel... at about one in 45 thousand. On the other hand, Harvey's lifetime risk of dying in a car accident is about 1 in 84.

But what can I do??? I have to get him to baby gymnastics!!!

There is a chance the Harvey could die from many things at many moments. Heck, the same is true for me or Dan or any of us - this life is a terminal condition after all, and none of us gets out alive.

Look, we keep the poisonous cleaners locked under our sink, we use car seats, and there's a gate at the top of the stairs. But we let Harvey play with dogs, sticks, Duplo legos (for ages 1.5 and up) and yes, crayon rocks. Because he's a little boy and what else is he going to friggin play with??? No really, because statistically, we're not likely to alter Harvey's risk profile very much by the sort of constant worrying that shuns inch-long crayons.

And there's another risk of fretting over crayons and hand sanitizer and strangers. We could very likely raise a child who views the world as a dangerous place, who fears people, fears change, fears new experiences. A child not very able to cope with life.

And life's too short for that. I'd rather let my one-year-old draw.

We tried rocking him back to sleep, petting him, cuddling him, and all manners of non-milk soothing for a few nights. It was and wasn't working. He was going back to sleep but he slept fitfully, rolling and crying and back to full-on screaming two hours later. The problem is that the little butter ball is hungry. He can't sleep because he need the calories from milk. But he's not eating enough at dinner time because he expected all the nursings. So project sleep through the night quickly became project ween our clild and then sleep through the night. Like I said, we've been busy.

We cut out all nursings during the day first. That wasn't so hard on him, since he was only getting one bottle when I was at work, but when I get him up from his nap sometimes he remembers how much he used to like to nurse after napping and throws a little tantrum until something else sweet gets into his mouth.

He used to get two feedings in the evening, one when I got home from work and one before bed, and these were really messing up his ability to eat dinner. So we cut out the 5pm nursing and kept the 7:30, which seems to work although sometimes he starts to breakdown and claw at me around 6:30 and I'll give in if he's already eaten dinner.

All this has upped his appetite for solid foods, but it hasn't translated into sleeping success yet. He was doing well skipping his first wake-up for a while and going until 3am, but a few nights of family sickness set us back to a 11pm, 3am, 6am schedule. Dan was sick this weekend and while Harvey and I were sleeping on the mattress downstairs I admit to nursing him twice before the morning. No way was I walking through the cold house to go upstairs to the rocking chair.

So that's where we are now, with a morning and evening nursing and a toddler who'd like to get in two more feedings on the back end. I never had a clear plan for weaning, only that I would nurse him as long as we both wanted to. Well, I think the moment is rapidly approaching. I no longer want to. Not at 3am, anyways.