Nap Strike Ends In Victory for Local Housewife

That's right, people, that baby, that baby right there - the maniacal one:

yeah, him - he's asleep! Against his will even! I win! Awww yeah! Dig it! Freddy, my love, let me hear it! Show me some love!




You may ask why I am so giddy about a mere nap, and I will tell you. We are in the 5th straight day of a nap strike. Union reps and household management have yet to reach an agreement that is acceptable to both sides, but I am happy to say that I have managed to go around the mediators in this instance, and have, through sheer persistance, been able to make The Baby see things my way this afternoon. Booyah, baby, booyah!
Seriously, this is one stubborn kid (a trait I am quite sure he got from his father, thank you very much). When he doesn't want to nap, by God, he's not going to nap. When he is agreeable, the routine goes like this:
8 a.m. - up and out of bed after about 10 minutes of him climbing onto my face and neck, giggling and farting.
8:15-8:30 a.m. - watches Dad shower and attempts to climb in with him only to realize that his legs are still a little too short to get over the rim of the tub
8:30-9 a.m. - breakfast, during which some food might actually make it into the baby. Cuteness and messiness abounds.
9-10 a.m. - chase cat, play with toys, read books with Mommy, run amok, maybe poop
10-10:15 a.m. - nurse and pass out
10:15 a.m. - 12 p.m. - sleep with reckless abandon
12 p.m. - wake up, get diaper changed
12:15-12:45 p.m. - vid chat of lunch time havok with Daddy
12:45 p.m. - 2:30/3 p.m. - amok amok amok, with a shower in there somewhere
3- 3:15 p.m.- nurse and pass out
3:15 - 4:30 p.m. - sleep like you mean it
4:30 - 6:30 p.m. - run amok in such a way that all earlier amok running seems like a pale and lackluster foreshadowing
6:30 p.m. - greet Daddy, drag him around the house
7- 7:30 p.m. - dinner, messiness, cackling
7:30 p.m. - into jammies, quiet play time
8/8:30 p.m. - nurse, cuddle with Daddy, pass out

These days it's the same until:
10-11:30a.m.- nurse, refuse to sleep, grab Mommy's hair, poke Mommy in the nose, giggle, squirm, fuss, look around, try to escape, throw a fit, babble, wiggle, throw another fit, pass out
11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - sleep, but mix it up - sleep like the dead for 15 mnutes, then flop about and open eyes for a bit, demand to be held halfway through
1:30p.m. - wake up, proceed as usual until
3 p.m. - repeat process

He was so stubborn about this nap that, in the end, his eyes were closed from overwhelming exhaustion, but he started babbling loudly in protest in order to keep himself awake. In the end, however, I have had my victory and he's sacked out. Because I am the Champion, my friends.

Dateline: Daly City

The world is going to pot it seems. Global climate changes, genocide, terrorism, war, zealotry, e. coli, blizzards, Lindsay Lohan! I suspect that the planets are aligned in some unfortunate configuration that is causing upheaval across the Earth. Crises are springing at every level, International, national, local, and even right here in the beige-carpeted domestic haven that is Casa Grammatarian. Yes, our very own civil war rages on, unabated. Battles are won or lost on either side, but no end to the conflict seems forthcoming. On one side stands the United Parenting Front. Their pro-nap, anti-tantrum stance has them at odds with their opponent, the Toddler Demolition Force. The TDF has vowed not to rest until...well, actually just not to rest, period. Toddler scientists have come up with a masterful new technique that renders certain members of their force immune to all forms of sedation, including a great favorite of the UPF, "The Car." The TDF has also called a food strike to protest the creation of Toddler Free Zones around the home electronics and the application of child locks on cabinets filled with Many Interesting Things. Mealtimes have become a source of great tension, particularly for innocent civilian cats who are likely to become accidental victims of cracker shrapnel and yogurt spray.
Aggressions are spilling out of the house and onto the streets of Daly City, where the leader of the Toddler forces, Thomas "the Disco Ninja," in a deliberately provacative act, was seen consuming sand at a local playground. After several attempts at intervention showed the Parents' representative's inability to move swiftly enough to curb the crusty consumption, the agent, one "Mom," gave up her efforts at inhibition and resorted to documenting the event for posterity.



As of yesterday, both sides received reinforcement from allies. Caitlin (alais: Monkey Girl) has joined The Disco Ninja, and a mysterious agent known only as "Grandma" has reportedly signed on to the opposing team, keeping the TDF outnumbered. How will the weekend play out? Though possessing superior numbers, the UPF still faces a determined opponent willing to fight dirty, engage in psychological warfare, and has no moral compuctions about breaking international conventions of warfare for the simple reason that they are too young to have any morals at all. Further updates as events unfold.

Yesterday I was feeling brave and actually left a comment on one of my favorite blogs, Mr. Nice Guy, in which I confessed that he rocks me sockless. After reading elasticwaistbandlady/The Smiling Infidel's most recent post, however, I am thinking that sockless might just be a damn good thing, and that Mr. Nice Guy is lucky to be spared socks like these:


These are the only entertaining socks I own, and while the selection is nothing like the Infidel's, I admit that the area of footwear where I really excel, and in which I am willing to throw down the gauntlet of challenge, is shoes. Shoes like these:


and these:



I'm even inflicting my passion for shoes onto the adorable little feet of my boy-spawn. Observe the midget's shoe collection:




I believe firmly in the idea that the world is easier to face in a really kick ass pair of shoes. There is little one can't overcome with the proper footwear (and the proper application of said footwear to the posterior regions of the deserving when necessary).


Edited to add:
Oh yes, and just for you, my dear EWBL, I also have these:

Just because it makes me happy, I will share this with you:


Also, I have started a movie nerd blog here in an effort to get myself writing more often, and also to share with you all my sometimes embarrassing and very eclectic taste in movies.

Eeek! Thank you Anonymous for reminding me that I do, indeed, have a blog! And the blog I have has not been updated since November! I left all three of my readers hanging with that tidbit of a novel and a promise to not only actually write the rest of the story, but also to post snippets of it here. Did I do either of these things? Well...no, no I did not. So you may very well ask, "what the Hell have you been up to, you goofy broad you, during all these postless weeks that was so very time-consuming that you couldn't be buggered to either write a 50,000 word novel OR post a measely little blog update?"
Fair question. What the Hell have I been up to? Surely it must have been exciting, right? I mean, I live a jet-setting rockstar sort of life, after all. I'm a madcap wild woman, a whirlwind of excitment and non-stop antics I tell you! I secretly counsel the top tabloid-fodder starlets of the day on how to live it up with tips from my own wacky adventures with lost undies and drug-addled collapses in various super-elite nightclubs. They are a pale imitation, but they try their best to live up to hard-rockin' example I set. Courtney Love thinks I should slow down - yeah, I roll like that.
Okay, okay, that might be a very slight exaggeration. I have actually worn underwear pretty much the whole time since my last post, and the collapses were actually more like stumbles and pratfalls from not paying enough attention while navigating the gauntlet of legos, wooden trains, stuffed animals, toy drums, and various other obstacles and living room landmines strewn about my house by my toddler.
I did go on a vacation, though. In November Mr. Grammatarian, The Disco Ninja, and I took a little trip down the coast for a week to celebrate my birthday. We stayed in a wonderful place called Costa Noa where Mr. G and I used to go when we were first married. We lounged in bed, had family baths in the deep soaking tub in our room, cooked out on the bbq, sipped wine, went to the beach, and just relaxed the week away. It was heavenly. Having broken our camera in late October, I was only able to get camera phone pictures, but I think a few of these shots will convey the awesomeness of our trip:




After that came the great rush for Thanksgiving. This year, we decided that a turkey was just too, too last year. Instead, there was nothing for it but to get ourselves a turducken. What is a turducken? Glad you asked. A turducken is a mouth-wateringly delicious exercise in excess, Cajun style. It is a boneless chicken shoved inside a boneless duck which is then crammed into a boneless turkey, the spaces lovingly filled with cornbread stuffing and Cajun sausage, frozen solid, and shipped all the way from Florida to our Northern California abode to be baked, basted, carved and devoured in a frenzied orgy of festive gluttony by our friends and family. It was truly awesome, and we'll never go back to plain old turkey, not matter how hip and retro it may become in the future. We've moved on; we're on a higher plane of over-indulgence. One bird is no longer enough. Two birds won't do. No, no we now require three birds, jammed one inside the next, like a set of carnivore's nesting dolls.

Thomas turned one year old and discovered the joys of dulche de leche ice cream cake:



We also went ahead and bought him a new car for his birthday:


Then came Christmas. We survived it with liberal applications of egg nog (straight up for me, and "Dad Nog" style for Mr. G. Dad Nog contains rum, vodka, whiskey, and brandy, and is much like napalm: sticky and surprisingly flammable.), chocolate, and the traditional Grammatarian family holiday movies: A Christmas Story, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, When Harry Met Sally, and Better Off Dead. We had a gorgeous prime rib for dinner, enjoyed the company of dear friends, and wallowed in pie, Tenacious D episodes, and Guitar Hero until bed time.

New Year's Eve, what can I say about New Year's Eve? Just for a giggle, let us compare this last December 31st with the one I celebrated when I was 21. It was 1998. I lived at that time in West Oakland in a warehouse with a group of motorcycle riding, nightclub working, twenty-something hoodlums. I had a coffin in my bedroom, a job as a receptionist, and a wardrobe that was well over 60% fishnet. That night I zipped myself into a black vinyl catsuit, whipped my hair into a complicated construct of chopsticks and glitter, slathered my face with a heavy patina of make-up, and headed off to the club I had once worked at, and spent the night dancing on the bar, downing a variety of vodka based drinks, and in the end making out with an equally inebriated former bar co-worker, since neither of the two men I was dating had come out with me. Fast foward to last week. Now married to one of those two formerly absent boyfriends (the awesome one), for over five years, a mother for just over a year, and a full-time Daly City housewife, we spent the evening in our pajamas, had a sensible dinner, a glass of wine, put the baby to sleep, watched a movie, and went to bed at 12:30 a.m., after I spent a half hour cursing and grumbling and generally being crotchety about the fireworks set off by our neighbors because they could have woken my son. That's me rockin' the hedonistic life, yo!