Gabe's been battling some writer's block when it comes to the blog, so I'm jumping in, since I am not as particular of a wordsmith. :-)Let me explain the title. Averaged out, life is very good these days. But the pendulum swings pretty damn far into despair and then into joy and then back into despair and then... you get the idea. There are two big reasons for that - Ezra is two years old, and we're doing "sleep training" with Oliver. That's a truly terrible euphemism for something more akin to breaking a wild stallion.
Here are some joyous moments - watching Gabe hoist Oliver in the air as he shrieks with giggles, me dancing the hokey pokey in front of him as he laughs his head off, Ezra cracking us up multiple times a day with the crazy things that come out of his mouth...
for example, on the first day we sent Oliver with Ezra to our nanny Najiba's house, we asked Ezra a few separate times, "Did Oliver cry at Najiba's house?" After the last such question, Ezra stuck out his hand in exasperation at Gabe and said, "I told you FOUR TIMES already, Daddy!" (It's hilarious to see a toddler affect the resentful ennui of a teenager.) And then there's the time that will probably become family legend after a pretty unsuccessful lunch trying to ge
t Ezra to eat a ham and cheese sandwich. Gabe was then doing the naptime singing routine when Ezra bounced up in the crib saying, "Shit! I forgot to eat my ham! I forgot to eat my ham!" (Oops. I guess little pitchers DO have big ears.)Here are some bleaker moments - listening to Oliver howl at the top of his lungs for more than an hour and a half in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago as we imposed the "Ferber method" on him - checking in after increasingly long intervals of time till he falls asleep. After so many sleep issues with Ezra, we had really hoped we had been cut a break with #2, and on the whole, he is a better sleeper than Ezra was. But we were having the same issue crop up - he wasn't able to fall back asleep without nursing, and that meant that I had to sleep all night in the La-Z-Boy with him attached to me. Now actually, I don't really mind this because I love sleeping with him so close. But I can't go to bed every night at 8 pm, which is what he needs. But tonight - knock wood - things have gone a lot smoother and we're hoping that the worst may be behind us. It's absolutely the worst feeling in the world to go into his room and see him crying his eyes out. I waver every single time on whether it's the right thing to do or not. But I can say for sure that it helped Ezra's sleep and our own sleep and that I'm 99% sure Ezra's not worse for wear.
As for bleaker moments with Ezra - one is that he shrieks at the top of his lungs when he doesn't get his way.
We have some work to do in the discipline department. On the flight home from New Mexico, when we discovered we hadn't charged the DVD player, he let out a blood-curdling scream that instantly turned us into the plane pariahs. Then Oliver started crying, cementing that status. We're trying very hard to teach Ezra good manners, but no one would be able to tell that at the supermarket, where people three aisles over can hear him yelling/whining, "I NEED THAT, MOMMY! I NEED THAT!" or "I WANT A LOLLIPOP, MOMMY!" (A pox upon our local grocery store for giving away free lollipops).I'm also sad to say that we've allowed Ezra's brain to rot a bit in front of the TV and YouTube. Up until he turned two, we were pretty much a no-TV family. But it's proven to be a seductively easy way to harness his energy when we need a bit of a break, or have to put Oliver down for a nap, or finish making dinner. It's definitely tough to put that genie back in the bottle. The worst is when he's nagging to watch a Thomas the Tank Engine video or Schoolhouse Rock cartoons on YouTube and you're just tired and out of ideas for keeping him entertained. I always feel a bit depressed sticking him in front of the tube. But when we put on Schoolhouse Rock or vintage Sesame Street clips or footage of space shuttle launches, I don't feel quite so bad.
That said, his imagination is as alive as ever. Ezra's pushing the boundaries of our creativity in ways we never expected. He demands that we tell him stories almost from the minute he wakes up till he goes to bed. Of course, we could tell him no, and we do sometimes, but it's gotten to almost be fun (when you're not feeling utterly braindead, like right after work or at 6 am). It's kind of like improv theater.
He'll throw something out there - like, "I want a sock tree story!" and we have to think on our feet to come up with some halfway entertaining tale involving a tree and socks. The sock theme is a particularly weird one, and stems from a character named Andrew Sockman (think Long Island Jewish) whom Gabe created. Some of our stories are LAME, LAME, LAME, but he doesn't seem to mind, and other times, we're kind of proud of them and think we should write them down. But of course, we never do. :-)When we were in Santa Fe, we outsourced a lot of the storytelling to Katy and Lisa. Please come visit, aunties! We could use your imaginations!
Love,
Ash, Gabe, Ezra and Oliver
P.S. The bottom pic is with Jonah Herman, Denise Gelb's baby boy (who is just 6 weeks older than Oliver)... we hope to take time-lapse pics of them as they grow up.
