One Thousand Words

Nesko came home today, came into the bedroom where Niko and I were sleeping (and I have a headache from too much sleeping, ow!), and announced that he had a free ticket to the auto show downtown. Did I think Niko would be interested in going?

Hell. Yes.

We explained to Nikola that he would be taking a TRAIN to see CARS and he basically went into a joyous frenzy of running, jumping, going in circles, and throwing himself dramatically to the floor. It was like a slightly older child encountering Christmas.

I forgot to pack my camera; I hope Nesko takes photos with his phone.

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I think I’ve mentioned in the past that Niko refers to apples and oranges as “myum myum balls” because “myum myum” is food and apples and oranges are round, like balls. Food balls! He likes to eat both apples and oranges and in an attempt to accommodate his desire for fresh fruit and our own healthy eating initiative, we’ve instituted a fruit bowl that we keep on the dining room table, filled with washed fruit. It is ready to go! All we have to do is eat it! Niko is thrilled and spends a lot of time pointing at the fruit in the bowl and demanding myum myum balls instead of the terrible crap we try to feed him. You know. Like home made macaroni and cheese, or chicken quesadillas, or roasted cauliflower, or the eggs he specifically requested, or from-scratch chicken tenders and oven fries. They are almost as enticing as home made cookies, cooling on racks on the table.

Oh, how we torment him, with food on the table he isn’t supposed to eat in mass quantities!

So he tries to climb up onto the table and steal the food.

Recently, we picked up a bag of mandarin oranges. I thought they were clementines. THERE IS A VAST AND TERRIBLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MANDARIN ORANGES AND CLEMINTINES. Basically: clementines are totally awesome and tasty; mandarins are syrupy sweet and foul. I WAS DISAPPOINT. Niko, however, disagrees with me and thinks mandarin oranges are the BOMB. And they are very easy to peel, with not much pith, Cara Cara oranges I am looking at YOU. So we’re spending a lot of time recently chasing him off the table.

I am thinking of getting a squirt bottle.

I mean, it works for cats, right?

Yesterday, Nesko and I were hanging out in the bedroom laughing at something (probably fart jokes, we are totally mature that way) and enjoying the way I’ve rearranged furniture in there, when Niko edged in with a huge grin on his face. I mean, the little dude sidled in. Like he was hiding something, or trying to. He had his hands behind his back. What was in his hands? Why, two mandarin oranges of course!

It was some hilariously inept sneaking, let me tell you.

So Nesko congratulated him on his ninja moves in getting the oranges off the table without any tell-tale chair-adjusting scraping, and went to put the oranges back in the fruit bowl… at which point he did a quick count and realized that Niko had actually removed the oranges and stashed them somewhere previously. Like, the day before previously. About half an hour later, I intercepted him with a Halloween Treat Bucket full of mandarin oranges. He was swinging it around, learning about Centrifugal Force.

The fruit bowl is now on the kitchen counter.

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Nikola uses a pacifier, but only when he’s sleeping (or really sick and miserable). The transition from all the time to just in bed was pretty easy. We gathered up all the pacifiers, put them in the bedroom out of his reach, and told him that pacifiers were only for bed time. Was he sleepy? He can only have one when he’s sleepy. For a while at first he’d sleep with one in his mouth and one in each fist JUST IN CASE but now he just sleeps with the one. We leave them within his reach, and if he gets sleepy he’ll go into the bedroom and get one and walk around sucking on it and being chill. Part of his going-to-sleep ritual involves getting his pacifier. When he’s done sleeping, part of the “I’m really awake” ritual is handing the pacifier to whoever is with him. (or throwing it across the room, if he’s in a pet.)

He’s almost two– he’ll be two in March– and his teeth are really crooked. This isn’t a surprise because my teeth were really crooked, and after over ten years of braces, are still KIND OF crooked. I have very large teeth, a small mouth, and supernumerary teeth. Nesko had braces, too, but only for a year or two. So we were very prepared for Niko to have orthodontic problems. But even with his limited use of the pacifier, I’m starting to worry that the sucking is contributing to his tooth problems.

Then there’s the fact that when he’s asleep and the pacifier falls out of his mouth and he wakes up and it’s gone, he has a hard time resettling himself unless he can find it. Since it’s often tangled up in covers, between the head of the bed and the wall, otherwise hard to get to, what usually happens is he wakes all the way and starts crying and needs help finding the pacifier. This is a sleep disruption for ALL of us (we share a bed), and although we started using the pacifier to help him transition to sleep and learn to self sooth (he was a GREAT sleeper for a LONG time), I think it’s now hindering him from developing good sleep habits.

I was originally going to wait until he was potty trained to dump the pacifier, but he is almost 2 and shows NO interest or inclination where the toilet is concerned.

One of the techniques I’ve heard about involves talking about the pacifier fairy, or giving the pacifiers to babies who need them, etc. I don’t think he’s old enough to understand that, and I don’t think he has the empathy to care about another baby (he is a toddler, after all), unless we talked about a specific baby we know. Then there’s the “trade in the pacifier for an awesome toy” strategy but again, I don’t think he has the brain power for that due to his age.

So. Any suggestions?

What have you done? What have people you know done? What have you read/heard about?

Give my ANY suggestion, no matter how obvious you think it is.

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My wonderful, amazing, beloved, child:

You may have heard that I have eyes in the back of my head.

This is true! So don’t, you know, try anything.

However, I do not have eyes in my ass. Shocking, I know. This means that when I am standing at the sink washing dishes (a chore I hate, and thus you whining and moaning through the entire ordeal adds NOTHING to my joy) and you come up behind me and shove an open book against my ass repeatedly?

Yeah. Not helpful.

Sadly, I am unable to multi-task and both ensure the dishes are clean and won’t poison us with salmonella or e-Coli or whatever, AND read you “Mike Mulligan and his Freaky Machine Wife Named Mary Anne” yet again.

I’m working on this.

I promise.

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Niko has a cold. It’s pretty awful! He’s a terrible snot beast and he’s got this awful gaspy wracking cough that’s worst when he’s lying down, so night time has involved a careful corralling of pillows and propping him up against my body so he’s more or less upright and can breathe better. It’s rough, but he’s getting better, and THANK GOD (knock on wood) I’ve managed to avoid this death cough.

I’m a little lax on the baby cleanliness department, I’ll admit it. He gets a bath about twice a month, more often if he gets dirty. But mostly he’s fine with a wet wash cloth on his face and hands or anywhere else he’s gotten icky. A bit part of this is because of his eczema which, let me tell you, this not bathing him? Is GREAT for his skin. His tata and I both are sensitive to a lot of soaps as well, so avoiding them, I’m sure, is good for him. The last time I gave Niko a bath, I washed his hair. Then we had pudding and he rubbed pudding in his hair. So I had to give him another bath and another hair washing. I guess he felt he had to restore the filth equilibrium or something. But both those hair washings were really hard. He did not like the water on his head! NOT ONE BIT!

I gave him a bath today, and I told him ahead of time what I was going to do (pour water on his head three times, one two three, shampoo his hair and get it clean, and then pour water on his head three times, one two three), asked him if he could pour water on his own head (he could! sort of. He mostly missed. He got some of it! And he looked very pleased with himself.) and then narrated what I was doing as I did it. He took this hair washing better than the previous ones, although he rubbed some baked beans in there during lunch. Again, filth equilibrium.

I’ve been trying to clip his nails for the past few days. They are getting, like, french manicure long. And although for a while we had a nice little nail clipping routine worked out, he was totally rejecting my grooming advances. Then, today, he came up to me with our copy of “Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel.” (To clarify: he came up to me for the fourth time today with our copy of “Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel.”) Before I settled into reading it (again!), I told him that I had to clip his nails FIRST before we read the book. And AFTER we clipped his nails, we could read the book together.

This pleased him.

The promise of the book was so compelling that he even picked up the nail clippers and brought them to me (he had, previously, hidden them (although not very well)). I set to, clipping his nails. When he tried to pull his hand back, I reminded him about our deal and gestured to the book, and he was once again all compliance. So we read about Good Old machine-lovin’ Mike (who is helpfully referred to as “an Irishman” on the dust jacket) and then read “Bread and Jam for Frances,” which is a great book and I’m looking forward to getting ALL the Frances books.

For your amusement, check out these following videos involving “Werner Herzog” (not really Werner Herzog) retelling children’s stories:

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