The Daily Fuss

Top 5 Friday: My Favorite Apps

This week's Top 5 friday is dedicated to my favorite iPad apps. I've been enamored with a handful of apps for months. Here are my top 5, as well as a few honorable mentions.

1. Flipboard

Flipboard morphs your shared content into a dynamic personal magazine. Flip through your Facebook feed, tweet timeline, photos sounds and more. This app is thoughtful, clever and slick.

Flipboard is a gamechanger. Best app EVER.

2. Map My Run

Map your run, capture your metrics and share your successes with friends.

This app is addictive. You can figure out how far you've run after the fact, track your routes and times and post your bests online. PERFECT.

3. TED

TED's official app presents talks from some of the world's most fascinating people: education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus and music legends. Find more than 1,100 TEDTalk videos (with more added each week) on the official TED app.

TED  brings genuises and gurus to you. It's like graduate school on demand. BRILLIANT.

4. Houzz

Called the "Wikipedia of interior and exterior design" by CNN, Houzz has the largest database of home design ideas on the net, with over 400,000 high resolution photos. Browse photos by style, room and location and save them to your virtual idea book — it's the equivalent of clipping design magazines to a scrapbook — making ideas easier to search, save, and share.

This is the app for daydreaming, inspiring, designing and mentally renovating your home ten times over every month.

5. Singing Alphabet

They’ve turned the alphabet into cute characters who sing. MARVELOUS.

Honorable Mentions: Instagram, Dragon Dictation, Nighty Night and Little Fox, and WSJ House of the Day.

Enjoy!

Nothing Game

When I was pregnant with Leighton, imagining Ryan and I as new parents, my mind's eye perpetually flipped through the rosy, picturesque aspects of motherhood juxtaposed against the darker "what if" fears realistically beyond reason.

Both sides of that coin draw tears to a hormone-jacked woman about to give birth. But, until I actually had Leighton in my arms, I had no idea how special the small moments would be.

It's impossible to appreciate the day-to-day silliness children bring until it happens. The dinner-throwing, first-words, first-times, sibling-rivalry, middle-of-the-night-fussing, no-pants-partying, vomiting, teasing, slapping, laughing, questioning and just plain banality of parenting is amazing.

The small moments shore up the monumental ones and keep my relationship with my children in perspective. I make a concerted effort to NOT take my family for granted.

Stringing together the small moments offers some of our most cherished memories. Those moments are fleeting and I don't write about them as completely as I would like. Which brings me to today, and this very moment to be specific.

Leighton takes classes. She genuinely likes school - both the learning and social aspects - so we go with it. Today, she had "Crayons Cooking and Fun".

She loves this class, just as she's adored Gymnastics, Music, Ballet, Head to Toe, Swim, Yoga, Arithmetots and Phonics over the last year. She generally comes home and spills the beans on whatever happened in the 90 minute class.

However, starting this week, when asked "What did you learn at school today," Leighton would unflinchingly answer, "Nothing."

In my opinion, this apathy should not have reared its ugly head for several more years. What the heck? These classes are pricey and we want to know whether she's enjoying them, at the very least.

Is she seriously dismissing me?

Her new "nothing" response obviously bugs her daddy, because he started playing a little game with her. After three days, we refer to it as the "Nothing Game."

The Nothing Game goes like this: If we ask her how her day was or what happened at school and her answer is "nothing". We get to tease her a bit.

It's fun. Here's a typical example:

ME: "Hey Leighton. UPS delivered a package today and it was wrapped in pink sparkly paper and tied with a big, purple, satin bow. I tore it open and dug through the packing peanuts and, you know what was in it?" 

LEIGHTON: "What mom?"

ME: "Noooothing."

And Lei will laugh her ass off. Once she recovers, she will formulate a zinger of her own and keep it going. Then Ryan, then Leighton, then me, then Mairin (who just starts laughing and screeching and so on) and the game continues.

The lesson, of course, is that the answer "nothing" is annoying. The Nothing Game loosens her up, gets her talking. It's like verbal tickle torture. It's hilarious to us.

I can't take credit. Ryan started it. I just fully intend to keep it going as long a the imaginitive cackling continues and she eventually tells us what she did at school that day.

Boom Boom Part II: Lemon Drop

As I may have mentioned, Mairin is still nursing and basically using me as a pacifier at night. What sleep I do manage to get is achieved in a crooked "S" shape on my right side.  

I understand the argument that my youngest will eventually roll her eyes at me and make me drop her off a block before the theater and I will long for the days when she was a wee babe.

I realize that I said I would coast along for another two months and then phase out feedings. I said this as recently as Monday.

But, I can't take much more of this. She and I both need a good, solid night's sleep for a change. Actually, all four of us need it. Mairin's late night fussing has been waking up Leighton, who ends up in our bed, digging her toes into Ryan's spine.

We enjoy the family bed, but sometimes it's an ugly commune-type situation that results in a tough morning. We've had a string of those lately and something needs to change. Plus, my little Marinka Dinka has all but forgotten how to self-sootheas she likes to nurse to sleep. It's unequivocally my job as her parent to help her with that.

At approximately 1:00 am Tuesday morning, I broke free from my crooked "S" and found my iPad next to the bed.  I began Googling "how to wean a toddler," and "toddler resists weaning" and a few other seemingly absurd variations.

Most of what I found on the good old interweb pertained to weaning toddlers from a bottle. This, to me, seemsa much simpler proposition than weaning a toddler form the breast. I've done it with Leighton. I just didn't give her a bottle and talked her through the withdrawal. She was done in two nights at the age of sixteen months - from boobie to baba to batte just like that.

A toddler can't climb into the upper cabinet, fetch a bottle, assemble the nipple, get the milk from the fridge, heat it up, pour it into the bottle, screw on the nipple and have her batte. Toddlers are crafty, but not that capable.

They are, however, able to unbutton a blouse, shove their hands into the neckline of a shirt, stretch it out, throw a temper tantrum, bite through the blouse, pull out your earnings and repeatedly yell, "BOOM BOOM" as loudly as possible to cause a scene.

If I could put my breasts in a kitchen cabinet on some days, I would do it.  Alas, no.

So that brings me back to what the Google machine eventually did reveal. The message boards and blog comments have all the goods - the real answers from real people who aren't afraid you're going to try to sue them for giving worthy advice.  

I stumbled upon a few comments about toddler weaning using lemon juice. WHAT? I know, rubbing lemon juice on my boobs struck me as something akin a dare or a cruel trick to play on a little kid. Still, the desperate women who tried it happily reported that it worked like a charm. Their babies didn't mind much and lost interest fairly quickly.

So,I tried it. I cut a lemon in half and applied it to the targets. Before bedtime, Mairin made her plea for "Boom Boom". I let her try it and she pulled back, made a little face and said, "taste", "taste" while shaking her head. She tried it again with the same reaction. Then, she hopped off my lap and got a book to read.

A little while later, Ryan picked her up for bed. She said, "boom boom?" so I offered it up. She looked at me for a moment and, apparently remembering her previous attempt, changed her mind. She said "no" kissed me good night and went off to bed.

And then, I cried.

Boom Boom

In light of the whole "Are You Mom Enough" extreme parenting brew ha ha, it's as good a time as any to mention my fear that Mairin will soon need a step ladder for boobie dish. 

She will be sixteen months old on June 3rd and still asks for "boom boom" throughout the day.

She only nurses at bedtime (usually) but she's been teething (four at a time) and I feel bad for her and so ... I cave.

Leighton weaned herself fully by ten months. It was easy - for both of us. Mairin is a different story entirely, and I'm not sure what to do about it. She's so happy to nurse and so miserable when denied.

I always said that when she got teeth, I'd be done. She has ten, but she's figured out what "gentle" means. She's old enough to understand that this situation is not ideal, but plays dumb when I tell her she's a big girl and should eat her dinner because she can't have boobie dish forever.

She makes a pitiful face and tugs at my neckline and replies, "Boom boom". 

What's a mom to do?

To answer my own question, I am content to coast along without a hard and fast plan for another two months and then commit to phasing out the feedings.

Until July 21st, I suspect that boom boom will continue as usual.