Out with the old, in with the new?

I'm going to be 40 next year. I left the town I grew up in 22 years ago, and my home country 11 years ago. Almost everyone from my past is gone, and the ones who weren't gone are drifting [in a different direction than I am - or so it seems]. Everyone who is new is missing the past. They have no background info about how I tick. We share nothing but the present. How can they know me in such a short time? How can I know them?

I feel like I have nothing to hold on to. I slide up and down the the time line and watch the faces roll by. But none of us stops.

I went "home" - although the whole time I was there I referred to Germany as "home"- and all of my homesickness and yearning seemed to dissolve. Not dissolve -> disappear (through fulfillment, for example). Dissolve -> be absorbed into the environment, and myself. They weren't fulfilled at all, just decayed into tiny molecules that could hide among the atoms of everyday. And they're still there.

All of my prospects and memories are trapped in the past. I can't resuscitate them or reanimate them. They are no more. And all the music and dreams that call them are just futile shocks to my soul. I can't go back. I can't pretend to go back for a nanosecond. I can't even visit. The world has become new and and all that I have known and loved exists only in dismembered, scattered drops.

If I were to read this written by someone else, I'd likely tell them to stop whining and move on. But sometimes we are reminded of our losses and it helps to recount and mourn them. Don't you think?

Of cribs and beds

After they spent three weeks of sleeping on beds without bars, we decided Mia and Aidyn were ready to move out of their cribs and into tiny beds.

Since then, we've questioned this decision.

Bedtime stretches from 8 to 8:30 and there's screaming involved: "AIDYN, go back to bed!" "MIA, what is WRONG?! Lay down and go to sleep!" Nobody wants to go to bed in the new bed.

The first night, Aidyn cried out at 2 am. I found him standing between his bed and the wall, screaming at the giraffe he couldn't see. Mia I almost stepped on trying to get to Aidyn. She had fallen out of her bed and not waken up, just continued to sleep on the floor between the beds. I felt terrible.

The past two nights have been the same story: Aidyn cries, Mia's on the floor sleeping. Aidyn does not want to sleep in this "new" (it's the same bed, just without the crib slats) bed when he wakes in the night, Mia does not want to go to sleep in the evening. (This may also be because it is pretty much daytime here at 8 pm when they are scheduled to go to sleep. Nighttime in Colorado looks different... Not to mention that we didn't exactly enforce the 8 pm bedtime on vacation.)

I hope they will get used to the new beds. Soon.

Looking back, I realize we did the same thing to Chloé: we returned from vacation and less than a month later we put her in her own room. New experiences, jet lag and insecurity issues be damned. Bad parents.

I don't know, maybe living through all the change, we feel inspired to change as much as we can. Take it to the limit. Live on the edge. Take charge of something in the chaos.

I'm sure they'll get through it, with a little time. My kids are trained at adapting to change. I do it to them everyday.

In the meantime, I'm practicing not sleeping. Again.