Category Archive

Let me start by saying that this getting up an hour before the kid has been working out pretty well for me, but not so much for my writing habit, which is why I started doing it in the first place. I won’t bore you with reasons why I haven’t been writing, but they are completely legit and have actually provided me with writing material. But for another day, because right now I have some other things to toss around, and I’m falling back on my friend the bullet to help me remember everything.

• My laptop died at the ripe old age of 1 year, 7 months. I know someone in real life who could have fixed it gratis, but his father passed away a few days ago and he has enough on his plate, so I took it to the Ge3k Squad, and here is what happened: I stopped counting charges at $350, and this was before we even discussed the actual cost of repair. So I left and found a guy in the phone book who is going to back up my hard drive (which I had been investigating doing myself for the past few weeks prior to the crash!) for $95, and the manufacturer is going to fix it for nothing, even though it is technically no longer under warranty.
• I am borrowing the laptop I have used at school for the past two years, the exact same one, which I complained about endlessly and called awful names, but which is still working perfectly. Huh.
• Unfortunately, the laptop I am borrowing only connects to the internet via a wireless router, which I do not have, so I either have to use it in a WiFi zone or hold it up above my head on the screened porch and hope it picks up one of my neighbors’ wireless signals. And yes, that is what I’ve been doing.
• I realized in the mountains last week how attached at the hip I am to technology. I can check and send email with my phone, and I can even access the internet, and so both nights I was there I would wait until Mia went to sleep and then I would sit on a trunk by the window in our room and read email and catch up on blogs. Isn’t that ridiculous? I mean, we complain as as society about being too connected too much of the time, but I think deep down inside we are all addicted to the connection. I need to think further about this. I’ll get back to you.
• My daughter has a love/hate relationship with our vacuum cleaner. When I get it out she will come sit as close to it as she can get, sometimes ON it, and lightly touch the hoses and compartments while softly mumbling something I can’t make out; but as soon as I fire it up she takes off in the direction that affords her as much distance from the machine as possible. And when she is running away she looks exactly like Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow when he is running away from the natives in the second pirate movie. I would try to capture this on video for the sake of comparison, but every time it happens I fall down laughing.
• I might have a new job. Shhhhh. I don’t want to say it too loudly. I believe I have the power to screw it up by feeling TOO optimistic about it. I cannot tell you how nervous the whole thing makes me. I have been working in the same school for 12 years. TWELVE. I have never resigned a position, nor have I had to start fresh in a new one in a long, long time. It’s damn scary. And also exciting–don’t get me wrong. But mostly scary right now.
• I yelled at some pre-pubescent boys in the lazy river at water park yesterday, where Mia and I go almost every afternoon. What IS it with me and lazy rivers? Or maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the real question is this: Do lazy rivers simply attract obnoxious people? Because these boys were having a bumper car rally with their floats, and they were banging into babies. One of them was mine, but it was over the other baby that I lost it. He was much younger than Mia, and his mother seemed unconcerned that these little cretins kept splashing him right in the face. I couldn’t help myself. For all I know they were her kids–she didn’t say a word to me after the incident–but I didn’t care, I morphed into Classroom Manager Mommy before I could stop myself.
• ANd finally–Happy Independence Day, whatever that means to you.

So I have this giant bald place, and it was completely and totally a result of the resort emergency alarm, which apparently was “falsely activated.” Do you know what that means, people? Do you? It means that some punk kid (or obnoxiously immature adult, which I’ll get to another time) pulled the fire alarm lever and ran away. I know this because I work in a high school, and it happens there all the time. Kids think its hee-freakin-larious to interrupt the normal daily activities of several hundred people, which is why I rolled my eyes two years ago when the fire alarm went off during the lunch period while I was teaching a 9th grade English class. Schools don’t have fire drills during lunch, so it had to be a prank. I told my kids we’d be back in within minutes, and we all left our stuff behind without a second thought. Except it was real, and within 24 hours the building was a shell, and all that “stuff” we left inside was either crispy or completely waterlogged from the fire hoses. So you can imagine my panic last Tuesday evening when the alarm sounded. Shaking, I held my frightened daughter and whispered in her ear (”That’s a fire truck,” “Look at the clouds,” “Can you hear the ocean?”) while I nervously watched emergency vehicles surround our hotel.

And then I read this little sign in the elevator the next day: “Please help us. If you see anyone tampering with the fire alarm pulls, please alert the front desk immediately.” Since the little sign didn’t read, “We apologize for the inconvenience, but our alarm system was being tested,” or “We are sorry for the alarm scare–the system malfunctioned but has been repaired,” or even, “Your safety is our biggest concern. A _____ (gas leak, grease fire, terrorist, swarm of killer bees) was reported and evacuation was necessary,” I can only assume resort personnel had nothing to do with the alarm and were simply looking for some unknown culprit to arrest (did you know pulling a fire alarm in jest is a federal offense?). This made me furious–12 year classroom veteran sick of immature little teenage brats furious. I wanted to find the little jerk and go all teacher on his ass.

And then the alarm went off again on Thursday morning.

MORNING.

At 5:45.

In the morning.

While my daughter was sleeping.

While I was sleeping.

No longer was I feeling the anger of a sick-and-tired teacher. Now I was pissed in the way only a mother can be pissed, and as I scooped my sleeping baby up onto my shoulder and covered her head with a blanket and joined the sleepy masses stumbling down the stairs, I glared at anyone who dared make a noise near me or who came remotely close to bumping into my sleeping kid. You see, Mia is a late-to-bed, late-to-wake sleeper, and it doesn’t matter how early I get her up, she is still late-to-bed. The difference is that if she has to wake up early, she wakes a totally different child–a child with a serious anger-management problem and a penchant for hurling objects and screaming. I didn’t want to spend the day with that child. And so I lay down on a dew-covered lawn chair and held her and muttered curses at whoever thought it would be cute to see hundreds of resort patrons milling around in their jammies at 5:45.

I’d love to tell you there is a satisfying ending to this tale–that the resort security guys found the alarm puller and held him/her screaming for mercy over a ravenous shark just beyond the breakers. Or, you know, something equally appropriate. But if anyone was apprehended they never told the rest of us, and that’s probably a good thing, because I can only imagine what I might have done had I come across the little brat. And believe me, I can definitely imagine…

No, the real ending is this (and some of you will roll your eyes and think, “Why did I bother, that’s not a real ending,” and to you I say, “Hey, no one forced you to read this post!”): MY KID SLEPT THROUGH THE ENTIRE THING. Through the screaming kids running around, and the old man who took a piss in the bushes just a few feet away from us, and the alarm sounding continually, and the fire truck sirens, and the sunrise. She never even opened her eyes, and when we went back up to our room and I put her back in bed she curled up and sighed contentedly like she’d been sleeping there the whole time. So now when she wakes up after a 37 minute nap because the cat meowed at the other end of the house, I want to look at her and say, “WTF, kid? You slept through a 45-minute EMERGENCY EVACUATION! GO BACK TO SLEEP!”

This was about to be one of those sorry introductions about how I haven’t blogged in weeks because this is such a busy time for people in the education field, and how even though I’m not in the classroom anymore I am just not in the mindset to sit down and actually put words on a page. To support this drivel I was going to give you some statistics from previous Mays to prove that I am indeed too emotionally and mentally overwhelmed to blog. But apparently last May I posted 20 times. TWENTY. That’s an average of five posts a week. Sure, in May of 2006 there were only 7 posts, and in May of 2005 only 2 (which doesn’t actually count, since I only started blogging in April of 2005), so I could feasibly argue my original point. But I won’t. Because I don’t really have an excuse, unless you want to go along with my personal belief that upon walking across the University stage on May 17, thus marking the completion of my Master’s degree, the remaining functional brain cells rolling around in my skull went on an indefinite strike and have not been heard from since. But that is not really true, not to mention physically impossible.

So let’s just skip the boring introduction (and for those of you who inevitably read it because who the hell starts with the second paragraph, sorry about that) and move on to what will undeniably be only slightly LESS boring: A Bulleted Rundown of the Last Two Weeks.

• As mentioned, I graduated. Woo-freakin’-hoo. I am so over it that I don’t even have anything else to say about it. I do have some commentary about the photos taken that day, and after reading this, you probably will as well. First, it should be obvious to you after looking at these pictures that I have not been exaggerating all those times I’ve said Little got all the boobs in our family; and in case there was any doubt that I got next to none of the allotment in that department, my University graciously marked the size and location of my own non-boobs on the outside of my robe. Secondly, I tried [unsuccessfully] to avoid uploading any of the photos that showed my feet, because apparently, that is where the Universe chose to give me a surplus. Seriously, my feet look like CLOWN FEET in every single picture. My mom keeps trying to comfort me by assuring me it was just the shoes I was wearing, but I keep insisting, and rightfully so, that the shoes are only as big as my actual feet! It’s not the shoes’ fault my feet are enormous! And finally, do I have a cute kid or WHAT?
• Having completed a Master of Library and Information Science, and having worked for an entire school year as a school media specialist, I regret to announce that I won’t actually be working as a school media specialist next year. Thanks to the ubiquitous Public School Budget Cuts, my position no longer exists. Before you school librarians start hurling curses and shaking your fists at the education gods, I was media specialist number two at my school–the entire program wasn’t cut, just the second position. I was offered two options: a) returning to the classroom as a 9th grade English teacher, or b) a position called “Curriculum Facilitator,” or CF for short. I chose B. Given what longtime readers know about my last few years’ worth of frustration in the classroom, I would have taken a position called “Chief Sidewalk Crack Filler” over potential incarceration, because going back to the classroom would have incited violent behavior on my part, and I don’t think they let girls take their babies to prison. And anyway, don’t you think it’s hilarious that I’m going to be a CF? Am I the only person who thinks that’s a total scream? Someone should invent an education job whose acronym is SNAFU. We could have adjoining offices and take the blame for everything wrong in our school.
• So two weeks ago I had this excruciating pain in my calf. I would have assumed it was a muscular injury of some sort, except I didn’t remember injuring my calf, so I consulted the school athletic trainer, and after some poking he said, “Well, I guess it could be a blood clot.” You know what came next, right? Oh, Dr. Google, I hate you. Because by the end of that day I was a nervous wreck, so nervous that I actually went to the doctor. The short version of this story (because in the long version I would have to type the phrase, “and after a multi-hour wait…” several times, and I think just seeing it that once is enough to give you a picture of the next 48 hours) is that I did not have a blood clot. There was no actual diagnosis, only instructions to take Al.eve twice a day, and so I can only assume I had–wait for it–a muscular injury. Apparently I have reached a whole new level of clumsiness, one that involves painful injury with no memory. Go figure.
• I was flipping through a magazine a few weeks ago and saw this, and I immediately decided my daughter had to have one. My deepest hope is that these lovely little doors will satisfy her door-opening and closing needs. A girl can dream, right? So I used some graduation money from my dad to purchase one from some website I’ve never heard of, because it was the cheapest one I could find. Nearly two weeks later, I still have not received my order, and after several unanswered emails and dead end phone calls, I actually did some fishing around and discovered a review of the site indicating that it is out of business. So far my credit card hasn’t been charged, so I feel pretty fortunate in that department, but mostly I feel annoyed because I really just want the kitchen, and because if you have a retail site but are no longer selling retail, WHY NOT JUST TAKE YOUR SITE DOWN? Gah.
• Mia and I spent Memorial Day Weekend at my aunt’s lake house. Pictures coming soon, but the entire weekend can pretty much be summed up in two words, spoken as questions, over and over and over again: “Butt? Wawa?” (For those of you who need a translation: Boat? Water?) My baby, she loves the water, and if I thought it would improve her napping as much as riding around in my uncle’s pontoon did, I would dig a pond in our yard and put her bed in a canoe.
• I am almost as behind on reading other blogs as I am on writing this one. There are high fives and kudos and good luck wishes and virtual hugs in order, and although I’m not managing to put them into comments they are out there in the Universe, hopefully finding their way to you.
• And finally, just for old times’ sake, there are EIGHT DAYS left of school.

Did you ever see that episode of “Friends” where the guys go on a police ride-along with Phoebe’s boyfriend du jour, and Ross gets all “I have a new lease on life” because he thinks someone took a shot at him? And Joey threw himself onto Ross to “shield him from the bullet”? But it was really just a car backfiring? And Joey was just saving his sandwich? And for the next week (or however long 22 minutes is in a sitcom) Ross walked around all starry and dreamy because he truly believed he had been inches from death? Well, last Thursday night I was Ross, but instead of being on a ride-along with a cop, I was glued to the local weather report, and instead of thinking I was being shot at, I thought a tornado was going to rip my house out of the ground. Also, there was no handsome Friend diving on top of me to save his sandwich. I was mostly doing the diving, and there was no sandwich, only a small, sleeping 16 month-old who finally woke up after the worst was over, reached up and touched my face in the dark, and said hi like being curled up next to your mother in the bathtub in the middle of the night was the most normal thing in the world.

I have talked about my fear of tornadoes on this blog, but I have never been as afraid of a tornado as I was last Thursday night. In the past my tornado horror fantasies were pretty scary–I was pulled right out of my house through a gaping hole in the roof, or I was in my car and the funnel cloud lifted me right up into the air a la Dorothy Gale–but I was always fighting, clawing my way to safety. The tornado never got me, because I was all I had to look after, and I’ve always been of the opinion that I can survive anything. But add someone else to the equation, someone smaller or weaker, or smaller AND weaker, and all bets are off.

I was a tree-climbing, no-helmet-wearing bike-riding tomboy as a kid. I hung upside down on the highest monkey bar on the playground and stomped around barefoot in the woods. I played on the railroad tracks behind my childhood house and stood a mere foot or two from the trains as they passed. I never thought twice about any of this until Middle Sister and Little Sister were born. I remember watching them climb and romp and dangle when they were little and I was a seasoned 16, and I constantly saw potential injury. When I was older (you know, like 17) our family went to a local amusement park and I literally broke out in a cold sweat watching Little and Middle stand in line for that stupid pirate ship ride that hangs upside down. Every time I closed my eyes I saw my tiny sisters raining down out of that boat. All that danger was fine for me, because I could take care of myself, but watching them interact with danger was torture for me.

Do you see where I am going with this?

Last Thursday was the scariest moment of motherhood thus far, scarier, even, than that first moment when Dr. T placed Mia in my arms and I came face to face with the magnitude of her existence and all it entailed. Last Thursday there were a few moments when I doubted my ability to protect her, when I saw the potential for danger all around me and was not sure if I could keep her safe. That, my friends, and not the tornado, is now my greatest fear.

It was around 10 p.m. when I tuned into the storm coverage on a local news channel–and that I typed those words without any implication of mockery or sarcasm should give you some idea of how scared I was, because I do not watch local news or weather. At first I was convinced it would fizzle out by the time it got to us, that there would be some lightning and thunder and rain, and I would go to sleep wondering if my mostly deaf dog had even registered the event. There had been tornado warnings all night, but no actual tornados had been spotted, kind of like those blizzards that never reach the ground during winter in the South. I kept telling myself the NWS was just being cautious. The weather guys thought as much. As it turns out, we were all wrong–the storm just got stronger, and the tornados found their way to the ground–three of them. The weather guys were using fancy weather words I’m sure they don’t get to say much, but there was an edge to their delivery, and it made me nervous. It wasn’t the typical ominous tone local weather people use when there might be bad weather. There were no mights, no maybes. This was for real. When they started naming streets less than a mile from my house, streets I drive every single day, and when they urged people on those streets to take cover, I tossed every pillow and cushion and quilt into the windowless hall bathroom, built a nest in the tub, and pulled a soundly sleeping Mia out of her bed. I pulled pillows and blankets all around us and formed a shell over the baby with my own body, and then I held onto her as tightly as I could without waking her. And then I prayed.

I was raised in a family that prayed, a family that believed an all-powerful God heard those prayers. As an adult I don’t talk much about religion, and my spirituality is very personal to me, but I would be holding back if I didn’t tell you that last Thursday night I prayed. I have never prayed so desperately or so sincerely–or so simply–in my life: Please please please please protect us, please keep us safe, please please please. Later I would think of Anne Lamott and her books about faith, and how she wrote once that if you can’t think of what to say to God you could just start with “please” and maybe add a ”thank you.” But at the moment, when that first deafening roar swallowed my house, and then when it returned a second time a few minutes later, I was only aware of two things: the word “please” coming out of my mouth like some primal animal wail, and smell of my sleeping daughter, sweat and soap and skin pressed against my cheek.

Later, when it was all over and she was wide awake and amused as hell to be lying on a bunch of pillows in the tub, I got around to the “thank you” part, which was more like a gigantic sigh of relief than an actual prayer. But the next morning was a different story. No one in my neighborhood lost homes or cars, or, to my knowledge, was even injured–not like those poor souls a few towns over whose homes were literally flattened. My neighbors’ yards were littered with branches and leaves, overturned trash cans and chairs and other yard items. The trees on our cul-de-sac looked like they had been hastily shaved after two rounds with quarter-sized hail. But at my house there was little out of place–a few holes in my hostas from the hail, a small littering of rose petals on the driveway from the wind, and evidence of the heavy rain, but that was it. My plastic Adirondacks hadn’t moved an inch. The big blue exercise ball that Mia likes to push around the yard was exactly where I’d left it. When I walked outside on Friday morning I almost felt ridiculous, like I had panicked for no reason. And then I opened the morning paper.

Pictures of mangled planes and stacks of cars initiated my first round of “thank you thank you thank you” that morning, but it was the story of the mom and her two small children being trapped under the debris that was once their home that really got me. That could have been me, my kid, my house. There were at least three tornados on the ground that night, and two of them were within a mile of my house, maybe closer, and they didn’t even rearrange the stuff in my little yard. You can tell me that storms like this one are unpredictable, that they can level a house and leave the one next door standing, and that I simply escaped a random act of destruction. You can tell me that it was the sheer power of my own will that protected us from harm. You might even tell me that yes, some higher power heard my call for help and shielded us from the storm. Like I said, spirituality is a private matter. But last Friday morning I truly felt like I’d been spared something awful, and every breath I took felt like a prayer–Thank you thank you thank you–and when I stopped outside Mia’s room to listen to her breathe on my way out of the house it was like getting a response from the lips of God himself: you’re welcome you’re welcome you’re welcome.

• I forgot that tonight was “career night” in my library administration class. We were instructed via email to dress professionally, as if we were attending an interview. When I got to class I had a smiley face sticker on my right boob, snot on my left shoulder, and enough cat hair on my black polo shirt to make a kitten. Good thing I already have a job.
• I found out today, due to oblivion, the inability to read, or just plain denial, that the group assignment I’m working on for the aforementioned administration class is due one week earlier than I thought, and that there is ANOTHER assignment, one I didn’t even know about (see previous re: inability to read, etc.), due FOUR. DAYS. BEFORE. GRADUATION. I did not have this assignment on my little Checklist of Sanity, and so it simply did not exist–until a classmate physically showed it to me at the very, very bottom of the syllabus. Still, I kept pointing to my checklist, saying, “But it isn’t on HERE,” and she kept saying, “But it’s here, see,” and I was like, “But look HERE, it’s not HERE on my LIST,” and it went on like that until I crammed the syllabus up her left nostril and ran away. 
• Lately I have spent quite a bit of time in the presence of groups of children whose teachers are trying BY GOD to educate them and learn them how to read stuff in those book things, but mostly it doesn’t go well. Today’s teenagers are accustomed to typing into Google the topic they have been assigned to “research”–for example,The pros and cons of moving large American companies to Latin America–and then writing down, NAY!, copying and pasting into Word, whole chunks of information they have not even read. Never mind that the article, according to its HUGE GIANT BOLD title, is actually about Pros in the American Baseball League who con large moving companies into taking Latin. Or, you know, something else totally unrelated to their topic. My point here is that these children do not know how to read, and until someone figures out a way to Google an actual book, Lord Jesus and Buddha help us all.  I actually witnessed this conversation today during a world history class during which the students were supposed to be researching topics related to terrorism:

Kid: I can’t find anything on my topic.

Teacher: What’s your topic?

Kid: Al Qaeda.

Teacher: I see. What are those things there in your hand?

Kid: I don’t know, books. There’s nothing in them, though. I already looked.

Teacher: What are those books about? See there, on the covers? The titles? What are those books called?

Kid: I’m not sure, Al Somebody. Is he a terrorist?

And recently, during a peer observation of a fairly bright, above average honors 9th grade English class–the kind of class that makes me miss the classroom just a tiny bit–a girl raised her hand after reading William Carlos Williams’s “Danse Russe” and asked, “What’s a kathleen? Is that, like, a name?” Like, I’m totally NOT making any of this up, yo.

• And finally, Feeny specifically requested that I discuss the topic of Mia and tampons, which is listed on my Virtual Sticky Notes. Sorry, E., it’s not as dramatic as it sounds. See, what happens is, when I go into the bathroom for any purpose, Mia follows me and requests “dese, dese, dese,” which is Baby for, “Hand me that object there, Woman, before I fall over and bang my head into the linoleum out of pure boredom!” Sometimes “dese” refers to a makeup brush designated for pretend makeup brushing, and sometimes “dese” refers to a few strands of Mardi Gras beads that live in the bathroom to occupy small bored people, but most of the time “dese” refers to a box of Kot.ex tampons. She likes to take them all out of the box. Then she likes to put them back in. Then she likes to take them all out. Then she likes to put them back in. Then she likes to line them all up on the floor. Then she likes to hand them all to me one at a time. And then she likes to put them all back in the box. And sometimes she likes to put them all in the trash. And that is why “dese” are out in the open all the time, and not just a few days during each month, because I will do whatever it takes to brush my teeth, wash my face, and pee in peace.

*I actually heard both of these phrases in casual, normal conversation today. Ah, the language of the South.

While I am fully aware that thousands of people will read your latest blog entry and have exactly the same reaction I did, I’d like to thank you personally for making me cry actual noticeable tears during my Monday night graduate class. Thank goodness my professor is part bat, or opossum, or something, and likes it dark while he teaches, because the only person who noticed my show of emotion in that chilly little cave-den of a classroom was the person directly beside of me. I was able to play it off as a coughing fit–finally, a good time to be sick!–instead of some bizarre, unwarranted reaction to bad customer service, which is what we were discussing this week (and the reason I was reading your blog instead of paying attention to Dr. Nocturnal). But the truth is, I wanted to lose it, to positively sob, and certainly not because of that hideous drugstore incident a few weeks ago that I am still considering reporting to the management*. I have, in fact, been on the verge of losing it for several days now, and it’s because I once had this tiny, squirming baby with enormous brown eyes and the most charming repertoire of little word-sounds and song-sounds, and now, today, this small person stopped in the middle of her play and walked over to me (walked!), made the sign for “eat,” and said clearly, “banana?” Just like that, a question, like she knew there was a chance I’d say no but she thought she’d ask anyway, and when I did say no, because we had bananas for breakfast, and I offered her strawberries instead, she nodded (nodded!) and walked to the high chair and waited patiently for me to lift her up and buckle her in and slide on the tray, and before I could do any lifting or buckling she threw her arms around my neck and said, “Mama!” like I had just made all of her dreams come true.

I have moments like this daily now, moments when I just want to stop and stare in awe at this creature who wasn’t even here a little over a year ago, who was just a living, moving extension of my very body, but who now fills up such a huge space in my world. Already she is so passionate in her curiosity and her concentration and her love. Where did she come from, this person who very gently and very deliberately strokes the cat’s nose with the tip of her index finger, who digs through the scarves and hats and gloves in the basket next to the door until she finds the ratty old scarf I got at Old Navy for 99 cents, the one I wore almost every day this winter, who sings to herself the same three clear, perfect notes over and over, and who pulls her feet to her tiny nose and sniffs dramatically every night when I pull her socks off, a sly smile playing around her eyes? She doesn’t like open doors and walks around behind me closing them, and she likes to throw paper in the garbage, and at night when it’s time for bed she helps me put her toys in their bins and cubbies and points to the lights insistently until every switch is flipped. She claps her hands only to music she likes, and she invites me to dance, reaching her small hands up to take mine and moving her feet wildly, allowing herself to be lifted and twirled and dipped. And when I gather her up out of her bed every morning and hold her close and breathe in her scent, she wraps her arms around my neck and turns her face until her forehead is resting against my neck and sighs, and I am overcome with love for her, and I am blown away–not just because she exists, or because she is mine, or even because she is evolving from baby to girl-child, but because she chooses to love me back.

*Let’s just say that if you have a store coupon for your previously-prescription-now-OTC allergy medication from that drugstore that rhymes with Tallgreens, and if that coupon does not have an expiration date on it, but the coupon ON THE BACK does have an expiration date on it, the snippy know-it-all manager will not honor the coupon and will keep flipping it over to show you the expiration date, which is actually on a coupon for an antacid, and will try to make you feel stupid for using an expired coupon even though, and I can’t say this enough, there is NO EXPIRATION DATE ON THE ALLERGY MEDICINE COUPON.

Apparently, children who read a lot start to look like their favorite characters.

An as yet undetermined prize to the person who can tell me the origin of this picture.

Well, not really. This is what actually happened:

Because my daughter has hair like this…

(It’s hard to see here, but the multi-layered look she is sporting is more 1981 Mullet than 1997 Jennifer Aniston.)

…I had to go and do this…

…and now she looks like this…

The stylist in the picture is Tina. Tina used to own the salon where the monumental haircut event took place and now that she is “retired” she works one day a week. During my last year-and-a-half of college I worked as the assistant manager at the salon for Tina and her husband Marvin, and they were very good to me. It was Tina who gave me my first color and convinced me to wear my hair short, so having Tina at the scissors for the first haircut was symbolic, a circle-of-life moment, and I’m glad she was willing to do it.

I was okay until she started on the bangs. I had decided to leave the bangs alone. But the hair that would be bangs (honestly, can you call nose-length hair “bangs”?) was always in her face, and she was always trying to push the hair out of her eyes. It needed to happen, but it was hard for me, especially since I had to physically hold her head. She didn’t mind, though, because she was sucking on baby crack a cherry Dum-dum. Thanks, Tina.

To see more before, during, and after, go here.

Now with pictures!

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I am finding it hard to type, what with being jacked up on Albuterol and all. I had heard that phrase before–”jacked up on Albuterol“–and I assumed it was some sort of anti-depressant. Turns out it’s an asthma treatment. Huh. And that’s the end of the story of my bangin’ holiday vacation. Considering that I can actually inhale now, it’s actually a happy ending. Oh! Did I mention? I don’t even have asthma! It’s been quite the series of primarily unfortunate events, with a few sunny moments thrown in. The following, for your entertainment on the last day of 2007, is the story from the top.

Wednesday, December 19: While not technically a part of my vacation, I discovered late Wednesday afternoon that the 60 holiday cards I’d ordered from one of the cheaper online photo places (instead of the more expensive place with the prettier cards, oh no! because that order would have been about 80 bucks) were indeed WRONG. As in, “Our wish for 2007…” You know, the year that’s ENDING in a half hour. My mistake. Turns out, I should have held out a few more wishes for 2007, as you will soon discover. Instead I reordered the cards with the correct year, thus bringing my total payment to Cheap Photo Place to–yup–80 bucks. On the bright side, my mom, Little Sister, Mia and I picked up Middle Sister from the airport, so things seemed to be looking up by the end of the night.

Thursday, December 20: This should have been my last day at work before the holidays, but I took the day off to accompany my mother, aunt, and sisters to my five-months-deceased grandmother’s house to collect what belongings her asswipe husband deigned to share with us after all this time. My father was with me, he who has space to store the furniture my grandmother left me, and we left my house right after he fixed my dryer, which had been broken for over two weeks. I was starting in the black, see. We got there and did what we went to do and we left, and that’s really all I want to say about that particular segment of last Thursday for the time being.

My dad left from my grandmother’s with a truckload of stuff, and I flew home as fast as my car would carry me because from my grandmother’s we were all going to Charlotte to have Christmas at my aunt’s new house. Charlotte is a little over an hour from my house, and my plan was to leave home in time to feed Mia dinner by 7:30, which is pretty much her absolute threshold for the evening meal. I left my driveway at 6:00. At 6:15 as I pulled onto the sideroad that would take me to the interstate, I heard a loud ka-thunk-ka-thunk-ka-thunk sound. At first I thought it was the annoying music coming from the car behind me. It wasn’t, of course. It was coming from my car. Specifically, what used to be the right rear tire of my car. 

I’ll skip most of the details. My roadside assistance service arrived 40 minutes later. In the interim I tried to entertain my kid, who was becoming hungrier by the minute and not at all happy about being stationary in a dark car. The tow truck sound scared her. She cried through the whole spare tire experience. I drove to Gayle’s and she fed Mia while I transferred all my crap to her car. My new goal was to be in Charlotte by 9. Having never been to my aunt’s new house, I set her address on the navigator on my phone and hit the road. At 8:45, a mere 19 miles from my destination, traffic came to a dead stop. I could see red taillights for what seemed like infinity. I called my family to tell them I was stuck in traffic, and it was during that conversation that I discovered the following: earlier in the day while we were still hauling stuff from my grandmother’s to my mom’s, my aunt and my sister Little NOTICED THAT MY TIRE WAS FLAT. BUT FORGOT. TO. TELL. ME. People, when I FINALLY discovered the state of my tire, the wall was completely shredded from the tread. I had to get a new one. There was no repairing the damage. I don’t know about you, but I think Aunt and Little owe me a new tire.

I arrived at my aunt’s house at 11. It was raining. My kid, who had been asleep for most of the traffic stall (apparently caused by some sort of explosion earlier in the evening–seriously, a part of the metal guardrail was melted) turned into the Energizer Bunny as soon as we walked in the door and went to sleep at 2:30 in the next morning. The next day was great; we celebrated Mia’s first birthday with the family and left around 4 that afternoon. At home later that night I remember thinking to myself, “This is good. Now I can relax. NOW my vacation can begin.” Stupid, stupid woman.

Saturday, December 22: I had a long list of things to do–unpacking, cleaning, laundry–and did none of them, opting instead to stay in my jammies all day long and play with my kid, who also stayed in her jammies all day long. Which meant that on…

Sunday, Christmas Eve-Eve: …all the things I didn’t do on Saturday had to be done, plus all the other things I’d planned to do on Sunday in the first place. One of those things was having the dog bathed. Suzanna has been living in the garage since September, when she brought fleas into my house (yet another saga from the past few months I won’t get into now), fleas she got from the stray cat I adopted last year and am now trying to relocate. Cat, anyone? Sweet disposition, updated shots, no uterus. But I digress. I unloaded a large amount of money at National Pet Chain Store to have my poor flea-allergic smelly itchy dog bathed, de-fleaed, un-hot-spotted, and settled into a brand new bed. That night she woke me up four times during the night begging to go back to the garage. And the scratching, good lord, the scratching. The stuff I sprayed on the hot spots made me sneeze, or maybe it was the shampoo, and yet, the scratching never stopped. I decided she was just readjusting to the house, gave her some benadryl, and tried (unsuccessfully) to sleep.

Monday, Christmas Eve: The stuff I didn’t get done on Sunday (do you see a pattern here?) was waiting for me on Monday. I was exhausted from the previous night of no sleep. Mom, Middle, and Little were coming for dinner, a dinner I was making and for which I had no ingredients. This would be a great time to sing the praises of the most wonderful child on the planet. Not one time during anything I have described, nor during anything I will describe in the next several paragraphs, did my daughter lose her cool. No crying (well, except for the tire-changing incident), no fussing, no public outbursts. If not for her, in fact, I would probably still be sitting on the side of the road next to my grotesquely flat tire.

I was halfway through dinner preparation when my family arrived with a moving van full of presents, and we had a nice meal–a ratatouille dish much like the one from the cartoon (laugh if you want, but it was amazing) on a bed of couscous with goat cheese and french bread. Little and I stayed up until 3 a.m. watching Harry Potter 5, and everyone, including my daughter, slept until almost 11 Christmas Day.

Tuesday, Christmas Day: It was wonderful–a bright spot in a series of distressingly eventful days. It is best viewed, not described.

Wednesday, Mia’s Birthday: Mia and I went to my mom’s to help her go through all the stuff we took from my grandmother’s house. Did I mention? I don’t want to talk about that yet. We hung out with my mom and were (I’m afraid) more messy than helpful. We got home just in time for bed, and I was welcomed by a puddle of pee next to the front door. By this time the dog was really starting to wear out her welcome. I didn’t sleep well because my throat was scratchy and my nose was a bit runny and I had a bit of a dry cough. The smell of Suzanna–I’m not sure if it was the hot spot spray or the shampoo from Sunday’s bath or just her own weird smell–permeated my room…and my sinuses.

Thursday, December 27: Mia’s 1 year well baby check-up was at 1:15. She got shots and cried pitifully. Gayle came over and we had lunch and went to Target to buy cute little plates and napkins for Mia’s Saturday birthday party, which was being held at my friend and coworker MJ’s new house (because I wanted to invite more than 5 people, see, and my house is TEENY). Late that afternoon my throat felt really scratchy and I couldn’t stop coughing. I said out loud at one point, “I feel like I’m getting sick.” Mia’s eyes were watery and she had a slight runny nose. I decided that Suzanna could not stay in the house any longer because I was convinced that her weird smell was contributing to our allergic demise. I felt horribly guilty about giving Suzanna the boot, but she seemed okay with the arrangement and I had a party to plan. I bought wine and beer, cake supplies, chips and dips, and ingredients for a baked brie and some spinach rolls I found in a magazine. I was pumped. And I felt like shit.

Friday, December 28: We didn’t leave the house. Mia had a fever; I couldn’t breathe through my nose and my cough had deepened. By dark I was wheezing and Mia was a veritable fountain of snot. I decided that if she had a fever the next morning I would cancel or postpone the party. Still, I stayed up late and made the cake. You know, wishful thinking and all.

Saturday, December 29: If you guessed that my kid still had a fever on Saturday morning, you guessed wrong. She was fine–a bundle of energy and all smiles. Snotty, but smiley. I, on the other hand, was having trouble inhaling. My cough had worsened. The wheezing was audible. My head ached. I seriously considered sending Mia to her party without me. But I didn’t. I went on with it. I hauled all the food and the drink and the kid to MJ’s house (thankfully no presents–Mia has a registry at Heifer.org and has raised almost $500 for the organization in honor of her birthday). 

Anyway. I think the party was a success. I think people had a good time. Mia loved her cupcake, and friends of mine from different circles were mingling and making conversation, and the handful of kids who were there played like the best of friends. But honestly, there are parts of the afternoon I don’t particularly remember. By now my chest was actually hurting, and inhaling deeply was a physical impossibility. I was starting to get a little freaked out. Which is how it came to be that immediately after the party I found myself at an urgent care center near my house. While Mia played with Gayle in the waiting room, I got a shot of steroids in the buttocks and received a 30 minute Albuterol treatment. Comedienne Suzanne Westenhoefer does a bit in one of her old shows about how some Amish people in a community near where she grew up in PA got addicted to crack, and how they must have been speed-quilting and putting up barns single-handedly in mere hours. That’s how I felt after the breathing treatment. Like I could have cleaned my carpet by washing each fiber individually in 15 minutes. My organs were trembling, and I could feel them. My hands and arms seemed to be propelled by forces beyond my control. It was horrible. But not as horrible as not being able to breathe. That part was an improvement. The doctor sent me home with a high-powered expectorant/cough suppressant, a five-day round of steroids, and an asthma inhaler. He didn’t actually diagnose me with asthma but indicated that I could develop a chronic form of it as an adult, or even just have an acute case in the event that my immune system had been compromised for whatever reason. You know, like dead grandmother stuff and sleepless nights and weird dog smells and flat tires and the general stress of the holidays. Or something like that.

Sunday, New Year’s Eve-Eve: The twitches finally wore off after midnight and I slept well for the first night in over a week. I figured out that if I take Tylenol when I use the inhaler, I’m not quite as crawly and my sleep is not as disrupted. Mia is still a little font of snot, but she is undaunted and is equally interested in her birthday balloon (under strictly supervised circumstances, of course) and crawling under the table as she is in playing with her load of new toys. We’ve been playing a lot, and she’s been napping well, which means I’ve been lying around watching lots of movies. It sucks to be sick, but–fingers crossed–the major drama seems to be behind us.

Monday, New Year’s Eve: Actually, according to the TV in the background, it’s no longer New Year’s Eve. I can hear fireworks outside, and the ball just dropped, and I’ve kissed my sleeping daughter on the head. Let’s put ‘07 to bed, people. Here’s to a brilliant new year.

One year ago…

…today.

Happy birthday, my beautiful laughing girl, sweet love of my life.

So we ended up at the pediatrician’s office last Thursday evening, in the words of the nurse I spoke with earlier that day, “just to be on the safe side.” She asked me a bunch of questions about my baby’s girly parts, most of which I could not answer, and crooned sympathetically to me when I responded, “I feel stupid saying this, but I don’t know.” She assured me that I was not stupid, that everyone’s parts are different, and even if my baby’s weren’t the size of a grain of rice I still might have trouble seeing a problem. I cried secretly while she scheduled our appointment.

Apparently she does still have a “moderate adhesion,” but not enough to impede urination. She has no other symptoms, no fever, no redness, no weird lumps or other out-of-place things. No, folks, what we have here is a case of pee-holding. The ped told me to try putting her on the potty. What the ped doesn’t know is that she’s been experimenting with the potty for a little over a month. She likes to read there. Sometimes she pees. Occasionally she even poops. Yesterday I changed a total of three diapers; in between there was much peeing and pooping on the potty, and much hand clapping.

Of course, at the moment there is much weeping and gnashing of 3.5 small teeth. There was no napping today save our 25 minute drive home, so this house is going to bed early. When we say our night-night prayers, we’ll be asking for embryos to thrive and eggs to be fertilized, and for all the other uteri in between.

Yesterday Mia went almost 9 hours during the day without wetting her diaper. NINE. She did pee eventually; she was wet this morning when she got up at 7, and wet again at 10:3o. But she hasn’t been terribly active in that area today, and I’m starting to freak out a little. Because that is what I do.

At the 9 month appointment the ped told me she had a la.bi.al adhesion and told me to treat it with estrogen cream for 10 days.  She also told me to keep an eye on things and to reapply the estrogen cream if I noticed a recurrence of the adhesion. Um, yeah. The words “teeny,” “tiny,” and “extremely delicate” have taken on a whole new meaning for me. I am terrified I am going to hurt her, and she does not care for the inspection process, so I don’t know if we have a recurrence or not.

I have, of course, “researched” this malady obsessively, and I’ve learned that problems with urination only occur in extreme cases. I don’t know if I have an extreme case on my hands, or if my kid is holding her pee, or if she is dehydrated and not producing pee, or what. Please advise. How many times a day do 11.5 month-olds pee? Anybody else’s daughter have this problem, and if so, was it “extreme?” Any other words of advice? Meanwhile I’ll be backing away from my Google search results now. It’s scary there.

The following is my contribution for last Friday. 

When I was preparing for parenthood, I had all these theories and ideas about what kind of parent I would be and how I would handle certain situations. I think this is probably a universal trend. What mother in the world has not said, about one thing or another, “My child will never do that” or “I will never allow such and such in my house.” Yeah. I’d venture to say one of the biggest issues that we expound on before the little bundle arrives is sleep. Specifically, sleeping quarters, sleeping times, and that loaded and half-cocked gun, sleep training.

I have to interrupt myself for a moment, because I have this picture in my head of a bunch of moms in warm-up suits with whistles a-blowing, stomping around on a field teeming with crib-bound babies in various states: some are screaming, some are cooing at their mobiles, some are swaddled, some are flailing–and some are actually asleep. Because isn’t that the way it is? You can read all the manuals and employ every mother’s tried and true method, but ultimately it’s all about your individual baby. My baby is a champion sleeper who sings herself to sleep around 10:30 every night and sleeps in until after 10 every morning. You’d better believe I’m counting my blessings, because I know my next child could be up at the crack of dawn. Like, wide awake and ready to–gulp–start the day. But I digress.

One of those things I said I’d never do was keep Mia in my room at night. I did, of course. It was the first of many hearty servings of crow that I would (will) eat. She slept in one of those little sleeping boxes right in my bed until she was too long for it, and then she slept in the bassinet insert of the pack-and-play until she could roll over, and then she slept in the bottom of the pack-and-play. I kept inventing deadlines for her relocation, but then, at the last minute, I would move the deadline back. There was always some reason, some logic I could offer should someone ask me why (no one ever did), but the real reason I kept to myself: when she was a foot away from my bed I could hear her breathing. There is no more powerful sound than the pattern of her inhalation and exhalation, no sweeter music. I needed it close to me. It soothed me, and not in a calming-spa-relaxation kind of way. In an “Oh my god, is she still alive?!” kind of way. It was best that I didn’t have far to travel for confirmation.

But I knew it couldn’t last. I knew she needed the comfort of her own bed, her own room, her own space. She likes her crib and enjoys looking at the things in her room, and that’s as it should be in my opinion. So I set about establishing a new deadline. My aunt Mary’s July visit was a perfect opportunity, because I was giving her my room, so on the day of her arrival I folded up the pack-and-play and put it away. I inflated my air mattress and placed it on the floor next to the crib. I put Mia to bed that night and waited for a protest that never came. It was that simple. She was ready. I would have to adjust. And I did.

I’ve come a long way since then. I missed her closeness for a long time, but now I rather like having my space back. Sure, I still get up during the night to hear the breathing, and sure, I bring her to bed with me on the weekends after the early morning bottle, but we have a peaceful sleeping arrangement and it works for us. I am never so sure of how well it works for us until, because of travel or company, we have to share a room again.

When Mia was a tiny baby I put her to bed asleep. As she got older and more aware of her surroundings (read: easily distracted and more reluctant to just go to sleep because it was time to do so), I put her to bed awake at around the same time every night and, much to my smug delight, she would coo or fuss a little, or rarely, cry for a few minutes, and then she would fall asleep all by herself and stay that way all night long. See above re: my next baby will never sleep, ever. Nowadays she is awake every night when I put her to bed, and while she expresses in no uncertain terms that she’d really rather stay in my room at catch a few reruns of “Will and Grace*,” she gets over it quickly with the help of her aquarium and groovy ceiling nightlight. But when we are sleeping in someone else’s house or, God forbid, in a hotel room, and she is a strange pack-and-play, and she can SEE ME RIGHT THERE NEXT TO HER, all bets are off. Which is why, during our stay at my dad’s over Thanksgiving, the kid and I did not sleep much.

Were she not my kid, and just someone I was assigned to room with, I would have included the following in my letter of complaint to the establishment:

• tenant would not stop staring at me
• tenant threw things at me in an effort to get my attention
• tenant babbled loudly, and even screamed at times
• tenant continuously kicked the side of her bed, causing my bed to shake
• tenant smelled

Which brings me to my point. When you share a room with a baby for almost 7 months you get used to things–sounds, movements, smells. They become part of the sleeping experience, part of the background. You just don’t notice them after a while. Fast forward four months. The background changes. You get used to the absence of certain things. Like being stared at from a short distance, and weird odors. That which used to be the norm is now a reason to wake suddenly from a deep sleep, sit up in the semi-darkness, inhale deeply, and say to the small figure whose face is pressed firmly into the mesh of the nearby pack-and-play and who has probably been staring at you for some time, “It smells like poop in here.”**

I used to sleep through passing trains, low-flying airplanes, the sounds of the dirt racetrack near my granparents’ house. Now smells wake me. Having a baby really does change everything.

*TV is another plate of crow I’ve had to eat. I vowed never to have it on while Mia was in the room, but that didn’t last. She doesn’t really watch TV, but now she is in love with those pink cow creatures and Elmo, and she will stop whatever she is doing and dance to the “Reba” theme song.

**My kid never, ever poops in the middle of the night. I’m pretty sure she was expressing her opinion about the sleeping arrangements, which, as you might have gathered, did not meet with her approval.

What? I’m supposed to have WORDS?

Okay: Read Catherine Newman’s Waiting for Birdy. Very funny, and so, so true. And so much more interesting than ANYTHING I might crank out here tonight.

Last night I was looking at some pictures of Mia from over the summer, and I came across one of her lying placidly next to Suzanna the Dog on an afghan my friend Cheryl’s mother made. Mia was staring over at the dog with a look that held the perfect combination of wonder and oblivion; Suzanna was looking all, “I used to lie on blankets. I used to have my own blankets. Now I have to lie on carpet. Hmmmph.” I had put Mia down on the afghan and stepped out of the room for a moment, and Suzanna had jumped at the chance to lounge on the Forbidden Blanket. It’s a sweet picture, and looking at it caused a little pang of nostalgia to erupt in my chest. Before you go all misty-eyed and start nodding your head, thinking I am about to expound on the loss of infancy and how sad it makes me that my baby is growing up too fast, put away your Kleenex. That pang I felt was tied to the fact that I can’t just put her down in the floor for a few minutes anymore. Gone are the days when I can go pee whenever the urge strikes me. Now I have to plan trips to the bathroom carefully. I have to make sure the Bumbo is in the bathroom so she can sit at my feet and look at a book or lick her reflection in my hand mirror or bang on the wall with my hair brush, because now when I put her down on the floor, she crawls away at the speed of a shrill scream.           

Other things have changed as well. There was a time in the not so distant past when Mia would sit in her high chair or the Bumbo and look at a book of my choice for 20 or 30 minutes straight. She will still sit and flip through a book—as far as she is concerned, the best invention since the printing press—but she wants to pick the book, and she doesn’t want to be stationary. Lest you think my child is a delicate flower who crawls deliberately over to the shelf and gazes at the spines, occasionally reaching up to stroke one, ultimately settling on a classic volume penned by A.A. Milne or Eric Carle, let me set the record straight. Picking a book requires unshelving every single volume, usually with some over the shoulder tossing action, like she is frantically saving them from some impending doom and she just doesn’t have time to explain. Sometimes the books in question actually belong to her. After all the books have been freed, she crawls around in them, finding a nice sturdy one to sit on, and then she handles all the ones she can reach. Some she opens and peers into, others she picks up and immediately tosses back into the pile, until she finds The One. Most of the time she chooses a book I received free in the mail called Baby Faces or a Todd Parr title, but I’m not going to lie to you: a lot of the time she picks a clothing catalogue. She prefers Land’s End over Eddie Bauer, and she is particularly fond of the shoe section.           

And God forbid I try to remove a catalogue or one of my personal books from her vice-like grip. Oh, dear people, you should tremble in the face of her wrath! She has been perfecting her tantrum from an early age. I believe I photographed one when she was just shy of six months old, and I was laughing as I released the shutter. Now, almost six months later, the ability to stand while holding onto something has given her tantrum a whole new dimension. Now when she arches her back and flings herself into the space behind her, be it carpet or mattress or wall or water, I do not laugh. I attempt to keep her from cracking her skull or drowning, and I attempt to control my own irrational irritation with her random fury by saying things like, “WHAT is WRONG with you?” over and over through gritted teeth, or, on a good day, in a funny little voice, “What’s wrong little Pookie, why are you so mad?” I’ll tell you, little Pookie is not amused. And actually, these moments of fire and brimstone are not frequent. Not that she doesn’t have a temper all the time, but mostly she expresses it in different ways, different being the operative word. She has typical frustration reactions—throwing whatever innocent object has offended her, for example, or screaming, but her favorite expression of frustration is trilling. Rolling her tongue. You know, like you learn to do in Spanish class. She used to do it all the time, but now she only does it when she’s mad. She is like a cross between a little African tribeswoman and a tiny terrorist. If her first discernable word is “infidel” I am enrolling her in military preschool immediately.            

I kid. Actually, she already has discernable words. When I was pregnant—in fact, I believe it was Christmas Day, the last day I was pregnant—my mom made the statement that she couldn’t wait to hear Mia’s voice. At the time I assumed she meant, literally, her very first utterance, which sounded a lot like a cross between the mew of a kitten and the staccato bleat of a goat. But in retrospect I think she meant speaking voice, a sound we hear a lot around here these days. Mia is a talker. For the past two months or so she has “talked” to herself or “read” aloud in this little under-the-breath mutter (imagine her eyes are narrowed and she is wringing her hands) that makes me think she is plotting my downfall.  But in the past few weeks she has started talking. Conversationally. Like, with emotion and inflection and emphasis on certain words. Sometimes she will say something, and then after a moment of silence (presumably to allow someone else to respond), she will laugh and laugh, as if she just made the world’s most hilarious observation about Republicans or the absurdity of reality television. While I’m fairly certain she is speaking Portuguese or Swahili, I love the sound of her little voice, and when she says actual recognizable things, like Mama or Buh (book, ball, bath, take your pick), I swoon.           

I could write all day about how rapidly she is growing and changing—how there was a time when she would willingly eat whatever I offered her, but now she has to touch it and inspect it, and sometimes she rolls it around in her mouth and then spits it out and looks at me like I just fed her cyanide disguised as a pear cube. Or how she dances whenever anything remotely like music drifts into earshot, and how, if I am singing to her in the early morning after she has finished her bottle and I make the mistake of stopping because I have drifted off, she will jerk her whole body and grunt so I will continue my random hum-a-thon of Christmas carols and gospel hymns. Or how that little four-key piano I bought her months ago has finally become interesting, and how she plays it with her feet while sitting or standing on it, a miniature Jerry Lee Lewis in footy pajamas. Or how she points at everything and murmurs, “dah?” like a question or a revelation, as if she is both questioning and acknowledging the existence of everything she sees. I could go on and on, but my point in the end would be the same: she isn’t a baby anymore, my Mia. And even though I thought I would get all weepy over this fact and pine over the early days and weeks and months of her life, I don’t.            

Here’s the thing: we get very wrapped up in the idea of wanting a baby, and by “we” I mean us, the girls who, for months and even years, chart our cycles and take our morning temperature like some religious ritual and examine our bodily fluids like we’re reading the future; and by “baby” I mean pregnancy, because ultimately, it isn’t really a baby we want. We just don’t know it isn’t what we want, because for all the months it takes us to conceive one, it’s all we can think about. And for those of us lucky enough to actually knock ourselves up, we fixate on this being inside us and our preparation for its arrival. But for me, at least, the baby part lasted all of the two days I was in the hospital. I remember very clearly the day I brought her home: I am sitting in the chair in her room, holding her tiny swaddled form on my lap, and I am on the phone scheduling her first appointment with the pediatrician. I say aloud to the nurse, “I need to make an appointment for my daughter,” and when I hang up I am stunned and overwhelmed by what I just heard come out of my own mouth. I say it again to myself, over and over in my head, like a mantra. Daughter, daughter, daughter. Sure, at the time she was a baby, but even in the two days since her birth she had changed, and in that word I could already see the years stretched out before me, the worry and the frustration and the pure joy and the overwhelming love. She would be my baby for a few months, but she would always be my child, my daughter. It occurred to me in that moment that I had never actually wanted a baby. Ultimately I had been yearning for this more complicated and complex thing, this three-dimensional being with a personality and a mind of her own, and here she is, every single day, a person. I think about my mom and wonder if she misses the infant and toddler versions of my sisters and me, or does she, like me, look at us and think, Daughters, daughters, look at all my daughters!            

Last night as I looked at the picture of my kid and my dog sharing a moment on the blanket, I glanced over at Mia, who loves examining my computer and was trying to catch a glimpse, and said, “Look at how little you were!” And then, frustrated because she couldn’t climb my leg, she let out an angry trill, and when I picked her up she wrapped her arms around my neck and said “MAma,” and her emphasis on that first syllable sounded a little like, “FINALLY!” and I thought, That’s my girl. That’s my daughter. She is every dream I’ve ever dreamed, and all the love I am capable of feeling, and all the joy in my life, and all the sorrow and all the fear, and I can say truthfully that I don’t have time to miss three or six or nine months ago, because every single day she grows in every sense of the word, and my dreams and love and joy and sorrow and fear grow right along with her. I am too busy marveling at who she is in this moment to miss who she used to be. She is like Midas, only the wealth she creates isn’t material, and yet, I am the richest woman in the world.

We have this autumnal practice here in the south of going to “see color.” Leaf color, that is. It usually involves the car and a day trip to somewhere due north or west–somewhere where there are mountains. I’m guessing this is because, for the most part, the fall color in this particular region usually lasts for around, oh, 30 minutes before the leaves all turn brown and fall to the ground.

Not true this year. Yesterday I had to drive to a neighboring city for a school library conference, and I was stunned by the beauty of the trees lining the highway. It was breathtaking. If I didn’t know any better I would have thought I was looking at an artificial backdrop that someone hand painted. There was just enough balance of reds, oranges, and golds, with the occasional evergreen thrown in. The trees were bold and bright, and they blended perfectly into one another, and against yesterday’s weird half sunny-half gunmetal gray sky, they were as beautiful as any autumn mountain vista I’ve ever seen.

Even though it was the buttcrack of dawn, and even though I was late to my conference, and even though my university adviser and district supervisor told me there was really nothing they could do if my principal decided I had to teach a class, the leaves were beyond gorgeous. It was the best part of my day.

That is, until I went home to this:

And also, this:

If you braved the poop segment of yesterday’s post, you’ll be thrilled to know today’s batch was a-okay. I’m citing the blueberry applesauce as the culprit, and to further my research I served said blueberry applesauce for lunch today. Tomorrow’s results will be the deciding factor in whether or not I continue to worry. About this. There will always be something else.

 ~

We ventured out to Target this evening, even though at 5:30 it felt like 9. Seriously, this time of year is hard on my psyche. Anyway, on the way I encountered stupidity at its scariest–people doing stupid crap behind the wheel of a vehicle. The following is my Dumbass Awards Presentation for the evening:

In third place is one of my biggest pet peeves: that person who clearly saw me waiting to make a left turn at an intersection and fully intended to turn right into the same intersection but DID NOT INDICATE AS MUCH WITH HIS BLINKER. This is mere common courtesy, like not letting the door slam in the face of the person five steps behind you. Thanks for making me wait, Dude.

Coming in second was the woman who, presumably for safety’s sake, had pulled over on the side of the road to have a cell phone conversation. Now before you’re all like, “Hey, now, maybe she was having car trouble,” let me assure you that I’m fairly certain that was not the case. Her interior lights were on but not her hazard lights. Thanks to said interior lights I could see her flipping through what appeared to be a calendar or notebook. She was laughing. How could I see all of this in the dark while I myself was driving? Because she was blocking traffic on a side street, and what else could I do but STARE INCREDULOUSLY INTO HER CAR as I drove slowly around her?

And in first place tonight is the guy driving that enormous truck pulling the trailer full of lawn equipment who cruised down the middle of a street of normal width even as oncoming traffic practically pulled onto the sidewalk to avoid a collision. I could have parked a motor home in the space to this guy’s right; unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the space to his left, which is, of course, where I was attempting to drive. This one doesn’t even need further discussion–he is by far the clear winner. Congratulations, Idiot.

~

I’m not sure, but I think I’m a little crabby. I think I need to go have dinner. Or a half gallon of peppermint ice cream. Thanks, Cali. (No, really, that I mean. That wasn’t sarcasm at all. It’s the best ice cream EVAH. It’s like eating winter. I am SO having peppermint ice cream for dinner.)

My grand NaBloPoMo plan to write during some quiet coffee break or snack time at work was apparently a big joke. Thus, for the third or fourth night in a row, I find myself sitting at the computer when I should be getting ready for bed. In fact, I considered skipping tonight and going on to bed around 9:30, but then something happened that couldn’t be ignored.

I was reading this post and laughing right out loud when, as if she, too, were reading it, my daughter, the Queen of the Impossibly Hard BM (for the past several weeks), pooped. Audibly. Just like the baby in the post. I’m reading and laughing, and I’m laughing at my kid who is red-faced and quite noisy, and I’m going, “Ewwwww, gross, I hate it when that happens.” And then everything got very quiet, and also very smelly, and I thought to myself, “Gee. That smells runny.”

The next few minutes were a blur of  discovery and clean-up, and while I’m glad to report there was no animal involvement in this poop event, Mia’s jeans were not so lucky. For once I’m kind of glad she wasn’t sitting on my lap. Now excuse me while I examine my carpet.

She is wearing one sock and her hair clasp is hanging by a few strands. Dressed in hand-me-down PJs, the red ones that belonged to Matthew with the yellow dump truck on the front, she rubs her eyes with one fist and pulls the Wee Hairy Beastie to her cheek with the other. I pick her up and her head goes immediately to my shoulder, and I inhale her, all applesauce and generic baby shampoo and sweat. Minutes from now we will be curled up in my bed, she with her bottle and me with my baby, some book held out in front of us that I’ll attempt to read while she flips the pages back and forth, back and forth. She will fall asleep next to me, and I will drift in and out of my novel, the one I have started three times now, until finally I have to carry her to her own bed and call it a night because I just can’t hold my eyes open any longer. I could write more after that, after sleep has settled her and the house is still, but we all know I won’t. On this late fall night, with its premature darkness and crisp fall breeze, I will tell myself it is enough that I came here to offer up this excuse: my daughter is sleepy, and she is reaching out her arms to me.

I started doing these little monthly updates for the same reason that a certain well-known blogger does monthly letters about her daughter: changes, both physical and mental, happen so fast with babies, and I didn’t want to forget anything and end up posting something in December like, “You’ve grown a lot.  You’re a year old. You’re a big girl now.” Unfortunately, I’m pretty much at that point at present. I believe my last monthly update was in June, and if I remember correctly, it was actually addressing things that happened in May. Lots of things have happened since then. In truth, you have grown a lot, and you are a big girl now. I know, I know…it’s only downhill from this point. But instead of looking at my lack of monthly updates as a failure, I’m going to approach the task from now on in the same way I might approach, say, a baseball game. I call myself a fan, but I don’t really have the staying power to sit through a game, so I have the TV on in the background, but mainly I just want the highlights.

Incidentally (she scrambles to clarify with horror), I am not comparing my parenting style to this method of viewing baseball. I am in merely criticizing my own blogging habits. I am a bad blogger. I do not think I am a bad mommy. You may claim otherwise in the future, but it will most likely be because you are 12 and pissed that I took away your stash of Absolut. For now, though, if motherhood were a baseball game I would be right there on the front row, or on the field, or in the dugout, or, as my life goes lately, in all those places at once. But lately I am more of a listen-to-baseball-from-the-kitchen-while-I-fold-laundry-and-do-dishes sort of blogger. Just to clarify.

That being said, the following is not a play-by-play of the past few months, but rather a rundown of the highlights. These highlights are not really in order, and my definition of highlights may not necessarily reflect the kinds of things baby books have stickers for, and some of the highlights are more like lowdowns, and since that probably makes no sense I will start there.

• You are not even nine months old, and already you have been to three funerals. Two of them were for your great-grandmothers. It pains me–physically, deep in my heart–that they aren’t around to see you, to enjoy the little person you continue to become. They both got to meet you, though, and Mama was probably the first person besides Dr. T. to witness your birth, because every time I looked up in the delivery room her face was peeking over his shoulder. Lately I get the feeling she’s peeking over mine, so maybe she’s watching you evolve after all.
• Your personal transportation skills are wonderous to behold. Last week you used all fours to crawl, but for the past 6 weeks or so you have not so much crawled as sped across the floor in a rendition of The Worm. The only thing missing is 80s music, a headband, and a pair of leg warmers. Your latest feat is standing; you pull up on everything, and now you are starting to move sideways while holding onto things, and next you will be walking. When that day comes I will either have to sell all our belongings and become a stark minimalist, or I will have a ceiling installed on the top of your play yard (because you are also starting to understand the mechanics of climbing, and I am starting to be afraid, very afraid).
• You seem to have a texture infatuation. Whenever your hand makes contact with any surface, up to and including my flesh, you make a little scratching motion with your fingers. Sometimes this action results in sound (like when you scratch the wall next to the changing table) and you do it over and over and over until I have to find something soundless to shove under your hand lest my eyeballs explode. You also like to run your fingers through things–carpet, my hair, the cat if he’ll allow it–and you like gripping soft things like blankets, clothes, and your Wee Hairy Beastie. And also, when I am leaning over you changing your diaper, my boob, which you also use as a handle when pulling up to a standing position.  
• You are freakishly like me in many ways. For example, I am a texture freak as well. Also, you hold your pinkie finger out for no obvious reason; I do this, also for no reason in particular. Most recently, your preference for having your face covered while sleeping has become quite pronounced, a preference I have as well. It baffles me that at 8 months old you do things I have done my whole life. How did you learn these things? Is there a gene for “sleeping with face covered”?
• Blowing raspberries is one of your life’s passions.
• You have experienced lots of firsts lately. You rode a boat and a golf cart for the first time. You went to your first baseball game over the summer, and last week you attended your first high school football game. We were sitting right under a loudspeaker, so I was sure the announcing would scare you, but you seemed not to notice it. What scared the daylights out of you, I am sorry to say, was another baby. This particular baby is a month younger than you, but you are the same size, and every time she “talks” to you, you have a complete meltdown. I don’t understand it. Is she saying something mean? And finally, you saw your first live cow a few days ago. You love “fake” cows–stuffed, sculpted, painted–and you love other animals, so I thought the cow would be a hit. I think I can safely say you didn’t actually SEE the cow, so fascinated were you by a giant paper Taco Bell cup on the ground outside the pasture fence.
• You have two teeth now, both on the bottom. I had been waiting and looking for the first one for so long that I didn’t even notice when it finally popped. The second one was a different story. I actually considered helping it along with a pair of pliers at one point, but it is finally visible and the whining, GOOD LORD, the whining, is starting to diminish.
• You are a constant source of joy. This, above all, is how I would define my time with you so far: joyful. You laugh so easily, and you are interested in everything around you, and when I come home in the afternoons and you see me and your squeal with delight, I feel a gratitude to the universe so big and powerful it takes my breath away. I know every mom probably feels this way about her kid, but I believe you are special. There’s nobody on earth like you, and now that I have you in my life, I understand all the things that came before, all the trouble and sorrow and work, all the growing and learning and living: it was leading me to you. And just so you know, I’d do it all again.

Ti amo,

Mommy

Coming soon: highlights from this month in words and pictures.
08 25 07 009 copy, originally uploaded by tbgdee.

Remember that thing I told you about the other day, the really horrible thing? I am choosing not to speak of it at this time. It is even more horrible than I thought, and I don’t want to talk about it right now. Nonetheless, I appreciate the wishes of love and light more than you know.

What I would really like to talk about today is this little person with whom I now share a life, this little person who, in the weeks and weeks when I was not blogging, turned 6 and then 7 months old. I know I am biased, but she is truly amazing, and while the rapid passing of time is a little bothersome to me, I don’t really have time to be sad about her growing up right before my eyes, because watching her grow up right before my eyes is entertainment at its finest. With this to watch on a daily basis, who has time to pine about the past?

When she was brand new and just starting to grow into herself, I worried about milestones and development; I worry less about those things now. Who am I to pass judgement on when my daughter sits up when I, after almost 33* years of living, still walk full speed into door frames and trip over hairline cracks in the sidewalk? No, it is better to focus on her special skills and talents. For example:

• She can trill–roll her tongue–like a proper Spanish or Italian speaker, something many adults I know cannot do. Not only does she possess this skill, but she also has the ability to add different sounds to the trill. Sometimes she sounds like an exotic jungle bird, and sometimes she sounds like a motor, and sometimes she sounds like Cujo preparing to chew through a chain-link fence.
• One of her favorite foods is the Cheerio, slightly dampened and in large quantities. I have watched her pick up a Cheerio in a delicate manner, with her thumb and index finger, her tiny pinky extented. However, this is not her preferred mode of eating Cheerios. Mostly she picks up handfuls with both fists and shoves her hands into her mouth while making a hungry, enthusiastic chomping sound to rival Cookie Monster.
• She is an accomplished kicker. There is never a time when her feet are not moving. Even when she is on her belly doing her version of crawling (or The Worm, which is a much more accurate label) she is tapping the top of her right foot on the ground. It is cute, the kicking, until it gets all up close and personal with y