Polka Dots

Gabe has been busy this week, in terms of noteworthy occurrences (not in terms of being actually "busy," because I couldn't abide such things).

Today has been a series of typical disappointments to the Grand Scheme of How Things Should Work that I hold near and dear to my heart at all times. There is a Right way, and a Wrong way that the world should work. Specifically, my way is the Right way, and any other way that things might go is the Wrong way.

To my way of thinking, children should wake up quietly in the morning, cheerfully eat some breakfast, entertain themselves, again quietly, while I have my coffee and morning computer time, entertain me for a few hours (here they can make some noise, but only enough to be heard--I couldn't laugh at their antics if I couldn't hear them), then have lunch. After lunch, they would have about four hours of nap, during which time I could do my own thing, perhaps even taking a nap myself. After that, I'd be willing to allow them to do whatever they wanted until bedtime, as long as it's quiet (bedtime should be promptly at 7:00, though the kids could certainly read to themselves in bed for an hour or so if they wanted, as long as it didn't interfere with my watching of grown-up shows or whatever other grown up thing I might want to do).

Oddly, things almost never seem to work out the Right way. Perhaps it is my fault. Maybe I ask too much of myself. Hmm. Something to consider another time.

Today, for instance, nothing went the Right way through the morning, just as it never has before, but we managed to make it through to lunch time nonetheless. Gabe ate, Norah was fed, and it was nap time.

Much to our chagrin, Norah still treats sleep like the enemy--specifically, an enemy that she plans to go down fighting. In her defense, she has nearly mastered conditional initial sleep, or going to sleep when we first lay her down for her nap and for bed time. The condition is that she MUST have a bottle in her mouth. She won't go to sleep any other way. After that, though, it's a crap shoot. She still rarely sleeps for more than two or three hours at a stretch, and she makes sure EVERYONE knows she's awake when she is. It takes another bottle to get her back down at night, and, during nap time, whenever she wakes up the first time, she's usually done napping.

Generally, she's good for at least an hour of nap time. On blessedly wonderful days, she'll stay down for two. When the stars align, the heavens beam down on us, and Colm Meaney is getting regular work (because all things revolve around Colm Meaney), all at the same time, she'll sleep for three hours (I think it's happened two, maybe three times).

Today, she wasn't good for even an hour. Thirty minutes after I put her up there, she started wailing. WAILING. If she wakes up and makes just a little noise, she might go back to sleep. If she wakes up and starts crying, Daddy Time is over.

So, ugh. I went up and got her, but she wouldn't stop shrieking about whatever it was that woke her up. Then Gabe woke up. Great, the double whammy, two kids with an hour of nap between them. This always makes for a fun afternoon of whining and screaming (which manifested shortly after the incident I'm going to go on to describe in the passing of an episode of Wow Wow Wubbzy, a show Gabe has only ever shown passing interest in; the episode finished, the hour we have on our DVR went by, and, suddenly, Gabe decided that he wanted to watch that episode again; he cried for ten minutes over it--how did we EVER survive as children with only an hour of Sesame Street to watch one hour a day?).

Wait! Don't go! This is all going somewhere, I swear.

About 3:00, Norah started to fade, so I put her up to bed with a bottle to see if I could squeeze an extra hour of sleep out of her and, hopefully, keep her from starting to melt down by 6:00 tonight. After five minutes, she was quiet, so I considered the experiment a success. Gabe was watching, you guessed it, Wow Wow Wubbzy.

"I'm going to take a quick shower," I told him, since during the thirty minutes they were down for a nap I'd only managed to eat my lunch and watch The Daily Show from last night.

"---" he replied, without so much as a glance away from the TV.

So I showered.

When I came out of the shower, my first thought was to ask Gabe if he needed to pee, so I headed to the living room. He met me halfway.

"I put polka dots on the TV!" he proclaimed proudly.

"What?" I said, already knowing that I wasn't going to like what I was going to see.

I hate stickers. As a child, I really never saw much appeal to them. My younger brothers covered at least two chests of drawers with the things, but I really don't remember doing much with them (though, that could just be selective memory on my part--I'm willing to admit that I might have blocked my stickering responsibility out of my mind after spending HOURS trying to scrape the goddamn things off many years later). Gabe, however, loves them. Loves, loves, LOVES them. He's gone through at least 250 stickers in the last month or so. Usually, he doesn't do much with them. He sticks one somewhere that he's allowed--we've stressed several times where he could and couldn't put them, and he's been pretty good about it (another reason that I have to chalk this afternoon up to not having a nap)--and then he sticks another one right on top of it. If he has enough stickers to do it, he might create a stack of one hundred stickers, going straight up. What the appeal is, I have no idea. He doesn't really care what's on the sticker, he just likes that they stick, I think.

Today, somehow, he got a hold of a sheet of about 100 little dot stickers with bugs and smiley faces on them that we had used for potty training until it became apparent that he'd need a more substantial bribe than a sticker to ply his cooperation. I'm not sure where he found them or how he got them. I thought we'd tossed them. Guess not.

You can see where this is going.

Since I was only in the shower for maybe seven minutes, he must have made a beeline for the sticker page as soon as I went in there and immediately started applying them to the face of the television. There were THIRTY of them on there (well, almost thirty, twenty-eight, but THIRTY has more impact). He hadn't been satisfied with just polka dotting part of the thing, he got every part of it he could reach.

I reintroduced him to my most withering glare.

So I spent a half hour carefully scraping them off and hoping that I wasn't damaging our TV. This is one time I miss the old, glass TV tubes, at least you know where you stand with glass.

Actually, I feel kind of bad about the whole thing. Obviously it was wrong, and I don't think I was out of line giving him the Glare that I reserve for special occasions, but he was just so excited about it. Like he'd just built a scale model of the Sphinx out of toothpicks or some other uncooperative medium. He genuinely thought that he had done something very special--for me, for Momma, and maybe for the world. He'd invented Polka Dot TV! And I'd Glared at him for it (and continued to Glare at him as he cast weepy gazes downward at the floor throughout the time it took me to clean off the TV).

Sad. For him and for me (since I had to clean it). I blame stickers.

Whoever invented them probably had that same look of accomplishment on his face after he'd done it. I'd Glare at him, too, and never think twice about it.

Oh, and Norah wasn't really sleeping, either, it just took her ten minutes or so to make it through her bottle. So tack that in there somewhere, too.