Owen + Eliza: A Love Story

When you have Baby #1, everyone's inevitable first question is "How's the baby sleeping?" -- doubtless because sleep is assumed to be the main obstacle standing between you and the eventual regaining of your sanity.  But when Number Two comes along, the threat of sleeplessness is overshadowed by an even more sinister family hazard: sibling dynamics.  The delicate household balance you spent 21 months carefully cultivating can be immediately annihilated by a jealous toddler trying to find ways to get Number Two back to the hospital.  And so naturally the question now is, "How does Owen like Eliza?"

The answer, we are so grateful to say, is that he absolutely, positively adores her.

Since the moment Owen met Eliza in the hospital when she was just three hours old, it's been a love story.  While he hasn't always known exactly how to treat an infant (e.g., he frustratedly tried to force a pacifier into her nose upon first meeting), he has always adored her and doted on her completely.  He often adopts a high cooing voice and tells her that she's his "Appletizer" (no clue) and that's she's "so cute and getting so big."  He snapped at us singing too loudly one night ("Daddy! Don't wake up Ewiza!") and calls our attention to her needs when she's fussing ("Mommy! Ewiza needa bottle!").  Lately, he's started asking us to put Eliza in his crib in the morning, and a few days ago this request was accompanied by very explicit instructions: "Mommy, put Ewiza right there.  I stay with Ewiza.  You go play trains."

(Timeout: that's what you think I do for fun while you're not around?)

For her part, Eliza is just an unbelievably good sport.  From the moment she arrived, she has been a curious but exceptionally easygoing girl, a disposition that has been thoroughly tested by her very hands-on older brother.  He loves to lie on top of her and give her a huge hug (and a mouthful of his unruly curls), hold her cheeks and squeeze her hands, and position her legs in the yoga poses ("Happy Baby Toes!") he learns at school.  All the while, she looks at him with wide eyes and a big gummy smile and has eyes for no one and nothing else.  Aaron and I do all sorts of ridiculous stunts to get her to smile, but Owen only has to look in her direction to provoke a full belly laugh.

In the nearly six months Eliza has been with us, I have taken approximately 39,385 of the same photo -- some variation of Owen holding Eliza (and often, Eliza looking at me with disapproving skepticism). Since this blog is called Baby Spam and you're my captive audience, here are an unsolicited few of those many, many sibling pics.

Learning to hold "Baby Wiza in his wap"

A common theme: Owen looking lovingly at Eliza, Eliza giving me a what-the-hell-is-going-on look

The first of many times Owen will be told not to drive trucks on his sister. 

After positioning the chairs like this, Owen spent 15 minutes playing footsie with Eliza.

Putting the skills he learned with his doll to work

"Seriously, Mom?" Part I

"Seriously, Mom?" Part II

"Seriously, Mom?" Part III

Spontaneous hand-holding to settle Eliza down in the car

Two more "Reasons My Son is Crying"

1.  He found out he has to share his last name with Eliza.
2.  I answered "No" when he asked, "Does Mommy have a peepee like Owen?"

Go figure.

This is not America.

Before you have a two-year-old, you think you have some idea of what this age involves:  epic public meltdowns, a proliferation of the word "no," and repeatedly counting to three.  But no one warns you about the root cause of all this friction -- the completely irrational, almost always absurd reasons the kid is crying in the first place.  Sure, there is the understandable freak out about the vegetables you're making them eat or the bedtime you're enforcing.  But until you have a two-year-old, there is no way you could ever anticipate igniting a firestorm by offering ice cream or explaining that we eat turkey on Thanksgiving.

There is a whole hysterical blog (Reasons My Son is Crying) devoted to these irrational freak outs, almost none of which I would've believed a year ago.  But, boy oh boy, do I believe them now.  It takes crafty negotiation skills to go head-to-head with a little person who is pissed about not being allowed to eat chicken fingers for breakfast.  To add to the Reasons My Son is Crying (Barasz Edition), here are some recent favorites...

• I told him his middle name is Charles. 
• What he heard:  "Your middle name is Saddam."
• I told him that "ka-wear-us" is actually pronounced "hil-ar-ious"
• What he heard:  "Eliza is my favorite child."
• I wouldn't let him out of his high chair to "go clean the whole house" (no joke) until he finished eating his lunch.
• What he heard:  "You're not allowed to eat your lunch until you go clean the whole house."
• I suggested we have lunch at Panera.
• What he heard:  "Santa's not real."

One favorite "Reason My Son is Crying" moment came yesterday after a prolonged battle over a shirt selection.  (Clip below.)  Stupidly, I offered Owen a choice between his gray train shirt and a red striped shirt.  (Total rookie mistake.)  He'd already spent 20 minutes melting down after finding out he could not wear them both simultaneously, when Aaron told him he had to wear the train shirt (period, amen) because this is America and Daddy said so.  Talk about fuel on fire.

This. Is. Not. America.  !!!!!!!!!

Shouldn't all diplomatic training involve being locked away with a toddler for a week?  It seems like Kim Jong Un might have a lot in common with a hungry 2-year-old.

[Owen] Charles in Charge

They say God doesn't give you more than you can handle.  If that's true, he must've seriously doubted my capacity for "handling" when he gave me Eliza -- the most easy-going child on the planet -- and Owen -- whose favorite pastimes are cleaning and parenting.  

Aaron and I joke that there are now three parents in our family; should we have a momentary lapse in judgment or (gasp) try to cut a corner here or there, we can count on Owen -- our Mini Voice of Reason -- to bring us back into line.  He patrols the household diligently for items out of place or routines not followed, and seems to take pride in publicly shaming the offender.  

We first realized we'd acquired a third parent when Eliza was only a few weeks old.  Sleep deprived, chronically late, and hungry, we'd hurriedly left the house to go to dinner when Owen announces:  "Daddy, Owen need shoes on."  Oops.  One point for the 2-year-old.

And he's handy for many such transgressions.  For example:

• Should you try to bribe your toddler into eating eggs by sprinkling them with parmesan cheese:  "No Mommy, that for pasta, not for eggs."
• Should you display poor hygiene after allowing your toddler to sit on the potty: "Mommy, need to wash the hands."
• Should you lazily leave an empty baby bottle on the coffee table:  "Have to put it in the sink, Mommy.  Owen do it."
• Should you recklessly climb a tree in the park:  "Need to be careful up there, Daddy."
• Should you negligently ignore the spit-up slithering down the baby's chin:  "Mommy, need to wipe Ewiza face!"
• Should you think it's acceptable to splash your brother in the tub:  "Don't kick water on me, Ewiza JANE!" 

It's reassuring to know that someone's making sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Here I go again...

After an eventful 15 month hiatus, I've decided to give this mommy blogging another go.  I'm not sure how often I'll be able to post or how much (or how well) I'll write -- having two kids has proven to be a recipe for utter domestic lunacy -- but there are a few reasons I'm thinking this is a good idea:

1) I'm trying to fight Eliza's inevitable "Second Child Syndrome."  There are a lot of things that aren't...hmm...the same the second time around.  As a good friend of mine recently said of her second:  "She's basically treated like a purse, toted around as I chase after Kid #1."  The Mommy Guilt keeps pointing out the fact that Eliza sleeps in a Pack N' Play, hasn't been read "Goodnight Moon" 435 times by now, got kicked out of our room after 2 nights (not 2 months), and faces a significantly longer wait time between pooping in her diaper and getting a fresh one.  But on the plus side, her parents are way less nervous, she has an endless source of entertainment in her always-moving, always-talking big brother, and if she plays her cards right, she could probably guilt us into buying her a pony when she's 12.  But for now, writing a few blog posts about her seems like a good attempt at parity.

2) I'm almost certainly not forming any new memories right now.  The days are wild and surviving the 16 waking hours between 6:00AM and 10:00PM sucks all my brain juice out.  I often can't remember to shower or eat or brush my teeth; mentally recording the sweet (and not so sweet) moments of young motherhood is out of the question.  So years from now, when I suddenly emerge from this sleepless, spit-uppy fog, look around me and wonder how the hell I got here, there will at least be some record of the journey.

3) Blogging might be the key to my continued (quasi-)sanity.  When you keep a blog, mishaps and blunders that at the time seem totally meltdown-worthy are transformed into amusing blog fodder, automatically activating your much-needed sense of humor.  It's the well-at-least-it-will-make-for-a-good-story-later phenomenon.  Take, for example, one evening two weeks ago.  Home by myself and bathing both children during the always hectic pre-bedtime routine, I very narrowly averted a biohazardous disaster.  I'd just taken Eliza out of the bath when -- for the first time ever -- Owen pooped in the tub.  Like gross, crumbly, spread-before-I-could-catch-it poop.  With two wailing kids and an uncontainable poopfest on my hands, I almost threw my hands up and cried with them.  But I stepped back, thought about how completely silly the situation was, [called my mom and asked her what the hell to do with a tub full of shit], and realized that maybe I should restart the blog.

So here I go again.  Hope to see you back here soon.

Looking for Trouble

Before I started [sporadically] writing again this summer, I predicted that my blogging would be cut short by the start of classes or Owen's walking.  The latter, as I posted several weeks ago, has begun.  And oh my, how life has changed.

People warned me that this would happen.  Seasoned moms laughed knowingly as they foreshadowed the end of downtime as I knew it.  But in a state of near-pathological denial, I shook my head, said that couldn't be true.  I rationalized that Owen was already all over the place as a crawler, and how different could walking really be?

The answer: completely, unrecognizably, turn-everything-on-its-head, suck-every-ounce-of-energy-out-of-your-bones different.

With the newfound physical skill, there came an unanticipated mental shift, a sudden bolus dose of independence.  Where Crawling Owen got into everything within a 10 foot radius of where we were playing, Walking Owen prefers to dash into other rooms -- a lone hunter in search of trouble -- and rediscover whatever toilet or closet or cabinet he was most recently pulled away from.  This morning after one such episode, he looked me in the eye, flashed a sweet smile of mischief, and shook his head "no" as he tried to topple a floor lamp.

At least we know he has a sense of humor.

Lethal Combination

Some things just don't belong together.  Oil and water.  Square pegs and round holes.  Tom and Katie.  New teeth and new walkers.

I'm not sure what in our evolutionary history would've selected for teeth to sprout at approximately the same time as walking begins.  It seems like something akin to running with scissors, only the scissors are actually implanted in your mouth.  When you're face-planting every tenth step, teeth are a real occupational hazard.  Not to mention the danger to the poor teeth themselves.  I now look at 3- and 4-year-old children with a sense of absolute amazement that they have a fully intact set of choppers.  

Thanks to the single snaggletooth protruding from his top gums, Owen has had three fat lips in three days.  During the last fall, Aaron and I actually came to terms with the fact that Owen might've knocked out his one and only pearly white, before the blood cleared and we could verify that the tooth was, in fact, still there.  

Maybe new teeth aren't only there to wreak senseless havoc on new walkers; maybe like spurs on a horse, they're meant to serve as a moderately painful incentive to start moving the right way.  Whatever the case, I'll put one in the win column if we can make it to preschool with an intact mouthful of teeth.

(Side note:  if you're thinking, "Hmm, it's weird that Owen only has one tooth at nearly ten months," you would be right.  The average age for tooth-growing is 4-8 months, and his first clocked in at 9.5 months.  He actually took his first steps before he had a single tooth in that little mouth.)

Transitioning from "has walked" to "is walking"

The latest iteration of Owen's dance moves

(Warning: do not watch more than once.  This song will haunt your dreams.)