Suddenly Human

The Car Seat: And Then There's Reality

2011-09-25T04:03:00.000-07:00

Recently a carpooling situation has been introduced into our daily routine, which relieves us, in theory, of multiple trips back and forth to Sydney's pre-school. My husband brings Sydney, her schoolmate, and Lauren (by default) to the school, and then her schoolmate's mother brings Sydney and her son back to her house, where I will pick her up on my way home. This arrangement works well, in theory.

But in order to accomplish this, a rotating saga of carseats must occur. A third carseat must somehow be inserted between the first two car seats of the car, since Children Can Be Seriously Hurt Or Injured by the Passenger Side AirBag!! Children are ALWAYS Safer in the BackSeat!!

It is nearly impossible to put this third car seat into the car without going through major bodily contortions, and it is completely impossible to do it within fifteen minutes. Add to that the other two car seats were recently removed from the car because Sydney and her sister went somewhere with Grandma the other day, and we can all be pretty much assured that something, somewhere, is going to be buckled in either haphazardly or possibly not all. The end result is three most likely "improperly" installed car seats and a possy of parents who are now exceedingly late to their destinations.

The LATCH system? Well one car has it and one car does not, and anyone who thinks this finger pinching system is easier than the seatbelt contortion is high on drugs anyway... but when you're dealing with multiple people trying to install carseats in multiple different cars you don't add multiple different ways to install them. So we only use the seatbelts. Which means there's this large metal object dangling from all three car seats, ready to smash someone on the head in the event of an accident, and also a whole group of child car seat safety experts shaking their heads in disbelief.

A recent study shows that most car seats are installed incorrectly. The study tries to fault lack of awareness, but that's not it at all. I'm perfectly aware that our hurried installation of merry-go-round car seats are likely lacking in some way. Sometimes I discover they're not installed at all, due to a miscommunication from Party A with Party B. It's a lack of time and resources, also a very real lack of safety features in the car itself. Here's the thing, corporate America, I shouldn't have to buy separate pieces of equipment to keep my children safe in your car. Your car should be made safe for my children. My 1 1/2 year old should not have to ride backwards with her feet scrunched up against the ill-fitting back seat for another three years because we can't be bothered to make a back car seat which can comfortably and safely accomodate her. And I should be able to fit three children into the back seat without spending half an hour installing car seats badly or, alternatively, buying 16 car seats and a minivan.

You know, sure, on paper, we should all slow down, relax, make sure that all our t's are crossed and our i's dotted before setting out on any adventure. We should all brush our teeth daily, eat a good breakfast, exercise for fifteen minutes, sleep 8 hours a night, get a little me time in there somewhere and make sure our children's car seats are installed properly by stopping by our local police station and having them double check our installation (which in our situation would be several times a day). Yeah, doesn't that seem properly reasonable? Except we all slept late, we're out of milk, I can't find one of my running shoes, I stayed up late last night doing laundry, I'm not sure when I last had a free moment and all three car seats are outside on the driveway soaking in the morning dew. Oh, and our friendly local police only work part time. Also, we're already half an hour late and the car needs gas. What do you think is going to happen?

Lipstick on a Pig

2011-07-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Sydney came home one day with a picture of a dinosaur she had drawn during one of her outings—the library or preschool, I don’t remember which. It was a girl dinosaur, she informed me, because it was wearing lipstick.

Uh oh. Gender minefield, my brain said.

See… I don’t wear lipstick. Or eyeshadow. Or blush, or nail polish, or any of the other body painting items that I presume 90% of my fellow women use. I don’t even own these items, nor have I ever understood how or why I would use them. Furthermore, most of my stockings get used for practical things like sucking up unwanted ladybugs in the vaccum in the winter or shoring up tomato-laden plants in the summer. I own a few dresses but rarely wear them, all of my shoes are comfortable and usually scuffed up, my regular jewelry consists of one plain gold wedding ring, and basically I’m lucky if I manage to put all of my clothes on right side in and get to work without spilling something on them in the morning. In short, I don’t get the whole feminine body image thing. I don’t even think about it.

Add to that the inherent stereotypes created by a society which assumes that “lipstick is for girls, trucks are for boys” and my need to create for my daughters a caring and open childhood free of added burdens simply because of their physical sex while at the time time not dooming them to freakdom and ridicule by their less open minded peers and parents, not to mention trying to explain (for example) the symbols on the bathroom door for practical purposes such as not going into the wrong toilet by mistake, and what exactly do I say? Clearly, an older person or a peer informed Sydney about the lipstick=girls connection. And since Sydney’s mother doesn’t have or wear lipstick, that part probably had to be explained too. And now here I come along, bent on undoing Sydney’s developing understanding of why her dinosaur is a girl.

But on the other hand… what if she wants to be the icon of feminity when she gets older? Who am I to impose my own views of gender on her? I certainly don’t want to limit her possibilities just because I happen to be an unrepentant thirty-something tomboy with a penchant for motorcycles and excavators and no fashion sense at all. What if she’s destined to design the next Ralph Laurenesque line?

And what will happen when she does start toeing the line in the makeup department? How will she interpret her mother’s complete lack of competence in this arena? Where will she learn to wear lipstick and eyeshadow and what purse to carry in the fall if not from me?

All this was going through my head as I finally said, carefully: “Boys can wear lipstick too, you know. And I don’t wear lipstick, and I’m a girl.”

To which she replied: “But mommy… you do wear lipstick! You put it on whenever your lips get dry!” Proving that even though she is out in the world she still sees the world largely through the actions of her own parents. I do indeed wear Chapstick, mostly in the winter, and so does Daddy, so we decided it was still a girl dinosaur but her lips were dry which was why she was wearing chapstick/lipstick.

With that settled, Sydney rattled the picture in my face. “ROAR!!!” she said.

Phew. Dodged a bullet. May she think Chapstick and Lipstick are the same thing for many years to come.

Royal Arguments

2011-06-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

In the ever growing, complicated saga that is Sydney’s daily existence, there are times when she is reprimanded and feels maligned by the process. Which is to say, most of the time.

Sydney doesn’t like to be caught doing something wrong, be told what she is doing is not nice, or find out that what she thought was right was actually wrong, which bodes well for her future behavior, I suppose, but makes the whole process convoluted and drawn out in the moment. Take for instance this exchange, in which I had just reprimanded Sydney for yelling at me while I was in the midst of talking to someone else:

“Mommy! I have to tell you something.”
“What, honey?”
“When superheroes are serious to princesses, they fight.”

Possibly in retrospect, I should have realized that this matter of fact statement had already been discussed and agreed to during the day by Daddy and Sydney. Apparently the agreement was that princesses and superheroes are equal, but when they are serious with each other it sometimes leads to fighting, which is why she assumed that I had gotten mad at her for yelling at me. But I didn’t know that at the time, and assumed that what Sydney was trying to tell me was that a) I was a superhero but I was being mean b) that she was a princess and therefore people couldn’t tell her what to do and c) she didn’t want to fight. Apparently I was wrong on all counts, so the conversation rapidly went downhill:

“Well, I can be serious to princesses.”
“No! Because princesses don’t like it when people are serious!”
I don’t even know where this princess thing came from, but I wasn’t buying it. “Well, princesses have to be strong which means they can’t cry when people are serious with them.”
“Why?”
“Princesses have to rule the country, right?”
“Well, I’m the ruler! And I don’t want you to be serious!!”
“Honey, I have to be serious with you sometimes when you yell at me for no reason.”
“I said I was sorry!!! I’m going to my room for 55 hours and I’m never coming back!!”

At this point, a seriously over-dramatic Sydney mopes slowly out of the living room – or stomps madly, depending on the circumstance, but reappears well before 55 hours are up with a sad expression on her face.

“What’s up, honey?”
“You shouldn’t be serious with princesses!”
“Honey—“ where’s the fast-forward button? – “Honey, I will always be serious with you when you yell at me.”
“But when superheroes are serious to princesses, they fight!!”
“Well I don’t think they should fight at all!”
“DADDYYY!!!”

After many tears and sobs and a version of the story that in no way matches mine, Daddy finally comes in to clear up the matter between the two of us. Apparently, superheroes and princesses need some kind of moderator when they start to fight. I’m not sure who won the final negotiation, but at last we reached a compromise:

“Honey… what will make you feel better?”
“You have to tickle me.”

That, I can do.

To Sydney on her 4th Birthday

2011-04-17T02:07:00.000-07:00

When you were born I had no idea what to expect in the years to come. And up until now, though you outgrew your baby clothes and started walking and talking and eating real food, you were still our first little baby. But the other day you showed up nonchalantly at the sugar house, having walked down the snowy, wooded trail all by yourself, and you thought nothing of it. I, on the other hand, was completely thunderstruck.

Actually, you’re doing that a lot to me, nowadays. Instead of the scribbles and fanciful colors upon the bottoms of which your teachers have dutifully translated what the picture is for us, you’re actually drawing yellow suns and red houses and birds with wings in their relatively correct places. You wrote your name, in recognizable letters and in fairly recognizable order the other day, although the E had a few extra lines in it for good measure and a few of the letters were backwards and one was over in the corner of the page by itself. I’m not saying you’re all grown up, but you’re definitely not an infant, a toddler, a three year old anymore.

You can help out now, and not in the way that your little sister “helps out” by removing all the tupperware from the drawers and scattering it all over the kitchen, or the way you once helped Mommy and Daddy “put the corn to sleep” which involved pulling out the corn plants, laying them on their sides and covering the whole thing over with dirt and then patting them hard (we didn’t have a very good corn patch that year). When asked to bring knives and forks to the table, you take them courteously and you put them right where they are supposed to be. You’ll entertain your sister for awhile so that one of us can make dinner. And you’ll relay messages between parents, although not always with the necessary accuracy (“Honey, Syd says that you said to tell me the washing machine is burning up? I’m sorry, can you explain that again?”) You’re growing into a pretty reliable, well-adjusted kid.

That’s not to say you aren’t still hilarious. At your birthday circle at pre-school, I arrived to find you in crown and cape, and the teacher informed me that Sydney had taken a “birthday vacation” and left Prince Charming to stand in her stead. Super Prince Charming, to be exact, not to be confused with Buzz Lightyear, Mighty Mouse, Super Dorothy, Tin Woman, Emergency Buzz (for those times when you don’t have time to say “to Infinity and Beyond!”) or Super Max. It becomes a bit of a challenge, at times, to keep up with you, especially when you announce out of the blue that you need oil (Tin Woman drinks oil, you see. Because water makes her rust.) or that I have to take off your spacesuit before you can get into the bathtub. But once I do catch up it’s just a pure pleasure to immerse myself in your world, for all its chaotic, illogical orderliness.

The most amazing thing about you growing up is that it turns out that I am growing up too. Now that I find myself having to concentrate through a haze of conflicting conversations between Daddy and Mommy, Daddy and Sydney, Sydney and Mommy and Sydney Talking To Herself, or trying to drive in a straight line while also trying to right a suddenly up ended water container, I’m a lot more sympathetic. Patience has become my middle name. Trying to come up with definitive answers to seemingly obvious questions such as “how do they make light bulbs?” has made me realize that I really don’t know all that much and that what I do know isn’t really black and white. Most of all I’ve learned that you cannot cook the best steak in the world at the same time that you are trying to prevent your almost 1 year old from climbing up the stairs and your 4 year old from writing on the walls. Multi-tasking means compromising at best.

So, Sydney, we’ve made it to four. In another four years, you’ll be eight. In 4 times 4, you’ll be learning to drive. And 4 after that you’ll be out on your own. But that’s a lot of fours down the road.

A Majiggy

2011-04-02T18:18:00.000-07:00

The other day Sydney found her long lost Wiki Sticks (or is that "stix") in the bottom of the toy box, and she was so grateful that she decided to be generous. After finally managing to unravel the sticky, colorful ball, she told me that before I went to work she would make me something.

"Great, honey," I said vaguely, rushing around and as usual late for work. As promised, a little while later she held out a Wiki Sticks conglomeration vaguely amoeba shaped, and told me I should keep it on my desk at work.

"Thanks honey," I said, holding out my hand for my gift. "....what is it?"

"A thing," Sydney said, who had already embarked on a completely different project involving scissors and playdough.

"What kind of a thing?" I persisted, because heaven forbid six months from now I call it an amoeba and it turns out it is really higher on the evolutionary timetable, say a dinosaur, or a cow, or Buzz Lightyear.

"It's a majiggy," she said absently.

And so I went to work and placed on my desk a genuine Thing, A Majiggy.

All in a Name

2011-01-04T03:01:00.000-08:00

A few months ago Sydney saw a homegrown, musical variation on the Wizard of Oz. Ever since she has incorporated pieces and parts of the story into her play; the wizard, Toto, the witch, the lion, scarecrow and tin man. She has also been watching a good deal of Sesame Street, and has attached herself to the idea of SuperHeroes, mainly in the person of Super Grover. All was well until one day she insisted to me that her name wasn't Sydney anymore.

It was Dorothy.

Super Dorothy, to be specific.

Super Dorothy and Super Grover fly around saving people, sometimes with liberal doses of help from the witch, the wizard or Abby Cadabby. This super hero game can go on for hours and is never ever boring, I guess, since when we finally decide that we have to do something else, like wash dishes for example, minor catastrophes ensue which prevent us from leaving SuperHero world just then.

Sydney had insisted so many times that she had changed her name to Dorothy that I was beginning to despair of ever calling her by name again when we watched Toy Story and Toy Story II over the holidays, and she stopped insisting her name was Dorothy.

"am beyond!! PHHIISHH!" she hollers as she sticks her arms out straight and prepares to save people in her new iteration.

"My name isn't Sydney!" she insists, "it's Buzz LightYear!!"

To infinity. And beyond. At least we're going somewhere.

What Lies Beneath

2010-12-04T04:23:00.000-08:00

Sydney's a good kid in general but for some reason she has an oral fixation with paper. She'll tear off a little piece of her tissue, ball it up in her hands, and place it tenderly in her mouth, savoring God knows what chemical flavoring and artificial texture before being told sternly by her parents, once more, that we only put food in our mouths, and paper is not food.

Sydney now knows emphatically that her parents think that paper is not food but she herself apparently begs to differ, and in order to indulge her secret fondness for paper she employs various strategies, with varying degrees of success. She's tried to reason with us. "Stop talking," she'll say. Or "go away." She's tried distraction. She's tried going in the bathroom and closing the door. None of these strategies have yielded the desired results, and so yesterday she tried something new.

She tried an outright lie.

The conversation started out normally enough: "Sydney, what is in your mouth?"

But rapidly went south: "Cereal," she said. And then she swallowed the evidence.

"Cereal? Where did you get it?"

"It was on the floor."

Right away she realized that was the wrong answer, because although cereal is food, she has been told that when cereal is on the floor you don't eat it. Which she is promptly told. So she changes her story.

"I got it from the box."

"What box? Is there a box of cereal on the table?"

There is not and Sydney knows this, so again she thinks quickly and comes up with: "No, I got it from the cabinet."

Since the cabinet in question is about six feet off the floor and impeded by a kitchen counter, I had serious doubts about this story.

"Really? How did you get it?"

Sydney has now realized that she can't account for this. So she is silent.

Even though I found the attempt hilariously funny, I somehow managed to keep a straight (and stern) face and reprimanded her for lying to me. Having been caught in such a bald faced lie, and being the good kid that she is, she immediately crumpled in a puddle of tears and promised not to do it again.

Which she won't. She'll definitely tell a better lie next time. Here we go.

Tongue Twist

2010-08-28T06:30:00.001-07:00

Witnessed just now:

Dad: "Sydney, what's in your mouth?"

Sydney: "Just, go away." Waves Daddy away.

Dad: "Sydney. What's in your mouth? Is that plastic?"

Sydney: "Stop talking."

Dad: "Sydney, don't put plastic in your mouth."

Sydney: "It's not IN my mouth. It's ON my mouth."

Dad: "Well don't put it on your mouth."

Sydney: "But it's my extra tongue!"

Dad: "What...?"

Sydney: "I have to put it on my mouth, it's my extra tongue!"

Dad: "....Can't you pretend your extra tongue is somewhere else?"

Sydney: "NOOOOOOO!"

Dad: "Well, I'm sorry, but its dirty so you can't do that."

Sydney: "What if I wash it off?"

Dad: "...okay."

What a three year old has to go through just to have an extra tongue!

Mekkers

2010-06-22T17:30:00.000-07:00

Daddy and Sydney were sitting on the floor looking at a picture of the solar system. I expect the concept of other planets is a little out of her reach but she was gamely trying.

"See?" Daddy said, pointing at the various colorful spheres, "there's Mars and Venus, Earth, Saturn, Neptune..."

"..and Scotland!" Sydney exclaimed excitedly.

My maternal grandmother was Scottish. She did say she'd travelled a long way to get to America.

Just as Sydney is gamely trying to understand her world, we're gamely trying to keep up with her. The other day we told her it was time to go to bed when she told us she wanted to play a "short mekkers."

"What's 'mekkers?'" we asked.

"It's a game," Sydney said, and proceeded to bend over with her head on the floor and one leg in the air. This was how you played mekkers. Easy enough.

Yesterday I found my husband lying on the ground in the driveway while Sydney piled hay on top of him.

"What are you guys doing?" I asked.

My husband looked up at me wearily. "We're playing a long mekkers."

Oh. Mekkers is that kind of game. I see.

Y Knots

2010-06-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Things have gotten a little more complicated these days with the introduction of a new arrival. We have suddenly become the show stopper at every venue; restaurants, shoppng plazas, libraries--wherever we ventured so happily as a threesome before has become a veritable clan of look-alikes, albeit in various stages of maturity.

This explains, in part, why there is a stick taped to our sliding glass door and a plastic bag attached to one of our dining room chairs.

And it's the only explanation you're likely to get.

Meanwhile, Sydney has reacted to her new status by becoming Three with a capital T, conveniently ignoring requests she would rather not deal with, refusing foods she used to eat with gusto, and bursting into uncontrollable tears at the merest misstep by her over-tired parents, and instead of punctuating every response with a rhetorical why? has progressed into the more challenging question, why not?

e.g.

"Syd, please don't put dirt into the baby's bouncy seat..."

"Why not??"

It's all fun and games, here.

Mermaid Salad

2010-04-28T03:15:00.000-07:00

Being three apparently has a lot of advantages I hadn't thought of before. We were at the dinner table the other day eating ham, which Mommy and Daddy were enjoying with a spot of mustard and a little horseradish, when Sydney insisted that she also needed to have some mustard and horseradish. Leaning on our past experiences with this child we were pretty sure that she didn't like either, and told her so.

"Three year olds like mustard," she said. And they do. They like horseradish too, it turns out. Plain, with no ham to interfere.

So my little gourmand came into the kitchen with her toy elephant last night explaining that she and the elephant were hungry and they wanted to go to a restaurant.

"Okay," I said, playing the role of the waiter, "what do you and the elephant want?"

"I want a peanut butter and samwich," she said, clearly, "and the elephant wants mermaid salad."

Don't blink, I thought, and said, "Does he want a mermaid salad sandwich or just mermaid salad?"

"Just mermaid salad, please."

So Sydney had a peanut butter sandwich and the elephant ate his mermaid salad.

A little while later she came up to me and asked: "Excuse me, how do you make mermaid salad?"

I have no idea. "First," I said confidently, "you catch some mermaids."

"Yeah?"

"Then you cut the tails off."

"Why?"

"Because that's the part you eat. Then you cook them for 35 minutes, and you put them in a big bowl."

"Yeah?"

"And then you add mayonnaise, onions, celery, pepper and salt." Essentially I have just subsituted mermaid for tuna. Yummy.

"Oh!" Sydney said, "My elephant is still hungry. Can he have some more?" And off she went with more mermaid salad for her elephant.

But what have I done? Is she going to traumatize some little girl with a Little Mermaid t-shirt by making yum yum noises at it? Is she going to ask her pre-school teachers if they can make mermaid salad? Have I altered my daughter's experience with half-fish, half-human mythological creatures for life? Or is she really just skipping all that and admitting that all they may be good for is a substitute for tuna salad?

I wish I was three... I'd probably know the answer.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

2010-04-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

Sydney's powers of reasoning have sky-rocketed over the past few weeks. Today she reasoned that, when asked what her grandmother said and her grandmother replied, "I didn't say anything," that it must mean that her grandmother's mouth was stuck up with glue. There are a few gaps in this reasoning, to be sure, but it's not bad for a first try.

When I was in college I took a logic course with the specific goal of being able to reason nonsense in such a fashion that no one could argue with me. This same desire may have been passed down to my daughter who the other day very sanely reasoned that soap was made of rubber. Observe:

1. Wild rice is yummy.
2. It is yummy because it tastes good and also because it has a neat texture.
3. The texture of wild rice is slippery, crunchy and a little rubbery.
4. Soap is slippery.
5. Therefore, soap is made out of rubber.

Obviously.

Third Time a Charm

2010-04-18T08:10:00.000-07:00

Now fully versed in English and with a long memory, Sydney got exactly what she wanted for her birthday: a chocolate cake, vanilla frosting and chocolate (no, wait, I want vanilla) ice cream. She also had: three red balloons, a single candle with a three on it, a bunch of daffodils, a hat and a sweater, a veterinary kit, a craft table, play doh, a book of Curious George, a bubble maker, and a guitar.

Not a bad haul for a three year old.

She also definitely has the birthday, now-I'm-a-year-older concept down. This morning she told me she was still three. And that next year, she would be sixty.

From three to sixty in one year? The way time speeds up around here, I don't doubt it.

Building the Girl

2010-04-14T17:53:00.000-07:00

Since we live on a farm, Sydney is exposed to probably more adventures than your average three year old, just by being at home. Last year she acquired a toy chainsaw and she can frequently be seen working along side Daddy or Mommy, cutting up sticks, grass, snow banks or whatever else gets in the way. Ever since Daddy had an accident, she's also realized the thing can be dangerous; consequently whenever she gets any kind of cut or scratch and a random stranger makes the mistake of asking her how she got it, she will bravely tell them she did it with a chainsaw.

Despite this statement we have not yet been visited by child welfare officers.

At any rate our pint sized farmer is coming along fine. While playing in the sandbox at her preschool the other day, she announced to the boys bunched along the sides that she was digging a trench.

"A trench??" the boys asked, increduously. They'd never dug anything but holes. "What's a trench?"

"A trench," Sydney explained, "Can be a big hole or a small hole. I'm digging a big hole."

I think the boys have some catching up to do, if they want to dig trenches with Sydney.

Manners

2010-04-06T17:23:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I asked Sydney if I could have a piece of her cookie. She must have been in a good mood, since she answered, "Yes, you may sure can!" And she even broke off a sizable piece and gave it to me.

I fully realize that she picks up these phrases and mannerisms from the people around her (mostly me and my husband), but they are both amazingly endearing and hilariously funny coming out of the mouth of a not-quite three-year-old. And you never know when you might encounter them. Yesterday evening at dinner, my husband offered Sydney a cucumber slice, to which she waved her hand at him and said, "No, thank you for the offer, though."

A little while later, he offered her a bite of fish, to which she replied:

"BLECCCHHH!!!"

So at least we know she's still not-quite three and not some old soul stuck in a child's body.

A Day in the Life of a Sydney

2010-02-02T18:16:00.000-08:00

Things are going well, and Sydney is cheerful, rambunctious and mischievous. Suddenly she removes both her socks and her sweater and throw them away, declaring that she is hot and doesn't want to wear them.

It is about 5 degrees Farenheit outside, and while warmer inside, it is definitely not tank top weather, which aside from her jeans is now all that she has on.

"Syd," I say, in my calmest, most reasonable voice, "You have to wear your sweater."

"I don't want to wear my sweater!" she says, still happily bouncing around.

"Yes, I know, but it's cold out, so you have to."

"Noooooo!" she says, and we're clearly going downhill from here.

"Syd-"

"I'm going to hide!" she says, and darts into the kitchen.

I try the Ultimatum as I follow her into the kitchen with the discarded sweater in my hand. "I'm going to count to three, and when I get to three, I'm going to put it on for you!" Counting is bad enough, but the threat of someone doing something Sydney knows how to do herself is to be avoided at all costs. I'm sure I have her now. But she's not moving, so I start my count.

"One...."

"NO! Don't count!!" she says, and gets up, always a good sign. I come closer and she comes closer, we've almost gotten Project Sweater under control.

"Two..." I say, and she darts past me, runs back the way she came, goes into the bathroom and closes the door.

My husband, who has been trying to cook dinner, now enters the fray.

"Sydney, you have to do what Mommy says."

"I don't want to!" comes the muffled, determined voice, and she leans against the bathroom door to make sure I don't come in.

"Fine," he says. "Stay in the bathroom then."

Well, that works, because she comes out, but still won't stand still long enough to wear the sweater. Now both parents are engaged, and we surround her from both sides. Desperate, cornered, she does the only honorable thing. She grabs the sweater from my hands, rushes to the gate which blocks the dining room, and throws it over the gate into the darkness beyond. Then she glares at us, defiant, and collapses into a protest heap on the floor. "I...don't..want..to...wear! the! Sweat! er!!"

Fortunately, she still only weighs about 25 pounds, so its still relatively easy to pick her up at this point, carry her upstairs, and deposit her into her room to think it over. She cries and cries and then finally falls silent.

"Mommy?" she says, in her calmest, most reasonable voice. "I'm ready to wear my sweater now." I go into the room, we put on the sweater, and we hug to make up.

Later, she protests that she already blew her nose and doesn't need to do it again, and makes her point clear by hiding the tissue under the dog's bed. We let it run. What's a little snot in the scheme of things?

Gondolas in Space

2010-01-15T18:53:00.001-08:00

It was New Year's Eve, and we'd seen a circus, a taiko performance, some fireworks and a bunch of Loony Tunes cartoons, all part of First Night in Burlington, VT. Sydney had been going strong all day but there we were, napless, trying to eat dinner in a small Korean restaurant. One of the cartoons had made a big impression on her.

"I want to go in a rocket ship with Mommy and Bugs Bunny!" she said, restlessly toying with a dumpling.

"Okay!" I said, glad to have some kind of distraction that did not involve throwing food. "First, we need a countdown!" And I counted down from 10 to 1. Sydney was obviously anticipating the next maneuver, so with great gusto I lifted her out of her chair and made rocket noises at the same time.

Instead of giggling happily, she burst into hysterical tears.

"NO!" she cried between hiccups, "I wanted to go in a real one!" And she collapsed onto my shoulder with great, shuddering sobs.

Which is just as well, since I was suddenly overcome with hysterical laughter, even over my horror at unintentionally bursting her bubble.

Welcome to reality, kid.

Gently as I could, I explained that we couldn't go in a real one, at least not right now, and that she perhaps might like to practice first? Maybe go to astronaut school? Maybe someday when she was older and had gone to astronaut school, she could go in a real one. A few moments later she collapsed into a puddle on my lap and fell deeply asleep. So started Sydney's 2010.

We have these heartbreaking moments of disappointment more frequently now, as Sydney realizes more and more that the whole world is not actually revolving around her, that things can't always happen right now, that even fun things come to an end. We try to tread the fine line of not giving her false hope and also not breaking her spirit, and sometime we succeed, and sometimes we don't. It depends on the day, or maybe just the moment.

At any rate it's certainly not all bad. Today I came home to be greeted by an obviously excited child who couldn't wait to tell me about her day.

"We ate lunch in a gondola!!" she cried.

It's not a spaceship, but maybe it's just as good.

Navigating Christmas

2009-12-26T20:24:00.000-08:00

It sounds fun and easy, doesn't it? Who doesn't have fond memories of waking up on Christmas morning, only to find that Santa really did come and he left you presents that you may have asked him for and some you only thought of? Who doesn't remember the excitement of new toys which last for, oh a few hours at least? Who wouldn't want to recreate those moments for their own offspring? Really, how hard can it be?

Okay so first off, remember now that you're carrying on a deception based on a conglomeration of Swedish, German and Macy Department store's traditions in which a fat, jolly man who usually lives on the North Pole flies around the world delivering presents to every single (good) child in a red and white suit with flying reindeer in a single night. And now you're trying to explain to a two and a half year old that this man comes down your chimney, fills an empty stocking and leaves presents, but somehow doesn't do it until she's asleep. "Why?" she asks, the typical two year old. At one point, early on, she surprised me and asked, "Is Santa Claus real?"

I said yes. I outright lied. I just didn't expect the question before the age of say, eight.

We got past the Santa Claus hurdle, only to be thrown into the melee of what the heck to buy the two year old who has everything and is used to "shopping" at the town's "Swap Shop" (i.e. the "dump"). Everything in the world contains batteries, educational DVDs and flashing lights. Everything else is toxic or made for ages 3 and up. What would she really play with? The traditional way of gathering info--asking your child what they asked Santa for-- wasn't yielding any information, since Sydney asked Santa for a Christmas Tree.

Stuffing the stocking became an issue; I hadn't bought enough stuffing. Recalling my stocking days I finally figured out why my stockings always contained fruit; they filled up the space nicely. Then it came time to wrap the presents... and wrap, and wrap, and wrap... it was 10:30 before we were done. Exhausted, we went to bed.

Predictably, when Sydney came downstairs to encounter the newly stuffed stocking and the presents under the tree, she didn't ask about Santa. She said, "Did somebody come here?"

All in all, the rest of the day went well, and Sydney was delighted with everything, most notably a Black & Decker toolset complete with hard hat, safety vest and goggles (goo goo goggles, she calls them). This morning she asked tentatively if her new presents were still here, as if she expected them to disappear with the Day. I told her they were and she went downstairs happily.

The Christmas Mystery; solved. Now, if only someone had told me that fingerpaints were so messy.... but that's a different story.

Have Toilet Seat, Will Travel

2009-11-30T05:20:00.000-08:00

One of the unspoken secrets of parenthood is that toddlers are a source of unremitting hilarity.

Of course, you can't laugh at them, you'd give them a complex. Even when I laugh at one of Sydney's silly antics, something she is doing silly on purpose, she still asks me, "why are you laughing?" To laugh at her when she endeavors to offer her own serious opinion, or when she is stomping around in the kitchen in her "dancing dress" to Elvis Costello's "Red Shoes", or when she suddenly bursts into tears and declares she doesn't want the Christmas Tree because it isn't Christmas yet, would surely be classified as child abuse, so we spend alot of time with our hands over our mouths or with our backs turned, trying to hold in a serious case of the giggles.

And now we've got toilet humor. Sorry, folks.

Early in Sydney's potty training career, she was feeling confident enough one day to do the whole operation by herself. So without telling her father, she climbed up the stairs, went into the bathroom, took off her diaper, and climbed up onto the big potty, only to fall straight through the hole and ended up screaming her head off, whereupon Daddy found her half submerged, her shirt wet and her little arms trying to keep her butt out of the water. Talk about trying not to laugh in the face of serious crisis.

This incident has marked Sydney, so even though she is perfectly toilet trained she is afraid of the Toilet, i.e. the thing that grown ups sit on. She still insists that Daddy teach her to pee standing up, a request I am continuously vacillating on, on the one hand telling her that Daddy will teach her when she's six (an age I've placed a lot of arbitrary milestones on) and on the other telling her that girls pee sitting down. She countered the last one the other day by responding that she wants to be a boy.

"um," I said.

It's a frequent response of mine, these days. I mean really. What is the correct parental guidance response to a request for an early toddler sex change?

In any event, to combat the problem of the Big Evil Toilet, the only kind they ever have in shopping malls, gas stations, or restaurants, we've started carrying with us in place of the diaper bag a toddler's toilet seat.

So there I am, in a small Co-op with my hilarious sidekick, who is constantly chatting up a storm, running around the aisles, and generally making herself (and me) conspicuous to all the other shoppers, when she announces at the top of her lungs that she needs to poop. We get out the bag with the potty seat in it, rush to the bathroom, and get set up, whereupon she announces that actually she doesn't need to go. So we undo the operation and go back to our half filled shopping cart, where five minutes later she announces once again that she needs to poop. So we run back to the bathroom and this time we get something for our troubles. Thoroughly frazzled by now, I go back to my shopping, but Sydney is done, and she runs around and around screeching delightedly. I decide that I'd best be done too, so we go to the register and unload the wagon. Sydney puts on her Helpful Toddler Hat and decides she can push the wagon back to where we got it from, and starts pushing it in a random direction, heading toward a display of bananas. I'm in the middle of paying. "Honey," I say, in that distracted parental way, trying to keep one eye on her and one eye on the debit machine, "please be careful where you're going."

Sydney stops, stares at me, and then in her loudest, most incredulous voice, cries, "What!??"

Whereupon the cashier, the bagger, and half the store burst out laughing.

That's Sydney, my little comedian.

Toiletry

2009-11-24T03:24:00.000-08:00

Saturday began like any other day. Sydney went down for her "nap"-- otherwise known as her private two hour sing-a-long, at around 2, and at around 4:30 I came back into the room to find her sitting on the bottom of the bed with a huge grin on her face.

"I didn't sleep!" was the first excited thing she said to me, and then the real kicker, "I'm not going to wear diapers anymore because I'm a big girl!"

"Really!" I said, conveniently responding to both statements. We dutifully got out of the diaper and into underwear (recycled and much too big), and when downstairs I asked her to repeat the last part so that Daddy could hear.

"I didn't sleep!" she said.

"No, the other part," I said.

We decided to take her at her word, though we were worried, for instance, when she and I went out for an hour to hike about looking for Christmas Trees, or when we went out for a third of the day to go shopping, or what would happen when she napped.

So far, she's done it almost perfectly.

So in honor of Sydney's new journey into the world of Toilets, you should read this link. Maybe Sydney knew it was momentous day after all.

Pop, Pop, and Away

2009-11-07T19:05:00.001-08:00

We went to town today to gather a few items and also to buy a gift for a friend of Sydney's, just turning three. Sydney's favorite place to buy gifts; The Party Store.

When you go to the Party Store, you're really there to buy balloons. So we explained that one balloon would go to Sydney, the other, to her friend.

"Okay," Sydney said, and then promptly picked out a bright, cheery orange one for herself, and a somber black one for the birthday boy.

We intervened and picked out a purple Happy Birthday balloon, and handed them out to the clerk to be filled, whereupon the balloon became about the size of Sydney and three times as wide.

"Hon," my husband said to me, "Do you think we can fit that into the car?"

We then belatedly learned from the clerk that a balloon of that size would probably deflate in 4 or 5 hours. The birthday party would be the next day.

"Fortunately," the future salesman exclaimed, "for 35 cents extra we can add a substance called Hi Float, which will make the balloon last for 24 to 36 hours!"

We had already committed ourselves to the balloon. We agreed to fill two balloons with Hi Float.

Six dollars later, we were out of the store and trying to stuff them into the back of the car when one of the balloons popped suddenly. It was the bright cheery orange one.

"Uh oh," we muttered to each other. "What should we do?"

"Syd," my husband said a few seconds later, "your balloon popped."

"Oh," she said, disinterested. She was busy looking at the pavement.

"Is that okay?" he persisted.

"Yes," she said. She was on to something else entirely.

Relieved, we stuffed the remaining balloon into the back of the car and headed to our next errand, a drugstore. Somehow, Sydney found herself in the party section of that store (is party animalism genetic?) and shouted for joy. "Bayyoons!!" she cried, and promptly pulled down a mylar helium contraption with Dora the Explorer on it.

We were now 9 dollars into helium, ribbon, mylar and rubber.

We began to wend our way home with the new balloon, the birthday balloon and our various other errands stuffed into our small Prius, when we heard another explosion in the back. The big, Hi Float Happy Birthday balloon was gone.

Two balloons down. At least we still had Dora.

Who, true to her name, decided to set out Exploring when I opened the trunk during our next stop to change a diaper. Neither Sydney nor I witnessed Dora's silent escape from the car, but she was nowhere to be found when we got home.

Fortunately Sydney had bought a wooden secondhand train. "Your balloon is gone," I explained to her as we went into the house.

"Oh," she said, rolling her train on the floor.

The train was 2 dollars. And Sydney was happy. And that was all that really mattered.

Happy Halloween

2009-11-01T04:11:00.000-08:00

I don't think that Sydney really understood the question. After all, the past two Halloweens she's been around for, her language skills were either undeveloped or largely absent. But in any,event, whenever we asked her, she stuck with her story.

We saw several ladybugs, a spider, a couple of Batmen, one Boba Fett, a million disney princesses, a few witches, a devil, and an infant dressed up as a carrot. There were also a few nondescript costumes, mostly teenagers, dressed up in that Just Give Me the Candy kind of way. It was a warm, though windy, Halloween, and everybody seemed to be having a good time.

Oh, what did Sydney want to be for Halloween?

Spinach.

Out In the World

2009-08-21T19:44:00.000-07:00

Parenting is, on the one hand, a matter of subjective opinion, and everyone should have the right to raise their children as they see fit. On the other hand, being a parent is like being under a giant diplomatic microscope; a UN of patriotic, vitriolic, sympathetic procreators whose country of child is necessarily the center of the universe. Enter; the beach.

Sydney, myself, my husband, and his sister and her husband, all met up at the ocean front a few weekends ago. Although the beach in question has miles of relatively uninhabited areas in which to camp for the day, we uncharacteristically chose the most busy spot; next to the pier, the playground and the sandy beach. Sydney was ready to play, you see.

All around us were people and children of varying stages of life and varying stages of beach dress; from the almost-nothing string bikini to the full veil of the modest Muslim. They were also from all different walks and views of life, as evidenced in the many encounters we had.

It's these encounters with perfect strangers, whose children interact with mine, which is the sticky point where diplomacy might break down. Sydney met up with a girl named Katherine, a cute princess of a three year old who seemed friendly enough until Sydney picked up some seaweed.

"Eww!" Katherine said, "I don't want it!!" Katherine's parents had obviously taught Katherine the dangers of the wild outdoors. Sydney, on the other hand, has never seen a slimy green thing she didn't like.

Ignoring the outburst, Sydney gave it to me. "Whatz dis?" she asked.

"Seaweed," I said.

While Katherine was still inching back closer to her new friend, Sydney asked, curiously, "Can I eat it?"

Seriously. What could make a mother prouder?

Later, as I was enjoying a nice dive in the cold Atlantic, I noticed a recently dead but mostly intact crab floating in the waves. I showed it to my sister in law, and then noticed that Sydney was still engaged with Katherine. "I'm going to go freak Katherine out," I said, and hurried to shore to cause diplomatic havoc.

Later, I felt a little bad. Was I dooming my daughter to a life without friends? But on the other hand, she has plenty of friends. She immediately named her new crab friend "Jeebo." Who needs a Katherine when you have a crab?

Y?

2009-08-10T18:29:00.000-07:00

Sydney, you can't eat dirt. Don't eat dirt.

Why?

Because it isn't good for you.

Why?

Because it isn't food.

Why?

Because dirt isn't food.

Why?

Because it isn't.

Why?

Just because.

Why?

I don't know.

.....

Why?

Sorting Reality from Fiction

2009-07-29T19:04:00.000-07:00

"A boy hit his head with a bottle!" Sydney declared, a few days ago, apropos of nothing, "but he okay kapuz his friend pick him up."

"Oh, I see," I said, trying to process a) what she was talking about and b) where she'd witnessed such an event. These days I have to navigate carefully through these statements to get at what she's really talking about. If I ask directly, she'll reply, "Stop talking to me!" and then she'll end the conversation and I'll be no wiser. So I try to sort it out in a round about way.

"Did you see this on the computer?" Maybe it was a Sesame Street scene?

"No," she said.

I tried a different tactic. "What was the boy wearing?"

"A jacket and a coat," she said, emphatically, and then she moved on to another subject. "You a BOY!! How you doin? It's so nice to see you!!"

Maybe she dreamt it. Maybe it was part of a conversation. Maybe she made it up.

Maybe, I don't want to know.

Kapuz

2009-07-06T19:02:00.000-07:00

I make up stories and I make up games and I immediately regret it because whatever I invent we'll play for days on end. Take, for instance, Whappowong, which is when you suddenly flop down on the grass with your legs in the air and then you drop the legs suddenly--wong-- which is very funny and also, it turns out, funny on the twenty or ninetieth try.

I made up a talking hand puppet when Sydney was 9 or 10 months old called Tickle Monster. Then I made up another one called Cousin Tickle Monster. Some days, Sydney will only talk to Tickle Monster or Cousin Tickle Monster and not to me. Somehow she trusts them, even though they often tickle her instead of answering questions. "Hi Tickle Monster! How you doin'?" she'll say, looking directly at my curled up hand. "I'm good, Syd, how are you?" I'll say in my normal non-Tickle-Monster voice. "NO TALK! Just Tickle Monster!" she'll tell me. Sigh. I used to be so much more than just a hand.

Sydney's favorite joke is to call me a boy. "You a BOY!!" she'll yell joyfully. Recently she's been told that actually her mother is a woman. "You a WOMAN!!" she'll yell at her father, generally in a particularly crowded grocery store.

She's starting to rationalize things too. The other day she told me that she couldn't sit on the potty "kapuz it pinch me."

"It.. what?"

"Kapuz it pinch me!"

"Kapuz?"

"You don' unnerstann!" she said, sorrowfully, an expression I've used often to let her know that I'm trying to figure out what she's saying, but don't quite get it yet.

"Say it again, I'll understand this time," I said, helpfully, hoping it was true.

"No potty, kapuz it pinch me!" she said, impatiently.

"OH! Because it pinched you! I see..." it had pinched her the other day, accidentally. I let her know I fixed the potty and all was well, and we went on to our customary "I don't half to be brave" which means that she won't get a "soap bath" tonight and won't have to endure the agony of getting her hair washed.

Kapuz we all know how bad that is. Just, you know, kapuz.

I See France

2009-06-11T19:06:00.000-07:00

Sydney hasn't seen her favorite aunt for a month. But she loves to talk to her on the phone and tell her all the important things going on; usually those things are right in front of her, so the conversation is a little disjointed. Today, however, she proudly announced to her aunt:

"I'm wearing blue underwear!"

She was, too.

Storytelling

2009-05-25T04:12:00.000-07:00

Out of the blue, Sydney will suddenly feel compelled to tell you her favorite story. It goes like this:

"Watching a tree fall down, go BOOM! in da trunk uv da maple. But da maple okay. An' mommy pull da comealong, and daddy pull da comealong too. An' daddy cut it up in pieces an 'they go in the fire."

That pretty much sums up our entire existence, with side ventures into blueberry orchards and vegetable gardens and our new venture, chickens. Sydney hears about our need for wood all the time, and she hears the chainsaw, but the felling of this one particular tree--which hit a maple we were trying to save but didn't end up ultimately hurting it-- made a huge impression.

The story makes a bigger impression on us. Those are full sentences she's saying there. Where the heck did those come from?

Happy Birthday, Too

2009-04-18T04:20:00.000-07:00

Sydney's gotten into this bad habit of repeating things; so here we are. Our officially two year old daughter can count to ten (1...2...3....6!...6!...6!...7...8...9..10!) and recite the alphabet (A...B...C...D...4!.....4!....4!) and she can tell you what color things are (usually, they are blue), she can wash her hands and put on her slippers "all by self" as well as remove all the keys from my laptop's keyboard, and in generally she's turning into a fairly active, curious and energetic kid.

Happy Birthday, you silly little girl!

ECHOechoecho

2009-04-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

Or maybe there's a parrot in the house.

On Saturday we moved the wood splitter from the garage to the open sun so I could see what I was doing as I changed the oil and tried to get the crotchedy thing started. My husband took his chain saw and announced that he would cut down a tree that I had refused to help him with, stating firmly that it was entirely too close to the power lines and I wanted nothing to do with it. He was feeling confident--or cocky-- and announced he needed no help from me. Off he went, leaving me to my task--and to Sydney, of course.

The %$#@*^!! thing wouldn't start, and I couldn't find any of our tools, and as I struggled to remove the spark plug I was muttering under my breath all sorts of four-letter words, which Sydney immediately picked up on and said over and over at the top of her lungs. Fortunately that's when I heard the tree topple and looked up to see the power lines flailing hugely up and down, to which I stopped my cursing and said to Sydney: "Daddy hit the lines!"

We watched the lines with some dismay until they stopped their oscillation, and I ran into the house briefly to make sure we still had power. When I returned, Sydney was repeating over and over excitedly: "Daddy hit the lines! Daddy hit the lines! Daddy hit the lines!"

Soaking it all up, she is. But she's not sure how to spit it all back out. So for the past few days her sentences have been full of curse words, demands, song snippets and random sentences, so at any one time one might hear: "Water! Bear, sit down. %#@%*$!! Mary had a little lamb, laugh and play, Daddy hit the lines!"

I can see why some people jokingly say that once they start talking, you'd wish they'd shut up. It's not that you don't want to hear what they're saying. It's that you have no idea what they're talking about.

Life in the Toddler Lane

2009-04-03T15:42:00.000-07:00

For the most part, my life was pretty stable and predictable before I had a kid. I knew, for instance, that my keys were in my bag, that my hair brush was somewhere in the bathroom, that my shoes would remain empty until I chose to put my feet in them. These days things are not so predictable. I have no idea where my keys are, my hairbrush could be anywhere in the house and my shoes often have various pieces of detritus in them, including but not limited to: pieces of bark, small toys, coins, tissue paper, or baby socks.

This morning I stumbled into the bathroom to discover two cardboard tubes scattered on the floor. Last night I apparently slept with a dragon finger-puppet, which I discovered under my pillow when my own hand finally crept under there. I had our accountant's calling card safely tucked into my backpack, but I found it the other day among a recently re-arranged tupperware drawer. I just never know what might be hiding under the tablecloth or floating in the toilet. Who knows what has been thrown away in the trash can or tucked away somewhere safe.

Well, Sydney knows. But she doesn't necessarily think these things are important to tell you.

The Princess and the Pee

2009-02-25T18:51:00.000-08:00

"I farted!" my angelic, sweet-faced grinning daughter yelled out. "I farted!" she said again, and to forestall a broken record repeating of the two words which will occur if I don't answer, I replied, "yes! Yes, you did!"

Actually I had no idea if she had or not, so I had to take her word for it, like I have to take her at her word when she looks me in the eye and says the following key words:

"diaper!"
"poop!"
"pee!"

Sometimes she means it, and sometimes she doesn't. Or possibly she's getting pee and poop mixed up, or maybe she gets the poop and the farting mixed up, or maybe she's just telling me that she's wearing a diaper, or that a few hours ago she pooped, or perhaps she's telling me that she knows what poop is, or maybe, she's just saying words. It's hard to tell these days.

In any event, we've hopped onto the potty train.

So far, nothing has come of it. Except that this morning she told me that the potty was cold and then refused to sit on it, preferring instead to squat in front of it, which is not, ideally, in the end what we're striving for.

I told her father this story and this evening he decided that if the potty was cold then by golly we'd have to warm it up. So he took a heated wash cloth and wiped the thing down, and lo and behold our princess did indeed sit on the throne.

No pee came of it. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time, as long as we can keep the seat warm.

Nice Hot Bowl Wa-Wa

2009-01-31T12:50:00.000-08:00

We were fresh out of swim class, walking at the head of a crowd of people leaving the Y, and I was negotiating with Sydney.

"Mo hop-hops" she said.
I shook my head, "No, no more hop-hops until we get to the car."
"Car," Sydney said, "No hop-hops, car."
"What are hop-hops?" The woman behind me finally had to ask.

Busted!

Hop-hops are, of course, what Sydney calls bunnies, because she knows they hop, I suppose, and she and I were actually talking about Annies Bunny Grahams, which are kind of like your traditional Animal Cracker except they are all bunnies. So I had to explain to the woman that my daughter was actually talking about eating bunnies, which sounded terrible when you explained it in adult English. At least she wasn't sitting at our dinner table, listening to Sydney expound upon her love of baa-baa while eating lamb.

We'd recently heard from a child expert that not using the correct word for whatever the child says when speaking back to them is bad for language development. That means when Sydney announces that she wants wa-wa I should promptly say "water" back to her, and I should definitely not fall into the trap of referring to bunnies as "hop-hops." But on the other hand, what is language development after all but the ability to aptly express yourself? Why shouldn't I start referring to our mouthwash as "teeth juice?" Or to soup as "bowl wa-wa?" Or to the act of plowing snow as "mommy push snow?" Maybe Sydney just isn't as hide-bound, language-wise, as the rest of us. Maybe toddlers don't develop language so much as craft it.

Bowl wa-wa, by the way, is a simple meal which can be cooked up right at the dinner table. All you need is a bowl, some water, and some dinner. First you pour the water into the bowl. Then you put select pieces of dinner in the bowl. Then you mash it around with your hand. Then you drink it. If you have hop-hops and baa-baa at the same time, you might just be in toddler heaven. Or as Sydney might put it, in "baby up-high".

And Yes means Yes

2009-01-27T16:27:00.000-08:00

At 21 months, we're embarking on 2, and we all know the Terrible Twos.

Here's a sampling:

The game of Chase Me: Chase Me is excellent exercise, for child and parent alike, and consists, at least at the moment, of going round and round the dining room table or, if we're really ambitious and rambunctious, the circuit we can make by going through the kitchen to the living room through the hall to the dining room and back through the kitchen. The game is necessarily accompanied by the panicky giggle from the 21 month old and the phrase "I'm gonna get you" from the chasing parent.

Chase Me is also employed when about to do something you might not want to do, such as getting dressed or going to bed.

No: The word no is increasingly employed by both parent and child to mean things we shouldn't do (No climbing on the radiator) or things we don't want to do (no brush!) or things we're not going to do right now (No car today) or things we're not going to have anymore (no more juice). No is also a word ignored increasingly by both parties, to the point where my husband, in one frustrating moment, told Sydney sternly, "No means no!" She has taken this to heart, repeating it endlessly back to us so that we understand too: "nomeanno! nomeanno! nomeanno!" Of course she's right. In a fair world, her "no" would mean no, too. Someday soon, maybe, Dad will be forced to tell her: "yeah, well, life's not fair." Hopefully that won't be until we reach the Terrible Teens.

Smiling: Yes, Virginia, being cute and having an adorable smile will get you everything in the end. This girl has a mind of her own, a head of blond hair and the smile of an angel. Watch out, world. Here she comes.

Errant Xylophones

2009-01-08T17:19:00.000-08:00

"Nysh!" Sydney says, pointing to the swords we have hanging on the wall or to the cucumber she wants cut up smaller. "Nysh!" she says when she sticks her hand under the water, when it is that rare just right temperature that is neither hot nor cold. "Daddee! Nysh!" she says with a definitive nod of her head, which either means "Daddy is nice" or "Daddy is a knife." We assume the former.

Language has always been a confusing mishmash for me, one of the reasons I have stuck with my primary and only tongue, English, although my fluency in this particularly confusing grammatical structure is probably a fine accomplishment, given the sheer number of rules and exceptions we have to play with. Not to mention the further down the alphabet you go, the less examples of viable words you have.

Take, for instance, the letter X.

Sydney has started to take an interest in her blocks. She has moved past the knock them down, stack them up stage and has moved to the pictures, numbers and letters represented on each of the six sides. Some of the blocks are thoughtfully arranged so that the letter represents a word represents a picture, and thus we have our lesson in language while striving to play. For a while the game is easy enough. "A" is for apple, "B" is for basket... but then you get to "X" and what do you do now? What super 21 month old can get their tongue around the word "xylophone", not to mention trying to explain what it is?

This particular block set tried to represent x-ray, with mixed results:

"X!" I say, turning the block around to reveal the big X and the small x. Then "X is for xray..." and then turning it around again to the picture side, which shows a kid with a blackened middle and bones for a belly, at which point I say "and this is a...."

"Boy!" Sydney gamely says, going for the most obvious portion of the picture and conveniently ignoring the "x" part.

.."Yes," I say, "x is for... boy." How am I really supposed to explain the concept of a machine which can see your bones? She doesn't even know she has bones.

Houston, we have language, over.

2008-12-02T17:47:00.000-08:00

It's not the Queen's English, not by a long stretch. In fact most of it could not properly be thought of as English at all. But it gets its point across.

Sydney learned, a few weeks ago, to say 'no'. She's been shaking her head 'no' for quite awhile, so it was almost an afterthought when the word came out of her mouth, an emphatic, clear, beautifully simple 'no' which, though I knew I'd come to regret it later, I promptly encouraged. Now she uses the head shake for a different purpose, to indicate that she knows the thing that she is saying and the thing that she is pointing to are not the same. For instance, a hand straight up to the ceiling, a shake of the head and the spoken word: "baby" means: "There are no babies on the ceiling."

It's true, too. There aren't.

"Shoe!" she told me in a plaintive sort of way, the other day, having lost one between the cushions of the couch. "Shoe! Shoe!" she continued to whine, until I retrieved it for her. "Shoe!" she said, relieved.

But we're not done with the language feat yet. She continues to surprise us with just how much she understands, now that she can tell us, in her limited way. We were talking about the kids she'd see tomorrow in playgroup, and we mentioned one rambunctious child by name. "Bmp!" Sydney said, with a sorrowful expression and her hand on her head. I knew immediately what she meant, "yes, he's kind of bumpy, isn't he? But he doesn't mean to."

"Wow!" my husband said. That was a leap we hadn't quite expected to make, given that we're still just on nouns, yet. Perhaps perceiving she'd blown our minds, Sydney safely retreated to known territory, pointing to the ceiling and shaking her head. "Baby!" she said.

No, there's no babies up there. I'm not sure there's any here.

The Young and the Binkiless

2008-11-02T17:10:00.000-08:00

Time flies, even when you're in the midst of the largest poopy diaper you have ever seen.

And sometimes, when you're having fun, too.

This past week we made a trek via airplane to St. Louis to visit my brother and his wife. Just two years ago we swore up and down to each other, pray God to strike us dead if we didn't, that we would never, ever, ever take Sydney anywhere which required flying until she was 18. Fortunately we didn't specify the unit of time.

At 18 months, Sydney isn't saying much, but what she does say speaks volumes. For instance, if one of your only words is "hat," you will make sure that everyone around you knows that the world is full of hats. Lately the fullness of the world is divided between hats and shoes, and the newest addition, cars, threatens to push hats off to the sidelines. Planes aren't cars, though. No, planes are items which, though fun in theory, are a bastion of pure toddler torture. All these people to smile and play peek-a-boo with, a full aisle to walk up and down, and a Fasten Seatbelt Sign on for most of a turbulent flight. What could be worse?

Still it wasn't all bad, especially the Itsy Bitsy Spider with Aunt Stephanie, and the chimpanzees Sydney struck up a conversation with at the zoo, and the long, long message she managed to leave on our home answering machine, after somehow successully dialing our number on the cell phone. Her first attempt didn't make it out of St. Louis. That's because she dialed Uncle Nathan, who was driving.

Anyway, we're back. We're out of the "car". We've bought a new "hat" (it says St. Louis Zoo). We managed, we think, to bring everything and everyone back, even though we lost the parking ticket at the airport. Note to my childless friends out there: Yes, children are a lot of work. But everyone sympathizes with you when you have one. If you can stand the 3 o' clock sleepless night and the 4 pm tantrum for no reason, then having a kid will get you places. And then nice people will help you get out of those places.

Having a kid will make your blog entries schizophrenic, too. Oh well. Can't have everything.

Walking on Water

2008-09-25T03:31:00.000-07:00

First it was a few hesitant steps before falling back down onto the floor. Then it was a few more steps here and there, when Sydney didn't have any place important to go. Then all of a sudden, one day, like a switch had been thrown in her head, it became the dominant method of locomotion.

The Sydney walketh.

The entire process between the first few steps and the actively walking toddler took about two months, belying my romantic notion (and really I should know better by now) that these things just happen one day and then you're on to the next milestone, say, speaking words that make sense to the adults around you.

The pinnacle of the walking saga so far has been the walk we all took on the weekend, complete with dog, stroller and baby. On the way out Sydney was content to be wheeled about but on the way back she insisted on getting out. Once out, she insisted on getting down. And then she walked--marched, more like-- all the way back home.

Uh oh.

Gray Anatomy

2008-06-03T03:29:00.000-07:00

Years ago while I was still in high school, and the specter of having children was at least a ways off if possible at all, I entertained my friends with the notion that should I ever have children I would inflict upon them a language no one else would understand, though it would still be English. I would do this by teaching them that a knife was a "fork", a spoon a "bowl", and so forth. Of course I myself would have to learn this new language to really be consistent about it, but that didn't factor into my fantasy. I just thought it would be funny.

So these friends might think this is only karma.

Sydney and us are at the point where limited but emphatic conversation can occur. "Do you want to read a book?" will be met with an enthusiastic nod. "This one?" --another nod. "Do you want me to read it? Or Daddy?" -- another nod (the multiple choice question is usually where the conversation breaks down). Occasionally there is something which does not meet her approval and she will vigorously shake her head to indicate her unwillingness to take part.

So we've embarked on a somewhat serious effort to impart the knowledge which was passed down to us. I decided to start with body parts.

"This is your eye! This is your nose! This is your mouth! This is your ear! ..." and so on. Then I'd ask her to show me where the body part was. Until recently, I've been met with a blank, disinterested stare before Sydney would turn away to show me something much more interesting, like her stuffed dog. But the other night we finally had a breakthrough: when I asked Sydney where she thought her nose might be, she confidently and enthusiastically patted the body part she thought I wanted. Surprised, I asked her again, with the same result.

Here it is folks: Sydney's nose is where most people might think her right ear would be.

Venturing Outside

2008-05-11T05:02:00.000-07:00

My husband came home from a trip to the dump to the sounds of his daughter screaming in the wilderness, as if she'd been abandoned in a cave, or her arm had been cut off, or she was surrounded by hungry bears about to tear her from limb to limb. Concerned, he rushed towards the sound, only to confront his wife coming out of the field, holding onto their struggling, protesting daughter.

"What happened?" he asked.

"I picked her up," I replied.

Sydney has discovered the Great Outdoors; the infinite wonder of leaves, dirt, bugs, and worms. And she loves it so much that she will stay there, thank you, until she's had her fill. Never mind the black flies, the sun, the inclement weather, or the fact that its time to go eat dinner.

While we take in the whole landscape, noting the little baby on the big lawn, she's examining the minute details of grass, dead leaves, a baby-hand-sized rock which she's found hiding under the grass. She will reverence these objects for long moments, and then, as a final compliment, she will put them lovingly into her mouth, a kind of reverse engineering; I like you, therefore you must be edible.

As with all new things this too will become old hat, and we'll see her start walking through puddles, running over fields, walking into the forest, climbing up mountains. But for now the kid is rooted in one spot, endlessly picking at the growing grass. If I could only pick her up and move her to another location without causing World War III, I almost wouldn't have to mow.

One Year Later: A Retrospective

2008-04-16T18:00:00.001-07:00

One year ago today, Stanley Hilarius became Sydney.

It's certainly been an interesting one year and nine months. It's been a long, hard fought battle, but I must admit that Sydney has won. And I have the scar to prove it.

We've learned alot since those first shell shocked days. Mostly by trial and error, we've learned what Sydney does and does not like, when she'll sleep, and when she won't. We've also composed quite a few songs which, I'm sure, would make my operatic brother cringe but actually shouldn't surprise him too much. After all, I did come up with the words to the fantastic song: Fat Person, Sittin' on a Bike.

Chewin' on the Sydney Hands
Chewin' chewin' chewin'
Whatcha think you're doin'?
Chewin' on the Sydney Hands!

Magic Bag
Sydney's in the magic bag!
Cuz she is a baby.
Sydney's in the magic bag!
And I don't mean maybe.

Big Syd
It's the Big Syd!
The Big Big Syd!
The Big Big Big Big
BIG little Syd!

The Sockless Sydney
Sydney doesn't have any socks on!
What are we gonna do
About the sockless Sydney?

Washing
Oh, we're
Washing the face
Washing the face
Washing the face
So we can go to bed.
Cuz if we don't wash the face
then we can't go to bed
and if we don't go to bed
then the morning doesn't come.

Talent creeps up on you, you know.

In any case, we've managed to go back to our previous hectic lives, albeit with the copious help of relatives agreeing to babysit and rotating schedules which, whilst we were still in the midst of the breastfeeding saga, basically took me entirely out of the picture every two hours.

Fortunately Sydney took up the slack. That girl can stack a cord of wood in no time.

Wait, that's not how it happened. Turns out she was with me.

So today is Sydney's Big Day, and to celebrate, she decided to cry around 2am this morning, just about the time she first made noise. She's on her own journey, notwithstanding us, her parents, and we're really just following along. We try to guide her towards the carrots and the sweet potatoes of life, but more often than not they'll end up on the floor. Whatever she ends up putting on her plate isn't really up to us.

Happy First Birthday, Sydney!

Standing on Ceremony

2008-03-10T03:44:00.000-07:00

Babies are constantly on the move and their brains are constantly calculating the next developmental step, and most of all, babies do things on their own time, so you often miss the next big thing until it happens out of the corner of your eye while you're having a conversation with your spouse.

Look ma! ...no hands!!

Sydney has learned to stand and she's learned to cruise, and apparently she's been processing the fact that her parents don't need to hold onto things when they walk about the room or carry her about, and so yesterday, apropos of nothing, she removed her hands from her mother who was being used as a support, lifted them up, and for two seconds was standing on her own two feet with only gravity and air keeping her upright.

To which we responded with the appropriate amount of praise, while our minds were whirling. Oh no! And we just got the house child-proofed for a crawling baby!!

Next I suppose she'll start saying real words, like "president" or "tricycle" instead of "bababa!" or "rarara!"

Should I start making her apply for college now, or wait until the summer?

Cutest Baby in the World

2008-02-13T03:30:00.000-08:00

It is increasingly obvious to us that our baby, of all the babies in the entire world, is the cutest baby there is. We know this for several reasons:

1) We think she's cute. Now you'll say that we are hardly subjective and of course we think our baby is the most beautiful creature to ever crawl this earth, but we are both intelligent, objective, independent people who are not above admitting to ourselves an ugly truth, or an ugly baby.

2) All of her relations say she's cute. Again you'll argue that this is not exactly definitive proof either, since her relations will also not be entirely independent and probably as blind as we are, but we're going to take their words for it because:

3) Perfect strangers go out of their way to tell us she's cute. Or more likely, they won't talk to us at all. They'll interrupt an earnest conversation about whether to buy another pacifier to replace the 10 misplaced ones, duck their head in to Sydney's level and go: oh aren't you precious boy you're a cute one what beautiful eyes.... oh, I'm sorry. They'll finally say to us. But she's just the cutest thing.

This last phenomenon drives us crazy, as it makes shopping a hazardous obstacle course full of well meaning, googly-eyed old ladies, sentimental, sheepish middle aged men and younger people of both genders who look at our bundle o' joy with romantic ideas and have no idea what they're in for.

These conversations are excruciating, because no longer is this a matter of one adult being rude to another, as was the case throughout the long nine months of pregnancy, but of an adult ignoring the social constructs of normal human behavior to ogle directly at another human being, who, cuteness factor aside, is learning rapidly from everything around her--including that her smile will get her everything in the world, that everyone loves her, and that she is the cutest thing around.

On the other hand, we don't want her to think that all strangers are weird and scary. "Thank you," we say politely, if we can ever get a word in edgewise.

Long time human, first time parent

2008-01-16T03:27:00.000-08:00

We've been feeding Sydney increasingly chunkier pureed mashes consisting of different types of vegetables for almost three months now, and for the most part they've agreed with her. She's also developed some sense of what she does and does not like; for instance, carrots and cauliflower are on the do-I-have-to? list, while applesauce is on the I-can-not-will-not-Sam-I-am list. Winter squash, rice cereal, avocado and beets are on the favorites list.

Anyway to make a long story longer, Sydney's last meal the night before had been beets.

I put her to bed with no incident at 7:30, and then we spent an enjoyable hour watching TV, a luxury which has only just begun to return to us, puttered around for a little while, took the dog for walk and finally climbed into bed around 10:30.

I swear she has radar in her head. Okay, now's the time to do my trick! At first it was a just a cough and a whimper, then it became more insistent, finally it was definitely something I had to deal with; so I strode into the darkened room and found Sydney covered in what could only be a puddle of blood.

Did I mention Sydney's last meal had been beets?

When I turned on the light to see what was going on, I found that Sydney had deposited her very last meal onto the bed, her clothes and herself, creating perhaps the most horrifying, disgusting sight I have ever been subjected to. And it was up to me to clean it up. Talk about your Dirty Job. Also, while my very first instinct was to pick her up and reassure her that everything was alright, my second instinct was to hold her like a dirty rag, well away from me and everything else. I compromised by holding her close but away from me, in case any more of the beets should make their appearance.

Two baths and several retches later, we finally had her cleaned up enough to reassure her that everything was fine, whereupon she deposited more of her dinner onto herself and the floor and we had to start over. Eventually there was nothing left, which left us free to call the Night Nurse, a service which has been started presumably so that pediatricians can be shielded from anxious, clueless first-time parents and their stupid questions like: "Pedialyte?? What's that?"

We substituted apple juice instead, but it just wasn't the same.

Finally, around 3am, on the recommendation of the Night Nurse, we bundle Sydney up to take her to the hospital to be evaluated for dehydration. We trundle sleepily outside, put the baby in her car seat, turn on the car, and start down the road.

"Car's awful loud," my husband said.
"How's it handling?"
"Okay. Well...." he stopped the car, I got out, and sure as rain, the right front tire was flat as a pancake.

We turn the car around, limp back up the driveway on our flat tire, take the kid out of that car and put her in the other one, turn it on and remember that this car is low on gas. We debate whether we think we have enough gas to get to the nearest gas station, twenty minutes away. We decide we probably do, and drive to that gas station only to discover that it isn't the 24 hour variety of store we were led to believe it was. The attendant isn't moved by our plight, repeating that they were open at five am, but finally relents enough to inform us that the Cumberland Farms down the road is open now.

So we finally get gas at the Cumberland Farms and head off towards the hospital, about an hour later than we'd planned.

When we got there, Sydney was wide awake, quietly smiling at her surroundings and interested in all the new pull toys such as the nurse's station button. The doctor pronounced her fine, repeated the story about the Pedialyte: Elixir of Good For All Babies, and sent us home.

Was it a wasted trip? I don't know; we apparently needed the Pedialyte anyway, and our country bumpkin drugstore isn't open at all hours of the night. Plus Sydney fell asleep in the car ride over there, and we weren't sleeping anyway. We might as well be on the road. Finally, isn't it a given that the first time parent will over react the first time their kid vomits (beets or no beets)? We're just following the same story line that's been carefully laid out before us. We can't wait to see what happens next.

Creepy Crawly

2008-01-05T08:48:00.000-08:00

We have officially entered into the next phase of baby-hood. Sydney is crawling.

At first it was a just a few hesitant missteps before falling back on the much more reliable "commando crawl" which involves slithering forward on your belly lizard style to get to your desired object. Then it became more insistent. Now it is what Sydney does best.

Now we live in constant fear of what might be on the floor or what Sydney might walk into. We are not neat people, but we've cleared out the spaces the baby crawls in as best we can and we're becoming intimately acquainted with our vacuum, broom and mop. We've gotten down on our hands and knees and scrutinized the rooms from a baby eye's view, and tried to put ourselves in the mindset of a fearless but clueless 8 month old, discovering electrical cords and outlets for the first time, interesting items in the wide cracks of our pine floors, and completely uninterested in basic physical concepts such as gravity.

Even so, she still manages to find and chew on things which the more mature of us do not consider edible. So far we've pulled the following out of her protesting mouth:

moss
scotch tape
dog hair
paper
unidentified fuzz
flower petals
half a dead lightening bug
a burr

That's just the things we've found before they were swallowed. Who knows what's made it down into her digestive tract. So far, nothing obvious has been spit out the other side but I fully expect to see, reconstituted in way I've never seen before, inedible, inorganic items which have followed the same path as all the other stuff that goes into her mouth.

The crawling has also made us both uneasy enough that it invades our sleep. I sat up the other night and asked wildly where the baby was. My husband, woken up from his own uneasy sleep, assured me she was in her own bed. "Did you put her back?" I asked, because I had been dreaming that she was in bed with us but kept crawling away. My husband was silent for a time but decided to humor me. "Yes," he said, " I put her back." So far she's been unable to escape from the crib or the playpen but I suspect it is only a matter of time before those monkey instincts kick in. She'll progress from crawling to swinging from the trees before I know it.

Sydney for Ba-Rock A-Baby

2007-12-08T19:21:00.000-08:00

Magic in the Air

2007-11-15T03:14:00.000-08:00

Perhaps all parents already know this, but there's always one object, one beloved item or action which, if all else fails in a parent's myriad comforting bag of tricks, is the one emergency item you bring out because you have discovered that it works. Every time, like clockwork. That item is magic.

The first item we discovered was magic was an Infantino Sling Rider, basically just a bag with a strong padded strap, capable of carrying up to 20 pounds of baby weight. When placed in the sling, Sydney would be all scrunched up and terribly uncomfortable-looking, and would, 30 seconds later, fall fast asleep. Wearing the baby around our neck all day quickly became the norm, especially earlier in her career when "awake" generally meant "crying" and "asleep" generally "didn't happen." We began to call the sling the Magic Bag. We even gave it its own song, as we are wont to do, the lyrics of which went like this (to the tune of Magic Bus):

Sydney's in the Magic Bag!

Cuz she is a baby.
Sydney's in the Magic Bag!
And I don't mean maybe.
Magic Bag! Magic Bag!

The need for the Magic Bag has tapered off in recent months, although it is still resorted to in a pinch. Mostly things don't get that tragic anymore, and Sydney has learned to entertain herself to a certain degree. Also she is getting a lot more mobile and the memory of the womb is fading, so being squished up in a bag she can't see out of is less comforting than it used to be.

However, yesterday we went to the hospital (an ongoing saga of checkups and appointments for a borderline case of hip displasia, which was detected when she was first born by an emergency room nurse but never since) for an ultrasound and a doctor's appointment, and, because we are weaning Sydney from Mom, meant to bring the all important food and bottle combination. It was all put together properly and stored neatly away in the breastmilk cooler bag and put on the floor with all the other accoutrements we needed to bring, and it was still sitting on the floor when we got to the hospital.

We were going to be at the hospital pretty much all day, and we had no food for the baby. What kind of parents were we? We begged a few bottles of formula off of one of the nurses and bought a sippy cup (the closest thing they had to a bottle) in the gift shop, and made do with these items and some snacks from Mom's rapidly unproductive breasts. Still she didn't eat much. So much stuff was going on at the hospital that she was pretty cool with it, until we finally bundled her back into the car to go home. Then she let loose.

On the ride up earlier that day, before we knew of the food shortage, there had been a slight disturbance in the backseat, in response to which I turned on the car's CD player which had in it: Baby Beluga by none other than Raffi. My husband was less than enthused about this musical choice and teased that I just wanted to hear the CD again. I assuredly did not; this CD has been played way too many times in my presence. It was the only CD I had, though, and our reception in these parts is spotty. Rather than hunt the dial for music worthy of a six month old, I turn on the CD. The disturbance in the back quieted down and we eventually turned off the CD and thought no more of it.

There's not much you can do for a desperately unhappy infant screaming her head off while traveling down the interstate at a higher rate of speed than the posted speed limit, even if there are two of you in the car, so out of desperation I turned on the radio and cycled through the dial trying to find music and not commercials, gave up after a few seconds and turned on the CD again as an interim.

And the sudden silence from the backseat was golden.

After a few songs and a long period of contentment in the back we thought we could, perhaps, turn off Raffi and turn on NPR, but as soon as the CD went off a horrifying wail began again, and continued until I managed to get the CD turned on again. Sydney quieted down only to have the CD switch back over to Track 1, which takes longer than usual, and in the intervening silence she began to whimper again. Track 1 started. Silence again.

"Is there some subliminal message, do you think? Do drugs! Do drugs?" I asked.
"Or maybe, shut up kid or the monster will get you!" Raffi's charm was still lost on my husband. But we both agreed that we had hit upon the Magic CD, and that this CD should be carefully stored and cared for in order that we might, in a pinch, be able to make the world right again, at least for a while.

This morning we were both wide awake at 2am. Finally from the darkness my husband whispered, "I have Raffi in my head."
"Me, too," I said, "Which one?"
"Over in the meadow on a rock by the shore..."

And we both fell back to sleep.

Baby Tag

2007-11-11T10:14:00.000-08:00

A friend of ours just tagged us with an impossible stunt; turn to page 161 of the book you are currently reading, and then quote the 5th sentence.

While we're flattered that he thinks Sydney is reading books of such grandeur, we're not sure how we'd pull this one off. So we'll take the book that we read most frequently: Caring for Your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age 5, turn to page 161 and read:

He appears hungry, searching for something to suck shortly after feedings.

How random is that?

Breastfeeding's Final Thoughts: A %$#@*&#!! Pain in the Ass

2007-10-23T14:56:00.000-07:00

Well folks, we've made it six months as the sole gravy train and it's time to get off.

On October 17th, Sydney's six month birthday, we celebrated by feeding her "solid food" for the first time. By the time we got around to doing it, she'd fallen soundly asleep. My husband suggested that perhaps we wait for another day, but I was adamant. "Today's the day! We're starting her on real food today!"

"Real" is subjective, and "solid" is kind of a misnomer, as the resulting mush made by the rice and milk was hardly less liquid than what she usually gets. We woke her up, fully expecting a false start, but she gobbled it up, as if she too were eager to get on with this new concept. That night she slept hard and fast, a phenomenon that has disappeared recently with the arrival of teeth.

And with the introduction of food, solid or not, a huge weight has suddenly been lifted from my shoulders. For one thing, I no longer have to rush home from a full day at work to feed a hungry baby. For another, it means that this whole breastfeeding thing will soon be over.

Me and Sydney have been feeding this way for all of her life and sometimes, in the evenings when I put her to sleep this way, I get nostalgic and realize that, five or ten or fifteen years from now I'll try to remember these moments and won't be able to fully recall them. But during the day when I am frantically answering phone calls, racing to meetings and oh by the way, stepping out for twenty minutes three times a day to pump myself dry, I find myself counting the days.

Especially on those days when I forget a vital piece of the pump and have to either jerry-rig the thing or go out to buy new pieces, in between those phone calls, meetings, etc. Or in the mornings when I have to wash and sterilize the various portions before I can leave. Or those days when we are out on the road and invariably Sydney becomes hungry and we have to pull over and feed her, adding twenty minutes to our commute. Or those days when she wakes up every twenty minutes and is ravenously hungry all night.

You know, most days.

My final thoughts on the matter? The bottom line is that feeding a baby is inconvenient, period. But when you decide to breastfeed, it's all on you. Dad can't help unless you pump, and pumping is time consuming, annoying and and in general a pain in the butt. Breast feeding activists are lying when they say that breastfeeding is more convenient than formula feeding. It may be true for a select few, but for those of us who are rushing around trying to live our lives and have jobs and families too it simply isn't true. It may be better for baby and mother, but better doesn't mean formula is bad. Take it from a breastfeeding mother, you are not a bad person if you decide not to put up with what I have for six months. It can be done (I did it) but it doesn't have to be, and don't let anyone make you think otherwise.

That being said, am I glad I did it? Yes-- I like a good challenge. And experience is always a good thing. Life is short and can't be replayed. On the other hand we're about to move on to a new and exciting challenge--keeping up with a crawling baby. One challenge at a time is enough for me.

The Subject of Tonight's Word

2007-10-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

Toothiness.

Nation, one of the most insidious pastimes of babies isn't rattling or spitting up or even crying. No, they do all that to make you think you've got them pegged. What are they really doing under those pouty lips?

Growing teeth.

That's right, fans, Sydney has grown her first tooth. Right now it's a cute little (sharp little) hard nodule on her once smooth gums, but that's just the beginning. She's also learning how to chew. Just tonight she wrapped her arms around my neck and planted a big one on my cheek. I had just done the same thing to her, but she went one step further. She opened up her mouth and bit down.

Maybe she's trying to see if the rest of me is edible, too. Hopefully she decided, not.

Readily A Parent

2007-09-16T05:22:00.000-07:00

It was only a few days after the birth that we went to see the doctor and so we all bundled up, drove in, and stood in the check-in line to be registered for our appointments. I got to the head of the line and was about to announce my name when I realized, for the first time, that I wasn't checking myself in. I was checking the baby in. Whoa. How weird is that?

Stumped, I just stared at the receptionist, trying to get my head around this new state of affairs. Finally I stumbled over some kind of sentence such as, "I am here to check my daughter in." The words "my daughter" did not fly prettily off of my tongue, but at least I'd gotten the words out. I smiled sheepily at the receptionist.

But she wasn't done. "What's her name?"

Uh oh. What was her name? To be fair, I just met the kid a few days ago. How come I was expected to remember what I named her? But I went through my list of possible names and finally settled on the one that seemed the most right.

"Stanley," I said definitively. Now it was the receptionist's turn to stare blankly at me.

"Your daughter's name is Stanley? Are you sure?" the woman said politely.

Clearly I wasn't sure of anything. Not the least of which was this ephemeral idea of being a "parent" of a "child", whatever the heck her name was.

Now, almost five months later, the words "my daughter" do not stick on the way out of my mouth, while the fetus formerly known as Stanley has solidified into her suddenly human brand name of Sydney with relative ease. But I still don't much feel like a "parent." After the initial shock, our daily routines have pretty much re-set themselves, albeit with a central hub which was not there before around which we navigate carefully. Still, there are signs of change, subtle though they are:

1) I can speak Baby.
While I by no means am fluent in the language of baby I do know some limited words and phrases which allow Sydney and I to communicate pretty well. For instance, WAAA means I'm Hungry, while WAAA means my diaper is wet. In contrast, WAAA means that Sydney is cold and needs a blanket while WAAA means that she is bored and wants to be picked up. And finally, WAAA means I'm really tired but I don't want to go to sleep. See how simple it all is? Now you can speak Baby too. Though heaven forbid you get WAAA and WAAA mixed up. Then you'll hear all about it when she says WAAA in a very angry voice informing you of how hard it is to get good help around here. Oui, mademoiselle, whatever you say, mademoiselle.

2) I have become wise to the dangers of the world.
Every news report which involves missing, abused, kidnapped or killed children immediately becomes wrapped around my mind like it was my child that was in the headlines, not the nameless faceless one with the outdated grainy photo. Then I call home on some pretense just to make sure everything is alright. "Honey, you've called ten times about the bank. I promise not to forget!!"

3) Children's toys have become endlessly fascinating.
Who woulda thunkit but those fish shaped rattles and those blocky stacking toys are major fun when seen through the eyes of a five month old. Actually, when you're five months old, everything is a toy, including the doctor's stethoscope which, by the way, is also edible. Even more interesting is that Mom and Dad also find these toys suddenly fascinating and sometime will bring them to their mouths to see if they taste good. Hey! The red one tastes like cherry!

4) There are a lot more kids in the world than I thought.
Even though of course my daughter is cuter and smarter than all of them combined, I find myself looking at two, three, four-year olds to determine what my future holds in store for me. I notice behaviors I don't want to see in my daughter and try to plan for squelching them gently before they blossom, and behaviors I might at the same time want to encourage, and outfits I definitely will not subject her to. Like most well-thought out plans, this one will most likely get trampled over on the way to whatever Sydney needs to get to, but it occupies my time. Which I have an endless supply of these days. Ha. Ha.

and finally

5) Sleeping in means not waking up until, oh, 5:30am.
The phrase "sleep through the night" is relative. I never before thought anything before 6am was a valid time, and something in the 8am or 9am time frame was a much more preferable wake up time, and a 10am wake up call was downright luxurious. Now, 5:30am is the standard by which we set our alarm clocks. If Sydney sleeps until 5:30am, we're all well rested and yet we can still get to work on time. If Sydney wakes up before that, well, at least she doesn't wake up every two hours like she used to, unless of course it was like last night and actually that is what she does. Sleep, schmeep.

The Sound of Music (Please Make it Stop!)

2007-09-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

Some people claim that children learn better when their life's lessons are sung to them, and that Mozart makes a baby smarter. This theory has permeated through the toy industry with great gusto, of course, with the predictable result that everything you might buy for your infant takes three double A's, or two triple A's, or six D batteries to truly make for a baby-riffic experience.

We had sworn, before Sydney was born, that we would not fall for anything which required batteries. After all, parents have been mollifying their children for centuries without artificial help. But we quickly found out that that was because one parent was with said infant all the time, and that while this may be the ideal experience for our newborn we were not accustomed to having a living, breathing third brain super-glued to our bodies at all times. We've slowly let go of the no batteries mantra, and as a result, Sydney's musical repertoire has been gradually building.

Too bad you can't change the tune.

Or the instrument. Or the order of the &#$@^&^ songs.

A mechanical swing belts out snippets of artificial notes resembling a carnival ride. Frere Jacques and Oh Suzianna and Row Row Row Your Boat for as long as you can stand it. A musical mobile floats birds and bees and butterflies in the air and croons Papa's Gonna Buy You and also Night Sounds for that outdoor experience. A blue, fuzzy, beloved octopus plays Mozart and some other classical tunes, thankfully short. A lion, when his tail is pulled, plays a lovely little ditty. And a bouncy chair will vibrate (good, good, good, good vibrations..) and will run through a series of sedate tunes which will put Sydney into a nice, quiet, contemplative mood every time. While the music would soothe Sydney to sleep it would make us think of wood paneling and tons of flowers and black umbrellas for some unknown reason until just today we realized that it sounded exactly like funeral parlor music.

Our own musical tastes run somewhat less than clean, to the extent that we actually have video of Sydney "dancing" to the lyrics of Devil's Haircut by Beck. It's still music and fair game but it's definitely a far cry from Mozart's Requiem or Beethoven's 5th or whatever else is supposed to expand the mind of the young.

As for us, we too sing for Sydney, mostly the same thing over and over, and mostly having to do with a) not crying anymore, b) how fun the next activity is going to be c) no, we said the next activity was fun, and d) how did things get so bad?

We're not musically inclined, really. So maybe it's just as well that all her toys seem to be. Although the great maestros would hardly consider the noise that comes out of these toys music, I daresay. More like... reckless noise. Which plays over and over. And over. And over.

Pump it Up

2007-08-29T03:17:00.000-07:00

Consider this scenario: you are the Vice President of a small financial company, and are a Very Important Person, at least when you walk the corporate halls. People defer to you constantly. Oh! You want the projector? Sure, take it. My presentation is unimportant. Oh! You want to schedule a meeting at 7:30 in the morning before anyone even gets here? Sure! I'll just come in early.

One day you are in need of a particular person's assistance. She's quite a capable employee even though she recently had a child and was out for eight weeks on disability leave. You really need her assistance right now, and you're sure, like everyone else in the company, that she'll jump to your beck and call. So you go to her office to enlist her help and find a closed door with a sign on it: Please Do Not Disturb.

Do you:
a) Decide not to disturb the person?
b) Knock on the door?
or
c) Knock on the door and then open it quickly before she has a chance to respond?

.....or to cover her exposed upper body which she has been trying to find the time to empty of breastmilk for over two hours because everyone needs her right now?

As of now I may be the only person in the company who now has a Vice President tiptoeing around me.

I have, in the meantime, discovered why many women choose to nurse their infants for well over two years. It's not really because they believe it is good for their children or because they can't bear to part with the closeness. It's because when you're nursing, you can eat whatever the hell you want.

My pre-nursing diet usually consisted of:

Breakfast: a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee
Lunch: salad or sandwich
Dinner: half of my entree and half of my salad.

My current diet goes like this:
Breakfast: two bowls of cereal, some yogurt, and two pieces of fruit
Lunch: 4 hard boiled eggs and half a sandwich plus some carrots or anything I can get my hands on
Dinner: All of whatever is on my plate and in my salad bowl and maybe seconds and what's for dessert?

Meanwhile, and here's the really freaky part, I continue to lose weight.

Now there's a weight loss program for you. And since it's typically women who worry about their weight so much at the same time wishing they could eat like their husbands do, I think it's time for a new fad: Lactation Dieting.

All you need is some hormones to get those juices flowing, a breast pump, and a nursing bra. Then you really can have your cake and eat it too.

Dangerous Knowledge

2007-08-06T06:04:00.000-07:00

As new parents we excitedly await every new milestone there is. For instance Sydney learned a few months ago that a smile will get her everywhere. And it does, because it is heartbreakingly cute. We're hoping she doesn't really know that this smile will manipulate us, but we have our suspicions.

Recently she has learned to roll over onto her belly, which causes all sorts of problems. For one thing she hasn't figured out how to roll back over onto her back, so when she's done with being on her belly (usually about five seconds after getting there) she lets us know about it loudly. Immediately upon being rolled over she will try her new trick again. For another, all the new and improved parenting books tell you to put your baby to sleep on her back. Which we do. But apparently she likes sleeping on her belly and will roll over to a more comfortable position as soon as we're out of sight. The parenting books don't say anything about this. Do we roll her over? Or do we decide since she put herself that way it's okay?

We've also discovered that she will bring whatever is in her hands to her mouth. This evolutionary trait must be needed in order to learn what is good to eat and what is not, or possibly just to drive parents insane. Mostly there's nothing in arm's reach to swallow, except mom's hair, which has been falling out in droves (another neat pregnancy trick). Do babies get hairballs?

Possibly the most dangerous trait she has learned is her fascination with sparkly, twirly things. We recently went to a craftsman's fair, and besides our discovery that fairs are Baby Central (more babies than adults, I swear) we noticed that Sydney was absolutely riveted on certain items that we passed. Naturally it followed that she had to have the item. Pretty soon we were lugging around shiny, sparkly, twirly things that we never would have picked up on our own. They say children are expensive. Now I know why.

Animating Baby

2007-07-29T06:11:00.001-07:00

The Inconvenience of Breastfeeding Part II: Milking the Salmon

2007-07-17T03:24:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sears frequently makes it clear that he thinks leaving your child for any length of time to go on a much needed vacation is akin to child abuse, or at the very least demonstrates a lack of good judgment. Dr. Sears may have something there, but he obviously does not understand the insidious addiction one might have to Salmo salar.

So I packed up my fly fishing gear and some clothes and some sunscreen. I packed up my clothes and a few odd books, and then with a resigned shrug of my shoulders, I packed the breast pump.

Then I left Sydney and her father and headed out to Newfoundland with five other men. And that was the problem, really. Though I warned the trip leader that I was going to have to pump every three to four hours and he nodded sagely, none of my compatriots really knew what that meant, or for that matter, what the big bag was for.

It takes about 18 hours to get to North Sydney, Nova Scotia by car from my house. Then it takes another 6 hours by boat to get to Port aux Basque, Newfoundland, then 45 minutes to get to Rose Blanche, where the road ends and you have to take a smaller boat for three hours to get to the mouth of the river, where you finally disembark and start walking up river until you get to the fishing camp, three miles inland. Somewhere in between all these hours of traveling I had to find a deserted corner and twenty minutes in which to empty myself out and then dump the resulting product.

You may be able to breastfeed your child discreetly while in public, but milking yourself is not a discreet activity. Even the bathroom of the highway rest stop is not a good place to set up your breast pump. For one thing the thing is so loud it penetrates out into the hallway. For another, women are not as polite as they might seem when faced with a closed bathroom stall which has been occupied for more than five minutes. One woman actually began climbing under the bathroom stall, presumably to join me or possibly berate me for spending too much time in the bathroom when the line snaked out into eternity.

After enduring endless hours of being entirely too full and endless commentary from my male companions when I finally emerged from my hiding spots, we finally did reach the camp, where recent renovations had provided a private sleeping area for me in a small outbuilding a few feet from the main camp. Normally I would have protested this special treatment, but the trip up convinced me that a little feminine privacy might be a good thing. And it was-- except for the fact that control over the generator which powers all the buildings rested in the hands of the my friends, with the result that I would be in the middle of a pumping session and be the victim of a sudden loss of power. Good thing the pump also runs on batteries.

To solve the issue of being way down the river into some good fishing when the time came to pump, I stuffed the hand pump into the back of my fishing vest. In between runs, while resting a pool, I disappeared into the bushes, removed my shirt, and, while being attacked by hoardes of black flies, proceeded to pump a few ounces from each side, just enough to tide me over until I could get back to camp.

Despite this extra challenge imposed on me by nature, I had a good time and landed quite a few fish and lost a bunch more and generally enjoyed myself thoroughly, away from house, home, and baby. When I came back, late on a Sunday night, I put the child to my breast as an experiment, and she latched on immediately, seemingly unaware that I had been missing for more than a week. Feeling good that I had survived the week, caught fish, and not lost my milk supply in the process, I asked my husband how the feeding went. I had left him almost five days worth of breast milk and then bought powdered formula to supplement. He managed to stretch the breast milk until I got back but he went on and on about the powdered formula.

"This stuff is so easy," he said. "You just put it in the bottle, add water, shake it and you're good to go. It's totally convenient!"

Convenient, shmenient.

HeSheIt

2007-06-21T03:27:00.001-07:00

"What a cute baby!" We're all in the bookstore, Dad, Mom, and Sydney, where we stopped after Mom's softball game.
"He's so cute!" the store clerk continues, smiling giddily at our child.
"She is cute," I say, which of course I'll say since she's my baby. She has on her little baseball uniform complete with hat. There's pants with the outfit too but they're too big.
"Oh! It's a girl? She's wearing a boy's outfit."
"It's not a boy's outfit. It's a softball uniform. We were at a softball game." Also, I am wearing the same attire, only larger, and no one has ever yet called me sir when I wear it.
"Gender," my husband added, "is irrelevant."
"I'm so sorry!" the clerk said, flustered, and then, trying to recover, added, "It's still a cute baby."
"Yes, she is," my husband said, and then we booked it out of the store before we burst out laughing.
I can't wait until she's big enough to fit into her little Carhartt overalls.

Breastfeeding: The Inconvenient Truth

2007-06-05T17:09:00.000-07:00

con·ven·ient (kən-vēn'yənt) Pronunciation Key
adj.

Suited or favorable to one's comfort, purpose, or needs: a convenient time to receive guests; a convenient excuse for not going.
1. Easy to reach; accessible: a bank with branches at six convenient locations.
2. Close at hand; near: an apartment that is convenient to shopping and transportation.
Obsolete Fitting and proper; suitable.

Don't get me wrong: there's definitely advantages to breastfeeding, good, scientific reasons to do so. For one thing, this is the way nature intended us to be fed for the first few months of our lives. For another, it's free. But those who want to get young first-time mothers to believe that breastfeeding is more convenient than bottle feeding obviously either never breastfed or never went anywhere. Case in point; it takes two or three pages of instructions on breastfeeding away from home for Dr. Sears to make his point on the convenience of breastfeeding away from home. Anything that takes that much work cannot possibly be "convenient," or this is a completely different definition of "convenience" that I have not previously heard of.

There will now be a chorus of mothers who have breastfed their children until they went off to college who will now berate me. They will tell me perhaps that I need to relax, go with the flow, slow down, enjoy the time I spend with my bundle of joy, et cetera, et cetera. They themselves have breastfed everywhere; while shopping, while dining, while walking down a busy street. I suspect though, that none of them ever tried to breastfeed their infant while playing catcher in a softball game. Clearly you can't just duck in for a quick snack between innings, so you have two choices; let your infant scream her head off during the entire game, or, have someone else give her a bottle while you play.

Enter the breast pump.

The breast pump must be purchased or rented and therefore makes your breastfeeding experience somewhat less than free. Plus there is the indignity of being milked like a cow. Pumping takes some practice. The standard instructions: "relax, and think about your baby" do not work for someone who's corniness detector is still intact, so you have to come up with something else to get the juices flowing (for me: waterfalls full of jumping salmon.) Then there is the timing: exactly when do you try to milk yourself during the five minutes of down time you might get between feedings (every two hours?) But you do it because you know that there will come a time when your infant will not be with you and will be hungry. Or your infant will be with you and, since actually feeding at the breast is not all that convenient while in public, you'll feel the need to give her a bottle instead.

Except now you've missed a feeding, and you can tell. Not because you're feeling guilty about depriving your infant or missing the closeness of the experience, but because now you are bursting at the seams. You have gone from breastfeeding mother to porn star in two hours. And you're leaking. It's all you can do not to rip off your shirt, grab your now well-fed, sleeping infant and force feed her then and there to relieve the pressure. This is a sight I hope none of you ever have to see. It's not pretty.

Despite my annoyance at this inconvenient feeding method, we're still gamely breastfeeding. It doesn't help that Sydney has a definite preference for one breast over the other (the left), that she talks while she eats (mmmyummmrrrrrmmmmyum) and that, when we do try to feed in a public place, she is somewhat less than cooperative, repeatedly popping off and yowling at me for some unknown reason. But I'm hoping to last a while yet. Solely because it's good for her and for me and no other reason, we're doing it the old fashioned way.

For now.

Staying At Home

2007-05-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

Throughout the long nine months and even now, the other nosy question on everyone's mind was: so, will you be returning to work?

People would ask the same question of my husband too. They would ask: So, is your wife returning to work?

The answer in both cases was yes.

No one asked my husband if he was going to return to work.

In his words: "You carried her for nine months. The least I can do is carry her for the next nine months."

Small Pleasures

2007-05-06T14:49:00.000-07:00

Having had to wear pseudo-fashionable, completely unwearable pieces of cloth which passed for maternity wear for the past 7 or so months, and being warned by various jaded sources (such as one extremely negative nurse who informed me, out of the the blue, that she personally was in her maternity wear for 7 months after she was pregnant and that the majority of women never return to their pre-pregnant weight and implying that one shouldn't even try) that I'd be wearing the damn things for a little while longer yet, I am pleased to report that yesterday, being fed up with the maternity jeans which never fit properly to begin with and now were threatening to fall completely off my body, I pulled out a pair of my old jeans, slipped them on, and zipped them up.

Ahhhh. That's better.

Other small pleasures:

Being able not only to see one's toes, but to be able to bend over and touch them.
Being able to tie one's own shoes.
Being able to take a very hot, almost scalding, bath. No more lukewarm body temperature bath waters for me.
Having a glass of wine.
Going for a walk and not feeling like you are on Jupiter. In fact, you feel so light you might even be on the moon.

and last but not least:

No one asks you: When are you due?

Though sometimes they might say, Sorry to intrude but it appears you're leaking.

Oh well. Can't have everything.

Aftermath

2007-05-01T04:59:00.000-07:00

Then we brought her home.

"They" tell you this will be the hard part, that you won't sleep, that everything will take longer, et cetera, et cetera, but they can't really tell you how it is. This is one of the great mysteries of life which you just don't know about until you're in it, laying siege. There's a great number of mysteries here to contemplate, perhaps at 3 am in the morning when all good babies should be asleep but clearly aren't, not the least of which are:

1) Why aren't you asleep?
Are you part werewolf, perhaps? What is so bad right at this moment that wasn't so bad while the sun was shining? And why are you so angelic when we have company? Should we start having people over all the time just so we can get some rest? Maybe you are trying to get your hermit parents to live a little. That's generous of you.

2) Why do we find the word poopy suddenly so endearing?
You'd think that changing a diaper would be a horrid nasty task but, given that in order to know that our child is not being starved to death we have to record at least 3 dirty diapers in a 24 hour period, each diaper inspection is like opening a tiny smelly present. When the desired result is encountered a joyous cry arises from the nursery: "All right! Poopy!" And all is well in the household.

3) Why can't I remember any nursery songs except Rock-a-Bye Baby?
Which is just a really negative song to sing to a baby, threatening to put them in a tree for one thing, and insinuating that tree will not hold them for very long. Plus I can never remember when the bough is supposed to break. Before the baby is in the tree? After baby falls? Anyway, we've made do instead with songs like "The Sydney is Sleepy Song" (not always a hit) or the "Chewin' on the Sydney Hands" (aka Sydney is Hungry) song, which are sung off key and sometimes with different tunes altogether, depending on the time of day.

4) Why is our phone number suddenly the most popular thing to dial?
I was never much of a phone person, but now I loathe the thing. Fortunately we have caller id, so if it is someone we don't really need to talk to, we can just let the answering machine get it. Unfortunately, these particular people often get miffed that we didn't call them back right away, even though they are distant acquaintances who are lucky to get a birth announcement, let alone a phone call. One guy has called so many times that my husband jokingly asked me if I was sure the baby was his.

Aside from these mysteries, much of the day has become predictable; feed, sleep, diaper, cry, cry cry, sleep, feed cry. Sometimes we manage to get out of the house for a whole twenty minutes to enjoy the spring air. We hear it's not always like this, so we're waiting, as patiently as we can, for the phase to pass into something more spaced out, calm, and manageable. Eventually we'll have to face the real world again, and it would be nice if the real world didn't seem so surreal in the meantime.

Recap

2007-04-25T04:01:00.000-07:00

It was a dark and stormy night.

The last of New England's late coming winter was spitting out snow all during the day and I finally concluded I'd have to plow. "Just in case," I told my husband, who, perhaps himself feeling some kind of pending anxiety, was busy clearing up the nursery. So I went out to plow our driveway, nine months pregnant, on our John Deere tractor. Talk about a bumpy ride.

It wasn't until 10pm, when the snow had turned to a sleeting rain, that things started happening.
"Is this it? Do you think?"
"Let's time them."
"On what?" Neither of us wear a watch. This is one of those things you're supposed to keep handy at just this precise moment but they haven't quite caught up with the digital age yet; who the hell has watches with second hands any more? After some scrambling I remembered that the iPod had a stopwatch feature. I doubt Apple had this particular use in mind when designing the extra features of their mp3 player.

Sure enough, the contractions were coming at regular intervals, about 8 minutes apart. We called the hospital.

"Take a bath, wait until they're 4 minutes apart, and call us back." The nurses at the hospital didn't think it was true labor, and I didn't either. After all, I'm supposed to just know, right?

Two hours later, after a long bath and increasingly regular contractions, we headed out in the storm. The normally 40 minute trip took us an hour and half. We were admitted through the emergency entrance, ushered to maternity, where the nurse proclaimed me truly in labor at 3 centimeters dilated.

See? From nothing to 3 in 4 hours? This'll be easy!

Or, maybe not.

We paced the halls of the hospital all night, as walking was more comfortable then sitting still. The morning came and went and someone fed my husband. Then midday came and went and another meal was served. Things were progressing but I was fading; I wasn't hungry but I hadn't eaten anything since the day before. Mostly I was just tired. The midwife suggested a morphine mix drug to dull the contractions and let me sleep.

"Okay," I said, at that point willing to try any new approach. For one thing, the halls were getting very familiar and for another I was beginning to alarm people when they heard me moaning. So I spent the next few hours in a beautiful drug induced sleep, unmoved by the contractions which, supposedly, were still occurring and still progressing me along. Which they did, nicely, now I was at 7 centimeters. But I forgot something: morphine kicks my ass.

Dinner arrived and my husband convinced me to eat something. I did, munching gamely on tuna and sipping on beef barley soup, but soon after it all came up again. A few minutes later I innocently sipped apple juice and couldn't keep that down either. I broke down and asked to have the intrathecal, thinking that the really hard part of labor was going to start any moment now and I had nothing in reserve. I just needed a few more props to help me through.

Maybe I should have halted this process when the first attempt at an IV failed. Or maybe I should have halted it when the second attempt also failed. But I didn't, and for another four hours was pain free. But also, alarmingly, sometimes, contraction free.

"Uh oh." We started pacing the halls again in an effort to get things going. Finally everything came back, stronger than before. It was midnight on Tuesday, and I was still at 7 centimeters.

The obstetrician suggested pitocin (for inducing) mixed with a drug called Newbane which supposedly would take the edge off. I nodded, forgetting again: morphine kicks my ass.

Now I was falling asleep between contractions. There's probably a secret CIA manual on just this kind of special torture; let your victim fall completely, deeply asleep for about two minutes, and then give him severe stomach cramps. I'm pretty sure the victim would tell you anything, because about an hour later I finally called uncle and asked to have what was likely inevitable anyway; a c-section.

Things moved quickly after that, although not fast enough to my taste, as now I was enduring what were, pretty much, completely useless contractions, I was falling asleep where I stood, and my husband, who had been pretty stoic through the whole thing, was suddenly panicking about major abdominal surgery. At one point he decided he wasn't going in to the delivery room with me. The doctor and nurses persuaded him back from the edge, and after assurances from the doctor that I would not die on the operating table, agreed to put on the scrubs offered to him.

I didn't care; I just wanted the damn spinal.

The rest of it? Kind of a blur. I was apparently grinning widely after the spinal was administered, happy that at last something was happening, even if it wasn't the way nature intended. I remember hearing my daughter's first cry. I remember my husband leaving briefly to cut the cord and returning. I remember, paradoxically, the nurse, giving my daughter her first bath and talking to me through it, as though I would remember these instructions through a haze of anesthetic, morphine and pure exhaustion. Maybe she was just trying to keep me awake.

Finally, my daughter was placed on my chest, where she was supposed to be, and everything was well again. And the sun was about to come out for the first time in two days. Things were definitely progressing now.

Please Welcome....

2007-04-21T06:01:00.000-07:00

Stanley Hilarius, nee Sydney, a girl weighing 8 pounds 2 ounces, and measuring 20.5 inches long. She was born April 17, 2007 at 2:07 am.

Ready...Set....no?

2007-04-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

Okay! Today's the day! Out you go!

Oh well... I guess not. Although technically as I write this there are still six and a half hours left to today, so it's still possible if not particularly probable.

Luckily there have been millions of years of pregnancies and remedies for this very problem, so we can begin to work on those natural ways to induce labor. Which, if they don't actually do anything, will at least keep all those hormonal overdue pregnant women busy and off the streets. Here's a sampling:

Go for a bumpy ride: Great! I live in New England and it's spring time, otherwise known as Frost Heave Season. My entire commute is bumpy! All I have to do is get in the car to go anywhere and I'll be in labor in no time!

Go for a walk: Why walking will suddenly induce labor now that I'm overdue and didn't before baffles me. How do they think I transported myself for nine months? By Segway?

Eat Spicy Foods: Perhaps this one comes about in the mistaken belief that heartburn and gas are connected in any way to the reproductive system. In any case I'd have to down entire case of Tabasco sauce to notice the effect, as spicy and I have an ongoing competition to see who'll beat who. So far I've been winning this competition, and Stanley's been in on part of the ride. Me and Stanley can best any spicy food.

Have Sex: Neat! What got us into this predicament can also get us out! Of course, having sex is maybe the last thing on our minds right now. But at least it will pass the time.

Perhaps if none of these work, pure ornery Fate will have a hand in the outcome, as apparently they've started a pool at work on when I'll go. Hopefully Fate will pick a random date within this pool that is sooner rather than later, and hopefully my co-workers will have mercy on me and not pick dates too far out into the future. Because as much as this whole pregnant thing has been an adventure, it's time to disembark now.

Asking for it

2007-04-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

Here are the warning signs of impending labor:

1)Engagement: AKA the baby dropped.

2)Pelvic Pressure

3)Vaginal Discharge
4)Nesting Instinct: AKA impending mother suddenly gets the urge to clean everything in sight.

5)Braxton Hicks Contractions: AKA false labor

6)Shivering or Trembling
7)Diarrhea

8)Mucus Plug or Bloody Show

9)Rupture of Membranes: AKA the water broke

and finally...

10)Regular Contractions

You'd think the questions couldn't get any dumber, nosier or riskier but here's the new one, heard only in the last few days: So, have there been any warnings?

What they mean is, do you think you'll be going into labor any time soon?

"Well, let me see," I can imagine telling random co-workers at lunch, "Yesterday I woke up with a whopping case of diarrhea, and then all day I was having these irregular contractions, and then the mucus plug came out and I had a bloody show, and all day I felt like cleaning the entire house and rearranging the furniture, plus for a week I've been having all this vaginal discharge and major Braxton-Hicks contractions, but other than that, no, I haven't had any warning signs. Hey, you don't seem to be eating your lunch, can I have it? I'm eating for two, you know."

Or, maybe I should just keep all that in my head and answer the question as I have been, which is, "Warnings for what?" Someday they may just figure out it's none of their business, though by then it will be too late. For me, anyway.

Countdown

2007-03-31T06:40:00.000-07:00

I walked into a Mexican restaurant to pick up lunch and the woman behind the counter said, "Wow, still working, huh?"

I guess the entire city is waiting for the Big Day.

Which is imminent, or so I hear. The 38th week is considered term, 40 is ideal, and no one starts worrying about inducing or cesareans until week 42. It turns out that, as with almost everything else about pregnancy, calculating the "due date" isn't as scientific as you might think. It's a guess based on fairly arbitrary questions and our current 365 day in a year convention, with some ultrasounds and some tape measures liberally thrown in.

I am "due" on April 10th. I plan to work through the 13th, a fact which inevitably creates bemusement on faces. "But," they splutter, "April 13th is after April 10th!" (Maybe they feel that since all my brain cells are impaired I am unable to do simple arithmetic.) I nod at this sage observation, and quietly explain that, since I can't possibly predict the actual date, I picked an end date that was reasonable for the majority of the statistics; most first babies are late, not early, and in my family in particular there's a history of lateness. If I go early, chaos will ensue anyway. If, on the other hand, I am late, I will go stir crazy if I have nothing to do but sit at home. This seems entirely reasonable to me, but then, these are people who offer me chairs and demand I sit down (I've been sitting down all day!) or apologize when they've made me "walk all the way over here."

I've been berated for not packing my hospital bag, as well. Every expectant mother knows that you have to pack your hospital bag way in advance because, well, you just never know when you'll have to go there. Every expectant mother also knows not to rush off to the hospital at the very first sign of labor, so the question is: why can't you use all that waiting time to pack the bag for the hospital? And furthermore, this isn't a vacation.... how much stuff could I possibly need to bring with me? Yet, there are countless lists out there for the packing impaired to choose from.

So, we're waiting, we're enduring, and yes, we're still breathing, walking, talking and working. Stanley Hilarius is inevitably dropping and things are slowly coming to their hopefully happy conclusion. We'll let you know how it goes.

And the hits just keep on coming...

2007-03-15T05:04:00.000-07:00

I'm not tired of being pregnant, per se. I'm tired of other people.

"When are you due?" is the new "Nice weather we're having." Only more nosey and less relevant. Especially when it's been asked by someone who has already asked you this question. Here's a hint, people, it hasn't changed from the last time you asked me.

Here's a good one: Put your finger directly on a pregnant woman's belly. She won't mind. After all, it's not like you're touching her... oh wait, you are. But she won't mind. Then ask this amazingly dumb question: "What's this?" And remember, she won't ever say something sarcastic like "that appears to be my stomach." And if she's rude and says something like "please don't touch me," don't take it personally. Those raging hormones make her say things like that.

If you are extremely obese, try making a pregnant woman feel good about her self-image. Say something like: gee, it looks like you're trying to imitate me! She'll find that amusing. See, she's grimacing right now.

And if you're a midwife or an obstetrician, here's a neat trick. Each time your patient comes for her now weekly visit, grab hold of the baby's nether regions through the mother's sensitive belly and give them a good shake. Everyone will enjoy that because then baby will wake up and move around indignantly. Well, mom will get a few kicks in the ribs. But she's used to that so it's okay. And that'll make her look forward to next week's visit even more!

What could be worse than nine months of stupid people? Oh, probably 18 years of stupid parenting advice. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Non-Alcoholic

2007-03-07T03:48:00.000-08:00

The whole thou-shalt-not-drink-while-pregnant line has been blown way out of proportion here in Puritan, Prohibitionist America. Case in point: while the AMA's official line on the subject is no amount of alcohol consumed while pregnant has been proven to be safe (their official line on just about everything to do with pregnancy, as they don't test drugs, recreational or otherwise, on pregnant women), the myriad pregnancy experts have taken up the call and twisted it to: even the smallest amount of alcohol could harm your baby!

Making it sound like if you accidentally swallow your mouthwash anytime during those tedious nine months, you might as well go to jail for child abuse right now. All hope is lost. Now everyone knows that pregnant women can't drink at all lest their offspring have more than one head, and so the option isn't even there. But they have no compunction about drinking around a pregnant woman. The thought in the back of everyone's head is that, as long as she's not an alcoholic, she couldn't possibly mind, right?

My husband and I love wine. The taste of it with dinner, and the romantic idea of it: a warm glass of red by the fire in winter, a chilled glass of white of a hot summer's evening. We love the idea of wine so much we make wine, lovingly squeezing fruits of their essential juices, adding yeast, and letting nature do what it does best. Our traditional New Year's celebrations include an expensive bottle of champagne, which we consume the whole of (the only time we down an entire bottle of alcohol) all the while describing its properties in admittedly layman's terms to keep for prosperity. Sometimes we even talk about our goals for the New Year.

This year, of course, all that has been curtailed. For both of us.

We were recently at a friend's house for dinner. Bypassing me, the host asked my husband if he wanted a drink of some kind. My husband shook his head. "Alas," he said, "I'm pregnant."

The host looked from me to him incredulously and blurted, "You're both not drinking together??"

Heaven forfend we agree to do something together. Like, say, get pregnant.

To me there is no other way to go about it. You're either both on board or not. There were a number such conditions I laid out before I agreed to go down this road, not the least of which was that if I couldn't drink, my husband couldn't drink. Or put another way: if you drink, I drink, and you wouldn't want to harm your unborn child like that, would you?

But I don't have to threaten my husband to make this journey into as much of a partnership as we possibly can. There is, in reality, very few things that he is able to do or sacrifice during the nine months of gestation, so those conscious efforts to stay on the road with me are essential. Instead of making this a non-choice that only I have to make, he's made it into a positive choice for both of us. We're both not drinking. Not because one of us is pregnant, but because we've decided not to imbibe in alcoholic beverages for a period of 9 months.

Everyone deals with pregnancy in their own way. Some women don't feel the need to involve their partners. Some women either don't have partners to involve or have partners who are just getting dragged along for the ride. I personally think that's a sad and lonely way to go about this journey, but that's just my opinion.

Our long abstinence is almost over and we're glad. There are still some Nazis who claim that alcohol and breastfeeding don't mix, and I'm sure they don't if you plan to get plastered every night. But we plan to enjoy our New Year's eve champagne soon after Stanley's born, maybe right there in the hospital. And we plan to sample the fruit wines that have been aging in the basement, and we plan to savor our first glasses of red and white wines as the sun sets on our early spring evenings.

Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. I think everyone should try it. You don't even have to get knocked up to do it.

Small Miracles

2007-03-01T16:02:00.000-08:00

As we sat on extremely uncomfortable chairs being forced to watch our 13th or 14th waterbirth on the childbirth educator's favorite DVD (..and who knew there were so many birthing exhibitionists out there?) I sat trying not to fidget and ended up contemplating my navel.

Which, miracle of miracles, is still there.

It might not be much longer. It's gotten much flatter and drawn out in the past few weeks, and Stanley really doesn't have too much more room to grow without taking up that small amount of space which used to be my fairly deep, round, innie belly button. On what used to be my fairly flat, hard stomach. Oh yes, those were the days. They were good times, those days.

I monitor my belly button's progress because I can't really gauge the progress of anything else. The days simply plod on and though we are marching inexorably closer to the fateful day, the bodily changes aren't fantastic enough from one minute to the next to really pinpoint any succession.

Still, we're ending our 34th week here and we've still got our navel. We still don't waddle, we've only had one incident of swelling ankles, and the need to urinate, contrary to popular myth, is really quite manageable. There's been no heartburn to speak of. Sleep is uncomfortable at times but not completely impossible.

Hey, I strung sap tubing a few days ago while slogging through a foot of snow. You can't say the old girl's had it yet. Suffice to say we're hanging in there. The heck with the miracle of life; I'm counting the small miracles now.

All Classed Up

2007-02-22T15:15:00.000-08:00

Following the advice of the prenatal coordinator, we signed up for the seven week childbirth education course. Naively, we thought perhaps it would teach us some techniques that would be useful for those few fateful hours during childbirth, as well as perhaps some exercises which might be useful in preparation.

So far, it's been a fairly obvious and at times either gruesome or pornographic anatomy lesson with faded handouts giving us tiresome advice about what we should/could feel like in the first, second, and third trimester, mixed in with some fairly stereotypical or even downright sexist remarks, spread liberally about the gender spectrum (From the firmly debunked "pregnancy brain" comment to my personal favorite: "All guys think alike." Yes, every woman in the class is accompanied by a male partner.)

In short I haven't learned anything I haven't already learned by reading a book, and the rest of the time I've either been grossed out or annoyed. Each class is two hours long, is held on Wednesday's at 6:30, and invariably goes over the time limit, with the result that I leave my house at seven in the morning and don't return until quarter to ten. Aren't pregnant women supposed to get lots of sleep and lots of exercise? Exactly when am I supposed to practice the hastily taught exercises squeezed in at the end of the class? What good was this class supposed to be again?

They say that in the third trimester you begin to get bored with being pregnant, can't wait to get it over with, and that the last month or so before the happy date can seem eternally long. I was already bored with being pregnant 7 months ago, and have been biding my time ever since, but this class is definitely making me want to get the rest of this over with. I'm not sure I can bear another 5 weeks of dreamy-eyed, un-informed nonsense.

I keep going because I keep hoping they'll tell us something useful. You never know, something might slip out.

Buying for Baby

2007-02-06T17:22:00.000-08:00

Today I was paid a backhanded compliment by a co-worker who told me that I didn't walk like a pregnant woman.

Thanks, I didn't say, and may I just say that you don't walk like a chicken?

Unlike alot of first time parents we have not yet really gotten into buying things for our newborn. We know, for instance, that Stanley will need some type of surface to sleep on, but we were unprepared for the overwhelming choices of furniture presented to us by this simple need. There's cradles, bassinets and cribs, not to mention pack and plays and play pens. When it comes to cribs you can get a convertible crib which will break down into a daybed later, or if you get really fancy you can eventually convert it into a full double bed (from birth to marriage, is perhaps the point?) For entertainment there are bouncers, swingers and walkers, the practical difference being completely lost on us other than the obvious, that bouncers bounce and swingers swing. Perhaps the most perplexing part for me is the startling variety of outfits with which to clothe your little miracle, for the 48 hours it takes them to grow out of said outfit, anyway. Is this stuff really for the baby, or for the parents?

My ultimate favorite though, is this product. How cruel we've all been lo these millions of years, to use unheated diaper wipes on our children. Imagine the psychological damage wrought on all of us. No wonder society is at such a perilous crossroads. Thank god someone has finally put a stop to the insanity.

Kicking the habit (or the mom)

2007-01-27T08:14:00.000-08:00

Here we are in the third trimester, the final stage of the pregnancy journey before the Big Moment, when Stanley and I get to meet face to face. So that's what you look like, I'll get to think. Hey! Where'd my world go?? And what's this thing holding me?? Stanley will wonder.

Stanley's definitely getting used to his/her world in there. Stanley's movements have gotten a lot more coordinated, and I'm pretty sure the little devil is using this newfound talent to rock his/her world. Literally. A good sharp kick in the ribs is sure to shock anybody, and when it comes from the inside at unexpected moments, the resulting earthquake must be quite a ride.

I have a small mischevious streak, and my mother claims that I jumped up and down on her bladder on purpose. Mischeviousness may well be genetic, which may account for these sudden, purposeful jabs.

In any case the rumblings and rollings and sudden right-left jabs are getting much more noticeable in an Alien kind of way, so much so that I have to be careful not to lay a full glass on what's left of the flat of my stomach or it may get spilled with one powerful acrobatic twist on Stanley's part. And we're only at the beginning of this final, fun trimester.

Can I claim being battered from the inside as some sort of insidious domestic abuse? Or is this what my mother meant when she said, a gleam in her eye: just you wait? Does all this activity indicate a wild child? Or is Stanley just getting it all out of the way now so s/he'll be a model of angelic sweetness the rest of his/her life?

Only time will tell; we're only ten weeks away. Only ten weeks, a veritable eternity of constant Stanley activity. Oh well. At least we know Stanley's still in there.

Myth versus Reality

2007-01-14T05:51:00.000-08:00

For the past two weeks I have been covering for a co-worker, the Network Administrator, while he goes off for a much needed vacation in St. Martins. I've covered for him before, but never for so long a period of time, and never at quite such a critical time; the first two weeks of the New Year. Naturally, I've been quite busy, since I am effectively doing the job of two people.

One (but not all) of the duties of my job is to collect and funnel Help Desk requests to the appropriate people. As the self-imposed first line of defense, I'm supposed to handle the "simple stuff" (are you sure your computer is on?), but often I'm able to funnel some of them off to the Network Administrator, with the excuse that I have other things to do. Being the Help Desk means that I am constantly being interrupted, and that's when we're fully staffed. Being the Help Desk and the Network Administrator pretty much ensures that my entire day is spent putting out fires. Especially when two switches and a tape deck die in rapid succession, the main file server seems to be asleep, people are screaming because a printer isn't printing or their email is on the fritz, not to mention all those calls where people are asking how to save a file in Word.

Clearly, some things will begin to fall through the cracks at this point.

So on Wednesday we had a three hour kick off meeting on a new product venture, which blew everyone's schedules out of whack. At the end of the meeting, no less than five people converged on me, wanting to talk about wildly different subjects and all of which needed to be dealt with asap. Doing my own mental task list, which put these items in a relative order of importance, I accomplished each one in turn, finally getting back to my desk half an hour later to accomplish the last, when my phone rang. It was the woman who had asked for Task #5.

"Sorry," I said, not feeling sorry at all, "I will get to it now."

"Pregnancy will do that to you," she said, a non-sequitor of monumental proportions.

"What?"

"Pregnancy. Makes you forgetful."

"Uh... doing two people's jobs will do that too." I didn't bother to point out that I had just gotten back to my desk and technically that didn't count as "having forgotten."

I made the mistake the next day of actually telling someone I had "forgotten" about their request, whereupon they seized upon the myth again, telling me with glee that when they were pregnant, they forgot everything. The woman in question was asking me to install a printer on her computer, a tediously simple task that she couldn't remember how to do from the last time I showed her, but I kept her chronic apparent memory loss out of the conversation.

Maybe some people do suffer from forgetfulness due to "Pregnancy Brain." Like doing the job of two people, you can only focus your attention on so many tasks at a time. If you are the type to concentrate more on your pregnancy than on the reality going on around you, then yes, you may find that you've forgotten the name of your husband or perhaps the name of the street you live on. But if you're like me, you may find reality much more appealing.

Some people like to quote this study as proof that pregnancy kills off brain cells. The study itself merely shows a corrolation between the last month of pregnancy and six months after and an increase in brain size before the brain returns to normal. Since no study was done to measure brain size throughout the whole pregnancy, it must have taken some doing for people to hypothesize that the increase in brain size during this period must be due to a decrease in brain size the rest of the time, sort of bending the science to fit the legend. Still, that's the popular myth: allowing pregnant women (and apparently the people around them) to blame yet another normal human condition--occasional forgetfulness--on their impending motherhood. These myths are so pervasive that even when faced with the obvious: person doing five tasks at once, forgets one task, the perception is all: pregnant woman forgot one task.

Taking respsonsibilty for one's actions, whether it be emotional outburst due to some inner turmoil or the act of forgetting where you put your keys, is something that we all have a hard time doing in practice. It becomes even harder when popular science encourages you to place the blame for these things on factors you "can't" control, such as "raging hormones". I've never put much stock in the raging hormone theory. I believe in mind over matter. Even if the hormone theories are true, I have no doubt that with a little mental discipline we can all overcome them. I am an intelligent, logical, stable human being, and no popular pregnancy myth is going to make me forget it.

Milestones

2007-01-11T16:16:00.000-08:00

I reached another milestone in every pregnant woman's life: the Total Stranger Recognition Moment.

I shouldn't say total stranger; I see this woman two or three times a week when I come by to pick up my lunch. But still she's outside of the realm of corporate informants, and therefore I feel I can count this as the first such encounter, especially since she started it out with, "Congratulations, I didn't realize you were pregnant!"

I took this as a compliment, not because I particularly want strangers to notice the pregnant woman, but because I've apparently been hiding it well, until now, anyway.

I also reached another very important milestone today, the Pregnant Women Should Not Carry Items Perceived To Be Heavy Milestone, items such as, say, computers. In my myriad roles at work I sometimes have need to remove or replace equipment, and, unless I am doing more than one at a time I usually prefer to carry the single item down the stairs. It's mild exercise, to be sure, but it beats sitting at a desk all day. So today I had in my arms a small CPU topped with mouse and keyboard, barely 10 pounds at most, but was stopped by a co-worker who threatened to take it from me. "No, I'm fine," I said, and continued by him, at which point he said, "Well, you're pregnant, you know..."

I stopped and stared at him. "I am???" I said. And then continued on my way.

Sincerity meets the Sarcastic

2007-01-09T15:03:00.000-08:00

The highlight of our last appointment--aside from the fact that, when asked to give a urine sample, I nodded distractedly, did my business and flushed the toilet, then belatedly remembered I was supposed to pee in a cup, thereby cheating my benefactors of the 9th or 10th urine sample they believe they need, not to mention the intensly gross, high-sugared drink they forced on me as a way of seeing whether I had gestational diabetes--was the aforementioned prenatal coordinator visit.

The staff is sincere enough, and the woman patiently explained all the classes we might take; "I highly recommend this 7 week course. It's designed for people who are having their first child, or people who've had children without the benefit of childbirth classes."

"Can you imagine," I said to my husband sarcastically, later when we were finally left alone, "People actually manage to give birth without taking a class?"

We were also sent home with tons of promotional material, which the prenatal coordinator carefully pulled out of the packet she had prepared and showed to us, ending the demonstration with a flyer on the kinds of birth control there were available.

"Birth control?" I said, "Now you tell me."

The material itself is well-intentioned, but clearly not intended for people such as myself. A pamphlet labeled "Questions Dads have about breastfeeding" labeled one of the benefits of breastfed babies as "mom will take fewer days off from work due to baby's illness."

"Mom will, eh? What about dad?" I grumbled.

The pinnacle of all the information was a pamphlet on Post-Partum Depression, which helpfully told me to seek the help of a psychotherapist and then, so I could be understood when I called to seek the help of the psychotherapist, told me how to pronounce the profession (sahy-koh-ther-uh-pee).

But clearly I can't take my hard-won sarcastic self out on the gentle souls of the baby profession, so even though I need to fill out a form outlining my pre/during/and post birth choices, I will refrain from answering these specific questions in this way:

Q: (Circle your preferences) Here are some common choices for labor: Wear own gown, tee-shirt Wear hospital gown Lights bright Lights dimmed Birthing ball Other: (write in)

A: I would like to wear my leather maternity bondage ensemble and would like to have the room plunged completely in darkness so I can perform my nightly satanic ritual in peace.

Q: Do you have any preferences for birthing positions?

A: I think that our belief in gravity is over-rated and therefore I would like to be strung feet first from the ceiling. I feel that our obsession with birthing children "down there" is a patriarchal misogynistic anachronism and think women should be able to give birth through any opening they'd like, including their mouths. Mine will be the very first esophagal birth.

Q: How do you plan to feed your baby?

A: Intravenously.

Q: Do you have any special concerns or requests regarding your baby's care while in the hospital?

A: Please don't paint the baby blue.

Q: What are your feelings about circumcision?

A: I think circumcision is great. In fact, why stop there? Eunuchs have made great contributions to history, and it's time to bring them back.

Q: How long do you plan to stay in the hospital after the birth?

A: Oh, three months to a year, maybe more. Please forward my mail.

Q: We offer home visits. How do you feel about this?

A: I have a gun. How do you feel about that?

Toeing the Gender Line

2006-12-30T07:14:00.000-08:00

I had just helped a coworker find her online email so that she could find an order which was placed before Christmas and never arrived (not exactly a work-related question) and was about to leave my office to check up on some real work that was going on, when she asked me: "So, do you know what you're having?"

"Yes," I replied, with a smile, "We're having a baby."

When I came back into the office a little later, my male office mate, who has been present at many of these inane conversations, was still laughing.

When I ask people why they need to know the gender of my impending child, they tell me it is because it makes it much easier to buy something for the kid. Even after several explanations, I fail to understand why. A stuffed teddy bear is a stuffed teddy bear. A bottle is a bottle. As for clothes, I myself do not recall what I was wearing much before the age of two, and at the age of two I recall being so uninterested in the idea of wearing clothes that I spent most of my time trying to get out of them. (This was the era of Super Me, who leaped over tall leggos in nothing but a towel tied around the neck. Super Me could get out of her street clothes and into her superhero costume in 5 seconds flat.)

One person tried to entice the gender out of me by painting a tantalizing story of a woman who, by virtue of knowing the gender of her child, was able to decorate the nursery in an "airplane" theme, with the logo of an airline stenciled on the wall, and elements of flying scattered about the room. I will leave it to the gentle reader to determine which gender was entitled to this sort of design concept, but my immediate thought was: a bedroom full of airplanes! I would have loved that!!

At some point we will no longer be able to keep Stanley's gender a secret (although, I suppose if we named him/her Pat and dressed him/her in yellow all the time, the secret could be prolonged for an indefinite period of time), and at that point I can imagine gender related presents being steered towards Stanley's perceived best interests; train pajamas if Stanley is a boy, Cinderella pajamas if Stanley is a girl. But I hope Stanley can determine his/her own interests without outside interference. If Stanley my son wants to be a ballerina when he grows up, then ballerina he shall play. If Stanley my daughter wants to be a car mechanic when she's older, I'll get her to change the oil on my car. If Stanley my child wants to be things which fall within the artificial gender divide, that's okay too.

Don't know what to buy for Stanley before Stanley meets the world? Buy Stanley something you'd have liked as a baby. Stanley will like these things too. Stanley will like everything that goes on-- it'll be so much more interesting than where s/he is now.

Cleave Land

2006-12-26T16:19:00.000-08:00

I was, after all, prepared to gain amusingly large amounts of weight. I was prepared to suddenly be unable to see my toes, and to look in the mirror in profile and wonder whose soccer ball I had accidentally swallowed. I was prepared for a lot of things, even, in a vague way, larger breasts; but I was not prepared for cleavage.

I've always been happily small breasted, meaning that not only was I small in the chest, but I was proud of this fact. Breasts are nice in that they define the female body, but large ones make one look top heavy and ditzy, and furthermore are like overlong hair; in the way of almost every thing. I've always liked the size mine got to be. Enough to prove to everyone that I am female. But not big enough to need major structural support 24-7.

Until now. I've outgrown almost all of my upper body underwear. My shirts are straining not only at the belly but at the chest as well. And yesterday I happened to look down at myself wearing a fairly low-cut shirt and noticed for the first time that I have grown cleavage.

"Holy Shit!" I yelled out. "Shit! Shit!" This was enough cursing for my husband to come running into the bedroom, where I was staring at myself in the mirror.

"What's wrong?" he asked, concerned.

"I have....cleavage," I gasped, holding the last word out like a dirty diaper. My husband's concerned look collapsed into a relieved smile.

"It's okay," he said, "It's only temporary."

Any man who can confidently reassure his wife that her cleavage is temporary is definitely someone worth keeping. God, I love this man.

Stereotypes and Kilroy

2006-12-15T17:44:00.000-08:00

A coworker asked me, with a downright gleam in her eye, whether I was "finally" getting tired.

"No," I said. I have been having some trouble sleeping but I'm not going to divulge these personal details just to satisfy that hungry gleam. In any event, all in all I feel just as perky as I always have, restless even, now that I've been grounded from certain activities such as racquetball or soccer. The gleam disappeared and the woman actually said, "dang."

This hunger of my fellow female acquaintances to share in what they feel should be my discomfort is disconcerting. A woman who works downstairs and fancies herself in charge of parking took it upon herself to insist to the new HR person that one parking space is "always" reserved for people who are pregnant. "The last girl who was pregnant," she told the straight faced HR woman, "was so huge she could barely get out of her car." The HR person couldn't help smiling as she offered me the space; she knew I would turn it down. If I didn't play the Disability Card when I was one leg short of a working pair after ACL surgery while still in college, hobbling around like a madwoman from class to class across a 135-acre campus, there's no way I am going to play it when I have two perfectly good legs and a sudden aching desire to play tackle football. Talk about weird cravings.

I did however have the common experience recently of dreaming that we had the kid. Stanley was fine, although pretty old to be a newborn, and the main thrust of the dream was that I had completely blanked out the whole process of giving birth, which, on the one hand, was just fine with me, but on the other hand was disturbing, because apparently I had been awake and aware during the process and Stanley somehow ended up with the name Kilroy. "Kilroy?" I kept asking my husband, "Why Kilroy?" "I don't know," he replied in the dream, "You kept insisting that it had to be Kilroy, so that's what I did."

Stanley Kilroy Hilarius. At least the name is anything but stereotypical.

Limited Time Offer! Get Your Doula Now!

2006-12-07T16:35:00.000-08:00

Our last prenatal appointment, which was ostensibly to check my weight, blood pressure, urine, and make sure that Stanley is still in there, was supposed to last 15 minutes. But the woman who came in to greet us was a midwife, and she was clearly drugged to the teeth with thoughts of Baby. "Glorious!" was one of the first things she said, outside of introducing herself to me and to my husband (the first time he has actually been acknowledged without prompting--admittedly a point in her favor). The dialogue went downhill from there.
"Fantastic!"
"Isn't it wondrous?"
"Oh joy!" were all interjected into the conversation, which she carried on mostly by herself, needing only small amounts of prompting ("No problems, just a small problem sleeping, but I hear that's norm-") to tell me all about breathing techniques and homeopathy and how badly she slept when she was pregnant and whatever else came to mind before she ran out of air and had to breathe in more. Both my husband and I were now late for work, and so I tried to shorten my answers to monosyllabic yeses and nos, until finally, 45 minutes later, we were let go.
Please god, shoot me now.

That was a few days ago. Since then it's been mostly quiet on the baby front, to my infinite relief, but today a woman sauntered into my office on another pretense and asked that tired old question: When are you due? Distracted, I told her, which she used as an opening to introduce herself as a doula, and did I know about the doula program and here was all this information about doulas, and she would be happy to answer any questions I had about the doula program-
Please, please go away now.

But wait! There's more to giving birth than just midwives and doulas, not to mention registered nurses, doctors and... oh yeah, the woman actually giving birth... in case you were worried if you were going to be able to keep it all straight in your mind, we've introduced...

wait for it...

wait for it....

the prenatal coordinator.

We get to see the prenatal coordinator next month, where she will most likely ask us if we've given any thought to a birth plan.
Yes, I expect I'll say. I plan to give birth.

Belly Dances

2006-11-30T16:04:00.000-08:00

"When are you due?" As usual, I am being questioned about something irrelevant to the problem at hand, this time a scanner which randomly refuses to email the recipient his/her documents after being asked to do so. Nevertheless, because I am at work and wish to maintain a polite facade, I answer the question absentmindedly, "April 10th."

I look up to see her staring at my belly, which, after five months, has finally expanded enough to display to the world that I am, indeed, pregnant, not merely chowing down too many hamburgers.

"Are you carrying more than one in there?"

"No," I say shortly, and get back to what I was doing, subtly trying to get through to her that this is not an appropriate conversation.

She's not socially adept at picking up other people's don't-wanna-talk signals, so she barges on, "Are you sure?"

Am I sure? See, there's these things called doctors and blood tests and the all-knowing ultrasound, which gave ample evidence to all sorts of things, including that there's just one Stanley Hilarius. "Yes," I said, "I'm positive."

"Uh oh," she says, meaning to convey that she thinks I am larger than I should be, and walks away.

Since I actually know, from having seen many a picture of women at the same gestational period as I am, that the amount one shows is not indicative of anything except individual body type, and that, on average, I'm actually on the lower side of the "showing" scale, which suits me just fine. Apparently this type of comment about twins is actually fairly common, it seems, and the only explanation I can think of is that people are surprised that when someone is pregnant, their belly gets larger. You wouldn't think this would surprise people, but obviously it must. What gets me is that, on seeing an obviously pregnant belly, people's brains turn off entirely. I am arguably the only thinking person in a room full of other people now, simply because of this paradox of pregnancy that has only been going on for 300 million years.

Insult to Injury

2006-11-20T16:06:00.000-08:00

I've never been too keen on having to buy clothing but in the last few years the chore has gotten even worse; ever since the teeny-bopper-Britney-Spears-look-a-like-contest has spilled over into office wear and what passes for "jeans" in the women's section of the department stores I try to breeze through. I've gotten away with bypassing the women's sections all together for many things, and going for the men's apparel which, thank god, doesn't bend with the fashion wind, but now that I am confined to the maternity ward my choices have gotten very, very narrow. With this ever diminishing choice of clothing has come the following two observations:

1) All pregnant women are ten feet tall.
2) All pregnant women aspire to look like Britney Spears. No, not this one. This one.

I am so out of it. Plus, I'm way too short.

Still I've tried to make the best of it, buying clothing which ill-fit me when I was normal proportions and now is even worse, and buying iron-on hemming material because there is no way I am wasting my time sewing anything on these monstrosities. I had a moment of pause as I contemplated the damage I might do by ironing two different height cuffs by accident; then shrugged and remembered that whatever I did was bound to be better than my recent alternative: balled up pieces of cloth held up by paper clips.

I must be looking a lot younger though, in my new Britney Spears style and roughly hemmed jeans; today I was carded at the checkout counter.

For non-alcoholic beer. I can't win.

Sharing the joy

2006-11-13T16:12:00.000-08:00

My husband and I were attending a surprise 50th birthday party for my brother-in-law, and we were in a small hole-in-the-wall New York City eating establishment. We didn't know these people very well, and I had expressed some distaste at being in a group of people who would inevitably find out our current state of affairs. On the other hand, I told my husband, this was a rare opportunity for him to experience the Baby Button Phenomenon that I had repeatedly complained to him about.

We finally found someone to chat with, having successfully steered her away from Baby, and were deep in conversation about her sheep dogs, when the woman beside me, whom I will identify only as Peroxide Blonde, interrupted the three of us to interject the following:

"Epidural, all the way."
"Epidural?" my husband repeated, staring at her blankly.
"Yes," she said, "I don't believe in natural childbirth."
"We were talking about dogs," my husband said.
"I know; I'm just saying, it's all about the epidural."
"....We'd rather talk about dogs."

Maybe she figured out that she'd been overly rude, or maybe she thought we were exceptionally unfriendly. In any event she didn't say another word to us for the rest of the evening, thank god.

The Sounding

2006-11-11T05:55:00.000-08:00

We were scheduled to have an ultrasound this week so as instructed I drank an entire quart of water before 7:15. The ultrasound was scheduled for 8:15. This meant I had to wait in agony for an hour. My mother informed me that lo those long thirty years ago they had made her drink huge amounts of water also. This effectively means that ultrasound technology hasn't advanced anywhere since the middle of the last century. That's comforting.

We were supposed to stop by the lab for blood work first, but upon trying to check in they informed me I had to have a piece of paper which I definitely didn't have, so we went upstairs to get said piece of paper and the receptionists just stared at me. "What piece of paper?" they said. That was my thought. Don't we live in a paperless society now?

Finally we were ushered into the Ultrasound Room, the big event, with the ultrasound technician greeting me with a smile. A small silence ensued, and then my husband introduced himself. This is our irony: I get more attention than I really want, while he gets completely ignored.

It turns out the water torture was really just to get a good look at my cervix (and did anybody ask me if they could go snooping around my private parts from the inside??) and then I was allowed to become normal again. Finally we got to the part we were really interested in: getting a good first look at Stanley Hilarius.

Stanley's looking pretty good! Stanley has a head, two arms, two legs, a brain and a four chambered heart, all of which we got to see. More importantly, Stanley really is in there, swimming around, a fact we knew, of course, but couldn't really imagine until now.

And we did, in the end, find out Stanley's gender. And for those of you who are dying to know, it turns out Stanley Hilarius is..........

either a boy or a girl. You'll find out soon enough.

Make it so, Number One

2006-11-06T14:47:00.000-08:00

I, a male co-worker, a female vice president and two more female co-workers were sitting in the cafeteria eating lunch, when all of a sudden the female vice president launched into what she must have thought was a riveting tale involving the potty-training of her newest grandchild. This conversation was hardly lunchtime material, nor was it particularly interesting or entertaining, so I drifted off to think of more important things; items still outstanding on my desk, what we might have for dinner that night...how come the Starship Enterprise is able to make whooshing noises in the vacuum of space...then my male co-worker, apparently noticing my sudden non-attentiveness to the conversation at hand, commented wryly that I would be participating in these conversations in the future.

Cautiously I looked around. Of the five of us, three of us were indeed engaged in the toilet discussion. The only two who weren't were him and me. I was just barely in the minority and had to tread carefully at this point. But I forged ahead anyway.

"I'm pretty sure," I said slowly, "that I will never find the subject of potty-training, or any other bodily function, to be an acceptable conversation topic at lunch time." Whereupon three people stopped talking and left my male co-worker and I arguing about whether eating could be considered a "bodily function" and whether it was an acceptable mealtime conversation piece. We happily decided it was and then continued eating our lunches in peace, having shut out the potty-train for the duration.

Sometimes you need help with your behavior modification project. Thank god I'm not the only sane person at the lunch table.

Athleticism runs in the family

2006-11-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

Speaking of the tango.... Stanley seems to be practicing one.
"They say.." that around 17 or 18 weeks you may start to feel the wriggling and kicking that's been going on for at least 10 weeks now, otherwise known as "quickening", aka "feeling the baby." "They say" it may feel like gas or butterflies or popcorn popping. In other words it's kind of hard to describe. Whatever Stanley's doing in there, it manifests itself as little bumps in the night, giving me the mental image of a fish in a fishbowl bumping up against the glass, or the antics of a would-be gold medal gymnast using my insides as a trampoline.

A miracle? Not really; just basic physics and common sense. A blessing? I don't think so--who really wants to be kicked? Weird? Yes, I'd agree with that.

So far the antics have been too few and far between to get an accurate feeling of just when to call my husband over to feel my jumping belly, but I'm sure the time will come. And just as surely I'm betting that this fairly new sensation's interesting-ness will begin to pale as Stanley grows bigger and kicks much harder. But for now it's an interesting distraction which marks the next stage of this game. We've cleared another base. Though sometimes it seems like time stands still... things are coming along.

Two to Tango

2006-11-03T18:36:00.000-08:00

I have mentioned just once in the company of my fellow man that I am pregnant and so far I have been given or offered two books, a bunch of magazines, a bag of maternity clothes and tons of unsolicited and mostly conflicting advice.

My husband has mentioned that I am pregnant to just about all of creation and no one has offered him a thing. That just doesn't seem right.

It takes two to tango, after all, and he's in the same boat as I am. I seem to be doing most of the rowing at the moment, that's true. But his job as navigator is just as important. And since I'm the one who is clearly busy at the moment you'd think all these offers and gifts would be directed at the one whose hands are free. But no, they look right through him. He's just a guy. None of the parenting books and magazines are even really geared towards him. Because, you know, he's going to be the father. Fathers bring home the bacon. They don't cook it. Fathers coach Little League. They don't change diapers. And fathers hold the newborn after it's born. They don't have anything to do with the nine months it took to bear it.

I don't buy it. I would never have embarked on this adventure at all if my husband had not only agreed but reassured me time and time again that I wouldn't be in the boat alone. I don't feel that I am pregnant, all by myself, with the guy who started it waiting on the sidelines while I bask in the glow of pregnancy and soak in all the sudden attention. I feel that we are pregnant, as much as that is biologically impossible, and I don't think it's right or fair for people to pass over him and focus solely on my rounding belly. I am more than a vessel with a fetus, and my husband is more than just the sperm which got us here. Treat me like a person, treat him like pregnant partner, and stop, for godsake, offering me random manuals on child care. Children don't come with off buttons, you can't set their time, and they certainly don't come with manuals which neatly describe every possible behavior with an easy to use troubleshooting guide at the end.

There's no map for the navigator either, and no instructions on how to efficiently row this boat. We're just going where it seems best.

The Nosey Narrow Minded

2006-10-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

"So," says a perfect stranger, "have you had an ultrasound yet?"
"What?" I'm trying to get my lunch together, and was not expecting conversation not related to passing the salt and pepper.
"Have you had an ultrasound yet?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Um..."(None of your business?)
"Too early?"
"Okay." (Can I make it any more clear that this is none of your business?)
"My daughter's pregnant too."
"That's....great." (That is none of my business.)

I told my husband about this conversation and he came out with this gem:
"Yeah, I just had the ultrasound yesterday and it turns out that the baby has 60 fingers and no head. I've been crying about it for the past 24 hours and finally managed to think about something else until you brought it up just now. Thanks for asking."

The same person accosted me later in the kitchen and asked me about whether I know about "belly bands" because her daughter has some. I told her I had, and that I had it "all under control." She finally got an inkling that I wasn't really appreciating these conversations, since she said "I'm going to ask alot of questions" to which I replied, "Well I might not answer, I feel this is my thing." To which she finally replied "Okay, I won't ask." Which implies I finally got through her thick head.

Or maybe I should have stared at her and said: Are you trying to tell me I'm fat??

I am treading on thin ice because I want to be known as the competent, professional, well-adjusted career woman, but instead my co-workers, especially the female ones, want to drag me down into the realm of un-reasonable, tempermental, rude pregnant woman. I don't think they do this intentionally, but they remember their experiences as the pregnant woman at work and they've read too many pregnancy guides and somehow they have bought into the idea that everything that a pregnant woman does is related to pregnancy. And that every pregnant woman wants to talk about ultrasounds and sore breasts at lunchtime and stretch marks and maternity clothes at break. That I don't find these topics of interest or something I want to discuss with people outside my immediate family is a source of frustration and mystery to them. My male colleagues do not have the same reference point, and so even though they are prone to making dumb comments they do not have the same intensity of feeling or the force of opinion or the need to say anything at all unless I bring it up. Is it any wonder, then, that I have few female friends?

I feel sorry for these women, I really do. It must be so sad to live in a world so narrow.

It Takes a Village

2006-10-24T04:02:00.000-07:00

I knew that pregnancy was an obvious condition, but I was unaware that most people consider it a community project.

I was working on something (I forget what, but the key is that I was working, because I was at work) and a co-worker came into my office to hand me a "hilarious" book which she found very helpful and very funny and even now, she was giggling as she handed it to me. It is called The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy: Or Everything Your Doctor Won't Tell You, and it is just that, everything you would discuss with your Girlfriends, if you had Girlfriends, which I don't. And, having glanced at this book, I'm glad that I don't. Nosey busybodies. But I accepted the book with good grace and thanked the woman profusely, who then proceeded to stand in my doorway for fifteen minutes and offer random bits of advice, from bottle feeding to the benefits of co-sleeping, all without my having to say a word. She ended by offering to give me her entire five year collection of Child Magazine. I asked her to let me borrow just one.

Having handled that burst of well-intended but unsolicited advice, I went about my work-day. An hour later I received a phone call from a nice but rather dull woman who works part-time downstairs. I hardly know her, but she was calling me from home to offer me her daughter's entire collection of maternity wear. "I know you've got a male colleague sitting with you there," she said, "So you can just say yes or no. We'll keep it low-key." Bewildered at both the offer and the secrecy, I said yes. When I hung up I started laughing hysterically, which got my (male) co-worker's attention. "What's funny?" he asked.

I tried to explain that I found all the generosity extremely funny, but he didn't really get it.

Clothing Issues

2006-10-22T16:01:00.000-07:00

With a rapidly expanding midriff, getting dressed in the morning has become an issue. I should say "properly dressed": since most activities require something more substantial than sweatpants. The problem isn't that they don't make clothing for pregnant women, obviously they do, since pregnant women don't go around naked (we'd noticed this). It probably isn't even really a problem for most women, since by all accounts most women not only gamely wear their maternity wear, they are apparently eager to do so and get upset when they're not showing fast enough. But it is a problem for me, mostly because Carhartt doesn't make maternity clothes.

Neither does Orvis or Cabela's. What gives?

Where am I going to find a solid pair of work jeans? A truly warm jacket that covers my belly? Who's going to stack the wood and plow the driveway? And who says I can't go fishing while pregnant? Well, I can't... but only because I won't find waders that fit.

Clearly we all need to go back to the wrap around bearskin concept which was such a fad back in the Ice Age. Bearskins were the great equalizer. You can wear a bearskin however you'd like and call it acceptable clothing whether you're male, female or that other gender, pregnant. They were warm in the winter. In the summer, you'd wear it if you required protection from something, like bugs or the sun. Otherwise you'd just go around bearskinless. It didn't matter. Who would care? The fig hadn't been cultivated yet, and Adam and Eve hadn't been invented yet, so the whole must-wear-clothing thing was a long way off... things must have been simpler then.

Meantime, I'm making do with unzipped pants and various bands to hold them up, and hoping the clothing situation doesn't get too ridiculous. If I'm having trouble now, I can't imagine what it'll be like three months from now. Maybe by then I'll have procured a bearskin, and maybe a cave. I'll grunt at people who try to talk to me. They'll think it's just hormones and let me get away with it. I knew I could play that card someday.

Baby Business

2006-10-20T19:20:00.000-07:00

We went to our next pre-natal appointment and the registered nurse confirmed the existence of the other being by finding the fetal heartbeat. It was pretty neat. WHANG! WHANG! WHANG WHang...whang.... WHANG! WHANG! WHANG WHang...whang.... the kid wouldn't hold still long enough, apparently, for the nurse to get an accurate count of the heartbeat. "It's the pressure," the nurse explained, "the fetus is trying to get away from." Thereby re-affirming the truth of the old adage like parent, like kid: Stanley Hilarius doesn't like all this attention any more than I do.

While we stood at the appointment desk to schedule the next visit, a chiming sounded and the women behind the glass, in a display of excessive sentimentalism which immediately made my hair stand on end, all sighed in unison. Apparently the father of the very new child gets to inform the world of his achievement by pushing a button which rings this chime. Great. As if enough perfect strangers didn't know all about the impending birth. What happened to a woman's right to privacy? Wasn't that the crux of Roe v. Wade?

I had called ahead to confirm the time for the appointment and while the woman on the other end brought up the information, a soft bell could be heard in the background. "Oop!" the woman said, "A baby has just been born." "Really," I said, mostly to make polite conversation. Then a new mother and her newborn apparently stopped by the desk and the woman started cooing. She's beautiful, she said to the new mother. This of course is a complete lie. Babies are not beautiful. After they've been in the outside world long enough, they're cute in a funny looking way, but they're not beautiful. And newborns are just plain ugly. There's really no other way to describe them. They look like any other human who might have been sitting in water and in the dark for the past nine months and then squeezed through a small opening. It's just not the way we're supposed to live our natural lives, and while I admit that this is the way we all come into the world I rather think it's not so much the way it has to be as a matter of poorly thought out design on the part of some busy fertility deity who forgot to add the finishing touches. If newborns were meant to be beautiful, they wouldn't be waterlogged on delivery.

Still, the women who sit behind the glass at the OB are in the baby business, after all, and presumably they are in the baby business because they genuinely enjoy babies. Many of them probably think full grown humans leave something to be desired in the beauty arena. So perhaps I should forgive them for being more sentimental about this baby business than I could ever be.

Of course Stanley Hilarius will be a paragon of human beauty his/her entire life. That goes without saying.

Let the Games Begin

2006-10-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

Knowing that at some point things would become obvious, I finally made an announcement to my co-workers during an all-staff meeting. Congratulations were extended, etc, and really, that should have been the end of it. Right?

Wrong.

Now every conversation I have is tinged with references to either pregnancy woes or to the headaches of having children. People don't like to impart good news, apparently, just the bad stuff:

Me: I slept pretty well last night, except the dog barked in the middle of the night.
Female Co-worker: Oh, that'll change. Just you wait a few months.
Male Co-worker: Yeah, and then you won't sleep for six months after the baby's born, heh heh heh!

Ha. Ha. Who asked you?

Or this exchange after a rather beligerent co-worker had an inappropriate outburst at another meeting I conducted:

Female Co-worker: I thought you handled that very well, you never got defensive and you never lost your cool.
Me: Thanks. I didn't see losing my temper as being very productive.
Female Co-worker: Of course, with the little one on the way your hormones will probably take over and you might not be able to keep your cool, so if you ever have to blow off steam you can come talk to me.

Oh, give me a break. Not the Hormone Defense again.....

And, my favorite, sudden scrutiny over my eating habits. I've been pregnant for almost four months with nobody the wiser, now all of sudden when I eat a late lunch they assume I must have eaten before and now I am "eating for two."

Male Co-worker: Oh, eating again, eh?
Me: Uh... no.... I've just managed to sit down for lunch now.
Male Co-worker, oblivious to previous statement: Well, once you have the kid, you won't have time to eat so you should eat all you can.

I'm sorry... what?

Given that I'm not even really showing yet, I can't wait until I do so I can get all sorts of inane comments regarding pregnancy, my personal appearance and what the future holds. Maybe I should start commenting on my overweight co-workers appearance too. Oh, eating for two, eh? Or how about the woman downstairs who has a noticeable limp? Maybe I should start commenting on that. Hey, can I touch your leg?

Or, maybe I should just keep my cool, raging hormones or no.

Spilling the beans

2006-10-03T16:59:00.000-07:00

Having exhausted the excuse of only being in the first trimester, la de da, we finally broke the news to the assorted elongated Family this past weekend.

Our first call, to my husband's sisters, was relatively calm and orderly, since they had both already guessed what was up. One sister-in-law had come up to visit us and brought as a gift a bottle of wine. We love wine and it was a perfect gift, only; we had stopped drinking. My husband made up some story about how we were watching our weight and my sister-in-law let it pass, but the gig was up. Another sister-in-law was engaged in a genealogical discussion with my husband, when all of a sudden he wandered off subject to talk about prenatal genetic questionnaires. So she was understandably suspicious as well. When we finally all got on the phone together, they were prepared.

Then we had to call my assorted family. From this I can tell you that everyone asks the same questions:

1) Are you going to find out the sex?

2) How are you feeling?

3) When are you due?

and they say the same things:

1) You must be excited.

2) I thought this was never going to happen.

It's hard to maintain a sense of excitement over and over again, especially in my case; if I had my way no one would know until the whole thing was over. But this is the beginning of my getting to be a public figure. Everyone will think they have the right to ask me questions they would never ask anyone else. People will try to rub my belly. Strangers will ask me when I'm due. And I will have to grin, bear it, and resist the urge to kill them.

On the other hand if we don't tell anyone we can't have a baby shower; and I plan to tell everyone we're having a boy even if we're not so I get alot of Tonka Toys. Baby showers are supposed to be for the baby but I have to test out all this stuff first to make sure it's safe, right? Any responsible parent would do so.

Anonymous

2006-09-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

So far my mother is the only one who knows the joyful news. We've wisely decided to wait until the high danger of miscarriage is over to tell our family members. Me, I'm waiting until I actually look pregnant to break the news, mostly to dispel notions that I am getting fat.

But, admittedly its nice to have someone to be able to confide in, especially since she's (obviously) done this before, and (obviously) all parties survived the experience. So we had dinner with her on Saturday and she handed us an Expectant Motherhood book with a 1940 copyright (which, by the by, tell us with confidence that having alcohol is completely harmless--see sentence about us all surviving the experience) and what she called the most important book of all: Name Your Baby.

Since we don't yet know what species of child we shall have as yet, we just flipped through it for a while and announced names at random. "Brunhilde" was rejected out of hand, as was "Gunther." But then I came across: Hilaria, which means, "always cheerful." I fell in love with it at once. What better name with which to command your offspring to be happy and prosperous? What name would roll better off the tongue? Meet Hilaria, my always cheerful daughter.

"Yes," my husband said, "but what if it's a boy?"

"Why then," I replied, "we would name him Hilarius." And to prove how wonderfully apt this name would prove to be, I then cracked up. Simply imagining the introductions brought tears of joy to my eyes.

"Hi everybody, this is Hilarius."
"What's hilarious?"
"He's Hilarius."
"He thinks he's hilarious?"
"No, he really is Hilarius."

My husband brought me back from my joyful reverie to ask me what I thought of the name Stanley. He was clearly trying to bring us back into the fold of normal society and I wasn't buying it. Besides.... Stanley?? But I agreed we could name the boy Stanley if I could choose his middle name.

Stanley Hilarius. I see a shining future ahead.

Sick of the Morning

2006-09-03T06:48:00.000-07:00

They call it "morning sickness" like they expect it to go away after 11:59 am. But like most things this is a misnomer. Morning sickness can occur at any time during the day.

When we found out we were pregnant, we started reading up on things. It's hard to weed through the quacky material and get to sensible advice, so I ended up with the statistic that almost 80% of women experience some morning sickness, while my husband had read that only 50% did. We argued about this for a little while and then I finally said, "Well, I still think we should have saltines in the house. That way we'll be prepared."

So we bought saltines. This is basically the advice our knowledgeable, worldly pregnancy experts give. They don't know what causes it, they don't know what helps it, they don't know why it goes away. Here, dear, just eat some saltines.

It started at a worktime lunch where I was gamely munching on a chicken caesar salad. I have chicken caesar salad every day at lunchtime. I like chicken caesar salad. Normally. But this day the salad tasted like cardboard with dressing, and I ate less than half of it. I saved it for the next day, and around 10am (when I normally start thinking about the lunch I will have two hours from now) I thought about my perfectly good chicken caesar salad, and felt instantly nauseous.

This is what they mean by "morning sickness"?

I cast around in my head for something that was not insanely gross like chicken caesar salad, and settled on a local Mexican restaurants side order special called simply "rice and beans." It's rice, beans, and cheese, all nicely cooked up and melted together. Together with some chipotle sour cream, it's a delight. This odd concoction was okay for me to swallow, while lettuce and chicken had become utterly unpalatable, to the degree that the mere thought of it made me sick to my stomach.

This was my new relationship to food. The choices I had became extremely narrow, and quite specific. I asked my husband to bring home hot and sour soup from the chinese restaurant, and he, deciding on his own to be creative, brought home seafood hot and sour soup instead of regular. That sent me on a downward spiral. It wasn't really all that different, but it was not what my narrow palate could eat. And this wasn't the famous cravings of pregnancy, but rather my settling on a food which didn't make my stomach curl when it was thought of.

Also, about this saltines thing. Don't bother. Saltines have nothing to them which make them the miraculous morning sickness cure. The only things that got me out of this slump was real food, and by real I mean; meat and potatoes. Protein. Carbohydrates. Stuff you aren't supposed to eat on a regular, singular basis.

By now the morning sickness has faded. The narrow palate hasn't. And so far I think I've kept my secret pretty well. I've switched my lunchtime meal from chicken to steak tips, caesar dressing to italian, and though my lunch mates have noticed the change, they haven't gotten suspicious about the cause. They'll know, of course, soon enough. Sooner or later, it'll become obvious. If they have the hindsight to look back at my sudden change of eating habits, the women in the group might do a mental "Ohhhhh!" But by then the scenery will have changed, I suspect. We'll have other fun symptoms instead.

Be vewy vewy caheful...

2006-08-29T16:56:00.000-07:00

I went to my first pre-natal appointment and was told by the registered nurse that I could not do the following:

1) Eat deli meat, hot dogs, soft cheeses, or tuna fish
2) Drink acohol
3) Touch a cat
4) Play softball
5) Drive a motorcycle

I pressed her on items 1,3, 4,5. We've already surrendered on item number 2.

Item number one: Why can't I eat these things that I love?

Answer: Bacteria accumulates on food which is left out for too long. Tuna has too much mercury.

Me: So it's not about the food itself, but where it is and how it's prepared or where it's taken from.

Answer: Well.... yes.

Me: So I can eat deli meat. I just have to be sure the deli hasn't left it out for longer than they're supposed to. And I can have tuna as long as it is certified to be mercury free. So really, these are not things I should just not do while pregnant, it's things that people should do in general. Right?

Answer: Well, yes, ideally...

Me: So why not tell me this important health news before I was pregnant?

Item number 3: So you just said that toxoplasmosis is bad for the fetus?

Answer: Yes. If you go to someone's house with a cat, just ask them to put the cat in another room.

Me: But you just said it was okay if I had a cat, just not to touch the litter.

Answer: Well, yes...

Me: Am I somehow more likely to get it from someone else's cat?

Answer: Well, no...

Me: And just how common is it for babies to be born with a defect caused by toxoplasmosis, anyway?

Answer: Well, actually... pretty rare.

Me: So it's really not an issue.

Answer: I guess not.

Item number 4: What do you have against softball?

Answer: You could get hit by the ball directly in the stomach, and that could cause miscarriage.

Me: I have never been hit directly in the stomach in my life. In fact, I'm more likely to get hit in the head; I'm the catcher. And I have softball tournament this weekend, and I intend to play in it.

Answer: Well at this stage it would have to be a hit the equivalent of a car crash to cause any harm, so I guess it's okay...

Me: You mean hard enough to cause internal damage?

Answer: Yes..

Me: Well in that case don't you think I'd have bigger things to worry about?

Answer: I guess....

Item number 5: I guess you noticed I rode my bike to this appointment.

Answer: Yes, I really think that you shouldn't drive a motorcycle while pregnant.

Me: Why not?

Answer: Well if you were to fall or be in a crash, it could cause a miscarriage.

Me: Well I certainly don't want to crash. Am I statistically more likely to get into a crash because I'm pregnant?

Answer: Well.... no...

Me: Then I guess we're okay then, aren't we?

And then there were three (one was very very small)

2006-08-29T15:57:00.000-07:00

When I told the registered nurse at the OBGYN that I'd gone off the pill in order that my husband and I might get pregnant, she tried to reassure me by telling me that it often took 6 months to a year before one found oneself in such a state.

This is what my brain took from that statement: You will be pregnant in one year.

I could deal with that: it gave me plenty of time to prepare for the idea of being pregnant and, even more importantly, of being a parent for the rest of my life. Imagine my surprise one month later when it turned out that what she meant was: You have a chance of getting pregnant any one of the next 365 days.

I wish she'd been more clear.

Suspecting something was up, I went to the drugstore near the office after work in search for that which I'd never searched for before; a home pregnancy test. Consequently I didn't know where to look. This turned out to be a fortunate circumstance since a co-worker sidled up to me as I was aimlessly perusing what turned out to be the headache aisle.

"Whatcha buying?" he greeted me.

"Uh," I said. After he left I snuck out and went to the opposite side of town to another drugstore.

Home pregnancy tests are stored under "Family Planning," by the way. And you really can't miss them, because they are bright pink. That's right, an item that most people would probably want to buy discreetly is packaged in a color which screams BABY! BABY! BABY! all the way up to the counter. But they did do their thing; two lines showed up almost immediately.

I'm sure every expectant mother remembers with clarity the moment they learned they were pregnant. I believe my exact words were: Oh, fuck.

Which is how we came to be sitting there, after all, staring at a pink stick with lines on it. With apologies to those who have trouble conceiving, it was amazingly easy. I'd gone for years half-wondering if those organs even functioned, and three tries and one month later I had incontrovertible truth that I was fertile. Apparently quite so. Wham, bam. Thank you ma'am.

My husband, of course, was delighted. It was more his idea than mine anyway; in fact, if there'd been a way for him to be pregnant, he would have gladly done so. I wasn't so sure. I liked my life the way it was; why add somebody else to it? And I was definitely not on board with the whole nine months of pregnancy thing. I knew, for instance, that eventually it would be obvious to perfect strangers that I was pregnant, and all my actions would be scrutinized. (She's eating deli meat! Doesn't she know that's a no no??) The registered nurse had at one point tried to still these fears by pointing out that it was only for nine months.

"Nine months," I shot back, "is only three months shy of a year."

Still. After some doubts and some anger and some desperate tears, we've settled out some and we're ready for the long haul. Those wild hormones are no match for me. And though it seems like we've already been pregnant forever, we're only nine weeks along. Nine weeks is only three weeks shy of a trimester.