3am Wake Up Calls, and the Reasons Why

If you're ever struck with a case of insomnia around 3am, call my cell. I'll be there. And awake.

Two nights in a row. The kids are 6 and 3 (almost four) - why are we still getting up in the night???

Tuesday night I woke up at 3:15am to the sound of Jack and Ryker talking to each other. Jack has a habit of waking up in the night and moving all of his bedding into Ryker's room and sleeping the rest of the night in there. We don't like this particularly, but we are picking our battles, and that's not one of them.

I woke up, dazed, and prepared to launch myself into Ryker's room, scare the daylights out of both of them, threaten them with death if they didn't go back to sleep, and hobble back to bed. I opened my door, ready to storm down the hallway, and almost tripped right over Jack. He was sitting in the middle of the hallway, lights on, tub of batteries in his lap, putting fresh ones in the Leap Pad, while carrying on a conversation with Ryker, who was sleepily thrashing around in his bed.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING???"

Scared them, yes.

Threaten certain death, yes.

Only at 3:45 it happened again. Not the batteries, but the waking up and the talking. I sent Jack to his room, whisper-yelling at both of them.

Fast forward to last night. I had a whole conversation with Jack, imploring him to be a big boy and stay in his own bed. He did GREAT. Ryker did not. Wanna know why? Because his lip is busted. He hurt it at school Wednesday afternoon and I spent all of last night trying not to look at him. Christi (my cousin-like-a-sister) made me look, and I'm holding her solely responsible for the knots in my stomach.

You all can thank me later for not getting an actual picture of his lip. Except my mom, who had to look at it via Facetime last night.

Chuck thought he was fine and that we shouldn't take him in. I went along with that and put myself to bed at 9pm - figuring unconscious was a better state than awake and trying not to think about my baby's lip.

Ryk awoke at 3am. What is it about 3am? He awoke, mumbling "mama" through a severely swollen lip.

"My wip is hurtin."

I had a moment of Mommy Genius - 3 in the morning - and got him a soda can to hold against it. No edges, no bumps. Gold Star to me. I patted his head until he fell asleep again.

This morning I looked sideways at him, averting my eyes but trying to gauge the severity. Then I left the room and made Chuck take a closer look. Then I demanded he take him somewhere. Most of you know about my aversion to blood and hospitals. I have fainted more than once because of those two things.

We spent the morning trying to call the clinic, talk to the triage nurse, keep ice (or Popsicles) against his lip, and telling him to "be kind to your face."  I tried to quickly make Jack's lunch, which ended with him locked in the bathroom sobbing and refusing to go to school because I hadn't put raspberries in there. We actually DID put raspberries in there, on the second attempt, but that wasn't good enough to overcome the first error (read: the lack of attention he was getting). I told him, through the bathroom door, that he was, in fact, going to school - because one parent was taking his little brother to the hospital for his busted lip and the other had to go to work to earn money to paid for said raspberries and the medical bills. So there.

Back to Ryk. He's out of Children's Hospital - no stitches. Wash with saline and he'll be fine. Whew.

So anyway, call me at 3.

The Garage Sale

First and Only.

Awhile back Chuck decided we should have a garage sale. I said no. I wanted to just donate it all and be done. Everyone I knew that had had a garage sale had only had A garage sale. Singular. I took that to mean it wasn't a very good idea.

We did it anyway.

I should back up a sec. I have a little tendency towards hoarding important things. Like everything ever associated with my kids. We have a fourth bedroom in the basement, and I have been using it to store all of the old kids toys and clothes. I have clothes back from when they were infants. I have hats, coats, mittens, boots, onesies, sleep sacks, overalls. SO MANY OVERALLS. I have car seats, three strollers, a crib, a race car bed, a highchair, baby swings, bouncy seats.

We also have hoarded books, computer stuff, cords, cameras, alarm clocks, vases. We have a set of bar stools. I'll stop now. You get the point.

Okay, so we decided to join the rest of the city of Bloomington in the city-wide garage sale.

I worked for weeks to get things thrown away, sorted, and cleaned. The last week was spent in the garage - setting up the tables and pricing everything. Nicki joined in our efforts, so I got to hang with her quite a bit, which was fun.

We started with a goal in mind of paying off the tires we had to put on the van last week. Not cheap,  and I was scared we wouldn't make it.

We paid them off by 3pm on the first day, and doubled it by the end. WHEEE!

I also met some very interesting people. There was the woman who was negotiating with me about the toys and seemed kind of gruff, until she softened and told me she buys toys and then takes them to Mexico to give to children there on Christmas. There was the man who got me to take half off my price for kids' clothes and made me button every button and fold them "nicely," who I was about ready to kick to the curb. Then I asked what he does with all of these clothes (he took over 40 pieces), and he told me he sends them back to his country, Kenya, for the children. His wife and kids still live there.

All in all I'd call it a success. We got rid of most of the major items we wanted to get rid of, made some extra money, and got a good lesson in not judging a garage-sale-attendee by its cover.

Help For Jack

Oh man do I feel better. It's not about me, but I'm just sayin'.  In case you're wondering how *I'm* doing.

We had our first appointment with Jack's new therapist today. She was great. We're in good hands. Jack was perfectly adorable, as usual. Her office was at the end of a long corridor, which he spotted quickly. When she came to get us, he said "is that your office?" and she said yes and he took off running to get into it. Not the response I was expecting.

She got medical histories from us, asked his history with frustration and anger, and asked him a bunch of questions.

At one point she asked what he liked to do most when he wasn't in school. He goes "umm...cuddling with Momma..." and then he listed other stuff but honestly I stopped listening then because I was grinning so hard I couldn't hear anything.

Anyway, she will have two more appointments with him, alone, and then she'll have one with just Chuck and me to give us her assessment. We'll go from there, but she made it sound like she thinks she might be able to teach us some good ways to help him ourselves without him needing to be in therapy for an extended period of time. As she put it, "6 year olds have better things to do than sit in therapy."

It felt good to take the first step towards helping my Jack Attack feel better.

Dinner Date

Tonight Chuck was putting Jackson in bed and they got talking about the fact that Chuck and I are going to dinner tomorrow night.

Jack asked if he and Ryker were going too and Chuck said "nope, just Momma and me." And Jack asked why. Chuck said that we just want to have dinner together and Jack goes "peaceandquiet?" kinda as one big word.

Chuck said "yes, peace and quiet" and Jack said "inner peace" and then went on a Kung Fu Panda rant.

Also....

The Blogger platform now gives you stats. I only rarely look at them, but tonight I was playing around with them.

One of the features is that it will show you how people got to your blog through keyword searches. We've all done this, right? We're not sure what the name of something is, or how to describe it, so we type a bunch of words into the search function of Google and hope for the best.

The keyword search that brought the most people to this blog is "she and 3 hes." That makes sense.

The rest were all tied for 1 referral. Most were variations on the title of the blog. But my favorite two?

• What do agnostics do with rabbits?

and

• Most words spoken in a day guinness record

What does that even mean?

Bad Blogger!

I haven't posted since April 16? Bad blogger! And I left you on such a sad note!

I have a couple of funny Ryker stories, but first I'll tell you that Jack has had a couple of very good weeks since I last wrote. We see his new therapist a week from today, which will also help (I hope), but he seems to be managing things a bit better recently. Go Jack! Also, I went to give him medicine the other night and the dosing on the label said that his weight was the equivalent of a 9-10 year old. HA!

Okay, on to Ryker. He renamed our family last week. This is not news to those of you on Facebook, but I should post it here for posterity's sake.

He kept calling me Dadda, which is fairly normal for him. I reminded him that I'm Momma, and he asked if we could rename our family. Sure. So I'm Dadda, and Dadda is Momma. I was following up to then. I asked what his name was. He stuck his tongue out, then moved it side to side going "lalalalalala." Good. Then I asked what Jack's name was. Without missing a beat, he said "Music Teacher." I want to be a 3 year old. Seriously. How much fun must they have, up inside their own head?

And apparently he gets really worried about other people's children. I don't think he trusts adults. I was home one day from work with him, and we went with Nicki up to the school to get her son from morning kindergarten. Nicki runs an in-home daycare and only had one baby that day, and that baby's mom happens to be Nicki's son's kindergarten teacher. Are you following? It doesn't really matter I guess ... Well, yeah, actually, it does. Go back and re-read until you are following ... Okay? Okay. So we have the baby in the stroller as we head up there. We gave her to her mom for some good cuddle-time when we arrived, and then her mom said that she'd just walk her back to Nicki's in a bit because she had time before her afternoon students arrived. Sounded like a decent plan, so we left the stroller for her too. We started to walk back home, and Ryker immediately began bombarding us with questions about where "that baby was" and why weren't we taking her back, and where was her "baby cart"?

And tonight I was talking about there being an adorable boy in the backseat of a car I was trying to help jump this morning (long story), and he goes "what did you do with that 'adorable'? You take him to your work?"

We used to call Jackson "Officer Jack" because he was so concerned with safety. I think Ryker might need to be dubbed "Child Protective Services Case Worker Ryker," although that doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Jack's Anger

I've touched on this periodically on the blog, but here's an update on Jack's anger stuff.

Since he was born, Jack has had trouble controlling his anger and frustrations. He was colicky for the first few months, and has cycled in and out of it since then. You can SEE him getting angry, and see that he is unable to control it sometimes.

He is trying, he really is. I had a good talk with him the other day about it. I asked him why he doesn't get so mad at school (his teacher said she had never seen the rage we see at home). He said that he gets mad at school but doesn't want to scream or make angry faces because he doesn't want to be embarrassed, so he just keeps it in. I asked if it just feels safer to get it out at home, because he knows he won't be embarrassed, and he said yes.

That's pretty impressive self-control, if you ask me. He's 6.

Anyway, it DOES come out at home. Oh boy, does it. And here's the bad part - it comes out in ways that are pretty self-degrading. He says mean things about himself, and says that he'll hurt himself. HUGE red flag, obviously, although Chuck and I both think he says those things because he knows they are BIG threats and BIG words and that they get our attention - and my attention in particular. He hasn't ever hurt himself, but I refuse to test that theory.

So today we took him to see his pediatrician to talk about it. I was so proud of him. He spoke very eloquently about it and answered all of her questions. What a sweetie.

We're going to see a therapist out of the same offices that works with kids. We're also probably going to call this other clinic that does more integrative approaches to pediatric psychology. That sounds awesome to me.

I feel like we're being proactive, which is good. I just want my sweet boy to be calm and happy. That's all.