Sunday, April 29, 2012

The Only Thing it DIDN'T Hit Was the Fan...

Last week was my inaugural Full Week of Solo Parenting Three Children. By 2:15 on Friday afternoon I felt a surge of WE SURVIVED! and that it had gone, overall, well. With the exception of...Thursday.

Thursday morning was fine, normal. Will went to preschool, so I took Finn and Bridget to run a few errands and then we hit the park for some scootering before lunch and preschool pickup. It was a sunny day. Spirits were moderate-to-high. We picked Will up and I brought the gang home. Bridget got tucked into the Bjorn and we got ready for nap. Then it happened.

Finn started protesting nap, so I moved him out of the room he shares with Will (they've been trial-napping together there, too) and timed him out in "Bridget's room." (She uses it for diaper changes, full stop.) He was shrieking and jumping, so I told him that he'd have to stop or I'd leave him there for all of nap time. He could still see me through the cracked door, and he began to gently bounce on the balls of his feet. Juuuuuust to see what I thought about that.

My primary parenting philosophy, which piggybacks on my primary teaching philosophy is: choose short-term pain for long-term gain. So I took a deep sigh and went in to say good night and close the door all the way. He had broken the rules, as much as he'd been pretending to sort of abide by them. I imagine if he was even a year older, he'd have been hollering "But Mom! I wasn't jumping, I was just BOUNCING!" Instead he just screamed until I collected his pillow, blanket and Bobo from the other room and proved I was unmoved.

ANYWAY, at that point Will was doing his every-third-day "rest, not sleep" time, but he stays in his bed and that's the only rule that matters to us. He also sleeps on a small quilt laid over an underpad because he no longer wears a diaper for his nap. So I went about the house, started the dinner process, rotated the laundry through, and then about an hour later, I heard something on the monitor.

I looked. Was Finny putting on underwear?


I went into his room. It was a crime scene. He had pooped in his diaper, removed his diaper--getting poo all over his foot, pants and the crib sheet in the process. Then he had reached through the crib slats for a pair of Will's outgrown underwear he'd seen lying on the floor. Both of Finn's legs were in the same leg hole, and he was whining about that. THAT'S what he was whining about--not the fact that he was sitting in/smeared with poo, but that he was a bit uncomfortable what with this underwear on wrong. !!!!!!!!!!

Even the baby knows this is ridiculous 

So I scooped him out of his crib and bathed him, Bridget still sleeping in the Bjorn, and then I heard a noise from Will's room.

Will had taken himself by surprise by falling asleep after all. He had peed--and he had soaked through EVERYTHING--underwear, pants, tee-shirt, socks (socks!), quilt, underpad, regular sheet, mattress pad. So I helped a wailing Will strip off his saturated clothes, took everything off his bed and Finn's temporary crib, and then went back to Finn to put a diaper and new outfit on HIM.

At this point, my friend Mindy came over and took one look at us: naked, repentant Finn; Will with a trembling lower lip; me jogging Bridget in place to keep her asleep; a gigantic mound of bedding-only laundry in the hallway. I told her the story and then, to my credit, said "I mean, I can't really act surprised, can I? I chose to have a three-year-old, two-year-old and a newborn, so this is probably the kind of thing that's going to happen to people like me, right?" She just shook her head at me and laughed.

There's no moral to this story, I don't think, except maybe: Yay! I kept it mostly together during this really gross event, and also: At least newborns can stay asleep through pretty much anything.



My kids are anything but boring.

2 comments:

Grandpop said...

We were watching Dancing with the Stars at the same time we were watching the video "My kids are anything but boring".

We gave Will and Finn a 10 for their performance.

Love,
GM/GP

Anonymous said...

Love me some Noon boys!
-Ceci