I am at my favorite hangout, enjoying R’s birthday gift to me—three uninterrupted hours, a late lunch, and some solitude. Though I just ran into Modern Mystic, my friend and fellow Writing Rev. It’s fun to have lived somewhere long enough to run into people while out and about.

I’ll be pulling out the book and/or journal in a minute, but here are some tidbits of life right now:

We got C some Brain Quest cards, which are little “flash cards” that have questions and answers on them. They’re actually fun. We don’t drill her or anything. Anyway, we were going through some of them and she got stuck on one. I started to offer some suggestions and she said, “Stop, I’m supposed to think about these myself, Mommy!” Nice.

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Life with SBJ:

1. I remember visiting R’s brother and sister-in-law and their new son a few months ago. Baby H is a sweet little guy who goes with the flow, happily tagging along to brunch, shopping, whatever. Later R and I were playing “Would You Rather” and I asked, “Would you rather have a baby who is incredibly easygoing but who is still getting up one or two times a night, or a baby who sleeps through the night but who doesn’t go with the flow as easily?”

Both of our girls slept early but tended to cluster-feed at unpredictable times during the day. Sweet baby J is definitely cut from that cloth—he slept 8 hours the other night, but it’s more like 6 normally. But there’s one added challenge—he HATES running errands. It doesn’t matter how tanked up he is on breastmilk, strap him into the car seat and take him to Target, the grocery store, whatever, and he is crying within 10-15 minutes.

I love my sleep, and my mental health is greatly improved with regular shuteye, but this errand thing is incredibly inconvenient.

Most of the time I can be philosophical about it. This too shall pass. Ha! Finally I am starting to learn some things. Hey, with a fourth kid I’d be downright Zen about stuff!

No, Mamala.

2. I cannot tell you how nice it is to be able to get away from him from time to time. M never took a bottle, so it was either me, or pouring breastmilk down her gullet via cup. Which wasn’t very satisfying. At least she never had to be weaned from the bottle, going right to sippy cup at a young age, but gah.

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A friend of mine who has also been indoctrinated into the iPHone cult introduced me to Jott. Jott is an 800 number you can call, speak a message into the phone, and have a text version of that message sent to yourself, others, or to Vitalist, which is a web-based to-do list that has a nice iPhone interface. (Vitalist is also set up using the Getting Things Done system of organization, for those of you familiar with that.)

The whole premise of Getting Things Done is having a trustworthy system of recording and organizing everything, so you don’t have the anxiety of having to remember stuff. So if I’m out and about (or trapped under a nursing baby) and think of something I need to do, I don’t have to remember it or find a paper and pen, I can just call Jott and it’ll end up in my Vitalist inbox, to be processed later.

What a time to be alive.

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I mentioned earlier having read Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting. One of his things I totally agree with is not to make children apologize when they do something wrong. How sincere is an apology when it is coerced, or even required? Does anyone appreciate or trust a reflexive “I’m sorry” from someone of any age?

Of course, kids do need to learn how to express regret and make amends. Kohn recommends modeling rather than coercing, by actually apologizing to our kids when warranted. His tossed-off comment is that you ought to make a point to apologize maybe twice a month. He admits that’s arbitrary but it seems right. Don’t we make more than two mistakes a month as parents?

Anyway, I had opportunity to try this out accidentally broke C’s favorite Christmas ornament yesterday, and she was heartbroken.

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Yesterday morning during bathtime I actually let the girls soak the bathroom in their attempt to squirt water all the way to the ceiling. I normally hate water outside of the bathtub. C went on and on about it afterward: “Wasn’t that just so much fun, Mommy?” Hmmm, you know you’ve been treating your children a little too seriously when your kid will not stop talking about how fun the messy bathroom was.

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R had a good Dad day yesterday.

1. For Christmas he received a kit and instruction book on how to make balloon animals, and following the broken ornament incident I walked into the family room to find him trying to make a flower for her (one of the hardest shapes to make).

2. Last night he fell partially down the stairs while carrying J. I heard it and came running. He got the wind knocked out of him, and was simultaneously gasping, reassuring me that he was fine, and handing J to me. Later he said that he could have easily broken his fall, but his priority was keeping J safe. Of course it all happened too fast for him to consciously think, “Must keep hold of the baby”—so it was all instinct. Good guy.

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Tomorrow I have my follow-up visit to the midwife, and Tuesday it’s J’s one-month ped visit. Can’t wait to find out how much he weighs.