ReparationsMom

With only slight hiccups (night I pulled him into bed when he cried, without realizing it, and found Abe on my chest at 4 a.m.; last night, Abe woke screaming from having passed a poop that felt like slightly dried out clay), things have gotten a lot better in the sleep department. So I've been able to move on to the next item on the agenda, namely, repairing my relationship with my firstborn. Recognizing my anger is only a fraction of the battle, that is now clear. Finding a way back to Jonah, rebuilding his self-esteem (which I must believe has suffered as a result of my anger, if his uttering, after a tantrum, "I want to throw myself away!" is to be considered a window into his psyche), is my first priority.

As Abe gets farther into solids and starts eating three mini-meals per day or so, I am finding that the hours between feeds are increasing almost exponentially, leaving me with some time to kill. Abe is happiest these days on the living room rug, where he will promptly jolt himself from seated to flat on his face, swimming in the air and trying like hell to figure out how to do a pushup and get his butt up so he can finally start crawling. In the meantime, he is perfecting the roll-and-pivot method of exploring the apartment, and often winds up in odd places, like jammed up against the French doors, or under the couch. He waits there, patiently, to be extracted.

Jonah just had his first full week of school in ages, since there was a lot of time off for the Jewish holidays. The teacher who works with him for five hours a week in the classroom reported that he did not have a great week - he was constantly distracted, not able to pay attention, not responding when his name was called, etc. It took us a great while to realize that he is simply TIRED. We were keeping to his same bedtime, not realizing that the longer school day, combined with the fact he doesn't nap there, is exhausting him. We've started getting him to bed a full hour earlier, and I'm hoping we will reap the benefits next week.

In the meantime, we had a so-so outing with him today (again with the sleepiness), but when we got home, Josh got to work preparing a succulent dinner he'd been planning to cook for ages, and I got to spend quality time with the kids. Quality time I define as any time during which I can fully enjoy motherhood and not feel stressed out about the demands that one boy or the other is making. Abe, having successfully and painlessly pooped (at last!), was on the living room floor doing his calisthenics, and I settled into the couch with Jonah, who was holding up some obnoxious little Tonka books we got a while back. He wanted to read those with me. They are board books that fit in your palm, the illustrations are hideous, but who would have thunk it? He was treating these books as his freaking Rosetta stone. I didn't even get a chance to say "The tow truck pulls cars and trucks" before he'd pointed to the word "cars" on the page and said, "That says, CARS!" He delighted in finding words that I challenged him to find on each page, solely by figuring out which ones started with the right letter. I was breathless, watching all of this come together for him. Later, while we read Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel before bed, he said, "We can move things with our bodies." I said, "No we can't! Can you move a car with your body?" He thought for a millisecond, then replied, "Well, we can use our hands on the steering wheel." I was floored by this rapid use of logic.

Today he rode the carousel with me, and then solo. During the long wait for his second ride, I motioned "I love you" to him through the fence and he motioned it back at me. I think this physical show of affection means more to him (and me) than the words, and it bridged the gap between one carousel ride and the next, the distance between a penitent mom and her sometimes-petulant nearly-4 year old, on a spotlessly blue-skied October afternoon. I hope like hell this was the opening of a new path.