Parents Feign Deep Sleep at 5 AM

The early wake-ups are killing us. We recently took down the gate in front of Kina’s room, hoping that she’d walk herself to the bathroom when she woke up—which maybe she is—who knows—but it does not appear to have slaked her thirst for our attention in the wee hours o’ the morning. Our most recent countermeasure is to pretend that we are in a slumber so deep that we cannot be roused, hoping that the creepy velociraptor that is our child will move on to some other form of entertainment. This works, for short stints, as long as she has something amusing. For each of the last few days, that amusement has been the 36 cans of Play-Doh that I accidentally bought on Amazon, which she passes through her little pasta extruder, making long chubby noodles in different color gradients: lavender to pink, green to orange, yellow to sky blue. She saves them for us until she thinks we should wake up, which I’d like to say is at a reasonable time like 6:24, when the wake-up light turns green, but is usually half an hour after she’s initially tried to wake us—today, she gave us until about 5:45. This is manifestly unacceptable. We have re-enlisted the help of a woman we call “Dr. Pam” (not actually a doctor), a Canadian child sleep aficionado who got us through our last bout of horrible sleep practices by telling us sternly not to be weaklings. This time, her strict admonition is that we are to walk her silently back to bed over and over again until it is reasonable for her to wake up, and to make “the rules” very clear to her at night. We dread this, but will report back. Until then, noodles.

“Kina? I Don’t Know Her. Is She a Boy or a Girl?”

The kid is now spending most of her time with us as an Octonaut—Dashi, the “sweet-natured IT officer” dog—and has taken to asking us about Kina the strange human and what he/she/they are like. I will go so far as to role play as Captain Barnacles, but refuse to engage in deliberate dissociation. I have my limits. Also, I will reiterate that once you know how to draw one Octonaut, you can draw all of them. It’s all in the ears.

“I Couldn’t Do Tracing Cuz My Lip Hurts”

You know how you’ll be trying to do a thing these days—work, eat, wake up, take a shower—something simple and not exhausting, but all your energy is just drained by living through this year? You are tracing with a busted lip. This year is our busted lip. We trace nonetheless.

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