We just returned home from yummy vegetarian Indian food. Tiger had a bit of a breakdown before the food arrived, but she calmed down without too much hassle. For a two-year old, she is great at going to restaurants (it probably has something to do with the amount of time we like to spend in restaurants, which has a strong correlation to the amount of time I don’t want to spend cooking in the kitchen).

Doolies is upstairs bathing Tiger (after she made it very clear, “No Daddy, just Mommy” for bathing), and Dinosaur is still sleeping in the car seat from before we left for dinner. That gives me a few minutes to jot down a couple of thoughts.

Doolies wanted me to clarify something in my last post. In the discussion about losing my voice at parties, she wanted me to say that I am not a party animal, and that regardless of how you read the paragraph, you should not take away this fact. If anything, I am the anti-party animal, as I thought I made clear in my discussion about being a small-room vampire (sorry Chuck, my vampire-in-the-closet college friend and now successful Korean professor).

We went to our first Naginata class together since Doolies returned from her pregnancy break. Doolies did manage to go to a class at the tail end of the last quarter, but I haven’t gone in quite a while. It was nice to hit Doolies on the head again. I’m looking forward to her returning to her fighting form.

This morning was long and very tiring. The details are fuzzy, but there was a lot of babies and toddlers crying and running around (that’s more the toddler than baby), and both Doolies and I were again exhausted from a long night. We spent some of the night in the bathroom with him running the hot shower while he slept soundly in the bouncer. I managed to trade the shower sounds for a Surface white-noise app, which worked great until the steam in the bathroom went away. (What does steam do when it goes away? I expect it just breaks apart in the regular air until it’s not noticeable anymore. It’s not like steam can evaporate.)

Does this feel forced to you as well? I keep looking at my wallpaper desktop and thinking that it would make a good background for a Horrible. That’s another way of saying that my brain is not working and I’m tired from both lack of sleep and long overdue exercise. I was quite out of shape during class. Thankfully I wasn’t alone. That whofle misery and company thing is more true than not.

Dinosaur is beginning to make his dinosaur sounds. I tried to convince Doolies that when he does that during the night she shouldn’t go running to pick him up. When I look in on him when making those sounds at night, he’s usually sleeping. This is why moving him to a separate room where we would only here him when he cries will do wonders for our sleep. Doolies pointed out when we had this discussion that it would do wonders for my sleep, and not necessarily hers. Good point.

My sickness is getting better. My vocal cords are still weak, and I’m still coughing a bit—the painful coughs, where they come from either deep in my chest or high in my throat, depending on the moment, and both hurt equally in different ways. The chest one feels like an earthquake as the phlegm moves around, and the throat one feels like the—do throats have skin or is it flesh or muscle—throat thingy is about to peel away.

Man, words are not my friend tonight.

I’m sitting here thinking about what I should say. As you can tell I don’t have much. I believe I exhausted most of the easy, diary stuff. Doolies had a few more complaints about yesterday’s musing, but I don’t have the energy to remember them right now. We still have to put Tiger to sleep, bathe Dinosaur, and find and watch a new anime before crawling into bed for hopefully more than a handful of hours. The one high point about last night was insomnia was not an issue.

I’m resisting the opening of the internets. It’s calling me but I’m good at following rules. It’s one of my biggest (and most pathetic) strengths. It’s why I still eat kosher and probably why Tiger doesn’t like me as much as Doolies. Doolies said this morning that Tiger would like me better if I made her cry less. I don’t try to make her cry, but I do like rules and challenging her.

I have been developing more patience with her as she wants to do everything herself “Self, self, self!” This is harder when we’re running late in the morning. There were a couple of days where she wanted to climb into her car seat by herself. It was frustrating Doolies as she would arch her back and refuse to be buckled in. I solved it helping her climb into the car, closed her door, and went to my seat. When she finally pulled herself up into her seat, she’d say, “help, Daddy. Help!” and wait for me to buckle her in. Now that she knows that she can, she mostly lets me carry her into her seat. It’s more efficient and everyone is happier.

Do I talk too much about my children? I guess I don’t have a choice. Write what you know, someone said. And now I know about small children. I’m sure this information will go away soon. Tiger’s first year is gone as I remember nothing that is helpful with Dinosaur. He’s grown a bunch in the last month.

I should probably go help out upstairs. I’m about halfway through my time, so I expect to either keep adding words, or more likely, go back and edit and fill in the above with more interesting prose from our tiring day.

Tiger let me read to her tonight! Well, actually, she let me watch her read to herself. The Llama, Llama books she knows very well. She quickly turns the board pages and says the words as fast she can think them, which is way faster than she can pronounce them. She then went to the Max and Millie book. While she can’t recite it as well as Llama, Llama, she does understand the gist of the book, and it’s funny to listen to her explain what’s going on in each page, while throwing out a few of the more familiar phrases from that page. She does great for about half the book, and then starts repeating the earlier parts.

She also reads the Elmo Says book, which is a bit like Simon Says, only with Elmo. She only likes some of the things Elmo says, so she focuses on those (including singing the “Old McFarmer had a farm, e, i, e , i, o” song. I love how she calls him Old McFarmer.

With that, I’m out of energy and past my commitment. Until tomorrow.