Tag Archives: hall director

Sometimes My Apartment Smells Like Poop

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For a year and a half, I have wracked my brain wondering why my apartment randomly smells like poop sometimes.  It would be easy now to blame it on C, but he’s only been around for nearly nine months. ;)

Every time it happens, I walk around my apartment sniffing everything like a bloodhound.  The garbage can, the diaper genie, the bathroom, the sink, the refrigerator.  I probably look pretty crazy.  But how the heck does the smell of poo infiltrate our humble abode?  It’s an unsettling problem to have.

I think I finally solved the poop mystery.  We live just down the hall from our residence hall’s public restrooms and, even though a hallway door separates us, I think we get the privilege of smelling any ginormous deuce that people decide to take.  So here I sit soaking in the smell of someone else’s waste.  Yum.

Nighttime: An Open Letter to C

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Dearest C,

When you were super little, I very much enjoyed sharing our one bedroom with you.  It was such a comfort to know that you were just a foot away from me.  It was so easy to come to your aid in the middle of the night when you needed one of us.  In the first couple of weeks, when my new maternal instinct was in overdrive and I had to check to make sure you were breathing, I didn’t need to go far.

Fast forward seven months…

You are quite a wild little sleeper.  You like to bring your legs up in the air and slam them down on your mattress.  You move your arms around all the time.  Even though you still have no interest in rolling over, you rarely wake up in the same position that we set you down in.

In short, you’re loud.  You’re also the lightest sleeper I have ever encountered.

When your dad or I enter the room to go to bed, we slowly turn the door handle and silently slip into the room.  Regardless of how stealthily we attempt to be, we disturb your sleep.  I don’t know if you can sense our presence or if we somehow disrupt the airflow of your sleeping radius.  If we’re really lucky, you go back to sleep.  But 90% of the time, you completely wake up just as I am drifting off to sleep.  You wake up crying.  Did I mention you’re a loud little person?  Then we need to get out of bed, make you a bottle, feed you, put you back to bed, shut the door and cross our fingers that you fall asleep very quickly so that we can begin the process anew.

This entire process has become so troublesome that your father and I have contemplated moving our bed into the living room.  The living room, C!  Do you know what that would mean?  If someone came to our door, the first thing that they would see is our bed.  *sigh*

Raising you in a residence hall environment certainly has its pros and cons.  I’m filing this under the “cons” and counting the days until your dad graduates and we can move on to a larger apartment.

Love,
Your tired mother, who wishes you were a heavier sleeper :)

Raising a Child in a Residence Hall

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I’ve mentioned in the past that Hubster has a live-in graduate assistantship.  He is a residence hall director and we live in the hall director apartment in a residence hall.  There are distinct pros and cons to raising a child in a residence hall.  It’s an environment that emphasizes the value of education and diversity.  I’m really excited that my son will be growing up understanding how valuable and exciting higher education is.  We will have the opportunity to expose him to a diverse group of people, backgrounds and beliefs.  There are many students that may not have experienced these things until entering college, but our son will be opened to them from the beginning.

Then there are the downfalls of raising a child in this type of environment.  Things such as a surprise fire alarm screeching in the middle of the night and rushing into the cold night air.  I can’t WAIT for that, which will inevitably happen this winter.  (That reminds me, I should have things prepared to grab when we’re running out the door…)  There’s moments like tonight, when C is in the middle of a night feeding and is startled by a young man shouting the F-word in the hall.  Right now, he’s young enough not to know what it means, but I dread the day that he starts repeating everything he hears.

I suppose that, as with everything else in life, you take the good with the bad.  Hopefully C will somehow manage not to develop an extensive, cringe-worthy vocabulary and instead become a boy who is eager to learn and is open and accepting of all people.