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the IT city, the I.T. Baby

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A big day, and why are you afraid of monsters?

Maggie in the back sling
Took Maggie in a back carrier on a hike at Radnor yesterday. She PTFO, then woke up, PTFO in the car, woke up, and went down for bed pretty easily. Riding must be hard work.

Maggie went to school with several pair of underwear, pants, and socks as the teacher is determined she’s going to potty train her. Overall I think this won’t be terribly hard to do for pee as she will let you know when she needs to go, but for poop that’s a different story.

Maggie derives some perverse glee in going in another room, pooping, and then running out to hug you. You smell something foul, it’s your poop child. She laughs like a mad woman all the way to the changing table. It’s some sort of poop joke and she finds it hilarious.

I imagine we’re going to drag a mostly liquid-filled bag back home today to throw in the wash, but we’ll see.

In other news, Maggie has started talking about monsters quite a bit and has become a little afraid of the dark. We have to leave the hall light on for her to be comfy, which is ok. We’ve had some conversations about what she is exactly afraid of and all I could determine was that it was a monster who looked like Cookie Monster who got shot.

I’m not sure I was asking the right questions.

Two days ago we had ultimate meltdown. A toddler who was already off schedule due to being in PST for two weeks now in CST, refusing to nap, and otherwise having trouble sleeping because of monsters.

The meltdown started with a friend of hers over. She switched into the “mine” mode about 5pm, it got worse at 6pm, I finally put her to bed at 7pm after total meltdown from her friend asking if he could ride in the car she was in.

She passed out, slept for 40 minutes, and then proceeded to wail from 8-9:40. I made various attempts to defuse things, but nothing really worked. I tried hugging her/blowing my eardrum out, just staying in the room, and most of the other wait it out techniques. That lasted for nearly two hours.

Yesterday it almost started again. Bedtime neared and it was all “no, don’t wanna go to bed,” which is usually where she shuts down and starts crying. It was worse because she’d gone to her big girl bed and was laying down with an iPad and I needed to claim it to get her to actually go to sleep.

The howling was about to start, so I plunked her on the bed and distracted her by playing like a dog. She started laughing and I got her out so Kim could read some new books to her. After that it was very minimal delaying tactics and she passed out.

Unfortunately about 2am she woke up miserable – diaper had failed, I had to change the bedsheets and all she wanted to do was go back to bed while saying “I don’t wanna go to bed.” Fortunately this was easily remedied by just putting her back in a clean bed and acquiescing to the request to read a story.

I did that, snuck out, got back upstairs and the little 4 month old decided I was not going to be getting sleep so she woke up shortly after.

Paul King

Paul King lives in Nashville Tennessee with his wife, two daughters and cats. He writes for Pocketables, theITBaby, and is an IT consultant along with doing tech support for a film production company.