Pregnancy Journal

My days are a blur of nursing, changing, cooking, setting up the meal, feeding baby, cleaning up, pottying him, reading books with him, playing with him, working, setting up dinner, cleaning up, giving him his bath, reading another story, more pottying, nursing, and bedtime. Same every day. I don't get much time to write in here. When I do get some time, I just want to watch TV.

Gunner is a little peach. He has such a sweet, sunny disposition. It's like he's happy all the time. The only time he complains or cries is when he really needs something and I'm not attending to him right away. Even when I take away some object he shouldn't be playing with, he gets over it pretty quickly. I'm so lucky to have such a nice kid. He's still extremely active, but that doesn't bother me.

He's doing really well with signing, communicating well all the time, and he's starting to say a lot of words. He seems to have new ones every day. The signing is gret because he is able to communicate thoughts he otherwise never could. The other day he pointed out part of the pattern in Arron's bedspread and signed 'balloon' and it did kind of look like a balloon.

He is doing well with the EC, too. Even though he is stll in diapers all day, he does nearly all his poops in the toilet. He now signs 'poop' as well as 'potty' and 'poop' is a lot easier to discern. Yesterday he signed 'poop' while we were at the grocery store. I rushed to finish my shopping and get him home and when I got him on the potty, he did poop right away. He also signs more clearly and more often when he has to pee and seems to wait longer before going in his diaper, so I can get him to do his pees on the potty more often. I usually catch about 4 or 5 pees a day now, mainly in the morning and at night. If this continues, he should be toilet trained by 2 years, which will be great cause some daycares won't take kids over 2 1/2 if they are not toilet trained.

Joel has been sliding into one of his depressions over the last few months. He started to sound more and more negative, slipping in comments now and then that let me see he was going down again. Then I found out he had gotten kicked out of his apartment for not paying his rent for 3 months. I let him stay with me for 10 days. He got a new place but, strangely, gave the landlord back the keys after a week and put himself out on the street. He seems to be punishing himself, acting really irrational. One day he says he doesn't want to be friends with me and that I shouldn't call him again. The next day, he wants to see the baby. When we meet up, he again storms off and says I won't hear form him again. The next day, he calls and says he misses the baby and wants to see us. He treats me like a yo-yo. Tonight I told him this has to stop: if he tells me not to call him again, I will see him for a week. He can't just keep jerking us around. He admitted to me that he is just really depressed. I can see that he is setting up circumstances for him to be miserable enough to have, in his mind, an excuse to do heroin. I told him he needs to pray and ask God for help. I guess I will find out tomorrow how that went when he calls me.

Poor Joel, it's always the same thing with him. He is his own worst enemy. It's too bad because Gunner loves him so much and he loves Gunner more than anything else in the world, but he is going to ruin his relationship with him if he doesn't stop what he is doing and get his shit together. Of course, I won't let him babysit while he is in this state and it will take a good while before I can trust him again, but if he keeps doing what he is doing he will only make things worse

Bad Kids Have Bad Parents

I have been watching a lot of these Nanny 911 and Super Nanny shows and i'm trying to learn something from them. I watch all these out-of-control kids and the one thing they all have in common is bad parenting. When I was growing up, the consensus in my family was that there must be something inherently wrong with me to make me difficult, disobedient, disrespectful and discontent.

My mother like to tell me how 'Uncle George', the psychoanalyst, having observed me at nine years old, declared that I had 'inner conflicts' and 'must be locked up and never let out'. Besides exemplifying the flawed reasoning of conventional analysis this summarized the sentiments of my parents who believed that the only thing to do with a kid like me was to label me and get rid of me. My mother liked to highlight the fact that she did not follow Uncle George's advice- at least not for the time being. When I was sixteen, she had me confined t an 'experimental therapeutic boarding school', but that's a whole other story.

Nine-year-old girls often wear t-shirts with slogans on them. Usually, these consist of something positive that reflects their parents'  high esteem of them, such as 'Princess', 'Superstar' or 'Daddy's Little Girl'. When I was nine, I had a very limited wardrobe. True, this was partly due to the fact that I was pretty picky when it came to my clothes in terms of comfort- nothing itchy, prickly, scratchy or tight would be tolerated- but what compounded the problem was that my mother would only let me wear clothes she had chosen for me. To make matters worse, we had widely different taste in clothes and I was not the most accomodating when it came to compromising in this area. As a result, I had a very limited wardrobe right up until the last two years of high school, when I discovered thrift shops, which offered comfy duds that both fit my budget and suited my tastes. At nine, I had a selection of three or four t-shirts with slogans on them, which I wore on a daily basis.

 I have often said that the biggest problem I faced in my relationship with my parents was that, growing up, I always felt that I could never do anything right, while my brother could do no wrong. If we got into trouble together, I took the blame: I was always the older one. No-one seemed to noticed or care if I did well in school. If I reported an academic success, my mother would respond with, 'That's what I expect'.  No-one took an interest in my extra-curricular activities: I was the only girl on my gymnastics team whose parents didn't watch her compete at the regionals. I won two silver medals, made it to the provincials, and got a ride home from my friend's mom. I was the only girl in my acting club whose parents didn't come to watch the play we produced. That kind of thing send the message that what you are doing is not important. Meanwhile, plenty of attention was paid to what I wasn't doing right, through endless laments and comparisons with other children we knew.

My ordeal was summarized by the saying printed on one of those t-shirts I was always wearing: 'My parents may have many faults, but I have only two: everything I say and everything I do'.

As a parent myself now, I seriously wonder what parent would have their kid wear such a shirt, unless they were either blatantly insensitive or deliberately trying to demolish their self-esteem. Which is worse is anyone's guess.