Once again unto the Kit sleep-training breach. Or solitude training, rather, because—as the child sleep specialist told us—Kit doesn't have a sleep problem, Kit has a being-alone problem. I've often said that the biggest downside of a 3:1 parent:child ratio is that there's always someone right there, and we have to consciously make space for Kit to be alone, which they often don't want to be. Add in the need for a bit more supervision and assistance because of their mobility challenges, plus a year of pandemic isolation, and you get some very close attachment. We've spent the last couple of months encouraging solitary playtime and getting Kit used to the idea that we might say no when they ask for time with us, and now it's time for the next step.

( Four nights with various challenges )

Kit just negotiated for what they want. I think this is a first!

Usually when they ask for something and don't get it, they just get upset or beg. But they wanted me to get down the pump that we use to reinflate their sports balls (they just like pumping it as an upper body workout), and I said no. They went to X, and X also said no. And instead of crumpling, they earnestly looked at me and said, "Pumper, in my room only! Please?"

I was so impressed that I said yes. They smiled hesitantly like they couldn't believe it had worked. We shook hands to seal the deal. I got the pump down and brought it into their room with Kit bouncing alongside me chanting "Only only only!", and they happily settled into pumping it up and down in front of their mirror.

They later brought it out briefly and I said, "In your room only, remember? We shook on it!" They immediately took it back in their room and shut the door, possibly to remind themself not to bring it out.

I feel like this should go in the baby milestone tracker or something. I'm so proud.

I can hear all of you more experienced parents saying "You may regret this in a few years" but trust me, I am not concerned. My brother, a proto-lawyer from birth, once responded to our mother's request that he clear the dinner table by batting his eyelashes and saying, "You made the mess. You clean it up." She was shocked, then belly-laughed and said, "You get away with that... once." So I'm fully prepared to live with a relentless negotiator, and I also have a good role model for encouraging it within limits.

Besides, as another parent of a speech-delayed kid once told me, nothing is sweeter than the first time you wish your formerly silent child would please just stop talking. Kit used to whisper one word at a time. I'll take argument and bargaining over that any day.

Addendum: Kit was so empowered by this that they became the boss of bedtime. When their ocean sound night light turned on, I heard them say, "Ut! I tell my parents," and then they came out and yelled, "IT TIME BED." (Prepositions are hard, so Kit mostly doesn't use them.) When I took off their pants, they asked to keep their shirt on to sleep in. They tolerated toothbrushing and then announced, "I read a story my bed." They brought their chosen book in and we sat down on the bed to read it; halfway through, they abruptly told me, "Put house 'way!" (Their playhouse is where they have school, and we put it away at night and on the weekend.) After asking them to ask a little more nicely, I took the playhouse down, and we finished the story. They asked for a Daniel Tiger story and I read that one too, and then I tucked them in and turned out the light.

At this point Kit realized their efficiency had a downside: they were in bed with lights out a full 20 minutes before this usually happens. So they tried to get up, and I said no. They said they needed to sit in the rocking chair with me, and I said no. They said, "Where my socks? My feet cold." Kit never gets cold, even with bare feet on the bare floor in winter, and they were under three blankets, so I was certain this was not true. But they do often feel very strongly about having socks on and we tend to go with it, so I got them some socks and tucked their feet back under the covers. Running out of excuses, they ventured, "It bacteria on my teeth." I was quite impressed that they would rather brush their teeth again than go to bed, but I held firm. Eventually, for lack of any other option, they went to sleep.

I can't emphasize enough that I love every minute of this. Every single minute. And I fully expect to keep loving it through all the challenging questions and assertions I'm going to field from my kid for the rest of my life. I truly wouldn't have it any other way.

This stage of habit-building, where I've been doing it long enough to feel like I want a break but not long enough for the harder parts to get easier, is always the most challenging. But I press onward.

I dropped donations into a couple of fundraisers. I can't do that every day, but I'm glad to do it when I can.

Kit picked up several of the library books I'd put holds on—they were so happy to be able to go to the library again, even just for a quick lobby pickup—and yesterday and today they read Hair Love and Something Happened in Our Town and Let the Children March. (They showed off their books to their teacher, who said, "Wow, what great choices for Black History Month!" I... had forgotten that February is Black History Month. We just got those books because they looked cool!) We also read some pro-social books, When I Miss You and When I Feel Scared, that I think of as activist, in the sense that it's still pretty radical to treat kids' feelings as important and worth paying attention to. Books like that are also part of raising a kid who acknowledges other people's feelings as important, which I view as a foundational tenet of both progressivism and being a decent human.

Speaking of which, a thread on Ask a Manager about professional boundaries with nannies led me to explicitly say to Kit that caring for them and teaching them is Hannah's job—a job she loves, as she was quick to say, but still a job—and that's why she gets to go home every evening and stay home on the weekends, just like we stop our work at night and don't work on the weekends. I'm not actually sure they knew that she works for us. We frequently tell them to respect her hour-long lunch break, which she tends to spend reading on the couch because there isn't really a private place in our house where she can go while she's on break, but I think they see that as equivalent to not knocking on our doors when we're resting or on the phone, not as something she's owed as a person who's working hard all day.

(For that matter, I'm not sure how clearly Kit understands "job" and "work" and related concepts, including money. They're still not great at answering abstract questions like "What do you think money is?" so I'll probably just sit them down for a lesson at some point. My inclination is less to say "Money is what you trade to someone who does something for you or gives you something" and more to say "Money is a great big imaginary thing that we all imagine together". But I should probably start with goods and services and supply and demand.)

Like a lot of Americans, I wasn't explicitly taught how to grapple with the ethics and emotions of hiring domestic labor. My personal approach is to treat it exactly like hiring someone for any other kind of work, which is to respect them as a professional, pay them fairly, and not behave any less formally around them than I would in the office or with a client. We've made a point of talking to Kit about how important it is to stay out of our house cleaner's way while she's working and to respect her and her excellent work, but we haven't done quite the same with our babysitters, and I want to do better on that front. Kit thinks of Hannah as a bonus parent, more or less—she's in the category of "my grown-ups" along with us and Kit's grandmothers and favorite teachers—and I'd certainly rather they err in that direction than in the direction of bossing her around like she's a servant. But there's a middle ground that I think it would be good to be in. Something to keep working on.

Scrolling through openletterbot to find a letter to sign worked so well yesterday that I did it again. Maybe I'll make a daily practice of that as my minimum action, and then try to do something in addition on days when I can.

I'd hoped to send postcards with Kit today, but I seem to have either run out of blank postcards or stashed them somewhere extremely safe, so I ordered more. I already have a roll of postcard stamps. I'll pre-print some card fronts with images from http://tinyurl.com/angrypostcards (where I just updated the postcard back template to say "President Biden" and "Leader Schumer", yay!) and leave others blank for Kit to make art on. Making it a thing we do together will help me to do it; that roll of postcard stamps dates to 2017, when I clearly had good intentions but never quite got off my ass.

And I reserved a bunch of anti-racist picture books at the library, because our local library branch is finally open for book takeout! It's been closed for most of a year because pandemic and we've missed it so much. So on some future day, my action will be reading and discussing Let the Children March or Something Happened in Our Town or Where Are You From? with Kit. I'm setting myself up for success!