I love it when I’m offering the kids a treat from their Halloween bag and the Captain asks for a “kitty cat” bar.

It’s hard not to laugh when the Captain is playing boats in the bathtub, and refers to the toy buoy as a “booty” — “No, police boat! Don’t touch the booty! Go around the booty!”

likes it when Gal Smiley asks him if he is going to take his laptop “pooter” to work today.

The Captain is really outstanding at learning the lyrics to songs, but I do like it when he sings O Canada with this line: “Guard keep our land/ Gory, us, and free…”

And I love it when the Wee One is going to bed, and the Captain calls out, “Goodnight, Peeps!” It’s his own version of a rapper saying farewell to his entourage.

The Wee One has had three colds already in her short, 4-month-long life. When a baby gets a stuffy nose, they make a terrible gurgling sound when breathing, like they’re halfway underwater. And one thing that a parent does NOT need in their life is any additional reason to freak out about their baby’s breathing, like, all the publicity given to SIDS (a parents’ absolute worst nightmare, I think) is more than enough to freak me out, thank you.

So when your baby has a runny and stuffed up nose, you feel the need to do something about it. Luckily for me, I have top secret weapons from foreign lands. High-YA!

When the Captain was born, one of Sir Monkeypants’ good friends from high school, Emile, was living over in Singapore with his lovely and sweet wife, Yannie. They’d had a baby boy about a year before and as such, were totally up on the parental knowledge. They sent us a fabulous package of very strange, Asian-made baby items that they thought would be useful to us, that we probably couldn’t buy in Canada. Those crazy Asians, they make some VERY strange teethers, let me tell you. They also make a couple of rather scary nasal clearing devices that are probably not-at-all legal on the Canadian market.

In North America, if you want to clear out that phelgm, your only option is this:

That’s a nasal aspirator. You use it by squeezing the ball part, then sticking the clear part in your baby’s nose, then releasing the ball part — the resulting suction is supposed to be the equivalent of baby nose blowing. Sadly, this device just basically blows.

Now, when you have some chunky bits in there that need removing, and you have the means and opportunity to jet over to Singapore for the weekend, you want to pick up one of these little Asian babies:

These are my beloved nose tweezers, and they are the single most valuable baby item that I own. Any crusty things up here interfering with breathing are quickly grabbed and popped out, and then everyone can sleep happily. I wish I had kept the package that they came in — all the writing was in Chinese characters, so we couldn’t read it, but it was clear from the drawing on the package what they were to be used for. Apparently a smiley face with tweezers shoved up its nose is the universal symbol for “booger.”

When we were lending all our baby stuff to LittleSis last year for her first baby, I thought about giving her the tweezers, but they were just to precious to risk them leaving the house. Besides, even though my kids were getting older, what if one of them was playing with a plastic beaded necklace at night, in bed, and it broke, and one of the beads got wedged up their nose, creating a major crisis that could only be resolved with nose tweezers? Not that that happened to any friends of mine, or anything.

I like to imagine a day when one of my kids has their own first child, and I pass on the tweezers with great solemnity, giving them the gift of the greatest baby item ever. They’ll accept it, then later after I’m gone, they’ll turn to their spouse and say, “Can you BELIEVE my Mother used to stick this torture device up my nose?? Is this not conclusive proof that she is totally, utterly insane?” and then they toss it in the nearest trash bin.

Maybe I’ll just have it bronzed instead.

Emile and Yannie also sent us another snot-removing item. It’s super hardcore, though, and I never had the guts to use it on either the Captain or the Gal. But the poor Wee One was really suffering with a stuffy nose a few weeks back, and the aspirator and the tweezers just couldn’t seem to help her, so I had to break out the Super Sucker:

You can tell it means business because it has its own carrying case. With this thing, you stick the teardrop-shaped part of the bottle into the baby’s nose, then you suck on the end of the straw, creating as much or as little suction as you need. Then the crap in question gets sucked into the bottle (I like it that the bottle is so big — quite optimistic about the number of boogies it will be removing today!).

It really worked, too. They don’t call it the Super Sucker for nothing. I’m almost looking forward to the Wee One’s next cold.

Since we took away the Wee One’s sleeping chair, her nighttime sleep has gradually gotten worse. At first, she went from sleeping right through the night to getting up once around 4 a.m. Then, a week or so ago, she started to get up twice, once at 1 a.m., and again at 4. Then, the night before last, she was having a lot of trouble around 8:30 p.m., and I was still awake, so I thought, oh, I’ll just pop in and settle her down with some nursing, and maybe the extra milk will save me the 1 a.m. wakeup call. But no, she still got up at 1, and then at 4.

Last night, the same thing happened — fussiness around 9, I was still up, so I gave her a little milk. Then, around 11:30 p.m., I heard crying again.

And there it was, staring me smack in the face…the cry-it-out.

I don’t think there is anything more controversial when it comes to child care than the cry-it-out idea. Some parents think it’s completely inhumane not to respond to your kid when they are crying. But I definitely feel that rushing to your baby’s bedside every time they fuss causes them to become unable to comfort themselves, and possibly interrupts perfectly good sleep if they were only fussing a little because they were at a light part of their sleep cycle.

So where do you draw the line? How long do you let a “fuss” go on, before responding? How much crying is too much? It’s one of the toughest things to decide as a parent, and it’s pretty hard to stick to any particular rules. Some nights, a little crying is too much for me to handle. Other nights, I’m exhausted, I know she’s safe and not really hungry, and it’s better for us both to just let things be.

With the Captain, I didn’t have the heart to do the cry-it-out thing for months. I belonged to two different mommy-and-baby groups, and I was still getting up three or four times in the night with him at 8 months old, when everyone else’s kid was sleeping right through. I could afford to be somewhat indulgent because he was our first, meaning I was free to nap twice a day at the same times he was sleeping, but eventually, with weening looming, we decided enough was enough. He cried for an hour the first night, while and I sat in the next room, practically weeping ourselves. The second night, it was 10 minutes of fussing, and ever since then, he’s put himself to sleep happily and slept through. I cursed myself for not trying it months earlier.

With Gal Smiley, we never really had to make that call. She found her fingers to suck on very early on, and was always great at putting herself to sleep. She only ever got up once in the night after she was two months old. We did have trouble getting rid of that one nighttime wake-up — eventually, after she was weened, we did try to cry-it-out, but she had an amazing power to cry at 3 a.m. for two hours at a time, until I eventually broke, so that never really worked out. Instead, we just lived with the wake-up — taking turns going in to briefly comfort her — until she phased it out herself, at around a year and a half old.

Now with the Wee One, I’m not sure how we’ll be handling things. Getting good sleep at night is very important to me now, since I have to take care of the other two all day, and it’s a high energy job. I definitely cannot afford to be getting up four times a night. Plus, we know from just a few weeks past that she is quite able to sleep through until at least 4 — I think that is the hardest part, the frustration of the backslide from good sleep into bad. And with the other two roaming around during the day, I also can’t afford to be spending hours putting her down for each nap. She has to be more versatile, she has to be more independent, and she has to do it soon.

So last night, we decided to let her cry a bit at the 11:30 mark, and she made it through herself after about 15 minutes of crying. Then I got up to feed her as usual around 1, but after that, she slept through until 6:30. Progress! I’m still torn, but I think that we’ll be making a new “no feedings before 1 a.m.” rule around here. We’ll worry about eliminating those later feedings once she is a bit older, maybe around 6 months, I think.

Hopefully we all get some better rest out of the deal.

Well, the war has been waged and a victor has been declared. In the battle between New Shows Featuring a Man-Child Who Works At A Big Box Store who now must Save The World through New Found Powers while Winning The Girl — those being Chuck and Reaper — I have decided that Reaper is the winner. It really was Ray Wise as the Devil that totally won me over — I adore him. Plus, the last couple of episodes have introduced a nice hint of mythology regarding Sam’s contract with the Devil and deeper secrets his parents are keeping, so that’s all good and Buffy-like as I was hoping. Since I can’t keep up with my busy TV schedule as it is, Chuck is getting dumped. Sorry dude, I hope we can still be friends!

Sir Monkeypants has actually decided to go the opposite way. He’s broken up with Reaper but is still watching Chuck. I believe that he honestly finds Chuck to be the superior, more interesting show. But I also believe that he finds the chick on Chuck to be hot, which, you know, never hurt a series.

Her name is Yvonne Strahovski. Here’s a cute shot of her:

Even though she’s obviously adorable, has quite clearly been living with me for too long, because after the very first episode of Chuck, he could not stop talking about her teeth. I’m a wee bit teeth obsessed, especially regarding Tom Cruise, whose off-centre front teeth are so distracting that I really can’t enjoy any of his films. Yvonne’s teeth are beautiful — white and straight, definitely much, much nicer than mine and most of the population of England. However, by Hollywood standards, they are noticeable because they aren’t perfect-perfect — glowing white and perfectly, identically even all around. I’m guessing that these are her own natural teeth, no whiteners or braces or caps, and as such, they really stand out on TV.

It’s actually really hard to find a picture of her smiling — certainly all her promo shots show her with her mouth closed. I found this one at Maxim’s website:

Compare Yvonne’s smile, just for example, to Halle Berry:

Not that I’m implying that Halle has had dental work done (although, anyone with teeth that perfect probably has), I’m just saying that Halle-style teeth are so common on TV and in movies these days, that someone with great-but-natural teeth, like Yvonne, totally stands out. I wonder how much pressure she’s under from her publicist and agent to get her teeth filed down or whitened or totally replaced. It’s crazy how plastic the famous people are these days, and how everyone looks exactly the same, like pod people. I admire her for standing strong. And for continuing to be attractive to the likes of .

Yvonne, you go girl! Fight the power!

A couple of days ago, we got out our high chair for the Wee One. She’s a little young for solids (although, not according to my mother, who was giving me a spoonful of cereal at three weeks old…times sure do change), but we wanted her to be able to sit with us at the table at mealtimes.

That makes a shocking total of six chairs that the Wee One has in this house.

There’s the high chair at the kitchen table.

In the TV room, we have a Bumbo, on loan from LittleSis. We use that one when the Wee One is feeling energetic, because it requires her to hold up her own head, and when she wants to be part of the action, watching her brother and sister play.

In the main hallway outside the office, we have a swing with a removable chair. That one is good for when she’s tired or sleepy, as it provides full head support, and the rocking comforts her. When I have to work in the kitchen or take Gal Smiley to the potty, I carry the Wee One around in this chair so she can always see me; the tray on it provides a nice area for me to pop down a few toys to entertain her.

In the laundry room, there’s her infant car seat, ready for outings. She also sometimes sleeps here in this chair if she falls asleep in the car.

Upstairs, in our bathroom, we have a chair that was the Captain’s infant car seat, but now is too old to be used in the car. This chair was the infamous sleeping chair and is seriously worth its weight in gold. Now it serves as a place for the Wee One to sit and enjoy the warmth and rushing water sounds when I’m having a shower.

And lastly, in the main bathroom, we have her bouncy chair, where she sits when I’m getting her ready for a bath, or when the older two are bathing.

That’s a heck of a lot of sitting for someone who technically isn’t able to sit, yet.

In other development news, the Wee One has learned how to turn on the aquarium — a Fisher Price toy that plays music and lights up — that is attached to her crib. It has one big button on the front for on/off, and she’s figured out that she can lift her feet and kick at it and turn it on when she wakes up in the morning. Then I get up, and come in to find her grooving out to the music, while totally turned around and in a completely different location than I left her in. Locomotion + logic is freaking me out.

And the pants that we have for Gal Smiley — too long for her just two months ago — are a little too short for her this morning. They grow up so fast!

Oh my God, there’s been a time change.

Those of you without toddlers in the house probably think of this is the “good” time change. A whole bonus hour of sleep. Or maybe, if you prefer, an extra hour for blogging. Or perhaps a whole free hour to catch up on back episodes of High Stakes Poker. In any case, the chance to arrive at work on Monday morning feeling like you got a wee little holiday.

But for those of us with toddlers…this is one where our kids think they are getting up at the usual time, but really are getting up at 5 a.m. And are more than ready to go. Let’s get up! Let’s go out! Let’s do stuff! Poor Sir Monkeypants really took the brunt of it this morning, as he got up with both the Captain and the Gal, and got them all dressed and fed and ready for their early Sunday morning gymnastics class, only to find out it was still 6 in the morning. Crap!

Then comes the post-dinnertime trauma, in which they think it is bedtime, but really we have a whole extra hour to go, and we have to find something soothing and fun but not-too-fun to keep them awake but not hysterical. Then you put them to bed with strict instructions NOT to get up until the clock on their bedside table says “6:00” and pray that it registers.

Not that getting up in the “morning” is an actual concept in my life these days. I was up four times in the night last night, twice to take little ones to the bathroom, and twice to feed the baby. On the plus side, I almost made a cutesy blog entry at what I thought was 12:30 a.m., to make today’s post for NaBloPoMo, but it would have turned out to have been an hour too early.

I think. Time for some coffee!

Yesterday was a PD day for the public school system. Which means, the Captain was at home all day. More importantly, it means that the two pre-teen boys who live on my street who deliver the Flyer Force were home all day. Which means, we got our Flyer Force flyers on Friday, instead of the usual Saturday.

A mere five years ago, I used to curse the arrival of the enormous packet of flyers on our front porch each weekend. I wanted to put our black box right there on the porch, with a big Scrooge-ish sign that told delivery persons to just deposit their ads directly into our recycling box. It would have saved having to listen to me grumble as I made the long, hard, terrible three-step journey from front door to garbage door, to put them in the recycling myself. We never opened the pack, never looked at anything in there. If we needed something, I’d just go get it…who cared about what the stores were trying to push on us?

These days I await the arrival of the flyer pack with baited breath. The Flyer Force, who puts together the set, sometimes calls to check to see if we are getting our delivery, and I proudly say, “Yes! And Thank You!” When we first moved to our new house, there was no delivery person for our area, and I actually called to complain…and for a moment, even considered taking the job myself. I must have my flyers!

Naturally I blame the children. Shopping for all that baby stuff — strollers, cribs, adorable teeny tiny socks — made me suddenly interested in the concept of “sale.” Now that we have three, we’re always interested in saving money. The flyers allow me to comparison shop from home without having to shlep our kids around to five different stores. I’m a coupon-clipping, loss-leader shopping momma. Which is why it’s such a big deal that the boys brought our flyers yesterday. Usually they don’t get around to delivering them until Saturday afternoon, and since the sale prices in the flyers start on Friday evenings, by the time we’re aware that a bargain is out there, all the really awesome deals are gone.

It’s more than just the dollars and sense, though. Every year when the Sears Christmas Wish Book arrived at our house in Cambridge, I’d go through it page by page and imagine the shopping. Oh, the shopping! Every page would be carefully studied while I picked out what stuff I’d get if only I had millions and millions of dollars. I think the weekend flyers are kind of like that — a little bit of Christmas Wish Book in a weekly package. I’m like Scrooge on Christmas morning — completely converted and giddy as a schoolboy!

Well, we survived day one.

The last couple of days that Sir Monkeypants spent at home were not, unfortunately, the best days we’ve ever had as parents. The main problem these days is Gal Smiley. She’s in a very strange stage, in which she spends half the time being unbelievably sweet and kind and thoughtful and tender, and the other half of the time raging uncontrollably. One minute, she’ll be noticing that you don’t have any Smarties, and she’ll look at her own box of Smarties, her favourite treat, and then offer you some, and ask you to do “cheers” with her. The next minute, she’ll be gently wiping away spit up from the Wee One’s mouth, then giving her a push in the swing. The minute after that, she’ll be on the floor screaming because you dared to suggest that she put a sweater on before going outside; she’ll screech at you not to touch her, to LEAVE! ME! ALONE!, until finally she gets angry to the point where she throws Shearly, her stuffed sheep. Then she has a total and complete meltdown, because Shearly is across the room for some totally unknown reason, and this is clearly an unsolvable problem on the level of world hunger.

This last week her tantrums have been quite unpredictable, and I had no idea how I was going to handle it. What would I do if she had a freak out while the baby was sleeping/eating/trying to grow up with normal hearing? We knew for sure that this would probably be the end of the Gal’s afternoon naps, because naptime is the one time guaranteed to cause a breakdown, and there was no way I could spend a half hour calming her down, then another half hour trying to get her to go to sleep, while the baby was who-knows-where and the Captain was doing who-knows-what. So today I avoided the whole nap situation and just let her stay up, and she did surprisingly well. So good, in fact, that the only time she had a meltdown was at bedtime, for Sir Monkeypants, who had just come home from work. Welcome home, Daddy!

Between the lack of tantrums, and the baby happily putting herself to sleep for her four naps, and the Captain helping Gal Smiley use the potty while I was busy nursing the baby, I’d say that our first day as a team of four could not have gone better. Knock wood!

Just about the only down side is that I used up all my MommyFun Activities in one day. I had a whole schedule of stuff to be used to fill up the time — PlayDoh on Mondays, painting on Tuesdays, riding bikes in the basement on Wednesdays. Today we painted, and coloured, and did PlayDoh, and did stickers, and rode bikes in the basement, and went for a walk outside, and still had time in there to watch a movie. What the heck we are going to do for day two, I’m sure I don’t know!

Today, Sir Monkeypants goes back to work. I think we’re both tense about it. He’s wondering how he’ll get to spend quality fun time with his three little ones, and maintain his usual go-getting work schedule. I’m just wondering how I’m going to survive.

Back when Gal Smiley was born, Sir Monkeypants took a 3-month paternity leave as well. After about 2 1/2 months, I was more than ready to be a full-time mother of two, and kind of shooed him back to work. Off with you boy! Give me some space to clean my kitchen!

This time around, I don’t feel ready, and it’s scary. I don’t know how I’m going to make the daily schedule work, or how I’m going to make sure that each of our three kids is getting all the time that they need. These past 3+ months that has been home has been like a wonderful vacation for me, and now it’s all over. And I don’t mean vacation in terms of less work — with the new baby around, there’s more than enough chores and running around to do and sleep to catch up on. I mean it’s been a huge mental vacation, a freedom from stress. I can answer the needs of the baby at any time and I don’t have to worry about what the other two are doing. I can take care of any one of the kids, and if another emergency arises, there is someone else there, someone I trust absolutely, to respond to the call. I rarely have to worry about the safety of the Captain and the Gal while I’m busy nursing the baby, or the state of the house while I’m off giving the Wee One a bath. It’s taken care of, and that freedom from worry has been like a fabulous all-expenses paid trip to Club Med in Cancun for my brain.

So now that it’s back to work for me, too, it’s time to move into survival mode. We’ll be basically spending our time inside, trying to find activities to fill the gaps between the baby’s naps, and using the TV as little as possible. My goals for each day: get school kids there and back; get at least a couple of naps in for the Wee One; make it to bedtime with my sanity intact.

Welcome to Day One.

We carved our pumpkins last night. I spent three hours sorting through pumpkin guts, extracting the seeds for toasting (and they turned out yummy). Meanwhile, Sir Monkeypants spent his time making this beautiful but aggravating Thomas The Tank Engine jack o’lantern:

Now that is the very definition of a man who loves his son.

And speaking of fathers…

Carving pumpkins reminds me of my dad.

I don’t have very many father-related memories from growing up; he was away a lot and missed many of our major life events. But I do remember him being home for every Halloween. My mom would send us down to the basement with four pumpkins and our dad, and we’d bug the crap out of him, circling and circling, asking if the pumpkins were ready for carving and telling him exactly how to do everything. He was fairly patient with us, though, and let us design our own, doing his best to carve out any pattern we wanted. We’d do the seed sorting while he put our chosen faces, silly or mad or scary, onto our pumpkins. Then he’d display them proudly on our porch. It was a whole day of dad time, quite rare in my youth.

Even now, every Halloween, my mom pulls out the family legend of that time that hooligans took one of my dad’s hard-carved creations off the porch and smashed it. The idiots did their damage while my father was sitting in the front room watching TV. When he heard the splat, he jumped up and ran out the front door, chasing them all the way up the street. My mom says that he definitely would have caught them except that he was wearing his slippers. She says that they were pretty lucky he didn’t have decent footwear on, because it was one of the rare times he got really, truly angry. Stupid hooligans.

On Halloween night, he’d light our pumpkins at home, and then take us all trick-or-treating. My dad was a trick-or-treat machine. He’d run us from house to house to house, pausing only to offload our little bags into the two or three garbage bags he was carrying. We’d cover all the streets around ours, and then some, travelling up and down all through the entire subdivision, working hard for upwards of three hours. Between my three sisters and myself, we’d have no trouble filling those garbage bags, and then we’d haul home the booty for sorting. We’d make one big pile and then divide out the chips, then the chocolate, then the candy (with a special little pile of those molasses candies that no one wanted but me). Then my dad would solemnly allow us each to choose three pieces for immediate consumption, while my mom put everything else away, to be doled out in our lunches two pieces at a time until Christmas.

Not counting the stuff my dad sneaked out of the cupboard when he thought we weren’t looking.

We keep our pumpkins outside, but don’t worry Dad — I always have one eye out at all times for the hooligans.