The Kitchen You'll Never Know

Have I failed to mention you're a reality TV star? Oh my.

This morning, at 8:15 we moved out of our house and the film and design crew for HGTV's Deserving Design moved in. In four days we will be summoned back home for the television-worthy (let's hope) reveal of our brand-new kitchen. It's totally surreal.

A few months ago I nominated your grandmother for a room makeover. Miraculously, the perfect show for our story just happens to be based in Atlanta, where the designer Vern Yip lives. I sent off an email describing the reasons we all live together: your father took a job helping people who could not afford a lawyer, your grandfather died a little over a year ago, your grandmother was alone in a big house and wanted to be closer to family, and I thought raising you in the very same house where I grew up would be tremendously meaningful. Apparently, the folks at Deserving Design thought our story was pretty compelling. Now, nearly five months after I sent that email, we're getting a new kitchen.

The kitchen we left behind this morning belonged in a museum. What kind of museum, I'm not quite sure. The museum of extinct appliances? The museum of home repair projects gone bad? The museum of funky wallpaper and decorative doorknobs? As we spent the last week packing it away I relived a good bit of my childhood as we sorted ET cups, Tupperware lids and flower vases that haven't held water or flowers since the early 70s. It was a real trip down memory lane. This morning, walking out the door sure that I would never see the kitchen again, I experienced just the slightest twinge of loss. It passed quickly.

We have four days to get our TV faces on. We're staying in the lap of luxury at Jenny's parents house in Decatur. There are woods and a creek right out our back door and we have our own private little apartment. Your father may decide to stay permanently, there seem to be precious few home improvement projects needed around here.

It's just unbelievable that in four days, without lifting a single power tool ourselves, we'll have a brand new kitchen! You will never remember the chartreuse, aqua, green daisy wallpaper, or the JC Penney Stove so I've added a few pictures for the record. Now, let's practice our amazed faces and memorize what we'll say on camera so we don't embarrass anyone.

A Room with a View (and a front porch)

What a difference a week makes! It was a monumental task: take a room that hadn't seen a change of wallpaper and carpet in over three decades and turn it, once again, into a charming nursery. There are few people in the world up to the task but a handful of them just happen to be your closest relatives and founding members of your fan club. We spent the week with your grandparents, Aunts Christa and Katie and your Uncle Kurt laying bamboo floors, painting molding, cutting (and cutting again) plywood and wallpapering. Your grandmother awoke one night with the brilliant idea to turn one wall of the room into your very own house and hand painted the edifice and built-in your room-within-a-room. It's a magical little place; we spend every morning in your little room playing with toys and exploring. It seems to suit you perfectly. Every time I walk in I'm a little astounded.

It's nice to have brilliant relatives who love you so immensely. It's an added bonus that they know how to use every tool at Home Depot.

Weird Science

Today, we donated you to science and it was fun! You and I spent an hour today at the Bauer Memory Lab at Emory (aka Memory at Emory) and walked out perfectly contented lab-rats.

First, they strapped a contraption to your head that emitted gentle puffs of air around the area of your eye. For about ten minutes you watched one of the researchers play with puppets and every so often a little chime would ring and a puff of air would cause you to blink. There were supposed to be three electrodes strapped to your head to measure the blink reflex but you pulled two of the three electrodes off within the first ten seconds. Sometimes, the chime would ring and no puff of air followed, the researchers filmed you to see if you still blinked. I have no idea how you performed because I was too busy watching the puppets and trying to keep you from eating the electrodes.

The second test was a lot more fun and didn't involved puffs of air, electrodes or chimes. The researcher brought out two groups of toys. The first was a piece of wood and a plastic turtle. You were allowed to play with the toys however you wanted to for two minutes and then the researcher showed you that the piece of wood actually bent in half to make a ramp and the turtle could slide down the ramp. She showed you this trick twice and didn't let you touch it again. Then she brought out the second set of toys which looked like a minature gymnastics bar, a wooden hammer and a small curved piece of plastic. You were free to play with them for them for two minutes and then the researcher showed you how to "bang the gong" by hanging the plastic piece over the gym bar and then banging it with the hammer. Then we went to the floor and played with a basket full of toys for ten minutes.

When we returned to the test site you got a chance to show those folks what you'd learned. Out came the turtle and the wood. You went right to work making the slide and then took the turtle and moved it up and down the slide. Then you chewed on the turtle for what was left of your two minutes. The gong was a lot harder; you took the hammer and banged on everything, even the place where the gong should have been hanging but you never even glanced at the piece of wood that needed to hang on the bar. Then you chewed the hammer for what was left of your two minutes.

Just think, thanks to you, the world will better understand infant memory. Or at the very least we'll better understand that turtles belong on slides.

Feeling Lucky?

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Chiclet

With one tooth in your head, we've taken to calling you chiclet. If the name fits...
And it turns out one tooth is all you need to eat lentil soup.

Sleep Like a Baby

It's interesting that one of the first questions people ask new parents is, "so how's she sleeping?" Generally speaking, if the questioners have had children or know anybody who has, they already have a knowing smirk on their face. They expect the weary, red-rimmed eyed parents to respond meekly "ah, you know, not so well...can you direct me to the nearest coffee pot?" This is always followed by a hopeful bit of folklore from the earnest questioners, "don't worry, after the first six weeks it will get better!"

All new parents should learn to answer this question with the simple truth, "She/he is sleeping like a baby." Obviously, whoever came up with this aphorism never spent a lick of time around a baby. The fact of it is, babies don't sleep so well for good biological, evolutionary reasons. Your REM cycles are more frequent which means you spend less time in deep sleep than your adult bedmates.

Of course you weren't quite the norm. Your sleeping patterns those first six weeks fit a different description: you slept like a rock. In our first week home I would wake you up in the middle of the night to feed and was astonished that five hours would go by before we would hear from you again.

Fast forward eight months.

We've had some rough nights these past few weeks. Between my inability to get to sleep early and your inability to stay asleep, no one's been getting a ton of zzzz's. I don't know whether it's teeth, approaching milestones (nope, still not crawling but getting closer the day) or the change of seasons, but something's got ahold of our sleep cycle. I have developed an eye twitch in my right eye which, after doing some research on the internet, seems directly related to:

• Fatigue or lack of sleep
• Over consumption of caffeine
• Associated with temper tantrums (especially in children)

They didn't make a point of saying that it's the parents of children who throw those temper tantrums who get the twitch, but I'm here to tell you, it's true...

This time next week, after your grandmother and grandfather's work-camp visit (your aunts and uncle too! What fun we're getting ready to have!) you'll have a nursery and your crib will be set up for the first time. The temptation to lay you down in the crib at night and stretch out in my own bed with your dad, who would no doubt enjoy the extra three feet of space, could be enticing. I just don't see it happening.

From the morning we brought you home and took our first nap together you've slept between me and you dad on our queen sized bed. While our commitment to co-sleeping was originally quite practical, we've learned more in the past few months and have come to believe it's just the right thing to do--for us, for you, for this situation. When the midwife asked me, at her first homevisit, where you were sleeping, I rather sheepishly answered, "uh, with us." She smiled, a cherry Blowpop in her mouth (I love midwives!), and said, "Good. I think kids should get their own bed when they can get up and walk there."

It all comes back to sleeping like a baby. Babies wake up, sometimes pretty frequently, during the night. Babies don't understand that when something is not in front of them, it still exists. That's why playing peek-a-boo is so funny at this age: it's gone and then, voila, it appears again! Magic! When you wake up at night I want you to know where I am, that I exist, that I am right there. And honestly, I feel better knowing the same is true of you. Research shows that children's nightmares are most frequently about separation from parents. But if you've never been alone during the night at an age when you can't understand that being in another room does not mean you're all alone, then maybe you won't have those scary dreams. Will sleeping together make you more secure in your attachments, less clingy, more confident and independent? Who knows, some literature seems to suggest it will. Will you have friends who slept in cribs from day one and turn out to be perfectly happy, normally functioning adults who love their parents? Yes, of course (I'd like to think I turned out okay and I slept in a crib). What I know is that it feels right for us right now.

I have the great luxury, and I truly believe that it is, not to have to get up and be at work in the morning. With that luxury comes the responsibility to parent you at night the same way that I parent you during the day. When you are sad, scared or mad during the day, I pick you up and hold you. I feel lucky to be able to do the same at night and especially happy not to have to get out of a warm bed to do so. I'll probably have to remind myself of that "lucky feeling" some night this week.

I've had this blog post on my mind for some time now, I've never really explained to you why we sleep the way we do. I don't believe for one minute that you will be in our bed until you're five or six years old. We'll work on taking naps in your new crib and when the time is right, when you are ready (which may well be before I am) we'll send you off to sleep the night away in your own room. Perhaps I'm writing today to strengthen our convictions after a particularly long week. Perhaps I'm writing because last night you went to bed at 10pm and didn't make a sound until 5:30, ate once and then woke up with your dad at 7:30.

You slept like a baby.