Norah’s Big Sister Angst

Poor Norah. She thinks having a very pregnant mom is kind of a bummer. She has no idea what she is in for. I admit the last few weeks of this pregnancy have been hard on little Norah. I’m not picking her up when she wants me to and instead I’m asking her to pick up her toys or socks or anything else she has scattered around the apartment. When we attempt to leave the apartment I have to chase and wrestle her to get her dressed and while I used to tolerate this in good humor I’m increasingly inconvenienced and frustrated by it which I’m sure has her feeling equally inconvenienced and frustrated. Instead of carrying her to the car to avoid her running around the building I have to depend on her holding my hand and following directions. It turns out she is undependable and this leaves me to either chase her and then carry her to the car, incentivize her with a treat or sticker (surprisingly ineffective) or threaten to take away some privilege (never works). All in all, she is being asked to follow many more directions and clearly resents it. She has never been more stubborn or contrary (please note her tweet about going to the Sciencenter - one of her FAVORITE places).
I’ve been trying to keep things positive and even got her a calendar to put stickers on every time she follows directions. This has been mostly a failed campaign. Last night she actually earned about half a dozen stickers for picking up toys but generally the stickers don’t have much pull. This morning I had planned to take her to target to pick up a few things and thought it would be a fun outing for her as well. She’d get some free popcorn and get to pick out new stickers to replenish the stash since she’d been such a rock star last night. Well Norah was doing everything she could think of to delay this fun outing. Frustrated, I backed off and ignored her for a bit while she played in her room – or so I thought. When I went in I saw that she had colored with crayons all over her wall and covered it with the stickers I use to reward her. This should have been my tip off that she had learned how to open the desk drawers (where I keep everything that is small and dangerous (pennies, batteries, sharp things, super glue etc) but I guess I thought I had left out the stickers last night and I was probably too mad to think it through anyway. Norah absolutely knows that drawing on walls is bad. We’ve gone over this. When I tried tell her how naughty this was she just laughed at me and I felt like I was rewarding her with all the attention she wanted which made me even angrier so I put myself in timeout in my room to calm down. When I came out Norah greeted me with black Sharpie (from desk drawer) in hand, covered in body art. There was sharpie on my door, the wall, and even the lid to the toilet! But she really took out her angst on the baby room. The door, two walls and crib were sharpied. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. . .
I freaked out, cried and called Bryan who googled a solution for the crib: aquafresh toothpaste and baby wipes (who knew?). This picture was taken after I was able to clean the sharpie off of the crib so it doesn’t really do justice to Norah’s statement. Of course, while I was doing this Norah was trying to climb into the bathroom sink for some reason and stepped onto the toilet paper holder, which then broke off and caused her to fall. Thank heaven she didn’t crack her head open. She didn’t even have a bump. Really – things could have been much much worse in many ways:
-Norah could have chosen to eat batteries or any number of dangerous things in the desk that I have to now find new homes for
-She could have taken the sharpie to the living room chairs (I’m surprised she didn’t)
-Miracle of miracles – she did NOT sharpie the quilt I had made for Baby Alice and left in the crib (it has since been tucked away)

So anyway. We’ll be cleaning out the desk tonight and testing the power of Mr. Clean magic erasers on the walls.