Everything in moderation

I have my very own pet troll now. It's so exciting! I've never had one before. How do you feed one? Does it need vaccinations, and is it likely to pee on the carpet? Shall I train it with the newspaper or the pointy stick? At any rate I apologize for any delayed comment posting because I'm now moderating them. Keep faith, o my millions of readers.
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Just got out of a list planning meeting that began with "We do have ONE sane author this season." This was intended to brighten our spirits. I like my new job. But it does involve managing quite a fragrant bouquet of neuroses; I do not know why this discipline attracts the unstable, but it does. Sprinkled among them, however, are a lovely crop of hyperorganized, appreciative, and responsive authors, and I'm doing my very best to keep my focus firmly on those.
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Random Flann moments: He's unwilling to swim even with floaties on - I'm taking him twice a week because I am determined that the kid will share my love of pools, oceans, cenotes, streams, and soggy bogs - and climbs my head like a nervous cat whenever I suggest it, but he does love sticking his head under the water. He counts down from five, loudly, like someone at Houston Command, closes his eyes, dives down, and emerges proudly onto the pool deck, announcing, "I went under! My hair's wet! Everyone look at my hair!" In a few months I'll try to graduate him from mommy-plus-kiddo swimming to Big-Boy, Mommy-Watches-Through-the-Pool-Window classes. Several of his older classmates from his last preschool take these sessions, so that might bribe him into compliance.
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At what age should kids begin to recognize letters? Flann's down with those letters that begin the names of important people in his life - L, M, and his own illustrious F, which he can spot on passing store windows, license plates, and remote FedEx planes no matter what gussied-up typeface it's in - and he likes the exotics, such as X, Q, and Z, but confronted with most letters he merely guesses. I try not to push him, but I'm so eager for him to read. My life has been about reading, and I feel it's one of the few real gifts I can give him. Perhaps he won't be bookish (or swimmish) at all, though, and then Mommy will have another Life Lesson to learn.
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And now the lad sings thee to thy rest:

Turn to the right

Yesterday I had my second annual mammogram. At the tottering age of forty-one, I’m now in that segment of the citizenry encouraged to have its boobs flattened like underdone pancakes between two pieces of Plexiglas in an over-air-conditioned room while a tiny encouraging woman tells me to relax this arm, bend that arm, and strive toward postures that will enable her to actually get photos of my A-cups that show more than nipple.

Last year I was blithe about the procedure, which was pain-free and required no more than five minutes. But yesterday my tiny encourager fussed and worried at my right breast, taking shot after shot at various angles that lifted the poor, stalled-in-pubescence mammary like a wee ambitious moon rocket toward the ceiling. All the while mumbling, “Oh, we can’t tell you anything, dear. The radiologist interprets all the scans. I’m sure there is no problem, but if there is anything, your doctor will call you, and I’m sure there is no problem. Dear.”

I’ll say that Miss Right has felt odd since I finished nursing two years ago. She suffered a few plugged ducts; she’s been a tad peevish during my otherwise symptom-free periods. I conjecture there might be a funky duct still sitting in there, and perhaps that’s what caused the 180-degree Torquemada-ing of the poor girl during yesterday’s photographs. But it’s hard not to worry a bit, especially because yesterday I also scheduled the third colonoscopy of my life. My mother developed colon cancer at thirty-seven and died at forty-one—I’m now officially older than she ever was—and so I’m considered high-risk. Cheerful gastroenterologists have twice plumbed my workings, and are now due to plumb once again. My only comfort: the lovely, lovely twilight doofy drugs the process includes.

I wonder if this is what middle age shall entail: tubes snaking around my innards like tentacles out of Naked Lunch, and detailed photographs and the increasingly intense scanning of my body like a suspicious suitcase in a TSA machine. I wish that one’s skin simply turned transparent at forty, so that doctors could casually glance at our noses and ovaries and patellae and neural arteries and say, like cheerful plumbers, “All’s right here, mate. Off the table and see you next year.” And we’d glitter in the kindly sun as we drifted back home, clear and purified and shed of our dear, deliquescing human flesh.

I'm back.

I went private for a while, after a wee blitzkrieg by pissed-off Mormons who Disapproved of My Parenting Practices. But I am back, stamping gaily on the corpse of Joseph Smith and his delusional minions.

Many things have happened:

1. This child talks. Constantly. Coherently. Forgets nothing. Makes up songs about chickens, cupcakes, and moose.
2. This child is obsessed with opera, trains, guitars, VERY LOUD NOISES, and an adorable schoolmate named Michelle who sports enormous blue plastic glasses that Flann covets and steals when he can.
3. A concentrated six-month campaign of Rainbow Goldfish bribes has at last resulted in consistent potty-pooping. There, I've jinxed myself.
4. I'm wasting far too much time on the Internet checking out bedframes, rug patterns, wall posters, and toddler bookshelves for his long-awaited move to his big-boy room, formerly known as his beleagured dad's man-cave.

5. He's in a university preschool now. The transition has been a bit like riding down a logging road at night without headlights and a driver imbibing Cuervo, but it's smoothing out at last. We may yet emerge with our limbs and f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.
6. He's a peach. I never enjoyed the newborn stage. Too much fatigue, screaming, borderline colic, expulsions of fluids from various orifices, and laundry. But this toddler thing: I like it. He wakes up in the morning with his hair standing on end, talking about bunnies wearing underpants and running away from trucks on fire (or whatever it is he's dreamed about), crawls into bed with me, plants his head under my chin and his feet in my stomach, and I'm perfectly, perfectly happy.

Potty, dreaded and beloved

There's not a parenting hurdle that I haven't managed to mind-fuck to death (pardon mixed metaphor; not on company clock at moment), and potty-training has presented me my latest gate to clear.

In sum, the lad has been happily peeing in potty once or twice a day for well on a year now. Sometimes he trots happily after daddy into bathroom in the AM; always he's been willing to vent his spleen before bathtime at night. Two weeks ago, daycare and I decided ("daycare" = head teacher, an elegant blonde high-heeled utterly competent Madeiran who has trained perhaps two generations of Berkeley tots by this point) that he was ready to begin wearing cotton training pants, rather than diapers, at school. He pees contentedly there, alongside his coterie of best friends, all of them ca. six months older (he is the youngest in the toddler room), and all fully trained. As for poop: uh. Let's say I have been carting home many a mound of unmentionables cloaked in plastic Andronico's bags, thumping resonantly and redolently against the stroller handle as we hike the mile home.


But: now he will no longer even pee at home. Need to go? NO. Go now? NO. Three minutes later: puddle spreads, amoeba-like, on floor.

I think the take-home lesson is that he's simply not ready. He's twenty-eight months now, but still: not ready, and feels pressured, specifically by that mommy who is so eager to transcend the brown-diaper stage of life. I'll keep him in cotton trainers at school, diapers at home. And continue to buy Gerber trainers in lots of twelve from Target, so that the husband (who is charge of laundry chez nous) need not deal with any swamp-monster underpants.

I have another, longer post about preschool, specifically the changes I am contemplating for fall. In the meantime, the boy in contemplative (and cleaned-off) mode:

I think I will skip blithely over the “why I haven’t posted in nearly a year” overture and plunge directly into recitative. The child is twenty-seven months old now. Thirty-eight inches tall. Twenty-seven pounds. And has entirely outgrown the facts and figures, the percentiles and curves, with which I could once mark his unfolding into a full-fledged Human.

He's contemplative. He's shy. He's alternately hysterically funny and tremendously needy. He has a vast alternative repertoire of song lyrics in which "poo-poo" is substituted for nouns, he's difficult, he's cuddly and warm, he likes to play soccer in the hallway with tennis balls, and he has graduated to Big Kids Swings, the toddler/preschool room at daycare, and peeing in the potty at least a couple of times a day. His feet are suddenly enormous. He's flown transcontinentally twice, once with great drama, once with jaded indifference. He is greatly in love with his father, Thomas trains, ball sports, cheese pupusas, and daddy's scrambled eggs. I still don't know what the hell I'm doing.

I promise a topical post in the next few days. Work has become quite demanding of late; we've lost five editors and all our assistants, and our work has been reconfigured into a pattern that while ostensibly intended to produce less work has in the interim produced far more. As filler, here's the boy in all his recent glory:

Junior Forest Ranger at Halloween:















The Umbrellas of Cher-Berkeley:

Two-year birthday:

Post-vax rainbow-cupcake joy:















Aboard the local steam train; utter rapture:

Time to...

...return, I think.

Through the seasons

My chops for the narrative form are lacking. When I studied writing I was always chided that my stories were catalogues of detail, sometimes nicely observed but in general containing no dramatic keystones to brace the Narrative Arc of good fiction. "You're like eyes on a stick," my Pulitzer-laden personal heroine of twentieth-century fiction told me grimly in tutorial one day over a manuscript (dot-matrix-printed! The years, they are dizzying). "You see everything, but you participate in nothing." Fair enough. I think my best possible career, apart from the ink-stained drudgery I've chosen, would have been something like the work of Julius Knipl, real-estate photographer. Taking snapshots of a transitory, vanishing world. Photographs of dustballs and abandoned clothes, the things people leave behind when they suddenly jettison their homes and shops at midnight, one step ahead of the taxman.

Anyway. Herewith quotidiana about Flann; the only logical home for quotidiana is, after all, in a baby blog.

Flann is in a housework stage. He spills things for the pleasure of wiping them up. Yesterday I bought him a toy dustpan, sweeper, and broom, and he's dragged them all through the apartment looking for specks to rearrange with his bristles. At daycare dropoff I settle him by opening the toy closet and removing the toy Dustdevil and Dyson vacs (the latter has colored yarn and sparkles behind its window, to imitate the gerb one sees when using an actual Dyson). He assiduously vaccuums the playroom floor, pausing a single tearless moment for our goodbye kiss.

He's also in a Boy Boy Ultraboy Manchild stage. He is so physical. On the playground or in playspaces the little girls, active as they may be, often sit for many minutes sculpting sand mountains, pouring water from one cup into another, or arranging toys in geometric runes whose meaning is occult to all but themselves. Flann does concentrate on tasks, often for a notably long time, but then a tidal bore of energy rushes up through him and he must move. He's not a manic child; instead his movement is like that of a long-haul hiker. He wants to go up the hill, down the other side, across the river, round the next bend. I imagine he'll be hiking the Pacific Coast Trail by age twelve. Naked between diaper changes at home, he grabs up the model silver subway train Emily sent from the Brooklyn Transit Museum and runs laps through the hall with it, crowing and laughing, a baby Freudian archetype swinging that phallic train overhead.

And he is much in love with his father these days. Matt gets little time with him. His commute is long and Baatan-like and he must attend many nighttime performances in concert season. But when Flann arrives home he searches through the empty apartment, inquiring, "Dada? Dada?" around each corner, sometimes snagging an abandoned paternal sweater or sock to haul around after him. On weekdays mornings - their only guaranteed time mano-a-mano - the boy cannot be pried away from Matt. Should the padre abandon him for the bathroom, or to pour coffee in the kitchen, plaintive tears result. Together, with their big square heads, their happy-within-themselves maleness, arm in arm on the couch, they are an affectionate phalanx. My boy is member of a tribe that I can never join, but instead of sadness this brings joy. There is a larger world for Flanny beyond my limited self; he'll know things and feel things that I never will.

Owls, lilacs, cacti, roses, ladybugs, hummingbirds, and wild fennel: various obsessions Flann has lately gleaned from his books and his walks. Owls have flocked into the boy's psyche to such an extent that he now owns one stuffed barn owl chicklet, one full-size Gund Great Horned Owl, a book of owl babies, and a beautifully illustrated Owl and the Pussycat in which Owl is a smooth-talking Islands mon who inviegles his petticoated lady-cat into a year of moonlit sails through Caribbean seas before making an honest feline of her before an overstuffed British magistrate, played by a turkey in full display. It must be read to him every morning. It must be read to him every night. And he must sit with Matt in front of YouTube watching owl video after owl video, pausing to protest, "No! No! No!" whenever some sad-sack London Zoo employee or wildlife guide dares intrude into frame next to the Sacred Owl. Why the obsession? I suppose owls are both cuddly and soft - and the kid is obsessed with babies now - and fierce and terrifying. An ideal companion for for the liminal stage between babyish need and baby hunter-warrior boy.