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.
