Peasant Woman

Mali Zub was sick again last week, and this one was quite a doozy. A flu on top of a cold made everything all the more exciting; each new moment, a new adventure. Sleep, a distant memory. My brain cells--an old, forgotten friend.

Will they ever grow back, I wonder. Or am I destined to live the rest of my life as a drooling idiot, unable to complete sentences and remember phrases of old....

See, this is how they get you, those little babies. Wait until they've got you wrapped around their teeny little fingers, then become Awake, morph into Monsters from the Deep, crazy little foot-high zombies that somehow still charm the hell out of you during daylight hours.

And every once in a while, just to mix things up, they pull these little surprise sleepless festivals, just to see if you're paying attention. Like a couple of weeks ago, when Mali Zub, for no apparent reason, decided he was done sleeping. Oh, yeah. Just wasn't in the mood anymore. Which meant that Kimo and I were done, too, of course. And this went on for three weeks. Three glorious weeks of watching our once-sweet baby writhe and play and toss and back-flip and cry and babble and raise his fists to the sky in his attempt to overthrow The Oppressor.

And you know what? It worked. Mali Zub won. At the end of those three weeks, he started sleeping again. Let's hope we get a similar reprieve soon.

No luck on the sleep reprieve. In fact, things have gotten worse at the local Peasant household, where our lord, the young Mali Zub, seems to have ceased sleeping whatsoever. Last night alone, he was up 8 times between 9 pm and 3 am. What do you do with that? Try very hard not to heave yourself out a window, that's what. In the meantime, I'm sending a super-psychic call out to the universe to send us some help. Anyone out there who can help us get this baby to sleep?

Mali Zub finally slept for a couple of hours last night (and I got more than, gasp, 3 hours of sleep), which means that my brain is maybe hopefully beginning to work again, and we can get back to business.

Which leads me to today’s topic: Children of the Corn (I mean Peasant)

Life is weird enough when you’ve got Peasants for Parents, but it gets even weirder when you toss in friends and neighbors when they find out that, yup, you and yours ain’t from around here. Which for us was pretty much right off the bat, considering that my parents spoke with crazily-thick accents and every person who ever visited us looked like they were straight off the boat.

Which inevitably led to one of the following questions:

“Your parents are what? They’re from where?”

Or: “What does that mean? What kinds of things do you do?”

As a ten-year-old born and bred on Saturday morning cartoons, the questions got a little boring after a while, a little lackluster. So I always tried to spice things up a bit in my answers, telling people we were from Australia instead of Eastern Europe, that we worshipped cows instead of Pope-like people, and that we spent out spare time doing corn-husk-a-voodoo.

“A-what?”

“You know. Corn-husk-a-voodoo. We make voodoo dolls from cornhusks. You know, for people who are bugging you.” Pause. “Like you.”

Mali Zub finally started sleeping again these past two nights! Which means that Kimo and I have started sleeping again as well, and we no longer look like outcasts from a zombie flick, the walking dead. And that I'm finally able to start completing my sentences again (a task which seemed near-impossible this past week).

Talk about a new lease on life! Someone told me that a new mother loses 1000 hours of sleep in the first year of her baby's life, and after these past two months, I believe it. You can only get by on little-to-no sleep for so long; this weekend, I actually found myself driving side roads instead of the main ones to lessen my chances of accidentally driving into oncoming traffic (not as hard as it sounds when you've been up three nights straight).

So fingers crossed, knock on wood, whatever other superstitious you'd like to throw into the mix. I'm hope-hope-hoping that this amazing sleep stretch will continue, and that the little bugger won't revert back into his old routine (which is sleeping one or two nights, then staying up the next two weeks). Which means that I might even have enough brain cells left to get back to Peasant Life, and start putting in some decent posts again. I can dream, can't I?

Mali Zub's grandmother, the original Peasant Woman, is always bringing over gifts and things when she comes to visit the little pezoro. Yesterday, she had two new gifts for the little guy: a brightly-colored toy lion and a pear. Which one do you think he liked better? That's right, the pear.

Which got me thinking about the benefits of being a Peasant Child. While most other kids out there are swimming in a sea of mechanical and stuffed toys, Peasant Children are out in fields, learning the joys of nature. Picking cherries in orchards, chasing chickens out of coops, shooing donkeys out of the road.

But seriously. There's something nice about the simple beauty of a pear as a gift. And you should have seen Mali Zub eat it up! He loved it -- pears have always been one of his favorite foods. The plastic lion, meanwhile, has already been abandoned to the outskirts of toy land. Maybe the dog will take pity on him and adopt him.

Your know your ethnic group's arrived when you hear a guy telling his kid to eat his dinner because there are starving kids in Bosnia.

When I was a kid, we were told to eat our dinners because there were starving kids in Africa. Who knew that, so many years later, the phrase is still a good way of gauging the latest political hot spot:

"Eat your dinner because there's a kid starving in (fill in the name of your ethnic group here)!"

After two months of not sleeping, I hit rock bottom last week and hit up anyone I could find who'd made it through the kid-not-sleeping thing for advice. Some of the suggestions ranged from the 'ole suck-it-up-and-cry-it-out to craniosacral therapy to rubbing brandy on Mali Zub's teeth to every homeopathic teething remedy in the book.

So we started trying things. And tried some more. And then I finally gave in and brought my kid to the chiropractor after three different people on the same day told me that they swore by it. And lo-and-behold, the first day I brought Mali Zub home from the chiropractor, he slept an eight-hour stretch--something he hadn't done in months.

So fingers crossed. The poor little bugger's got three new teeth coming in, and even though he's not the happiest kiddo on the block, he's still sleeping better than he was Before Chiropractor (B.C.). Never mind my poor peasant ancestors, who are turning over in their graves. Could you imagine such a thing in the old days? "Don't mind me, Grandma. I'm just going to take my 10-month-old baby to have his spine adjusted. Be right back to help you harvest that tobacco."