First off, I would like to share with you a brilliant innovation in the field of parenting that Geralyn and I have come up with. Feeding time in our house has always consisted of troublesome chewing and clumsy sitting in chairs. Earlier this week we hit upon a solution to these annoyances in the form of just feeding our children nutrient rich paste from a tube on the go:
So far the only food we’ve been able to find in tube form has been cake icing, but judging by the reactions from Sam and Mandy, the program has been a huge success.
This last week also marked the 4th of July, on which we Americans display our penchant for blowing stuff up by blowing stuff up. We let Sam and Mandy stay up way late so that they could partake in the fireworks fun, but I think I may have taken my safety warnings a little too far when I told Sam that if she got too close to the fireworks they would not only kill her, but her mommy as well. As a result, Sam would shriek in fear and run for the hills if I so much as offered her a sparkler. Mandy, on the other hand, made every attempt to grab the sparkling fire.
Sam also got to experience her her first bonfire after the fireworks were spent, an event she had looked forward to for its marshmallow roasting potential. Of course, once the conflagration got going, Sam wouldn’t go within 20 feet of it. This was generally fine by me, as keeping my children out of raging fires is pretty close to the top of my parental to-do list. It’s like one of my core parenting philosophies, right up there with keeping the hyenas away. The downside, of course, was that I was the one who had to get his eyebrows scorched so that Sam could have a toasted marshmallow treat, take one bite, then declare that she didn’t like it.
After letting Sam stay up late on the 4th, something about her relationship with sleep has become apparent. First, she always gets up at the same time –around 7 am– no matter how late she’s stayed up. I think we could keep her up until 6 in the morning and she’d sleep an hour before getting up at 7. This means that she’s tired most of the next day, and a tired Sam is not necessarily a cranky Sam. But it is a spastic Sam. Seriously, when she misses out on sleep she just turns into this gibbering, spaztoid that runs around yelling stuff and never sitting still. It’s weird, because on the days after she does sleep well, she’s calm, polite, and mellow. It’s weird.
Annalie reacts to a lack of sleep in exactly the same way as Sam, except that she also is really impatient and loses her cool easily when she’s tired. But mostly, she gets giggly and frantic and can’t sit still for more than two seconds.
I am still laughing at your core parenting philosophies.
Eating icing from the tube, that brings back memories. From the photo, that looks like a genuine cake wrapper-thinga-majingy like the ones when we were kids. I remember stealing icing roses from the freezer at my grandmothers house (she used to decorate wedding cakes for some cash on the side). Always got caught with the tiny wax paper squares stuck to my body.