Goldilocks

You may recall that a few months ago David and I were deeply entrenched in a stand-off with our crib-jumping two year-old. My husband did not want to resort to the crib tent, which we used with Primo and which worked, marvelously, and led to peace and happiness, Instead he wanted to show his daughter who was boss the old-fashioned way, in a battle of wills. I conceded. After a few days of awful screaming, she seemed to surrender. I say “seemed to” because it only lasted two months or so, and then she started her crib-jumping again. Except this time, she was smarter about it. The months she spent in confinement gave her the opportunity to think up new, nefarious plans for home domination. She realized if she was quiet, she could go and do whatever she wanted.

It started a few weeks ago, when we were putting her to sleep earlier than usual, because she’d taken to skipping naps. So we’d stick her in her crib before her brother went to bed. We’d read him his books and tell him his stories and prayers and then we’d bring him into his bed to tuck him in. Only there’d be a little Goldilocks there.

“SOMEONE IS SLEEPING IN MY BED!” he would shriek, enraged. She is, of course, already the usurper in his mind, and this didn’t help matters.

Of course, we thought it was sweet that she wanted to sleep in her brother’s bed and we overlooked the transgression. Big mistake. Give ‘em an inch . . . .

The other night, we put her to bed in the Pack N’ Play in our room because she was menacing her brother and when David went into the room to grab something a few hours later, he found her in our bed, not asleep, but sitting upright, bleary-eyed, just waiting to be discovered. It was 10:30pm. The child has bionic powers of wakefulness when there’s an act of mischief to be hatched. She just stayed awake silently for over three hours, doing God knows what with my make-up and jewelry in the dark.

So he put her back in the Pack N’ Play and she feel asleep. Then I went to bed a half hour later, creeping under the covers in the dark. When David came to bed he found Goldilocks sleeping in his bed, curled up right next to me. I had no idea.

Since that time, it’s been pandemonium. We put Sec in her crib and we find her sleeping in all sorts of strange places. The other morning she was sleeping with her head on a pillow under the coffee table in the living room. She sleeps in the bathroom. I discovered that one morning when I went to open the bathroom door first thing in the AM and it wouldn’t budge.

“Stuck on a goddamned towel or something,” I muttered, pushing the door again.

Then I realized what was stopping the door from opening was my daughter’s body, which was sprawled out on the other side.

I mean, I know they call these the terrible twos, but really, this is too much.

So I told David the kid was out of chances, we were putting up the crib tent and she’d be stuck in there and I wouldn’t have to worry about stepping on her when I walked into the kitchen for coffee.

The problem is, after only a week, she has figured out how to get out of the crib tent. Primo NEVER figured this out. He was too terrified of the zipping sound which meant lock-up and lights-out to even try to escape.

I have a Houdini baby. That’s what I’ve got. Not to mention an ulcer in the works.

Tear shit up

Something unfortunate has occurred.

My daughter has stopped napping.

It’s the sort of thing that you know is coming, especially when you have an older child, but you just can’t quite believe that it’s time for it already. I mean, Seconda’s not even two and a half yet and I thought we had a good year at least of peaceful early afternoons before us. My son was at least 3 before he gave up his nap, and with him, it was a gradual process; he’d skip his nap for a couple of days, but I’d persist with our naptime ritual and he’d eventually cave in to sleep since there was nothing better to do, in the dark, in his crib.

Well Seconda has found plenty of better things to do in the dark. Not in her crib of course. That wildcat leaps out of her crib before I’ve even closed the bedroom door behind me. Most of the better things she’s found to do are highly destructive.

What I mean is, she likes to tear shit up. Literally. And the easiest thing to tear is, of course, books, Which in our house is tantamount to hurling the family’s crystal against the wall. I mean, I am willing to accept that my children do a lot of bad shit but tear up books?

“What did this book ever do to you?” I ask her, “All it wanted was to make you HAPPY and you’ve destroyed it!”

There was one time that Primo tore up his very beloved, very fancy, very expensive pop-up Wizard of Oz book. I don’t know if it was a masochistic thing or what, but it occurred during the tail end of the losing-the-nap period when he was stuck in his room for two hours with nothing to do. When I opened the door to release him from nap captivity, I saw all these beautiful bits of glimmering Emerald City and yellow bricks and pieces of poppy field scattered everywhere and I’m not going to lie to you, it hurt. I gave him such a stern talking-to then that he kind of has post-traumatic stress disorder about the whole episode. In fact, a year later, we were just sitting in the kitchen one morning talking and he told me that he had a horrible dream the night before.

“I dreamt that I tore up the Wizard of Oz pop-up book,” he said.

“That wasn’t a dream,” I informed him, “That happened.”

“No, no, that’s not right,” came his reply.

My stern reprimand scarred him enough that he hasn’t so much as dog-eared a page since.

Seconda, on the other hand. could care less about my little lectures or my time-outs or my yelling or my forcing her to read only board books until she proves that she deserves paperback again. During my stern talking-tos, she regards me with this bored kind of expression that is so awfully adolescent, I fear for the future.

“Whatever, lady, keep flapping your lips,” her eyes seem to say, “As soon as you turn your back, I’m ripping Puff’s face right of his magic body while Jackie Paper watches, then I’ll shred that sucker too.”

Crib-Jumpers

The inevitable happened last night. Seconda learned how to climb out of the crib. If you’re a parent, this will strike a chord of terror in your heart. Or it should. If it doesn’t, it means that you have one of those super low-key children who, in the unlikely event that that they should ever climb out of a crib, would present no danger to themselves, others or your home, the kind of kid who after climbing out of the crib would probably just look through their Beatrix Potter collection until they felt sleepy, at which poiut they’d climb back in the crib or doze off on the cozy shag rug in their nursery. If you have this kind of child, curse you.

I, however, do not have a Stepford child, not even one. Both my children are what experts nowadays like to call “high spirited” which is to say totally unmanageable. Once they climb out of the crib, there is no turning back. The crib-jumping is more or less a declaration of war against David and I. Especially when it comes to the little one.

She’s fierce and wily. She is drawn to electrical outlets and stovetops like a bee to honey. And that’s to say nothing or her uncontrollable oral fixation. I am left in awe of the things she puts in her mouth, even at two years old. There’s the standard set of verboten items like Play-doh and pennies, little accessories belonging to Playmobil guys, small rubber balls included in 4 year-old party bags, handfuls of dirt, sand, lead pencils, and copious amounts of Colgate with whitener. But she also goes for the freaky shit too. Her favorite teething apparatus used to be tampons. If I left her alone for five minutes, that kid would go through a Costco-sized box of Tampax.

“What are you DOING>” I’d yell, “You know how expensive tampons are!”

Seconda gnaws through food packaging like a rat. She’ll just open the fridge, take out a hunk of Jarlsberg cheese and eat it right through the Saran Wrap. When we’re on line at Fairway and I’m busy loading our stuff onto the counter, she will take the opportunity to eat through the Perugina chocolate bars placed next to the cashier, aluminum foil and all. Lipstick, too, the more expensive the better -- you won’t find her devouring the Revlon Toast of New York, but oh, the Nars Hot Voodoo, how tasty! This is not the kind of child you want roaming around the home when you are sleeping. Which is why I had a minor crisis in faith last night when, after placing Seconda in her crib, I heard not the ear-splitting scream of agony I was accustomed to but rather the awful, unmistakable sound of little feet padding along the floor. I waited in the hallway to witness Sec blithely breezing out of her room, announcing, “No sleeping time. Let’s play games!”

“Oh my god,” I gasped. And then, “What are we gonna DO?”

My daughter thought this was just about the finest phrase she’d ever heard and began repeating it over and over again, “What we gonna DO? What we gonna DO, Mommy?”, while the house of cards that is my sanity collapsed entirely.

I will never forget the first time Primo climbed out of his crib. I was about four months pregnant with Seconda, and he was a year and a half old. He has always been a colossally shitty sleeper, and for that, I blame my parents one hundred percent. I like to blame them whenever possible, and usually it’s easy enough to do. See, David and I had read Weissbluth and understood the virtues of sleep training, so at four months, we got started. But a few days into it, my grandmother came over and when she heard the screaming emanating from the nursery, she went balls-out beserko.

“This is child abuse!” she shouted, “I’m gonna call da police!”

Two minutes later, it was, “I’m an old lady! I can’t take dis! I’m gonna have an attaco del cuore!”

And five minutes after that, “You say you love you baby and den you torture him like dis? You no love you baby!”

My father, a professional cardiologist and armchair psychologist, built a careful argument for how Primo would sustain permanent mental damage from the cry-it-out technique, damage which might result in a sociopath.

You will not be surprised to hear that after a week, just as we were making progress, we started to falter and never committed to it again.

Until I was five months pregnant with Seconda and was literally incapable of bouncing Primo on my shoulder for an hour, and then again throughout the night. We’d hit rock bottom and had no choice but to sleep train, which was a horror show. He would stand at the crib railing and scream “MOMMY NICOLE!!!!!!! DADDY DAVID!!!!!!” for - I am not shitting you – two hours straight while David and I huddled on the couch letting the cries lash us in penitence. Or, at least, I did. David just drank beer. Then, a few days into it, just as Primo was settling down without too much fuss, it happened. I put him down in his crib and a minute later he walked right up to me in the living room. I thought I was hallucinating. Then I understood what had happened and that there would be no stopping him, no training him, no sleeping ever again, no sleep, no sanity, no mercy. And I had the biggest meltdown of my life. Up to that point, I mean. That freak-out can’t hold a candle to what I can throw down now. But back then, it was like a 9 on the freak-out Richter scale. I’d never felt so incompetent, so helpless. I called David at work and cried for five minutes without speaking.

“What are we gonna DO?” I wailed when I recovered the power to talk.

Thankfully, David knew what to do. He went directly to Buy Buy Baby and purchased a crib tent. I banned my grandmother from the house and ignored my father’s continuous reminders that I was imprisoning my child and shirking my responsibility to teach him impulse control. I knew with certainty that If I didn’t lock him up, I’d have to lock myself up.

That crib tent saved my life. If I could manufacture bumper stickers I’d make one that said, “I brake for crib tents.” But it became somewhat inconvenient when we spent nights away from our place. We were so terrified about what would happen without the tent that we took it everywhere, and if you’ve assembled one of these things, you’ll understand how insane that is. It doesn’t simply pop into place like a little play tent or a Maclaren stroller. It’s a major production with several poles that must be fit together, Velcro straps that have to be placed properly around the crib railing and a huge amount of mesh netting – all of which we had to pack into our suitcase. With all this wear and tear, the damn thing ripped so I had to darn it, and believe you me, I was never meant to darn anything

So this time around, David has asked that we forgo the crib tent. He wants to kick this habit the old-fashioned way, by breaking the child’s will. Just putting her back in the crib every time she jumps out until she understands that we, the parents, are more powerful and surrenders.

“But we aren’t more powerful,” I whimpered, “It will never work.”

He asked nicely though, and my husband almost never asks to take the reins on parenting stuff. So I gave him three days.

Start the countdown.