Christmas dislocations and thereafter
Sometimes, changes in a growing child happen in such small increments you hardly notice them. Sometimes, a change is as stark as black and white. And sometimes, along the evolving pathway, you note a benchmark against which a change becomes noticeable, whether gradual or not.
The Christmas holiday marked a number of milestones, some we hope we can move past and some that we will cherish. It jolted our London routine, and now, back in London, we're still living in the aftermath.
It's natural and common that we prefer the happy memories. So when someone shows a camera to snap a photo, we all smile and pretend like we're really happy, regardless of how happy we really are at that moment. Social media is now infamous as a tool for us all to present only the happiest aspects of our lives, not to mention spin them so it all seems better than average. As I write this, I can't say that every day of parenting of late has been one of unrelenting smiles. Even this blog has tended to focus on the best parts of parenting (European museums with our well-behaved, cosmopolitan toddler!), but remembering the emotional and dramatic days in these several weeks after Christmas will provide a reality check.
It's the Fucking Cedar Rapids Catalina Christmas Wine Mixer
The Christmas adventure was bigger than many of our other trips. We traveled to Iowa for three weeks. This was our first intercontinental flight since the two year milestone, after which kids must have their own seats on the plane (read: parents must buy them a ticket, although the approximately 10% discount to the adult price is... I don't expect much from airlines).
So far so good. The plane's entertainment system had one extended Thomas the Tank Engine episode. On the tablet, we had downloaded a number of other videos starring buses, trucks, fish, and dinosaurs (not always appearing in the same videos) as backups, but he wanted that one Thomas video over and over and over. We were so fancy, flying premium economy on BA. Included in the premium economy perks is an arm rest that apparently cannot be moved, so nobody can lie across multiple seats -- it's like being in an urban bus station (although I've still managed to sleep there). Bob had trouble sleeping because he could never get comfortable. So we arrived in Iowa tired. (However, while he didn't sleep, his enthrallment with Thomas was deep enough that he was easy to manage on the flight -- will we kiss good bye those days of the crazed salmon advocating for anarchy against airlines' arbitrary rules?)
Sleep deprivation is often found near the roots of the less happy days. When kids are tired, they are quicker to anger, as are parents and other adults. The early days in Iowa were reminiscent of our early days in DC during last summer: even while all his relatives want to play with him and talk to him, he's just a bit ornery. He wanted to take very long naps during the day and didn't want to go to sleep at night. For the first few nights, I resorted to a stalwart trick of mine: he always goes to sleep if I let him sleep on top of me; I guess it's just more comfortable to be held. During these first few days, he didn't seem much interested in playing with his cousin Hendrik. He just wanted to watch TV. Nothing was very much fun to him at all. This was annoying, but he grew out of it. Bobby's bad mood was jarring because he'd been such a fun boy in London, outside of his Irish meltdowns (again, we see travelling-induced tiredness infecting at the root).
And before too long, he was having the most fun ever with his older cousin. By the time the holiday itself rolled around, they were enjoying throwing their matching Elmo dolls in the air and bouncing in Hendik's inflatable bounce house. Bob continued his fascination with Christmas trees and was often excited to see the Christmas tree in Nainai's living room as well as the pine trees outside, all which received the exclamation, with a point of the finger, "Krisch-mussh-tee!"
One jolt from London to Cedar Rapids is the change in vehicles we can observe. For us, and our vehicle-obsessed little one, London is a city crisscrossed by trains above and below ground and many big red buses. We thought Bobby may be disappointed that his gugu wouldn't bring to Iowa her famous Mini-Cooper (or "gugu car!" as he shouts whenever he sees a Mini on the streets of London). What we didn't expect was that Bobby would name his nainai's black Chevrolet Equinox as the "Nainai Taxi." It seems so obvious now that it does look like those London black cabs. Every day he wanted to ride in the Nainai Taxi. He also enjoyed all of the big trucks heading through Cedar Rapids to the various factories around town -- we don't see so many big trucks in London. From the backseat of the car, we repeatedly heard Bob imploring, "Baba, watch up! Car coming!" Little guy knows from walking the streets of Islington to be careful of oncoming cars.
We passed a number of development milestones while in Cedar Rapids -- or at least we noticed new milestones reached, with the Christmas holiday as our timing benchmark. While the boy had peed and pooped in the toilet before (sometimes after much waiting and cajoling), in Iowa he was peeing in the toilet every night. He got his last baby vaccines in Cedar Rapids. Filling out the two-year-old check-up forms for the doctor, we noted that he was exceeding all milestones: he was stacking blocks up to seven high, he was referring to himself in the first person. He made his first trip to the farm, even if he was whiny and wouldn't walk through the tall grass. He went to Cedar Memorial, where in the Linge family room there was a -- hooray! -- train!
At Foxwood, we ate a lot of cookies and other assorted hearty and heavy Midwestern winter classics. Before we all arrived in Iowa, Gugu was making plans for every single night. One night, we were instructed: "everyone in the family has to make two creative Christmas cookie recipes." Yes, ma'am. In any event, we ended up with a lot of cookies. The boy charmingly called all of the cookies chaw-chahk kehk (chocolate cake). Eventually, we had to throw away the unlucky few cookies that didn't get eaten because it was really cookie overload. Bobby, Hendrik, and most of their parents had a classic American pancake and burrito breakfast at Lucky's on 16th -- before going back to Hendrik's and jumping more in the bounce house (as we did most days after Christmas). Nainai spent New Year's Eve with the boy while Mum and Baba ate at Cedar Rapids' -- probably first and only -- tasting menu at Cobble Hill.
Dislocations
The flight back to London was similar to the flight to the US: not much sleep but Thomas on repeat. Back home to London and struggling with jet lag again, I slept a few nights in the big bed with the boy. While he eventually got back on schedule, he began refusing to sleep in his crib and would only sleep in the big boy bed. Screaming in protest, we even put him in his crib, and like a cat he nimbly slinked over the crib wall. The crib now useless in its jailing function, we had no choice but to grant his wish to sleep in the big boy bed. We'd be happy to do that, except once in bed, he rarely wanted to stay there. And now in March we're still dealing with that. How lucky we used to be where our boy would sleep until 8:30 (making Baba late for work every day, but Baba didn't mind); now he is up and out of bed between 5:30 and 6:45 every morning. He hates naps and will cry and scream and throw a tantrum every day he's home for a nap (but apparently sleeps at nursery without much complaint).
The first month back in London saw illness visited upon the poor boy. The boy's chicken pox vaccination gave him a few pox and a fever. We took him to the local NHS clinic on a Saturday morning, where we walked right in, having made an appointment an hour earlier, and then walked out without paying, as is the custom in the UK. Three weeks later, he threw up at nursery. Then at home he threw up on his Baba. We spent that weekend under the blankets on the couch watching Cars.
During January, we made progress on the potty training. For a few weeks, almost every time he needed the bathroom (while at home at least), he used the toilet. I noticed him making compound sentences, such as "Yesterday I go pee pee, and today I take underground train."
But by February, it had all just became too much. He just decided he didn't want anything that we wanted. He said no toilet (toy-deht, as he says), only diapers. Time to go to bed -- NO BED! Time to take a bath -- NO BATH! And then I have to bathe him as he thrashes in the tub like a rabid salmon. Time to get dressed -- NO GET DRESSED! And he runs away and hides under the table and after begging him we eventually relent to forcing him to get dressed while he thrashes in protest like a, well, doomed and rabid salmon. We take him to the park and he just whines and wants to be carried; we could barely get him to go down the slide. He went almost a week without eating his dinner. He never wants to speak in Chinese. He screams because we won't give him cake the moment he decides he wants it, even though he had moments earlier refused to eat his dinner.
Reciting this now, it sounds almost funny, but in the moment it's not. It makes you feel terrible. You wonder why he hates you so much, and whether you're doing it right. Sometimes he is so persistently whiny and unhappy; this is not the child we're trying to raise. Hopefully he grows out of it, and we can resume running through the park and laughing.
Then sometimes there are glimmers of the good times you hoped parenting would be. Bob and I went to the Science Museum on Sunday. He was running around excited to see the cars, tractors, trains, and rockets. I told him I'd take him to see the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. He didn't complain when the lines ended up being insanely long, and we didn't go in. We ate his favorite pastel de nata (Portuguese custard tarts) and had ramen for lunch (where he made quite the mess trying to eat with chopsticks). But then we came home for nap time. And he refused to nap. He screamed. He cried. He was in bed, then out of bed; I forced him back to bed, then he was out again, then I begged him to stay in, and then repeat all steps, out of order, like a broken record playing a terrible album. For one and half hours. Eventually I gave up. As he often does after a big temper tantrum, he meekly came to me, hugged me, and said very sincerely "I'm shorry." By dinner time he was delirious with tiredness, saying he wanted that, and then that, and then that, unable to concentrate on anything. We put him to bed at 6:30 with no dinner -- he tried to cry in protest but was too tired -- he slept until 6:30 the next day. Just a few months ago it wasn't even a special occasion for him to sleep 12 hours like that.
When you start off with parenting, you think that you're going to focus on just a few independent variables, and focusing on those will ensure you all have a happy family experience. But you're horribly conceited to think that will achieve what you want it to. Humans and society are too complex. In reality, we're all clinging to life just barely, from breath to breath, every day. All the world is an infinite, looping system of variables that are dependent on independent variables that are dependent variables of other independent variables that are dependent on other independent variables until they have all turned back on each other and then back again. Like Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park: it's chaos. We're all just grabbing on to the invisible currents like those turtles in Finding Nemo and managing what we can at the margins the best we can and just hoping on the balance that we're good.
We'll just keep trying to manage the independent variables of parenting that we think we can, hold our breath, try to stay positive (like those turtles), and hope for the best. We read parenting books and online articles written by doctors (babycentre.co.uk, mayoclinic.org as sources). We have learned that kids want to feel in control. Instead of telling Bobby it's time to get dressed, we let him pick out his own clothes (if we can corral him into the bedroom) or give him a few options of potential outfits. You can find all sorts of ways to turn tasks into choices. This works sometimes. Other times you're just exhausted, so you yell, which also doesn't work. We always try to lead by example (which of course breaks down regularly) and lavish praise on him for good behaviors like eating his dinner and getting dressed.
Sometimes it seems harder to raise kids so far from family, no matter the digital technologies we use to keep in touch for literally every waking moment (i.e., texting sisters, mothers, and cousins until we pass out). Family is where our values come from. These values form the system of morals that we all have. More exposure to the wider family social network must be good for children, little moral sponges they are. Plus, relatives provide free childcare, and sometimes parents need a break (and maybe absence gives you a chance to consider and appreciate). Mum and Baba don't go to solo tasting menu restaurants in London unless relatives visit and watch the little boy.
But, again, with the conceited pseudo-science theories by which we try to manage the human experience. Sometimes it all seems so bad, but other times it is also so good. Often these emotions are felt within the same hour. How boring would life be without kids? Do we not enjoy challenges? For me, more family is always better.
The Christmas holiday marked a number of milestones, some we hope we can move past and some that we will cherish. It jolted our London routine, and now, back in London, we're still living in the aftermath.
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| Thank you, Santa, for this bounce house (and for a fun cousin). Flopping face first into the new year like... |
It's natural and common that we prefer the happy memories. So when someone shows a camera to snap a photo, we all smile and pretend like we're really happy, regardless of how happy we really are at that moment. Social media is now infamous as a tool for us all to present only the happiest aspects of our lives, not to mention spin them so it all seems better than average. As I write this, I can't say that every day of parenting of late has been one of unrelenting smiles. Even this blog has tended to focus on the best parts of parenting (European museums with our well-behaved, cosmopolitan toddler!), but remembering the emotional and dramatic days in these several weeks after Christmas will provide a reality check.
It's the Fucking Cedar Rapids Catalina Christmas Wine Mixer
The Christmas adventure was bigger than many of our other trips. We traveled to Iowa for three weeks. This was our first intercontinental flight since the two year milestone, after which kids must have their own seats on the plane (read: parents must buy them a ticket, although the approximately 10% discount to the adult price is... I don't expect much from airlines).
So far so good. The plane's entertainment system had one extended Thomas the Tank Engine episode. On the tablet, we had downloaded a number of other videos starring buses, trucks, fish, and dinosaurs (not always appearing in the same videos) as backups, but he wanted that one Thomas video over and over and over. We were so fancy, flying premium economy on BA. Included in the premium economy perks is an arm rest that apparently cannot be moved, so nobody can lie across multiple seats -- it's like being in an urban bus station (although I've still managed to sleep there). Bob had trouble sleeping because he could never get comfortable. So we arrived in Iowa tired. (However, while he didn't sleep, his enthrallment with Thomas was deep enough that he was easy to manage on the flight -- will we kiss good bye those days of the crazed salmon advocating for anarchy against airlines' arbitrary rules?)
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| This really must have been a good episode of Thomas. It's the one where the engine with the Christmas trees falls into the ice and needs to be saved by the other engines. |
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| As comfortable as it gets when trying to sleep in BA's premium economy. Next time, we're going by private jet. |
Sleep deprivation is often found near the roots of the less happy days. When kids are tired, they are quicker to anger, as are parents and other adults. The early days in Iowa were reminiscent of our early days in DC during last summer: even while all his relatives want to play with him and talk to him, he's just a bit ornery. He wanted to take very long naps during the day and didn't want to go to sleep at night. For the first few nights, I resorted to a stalwart trick of mine: he always goes to sleep if I let him sleep on top of me; I guess it's just more comfortable to be held. During these first few days, he didn't seem much interested in playing with his cousin Hendrik. He just wanted to watch TV. Nothing was very much fun to him at all. This was annoying, but he grew out of it. Bobby's bad mood was jarring because he'd been such a fun boy in London, outside of his Irish meltdowns (again, we see travelling-induced tiredness infecting at the root).
And before too long, he was having the most fun ever with his older cousin. By the time the holiday itself rolled around, they were enjoying throwing their matching Elmo dolls in the air and bouncing in Hendik's inflatable bounce house. Bob continued his fascination with Christmas trees and was often excited to see the Christmas tree in Nainai's living room as well as the pine trees outside, all which received the exclamation, with a point of the finger, "Krisch-mussh-tee!"
One jolt from London to Cedar Rapids is the change in vehicles we can observe. For us, and our vehicle-obsessed little one, London is a city crisscrossed by trains above and below ground and many big red buses. We thought Bobby may be disappointed that his gugu wouldn't bring to Iowa her famous Mini-Cooper (or "gugu car!" as he shouts whenever he sees a Mini on the streets of London). What we didn't expect was that Bobby would name his nainai's black Chevrolet Equinox as the "Nainai Taxi." It seems so obvious now that it does look like those London black cabs. Every day he wanted to ride in the Nainai Taxi. He also enjoyed all of the big trucks heading through Cedar Rapids to the various factories around town -- we don't see so many big trucks in London. From the backseat of the car, we repeatedly heard Bob imploring, "Baba, watch up! Car coming!" Little guy knows from walking the streets of Islington to be careful of oncoming cars.
We passed a number of development milestones while in Cedar Rapids -- or at least we noticed new milestones reached, with the Christmas holiday as our timing benchmark. While the boy had peed and pooped in the toilet before (sometimes after much waiting and cajoling), in Iowa he was peeing in the toilet every night. He got his last baby vaccines in Cedar Rapids. Filling out the two-year-old check-up forms for the doctor, we noted that he was exceeding all milestones: he was stacking blocks up to seven high, he was referring to himself in the first person. He made his first trip to the farm, even if he was whiny and wouldn't walk through the tall grass. He went to Cedar Memorial, where in the Linge family room there was a -- hooray! -- train!
At Foxwood, we ate a lot of cookies and other assorted hearty and heavy Midwestern winter classics. Before we all arrived in Iowa, Gugu was making plans for every single night. One night, we were instructed: "everyone in the family has to make two creative Christmas cookie recipes." Yes, ma'am. In any event, we ended up with a lot of cookies. The boy charmingly called all of the cookies chaw-chahk kehk (chocolate cake). Eventually, we had to throw away the unlucky few cookies that didn't get eaten because it was really cookie overload. Bobby, Hendrik, and most of their parents had a classic American pancake and burrito breakfast at Lucky's on 16th -- before going back to Hendrik's and jumping more in the bounce house (as we did most days after Christmas). Nainai spent New Year's Eve with the boy while Mum and Baba ate at Cedar Rapids' -- probably first and only -- tasting menu at Cobble Hill.
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| After getting his shots at Dr. Allen's office, we went to Hy-Vee and took advantage of the free children's cookie policy. This one was called chocolate cake by Bob. |
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| Nainai's grandchildren all at Foxwood together for the first time. |
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| The melee of Christmas morning. Foxwood Christmas is a full-on experience. It's the fucking Catalina Christmas Wine Mixer. Laura, I'm sorry your head got cut off. |
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| Seeing the big recycling trucks and tractors at the County Home Road Solid Waste Facility. Trips to Cedar Rapids often require us to remove refuse from Foxwood by the truckload. |
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| Nainai gave this big boy some construction worker kit so he can be a heavy equipment operator. But she didn't give him any pants! (Kidding, of course, no one has bought him more pants -- and matching tops -- than Nainai. Her grandchildren are nothing if not well-dressed.) |
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| All of the babies got Elmos for Christmas. You can see Elmo moving from potential energy with the leftmost baby and moving increasingly into kinetic energy with the rightmost baby. Elmo is about to launch! Watch out, Aunt Mawti! |
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| Aunt Mawti making good use of her Christmas present, instructing someone to get her a full glass. Above her head you can see a red Elmo streaking through the air. Bobby and Hendrik sent their little puppets airborne repeatedly. |
Dislocations
The flight back to London was similar to the flight to the US: not much sleep but Thomas on repeat. Back home to London and struggling with jet lag again, I slept a few nights in the big bed with the boy. While he eventually got back on schedule, he began refusing to sleep in his crib and would only sleep in the big boy bed. Screaming in protest, we even put him in his crib, and like a cat he nimbly slinked over the crib wall. The crib now useless in its jailing function, we had no choice but to grant his wish to sleep in the big boy bed. We'd be happy to do that, except once in bed, he rarely wanted to stay there. And now in March we're still dealing with that. How lucky we used to be where our boy would sleep until 8:30 (making Baba late for work every day, but Baba didn't mind); now he is up and out of bed between 5:30 and 6:45 every morning. He hates naps and will cry and scream and throw a tantrum every day he's home for a nap (but apparently sleeps at nursery without much complaint).
The first month back in London saw illness visited upon the poor boy. The boy's chicken pox vaccination gave him a few pox and a fever. We took him to the local NHS clinic on a Saturday morning, where we walked right in, having made an appointment an hour earlier, and then walked out without paying, as is the custom in the UK. Three weeks later, he threw up at nursery. Then at home he threw up on his Baba. We spent that weekend under the blankets on the couch watching Cars.
During January, we made progress on the potty training. For a few weeks, almost every time he needed the bathroom (while at home at least), he used the toilet. I noticed him making compound sentences, such as "Yesterday I go pee pee, and today I take underground train."
But by February, it had all just became too much. He just decided he didn't want anything that we wanted. He said no toilet (toy-deht, as he says), only diapers. Time to go to bed -- NO BED! Time to take a bath -- NO BATH! And then I have to bathe him as he thrashes in the tub like a rabid salmon. Time to get dressed -- NO GET DRESSED! And he runs away and hides under the table and after begging him we eventually relent to forcing him to get dressed while he thrashes in protest like a, well, doomed and rabid salmon. We take him to the park and he just whines and wants to be carried; we could barely get him to go down the slide. He went almost a week without eating his dinner. He never wants to speak in Chinese. He screams because we won't give him cake the moment he decides he wants it, even though he had moments earlier refused to eat his dinner.
Reciting this now, it sounds almost funny, but in the moment it's not. It makes you feel terrible. You wonder why he hates you so much, and whether you're doing it right. Sometimes he is so persistently whiny and unhappy; this is not the child we're trying to raise. Hopefully he grows out of it, and we can resume running through the park and laughing.
Then sometimes there are glimmers of the good times you hoped parenting would be. Bob and I went to the Science Museum on Sunday. He was running around excited to see the cars, tractors, trains, and rockets. I told him I'd take him to see the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. He didn't complain when the lines ended up being insanely long, and we didn't go in. We ate his favorite pastel de nata (Portuguese custard tarts) and had ramen for lunch (where he made quite the mess trying to eat with chopsticks). But then we came home for nap time. And he refused to nap. He screamed. He cried. He was in bed, then out of bed; I forced him back to bed, then he was out again, then I begged him to stay in, and then repeat all steps, out of order, like a broken record playing a terrible album. For one and half hours. Eventually I gave up. As he often does after a big temper tantrum, he meekly came to me, hugged me, and said very sincerely "I'm shorry." By dinner time he was delirious with tiredness, saying he wanted that, and then that, and then that, unable to concentrate on anything. We put him to bed at 6:30 with no dinner -- he tried to cry in protest but was too tired -- he slept until 6:30 the next day. Just a few months ago it wasn't even a special occasion for him to sleep 12 hours like that.
When you start off with parenting, you think that you're going to focus on just a few independent variables, and focusing on those will ensure you all have a happy family experience. But you're horribly conceited to think that will achieve what you want it to. Humans and society are too complex. In reality, we're all clinging to life just barely, from breath to breath, every day. All the world is an infinite, looping system of variables that are dependent on independent variables that are dependent variables of other independent variables that are dependent on other independent variables until they have all turned back on each other and then back again. Like Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park: it's chaos. We're all just grabbing on to the invisible currents like those turtles in Finding Nemo and managing what we can at the margins the best we can and just hoping on the balance that we're good.
We'll just keep trying to manage the independent variables of parenting that we think we can, hold our breath, try to stay positive (like those turtles), and hope for the best. We read parenting books and online articles written by doctors (babycentre.co.uk, mayoclinic.org as sources). We have learned that kids want to feel in control. Instead of telling Bobby it's time to get dressed, we let him pick out his own clothes (if we can corral him into the bedroom) or give him a few options of potential outfits. You can find all sorts of ways to turn tasks into choices. This works sometimes. Other times you're just exhausted, so you yell, which also doesn't work. We always try to lead by example (which of course breaks down regularly) and lavish praise on him for good behaviors like eating his dinner and getting dressed.
Sometimes it seems harder to raise kids so far from family, no matter the digital technologies we use to keep in touch for literally every waking moment (i.e., texting sisters, mothers, and cousins until we pass out). Family is where our values come from. These values form the system of morals that we all have. More exposure to the wider family social network must be good for children, little moral sponges they are. Plus, relatives provide free childcare, and sometimes parents need a break (and maybe absence gives you a chance to consider and appreciate). Mum and Baba don't go to solo tasting menu restaurants in London unless relatives visit and watch the little boy.
But, again, with the conceited pseudo-science theories by which we try to manage the human experience. Sometimes it all seems so bad, but other times it is also so good. Often these emotions are felt within the same hour. How boring would life be without kids? Do we not enjoy challenges? For me, more family is always better.
 |
| He sure looks happy in the big boy bed during one of his first nights sleeping on his own. Minutes later, after the light had been turned off, he would have exited the bed to come find Mum and Baba. Repeat 1,000 times (even at 2 and 4 in the morning). |
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| Recovering from all the vomiting. |
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| Foxwood Christmas memories to cherish |
Comments
Nainai would like to take exception with the credit given to child rearing books & articles read by Bob's parents. Is Nainai chopped liver? How about tossing a bone to the early childhood expert who gladly shares all her knowledge with you? Hmmmm???
Niki