the good, the bad, and the ugly

Yesterday was an up and down kind of day.....

The Good

I recently started reading the blog of a friend of mine with two little ones. Her daughter is a year or so older than Rachel, and she has a younger son. I went back and read the archives over the course of the last couple of weeks. One of the things she wrote about was using a timer, and how much it has helped her at home. For instance, her daughter kept asking her to play with her, but she kept telling her, "Mommy has work to do," so she felt guilty for not playing with her daughter. Or she'd play with her daughter and feel guilty that nothing was getting done. This is a constant struggle for me, as well. So one day she set a timer and told her daughter Mommy would work until the timer beeped, and then when it was done, she'd play. Then when it was time to play she set it again and told her daughter, "Mommy will play with you until the timer beeps, and then I need to get some more work done." She wrote about the freedom this brought her--freedom to do work without feeling guilty because she knew she'd soon have time to play, and freedom to play with her daughter without feeling guilty for not working because she had already gotten some done and would soon get more done.

So yesterday I wanted to get some cleaning done, and Rachel started asking me over and over to play with her. I kept telling her that Mommy had work to do, but felt sad for constantly turning her down. Then I remembered the timer technique. So I told Rachel that she needed to play by herself until the timer beeped, and then Mommy would play with her. I set it for 15 minutes to start with. And it worked! She played happily by herself and I got 15 minutes worth of cleaning done (and 15 minutes actually allows me to get a lot more done when I don't have to be constantly shooing her off to play). After it beeped she ran in and said, "Mommy, you pway wif me now?" So I set it for another 15 minutes and told her I would play until it beeped again. She wanted to play her Wiggles Memory game, so we did, for a solid 15 minutes. And I didn't once feel bad for sitting on the floor playing with my daughter when I had work to do. I knew I would get to it soon. The timer beeped and she looked up and said, "Time for Mommy work!" The next time I set it for 20 minutes. Worked great and got a lot done. Then we played princess castle for 20 minutes. Actually, she played most of it by herself and liked just having me there watching her. Occasionally she'd give me a role to play, but mostly she moved the people around and used her high pitch pretend voice (where do kids learn that, anyway? I remember using that same voice when playing Strawberry Shortcake and other pretend scenarios growing up!) and played by herself.

I thought this was funny....the princesses and prince got thrown aside so the Yo Gabba Gabba gang could take a ride in the carriage. Oh, and she calls the knight in shining armor an "astwonot." I guess armor does slightly resemble an astronaut's suit, if you squint a bit!



So the timer....a new good thing around our house.



The Bad

There was absolutely no success in the potty training department yesterday, after a nearly perfect day the day before. Ugh. So frustrating--just when you think you're getting somewhere, there are nothing but accidents. And worst of all, the last one happened while she was sitting on the couch. Right on the crack between two cushions. Pee went down the crack and onto the material below, which soaked the bottom portion of the cushions, too. Top, sides and bottom of two cushions, completely soaked with pee. Gross.

Before dinner last night I started having an upset stomach and spent a good portion of the evening laying on the couch or in the bathroom. My husband was gone at the gym. So I had to clean up wet cushions (and a wet kitchen floor from another accident) and deal with not feeling well by myself. Not a fun evening.

The Ugly

I thought the evening was bad. The night was positively awful. At 9:55 or so, as we were finishing up watching The Biggest Loser and thinking about getting to bed, Rachel woke up crying. It was then that I remembered that she had been slowly developing a stuffy nose all day and I meant to give her some benadryl before she went to bed to help her sleep (she woke up crying from her nap yesterday, too, because she couldn't breathe, so I knew the night would be worse). But after the rough evening, my husband gave her her bath and put her to bed, since I wasn't feeling well, and since I wasn't up there, I completely forgot about the benadryl. So I went into her room to console her and give her some medicine. Only she wouldn't be consoled or take the medicine. She cried and cried and cried, half asleep, but unable to breathe. She kept pushing the medicine away. I tried, my husband tried, and finally I just had to force it into her mouth. About half of it spilled back out of her mouth, so she really didn't get very much.

I finally got her calmed down and back to sleep. But this scenario repeated itself (with ever increasing intensity) about every hour or hour and a half throughout the course of the night. I'm exhausted. Her longest (and therefore my longest) stretch of sleep was from about 3:30 until 7 this morning. At one point in the middle of the night I just couldn't get her to calm down. She was crying and crying, making her stuffy nose worse, of course. She kept sniffing really hard and then crying, "I can't do it!" At first I didn't understand why she was saying that--what couldn't she do? But I finally realized that she couldn't put words to it, but what she meant was that she couldn't breathe! She was trying hard to inhale and get air into her lungs, but she just couldn't. Poor little girl.

Today she woke up just as happy as can be, but still totally stuffed up with watery eyes all morning. Hopefully tonight with the benadryl I'll make sure not to forget, we'll all sleep much better.