4 Happy Family The personal blog of Kevin R. Hoffmann

Kiss Me I am Irish - for today

Maya had her big class celebration today fot St. Pat's day. We had a birthday last weekend with an Irish theme and Courtney brought one of the bar giveaways home for Maya to wear which was a necklace of plastic shamrocks. The kid loved it (along with her hat in the not-so-flattering picture below).

It seems that Maya's teacher was at a celebration that featured the same trinkets. She came up to Courtney after class today and told her that she and Maya were wearing the same necklace....but she had cut off the Miller Lite site hanging at the bottom of the necklace (which Maya's still had on to Courtney's chagrin).

Sound the alarm

A little while back I set off the smoke alarms by cooking asparagus with bacon in the oven’s broiler. Freaked Maya out something crazy. The detectors are the talking kind and it took a couple of days to convince her that there wasn’t someone living in the house (that day at school happened to be “stranger-danger” day – a perfect storm of freakedoutness).

It was getting to the point that she would be cautious going into some of the rooms because she was terrified of the smoke alarm. (Also it was never her that was scared, she was scared for the dog Polly or she would say “Snowman doesn’t like it”) We made a mini-breakthrough last weekend when I took one off her wall and she held it being careful not to press the button. I was able to mute the speaker and have her press the button and she seemed good. Ah, the joys of parenting. Where the hell is the chapter on smoke alarms, Dr Spock?

Courtney had a couple of girlfriends over yesterday complete with their gaggle of kids. They have fun running around and pulling everything out like kids like to do. After calming Maya down and putting her sleep we were popping open a bottom of wine when we noticed that “Little Brother” – what we call the baby monitor (I know poor 1984 reference) was going crazy.

Always buy the monitor with the sound bars that increase when noises are louder. We turned it up and there was a very loud and shrill: BEEP – BEEP – BEEP. Apparently one of the kids had set the alarm clock and it just happened to be going off right after she had presumably fallen asleep. Now, this is not your normal alarm click noise, this is one of the ones that they sell for college dormitories to wake hungover students up in time for their 10AM class on Leisure Ethics seminar.

Knowing that there was going to be a freakout, I went upstairs and she was sitting bolt upright in her bed. At first she thought it was the smoke detector but we talked her down and explained one of her friends played turned on the alarm and that they did not mean to scare her. The poor thing was petrified and she fell asleep in our bedroom for the second time in her life.

When we tried to move her when we were going to bed she woke up and freaked out, as in trembling, so we decided to let her sleep with us; which she won’t do. Maya likes to play and be active. We tried to deal with it for about 90 minutes as she would seem like she was falling asleep, but it wasn’t working and we had to put her back in her room crying that she was scared, but in her “I know you are a sucker” voice. She fell asleep so quickly after crying that we went back in to check to make sure everything was OK. Which it was of course. So tired….