It’s either some introspective cosmic spiritual thing or a combination of sleep deprivation and eating several one week old race car fruit snacks in my dirty coat pocket that I write. Do you ever think of all the blog things that are going on and even if you did have the time or brain matter to write a post up, that you still want to wait till its the event(s) are all over before you post about it? Like, how the heck do I post about all this and even if I could find the words and then actually read my own words and then think…I just don’t want to relive it all. Can someone make an adult version of a fruit snack? Ya know, like a range of them based on what you need at the time….chamomile fruit snacks to help soothe up to Valium infused for those more aggressive days?
Moving along.
To recap all the milestones – we did the egg thing, we did the family Easter shots (kind of – self-timer is my kryptonite),
we saw grandparent set one
and two (along with an Easter egg hunt that looked nothing like the 1.99 Easter basket from my youth),
, and we live at Impression 5:
We’ve had a chronic problem over here…going on 29 months. Ive mentioned that Scrappy likes to jump in prior posts in a kind of light-hearted, “oh how funny, we have a little Mexican jumping bean”, or “Scrappy has a lot of energy”. Here is the real extent – also, please don’t write suggestions about this behavior…we’ve done it all including me climbing the house naked with a prayer rod in 15 degree weather with wind at 18 knots, facing due-north minus 12 degrees at 10:15pm and reciting the Gettysburg address. I blame grandparents, but let me just break down what he does.
Cute, isn’t he? And doesn’t he look rested and all productive?
We all do it innocently enough with infants. Stand them up on our laps and let them jump so they giggle and laugh. Grandpa Daane made click-clock horse sounds when he did it and Scrappy was hooked. Then Grandpa was sick and wanted to still give Scrappy the jumping experience and bought him a bouncy jungle gym thing – in which Scrappy would jump himself to sleep. So innocent and yet so effective. But since then, every night and all throughout the night, Scappy jumps in his crib to the decibel level of shaking the whole house and while doing this bizarre un-Zen-like sound that is best described as a garbage disposal on its last leg with a spoon in it . Hubby and I alternate evening jumping patrol so at least one of us can sleep, but its so loud and annoying that we never do.
But we all have our breaking point and we both reached it.
Hubby woke up one evening to the sounds of our china rattling and that all-too-familiar jump and removed something .
He tore off the front crib panel.
And he slept.
But we didn’t because we were so wierded out.
And because there is another monkey see.
We had to monkey do it again.
Breaking points can be good things and so is precious sleep. The transition of an open crib has been different but the adjustment is better than the house shaking and our neighbors wondering what bizarro alien-lab experiment is going on in our mothership.
When I designed Sailor Daane for Gangles McGee, I choose colors, design, etc, that I thought best reflected his personality. It took a few months. When beginning a pattern that reflected Scrappy, (also called Pinocle in these parts), I had ideas. I also gave other people the free association game and all unequivocably always said “jumping” first, “likes to wear hoods”, needs something loose-fitting, and blue. Here is what I came up with:
The stockinette and reverse-stockinette pattern repeats are meant to look like a stretched spring or coil, and of course there is his trademark gangsta hood with a coil-like trim:
The pattern is done and is in the test-knit phase. These are the ONLY two of 500 shots of him that are not blurry or him screaming “NO PITCHER”…they will do for now.
There is still jumping when he first goes to bed as he can still uses the back of the crib, but I think it’s his equivalent of a nice Pinot Grigio before bedtime, and I for one would never take that away from him.
