American in Spain

Today was the big Carnival parade, sort of a “Halloween meets Mardi Gras” thing that is very typical for children in Spanish culture. Apparently I did such a fine job last year that my presence was simply assumed as The Official Daycare Photographer. Perhaps in honor of that job, I was also given a leading role in this year’s costume theme. About a month ago, I was told by Adela, the daycare owner, that this year for Carnival the kids would be dressed up as dwarves, the daycare employees would all be dressed as Snow White, Adela herself would be the Evil Stepmother, and I, the only parent with a themed costume, would be dressed as none other than Prince Charming.
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We have had our first month of nocturnal ambulation. The first incident occurred while I was asleep in Nora’s room. Often, if Nora cries at night, I will get up from my bed and go sleep in the guest bed in Nora’s room. This enables me to calm her down without getting up using just my voice, nipping a possible crying episode in the bud. In the time it takes her to crescendo up to a cry that I can hear from my room plus the time it takes me to get up and make it to her room, sometimes the emotions have snowballed into a bawl that’s harder to quash. On the night in question, I awoke at 3:00 AM to the sound of latex on latex; Nora was rubbing a deflated balloon over my ear. When I opened my eyes, I saw her big eyes there on the bed beside me staring intently. I told her that she had to go back to bed, and I put her there with little protest. It was only in the morning that I noticed that many of the objects, like her bedtime books had moved across the room to various places during the night.
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We’ve taken a bit of a slide backwards in our nocturnal potty training efforts this month. There was one week when we had to change wet bed sheets every single night of the week. Plus, with my parents’ visit and the loss of a family member this month, we have gone back to having Nora wear diapers at night to avoid the hassle of midnight bed making. While disappointing, when one takes a step back and gains some perspective, this is really not that big of a deal. It took her seventeen months to walk (and longer to crawl), and her English was slow to develop at first, but is now staggeringly advanced. We’ve decided we’re in no huge rush with the nocturnal bladder control.
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The big change in the offspring this month has been the transition to the Big Girl Bed. It went quite well, and she’s been very proud about sleeping in a bed and not a crib. I dismantled the crib and moved it into storage, which was sad in a “my baby’s all grown up” sense, but also because I did it on what would’ve been the due date had our second pregnancy made it to full term. Nora hasn’t really fallen out of bed yet, but she has “oozed” most of the way out several times. Since the bed is so close to the floor, I often find her sleeping with only part of her body on the bed. My hypothesis that a nightlight would provide some visual stimulus and reduce nocturnal disorientation terror seems to have been correct.
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I think that perhaps we waited too long to make the transition for Nora from her crib to a real bed. Lately she has been sleeping very poorly in her crib, and it’s clear that it’s the size that is bothering her. Or at least it’s clear to me, as a larger-than-the-average-bed individual. You know those nights we all have occasionally where no matter what posture you adopt, you’re just not comfortable. As adults, we moan or sigh, but a two year old cries.
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Nora has taken very, very well to her potty training that we started in June. We’ve had just three bed wettings in the six weeks since returning from her three-week summer vacation and going “off diaper” 24/7. We’ve had a few bowel surprises that weren’t quite anticipated in time to “RUN TO THE POTTY!!” (an exclamation heard often lately). About once a day she lets enough drops of “pee-pee” escape to require a new pair of panties, but the outer garment almost never needs changing. Quite often, she’ll head out of the room like she’s going to get a toy, only to utter, five minutes later from behind a closed bathroom door, a “Poppy! Come limp my bottom!” When I enter, I find her sitting on the toilet with a gigantic, er, “creation” in the bowl beneath her.
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When we visited Alcatraz last year (which I highly recommend), I couldn’t resist buying two souvenir magnets in the gift shop on the way out. During the tour, we learned that, when a prisoner first arrived to the maximum security prison and was shown to his cell, he found, on the fold-out table in his cell, a list of the prison’s rules and regulations. The two regulations on the refrigerator magnets I bought are fantastic for parenting a child. I plan to have them posted in the kitchen for the duration of my daughter’s stay under my care.
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Earlier today I came up with a Spanglish joke: “Mi hija es la más why del mundo.” Like most one-liners, it’s a play on words. It is pronounced exactly the same as the syntactically correct Spanish sentence, “Mi hija es la más guay del mundo” The word “guay”, which is pronounced exactly like the English word “why”, and I think is only slang in Castilian Spanish, is a general positive adjective mainly used by youth that could translate to the English words cool, great, awesome or terrific. So the meaning of the proper sentence “My daughter is the awesomest in the world.” Of course the joke was to substitute her new favorite English word, making her “the most ‘why’ daughter in the world”.
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My two year old now had the mental capacity to reason through simple causal statements like “Mommy is sleeping, because it’s night time, so we need to be quiet,” but the logical side of her brain isn’t yet powerful enough to override the emotional side enough to accept, “It’s night time, so you need to lie down in your crib, be quiet, and have the light off and no one else in the room with you.” She does, however, accept small bargains where good behavior results in her getting something that she wants. Lately I’ve been using this to my advantage.
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A false dichotomy is a fallacious rhetorical device that provides an either/or choice in an attempt to force the listener to choose between the two options. The fallacy comes from the fact that the list of options are not really exhaustive, but limited in the speaker’s favor. The standard example is “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” A critical thinker will stop the speaker upon hearing a false dichotomy and say, “Wait a minute! Those aren’t the only two options!” But it works like a charm on a toddler.
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