diving in

for the most part i don't give too much thought to the whole "mommy wars" debate that has been running around for the past few years—you know, stay at home moms [sahms] vs. working outside the home moms [wohms], all the books and articles and sniping and blah blah blah. but then in the past week i stumbled across this and this, which begat this.

please take a moment to read or skim.

done? okay, moving on.

after reading and rereading both of these, it's been all i can think about. and i know this is unsafe territory to be walking in to. as a matter of fact, real life example: just a couple of weeks ago mona and i were sitting in a coffee shop having lunch with our friend stephanie (and all of our offspring, of course), talking mom talk, and stephanie said something like "i just can't imagine going back to work after 3 months," and the woman grabbing some straws and napkins from the bar behind us raised her eyebrows so high i thought they were going to merge with her hairline and turned to us and said "you're lucky you didn't have to!" to which stephanie replied, "i know." to which eyebrows mcgee gave us a sanctimonius smile and walked out saying "have a nice day, ladies...."

so lest you injure your eyebrows while reading this, let me start this whole thing by saying: i know. i know that i'm lucky that i didn't have to go back to work for economic reasons. i know that a large percentage of the mother who go back to work do so because they have to.

okay, so now that we're past the disclaimers, what's been stewing in my brain is this: what the hell is up with this (sometimes angry) backlash against sahms? why is working outside the home (you know, for money) seen as something that validates our existence, confirms our worth, and forms our identity, and working in the home (aka being a stay-at-home parent) so often pissed on?

the amy sohn piece that i linked to up there (on mr. nice guy's blog) has been all over the blogs (although if you try to follow the link to the original piece, on her site, you'll find it's been deleted. coward.), and while most of the comments have called her out as the ludicrous beyotch that she seems to be, there have also been a fair share of "sahm go home"–type comments. this is a response to a comment that calls sohn's essay the result of "a guilty conscience lashing out":

guilty conscience lashing out? maybe, but at least she has enough sense to be ashamed. unlike so many stay-at-home parents who've taken to parenthood without a trace of regret or doubt.

i'm sorry, i just hallucinated for a minute. what? the "sense to be ashamed" of....staying at home with her child part time? heh? and why exactly am i supposed to feel regret and/or doubt about my choice to stay home with my baby?

and sohn's essay itself, even though she starts off pissing and moaning about how sahms are "lionized", goes on to smack down the sahms, positing that staying at home with your baby makes you crazy, stupid, and a bad mother. oh and if you went to college, it makes you irresposible, because you're wasting your education by not working. which encapsulates the attitude toward sahms that i've been running into lately and that's got a bee in my bonnet: people feel that sahms are being lionized, but really they're being put down and patronized to; treated like a second choice, something you do with a heavy heart.

i feel like every time i read something about sahms, the writer is, often in the very same breath, saying how very awesome it is for women to stay at home with their babies but also how it is such a sacrifice and how by staying home you're missing out on, you know, life. example: the woman who writes the parenting column in our neighborhood paper reacted to sohm's article this week. and while she chastizes sohm for being so "nasty" towards motherhood and "putting down" sahms, she also says that she "found it exceedingly boring to be home with [her] one-year old", and only made it through because she was able to "escape" to her writers' group and therapist.

all of which, you know, is valid. you need a break from the 24/7 baby immersion, absolutely. but, as any writer knows, choice of words is powerful, and using the word "escape" makes being at home with your baby sound like a prison sentence. and, yes, life with a one-year old is definitely big on repetition and low on intellectual stimulation. but it's pretty big on emotional stimulation. and again, word choice! "exceedingly" boring? really? all the time? could you maybe mention the good parts too?

the parenting columnist called what sohn and others are spewing "mommy rage". i think a more accurate term—or maybe just a related symptom?—would be "mommy shame". in addition to her diatribe against sahms, sohn wrote a stupid article in new york magazine in which she dished about how her "goal is not to look like a mother so much as a still-young, still-cool person who just happens to have a child". like it's embarrassing to admit you like being a mom. it's like how i used to be embarassed to admit that i liked destiny's child because oh no, i don't listen to anything that's on z100, i listen to indie rock and hip hop. but you know what? i really like destiny's child. and my not admitting i like destiny's child doesn't harm destiny's child, or pop music in general. but moms being freaked out about admitting that they like being moms—or even that they are moms—is really damaging. it's like how "mommybloggers" have become a whipping post in the blog world: first off the term, which is slightly condescending, and then the attitude from other bloggers that parenting blogs are somehow less intersting/valid than other blogs, that mom blogs are just stupid women blathering on about how wonderful their kids are and woe is me how hard mothering can be and oh they should try getting out in the real world if they want to see hard. and that just pisses me off, because what it comes down to is the idea that if something isn't in the public sphere it's not valid, which is a bunch of bullshit. if only two people see a beautiful painting, is it not beautiful?

i think this is partially a failing of modern feminism (hello again, unsafe territory!). i know that the first step of second wave (60s and 70s) feminism was getting women out of the home, getting equal pay, equal opportunities, etc. but saying "staying home with the kids is for suckers! we want to be out in the world, doing important work!" made it so: staying at home with the kids was for suckers, and only work done outside the home, for money, was important.

now, before my stepmom gets in the car to come down here and smack some sense in to me, let me say: thank you, second wave feminists. we have choices. we have stay-at-home dads. we have female CEOs. we are free to be you and me. life would truly suck if the women's movement hadn't done their thing. (and i might not be such a blissed out sahm if being a sahm was a given rather than a choice, like it was back in the day, since lord knows there's nothing i hate more than being told what to do.) but! we also still have people clinging to the idea that staying at home with your child is a "sacrifice" and something to "regret".

and maybe another part of the problem is that there does exist this holier-than-thou picture of the sahm—it's better for the kids, you should love every second you spend with your children or you're a bad mom, etc. and so some women try to adhere to to the "ideal" even though they realize after a few months (weeks, whatever) that being a sahm is not for them. and then they do go kinda crazy, and get really frustrated, and, in venting their frustrations, perpertuate the idea that being a sahm is something done with many reservations. to which i say: then don't do it! go back to work! but don't slam being a sahm just cause it's not for you.

i love being home with wile. but i didn't quit or take time off from a career i adored to have my baby. i like being at home, puttering around the house. i like being by myself. i'm not all that ambitious. i've always been one for simple pleasures. but that's my story. i know it's not everyone's. but it's mine. and anyone who wants to tell me it's a bad story can fuck straight off. i hope all mothers can say the same.

essentials

gwen recently got a book about saying "i love you."

since then she has been saying:

"i love mommy."

"i love daddy."

"i love wile."

"i love bacon."


yup, that about covers it.

no comment

it has come to my attention that some people have been trying to comment but have been thwarted by some weird blogger glitch. while i'm happy to hear this because i was getting just a little bit sad that there had been no comments in the past month or so, i'm also pissed that blogger is being wonky. but i just tried to comment on the last post—disguised as an anonymous commenter, ha ha, take that, blogger—and it worked fine (you won't see it there now b/c it just said "testing testing" so i deleted it). so please, if you had anything at all to say in the past month, try try again.

the left coast

so i finally made it out to the west coast—passing my previous westernmost point, durango, colorado, where i spent a summer cleaning rooms in a 2-bit hotel and learning to play pinball while stephen went for the world record in consecutive days spent taking bong hits and playing sega hockey; ah, youth—and it confirmed what i already knew to be true: i am an new york girl through and through.

don't get me wrong, we had an absolutely, perfectly, wouldn't-change-barely-a-thing kick-ass time. and the land (and sea) is gorgeous out there, often breathtakingly so. but here's the thing: i remember once, back when i worked in an office, looking out the window of said office with my co-worker mike. the view was of a section of lower manhattan—rooftops, etc—and the brooklyn bridge in the distance, and i commented on how beautiful it was. mike replied that he didn't think so at all, that he'd much rather look out the window and see mountains and trees. so i asked him why, then, he didn't live somewhere where there were more trees and maybe some mountains, and he shrugged and said "you'd really rather see this than mountains, trees, maybe a river?", and i replied, with no hesitation, "yes."

for the first few days of our trip, we took driving tours of san francisco every afternoon while wile napped—at $3/gallon, the most expensive naps ever, but great because we really got to get to see and know the city. (i, the most directionally challenged human on the planet, even got my bearings and was able to tell stephen that we were heading west when he thought we were heading north! amazing!) and after three days of driving around and about and through, my reaction was a firm "meh?". i didn't get it. i got that the location of the city is amazing—drive 10 minutes out of new york over the george washington bridge and you're in some crappy jersey suburb; drive 10 minutes out of san francisco over the golden gate bridge and you're at a secluded little beach cove with a redwood forest behind you. i also got that half (more than half?) of the city has been taken out by the big earthquakes, so a lot of the old buildings, the old old buildings that are what i love about new york, that are what give a city it's character, are gone. and i also get that somewhere in a city in europe, someone is laughing at me for calling buildings in new york old old, so i'm going to shut up now. my point is this: i liked san francisco—especially the food (which will get its own post), and especially when we came back in to town for a few more days at the end of our trip and i saw the wonderful wood-frame houses that perch on russian hill and the cool shops in the mission and north beach—and i loved some the other parts of cali that we checked out: the mountains and beaches in marin county, berkeley (i am, after all, of hippie/anti-establishment descent), santa cruz. but i loved them as places to visit. and i was happy to come home to my city.

yeah yeah, you say, enough about you—what did wile think? wile had such a fantastic time, it makes me really sad to think that he's too young to be able to remember it except through pictures (or possibly hypnosis). so, without further ado:

wile's california top ten:

10. his first gay pride parade

we were on our way to the ferry building to check out the sunday farmer's market (what, you don't go to farmer's markets on your vacations?) when we realized that the parade, which we thought had been the day before, was happening at that very moment. and much to wile's delight, we came out on to the parade route just in time for....



dykes on bikes! wile was enthralled. mow-ah (motorcyles) and plenty of ba-boo flying around, what more could you ask for?

9. big bah-bah

when we were in half moon bay visiting with the wrubels, friends of stephen's parents, we took a walk down to the beach by their house and came upon a fully operational construction site: two big backhoes (bah-bahs), a bulldozer, and a couple of dump trucks were working to replace a sea wall. sadly, i have no pictures.

8. 826 valencia

did you know that dave eggers has a pirate store in the mission district in san francisco? well, now you do. and if you're under 12 and you draw them a picture, you get to do this:



you get to keep one piece of treasure. i bet most people, however, don't bring their own shovels....

7. bay-beees

wile likes to tell me now that he's a big boy. this fact was confirmed when he met, and "held", a couple of babies.

noah:



and charlie:



in comparison, it is indeed easy to see that wile is no longer a bay-bee. unless he wants to be.

6. bow-die and vih-shee

our friend bradly has a very large black lab named bowie. when we were in college and bowie was in nis un-neutered prime, i wouldn't have let him in the same room as my child, god forbid i had had one at 21. but now bowie is 10 years older and has mellowed out, and was the perfect friend for wile.



wile lurved bowie. we stayed with bradly two nights, and wile spent the whole time we were there talking about bowie or playing with bowie or taking bowie out in the yard or talking about bowie pooping in the backyard or bringing bowie his toys to play with.... at one point i was in the kitchen making some bunny pasta when i heard from the living room wile yell "hoe-shee!"



good dog, bowie. good dog....

and our friends kevin and jill have a beautiful lady kitty (or, as wile would say, "maow") named vixie, who wile also tried to befriend, but with slightly less success:





thankfully, jill was able to step in and mediate a bit:





in fact, i think that part of wile's fascination with vixie had to do with his fairly obvious crush on jill....

5. steam train

as we were driving through tilden park, up in the hills of berkeley, we saw signs that read "steam trains", with an arrow. so we followed the arrow. and we found a miniature little "station", with minitaure little tracks, on which ran an authentic steam engine, only in .25 scale. it pulled three open cars filled with benches, and for $2 each—and wile was free!—we caught the last ride of the day, out into the woods, through tunnels, over little bridges, past magnificent views of the valley and town below.



before we left for this trip, i spent hours on line researching things to do in the bay area with kids. i did not read the words "awesome steam trains" anywhere. get on this, tourism people.

4. and more trains

technically, cable cars. but wile called them trains, and who am i to argue?





3. o-shee!

wile has been to the beach before, but not since he could walk. or, more importantly, run. as in, run straight into the rip tide. we first took him to ocean beach, on the west (duh) end of san fran at the end of golden gate park. he put his little toes into the damp sand and stood there for a minute, i could see him thinking "this is either awful, or the best thing ever...." then he took a tentative step forward. then he looked over his shoulder at us, grinned, and turned and ran straight for the waves. so, yeah, i guess we don't have to spend money on those baby swimming lesons to make sure he's "comfortable in the water".....





so after that we hit a beach as often as we could, in mill valley...



half moon bay...



and santa cruz, where it was too cold to go in the water but still fine weather for digging:



2. sea lions

when we were talking about what we wanted to do in san fran, before we left, i told stephen that i wanted to take wile to see the sea lions that lived on the coast. i'm pretty sure he thought that maybe i was making this up. but they're there! you have to go through hell (aka fisherman's wharf, a mall-ified series of blocks filled with overpriced crab "shacks", tchotchka stands, and crabby families toting around large cameras) to get to them, but the speechless joy that overcame wile when he saw them was worth it.

on the way to the wharf wile was getting a little impatient, so stephen kept telling him about how we were going to see the sea lions, which wile calls "auh-auh" (as in the noise that they make. obviously. and accompanied with a hand (fin) clap). part of stephen's patter was as follows: "and they're called sea lions, right? lions? and lions are big kitties, right? so sea lions are kind of like the kitties of the sea...." after which wile was silent for a few minutes, then turned to stephen and said "maow auh-auh?". and so they have been called ever since.



(i know, not the greatest picture. the maow auh-auh are those blobs on the docks.)

1. drums!

the most important reason for our trip out west, besides to see friends and for me to get my first taste of california, was for kayce and grace's wedding. it was an early-evening wedding, so wile skipped the sitter, put on a party shirt, and came along. he had a fantastic time. some highlights included giving his personal benediction to the happy couple...



listening to kevin and nate whenthey told him, "put rocks in your hair!"...







and the ultimate highlight of the wedding, and of the entire trip...



...joining the band.

kibbitz and bits

hi, we're back! in case my last mysterioso post was too mysterioso for you, the san francisco bay area is where we're back from. and we had a kick-ass time.

alas, this is not the vacation wrap-up extravaganza post. oh no no no. i'm too jet-lagged for that—we arrived home at 6am. which is 3am california time. which means yes, god help us, we flew the red-eye with a toddler. and we didn't get him his own seat, as this was our last chance for him to take advantage of the kids-under-2-fly-free rule. which means that he slept on my lap. and have i mentioned in the past that he's a crazy sleeper? a flailer and flopper and twister? at home, he always ends up sideways and upside-down in his bed. in my lap, sideways and upside-down is less of a do-able task, so he'd come to when he tried to accomplish some feat of nocturnal gymnastics. he'd only fuss for a minute then go back down, but the problem was that once he got "comfortable" (head in my armpit, butt up, left leg resting on the edge of my upright-and-locked tray table, right leg extended with my headphones dangling from his toes, left hand stuffed down my bra) i was generally not comfortable, and afraid to move lest i awaken him again. so i got about....oh....15 minutes of good sleep.

plus i'm still waiting for my approximately 1335 photos to load in to the computer.

but here's a little anecdote to hold you over:

it was our second-to-last day in san fran, staying at a british-type bed-and-breakfast/inn place that was just ducky. we had been out all day gallivanting, and were making a quick pit stop at our room before heading out for dinner with aunite tam, aunt sadie, kramer, and baby charlie. we were standing at the door to our room, getting out the keys, and laughing about something silly that wile had just done or said, when we hear a voice from the room next door say "stop laughing!" i looked at stephen for a second, then, of course, laughed. and again, the voice said "stop laughing!" i looked in the direction of the voice and asked, "are you talking to us?" the voice said, "yes!" to which, of course, i laughed again. and the voice said, "stop it! you've been out there all day making noise! stop it!" i replied, "we just got home and have been in the hallway for about 20 seconds, unlocking our door." the voice begged to differ: "i've heard you out there all day, kibbitzing! stop kibbitzing in the hallway!" kibbitzing!!! i almost fell down laughing. the voice, predictably, told me once again to "stop it!" i managed to catch my breath to say, "honestly, if you don't want to hear other people, perhaps you shouldn't be staying in a hotel." by this point stephen had gotten the door unlocked and he and wile had retreated in to our room, so i was the only one left in the hallway to hear the voice say, once more, "stop kibbitzing!" i picked up the last of our bags, said "lady, you need to get a grip," and went in to our room. and locked the door. just in case.

up! down! big hill! ocean!

these are wile's new words.

can you guess where we're spending our two-week vacation?

[bonus hint for a portion of the readership: he also says vixie! and bowie!]

a moment of silence, please

as we have no tivo or tivo equivilent, my television viewing is limited. what i mean more precisely is that i conciously limit it, because there's really no use getting all invested in a show if there's a decent chance that when said show airs, i will be putting someone to bed or giving someone a bath or cleaning up someone's barf or—until recently—running upstairs to put someone back to sleep. i won't name any names.

yes, i could set the vcr to tape a show i wanted to see, but that means actually remembering to set the vcr to tape the show i want to see, every time it's on. not bloody likely.

so i've basically whittled my tv time down to baseball games and two shows. okay, for a while there it was three shows, but halfway through this season i had to throw in the o.c. towel. it was somewhere around the point that marissa's sister came back from wherever they'd been hiding her, and sandy was involved with some hookers, and....yeah. i had to back away. i am a little sad that i missed marissa doing the coke. but, c'est la vie.

anyway, i was down to two shows. one was project runway, and, when that ended, top chef. but, though i love them, those are reality shows, which are the summer flings to the going steady of a network series. and just who was i going steady with? everwood. yes, everwood. yes, on the wb. look, i don't go to the tv to think. i've got npr and the new yorker for that.

last week, i kept seeing ads (during one of my baseball games, which air on the wb on the weekend) for what i thought they were saying was the season finale of everwood. but then about the fifth time i saw the ad, i realized that they were really saying series finale. series! finale! no more everwood! and this isn't like when buffy ended, when the show had gotten so mind-bogglingly bad that i was marking off the days on my calendar till the last episode (but, after 7 seasons, four of them brilliant, couldn't give up so close to the end.)

but though the quality was still there, i can't say i'm surprised that everwood got canned, since i didn't know anyone else who watched it except me. but i am sad. so a moment, if you would, to say goodbye to ephram, amy, bright, hannah, dr. brown, delia, nina, edna, rose, and the totally awesome dr. abbot. rip, little mountain town.

and so begins the search for a replacement....

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.

hello i must be going

1. i have been thinking in list form for the past few days, so the only way i'm going to get this post written is as a list.

2. i have been thinking in list form because we're getting on a plane tomorrow morning to head down to the sunshine state, and wile and i aren't coming back for 3 weeks. 3 weeks! the packing has been intense. mostly because the first leg of the trip is a jaunt to miami for the goldwyn-schmergel nuptuals. so part of my packing list my list was broken down by event. and i have one bag which is miami-only, which will come back with stephen when he returns home next week. in that bag are, among other things, 5 pairs of shoes. all with heels.

3. oh and the baby has been barfing all day!

4. and i got a haircut and i can't decide if it's fantastic or horrible.

5. i may be able to post from florida, but don't hold your breath.

6. i think wile's awake. yes, he is.

7. see you in a few weeks!

yeah, passing like a gall stone

whenever anyone talks about all the lovely stages that babies and toddlers go through, the common refrain is "well, it'll pass..." and yes, this is true. the stages will pass. but the passing? it hurts.

for example, right now wile has dived headfirst with a mighty yowl into the separation anxiety stage. man oh man, has he ever. tuesday morning i ran out to the store to get soymilk and juice and left him with his father. his father, the closest person to him besides me, coming in second possibly only because of lack of boo-bas, with whom he shares dna and, often, a bed. i was gone 20 minutes. he cried the whole time. wednesday morning i left him at playgroup with stephen's mother while i went with sarah for her final dress fitting. at playgroup, with all of his friends and all the awesome toys and all the moms and sitters who he spends three mornings a week with and loves. he screamed bloody murder when i left; when i got back i met janet and shauna out in the lobby and they told me i better hurry up and get in there and rescue my son.

all of this is troubing, of course. it's hard to know that he's inconsolable when i leave him—and hard to know that whoever stays with him is in for a rough time. but really, i could deal very easily with this whole stage if those were the only symptoms. alas, they're not.

this is what my nights with wile have been like for the past week or so:

6:30 - wile bath
7:15 - wile into pajamas
7:30/8:00 - wile asleep
10/10:30 - wile awake, and not only absolutely not having any of stephen coming to put him back down, also not having any of me coming in, putting him back down, and leaving. he won't fall back asleep, so eventually, as i'm in a dark room, i fall asleep too.
1:00/2:00 - i'm wide awake, wile and stephen are asleep. i get up and do the things that i normally get to do between 8pm and midnight: email, fold laundry, brush my teeth, etc.
3:00/3:30 - back in bed
6:20 - wile's wide awake and ready to get up

this? this is not a healthy sleep pattern. i feel like i'm back in the newborn days. only back then i didn't have anything to compare it to. but now i've gotten addicted to my post-wile-bedtime hours, and the withdrawl is a bitch. my only consolation last night was that they replayed the newest episode of project runway, which i had missed at 10pm, at 2am, so i got to watch it.

okay, enough kvetching. go look at pictures of wile and his people sledding. that's iden in the camo hat, luella in the pink hat, and gwen sprawled in wile's lap....

correspondence

dear department of motor vehicles -

i believe you owe someone an apology, dmv.

i know, dmv, that there were some parts of our sojourn in your hallowed halls that we can't blame you for. like the man who tried to quietly and nonchalently slip in front of me in line, pretending that he didn't see the 500 people in line behind me. no, sir, that's actually not my entourage, though i'm flattered. and i can't blame you, dmv, for the father of the little girl who, when the little girl got a little pushy when trying to make friends with wile, snatched her up and said "don't push! i'm gonna beat your ass! why you so violent?"

and let me say that i know that i brought the child there of my own volition. however. three separate waits? three? honestly...

while we were in the big line that snakes out the door into the hallway, twisting around the little metal-pole-and-cloth-strap dividers, the gentleman behind me, after about 20 minutes, said "excuse me, miss? is this really just the line to...get the numbered tickets...so we can get in another line?" i believe his dumbfoundedness spoke for all of us in the line. the line that seemed to move backwards.

so once i finally get the number, wait some more, and then finally see my number flash on the board (bingo!!) and get to go up to the window and do my thing, the nice man who helps me...gives me another number! so that i can wait some more, and then go to another window! now i know, dmv, that you're a government agency, which means you probably did some big study that took like 10 years to complete which determined that splitting up everyone's transactions between different windows somehow makes the process run more smoothly and efficiently. but to the average dmv-goer? it kinda makes us feel like whats-his-name who has to keep pushing the freaking boulder up the hill, only to watch it roll back down again, for all eternity.

and perhaps, dmv, you could have a little chat with your security guards. perhaps you could tell them that if they see a mother nursing a child, they could maybe not come over and tell them that they are in the "wrong waiting area" and that they need to move. especially when the nursing child is ASLEEP. oh and perhaps you could also tell them that when a mother has her child sitting up on the counter, firmly in her grasp, so that he doesn't cry while she's signing some papers, they could not come over and say "the baby can't be up there cause the baby could fall and then it could be the dmv's fault and you could sue." of course, if you got through to them with the don't-fuck-with-a-nursing-mom lesson, that second one would be unecessary, as the child wouldn't need to be up on the counter because he wouldn't be super cranky from being woken up.

so yes, i think an apology is in order. oh, no no no, dmv. don't look at me. i need you to apologize to the woman who we passed on the street after we finally escaped your clutches, who, upon seeing wile's un-mittened hands, told me that "baby's hands are cold!", to which i replied: "bite me."

yours sincerely,
hey mama

ll cool w

you know how there were those boys who had girlfriends in 5th + 6th grade, but by the time they got to high school it was all over? they weren't cute anymore, the acne set in, or they were still the same height as they were in 6th grade.... they peaked too early, like a child actor who you know is never going to see celluloid past the age of 12.

well, what happens when you're a ladies' man at 18 months? at the moment, wile has 3 ladies competeing for his affections.

first there's gwen, mona's daughter. gwen proably qualifies as the girl-next-door (technically around-the-block). she's 13 months and had a vocabulary of about 20 words, one of which is "wi". as is, wi-le. she wakes up from her naps saying "wi? wi?", as if she's been dreaming about him. there have been several kisses between gwen and "wi", including a big fat wet one that engulfed her nose.

then there's our other friend, luella. lulu for short. 15 months. she's a twin, and her brother, iden, is a little bruiser who i think wouldn't have a problem taking wile down if he felt wile wasn't doing right by luella. she also says "wi", but it's not the first word out of her mouth when she wakes up (yet). wile has, on a couple of occasions, tackled lulu to the ground and kissed her, which has made her cry. methinks she doth protest too much.... the other day at playgroup i was holding wile on one hip and lulu on the other, and he gave her a kiss and she lit up with a huge smile.

then there's the older woman, macy. macy is 2-1/2, and a playgroup regular. i got an email from her mom last week telling me that macy talks about wile all the time at home. no kissing yet, but: we were at the park one day, before playgroup started up, and macy was there with her dad. we hadn't met them yet, but wile was intrigued with macy, and followed her around for a little while, though he wouldn't get close enough to actually make contact with her. playing it cool, you know. but they were playing ball together at playgroup on monday....

we're going to be the first baby playgroup to be cancelled due to catfights.

lather rinse repeat

wile has begun to listen to things i say and spit them back out at me. which is exciting! really really exciting! but also leads to conversations like the one we had in the car today after a particularly long traffic light:


"that light was shhh....kunky"

"excuse me? did you say 'shkunky'?"

"well, i didn't want to say....what i wanted to say."

"so you settled on 'shkunky'?"

"yeah"

"shkunky."

"well, 'skunky', really."


so, yeah, we're going to sound like idiots for a couple of years. which might be better than sounding like a longshoreman, which i often do now. find me a word that can't be improved by inserting a "fuck" in the middle. i dare you. but those days are behind me now, sadly....

the upside is, of course, the unbelievable cuteness of the quasi-words coming out of wile's mouth.

today we were in the living room playing cars and i smelled that telltale smell and said "wile, do you have poop in your diaper?" and he looked at me, tilted his head to one side, pointed to his butt, and said "poo?".

i'll trade a few "motherfucker"s for that, any day.

wile projectile vomitted in a cafe, stephen puked in the denver airport, and i just barfed in a stockpot

and how was your day?

and he likes loud music, too

i've always thought that the 2 - 4 years are the puberty of childhood—you rebel, you assert your independence, you've got a bad attitude, you tell your parents how things should be.... just like the sweet 6th grader who loves cats and anne of green gables is suddenly the megabitch door-slamming 7th grader in blue eyeliner, the darling giggling little baby is suddenly the screeching toddler marching around the house giving orders and loudly protesting all challenges to his authority.

so wile is in the "tween" stage—not a full-on teen-baby, but showing the warning signs. oh-ho-ho, yes. definitely showing the warning signs.

i mean, look at this picture:

"dad. come on. leave me alone. seriously. god."

one of wile's favorite games is stair ball: we sit at the bottom of the stairs and i throw the ball up the stairs and we watch it bounce down. sooooo fun. the other day, he picked up a ball, led me over to the foot of the stairs, pointed me to sit on the bench, and then handed me the ball and pointed at the stairs. okay, fine. but when i threw it up, he turned around and walked into the living room. i thought, "okay, he changed his mind" and got up to do something else. he saw me get up and yelled at me ("eehhhhh!!!"), pointed me back to the bench, and pointed at the stairs again. then turned back and went into the living room again, turning, when he got there, to look back and make sure that i was playing. as if to say "look, mama, i have some stuff to do over here, so you play stair ball so i can get it done, okay?" i threw it a couple times. when he heard the thud, bounce-bounce-bounce stop, he looked over at me and pointed and yelled again. okay, fine.

changing wile's diaper used to be cake—he liked laying on his changing table, watching the ceiling fan spin, or listening to me sing to him.... now it's like wrestling a monkey covered in motor oil. a howler monkey. and getting the clothes on and off him? nearly impossible. the only easy wardrobe change i've had in the past two months was the other day when, after i'd finally managed to get his pants over his big ol' butt and zipped and snapped, he went over to the dresser, emptied out a drawer full of overalls, picked out a pair, and brought it over to me, clearly saying "take those dorky pants off me and put my rad overalls on, woman." i did. he stood stock still, only moving to obligingly lift his fat little feet up to step in to the overalls.

other signs of baby adolescence? he's made out with two girls in the past two days. today he tackled poor luella to the ground and planted one on her while she cried. yesterday he fared much better: he and gwen were pretty much making out at her birthday party. mona and i were like "um, do you guys wanna go in the other room and turn the lights down and 'watch a movie'?"



ps - that picture up there is actually a few weeks old—we've been cast-free since december 14th! check it:

there are more pics of the big day on wile's site.

pps - yes, i put clips in his hair. no, i don't want to cut it; i'm waiting for it to get long enough to tuck behind his ear. no, i don't think it makes him look like a girl. anyway, his nana told me that all the hot european soccer stars wear clips in their hair, so it's cool.

ppps - happy new year!