Octoberrific!

It’s October. Shut UP. No, really. Not even October: mid-October. I know — crazy. It’s been like that, lately, where I think something that happened last weekend happened the weekend before. Or the one before that. Or, say, last month. Which was September. And in September, we just got kind of busy. It hadn’t occurred to me that we weren’t busy in the summer but, clearly, I had no idea, what with second grade and junior kindergarten and preschool and babysitters and music and sports and Hebrew school and the like and why do I feel all of a sudden like I live on planet Suburban Mother? Because I do. I live on planet Suburban Mother in September October and thank GOD for our calendar with its very large squares and stickers, the calendar that is designwise a blight on my delicate aesthetic senses but without which I would not survive.

Excuse me while I go fill the station wagon and get that meatloaf in the oven.

Yeah, so we’ve been Septemberized. I just made up that word. And, actually, it was a lovely month, gone all tickety-boo (cf CALENDAR; also setting the alarm). A lovely month made lovelier by a certain four-year-old’s 180° shift in attitude about extracurricular (not to mention curricular) activities. Last September was dominated by Isaac’s utter misery over preschool, his sheer dread of which permeated every waking moment. But this year? This year, he has scampered off gladly to every new activity and classroom September has thrown at him: five new things in one week, and the kid who held onto my leg and sobbed last year walked in, cracking jokes, only looking up to say, “You can go now, Mommy.”

And so we went.

I should point out, however, that this newfound independence has not extended into sleeping arrangements. In other words, Isaac is still sleeping in our room, curled up happy as can be on a single mattress next to ours. It’s been at least a year, now, minus a brief but valiant effort on Rachel’s part this past summer to get him back into his own room. (“But then we wouldn’t have a guest room,” I protested, completely inured by then to the idea of a child depriving me of a bedside table for the foreseeable future. I needn’t have worried, given that Isaac has historically, and successfully, resisted all known forms of sleep training for the school of I’ll Do What I Damn Well Please, to the point where we started calling him “Isaac the Untrainable” (a moniker since adopted by our friends for their two-year-old daughter, who is Totally Not Down with spending the entire night in her toddler bed).)

At this point, though, I will admit that it might indeed be nice to sleep through the night in my own room while Isaac sleeps through the night in his. Instead, he wakes at some point in the middle of the night several times a week and, depending on what side of the bed he wakes on (get it? Ha ha), requires varying degrees of coddling to go back to sleep. A few nights ago, he wanted Rachel to cuddle him, but reluctantly settled for her holding his hand. Except that (and don’t tell him this) he wasn’t really holding her hand. Realy, he was holding my hand in the dark while Rachel stayed securely on her side of the bed, murmuring aphorisms to him like Cyrano de Bergerac about how nice it was to hold his hand, too. He finally let go, saying, “Rachel, you don’t have to hold my hand as long as you stay right next to me.” “Okay,” she said, and we all went back to sleep again. We're totally winning this one, obviously.