drudgery + delight

Birth Story

2011-10-14T14:31:00.001-04:00

I woke up around 4 AM with abdominal discomfort. Contractions or gas? Hm. Gas. Totally gas. Definitely gas. But I wasn't falling back to sleep, and gas might have been a coincident red herring. I played with my iPad in bed until Ben and Andy woke up. By this point I was fairly sure I was feeling contractions, but they were still mild.

It was July 31, a Sunday, the day before my due date. Ben had come a week early, so I was pretty impatient by this point, as I'd been 100% sure that the next one could only come sooner. Ben's birth was also quick (contractions started mid-morning, hospital by 4, born at 7) and labor progressed steadily, so I was expecting the same or faster. So when I was still having pretty mild, on-and-off contractions by mid-afternoon, I started to worry. We'd just been puttering around the house all day, and now we were all kind of bored and cabin-fevery, and instead of a steady progression from mild to intense, from long intervals to short, this labor was kind of all over the place. It would seem to be intensifying, and I'd have one or two whizz-bang contractions, and then nothing for half an hour.

At 3:53, I sent this email to C.:

Argh. Contractions pick up and then taper back off just when it looks like it might be getting interesting. I was worried she'd come even faster than Ben, but this is much worse. At it for 12 hours now, bored to death, not feeling like I'm making much progress, and worried about how tired I'll be if this drags on a lot longer.

And it worked like magic: suddenly the contractions were coming stronger and faster. We called my mom to come be with Ben. We called my OB/midwifery practice's service to give them the heads-up. By the time the on-call midwife got back to us, we were ready to head to the hospital. Luckily Midwife Jaime lives close, and so do we.

We got to the hospital around 5:00. They offered me a wheelchair at check-in, but the idea of sitting didn't appeal at all. I draped myself over the front desk while Andy answered questions and filled out paperwork. I walked to the elevator and to the L&D room.

I got a room with a tub this time, which I was happy about -- I'd wanted one for Ben's birth, but the hospital was crammed and there wasn't one available. But they had to put me on the monitor for a while to get a baseline before letting me into the tub. Fine. Jaime was there, and so was Emily the L&D nurse. I remember much more coming and going with Ben's birth (a different OB practice, an OB attending rather than a midwife), and I liked very much the coziness and intimacy of having just Jaime and Emily and Andy and me in the room throughout.

During my labor with Ben, I was concentrating so intently on my breathing and relaxing that I think I put myself into some kind of deeply meditative state. Which was nice, because I really was relaxed, and though it was certainly a painful experience, it was almost as if I wasn't entirely there for it -- some part of me was deep inside myself and insulated from the discomfort. When the time came to push, they told me to put my knees up to my ears, and I literally had no idea what they were talking about -- Andy had to translate for me because I was able to hear him in a way that I couldn't hear the doctor and nurses.

This labor was different. I was breathing and relaxing, but I was much more present. Andy was making small talk with Jaime and Emily, and I was able, when not actually in the middle of a contraction, to participate. My eyes were open. I was there. I was decrying the experience with colorful language.

I got into the tub, and Emily asked if I wanted to keep my bra on, and I laughed. As if that would preserve that one last shred of my dignity! The tub was nice. I don't know if it actually helped ease the pain, but it certainly was distracting and comfortable. Jaime said a couple of times that she had a feeling I wouldn't be in there long, that she had better keep a close eye on me because I was going to need to come out fast. Which is what happened, of course. I was feeling like I needed to poop, which I failed to mention because -- well, partly because I was kind of busy panting through contractions -- but also because even though I knew that was a sign of needing to push, it didn't feel like it felt with Ben, and it just didn't seem all that relevant at the moment!

When I finally did mention it, Jaime started saying stuff about a water birth being just fine, and I was all NO WATER BIRTH GET ME OUT, so during the next interval, Andy took one arm and Jaime took the other, and they more or less hauled me, sopping naked, over to the bed. Where it was suggested to me that I could push on my back or on all fours, and while neither sounded appealing (what sounds appealing at that stage? unconsciousness!), knees seemed less horrible, as leaning over had offered some relief throughout labor.

So there I was on the bed on all fours, with Andy up by my head and Jaime and Emily poised to catch. There was a fair amount of screaming and yelling. My water never broke, so Jaime did it. I can't remember how many times I pushed, but I couldn't have been there for more than five minutes.

And then there she was! A tiny little person, passed up under my belly into my arms, and they helped me turn over and sit down while they cleaned me up. She latched immediately and nursed like a champ, thus no doubt tipping the scales on her birth weight, which wasn't recorded for a good while.

We looked at our list of names, still very much undecided. The final short list was Joanna, Jane, and Margaret. I told Andy to rank them and did the same myself, and our number ones were the same.

Jane W. L., born 6:11 PM. 8 lbs even, 20.5 inches.

Pot's Right

2011-07-06T08:13:00.002-04:00

Potty training isn't quite the third rail that vaccines or circumcision are, but it's definitely one of those parenting issues that people tend to feel strongly about and other choices get interpreted as criticism. And it's another parenting issue on which I don't have a strong opinion affiliated with any particular school of parenting, and on which, therefore, I tend to think it pays to be flexible and open to various ideas because what works for one kid may not work for another, etc.

A big part of our potty training technique was informed by laziness and a deep ambivalence about starting the whole process, which I was pretty sure was going to be awful. I mean, if it was going to feature, in any way, poop ending up where poop was not intended to be, my feeling was that this was worse than diapers and (not should, clearly, but) would be put off as long as possible. The thing is, I got pregnant, and while the notion of two kids in diapers at once was unpleasant, it wasn't the gun at my temple that the looming prospect of pre-school was, and the the notion of having to train Ben while wrangling a newborn.

Luckily, it wasn't like we'd done absolutely nothing up to that point (that point being a couple of weeks ago). We started putting him on the potty at diaper changes when he was around 16 or 18 months. This was the result of what I thought was smart advice: that even if you have no expectations whatsoever of moving past the occasional potty-sitting, it's a good idea to get the baby used to the potty long before they reach the more oppositional phase around two and a half. And I'd tried a few times since he turned two to take it a step further. I put him in underpants and covered the sofa with towels, and he was enthusiastic about the M&M bribes and game for the Lightning McQueen underpants, but the experiment was always a FAIL, and we went cheerfully back into diapers. The last thing in the world I wanted was to stress either one of us out by forcing the issue before he was ready to be successful.

I think we'd tried maybe three times, each "time" consisting of a few mornings in a row, by the time his third birthday rolled around and I started getting freaked out about pre-school. And it had been a while since the last attempt, because lately, in the last six months, he'd become quite opposed to the very notion of underpants, and I didn't want to force a confrontation.

But the weather had turned warm, and if he refused underpants, he would at least agree to a couple of hours in the morning with no pants on at all. Which was the key in the end, I think, because the feeling of underpants was too close to the feeling of a diaper, but total bottom-half nudity made him pay attention much more closely to his body's signals, and he didn't have a single accident over the couple of weeks we tried this out for an hour or more every day.

But still he refused underpants. And then I realized I had one powerful tool yet unused, just lying there! Bribery. M&Ms worked great for the short-attention-span toddler years, but they weren't compelling enough for my three-year-old. But the promise of a toy was.

I told him if he could go one whole day in underpants, no diaper, from the time he woke up until bedtime, he could pick out any toy he liked (within reason, void where prohibited, no live monkeys). This was a Sunday, and I figured amid the failures, we'd go to the toy store sometime during the next week and choose the desired object, which would then be dangled in front of him in some cruel but motivating way for as long as it took to get through a whole day. What happened was that he barely left me alone about the toy -- which he decided early on would be an excavator, which I hoped existed -- to the extent that it was clear the toy did not have to be in the house for effective dangling. And miraculously, he stayed dry in underpants that entire next day. And we went to the toy store on the Tuesday, and lo and behold, they had a Playmobil Excavator, worth every penny of the sixty bucks it cost.

And that was that. Potty trained.

But of course that's not how it works, is it? Potty training is a continuum, and we had achieved only the first stage. Which is a big deal, don't get me wrong, but it's definitely one of those things with which parenthood is rife: the thing that looks like one simple step from one side and turns out to be a whole staircase from the other.

Because it's not like you move right from diapers to the kid climbing cheerfully up onto public toilets and wiping his own tuchus. I drive around now with a Frog Potty in the way-back of my Outback, a technique I heartily recommend to anyone at this stage of training. (Empty pee into shrubbery or anywhere you wouldn't feel rotten about a dog peeing, which is pretty much anywhere, at least if you're me; wipe out potty with wipes. Poop goes in trash bag and right into any trash receptacle you wouldn't feel rotten about dumping dog poop under similar circumstances -- which may mean you drive around with it in the car for a while, so have plenty of extra bags.) The kid can pull down his own underpants, but he balks at doing the same thing for pants, and he simply isn't coordinated enough to put any of his clothes back on. He's in diapers at night, largely because we still have a big box of them, but he wakes up dry more often than not. And he'll sit on a proper toilet without too much fuss, but still prefers the frog potty.

But he's trained enough that I don't have to hoist him up onto the changing table or get down on the floor to change his diaper, which is a mercy at nine months pregnant. And he's trained enough for pre-school, where I'm relying on a little old-fashioned peer pressure to carry him the rest of the way.

Chatter

2011-05-06T09:21:00.000-04:00

I was talking to a father at one of Ben's activity groups this week about his daughter who at 18 months has just a few words. He was worried. As it happened, I had just reread this blog post, so my attitude about the same stage with Ben was fresh in my mind. I told him that we, too, were told we ought to work at being a little less attentive, to pretend we didn't understand what he wanted so as to elicit words, and that I didn't like that kind of deception and didn't do it. (Instead I prompted him for the word before giving in to whatever it was I already knew he wanted.)

I have no idea if any of what we did or didn't do hurried or delayed his talking schedule. He had around 50 words at at his 24-month check-up, which I know because we made a list, and it's a pretty entertaining little artifact. His pediatrician said to give her a call if the summer passed (his birthday is the end of May) without a substantial language explosion, and I remember being a bit concerned even into July, and I don't remember ever thinking, "Oh, here it is: the language explosion!" but I also don't remember reaching the end of the summer and even considering calling the pediatrician.

And now here we are at nearly three, and it's not unusual for people to comment on how articulate and chatty he is. He's very chatty. He likes to bust into whatever conversation is happening between me and the check-out clerk or me and the server or me and the FIOS installer to announce apparent non-sequiturs like, "But I have a semt mixoo [cement mixer]!" or once, memorably, to respond to the age question from an enthusiastic waitress, "Two half. But I have gun!" (A wooden one Andy made so that Ben would stop stealing his carpenter's square.)

I was never really worried about his language development. I knew the range of normal was wide, and it was clear from very early that his receptive vocabulary was huge. But it was one of those things, lurking just beyond the horizon, ready to burst into star-spangled worry at any moment. Until it wasn't.

Baby Videos

2011-05-02T09:14:00.000-04:00

I've been downloading and processing the drawerful of mini DV tapes, mostly from after Ben was born, with a few of just dogs and Andy and me from before. I'm mostly doing it because I want to make a DVD for my father-in-law, who never gets to see the kid, and because it's something I've been meaning to get around to that's way more fun than vacuuming, but it's also rather a handy review of babyhood for someone who's going to give birth (Inshallah, knock wood, no jinx) in three months.

The funny thing is, what I'm surprised by isn't the hard stuff, which I remember vividly, but the sweet stuff. Of course, you don't tend to videotape the fourth straight hour of crying, the epic diaper, the inability to eat at restaurants. You tape the dog giving the baby foot kisses, the baby digging the swing, the baby gumming tasteful European wooden toys. But Ben was a tough newborn, and the former stuff has loomed much larger in my mind than the latter, and I confess to being a little freaked out at the thought of going through it all again, especially since this time we'll be subjecting our happy pre-schooler to the misery, too.

I wasn't a big fan of babies before my own was born. I believed the people who said you'll love your own even if you don't like babies at all -- or at least hoped very hard that they were right. And of course they were. And I was even fond of other babies when my baby was a baby, but the interest faded quickly. Now I find babies vaguely creepy and offputting again, though I can generally work up the requisite enthusiasm when presented with a baby belonging to someone who matters to me. Once they hit six months or so and aren't quite so fragile-looking, I even find them cute, but I feel no particular desire to hold one or do more than make a face to get smiled at. I wanted another baby not because I wanted another baby, but because I wanted another toddler.

But looking a these videos, I don't know. He's awfully cute with his super-fat cheeks and thigh rolls, giggling in his doorway bouncer and giving the dogs open-mouth kisses. Maybe having a baby around again will be pretty nice after all.

Reunity

2011-02-04T09:39:00.000-05:00

My 20th high school reunion is this spring. I haven't been to any previous ones, and since I went to a prep school (I was a day student at a boarding school), that makes nineteen events I've blown off so far.

At first it was the angry resentfulness of a self-perceived outsider at the warm heart of adolescent belonging: why would I want to go back there and feel ostracized some more? Of course, I wasn't really an outsider, and a little perspective and the wisdom and confidence of years revealed not only how lucky I had been to have had the wide circle of friends I did and the embrace of a few thriving school subcultures, but how hard life must have been for some of the people whose existences I thought charmed because I only saw them from a distance. Blonde and pretty and even rich aren't much protection against most of life's cruelties (one of the enduring lessons of early exposure to wealth), but a safe and solid home life is, and I had that in spades.

Then it was pure lack of interest. I wasn't intimidated by the people who showed up for Alumni Days and reported their milestones in the alumni magazine. But I wasn't especially interested in them, either. The people I wondered about, the ones I'd been friendly with and the ones I hadn't but wished I had and the ones I hardly noticed but in retrospect should have: these people didn't show up for events. But of course, neither did I.

It's funny, the psychological space high school takes up for many of us. There's something about that time in adolescence that imprints itself and sticks, even though it's just four years, even though it ceases quickly to matter in any real way. I still have dreams -- lots of them -- that take place in high school, peopled by people I haven't set eyes on in 20 years. It's like my brain got colonized by these archetypes based on an essentially random sampling of humans I happened to share an institution with between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. People I knew later who made a much deeper and more profound impact on me don't show up in my dreams.

At the same time, I look back on those years and I feel like I'm seeing everything through a veil of self-involvement and crappy perception. I remember confiding in my friends and being confided in, and it felt at the time like we were sharing something real, but now it seems like those things, our big secrets and dramas, were facsimiles of emotional content, things we created to take the place of the real dramas we may have been experiencing but couldn't handle or couldn't articulate. For instance, I knew who all my friends had crushes on at any given moment, but I had no idea about their home lives, even the ones whose homes I occasionally spent the night at. Or maybe those teen love dramas were more real than I give them credit for, and it's only now that I'm a parent that I think the real emotional content was happening at home.

Whenever my mother is in a reminiscing mood, she'll talk about how time telescopes in memories, how forty years ago can seem closer than last week, more vivid, more important. I'm old enough now to feel that, and also to feel the kind of fondness for youth that obscures both the pain and the vacuity, so that not only do I feel close to my high school years, I feel an affection for them that extends to those random characters in my dreams. I don't care whether I like them or not, whether they're interesting or not. They share this funny, vivid, profound-and-yet-not-at-all-profound period of my life, and so I want very much to make some kind of connection with them, even if -- maybe especially if -- it's fleeting. Our 20th reunion seems like an ideal time, and maybe even the last best chance to do that.

So come on, Class of '91. Show up.

Seven Books We Like a Lot

2011-01-21T10:29:00.003-05:00

I admit it: I don't like Dr. Seuss. Partly it's a matter of unsuitability to Ben's age: the books are really aimed at children just learning to read, and the repetitiveness that makes them accessible to beginning readers makes them extremely tedious to me. And they're way too long. I could take 20 or even 30 pages of in a box or with a fox, but 62 pages? No way, man. It's torture. And the illustrations are hideous! Sadly, many adults who haven't read aloud to children for thirty or forty years (mis-?)remember Dr. Seuss with fanatical fondness, so Ben gets a lot of his books as gifts. I keep meaning to put them into storage until the kid is ready to sound them out on his own -- I can quite imagine considerable cuteness issuing therefrom, but until that time, I'd really rather not see them again. But Ben does like them, and he likes sitting by himself and paging through them without involving me, and I'm not a total jerk, so I won't take them away. I won't read them at bedtime, though.

Andy and I each read the kid a book before bedtime. Ben gets to pick, but we exercise the veto: that one's too long, Dad doesn't like this one, Mom read that one five times already this week, etc. He's generally very accepting of our prejudices, and we are generally amenable to reading books we dislike when he loves them. He goes through phases of devotion and antipathy with various titles, but the following are long-standing favorites of his and ours, which means they have whatever mysterious qualities make them attractive to this particular two-and-a-half-year-old, plus they are attractively illustrated, quirky or funny or presenting of some unusual perspective, not patronizing or twee or saccharine, and mercifully brief.

Instructions by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Charles Vess

Typical Gaiman, mining myth and fairy tale and stringing together references in that slightly breathless voice that fools you into thinking he's deeper than he is. I have a lot of affection for the man, but I also find him infuriating. Anyway, his schtick works extremely well here, except for a few places where he gets tripped up in language that doesn't quite work, and the illustrations are marvelous. Part of the fun is picking out all the characters and creatures in the backgrounds. Ben, for instance, sees Tomtens everywhere.

The Tomten by Astrid Lindgren, illustrated by Harald Wiberg

My first notion of this book came from knitting: iconic knitting designer Elizabeth Zimmerman named one of her more famous children's sweaters after the gnomic protagonist. I knit the sweater before I read the book. Then friends gave us a copy, and it became a favorite. It's a strange combination of unnerving and warm -- the benevolent little Tomten pads around the farm at night talking to and doing favors for the animals, and it's all very sweet, but he's also a little non-human creature creeping about at night, which can't help being a bit creepy. It definitely has that timeless, northern European thing going for it: it could take place in pretty much any century including our own, and that seems to be an appealing element in children's books -- to me, at least. As is, come to think of it, that combination of creepy and comforting.

Arrow to the Sun: A Pueblo Indian Tale adapted and illustrated by Gerald McDermott

On the whole, I like Anansi the Spider better, but I've already blogged about it. And Arrow to the Sun is good, too. Especially the Kiva of bees, which is Ben's favorite part. It's not too often you see accusations of bastardy in children's books, and it's refreshing! Not at all inappropriate! Seriously, though, the way McDermott handles the strangeness of the cultures he presents (as if there's nothing strange about them, matter-of-factly, without oohing or pointing or -- worst of all -- explaining) and the sophistication of some of the concepts is masterful and positively awe-inspiring when you compare his work to the kind of multi-culti, Here Comes Hanukkah! drivel you generally see.

My Little Round House, illustrated by Bolormaa Baasansuren, adapted by Helen Mixter

Speaking of multi-culti. Mongolia isn't exactly a popular getting-to-know-you culture for toddlers, but this book is just terrific. I can't express how gorgeous the illustrations are. I know jack about Mongolian art, but the drawings manage to seem both entirely of their culture and yet thoroughly accessible to little kids, full of detail and yet not too literal. The story is a bit shoehorned: the protagonist, born in spring, is crawling by summer and running at one year so that the tale fits into the one-year seasonal cycle, but I can suspend my disbelief on that one because the book is otherwise so charming. ("Ger" rhymes with "bear," by the way. Which I know because Andy corrected me. He's been to Mongolia. Show off.)

Angus and the Ducks, Angus and the Cat, and Angus Lost, written and illustrated by Marjorie Flack

No dog person could doubt for a moment that Angus was Marjorie Flack's actual dog. He's as real a dog as I have ever seen presented in literature. Possibly people who are not dog people will therefore find the appeal of these books limited, but I am bowled over again and again by their charm. Part of the magic, too, is nostalgia for the kind of genteel, early twentieth century country life sketched in the margins: the milkman's horse, the chintz chairs, the tea service. But it's mostly happy, dopey, having-of-dog-logic Angus and the scrapes he gets into and out of that make me smile whenever Ben pulls one of these books off the shelf.

[If] Mommy Says No Santa [Says Yes]

2010-12-27T10:33:00.001-05:00

I wrote about Santa two years ago.

I guess I don't really have anything to add to that, except that it continues to surprise me how many parents I know embrace the Santa thing. In part I think it has to do with happy childhood memories; if you believed in Santa and didn't feel traumatized by the disillusionment, you're more likely to want your kids to have the same experience -- or to want to revisit the belief yourself.

There are lots of good reasons not to lie to your kids, especially about something so trivial. I mean, really, the default should always be honesty unless there's a particularly good reason to lie. And this is what gets me about the Santa thing: no one ever gives a good reason for doing it. "Magic," they say, as if the very absurdity of the story justifies it. The thing is, it's only magical to grown-ups, because we're the ones who live in a world where Santa cannot exist. It's not particularly magical to children, because so many explanations are beyond their comprehension, and so much of their understanding is about taking our word for stuff. Is it so much more magical to think that a fat dude in a red suit delivers presents down the chimney than that a burly dude in a brown uniform brings them from grandparents in Wisconsin to your front door in Schenectady? To us, sure, but to a little kid? So is it really about making more magic in their lives, or is it about reliving the magic of our own childhoods?

As a kid who grew up knowing presents came from mom and dad, I can assure you that there's no lack of magic on Christmas morning for kids like me. You can even indulge in some of the Santa stuff -- I certainly got presents "from Santa" and left out cookies, knowing full well that Mom and I were playing pretend (Dad not so much a participant in the Santa thing), and enjoying it no less, and maybe more, for the knowledge. At the age when most kids are learning The Truth about Santa, I could throw myself wholeheartedly into the fantasy because it was never a matter of True or Not True; it had always been a myth.

I Don't Like Children, Either.

2010-12-22T11:12:00.001-05:00

(Good grief! I announce my return and then proceed to blow off the blog for two months. Sorry! The longer I go, the more pressure I feel to make a truly spectacular blog entry, and it's kind of making me crazy, so I'm just dashing this off to get the ball rolling.)

The other day, we were listening to the weather report on the radio, and the weather guy was talking about storms in the midwest, and Andy asked Ben what the dude on the radio was talking about, and Ben said, "Vat dude talk 'bout soda." Yep -- Minnesota.

It's pretty fascinating, seeing through the eyes of a two-and-half-year-old. Also infuriating. It truly boggles the mind how many times one person can be told NOT TO GRAB THE DOG'S EARS and yet still, about once an hour if not more, grab the god-damned dog's ears. How is that so tough to grasp when other things are absorbed and incorporated into his worldview so fast I can't even work backwards to figure out where he learned them? He started praising dinner recently by calling it a "(s)pecial meal." This is not something Andy or I say, or have ever said probably, and so it took us some time to figure out where it came from. A book about Thanksgiving, we finally figured out, which talks about people traveling to each other's homes for a special meal.

One of the things that continues to fascinate me is how fascinating Ben is compared to other children, who are all -- apologies to their parents, some of whom are my dear friends -- awfully dull. This is part of why I haven't written lately: all the things it occurs to me to write about ("Vat dude talk 'bout soda") fall so distinctly into the category of It's Interesting When It's My Kid; I Don't Care When It's Yours. It makes me think about a good friend of mine who explained his lack of desire for his own children by pointing out that he didn't particularly like children. Even before I had a kid, I had a pretty good idea that that was some bogus reasoning. I don't like children, either, as a rule. They're ignorant and selfish and dishonest and rude and make extremely tedious conversation.

My own kid, though? Total gem.

Knock Wood

2010-11-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

I've been superstitiously avoiding my blog, but it's time to get a grip. The last few times I posted about feeling better, I immediately felt worse, and while that might happen again, I miss writing it, and several readers have been so kind as to say they miss reading it, so there it is.

What's happened since I last posted is a lot of ups and downs in terms of how I've been feeling. Finally in September I had a full-blown panic attack over absolutely nothing, and that sent me back to my doctors willing to try the SSRI I'd pooh-poohed earlier in the summer. And wow, let me just say again how very glad I am to be living now rather than, say, in the mid-nineteenth century. Zoloft is much, much better than a few weeks in the country for an attack of the nerves. So I was on it for a couple of months, and now I'm weaning off it (with doctor's supervision) because I want to get pregnant and my GP and I agree that there was something of a perfect storm this summer that created this anxiety, and I'm unlikely to need medication forever -- so this seems a good time to try getting off it. And just the notion that I can go back to it later if I want to is a great comfort.

It's still shocking to me how many purely physical symptoms could be chalked up to the anxiety. When I went on the Zoloft, I was experiencing spikes of anxiety (often unrelated to any events or trains of thought -- just out of the blue), but also periods of extreme nausea and dizziness. I expected the Zoloft to take care of the anxiety and allow me to analyse the other symptoms without freaking out over them. Instead, they all went away. Though, to be fair, my GP discovered I had a B-12 deficiency and I started taking B-12 at the same time, so it's not altogether clear which issues were solved by the SSRI and which by the vitamin.

Anyway, even on the Zoloft -- and I was on what could be considered a half dose, just 25 mg -- I still had occasional spikes of anxiety, which I was able to treat effectively with Valium. And as time went on, I was able to wait longer and longer before taking the Valium to see if the anxiety went away, since I knew from experience that I'd be able to zap it if I needed to. And what I found was that mostly I could breathe through it, do a few yoga poses, or distract myself, and it would go away rather than building. Which makes me feel more confident about coming off the Zoloft and getting pregnant, when I won't have the safety net of the Valium. And can I just say how cruel and awful it is that there's nothing perfectly safe to take for anxiety during pregnancy? What kind of nasty trick is that?

So. Back to parenting, I hope, and not so much about my health in this here blog. And thanks again to all of you who reached out while I was feeling wretched or told me that you missed the blog -- you're peaches, every one of you.

Update

2010-07-07T08:50:00.000-04:00

The short version: I had some further medical drama, but I'm feeling much better now, and apart from the cyst thing, I think I'm past it.

The long version:

I was feeling better after that week or so of drama, and then a few weeks later, I went to the OB for a follow-up, expecting to talk about whether or not it was wise to start trying to conceive again, given this weird possibly-migrainey stuff that was going on. Instead I found out that the ovarian cyst I wasn't worried about hadn't gone away on its own as was hoped, and might in fact need surgery. If I didn't want to get pregnant, said the OB, he'd want to leave it alone and keep an eye on it, but he didn't want me getting pregnant and then having the cyst do something wacky and need removing while I was pregnant, making the surgery risky to the fetus. Here's the fun part: if I have the surgery, it's likely I'll lose the ovary, reducing my fertility by about a third. Great. We agreed to give it eight weeks to resolve on its own, still a distinct possibility, and re-assess after another ultrasound.

I found this extremely dispiriting.

Then I had another week of weirdness, this time bouts of extreme nausea with anxiety and what I would call general low mood. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure this was a dire case of PMS, but at the time, it felt like more strange and very unpleasant symptoms of something that none of my doctors could identify let alone fix.

I canceled a road trip I was supposed to take with Ben because I was afraid of getting dizzy or heaven-knows-what-else while on the road a hundred miles from home, alone in the car with my toddler. As it turned out, I felt fine that week, but I was happy with my decision: much better, I thought, to be thwarted by feeling fine at home than by feeling like hell far away from home.

I saw my GP again, and she thought the whole thing at this point might just be anxiety born of so much medical drama. She told me to stop taking notes on all my symptoms, and advised I start an SSRI. I didn't like the SSRI plan, so we met in the middle with a low dose of Valium. I also thought the anxiety diagnosis was wrong and more than a tidge dismissive, but at that point I was open to trying almost anything, so I took the Valium and put away my notes and hoped for the best.

I felt better once my period started. Which supported my growing notion that everything had to do with hormones. I took C.'s advice and went to an acupuncturist. I took my own advice and started yoga, thinking that every step I could take to make myself all-around more healthy would help whatever this nonsense was, too. I stopped taking the Valium after a day or two: I wasn't feeling so anxious, and the Valium just made me tired and depressed.

I went to another OB for a second opinion. He agreed with me that apart from the crazy brain stuff at first, the second round of weirdness sounded very much like extreme PMS, and that that was not abnormal for the few cycles after a pregnancy, even a short-term one. He was also much more optimistic about keeping my ovary if we had to operate on the cyst, and more optimistic about the cyst generally. (I liked him a lot, and his practice is also about twenty-five minutes nearer to me than my current OB's -- and he shares his practice with three midwives, which I like, too. So I'm thinking I'm going to change practices.)

So here I am. I've had a few sessions of acupuncture and have been taking Chinese herbs as prescribed. I've been getting out and walking as well as doing yoga once a week. Who knows whether any of that made a difference, or whether time was the thing, but I just sailed through PMS last week with nothing worse than some lower back pain. Pain -- so uncomplicated! so easy to treat! And now that my period has started and the pain has let up considerably, I'm not even afraid that the pain is a symptom of some other dire whatnot.

The cyst is still there, of course. (Unless it's not -- I won't know until the ultrasound at the end of this month.) But now that the mystery symptoms seem to have tapered off and been proven out to my satisfaction anyway as hormonal aberrations of post-pregnancy, I feel equipped to handle the cyst, even if it means surgery. My native unflappability has returned, for the most part.

There's still the "slightly abnormal" EEG, too. I saw my GP again last week, and she and I agreed that it made sense to wait a while, until I'm more sure of feeling normal otherwise, before going back to the neuro for the follow-up he wanted, which is another EEG, only with my brain stressed by a night of not sleeping. I'm choosing not to worry about it. For one thing, he said they treat symptoms, not tests, so as long as I continue to feel fine, they consider me fine. I feel fine. But I'm not eager to learn anything more about how not-fine I might be under the surface. So I'm happy to put that testing off until after the cyst thing is resolved. One category of bad news at a time, please.

I downloaded a bunch of video from a tape onto my computer this weekend, and a couple minutes were from February. The video is of Ben, of course, but I'm in the background, wearing woolly slippers and a sweater. Just turned 37. Pregnant. Blissfully unaware of all the crazy to come.

More Medical Drama

2010-06-01T14:42:00.003-04:00

It's been a while since I posted. Here's why.

The Very Short Version

I had some mysterious medical issues, at first very scary, now largely resolved, which for several weeks meant that if I looked at my computer, I felt sick. After extensive medical testing, everyone's best guess seems to be atypical migraines brought on by anemia.

The Long Version

On Thursday, April 29th, just before bedtime, after I'd been at my computer for several hours straight, I started experiencing a visual anomaly: basically, I had a big splotch in my field of vision that looked like the kind of bright semi-blindness you get after a camera flash. I had it in both eyes. It freaked me out, but it went away after five or ten minutes. When I got in bed and tried to read a book, I couldn't. I could read each individual word, but when I tried to string them together to make some kind of sense, I couldn't. Which really freaked me out. I felt perfectly fine otherwise, and I thought maybe I'd just given myself such a scare with the vision thing that I had, I don't know, made myself temporarily unable to concentrate. Or something. I put the book aside and went to sleep, figuring I'd deal with it in the morning if whatever it was was still happening. And it wasn't: in the morning, I was fine, and I chalked it up to eye strain and freaking myself out, and went about my business.

Nine days later, Saturday, May 8th, it happened again. This time it was around 9:00 PM, and I'd been playing a computer game for about an hour, and I got another camera-flash blob. I left the computer and went into the living room and turned on the TV. Again, the blob went away within five or ten minutes, and what followed was some kind of disorientation. I was watching Lost (on the TiVo), and though I could understand everything that happened, I couldn't follow the thread of the plot from scene to scene, and nothing seemed to have context.

I thought I was having a stroke.

We hauled the kid out of bed and went to the ER, for the second time in a month. They took my blood and pronounced me extremely anemic (from the blood loss from the miscarriage) as well as dehydrated. They did a CT Scan which showed nothing. They said it was probably atypical migraine or atypical seizure, and I should see my doctor as soon as possible.

The next few days are kind of a blur. I felt like hell, in retrospect partly because I kept looking at my computer, which it took me some time to realize was provoking a lot of the rotten feeling, but also because I was terrified. My doctor wanted me to get an MRI to rule out some very scary shit including brain cancer, and it was a couple of days before those results came back totally clear. I didn't have any more visual anomalies or periods of disorientation. What I had was a lot of nausea, dizziness, and general feeling like hammered crap. I also had a full work-up by a neurologist, including an EEG to rule out seizures, the results of which I'm still waiting for: I have the follow-up appointment this week.

Once I figured out that the computer, particularly reading anything on the computer, made me feel terrible, I turned it off and stopped looking at it entirely. Books and magazines were the same, but less intense: I could read non-electronic text for a a few minutes before it started making me feel weird, and my ability to read non-e text without adverse effect returned within a week or so. Oddly, I could read my iPhone comfortably.

By Friday, six days after the episode that sent me to the ER, I was feeling considerably more like myself. Feeling normal again made me realize just how wrong I'd been feeling all along. That wasn't the end of the episodes, but it was the end of feeling shitty all the time. From that point on, I felt mostly normal and fine, with isolated incidents of not-OK.

I went back to my GP, and she said that based on all the data she had by that point, her best guess was that I was having clusters of migraines, the first few "with aura" (that's what the camera-flash blob was), and that it probably had everything to do with my extreme anemia (which I have been beating back with massive doses of iron since my first GP visit after the ER) and the stresses on my body caused by the miscarriage and hemorrhage, and that she doubted it meant I'd become a migraineur. The neuro said basically the same thing, but wanted to rule out seizures, which I'll find out about later this week.

It's common, apparently, for women (most migraineurs are women) to begin getting migraines during some big hormonal change: pregnancy, menarche, menopause, etc. And the migraines often stop at some other hormonal event. Some women have them during pregnancy and never have them again. Many female migraineurs tend to have them at particular points in their menstrual cycle. Anyway, it makes some kind of sense that the the anemia along with the hormonal upheaval of my system resetting after the miscarriage would have provoked either a one-time cluster of migraines or the beginning of some migraine phase of my life. Of course, I'm very much hoping it's the former, but I can live with the latter. Better nauseous and disorienting migraines than the kind with blinding pain, after all (presuming, if I continue to get them, they will be like the ones I've already had) or any of the far-more-terrifying possibilities ruled out by the MRI.

Did you know they have TV in MRIs now? I couldn't actually see the Today Show because I had to take my glasses off, but the sound was pleasantly distracting. So was the Valium. The neurological evaluation was nifty, too. It was all a bunch of follow-my-finger, walk-in-a-line-heel-to-toe, tell-me-where-I'm-sticking-you-(gently)-with-this-pin type stuff, all of which made me want to grill the dude about neurology. I'd have even warmer and fuzzier feelings about all of it if all the tests and hospital visits and the fact that Andy's employer hosed us this year on medical insurance didn't mean that we had to cancel our modest September beach vacation.

Anyway. I had my last arguably migrainey spell on the 23rd after having a short night's sleep and being a bit hungover. And really, for the past few weeks, it's been tough to tell what's migrainey from what's just a bit queasy and wifty. I started back at the computer five or ten minutes at a time last week with no adverse effects, and now I'm spending upwards of an hour here (hello!) without even having little panic attacks about it. My guess about why the computer and to a lesser extent other reading provoked the spells is something to do with eye strain and maybe needing bifocals (I've been myopic since I was 8). So I'm hitting the opthalmalogist this week, too.

I talked to my pal the midwife at my OB's office a couple of weeks ago, and she said she didn't think it was a good idea to start trying to conceive until the anemia was gone. She said "a couple of months," but I can't see it taking that long. My hemoglobin had gone from around 8 to over 10 the first week after the ER visit, when I was taking three iron pills a day. That's already nearly normal, and I've been taking two a day since, so I'll be very surprised if my blood test next week doesn't show perfectly respectable levels. I've already had a normal (I suppose) period, which means I'm (probably) ovulating again, so now that I feel normal and am no longer freaked out about this whole thing, I'd just as soon get back on the horse ASAP. Especially since this entirely-without-fun roller coaster ride started when I got pregnant in February and it is now June, and I am in no way getting younger.

I'm off to the OB for a follow-up ultrasound and sit-down with one of the full-metal OBs this afternoon, so I'm going to talk to him about it. And I'll see my GP next week after getting the EEG results and also the results of a blood draw, so I'll be talking to her about it, too. And then I'd really like not to see the inside of another medical establishment until I'm safely and successfully and without incident knocked up. Cross your fingers!

Miscarriage, Act III: There Will be Blood

2010-04-23T14:12:00.002-04:00

Tuesday evening, three weeks to the day after the disappointing ultrasound, the miscarriage began in earnest. And when I say "earnest," try to picture that scene in The Shining with the elevator doors. In retrospect, now that I'm home from the hospital, I know that what was happening was not just surprisingly heavy flow, but a hemorrhage.

I called my OB's office and got juggled by incompetents at their answering service for a while, finally got a call back from the on-call doctor, who wasn't a member of the practice. He prescribed Methergine, a hormone, to slow the bleeding. Andy went and got it, and I took the first dose at 9:30 PM.

It was a scary night, and one of the worst things was having to make the judgment call myself. The standard is soaking through a pad an hour; more than that, and you're supposed to go the ER. But that's an extra-tough call to make when going to the ER involves waking your sleeping toddler and hauling him off with you. After the Methergine kicked in, the bleeding slowed, but I was still soaking more than a pad an hour, and I was passing some pretty horrifying clots. Tissue (normal) or clots (if large, worrisome)? How was I supposed to know? The trend was positive -- I was definitely bleeding less. So I stuck it out, and after the second dose of the hormone, around 2:00 AM, the bleeding slowed significantly, and I was able to sleep until 6:30.

In the morning, everything seemed fine. Bleeding like a normal period. I called the OB's office, and they said I should come in and get checked, which I did at 11:30. Andy took the day off work. I saw the midwife, she did a pelvic exam, and everything looked normal. In her opinion, I'd just had an all-at-once miscarriage, and though she could still see some blood and clots, she expected that I wouldn't bleed heavily again, and probably not for long. So, good! Hurray for that. Such relief.

We got home around 1:00, and the heavy bleeding started again. I called the office, and by the time the midwife called me back, I was beginning to feel light-headed. I should have mentioned it, but it didn't seem significant, especially since I'd hardly eaten all day, and I'm prone to feeling light-headed when underfed. She told me to take the Methergine again, but if I was still soaking a pad an hour after four hours to go to the ER. I took the Methergine at 2:30 and went upstairs to try to nap. I slept some, but mostly I just lay in bed and bled and worried. When I got up at around 5:00, I had to sit down at the bottom of the stairs because I felt like I was about to black out.

So we went to the ER.

The admitting doctor was a putz. He asked me how long my OB would "let me" continue bleeding. I told him what the midwife had said about four hours post-Methergine, and he started arguing with me in way I didn't entirely understand. I explained that I expected -- and I assumed my OB practice expected -- that going to the ER meant I would get a D&C at the hospital. The doctor said no, the ER would refer me back to the OB. That seemed crazy, but I wasn't about to argue with him, since I figured either another doctor would be less stupid or someone would call my OB.

They wheeled me into the inner section of the ER, and Ben became blessedly absorbed by Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. Eventually another doctor came in, who began by asking me how I knew I was pregnant, which flummoxed me completely. Uh, because I know how to pee on a stick? So he got the whole history and concluded that I needed an ultrasound before they could determine any course of treatment, which seemed entirely sensible to me. By the time they wheeled me out for the ultrasound, the bleeding had mostly stopped. That was around 7:30.

Another doctor joined in the fun. He said based on the ultrasound, which showed a small amount of tissue remaining, and the fact that the bleeding had stopped, we had two options: send me home with the caveat that if heavy bleeding started again, I was to come right back, and if not, go to the OB in the morning; or transfer me to Bellevue (the sister hospital a couple of miles away that handles all the OB/Gyn stuff for the hospital system) where they could keep a closer eye on me and possibly give me the D&C as soon as that night. They wanted to take my vital signs again and consult with someone from my OB practice before making the call. The vitals were what clinched it: they took them lying down, sitting up, and standing, and my heart rate was somewhere in the realm of crazy-cuckoo when I stood up, so no going home for me. Which was fine. The last thing in the world I wanted was to go home and start bleeding and have to haul the poor toddler out of bed and start this whole nonsense over again, but at some charming hour like 2:00 AM.

So Ben and Andy went home. And let me take a moment here to sing the praises of my mellow and largely unflappable toddler, who sat quite happily in a chair looking at books and crashing toy cars together and watching Seinfeld and eating crackers and charming nurses until nearly three hours after his bedtime. And Andy, for whom patience and calm do not come easily, who smoothly distracted Ben out of every possible turn into crabbiness and held my hand and didn't freak out even a little. At around 9:30, they went home, and I waited for the ambulance.

The next few hours were kind of hard. From the time we got to the ER, I felt enormously relieved that, whatever happened from that point, at least I wouldn't be the one making judgment calls, and if the crazy bleeding kept up or started up again, someone would know what to do. But when Andy left, I felt alone, and sad to be alone. I have lovely friends here who I'm sure would have jumped in the car if I'd called, but it didn't seem a dire enough emergency, my desire for further company and hand-holding, to get other mothers of babies and toddlers out of their beds at 10:30. I'd have called my mom if she weren't three hours away. I'd have called older friends with whom I have deeper credit, if they lived nearby. Maybe. It's hard to ask for help, even when you want it.

When the EMTs wheeled me into my room at Bellevue, I could hear a newborn crying. The room was just down the hall from where I'd stayed when Ben was born. I've never felt, throughout the loss of this pregnancy, that I was mourning a lost baby -- but ending this journey in that place was hard. The doctor on call couldn't come talk to me because he was delivering babies. I asked, when I woke up the following morning, how many babies they'd delivered that night. The nurse said five, and I'm not even sure why I asked, because of course it made me cry.

No one knew whether I'd be getting a D&C that night, or in the morning, or not at all. Which was fine, but it meant that I wasn't allowed to eat or drink, which sucked. I was substantially dehydrated from all the blood loss, and I'd been getting IV fluids since arriving at the ER, but it didn't make me less thirsty. They let me have a sip of water to take the Ambien which it was someone's excellent idea to give me around midnight, and handing that cup back demanded the kind of willpower I don't generally admit I'm capable of. I wasn't hungry until morning, and then I had to start changing channels when food ads came on.

In the morning, I had another ultrasound and another blood draw. The doctor (this time someone from my own OB practice) came in around 11:00, 12 hours since I'd been admitted and the first time I'd spoken to an actual MD, and said if I hadn't already lost so much blood, he'd be tempted to send me home to let the rest of the tissue pass normally, but he didn't want to run the risk that I'd start bleeding again, so he wanted to give me a D&C. Which, duh. I mean, I think I'd have burst into tears if he'd tried to send me home again.

They put me under for the surgery, bless them. Not on-a-ventilator under, just knocked out and with a local. So the surgery, so far as I'm concerned, was a total breeze. I came to, dozed for a while in recovery, then got wheeled back to my room. Most of my focus was on when could I eat something and might there be crackers and I have crackers in my bag if there aren't crackers here and can I eat crackers yet? The nurse brought me saltines and ginger ale, and never have such things tasted so good.

Andy and Ben had come for a visit in the morning between breakfast (theirs, of course) and nap time, and I'd requested -- for my sake and Ben's, not so much Andy's -- that they not come back until I was about ready to be released, since I preferred to rest and watch something on TV other than Dora or Dinosaur Train. After I gorged myself on crackers and further demonstrated my ability to function extra-hospitally by peeing, the nurse said it was just a matter of some paperwork (translation: maybe two hours) before I'd be free to go. That was around 3:30. I called Andy, and he and Ben came back. I was home by 5:00.

The bleeding started Tuesday night. I spent Tuesday night bleeding and freaking out, Wednesday night in two hospitals, and Thursday night sleeping soundly in my own bed. Today is Friday.

In terms of the surgery itself, I feel absolutely fine. I had some very mild cramping last night, wholly solved with ibuprofen. No pain whatsoever today. But I'm still feeling weak from the blood loss. The doctor told me to take iron supplements, and I should have thought to buy some on the way home, but I didn't, and I don't think I should drive, so Andy's going to stop by the pharmacy on his way home from work. Not feeling 100% up to kid-wrangling this morning with Andy back at work, I called in the cavalry, and two marvelous friends turned up to take Ben to the playground and wear him out.

No sex for four weeks. No attempting to conceive until after my next period, which will probably be in four to seven weeks. If I'd had the D&C three weeks ago, of course, I'd be three weeks ahead of this schedule. I think it's the timing I find most frustrating. We would have started trying to get pregnant this past fall, but I needed several dental procedures that were best done before conceiving, and what with scheduling and waiting for pre-approval from insurance, that ran us into January. I got pregnant in February, the first cycle trying, but it turned into a bit of a catastrophe, and now we can't even start trying again until the end of May at the latest, and probably more like the middle of June. I'm 37. The clock is ticking.

In the short term, right now, I'm feeling kind of traumatized. My bathrooms freak me out. Having always enjoyed rude good health, having my only experience of pregnancy before this an entirely by-the-book gestation and delivery, I'm finding myself pretty shaken, especially given my age, by the idea of the next pregnancy and all the things that can go wrong. A miscarriage, even one that goes as badly as this one, is really the least of my worries. It's like, once the possibility of this bad outcome was made manifest, the floodgates opened, and now all the bad outcomes seem far more plausible, far more threatening, far more real.

Fifteen Days

2010-04-14T08:58:00.001-04:00

Two weeks ago yesterday was the ultrasound. That was a bad day, but the days since have been fine.

Like I said in my first post about the miscarriage, the fact that this pregnancy never made an embryo was significant to me, and has really meant that I haven't mourned the loss the way I would have had a proto-person ever developed. And I certainly don't mean to minimize the grief experienced by other women in the same situation. I feel pretty strongly that you don't get to choose how you feel about something, and there's a big range of valid reactions to any experience, and it's just the luck of the draw that I don't happen to have been made very sad by this one.

It has been a bit of a roller-coaster, though. When I still wasn't bleeding after a week, the NP became concerned that my hCG levels weren't dropping the way she'd expect, so I had to go for more bloodwork and schedule another ultrasound. It was possible that I was still pregnant, but my dates were way off, or I might have had an ectopic pregnancy. The former possibility seemed so remote to me that I honestly didn't really even consider it. My cycles have never been irregular. I tested positive the day before my period was due, and then again about a week later, and the likelihood of two false positives is so close to zero that it might as well be zero. The latter possibility, though, was pretty terrifying. I drew some comfort from the fact that it seemed implausible that I'd have gotten to nine weeks with an ectopic pregnancy without feeling any pain. In any case, when the results of the second blood draw showed that my hormone levels had dropped significantly, I was relieved -- way, way, way more relieved than disappointed. I canceled the ultrasound and turned down another shot at a D&C.

Another week passed, still no bleeding. I had the next weekly blood draw yesterday morning and checked in with the NP in the afternoon. My hCG levels are now below half of what they were at the first test. She wasn't concerned yet about the possibility of necrotic tissue causing an infection and was totally on board with my continuing to wait for things to work out on their own. Which is still and will remain, until it seems like any kind of threat to my health, my preference.

And it kind of blows to be two weeks out and still with no end in sight, unable to move on, wearing pads when I leave the house because who knows when the bleeding will start.

Too graphic, too intimate? I'm erring on the side of over-sharing because it seems to me that we're all a little too delicate about stuff like this, and the result is that every woman who has a miscarriage has to learn it all herself, rather than benefitting from other people's experiences well before the event. It's too common an experience to be so shrouded in mystery.

Shillin' Like a Villain

2010-04-09T08:50:00.003-04:00

Heaven help me, I signed up to be an Amazon Associate. With my shall-we-say-modest readership, I don't expect to start sleeping on piles of cash anytime soon, but what the heck? I pepper my posts with Amazon links anyway, so I might as well have a shot at getting paid for it.

So. Here are some of Ben's and Andy's and my favorite picture books:

Anansi the Spider: A Tale from the Ashanti
adapted and illustrated by Gerald McDermott
Caldecott Honor, 1973

The illustrations in this book will cause you physical discomfort if you have astigmatism. Seriously. But that shouldn't stop you, bcause it is a goofy, goofy tale told in a voice that's inordinate fun to read aloud. Ben liked it immediately, and it's remained among his top most-requested. It took Andy and me a longer time to warm up to it, but it's earned a firm place in the household canon.

All the World
by Liz Garton Scanlon, illustrated by Marla Frazee
Caldecott Honor, 2010

I'd be lying if I said the latte-liberal fantasy element of this book didn't make me a little queasy, though I'm about as latte liberal as it gets. The farmers' market! The happy plump lesbians on their tandem bike! The baby in an Ergo! All the World indeed -- if all the world were only such a quiet and carbon-neutral resort town! Also, there's something facile about the lists of things with no active verbs -- they make for nice rhymes, but they don't go anywhere or do anything. Still. I can't actually read more than three pages without choking up, and the illustrations are so beautiful and intricate, the little town with its geography and genealogy fully imagined, each page referring to all the others. My head thinks this book is very, very silly, but my heart loves it very, very much. Ben likes all the dogs and trucks.

Ox-Cart Man
by Donald Hall, illustrated by Barbara Cooney
Caldecott Winner, 1980

If I had to pick a single favorite book, I think it might be this one. The illustrations are reminiscent of Grandma-Moses-y folk art, and they suit the story perfectly. The story follows one of my favorite themes for children's books: the work and produce of the seasons. It also speaks to my Yankee roots with its New Hampshire setting (rolling hills, little hamlets with tidy white churches) and message of hard work and thrift. Andy likes the woodworking, and I like the fiber craft. In fact, I don't think there's anything about this book I don't like. Ben likes pointing out the cheese in the shop and the lights in the window of the farm when the Ox-Cart Man returns home.

Let's Make Rabbits
by Leo Lionni

I love a little postmodern meta: so sue me. This is a sweet little tale about rabbits. It's also a bit of a meditation on the construction of reality. The hardcover version we have (a gift from C. -- thanks, C.!), which I hope is the same one I've linked you to, is a tactile pleasure in itself, a small volume perfect for little hands and a novelty for adult ones. It's also very pretty. I'm not sure what Ben likes about this one, but he demands it regularly.

At the Top of My Voice
by Felice Holman, illustrated by Edward Gorey

This one's out of print, I'm afraid, but it's not hard to get a decent used copy from, oh, let's say Amazon. I grew up with this book, and it's in my blood the way lines of liturgy run in the veins of someone raised to church. On tiptoe I'm taller, and taller I'm older. And I'm not Nan, I'm a dancer. And City asleep, city asleep, a carnival on the garbage heap. The poems are great, and the illustrations are great, and little kids should grow up with good poetry so they learn to love it before they can learn to fear it. Ben likes the squirrel, the birds, and the lion.

Beating It*

2010-04-07T07:57:00.007-04:00

I should probably leave well enough alone, but I went to bed last night still thinking about the anti-circ petition and what I'd said about it, unable to let it go, and convinced I'd become bogged down in nitpicking the text instead of making the bigger points that were really under my skin. (Ew, how did I end up with lice metaphors?)

So, allow me to beat this dead horse.

I don't think opposition to routine circumcision is wrong -- generally I find it reasonable and justified, and though I chose to circumcise my son, I consider myself an opponent of routine circumcision. But this petition obliterates any respect I might ever have had for the sense of anyone involved with it because it A) seeks to shut down debate rather than encourage it, and B) shows no respect whatsoever for science or expertise.

If you have taken a position based on a reasonable interpretation of factual evidence, you should never be afraid to hear new evidence that tests your position. If you're correct, new evidence will bear you out. If you're incorrect, why would you want to maintain your position? Similarly, you shouldn't be afraid to argue the point, especially with an expert in the field. Opposition to routine circumcision isn't an irrational position and has considerable foundation in medical science, so of all the responses available to a potential challenge, why on earth choose the one that boils down to SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP LALALALALA WE CAN'T HEAR YOU?

I can't fathom what motive the authors and supporters of the petition ascribe to the CDC for doing something so unethical and counter to its mission as ignoring -- not insufficiently weighing, but ignoring -- the risks of a procedure it is considering recommending. The CDC is not some crazy bunch of penis-mutilating yahoos. It is a body of public health experts. Being human, of course, they are fallible and certainly have biases of their own. It is foolish to take their word as gospel, but it is equally foolish not to accord them the respect their expertise deserves. If we could all conduct research and draw appropriate conclusions, we wouldn't need scientists, but the fact is that we're all a little busy doing other things, and many of us plumb ain't smart enough, and few of us have the talent or training, honed over a lifetime, to conduct or interpret the kind of medical research that the CDC is reviewing before making its recommendations. Skepticism is fine -- it's admirable even -- but when it crosses the line into anti-intellectualism, into opposition to science itself, it deserves a smackdown.

Though I chose to circumcise my son, I do not support routine circumcision. But if the CDC is considering recommending it, I'm certainly interested to hear why. What research, what interpretation of the research, could support such a radical position? I look forward to the opportunity to re-evaluate my own position in light of new evidence or new argument. I look forward to hearing the opposition's response -- if it's rational, if it's based, as the CDC's certainly will be, on evidence and informed interpretation.

I definitely look forward to any chance to improve public health. If it turns out that the research demonstrates that routine circumcision actually does provide a significant protection against deadly STDs, against cancer, wouldn't that be good news?

*I'm so sorry. I'm 12, and I can't write two whole blog posts about penises without a single bad pun.

Recommendations

2010-04-06T08:12:00.006-04:00

Mothering magazine and Intact America (a non-profit advocacy group opposing circumcision) are calling for signatures on a petition to stop the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommending routine infant male circumcision.

Circumcision is not a big issue for me, though of course I'm aware that it's one of those parenting third rails, like breastfeeding and vaccination. I did a lot of reading about it before Ben was born, and the most I could muster was a mild bias against, based on a general principle of avoiding all non-crucial surgery. At the time, there was some not-extraordinarily-significant research supporting circumcision as plausibly prophylactic against certain STDs, and the combination of that, Andy's more-than-mild-but-not-very-strong bias for, and the extreme discomfort and embarrassment of a family friend who had to be circumcised for medical reasons in his 70s added up to a Yes. There's also in there somewhere, in a way I can't possibly justify, a weird little family-cultural / atheist-but-CYA adherence to the covenant. Or comfort in the tradition. Or notion of tribal belonging. Or something.

Anyway, like I said, it's not something I can work up a lot of strong feelings for or against, and it's one of those things, like whether you use a baby carrier or stroller, that I have a hard time understanding why some people are excited enough about to advocate publicly rather than simply decide for themselves. But I do feel strongly about this petition, strongly enough to have broken my own very sensible rule about not picking fights on Facebook.

Here's some of what Mothering says:

Based on flawed studies that ignore the risks and ethical concerns of infant circumcision, the CDC may recommend this unnecessary surgery for our baby boys. We know that safe sexual practices and abstinence – not circumcision – prevent sexually transmitted diseases. And we know that there is NO link between infant circumcision and better health.

We will be delivering our petitions to CDC headquarters in April with the hopes of convincing them to make the right decision.

Mothering doesn't specify which studies it considers flawed and what those flaws might be. Unlike the CDC, it doesn't cite references. The CDC's fact sheet on male circumcision contains a useful paragraph, helpfully titled "Risks Associated with Male Circumcision," which includes no fewer than eight cites to studies that explicitly did not ignore the risks of the procedure. Mothering doesn't state its ethical objections, but I'm guessing they have something to do with the fact that an infant can't consent. And that's not something to dismiss out of hand, but we make decisions for our children every day, and that kind of ethical hairsplitting simply can't weigh heavily against substantive evidence (should there prove to be any) that performing the procedure would be a significant benefit to public health.

Mothering knows some stuff. Again, they don't cite references for how they know circumcision doesn't prevent transmission of STDs or how they know "there is NO link between infant circumcision and better health." And this kind of arrogant ignorance professing knowledge just honks me off. Take the claim that there's NO link between infant circumcision and "better" (as if that's even a meaningful or specific term) health: the American Medical Association says in this report, "there is little doubt that the uncircumcised infant is at higher risk for urinary tract infection." Smaller risk of UTIs = "better health"! But that's hardly the point, is it? The question isn't whether circumcision has any health benefits whatsoever (the most cursory review of current research makes it clear that it does); the question is whether the benefits are significant, whether they outweigh the risks and justify the costs. The ability to make that kind of essential distinction is only one of the reasons we trust the CDC before Mothering magazine to advise us about public health issues.

Mothering claims to want to convince the CDC to make the right decision. But to convince someone of something, you need to present an argument -- ideally with some evidence to back it up. A petition is not an argument. It's political pressure. It's a more or less polite way of ganging up. And I think we should all think very carefully about whether applying political pressure to the CDC is something we'd want to put our names to, or something we seriously think a group like the CDC should allow itself to be persuaded by.

It would be one thing if the petition advocated further specific study, if it made specific criticisms of the evidence, if it provided, in other words, an evidence-based argument to which it could then legitimately claim the CDC wasn't giving enough credence. But that's not what the petition advocates. Here's the text of the introduction:

No medical society in the world recommends male circumcision – yet newborn male circumcision is the most common surgical procedure in the U.S. This painful and risky procedure deprives more than a million boys each year of healthy, functional tissue – without their consent – while increasing medical costs by an average of $678 per baby.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is developing public health recommendations for the U.S. on male circumcision that could ignore the serious risks of this non-therapeutic surgery. As the foremost expert on public health in our country, the CDC has a responsibility to share the truth about infant circumcision.

We need just a few more signatures to help us reach our 25,000 goal before the end of March. Sign our petition to the CDC below and demand a truthful statement on the risks and harms of newborn male circumcision.

So, if the CDC's recommendations don't ignore the risks of the procedure and do present a truthful assessment of said risks, but conclude that the benefits outweigh the risks, Intact America will support the recommendations?

Here's the text of the petition itself:

As the foremost expert on public health in our country, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has a responsibility to share the truth about public health issues that can affect millions of Americans.

Newborn male circumcision is the most common surgical procedure in the U.S. - yet this painful and unnecessary surgery carries serious risks, including hemorrhage, infection, surgical mishap, and death.

The role of circumcision in preventing sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and other health claims has been investigated by public health researchers and remains highly debatable. Only safe sexual practices, such as the use of condoms and abstinence, can prevent STDs, including HIV/AIDS. Circumcision cannot be responsibly recommended as a way of preventing disease.

If the CDC chooses to promote newborn male circumcision, it is supporting a procedure called "non-therapeutic" by the American Medical Association - in favor of inconclusive and highly debatable research.

I ask that the CDC not recommend circumcision as a means of preventing HIV/AIDS and formally recognize the risks and harms of the procedure and the right of every child to bodily integrity.

Though Intact America makes no wild claims about what they know about circumcision, they throw the word "debatable" around as if it means "worthless." But they fail to mention what standard of proof they would find conclusive, and indeed fail to cite a single reference, most notably for their claims of the associated risks. They demand that the CDC admit the truth, implying of course that the CDC has failed to do so or is likely to fail to do so, but there is no evidence presented that suggests any kind of obfuscation or dishonesty.

What I can't understand is, if they accept that the CDC is the foremost expert on public health in the US, that the CDC has a duty to present the truth to the American people, and that there is debatable evidence about whether routine circumcision is beneficial to the public health, why on earth they can't just get the hell out of the way and let the CDC examine the evidence and make its conclusions?

The evidence is debatable, so for pity's sake, let's debate it! Let's hear it, all of it, including what the CDC -- the acknowledged experts -- think we should do. Let's open our minds to the possibility that while there might not have been significant evidence to support recommending routine circumcision five years ago, or last year, perhaps there is now. And if there isn't this year, perhaps there will be five years from now. Let's keep asking the questions whose answers might save or improve lives, and let's listen to the people who can speak about those questions with informed intelligence before we start arguing with them. Let's not dig so deep into the trenches we make of our personal decisions that we can't occasionally climb out and take a look at what a new day's sun might have revealed.

Miscarriage

2010-03-31T07:14:00.003-04:00

About a month ago, I got two lines on the pee stick. For the second time, it seemed, I got pregnant the first cycle of trying.

Yesterday I went for the dating ultrasound and discovered I had what's called a blighted ovum, which means the fetal pole (thus the embryo itself) never developed: I had a fetal sac and a yolk, but no fetus.

It's too soon to know exactly how I feel about this. I mean: I feel what I feel now, but who knows what I'll feel about it next week or next month or next year. Mostly, at this point, I'm surprised by how not surprised I am. On some level, I knew it. I had a bad feeling about this pregnancy, and some part of me is relieved to know for sure that it went wrong, to be able to move on rather than continue to worry about it. Of course, if the ultrasound had showed a squirmy little proto-human with a solid heartbeat, I probably would have shaken off the bad feeling and chalked it up to second-time-around jitters. You don't tend to know a lot about what can go wrong your first time. But then the second time, you know more mothers, and you've heard more stories.

I find myself comforted by the fact that an embryo never developed. There's something less tragic about a lost possibility than a heart that stopped beating.

It drives me crazy that there's no way to phrase it that doesn't lay the blame, at least grammatically, on me. I miscarried, or I had a miscarriage, or I lost the pregnancy. There's no the pregnancy failed, or the embryo lost itself. Even the word "miscarriage" tells you it was the carrier who fucked it up. English language FAIL.

I find myself dwelling on some really stupid details. Like: hey, now I can clean out the room where the cat boxes are so Andy doesn't have to do it. (Andy hates the cats, and I forgot to set him up with a minimally gross set-up to take over catbox tending while I was pregnant -- pregnant women aren't supposed to mess with kitty litter because of the risk of toxoplasmosis.) Like: crap, now if I get pregnant again ASAP, I'll end up delivering and racking up hospital bills on next year's deductible instead of this year's.

B., my nurse practitioner, said in terms of my health and well-being and future ability to conceive, it's about six of one, half dozen the other between letting nature take its course and having a D&C. In both cases, the risk of infection is around 7-9%. Which surprised me: that's a pretty high risk for a thing that happens so frequently. And this kind of infection can be extremely dangerous. The temptation to do the surgery is to have it all over with sooner and to skip the worst of the gore, though even with a D&C, you still have some bleeding and cramping. For now, though, I'm planning to let things just happen, with an option, of course, to go for the surgery if it's not happening fast enough or if it's too unpleasant. There's a considerable gross-out factor to the mechanics of miscarriage. B. said that because there's no fetus, for me it's likely to be more like a very heavy period. Let's hope so.

People who mean to be sympathetic and kind tend to say things about how nature gets rid of its mistakes or something, how miscarriage happens because the fetus wasn't good enough. I understand this impulse, and I certainly appreciate that it's kindly meant. But it's pretty stupid, and I wish people would think it through. Would you say that to someone mourning a person who died from a genetic disease? That it's somehow less sad because the person obviously wasn't made very well? Yes, it's true that many miscarriages are caused by genetic abnormalities. But that's not particularly comforting, especially because with current technology, some would-be mothers may actually know for a fact that that's not what caused their loss. They may have very strong, very complicated feelings about what did cause their loss, whether it's genetic abnormalities or something else. Plus, honestly, what seems comforting to one person may seem like minimizing to someone else, like: you shouldn't be so upset, because here's this information. In my opinion, the thing to say is the same thing you'd say to someone mourning any other loss: "I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do?"

I cried on the table at the ultrasound. I cried in B.'s office. I cried in the car. I've cried a little here and there since. But mostly, so far, I'm ok. I know that I have physical discomfort and unsettling gore to look forward to, plus the hormone crash at the end. But for me, mostly, this feels like a very annoying roadblock between us and the next wonderful member of our family.

(One quick request: I'm going to link this post at Facebook, but I'd really prefer that people not comment about my miscarriage on my Facebook page. Comments here are fine, or feel free to contact me some other way.)

BKB

2010-03-05T07:28:00.005-05:00

35 lbs this kid weighs! Which is spot-on his growth curve and all and not a means for concern, but good grief, he's a bit of a lot to lift and tote. And that was a big part of what spurred us to move him from a crib to a toddler bed this week.

If we hadn't happened to buy a crib that converted to a toddler bed, I would have no truck with toddler beds, and would have put him right into a single bed, or possibly just put his crib mattress on the floor. But lo, the wonder of Ikea.

Sadly, and maybe for the first time, Ikea let us down. When we took the bars panels out and went to take the top panels off the headboards, it became immediately clear that there would be no detaching and reattaching the decorative cap pieces. They didn't have a flush, flat-to-flat join; they had some kind of grooved thing that was on no account A) going to come apart without solvents or B) going to attach to the bottom panels of the headboard without sawing and sanding. Naturally, we began this process about forty minutes before the kid's bedtime, so power tools were not in the cards. We left the bed with no decorative caps, which means it has a sad, unfinished edge with weird holes. Meh.

I had intended to get a pair of those bed baffle things to keep him from falling out, but I forgot, so instead we put a big dog bed right beside. The bed's only about six inches off the ground, anyway. I wondered if he might not end up preferring the dog bed, and if so, whether it was my duty to discourage that.

I had searched for toddler bed linens online, and found two mutually exclusive categories: the ugly and the ruinous. One advantage of moving your kid out of the crib while he's still this little is that he has not yet developed an attachment to any licensed characters, so there was no tempation to yield to the ugly in the form of Elmo or Thomas or Spiderman in their poly-blend luridness. Nor was I quite willing to shell out fifty bucks for Dwell Studios' precious hipster 100% cottons. Besides, I didn't think the kid was going to be able to manage the top sheet + comforter; it seemed like a recipe for tangled child. But that was the only formula available from Target, which I quickly realized was my best bet for spending under rather way, way over fifty bucks.

So, Ikea. Which sells toddler pillows and duvets, and then sets of duvet covers and pillowcases (because for pete's sake, if you already have the crib, you already have fitted sheets!). But which doesn't ship its kid bed linens. I did actually consider the idea of tossing the kid in the car and driving three hours to New Haven. I'd have arranged to meet my mother, so it wouldn't have been thoroughly crazy, but still. She offered to go instead, and that was a much saner plan.

So. It only remained to see whether Ben would accept this transition or raise holy hell. Would he pop right out of bed and bang on the door, screaming? Would he rampage through his bureau or pull all the books out of his bookcase? We took the space heater out because he has a desperate fondness for buttons, so at least he probably wouldn't burn the house down. He's a pretty mild-mannered toddler, so odds were in our favor, but then he's always been an iron-jawed sleep resister, so there's that.

There was some initial yelling, but he didn't pop out or fall out of bed. And he settled down pretty quickly. We've now put him down for three bedtimes and two naps, and there's still a little outrage, but it's short-lived and appears to be on the way out. There have been some wake-ups, but no more than in the crib. And we're not out of the woods, I'm sure -- he could decide to rampage at any moment, after all -- but I think it's not premature to call the experiment a success.

But I would never jinx us like that.

Base Pairs

2010-02-27T08:39:00.004-05:00

I touch babies. I know I'm not supposed to, and for heaven's sake it even bothered me when strangers did it to Ben, but I swear I have no control. Before I'm even aware of it, there's a baby hand in my fingers, and I whip my hand away and apologize, but of course it's too late. I'm not even that much of a baby person! I just literally can't help myself.

I say this to illustrate that I understand the unshakable impulse where babies are concerned. But here's one I don't have, don't understand, and am perpetually perplexed and kind of grossed-out by: the match-making. Sometimes it's someone you know, and sometimes it's some total stranger in the grocery line, but if you have a baby or small child, you will hear, more frequently than you might think, this person's opinion about a sexual partner for your little one.

I find the career assignments weird and off-putting, too. I heard a lot about how Ben was going to be a linebacker. "That's fine," I'd say, "so long as he takes calculus." People who actually know him tend to observe his interest in cars and things mechanical and dub him Engineer (big stretch, given that's what his father is). I'm not sure why it bugs me. There's something inanely reductive about it, I guess, even though clearly it's meant kindly. But why the urge in the first place? Why narrow the field based on pretty much nothing at all? Isn't it more wonderful, isn't it part of what's so marvelous about tiny people to begin with, the opportunity to embrace the nearly limitless possibilities of their future selves?

But the sexual partner thing is just flat-out creepy. We fret over how early our kids become sexualized, but we're already pairing them off before they can walk, let alone before they have secondary sex characteristics. Of all the random small talk to make, why this? Wouldn't it be inappropriate and kind of bizarre if you said the same stuff about actual adults who are sexually active? Hey, your daughter's 25 and my son's 26 -- they'd be perfect for each other!

I don't know, maybe it's just me.

Quotidian Again

2010-02-17T07:22:00.004-05:00

I did this last spring, and I thought I'd do it again.

A Typical Day

6:00 Andy wakes up, goes downstairs, starts coffee. Sometimes Ben is up already and yelling about a car that's slipped through the crib bars.

6:30 It's unusual for Ben not to be up by now.

7:00 Andy wakes me up by yelling up the stairs. I come down, and Andy goes to work. I give Ben his breakfast of a sliced banana and dreary-ohs.

7:15 I read email and check in with the Interwebs. Ben does baby work.

The rest of the morning will include some or all of the following: reading to Ben, looking at photos or videos online with Ben on my lap, watching TV (me, not him -- he generally pays attention for five minutes and then goes back to baby-work), taking a shower, doing laundry, tidying, vacuuming, other assorted domestic chores. If we have errands to run, this is usually when they happen, so that we can be home with plenty of margin before naptime because if the kid so much as closes his eyes in the car, he will fight a nap like a mean cat.

10:30-ish Ben and I eat second breakfast, which is usually my first breakfast, and consists of half a PB&J for him and a whole one for me.

11:45 Ben picks a Nap-Time Car, and we go upstairs. He usually gets a diaper change and potty time and then a book on my lap, then goes down for his nap. I generally watch toddler-inappropriate TV and knit while he's napping. I also eat lunch.

1:30-ish Ben wakes up. He usually sleeps about an hour and a half, but it can be as little as an hour and as much as three hours. He gets a snack of some kind. Often I accede to his demands for a cracker (he points to the cabinet where the crackers are and yells).

Rest of the afternoon: We resume our work and play.

4:00 I go into the kitchen and empty and load the dishwasher and tidy and wipe down the kitchen. I start dinner. Depending on the timing required, I either start the whole deal or just do whatever prep can be done ahead of time. The aim is to eat soon after Andy arrives. I expect him between 5:15 and 5:30. On burger night and occasionally otherwise, I feed Ben, and then Andy and I eat after he's in bed. (Burger night usually happens when I've been out and busy in the afternoon, and we do it once a week. One of us does Ben's night-time ritual while the other goes to Five Guys for take-out, which we eat in front of the TV.)

5:15-ish Andy comes home, changes clothes, feeds Hugo.

5:30-ish We sit down to dinner.

After dinner Andy sits on the sofa and reads politcal blogs on his toy phone or plays the banjo while Ben runs around or rides his wheelie-bee or does puzzles or bashes cars around. I clean up dinner. Sometimes I join them and read or knit. Sometimes I play on the computer. This isn't a big block of time, as Ben's bedtime ritual begins at

6:45 Ben picks a Bedtime Car, and Andy takes him upstairs, brushes his teeth, puts him in jammies, and reads the first book. I come up after five or 10 minutes and read the second book. Then Ben turns off the light and gives us each a kiss on both cheeks, and he goes into his crib.

7:00 Andy and I come downstairs. I feed the cats and scoop their litter and close them up in the kitchen and basement so that Andy doesn't have to see or hear them. We watch TV. I knit.

9:30 We pack it in. Hugo goes out. There's some final tidying in the kitchen, or else there's not, and it gets left for the morning.

10:15 Andy's usually asleep by now, and I'm knitting and watching TV in bed.

11:00-ish I go to sleep.

Themes Cornball and Otherwise

2010-01-29T10:01:00.005-05:00

I remember being offended, before I had a kid, at the idea that I couldn't possibly know what it was like to have a kid. I'd been a kid. I'd been in love. I'd had vulnerable and beloved creatures in my care. And I had powers of empathy and imagination. So, sure, I couldn't know exactly what it was like, but surely I could imagine something close enough that my opinion wasn't totally discountable, right? The thing is, now that I am a parent, I really can't remember what I thought it was going to be like, so I have no idea how close my imagination got. My sense is: not very.

For one thing, loving my child is simply not like any other love I've felt before. It's not just a different flavor; it's a totally different food. Sure, it has things in common with loving a spouse, loving a parent, loving a pet -- it's still love. But it's profoundly different. Nobody else's suffering or delight could come close to affecting me the way his does. He belongs to me and I belong to him in a way that's nothing like the connection I feel to other people I love. (And that's not to disparage my other relationships. I have good, close connections to the important people in my life.)

I'm also responsible for him in a way that's unlike any other relationship. It's a responsibility that's hardwired, that I actually feel physically. The sound of him crying out in genuine anguish (as opposed to frustration, discomfort, boredom, or any of the other smaller unhappinesses that are immediately distinguishable from real trouble) isn't just a sound; it's like a klaxon in my spinal cord. But it's not just that. It's always being aware of him, even if we're not in the same town, even if I'm not actively thinking about him. It's like I have radar in the back of my mind, and the little blip that's Ben is always there, blinking.

Being a parent also connects me to the world in a new way, and more profoundly. Partly it's just having a bigger stake, I think, though you'd have thought being alive was a pretty big stake to start with. But it's really not -- not compared to being responsible for a small and completely precious person. For one thing, I don't think it would even have occurred to me to consider what my stake in the world was before I had a kid. So it's that, and it's sharing a deeply meaningful experience with the majority of humanity. In a very real way, I have something in common with parents in Khartoum, in Osaka, in Helsinki. For that matter, I have something in common with leopard mothers and chickadee mothers and coyote mothers. And I'm not talking about some goofball intellectual exercise; this is something I feel pretty deeply, something that's changed the way I exist in the world. And there's something else, harder to define: when it comes to passage-of-life stuff, there's a sweet in the sad and a sad in the sweet that I never felt before. German probably has a word for this mournful joy, but I don't. It's a bit like stepping back so far to see the forest that suddenly you see that joy and mourning are part of the same thing, a connectedness, an investment in the world, an expression of love.

It's tough to talk about any of this without sounding pretty colossally cornball. But I find that I don't care all that much about whether I sound cornball. And I really have no idea whether other parents feel the same way. I imagine there are as many different ways to experience parenthood as there are ways to experience romantic love, if not more. But we all hear about romantic love all the time. It's in every song, in every book, in every movie. People talk about falling in love and falling out of love, and we all have lots of words to describe the stages and problems and joys and minutiae of romantic love. And yes, we talk about parenting, one parent to another, and there are books of advice and instruction, and God knows there are blogs. But it's not the same.

My friend C., the domestic theologian, was looking for examples of literature about motherhood. Can you think of any? It's difficult to think of examples of mother characters, let alone examples where the mother is the protagonist and motherhood is a dominant theme. Kristin Lavransdatter was pretty much the only real example anyone could come up with. For a profound human experience, that's a pretty big gap in the market. I think talking about the big-picture, major-theme stuff of parenthood feels corny because it's been more or less exclusively the province of greeting cards and inspirational wall-hangings. Which I just so fundamentally don't understand. I look to literature to help explain my world, and it's like I just fell in love for the first time, and no one had ever written a book or made a movie about romantic love. And worse than that: that the very idea of taking romantic love seriously as a literary theme was kind of laughable and embarrassing.

So, a couple of things. First, everybody should immediately read Kristin Lavransdatter, which is a great (and I mean Great in the sense of Major Work of World Literature, as well as great in the sense of really wonderful) book, apart from being the only book I've ever read in which the protagonist's breast-feeding matters to the story. Second, and I mean this seriously: What the fuck? Why isn't there a canon of literature on the theme of parenthood to match the theme of romantic love? Is it as simple and stupid as the lack of female authors? And the fact that until pretty recently, women who wrote books tended to be women who didn't have children? I can sort of accept that explanation, except that fatherhood is pretty profound, too, so where are the themes of fatherhood in our glorious literature of the patriarchy?

It's a head-scratcher.

The Evolution of a Shower

2010-01-23T12:23:00.002-05:00

1. Pre-baby. A shower is a shower. When pregnant, it bugged me not to take very hot showers, which I prefer. (Lots of heat is supposed to be bad for the baby.) I am a homebody and a slob, so my usual shower routine is Day 1: shower; Day 2: no shower; Day 3: shower (but only if I have to leave the house). The upshot of which is I'm not the sort of person whose nose is going to be out of joint over two or three days without a shower, nor am I the sort of person who would generally choose to shower before, say, watching another episode of not-terribly good TV.

2. Newborn. Suddenly a shower was the holy grail, especially once Andy went back to work after two weeks. He would come home from work and I would head up for a shower, and it was untold bliss. It wasn't just that the shower itself was pleasant. It wasn't just that it was time alone. It was that if the baby was crying, not only was it not my problem, but I couldn't even hear it. Bliss! I still remember the sensation of turning the water off and listening for crying, and the relief when there was silence.

Some babies like being in the room while you're showering. They like the white noise and, apparently, the steam. Not Ben. I tried it once or twice, putting him in his laundry-basket bassinet or his bouncy seat, and he shrieked his baby head off. Oooooooh-kay, then.

3. Settled Baby. Now that the kid was napping reliably, I could put him down and then take the monitor with me into the bathroom. The trouble was, his nap time was my only freedom, and I hated to waste it on showering when I could be watching mediocre television or reading the Intertubes. Once he was crawling, I tried bringing him into the bathroom again, this time unrestrained, with all hatches battened of course, and an armload of toys. No dice. He'd be fine for a little while and then he'd get upset. I think it was the steam that bugged him. Mean mommy that I am, I still did it to him about half the time, alternating with naptime showers.

4. Toddler. When Ben was around 12 months and her son was around 18 months, I asked my friend S how she handled showering. She said she left him running around free while she showered. That had not occurred to me. I don't think I moved to free-range showering for a while -- certainly not until he was a well established walker -- but that was where we ended up and where we've stayed. He has access to the bathroom, his bedroom, and the upstairs hallway that connects them. If he wants me, he can come get me, and he can't get far enough away that I can't hear him if he's yelling.

At first he found that upsetting, too. He'd come stand by the tub and scream and cry for a minute or two, then get distracted by some mischief and disappear. It took maybe half a dozen iterations before he was totally fine with the routine. One time I heard his door slam and so had to leap out sopping wet and rescue him from his room. After that, I learned to block all doors. He went through a (mercifully brief) phase of bringing books and toys and trying to chuck them into the shower with me. He went through a (long, but now sadly over) phase of running down the hall as soon as the he heard the water stop to come stand in the doorway and applaud.

Toy Story

2010-01-21T07:28:00.004-05:00

Hasbro Playskool Busy Gears

This probably isn't in his top five anymore, but it's notable because I can't get over how evergreen it has been. His Grandma Kath sent it to him about a year ago if I'm not mistaken, and it has been among his favorite toys since the day it arrived. I'd say his interest in it peaked around 15 months. I would never have pegged it as an engine of inventive play, or a toy that would have unfolded over the months with different ways of interacting with it. It looks so one-dimensional!

You push the button, and music plays while the center cog turns, which turns the other cogs. The center one is attached to the toy; the others are removable (and stackable, though that doesn't seem to add anything to his enjoyment).

When he was tiny, he just liked taking all the cogs off and chewing on them. I would push the button for him occasionally, and he liked that well enough that he learned to do it himself. (And the music isn't bad, for a mass-market kid toy -- it might be the least annoying music-making toy in the house.) He then went through stages of mastery of manipulating the cogs in various ways: putting them back onto their nubs, sticking his fingers in the way so they can't move (it makes a different noise when the cogs are blocked), etc. Lately his interest is in putting things on the main cog so that they spin around or fall off. He's been experimenting with that for a while now.

Peg Puzzles

It's like he woke up one morning about a month ago and suddenly had peg puzzle mastery. He'd had a couple of the really big chunky ones for a few months, which mostly got handled and chewed and their pieces misplaced, but he never showed much interest in "solving" them. Then one day I got out of the shower and found him poring over one of the 8-9 piece puzzles (also presents from his Grandma Kath) that had been sitting on a bookshelf in his bedroom for month unnoticed. That was that. I found the others -- I'd put them away months ago -- and suddenly he was solving them in a flash and yelling for more.

Melissa and Doug, who made the four we had at first, seem annoyingly to be have added sounds or music to their classic 9-piece puzzles (like the one above), when one of the best things about puzzles as far as I'm concerned is that they're quiet! So we hit Target and found an armload of Circo puzzles instead.

Cars, Trucks, and Buses

Since his colossal interest in all things vehicular first manifested a few months ago, he's built up quite a collection in various materials and scales, from Matchbox cars to a wooden dump truck that was mine as a toddler and probably weighs ten pounds. He has the fabulous little Plan buses with smooth-running rubber wheels at left, and he has a seriously irritating Fisher Price schoolbus that makes a dozen different noises that all make you want to kill yourself. (And, wow, did Little People ever get super-lame.)

It's hard to say which among these are his favorites. He has affairs with certain ones for a few days and then casts them aside for others. He does in fact take them to bed -- the smaller ones, anyway. At bedtime and naptime, he picks one or two to take upstairs. He doesn't cuddle them, but they do appear to be essential to the going-to-sleep process somehow.

My favorites, of course, are the ones that don't make noise and don't have pieces that come off and need to be incessantly replaced.

Enthusiast

2010-01-15T07:16:00.002-05:00

I hear these rumors of toddlers who eke out an existence on a couple of crackers and a fish-stick per day. Not my kid. Ben is and has always been a food enthusiast.

I've been giving him portions of what we eat for dinner fairly regularly, sometimes supplemented by a cup of steamed broccoli or peas if a green vegetable isn't on the menu for the adults. I'm constantly surprised by the things he decides he loves. Like chili. I make fairly spicy chili, and it might be his favorite food. Generally he's not a big fan of meat, but if it comes in the form of chili, stand the hell back. He will yell for more so long as we're still at the table.

Mostly I'm happy with how he eats. He's open to new things, he has a lot of favorites that include mom-favorites like broccoli and veggie burgers, and he's thoroughly engaged by food, so he's pretty easy-going at restaurants. His pediatrician approves, so I'm not concerned that he's overeating. A worry pings me now and then, though, that he doesn't have an off switch. If he likes something he's eating, he wants to go on eating it well past when he must be full. He will go on clamoring for chili until physically removed from the table -- though, at that point, he is perfectly content to give up his demands and move on to the next thing.

Co-Sleep / No-Sleep

2010-01-14T07:32:00.004-05:00

We didn't co-sleep. Ben slept in a co-sleeper until he was around four months, then we moved him to his crib in his room. (For those of you who haven't geared up an infant in the last ten years, "co-sleeping" is putting the baby in bed with you, and a "co-sleeper" is a bassinet with three sides that attaches to the side of your bed so the baby is in reach but not actually in bed with you.)

I'm not philosophically opposed to co-sleeping, but it wasn't an option for me for a couple of reasons. One, I love pillows and blankets, and the recommendation for safety when co-sleeping with a newborn is not to have either. It seemed to me that the comfort offered by co-sleeping would be significantly reduced by stripping our bed. I didn't relish kicking out the dogs, either. Also, I like very much to read or watch TV in bed. At some point, I assumed, this child would be going to sleep before 9:00, and what was I going to do, headphones and booklights? This is my time to unwind, and the furtiveness would have bugged me. Possibly the biggest con for me, though, was the stories I'd heard of people trying to get toddlers or big kids into their own beds and having a hard time with it. Discipline and making big, uncomfortable, "for-your-own-good" transitions are so very much not my bag. It seemed easier, even during the hell of a sleep-resistant infancy, to buck up and Ferberize rather than buckle and co-sleep.

I had friends at the time who were co-sleeping, and whose babies (and therefore whole families) slept great. I envied them their rest. Now, though, while Ben reliably sleeps through and requires at most a brief redirect (usually a cuddle in the rocking chair), most of those kids are having a tough time with the transition to their own rooms, which in a few cases corresponded unfortunately with the arrival of a new sibling. I also know former co-sleepers whose transitions were seamless, though it seems less common, just like I know families who transitioned to a crib and sleeping through without incident. (I should say I'm more or less conflating co-sleeping with other forms of not sleep training. If you, say, lie down with your toddler in his room for an hour so that he can fall asleep, I'm lumping you in with the co-sleepers.)

So it seems to me that it's a trade-off. At some point, presuming you eventually want the child in her own room, she will need to learn to put herself to sleep there, and put herself back to sleep when she wakes up there. No matter when it happens, whether in infancy or later, it is a tough lesson to learn, and it's tough on the whole household. I think you should do what works for your family, but it seems to me that there's a positive benefit to getting this unhappy stage over with sooner rather than later, especially if another baby is going to enter the scene.

18 Months

2009-12-15T07:41:00.005-05:00

Ben had his 18-month check-up the other week. They weighed him on the big-kid stand-up scale, which made him a lot less angry than the baby one which requires getting stripped down and plonked into a cold metal bowl, but it also meant that they weighed him with his clothes and shoes and a (full) diaper on, so I think the weight percentile is probably off by a few points. He'd always been in the high nineties, and this time he was 99th! And 50% for height (which, because of the way they measure and toddler squirminess, isn't notably accurate), which taken together might be a cause for concern. But I limned a typical day's meals for the pediatrician, and she said don't change anything: he's eating completely appropriately.

But she was concerned about his not talking. She asked him a couple of things: to point to his toes and his nose, and where were the teddy bears on the wallpaper, which of course he had no trouble with, and I think she took me at my word that his receptive vocabulary is not just adequate but pretty impressive. She said she thinks that he's just not motivated to talk, and that it's time for us to try to motivate him. The idea is, he's not in day-care or vying with an older sibling for attention, and Andy and I are very attentive and very attuned to his needs, so we basically anticipate or are immediately able to understand whatever he wants, so he doesn't feel the need to learn to communicate better. And I think that's absolutely true, but I'm a little torn about whether I think it's necessary then to "motivate" him.

On the one hand, I think that if lack of motivation is the only issue, that's not a big enough issue to hassle the kid and risk his feeling pressured about language, since obviously he's going to figure it out sooner or later. On the other hand, I certainly plonked him on his feet, held his hands, and walked him around when he was working on walking, and how different is that kind of encouragement from getting in his face and enunciating CAR freakishly distinctly? The ped said to pretend we don't understand him to elicit words, and I just can't get on board with that. I don't like the deception; plus, that seems like a recipe for frustration and unhappiness. I can't believe there aren't effective ways to encourage speech without that kind of unkind pretense.

Maybe it's a minor distinction, but it seems significant to me. If he wants up on my lap, I ask him to say "up." I don't pretend that I don't know what he wants. As soon as he tries even a little to form the word, he gets what he wants. And we do a lot of work on words for things he loves, like CAR and TRUCK. He now says just the K and T sounds, and more or less interchangeably, but it's progress.

Tree Edit

2009-12-14T18:27:00.002-05:00

We had half a tree on a table last year, and I didn't want to do that again (in part because we found a better place for that table upstairs) -- I wanted a real tree. But a good 75% of our ornaments are glass, and I didn't see that working out with an 18-month-old and a heedless basset hound. We got the tree, and I put the lights on, and I thought about it.

Finally I decided on a combination of Target and triage. Target provided an armload of plastic balls that look just the hell like glass ones. Triage put all the precious fragile ones into careful storage and the ones that can take a topple or a wag or a being thwacked with a dump truck without being or causing hurt onto the tree.

And I felt one of those moments of Right Parental Compromise. Are plastic ornaments my favorite? No, they are not. Would I rather have the nested glass bells that were my dead father's favorite ornaments on my tree rather than in a box? Yes, very much. But what I wanted way more than a small carbon footprint or a meaningful memento was for Ben to enjoy Christmas, and for us all to enjoy the tree without its becoming a source of stress and worry. So he got to "help" hang the balls, and in the process learned (and appears to have successfully internalized) that once the ornaments are on the tree, they're only to look at and not touch.

And during the triage I also culled a bunch of ornaments from my Mom that, yes, do have pleasant associations because my memories of trimming the tree with Mom every year are among the best and brightest of my childhood -- but honestly, some of those ornaments are dead ugly, and some are just not my bag, and I realized as I was doing this big Christmas tree edit that I didn't actually have to hang them all. I didn't get rid of them, either. They're in a box of their own. Maybe someday I'll change my mind about their ugliness or their necessity.

The result of all this is I love our Christmas tree this year. It might be the best Christmas tree yet.

Snapshots

2009-11-02T09:09:00.003-05:00

Still no words. But when you ask him, "Hey Ben, when are you going to learn to talk?" he puts on this sweet, half-whispery voice and says, "Da da da da da da da," like: I got yer talking right here, silly adult.

He's been climbing up stairs for months now, but he wasn't going down them, and I was getting tired of schlepping thirty pounds of him every time he needed a diaper change, so we did a little crash course (without any actual crashes, thank goodness) in knees-and-belly descent last week, and now he goes down faster than he goes up.

He went trick-or-treating for the first time this Halloween, which meant I went trick-or-treating for the first time in more than 20 years. He was kind of perplexed by the entire ordeal, but totally game, and he definitely approved of the candy part. His enthusiasm was underlined by the howling and grabby-pointing after the pumpkin bucket when I disappeared it.

He very much enjoys watching the Life of Mammals dvds and slideshows of various animal groups on Flickr, especially Wild Animals in Action, both of which I heartily recommend for toddler-adult entertainment. He likes to point out each and every critter and say "Dah!"

He's all about cars and trucks lately, and in fact just walked in here with a toy car in each hand and then took them both over to the stairs to push them around. Walking through a parking lot can include his pointing at every single car we pass and saying, "Dah!"

He is a huge fan of books, and would probably be content to do nothing but bring me one book after another to read until we ran out of books, and then he'd want to start over at the beginning. Granted, I'm not that familiar with other toddlers' reading habits, but he seems remarkably patient with wordy books (like, say, Ping or Ferdinand) and also remarkably gentle with paper (i.e., not board) books. He will often amuse himself for long periods of time just sitting on the floor and paging through books, sometimes da-da-da-ing to himself.

He recently learned how to dip french fries in ketchup, and now he dips whatever into whatever else at every opportunity.

Blame the Sleep Deprivation

2009-10-26T07:54:00.003-04:00

Parenting a toddler has its challenges, and I'm not minimizing them, but it is so much easier now than it was around this time last year. Around this time last year, I decided to take Ben on a road trip to visit friends in Philadelphia, DC, Charlottesville, DC again, and New Jersey. It was going to take nearly two weeks. In my mind, if I didn't embark on this insane journey with him, I would never go anywhere or see anyone again. At the time, he was sleeping three or four hours at a stretch and was a fairly typically mercurial four-month-old. We got as far as Philadelphia, and he woke up and needed to be nursed back down often enough overnight that I knew I'd never make it on that kind of crappy sleep, and it was much better to turn back while still mostly functional than press on and get farther from home before having to make the same decision.

And that was fine. I missed seeing the other people, but what mattered was that I'd made the attempt. But what's significant when I look back on it is that I'm sure I really didn't grasp that Ben would grow out of that sleep insanity, that in a year he'd be relatively easy to travel with, that even if I didn't take him on road trips as an infant, he'd eventually be ok with travel just by virtue of being a little kid instead of a baby. Not that travel with a little kid doesn't have its own issues.

What I'm getting at (not very cogently) is that it's kind of astounding how blind I was as the parent of a newborn to the notion that infancy would, you know, end. That no matter how crazy it was, it couldn't possibly go on forever. Part of it, I'm sure, was the lack of sleep. But part of it, too, was just the degree to which having a baby spins your head around. Everything is different and crazy and has new rules -- it's no wonder that it's so hard to see clearly what the new progression will be.

I remember saying on several occasions that I couldn't believe, having gone through this once, that anyone ever has a second child. Andy used to vow (only maybe 98% seriously) that Ben would be an only child. And you can blame the sleep deprivation for our inability to form memories back then, because now the horror is a lot fuzzier, but now the idea isn't so terrible.

I wonder how many second children are conceived soon after the first child starts sleeping through the night.

(I'm not trying to be coy or anything. We do plan to have another baby. I'm being a little goofy about not wanting to be vastly pregnant in the summer, though, so we're waiting a bit.)

Psych!

2009-10-23T12:15:00.007-04:00

It's happened a couple of times recently that an adult being playful with Ben teases him by holding out an object and then pulling it away when he reaches for it. And clearly, clearly this is not meant with any kind of mean-spiritedness. And yet, damn, what a nasty trick to play on a toddler. He's not in on the joke. The joke is on him. Little idiot, reaching for an object held out to him, ha ha ha.

I'm not sure what to say. To a friend, I feel pretty comfortable with a light-hearted, "Dude, that's a kind of a dick move, teasing a toddler." But what do I say to a stranger?

Happy to Vaccinate

2009-10-22T08:08:00.012-04:00

Generally I'm all about agreeing to disagree when it comes to someone else's parenting choices. After all, what you choose to do to your kid usually begins and ends inside your house, and while I might have an opinion, it doesn't directly affect me and mine. But that's not the case with vaccination, and that's part of why there's such a bitter debate about it. Anti-vax people feel oppressed by regulations and pressured, sometimes bullied and terrified, by doctors. Pro-vax people feel betrayed by members of their communities whose refusal to vaccinate reduces the herd immunity and puts everybody -- even the vaccinated -- at risk.

I should say up front that I am squarely, adamantly in the camp of the vaccinators. But I'm not without sympathy for the members of the other camp. I'm by nature a skeptic, and the healthcare industry deserves major skepticism. I am also, like many anti-vax-ers, a buyer of organic foods and eschewer of nasty chemicals. I treat colds with herb tea and bed rest. I clean with vinegar or baking soda. I don't love the idea of injecting my toddler with a passel of chemicals I can't spell -- it goes against a lot of my better instincts as a parent.

But here's the thing: there's a lot of good science on the side of vaccination, and opposing it is one flawed if not downright dirty study, a lot of anedote, and a lot of straight-up ignorance.

Most of the recent fear of vaccination comes from a study led by Andrew Wakefield and published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 1998. It purported to show a link between the MMR (measles mumps rubella) vaccine and autism. The study followed only 12 children -- a head-scratchingly small sample size -- and made only modest claims of correlation in 8 of those children. But even though 10 of the 13 co-authors of the Lancet article formally withdrew their findings, even though the study has been thoroughly discredited, and most importantly, even though considerable subsequent research has been unable to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), people are still freaked out about vaccination.

Part of the reason is that there's a lot of anecdotal evidence of correlation between vaccines and the onset of autism. What happens is a kid gets a shot, and the next day, or maybe an hour later, or maybe a week later, he begins showing the first symptoms of ASD. Now, it's completely understandable that the adults in this child's life draw a line between the jab and the symptom, but it's not necessarily scientifically significant. Correlation is not causation. Just because two things happen in temporal proximity doesn't mean that one is the result of the other. Kids get vaccinated at almost every preventive-care visit (every three months) for the first two years, and most autism is diagnosed during that same period. When you think about how many millions of kids are getting shots, it makes sense that hundreds of them -- not a significant percentage, but a big number -- happen to develop ASD symptoms within 48 hours of a vaccination.

And again, it's not like this perceived correlation hasn't been extensively studied. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently published a review paper (pdf) summarizing 29 studies that failed to find a link between the MMR shot and ASD and another 10 that failed to find a link between thimerosal (a preservative containing ethyl mercury) and ASD. "Failed to find" might sound like incompetence on the part of the researchers, so it's important to understand that it's usually impossible to prove a negative, so proving a negative is not the scientific standard. You will often hear from anti-vax activists that the MMR vaccine has never been proven not to cause autism, and that is strictly true, but neither has Tylenol. Neither have M&Ms. You can't prove something is safe, but on the other hand, harmful things are generally pretty easy to prove unsafe, especially when they're being given routinely to millions of people every year.

And you know what? Even if the evidence supported a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, I still might lean towards vaccinating. Autism can be heartbreaking, and I've already blogged about being afraid of it, but it doesn't kill 3 out of 1000 people who have it like measles does. It doesn't cause deafness, cataracts, and mental disability in 8 out of 10 infants of mothers who have it in early pregnancy like rubella does. Take a look at this pamphlet (pdf), from the AAP (based on Centers for Disease Control [CDC] publications) comparing the scientifically demonstrable risks of vaccines to the diseases they prevent. Choosing not to vaccinate isn't choosing to avoid risks: it's choosing to take different risks, and across the board, greater risks of mostly much more dire outcomes.

On one side of this debate is pretty much the entire medical, medical research, and public health community. On the other are a few physicians who are not scientists and a whole lot of passionate amateurs. The evidence on the pro-vaccine side is manifold, and it is backed up by established procedures of peer review and standards of scientific proof. The evidence on the anti-vaccine side is anecdotal and backed by nothing. The internet and cable news tend to present these two sides as more or less balanced: the internet because you can certainly find as many anti-vax sites as pro-, and the vast majority of the information, if presented with a bare minimum of layout competence, looks equally trustworthy on its face; cable news because it tends to bestow a level of expertise just by virtue of putting someone in front of the camera and slapping the title of "expert" on him whether he deserves it or not. Take a look at this clip from a Fox News segment on the H1N1 vaccine:

Dr. Holtorf, billed by the Fox anchor as an expert on infectious disease, claims no expertise on his own website in anything relating to vaccination or epidemiology. He is not a scientist or an expert on public health; he is a physician specializing in hormone replacement. He claims expertise in chronic infectious disease, like lupus, which is a far cry from expertise in epidemiology. In the clip, he says that thimerosal is "highly implicated" in causing ASD though the medical literature doesn't suggest any implication at all. He says it (presumably a single dose of the vaccine, though it's unclear) has 25,000 times the amount of mercury that would be considered toxic in food or water, which is simply not true: there are 25 micrograms of mercury in an H1N1 shot and 28 in a typical tuna sandwich. He says he's seen this vaccine "devastate" patients with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and implies that it would be similarly dangerous to pregnant women, but he doesn't specify the symptoms his patients suffered or how he determined causation or whether their reactions were life-threatening, as H1N1 certainly is to pregnant women. But if you saw this clip and were predisposed to distrust the federal government and the medical and scientific establishment, this jackass would have confirmed all your fears with the imprimatur of an established news source. And even had Fox followed this guest with an actual expert to refute the bogus claims, it would have looked like two experts who came to different conclusions, as if there's debatable evidence on both sides.

Anti-vax activists like to frame the debate in terms of personal choice: it's up to you to choose what's right for you child. And that's true. But I think you have a much higher standard of proof to meet when you choose not to vaccinate because you're not just choosing for yourself; you're choosing for your whole community. Some people, because of weakened or suppressed immune systems or certain allergies, cannot be immunized. And vaccines are not 100% effective. Those who can't be vaccinated and those who have been but happen not to be fully protected depend on herd immunity, the notion that, depending on a disease's virulence, once a certain percentage of the population has been inoculated, the lack of hosts acts as a kind of firebreak. If you don't vaccinate, you're putting kindling into the firebreak.

And this is why I have a lot of sympathy for the physicians who "pressure" their patients into getting vaccinated. Not only is it demonstrably in the patient's own best interest, it's in the best interest of all the doctor's other patients, too. Yes, it's unpleasant to have your convictions challenged, but do you really want a doctor who won't passionately advocate for what she thinks is best for your health and the health of your community, a doctor who won't challenge what she sees as your misconceptions or ignorance? Would you really prefer a doctor who doesn't read -- or worse, doesn't believe or can't understand -- the results of scientifically rigorous medical research? And if you're so sure that vaccines are the wrong choice that you're willing to bet your kid's health and the health of everybody in your community on it, you should be able to go toe-to-toe with the biggest bully in town to defend your conviction. Right?

American Academy of Pediatrics Immunization page

Centers for Disease Control vaccines page

Autism and Vaccination (2007)
Vaccines and Autism: a Deadly Manufactroversy (2009)
at Skeptic

As Flu Vaccine Arrives for the Season, Some Questions and Answers
An H1N1 primer in The New York Times

Andrew Wakefield and MMR - The Investigation
at the site of Brian Deer, the reporter who covered the story

A Pox on You: My son has cancer. He can't go into daycare because of unvaccinated children.
In Slate.

One Nap to Rule Them All

2009-10-05T08:43:00.002-04:00

We've made the transition from two naps to one. It went on for a week or two: he'd go a couple of days with a totally normal (two-) nap schedule, and then we'd have a rough day where he'd fight the morning nap, or take the morning nap and then fight the afternoon nap and be Mighty Crabcake all day. And then right back to two naps the following day.

A few people advised me to keep pushing the morning nap back by half an hour every day until the afternoon nap turned into bedtime, and I'm sure that's sensible advice, but somehow it just didn't work out that way. On the days when he took a morning nap, he clearly needed it -- he'd be short-tempered and eye-rubby by 9:00, and even if I'd kept him up until 10:00 the previous day, I wasn't about to make either of us suffer for an hour on principle.

And then one day I realized that he would hit a kind of crabby period around 9:00 or 9:30, but if we pushed past it, he got a second wind and played on happily for another couple or few hours. And that was that: one nap at around 11:30 or noon. So far, he's still only sleeping for about an hour and a half, which was a fairly typical length of time for one of his two naps. I'm guessing he'll learn to stretch it eventually. Or not.

He's still sleeping 11 or 12 hours at night pretty reliably, and in fact we moved his bedtime up a bit since the transition to one nap, from 7:00 to 6:45, and he generally sleeps until around 6:30 in the morning. On the weekends, when nobody's up and moving earlier, he often sleeps until 7:00 or even 7:30 (bliss!).

I miss the big chunks of time to myself in the morning and afternoon. I'd got used to eating breakfast when he went down in the morning. I don't like to eat as early as he does (7:00 -- giving him breakfast is the first thing I do when I wake up and Andy goes to work), and he kind of flips out if I eat in front of him and don't share. I've started giving him a snack before he naps, around 10:30, and I generally hold out and eat with him then. And luckily he's really great about entertaining himself and not getting into trouble, so that even if I don't have as much solo time, I have plenty of opportunities to, say, read a book or write a blog post without his needing me every five minutes.

I was at a shower this weekend, talking to other mothers of babies and toddlers, and few of Ben's age-mates in the group had bedtimes as early as his. I have to say, that kind of strikes fear into my heart. From the first weeks of sleep-training, the hours between Ben's bedtime and ours have been a gift. To watch TV, knit, do fiddly little projects with sharp tools on the coffee table. To relate to one another as adults. To give the poor dog a break. I know eventually Ben's bedtime will get later. And it'll be fine, we'll deal, it'll be the new normal, and I won't miss those hours as much as I think I will.

But please, not yet! Not soon!

Why Knit?

2009-09-12T10:39:00.009-04:00

When we were in the Adirondacks last month with friends, four-year-old V. was not in any great hurry to interact with Andy and me. We spent all of Friday (except for the couple hours' drive) together, but it wasn't until late afternoon on Saturday that the breakthrough happened. Ben was napping, and I pulled out my knitting, and suddenly V. was practically in my lap, animatedly asking questions about history and technique. Score one for knitting.

My friend M. recently posited a theory (via his wife, my friend C., so if I'm missing a nuance or two, it's due to Telephone) that knitting is so popular because husbands and boyfriends are playing video games. I imagine his idea is that women want to be in the same room with their Katamari-rolling menfolk, rather than going to another room to watch TV (or banishing the men to the basement and using the living room TV) or read the Interwebs or a book. Or taking turns with the Katamari. I don't buy it. For one thing, I don't buy that so pervasive a fad has its roots in companion activity rather than some kind of itch that needs scratching in the breast of its adherents. Besides, it doesn't explain why knitting. Why not needlepoint? Why not any other of the blue million crafts you can do on your lap in the living room? The biggest reason it doesn't ring true for me, though, is that I hate when Andy wants to play a video game during my knitting hours. Video games are impossibly dull to listen to and only slightly less dull to watch, and knitting only takes up a fraction of my attention. I like watching TV while I'm knitting, especially if it's a show that doesn't rely too heavily on visual information. So it wouldn't surprise me if the enthusiasm for knitting is in some way connected to the uptick in good-to-excellent TV and the availability of whole seasons of same on dvd. But obviously there's more feeding the knitting beast than good TV.

I picked it up again myself because I wanted to knit for Ben -- I remembered enjoying knitting as a teenager, and remembered my mom's enthusiasm for knitting for littles because it takes up so much less time and wool. And if I'd stopped after the second or third project for Ben, or put the knitting away for even a week since I picked it up, that would be an adequate explanation for my interest. But I've knit almost as much for me as for him, and since I started last winter, I've hardly gone a day without knitting, and generally have at least two and as as many as five or six projects going at once. I read knitting blogs. I take photographs of my projects in progress and post them at Ravelry. I started plotting Christmas knitting in April, and am nearly done with my first Christmas present.

I enjoy the feeling of cozy domestic industry. I like that I can feel productive while sitting on my ass watching TV. And the things I produce are genuinely useful objects, performing the satisfying task of protecting me and my loved ones from the chill. You can't say the same for something like, say, scrapbooking or needlepoint, or for any of the other lap-top crafts I can think of.

There's a kind of gentility to knitting, bestowed in part by a venerated history: mother before mother before mother sitting by a fire clothing her kin, all the way back to the clever person who took a hard look at fishing nets and had a good idea. Crafting in general is popular, but most of what you can find at the Jo-Ann's or Michael's couldn't even sort of be described as genteel, and can't claim the thinnest patina of history. But knitting doesn't lose its appeal to the bedazzling masses by appealing to the be-Dansko-ed elite, or vice-versa. Sewing doesn't have the same appeal despite a similar history: you can't keep it in a basket and do it on the couch.

You might think, especially in this economy, that thrift plays a part in the enthusiasm: why buy a sweater when you can make one? Except in nearly every case, even if you don't count your time at all, knitting an object costs more than buying a similar one. If you buy really cheap yarn, sure, but there's something infinitely depressing about spending thirty hours knitting something that can't be nice because the raw materials were shitty. Good yarn is a pleasure to work on. Cheap yarn isn't. I'm knitting Christmas presents this year, and rather than saving money, I'm working hard not to end up spending a lot more than usual.

Friend C. went into her local yarn store this past week to inquire after mother-daughter beginner knitting classes, and reported to me later that she could practically feel the dollars being tugged out of her wallet by a new hobby: the tools, the materials, the books! (The other women bemoaning how much they'd already spent this month!) Score another for knitting.

Play Kitchen

2009-09-08T08:42:00.007-04:00

Ben is a little young for the kind of pretend play that takes place in a play kitchen (they're usually aimed at three-year-olds), but he's a big fan of kitchen tools, knobs, and cabinets, and he spent nearly all the time we were at the Fs' in July bashing around their play kitchen. So we decided to get him one. Only, Andy being the buildy sort, we're making him one.

Yesterday was the first effort: plans made and tweaked, materials bought, construction started. Here's what it looks like so far:

I can't tell you how awesome it is to co-parent with somebody who's willing and able to build play furniture. It opens up so many possibilities. I looked at dozens of play kitchens online, and the only ones I could get enthusiastic about were the unbelievably expensive ones like this one, three hundred bucks for just the stove! Or this one, which at least you get stove and sink for your $250. There were others I could have been ok with, like this one or this one, but they all had something I objected to, however nitpicky: they looked ricketty, or had microwaves (where's the imaginative fun in pretending to reheat something?) or fake clocks (a particular peeve) or my favorite bugbear of design for littles: ungodly over-embellishment. This is a big toy that's going to be taking up visual and actual space in my house for the next two years or more -- a lot more if we have another kid -- so it mattered to me that it wasn't going to be something I learned to hate the sight of.

But Ben's kitchen is going to be great. Sturdy, in colors I don't hate. It's going to have a stove and a sink and cabinet, and if he uses it enough and wants one, we left room to add a fridge. We even had fun wandering around Lowe's yesterday, looking for bits and bobs to be repurposed. We scoffed at the package of replacement oven knobs ($20!), when little wooden discs would do just as well and look cuter, too. We plotted how to paint neat circles for burners using shelf paper and a compass (Andy being Andy, we have a compass). It's a great nexus of Andy's craftiness and mine.

This morning I searched "play kitchen" tags at Flick r, and wow. A lot of people like us are building play kitchens, and some of them are pretty fantastic. I mean, wow.

Sleeping Through

2009-08-31T11:51:00.004-04:00

It's been a while since I posted anything about sleep. (I still feel the hovering shadow of the jinx, but I'm going to post anyway.) Since April, in fact, and I realize now that I've gone looking for posts about sleep that I never provided any closure on the issue for my gentle readers, nor have I said anything about what went right after so much had gone wrong.

So I'd like to tell you all about how we got from several wake-ups a night in April to none lately, but the sad fact is, I really don't remember! I know (because I read my own blog) that we tried to night-wean in the spring, and I think it was partially successful, but there was some backsliding around colds and teething. When we were at Andy's parents' in early June, I was still nursing Ben back to sleep when he woke up at night. But somewhere between that trip and the next, we night-weaned in earnest, because I know I resettled Ben without nursing him while we were at C.'s house.

I started out talking about sleeping and somehow I'm talking about nursing, and I think I've hit on what happened to make this kid sleep through. I think weaning was what finally really did it. The less he was nursing, the better he slept. So long as we both knew I could pull out the big guns, comfort-wise, whenever he couldn't get himself back to sleep, he was more likely to hold out for the boob and not resettle on his own. I was incentivizing his wake-ups.

He still wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes, but it's unusual, and he always goes right back down either by himself or after a quick check and cuddle. It's pretty amazing to me, actually, how he's gone from being such a lousy sleeper to such a good one. And it only took an entire, miserably sleepless year!

The next hurdle is naptime. He's been great about taking consistent morning and afternoon naps for months and months now, but just this weekend it seems like he's resisting the morning nap and moving towards nap consolidation. In the short term, I think, this is going to mean that he gets one too-short nap in the late morning/early afternoon until his body gets used to the schedule and stretches the sleep a bit more. So, early bedtime for a while until we hammer out the details, probably.

I'm excited about moving to one nap. I like the idea of having two longer stretches of time with him to do stuff like errands and outings, and one longer stretch of time to myself to do stuff like write blog posts and make soap.

Lax

2009-08-31T08:17:00.004-04:00

My mother said to me recently that I parent Ben as if he were a second child. I know she mostly meant it as a compliment, and I mostly took it as one. I'm not a worrier, and I'm lazy, and I'm in favor of as much hands-off parenting and child-led exploration and experimentation as is safe and feasible. The combination (in that order) means that I look for opportunities to let Ben do things for himself, especially when it means less work for me.

Right now, for instance, Ben is by himself in the living room, and I am in the office maybe 25 feet away. There are no closed doors between us, and I can hear him bashing around in his toy drawers, but I can't see him. I'm confident that if he came to any harm, I'd be able to intervene successfully. Part of my confidence comes from 15 months' knowledge of this particular kid. Part of it may well be misguided faith in the idea that if nothing terrible has happened yet, it probably won't.

I tend to notice my lax parenting style a lot more when I'm around people who don't live with toddlers. Other current parents of toddlers don't raise an eyebrow, which either means they're on board or are simply sensitive enough to criticism not to comment. Also, I don't know many other parents of toddlers. Parents of long-ago toddlers are most likely to draw my attention to my lack of concern, and I think it's in part because toddlers seem a lot more fragile to those not being persistently pummeled by them, not watching them face-plant and then get right up unconcerned not once but dozens of times a day. And I'm sure they seem particularly precious and vulnerable to people whose toddlers are long gone, turned into prickly adults who resent parenting advice.

It was too quiet in there, so I just checked on him. He moved from his toys to his books, and is now sitting on the floor paging through Moo Baa La-La-La.

I'm 99% confident that my style is the right one, and if I'm honest, I'd say I think it's not just the right one for me. I think more people should calm the hell down and stop letting fear rule their parenting choices. But it's easy for me to say, because I'm not a worrier. And while I'm glad I'm the kind of parent I am, if I really wanted to change, I'm not sure I'm capable of it.

Ah-dah!

2009-08-28T09:35:00.003-04:00

We spent a few days this past week sharing a cabin in the Adirondacks with friends whose twins E. and V. are almost five. After they'd spent about a day with Ben, they cannily observed that he says "Ah-dah" a lot. Which there is no denying. By the end of the visit, E. was jokily starting conversations with Ben by say, "So ... ah-dah!" and we were all saying "ah-dah" when pointing or drawing attention or wishing to express delight. At one point, I said to V. and E. that probably the next time they saw Ben, they'd say "ah-dah" to him, and he wouldn't know why because he'd be talking by then and wouldn't remember when all he said was "ah-dah."

That paragraph was pretty repetitive with all those "ah-dah"s, huh? You got a little tired of hearing "ah-dah," didn't you? It's not as cute on the page as it is when pronounced by a fat-cheeked little sweetheart, but still. It is pretty much all he says, and I am getting a little impatient for Mama, say, or even some other gibberish.

He says "bahm," which is apparently the sound a cat makes. So it means cat.

He says "gahng," which is any clanging sound. He says it after he's made a big clanging sound.

He says "Tsssssss" when asked what sound a snake makes.

He says "ah ah" when asked what sound a monkey makes.

We met ducks at the cabin, so now he knows that "gock gock gock" is the sound a duck makes -- he would start quacking the instant he walked out the back of the cabin.

I've been hassling him.

"Say 'ma-ma-ma-ma,'" I say. His eyes get wide. He likes this game.

"Mamamamamama," he says. (Or sometimes, "Nananananana.")

"Yes!" I say. "'Ma-ma' is me! 'Ma-ma' is Mom! Say 'Ma-ma.'"

"Mamamamamamama!"

He gets the sound. He knows it's the M sound I'm asking for, and he likes to make the M sound and get a positive reaction. But he clearly hasn't made the leap yet from sound to word.

Which is kind of baffling, really, because his receptive language is pretty amazing. You only have to name an object he's interested in once or maybe twice for him to remember that word. Sometimes when I'm making his dinner, I ask him to go get his sippy cup and bring it to me, and he he does it. That's grasping two whole separate commands and remembering both of them long enough to complete both tasks (which of course also demonstrates a quite pleasant willingness to do what I ask). He can point out an impressive range of barnyard animals in his beloved farm book.

I'm not concerned about his lack of expressive language in the sense of being worried there's something wrong with him. I know that not talking at 15 months is still absolutely within the range of normal, especially for a kid who's an only and home with mom all day where he doesn't need to work very hard to get what he wants. I'm just impatient! "Ah-dah" is undeniably cute, but I'm tired of "ah-dah"!

Grief

2009-08-16T18:35:00.003-04:00

I know that it's hard for people who don't have animals, or who don't form deep family bonds with their animals, to understand the depth of grief somebody like me feels for somebody like Lola. And I feel a little silly talking about it, knowing that people who don't understand will be reading, assigning me into some category of the absurdly emotional or revoltingly self-indulgent or something.

I'm not in fact particularly emotional. I tend to react to most things pretty rationally. I'm not sentimental or maudlin or even much given to tears. If I'm self-indulgent, it's about catalogue shopping, not finding ways to make myself miserable. But I've cried for Lola every day since she died. And not just eyes-filling, tears-leaking crying, but embarrassing, out-loud sobbing. I literally cry for her, in the sense of calling her name out loud. It's not the kind of grieving I've ever done for anybody else, and I've lost people.

In part, I think, losing someone who was so much a part of the fabric of your daily life, someone you saw more times a day than you could count or were ever consciously aware of, makes you especially raw to the idea of death itself, the finality, the unbearable absence of someone who was so very present. And the fact that my relationship with her was so physical plays a part in that, too. Somehow the idea that I can't just reach out and touch her is especially hard to bear.

I wish so much that I believed I would see her again. I wish I believed in heaven, in a conscious afterlife of any kind for any of us, in which some eternal aspect of me could embrace some eternal aspect of her. I wish I believed that one day we could do whatever ghosts or angels do that's like scritching and wagging and kissing faces. But I don't. I don't believe it, and I can't make myself believe it.

The part of her that was her is gone, and gone forever. The part of her that was flesh is ashes. We picked them up today, in a plastic urn with her name on a slip of paper scotch-taped. "NGEFL," Andy and I said in unison, shaking our heads. So many things were Not Good Enough for Lola that we shortened the phrase to its initials long ago.

I can believe that there's a kind of ocean of souls from which we each come, to which we each return, and that it includes all of us, from the very simple to the very complex. This notion doesn't give me the kind of comfort that the hope of concrete, individual me someday being reunited with concrete, individual Lola would. But it's a kind of comfort, being able to hope that, bound together as I feel certain we are, we will someday, in some form, embrace again.

Weaned

2009-08-07T09:46:00.003-04:00

As I said before, I'd have been happy to go along nursing at night and morning pretty much indefinitely if that's what Ben wanted. But I've come to believe (based on not a whole lot of empirical evidence, so take it for what it's worth) that babies give you opportunities to cut back and finally end breastfeeding painlessly, and if you don't take these opportunities when they're presented, cutting back or stopping later presents much more of a problem. So though I was perfectly content to continue, I was also looking for signs from Ben that he was ok stopping.

A couple of weeks ago, he balked at the boob at bedtime -- first time ever. It might have been because (Bad Mommy) I'd had a margarita not too long before, though I've had beers before bedtime without putting him off. I really have no idea why he balked, but when he did, I gave him a sippy of cow's milk instead, and he seemed content with that, and we went on doing that, adjusting his bedtime ritual slightly around it.

We went on for another week or so nursing just in the morning. But the evening feed had always been the substantial one, and the morning one was more about giving me another ten minutes to laze in bed than about satisfying his hunger or need to connect or soothe. And that was weekdays -- on weekends, Andy takes him in the early morning so that I can sleep in, and Ben didn't usually nurse until much later, after breakfast. So this past weekend, I tried just skipping nursing on Saturday morning, and he didn't even notice. When Monday rolled around, we changed the morning ritual a bit so that Ben wasn't plonked in bed with me, but instead I came downstairs and joined him and Andy.

And so weaning went pretty much seamlessly. He's asked once or twice (he pokes me in the sternum), but hasn't put up the tiniest fuss when I say no, we don't do that anymore, and would you like a sippy of milk?

And it's been pretty much seamless for me, too. No physical problems, which I wouldn't really have expected, since we weaned so very gradually. And really no sadness, partly because losing Lola the same weekend meant that all my sadness capacity was full of grief and mourning.

Goodbye, Good Girl

2009-08-01T12:59:00.003-04:00

It is with the profoundest sadness I have to report that our basset hound Lola died yesterday morning.

She'd been battling lymphoma -- and beating it back with aplomb, I might add -- since February of 2008. She relapsed this past spring and had been responding well to her second round of treatment, but something simply went wrong after her last dose on Tuesday. Yesterday I had her back at the vet, and by this morning it was clear that this was a system failure, that whether it had to do with the chemo or the timing was just a coincidence, she was, as Andy put it, scritching at the door. The last kindness we could perform for her was to let her out gracefully.

She was a stubborn, grouchy, opinionated, loving, wonderful dog. When she was a youngster and loved playing fetch, she knew all her toys by name, and would get the one you asked for out of her toy box and bring it to you. When we brought her to Andy's folks' in Wisconsin, she used to lure their dogs outside with a toy and then double back by a different door to steal their marrow bones. The people at the dog hotel she stayed in in Philadelphia were convinced she was a famous retired showdog, and a junkie outside the 7-11 at the corner of 34th and Powelton once called her a symphony.

She had long, beautiful ears and a heart-shaped spot on her right front stump. She sang with soul and gusto. She was about as lovely and graceful and dignified as a basset hound can be. She would have turned nine in August.

She was our girl, and we loved her very much.

Tech Help

2009-07-24T22:16:00.003-04:00

Hey, Readers:

I know some of you are savvy web-machen types, and I need help. I like this layout fine, but the style of the title really bugs me, and I have no idea how to change it in the stylesheet. I'm all over old-school HTML, so it's not like I'm completely clueless, but I open the code and I have NO IDEA what I'm looking at.

Need make blog pretty -- I can haz help plz?

Solo-Parent Road Trip

2009-07-24T18:06:00.005-04:00

We're just back from a whirlwind trip to Charlottesville for C's triplets' first birthday, with overnight visits in DC and Philadelphia on either end. The "we" in this case is me and Ben, no Andy, and solo-parent road-tripping was surprisingly easy. And by "easy," of course I mean "I didn't even cry once."

The thing that makes it doable is that the kid will sleep in his travel crib in strange places. For a while, that was not the case, and every trip out of town meant each night stacked up the sleeplessness. Now that he sleeps -- and I sleep -- all things are possible.

Another thing that makes it doable is understanding and helpful friends who don't roll their eyes at our arrival with armloads of gear and crap, who make room and help carry and let their schedules work around us a little. You expect it to some degree from other people with babies (or whose kids were babies in recent memory), but it's a wonderful gift from the unbabied.

What makes it fun is that he's a pretty gregarious and outgoing little dude. He genuinely enjoys interacting with people, making faces and getting reactions, so that he's both happy and the source of happiness in others. Rest stops on the Jersey Turnpike, for instance, are not generally a highlight of anybody's travel, but when you walk in hand-in-hand with a grinning toddler who likes to wave his fat little arm at everybody, it can be something of a treat.

I wish I were one of those people who could travel with a toddler and one overnight bag, but I'm just not, and I've made my peace with it.

- clothing and bathroom stuff bag
- diaper bag
- bag of toys
- bag of food, snacks, sippies, plates, and bibs*
- heavy-as-hell bag of travel crib
- Ikea plastic-canvas bag of booster seat and tray
- bag of dvd player and dvds
- stroller

And, sure, I could consolidate some of those bags, but what does it get me to put the toys in the food bag except hassle when I want to carry one and not the other? As it is, I had to shuffle a bunch of stuff to take just the minimal food and diaper gear when we took public transportation into Center City for dinner, since I wasn't about to lug the kid, the stroller, my handbag, and two other large bags up and down subway stairs.

Anyway. Doing this stuff on my own is mostly fine. I'm just organized enough, and just patient enough (though the experimental, let's-push-Mom's-buttons-'cause-I'm-bored shrieking on the Beltway did make me lose my mind briefly), and I like driving, and I like my kid. But it does give me profound respect for single parents of tiny people. Other people can give you help and respite, but not like a co-parent can. I had a wonderful time (and so did Ben), but it sure is nice to be back here where I don't have to change all the diapers.

* I realized after posting that actually I had another food bag, too: a cooler bag with fridge stuff in it. I also had a bag of knitting, but I can hardly blame that on Ben.

Happy Independence Day!

2009-07-04T18:26:00.003-04:00

Exuberant patriotic joy to the tune of a Sousa march to all!

Snapshots

2009-06-27T21:44:00.005-04:00

He got his first hard-soled shoes this week -- before I'd only ever had him in Robeez -- and he walks so deliberately in his new sandals. Stomp, stomp, stomp, lifting higher with the right foot than the left, partly delighted and partly perplexed by the new sensation.

It's not that he never noticed the stairs, but they hadn't been much of a draw before we got back from Wisconsin. Now he's all about the climbing. Andy and I make lots of Everest jokes about summiting without supplemental pants.

For some reason I can't fathom, he often prefers to drink with the sippy spout on the far side of the cup.

He likes to be upside down. The phrase "upside down" was one of the first things we noticed he understood, because if you said it, he'd throw his head back, waiting for you to make the rest of his body follow. He does this a lot.

He's started to give kisses. Really romantic kisses, where he basically opens his mouth, sticks his tongue out a bit, and leans in. They're a bit anticlimactic: he basically just presses his slightly open mouth on you for a second. Still, wow, so sweet. He also bumps foreheads and rubs noses.

Tragedy

2009-06-27T09:14:00.008-04:00

I'm not particularly sentimental, and I haven't been a big Michael Jackson fan since I was eleven, so I keep being surprised to find myself tearing up at the coverage of his death. I'm also surprised to find myself getting angry at the people who (mostly on Facebook) proclaim their indifference or even happiness at the news.

You don't have to know a dozen things about Michael Jackson's life to know that he was both profoundly talented and profoundly broken. You don't have to like the music to acknowledge the genius. You don't have to like the man to acknowledge the tragedy. And I think that because he became known to us as a child, because childhood -- the theft of it, the lack of it, the search for it -- was always a part of his ever-creepier persona, the tragedy is bigger and uglier.

I've been writing and rewriting a paragraph about how I feel complicit in the tragedy, how we as consumers of pop culture fueled the success and in doing so fueled the machine that ground him into little bits. And that's not the whole story, of course. But it's part of what makes me sad.

My friend M. used to teach undergraduates, and back when the first season of American Idol was on, she and her class were chatting about it, and she said that Justin Guarini reminded her of Michael Jackson, and they all looked at her like she had six heads. The only Michael Jackson these kids knew was the bandaged freakshow, the alleged abuser, the joke. So I'm glad, in all the media coverage, to see so many images from the time before. He was young and handsome and debonair! He had charisma and precision and grace! Despite the horrors of his life, he had joy.

Anyway, here's my favorite Michael Jackson song. I defy you to hear the opening bars and not want to get up and dance.

More Toys

2009-06-24T09:36:00.003-04:00

It was December when I last blogged a list of Ben's favorite toys, and the kid wasn't yet crawling, and probably unsurprisingly to parents of toddlers, the first two items on the December list make it onto the June list, too. We've gone from one big cloth box of toys to a whole TROFAST (I love Ikea) cabinet, with at least half the toys in storage so that A) there's some kind of limit to the mess, and B) toys can be NEW! all over again in a month's time.

Here are the evergreens, the greatest hits:

1. Leap Frog Learn & Groove Musical Table. Ben loves this thing, and for an electronic noise-maker, it's pretty amazingly non-irritating. My advice: put the talk mode in Spanish so it's less distracting when you're trying to read a book.

2. Ikea nesting and stacking cups and stacking rings. He's nearly able to stack now, which increases the play value, but you'd be amazed at how much he loves playing with these even without being able to manipulate them the way they're intended to be manipulated.

3. Animals from Playmobil 123 (from the farm set and the tractor set) and Schleich (I've bought him mother-baby pairs of elephants, cows, and pandas). The cows from both are the biggest hits. At left he's cruising the sofa with a Playmobil cow in hand.

4. Hammer balls from Plan. I love Plan Toys. Good, solid stuff, well made by a ecologically and economically responsible company. Ben, of course, doesn't care about that, and I have to confess I'm surprised by how much fun he clearly has with this toy, which I would have thought was of limited interest (he got it as a gift). He will hammer the balls through and then retrieve them and replace them to hammer again.

5. Playskool gear toy. Another one I'm surprised by the duration of his interest in. At first, he just liked pulling the gears off and chewing on them. Then he worked out how to push the button and make them turn. He clearly finds the thing fascinating and challenging, and the music is really not bad at all.

Here, on the other hand, are the things I wish he'd like, but he remains steadfastly uninterested in:

1. Push walkers. We have a super-cute one from Ikea and a plastic hippo-shaped one borrowed from a friend, and not only is he not interested, he gets annoyed if you put him down too close to one. Ok, no pressure, kid!

2. Blocks. We have at this point hundreds of very nice, very expensive wood blocks. Andy and I like them very much, and when we get down on the floor and make exciting block structures, Ben does enjoy destroying them, but that's really the limit of his interest. He has very recently figured out that he can stack one block on another, though, so it could be that blocks are on their way in.

3. A baby doll. I bought him this one for his birthday, and he gave it a good poke in the nose and proceeded to other things. His cousin, six months older, loved the baby doll and carried it around giving it hugs and kisses, so I have good hope that Ben will develop regard for his baby eventually.

All Together Now

2009-06-23T09:27:00.004-04:00

Until last night, Ben ate in his highchair in the kitchen, and I basically gave him one thing at a time as I made it, and Andy and I ate dinner after we put Ben to bed. But lately we'd been wondering whether a slightly later bedtime might result in a slightly later wake-up time (5:30 AM = so not fun for all), though the idea of losing even half an hour of our precious grown-up time in the evening was painful to contemplate. (We'd been putting Ben down between 6:30 and 7, and going to bed ourselves around 9:30 or 10.) But then it occurred to me that Ben is ready -- way past ready, in fact -- to join us at the table for dinner, and that we could solve all our problems by having dinner earlier, all together. (So that while we put Ben down later, we don't then have to spend any time making dinner for ourselves, so we have about the same amount of leisure time.)

So we did it last night for the first time, and the dinner part, at least, was a success. It was a bit of a scramble getting everything ready together, even though I was only making frozen pizzas and a Greek salad. But Ben hasn't warmed up to salad, and needed more than French-bread pizza to eat, so I made a standard Ben dinner while Andy finished the salad and wrangled the boy-o and fed the dogs, and we managed to sit down to a relatively civilized dinner, all three of us. It was very nice.

Sleeping, oy, no such luck. I don't know whether it was even related to the change in schedule, but the kid had a really tough night with several wake-ups, none that he went down easily after. He did sleep about half an hour later, though, but what with all the wackiness overnight, I don't consider it good data. So we'll see.

Unsolicited Advice: Crack a Book!

2009-06-22T16:09:00.003-04:00

People are funny about parenting books. Even among people I'd generally consider fairly book-friendly if not book-obsessed, there's often an attitude of disdain and dismissiveness about taking parenting advice from a book. Of course, the disdain appears most prominently when the book advice disagrees with the disdainer's. But even when it's not a case of competing expertise, there's a common sense that parenting is just isn't the sort of thing that experts can help with.

And I understand and even to some extent even agree. Parenting books can only talk in generalizations and averages, and when your child lies outside the catchment of the generalization, the advice isn't much use, and can be demoralizing. I remember reading (it was Ferber or Weissbluth, I can't remember which) that there's no such thing as a kid who's just naturally a bad sleeper -- there are only kids who haven't been shown how to sleep well. Which I read, not surprisingly, as a blistering indictment of my parenting. Not helpful. And now that I have more confidence as a parent, I can say with assurance that that's nonsense, that while I'm sure any baby's sleep can be improved in various ways, there absolutely are sleep-resistant kids, and mine is absolutely one of them. So I support taking expert advice with a grain of salt, and I certainly support skepticism of any advice that undermines you or seems not to jibe at all with your own observation.

But.

What I don't understand and can't support is not reading the books at all. I can't count the number of times a parenting book introduced me to a concept that had never crossed my mind, or offered a tactic or solution or small but crucial course correction that I found helpful. Even just reinforced something I'd done at first instinctively, or backed up a decision I made thoughtfully but absent expertise.

I think we sometimes have this notion that parenting ought to come naturally. And to some extent, it does. I'm pleasantly surprised by the number of times I've done something without thinking it through, without making a conscious decision about it, and had it turn out very well, turn out in some cases to be exactly the thing the experts say you should do. But just because it's possible, even common, to stumble blindly into doing the right thing doesn't mean we shouldn't be aiming for conscious and conscientious parenting. I've observed too many parents whose instincts are flat-out crappy to have any real faith in instinct. And though I often get great advice and the benefit of other people's experience by talking to friends, there's no way for casual conversation to cover parenting topics as broadly or thoroughly as a book can.

Or, more accurately, as a whole bookshelf can. Because you can't just read one book, or a few books. Because the experts disagree, and you may disagree with the experts. If you only read Dr. Sears because you're all about AP, there's a lot of helpful information you'll never get, a lot of dissenting opinions that may suprise you by ringing true. Sometimes the books that challenge your cherished notions of parenting are the most helpful because they're the ones that make you think hardest about why you make the decisions you do.

Curious

2009-06-20T14:09:00.003-04:00

Dear Readers, would you do me a favor? If I don't know you -- personally or through an online forum -- and you're a regular reader of this blog, would you drop me a line and let me know how you found it? I'd be most grateful.

Dog, Dad, That, This -- Cracker!

2009-06-19T21:17:00.004-04:00

Walking is unmistakable. Either you can put one foot in front of the other, not hold on to anything, and propel yourself, or you can't. Ben did it for the first time last weekend, and despite much celebration on all our parts, seems to have lost enthusiasm for bipedality (a not-uncommon reaction to first steps, apparently) and regained considerable gusto for crawling. Which is fine.

But talking is such a judgment call. I had him at the pediatrician for his one-year physical, and she asked if he has any words, and I said No because we don't think he does, really, but who knows? He says "dah" about a lot of things, and it's entirely possible that one or two or six uses of "dah" are actual words. Certainly he never uses another sound or syllable for Dog, or for Dad. He says "diss" in a way that suggests "this" to me, to go along with another use of "dah" for "that." Sometimes he says stuff that sounds an awful lot like "cacka" when he's very excited about getting a cracker (which is pretty much any time he's about to get a cracker -- kid likes crackers), but he doesn't do it consistently (sometimes he just says "dah! dah! dah!"), and he won't do it when prompted.

He has considerable receptive language, and he certainly communicates his desires very well by pointing and "dah"-ing. When asked, he can point to such varied and useful items as his toes, his mouth, his hair, Mom's belly, a dog, a ceiling fan, a window, peas, pineapple, and probably a couple dozen other quotidian things. When I've told him not to bug sleeping Lola, he points to her and shakes his head sagely.

Do I sound like I'm making excuses? Early expressive language is a marker of intelligence. I was an early talker. But really, it's not that. I'm not concerned that this child will be a dullard. It's just that I talk to him all day, every day, and I'm so eager for another voice to join in and make it a conversation. And it's such a huge and crucial part of personhood, and watching him become a person is an addictive delight.

Comfortable Faces

2009-06-11T08:51:00.011-04:00

In the house I think of as "the house I grew up in" (even though I lived in four different houses from infancy to college, and this one no longer than the others), one wall of the family room was covered in photographs. They were arranged in three not-quite-separate columns: on the left was my dad's family, on the right was my mom's, and in the middle was the three of us.

I loved that wall of photographs. I loved that I knew the names of all the people and how they were related to me. I loved that visitors always seemed interested and wanted to know who was who. There was something essentially comforting about that mass of images, and I've been wanting to recreate it in my own house for years.

I've asked my mom for photos, and she's brought sheaves on various visits. When we were in Wisconsin last week, Andy's mom covered the dining room table in boxes and albums, and we sorted through them all evening, picking ones to take home with us -- not to keep, but to scan and return. We've already framed and hung a few of my family; now we can do the same for Andy's. And we scanned a bunch of my family, too, and posted dozens of each on my Flickr site and sent links to relatives. I hope everyone enjoys them, and I really hope that they feel moved to cough up some photos of their own which can also be scanned and returned.

I've picked the dining room as our family gallery. The walls don't lend themselves to the three-column approach; also, I prefer a more scattered look. But there's lots of space to fill, and I look forward to picking and grouping, framing and hanging. I don't suffer the delusion that Ben will share all my interests and pleasures, so it won't surprise (or, I hope, disappoint) me if he isn't eager to memorize all the names and faces, if he doesn't find them the comfort I always did. But there's a (silly? superstitious?) part of me that feels that the people in those pictures want to watch over us, want to get a look at my kid growing up, and that I somehow wouldn't be doing right by my ancestors if I didn't festoon the place with their faces.

(Andy's paternal grandparents Etta and Bernard, my mother Betsy in my grandmother Helen's arms with my aunt Sylvia, Andy's uncle Bob and mother Kath, my aunts Nina and Elaine with my dad Stanley)

Nurse More?

2009-06-10T09:44:00.003-04:00

Ben was an enthusiastic on-demand nurser from the get-go, and that worked for me just fine, especially early on when he desperately needed comfort, and nursing was the most effective comfort I could give. At around nine months, though, it occurred to me that I wasn't 100% happy with on-demand nursing anymore. I'm not sure that I can give a particular reason or list of reasons that would logically outweigh whatever reasons someone else might give for continuing. I have reasons, and I will list them, but I think more than anything it just felt to me that he didn't really need it any longer, and I didn't really like it any longer, and that feeling was more of a motivation than any of the reasons I'm about to give.

So here are some of the reasons:

I'm not entirely comfortable with the conflation of eating and comfort past a certain age. I'm sure plenty of people comfort-nurse well into toddlerhood without creating bad eating habits, but there's something about it that bothers me. I didn't want a toddler who fell down and then needed to nurse to regain his composure.

I've never much liked nursing in public. I don't think I'm excessively modest, and I certainly got over my initial squeamishness about it very quickly, but Ben happens to enjoy the eat-a-little-talk-a-little method of breastfeeding, which is mildly irritating at home, but creates a lot of nipple-management issues at, say, the mall.

He's a very good eater of solids, and he's a chunky little dude. I am in no way concerned that he's getting too little good nutrition. In fact, he eats way better than I do, and I believe he gets better nutrients from his plate than at my breast.

Even so, I probably would have continued on-demand nursing if he had put up any kind of fight about moving to a schedule, let alone eliminating feedings from the schedule. He didn't. I realized that he was usually nursing before and after every sleep, plus once overnight, so the first thing I did was experiment with no nursing before naps, which he didn't even seem to notice: no trouble at all. At first he did ask to nurse occasionally (he pokes at my sternum), but didn't appear fazed at my refusing and offering some kind of redirect. So he was now nursing at an early wake-up (around 4:00 or 5:00), again when Andy left for work and handed him over to me (7:00), after each nap (around 10:00 and 2:30), and at bedtime (6:30), and that went on for a couple of months. (I wasn't a total hard-ass about it, either -- if he was sick or having a very hard time with something and wanted to nurse, I let him.)

So last week we were in Wisconsin at Andy's parents', and it occurred to me that with all the distraction and excitement, Ben might not even miss one of the post-nap nursings, so I skipped it and gave him a snack of crackers and milk instead. No problem. (It should be mentioned that this kid is a huge fan of crackers.) So no more nursing after the morning nap, check. And the day before yesterday, I did the same for the afternoon nap, and again, he didn't seem fazed in the slightest.

Now I'm perfectly happy to go on nursing in the morning and at bedtime for as long as he shows the slightest interest. But he threw me a bit of a curveball yesterday: suddenly his enthusiasm for his second morning nursing (the 7:00 one when Andy brings him to me in bed) seemed drastically reduced! He was way more interested in clambering around on the pillows and beating on the wall behind the headboard. I heard the slightest plaintive note in my voice when he squirmed away for the third or fourth time and I asked, "Nurse more, kiddo? Nurse more?"

Road Trip

2009-06-08T14:42:00.006-04:00

We spent Ben's first birthday with Andy's folks in Wisconsin, which means that we spent four very long days (12 hours, give or take) on the road with a 12-month-old. And it went about as well as four 12-hour days in the car with a 12-month-old could possibly go, I must say.

On the advice of friends, we bought a portable dvd player and a dohickey to hang it from the front seats, and when it came time to pull out the big guns, I have never been so glad to kiss goodbye my formerly strong opinion that videos in cars are one of the things wrong with Kids Today. Without the magic trance-inducer, we'd have to have added another day to the trip each way, without a doubt. (Our dvds, in case you were dying to know, were They Might Be Giants' ABCs and 123s, and Yo Gabba Gabba.)

The other sine qua non of the trip was stopping for actual meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's tough to abandon a driving lifetime of honed road-trip tactics (the drive-through, the you-pee-while-I-get-gas, the lap snacks rather than meals), and it's really tough to feel that hour or hour and a half tick by, knowing that every minute is another minute you're going to be stuck in the car at the other end. But babies aren't roadtrippers, and the kid needed to stretch his baby legs and look at the crap on the walls of the Cracker Barrel instead of the back of a headrest for a while. And I do recommend Cracker Barrel. The vegetables are awful, but the rest of the menu is very tasty and very inexpensive. I can't think of another chain that's as ubiquitous and reliable without being also terrible or overpriced.

The real lesson of the trip, though, is don't take a baby on an eleven-hundred-mile road trip if you can possibly avoid it. Plane travel has its pitfalls and problems -- the expense springs to mind, along with the hell of being the one responsible for the crying baby making everyone else unhappy -- but I think it still might beat four 12-hour days in the car. Best of all, of course, is when it's their turn to come to you.

Dogs! Dogs! Dogs!

2009-05-12T09:07:00.003-04:00

Ben has enjoyed paging through his big photo books (especially this one and this one) for a while now, but it's mostly been clear that his pleasure has had more to do with the hinge-motion of the pages than observing the pictures. But recently he's made the mental leap and is able to recognize that the images correspond to real-world objects and creatures.

At least, if they're dogs.

We have two basset hounds, Lola and Hugo, and as I mentioned here, I first noticed he'd acquired some receptive language when I named the dogs and he looked at them. He likes them both very much, and the feelings are decidedly mutual. So it's no surprise that they continue to open developmental doors for him.

This latest started with the basset hound calendar in the kitchen, which was the first image Ben got excited about, first grinning and then pointing and grinning, wanting to be taken closer so that he could smack at the image, possibly making sure there wasn't really a doggy behind it somewhere. Then he and I were paging through one of his picture books, and he pointed at a photo of a dog: "Dah!" This dog wasn't a basset hound. And then he pointed at a bear and a wolf and a cougar. So, ok, we haven't exactly narrowed down what a dog is, but bears and cougars aren't that far off, and wolves are just dogs whose ancestors -- rather shortsightedly -- resisted the appeal of human garbage heaps. Which of course makes me think about how I know a wolf from a bear from a dog, how infinitely complicated those distinctions are, what a miracle it is that my not-quite-year-old can do it, how essential this kind of detailed visual sorting must be to human evolutionary success.

And then the thing that really knocked me out: he pointed out the doggy in an illustrated book. And not a photorealistic illustration, rather a stylized one (in Dav Pilkey's The Paperboy). This dog isn't a basset hound, either, but it is a low-rider and a bit of a fatty, so similar. Still, how does the kid know? What markers of dogness do his real dogs share with this painting? In the time before photography, did it take longer for babies to recognize images? Do photographs create a kind of visual bridge between the real and the imagined?

When her first child was around Ben's age, my friend C. asked me for photos of Lola, who was a puppy at the time. (I believe I sent her prints -- decent images were probably too big to email eight years ago, and there was no such thing as Flickr.) She was making a doggy picture book for her son. I loved the idea, and loved that she wanted to include Lola. Last week, I made one for Ben, with photos of our dogs, dogs we know, and lots of dogs from the Dogs! Dogs! Dogs! pool at Flickr. (Scotch photo laminating sheets are awesome.)

He loves it.

Happy

2009-05-10T19:02:00.002-04:00

There was a vase of daisies on the counter this morning with a note attached: "Happy Mother's Day" in block letters, and beneath some scratches in crayon that could only have been the very first artistic product of my pride and joy.

We ate lunch at the Cracker Barrel, my favorite kid-friendly chain place (two words: hashbrown casserole), along with half the population of the Capital District and their moms. Ben had his first buttermilk biscuits and first grilled-cheese sandwich, both big hits. I grinned (probably inappropriately) at a couple of hugely pregnant women who reminded me of me this time last year.

Andy elected to skip the Lowe's because I find it tedious, and instead we did pleasurable-to-me errands including a leisurely wander through a nice nursery with iced coffees. And yesterday -- part of the Mothers' Day extravaganza, though it was more or less a coincidence -- I got a haircut and highlights and a brow wax and went bra shopping and ate lunch with a book.

And for dinner we ate Five Guys take-out, one of my favorite meals, and not just because I don't have to cook it or even go get it.

It was a very nice weekend. Maybe I like Mothers' Day after all.

Martyrs' Day

2009-05-05T08:52:00.004-04:00

I've never liked Valentine's Day. When I was single, it just made me feel conspicuous and lonely. When I was first dating somebody, it was awkward. In an established relationship, it feels canned and corny to do something romantic on one prescribed day. It makes me feel that the relationship is empty if romantic gestures have to be prescribed, if expressions of passion and tenderness are things to avoid shirking rather than extemporaneous outlets of genuine feeling. I'm not sure yet if I feel the same about Mothers' Day. I have a feeling that I will, though, since it's kind of the same deal: being told I'm loved and appreciated because today is the day for it just makes me feel unloved and taken for granted.

I was talking to friends the other day, and one woman expressed outrage at an acquaintance's husband's failure to thank his wife properly (by celebrating Mothers' Day properly) for raising his children, giving up her career to stay home with them, and so forth. It took me aback. I stay home with my kid, but it wouldn't occur to me to feel martyred about it. For one thing, I didn't give up anything meaningful to do it. But if I'd been invested in a career, I would have made a choice about working or not working that was mine to make, and I'd have owned it. More than that, I see my ability to stay home with Ben as a luxury provided by Andy. Not only do I not think he should be especially grateful to me for staying home, I think I should be grateful to him. And most importantly, I never want Ben to think that parenting him the way I chose to was anything other than what I wanted.

Which is not to say that being the at-home parent of a baby or toddler isn't full of drudgery and mostly thankless. It is. When Andy performs particularly well at his job, it's because he overcame an interesting challenge, and he gets praise from people whose opinions he respects. When I perform particularly well at mine, it's because I overcame Ben's crabbiness and got the grocery shopping done and dinner on the table, and nobody but me tends to notice.

So if there's a part of Mothers' Day I might actually cherish, it's being told in all seriousness by someone whose opinion I respect that what I do matters, and that I'm good at it. And even so, if I only hear it once a year, it's just going to piss me off.

Lunching

2009-04-26T16:38:00.003-04:00

On Saturday, I knew we'd be eating lunch out, so I brought along Ben's sippy cup, a bib, and a bag of dreary-ohs and fruit bits. It's not that I fear for his nutrition if he goes a meal without oaty Os and freeze-dried fruit; it's that the time between sitting down and getting served is easier on everybody if Ben has dozens of little foodlets to pick up and put into his mouth.

I used to bring all his food: overcooked organic veggies and strips of whole-wheat bread, shredded cheese, a banana. And I don't look back on those meals out and think I was a chump to do it -- he was new to solids, and I think it was appropriate to introduce each food carefully, prepare it minimally. But now he's a sturdy little nearly-eleven-month-old Big Fan of Food, and I'm not going to let a little breading scare me.

So we order off the kids' menu now. Chicken fingers and steamed broccoli. I cut it all up into wee pieces and set a few pieces at a time in front of him. The server invariably asks if we want a plate, and I'm sure the sight of a baby eating right off the table is unsettling, but he can handle the germs, and he'd just knock a plate onto the floor.

We didn't plan to eat out again today, but it worked out that way. I didn't have a bib or the snacks, but I did have his sippy cup, and I made a mental note to keep one in my purse from now on -- it's really the only brought-from-home lunch item that we'd miss. He ate his deep-fried, mostly-breading, far-too-salty chicken and steamed-but-drenched-in-saturated-fats-and-salt broccoli, and would I want him to eat like that all the time? No way. But once in a while, no big deal. And it's great to be able to eat lunch at a restaurant on the spur of the moment.

These are not fancy or sophisticated places, of course. Yesterday was Pizzeria Uno at the mall, and today was the Ruby Tuesday across from the Lowe's. His restaurant experiences include Cracker Barrel, Panera, Five Guys (where there isn't, sadly, anything I'm willing to give him -- yet), and a cafe in Albany called Peaches. I want him to be the kind of kid who's used to eating out, who can transition easily to nicer places -- and dinner -- once he's past the chucking-stuff-on-the-floor phase, and it seems to me that the way to get there is through a lot of "family" restaurants with fried food and patience.

We tip generously, at least 30%, to make up for the mess.

Quotidian

2009-04-23T09:21:00.003-04:00

A typical day:

AM
4:00 Ben awake and crying; I nurse him, and he goes back down.
6:00 Andy, Ben, and the hounds awake. Andy gets dressed, changes Ben's diaper, puts him in his high-chair, feeds himself and the dogs.
7:00 Andy brings Ben to me in bed. Ben nurses and squirms around. I get up, get dressed, bring Ben downstairs and give him breakfast. We listen to Morning Edition.
7:45 I eat breakfast in front of the computer while Ben hangs out in his doorway jumper.
8:00 Ben loses patience with the jumper; we go into the living room, and he plays with toys and explores his environment while I go back and forth between participating and reading a book. Usually there's a diaper change and a change from PJs into clothes during this time.
9:00 Ben gets fussy, demands to nurse, falls asleep (or gets drowsy); I put him down for his nap. I play on the computer or watch TV and knit or do laundry or some combination.
10:00 (give or take half an hour either way) Ben wakes up. We might go out and run an errand or make an appointment* now. If we're home for the morning, we go downstairs and repeat 8:00's activities. He will usually ask to nurse at some point.
11:30 (give or take, depending on when the nap ended) I give Ben lunch in his high-chair in the kitchen. I make myself something small and quick or else eat some portion of what I'm making for him. We listen to This American Life podcasts (the afternoon programs on WAMC are mind-numbing).
PM
12:30 (give or take, etc.) If there are afternoon errands or appointments, now is when we'd set out. If not, Ben goes back into the doorway jumper and I go back to the interwebs. There's usually a diaper change around now.
1:00 Back to the living room for more toys and exploration. If it's a nice day, we might go into the front yard or out to the park.
2:00 Ben gets grumpy and asks to nurse, falls asleep or gets drowsy, and I put him down for his afternoon nap. I proceed with laundry, tidying, reading, TV, knitting, etc.
3:00 Ben wakes up, gets a diaper change. This is another opportunity to head out for errands or outings. (I like to grocery shop late in the afternoon so that we get back around the time Andy gets home, and he can help put the groceries away.) I usually read him some books as long as his patience for that holds out. He nurses and maybe also gets a bit of an afternoon snack like dreary-ohs or a few bites of my Nutrigrain bar. We play toys, or he does while I read.
4:30 I give him dinner. We listen to All Things Considered.
5:15 Andy comes home round abut the time Ben finishes eating. He changes clothes and grabs some kind of snack.
5:30 Andy and Ben hang out in the living room playing toys, or maybe Andy plays the banjo and Ben smacks it. I feed the dogs, do dinner prep if there is any, and then play on the computer for a while, usually watching something on Hulu while I knit. I might drink a beer.
6:30 Andy takes Ben up and changes him for bed. I go up after a few minutes. Ben nurses, and Andy and Hugo sit on the floor while I go through the bedtime litany of listing all the people and doggies who love Ben (starting with Mom and Dad and Lola and Hugo, going through friends and family and their doggies if any, ending with the babysitter).
6:45 Ben goes to sleep. Andy might go for a quick bike ride, or help me get dinner going, or keep me company while I get dinner going.
7:30 (give or take, depending on how time-consuming dinner is) We eat while watching TV, usually two episodes of Jeopardy on the TiVo.
8:30 I make myself tea and some kind of sweet, feed the cats and scoop their litter, and return to the TV. Andy might be working on some carpentry/IT/other fiddly project while we watch. I am generally knitting.
9:30 We pack it in. We rouse the houndies, who resist, and make them go out before bed. There's some tidying of the kitchen and setting up for the morning.
10:30 Andy is asleep by now; I'm watching TV in bed and knitting.
11:00 I go to sleep.

* Errands and appointments, e.g. Take Lola to the vet for chemo/recheck/CBC, take Ben to the pediatrician, hit Target for diapers, go the H&M mall and check out H&M baby clothes, go to the L.L. Bean mall and check out dowdy clothes for me, meet up with the moms and take a walk somewhere, hit the post office, take a passel of outgrowns to the consignment store, hit the yarn store, hit Barnes & Noble, hit Petsmart, get groceries at the Price Chopper, the Hannaford, the Co-op. Usually more than one destination per outing.

I'm not sure why I thought this rated a blog post. Mostly I sort of wanted to record it for my own future interest.

Toys There Should Be

2009-04-22T15:16:00.004-04:00

1. A deck of sturdy, circular plastic cards, each about the size of an adult's palm, with photographs of everyday objects or African animals or body parts or other things you find in, say, Priddy books. If you must make them "educational," the reverse of each could have the word, or the initial of the word.

2. Board books made of sturdy plastic or wood, so that gnawing youngsters don't A) destroy them and B) end up with little pieces of semi-dissolved paper in their mouths.

3. A toy with one very easy to operate switch that turns a light on and off. Bonus if the switch is actually shaped like a real light switch.

4. Boxes with hinged lids and different kinds of closing mechanisms, all slightly challenging, in which parents can stow different assortments of interesting gummable and handleable objects.

If any of these things do exist, please tell me where to buy them.

And Still More about Sleep

2009-04-10T21:43:00.004-04:00

So here's where we are with the sleep thing.

It was going swimmingly there for a while. The kid would go down and stay down with a few little bleats of protest punctuating the silence but not turning into full-on screaming hysteria. I was pushing his overnight feed later and later every night, and mostly he was sleeping well past those appointed hours.

And then the teeth. Two more on top, one a little ahead of the other. Tooth A (which is really Tooth E, but whatevs) didn't seem to cause him that much distress. In the past,t he worst pain appeared to happen before the tooth showed itself, and Tooth A erupted without my noticing any difference in his demeanor. But Tooth B, oh my heck. Tooth B was apparently a real byatch, because out of nowhere, his sleep went to hell again. Up every few hours, couldn't be redirected back to sleep, lots of yelling which eventually resulted in my buckling and nursing him, poor little guy.

The day after the third night of this was really bad. I was exhausted. He was a crabtastic crabtacular jumbo lump of crab meat. I was short-tempered. He was short-tempered. The morning began with him biting my nipple and me yelling at him and bursting into tears. The worst part (though I have to say, having your nipple bitten by sharp little fresh baby teeth is pretty bad, and it's hard to name a worse part of any day) was feeling defeated -- not only did it seem like we'd lost the sleep battle it had appeared we'd won, but there was now one less tool in the box, night-weaning having come to naught.

Of course, I hadn't really focused on the teething yet, so all of this seemed like random, unexplainable failure to sleep. Once I realized what was going on and started dosing him with ibuprofen at bedtime, things went a lot more smoothly. I was open to giving him a break and nursing him down when he was having a hard time -- this being a phase requiring mercy rather than a pattern requiring squelching.

But Tooth B is nearly out now, and his daytime mood suggests that he's not suffering anymore, so no more ibuprofen, and no more comfort nursing. I had a plugged duct this morning, so I may do a dream feed before I turn in just in case, but we're going cold turkey till dawn.

Knit

2009-04-10T08:47:00.007-04:00

My mother taught me to knit when I was ten (I think -- if I'm off by a year either way, who cares?). My first project was a garter-stitch scarf in a variegated white, blue, and purple wool we bought while on vacation in England. I worked it on wooden straight needles, and the number of stitches varied wildly from row to row. My memory is that it turned out hideous and I wore it proudly with a ski jacket bought to match.

Over the next [mumblemumble] years, I made some more scarves, none notable, and several sets of two-needle mittens and basic hats, also not particularly notable, though I do remember going through one Philadelphia winter with a pretty blue hat that turned out rather well and kept my head warm without mussing my hairdo. I tried not to put myself in the position of having to learn any more stitches than absolutely necessary. When I picked up knitting again this year, I knew how to knit, purl, knit two together (basic decrease), knit into the front and back of a stitch (basic increase), cast on, and bind off -- though I had to call my mom more than once to ask, once I'd reached the end of a project, how do I bind off again?

Knitting wasn't chic for most of my life. When I revealed knitting in middle school, in high school, in college, it was regarded as a grandmotherly oddity -- not lame exactly, but certainly not cool. Now it's cool. Well, ok, I admit I'm wholly unqualified to assign coolness, but from where I sit, it sure looks cool. I mean, check out this guy's blog. Cool, right?

Anyway, I picked up knitting again this winter because I liked the idea of knitting Ben a sweater, though it would probably involve learning a new knitting technique or two, which I generally opposed. I'd never made a sweater before. Andy, reading my mind in that magic way spouses sometimes do, got me a bunch of knitting stuff for Christmas, and I took it up with the kind of enthusiasm that generally burns itself out after I've spent too much money on random gear.

And it still might, I guess. But I have a lot of projects going now, and lots more in my Ravelry queue, and I've been reading knitting blogs (three of which I've added to my blogroll), and I'm taking a BSJ class, and I'm sort of annoyed about the approach of warm weather because I prefer knitting with wool to knitting with cotton, and I'm positively eager to pick up new techniques and follow ever-more-complicated patterns.

The Boob: Right or Wrong

2009-04-03T09:04:00.005-04:00

The Case Against Breast-Feeding by Hanna Rosin in this month's Atlantic.

First of all, it's a wretched title. She's not actually making a case against breastfeeding so much as she's knocking a few holes in the case for breastfeeding, and in fact she concludes the piece by telling us that she herself continues to breastfeed, and even cherishes her time doing so. I've heard that Rosin had a different title in mind, and the editors switched to this more sensational one. Phooey on that.

I haven't read the relevant medical literature, but I have no reason to disbelieve Rosin's representation, which is basically that the evidence behind our culture's current mania for breastfeeding is thin because it's difficult to control for all the other healthy choices breastfeeding mothers tend to make, and the socio-economic group to which they all belong. In other words, if you want the benefits that advocates of breastfeeding claim are the results of the boob, your best bet is to be educated and upper-middle class.

I agree with Rosin that the pressure put on mothers to breastfeed is well out of proportion to the established benefits. Formula is not dangerous, and it's outrageous that it is presented by breastfeeding advocates as tantamount to smoking while pregnant. However, I don't think that the benefits of the boob are to be dismissed simply because they are difficult to prove. And even if the balance only slightly favors nursing, that's a solid argument for giving it the old college try.

Because where I really disagree with Rosin is her notion that breastfeeding is a significant hardship, that it's keeping women down the way housekeeping did in the 50s. "Modesty, independence, career, sanity" are what one stands to lose, she says, by breastfeeding, and that's utter hogwash. Sure, I have the luxury of not working, but I know far too many women who pump on the job without bitching about it to believe that it's that big a deal. And modesty? Come on -- it takes a little practice, but anyone can learn to nurse in public without flashing a nipple, and past the first couple months, you almost never have to nurse in public if it bothers you, anyway. If you stand to lose your sanity because of breastfeeding, by all means, do please stop, but I can't imagine that this is seriously a problem for any but the tiniest and therefore most entirely irrelevant minority. And if independence is that big an issue, don't introduce into your life a tiny creature who is wholly dependent on you -- how you choose to feed it is the least of your worries.

Rosin makes a stab at arguing from the perspective of the working class, but it's not very convincing. Her argument that breastfeeding can only be considered "free" if you don't count the mother's time ignores the time spent sterilizing, mixing, and warming bottles -- which is only "free" if you're paying someone else to do it, which is not generally an option open to blue-collar moms. And, yes, pumping on the job is a lot harder "if you are, say, a waitress or bus driver." But you know what? Everything is harder if you're a waitress or a bus driver, so it's not exactly a winning argument against the boob -- though of course I'm more sympathetic to a mother who gives up pumping because it's genuinely a pain in the ass than one who just can't be bothered to give it a try.

Her only argument against breastfeeding that really resonates with me at all is her claim that it makes for an imbalance in marriage. I remember fondly the very early days of Ben's life, when I felt strongly that Andy and I were a team, were in it 100% together; and I remember the feeling of being at sea when he went back to work, when it became clear that the only way to get the baby back to sleep at night was to nurse him, when suddenly I felt like the parent and he felt like the occasional assistant, when my parenting felt required and his felt optional. That sucked. But some of that would have happened even if we'd been bottle-feeding. With one of us working and the other staying home, there was bound to be an imbalance. And now that we're night-weaning, and nursing doesn't have that kind of powerful sleep magic any longer, the little imbalance that remains doesn't feel at all unfair, and has everything to do with my spending 16 waking hours a day with Ben compared to Andy's eight.

Rosin goes on to posit that this initial inequality leads to others: "[The mother] alone fed the child, so she naturally knows better how to comfort the child, so she is the better judge to pick a school for the child and the better nurse when the child is sick and so on." Talk about hogwash. This kind of gatekeeping is a conscious choice on the parts of both parents, and if you wish to avoid it, you damned well avoid it, and it has fuck-all to do with breastfeeding.

She closes the article by bringing up a suggestion of one of the medical researchers whose studies she's read that perhaps it is not something in the breastmilk, but the physical closeness between mother and child which is responsible for whatever positive outcomes are associated with nursing. And she's right to say that if this is the case, it should be more widely publicized.

I, like many mothers in my generation, have mixed feelings about the debate. I feel for women who try to breastfeed and can't, and are made to feel just awful for their "failure." At the same time, there's still enough cultural squickiness to the idea of putting a baby to suck that without some measure of peer pressure, I think fewer women would make the effort, and I do believe it's an effort worth making. I feel strongly, right or wrong, that I'd have been missing out on a profoundly rewarding part of Ben's infancy if I hadn't nursed him -- and I feel just as strongly that if I'd been unable to, he'd have been just as healthy and every bit as smart on formula.

A quick further thought: I want to make it clear that I'm very much in favor of everybody giving breastfeeding a real go, but I am also vehemently against giving anybody for whom it doesn't work a hard time. I argued against Rosin's characterization of breastfeeding as costing "modesty, independence, career, sanity," and I stand by what I said as a generalization (as Rosin's characterization was), but I'm well aware that individuals do sometimes feel these precise costs -- and others -- and I absolutely support mothers who value their own health and happiness enough to put them squarely on the scale.

Lifeline

2009-03-31T14:59:00.002-04:00

I understand that some mothers have actual humans with whom to compare experiences and off of whom to bounce ideas about parenting. This sounds rustic and earthy and not entirely unlike the sort of I-can-smell-you companionability of our ape cousins as they pick nits off one another's backs in the forest primeval.

No, I have real-life mom friends, and I'd absolutely like more of them, and almost none of them resemble chimpanzees. But the fact is that I have few close friends, of whom very few have kids, and the other mothers I meet in the course of mommish activities don't tend to share many of my experiences or values -- about parenting or the wider world. Combine these sad truths with the fact that we moved from Philadelphia to upstate NY while I was pregnant, and the outcome is pretty lonely.

Or would be, if it weren't for the Interwebs. I could bore you now with a brief history of my participation in online fora from the days when salon dot com was the URL of a hair place, but I won't. Suffice to say, I am a member of two active online communities, and my participation therein, pleasurable and meaningful before I was a parent, has become a kind of lifeline and protective shell surrounding my sanity since.

There are a lot of fora (or forums) out there. Many magazines have some kind of online discussion community, and there are boards for just about every hobby and interest and profession and location, and most of them, if they are active enough, become a place where their participants talk to each other not just about whatever the nominal focus is, but about their lives and other interests. I'm describing this network of networks as if you've never heard of them, and I realize just now that of course most of you are rolling your eyes, and maybe the only one saying "Oh, really?" is my mom.

Anyway. My point is, these communities of people with whom you share interests and values are infuckingvaluable when it comes to hashing out the nitty-gritty of parenting. And if they're not -- if your online communities are not providing you with this kind of rock-solid sounding board -- then you need to find some better communities stat, because they're out there, and life without them is way, way, way harder than it needs to be.

Night Weaning Status Report

2009-03-29T10:20:00.003-04:00

I should have mentioned in my last post that it wasn't just sleep training we were about to attempt; it was also night weaning. Sleep deprivation makes you forget stuff.

So. As his "normal" night nursing schedule was somewhere along the lines of every three to six hours, we'd take the outside of that range and make him go six hours between feeds, or once a night, with the intention of pushing that one feed later each night until it was eliminated.

First night, Thursday. Down at 6:45, slept straight through his usual wake-up-and-nurse between 9:30 and 11:00 and woke at 12:30 (close enough to the six-hour cut-off), diaper change and nursed down, slept until 4:00, woke and fussed and grumbled (with a check-and-snuggle) for half an hour or so, slept until 6:30. Excellent.

Second night, Friday. Down at 6:45. Up at 10:30, resisted all attempts to check and soothe, cried and yelled for an hour and a half, reducing me to a sobbing mess of jangled nerves. I checked on him three times, the last time with a diaper change (all that standing and yelling produced) and a long cuddle in the rocking chair which calmed us both down somewhat, and then we both slept. Until around 3:00, nursed down. Up again around 4:30 and another round of yelling on and off until around 5:30, when he fell asleep again until 8:00. Not what I'd call a good night.

Third night, Saturday. Down at 6:45. Sporadic grumbling cries followed by silence. Up at 5:30, diaper change and nursed down. Up at 6:30, check, back asleep until 7:30. Beyond excellent.

I might get over this sore throat (which Andy now has, too) after all.

Sleepless

2009-03-26T14:41:00.003-04:00

We had a good run of sleep there, what-was-it, last week? The week before? Anyway, there was even a night, the first-ever, in which he slept through from 10:00 until 6:00. That was glorious, un-heard-of, epic.

But now we're back to hell of every-two-hours wake-ups, which isn't quite in contravention of the Geneva Conventions, I don't think, but at nine months is quite unacceptable. I have the lingering threads of a cold, too, which I've been unable to beat wholly for nearly two weeks. Now it's a sore throat which I hope isn't strep. I'm convinced I'd beat it if I could just get some decent sleep. And even when it was fairly good -- not sleeping through good, but maybe two wake-ups per night good -- it still wasn't really all that great, frankly.

So it's back* to sleep training, heaven help us, which probably won't be so bad as I think, but won't be fun, either. This kid is fully capable of yelling on and off for an hour or more, and I know there are folks who think we must be cruel monsters to subject him (or ourselves) to that, but I can only assume that these folks have not gone without longer-than-two-hour stretches of sleep for weeks on end, or without eight full unbroken hours' sleep in almost ten months.

Walk a mile in my shoes, bitches. Or maybe you have, and you're just functionally insane, and think that this state of affairs is simply one of the challenges of parenthood. Which it isn't. Everybody needs to sleep. The crying and yelling sucks, and I wish it didn't have to happen, but the sad fact is that the only way out is through.

*I say "back" because we sleep-trained Ben around four months, wildly successfully: he went from being totally unable to put himself to sleep, having to be nursed and then nursed again when putting him down jostled him just slightly so that he woke up again, and then again, and then again, unable to nap except at the breast; to being able to be put down wide awake and fall asleep on his own pretty much every single time for naps and bedtime. And it happened in less than a week. God bless Dr. Ferber.

ASD

2009-03-25T09:34:00.004-04:00

I think it's fair to say that everybody is freaked out about autism. Diagnoses are way up, and no one knows why (beyond that we're getting a lot better at diagnosing), and though the spectrum is wide and includes a great many highly functional people, and though early diagnosis and therefore early intervention is likely to produce significant improvement in most cases, it's a hell of a scary thing to face.

Nobody has a real diagnosis, but it's my opinion that Andy and a few of his relatives show some distinctly Aspie traits, and since I think autism spectrum disorders are probably genetic (at least, predisposition to them is), I'm more vigilant than I would otherwise be about ASD signs in Ben. So I brought it up when I had him at the pediatrician for his nine-month check-up this week.

The pediatrician said the things to look for (because the absence of them could be a warning sign) are babbling (check), maintaining eye contact (check), playing peek-a-boo (check), and clapping -- at which point, he snapped to attention and started clapping and grinning at her. It's not the clapping itself, apparently, but the interactive, social-feedback-y nature of how we encourage clapping that's relevant to ASD detection.

So the kid's in the clear for now, which is a relief, except that I know that autism can show up late and present as regression in kids who until that point showed no signs. Comforting, right? I do try not to worry about it, which isn't that hard, because I'm not really the worrying kind. And I know that we're intelligent, loving, capable people who'll do our best for him, and our best will be pretty damned good. But it's out there, hovering, like the polio of this generation, and I can't help sometimes shivering in its shadow.

Dada, duh.

2009-03-18T16:10:00.003-04:00

His first consonant was M: "Um," he'd say, "um." I convinced myself it was when he was asking to nurse, and I'm probably not far off, except that he's more or less always asking to nurse, in that he's never been presented with a boob he didn't immediately avail himself of.

Then it was B: "Bob Bob Bob Bob," he'd say, smashing peas, "Bob." Andy has an uncle Bob, but Ben has never met him.

Then D: "Da-da-da-da!" he exclaims, having followed the ball and captured it, "Da!" But his vowel sounds are expanding now, too, and so sometimes we also get an emphatic "Duh!" And there are times I swear he says "Doi" in exactly the tone a teenager might, to express weary frustration with her interlocutor's ignorance.

No one in grocery stores or waiting rooms had anything to say about Bob, but boy do I hear about Da. "They always say Dada first," the crones insist on telling me, in tones of deepest sympathy, "but Mama will come."

"It's not a word," I say, because I'm pigheaded enough to argue the point rather than just nod and smile. "He's just making the sound."

He says it with relish and delight when encountering the dogs ("Da!"), with engaged curiosity when encountering new objects ("Da?"). He greets most people with it, which means that maybe a third of the men we encounter get awkward and sheepish and stammer something about not being his dad. (Doi, dude.) "Don't worry," I say, "He says 'da-da' to bananas and his feet, too."

It was a thoroughly goofy artistic movement, Dada, the sort of thing everybody should think was fabulous in high school and then immediately get over. It doesn't get an "-ism", either (no matter what Wikipedia says), so you can cut that right out (Alex Trebek, I'm looking at you). I haven't thought about Man Ray so often since high school.

"LHOOQ," I tell Ben in lousy French, "It's a pun."

Gentle Touches

2009-03-11T09:45:00.004-04:00

It seems like a big mistake to me to get into a contest of wills with a nine-month-old, so whenever he's doing something I'd really rather he not do, my solution is the redirect. "Hey, look at this thing!" is a remarkably effective answer to pulling books off the lower shelves or grabbing the washcloth that baffles the pee fountain during a diaper change or lunging at a sleeping dog who outweighs him by thirty pounds.

But he's started doing something which I feel merits a "No" with some (eventual) expectation of understanding and self-control. Possibly this is wildly unrealistic.

He grabs the glasses off my face, or smacks me in the face, or grabs my lower lip. He's strong now, and I actually fear for the integrity of the glasses, not to mention my features. It's like he's just discovered there's a face there, despite my being in his tiny grill pretty much 24/7, and he's as excited about grabbing for it as he is about grabbing for, well, pretty much every other thing.

So far, my response has been ... Ok, mostly my response has been "Ow! Dammit!" but I recognize this is unlikely to be effective, especially as he finds it highly entertaining. So I've been saying "No glasses," or "No grabbing faces" in a stern voice and holding on to his little hands, which drives him absolutely bonkers. Then I say "Gentle touches," and guide his hand to do just that. So far, no success whatsoever, but I wasn't really expecting any. Sooner or later the light will dawn, I'm sure, but until then I think it's mostly a strategy about venting my irritation in a potentially constructive direction.

Anyway, I'm hoping it's a phase, like the occasional shrieking, that comes and goes rather than continuing until I've won the contest of wills, which: oy vey.

Bright Copper Kettles and Warm Woollen Mittens

2009-03-04T10:09:00.005-05:00

Some of Ben's favorite toys are not toys. I'm not surprised by that, as toys for babies are largely total failures. Do toy manufacturers never put babies in a room with a box of objects and just watch which ones fascinate?

Some of the objects which have obtained resident status in toy boxes because of sustained interest:

The ex-mobile cards (from the Manhattan Baby Infant Stim-Mobile). I guess you could argue that these were intended as a toy -- sort of. But they're certainly not being used as intended. We cut the little pokey bits off and smoothed the rough edges so they're more or less just round, rigid plastic cards with colorful images on them. He loves to turn them over and over in his hands, gum them, fish them out of boxes. They may be his longest-running consistent favorite.

The remote control. We took the batteries out of the remote from a long-expired dvd player (luckily, Andy is an electronics packrat, so the remote from a dvd player we haven't had for two years was in the bag of remotes, of course). It's smaller than the universal remote he's perpetually lunging for, and no one uses it but him (which I'd have thought would reduce its interest significantly, but doesn't seem to), but oh man, does he love the buttons. It also gets turned over and over and gummed.

Similarly, the old cordless phone, also with its battery removed. Toy phones are a staple of childhood, but kids today have a crummy crop of them, in my opinion. Most people use only cell phones, and have you seen toy cell phones? So lame. We're among those who still have a land line and use a cordless, but I don't think I've ever seen a toy cordless phone. But we did have an old cordless handset lying around (see above re packrat), which has been in Ben's toy box since before he could really even hold it properly. Buttons. Kid loves buttons. I should add that Andy's mom gave him a toy ye-olde phone -- the Fisher Price "chatter" phone we all remember from our childhoods (which is no doubt why they still make them), which Ben also loves. But it bears as little resemblance to the phones he sees us using as one of the cats or a glass of milk, so I don't see it having a lot of imaginative-play value. When he gets around to that, which of course isn't yet.

An empty tea tin. Go figure. It's red and metallic. It's of a slightly awkward size which tends to slip from his fingers and there for need to be chased. I've been thinking of putting a coin inside to make it a rattle, but I'm not 100% confident he can't get the lid off.

Kitchen gadgets, especially large bowls, small pans, measuring spoons, and a mesh strainer. We haven't baby-proofed the kitchen yet, but when we do, I intend to give him access to at least one cabinet which I will stock with as many baby-safe kitchen implements as I can conveniently donate to the cause. I've started looking at the gadget aisles in kitchen stores with new eyes, too, and I recommend them to parents of inquisitive crawlers as a source of relatively inexpensive toys which not only may have more lasting interest than some musical horror, but which may actually have a life after baby as useful household objects.

Cute

2009-02-28T14:26:00.003-05:00

The delights of parenthood are manifold, but one is being told your kid is cute. Other people, I understand, don't necessarily like talking to strangers in the grocery store. I'm gregarious. I like random interactions with my fellow man. And when the interactions are baby-based effusive praise, I'm all over it like a cheap suit.

"Look at those cheeks," they'll say, or, "Oh my goodness, how cute," or "Hello, handsome!" (He is infrequently mistaken for a girl, despite my generally dressing him in gender-neutral rather than explicitly boyish clothes. He has a dark purple cabled sweater, though, which increases his odds of mistaken gender by about 31%.) Sometimes they stop to ask his age and talk to him a little. Unless he's in an unusually gleeful mood, he responds with a level stare until they stick around long enough to pass whatever test he's clearly running, because after a minute or two, he opens up his can of HUGE ADORABLE BABY SMILE. Then I have to peel them off or they'd follow us home.

A couple of the deli guys and one of the check-out girls at the smaller of our two grocerias know him by name now, as does the nice lady at the yarn store and one of the tellers at the bank inside the other grocery. I remember this phenomenon; it was the same when Lola was a puppy and we lived in Powelton Village and walked her around the neighborhood a lot. Babies -- even (or maybe especially) baby dogs -- are the best possible calling cards to introduce you to a community.

It's one of the things I'm cherishing about his babyhood because I know full well it won't last. Before I know it, he'll be three and catastrophically emptying shelves at the grocery and having a tantrum at the yarn store and asking the bank teller if her penis came in yet.

Refugees

2009-02-27T18:11:00.004-05:00

The first time it happened -- at least, the first time I remember it happening -- I was walking from Target back to the car with Ben in my arms. He was heavy enough (this kid got big fast, so he was probably still a newborn) that I could feel the strain in my arms, and a horrible thought arrived unbidden: what would it be like to have to to carry this baby on some kind of forced march? I didn't necessarily have a specific forced march in mind; the image was just vaguely war-torn and desperate, a bit sepia-toned and European, as opposed to vivid and African, for instance.

Then it started happening more often. Practically every time I was out in public with Ben and had to lug him for some uncomfortable distance rather than bang him in the stroller, I'd have the flash of fear and desperation, feeling suddenly, unaccountably, like a refugee. I made a conscious effort not to dwell on these images. They would arrive, I'd do my best to have the feeling and allow myself a moment to reflect: on the weirdness of this recurrent fantasy, on the depth of my new appreciation for what it must be like to suffer big hardships with a baby -- and then let it go.

I also tried, though I wasn't consciously aware of it, I don't think, to steer these fantasies away from their obvious destination. The recurrent thoughts of being a refugee were bad enough; I did not want to start thinking about the Holocaust. But eventually it happened. And what's worse is that we managed to move on, in these awful thoughts, from the forced march to the horrors that succeeded it, which are frankly too upsetting even to name.

I don't know what's bringing this on. I'm not obsessed; I don't have these thoughts even every day. But I do have them, and they are brutal, and I wish I knew why. The silly side of my psyche suggests a scarring former life, but my rational mind doesn't accept that, and my heart doesn't find it a satisfying enough explanation. I have to assume it will eventually stop. In the meantime, I do my best both to keep from dwelling on these thoughts and to honor the memories they represent by not banishing them as entirely foolish, either.

Solids II: Eclectic Goopygoo

2009-02-24T16:31:00.004-05:00

Ben and I were about to take what turned out to be an overly-ambitious road trip (we called it quits after a couple of sleepless nights in Philadelphia), and I didn't want to start more complicated foods until we got back home. So he had nothing but rice cereal mixed with formula for about 10 days. I increased the cereal to formula ratio over that time, testing how solid I could make it and still have it be acceptable to him. He was ok with pretty solid goop pretty quickly.

So, where to go next? I felt kind of at sea about the next step. It seemed sensible to me to start with inherently mushy foods rather than non-mushy foods that would have to be further processed to be acceptable. So the first thing he got was sweet potato, simmered within an inch of its life and then mashed through a sieve. Big hit. Thumbs up for the sweet potato.

Next was avocado, mashed through the sieve raw (of course -- does one ever cook avocado?). Not so much of a hit, avocado. Foods of which he was skeptical were afterwards said to have gotten "avocado face." Then bananas. Then peas.

Around this time, he started really grabbing for the spoon, with which he was surprisingly dextrous for a six-month-old, but still resulted in a lot of mess. I experimented with sweet potatoes: I cooked the bejesus out of them, but didn't strain them. I'd already cut them into small cubes to freeze them (so that I could cook only what I wanted for a given meal), so I just cut the bigger cubes into smaller cubes, and tried giving them to him whole. They were extremely soft, so I didn't think they were a choking hazard, but I did expect him to struggle a little. Nope. It took him some time to get used to the sensation, but he was an immediate fan. I put one cube at a time into his mouth -- no fuss, no muss.

This opened the door to other mushy pieces of fruit and veg. I stopped mashing peas. I introduced granny-cooked green beans, microwaved blueberries, waterlogged broccoli, all in tiny pieces, from my fingers to his lips.

At this point, about a month into solids, he started getting three meals a day. Breakfast was cereal and a fruit, lunch cereal and a veg, and dinner cereal and a fruit and a veg. Each serving of cereal was about a tablespoon dry. Each fruit or veg was maybe a quarter of a cup. Some things I still mashed or stewed and gooed, but anything that could be fed in chunks was fed in chunks. We switched from rice cereal to baby oatmeal, and then to multigrain. He tried peaches, pears, carrots, corn, mangoes, apples. Plain, whole-milk yoghurt. Little strips of whole wheat bread (still a huge favorite -- he squeals when I take the baggie of bread pieces out of the fridge).

Sometime around seven and a half months, he started really lunging for the cups and plates of food I had until that point somewhat successfully kept hidden during mealtimes. He was ready to feed himself, thankyouverymuchMOM. Up to that point, I'd been feeding him in his Lionheart chair (like a Bumbo) on the kitchen counter, sitting directly in front of him. If he was going to start feeding himself, that set-up wasn't going to work.

I hauled a dining room chair into the kitchen and attached his booster seat. I figured I'd still be handing him most of the food, but he'd have small piles on his tray to play with. And heck, we have dogs who'd be delighted to clean up the windfalls. And sure, it took him a while to get the hang of delivering food to his mouth himself, but really, he got pretty damned good pretty damned fast. He already had a raking grasp at that point, and he quickly developed a sort of modified pincer, where he grabs pieces between his thumb and side of his bent index finger. It wasn't a a couple of weeks before I realized I wasn't feeding him at all anymore, except the few things he still got on a spoon (cottage cheese, stewed fruit, yoghurt).

At nearly nine months, he's eating dreary-ohs, zucchini with olive oil and herbs, several kinds of cheese, crackers, chicken, egg yolks, pineapple, oranges. At each meal, he generally gets two kinds of grains, two or three fruits or veg, one or two dairy or proteins, and a sippy cup of water, which he manages very well himself.

Last week, he and I ate lunch out with friends at an Indian restaurant, and he tried tandoori chicken and naan. Big smile for the tandoor.

Still no dice on avocado, though.

(Edit: I should have made it clear that he's been breastfeeding enthusiastically throughout.)

Solids: Part I

2009-02-24T09:05:00.005-05:00

As I've said before, I really do believe that Ben would've been a good eater unless we seriously screwed up, and I can't take responsibility for doing anything particularly right -- just nothing particularly wrong. But since he is such an enthusiastic eater, and this is an area of success, it seems like I might be holding useful information that it's silly not to share. So.

The pediatrician gave me the green-light to start solids after his four-month check-up, which seemed nutso early to me, and against conventional wisdom. I took it as a green-light to start reading about how people approach introducing solids. My friend J. recommended Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense by Ellyn Satter, and her method and message resonated with me. Basically, she says the most important thing is to pay attention to your child and let him lead -- don't force anything, and don't hurry him, and try to make eating a pleasurable experience for everybody.

I knew I wanted to avoid jar baby food. Not that it's some kind of horrible poison, but I'm home and have the time, and it seemed sensible to give him as many whole foods as I was able. But apart from a general consensus about introducing foods well-strained and one at a time, I found very little agreement among experts about which particular foods to start when. Even the conventional wisdom about delaying the introduction of potential allergens turned out not to be supported by the research, according to two review papers another friend sent me (ESPGHAN Committee in Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition: "Complementary Feeding," and Greer et al. in Pediatrics: "Effects of Early Nutritional Interventions on the Development of Atopic Disease in Infants and Children") -- which doesn't, it should be noted, mean that the research disproved the theory, but that it didn't support the theory.

Many of the parents I know resisted the notion of beginning with rice cereal, possibly because it seems so awfully unappetizing, and apart from the iron, isn't terrifically nutritious, either. The iron is important, though. Babies start to get iron-deficiency anemia around six months, and they need to get iron from solids (or from iron-fortified formula), and fortified baby cereal is a good source. Plus, it's not like babies have refined palates. Starting with something wicked bland made sense to me, so that's what we did.

At around five months, I decided to give it a go. I mixed baby rice cereal with some formula we still had around, and presented the kid with a nice, thin gruel. I expected resistance, and I was ready to back the hell off immediately and try again in another few weeks. Instead his eyes lit up, and he polished off the tiny portion I'd made and shrieked for more.

The Third Man

2009-02-23T14:12:00.002-05:00

I'm looking for a nanny slash sitter to come in once a week for a few hours and spell me, and to be on tap for the odd evening out to the movies.

If we still lived in Philadelphia, I doubt I'd be looking to hire someone. I have enough friends there with odd work schedules and big baby love that if I needed someone to watch the kid for a couple of hours so I could go to the dentist or get a haircut or just go and have coffee alone and read an entire article in The Atlantic Monthly like a grown-up, I think I could always rustle up that kind of help among people Ben was already familiar with. But we don't really know anyone here. Not like that. Not known-you-for-fifteen-years-and-you-owe-me-cause-of-that-time type folks. Which blows, I have to say.

I know other mothers of youngsters here, and though at least one uses professional (rather than family/neighbor/friend) in-home childcare, I didn't ask them for recommendations or references. It's not that I don't trust their judgment -- it's that on this particular subject, I don't really trust anyone's but my own.

I read a book recently which was given to me by friend C. and which I recommend: Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (and Parents Sane) by Gavin De Becker. It's not the sort of thing I'd probably have picked up if C. hadn't given it to me, because I resist all material aimed at parents that appears to ramp up paranoia and make every safety molehill into a mountain. But I read this book, and I'm glad I did, because I actually found it very sensible and empowering. His basic thesis is that you should trust your instincts about people who creep you out, because your lizard brain is much better at making those kinds of judgments than your rational brain, which tends to talk you out of those creeped-out feelings.

Anyway, one of the chapters is devoted to picking childcare providers, and one of the things he says that really resonated with me is that you shouldn't trust other people's recommendations because they have too much invested in believing that the people who care for their children are above reproach, even when -- or especially when -- they're not. He says to do your own research, ask your own questions (he provides several very smart ones), and do your own follow-up.

So I advertised on craigslist, and am currently sorting through responses and making appointments for interviews. With luck, by this time next week, there will be a third adult in Ben's life on a regular basis, one we all like and trust.

Screw Socks and Shoes

2009-02-22T18:49:00.004-05:00

Baby shoes are cute. I mean, all baby stuff is little, but shoes look like real-people shoes only wee, and somehow that means that baby shoes are, like, the cutest baby things of all. But they're a total waste of time. Socks, too.

Ok, maybe you have one of those babies who keeps very still and doesn't beat her feet against whatever her feet happen to be near, and so maybe your baby's socks and shoes stay on. Mine never did. And since Ben was a newborn in summer, it didn't matter, anyway. There is no earthly reason to put anything on a baby's feet except to keep them warm.

I had lots of socks and shoes, though. People buying baby presents love to buy socks and shoes. (Did I mention the cuteness?) And I loved getting them. Wee moccasins! Wee faux sneakers! Wee socks that look like wee sneakers! And I tried each and every pair, all of which either couldn't even be crammed onto his feet in the first place or fell off almost immediately.

Except the sock-mock, favored by all of Ben's household gods. Hanna Andersson makes them. Circo made wicked cute stripey ones last fall, but I haven't seen them since. I came across some other brand at a kids' boutique in Albany, but I can't remember the name.

He's gone all through the winter with nothing on his feet at home, and socko-mockos everywhere else. And people often exclaim over the cuteness of them -- and they are cute, the stripey ones especially, but the kelly green Hanna ones ain't too shabby -- and I always wonder at their never having seen them before. What do other people put on their babies' feet, when nothing else worked even a little for my kid?

Hello, Receptive Language!

2009-02-16T10:44:00.002-05:00

I'd like to say I was on the look-out for it, checking carefully at least every week, but really I just happened to notice, and he's probably been doing it for ages. I say, "Where's Lola?" and he looks right at her. (Lola is one of our two dogs.) Where's Dad? Where's Hugo? (the other dog) Where's Mom? He knows. He looks right at us, every time.

Language acquisition is an unbelievably huge accomplishment. It knocks me out that he's busily learning -- not just all the names of all the things, but the largely arbitrary and unutterably complicated structure on which we hang all those names, grammar. And it's not like he's taking a sabbatical from his immersion classes in Fine and Gross Motor Skills. No wonder he's so sleepy and crabby -- baby work is hard.

It's just the first wee step, this clear sign that he knows the names of his most important people. But suddenly I'm so much more aware that there's someone listening when I talk. I haven't stopped cursing or anything like that, but I am consciously trying to pepper my conversation with lots of names and labels and plenty of pointing.

Where's the spoon? Where's the car? Where's the sky?

Inside Dog Jail

2009-02-09T08:21:00.004-05:00

Before Ben was even sitting up on his own, one of my biggest worries about a future milestone was how we were going to deal with the keeping the dogs out of his business while he was learning to crawl. The dogs, Hugo especially, are big Ben fans, and tended to, whenever opportunity presented itself, kiss him pretty much unceasingly. Luckily, Ben mostly didn't object to this, and as unsqueamish people and proponents of pets beefing up babies' immune systems, we didn't object, either.

But that was when Ben was mostly in our arms, able to be instantly swooped away from overwhelming dog interference at the first sign of his discomfort. I didn't want to jail the baby, so I figured we'd be facing months of jailing the dogs -- in the kitchen, behind gates, banished and unhappy, looking on and unable to participate.

What happened instead was this. We got a big plastic hinged gate and set it up in a play-pen shape with Ben's playmat and rugs for cushion, and lots of baby toys. The dogs would sit and gaze longingly at him, so that we got to calling inside the gate "outside dog jail" -- "dog jail" being, of course, the whole rest of the house. When the boy was first sitting up, he did some sitting in there, and a good bit of falling over. But he moved quickly from first being able to sit to being able to sit quite firmly and reliably, so that I wasn't as concerned that random canine incursions would knock him over and frighten him. So he started doing a lot of sitting inside dog jail, too (thus transforming it, of course, into something other than dog jail), and once that started, I came to learn through experience that while the dogs, especially Hugo, were eager to get up in his grill, they also love a lap on the sofa, and they'll mostly leave him alone so long as I'm willing to provide them with a warm body to curl up next to.

Now Ben is crawling and pulling up on furniture and even beginning to cruise, and contrary to my worries, the dogs didn't get in the way of his attaining these skills at all. But now that he's mobile, he's beginning to get into their business, up in their grills, and that's a whole new set of challenges and concerns.

The point of all of this is that it illustrates something I'm coming to understand about parenting. What you see as a challenge from the starting line tends to turn out not to be nearly so challenging, in part because once you've identified it, you've already started to solve it; and no sooner is the finish line in sight but you see that it's really the start of a whole new race.

Dear Readers

2009-02-01T08:51:00.003-05:00

I love Site Meter. I doubt you'll find my visitor data nearly so fascinating as I do, but I want to share some of it anyway.

Most of you are in the northeast US, which makes sense, because many of you are my real-life friends and family, and that's where I've always lived. But I have regular readers in Tennessee, Louisiana, California, Canada, Australia, the UK, and Slovakia, too. About a fifth of you have ISPs who don't share location data with Site Meter -- you could be anywhere, people of mystery!

The vast majority of you first arrived here having followed links from TPW, ISL (a private forum), or Facebook. A very small minority came from a Google search. Another small minority came from links in emails. And a growing number of you now arrive from "unknown," which I gather means either that your ISP is cagey or you've bookmarked me.

I get an average of nine visits per day, and the average visit lasts two minutes and 28 seconds. A significant number of visits show up as having lasted zero seconds, though, which I imagine is some kind of data glitch, so I'm guessing the real average is a bit longer. I've had 779 visits since the site went live in October.

Some of you leave via links, mostly to blogs on my "Mommish" list, which is great, because I love them all, and I'm delighted to provide them with traffic. Phantom Scribbler recently added me to her blogroll, for which I'm grateful -- I look forward to seeing folks arrive from there. If there are other parenting blogs you read and love, consider leaving a comment to recommend them.

Many of you I know I know (Hi, Carrie! Hi, Emily! Hi, Mom!). Some of you I believe I know (Hi, Diva! Hi, Zia! Right?). Most of you are question marks about whom I might make educated guesses, but really have no idea (Who's my faithful reader in Yorklyn, Delaware?). But I'm happy to see each and every one of you. Thanks for reading!

Credit

2009-01-28T11:15:00.004-05:00

I had friends with toddlers over the other day, and the visit happened to coincide with Ben's usual lunchtime, so I hauled his be-boostered chair from the kitchen into the living room and proceeded with his parade of solids: dreary-ohs (generic organic oat circles), small strips of whole wheat bread, spoon-fed full-fat cottage cheese, quick-microwaved green peas, and spoon-fed stewed-fruit mush (usually apple, pear, and blueberry). For Ben, this is kind of a light lunch. Generally I'd throw another veg in there, like greenie beanies or little cubes of sweet potato or broccoli florets. And maybe a cracker. And some yoghurt.

Anyway, the moms were impressed with the quantity and variety of his lunch foods, and his ability to get so much of it into his mouth himself. And because eating, like sleeping, is one of those parenting minefields, I was feeling pretty proud of myself for managing it so well and creating out of whole cloth this wonderful, enthusiastic eater.

Yeah, except if I took credit for how he eats, I'd have to take credit for how he sleeps. No, thanks.

Clothes that Don't Suck

2009-01-25T17:59:00.001-05:00

Boys are harder to name and harder to clothe, and it's for the same reason: smaller groups from which to choose and less variation within the group. But I like a challenge.

Here's what I don't like:

1. Appliqués. I'm sure, in theory, there are cute ones. But I have yet to see one. Mostly they're just horrible, and scratchy on the inside to boot.

2. Sports themes, with two exceptions (Chicago Bears and Philadelphia Eagles licensed merch). Trucks and construction themes are moderately less irritating. I object on general principles to the neurotic desire to mark infants with gender identifiers, and I object more specifically to assigning sports, transportation, and tinkering to boys (long before they could possibly develop these interests), but really I mostly object because these garments are wicked ugs.

3. Mottoes that reference mommy, daddy, bodily functions, or irritating behavior for which an infant can't be held responsible. Especially icky are the ones that proclaim a parent's beauty or prowess.

4. Mottoes or themes that suggest strongly that parents are far too cool to be parents. It's the middle-aged hipster version of "I got my looks from Mommy," and it reads just as sad.

5. Over-embellishment. Look at the adult clothing departments of any store, and at least a third of what you see will be solid color basics. Now try to find anything solid-colored in the baby department. Try to find just stripes, or just a print. Good luck.

So it's clear what I do like: plain, simple, comfortable, well-constructed clothes in good colors that don't have anything to prove. Cotton knits with plenty of room to move. Bonus if they're made with turn-back cuffs that give you some extra grow room. Bonus if they don't cost an arm and a leg.

Here's where I've found them:

1. Old Navy. Guilty of ugliness and dumb mottoes, but they're also pretty good at providing some solid-color basics. And for cheap (especially on sale, and there's always a sale) stuff, it holds up pretty well, too.

2. Hanna Andersson. Arm and a leg, fo reals. But their sales are worth waiting for. I'm a huge fan of the wiggle pant, and the Swedish moccasins are one of two things I can put on Ben's feet that stay on. And, good grief, is anything in the world cuter than their jackets?

3. H&M. (They don't have online shopping, the freaks.) The more I try other brands, the more impressed I am by the quality of cheap-as-dirt stuff from H&M. It's the only place I know I can reliably find solid-color onesies and wicked cute stripey t-shirts in excellent colors. That wear like iron.

4. Lands End. (I refuse to play ball with their weirdly-placed apostrophe. Just how many lands are they at the end of, exactly?) Ben has a cabled sweater and a lightweight fleece "sweater" that he's almost always wearing, and they've worn well through dozens of washes and show every sign of making it all the way from fall to spring with a fast-growing kid.

5. Target. Their house brand, Circo, is decent, good-looking stuff at rock-bottom prices. I adored their cotton-knit footie pyjamas, ($5.99! and snaps, not a zipper!) which only go up to 9 mo size, more's the pity.

6. Zutano. (Which I used to get at Bugs & Blossoms, but they've sadly gone out of business.) They're not cheap, and they can be a bit hit-or-miss, and the sizing is kind of random: Ben is currently wearing 6-12 mo in tops and jackets, 12-18 mo in pants, and 18-24 mo in overalls. But for cute all-over prints and fabulous baby fleece, you can't beat 'em.

7. Kate Quinn Organics. I've already blogged my love, and my love is true and unfading.

Drudgery: Not So Much

2009-01-22T08:19:00.002-05:00

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's all delight, but there's very little drudgery these days. So little that I regret my choice of title -- I feel basically happy as a parent, and it bothers me a bit that the name of my blog suggests otherwise.

What drudgery there is comes more from being the at-home adult than from being a parent. It's dishes and laundry and vacuuming. And, to be fair, Andy as the working adult does a great deal of household drudgery, too -- it's not like he comes home from work and puts his feet up and demands bourbon and steak.

The delights lately are mostly about watching Ben develop skills. He's such a little dynamo of development, I feel sometimes like I'm watching him in time-lapse photography. My job is to strike the right balance of helping: helping enough, but not helping so much that my help prevents his work. And so sometimes my job is just to sit on the sofa and knit or read while he does his baby work on the floor, picking up toys one by one and examining them, testing their limits, or practicing getting from his hands and knees to hands and feet. He looks up at me every once in a while and we trade big grins -- we're both very pleased at his progress. And I love that doing my parenting work now involves entertaining myself, too.

He's also just a lot of fun to be around. He's gone from being a very fussy little baby to being a generally happy big baby. He grins and giggles and babbles and flirts and is just generally a joyful little person. I have to be in a very foul mood indeed for his delight in life not to rub off on me.

Which is not to say that we don't have rough patches. He's teething, and that means sometimes the very foul mood is his, and he refuses to nap and gets colossally cranky or has no patience and cries every ten minutes no matter where I put him or what I do. And these bad patches are made worse by the rotten weather we've been having, because generally, no matter how crappy a mood we're in, getting out into the fresh air of the park or even into the car to run some invented errands restores both our attitudes. But that doesn't work when we're getting ten inches of snow.

And sleep remains a recurrent source of discomfort and worry. We did a bit of a sleep-training refresher course a couple weeks ago, and though it was tough for a couple of nights, I think it made a significant improvement. A small outcropping of the sleep issue is the sad briefness of his naps. It's not a problem in terms of his getting the right amount of rest -- it's just that I would really enjoy having more than thirty or forty minutes twice a day to myself, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

But really, big picture: this is fun. I enjoy parenting, and feel generally competent. The delight far, far, far outweighs the drudgery.

Jinx

2009-01-21T21:59:00.002-05:00

Andy, for all his resistance to woo-woo crap and embrace of left-brain rationalism, is a big believer in the jinx. Me, not so much. Any kind of luck that needs to be maintained by keeping mum is not the kind of luck I'm ever going to have as a bosom buddy.

But about the kid's sleep, I can't help it. If he sleeps through one of his two usual overnight feedings, I hesitate even to mention it to Andy, lest I wake the Jinx Powers from their own light slumber. I write blog entries when he's sleeping poorly, mention my distress on forums, but when things are going well, OH GOD SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

When he still slept in the bassinet in our room (and I use the term "slept" very loosely), just the tiny click of my putting my glasses down on my bedside table would sometimes wake him. I was convinced it was a kind of jinx. I wasn't really attempting to sleep unless I took my glasses off. If my glasses were on, why, I was in a state of catlike readiness, and wouldn't be at all bothered if the baby started wailing again and required another forty minutes of nursing. It probably wasn't even the sound -- it was probably a coincidence, two nights in a row when he happened to wake within ten seconds of my setting the glasses down.

And yet here I am, nearly four months after moving the boy into his own room, as much time in his own room as in ours now, and I can't help but put my glasses down gingerly, wincing if they happen to click.

The Crap vs the Heirloomery

2009-01-16T08:30:00.004-05:00

A silver porringer. A silver cup. A bright yellow sweater. Velour overalls. These are relics of my own babyhood that have an active place in Ben's.

I fed him baby cereal from the porringer at every meal for a while there, until the charm faded a bit when his menu expanded and created even more dishes and I didn't feel like hand-washing the bowl three times a day. The silver cup is in the box of toys next to his green chair in the kitchen. It gets pulled out and handled and chewed on many times every day. Every so often I put a splash of water in it and hold it to his lips, tip it back, and see what happens. When he's ready to use a cup, it will be his first.

The sweater is getting lots of use lately in the wicked cold snap we're having. My mother made it for me. I'm doing some knitting myself now for Ben, and I tend towards chunky yarn and big needles for fast knitting, but Mom's project was way more ambitious: it's minutely knit of fine wool, but sturdy, and it's held up marvelously and is as useful an object as it is nostalgic and charming. The overalls, too. Mom ordered them from Switzerland, which, back in the 70s with no Internet (and did they even have phones?), what a project! They're great stretchy, soft, super-sturdy little numbers, though, and they, too, are employed for use as much as memory.

There are some other objects, though, of which I've also taken custody, that don't translate into use. There's the fine cotton bib with delicate embroidery, which I'm sure I'd have to hand-wash, and which might not stand up to it. This is a relic of Mom's babyhood which was pressed into service again for mine. There's the little silver chain with two clips shaped like duckies; one is supposed to clip a washcloth and use it as a bib, and back in the days before Velcro, I'm sure it represented a convenience. Now it seems fiddly and precious and time-wasting.

There are things from Ben's babyhood I'll pack away, hoping he or a subsequent kid will someday provide me with grandchildren and want to use. The silver cup and porringer, certainly, and the clothes, providing they make it through my kids' use. Sweaters I'll knit myself, and well made baby clothes I've come to love. Maybe one or two of the nicer wood baby toys, to which I've grown unaccountably attached. But none of the useful objects of babyrearing: not the spoons or bowls or cups, not the bibs, not the chairs (though I'm thisclose to buying the kid a Svan). So many of these things of daily use are well made for their purposes, which means easy to sponge off or machine wash, or thoroughly disposable, and therefore in no way candidates for heirloomery. Which is fine. I'm enough of a packrat without falling in love with every bit of baby gear. And if I'm tempted to bewail our culture's sad tendency towards the plastic, the crappy, the disposable, I just think about the entire day every week my grandmothers had to devote to nothing but washing clothes, and how much cleaning a baby created back before all these crappy but convenient products, and I thank my lucky stars.

177

2009-01-13T10:36:00.000-05:00

I've never been fashionably svelte, but I've never crossed the line into overweight, either. I'm tall (5'8"), so I can carry a bit of pudge without really looking like it, and I have broad hips and shoulders, so even at my skinniest, I never look thin. I think the thinnest I ever was was in my early twenties when I fell in love for the first time and stopped eating and found that suddenly I was a size 8 and 125 lbs. Through my twenties, I generally weighed between 130 and 140, size ten. After hitting 30 and settling down, I hovered around 150, size 12.

I quit smoking right before getting pregnant, so I went from about 150 to about 160 just as I started to pack on the pregnancy pounds. I wasn't concerned about it -- I was far too happy to have quit successfully to give myself a hard time about ten pounds. I put on a little more weight while pregnant than doctors generally advise. I think by the time Ben was born, I was up to around 190. Maybe it was more. I stopped looking at the scale, because: why?

I lost 15 lbs licketty-quick: 8 lbs 14 oz of Ben, plus placenta and fluids. Wow, did I ever feel thin!

And I knew that it could go either way with breastfeeding, that women either lost a bunch of baby weight while nursing (and then had to be careful about putting it back on when they weaned), or else they hung on to the baby weight while breastfeeding and only began losing after they weaned. I rather blithely assumed I would be in the former group, but it turns out I'm in the latter.

Towards the end of summer, when I had regained the energy and stamina to take Ben on long walks in the park every day, sometimes a couple of times a day (he found it soothing, and I enjoyed the lull in the screaming), I started to lose some weight, and celebrated this wonderful miracle with the purchase of some non-elastic-waist pants. Alas, soon after that, the crappy weather set in, and, hurray, Ben calmed down significantly, but it meant I wasn't motivated to take him for walks, and I put the pounds back on and glared at the pants now mocking me from the depths of my own closet.

Still, I was nursing, and not really the dieting type anyway. I bought some more elastic waist pants and gave myself a break.

But we're seven and a half months out now, and break time is over. I was at the doctor's office yesterday, and I looked at the scale: 177 lbs. Before you think to scold me that nursing mothers shouldn't diet, take heart: I am in no way the sort of person to deny myself to the extent that it could possibly hurt Ben. I am no crash dieter. But it's time to make a real effort at exercise and pay much closer attention to how much and what I'm eating.

To which I say a resounding PHOOEY. Wish me luck.

Fluffy Fingers

2008-12-26T10:55:00.003-05:00

The only thing more fun than making the kid laugh is discovering a new way to make the kid laugh. My latest find is nibbling on his fingers. It has to be with bare teeth -- lips or lips over teeth are not nearly so hilarious, apparently. And part of the fun for him seems to be his ability to control the action: he presents the fingers and gets to yank them away once they've been bitten. Uproarious.

Some other things that make him grin, giggle, or squeal:

1. Pinching his fat little thighs. Fingers and thumbs have to be on opposite sides of the femur, but at almost any location so long as they oppose.

2. Saying "peas" while drawing out the long e.

3. Making a noise like a suction cup being pulled off.

4. Rib and belly tickling, especially with long, anticipatory wiggly finger swoop-in. Referred to in our house as fluffy fingers.

5. Classic for a reason: This Little Piggy.

Trimming the Tree

2008-12-22T10:45:00.005-05:00

What with the ice storm blackout last weekend and my general inclination to procrastinate, we didn't get the tree up until yesterday. We were being thoroughly buried under snow (Friday night and Saturday delivered about 18 inches, and then Sunday brought nearly a foot more), so Andy was out shoveling the driveway most of the afternoon while I unwrapped ornaments and hung them, with Ben overseeing from his throne on the dining room table.

Trimming the tree is always a little emotional for me -- at least for the last few years, since we've owned a house and had a tree and Christmas there, rather than doing all that at my mom's, and especially since Mom transferred custody of the family ornament collection to me. There's a lot of history in those ornaments, a lot of joy, and a lot of loss.

There are the ones that have always been my favorites: the blue horse and yellow elephant, vaguely North African in design; the plastic whirlygig that used to turn if you placed it over a bulb but no longer does because bulbs don't burn as hot as they used to; the disco ball. These are not the prettiest ornaments, and they wouldn't be my favorites now, but they were my favorites as a child, and so they still take pride of place.

There are the oblong painted mirrors from my grandmother's childhood. Victims of a basement flood the first year my mom and I lived in our new house after my dad died, these have had their painting mussed and mostly ruined, but they are far too precious to abandon for mere lack of design integrity. My grandmother was always surprised to see them when she came for Christmas; we never treasured the things she thought we would, or should. That we made a fuss over these things which must have been cheapo trinkets in their day mystified her. A pill to the very end, she died this summer at 96, my last surviving grandparent, the only great-grandparent Ben got to meet.

There are the doves. My parents the atheists, the peaceniks, had lifelike doves for the top of the tree. There were three of them, and they were refugees from a store they owned that went belly-up rather disastrously. Their store Christmas decoration was flocks of these doves hung at different altitudes from the ceiling. I don't know what happened to the three -- my guess is one dog or another -- but I bought some myself last year.

There are the velvet ovals with gold cord that I know came from the first Christmas of my parents' marriage. I imagine them young -- younger than I am now -- starting their lives together in New York City in 1968 in a four-floor walk-up. It's been longer now since my dad died than the length of their marriage, much longer.

There's the plain glass ball that my mother painted, painstakingly, with watercolor scenes of the house we lived in when I was a small child: the deck from outside, covered with snow; the fireplace with the Christmas tree beside it. It's another flood victim; the scenes are clearer in my memory than on the ornament.

There's the dalmatian and the bear, ornaments I bought Mom years ago, meant to represent our two dogs at the time, now long dead.

There are the nested crystal bells, three and five, that were my dad's favorite ornaments. He liked to supervise the trimming of the tree. Mom and I would unwrap, exclaim over new-remembered trinkets, and Dad would look up occasionally from his book, from the depths of his massive leather chair, and point to empty spots on the tree. He liked the Christmas albums with lots of brass. I liked the Muppets. I've come around to his preference, and I was listening to the Philadelphia Brass Ensemble -- we had it on vinyl back in the day -- on the iPod yesterday.

I don't think about him often. He's been dead since I was twelve. But this first Christmas of Ben's, trimming the tree, I thought about him a lot. I thought about how much he -- raised Jewish -- loved Christmas: the music, the tree, going to all the recitals, picking pretty things for Mom from the Metropolitan Museum store. I thought about how delighted he'd have been with his grandson, and how unfair it is that Ben is missing one of the people who would have been most in love with him.

And, for good measure, how unfair for Mom, and for me.

Physical Pleasure

2008-12-16T20:47:00.003-05:00

One of the zillion or so things that would never have occurred to me about parenthood before I became a parent is how much physical pleasure my kid affords. I love squeezing his fat thighs and blowing raspberries on his belly. I love kissing and inhaling his sweet baby neck. I love the weight of him on my hip (for a while, anyway). I love the snuggly embrace of nursing him. I love the way his cheek smooshes with a smooch. I think my favorite is when I nurse him late at night and he falls asleep, and I rearrange him so that his head and elbows flop on my shoulder, and he weighs half again as much limp with sleep, and his cheek is warm from nursing, and he breathes close to my ear, and I feel half drunk with the pleasure of being close to him.

It used to drive me nuts when he was a newborn and people would tell me to cherish this time because it's all downhill from here. And I know full well it's not all downhill from here (I really look forward to, say, being able to converse with him), but I am consciously cherishing this physical closeness. He won't always be such a convenient armful. He won't always let me this close for as long as I want, as often as I want. There's a big part of this intimate physicality that can't but be fleeting -- it would be incredibly creepy if it weren't.

The fact is that we don't really share pleasurable physicality with other people apart from sexual partners. I guess people who play certain sports do. I can't really think of other occasions for adults to be appropriately, non-sexually physical with one another, though, except for hugging -- and hugging, nice as it can be, just doesn't hold a candle to snoozling a sleepy six-month-old. I'm sure there are cultures in which some kind of collegial physical pleasure is common, and the lack of it suddenly seems like a sad emptiness in ours.

Toys in Babeland

2008-12-11T08:21:00.003-05:00

"Playing" with toys at Ben's age (six months) is still largely a matter of his acquiring a target and working to bring said target to his mouth and gum it, with maybe a little passing the object from hand to hand and examining it a little. But some objects are clearly preferable to others -- these are the ones he will retrieve from the box most often.

1. Ikea nesting/stacking cups. He doesn't stack or nest them, but the cups themselves are of great interest. At $2.49, without question the best value of any toy so far.

2. Ikea stacking rings. Again, he doesn't stack them, but the discs themselves are favorites for handling and gumming.

3. Measuring cups and spoons. I took them off the rings they came on (which looked like they might pinch little fingers or lips) and put them onto those ubiquitous plastic links, so he can work at separating a spoon from its cousins.

4. Baby cups. The dented sterling baby cup that was mine and a plastic one with two handles. Good for gumming, bashing, and throwing, especially the silver one, which makes a much better noise.

5. This thing (Haba Pipapo) and another precious European wooden toy from Oompa that I can't find now -- it's a rattle shaped more or less like a lean mushroom, with a natural stem and a red cap, and four different colored beads on top and bells inside. It's such a hit that we keep it on the changing table to occupy him.

6. Classic for a reason: baby keys.

Honorable Mention: Dad's favorite toy is the Skwish by Manhattan Baby.

Extra credit: How many of these toys have been replaced because Hugo has eaten them?

Phase vs Pattern

2008-12-06T16:20:00.004-05:00

Ben's been having another bout of bad sleeping. He goes down fine -- like a ton of bricks, actually -- at his normal bedtime, and generally sleeps soundly or resettles himself easily until around 10:00, bedtime for the rest of the household. Then I nurse him again and either he falls asleep while nursing or I put him down drowsy, and, again, he has no trouble getting to sleep. But he's up again an hour or two hours later and repeats the hour- or two-hour-interval wake-ups for the rest of the night most nights.

The last time he went through a bout of this, about a month ago, we tried to Ferber through it, leaving him to cry for increasing intervals to remind him how to settle himself. In theory, anyway. In practice, he just wound himself up into hysteria, and even if he wore himself out and fell asleep for a while, he'd be up again in no time, hysterical again. This time, we decided to treat it as a phase and not a pattern, and comfort him through it with nursing instead of teach him through it with Ferbering. It feels like the right thing to do. My suspicion is that what's behind the sleep troubles is his working overtime on sitting up and crawling.

This phase vs pattern debate is a great way to make yourself feel like a shitty parent. If it's a phase and you make the kid suffer to learn something irrelevant, you're a big jerk. If it's a pattern and you coddle the kid into an unhealthy habit, you're a big jerk. And you can't possibly know until the damage is done. Enjoy!

Whisper Connect, We Hardly Knew Ye

2008-12-03T11:39:00.005-05:00

I can't remember why I picked this particular baby monitor for the shower registry. Probably my friend S. had recommended it in her long, annotated baby gear list (inherited from a friend of hers). It wouldn't have occurred to me then, or even until this week, that there was much difference between baby monitors, or which features would matter to me.

Until I dropped the receiver until last week, and it stopped working.

It was an Evenflo WhisperConnect Two-Way 900MHz. Not Sensa. Not Pro. And they don't make it anymore. And nothing else has all the features I came to require. Oh, why didn't I cherish this monitor? Why didn't I protect it and keep it safe in all its specialness? I was wrong, so wrong.

It had great sound quality. Sure, it got staticky sometimes, but don't we all? But you could hear everything in Ben's room with perfect clarity: the softest little pre-waking whimper, the mylar crinkling in one of his crib toys, the ping of the steam heat in the pipes. Several other monitor models boast that they filter all non-voice noise. Why would you want that? I want to hear if he's rolling around or playing with toys.

It had a rechargeable battery. And, ok, the sound was crappier when the receiver was plugged in, but leaving it on for hours on end was just an inconvenience and didn't require three new triple-As every time.

It had a dozen or so lights, not the five that seem to be standard, which, combined with its senitivity, meant that with the volume turned way down (when we're watching tv, for instance), the slightest peep registered a light or two, and grabbed out attention. The replacement monitor's first light only hits with a pretty solid cry.

It only had two channels, but that was plenty. More channels just means more confusion if you accidentally hit the channel button while the kid is sleeping. It had a walkie-talkie function, which we almost never used, but I bet Ben would have enjoyed playing with it in a couple of years.

I can't begin to understand why Evenflo would have changed the design of this monitor, given its Amazon ratings, which were head and shoulders above all others at a comparable price. They added some stupid pet motion detector ("Sensa"), and the ratings for the new model are significantly lower.

I've been shopping (online) for a better replacement for a couple of days now, and my success has been such that I'm now considering finding an electronics repair shop -- if they exist anymore, that is -- and paying someone the cost of a replacement to fix it.

And then I'll take ever such good care of it! I'll never drop it again! I promise!

Edited to Add: "Two-Way." Key descriptive title phrase I left out. And the difference is apparently more than just whether or not it has the walkie-talkie function. The two-way monitor got significantly better reviews than the same model without two-way -- which probably means it wasn't the same model at all.

Me or Your Lying Eyes

2008-11-25T19:13:00.005-05:00

I was raised Santa-free. Obviously I therefore have no basis for comparison, but Christmas sure seemed plenty magical, and I never had to get over the weirdness of discovering I'd been pointlessly duped by my parents. I did have to protect the innocence of the duped children, though, a duty I honored by total neglect. I told everybody. The ones who were only holding on in creepy obligation to parents wrapped up in the myth believed me. The ones who really believed thought I was nuts.

Anyway, I don't get it at all, which is to say I think nasty thoughts about parents who force their kids to believe in Santa. Parents and grandparents seem to derive some kind of sick glee from the deception. They always say it's about creating magic and wonder, but do they invent other jolly home invaders and insist maniacally on their existence? Generally no. I think kids would be a lot better served if the adults in their lives put some of that effort and enthusiasm into fostering delight in actual wonders -- in which this universe, thank God, abounds -- rather than lock-stepping along with this same hokey tale.

We all ask our kids to take our word for it that some things are not what they seem. Sometimes it's because our vision is simply wider: the stars are not little lights; they're huge suns far away. Sometimes it's because there are things in which we feel strongly they ought to believe: God, justice, the fundamental superiority of the Philadelphia Eagles to the Dallas Cowboys. But when you ask a child to believe you and not his lying eyes, you'd better have a damned good reason for it. You'd better believe it yourself, or no matter how cute, how precious, how magical the myth is that you ask that kid to accept, one day he's going to understand that you deceived him and feel like a fool for believing you. And then you're just an asshole.

(Edited to clarify meaning. Also to note that Andy Photoshopped the t-shirt -- it really reads "If Mommy Says No, Ask Santa.")

Cartography: Never Stop at Once

2008-11-23T16:57:00.004-05:00

We'd been in sort of a limbo, cart-wise. The kid used to stay in his baby bucket, which would be snapped out of the carseat base and clicked onto the metal seat-back of the grocery cart (trust me, it works great) to be wheeled around Target or the grocery. But then he outgrew the bucket (actually the weight of him + bucket just got to be too much for my wrists) and we switched it for the Britax giganto carseat which does not snap out because it weighs four million pounds and is the size of a Volkswagen. So then he had to be carried, put in the Ergo, or strollered -- none of which work terribly well for Target and the grocery, especially when the adult is flying solo.

But then he started sitting up, and we thought, "Woo-hoo! He can sit up in the grocery cart like a little kid!" Except he hated it and made his feelings known in no uncertain terms (the terms in question being sustained screaming). Until today, when suddenly the cart was A-OK. He sat up, looked around, chewed on the cart a little (T-minus a cold's incubation period ... ), and was perfectly content to be wheeled around in state as befits an adorable despot.

Which just goes to show: never stop at once. The first time for everything almost always goes badly. Hell, the second and third time probably goes badly. But at some point, without warning, the kid will change his mind, and suddenly the avocado/grocery cart/cloth blocks will be a big hit.

Essential Bookshelf: Kid

2008-11-23T11:30:00.005-05:00

These are some of the books I really enjoy reading to the youngster.

Caps for Sale
I like to do the salesman's lines in a broad Italian accent, and I also make all the gestures and shout when the salesman gets furious at the monkeys, which makes Ben twist himself around to look at me as if I've taken leave of my senses.

Hondo and Fabian
This is a gentle little story about a dog who goes to the beach and a cat who stays home. I can't quite put my finger on what I like so much about it, but I absolutely adore it.

Does a Kangaroo Have a Mother, Too?
Ah, the Eric Carle hegemony. I love books with lots of animals, and this one is a jackpot. Not only does it have lots of animal moms and babies, the last page gives the names for adult breeding pairs, offspring, and collective nouns for all the animals -- so cool. This is my favorite Eric Carle book.

Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes
Generally I resist explicitly messagey children's books (as well as explicitly educational ones -- my infant doesn't need to learn to count or have the virtues of tooth-brushing extolled to him, thanks), but this one is so sweet that I don't care that it's about tolerance. Nine times out of ten, I'm a little choked up by the time I get to the end.

The Story of Ferdinand
Only some kind of humorless jackass could resist Ferdinand.

Not Gross Enough

2008-11-22T21:09:00.003-05:00

My friend A, holding Ben (in what he would later reveal to have been his first experience holding a baby), remarked on having survived his first instance of being drooled on by a baby. And even though he's a potential member of Club Parent I desperately want not to freak out, before I could clamp my lips back over them, the words had fled: "Drool! Buddy, that's the least of your worries when it comes to baby goo."

I remember my friend T, father of four-year-old twins, describing to Andy and me when I was pregnant the stage of parenthood in which one observes a spot of dried baby poop on, say, the back of one's arm, and just goes about one's business, not feeling any kind of rush about washing it off. At the time, I was pretty sure he was exaggerating for effect.

Ben used to be a spectacular spit-up machine. One time he spit up directly into my cleavage, probably about a quarter cup of warm, milky saliva, which pooled in my bra. I did not have a burp cloth in reach. And, yeah, that was gross. But the regular spit-up, the everyday spit-up, which probably would have made me shiver with revulsion seven months ago -- whatever. It's an inconvenience. Changing diapers, unless we're talking about an amazing shitstorm (which does happen: the gooey, oozy, largely-liquid poop of the milk-only baby that's filled the diaper and then crept up the spine, saturating the onesie, which somehow has to be removed without spreading the damage), is no more gross than wiping my own ass -- and even the amazing shitstorm is basically noteworthy for the amount of tedious work it creates rather than for gross-out factor.

I've never been a terribly squeamish person, but I was a little afraid that I might be too squeamish to parent well. When you're five and you've just thrown up all over your comforter, the last thing in the world you want is a parent who's too grossed out to deal. I haven't dealt with a pukey five-year-old yet, but I now have confidence that I'll be able to do it without shuddering -- maybe even without hesitating.

Mostly the goo is just drudgery. It's not even gross enough to be exciting.

Independence

2008-11-18T20:14:00.003-05:00

I was reading T. Berry Brazelton the other day -- the six-seven month "touchpoint", I think -- and he talks about mothers who resist introducing solid food because eating something other than breastmilk reduces their baby's dependence on them, and honestly, that just strikes me as sort of psychotic. I mean, sure, when Ben starts kindergarten or gets his driver's license, I am positive I will shed a tear for the baby who was. Even when we wean, whenever that happens, I'm sure it will make me sad no longer to share that very sweet and intimate thing with him. But I'm sure as hell not going to resist weaning when it's otherwise timely because I'm enjoying his dependence on me too much.

There's a lot I enjoy very much about motherhood, but having a tiny, precious someone wholly physically dependent on me isn't among my favorite aspects. I love nursing him because it's essentially a squirmless, fuss-free cuddle, and who could not love that? And I wouldn't consider weaning yet because I know breastfeeding continues to be the best thing for him nutritionally. But it will be nice to be able to leave him with his father for a whole day without the bother of pumps and bottles. I love holding him and squeezing him and kissing his delicious fat cheeks, but I look forward to his being able to move himself across the room.

I celebrate all his small movements towards independence because I'm proud of him and I'm fascinated by the process, but also because every one brings me closer to independence, too. Today he sat in the crook of his Boppy and smacked at cloth blocks and plastic cups and righted himself when he listed too far to starboard, and it was a huge pleasure to watch him entertain and sustain himself.

And it was a huge pleasure to sit within arm's reach but not touching, and read a book.

Essential Bookshelf

2008-11-14T16:26:00.002-05:00

I keep meaning to grab the parenting books I like a lot and do reviews of each. And I'll get around to it eventually.

For the time being, though, I thought I'd just list 'em, and open up the floor to parent-readers to comment or list their own favorites.

Burton White, The New First Three Years of Life
American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age 5
Penelope Leach, Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five
Ellyn Satter, Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense

How Is it?

2008-11-13T11:01:00.003-05:00

My friend A, whom I hadn't seen since long before Ben was born, asked me this weekend, "So, how is it?" "It" being parenthood, life with a baby, the Brave New World. Perfectly rational, normal, polite question, right? But I don't think anyone had asked me before -- or if they had, it was back in the severely sleep-deprived first few months, and I don't remember.

I found myself flummoxed for a second. How is it? How do I even begin to evaluate? It's like asking me how I enjoy being an earthling, except of course I can remember a time when I wasn't a parent. But it's that level of all-encompassing experience, all but impossible to have the perspective to take a critical position. Which is pretty much what I said.

But I've been thinking about it. How is it? Big picture, broad strokes.

It's exhausting. Not nearly so much now as it was when the kid was around eight weeks, but still. Then, I hovered between functional and not, and the combination of the exhaustion and frustration brought me to tears several times a week at least. And I'm jinxing myself by saying so, but it's been some time now since I've felt anything but functional or parenting has made me cry. But I'm tired a lot, and I almost never wake up feeling fully rested.

It's full of joy. One of the things I've always loved about my dogs is how happy they are to see me. A beaming baby, half his face opened by a grin, puts all dog greetings to shame. And all his small accomplishments of development are sources of pride and wonder. He can pass an object from hand to hand! He can smack! He can blow raspberries! Every week there's a new tiny miracle that bowls me over not just with love and delight for him, but in the amazing and complicated process of becoming a person.

It's full of tedious work. I have to do laundry pretty much every day to keep up -- and that's with disposable diapers, which is why I'm not using cloth. (And I don't feel guilty because of this.) Changing diapers and dressing a squirmy little person and lugging him around and around the kitchen because he'll fuss if I don't -- these are not fun parenting tasks, and they occupy a big part of every day.

It connects me to the world in a new way. I have something in common with a staggering number of people, something really big and important in all our lives. This is both lovely and brutal. Lovely is the depth of fellow-feeling between me and random new parents at the grocery, the ease with which I can fall into meaningful conversation with other mothers of babies, the new richness of my relationships with friends who are or are about to be parents. Brutal is all the news stories that suddenly kneecap me, the starving and abused and lost and terrified children who are all Ben.

It is and is not what I expected. I think this is what my friend really wanted to know. He's only recently come around to the idea that maybe he wants to be a father after many years of believing strongly that he did not. You know it's going to change your life. You know it's going to be hard. But you can't really picture it, and no one can really describe it in a way that makes it real.

Yakkety-Yak

2008-11-12T09:46:00.006-05:00

I think it was Penelope Leach I was reading -- anyway, the author of a parenting book was exhorting parents to talk to their babies, and to overcome feelings of embarrassment or weirdness if talking to an infant didn't come naturally to them, and for a moment I couldn't figure out what she was talking about. Embarrassment? About talking to another human? Does not compute.

But it was only a moment, and then I remembered: oh, yeah, I am a compulsive talker. I talk to my dogs. I talk to myself. A solo trip to the grocery is likely to provoke half a dozen comments to no one in particular along the lines of, "What kind of crap outfit runs out of organic yellow mustard?" Not muttered under my breath, but spoken aloud, with gusto, as if talking to an imaginary friend who might be ten or fifteen feet away. Occasionally actual humans are nearby, and assume I'm talking to them, and respond, which always takes me aback a little. I wasn't talking to you, buddy -- what am I, a crazy person, to talk to random strangers? That's not strictly true, either: I'm running a monologue, but in fact I'm delighted if strangers bust in.

So I'm happy to know that this borderline-creepy mania of mine is positively encouraged by experts in child development. Apparently language acquisition has a lot to do with general capability, and the more different words a kid hears before age three, the more likely he is to be good at things like algebra and holding down a job. In fact, this is why experts want people to read to their kids; it's not so much about books or reading per se, so much as it's about exposing the kid to words that may not be in the parents' vocabularies.

My "conversations" with Ben these days are maybe one part thinking aloud slash grocery list, one part description of what's going on (recommended by parenting experts as the sort of talk babies develop an interest in soonest), one part babble, and one part conscious use of multisyllabic, big-vocabulary words. Viz: "We're at Ikea, Ben. Mom loves Ikea. Mom misses Ikea since we moved to the damnable hinterlands. We're walking past glasses, Ben: wine glasses and juice glasses and beer glasses and I don't know what those glasses are for. Those glasses are preposterous, Ben. Those glasses are absurd and improbable. Mom needs to find table lamps, Ben. Yes Mom does. Yes Mom does. Yes Mom does."

One of these days, a tiny person -- not a stranger -- is going to bust into this monologue and turn it into a conversation, and I'm going to be so delighted I might just be speechless. For a second.