People talk about the joy of having a new baby. They talk about their pride in the child's first steps. They emphasize cheerfully the good grades and high school and college diplomas. But there is a dark side to parenting that often goes ignored.
Yes, I'm talking about poop, and its relations in the bodily functions family. Children, particularly below age 4 years, are horribly disgusting creatures. We mistake them for being human beings because they look sort of like us. I assure you it is a ruse. Children do not really become civilized or human until at least 4 years of age. Right now, you may be thinking, "Oh, she's full of it. I know of at least one or two kids who don't fit her overgeneralized statement." Their parents lied. If you are the parent, you lied to yourself. Or your forgot, due to the trauma of the experience.
When first most people learn they are with child, it's usually one of two ways: through pissing on a stick or excessive vomiting which induces them to piss on a stick. (I do acknowledge that the first often occurs by a surprising lack of seemingly pointless bloodletting on a lunar basis. Because of the strangeness of the female body suddenly NOT being gross and unwieldy, women become suspicious and suddenly desire to urinate on their hands to check for alien invaders.) It's kind of gross, and the vomiting can stick around a long time. Some moms actually experience morning sickness for the entire duration of a pregnancy. Isn't that a joy?
As I also outlined, and my darling husband Andrew phrased so eloquently, the female body's pH can alter and cause "cock rot" to result after a man has intercourse with a pregnant woman and does not wash immediately afterward. (This is not true for all cases.)
And then there's birth: a gruesomely painful, often deadly experience in which a Cadillac tries to drive into a parking space intended for a motorcycle, metaphorically speaking. For some of us, that Cadillac is an Escalade. Anyway, it's a gory, bloody, flesh-tearing, mucous-spewing, sweaty, and sometimes vomitous experience. And if you're really unlucky, mom and/or baby has a bowel movement in the process, further complicating matters.
Oh, but the little dear is so cute and "tiny" and makes the most adorable little faces. Ah...wait, he's...oh, yeah, he's just shat in his diaper. It's your turn to change it.
For the first few months, on a liquid diet, baby poop can rocket out the back of the diaper to shoulder blade level. (I have photographic evidence.) In some bouncing bundles of joy, iron-fortified baby formula can cause serious unpleasant side-effects like projectile vomiting and projectile poop. At least one little boy who shall remain nameless (*cough*mynephew*cough) fell victim to this experience as a baby and fired off some blasts from his changing table that hit the wall over 4 feet away. But don't worry, whatever didn't hit the wall landed in his crib.
Things start to settle down a bit after baby starts on her solids. Her poops (while more disgusting in odor and consistency) are seldom spewing out the back of her clothes onto her car safety seat's fabric. She's just always covered in baby food somehow now. But look how cute she is trying to walk! No, don't touch that! It'll fall and break--
Eventually, parents get tired of changing diapers. They start to think that maybe it's time the child took matters into his own hands. Aheh.
And then, the poor fools, they allow children access to their own privates. We call this "potty training". Some people affectionately deem it "toilet learning". At this point in the process, I'm referring to it as the perfect justification for buying that Bissell SpotBot for the carpet.
Do I dare to share with you the experience of potty training thus far? I think you will have to wait. I'm still too traumatized after having to inform the restaurant tonight that my son shat on the floor under the table and smeared it on the seat on his way back up. But don't worry, we got our fair share of clean-up work to do on him in the parking lot afterward. Maybe someday Bissell will invent the SpotBot for cleaning fecal matter off toddlers in public places.
So, I say to you, children are disgusting, filthy creatures. In part, I blame the way we raise them. After all, if we never used diapers, and didn't have to worry about furniture and flooring (and disease), we'd have been more like our ancestors in finding ways to avoid many of the problems modern parents face. But as it is in our modern society, we are left to muck about in the mire that is child-rearing.
[Seriously, I love my kid. I just don't believe he's human yet. I'm hoping he will be by age 5. Keep your fingers crossed for me, will ya?]
Friday, August 27, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Where have you been?!
So, I know I haven't posted since May. I'm not dead. I haven't lost interest in the blog. But I did lose interest in the stuff I'd been posting to the blog. Turns out that I'm bored of doing toy reviews. Much as I'd like to continue to share them, I gotta take a break from them for a bit.
Besides that, life's been pretty crazy here in the Cheerios Garden. My mother and stepdad were both in hospital since my last post, and we've taken several trips this summer to see them and other family. My darling husband Andrew has also been trying to do his wonderful best to make use of his newly acquired bachelors degree (Manufacturing Management with an emphasis in Quality). His search included locales both domestic and abroad, and finally culminated in a promotion at his current company. This could not have happened at a better time as Andrew begins graduate school at The Johns Hopkins University this fall in an online program for a masters degree in Systems Engineering. We've also been planning to move at the end of our lease regardless. (Ironically, I just got called by the office now to schedule a walk through of our current place.)
So, why haven't I been posting? Surely I'd have some time, right? Well, back in February, our upstairs neighbors changed out from the previously only moderately irritating couple of young men with stompy feet to a family from South Korea with 2 children and limited skills in English--and no apparent need to sleep EVER. I gave them a month after they moved in before I said anything to them about the noise. I wrote a letter which I posted on their door, figuring that they may have an easier time understanding my intentions if they had time to read and process them--or put my words through a translator. The mother, Sook, acknowledged receipt of it cheerfully and for the next 2 weeks, things were pretty good. Well, then I guess Spring Break occurred, and after that, they were back to making noise of all kinds at all hours.
About now, I should explain the sleep situation. We live in a large apartment building, by Florida standards. I have a neighbor above me, a neighbor below me, and the unit adjacent to ours is the model unit which also rents out as a guest suite for residents' friends and family. Occasionally, I hear the downstairs neighbors playing piano. This is beautiful and lovely and not in the least disruptive. Every once in a while, their young son throws a tantrum and is made to sit outside their open front door while he screams his head off (also in Korean; we have an astonishingly large population of South Koreans and Japanese living here). But it's rare and during acceptable hours, so no big deal. We also try to respect them as our downstairs neighbors by being quiet during sleeping hours for children. Given that we have a child ourselves, this is something we recognize as important.
To help Jackson sleep, we gave him the master suite. While his window is the one exposed to the sounds of parking lot traffic, it also is the most insulated for sound from any other location. We have dark curtains on his windows to mitigate the street lamps outside his windows. We use a white noise generator (a sound machine) on full volume, and when he goes to sleep, we retreat to our bedroom for the evening. Jackson is a fairly good sleeper, but he's also a light sleeper. Certain noises wake him readily and cause him to be scared, now that his imagination is fairly active. He sees faces and turtles and fish in the curtains and claims fears of all sorts of bizarre things. However he was never afraid of the dark or the curtains, etc. until the upstairs neighbors moved in.
From what I gather, they have a Wii system set up in the living room of their unit upstairs, just outside the master bedroom. And their 6 year old son likes to jump like any other boy (and many girls) in his age group. When he jumps, not only does our ceiling shake, but our floor shakes as well. And from what I can tell, he has no enforced bed time, especially not in the summer.
So once school let out for the summer, not only were the children no longer on anything resembling normal hours, but the father, who teaches at the university, did not work this summer, so the entire family was keeping odd hours. They were often stomping about until after midnight--and up again just after dawn. Jackson's sleep was so often disturbed by all the noise (and it scared him so much), that we were having to help him fall asleep 3 to 5 times a night, every night, for a couple of months. I had made other complaints in person to Sook, but nothing really seemed to result from them. Finally, I knocked on her door at 11pm. My floor was shaking so much from her family that I was afraid my own downstairs neighbors were going to come knocking.
Sook answered the door looking very confused and offered for me to come in before realizing that I wasn't just there for a visit. Every light in the apartment was on, and I could clearly see her son and daughter romping playfully about the living room while the husband slinked off into a hiding place. I calmly but firmly told Sook that her family needed to be quieter. And then I got my favorite response from them, the one I always get: "We just got back from out of town!" The previous time she used this excuse, they had been gone for about 2 weeks. Jackson had just finally gotten used to being able to sleep uninterrupted again by the time they got back and ruined it. Apparently they have done a lot of traveling this summer on the same weekends as ourselves. However I explained to Sook that I didn't care that they just got back, and that I was WELL aware of the fact they had just gotten back because of all the sudden door slamming and luggage dropping, but that it was irrelevant to my interests as someone who did NOT just get back from being out of town and had a family who was desperately in need of sleep. I explained that my son was losing more than 2 hours of sleep at least each day due to the rudeness of her family. I told her that they were very loud and inconsiderate at late and early hours--and didn't even bother to bring up naps!
And then I got her response: "Your son is...how to say...he is too sensitive." I told her that he is NOT too sensitive when there is that much noise and that he was terrified of going to bed ever since her family moved in (which is completely true: he became afraid of the dark just after they arrived). He's not just unwilling to sleep but terrified of being in his room with that scary booming noise. She reiterated her belief in his oversensitivity, and I informed her that I would be filing a complaint with the office.
The following morning, I called the office, who told me they would "put a note on their door" with the hours of 10pm to 8am being explicitly stated as quiet hours. Well, something must have gotten through, I judged, because for the next 2 weeks we had very few issues with noise. I ran into Sook at the stairs and thanked her for her efforts to keep things quieter. She told me that she had felt so bad the night we had spoken last that she had been unable to sleep. I informed her that I hadn't slept that night either (though I'm sure my reasons were a bit different, as the injured and angered party). She said it was very tiring and frustrating because her family was home ALL THE TIME and gave her no peace. Ironically, my family suffered exhaustion on a continual basis because SHE was too tired to deal with her own. Of course, she didn't tell me this until after we'd already put in our 60 day move-out notice.
Fast forward a couple of weeks. Jackson and I had gone to visit my in-laws, just the two of us. (Apparently Andrew's coworkers think this is weird. My response back was that with us not owning a television, I don't learn social norms like "you're not supposed to like your in-laws". My bad?) He failed to nap for 4 days in a row, at which point I decided to head home. He zonked in the car, and that night, around 3:30am, he woke up screaming. There was some kind of music playing that seemed to be coming from above.
The music had a deep bass to it and played all night and all day the next day. I complained to the office, thinking it was the upstairs neighbors, and they promised to "put a note on the their door". It wasn't until the evening that Andrew finally determined that the very regular beat was the white noise machine on the baby swing in our outdoor storage unit, which had somehow activated itself. I went upstairs to apologize for making the false complaint. However I'm not sure they accepted it because ever since then, the noise has returned.
At least we move next month!
Besides that, life's been pretty crazy here in the Cheerios Garden. My mother and stepdad were both in hospital since my last post, and we've taken several trips this summer to see them and other family. My darling husband Andrew has also been trying to do his wonderful best to make use of his newly acquired bachelors degree (Manufacturing Management with an emphasis in Quality). His search included locales both domestic and abroad, and finally culminated in a promotion at his current company. This could not have happened at a better time as Andrew begins graduate school at The Johns Hopkins University this fall in an online program for a masters degree in Systems Engineering. We've also been planning to move at the end of our lease regardless. (Ironically, I just got called by the office now to schedule a walk through of our current place.)
So, why haven't I been posting? Surely I'd have some time, right? Well, back in February, our upstairs neighbors changed out from the previously only moderately irritating couple of young men with stompy feet to a family from South Korea with 2 children and limited skills in English--and no apparent need to sleep EVER. I gave them a month after they moved in before I said anything to them about the noise. I wrote a letter which I posted on their door, figuring that they may have an easier time understanding my intentions if they had time to read and process them--or put my words through a translator. The mother, Sook, acknowledged receipt of it cheerfully and for the next 2 weeks, things were pretty good. Well, then I guess Spring Break occurred, and after that, they were back to making noise of all kinds at all hours.
About now, I should explain the sleep situation. We live in a large apartment building, by Florida standards. I have a neighbor above me, a neighbor below me, and the unit adjacent to ours is the model unit which also rents out as a guest suite for residents' friends and family. Occasionally, I hear the downstairs neighbors playing piano. This is beautiful and lovely and not in the least disruptive. Every once in a while, their young son throws a tantrum and is made to sit outside their open front door while he screams his head off (also in Korean; we have an astonishingly large population of South Koreans and Japanese living here). But it's rare and during acceptable hours, so no big deal. We also try to respect them as our downstairs neighbors by being quiet during sleeping hours for children. Given that we have a child ourselves, this is something we recognize as important.
To help Jackson sleep, we gave him the master suite. While his window is the one exposed to the sounds of parking lot traffic, it also is the most insulated for sound from any other location. We have dark curtains on his windows to mitigate the street lamps outside his windows. We use a white noise generator (a sound machine) on full volume, and when he goes to sleep, we retreat to our bedroom for the evening. Jackson is a fairly good sleeper, but he's also a light sleeper. Certain noises wake him readily and cause him to be scared, now that his imagination is fairly active. He sees faces and turtles and fish in the curtains and claims fears of all sorts of bizarre things. However he was never afraid of the dark or the curtains, etc. until the upstairs neighbors moved in.
From what I gather, they have a Wii system set up in the living room of their unit upstairs, just outside the master bedroom. And their 6 year old son likes to jump like any other boy (and many girls) in his age group. When he jumps, not only does our ceiling shake, but our floor shakes as well. And from what I can tell, he has no enforced bed time, especially not in the summer.
So once school let out for the summer, not only were the children no longer on anything resembling normal hours, but the father, who teaches at the university, did not work this summer, so the entire family was keeping odd hours. They were often stomping about until after midnight--and up again just after dawn. Jackson's sleep was so often disturbed by all the noise (and it scared him so much), that we were having to help him fall asleep 3 to 5 times a night, every night, for a couple of months. I had made other complaints in person to Sook, but nothing really seemed to result from them. Finally, I knocked on her door at 11pm. My floor was shaking so much from her family that I was afraid my own downstairs neighbors were going to come knocking.
Sook answered the door looking very confused and offered for me to come in before realizing that I wasn't just there for a visit. Every light in the apartment was on, and I could clearly see her son and daughter romping playfully about the living room while the husband slinked off into a hiding place. I calmly but firmly told Sook that her family needed to be quieter. And then I got my favorite response from them, the one I always get: "We just got back from out of town!" The previous time she used this excuse, they had been gone for about 2 weeks. Jackson had just finally gotten used to being able to sleep uninterrupted again by the time they got back and ruined it. Apparently they have done a lot of traveling this summer on the same weekends as ourselves. However I explained to Sook that I didn't care that they just got back, and that I was WELL aware of the fact they had just gotten back because of all the sudden door slamming and luggage dropping, but that it was irrelevant to my interests as someone who did NOT just get back from being out of town and had a family who was desperately in need of sleep. I explained that my son was losing more than 2 hours of sleep at least each day due to the rudeness of her family. I told her that they were very loud and inconsiderate at late and early hours--and didn't even bother to bring up naps!
And then I got her response: "Your son is...how to say...he is too sensitive." I told her that he is NOT too sensitive when there is that much noise and that he was terrified of going to bed ever since her family moved in (which is completely true: he became afraid of the dark just after they arrived). He's not just unwilling to sleep but terrified of being in his room with that scary booming noise. She reiterated her belief in his oversensitivity, and I informed her that I would be filing a complaint with the office.
The following morning, I called the office, who told me they would "put a note on their door" with the hours of 10pm to 8am being explicitly stated as quiet hours. Well, something must have gotten through, I judged, because for the next 2 weeks we had very few issues with noise. I ran into Sook at the stairs and thanked her for her efforts to keep things quieter. She told me that she had felt so bad the night we had spoken last that she had been unable to sleep. I informed her that I hadn't slept that night either (though I'm sure my reasons were a bit different, as the injured and angered party). She said it was very tiring and frustrating because her family was home ALL THE TIME and gave her no peace. Ironically, my family suffered exhaustion on a continual basis because SHE was too tired to deal with her own. Of course, she didn't tell me this until after we'd already put in our 60 day move-out notice.
Fast forward a couple of weeks. Jackson and I had gone to visit my in-laws, just the two of us. (Apparently Andrew's coworkers think this is weird. My response back was that with us not owning a television, I don't learn social norms like "you're not supposed to like your in-laws". My bad?) He failed to nap for 4 days in a row, at which point I decided to head home. He zonked in the car, and that night, around 3:30am, he woke up screaming. There was some kind of music playing that seemed to be coming from above.
The music had a deep bass to it and played all night and all day the next day. I complained to the office, thinking it was the upstairs neighbors, and they promised to "put a note on the their door". It wasn't until the evening that Andrew finally determined that the very regular beat was the white noise machine on the baby swing in our outdoor storage unit, which had somehow activated itself. I went upstairs to apologize for making the false complaint. However I'm not sure they accepted it because ever since then, the noise has returned.
At least we move next month!
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