Children are … complicating.<\/p>\n
From a purely pragmatic and selfish PoV, Katherine has complicated our lives immensely.<\/p>\n
Nights punctuated and interrupted by howls of varied distress, often requring getting up to find out what the problem is and correct it, but always requiring arousal from sleep. The living alarm clock deciding it’s time for someone besides her to be up sometime between 5:30a and 8, regardless of whether it’s a work day or not, or whether the parents were up until 9 or Midnight, or were up during the night dealing with those distressed howls. Trying to keep her constantly amused so that she’s not screaming for attention. Tripping and dancing about various toys (and pieces thereof), pots and pans, and other dropped-where-interest-flagged detritus. The constant struggle to keep things out of her reach, which keeps getting longer, such that any horizontal surface becomes an emergency hosting place for coffee cups, books, papers, anything that shouldn’t be chewed, taken, or dropped. Outings that come to an abrupt halt because Katherine is too tired to be awake but too wired\/unhappy to go down in her porta-crib. The inability to plan or execute any<\/i> activity without working it around ad hoc right-now<\/b>-dammit<\/i> naps, feedings, bath time, bed time, or just I-want-to-crawl-in-your-lap-and-pound-on-the-keyboard sorts of demands, etc.<\/p>\n
Heck, not being able to sit down and watch a movie on TV at night without at least one irresistable demand for food\/visitation\/re-binking from Our Mistress’ Voice. And having to be constantly attentive, waiting for said Voice, whether it comes or not.<\/p>\n
There are times it gets incredibily<\/i> frustrating. And harrying. It introduces a level of stress that leads to me grinding my teeth, Margie and I snapping at each other, and general misery.<\/p>\n
It is something that nobody not in the situation can understand. Really. Trust me. I thought I did.<\/p>\n
And yet …<\/p>\n
Yesterday morning, I came downstairs, having slept in until 9:30a (albeit with multiple interruptions at wee hours of the morning), to find Katherine sitting on Margie’s lap on the sofa in the family room. And she was smiling, and happy, and full of joy, and she looked up and saw Daddy desending the stairs and the look on her face was just astonishingly precious. It made it all worthwhile.<\/p>\n
At least until the next time I found myself grinding my teeth …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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Trouble For Murdoch: Feds Collecting Billions In Fines, Sending Executives To Jail For Corruption Abroad | ThinkProgress - Nothing would make me happier than to see Murdoch and his empire go down in flames.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Potpourri"","block_context":{"text":"Potpourri","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/potpourri"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}