doing our best to subvert the dominant baby paradigm

wile, like most of his friends, boy and girl alike, has a toy stroller. granted, most of his guy friends' parents have opted for a more masculine (read: dark blue) stroller for their little men, while i opted for what was on the shelf at our corner dollar store: bright pink and purple plaid.

the other day at the park wile left his stroller in the ball pit (the fenced in area at the top of the park) while we went down to do some sliding. as we walked from one slide to the other, i saw that another little boy had gotten his paws on the stroller and was pushing it around; the woman with him saw me looking at them and asked if it was ours, i told her yes, and that they were welcome to play with it.

after wile had had enough sliding, we headed back to the ball pit, where the other little boy was still pushing the stroller. his caretaker, who turned out to be his grandmother, told him to give it back, but i said, "no, it's fine, he's more interested in his football right now, you guys can keep playing with the stroller." and i got back the standard "oh, it's a boy?" sigh. "yeah, he's a boy." "oh, i'm sorry, the hair...." "oh no, no big deal, common mistake."

so far, so typical. i have the yes-he's-a-boy-yes-his-hair-is-very-long conversation at least once a day. but then....

"oh....but this is your stroller?"

"uh-huh."

"oh.....so you also have a daughter?"

".....noooooo, that's his stroller."

"oh!"

oh, brother.

ah, young love

mona: you guys left wile's sweatshirt at our place on friday.

me: oh, whoops.

mona: yeah, gwen found it and brought it to me, saying "wile? sweatshirt? wile? try? on? on?"

me: heh.

mona: so we put it on, and she kept it on all afternoon. then when it was time to go to bed i tried to take it off and she flipped out, so we left it on.

me: she wanted to sleep in his jacket?

mona: yep.

me: oh, man.

mona: yep. and it was such a warm night, she was sweating like crazy, but she screamed when i tried to unzip it. i had to peel it off her after she fell asleep.

two steps forward, one step back

so, i know you're dying to know, how is the sleeping going?

the long answer is:

right after we went through the change there was an almost total reversal due to a nasty cold that kept him up at night horking and snotting, and i feared that all was lost. but once the germs left the building, we were back on track, though there was still some major heavy lifting to be done: he started waking up earlier, around 2:30 or 3:30, and asking for the ba-boo. now, when he was sleeping till 4 or 5, i was fine with giving him the ba-boo when he woke up, after which he would sleep for another couple of hours. but earlier than that? i had to just say no.

i don't think i can fairly represent the pathetic-ness of the cry of "ba-booooo? ba-boooooo?" that wile would subject me to when i went in at the earlier waking and didn't make with the boob. it was quavering and weak, yet insistent, tearful and indignant and filled with all the sorrow that the world has ever known. and i'm in a weakened state, my brain addled from being ripped from a sound sleep. let me tell you, he nearly broke me a couple of times. but i stayed firm. i found that talking to him—which all the books tell you never to do, no words, no, no, don't speak, don't speak—helped; if i calmly told him that he had already had ba-boo, and that it was time to sleep now, he calmed down a lot faster. there were several nights of this kind of negotiation, then a couple of nights where i went in, there were maybe one or two reps of "ba-booooo?" and then he was back asleep. sweeeeet!

yeah. then there were the past few nights, when i would go in when he woke up at three and he would "ba-booooo?" for 20 minutes, clawing at my shirt the whole time. then, after he finally gave up, exhausted and defeated, and flopped himself down on his pillow and fell back asleep, he'd wake up again at 6:30. not. acceptable.

but! then last night, he slept from 9 till 5:45, then till 8. it was a beautiful thing.

the going to bed alone, however, seems to be here to stay. there were a coupe of nights last week that gave me a little scare—i put him down, he was silent for about 5 minutes, then up and crying (ma-maaaa! ma-maaaa!) and needed me to come up and lay with him for a couple of minutes until he calmed down. the second night this happened, i had to go up twice. but that seems to have just been a little blip. most nights he's down no problem, and saturday night we had a sitter and he didn't give her any guff, said good night and went right down.

and then last night.... stephen and i were both in with him after bath getting his diaper and pajamas on, then he gave us both kisses and hugs, then i was about to take him from stephen to say goodnight to his things and sing and put him down when he looked at us and said "bye" and then looked at the bed and said "down!" ooookay! don't have to ask me twice! stephen put him in the bed, he lay down, and we took off. not another peep till 4:45....

so the short answer is:

meh.... but a mostly positive meh.

of course, i'm sure our upcoming trip out to california, to sleep in strange beds in a different time zone and probably not be able to keep to the nice regular schedule we follow here at home, is going to shoot any progress we've managed to make all to shit.

oh and speaking of sleeping, i found out on friday what happens to wile when he doesn't nap. in short: he loses his marbles. we took a trip in to the city to do some shopping, and of course he wouldn't nap in his stroller (which he does just fine, all the time, on the boring old relatively-quiet brooklyn streets, but not in super-exciting manhattan, apparently...). so we gave up and just plowed on to h+m, where he spent almost the entirety of our 45 minutes in the store running laps around the baby department, barefoot and pants-less, throttling two little stuffed monkeys—one in each hand—that he had grabbed from a display, shrieking and yipping like a purse dog on uppers: "yi! yi! yi! yi! yi! yi! yi! yi! yi!"

seems like only yesterday....

the other day as i walked in the house from the farmers' market past the blooming columbine, with a bunch of ramps in my bag, i realized: holy crap, it've been doing this pookiellama thing for a whole year!

as is the case with most of life with baby, it feels both like no time has passed and like ten years have passed. i was actually thinking about this the other day, before i even had my blogiversary revelation: wile and i were on our way to the park, he was in his stroller eating some snack out of a little tupperware. halfway there, he held the container up to me to take away. i did, then he said "wauh", so i gave him his sippy cup of water. then i stopped dead in my tracks, because the enormity of what had just happened hit me. he was eating a snack out of a tupperware container. when he had had enough, he knew how to ask me to take it away. he was thirsty, so he asked for water. all of which seem totally commonplace and unremarkable to me now. but six months ago? six months ago, we would have been stopping every three feet so that i could hand him more crackers, because if i gave him a tupperware to hold he would have littered the sidewalk with its contents like hansel and gretel. six months ago, if he was thirsty, he would have just started crying/fussing, and i might have had to go through a whole list of options before hitting on what it was that he wanted. [i often used to feel like i was contantly living out harpua, (that's a phish song, for you non hippies/ex-hippies), where the one person is like "how about a goldfish?", and other person is all "i! don't want! a goldfiiiish!", and the other person tries again "how about a goldfish?", and the other person is still all "i! don't want! a goldfiiiish!!" and it goes on like that for a little while....] six months ago, i would have offered up a limb or two for things to be like they are now. but now that he does communicate easily? it ain't no thing. it's just...normal. which is how it will continue to go as he grows up, of course. but what made me stop in my tracks in the middle of the sidewalk was the the thought that i should take the time to notice and appreciate these things, especially as he gets older. because for now, all the things that he is learning to do and the independence that they're bringing him isn't pulling him away from me. or, if it is pulling him away a little, it's not a bad thing—it's nice to be able to, i don't know, pee without someone sitting on my lap.... but as he moves from toddler to kid to (dear god) teenager, the things he learns will pull him away more and more, and he will begin to tear apart from me. and it will hurt. i know it will. but it will also be amazing to watch, and our relationship will only get richer, and i'll be able to share more things that i love with him, and he'll discover other things on his own and share them with me. but i want to know that i've been paying close attention through the whole process.

and writing on pookiellama? helps me pay attention. so thanks for reading.

mmmm, varnished wood

i was in my closet this afternoon when i heard wile in our bedroom making a weird noise, kind of like panting.

i went in and found him standing next to stephen's dresser.

"what're you doing?" i asked him.

he grinned up at me, but no explanation.

then i noticed what looked like a wet spot on the side of stephen's dresser. and another on the side of my dresser. and another on the window.

"are you.....wile, did you lick daddy's dresser?"

he grinned up at me and—there's no better word for it—cackled. and then he licked the dresser.

don't it make my white cat brown

dear con ed man,

i don't mind that you show up to read the meter at 8am. other people, this might bother, but lord knows i'm up. and i don't mind having to come all the way downstairs to let you in.

however.

when i ask you to please shut the cellar door on your way out, i'd really appreciate it if you listened. otherwise, an hour after you leave, this walks in to the dining room:





and drops this at my feet:



dear god what is that thing, you might ask? i'll tell you what that is. it's the mutilated plastic exoskeleton of what was once a furry toy mouse. trucky (that's dusty mcdirty up there) likes to "play" with the mice by first sitting on them for a while like a mother hen, then gnawing on them till all of the fur comes off, then eating the fur, then gnawing on the plastic, then, and only then, batting them around like a normal cat. i'm guessing this one got batted under the cellar door a few months ago and has been festering in the basement ever since, till you came, left trucky his opening, and allowed him to retrieve it and come up and drop it at my feet with a triumphant "mmmaaaaaooooo!".

look at that thing. do you see how, if you look at it right, it has an elf face? a creepy little elf face? staring right at you?

shut the door. please. that thing is haunting my dreams.

yours,
h.m.

quick bat quick bat

my mother swears up and down that if it hadn't been for the electric company, i wouldn't have learned to read as early as i did. she read to me a lot too, and did little phonics cards, but still she gives the majority of the credit to tv.

pretty much the only thing that i watch on tv during wile's waking hours is baseball. and not too often—i'm usually more than happy to listen to the game on the radio. but every once in a while i'll put the game on, or just turn it on sporadically throughout the game to catch the replay of a delgado home run or a pedro strikeout or a sweet d. wright catch (or close-up). all in all, i'd say he's watched about 7 or 8 inning total of baseball in his entire life.

but apparently, he's been paying attention.

a few weeks ago, we were in the ball pit at the playground—the fenced-in area where there are sprinklers in the summer—wile scooped up the ball, turned to me, said "pih!", then kicked up his leg a la dontrelle, cocked his arm back and held that position for a few minutes, then let one fly.

once i picked my jaw up off the concrete, i tried to remember if i had ever "pitched" the ball to him in one of our countless games of catch. i couldn't remember ever doing it. we'd talked about pitching when we'd read his baseball book, but the pictures in the book only show pitchers in their follow-through, not in their wind-up.

then last week we were in the dining room playing a rousing game of take all the empty plastic seltzer bottles out of the recycling, and, awesome game though it is, i got a little bored. so i picked up one of the bottles and the ba-ball that was lying on the ground, said "hey wile, check this out", and threw the ball up and hit it with the bottle. you could just about hear all the bells going off in his head. he broke out in a huge grin, grabbed a bottle, held it up over his right shoulder, rolled the ball to me, and said "pih! pih!" so i threw him a nice lob, and he whacked it. a clean single.

all of which leads me to two conclusions:

1. we have to really think about what we let him watch on tv. or listen to on the stereo. or listen to coming out of our mouths....

2. though we've suspected it for some time now, he truly is destined for the big leagues. obviously.

the good, the bad, and the ugly

but let's do them in reverse order, so that we end up happy, not pissed off....

the ugly
we spent this past saturday night at our friends sam and gabi's house, in a little town outside of baltimore. on the way in to their place, we passed a sign outside a little restaurant/lunchonette that said "PIT BEEF". so of course on sunday morning one of the first things out of stephen's mouth is "what is pit beef and do we have to stop for it?" sam, when he stopped laughing, said that he wasn't sure what it was, so we decided we had to go find out. pit beef, it turns out, is basically roast beef cooked on an open grill, so it's got a nice smoky thing going on, and it's absolutely delicious on a roll with lettuce, tomato, onion, and mayo. add in one of the "real old-fashioned milkshakes" that were advertised on the side of the building, and it was a perfect lunch.

about an hour later, as stephen and wile and i were making our way up I95, stephen turned to me and said "did you get your purse from the back of your chair in the restaurant?" hmmm. i looked around the van, then said "nope, i guess not. call up sammy and see if he can go back and get it for us?" i could not have been more unconcerned. little lunch-counter place in a little town? surely someone had spotted it and turned it in at the counter. sam called back, no problem, he'd go get it. then sam called back again, from the restaurant: no purse. some lowlife piece of crap had stolen my bag.

two days later now, no bag. sam left his name and # at the restaurant, no dice. i called the restaurant today, they could not have been nicer, but nothing has turned up. and of course, everything was in my bag: my wallet, my phone, the camera.

stephen and i have spent the past 48 hours cancelling all of credit cards, closing our bank account and opening a new one, changing the locks on the house, etc, etc. and though that was annoying as all get-out, it's not really what's got me down.

the first part of what's got me down is all of the stupid sentimental stuff that i'll never get back, including:

> the crocheted "kitty sushi" (literally, a kitten on seaweed-wrapped rice covered in roe) keychain that sarah bought me in san francisco;

> the plastic sports radio 66 wfan new york mets keychain that has been on my keys for as long as i can remember, which i can't just go out and purchase again, since it was a promo giveaway thing;

> my favorite newspaper clipping ever: one year around christmas we were at my parents' house and in the local paper there was an ad from the aspca showing all the pets up for adoption that was set up like personals ads—each pet had a photo and a little description. and there was one that showed a cat named lulu, whose photo looked just like lulu, and whose description read something like "lonely? let this lovely lady in to your life...." or some such nonsense about how she was going to be all cuddly and sweet and not a shredder of arms and furniture alike;

> all of the pictures and movies of wile that were on the memory card of the camera.

the second part of what's got me down is that i can really only blame myself, for leaving the damn thing on the back of the chair in the first place. and there's no one it's easier for me to stay mad at than me.

and the third part of what's got me down is...well, i think the librarian at our local branch expressed it best this morning when she was commisserating with me over the whole situation while i was getting wile a new library card: "i know, honey. it's just that it's your stuff! and it's not the stuff that matters, you can get new stuff. it's that somebody else has your stuff! and they got no right! and there's not one damn thing you can do about it! makes you wonder what's wrong with some people." exactly.

the bad
on on top of that: i'm still kind of sick and hacking up phlegm; i pulled a muscle in my thumb picking up the big man the other day and am sporting an ace bandage on my right hand; and i ate some dried fruit that must have been processed in the a plant that also processes mangos, because i've got hives on my wrist, back of my knee, neck, and herpes-esque blisters on my lips.

hot, no?

the good
the reason that we went down south of the waffle house line in the first place was for bill and marie's wedding, and it was a blast. there were about 15 kids under the age of 7, and wile totally rocked the party. in fact, he can now say party: "paaaah-ee".

he spent the first couple of hours raising havoc out on the dancefloor with the other knee-biters: running back and forth at top speed, climbing up on to the dias and under the table, pulling the flower arrangements apart, flopping on to the roll-away parquet floor like beached baby whales....

then it was time for cake. wile has never shown much interest before, preferring salt to sugar (apple? cookie? no! cornichon? olive? caviar? mais oui!). i smooshed a small bite of cake and frosting on to a fork and handed it to him, expecting it to be shoved back in to my face. not so much. he stripped the fork in .5 seconds flat and demanded "moe!" and when we had finished the whole slice, he still wanted "moe!". so we went back to the cake table, but now there was a line. i got in it, set wile down next to me, and started to explain that everyone wanted cake and we needed to wait.....at which point he took off, ran past the whole long line and up to the serving table, and stuck his fork in the cake.

[stephen also had a transporting food experience: wile and i came back from a visit to the bathroom to find stephen in the buffet room hovering over the roast with a carving knife, hands and mouth slightly greasy. he turned to me, starry-eyed, and said "i've never been left alone in a room with a cow leg before."]

after we got back in line and then got and consumed our second slice of cake, wile decided to work off the extra calories by getting down with his bad self on the dance floor. he started off with some basic moves: the butt, the deep knee bend, the march-in-place. but that was just the warm-up. the main event? breakdancing. his signature move: head and hands on the floor, downward-dog style, with butt up in the air and one leg thrust out to the side and kicking. we had video of it, but, well, yeah. not anymore. but wait, this is the "good" section! and the good is that the wedding photographer was enamored with our little breakdancer, and took about 500 pictures of him. we're going to get in touch with her, so after all we will have a record of wile's first time as a dancin' dancin' dancin', dancin' machine.

and that means that the terrorists didn't win.

proof that the germs are affecting my brain

the little man and i have spent the past week in the throes of a nasty cold—hopefully the last of the season—that has featured massive amounts of snot and a rattling, rasping, vocal-cord-scraping (i sound like marge simpson) cough.

i have also spent the past week being subjected to endless endless god-why-won't-it-stop prattle about the upcoming nfl draft evey time i try to listen to sports radio or watch sportscenter. one of the players projected to be picked in the top five is a young man named d'brickashaw ferguson. yes, you read that right.

so in my slightly delerious, phlegm-addled state, every time i cough, making the lovely "ah-HUGH-a-hugh!" noise, what i hear in my head is "d'brickashaw!"

d'brickashaw! d'brickashaw!

miss townsend if you're nasty

as we were walking home from playgroup the other day, mona asked me the names of the dad and two boys who had dropped in on the 'group that morning. i was able to tell her the names of the boys, but didn't know the dad's name. "you?" she said smiling, "you don't know his name?"

as i was walking to the park later that day i thought about the conversation again and laughed to myself, but then i started thinking.... i was meeting mona and gwen at the park so that we and our menfolk could all go over to the opening of the new market in our neighborhood, an expedition that i had engineered. and i had just gotten off the phone from leaving a message inviting our neighbor ken to meet us there. and i had started and actively promoted this whole playgroup thing. and just yesterday, i met a couple who had just moved to the neighborhood in the park, and when they told me they were looking for a sitter, i immediately thought of someone and got them in touch. i stopped in my tracks as i thought: oh my god. i'm social chair!

i cross my heart and swear to die that i won't lock you all in the gym and make you sing songs.

the dawning of a new age

a couple of weeks ago, stephen came home from seeing sarah and perry and related to me a story that sarah had told him: one of wile's many girlfriends, nola, goes to daycare. and at this daycare, they ferberized her—without asking/telling her parents first! my initial reaction to this was mild shock and horror—the whole cry-it-out/don't-cry-it-out debate inspires such strong feelings from both sides, i felt like this was a fairly insane in the membrane thing for this daycare to do. how could they be sure that the parents would completely freak out? luckily, nola's m+d, terra and derek, didn't. but how could they have known that? i could totally see some high-strung mother suing over somthing like this. and though i wouldn't have gone so far as to involve the courts if it had been my baby, i thought that i would have been pretty mad that they took that liberty.

but when i said to stephen "oh my god, are they freaked out?", he said that no, they were psyched—post-daycare-ferberization, nola would go to bed in her crib, cry for 5 minutes, sleep for 4 hours, wake up, cry for 5 minutes, and go back to sleep for another 4 hours. i could understand being happy about that, especially considering our whole sordid sleeping history. but i still felt like it was a betrayl of trust and would make me a little wary of keeping my kid in that daycare, like, what else would they do without asking? not that they would dangle her out a window or anything, but would they would make other choices that went against my whole parenting mojo?

yes, you possibly could say i was up on a little bit of a high horse. and last week, you could say that that horse was knocked right out from under me and i landed like a sacka patatoes flat on my ass.

last thursday we went to a friend's apartment for passover seder and left the little man with neesha, a sitter who has stayed with him once before. the last time (first time) she sat with him, we were going out to a party that started around 9, so she came over early so that wile could meet her, then she did bath and pajamas with us, then i put the monkey to bed. when we got home around 12:30, she was upstairs with him and he was in full freak-out mode, not interested in going back to sleep at all, and she seemed a little rattled. but when i called her to ask if she could sit last thursday, she didn't shreik and hang up the phone or pretend that i had the wrong number, so i figured all would be well. she came over around 6, i ran down bedtime routine with her (into pajamas, say goodnight to all the things in his room, walk/rock him till he's pretty much asleep, might need to lay down with him if he won't fall asleep), and i left at 6:15 to the expected crying ("ma-MA? ma-MA?").

we got home at around midnight, and neesha was in the living room. i asked if he'd been up at all, and she said that she'd been downstatirs since 8:30. great! fantastic! i asked how it went overall, and she said "well, i let him cry a little bit." heh? "when?" i asked, "you mean when i left, or....?" "no, when i put him down for bed." oh! oh really! "yeah," she said, "bath went well, but then he started to whimper and call for you when we were getting in to pajamas, so i just put him in his bed, said good night, and left the room. he cried for 5 minutes then went to sleep. he whimpered for a few minutes after that, but has been asleep since then."

my thoughts as she was telling me this story were:
1) that takes some freaking cojones to blatently disregard the parent's instructions re: bedtime, especially when it's only your second time sitting for the kid.
2) if he had cried for longer than 5 minutes, how long would she have let him cry?
3) is she telling me the truth? did he really only cry for 5 minutes?

but what came out of my mouth was just "oh. hmm. okay." because i wasn't sure how i felt about it, mostly because i was tired and had had a few glasses of wine at seder. and really, even if i was mad/upset/suspicious, what could i have done then and there? yelled at her? (oh hell no, that might have woken up the baby.) i needed to think about it, and if i decided that it was too big a breach of trust, i just wouldn't ever call her to sit for us again.

so stephen left to drive her home, i watched a little sportscenter and then went to bed with the baby monitor.

i woke up to crying through the monitor at 4:30. that's eight hours. i let him cry for a couple minutes, but when it started to escalate rather than die down, i went in, nursed him, and he went back to sleep and slept till 7:30. it was....it was like i'd always dreamed it could be.

but of course, after the way he's slept for the first 20 months of his life, i wasn't convinced that it wasn't a fluke. so we decided to try the put-him-down-awake-and-leave-him method again on friday night, and decided that stephen would do it. so stephen took him upstairs for bath/bed and i stayed downstairs to pace. eventually i heard stephen leave wile's room and heard the cry rise up—"da-DA? da-DA?"—then stephen came down into the living room, asked me how long i thought we should let him go, i said 5 minutes, we turned on the monitor, and...silence. the child had cried for thirty seconds, then gone to sleep. and again, he slept till 4:30. maybe twice in the night he cried out, but for no more than 30 seconds and he was back asleep. saturday night: cried for 10 seconds, asleep from 9 to 5:15, then to 8. sunday night: cried for 10 seconds, asleep from 8:30 to 4:45, then to 7:30. monday night: cried for 10 seconds, asleep from 9 to 5:15, then to 7:45. last night: cried for 10 seconds, asleep from 9 to 3:30, so a little backsliding there, but he did go back to sleep until 7:15.

so, pretty great, right? but i still wasn't convinced. we hadn't passed the big test yet: i hadn't put him down. with no snuggling. no falling asleep in my arms. no boo-bah. aaaaiiiiiieeeeee!!

tonight was the night. stephen had a poker date, and bedtime was all mine. i nursed him before the bath, a nice big feed. bath was great, tons of fun—lots of water-pouring, some singing, and i stuck his little pink lion-shaped sponge to his belly and he just about fell over backwards laughing. when it was time to soap, he stood up and let me wash his butt instead of pretending that he had accidentallly sat in a puddle of super-glue. when it was time to get out, he put all the toys back in the bucket cheerfully and didn't screech like a vampire bat when i picked him up out of the tub. diapering and pajama-ing, no problemo. but as i was picking him up off the changing table: "ba-boo? ba-boo?" oh man. here we go. "honey-love," i said, "you just had boo-bah. it's time to go to bed now." a little crying, but his heart wasn't really in it. we said good night to everything, and when we finished and turned off the light: "ba-boo? bed? ma-MA?" again, i told him that he had just had a nice big heaping serving of boo-bah, and that it was time to go to sleep. i braced myself for the outraged reply, and....he put his head down on my shoulder. wow. okay. so i sang him a couple of verses of beautiful boy and rocked him in my arms, then layed him down on the bed, at which point he started crying.

"ma-MA? ma-MA?"

"it's time for bed, baby. i love you."

[sitting up] "ma-MA?! ma-MA?!"

"go to sleep, honey. i love you. i'll see you in the morning."

[standing up] "ma-MA!! ma-MA!!"

[closing the door behind me] "i love you, wile. i'll see you in the morning. time to go to sleep."

[as i go down the stairs] "ma-MAAAAAAAAA!"

[as i reach the bottom of the stairs] wile: "............." me: "you've got to be kidding"

no joke. the child cried for 5 seconds. that was 8:43. it's 10:38, and i've only heard the littlest of peeps.

i'm pretty f-ing ecstatic. this is major major major major. and not only for the fact that after 8:30 or so, i can now either a) get more than three hours of consecutive sleep, or b) do work or a project without always being on edge, waiting for the baby monitor to erupt. and that alone is awesome. but even more satisfying is knowing that i can leave him with a sitter without having to give the whole deeply apologetic speech about how yes, he's going to wake up before we get home, and no, it's not going to be pretty, and feeling like i should be paying them double.

which brings us back to the fact that this was all brought about not by some strong and decisive parenting on my and stephen's part, but by...a renegade sitter. i'm not going to lie, i definitely had to work through how i felt about that before i could be wholly and without any reservations psyched about the sleeping. at first i felt a little embarrassed, like if it was really this easy to produce the good sleeping, were we bad parents for not initiating it ourselves? just lazy, passive, slacker parents? were we on the path to raising a spoiled, undisciplined child with bad manners? sweet rollerskating jesus, were we candidates for supernanny??!!

then i stepped back and said, "no, probably not." i think what we had was a stupidly common issue: we were just too close to the problem to see what the best solution was. isn't there some saying about forests and trees? yeah. and when you add sleep-deprivation to that kind of myopia, it gets even worse. so it took input from a near-stranger to resolve an issue with our kid that we hadn't been able to successfully resolve. so what? it's resolved. and if i'm going to try to go through wile's whole upbringing all "i can do it my own self, i don't need your advice, mind your business, back it up", it's going to be a looooong 18 years. yeah, so, i would have rather neesha had asked before doing what she did. but you know what? it's 11:23 and i'm awake and writing this instead of upstairs nursing wile back to sleep. word up.

which brings me to the other inevitable question: am i feeling stupid/kicking myself for not trying this technique months ago? and after some deliberation, i have to say: no. first and most importantly, i truly truly believe that if we had tried this a few months ago, it wouldn't have worked. wile is at the point now where he understands at least the general jist of everything we say to him. so when i tell him that it's time to go to bed, and i love him, and i'll be downstairs, and i'll see him in the morning, he gets it. he understands that i'm not leaving him forever, that i'll be nearby and will come right in when he wakes up in the morning. plus, though he's showing no signs of being ready for the w-e-a-n-i-n-g, the attachment to the boo-ba is on the downslope. 75% of the time when he starts "ba-boo?"ing, i can sway him with talk of rice cakes or cheese. through the months and months of sleepless nights, my stepmom kept reassuring me: "when they're ready, they're ready." and i think he was ready. if we had tried to do this a few months ago, i think that the crying would have lasted a lot longer than 5 minutes, 30 seconds, 30 seconds, 10 seconds. and i wouldn't have been able to deal with that, and would have gone right back to the methods that we were using anyway.

of course, i could be totally wrong. this could have worked back in january. but until somebody builds that time machine i always dream about, that's a moot (court (shout out!)) point.

homonym-a-rama-llama

wile's grasp of the english language is marching forward at a pretty good clip. this is of course making life easier—even if the "words" are kind of hard to understand, they're more decipherable than "eeeeeehhhhh!". i still twitch a little bit when i think of the "eeeehhhhh!".

the only time i'm really left guessing these days is when wile spits out a "word" that could be one of two (or more) words. sometimes context can help solve the confusion, but not as often as you'd think.... some examples:

"dusz" is either "shoes" or "juice". but it could be worse: in wile's friend dexter's vocabulary, "dusz" means "shoes", "juice", or "put on the dvd of the last waltz."

"yea-yea" is either "yellow", "yellow ball", or "luella". it's actually easy to tell when he means "yellow ball", because the "yea-yea" takes on a desperate, panicked tone, as in "mama i can't find the yellow ball we needtofinditnoooooow!!"

"bah" (pronounced with an a sound as in absent) is either "bath", "back", or "bad". and "back" can mean oh so so so many things: "go back to where we were", "put that back", "get it back out", "get back in the house, kitty!"....the list goes on. "bad" is used only when talking to the kitties. i'll find him standing over one of the little beasts pointing his finger at them and chanting "bah! bah!".

i'm sure there are more i'm not remembering right now. but tuesday night this whole homonym phenomenon caused a near meltdown....

we were getting mr. baby man into his pajamas after bath, talking about the normal things we talk about at this time like llamas and lambs and so on, when all of the sudden wile starts saying "moo!", emphatically and repeatedly.

wile: moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!

me: are you a little cow, wile?

wile: moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!

me: uuummm.....

wile: moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!

stephen: is he gonna get stuck like this?

wile: moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!

me: wile baby, i don't know what....

wile: [pointing to the door] moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!

stephen: [opening the door] wile, there aren't any cows in the hallway, see?

wile: [still pointing to the door] MOO! MOO! MOO! MOO! MOO! MOO!

me: [picking up the baby] okay, we'll go out here and look for some cows...

wile: [now pointing down the hallway to the window in my closet] MOO! MOO! MOO!

me: oh!! you want to look out the window at the moon???

wile: MOOOOOOOO!

and in that last instance, "moo" clearly translated to "yes i want to look at the moon, don't you speak english??"

how do i love thee? let me count the ways...

1 pair of tights

2 pairs of long johns

2 pairs of socks.

1 turtleneck.

1 thermal shirt.

1 wool sweater.

1 down coat.

1 scarf.

1 mets cap.

1 wool hat.

1 pair fleece gloves.

1 pair wool mittnes.

1 pair shearling-lined boots

38 degrees at shea at game time.

30 dollars spent on field-level seat, which got me not only a great view, but also a hot 16-oz hot chocolate, delivered to my seat, unlike the tepid 8-0z h.c. that you get at the stands in the upper deck, and a view of the guy sitting in the next box over from me trying to hit on the british girls sitting in front of him by offering them some of his peanuts, only to spill the beer he had tucked under his arm all over them whe he leaned forward to hand them the peanut bag, much to the amusement of me, his friends, the other group of guys sitting between us, and, finally, himself. the british girls? not so much.

at least 20 times i counted the guys sitting to my left yelling to nick johnson that he looked like ron jeremy.

4 runs scored by the mets, including a home run by xavier nady (do you have someone whose name starts with an x on your team? i didn't think so), a home run by carlos delgado, and an rbi single by david wright.

3 runs scored by the nationals before the ninth inning.

1 lead-off home run given up by billy wagner, our new closer, in the top of the ninth. oops.

0 runs scored by the mets in the bottom of the ninth.

3 death threats to billy wagner overheard.

5 runs scored by the nationals in the top of the tenth. oy.

1 run scored by the mets in the bottom of the tenth. on a balk. ouch.

0 percent chance that i would ever root for another team.

no soap, radio

today, since it was finally spring-like outside, wile and i flung open the windows and did some spring cleaning. we vaccummed, which is one of his all-time favorite activities—as soon as i turn on the vaccuum, he throw his hands in the air and takes off across the room yelling at the top of his lungs, not in fear, but in pure joy. weirdo.

so we were about halfway through the vaccumming ritual, at which point he was starting to lose interest and was just wandering around playing with various toys and not toys, when he came up to me laughing and pointing in to the dining room, motioning for me to come and witness whatever hilarity was ensuing in there. i parked the vaccuum and followed him, expecting to see one of the things that usually make him crack up that much: 1) the cats, or 2) something that he has spilled/strewn all over the floor. but, no! what he led me to, the big ha-ha, was....a can of tomato paste! on the shelf! sitting there! on the shelf! oh my god, you guys, it was sooooo funny!

i guess this is preparing me for having to laugh 150 times at "orange you glad i didn't say banana?"

i'm thinking about me today, not the baby. i know! call child protective services!

i had a memory pop in to my head today: freshman year of college. lounge of my dorm. somebody from career services came in and gave us one of those multiple choice tests that are supposed to tell you your perfect vocation. the only answers i remember giving were that i was artistic and would rather work alone than with a group. and based on those and 48 other answers, i was told that i should be a florist. which i remember being vaguely insulted by (granted, at 18 i was vaguely insulted by most things). but today, i started thinking: you know what? i think i'd be pretty happy being a florist! i started imagining this very style-y flower shop and all the creative designs i would do... and i thought, if society still operated the way it did back in, say, renaissance times, i would have been apprenticed to a florist around the time that i took that test, learned the ropes, and eventually struck out on my own. and then i wouldn't be bothered by the biggest, ugliest roadblock in my career path: the inability to make up my freakin' mind.

every couple of weeks someone—another mom at playgroup, my mother-in-law—will ask me when i'm going to start working again. you know, for money. and i give some vague answer that usually contains the phrases "when wile's in preschool" and "start my own business" and, sometimes, "fuck if i know". if it's someone i don't know well, that question is usually followed by the question of what kind of work i did before i got knocked up. and i'll tell them about how i was in school when the blessed event occurred, and before that i was an editor. but i could also tell them that before that, i was an apprentice chef, and before that, i got my b.a. in political science. and that though i was an editor for 5 years, it wasn't a career that i actively pursued: i moved to manhattan, was waitressing, thought i wanted to perhaps do illustration/design, a friend of my family had a publishing company, i got an internship in the design department but sucked because i didn't know quark, was shunted over to editorial by the frustrated design department, was noticed/mentored by an editor and eventually hired to run a travel book project, looked up five years later and found myself sitting in a cubicle, said "what the hizz-ell am i doing here?" and got out. even my current line of work was less a result of planning and more a result of serendipity and lackadaisical diaphragm usage.

part of my problem is that i can't definitively say no to something until i've experienced it. which is why i dated so many guys who were wrong for me, why i have to try on seven different pairs of shoes with an outfit before i can be satisfied that the first ones i took off the shelf were indeed the right ones all along, and why i have bounced all over the place in my search for a career. every time i think i settle on something, i start to think "but i also like to _____. and i'm pretty good at _____. so maybe _____ is what i should really be doing!"

you may be thinking, "but you did make up your mind! you went back to school, you chose textile design!" well, yes. yes i did. but the thing is, the program wasn't "textile design"; it was "textile and surface design". which means i took classes not only in designing for fabric, but for designing paper products, dinnerware, wallpaper, etc.. and even within textile design, there's the big choice between apparel and home decor. and how do you want to design? painting? silk screening? computer? when i first decided to go to f.i.t. i'd tell anyone who would listen that what i loved about the program was that it was "so broad" and taught "so many types of design"! oh, yay! so although the scope is narrower, there is still plenty of opportunity for indecision.

but.

i have an idea.

i don't want to talk about it yet. but it's there. and i think it's something that i can make myself stick with.

now if only all the other ideas will please stop barging in all, "but i'd be a funner thing to do! pick me! pick me!"

smells like baby spirit

we are continuing our descent into the 2s here at wile's house.... the latest permuatation is a fixation on the clothing. as in, unless it's something he's picked out, it would be easier to dress lulu in a corset than get a simple t-shirt and pants combination on to wile.

the other night, when stephen offered up some red footed fleece jammies, wile said "absolutement pas!", and insisted on a thin cotton union suit that barely snaps together anymore. somehow, stephen was able to convince him that it would be super-hip to wear a fleece jacket to bed that night....

so i've been giving in, mostly, and he hasn't left the house looking too insane. yet. though there are some times when i want to pin a sign to his back that says "i dressed myself today!" as in, "my mother, if she had any power at all in this situation, wouldn't have really gone with the reindeer hat with the football jacket." when we were down in the florida, the main issue was pants: he was against them. so we mainly went without.

this morning, when we were trying to leave the house to go to the store, there was a major outerwear meltdown. wile luuurves the windbreaker (ours is turquoise) that we bought before we left for florida. we don't shop for him too often (why shop when the gifts and hand-me-downs keep flowing in like water?), but one day iden and luella rolled in to the playground sporting these windbreakers and i knew we had to have one. so we trekked over to old navy and did what we had to do. and wile really enjoyed the whole process of picking out the color, trying it on, buying it.... yes, i do fear that he liked it too much. which is why our next lesson in shopping 101 will be "thrift stores and you: perfect together." but anyway, he loves him some windbreaker. so of course he wanted to wear it today. fine and dandy---except when we came to the part where i told him that it was cold out and we had to put another coat on over it.

15 minutes later and 10 decibels quieter, i had managed to get a fleece jacket under the windbreaker and a scarf around his neck and was reasonably satisfied that he wasn't going to freeze.

what about a hat, you might ask? oh, don't worry---he had his hat on. in fact, in the past four days or so, he hasn't taken his hat off. playing in the house? hat on. at playgroup? hat on. eating dinner? hat on. taking a nap? hat on. i expect sometime in the next week to be dragged to the local coffeeshop for open mike night, so that he can perform his angst-filled songs about the alienation he feels as a toddler living in an adults' world. you know, plus some pearl jam covers.

puttin' on the foil, coach

so when i told people--my dad, some moms from playgroup--that i was going to the rangers game last night (that's hockey, people) , the response i got across the board was a tight smile and a "oh, that's nice!", like the response you would have if someone came up to you and said "i'm heading out to a hare krishna revival tonight!", or "i've got a ticket to the doors reunion tour!" (or is that only me who's repulsed by "comeback" tours where they have a fill-in for the dead members?). but to them i say, "don't knock it till you try it." granted, i had never given hockey even a millimeter of space in my brain until i married a hockey fan--baseball is my game, and football is a nice distraction in the off-season. and i still don't love watching it on tv, and refuse to listen to it on the radio. but a couple of years ago stephen took me to a rangers game, and i got it. live hockey is a seriously good time.

allow me to present a few compelling arguments in favor of live hockey, rangers hockey, and hockey in general:

1. people always knock hockey (heh, "knock hockey") as being violent and blah blah blah. but do you know what the players do after they score a goal? not just sometimes, but after every single goal? they have a group hug.

2. at any given baseball game, i'd say about 75% of the crowd is there to really watch the game, and actually know who's on the field and what the infield fly rule is. the rest of the crowd is made up of a combination of people who are just there to enjoy some beers on the lovely summer afternoon, people on group outings with their office/school/organization, the ting girls in the xxx-small baby-pink jeter shirts, and other assorted people who should shut the hell up so that i can enjoy the game. but at hockey games, the crowd is serious. as awesome as madison square garden is, people don't go to hockey games just to "enjoy a nice night at the garden". everyone there is there to watch the game. once play begins, the crowd is nearly silent, so you can hear the sticks slapping the puck. don't get the wrong idea---when a goal is scored, or our goalie makes a great save, it's deafening. but you can feel how intent the crowd is on the game, and i love that.

3. every so often during the game there would be a loud, short cheer from one of the upper sections of "[unitelligible] sucks!" so about the third time it happened, i turned to stephen and asked "what sucks?", and he said, "oh, they're saying 'potvin sucks'---potvin was an old islanders (ny's other hockey team) player from like 20 years ago." awesome.

4. two words: petr prucha.

5. two more words: slap shot.


ps: big shout-out to auntie meg for making our hockey night out possible by sitting for the little man. the report from the home front was that all went well--she even washed his hair--until she had him almost asleep, after 15 minutes of walking him and then some laying next to him on the bed, and she sneezed on his head. at which point he didn't cry, just sat up and pointed up and out, like "now we begin again--recommence the walking." and after she had him almost asleep for the second time, lulu came flying through the door like a rabid bat, did a little crazy dance on the bed, and then shot back out of the room. but after all that, he slept for a good long time---around 10:45 or so i heard him wake up and make some noise. since he has mastered "mama", that's what he's been saying when he wakes up in the night, rather than the "eeehhhh!" that used to be his nocturnal battle cry. and the other night, when stephen put him to bed, when he woke up he cried out for "dada!" but when he woke up last night, what i heard through the monitor was "eeeeehhhhh? mmmuuhhh? du? um? uuhhhh.......? [rustle, rustle, trailing off to nothing]". it was like he was going "shit, what was her name again? it wasn't mama, it wasn't dada.... i know her..... oh screw it, i'm going back to sleep."

vacation hangover

my bags still aren't unpacked and i'm still feeling a little unsettled. and cold. so the most i have been able to do so far is get the photos organized, which you can get to through wile's site.

stories to follow soon....

kickin it florida-style

wish you were here

i'm in a public library because my mother has yet to bring the joy of the interweb in to her home, so this won't be long.

wile and i have entered phase 2 of spring break 2006: we have left behind the glamour of miami for the more prosaic, yet still awesome because it's 80 degrees out, charms of port saint lucie, spring training home of the mets and, more importantly, full-time home of the nana. wile and the nana are in the children's room while i'm typing this; every couple of minutes i can hear a "bah!" so i know he's okay.

wile has taken to nana in a big way. the first day we were here, they were hysterically laughing over a piece of dried flower that they found on the floor of her bedroom. she would say "what's that, wile?" and flick it across the floor, and he would crack the hell up. when she's not in his line of vision, he looks around and asks "nana? nana? nana?" until she comes back. the way he says her name is hysterical: it's less of a "na" sound than a "nyeh", like "nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh". and the emphasis is on the second "nyeh", but that seems to be his vocal pattern in general. i'm "maMA", stephen is "daDA", the ball is "baBALL", the boobs are "baBOO". we think he's part french.

okay, my time on this computer is running down. if you never hear from me again, we probably got eaten by the alligators at the playground. no, for serious: there's a sign at the playground that says "beware of alligators". at the playground.