Archive for the 'bath time' Category

The Road to Potty Training Is Paved with Good Intentions

Published
by
Melissa
on February 11, 2009
in Mama instinct, bath time, bed time, change, expectations, feeding my child, letting go, letting instead of making, potty training, practice, school, sleep, surrender, toddler tantrums, trust and you can't control everything
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Potty training is a big subject in our house these days.

Not because Mike or I have decided it’s time — Jake’s just 25 months old, after all.  But because Jake has shown an interest in it.  At least, he’s shown an interest in: getting our hopes up, testing my theory that all I have to do to raise him is follow his cues, and making his very pregnant mommy sit down on the floor to check the diaper he says needs changing many, many, many more times a day than a very, very pregnant mommy should have to do.  (It’s not the getting down on the floor that’s the problem, of course.  It’s the getting up off the floor again — which requires the help of the tub, a sink, the washing machine, and any other solid, immovable object I can use to hoist myself vertical-ward.)

What I find most interesting — and even of possible interest to those of you who have absolutely no interest in the subject of potty training — is that it’s turning out to be the greatest lesson in surrendering control Jake’s given me yet.

Potty training does not, for example, involve utter and crushing-depression-inducing exhaustion like the sleep thing.  It does not wrap me up in a deluge of hormones so great that often the only choice I had was curling up on the green armchair in a puddle of my own failure as a mother, the way breastfeeding did.  And the whole toddler tantrum experience — I sure like to turn the incidents into stories that become more amusing to me as I write about them, but Mike reminded me the other day just how trying they are when he said, “It’s hard for me to read about Jake’s tantrums.  I just want to let them go once they’re over.  You need to process them.”

Yep, processing is what I do, and the potty training process, while still a challenge, is proving to be a bit of an adventure as well.  I have no preconceived notions of how it will go — possibly because  Jake’s is the first diaper I ever changed and so perhaps I was, until a couple of years ago, completely uninitiated in the scatological functions of young children.  It is not too exhausting (other than the hauling myself up off the floor part) because it generally does not take place while I am trying to sleep.  And hormones, well, they’re all about the next baby at this point.

Instead, I can remind myself to take a step back, stop wondering why two kids in Jake’s class are potty trained but he’s not (okay, I do attribute it to them having older brothers), and let Jake lead me through the changes that will take place in his life no matter how I might try to bend them to my will.  Which, in this case, is not even so much as an impulse.

A few episodes to illustrate:

Continue reading ‘The Road to Potty Training Is Paved with Good Intentions’

Who Won This Round of the Battle of the Bath?

Published
by
Melissa
on February 2, 2009
in Mama instinct, bath time, expectations, letting go, letting instead of making, social life, surrender, toddler tantrums, trust and you can't control everything
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2 Comments

There comes a point when you must put your foot down.

Mine came after an astonishingly patient 3 1/2 weeks during which the closest Jake came to taking a bath was wading in some warm tub water while I used a funnel to rinse his privits, as I like to call them.  That’s 3 1/2 weeks of coaxing him into the bathroom with promises of coloring on the tub, not unlike the witch in Hansel and Gretel luring children to their doom with gingerbread.  Three and a half weeks of gritting my teeth every time I looked at my son’s hair and prayed it wouldn’t spontaneously sprout dreadlocks.  Three and a half weeks during which the mere mention of the word “bath” provoked as strong a negative response in Jake as it used to in my basset hound Roxanne, who, as a non-water dog, had a much better reason for despising the tub.

I kept it going through a combination of certainty in my parenting choice of giving my child his own choices and a good dollop of avoiding toddler tantrums whenever possible.  And then there was the time last week when Jake was sleeping beside me and suddenly cried out, “No!  No bath!”  How could I subject my child to a literal nightmare for the sake of my own sense of hygiene when a wet washcloth was available?

But by yesterday I had simply had enough.  It wasn’t the greasy hair or the sense that there is only so much cleaning you can do with diaper wipes and a quick rub of water.  It was the foam pit.

Yesterday marked a school-wide play date at a kids’ gym downtown, a place we’d visited a couple of times before on days when school was closed and it was too cold for the park and I was desperate for ways to tire my son out.  Although a warm, sunny day beckoned to us to skip it, I knew that at least one of Jake’s friends would be there, and I figured it would be good for me to spend some time with the other parents in the school.

Sure enough, Jake had a blast, and I had some pleasant conversations.  And one of the hit activities was bouncing down a long trampoline and then jumping with great enthusiasm into a pit of foam blocks.

A neighbor of mine had warned me about the foam pit, back when Jake wasn’t particularly interested in it.  “Don’t let him in it,” she said with a look of disgust on her face.  “Just think of all the dirt and germs.  You don’t know what’s in there,” she added ominously.

I certainly did as I watched children with runny noses take literal nose dives into it.  And I could only take a deep breath and pretend I didn’t notice when other kids were coughing directly into a pile of foam since other parents were kind enough to ignore my child doing the same thing.

But then we were home and Jake was too wound up to nap and was in the process of melting down anyhow, so I figured it was time.  If I was going to be subjected to a toddler tantrum anyhow, I reasoned, I should at least get to have it come from a child who’d had the foam pit washed off of him.

Continue reading ‘Who Won This Round of the Battle of the Bath?’

Can I Make My Child (or Anyone Else for that Matter) Happy?

Published
by
Melissa
on January 21, 2009
in Mommy time, awareness, bath time, compassion, expectations, inner peace, intentions versus goals, practice, sleep and toddler tantrums
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Jake has just discovered the concept of righteous indignation.

As in, “How dare you comb my hair for me!”  Only expressed in howls of unhappiness perfectly calibrated to get on my last nerve.

Or, “Don’t you dare fill up that bathtub!  Don’t even mention the word ‘tub’ to me!  And certainly don’t ask me why I am so upset about the prospect of taking a bath!”  Which he says, not in so many words, but by frantically running away from me crying, “No bath!  No bath!” even as I try to coax him into a pair of Dora the Explorer swim diapers.  (Frankly, I find them no less embarrassing for him — bright pink flowers and all — than the gender-specific Spiderman swim diapers modeled by a boy in the picture on the packaging that I plainly was supposed to purchase instead.)

Then there’s the one that precipitated my final breakdown last night: “What do you mean you’re trying to cook dinner and can’t pick me up?”  Very expeditiously communicated by standing at the front door wailing, “DAAAAADY!  DAAAAAADY!”

It was at this point that I crumpled into a corner of the bathroom and decided that I have never, ever been capable of making any other human being happy and that I was plainly, sadly wrong when I thought my son was my salvation and that by saturating him with my love I could make up for all the crippled emotions I have picked up over a lifetime that have somehow convinced me I am incapable of making anyone else happy.

Finding Jake staring up at me in shock did not shake me out of it, though one might expect such dramatic effect if I were writing a novel.  Since I am writing about true life, however, what it did was make me feel even worse for inflicting this traumatic moment on my child.

Especially when he quietly said, “I’m happy, Mommy.”

I swept him into my arms, leaving the garlic un-minced, and held him to me on the couch.  “You are a wonderful person,” I assured him.  “You haven’t done anything wrong.  It’s not your job to make me happy.  You make me very, very, very happy.”  And other words designed to reassure me as much as him.

Which they kind of did.  Until an hour or so later when he started wailing about the fact that I put aloe cream on his weather-reddened cheeks while getting him ready for bed and I walked out on him and told him we could read books when he was done with his tantrum while trying not to have another one myself.

Continue reading ‘Can I Make My Child (or Anyone Else for that Matter) Happy?’

How Much Influence Do I Have on My Toddler’s Tantrums — and the Tantrums of Others?

Published
by
Melissa
on January 16, 2009
in Mama instinct, awareness, balance, bath time, being connected to everything, centering, communicating, compassion, gratitude, letting go, nonharming, opening your heart, practice, the bigger picture, toddler tantrums, trust and you can't control everything
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2 Comments

It was only after the fact — as I recounted the incident to Jake’s preschool teachers this morning — that I saw the humor in it.

There I was, seven-plus months pregnant and clad in a thick black winter coat bulging at the zipper, crouched in the back seat of my CRV as I straddled my struggling toddler and he piked out of his car seat while I held him down and huffed through clenched teeth, “I’m pregnant and I’m tired and I’ve had enough.”

It’s true that I had had more than enough.  It had been an emotional morning:  The bellowing, outraged tears when I insisted on changing Jake’s diaper before washing his hands.  The same welling up of true hurt when Lilah the basset hound happened to wander by his chair as he was eating breakfast.  And don’t even get me started on the performance he put on at the top of the stairs when his father left for work.

There was a big part of me that just didn’t have the reserves to deal calmly with toddler tantrums.  I have been completely depleted since yesterday afternoon, when I was looking forward to my first few hours alone in the house in the three weeks there have been workmen sharing it with me (weatherproofing, thank goodness, so I shouldn’t complain too much.  But, then, I am.).  Instead of a cozy hour in front of the new season of Damages folding the multitudes of laundry that gather seemingly daily, I found myself huddled over my laptop at the dining room table, clad in my winter coat and sweaty yoga clothes, as the guys put a big, noisy blower in the back door and ran around the house for a couple of hours finding all the places it still leaks.  I, in the meantime, found that there is only so much one can do when one is not allowed to close any doors (say, to the bathroom where I was longing to take a shower) and doesn’t really have full access to the kitchen and is slowly losing one’s mind due to the constant HUMMMMMMMMM of the blower.

Certainly, the overwhelming sense of displacement that suddenly hit me goes a long way to explaining the fact that I yelled at Jake — I didn’t raise my voice; I YELLED — when he pulled the I’m-not-sitting-in-my-carseat stunt in the preschool parking lot when I picked him up from school at the end of my trying afternoon. And my ability to ignore his cries of despair as I washed his hair with him standing in the bathtub — the closest I’ve managed to get him to water since another poop-in-the-tub incident last week.  (Mike and I handled the most recent one with such calm that I can only imagine how much our first reaction must have traumatized him to find us back to coaxing him into a tub in his swim diaper.)

But somehow, this morning, it got even harder.  Because each time he built himself into an orgy of sadness I could feel the same emotion building up in me.  I could remember what it feels like to cry with the jagged urgency of being all alone, rejected, denied, unloved.  And it just plain killed me to hear him that way.

While, at the same time, it killed me to have to listen to it yet again.

Hence, my moment of straddling my crying child in the car this morning as I cried too and kept crying right through his two-year-old’s recovery, ignoring his comments about what we saw as we drove past, and, oh so cruelly, informing him upon his query that, “Yes, Mommy is going to work after I drop you off.  And not a moment too soon.”

Oh, yeah, he understood just what I was saying, poor guy.

Continue reading ‘How Much Influence Do I Have on My Toddler’s Tantrums — and the Tantrums of Others?’

Giving and Receiving Toddler Style — In the Bathtub

Published
by
Melissa
on November 21, 2008
in Mama instinct, awareness, bath time, being connected to everything, communicating, compassion, expectations, following your heart, gratitude, inner beauty, inner peace, intentions versus goals, karma, opening your heart, the bigger picture and toddler tantrums
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Jake took a bath last night for the first time in a week.

This fact is notable for three reasons.  First, he is generally quite fond of the tub, so a one-week boycott is a serious thing indeed.  Second, the fact that I was able to ease him back into the tub wearing a swim diaper adorned with Winnie the Pooh suggested that he might one day overcome the Poop in the Bathtub debacle I inflicted on him, oh, last time he voluntarily took a bath.  Third, of course, is that he has taught me a big lesson about giving and receiving.

Continue reading ‘Giving and Receiving Toddler Style — In the Bathtub’

At Least Now I Can Eat Dinner at a Normal Time, or Something I Actually Can Control

Published
by
Melissa
on June 10, 2008
in bath time, bed time, change, expectations, feeding my child, letting instead of making, partners, structure and you can't control everything
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Most people probably consider it an obvious choice to eat dinner with your child. It is, after all, the foundation of all those sitcoms we grew up with, isn’t it? Remember Richie Cunningham … eating hamburgers at Arnold’s restaurant with The Fonz. Or … the hijinks taking place in the otherwise unused kitchen during those forbidden episodes of Three’s Company I snuck up past my bedtime to watch. Now that I think about it, the only dinner eating on television I can remember seemed to take place during the once-a-year Thanksgiving episodes of Friends.

Okay, so maybe that explains why, until last night, dinner as a family wasn’t part of our family ritual.

Honestly, we figured with Mike getting home at seven o’clock, dinner as a family was sadly out of the question. By seven I am usually drawing a bath for Jake because I once read it’s a good way to relax your child before bedtime. Never mind that Jake resists any such relaxing bathtime properties and any modicum of tiredness the bath might inspire is cast off the second his father walks through the door. In fact, the Daddy-inspired adrenaline mixed with a good dose of daylight savings time and a lack of decent curtains in any of the bedrooms upstairs makes bedtime a chore, so whoever does the honors tends to creep wearily downstairs to face a 9 p.m. dinner in front of the television.

You’d think we would have come up with a new plan a little bit sooner.

Continue reading ‘At Least Now I Can Eat Dinner at a Normal Time, or Something I Actually Can Control’

There’s Something Bigger Than Forgetting to Buy Antibiotic Ointment

Published
by
Melissa
on May 9, 2008
in Mama instinct, Mommy time, bath time, being in the moment, illness, inner peace, motion, surrender, the bigger picture and too much to do
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0 Comments

It was plainly my fault. Because, I feel deeply, anything that distresses my boy is.

Bath time, these balmy spring evenings, has been a tad more fraught than usual. Mike has been arriving home right around when Jake and I sit down for his dinner. So we all head out for the deck, where Mike and I share some of our cheese and crackers with Jake and Jake excitedly drops things, like my cell phone, between the deck railings. This is so much fun that whenever I choose to start running the bath, it is sure to be way too early by his reckoning.

Still, a bath he must have, at least this week when he has been sporting a couple of persistent diaper sores that I feel are well served by a soak in warm water. I chalked up his rejection of this proposal over the past few nights to being over-excited and having a very clear sense that bath time was the first step on the road leading to bed.

Last night he made it very clear, however, that the factors prompting his complaints were far more dire.

First, we opened his soggy diaper to find it distressingly full of poop. “Distressingly” in this case refers to the fact that Jake was standing in the bathroom, where he sees no need to, say, be still while we clean him up. He explained this point to us in no uncertain terms as Mike struggled to hold him while I grabbed some wipes.

Then came the wipe with blood on it. Jake’s teachers had informed me a few days before that a bit of his diaper rash was bleeding and that I might want to put some antibiotic ointment on it. A quick canvas of the house confirmed that whatever antibiotic ointment I might have purchased, probably in, oh, 2002, had disappeared. Pressed for time, I managed to locate a tiny foil packet of Neosporin in an emergency kit that, incidentally, still had the plastic wrap intact. It’s not that we don’t hurt ourselves around here; it’s just that we don’t bother with much in the way of medical first aid.

At any rate, one dose of the antibiotic ointment on Monday night seemed to have done enough healing to make me both lose the Neosporin packet and conclude that I was in no rush to get to Target for a proper tube of it.

Which is why I knew it was my fault when my boy, bottom bleeding and unmedicated, began shaking with tears of rage as we, first, tried to sit him in the warm bath and, when that failed, tried to put a clean diaper on him. I should have known that he would need more antibiotic ointment. I should have known that he was suddenly rejecting his beloved baths because they hurt his bum. And — for at least the past sixteen months — I should have known the bleached, scented diapers we were using were bad for him.

And, because I felt I really did know all these things deep down but was too lazy to follow through, too distracted by my own needs to tend to my child’s, I cried too. I cried, as well, because I had no choice but to put the painful diaper right back on his poor little bottom.

Continue reading ‘There’s Something Bigger Than Forgetting to Buy Antibiotic Ointment’

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