To be fair, I have to start out by saying that we’re really lucky. For a two-year-old Griffin is very mellow. Most days we don’t have any tantrums. I know that could change, but for now we’re lucky. When the tantrums come, though, they’re spectacular. The biggest problem is keeping him from hurting himself, he flings himself around and bangs his head on the ground violently. Recently we were in the basement and he was playing on the treadmill while I slowly pushed the tread around with my feet. After a few transition warnings I stopped pushing the treadmill so I could come upstairs and start on dinner. This was one frustration too many and before I could stop him Griffin banged his head into the treadmill. So for several days he’s been walking around with a tread mark on his forehead that looks like a bindi:

We moved to Wisconsin because we decided this would be a good place to have and raise our family. Going back to the source like, well, salmon. Griffin has so many relatives here, and four cousins very close in age. We talk about it periodically and every time we come to the same decision, this is where we should be right now.

Even so, sometimes I miss California desperately. And being here can feel like I’ve gone backwards in life. Sometimes when we’re in South Wayne I start to feel like a trapped teenager.

We just watched the movie Junebug which was spot on about these conflicting feelings about home and family.

I must have jinxed our sleep situation with my last post. We had a few nights this week of lots of night waking, but the bigger problem has been getting Griffin to fall asleep in the first place. For naps he usually snuggles with me and falls asleep in three minutes. At night lately it’s an hour or more of bouncing off the walls and tantruming about not wanting a bath, not wanting to wear pajamas, and not wanting the light off.

Yesterday we compounded the problem by deciding to cut out the pacifier. For the nap instead of three minutes of snuggling and then sleep he literally bounced around the room for two hours. I read our sure-to-get-him-to-sleep book (Go, Dog, Go) something like fifteen times. I played the lullaby CD three times. I tried talking softly. I tried pretending to be asleep myself. He was completely manic, sometimes trantruming and banging his head into the wall or the floor, sometimes jumping on the bed, sometimes just laughing insanely. After two hours I gave up and parked him in front of the TV so I could get lunch.

Last night was a repeat of the nap. I had described the scene to Julian in a phone call but he was still shocked at the intensity of the manic jumping around. Finally after hours of despairing that he would ever fall asleep we hatched a new plan. We’ll give him the pacifier just until he falls asleep. 10-20 minutes a day shouldn’t have much impact on his teeth, and we can work on phasing it out from there. We gave him a pacifier and sure enough, it worked like a charm.

If I give Griffin the thumbs up and yell, “Thumbs up!”, he responds enthusiastically by pointing up. He was very happy to accommodate for the lens.

Sleep on the whole is going great guns these days. However, it’s not without its fits and starts. Last night Griffin woke up just about every 45 minutes throughout the entire night, and tonight we spent 2 hours in bed trying to get him to sleep over great protest.

I hesitate to write about this here because I’m sure to jinx it, but everything is great right now.

I love my job. Just completely love it. A switch into a new field was exactly what I needed, learning all this biology is fascinating. I managed to never learn much biology before now because I had issues about dissecting animals. So now I’m reading textbooks at home and listening to 7.012 lectures in the car and making Julian listen to me babble on about whatever interesting thing I learned today. The coding is interesting, too, it’s all in C# which has been fun. The schedule is about right, working towards a reasonable release date. And working four hours a day is perfect, I always leave wanting to do more. When coworkers ask me how I like it I have to tone it down so they don’t think I’m completely insane.

I appreciate my time with Griffin more now, too. He says a mixture of “Yeah” and “Yet” for yes and he says “Ope” for no. For a two-year-old he’s very agreeable, he probably says “Yet” five times for every “Ope”. We’ve been working on being polite and he’ll often say “Peas” and “Tank U” without being prompted. He’s sleeping through the night most nights, only occasionally waking up once. We do have some tantrums, one of the more memorable ones involved having to carry him naked and screaming through a hotel lobby because he didn’t want to leave the pool and he wouldn’t let us change his clothes. The tantrums are pretty rare, though.

Yesterday we all went for a bike ride in New Glarus and afterwards we ate at a Swiss restaurant. This has been one of the happy surprises about having a child, we thought we’d never be able to go to a restaurant again. It turns out that he’s always so happy in restaurants that we don’t even think twice about bringing him to fairly nice places. He likes looking around at all the people and trying new foods. We often get comments from the waiters and people at surrounding tables about how well behaved he is.

Some new stuff is on the horizon. Griffin’s permanent babysitter started this morning. Julian’s working from home today so he’d be here in case they needed him and he reports that it sounded like they had a great time. We’re going to try to phase out the pacifier, maybe in another week so it isn’t too many changes at once. We’ve thought about trying to move him into his own room, but since he’s sleeping through the night now and we all like co-sleeping we’ll probably just follow his lead on that.

Whenever I talk to my Grandma lately she tells me “when your children are little is the happiest time of your life”. I definitely see how that could be true.

Griffin completed his first set of swimming lessons on his own tonight (as opposed to a parent accompanying him in the pool). He’s a trooper! The new facility is less than 15 minutes away, which is very close by our out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere standards. You can kinda tell he digs his classmate, and he loves slurping water and spitting it out while he’s kickin’ it in the shallow end.

More on NYC: I quite liked New York. I was expecting Central Park to be shabby, littered and uninviting. Instead it’s meticulously maintained with an amazing amount of kid friendly features and little tykes running around everywhere. I expected the city itself to be dirty, congested and sinister, and instead everywhere we went felt safe, clean and uncrowded. It was awesome being able to walk a block and get all kinds of fresh produce, or duck into a subway and get anywhere for $2. Nice waterfront parks a few blocks from the hotel. Brooklyn was cool too (we stayed in downtown Manhattan, visited Brooklyn), maybe a bit Noe Valley-ish. I’m not saying I’d live there over Vancouver, but it was quite a pleasant surprise.

This week’s Gizmism:

We were playing around in daddy’s car, pretending to drive whilst parked in the garage, twiddling all the controls like a big person. Then, time to move on to the back seat.

Daddy: No, you don’t want to go back there, there’s too much crap.

Griffin (surprisingly accepting of the situation, probably because it was so obviously true): Hello. Crap.

Daddy: Wanna go back up stairs?

Griffin: Yet! Bye. Crap.