If your kid wakes up early, you wake up early

Lucy, who is now 2yrs, 4mo old, is a good sleeper. She's awesome at sleeping all the way thru her naps and all the way thru the night without waking up. But ... she's awake at 5:45 a.m. a lot. Like today. So here I am, 6:45, blogging to the tune of Dora the Explorer. Wonderful. At least I went to bed at 11:30 p.m. Mostly on time. I feel rested enough to pull this off. Yeah.

You hit a point with kids where giving up normal comforts like a good night's sleep, or having peace and quiet, is completely ordinary and you just have to accept it. Not doing so will only be cause for a fight. And not like a shouting match, it will be like a kid crying and standing there by your bed while you try to sleep. And if I say, "Go back to your room, Lucy. Go back to bed," she of course won't. She'll just stand there and cry. It's like a pathetic fight. And saying, "Stop crying," always makes her cry harder, and choke out through her sobs, the parroting skill coming into light, "Stop crying."

Peace and quiet are at a premium now, too. Beatrix is a big, big crier. And a big, big baby. Like, she's in the 95th percentile for height and weight. A huge kid. But, her height-weight ratio is on par. For some reason, she cries most of the time she's awake. She loves to scream and shout. It's def her favorite thing. I'm still not completely sure what her face looks like cause every time I see it, her eyes are squeezed shut, mouth wide open, screams coming out, face red.

But parents know that a colic-y baby is no easy thing to deal with. Thank God Megan has a little less than two months of maternity leave left. When she goes back to work, it's all me at home with these two angels. BB is four weeks, five days old today. I think she cries so much cause she has stomach issues up the wazoo. Always puking. Every day, without fail. She urps up multiple times. I guess babies just do this, but it's still weird. She also has lots of farts that seem to be painful for her. I feel bad for this poor kid.

Pretty much every night when it's getting close to bed time, she's inconsolable for a few hours. Just crying, crying, crying. I think she just cries cause she's bored half the time. And if you're not a parent, you're going to get horrified at this, but if you are, you know what an inconsolable crying baby can do to you. It's hard not to be insulted by it, or to start thinking that nothing is going to help, and the urge to smack her always rises up in me. 

Violence against a baby. I can't believe it. Here I am in life. Of course I don't smack her. Maybe I pat her back a little too hard sometimes, but otherwise I'm good at just rocking, rocking, rocking. Getting my ear screamed into. God BB has pipes. She'll be a good singer. Single folks just don't know what this kind of test is like. Kids will stretch you to your utmost. The virtue of patience becomes very, very apparent.

One thing parents never talk about is the urge to hit their kids. Megan and I have both admitted to each other in the past that, sometimes, we just want to smack Lucy. It sounds funny now, but it's such a sensitive issue that you can't really talk about it too freely. Not in public, anyway. But I assure you, every single parent has either hit, or wanted to hit, their kid at some point in their life. Kids misbehave and deliberately try to push your buttons; it's what they do. When adults do that, you want to hit them, too.

Why do you think spanking was such a popular discipline technique when we were kids, my fellow late-20's/30-somethings? Hitting kids was okay to do, until a certain time came about. I'm not sure of the history of children's rights, but sometime in there, hitting and switching was replaced by spanking. Now spanking is discouraged, cause hitting a kid anywhere only teaches them that it's okay to hit, even those you love.

My dad told me about times when his mom would hold him over her knee and smack his ass with a hairbrush. And he cracks up every time he tells me the story of when he got so old that he learned to clench his butt muscles, and she broke the brush over his ass, and then started to cry.

One day I was like ten or something, and my mom says, "Glenn, I'm going to spank your bottom!" And I just kind of smiled, then laughed, and then she started laughing too. My momma loves me. Even though I was a total shithead as a child.

It's fucking early and I haven't had my coffee yet. I guess I love writing.

Here, look at these pictures. All this talk of violence against children makes me want to relish some of the more sweet moments of parenting. Moments like this, and my all-encompassing love for my beautiful girls, make all the hardship worth it. I love my kids more than anything.

Lucy is such a sweety.