I Think I May Have Tucked My Dress Into My Stockings

My husband is, as they say, "on the market" this year. That is to say he's applying for "real jobs." (And that is my quote limit for the day.) He's applied all over, but there are a couple of places we would really, really like to go. I can't tell you where for fear of fucking up his chances, but they're cool places. Or we think they're cool places, anyway, and isn't that what really matters?

So one of the weird side effects of this is that I'm now getting hits through Xander's website and from people Googling him. While this makes perfect sense, it also makes me feel a little uncomfortable. Like I'm being examined, too. And what if I've tucked my dress into my stockings and now everyone can see my underwear? This could be really embarrassing. Which makes me want to say the following:

Hey, guys! Welcome! Xander is really great, and if you haven't met him you should make arrangements to do so. Yes, he's smart and he's published a bunch of papers and organized seminars and conferences and has a great teaching record, but he's also pleasant to be around. He's funny and kind and thoughtful and good at getting shit done. He's also really nice to have around at potentially awkward math functions, as he can make conversation with pretty much anyone and often does. Please try not to judge him based on the quality of his puns, which range from clever to really, really horrible. But more importantly, please don't judge him based on the rubbish you find on here. Xander is much cooler than this blog. Sadly, this is no Quomodocumque. Or xkcd. Oh, but how I wish I could be xkcd! But I do bake and brew beer, and I'll invite you over for such things if you hire my husband who, as I've mentioned, is awesome.

Whew. I feel better. Now that's out of the way, I can continue regaling you with tales of potty training and beer brewing and hairballs and whether or not I might be a hipster. Stay tuned...

You're Welcome

Bread and Ale

I started my first batch of beer yesterday. It's a blood orange ale. I was surprised to discover the process was pretty easy. It was mostly cooking. Here's my wort:


And then, I used this recipe and my spent grain to make this deliciousness:


It was a bizarrely productive couple of days that also involved sewing a dress from re-purposed fabrics and rigging a trapeze on my back porch. I feel sort of medieval. But in a good way. Bread, beer, new clothes, and old-school circus apparatus do wonders for my soul.

This Week...

I start learning how to do this:



I'm crazy excited. It turns out I'm not too old to join the circus after all!

Burnout

It happened. I have the stay-at-home-mother burnout. My kids are totally amazing and as well-behaved as toddlers could possibly be. It's not their fault. It's just that I get tired of doing and saying the same things every single day. I miss my old job. At least that came with a little more variety. And there were nice benefits like, you know, a paycheck and the occasional mid-day outing to acquire falafel sandwiches. A good falafel sandwich goes a long way.

How does one cure burnout? I mean, the obvious answers are "nanny" or "daycare." But let's just say the mother in question has no money with which to pay such people. Then what?

Maybe the question I should be asking is exactly how long I can stretch out nap time before the Fabertids stage a coup?

Cloth Diapers to Trainers: Part III

Before we started the official potty training push, Dinka was asking for the toilet regularly on his own. When we started training, he stopped asking so much, probably because we were constantly hounding him with obnoxious questions like, "Do you need the potty? Do you have pee feeling?" Pee feeling. Yeah. We're ridiculous like that. So we would put him on the toilet or his little potty about every thirty minutes. Then we moved up to an hour. After about a week, we started to get a better handle on when he'd need to go. He wouldn't necessarily stop what he was doing to ask, but if you asked him if he needed to go and he did, he would often run to his potty. Sometimes I would be so sure he needed to go and insist that he sit on the toilet, but I was almost always wrong. If he needed to go, he'd acknowledge it. If he didn't, he didn't. I started trusting him more and letting him off the hook when he didn't seem interested. Since he had started this whole thing by asking for the toilet on a regular basis, we knew he could and would, eventually, start asking for the toilet again on his own. Sure enough, after about ten days, he started asking for the toilet again. Most of the time. Unless he was doing something REALLY important like playing with blocks or riding his rocking horse. I mean, some things are just worth wet pants, ya know?

One difficulty regarding potty training at this age has been in the communication area. Dinka signs "potty," and sometimes says, "Pah," when he needs to go. And he also signs "potty" when someone says "potty." Or when someone else in the family is using the toilet. Or when he sees the potty and simply wants to comment on its existence. So we're working on getting him to be more specific about when he actually needs the toilet versus when he just wants to talk about the toilet. This is one of those things that is mostly just going to get better with time.

Even with all the success, he still can't stay dry through a three-hour-nap or overnight, so we use diapers then. Sometimes he'll stay dry when we're out, but sometimes not if we're out for a long time. This was the primary reason I wanted better training pants. Something absorbent and waterproof that could be pulled up and down easily. Something that if he had a major pee fest while we were out, it wouldn't cause a potentially upsetting clothes-changing scene in a restaurant or park. We want this experience to be positive for him, and he's too young to bear much responsibility for accidents at this point. I experimented with sewing extra padding into Gerber training pants, but it weighed them down in such a funny way that they didn't fit quite right. I found these online, but to buy enough for twins would cost more than we can spend, so I decided to make my own trainers. I looked at a bunch of patterns and decided I liked the Tinkle Time Trainer, the one I mentioned before, best. (Horrible name, decent pattern.) The pattern is really for perfectionist sewists who have plenty of time on their hands. I am not a perfectionist, nor do I have a lot of time, so after making one pair their way, I struck out on my own and did it my way. Theirs is better quality. Mine is faster. I figure the kid is just going to piss all over my handiwork anyway, so why spend a lot of time on this? They work great, though. They're absorbent, mostly waterproof, and because they were made with re-purposed fabrics from around the house, they were free. And they look pretty damn cute with a pair of leg warmers.




One of the best parts of toilet training, aside from the enormous reduction in diaper laundry, is that Dinka is so proud of himself. If we're talking about the people we know who use the toilet (Mama, Daddy, Aunt So-and-So, etc.), Dinka proudly pats his chest and nods his head to say, "And Dinka! Dinka uses the potty!" When he's on the toilet and starts to pee, he grins and squeals and points downward. I think it makes him feel really good about himself, even though he's a little too young to grasp the concept of growing up or being a "big boy." Dinke is also really supportive and will throw both hands in the air and shout, "Yay!" every time her brother succeeds in his bathroom endeavors. It's wonderful, really. And a lot of work. We're about 90 percent there, I'd say, but I suspect this last 10 percent is going to take some time.

Moreover, you know Sistergirl wasn't going to let her brother get all the attention for long. She only gave him a couple weeks' head start before jumping on this bandwagon. Which means that much to my dismay, even though we tried really hard to only train one at a time, we are now potty training twins. So if you need us this weekend, you'll most likely find us in the bathroom. This is one of those times when having twins is really and truly twice the work.

Real (Scientific) Conversations

Alana: I have trouble understanding phrases like "300,000 light-years long."

Xander: "Huge as fuck" is a synonym.

More Snow?

When we were packing for our move to Georgia, I put my snow boots, my down coat, and most of my sweaters in a big box that I labeled "moth food." I'm not sure where that box is, but this is what the last couple of days have looked like around here:

Love/Hate

I hate it when my kids scream my name, "MAAAAAHHHH MAAAAAAHHHHH!" But I love that I can say to them, "Guys, that's not very nice. Say it nicely," and they reply in sweet, soft little voices, "Mum mum." Like most toddler habits, I'm sure this one will be forgotten by next week. I'm kind of going to miss it.

Cloth Diapers to Trainers: Part II

In our last installment, I was talking about Dinka's decision to start using the toilet. He started asking for and using the toilet back in mid-December, and we just sort of halfheartedly went with it for a couple of weeks before we made an effort to really potty train him. We'd put him on the toilet when he asked, but only if it was convenient for us. When we officially started potty training, we decided to copy a good friend of ours and let him go pantsless for a few days. We did this for about four days, putting him back in a diaper or training pants for naptime, dinner, and bedtime. We put him on the toilet about every half hour at first and then every hour on the following days. The first day he had about half a dozen accidents. The second, the third, and fourth days he had only one each day, and every time it was while he was wearing training pants.

Let us pause to reflect on how opinionated people are about toilet training. Ohmifuckinggod but people obsess over this stuff. There are the people who think anyone who potty trains past the age of six months is a careless idiot, and then there are the people who think potty training before the age of three years is inhumane and akin to child abuse. We decided if anyone gets snarky, we're going to tell them we alternated between electroshock and sticking him with pins and that it all worked beautifully. I think all this nonsense comes from that weird parent competitiveness thing. For whatever reason, someone who does things differently is seen as a challenge. Whatever, dude. I say do what you want to do. If you want to put it off as long as possible, do it. If you want to go the elimination communication route with your three-month-old, do it. It's all a matter of preference, and like most parenting choices, you can find "research" to back up whatever your position is. There's no right way, and anyone who insists that there is is probably (at least kind of) an asshole.

Back to the story. So the no-pants thing went great. I highly recommend it, because it not only gives the kid immediate feedback about what's going on down there, but it also helps the parent become more aware of the kid's cues. The problem for me came when it was time to stop the pants-free stuff. He was clearly getting the hang of the toilet business, so what next? Training pants? Would he understand the difference between training pants and a diaper? (The answer is no, he did not.) The training pants are pretty thin and don't hold much more than a little dribble, which is fine for at home but what about when we want to go out? Leaving him in diapers was a less-than-ideal solution because they're hard to get off quickly, and I wanted something cloth that could be pulled up and down while still containing a sizable accident. It would be foolish not to think Dinka's going to pee his pants about a million times over the next several months. I mean, maybe he won't, but it could take awhile.

So what to do? You wanna know, don't you? Aren't you just dying of curiosity? Okay, well, can you pretend to be dying of curiosity so I can keep believing you like me? (Please like me.) Right now I have to go release the twins from playtime, but here's a teaser.

Like Pretty Much Everyone Else...

I'm obsessed with Andy Samberg. I wish he could be my cool little brother that I got to hang out with at the holidays. Me and him and my other brothers could sneak off to the other room with a secret bottle of whiskey and tell inappropriate jokes. It would be so awesome.

The end.

Sam: He's a Dog, He's a Dog, He's a Dog

We have a house guest. His name is Sam, and he's a seven-year-old basset hound. He has to be the most sheepish, non-aggressive, laid back dog ever. I'm pretty sure the only thought in his head as he trots around our house on those short stubby legs is, "Ima dog Ima dog Ima dog." Followed occasionally by, "You think she'll pet me? I hope she pets me. If it's not too much trouble, maybe she'll pet me." His former owners are moving overseas to study and will be living in a dorm, and the people who were supposed to adopt Sam backed out at the last minute. Anyway, for a quite long list of reasons, we cannot keep him permanently. Some dear friends of mine are going to foster him until we can find a permanent home. Soooo...if you live pretty much anywhere in the Southeast or mid-Atlantic and might have room in your house and heart for a sweet, sweet dog, please email me. We deliver.

Cloth Diapers to Trainers: Part I

I'd written a post awhile back about cloth diapering. For those of you who are new here, I'm not one of those women who thinks everyone should cloth diaper and that people who don't hate the earth. I mean, some people who don't cloth diaper really do hate the earth, but there are other indicators present besides the use of disposable diapers. We chose cloth mainly because we're not loaded and needed to save money, and the whole thing about them being better for the environment was the secondary factor. We live in a place with plenty of water (for the moment), so cloth seemed like a good choice. Anyway, even though I don't care what diapers other people use, I do think there's an irrational fear of cloth diapering, and my view is that it's not nearly as hard as people think it is. It's especially not hard if you're not obsessive about the details. (Traveling? Use disposable. Forget to do the wash? Use disposable. Just gave birth or adopted and not ready to get started just yet? Use disposable. You've always got a back-up plan.) And gods but do cloth diapers smell better than disposables! I don't know what it is about disposables, but damn! Those things smell horrible. Moving on...

So a few weeks ago in the midst of the holiday craziness, Dinka decided it was high time he got familiar with the toilet. Because Christmastime must have just struck him as the best time to learn something new, what with all the running around and visiting strange houses and it being cold outside. We were at my dad's house getting the kids ready for bed, and Dinka asked for the toilet. Now, we'd told him what the toilet was for, and because we travel regularly they had been in the bathroom with us frequently for months, and they each have little plastic potties at home, but we hadn't exactly taught them how to use them or anything. For one thing it just seemed to make more sense to wait until the weather did not require more than one layer of clothing. But somehow Dinka had put all the pieces together, and I'll be damned if he didn't pee immediately after being placed on the toilet. No adapter or anything. Just a big scary porcelain potty. We were shocked and, I admit, elated.

It just occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't be writing about potty training on the Internet. Hmmm.

We figured it might be a one-time thing, but then he used it again the next day and the next and the next with increasing frequency. One day he used the toilet all day. And this whole time we were snapping and unsnapping diaper covers as quickly as possible. After a little over a week, we were like, "Um, I guess Dinka is ready to be potty trained now?" There was definitely a question mark at the end of that sentence. So what to do? How does one potty train a child who cannot yet dress himself or speak more than one word at a time? In fact, he can't even say "potty." He signs it. I went looking for information, but there's not much out there that applies to kids his age. Everyone I know either potty trained their children as infants or at the age of two or more. But 18 months? I know no one. Which is why I'm going to write about potty training even if it might be a little embarrassing to my future teenagers. Because dammit, we cannot be the only ones out there with an 18-month-old who decided to start using the toilet in the dead of winter.

More to come. Stay tuned.

Happy New Year!

Dinka wishes all of you a happy 2011 from the comfort of his new underwear.* That's right. Underwear.



*Wow. I can't believe I just put a picture of my kid in his underwear on the Internet. But c'mon. He's cute, right? Resolution: Stop embarrassing my children in public. Yeah, right.