I haven’t written in a long time. This isn’t because I haven’t had anything interesting to say. In my opinion I’ve had TONS of fantastic stories to tell you. However I’ve been in self-imposed exile because I swore I wouldn’t become one of those parents who can’t talk about ANYthing except the latest adorable thing their offspring did. And frankly there is nothing in my life remotely as interesting as the consistency and regularity of my daughter’s bowel movements. I am just barely cognizant enough to understand you may not agree with this.
So, to amend my earlier statement, I could have written TONS of stories you would have found interesting - unless you happen to not be me.
I’ve managed to extrapolate, however, a few random thoughts that, while mostly still linked in some way to my daughter, are not actual “this one time, my daughter, she did the most ADORABLE thing,” stories so I don’t think they count. However if you’re not a parent or me, I warn you the following column (and probably all subsequent columns for the next 16 years or so) may not be of particular interest.
“B-E-D-T-I-M-E!”
Every night at 8pm, my father would call these letters out with undisguised glee. As a kid, I was completely baffled by this. I recognized the emotion - joy akin to what I felt the night before we were going to Disneyland - but I absolutely could not marry it to the reality of “bedtime,” which was, in a kid’s mind, the WORST word in the world. “Bedtime” is ritualistically followed by begging, pleading, resorting to simple tricks of bathroom and drink requests, ANYthing to prolong the inevitable necessity of lying flat in our beds with no books, no TV, no stimulus and the order to fall asleep.
How could anyone be so happy about the most miserable part of the day (assuming no doctor visits)? I just didn’t get it.
But now? Oh, do I get it.
Every morning brings with it the joy of seeing my daughter again after a long night of separation. As the day wears on, the joy wears off, in equal relation to the crankiness that grows as bedtime approaches. By the end of the day the entire family is worn down to a nub, and my husband and I watch the clock’s slow countdown to our daughter’s bedtime with a desperate eye. At a quarter to eight we turn to our daughter and announce, “Bedtime!” with very little ability (or attempts) to cover up our eagerness to get her into bed. I don’t spell it out, but I am known to sing, “It’s the most won-der-ful tiiiime of the daaaaaay,” as I carry her to bed.
When she’s older I’ll probably just hum it.
VIVA LAS VEGAS - SERIOUSLY
I have never been a huge fan of Las Vegas. I thought it was titillating when I was 21 and went with my boyfriend and another couple during college. We were so poor it was pronounced “poh.” We shared a hotel room that cost about $45 a night, and when they tried to charge us $55 we staged a massive retaliation campaign consisting of us all whispering angrily in the lobby and then shoving forward the largest and most well-spoken of us to argue the bill. I think what impressed us most about the entire weekend was the free drinks on the casino floor, and they were shitty drinks at a shitty casino.
When I was in my early 30’s and married and childless Vegas held even less appeal. Having finally paid off all my debt, I had developed a medically-confirmed allergy to gambling, and I generally preferred to get drunk somewhere a little less seizure-inducing. I much prefer a vacation that introduces me to new cultures, new ways of looking at the world, potentially the opportunity to get mud in my underwear. My feeling is that I have a very limited number of vacations in my lifetime, and certainly a limited budget to spend on them. I want to make sure I experience as much of the world as possible given those two limitations. So Vegas, a place I’ve already been and didn’t really “get,” was pretty much off the list.
But then my best friend Katy, for reasons I cannot mention in this column because she still reads it occasionally and owns a gun, managed to secure a free room, dinner and show in Las Vegas for Fourth of July weekend. For this sort of bargain I might consider vacationing in one of the states whose name begins with a K. Probably not, but maybe. Plus, it was my turn for a baby-free vacation. Tom got one when I went to New York for a week, and another when he went to a business conference in California, which I still totally think counts because most geek-related conferences have beer running from the water fountains. If you’re drunk, it’s not work.
I boarded the plane to Vegas with a feeling of “Oh, well, if nothing else I’ll get some extra sleep.” Yeah, who goes to Vegas hoping for sleep? Me. But on this trip, my eyes were opened wide to the benefits of Las Vegas. Because this was the first time I was experiencing it since becoming a parent.
When you have kids you have an extremely limited amount of time to cut loose, and even when you do cut loose, you are still half-listening for a 2-foot-person’s unrelenting attempts to commit suicide. You cannot let your guard down for a second, even when they are sleeping or at someone else’s house. You are always responsible, always alert, and always guilty if you so much as have half a glass of wine, definitely if you accidentally polish off the whole bottle which seems to happen fairly often these days.
In Vegas, time has no meaning, drinks are free-flowing, nobody knows you and everybody is there to have a good time. It is the absolute best way to cram as many sins into a finite amount of time. It is, really, the most efficient vacation one can take, and when it comes to a full-time working mother, efficiency is not THE word, it is the ONLY word. I crammed a year and a half of irresponsibility (stopping short of anything illegal… mostly) into 3 days. It was wonderful. It was liberating. It was just a little bit nauseating but not nearly as bad as being pregnant.
Fuck culture. I’m going back to Vegas, baby.
I have a Super Power. It’s not anything fancy, nothing that will save the world from Alien destruction or help us achieve our quest for World Peace, but it definitely has its advantages. Keeping it a secret is unnecessary so I will tell you: I have a really super keen sense of smell.
My step-dad used to say if someone farted in Mexico I would complain about it. This is a bit of an embellishment but it illustrates how much envy (irritation?) my super sense has garnered over the years. And luckily my sense of smell has not diminished as I have aged since it comes in handy multiple times a day. Take today for example. I microwaved some popcorn at work. As everybody knows, microwaving popcorn is a real delicate operation. Three seconds too long and a huge section of the middle is burnt. But stop it 2 seconds too soon and half the bag is unpopped kernels. Okay so maybe this isn’t a big deal to SOME people but it is to me. Luckily, my nose will tell me the precise moment a single kernel starts to blacken and I can hurl myself at the stop button and come away with a perfectly popped snack. I mean, that’s pretty handy, don’t you think?
I can also walk into the house and know from the front door if the baby has a dirty diaper. Tom will have spent the entire afternoon with her completely unaware and within a nanosecond I’m yelling “baby pooped!” Or “Something in the fridge is rotten!” or “Our neighbor didn’t shower today.” Okay not that last one.
If you lived with me you’d probably start to find this a bit annoying. But believe me, sometimes this super sense can be a real curse. Like when Tom eats this God-awful turkey chili from a can, which smells like a bowl of salted barf, I can’t be in the same room with him or stand to kiss him for, like, a week. And I can’t walk by the Starbucks storefront downtown that, for some reason, the entire homeless population likes to use as their outdoor urinal because the stench literally assaults me. I have to go all the way to the next Starbucks, around the corner.
Also, to make absolutely sure I don’t get a big head about my sniffer, fate has bestowed upon me atrocious eyesight. That way things are evened out. Luckily I was born in the latter half of the previous century in which contact lenses were invented. (Can I just point out how creepy it is to say I was born in the previous century?) If I had been born a couple hundred years ago my parents would have had to leave me out on a hillside to get eaten by wolves, because I wouldn’t have been able to FIND the field that needed to be tended, let alone tend it. Actually, no, by the time they discovered how bad my eyesight was I would have wandered under the wheels of a carriage and saved them the trouble. Even the first half of the twentieth century wouldn’t have been any good. Sure, I would have had a better chance of basic survival but it wouldn’t have been much of a life, since I would have been that chick sitting in a corner with glasses the thickness of a phone book, my eyes magnified twenty times, making me look perpetually half-witted. Certainly nobody would have been inclined to procreate with me, not even on a bet.
Speaking of which, all of this leads me to wonder what I have or have not bestowed upon my 13 month old daughter. Evidence thus far would seem to indicate she has no sense of smell, since she is perfectly content to cart around a load of odoriferous nastiness for however long it takes one of us grownups to notice it and do something about it. Which, for now, is definitely on the “blessing” side of things because with both of us constantly bitching about the stench Tom would go out of his mind. But hopefully as she grows older her sense of smell will improve, because burnt popcorn can ruin your whole day.
I feel awful that I haven’t written anything in so long. I know all my fans (both of you - hi, mom) have been really disappointed in me. When I tried to log on this morning I actually had forgotten my username for this site, which has never happened before. I feel horribly guilty for neglecting my writing.
In fact, I feel horribly guilty in general. Everybody warns you that having a child means feeling guilty pretty much all the time. If you’re at home you feel guilty that you aren’t at work, and if you are at work you feel guilty that you aren’t home with your child. The once a month you go out without your child you feel guilty for dashing out the door, whooping with glee.
You feel guilty for forgetting her hat when it’s 30 degrees outside.
You feel guilty for skipping the park one day because you know one of the mothers you can’t stand will be there.
You feel guilty for letting her nails get so long she shreds the furniture like a cat, and for having bought a house with wood floors so that she gets bruises on her little shins from crawling around on them.
And you definitely feel guilty about stuffing her with food to the point that she covers everything within a ten foot radius with projectile vomit.
Those few devoted readers I have will recall my extreme fear when it comes to vomiting. And while I don’t really concern myself with other people’s vomit, the smell is another story, because that can make me wretch. (Aside: what was Chef Boyardee thinking, making spaghettios smell EXACTLY like puke? Am I missing something here?)
However this is where I found guilt to actually come in handy: I was so busy feeling incredibly horribly guilty about force-feeding my child that I was able to get through the whole ordeal without one thought of adding my dinner to hers on the dining room floor.
“You FORCE FED YOUR CHILD?” I hear you asking, your mouth twisted in disgust and abhorrence. As well it should be; your mouth is absolutely right. But let me explain.
Lately, my beautiful adorable brilliant wonderful baby girl, aged 13 months, has decided to make every bedtime and every mealtime into an ordeal. She doesn’t want to eat, she doesn’t want to go to sleep. She has reduced us to performing any number of trained-seal-like tricks to get her to do one or the other. When it comes to eating, we are forced to perform “Staying Alive” ad nauseam (ha. literally). My daughter LOVES this song. She sings the “ah, ah, ah, ah,” part. And when she opens her mouth to join in the chorus, we take the opportunity to shove a spoonful of food into her yaw.
The trick of feeding her leads directly to the trick of getting her to sleep - and stay asleep - which, in turn, leads to ME getting sleep, which is heinously selfish of me to even think about and I feel very guilty about that. But if she doesn’t eat enough then she’ll wake up a couple hours later - after having spent an hour or two trying to get her to sleep in the first place - because she’s hungry. And then she’ll figure as long as she’s up we may as well read a book or twelve. And next thing you know, the night has gone by and she has slept maybe a total of 7 hours which is about 4 short of what she needs, thus leading to an excruciatingly long and cranky day during which she is too pissy to eat anything, thus contributing to the cycle.
So we’ve made it our mission to stuff her as full as we possibly can.
In our defense, this has been going on for a couple weeks now, and we didn’t really get it when she started to cry and squirm in her highchair that she really MEANT it this time, she didn’t want to eat. We kept bellowing Staying Alive and she kept opening her mouth and we kept shoveling it in. And then all of a sudden our gorgeous little girl spewed a torrent of orange and green vomit that would rival the output of the Colorado River should the Hoover Dam ever crack. Except way smellier.
I was horrified. This was the first time she’d ever really vomited. This was not sweet-smelling and gently dribbling spit-up. This was a torrential downpour of foulness and it was EVERYwhere. It was all over her and me and the high chair and puddling on the floor. I had to reach into those puddles in order to scoop up my sopping daughter. But I didn’t cringe because of the vomit, even though I could see out of my peripheral vision that there was some in my hair, likely a bit of carrot if one was to judge by the color. I cringed because I felt AWFUL. I still feel awful. My eyes fill at the thought of my abusive awfulness to my innocent daughter who has no way to protest other than crying, and I didn’t listen, and I shoved her so full she literally burst. It was that awfulness that dominated every fiber of my being as I hugged her tight and hurried to get her undressed and comfortable.
The thing is, as soon as I got her out of the chair and cleaned up and into the tub, she was happy as a clam. She sang and babbled to herself as usual, totally fine and happy, while I sat on the edge of the tub and pulled out chunks of my own hair as a form of self flagellation.
It’s true, she’s fine. She’s over it and has moved on. Chances are good she won’t need therapy as a result of this but me? I’m going to need intensive therapy probably for the rest of my life.
I feel really guilty about that.
My husband and I don’t have much of a social life anymore. We expected that; we’d been well-informed that having a baby would do this. And while we don’t love it, most of the time we don’t mind. We’ve always been home-bodies for the most part anyway. But we do have our limits, and they were severely tested this weekend.
We had just sat down to our usual special Saturday dinner treat: pizza that costs its weight in gold. With a baby in bed by 7pm we don’t have the opportunity to dine out very often and thus not much of a way to distinguish Saturday nights from every other night other than pizza delivery. But this Saturday night was to prove extra special in oh so many ways.
It started right after I’d taken my first bite of gold pizza. The dog had been making a nuisance of herself all day by licking her private crotchal area. This is something she has always done with some frequency, so other than getting incredibly irritated - really, the sound of that can catipult me into a bad mood faster than you can say “that pint was supposed to serve four” - I mostly ignored her. But Tom, who apparently pays a little more attention to detail when it comes to the dog’s private crotchal area ministrations, noticed something different this time: namely that she really, really would not stop.
Now, if it were still just me and the dog, like in the old days, I probably would have spent another 24 hours or so yelling at her every time she went crotch-diving before it occurred to me something might actually be wrong. Tom on the other hand leapt to attention and grabbed a flashlight in a resourceful and Boy Scout-like manner. I sighed heavily. I generally don’t like my meals interrupted, especially to shine a flashlight up my dog’s ass, but I couldn’t let him do this alone so I joined him on the floor and held the dog still while Tom did the honors.
Oh. My. God. What was going on with my dog Down There made giving birth look pretty. There was oozing. There were several non-solid substances providing varying levels of olfactory insult. It was the Battle of Normandy, if the soldiers had been covered in fecal matter the consistency of tar.
The sight knocked me completely senseless. I held the dog and felt dread sweep through my body. “What do we do?” I whispered in utter horror as Tom clicked the flashlight off with a grim expression.
We gathered Theo up in an old towel and Tom carried her through the rain to the car and to the emergency veterinary clinic where they diagnosed what every couple longs to hear on a Saturday night: “impacted anal gland.” “Yeah,” they elaborated completely unnecessarily, “those get pretty nasty pretty quick.” In fact, they wouldn’t even let Tom stay in the room while they treated Theo, for his own protection. While I was upset at the thought of Theo going through this without us there, I recognized that had Tom remained, he may never have had a good night’s sleep again.
Theo arrived back home around 11pm, thoroughly drugged and accompanied by a dozen different medications and instructions. And, for the first time in her 14 years… yes. The dreaded Cone Collar of Shame.
I couldn’t do it. I looked at my poor dear friend, drugged out of her mind, miserable, scared and shaking and simply could not force this further indignity upon her. She was so drugged, I reasoned with my skeptical husband, that she wouldn’t be inclined to lick anything anyway. Let’s just leave her be and let her sleep.
Of course I was awakened a couple hours later by that insanely irritating sound of ferocious crotchal area ministrations. With a sigh, I wrapped the Cone Collar of Shame around my miserable little dog and went back to sleep as soon as I was assured she had drifted off.
I was awakened again an hour later. She had managed to crane her neck far enough around the cone to continue her mission. With a cry of frustration and fatigue I pulled Tom out of bed who thought for a long while (he really likes problem-solving, and is fairly good at it, so long as you’re patient). “Maybe we should diaper her,” he said.
And here I couldn’t bear to put a cone collar on her! But it’s amazing what you’ll agree to do to your best friend when your best friend’s ass is leaking something indescribably heinous on your bedroom rug.
So we diapered the dog. How handy we happen to have an 11 month old baby who is, apparently, roughly the same size around.
Diapered and coned, we all fell back to sleep for a few minutes before the baby awoke at her usual Oh My God It’s Early hour. I got the baby, and Tom carried the drugged dog upstairs to get her settled on the couch for the day. As soon as I brought the baby upstairs and she saw the dog - I swear this is true - she started laughing. Even our 11 month old daughter knew the dog looked utterly ridiculous.
The indignities were not over. For any of us. The day found us juggling a very curious and mobile baby with the diapering and cleansing of our dog’s extra ass hole. I won’t go into any more detail on that. Just suffice it to say that I feel like I need a shower along the lines of the one they gave Karen Silkwood. And I may never eat pizza again.
But one thing’s for sure: I will never again complain about a boring Saturday night.
Today I discovered that, like a miracle, overnight, new sensor-flush toilets were installed in my office building. I am REALLY excited about this.
I’ve never been a major germaphobe. I am generally of the opinion that while you shouldn’t go around licking other people’s keyboards, nor should you get all Howard Hughes about avoiding germs.
But with all this H1N1 craziness, only some of which I am not convinced is a government conspiracy - although why the government wants us to get the flu is not altogether clear just yet - I can’t help but become a lot more diligent. After all, I have a baby at home, a baby who is in the High Risk category. I don’t care if I get sick, but I cannot let her be exposed to this. So that’s why not having to touch the toilet to flush it is so important to me. That and because I’ve never liked having to touch anything in a public restroom. A restroom with an automated door, automated stall lock, automated ass-wiper, automated flushing toilet, automated stall unlock, automated water faucet, automatic soap dispenser and automated paper towel dispenser would completely bliss me out.
Anyway my point is, I don’t want to touch anything right now, because I haven’t been able to get my baby vaccinated, and not touching things is the only other thing I know to do to keep her safe. Why hasn’t she been vaccinated? Well, because like everybody else except people who work for big important banks whose status has, unaccountably, warranted more doses of the vaccine than hospitals, I can’t find the stuff anywhere. Not that I’ve decided she should definitely get the vaccine, because the waters are further muddied by the controversy surrounding additives found in the H1N1 that are not in the more generally-accepted regular old flu vaccine that we all know and love. Apparently the vaccine could either completely paralyze you, or give you autism or, if you’re lucky, prevent you from dying. If you listen to the dissenters, it’s kind of a crap shoot which outcome you’ll get. Who do you trust?
I could live with my daughter having autism; I could not live with her being dead. So I guess if someday, likely after this thing has completely run its course, someone offers me the vaccine for her I’ll take it. But so far the closest we’ve gotten is our doctor’s nurse telling us they finally received five - just five - baby vaccines and would we like one? We said yes, but then she recanted, because apparently there is a Higher High Risk category to which our daughter does not belong. I felt simultaneously as if I’d dodged a bullet and signed my daughter’s death warrant.
There’s a possibility that after both my fans (hi Mom) read this, you will be driven for perhaps the first time to comment on my blog because this is such a heated issue. But I beg you: please don’t. If I read anymore opinions, or even, dare I say it, facts, about this situation my head will implode. Which is arguably worse than autism, but would at least negate my need for an H1N1 vaccine.
Toys
At first, there was one specific place for them. A cute little basket, tucked away unobtrusively on a shelf. But slowly the toys started to migrate. A few in the bathroom for bath time. A few in the kitchen for meal time. A few in the living room so we didn’t have to run up and down the stairs. A few in our bedroom - nobody seems to know how those got there.
A baby requires 24-7 entertainment. An unreasonably small portion of that entertainment is provided by sleeping. The rest is up to us. A single toy carries an interest factor of approximately 3.2 minutes. There are some toys that can be used more than once in a day, but only if it’s been several hours since the first time, and you must be prepared for the fact that the interest factor for the second use is reduced to about 2 minutes. Also, there are always one or two toys that, for some inexplicable reason, cause the child to scream in terror when they are produced. (In our case, a friendly-looking stuffed ice cream cone that makes a jingling noise when you shake it.) Of course, there’s no way to know which of the toys will be that kind until you’ve already purchased, unpackaged and thoroughly scrubbed down the toy so that it can be safely presented to the child. Accounting for these oddities, plus the few toys that are, let’s face it, really more for you (the baby isn’t going to be much interested in a lego Starship Fighter for quite some time, if ever), and based on 720 minutes in a day, with an average interest-level time of 3 minutes per toy, I calculate that to entertain a 10-month-old baby, you need about 275 toys. Glancing around the living room right now, that seems about right.
Fashion
Shopping for a baby is far less depressing than shopping for oneself on several levels. Even if an outfit is a size too small and covered in regurgitated peas they can still pull it off. Also, I can easily find adorable outfits for my daughter that cost ten dollars. She never complains that her ass looks too big in something - after all, it’s mostly diaper, and she knows this.
There’s really only one drawback to shopping for an infant: the guilt trip. It is incredibly easy to make a parent feel guilty. In fact, you don’t need to try. Chances are they feel guilty already. This summer I was shopping for my daughter at Osh Kosh B’Gosh where I was delighted to have found these delicious teeny little t-shirts embroidered with flowers for only five dollars each. Score! But when the cashier was ringing me up she asked, “Do you have enough shorts to go with these?”
I would have thought zero would be enough shorts for someone who is twenty-six inches long, but apparently I am the WORLD’S WORST MOTHER because I had NO shorts. Only shirts. What did I think my daughter was - Donald Duck, going around wearing only tops and no bottoms? Who allowed me to procreate anyway? “I-I, uh, wanted to wait and see how many I, er, already have at home,” I stuttered lamely. The cashier shot me a withering look that said she saw right through me and, as soon as I was out of earshot, she’d be calling social services.
But guilt trip or no, I really have no choice but to shop constantly for my daughter. She outgrows stuff so fast she’s like the Incredible Hulk. I put her down for a nap in a neat little outfit only to find her an hour later half naked with the ragged tatters of her clothing hanging off her limbs. Which brings me to my next thought:
Size
My daughter is 10 months old, and fast outgrowing 18 month sizes. According to the doctor she is in the 99th percentile for height and weight. But I don’t think she’s the freak the sadists who draw up these charts would like me to believe. Because when I started asking around, it turned out that ALL the babies are in the 90-something percentile. Now, I’m no statistician, but isn’t that, like, impossible? Seems to me we need some new charts. I’m guessing these are the charts used in 1886, when people were all generally no more than 4 feet tall and had waists 13 inches around, roughly the size of my dog’s. Meanwhile the clothing manufacturers are blindly and faithfully following these charts and creating minuscule socks that wouldn’t have fit my daughter when she was a four-month fetus. But that’s okay; I can use them as finger warmers. She can totally pull that off.
I knew flying with an 8-month-old would be challenging. I knew it in the same vague way I knew labor would be painful.
There is very little that would have enticed my husband and me to fly with an infant across the continent, literally as far as you can go while still remaining in the domestic states, except for the phrase “free Bahamas vacation.” When these words crossed my father’s lips all our trepidations were immediately forgotten and I was online within minutes researching airfares. For reasons that make sense only to the airline industry, we were able to find two first-class seats for less than three coach seats. Well! That solidified it. Baby or no, there was no way we wouldn’t have a fabulous flight sitting in first class!
We arrived at the airport with the entire contents of our home stuffed into about twenty pieces of luggage. The only thing left at the house were the larger pieces of furniture. Foremost in our minds as we approached security was an incident that occurred exactly a year ago, when I was six months pregnant, and we were going on our last pre-baby vacation. As we were putting on our shoes on the other side of security we watched a flustered couple as they unloaded one baby-gear item after another onto the x-ray conveyer belt, juggling a baby between them while removing their shoes, jackets, electronic items, etc. When they made it to the other side they high-fived each other. Tom and I shared a look of sheer horror. What had we gotten ourselves into?
Turns out getting through security was a breeze compared to the flight itself. A decided, in her typical baby bad-timing way, that now was an excellent time to start mimicking the art of adult conversation to which she had been paying very close attention for some weeks. A’s version of conversation is to holler good-naturedly at the top of her lungs for thirty minute stretches. I think she learned this from her grandma, because I don’t do that.
As we boarded the plane with far more luggage than the airlines allow (it turns out the one dubious benefit to flying with an infant is that the airline turns a blind eye to the amount of luggage you schlepp on the plane - or it could be because we were in first class. I wouldn’t know because I’ve never flown first class before, or with a baby, so I have no control group) A decided to regale her fellow passengers with an enthralling and detailed account of what I can only assume was her first airport tram ride. She was deep into a description of the marquee with its bright shiny red lights as we sidled into our seats, balancing our gear and engaging in the kind of multi-layered levels of coordination required when doing ANYthing with a baby.
“Babe, could you hold this so I can stow the luggage?” Tom asked me, shouting to be heard over A’s enthusiastic description of a woman she saw in the airport who sat in a chair with wheels on it.
“Well first I need to fix a bottle in case she starts fussing. Can you hold her while I fix the bottle and then I can hold that and then you can stow the luggage?”
“Okay but I need to set this in here so I can get the bottle stuff out so you can fix a bottle and then you can hold this while I stow the luggage and then I can take her and feed her while you get the toys and the sippie cup set up.”
“Wait - the rest of the bottle stuff is in that bag over there, so you hold her while I get that bag, then I’ll take her and then you fix the bottle and then I’ll take her and hold that and then you can store the luggage while I -”
“I think she just pooped.”
“Okay, you go change her while I fix the bottle and hold this and you can hold that while…”
Etc. You get the idea.
As soon as we sat down with sighs strong enough to blow a hole in the seats in front of us, A decided it was time for a rigorous round of calesthenics which resulted, naturally, in coffee being spilled in Tom’s shoe. However after another half hour we were both covered in mixtures of spit-up, coffee, drool, pee and our own lunches, so we quickly realized caring about our appearances was a complete waste of time and energy.
A is really cute, so people tend to readily forgive her for disturbing the peace in any one of her ten favorite ways, but they are less forgiving to her parents who have absolutely no control over anything. Tom and I diligently pulled out one new toy after another, Mary Poppins style, from a small bag that you would never know could hold so much. One after another they were flung to the ground as A seemed to favor either squirming, crying or hollering over any of the toys we brought. Various points of the flight found us bent over, ass up, searching for a rejected pacifier that, A decided seconds after flinging it from her presence, was THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD AND SHE HAD TO HAVE IT BACK RIGHT NOW. We went through our entire bank of animal noises, which never ceases to enthrall A so long as you don’t run out. But there are only so many animals who make noises one can mimic.
In over 12 hours of travel, there and back, neither Tom nor I were able to complete a one and a half hour movie. One of many FREE movies that first class passengers get. Nor could we use the Special First Class Lavatory, because it didn’t have a pull-down changing table. Instead we had to cross the threshold denoted by the blue curtain separating the riff-raff and stand in line with the peasants to wait for their toilet. Only one of us was able to partake of the meal served (coach passengers could, as far as the airline was concerned, just starve to death) because the other had to hold the baby. And we had learned our lesson with that first coffee; no free alcoholic (or otherwise) beverages for us, unless it came with a cap. So water it was.
The seats were roomy, it’s true, but not so much when you have a twenty-pound infant splayed across your lap grabbing at everything within reach. Suddenly the quarters were WAY too confined because EVERYthing was in reach. Note to Delta flight attendants: you’ll need to replace all the safety cards in row 5. Somebody seems to have eaten them. And while we were permitted to board first, it took us so long to stow all our crap that we were the last to actually sit down.
Thus, my conclusions based on this experience: If you are traveling with an infant, Coach and First Class have absolutely no distinction. In fact, you might as well just reserve the seat in the lavatory and save yourself a lot of time.
I’ve never been a fan of baby talk, not even to babies. When adults incorporate baby talk into their regular everyday conversation it’s like nails on a chalkboard to me. Baby talk, even when directed at babies, seems to assume the listener is a complete moron. And when you hear a grown woman talking to her grown husband/boyfriend/significant other in baby talk it’s just downright creepy. Like women who call their significant others “daddy” and then follow it up with a partially-gibberish request for jewelry. Gross.
(However, although I’ve never baby-talked to my dog, an ongoing discourse of complete nonsense is not, for some odd reason, an irregular occurrence: “Who’s the best dog ever in the whole wide world? Is THEO the best dog ever? Ever in the whole world? Yes she is! Oh yes she is! I’m going to fold the laundry now! Do you want to help fold the laundry? Nooooo Theo can’t fold the laundry! Theo doesn’t have opposible thumbs! No she doesn’t!” etc. As long as I pronounce each word maturely I for some reason consider this acceptable.)
While up until now I’ve managed to keep baby talk out of my speech completely, even when whispering sweet nothings to romantic interests at the peak of my teenage hormonal years, the somehow inherent necessity of repeating everything to anybody who is not an adult human being has not escaped me. Why do we do this? Is it because we feel the need to immediately fill any possible silence after a silly declaration to indicate we understand the joke is on us? Is it because we think somehow that even though the listener is certain not to understand us the first time, they will somehow gain whatever knowledge is necessary to decipher our meaning a millisecond later?
And now that I have an actual baby I do find myself doing the real baby talk thing, not just the repetition of inane but adult-word commentary - although not to an obnoxious degree (I must tell myself this, so I can live with myself). I’ve given myself a pass with the minor baby-talk that seems to just slip out - a phenomenon that seems to kick in whether you like it or not as a side-effect of giving birth - but only, obviously, when directed at my baby. Therefore you can imagine my shame and embarrassment when I asked a coworker the other day if her lunch was “lummers in her tummers.”
Even I don’t know what this means, although like Jabberwocky the context does at least provide a fairly reliable definition to infer. My coworker either didn’t notice or has a brilliant baby-talk filter mechanism because she didn’t react at all, just answered the nonsense question as if it were perfectly ordinary. But this did not alleviate my mortification. What if I’ve completely lost all baby-talk self control? What if she reacted so smoothly because I do this ALL THE TIME and don’t even realize it?!
For those of you who do not have or interact with kids and, therefore, have no reason to know this, babies have a tough time with pronouns so it is recommended you refer to her and yourself in the third person or by name. But Tom and I now refer to ourselves completely in the third person at home, even when not addressing the baby. “Mamma’s going night-night” has replaced “I’m going to bed.” We do it when the entire rest of the sentence is completely inappropriate for a baby’s ears: “Daddy is so FUCKing exhausted.” We may say “fuck” around our kid but at least we remembered to refer to ourselves in the third person.
I think the barriers between home and work are slowly erroding, as evidenced by the lummers question. Now I’m living in a constant state of paranoia. What if in my next staff meeting I burst forth with, “Who wants to hear Mamma’s reporty-worty? Who wants to hear? Who wants to hear Mamma’s reporty-worty-torty-lorty?” I really feel sometimes like this might not be too far off.
Is Mamma going a little nutsy-wutsy? Is she? Is she? Is Mamma going to have to go away to the hospital wospital? Oh, yes she is! Oh yes she is!
So Tom, Annora and I were hanging out in our sub-basement bedroom in our underwear, with three fans pointed at us, wondering how we were going to get through this summer’s heat. Because not only do Tom and I have to worry about my very vocal discomfort but for the first time we now have another person in the family who is - and who ever imagined this were possible - more vocal about her displeasure than I am.
“It’s hot,” I whined.
“Aheh-aheh,” A agreed, which is baby-speak for “I am upset about something. I do not have the vocabulary to say what, exactly. But you have 30 seconds to figure it out before I reach Full Baby Meltdown and I don’t think I need to remind you what happened last time.”
“We should get a baby pool,” I suggested. “That would keep her cool, and she loves the water. We’ll just get one of those small ones, fill it up and plop her in. She’ll love it!”
“AHEH-AHEH,” insisted A.
The next day we were out bright and early shopping for a baby pool. It turns out inflatable pools are quite cheap so we decided, why should A have all the fun? We should get one big enough for the whole family! We (as in, Tom) even had the presence of mind to measure the one flat space in our backyard to make sure the biggest one within our budget would fit.
We dragged our purchase home and ripped open the box. It was a matter of hours before the heat of the day would be on us and the aheh-aheh warning siren would begin. While A had her lunch and nap, Tom would inflate and fill up the pool and joila! Instant happy family splashy time.
But after about an hour of playing with A, and rapidly running out of amusing tricks, I wandered into the backyard to see what the hold-up was. The pool lay limply on the deck where we’d left it; Tom was in the yard sweating profusely over a plastic bag.
“What are you DOING?” I asked impatiently.
“We can’t put the pool on top of dog poop,” he pointed out. Well, I couldn’t argue with that; nor was I about to volunteer to help. So A and I skeedaddled back into the house.
A was in the middle of a tasty lunch of squash and peas (her favorite - don’t ask me where she got that) when Tom came inside, soaked with sweat, and announced, “Blowing this thing up is going to take a year and a half. I’m going to the store to buy a pump.”
I suppressed my sigh, glancing at the clock, but figured there was still time to get the pool inflated and filled before A woke up from her after-lunch nap.
While she snoozed I headed outside once again to check Tom’s progress. The pool was still limp, and Tom, barely recognizable he was so covered in sweat and grime, was futily pumping away with a hand pump. “I’ve shortened the amount of time to maybe 6 months,” he said grimly.
“Don’t we have an electric pump?” I asked. It seemed to me that at some point in our past Tom declared the necessity of an electric pump for reasons I no longer remember and didn’t bother to argue at the time.
Tom looked vague, then sheepish. “Oh yeah.” He went down to the garage and brought the pump up, and I went back into the house to attend to A who had awakened from her nap and was in a very sociable mood.
After I’d gotten A changed and we’d played a rousing game of peek-a-boo we once more went to check on the progress of the pool, only to discover - guess - that it still lay limp on the deck exactly where we’d dropped it that morning.
“I forgot this pump only works by plugging it into the car,” Tom said.
“So why don’t you bring it down to the street and inflate it there?”
Tom looked a bit dubious but also recognized no real alternative other than going to the store and buying yet another pump. So he hefted the heavy hunk of plastic over one shoulder and tottered down the steep driveway to the car, where he laid the pool out on the grass and hooked up the pump. After watching this ordeal and subsequently hearing the satisfying hum of the pump’s motor, insuring that soon, soon, we would be sitting in a cool pool of water, I headed back inside once more to dig deep into my creative soul for more ways to entertain a six-month-old.
After another hour or so, A decided, for lack of anything better to do, to take another nap. I put her down and glanced out the window to see how far along Tom had gotten with the electric pump. The pool was still completely limp. I watched him fiddle around, turn the pump off and on and off and on, and crouch beside the pool rubbing his face in consternation. Then a lightbulb must’ve gone off in his head because he suddenly lept up, did something in the car, came back out, and started up the pump again. This time I could see a barely perceptible ripple run through the length of the pool. At last! When A woke up she would get to experience her very first pool!
A had been up for another two hours by the time the pool was done inflating. She had run through absolutely every single toy and activity we had in the house and was clearly expecting an afternoon soujorn, as we did most afternoons to alleviate her predictable late-day boredom. But we couldn’t go anywhere with the pool ALMOST ready, and in any case we were fast approaching dinner time. While there was certainly plenty of time to have a nice splash in the pool, we’d be pushing it if we tried to go out anywhere, and we learned the hard way one day when we delayed at a friend’s party for an hour that you do NOT mess with the nighttime schedule. On penalty of insanity. But after another few minutes had gone by, still with no pool present in the backyard, I once again stuck my head out the front window to witness Tom attempting to maneuver the not-heavy but incredibly unwieldy pool - which was significantly larger than I envisioned it would be - up the front steps and into the house. I plopped A in her bouncer and ran out to help him.
“We may have been a bit overly ambitious,” Tom admitted.
“We can do it,” I said. “We’ll just get it up the stairs and heave it over the couch and around the dining table and out the patio door just as soon as I move all the patio furniture over to the side.”
So that is what we did, and finally the pool was inflated AND in the backyard. Now all we had to do was fill it and instant family play time!
“It’s getting dark,” I observed. The previously sunny patch of lawn which was the one place the pool would fit was now in shadow. “Do you think it’ll be too cold?” When the sun goes down in Seattle, the temperature plummets pretty quickly.
“Oh, it’ll be fine,” Tom said with a certainty that I had learned over the years not to argue with. “I’m not worried about that.” Which begged the question - what WAS he worried about? But I decided to leave it alone, particurlarly since A was starting to wonder aloud if, after fifteen minutes, she had been left completely alone on the planet. We played roller coaster baby for awhile, a game that would have made me, personally, sick to my stomach but which caused A to shriek with delight. When I started to feel light-headed and as if my arms were going to fall off, I brought A outside once again to check on this fabulous pool I had been promising her all day. And lo! There was water in it! In the inflated pool, in our backyard, there was water!
Tom grinned with pride, his dirty, sweat-soaked t-shirt sticking to him, and gestured at the pool he had assembled for his little family. “Go ahead and try it out! No need to wait till it’s completely full!”
“Okay!” I cried excitedly and whirled back into the house to get our bathing suits. I debated for a brief moment just leaving A in her diaper. What does one do in this situation for a person who still pees in her pants? If I leave the diaper on her, it will soak up half the pool water and I won’t be able to lift her out. But if I take the diaper off, the carefree feeling of a breeze on her tushy will inevitably cause her to add a little of her own warm water to the pool’s. I decided a little pee was no big deal - it’s sterile after all - and a loaded-down diaper full of pool water was less desirable. So, dressed in our bathing suits (A’s too big, mine too small) we gleefully headed out to our pool.
“Look sweetheart, it’s like a big bath!” I told my daughter, who squinted at it and looked unimpressed. Nevermind, I’d show her soon! She was going to love it! I clambered over the side of the pool with one leg and gasped. “Holy shit, it’s FREEZING.”
Tom rolled his eyes. “Well give it a second, you have to get used to it.”
“No, Tom, it’s FREEZING. Check if you don’t believe me.”
He stuck a hand in. “It’s freezing,” he said flatly.
We looked at each other in the waning light and Tom pursed his lips with determination. “We’ve gotten this far,” he grumbled and marched into the house. I watched as he filled bucket after bucket with hot water from the sink and dumped it into the pool. After about six trips he said, “Okay, that’s enough. This is getting ridiculous.” I couldn’t have agreed more. But at that moment A considered the delay an excellent opportunity to have a nice long pee, and it was currently running down my arms and legs, her bathing suit providing no road block whatsoever.
After I got us both cleaned up and decided to resort to the diaper-full-of-pool method we trudged downstairs into the twilit evening and I once again dunked in a toe. “It’s freezing,” I muttered glumly. “I’m done. No pool. It’s A’s dinner time anyway.”
Tom looked crestfallen. “But what do I do now? If I leave the pool out it’ll get full of bugs. I am NOT going to empty it and go through this again tomorrow.”
I just stared at him, too weary to offer suggestions.
Tom heaved a sigh. “I’ll go to the store and get a tarp to cover it,” he said, and off he went again looking like a homeless person in his crusty, dirty shorts and t-shirt. Or like a dad who is trying to give his kid a fun time in the yard. It’s a fine line.
A was finished with her dinner and we were moving on to bath time - the regular kind, in the tub, which she frankly never found anything wrong with in the first place - when we went once more to check on Tom. What we saw was the inflated pool sitting on top of a tarp, covered with another too-small tarp, and held together with a complicated series of bungee cords which Tom keeps in his car for things like this and securing Christmas trees to the roof once a year. Our yard was gone and had been replaced with a webbing of bungee cords which the dog would have to somehow maneuver through and around in order to relieve herself.
Tom looked up at me from his crouched position, looking like a very tired, very disheveled, and very dispirited spider in the middle of a web, and said without emotion, “I got the wrong size.”
At that point I think you’ll agree there was nothing to do but burst into hysterical laughter, so that’s what we did, until Annora gently reminded us that it was getting very close to bedtime, and woe to the parent who did not heed the warning:
“Aheh-aheh.”
First, allow me to apologize to all of my fans out there (both of you - hi, mom) for the huge gap in between blogs. You see, my brain has turned to mush, and I forgot how to type, formulate sentences, create original ideas, and everything else not associated with poop or drool. Frankly I’m still operating with less than half a deck and on hardly any sleep, and I have the attention span of a thirteen-year-old. All this does not bode well for a blog that makes sense, much less is entertaining. So you should probably just stop reading now.
Still here? Aw, thanks Mom. Okay, today’s topic is: useless signs. The idea came to me when I was in the restroom today at work, washing my hands. Because this is something one does after one has gone potty. This is what I was brought up to believe, and I certainly intend to bring my daughter up in the same manner. In fact, I am SO adamant about this particular habit that not only do I wash my hands after *I* go to the bathroom, but also after my daughter does. Because so far I’m the one who handles THAT matter as well. She keeps her hands clean; or, when they are not clean, she thoroughly cleanses them by emitting a bucket of drool which ends up being far more thorough than my own method involving soap based on sheer quantity of the water flow. Anyway, in the restroom at work is a sign that says “Wash hands before leaving this room.”
What a completely useless directive. Those of us who were not raised in a cave (and maybe even those of us who were) know to wash our hands without needing a reminder. Those of us who - and there is one in every office, if not several, and you know who you are and should be ashamed of yourself - do not make this an automatic practice are certainly not going to be reformed by a cryptic sign. I’m not sure what, exactly, it would take to convince someone who has just handled their own excrement that it’s a good idea to clean their hands afterwards if this thought does not occur to them on their own.
This led me to continue to contemplate useless signs, as to do so is less strenuous on my mushy brain than to try to engage in work. Work, after maternity leave, is something one has to ease into, like a frigid swimming pool at the very beginning of summer. I read the New York Times and deleted all the email in my inbox, and I think that, after having done NOTHING for the past 20 weeks except make silly faces, I have the right to call it a day and fuck off until five pm.
“Avoid alcohol during pregnancy.” This is one of my favorites. First of all, the choice of the word “avoid.” As if one might be ambling down the sidewalk and, due to a pregnant woman’s natural lack of balance, accidentally fall right into a pitcher of beer. If only she had been more careful to avoid it! Secondly, in order to read this sign and have it apply, one must already be a pregnant woman in a bar. Chances are solid decision making isn’t what led you to this circumstance in the first place and, again, a sign certainly isn’t going to convince you otherwise.
I don’t know if my absolute favorite sign of all time is still on the side of the highway leading to the Phoenix airport, but every time we read, “Caution, low flying aircraft,” everybody in my family would yell gleefully, “DUCK!” How, exactly, is this sign supposed to be of assistance? If an aircraft is flying low enough for you to be concerned about it, that’s pretty much it for you.
Of course, “Baby on Board” has been done to death, the typical sarcastic comment being “Well, I WAS going to hit your car, but since there’s a BABY on board I’ll let you go on your way.”
I’m sure there are lots more, but frankly I’ve lost interest.
