She Should Join the Pipefitter's Union

Brigid had an unusual day yesterday nap-wise. Her usual schedule goes something like this: She wakes up in the 5-6 a.m. range and comes in with us where she has some boob and falls back to sleep until about 8 a.m. She'll get up and run around for a while before Daddy gives her breakfast. They dance and play and read until 10 a.m. when it's time for Sesame Street. She'll watch pretty well as long as the action keeps changing, but sometimes Sesame Street gets a little "talky" and then she loses interest. But usually, she's good until 11 a.m. when Daddy gives her her first lunch, often a scrambled egg and some toast and fruit. He then works at getting her to take a nap. After she wakes up from her nap, she gets lunch No. 2. They'll play outside or go for a walk or any number of fun activities until I come home. Then I play with her until the girls come home from school. Then we all play with her or engage her in some way. She'll have a snack when the girls do after school. We have dinner and will play and dance some more before bathtime and then it's boob time for a while before she goes to bed.

Pretty simple day with variations depending on what's going on. But yesterday she refused to take a nap for Daddy. She just refused even though she was also dosed up with benadryl for her stuffiness. By the time I got home from work, she was flopping all over but even gave me a hard time about napping until finally, with the help of the boob, she fell asleep about 2 p.m., much later than normal, and then work up about 40 minutes later. She's never been a two-nap kid, nor has she been much of a long one-napper either. I know people who have kids who take two-hour naps every afternoon. Brigid has never been one of them. Margaret would nap like that; Patricia napped pretty regularly until she was about two and then forget it. But Brigid has never had that kind of napping longevity. When she does nap later, it screws up the evening routine so at 9:30 I was still trying to get her to bed. Finally got her down at 10 p.m. And she was tired. Didn't hear a peep out of her until after 6 a.m.

Today she and Daddy spent the morning shopping for a toilet. What fun! Our tenant's toilet needs to be replaced, so Daddy and Baby B got to play plumber. Hopefully it will be an easy installation and not an all-day project. She won't be at his elbow helping this time, however. Brigid isn't at the age yet when she can "help" with projects. She'd just run around Kathy's apartment and torment her cats or fall down the stairs. So she'll have to wait before she becomes Daddy's Little Helper.

One fun thing I did with Baby B yesterday was let her play in some uncooked rice (she saved the cooked rice to play with at dinner time). I was having her help me make rice for dinner, and when she plunged her hand into the cup of uncooked rice, I figured she'd have more fun with her own rice than that which I was planning to cook. I poured a cup of rice into a box and she swished it around, dumped it around, and generally made a grand mess on the kitchen floor. She has had a fascination with texture she can run her hands over. When she's outside, she'll squat down in the grass and rub her hands over the grass or the dirt or the sand from ant hills she comes across. So the rice was just a natural extension of that sensation. Makes me think I'll look for a good bin to turn into a rice box for her to continue such exploration of tactile experiences. Of course, it also means I'll be sweeping up rice for days on end, but it's a small price to pay for a few minutes of uninterrupted play by the baby, which translates into a few minutes of uninterrupted time to read the paper. Life is a series of tradeoffs.