Living Out Loud volume 20: You won't read this anywhere ...

Rich and I have joked about making a list somewhere of all the things my father doesn't like. That list would be very long, but the recent examples I can think of are Canola oil, luan plywood and Cox communications. Each of those could be a blog post (or several) of its own which is one of the many reasons I need to make my father a blog so that he can tell the World and not just us. A kind of old man therapy, if you will. I've also noticed a trend lately in truisms these days. There's a very entertaining site called 1001 rules for my unborn son with such gems as "388. If you don’t know what a knob does, don’t fool with it." and "311. Don’t date your bartender." That combined with the Twitter turned book turned TV show with William Shatner called Sh*t My Dad Says made me realize that we all have rules or beliefs that we need to pass onto others.

My father is often known to start a sentence with "you won't read this anywhere but ..." He can't actually say it now without grinning because it's all just some inside joke. But the nugget of wisdom has to be shared!

So that's what I want you to do for this month's Living Out Loud project. Tell us some of your rules. Maybe it's how the toilet paper goes on the roll. Maybe it's something about finding the perfect mate. Maybe it's some lesson that involves hiring J. Walter Weatherman to teach your children a lesson about leaving notes. It could be one really important rule or a list of guidelines for living. But the best part is they're your rules.

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I'm just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don't email me, I'm likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, September 5th (the first Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

We'll all just keep doing the things we shouldn't do unless you give us a list of rules to not do them!

It's such a struggle!

While at our first conference, we were dealing with the various shenanigans of travel and co-worker Heather blurted out "it's such a struggle!" It was obviously part of her personal folklore and she explained that it's what her mother used to say all the time whenever anything got complicated. This last month has been complicated. Our pool has been various shades of green so that we haven't been able to fully enjoy it, we left for our most recent trip only to discover the load of laundry with all of Ian's clothes and my favorite pair of jeans had gone sour so we both stank and the car doesn't know it uses synthetic oil so has prematurely started screaming that it needs an oil change with lights all over the dash making us nearly miss the notification that we were completely out of gas.

And did I mention our son screams every hour on the hour at night?

But last night was better. He only woke up twice to nurse and these were real wakings and not the stiff-armed screams. The second time at 5:47am he crawled up on me and nursed then snuggled up with me all on his own. I was like one of those swim up bars in Jamaica. Then he looked over at Rich who has been the neglected parent lately and crawled over to him to wake him up and request to sleep on his chest. It was very heart-warming and much preferable to our previous nights of sleep.

I've also found that whenever things start to feel rough if I just blurt out "it's such a struggle!" in my best Heather's Mom Voice it really does make things feel better.

Gotcha!

A few weeks ago I got a Baby Center weekly update on the status of Ian. It told me that as a nine-month-old he would not necessarily do well with travel and would need lots of down time. Cue the whirlwind of taking the baby to three conferences in two weeks. He went up to Oswego to hang out with librarians for a few days then flew over to Manhattan to cavort with his toddler cousins and 2000 bloggers at BlogHer. And this week we went up to DC for an archivist conference and our company outing of a Nationals baseball game. He's been a trooper through all of this but not without a few hiccups.

Yesterday, because of various circumstances, Ian only had two twenty minute naps all day. I tried nursing him and rocking him to sleep at the baseball game in an empty party suite but there was still too much going on. He went to sleep at 10:30 that night.

And woke up screaming at 11:55pm, 12:05am, 2am, 2:30am, 3:45am, 3:50am, 6am and 6:30am before actually getting up for the day at 7:30am.

I use the term "woke up" but that's not quite accurate. He would get all stiff-armed and flail around the bed crying like you'd stabbed him, but not actually be awake. He would settle back down within a few minutes each time, sometimes after walking around with him, but each time Rich and I both were ripped out of sleep to "OMG THE BABY IS CRYING WHAT'S WRONG HOLY SHIT MAKE IT STOP". Repeat each hour or so. One of my Google searches at 4am called them night terrors and I can see how they get the name because I can attest to waking up pretty terrified the first few times he did it. Ian, of course, wakes up perky and cheerful the next morning.

My father tells this joke about a pair of golfers betting on a game but one getting "two gotchas". And much like that golfer waiting for the second gotcha, each time I fell back asleep I was just waiting for the next panicked scream to wake me up.

This week should be pretty low key for him and I'm hoping the return of routine will help him out of this screaming night terror phase. I can feel myself getting threadbare from this last week of sporadic sleep.

When he's not screaming, he is pretty adorable when he sleeps.