Category Archive

Before you close this page and vow never to darken the doors of my Small Corner again, rest assured that my prejudices are not related to race, gender, sexuality, or religion. Well, I’m not really fond of the Baptists, but that’s a generalization I’m working through. No, my prejudices have nothing to do with skin color or lifestyle–unless you are, say, a gay Asian Catholic who happens to be OBNOXIOUS. Yep, that’s right, I don’t like obnoxious people. There, I said it. Do you still love me? Can we hug?

Seriously. I suppose I have always known this about myself, but in my insular little world, where I get to choose (for the most part) the people I encounter, I don’t often have to deal with it. I shop at the same grocery store every week, eat at the same handful of restaurants, buy coffee from the same Starbucks. Sure, there are obnoxious people at those places, but I have learned their patterns, because they, like me, are creatures of habit. That woman in the white Lexus SUV is always going to cut into the Starbucks drive-through line without going around like everyone else, and that surly teenage girl at the supermarket is never going to be happy when she sees me coming through the U-Scan line with all of my reusable shopping bags. There are even obnoxious people at work, and I know how to minimize my face time with them. I should note that kids don’t count because they are pre-programmed to be obnoxious, particularly teenagers, and while it’s annoying, I try not to hold it against them. It’s the Obnoxiuos Adult that bothers me, the individual who ought to know better, and probably does, but still chooses to wave his (or her) Ass Flag high and proud. And there’s no place like a touristy vacation spot to see those flags waving. Consider the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: The Restaurant

Last Wednesday while at the beach we had dinner at That Restaurant Owned by the Cool Dude Who Sings the Anthem to a Particular Tequila-based Beverage. We were on the patio where there was great live music and a nice breeze coming in off the fake lake surrounding the place. It was a great. Everyone was having fun–the waitstaff, the people standing in line to get in, even Mia, who was flirting with the waiter and shaking her little booty to the music. She even loved that every 30 minutes the lights would dim, and Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel would appear on the big screen TVs to announce a ”Hurricane Party Warning.” Inside the restaurant (which we could see through a huge picture window) an enourmous fake hurricane funnel would start spinning, complete with lightning and thunder, and a giant bottle of tequila would emerge from the center of it and appear to pour tequila into a giant shot glass. Then Cool Dude Restaurant Owner would sing his tequila drink anthem on the big screens and the entire place would clap and sing along. The first few times it was a blast. Then the Obnoxious People came.

Apparently, unbeknowst to the rest of the restaurant’s patrons, there was a So You Think You Can Whistle contest going on at the Obnoxious People’s table. At completely random intervals and for no apparent reason, one of the Obnoxious People would whistle. By whistle I mean he would insert his index fingers into his mouth and let out an ear-piercing scream of a sound that made people jump, and that is saying a lot considering how loud this place was. And just when everyone had recovered from the last whistle, he, or one of his Obnoxious Friends, would do it again. And every time one of them whistled, Mia would have a total meltdown–a pitiful, startled, shaking, fingers-gripping-my-shirt meltdown. I would have her calm and ready to go back into her high chair when the next whistle was dispatched, and with each whistle she calmed less and less, so that by the time my food came she was a wreck and I had to put my meal in a styrofoam box and go sit with her on a bench outside the restaurant.

Scenario 2: The Pool

You know in cartoons when they play ominous dramatic music to indicate that something bad is about to happen, and then you see what appears to be an enormous menacing figure in shadow wielding what looks like the world’s longest Samurai sword, but then the angle changes and it’s just a cricket in front of a light with a blade of grass in its mouth? Last Wednedsay afternoon at the pool the scene was the exact opposite of that. There was cool music playing on the pool sound system, and I was floating dreamily along in the lazy river with Mia stretched out in front of me. The sun wasn’t too hot, and the breeze wasn’t too cool. And then some people came into the pool area–three or four kids and three grown women who had obviously come in off the beach and were looking to settle at the pool for a while. Groovy, I thought. And then three things happened: they settled right next to the lazy river, they started talking, and they got IN the lazy river. I watched in horror as the cute little cricket morphed into a murderer of peace.

For starters, they took up the entire pool deck area next to the lazy river, part of which was intended to be a walkway, and if someone needed to get by, well tough shit. They weren’t moving. Not even if you said excuse me, or if you were carrying a squirmy toddler. Once they got settled in they started talking–some of them to each other, and some of them to remote parties via cell phone, and some of them to both at the same time. I don’t tend to be one of those people who gets all irate when someone is having a cell phone conversation in public, but there are cell phone conversations, and then there are CELL PHONE CONVERSATIONS. In this particular scenario it was the latter, and there was lots of crowing and hooting and screeching involved, as well as lots of stopping in the middle to repeat to someone at the pool what the person on the line had just said. But all of that was nothing compared to the lazy river.

At first it was just the kids, and as I said before, kids this age (12-15 or so) are often pre-programmed to be obnoxious. Unless their parents are watching them, and then all pardons are off, because HELLO, if your kid is actually knocking people off of their lazy river floats, you should do something about it. But it was soon clear that this was acceptable behavior, because when the adults got in the lazy river a few minutes later, they acted exactly the same way. Yes, people, I watched grown women knock little children into the wall and into the water of the lazy river. I had gotten out by this time, so I had a prime view of the action: the women made a dramatic point of walking into the lazy river with no floats, then decided to get on the floats in the deeper water where there are no helpful steps to aid in the process. There was a LOT of screaming and splashing, and they completely stopped the flow of traffic, and then, oh good lord in heaven, one of them fell off and GOT HER HAIR WET. I am surprised that no hotel personnel or beach lifeguards came running, because her shouts of, “Oh God, my HAIR! MY HAIR!” were so loud and desperate that she might have been saying, “Oh God, my HEART! MY HEART!” Thankfully, the trauma of WET HAIR IN A SWIMMING POOL was enough to drive them back to their rooms for the remainder of the afternoon.

Scenario 3: The Wrong Room

Their rooms, which were on the same floor as our room. Which is how it came to be that the next morning at 7:45 there was a loud insistent pounding on our door. Guess who! It was one of the ADULT WOMEN, and when the door opened revealing total strangers she said, “Sorry, wrong room,” and then turned around and yelled, without leaving the vicinity of our door, “IT’S NOT THIS ONE! TRY 317!!” So yeah, they were just knocking on doors. At 7:45 in the morning. Hoping to find…I have no idea.

And yes, in case you were wondering, my daughter, who slept through a 45 minute alarm and evacuation, woke up when she heard the pounding on the door.

So maybe I am being unreasonable (and I know I can count on you to tell me if that is the case), but there seems to be a definite lack of consideration for others on our planet, especially among the vacationing (is this because people throw their manners out the window on vacation?). I can admit that encountering bad behavior makes me prickle and fantasize about payback, but I’m not really a vengeful person, and I’m definitely not interested in putting more obnoxious juju out there in the universe. Mostly I want to teach my offspring how to be kind and compassionate, even when she is faced with a singular lack of kindness and compassion, and I don’t think hearing her mother say, “Yeah, bitch, WRONG ROOM” is an appropriate lesson for that objective. So what’s a girl to do? How do you deal? And if you have kids (or are planning to), how do you teach them to wave their peace flag high, even as the wind from the waving of those other flags blows sand in their eyes?

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!”

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.

While some of you were digging your way out of a winter’s worth of snow yesterday, we in the southeastern states were battling the first badass thunderstorms of the spring season*. I was at work when the first one started. I haven’t mentioned this in a while, but I work in a POD, which is really just a large metal trailer. I was here alone because all the sensible people left right after the final bell to beat the storm, so I was a little nervous. Maybe it was my imagination, but I think the building actually shook a little, and when I walked over to a window to have a look outside, a gust of wind picked that moment to slam into that particular side of the pod, and I could actually feel it through the glass. So there I am, standing in the middle of the room freaking out inside, when the double outside doors flew open and wind, rain, and lima bean-sized hail began pouring into the room. Into the library. All over the books.

For one brief moment I panicked, and then I sprang into action. I threw myself into the doorway, grabbed first one door, then the other, and pulled against the wind with every fiber of my being until the doors were latched. I was drenched, as was our floor, but thankfully the shelves protected the books in the path of the gush. One small title that was on display on top of a shelf, a biography of John McCain, got soaked and is now recovering under a vent. I dried out just in time to get wet again on the way to my car, but I left feeling very heroic. I saved the books from the scary storm! I am a superhero! I am a protector of libraries! Now if only I had a cape….

And there may be a cape in my future, thanks to Prizey and

Actually, in Mia’s future, and it’s not really a cape so much as a very cool, very stylish kids’ poncho. But if my kid’s imagination is nearly as grand as my own she will totally call it a cape, and that makes me want to win one even more.

*I know some southern states have been hit hard with tornadoes this winter, but it’s been pretty calm here on the seaboard. I hope places like Tennessee and Alabama have a calm tornado season, as they’ve had quite enough to deal with during the off-season.

This is how over graduate school I am: on Monday night I spent a considerable amount of time trying to create a stick figure with a big butt. I did it, too, so the night was not a total loss. The key, for those of you now pulling out a pencil and some scrap paper, is to draw your figure facing either the 5- or 7-o’clock direction, and to emphasize the curvature of the upper back leg.

There is more to this (the graduate school bit, not the stick figure bit)–an entire post, in fact, that I pencilled in my notebook after the stick figure victory, plus another hand-written one after that, not to mention the three remaining drafts I have saved in wordpress. The trouble is that I don’t have time for completion. I spent a guilt-filled day at work not working on work-related work, opting instead to pour myself into an assignment that is due in one of my classes on Friday. Seven straight hours I analyzed the demographic statistics of my school. Seven, and I didn’t even finish. So after I put my kid to bed at 10:30, I will continue to analyze demographics, and I will be careful not to mention in the part about school climate that the reason we have behavior problems at my school is a direct result of Satan being a blood relative of 75.4% of our student body.

Meanwhile, I know you are all jealous. “What? Statistical analysis? Lucky bitch!” So here are some statistics for you to pour over:

• 13: the number of months my daughter mysteriously turned last week when I wasn’t looking
• none: the amount of elastic remaining in the underwear I am currently wearing
• 64: the number of times I have reached down the back of my jeans to pull up my underwear
• 6: the number of days it has been since I vacuumed
• -1: the number of hours I will have to vacuum when I get home tomorrow in preparation for my friend Linda’s visit, because she is scheduled to arrive before I even leave work
• 11: the number of weeks that have passed since I last had a haircut
• 2 billion: the number of times in the past 5 days I have considered shaving my head
• 7: the number of times my kid has tried to get my attention in the past 10 minutes that I’ve been sitting at the computer
• 0: the amount of time I’m going to continue thwarting her attempts to play with me

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.

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.

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.

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.

In keeping with my temporary time warp, I’d like to announce that this is [my post for] Friday, November 2. Got it? Good.

It has been a long, long week. We were out of town last weekend, and a certain baby I know, who usually goes to sleep by 10:30 and sleeps for 12 hours, was awake until 1 a.m. last Saturday night and up by 8:30 Sunday morning. Add several wrong number calls during the night and a really noisy heat/AC unit, and you have one really groggy Mommy. I am only now starting to recover. Needless to say, I am really glad it’s Friday. (See there, how I can just pretend with such ease that it’s a full 24 hours ago?)

It has been a tense few weeks here at Pod HS*. Last week we had a fire in one of our buildings. It was set intentionally, discovered and contained quickly, and arrests have been made, but it caused a great deal of chaos and anxiety considering its proximity to the anniversary of that other fire. We’ve come a long way in a year. Every morning I watch the large expanse of earth where the school used to stand look more and more like the foundation of something permanent. A year ago today I sat in shocked silence and watched the footage of the inferno on television. Today I watched our students on the news at 6 a.m. where they did the electric slide and cheered on our football team at a pep rally hosted by a local news station. A year ago I dreaded going to work because of Principal. New-and-Improved Principal is a welcome change. I won’t lie to you: we still have our problems. Those kids I bitched about all last year? They are still with us, and our administration, while much improved, is still often at a loss where flogging and torturebehavioral prevention and maintenance are concerned. At least Principal is elsewhere, bringing down the status quo of some other high school, spreading her own brand of crazy over some other area of the state.

As for me, I try keeping my eyes focused on the bright side. Being in the library has been, and continues to be, an adjustment for me, but I am grateful for the change (read: glad I don’t have to spend all day with 14-year-olds). I have made some new friends at work, something I find very hard to do (Look! It’s 7th grade!). The new school that’s currently a flat piece of red dirt is going to be a beautiful, state-of-the-art structure, and maybe they won’t cut my position so I can work there when it’s finished.

But enough about work.

I have been searching the internet and reading all the books I own about The Baby and How it Works, but I have some unanswered questions about food (or should I say, questions I can’t seem to get a straight answer to), and I’d like some input from you Mommy people.

1. About eggs. According to my ped, “they” are moving the egg green light to 18-24 months. I get that: no straight up eggs for the kid. But what about things cooked with eggs? Does this mean no taste of my nonfat muffin from the coffee shop? Does this mean no pancakes? Does this mean any product that contains eggs PERIOD is off limits?
2. When did you give your kid fish? Not shellfish, just regular, run-of-the mill white fish? There is much conflicting information on this topic.
3. For those of you who eat tofu, can you give me some recipes? I want to try it, but I don’t know what to do with it.
4. I feel like Mia’s menu is a bit of a bore. I know, I know, she’s only 10 months old, but really, how many servings of pears, bananas, carrots, and sweet potatoes can one girl eat? What did your 10-month-old like to eat?

Fire away, girls.

*I have no idea if I’ve described our temporary school here or not. It’s made up of 10 modular buildings called “pods,” which are way nicer than they sound, and the source of myriad jokes about the “pod people” who inhabit them.

I was cleaning off my desk today and discovered a piece of computer paper with the following list scratched haphazardly in pencil and ink:

cookies/bakies
HP
2 brothers gored in ass–bulls
Blogger: real name?
tic-tac commercials
baby arms & legs –> crib
sickness
Astelin–taste
book 7, movie 5

I had to read over it a few times to realize that it was a list of things I wanted to blog about. It is a testament to their significance, or lack thereof, that I don’t even remember a few of them. The ass-goring, for example. I think that was a news headline that greeted me one morning; I was amused and thought it deserved some attention. Or not. I think, however, that the remainder of the list is intact somewhere in my brain, particularly the last item, as I am placing full responsibility for my weeks and weeks of silence on the head of Harry Potter. Perhaps I’ll start there.

book 7/movie 5: I started reading HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone in December, a few days after I had Mia. Let me clarify: I started RE-reading it. I believe this was read #5. I finished it sometime in early July. Don’t be alarmed, I am not a slow reader; there was a period of several months when no reading of any kind occurred in my house. I had stopped somewhere around the initial arrival at Hogwarts, and that’s where I started a few weeks ago. I sped through the remaining chapters. I moved on to The Chamber of Secrets. And then to Prisoner of Azkaban (my all-time favorite). And so on. You get the picture. My sleep suffered, as did my eating habits, fashion sense, and, on some days once I hit Order of the Phoenix, my hygiene*. Rest assured, my child did not suffer, unless you count that one day I was reading and forgot to give her the afternoon bottle. In my defense, she didn’t protest–she was in the process of self-adjusting some of her eating habits and had been showing little interest in that particular bottle, but I continued to offer it anyway. But on that day, when I realized that I’d read and she’d played right through a feeding, I freaked out a little. It was the same week of the news story about the couple who allowed their children to starve and be picked up by child services because they were too busy playing online video games. I could just see my own headline plastered on the internet: Mom Forgets to Feed Infant–Too Busy Reading Harry Potter.

Anyway. I mostly read during naps and into the night, and in spite of the 6 months it took me to re-read the first book, I sped through the others. I was preparing myself for the two big premieres. I knew once The Deathly Hallows hit the shelves I would have to read it as soon as possible, but I had read The Half-Blood Prince so fast that I had forgotten a great deal of it–hence my re-read campaign. And like many other Harry geeks, I wanted to re-read OOTP before I saw the movie, something I still have yet to do. When I finished The Deathly Hallows on Sunday it was like coming out of a dream–and in a way, that’s exactly what happened. When I read the Harry Potter books I am truly immersed in the fantasy. I want to have magical abilities, and I want to visit Hogsmeade, and I want (quite desperately, actually) to be able to Apparate and Disapparate. But when I read that final page, the regret I was expecting with the ending of the series didn’t come. I was almost relieved. Don’t get me wrong–nothing has changed, I still love the stories and will most likely read them all again, and probably again. But it was high time I started spending time with the three-dimensional people.

I will reserve my opinions about Book 7 for a later time, because, as I understand it, there are still a few people who haven’t read it yet.

On with my list.

cookies/bakies: Have you seen that commercial? The one where the guy doesn’t understand why cookies are called cookies, because cooking’s really got nothing to do with it? How true. Why ARE they called cookies?

HP: I believe this refers to my above epistle about the Boy Who Lived. I am sure I was going to use it as an excuse for not blogging. Which I have done. Did you notice the title? I feel certain it was not lost on my fellow Harryphiles.

Blogger–real name?: I had to think about this for a while, but then it hit me. Once upon a time, when most of us blogged at Blogger, my posts and comments were always signed hd. Now, suddenly and without any action on my part, my comments on Blogger blogs are signed with my real name. Why is this? Not that it matters, most of you know my real name anyway. It’s just a curious mystery.

tic-tac commercials: Clearly I pay too much attention to television commericals, but is anyone else as irritated as I am by those ads in which the people’s mouths appear to be possessed by something that’s trying very hard to escape? Or that girl juggles tic-tacs with her tongue? I want to throw things at my TV when I see those commericals.

Baby arms & legs –> crib: I have been meaning to seek adivce about this for some time, but since I scribbled that hasty little note I have had to solve this problem on my own. Thanks to mesh and velcro, I am happy to say I have not had to pry my kid’s arms and thighs out of the crib slats for some time. Has that happened to any of you? It’s damn scary. Of course, I always imagine the worst: tiny femurs snapping, limbs being torn from their sockets. See, I had to do something. For crap’s sake, it’s a crib, not a Rottweiler. So thanks to the taut mesh panels that now surround the crib, I haven’t been greeted by this in over a week:

sickness: I was sick. Now I’m not. It sucked, but it hardly seems important to mention now. I’m sure I was going to use it as an excuse for not blogging, but I believe a certain fictional character is shouldering all of that blame just fine, thank you.

Astelin–taste: However, thanks to the aforementioned sickness, which was either a cold or an allergy-induced sinus infection, I convinced my doctor to give me a prescription for Astelin. I was sneezing constantly and uncontrollably, and it was positively miserable, and I was convinced Astelin would solve all my problems. Admittedly, I saw an immediate change in my allergies, and I hardly sneeze at all anymore. But let me just tell you, there is no bold print large enough, no warning dire enough, to prepare you for the taste that is Astelin. Who knew a nose spray could taste so horrible? There are suggestions in the instructions for avoiding swallowing the spray and coming into contact with the taste, but if you manage, as I so often do, to get the stuff anywhere near a tastebud, you will taste nothing else for hours, and everything you eat or drink will be tainted. People, I’m telling you right now, Astelin is what evil tastes like.

And finally, off the list but significant nonetheless, my daughter turned 7 months old last week. Now I am not one but two months behind on my monthly updates. At least she doesn’t suffer the same neglect this blog has been suffering. Here’s proof. Does this look like the face of neglect? I think not.

*I forgot to add this footnote. Lo reminded me. Now I don’t remember what clever thing I was going to say about my neglected hygiene. Is neglected hygiene ever clever? I didn’t think so. I’ll leave it at that.