I bought gasoline at Costco today. It seemed like a good deal, but now I don’t know where to put the other 30 gallons of gas.

After filling up, we stopped at Home Depot for a new toilet paper holder to avoid another TP tragedy like yesterday. It was $15 and it doesn’t match anything else in the house, but now I can be assured there will be no more TP malfunctions in Anna’s bathroom. We then stopped at Kohl’s to look for a nice white cardigan sweater for Anna. She wanted to be carried from the parking lot to the store, but said that once she was in the store, she would “get some new batteries,” which is a metaphor we use to get her to nap. Essentially, my three-year-old just told me that shopping perks her up. Jennifer and I consider brick-and-mortar shopping to be a necessary evil at best, so were on earth is she getting this from? Maybe the shopping gene skips a generation. Inside the store, all of the clothes in her size look like the sort of clothes she would pick for herself: Dora this, princess that. Only the size 7-16 section had the sort of clothes Mom & Dad would pick out.

Afterward, we stopped by GTC Academy, but what is normally “open bounce” turned out to be “closed meet.” Finally, we stopped by the farmer’s market to utilize their bouncers. Since the market was so busy, we had to park some distance away. Anna said since that she was only in the store for a short time, she only had one battery, and she needed to be carried to the bouncers. Yes, that’s right, she wanted to be carried to the place where she jumps up and down for half an hour. It was then that I did my best to walk the line beween making my point unmistakeably clear and drawing suspicious glances from other parents in telling Anna, “If you are too tired to walk, you are too tired to bounce. You will walk the rest of the way, and if I hear any more whining, we will turn around and go home and you will go straight to bed.” At first, she obliged, and walked solemnly toward the bouncers, but then she began silently mouthing complaints at me as she walked, like some sort of whining mime¹. I decided not to argue the technicality.

At home, she recovered after a lunch of strawberries and… well, she really only ate strawberries. Now she’s down for nap, in theory at least; I hear her occasionally wandering about, so she probably is not getting any actual rest.

¹ “Whining Mimes” would be an excellent name for a band.

After a full day without Jennifer and Tara, the house still stands, and Anna is doing much better than the first night. She was amazingly well behaved all evening; very chipper at school, all the way through dinner (unprecedented!), and through the evening. This has been one of those “stepford days” we have every now and then. Bedtime was still a minor struggle, as Anna seems to be very averse to certain things, and I can’t tell if it’s genuine or not. Lately, she has been going potty many many times at night. I think it’s just her way of stalling. The last two nights, I have had to show her, as she whines and watches tearfully, how to obtain toilet paper without dislodging the roll–the TP-holder in her bathroom is not very robust. I showed her how to hold the roll in place while tearing the paper off, because if you try to just yank a portion free, the roll will fall off–this is a huge tragedy for Anna who gets very upset if she thinks she has broken something. Of course, once I have her in bed, she is able to go to the bathroom on her own without any sort of TP-tragedy. Nevertheless, we’re going to Home Depot today for a new roll-holder.

Last night I also heard her doing a lot of running around until about 8:40 (a full hour after bedtime), and upon coming upstairs later, found a neat stack of some items which she didn’t want in her room. Her room is generally a mess, but for some reason, she seems to know exactly what’s in it, and has a sense of what does and does not belong. Example: last night, we considered her Dora the Explorer activity book as a bedtime story, but it uses erasable markers, and she only has crayons in her room. Thus, she immediately had to put it by the top of the stairs, because it no longer belonged in her room. Also, any extra toys or stuffed animals which make it into her room during the day must be expunged at night time.

Well, I’ve got ten minutes to take a shower before she gets up, and today is sure to be a busy day in a busy weekend…

Jennifer and Tara are out of town for a few days, so it’s just Anna and I for a while. This is a fact now known to our family and friends, and to Anna’s teachers, friends, acquaintances, and anyone who has passed within 25 feet of Anna for the past few days. Tonight we went out to Outback Steakhouse for dinner because I was too lazy to go to Costco and get the usual steak-and-martini. She was well behaved, save the regular moping about how Mom was gone, and how she wishes Mom were here, and when were we going to see Mom.

Bedtime was especially challenging, because Anna has been having some nighttime issues lately; specifically she has been scared at night, and last night she went potty approximately 300 times. Tonight she was especially needy and reluctant to go to bed, but eventually she did settle down, and has been down for about three hours without issues.

I was looking forward to the break of not having a baby in the house, even if it’s a really low maintenance baby like Tara. After three months of having two young kids, the prospect of working all day, parenting only one child until 8pm, then cleaning up and having a couple hours of time to myself seems pretty sweet. I cannot imagine being the single parent of two or more children.

That said, for the months of July and August, I’m going to be a stay-at-home dad. When Jennifer returns to work, I’m going to take a couple months off to have Tara to myself. Anna will be in preschool, but I’ll try to have her home on a regular basis. I’ve always thought that I could manage both kids and make a little headway on the house in the process, but I have to find out if that’s really true.

(11pm) Anna just woke up briefly and went back to sleep. I need to sleep now, and hope that she goes the rest of the night. I’m really tired, and tomorrow I’ve got to start getting packed, because Anna and I have several activity-packed days ahead of us.

I’m looking for a new cell phone. I don’t really need one, but my contract with T-Mobile is up next month, and getting a new phone is free or better, so why not? My current phone is a Nokia 6610, which is nice and small, but sparse on features. I don’t actually use the 6610, because I swapped it for a Nokia 6800 that I got for work. What I have my eye on currently is a Nokia 6600, which has a large screen, bluetooth, camera, and runs Symbian. The only non-Nokia that I’m looking at is the Danger Sidekick II, but it requires a $20/mo data plan that would make the total bill over $60/mo. That’s too much. I called T-Mo and they won’t offer me anything interesting as an upgrade, so I will probably get a new service plan, phone, and rebate from Amazon. I really wish Amazon carried some of the newer series 60 phones from Nokia like the 6681/2/3 or the 6620; on the other hand, a new phone like that would be expensive. All I really want is something really cool, for free, that I don’t need in the first place. Is that so wrong?

We are still unfamiliar with this idea that I child will, when tired, actually sleep. We went through several years of the opposite, in which Anna, when overtired, would sleep badly, and only get more overtired. As a result, we almost never deviated from her sleep schedule; the punishment was too swift and too severe. Staying up an hour late to go out to dinner or have friends over, or even missing a nap would result in days and nights of crankiness and night waking. Anna has never seen fireworks; we just can’t bear to keep her up that late. That’s why this blog is called “We’re So Tired”; we had three years of not knowing when we would next have a full night’s sleep.

Tara, on the other had, had herself a fussy day on Monday, only getting only 14 hours of sleep rather than her normal 15 1/2. The result? She slept nearly 11 hours straight on Monday night, and continued to get extra sleep on Tuesday. In other news, she eats when she’s hungry.

Anna has actually become a better sleeper over the last six months, but we’re still gunshy on letting her stay up late. We have some travel coming up, and if she does well on the trip, I’ll feel a little more like we’re out of the woods with her. I really would like to take Anna to see ballgames, fireworks, and all the other things other kids get to do. Maybe someday.

Yesterday, we had some concern over whether or not Tara could hear.

In the hospital, after she was born, they performed some sort of hearing test on her, and I have no idea how it was supposed to work, because she was asleep at the time. Everything tested fine, but I’ve read more bad than good about these neonatal tests. More recently, we have noticed that Tara doesn’t seem to be startled by certain noises that we think should startle her. This led to a series of “tests” we performed at the dinner table, like sneaking up behind her as she lay in her bouncy seat and clapping our hands, banging pan lids, and squeaking a bicycle horn. Only the bicycle horn got any reaction, which I could most accurately describe as a mildly furrowed brow. I didn’t know anything about how a baby was supposed to react to such noises, but the noises were such that I was being startled, and I knew they were coming.

Jennifer did some research, and babies at this age are supposed to react by either being startled (2 mos) or blinking (3 mos). No such reaction out of Tara. The book also said that babies can filter stuff out easily, so one should not take a single test as conclusive. While Jen was frantically scouting her library of parenting books, I was not finding myself to actually worried by the situation. I’m the sort of person who believes everything will just be OK, or more exactly said, that I can be OK with anything. I even imagined what it would be like if Tara turned out to be completely, irreversibly deaf. It didn’t really bother me. I don’t know what that means.

Later in the evening, I was putting Tara down to sleep in her other bouncy chair, because she had been really fussy and had not slept much throughout the day. While her eyes were closed, I reached behind her head and gave a quiet snap of my fingers. Her eyes popped open and looked about with concern. I jiggled her back to sleep, then began to stand up. My knees cracked. Again, her eyes popped open. I felt some relief, not so much because I didn’t want her to be deaf, I just wanted some resolution to this mystery. I’m pretty certain she can hear. She’s just ignoring us.

I was making dinner when I got the call. To be exact, I was making pork chops stuffed with carmelized pear and bacon, with wilted spinach on the side. The call I got was not from God, Ed McMahon, or the major leagues, but rather from Jennifer, in that hurry-up-something-bad-is-happening sort of voice. Upon rushing upstairs, I discovered that–wait, first, I have to say that Anna has never been a barfer. As a baby, sure, she had the occasional minor spit-up. But nothing that wasn’t caught by a burp cloth. Only on one occasion has she had a stomach bug that had her throwing up, and that only lasted one evening–once in the tub, and thereafter in a bowl we had provided for her. What a good kid. That said, I return to the present. I discovered that Tara had spit up, and in a single salvo, had fouled:

• Everything she was wearing
• Everything Mom was wearing, through to her underwear, except for her socks
• The towel on which she was laying
• The chair on which mom was sitting
• The floor on which the chair was sitting

Cleanup involved two loads of laundry, some elbow grease, and no small amount of comforting. Tara was fussier than usual for the remainder of the afternoon and evening, and she has had more than the usual amount of reflux; hopefully this is a temporary situation and not some sort of more serious stomach bug.

The type of person I most admire is one who can finish things. I am really not good at finishing things. I’m really good at starting, but I don’t have the attention span to finish things because I’m too busy starting other things. Last September, I salvaged a play fort for Anna and added a set of swings, but never finished staining the added-on part. Seven months later, I decided enough was enough, and stained the remainder of the swings. In the process, Anna behaved well enough, but Tara managed to wake up and require attention at the most inopportune times, like when I was covered with paint, for example. Nevertheless, I managed to finish the job. To celebrate, I was useless for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow, we’ve got a whole lot of nothing planned, which is to say that we’ll probably spend the whole day cleaning up and preparing for the upcoming trip to Auntie K.’s wedding, or as I’m calling it, Auntiepalooza.

For a long time I’ve said that Anna has more drama than a mexican soap opera. Tonight, at dinner, she went a good five minutes without talking. For Anna, that really is staggeringly rare occurrence¹, and it was only the beginning of a dramatic episode which involved pouting, crying, whining, complaining, pacing, and swooning. The cause? Her dinner plate, which contained one bite’s worth each of a hamburger, grilled asparagus tip, and apple slices, was not to her liking. Lately, she will only eat macaroni, pancakes, and strawberries, and will not drink liquids in any significant quantity. As a result, she’s often constipated, and raises no end of fuss at dinnertime.

Several times a day, Jennifer and I flash each other three fingers behind Anna’s back, reminding each other that she’s still only three, and this sort of behavior is to be expected. Conveniently, the three-fingered-salute can be combined with the “tiny violin” gesture.

¹ After her trip to the psychologist, I started keeping track of how much she rambles. She regularly goes 20-30 minutes of constant talking, during which she pauses for no more than six seconds. That’s a lot of talking.

What do the following things have in common?

• Colds
• Artwork
• Daily reports
• Surprising language

Yes, they’re all things that young children bring home from school. Most recently, Anna has been saying, “I hope you sit on a tack!” She doesn’t really know if tack-sitting is a bad or good thing, but she does know that it’s very funny, and I think we have done a poor job of concealing this fact.

Meanwhile, Tara has found that she has fingers, and if she gets both of her hands together, and moving in a northerly direction, the sheer number of fingers in the proximity of her mouth nearly assures that one or two will fall in. Delicious. By comparison, Anna at the same age would try to get one hand moving in a random fashion about her face and neck, and only rarely would it land in her mouth before she had annoyed herself beyond any consolation. On the rare occasion of a successful thumb-to-mouth docking maneuver, she would manage two or three triumphant sucks on her thumb, she would raise both hands above her head with an elated expression of victory, only to find that her precious thumb was now nowhere to be found. Hysterics ensued.

In other Tara news, we have finally settled on Gerber as the Official Supplier of Baby Bottles after a long search. These old-school bottles can be found in virtually every drugstore, grocery, and corner gas station in America, for about a dollar apiece. This is a great relief to us, because the Avent bottles we used with Anna are apparently handcrafted out of Lexan and silicone by British gnomes, then imported at great cost, perhaps each on their own individual planes. Old-school is good.

Last night, K., a friend of Jennifer’s from high school came to visit. K. is a research scientist, and before she arrived, Jen and I got to thinking that many of her high school buddies ended up to be Ph.D.’s or M.D.’s. This makes Jennifer, with her measly Master’s degree in engineering and her Fulbright scholarship, the flunkie of the group¹. I only have a Bachelor’s degree myself, but I feel justified in ribbing Jen for her inadequacy because I came from a neighborhood where I felt I’d earned distinction by the simple fact that I still have most of my teeth. Nonetheless, K. arrived and shared dinner with us before spending the night. Anna took a shine to her in relatively short order, but still woke up a couple times during the night, probably because visitors are a change, and she doesn’t deal well with change. In the morning, K. had to leave after breakfast to return to the smart-people-conference which she was attending. Anna was disappointed. “Why does she have to go?” she asked. I explained, “She only had one night to visit us. Are you sad to see her go?” “Yeah, I want her to stay a long time.” “Well, maybe we’ll see her again. It was nice that she could come to see us anyway.” “Yeah, I like K. I hope she sits on a tack.”

¹ She is, of course, redeemed by her unmatched choice of spouse.