we don't need no stinkin' sleep

"dang, son. mama ran hard this
afternoon. thanks for coming with me."

"didn't look so hard to me, mama. i think
you could have gone faster and we'd have
made it home to my juice sooner."

yesterday i managed to get a good run in after work, before the storms showed up. but i guess it's thunderstorm season. and this season, they seem to be coming all at night.

used to be i loved a good night-time thunderstorm. sure, it might wake me up, but i'd listen to the thunder and see the lightning play through the curtains, and i'd hear the rain on the roof, and i'd sleep peacefully. occasionally another big boom would startle me, but only for a moment.

nowadays all that has changed. not because of john - he slept like the proverbial baby through the whole thing.

no, this is the culprit:

why yes, this IS a new thundershirt.
thanks for noticing.

poor wussy buddy. he did much better last night than in previous stormy nights, in part because of the thunder shirt and in part because of the benadryl i slipped him when i knew it was going to get stormy. but he still spent the night going between quaking at my bedside and hiding between my blanket chest and my nightstand in the corner of the room.

thank goodness for the thundershirt ... if you have a dog who is nervous about anything, i can't recommend it any more strongly. it makes a huge difference. and he DOES look sharp wearing it doesn't he?

Comments

on lullabies

i am not a singer. if you've sat behind me in church, you know this to be true. (and i'm sorry.) a musician, yes. a singer no. and yet i find myself singing to john almost nonstop. and the beauty is, he seems to actually like it! (there's no accounting for taste. he also thinks i'm the most beautiful woman in the world. i'm no ogre, but i'm certainly not winning any beauty contests outside of my son's brain!) and actually, i've written some lullabies for john that are pretty nice. and it made me think: did your parents sing to you? do you remember what they sang, and better yet, if you have kids, do you sing the same songs to them? reply in the comments!

i'm furberizing my baby

ok, let's get this straight right off the bat: i don't know if i am literally following dr. furber's methods of sleep training. there are so many versions out there. but saying we're furberizing john is WAY more fun than saying that i'm letting him cry his little lungs out in an attempt to teach him to sleep on his own. it's night two of our efforts. he went right to sleep last night, which was great. and he slept for 5.25 hours (!!!!) before waking up at 2:30 a.m. when he woke up crying, i let him cry for 5 minutes before going in to soothe him. (the soothing barely works at all, by the way, but it's what i'm supposed to do ...) then i let him cry for 10 more minutes before going in to soothe him again. next on the agenda was a 15 minute stretch of crying - but he fell asleep after 8 minutes. so a sum total of 22 minutes of crying. not too bad for night two. i've heard night three can be the worst ... so we'll hold on to our hats tonight. mean

home

annapolis rock 1988 thirty years ago, my family moved from denton, tx, to a tiny rural town in the mountains of maryland. i remember being sad as we sold our things (we were packing everything into two old cars to drive north) and actually crying over the sale of our washing machine. transition does strange things to kids' emotions. yet i remember arriving, excited, into this strange green mountainous place, and i remember even more anticipation as we found a home ("the old taylor place") and got ready for school to start at smithsburg elementary. third grade -- the same grade john starts this school year. i remember meeting my first friend on a dusty dirt road - the "alley" that ran behind the high school tennis courts and athletic fields from our home just at the town's outskirts to her home just outside downtown. (if you've never known a small town downtown, that's probably hard to envision). it was an amazing place to be a child. 199

john's mom works

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