Tuesdays with Sadie

6:15 A.M.-Faint cries fall on ears that I wish were a little less able. Luckily her mother attends to her for a while, and she doesn't start trumpeting her unhappiness again until 6:50, which is still obscenely early to be honest.

7:15-We drive mommy to work. S has pointed out that the lil s will think she works at the metro station, since that's actually what "driving her to work entails." I'm thinking of telling lil s that her mom has a lucrative career selling hot dogs on the side of the road.

8:00-9:15 Morning play time takes place downstairs, at first I'm promising myself that I'm going to be a good dad and play games with her, but then I realize that I'm extremely tired, that she has an attention span of roughly thirty seconds and that we don't have much in common when it comes to games. So I'm pretty much just sitting around the living room trying to make sure she doesn't swallow Greenworks bottles and hoping she'll go to sleep. She trundles into the kitchen and disassembles some replacement parts for a Brita filter, proudly pulls out the large glass measuring cup and walks into the living room and generally just brings hurricane like destruction raining down throughout the house.

12:15-1:30 Lil s pretends to behave like a champ, pulling down a set of blocks and meticulously inspecting them. However, after about a half and hour she tires of the game and decides that she wants to climb up three stairs to the landing, and, she proceeds to do this about five thousand times in a row. Every time she leaves the stairs and I get back on the computer, she immediately goes back to the stairs and climbs up rapidly and happily, because it makes me drop whatever I'm doing to make sure she doesn't do a half-gainer off them. Then she tries to climb down the stairs by some combination of walking and holding on to pieces of my face, which I try and discourage because sans my face the activity would result in a face plant and tears. I finally get her to go down backwards once, and she claps for herself, but I think she was just humoring me, because the next time she tried the same face walk.



1:30-I say, "is it nap time?" and lil s crawls up the flight of stairs and stands at the bottom of the baby gate saying "Up." Thank the good Lord for communication! Unfortunately, our communication starts to break down when I get upstairs, and I hear her banging around in her room fifteen minutes or so after we've agreed that she is to go to sleep. Next time I'll have her fill out a contract though she'd probably just try and eat the pen. Anyhow, eventually she seems to have settled down, and I content myself in our warm and fluffy bed reading a book. And it's about that time that I'm realizing how amazing our comforter is, and how easy it would be to take a second nap that she starts crying. Naturally I arrive in the room to discover she's pooped herself awake, and it's just one more reminder to start potty training ASAP.

I decided that I'd been enjoying my book though, so, after changing her diaper, I put in her pacifier, except that I didn't because she threw it across the room, which fine, I'm bigger, so I picked it back up, wrestled her to the crib's bottom and tried plugging with a pacifier while shoving her small blanket next to her face and cocooning her in two other blankets to limit her struggles. Luckily, mid swaddle, not me, but my fourteen month old daughter realizes that what I'm doing can't possibly be the actions of a rational person, so she begins laughing, and, because she's amazingly cute, I start laughing to, and say up for her and carry her out of the purgatory of her crib and let her go nuts playing upstairs. This involves opening random drawers and extracting items like combs, lavander oil and then parading around with them for a while before losing interest in some other room and dropping them immediately. I pity her future boyfriends.

But, as if to remind myself that my parenting hadn't been lax enough I'm reading her a nice book that she suddenly decides to attack, maiming a fox tail in the process, and I tell her no, and take the book away. At which point lil s becomes a ball of rage and follows me down the hallway screaming, and then when I shut the door to get away from her, pushes it open to do some more screaming before heading to the stairs and shaking the gate as if she were a prisoner or a very large primate while I asked her why she was so filled with rage.

Eventually I repaired the book and tossed it back in her room. She followed after me and dug it out from underneath four books that I'd placed on top of it, grumbling the entire time and then carried it with her tear-stained face into the guest bedroom where I was and put it down on the bed for me to read, because kids are both obnoxious and amazingly cute, and they have short memories. So we happily read the tails book together her face lighting up with delight as I made the animal noises for pangolins, lemurs, alligators, skunks, blue whales, tigers etc. a bunch of which, admittedly, I fudged a little, squirrels, lemurs and pangolins all come out sounding remarkably similar, a fact which she didn't hold against me, choosing to laugh instead.

The rest of the day: The most common refrain for the remainder of the day was lil S growling/crying anytime her little will was thwarted. Put down to eat and food isn't immediately available, growl/cry. Get to the top of the stairs and find self impeded by gate, growl/cry. In between playing with toys, growl/cry when not immediately stimulated. Can't find her lovie right away, growl/cry. Anyhow, this turns out to be annoying/representative of human nature. Without the strictures of society to hold us back we'd spend most of our day near tears because our wills weren't constantly being satiated. Thank God she's adorable and also dances with me by spinning in circles/laughs at the table when I belch/shares pita chips with me when we're hungry. It's like a buddy cop movie. I think she's the bad cop.