Mama Tried

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When your child says, "I have to pee pee" and then immediately follows with, "Never mind!" it is not because they did not actually have to urinate to begin with.

sweet baby james

sweet baby james
Originally uploaded by fracmeister

Eleven months old yesterday! My dad took this when he and Grammy came to visit this weekend and it pretty much sums up what James is all about. All pleased, all the time.

Having Grammy and Grandpa out definitely added to his enjoyment level- they took him (and the rest of us) to the Dodgers game (James' first, and he loved it- especially the music and playing with beverage trash- straws, empty bottles, etc.) and came to church with us for the boys' child dedication. Grandpa held James and James spent the whole time trying to climb Grandpa's head.

Updates

So, we moved, and there were all sorts of transitions with the boys sharing a room, and then I had to convert Nathan's crib to a toddler bed- he was not climbing out of it, but he WAS jumping from his crib into James' crib and back again, so it's not like he couldn't climb out of it, and THAT was just as awful as I feared the first night and pretty much fine after that. He will not get out of bed in the middle of the night or the morning, and he does pop out a few times at night but no longer wakes up James so that's fine. (He can be found, sometimes, at the end of a nap, having dragged all the dirty laundry into bed with him but whatever.)

James did pretty well with the move and is sleeping okay/awful-he does not eat at night, but is still up a couple times at night, and is awake by 4:30 or 5 or 5:30 if we're lucky. I remember Nathan did the same thing at that age and I wanted to kill everyone every morning. I don't feel like that this time around- I do not know if it is because I know it will pass or because I have iced coffee to look forward to mid-morning.
 
James also had a terrible time adjusting to childwatch at the new Y. At the old Y, there were a lot more kids and also a lot more staff, so usually the head or one of the CSUN coeds working there would take James and hold him when I left and then they'd set him down and he'd play. At the new Y there are only two staff members, and they were all, "Well, if he is not crawling he has to be in a carseat or the walker or the swing." And, people, James is almost 11 months old. He's not going to hang out in a bucket seat for an hour.  But they said they were too busy to hold him and I'd set him down and he'd scream and they'd always call me back and I did not know what to do- I did not put Nathan in childwatch or the church nursery until he was older, because Nathan was so clingy, but James is not clingy- he will play at home by himself happily and was very happy in the old childwatch.  Anyway, a friend (the same friend who told me that Nathan's transition from crib to bed would be rocky but fast- she is a genius) asked me what I thought would help, and I thought if I handed James to one of them first and they held him while he got settled it would help. She suggested I just ask if they could do that, and it seemed like a reasonable request so on Tuesday I did and they said yes, and James has done great all week. Today when I picked the boys up they were all, "James was crawling and laughing and so happy, we have never seen him so happy!" That's actually how James is all the time so I'm glad I asked for them to help him get transitioned, so he can be himself and I can work out and everyone wins.

Your Three Year Old, Total Frenemy

I was going to write about all the cute, sweet, funny things Nathan has been doing and how great he is. And then yesterday afternoon he a)screamed for 45 minutes straight b)kept running around the house jumping on all the furniture c)kept jumping on the bed waking up the baby and so all I could think about was how soon I could ship him off to boarding school. THREE.
I think part of the problem is my old techniques are no longer working with him. So I am trying a few new techniques (Time Out! Time Out for him, and Time Out for me) and we'll see. 
But he is not always awful. He made up his first joke, for instance:
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Mommy.
Mommy who?
Mommy in the bank.
I didn't say it was a good joke. 
The other day we were driving and Jeff and I were talking about taco trucks and grilled cheese trucks and Jeff was saying if he was a billionaire he'd start a deli truck. All of a sudden Nathan piped up from the backseat- "I would have a COOKIE truck." This is true.
Last night in the bath he was talking about his alligator bathmat. "Not real, Mommy. Just pretend." I said of course it was not real, I didn't even know what we would feed a real alligator. "Alligators eat leaves, Mommy?" I said I didn't know. He said, "Hmmm. Let me check my book." and pretended to pull out a book and look it up. "Fish, Mommy. Alligators eat fish."
I resisted the urge to add that they also eat little boys who DO NOT LISTEN TO THEIR MOMMIES. That was probably the only good parenting move I made all day yesterday.

Enfamil Epilogue

I'd be lying if I said there weren't a few lingering doubts and guilty feelings about weaning Baby James. But a few things have happened to erase those, fortunately.
The first is that I ran into a woman I know who just had her first baby 3 months ago and who is going through the same things we went through with Baby James at that age- weight loss, constant pumping, etc. She said two things that struck me. The first was when she asked how long I nursed Baby James and I said nine months and she said, "Wow, you made it to nine months? That's amazing!" I had not thought of it like that. The second was when she said she had been doing a lot of meditating on her issues with offering formula (we live in California, that's totally normal) and what she had realized was that breastfeeding made her feel important. And I was all, "Oh, really?" thinking well, it's totally not about that with me. And then I realized yes, it totally was. 
The most important thing was that we went to the doctor and James gained 3 freaking pounds. He's totally off weight watch for the first time in his life. Formula works for him, breastfeeding does not, and we're all happy with that now.