I Need a Shammich.

Doodle loves shammiches – like, more than most things in the world. Probably more than my cookies, which is really quite incredible, because he ADORES my cookies…

My cookies.

It’s really difficult to get him to accept any meal as an alternative when he has his mind set on a shammich. Jake is a dad more lenient than I am, and will often just make him a shammich whenever it’s requested. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, 2 minutes before night-night – it does not matter, Jake is happy to get in there and whip up Dad’s Special PB&J.

I have nothing specifically against shammiches. They’re super quick and easy, and they fill Doodle right up. I do, however, recognize that they don’t exactly provide Doodle with a varied diet and I don’t want to go through four loaves of bread a day – that just makes for really awkward grocery shopping…

Anyway, so I made us all a green smoothie this morning, and Doodle wanted “food breakfast” after he was done. That’s cool. “What do you want to eat, bud? Cereal? Eggs? Yogurt?”

“Nope. A shammich.”

“Dude, you can’t have a sandwich for breakfast.”

“But I want a shammich breakfast.”

“Maybe you can have a sandwich for lunch, but what do you want for breakfast?”

“I want lunch.”

Touché.  Ok – so I had to figure out how to stop this and give him something he’d actually eat.  I decided, well, I suppose a sandwich doesn’t necessarily need to involve bread, and behold, my latest and greatest invention…

Pancake shammich with peanut butter and bananas

Ok, so I’m sure pancake sandwiches have been around for a while. In fact, I’m fully aware that at the very least McDonald’s had it before me. But, at least Doodle got his shammich and I got him to eat breakfast food for breakfast…

So then, at 10:30 this morning, he stubbed his toe (or stepped on something, or the dog stepped on him, or somehow the end of the world was occurring on his foot) and he ran hobbled over to me to kiss it. Well, my kiss wasn’t enough so he ran hobbled over to Jake for some “Daddy Magic.” Apparently that wasn’t good enough either, because he continued sobbing for a few more minutes. That’s when it happened…

“Mommy, I need to rest.”

“Ok, go lay on the couch and rest.”

“No, I need to rest my bed.”

“Uh… Ok? Go upstairs and rest.” (Mind you, Doodle does NOT appreciate naptime, not even a little, and has NEVER initiated the naptime sequence.)

“I need you put blanket on me?”

Baffled, I followed him upstairs, turned on his nightlight and fan, covered him up, and closed his door. 3 hours before naptime. And he went to sleep. What in the world was that about???

So then, Doodle woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (his foot was “feeling much better, thanks”) and was all sorts of energetic. He’s a big fan of instruments and music…

Yep, that’s an elephant costume. Yep, he’s playing it like a French horn. No, he’s never actually played (or even seen in person) a French horn, but from what we can tell so far it is his very favorite instrument in the entire world.

Who Needs Mornings Anyway?

Ok – now don’t think me a child abuser or anything… But we typically keep a lock on Doodle’s door. It’s one of those plastic things that clips around the handle with the holes in the sides so big people with good dexterity can still squeeze through the holes and open it. Like, it’s on the inside of his door. Like, he can’t so much get out when he’s in…

Really though, I have a very valid reason! See, our rooms are upstairs, as is the bathroom, the spare room, and the coat closet. And in the middle of the doors is the smallest hallway in the world, directly followed by a half-a-staircase leading straight down to a life-sized Gumby, an overfilled bookshelf and a stand-up globe on a teeny-tiny landing, then a 180 turn to the whole rest of the staircase. To make this worse, there are zero, ZERO, outlets in the entire hallway/staircase/landing/Gumby area to plug in a light, and there are no windows either. Danger, Will Robinson, seriously.

And to make this even more worse – ok, I have a really hard time sleeping if I can hear absolutely anything at all that isn’t a constant sound. The dog storing, the neighbors playing their awful music, even my husband breathing. Not even snoring, just breathing! And it’s not like I can make him stop breathing so I can get some sleep, I wouldn’t so much have a husband when I woke up. So we keep a fan on through the night. And it’s not even that it’s that loud, but it’s really hard to hear much of anything with that thing on.

I mean, we can hear things, like when Doodle woke up in the middle of the night screaming BLOODY MURDER because he got the stitching from his blanket wrapped around his finger – purple finger, had a nice indentation for two days, seriously scary stuff! Alright, but anyway…

So, I’m absolutely terrified of a lot of things Doodle waking up in the middle of the night or even in the wee hours of the morning while it’s still dark – I can just imagine him being the little sneaky ninja punk that he is. His little door slowly creaking open, his little feet going over the squeaky floorboards without a sound, his little face glancing back at our open door, his little silent giggle as he realizes that we can’t hear him… But then, in my sneaky-ninja-punk-imagination, he tries to grab the hand rail but can’t see it, or he thinks he has another few inches to walk on the floor before the steps start and he loses his balance. Ok, sure, the life-sized Gumby (at least I assume he’s life-sized, who really knows how big Gumby is??) would provide a decent cushioned landing after thumping down those 6 or so steps…

But my mind keeps going, and I see my clumsy-sneaky-ninja-punk rolling off Gumby, into the bookshelf. The bookshelf then starts to topple over (as it’s crazy overfull, you see?!) and books and shelves start to fall on my discombobulated Doodle. He falls further over and into the stand-up globe. Then, in like Looney Tunes fashion or something, Doodle tries to run up on the top of the globe as it falls down the stairs. He ends upside-down at the bottom of the stairs, covered in bumps and bruises, with ripped up book pages and stuffing from Gumby falling all around him like snow. I know, my imagination doesn’t so much count on laws of physics or probability or anything… But anyway…

So there’s a lock on the inside of his door. And he’s always been so flippin’ cute about it when he wakes up – he’d just knock on the door with a sweet little “Hewwo? Hewwo-o?” until we’d get up and rescue him. (He’s actually able to open the door if he tries hard enough, he’s just REALLY GOOD about sticking to boundaries we’ve set for him and he leaves it alone.)

But, night before last – he’s been working on his two-year molars (I know, he’s almost three, leave me alone!) and he wasn’t sleeping very well AT ALL. Jake was up late (like 3 in the morning late) working on a final paper for one of his classes, so it was mainly up to me to get Doodle back to bed. Well, none of us really got to sleep until about 3, so we were pretty darn exhausted. So I wake up to a slight noise of, “Whoosh! Brrrr! Zhoom!” Jake looks at the alarm clock as I go to check on Doodle. He frantically looks at me, “What time is it?! The clock says 12:40!” Doodle sounds fine, so I don’t even open the door to check on him real quick. I check the digital heater box thingy, it says 11:40, but I can never be too sure about it since we don’t typically change it with daylight savings and it’s really difficult to decide whether it was spring forward or fall backward and was it right before that or after it and do I add an hour or take an hour away to figure out what time it is when I’ve just woken up. So I go downstairs and check the microwave and stove. 12:40.

I go back up, whooshes and zhooms are still going in Doodle’s room. I crack the door open, and Doodle has taken every article of clothing out of his dresser and made a huge pile of it. He is laying on said pile of clothing, fully dressed in a mismatched set of pajamas that I did not put him in the night before, and he’s got a pair of socks on his hands. He’s holding an old hat of his (we typically have all of his special baby clothes folded neatly in the bottom drawer of his dresser for safe-keeping – we should probably do something about that now…) and he’s playing with it as though it is a rocket or airplane of sorts. “Whoosh! Brrr! Zhoom!” At 12:40. In the afternoon. We just woke up. I have NO FLIPPIN’ IDEA HOW LONG HE’S BEEN AWAKE!

So Jake and I feel like awful parents, obviously. We’re neglecting our poor son, what would happen if he silently (yeah right!) hurt himself or needed something?! How will we ever work on nighttime potty training if we leave him locked in his room for hours after he wakes up?! We should be working on letters and numbers and crafts with him, not sleeping the day away as though we did not have a small person who depended on us for all of his upbringing. We’ve GOT to get that lock off the door and just be able to hear him if he were to get up. I’ve got to throw out my fears of him falling down the stairs, try to get some kind of nightlight set up in that hallway to where he can see if he does happen to get up in the middle of the night. We can do this, right?

I promptly forget to actually take the lock off the door as I get him dressed in something other than the inside-out and backwards pajama “set” that he’s gotten himself into and get him downstairs for some milk and brunch. We go through our day without a hitch (or a nap, because, you know, who flippin’ knows when he woke up and I don’t want to put him down for a nap an hour after we get up with him…) and I put him to bed at the end of the night. I don’t even think about the lock on the door when I put him to bed, but then Jake gets home, we hang out for a few, and we start heading to bed. We giggle again about our random sleep-in day, and I luckily remember at that point that I should probably take off the lock from the door as I go in to check on him.

I get in his room, notice that he’s laying sideways on his bed all wrapped up awkwardly in his blanket, and he’ll likely fall off his bed at some point if I leave him in this position, so I adjust him nicely, tell him I love him, re-tuck him in his bed, and proceed to take off the lock so I can close the door and he won’t be trapped in there when he wakes up. Only, a funny thing happened. The lock was not on his door.

I go and ask Jake, “Did you take the lock off his door earlier today?” “No, I haven’t touched it. Did you maybe take it off when you got him this afternoon?” “No, I can’t remember touching it since a few days ago when Ling and Hippie Mama came over to play and I took it off so they could play in there and not be locked in…”

That’s right, people… My son was NOT locked in his room, and he stayed IN HIS ROOM all morning, until 12:40, and likely would have stayed there for GOD ONLY KNOWS HOW LONG had we not heard him whooshing and zhooming his airplane-hat. UNTIL 12:40! In the afternoon! Fully able to leave his room and come wake us up whenever the eff he wanted to.

Now, ya’ll, don’t get all jealous-like. Last night we didn’t get to bed ’til about 2 as Jake was working on another final paper and getting a speech ready for some classes this morning. 7:45 in the morning Jude was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and opening that door, begging me to get up and get him milk and bananas and yogurt and a bagel and a “shandwich” and an apple and every other type of food he might want first thing in the morning. He’s so sweet, though. “Mommy, you make some coffee first?” Yes, I make some coffee first, I’m freakin’ tired.

Blooper Reel

Sometimes when we put Doodle down for the night, he doesn’t quite stay down.  Many nights we have to deal with incessant trips back upstairs to send him back to bed, to get his sleeping buddies back in their proper places, and to get his blanket back on him perfectly how he needs it for good dreams.  But every once in a while he figures out how to get to sleep on his own…  he just hasn’t mastered actually getting back in bed.

Birds-eye view. I could barely fit the camera through the door!

Yes, sometimes he just hangs out by the door waiting for us to come rescue him from the dreaded night-night until his little body gives in and he passes out wherever he was at that moment.

Yes, the door seems to be the best place to fall asleep.

While laying down right next to the door has been a recent favorite for him, we have found him in some other great positions.

Here he is seated at the changing table. Those things make for great shelves, by the way!

We often joke about whose turn it is to go “fix him” before we go to bed.

His left hand was actually stuck in between the side of the car and his mattress.

Makes me curious what goes on in his little head – how he’s positive that he doesn’t need to go to sleep, yet he gets in these relatively uncomfortable positions and stays in them long enough to actually fall asleep.

This was from a good three-week stretch of him falling asleep next to his closet door.

I’ve even gone up there to find him on the floor right next to his bed haphazardly tucked under his blankets, complete with pillow, buddies, and water, almost as though I had intentionally tucked him in there myself.

When he was little, we’d even join in on some of his awkward sleeping positions.  We are very much a sleep-loving house, and not much will keep us from trying to catch a few winks whenever and wherever we can.

Sleeping in his crib in the pediatrics ward, 7 weeks old, 10-day hospital stay.

Those nurses got such a kick out of seeing me in that crib every time they came in to check on him.   🙂

Not all sleep needs to be silly or awkward, though.  Sometimes we just need some soft sweet cuddles to slowly fall into a deep, comfy slumber.

Best nap ever, he was about a week old.

You Go To Bed Right Now! And You Have Good Dreams!

Doodle has been stuffy, coughing, had a fever for a few days. He apparently didn’t get the memo that Mommy’s doing all of this by herself right now, else he would’ve chosen before Jake’s school started for his cold, right? No matter, all we’re dealing with now is leftover stuffiness, and that’s totally tolerable, but he also seems to be trying to make up for having been miserable for those 2 or 3 days. He’s been an absolute punk lately. And after those first two nights of just Vicks, ibuprofin, saline drops and almost no sleep (for me, of course – Jake was sleeping soundly the whole time!), I threw in the towel and gave him some Zarbees.

Seriously amazing stuff! He slept! And if I layed him down anywhere around like 10 minutes after I gave it to him, I couldn’t even finish singing him our song before he crashed. And he stayed asleep, too. That’s heaven right there. I know we’ve been ultimately lucky in the sleep department for so much of his little life, but when you grow accustomed to a certain way, taking anything away from that is torture!

And it’s all natural with like honey and elderberries and crap, so it’s a lot easier to feel good about forcing him to sleep. But honestly, he needed sleep just as bad as I needed it, and just like magic he started feeling so much better the very next day!

But, the last 3 days (going on 4 now, he’s still effing crazy!) he’s just been a crazy wild little punk. I can’t get him to sit still! And he won’t nap, and he won’t go to bed, and he wakes up hours before he used to, and I don’t know what to do, and I’m ’bout ready to start pulling my hair out!

Seriously, from 8 until almost 10 last night, I’d stomp upstairs, lay down my best stern-mommy-voice, and put him back in bed. Not 10 minutes later I’d hear his little footsteps scurrying around up there, or I’d hear him knocking incessantly on the door, or I’d hear him talking to Slyfox about needing medicine on his chest, or I’d hear him spinning the wheels on his racecar bed… so I’d do it again. I’d plop his little body back in bed, put his buddies back in their proper night-night place, get his blanket back on him ever so perfectly, and I’d day sweet things in my mean voice.

Things like, “You get in bed and close your eyes so you can get some good rest!” or, “You better go to sleep so we can play tomorrow!” or, “Go to bed right now and have good dreams! I love you!”

So, I don’t hear him after the nearly-10-o’clock-night-night-reprimand, and I figure all is well. Jake comes home and we chat about our day, he eats some meatloaf muffins, and we head up to bed. I slowly open the door to check on Doodle, as I do, and there’s something blocking the door. With it cracked ever so slightly, I can barely see that his bed is empty, so I look down to see the obstacle in the way of the door. There’s Doodle cuddled up ever so sweetly right in front of the door. Seriously, I never heard him get back up – no idea how long my little guy was sleeping on the floor. Luckily I’m skinny, otherwise I’m not really sure how we would have managed getting in there, fixing his little predicament, and getting him tucked back into bed.

**Sigh** 🙂

So in an attempt to remember all of the wonderful reasons I chose this job, I’ll just share a few pictures from our last few days. I even had to get tricky with my camera to try taking *decent* pictures of the two of us playing as Jake is gone so much and thus unable to take cute pictures at my whim. 🙂

Mmm, cereal! Don't you just *love* his crazy-boy eating face?

Super fun tickles. 🙂 I'll have to see if I can get some video of his darling laugh.

Sick boy, all sortsa relaxed, watching practically non-stop cartoons.

Dinner with Mama. 🙂

Throwing my Doodle around. He's had *so* much energy since he's been feeling better.

Ok, yeah, I do love my job. Sleep, though, that’s important stuff too!