Better

After having a foundation-shaking crisis of confidence in my mothering skills yesterday, one necessitating a nearly half-hour long phone conversation with Josh punctuated by long silences, I did Jonah a good turn today. Due to a strange turn of sleeping habits (Abe is back in the crap sleep zone, and we must re-sleep train him starting tonight, now that he is in the big crib), Abe was up at 5 and wouldn't nurse back to sleep. I was mortally afraid Jonah would be wakened by Abe's crying and decide to get up to watch the clock turn color - again - I had Josh take him to the living room. Then I slept for just over an hour before Jonah woke up for the day. And since Abe was now asleep again, on Josh, it fell to me to keep Jonah company, something I haven't done in the morning for ages and ages.

The first thing I observed was that he was being very anti-social - either burying himself in books or lying down on the floor to play. I decided to make it clear to him that if he's up, he needs to interact with me - and, more subtly, that if he's too tired, he should go back to bed. It took some doing, but I managed to get him to help me empty the dishwasher (something he used to jump up to do without asking), and decide on something new to eat for breakfast (he shunned blueberry yogurt but did eat a bowl of dry Cheerios and a banana).

Since that had gone well, and since (after some prodding) he dressed himself, I decided he might be ready to try a new workbook I bought him, which is for learning to cut with scissors. I hadn't the faintest clue how to show him to hold the scissors, so every time he took them off his hand he'd forget how to get them back on (and I had to keep checking my own hand to see how to explain it). A few times I thought we might have to stop, as he was fidgeting so much. Eventually, he managed to get through not one, but two pages of cutting exercises. When he started cutting a fairly straight line across the first page, I was so excited I was almost shouting, egging him on. He was beaming with his achievement. He took that first completed page to school for show and tell.

Just a quarter-turn in one direction or the other produces such a radically different effect, both on a gas stove and on my big boy. That's the Zen lesson for today, neatly packaged in a white cardboard take-out container. Now to prepare for my night on the couch, hopefully free of the intimations of mortality that the last round of sleep training provoked...