Other than cleaning out the front garden, I have not really looked at my land yet. I’m just not in the gardening mood right now, probably because I feel like I am coping, but just, with the house right now and the idea that mowing is going to be added on feels gross. I should be glad to garden, as unlike the mower with its blades, it is relatively Noah-friendly (except for our deck which is a whole other rant). But I’m just not there.
However in the *other* elements of spring I feel very glad the good weather arrived the last few days, and have really been soaking it up.
Yesterday Carl ended up having to work from about 11:30 am on, after working ’til 3 am the night before, and this made me just a tad grumpy so after Noah’s nap (more on sleep in a minute) I put Noah in the car and drove to my (using the singular pronoun loosely here) old neighbourhood, the one explored on a bike with training wheels and then without and then a 5 speed and then a 10!!! speed. The one where I hid pennies in cracks and tree stumps and then went back to see if they were there. YOU know the equivalent neighbourhood(s) in your youth. I am fortunate in that mine is actually only about 20 min away.
And Noah and I played in my junior kindergarten playground (all spiff and new, of course) and had a blast. There were two open houses on that street, too. The first was a two-bedroom tiny, tiny semi with no parking. List: $329,000. The second, also a semi, was actually a house Carl and I had looked at when we were looking in March 2005 and at that time it was, if I remember right, listed at $289,000 and had knob-and-tube wiring, a horrendous basement, no kitchen really, a pink and black tile bathroom (not in a charming way) and was a small but decent 3-bdrm, if by decent you mean you can get at least a twin bed in the third bedroom. Anyways, whoever bought it then replaced the wiring, painted the basement, and put in a kitchen (but left the bathroom!) and it’s now listed at $389,000. All of a sudden my home started to look palatial in comparison.
Of course I also walked around the corner and got some wonderful organic bread and a Dufflet’s mini-carrot cake, so, you know. There are reasons for those prices, which are, by that neighbourhood’s standards, low.
Noah loved going through houses so we may have a new, if brief hobby. And it was really like a little fantasy, play with Noah in our old haunts, visit houses similar to ones we played in, get bread, go home.
Today I worked a bit & hung out online with lovely Idaho/Ell while Carl bravely dragged himself out of bed to watch the babe and then we went down to Bluffers Park along with oh, merely the eastern fifth of the city. We can actually walk down to the shore of the lake from our house, but it’s steep and I haven’t decided yet if I’m comfortable with the narrow path bit for Noah, hence the park. Noah adored the sand! The holes people had dug! The garbage he could find! And we came home sun-drenched and cheerfully worn out, had a meal thanks to the crockpot (and me) on the porch, and then had a terrible long bedtime.
Since we had sleep woes tonight though I can report without fear of the Blog Sleep Curse that actually sleep has been improving mightily around here up until tonight. I think I may have found a sleep book I can actually recommend, which is Sleepless in America. I did the little self-tests for Noah and discovered that by the quick and dirty standards there he is high-energy (no surprise there), medium-highly sensitive, mediumly intense, mediumly adaptable, very irregular in his body rhythms, and overall a sensitive sleeper. Okay that was not really news.
But I really liked a lot of the approaches in the book so far (I’m still getting deeper into it) and I decided to start even just this weekend with being more scheduled on meals and naps – I think we do pretty well on the predictability, but I have been sort of letting a domino effect happen so that if Noah gets up a little later, lunch is a little later, nap is a little later, etc.
So Fri, Sat, and Sun, I used the clock. Fri night he did better and Sat night he only got up once. (I figure a lot of this is him coming off the language explosion regression, but that’s one reason I wanted to try things now and not wait for the next regression). Tonight he wouldn’t go down but I think we overstimulated him a bit at the beach.
Anyways, my gut says that we may have found a few key things, and that’s before looking at nests and all that stuff. If so I will be a convert. And the book really reinforced to me why Noah’s particular temperment is not suited to CIO.
For the next 3 weeks I’m prioritizing naps/sleep over everything to see if we can’t get him to stay down to about one waking a night, though, ’cause he is so busy I just think HE needs it nevermind me.
Speaking of the language explosion, oh. my. god. Noah is kind of funny about new skills in that he cascades like he did with walking, but every day has been a cascade lately. Thursday afternoon he clued into the “uck” and “ock” sounds and started in on “t-(swallowed r)uck” and “lock” (“yock”) and “clock” and “duck.” Then he started in on anything with a k/hard c like ‘cracker’ and ‘cookie’ and whatever. Then he got going on “p” for some reason and Friday he was all “dumP t-uck” and “granPAPA” and “cuP.” Then Saturday he was into “R” (although he doesn’t really have it yet so it’s more like growling” so he was all “ti-rrrrrrrr” (tiger) and “rrrrrrorrrrr” and things like that. And today it was the hard g. (Glasses, tiger, gate, etc.) He literally picks a sound of the day and goes at it. It’s clear he knows what the words for things are, it’s just learning to spit them out on command. But it really is just so much fun to hear and watch.
And he’s such a chatterbox, but look at his mother. :)
