il piccolino

Everything in moderation

2010-09-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
And now the lad sings thee to thy rest:

Turn to the right

2010-09-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-09-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

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:

2010-02-16T18:14:00.000-08:00

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...

2010-02-14T14:27:00.001-08:00

...return, I think.

Through the seasons

2009-05-09T13:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Lexicon

2009-05-05T15:24:00.000-07:00

Just returned from a profoundly depressing staff meeting—oh, I don’t know, they yattered something about how the American reading public is now a feral, impoverished mess far more interested in hunting down rats for its next meal than in purchasing our newest thousand-page semiotics tome, and how we all must do more with less, assuming we will still have jobs in which to do more. So to cheer myself up, I’ll do something I was warned specifically against doing by an old friend who had a sprat just after I did, a woman of nineteenth-century demeanor who disapproves of this whole narcissistic blogging mass neurosis, specifically when it comes to detailing the quotidian activities of our kids. Yes, it’s time to List the Words That My Kid Can Speak (sort of...well, words that my kid can make a wild attempt at, and which will be understood only by his biological parents).

ABC
again
agua
airplane
all done
apple
baa-baa (= sheep)
baby
banana
bean
bear
bot-bot (sippy cup)
bubble
bye
car
cat
cheese
cow
cracker
creek (“kee”)
Dada
doggie (“dah-dah,” as if every canine is his father)
down
ear
Elmo (sigh.)
hat
help!
hi
hop
hot
juice
light
lilac
magnet (“may-yah”; i.e., “Give me that tiny fridge magnet so that I may cast it behind the cat box”)
Mama
moo-moo
moon/mouse/moose/mouth (all “mouw”)
more
no
Obama
octopus ("oh-ki")
oh, no!
outside
owl
peas
pee-pee
pizza (creatively rendered as “ah-pi-pi”)
please (sustained "peeeee" appended to any demand)
poo-poo
potty
purple
sky
slide
soft (shorthand for blankie)
star
street (“stee”)
uh-oh
umbrella (“uh-yah-yah”)
up
water
word
yahoo!
yay!
yeah (pronounced as German Ja!)

Thank you for your indulgence. Next post, I promise to stray beyond the bounds of my own navel. And now, Flanny feeds goats. Or perhaps they are sheep. Small woolly things at any rate.

How I wish one would open in northern California

2009-05-04T09:09:00.001-07:00

A completely outdoor preschool.

A real post soon. So say we all.

Noli me tangere

2009-04-08T16:08:00.000-07:00

It’s not until one is sheepdogging a toddler that one notices the straight and narrow tracks that adults follow through the world. We drive straight down streets, walk straight down sidewalks, climb up the middle of stairs and clump back down along the same path. In stores we touch only the products we’re thinking about taking home. When we open the fridge we reach for one or two items and close the door straightaway, before the cold air leaks out. When we brush our teeth, we handle a particular set of objects in a predetermined and time-honored sequence: tap handles, brush, toothpaste tube. We’re like streetcars on steel tracks; we go where we’re allowed to go. I imagine our daily movements in space could be sketched via a few straight lines. Toddler movements, on the other hand, would be graphed via a feral snarl of loops and tangents and spirals. They want to go everywhere, handle everything, upend everything, look at the bottoms and backs and sides of all objects, open everything that is openable and most things that are not, transgress, invade, disassemble, unpack, and rearrange.

A walk with Flann is a walk with entropy. If we pass a car in a driveway, he must scoot all the way around it, investigate its front bumper, crow at the cat that’s taken refuge underneath it, peek mischeviously at me beckoning him away, and only then return to the sidewalk, whereupon he flings himself prone to investigate a pillbug and then skitters into someone’s yard to maul daffodils. All the invisible boundaries and Berlin Walls of private property are nothing to him. He’s sad in grocery stores, strapped into his little cart seat, because there are dozens of boxes of oatmeal that need opening, peppers that need be tumbled out of their bin, wine and seltzer bottles that properly should be brought down in a cataract of glass shards and fizz. Only in certain settings—our living room, a fenced tot park, the playroom and playground of daycare—can he roam as he likes, can he consider (almost) any object fair game. Everywhere else...ah, it’s endless latches and locks and closed doors and voices saying no. no. no.

The poor widget. All this restraint isn’t easy for him. The world is all flashing colors and strange angles and mysterious clockwork to him these days, a funhouse full of danger and joy, and yet always he hears no. no. no. It’s an unhappy paradox that during the years we most want to explore the world, we don’t have the sense or coordination to safely do it. In several years, I won’t worry about him tumbling off the fenceless bridge over the creek, or falling through the open risers of the concrete stairway bisecting the steep block near the park, or careening into a cactus or patch of poison oak in a stranger’s yard—but by then he likely will be uninterested in the creek, that odd steep stairway, the neighbor’s intriguing horticultural selections. Instead he’ll be busy constructing his own steel streetcar track, mapping his own limited and particular set of destinations, and the buoyant loop-the-loop of toddler movement will pare itself down to a few logical lines.

All us travelers in the dark

2009-04-02T16:24:00.000-07:00

There is no more limply apologetic start to a blog post than I haven’t posted in ages, but. Indeed I have not.

For several weeks Flann’s sleep troubles kept me too disheartened to write. All I had in my head was the plaintive, boring whine Why won’t he sleep? and petulant responses to every bit of advice anyone offered me: Tried that. Doesn’t work. Tried that too. The kid was a tough nut.

His many, many months of poor sleep, the endless nights of repeated wakings and 4 AM reveilles, reached their nadir about three weeks ago, on a Sunday night. He woke up at 9:30 PM, after a bedtime of 8, and didn’t return to sleep until...4:30 AM. We brought him into bed. He wrassled, scrunched himself around, and, pathetically, clearly wanted to sleep. But he couldn’t. Time after time, he’d roll himself up into his favored pillbug sleeping posture, tunnel his face into the pillows, chew his binky, and blink expectantly, waiting for sleep to overtake him. But it didn’t come. The pattern repeated itself on subsequent nights: awake for hours, not wanting to be awake, often quite pissed about being awake, yet unable to sleep.

Matt and I traded off days of devastation; one night he’d be up with the boy, the next I’d be up. I called into work sick; he called into work sick. The flu came to visit in the midst of this, fortunately bypassing the boy and heading straight to us. (My version morphed into tonsillitis, then a raging sinus infection, and still hasn’t entirely departed.)

I started to frantically call the pediatrician’s office. Something is wrong; no baby sleeps so few hours a night; something must be wrong. But my pediatrician is on maternity leave, and her substitute is an RN with altogether too few stars on her Christmas tree. “There’s nothing I can do,” she informed me over and over again. “How about calling a private sleep consultant?” There are a couple of them in the Bay Area; they are, to put it mildly, costly. “I can’t afford a consultant, and I don’t think the problem is behavioral,” I said. “How about a sleep clinic? There must be one that focuses on children.”

She hemmed and hawed and finally allowed that she’d never heard of a children’s sleep clinic. Two seconds of Google revealed to me that the biggest fucking kids’ sleep clinic on the West Coast is fifteen minutes from her office. Nurse Numbnuts did not, of course, know how to get Flann a referral to it, so I abandoned her and went to his pulmonologist, who can refer to the clinic because many kids with breathing problems also have sleep problems. She whipped out a referral in ten minutes flat, and my faith in the functioning neurons of the medical establishment was restored.

In the meantime I whinged to my father about Flann’s troubles, and he granted me a paternal dispensation of cash to haul Flanny to a sleep consultant. Off we went to a rather splendid house in the Oakland hills—the sleep-deprived parents’ trade is evidently a lucrative one—where the kindly consultant observed Flanny upending Elmo dolls and chewing on crayons and attempting to break into her china buffet, and quizzed us both carefully about his temperament, his sleeping patterns, his daycare, his diet. At first I was a bit put off. “He’s of medium temperament, a bit shy, loves books and running around and knocking things over, and what could any of that have to do with his sleep?” Yet she was, in her tangential fashion, conducting quite a thorough assessment of the life and times of Young Master Flann.

Finally she teased out an associative thread. Flann took a binky at night, and for naps. He was fiercely attached to it. I had no plans to make him give it up; I thought he’d simply ditch it on his own in later toddlerhood, the way that most children do. He loved it. It made him happy. Why take it away? Well. Flann was in the bedroom with us since birth; we coslept until he was six months and then slowly transitioned him fulltime to his crib. When he’d wake, as a young infant, his binky would fall out, he’d cry, and we’d respond immediately because we were in the same room: pat him on the back, replace the binky and blankets. And off he’d go into sleep again. This happened perhaps once or twice a night. No big deal.

This pattern worked beautifully until he was a year old. He grew more aware. He got ear tubes, so his hearing improved. Once he was awake and we came to him, he couldn’t easily return to sleep, even though he was capable of plugging his binky back in by himself. Essentially, we were keeping him awake. How rude.

So, the consultant’s recommendations:

1. Earlier bedtime: 7 PM rather than 8 PM. Child has longterm sleep deprivation, needs to catch up on sleep, and probably has slightly higher cortisol levels as a result, which disrupt his sleeping hours.
2. No more binky. Break the associative chain “wake up ---> parents arrive ---> binky back in.”
3. We move out of the bedroom.
4. And yes. Cry it out.

She’s a Ferber rather than a Weissbluth devotee, instructing parents to check on crying kids at intervals rather than permitting them to cry indefinitely. She prescribed 15-minute checks. Tell the kid he’s all right and that he can go to sleep on his own. Remain calm. Don’t pick the kid up or take him out of the crib. So off we went, plan in hand.

The first two nights were dreadful. I still feel a bit shell-shocked. Crying at bedtime, lengthy crying fests in the middle of the night, the little boy sobbing hot exhausted tears into his crib pillow, pleading for “Bee! Bee!” and pointing at his mouth, wanting to get up and play, wanting to sleep but not knowing how. I was convinced the plan wouldn’t work. Too hard. Flann would never stop crying. I would never be able to stand the crying.

Fortunately Matt could stand the crying. On the third night he sent me off to sleep in the study at the back of the apartment, with earplugs. He slept in the living room, and dealt with each of the boy’s four lengthy wake-up-and-shriek sessions that night. He’s a much better night-time parent than I am. When I’m sleep-deprived, I’m grouchy and mean, and when Flann cries, I simply want it to stop. Matt’s calm and kind. And he believed the plan would work.

But on the fourth night: one waking. On the fifth night: no wakings. Eleven hours of sleep. He woke at 6; we took his sippy of milk into the bedroom and cuddled on the bed with him while he drank it. On the sixth night: twelve straight hours of sleep. I had to wake him for breakfast so I could get to the office on time. It seemed magical. I’d never really believed other parents’ stories of their sleep-training miracles; I’d been quietly stubbornly convinced that my baby was different, my baby could thwart any expert.

I’ve postponed the visit to the sleep clinic. Our subsequent nights have been mixed pickles: a few nights of hard bedtimes and midnight crying bouts; a few more nights of blissful uninterrupted calm. His top eyeteeth are almost through the gumline and are clearly causing him agida, but in general, I think the program has worked. For now, tentative hope. And an object lesson about my own negativity has been learned, I think.

Briefly

2009-03-24T19:10:00.001-07:00

Both of us parental units have some major head-flu this week. Combined with the instigation of brand-new-and-improved Sleep Training on Friday, a method crafted under the aegis of a local sleep consultant of some renown whose hefty pricetag my dear father is picking up, this has been...well, quite a week. Picture Wiley E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff, ripping his drawers on a saguaro halfway down, and then plotzing nose-first into a packet of Acme dynamite. Also, the boy might be developing our flu. Also, I believe he has pink-eye. Did I mention the sleep training involves taking away his pacifier? Hoo boy and a box of Twinkies. Miraculously he remains spiffy and cheerful in the daytime. I would like to record my blurry memory of him waddling into daycare this morning, bringing his favorite teacher a damp fistful of crushed lilac (i.e., Yi-Yack!) blossoms he'd ripped off a shrub in passing, but I'm fading. I'll blog more when my cerebellum grows back.

Moon thoughts

2009-03-10T20:29:00.001-07:00

There's a brilliant full moon in the spring sky tonight. I've taken Flanny out to see the moon—to point and exclaim Moo! moo! and then Stah! while gesturing at Orion, and Ar-puh! when he spots the green and red port-and-starboards of low-flying airliners—every night this month, but tonight I forgot. Dang. He's been dossing down early. An experiment upon whose results I am not yet ready to report.
———
He has many endearing habits these days. I want to record them before they change.

Mister Yes: He nods his head gravely in response to questions. Do you want to stop by the park on the way home from daycare? He pauses for consideration, then nods. Do you want yogurt? Do you want to get out of bed and see Daddy? Do you want to lie down with Cow (asked before midday naps, which he takes with face pressed into the stuffed Stanford mascot Matt brought him)? Pause, cogitation, thoughtful assent. Yes, madam, I believe I do.

Fartmeister: He announces Poo-poo! whenever any vaguely fartlike sound occurs in his vicinity. He says this to parents (ahem), to school friends, and today to a backfiring car. He looked carefully at the rear bumper as we passed, just to see what might emerge.

Soft face: This habit's been present for many months. When offered a new soft blanket, toy, or jacket, he places it on the floor and buries his face into it like a pillbug looking for refuge. It's incredibly sweet (and also a reliable sign that he's tired). And a source of guilty amusement when he carefully positions an item, face-plants into it, and misjudges his aim and bonks himself on the floor.

Funk boy: He dances. He dances a lot. Not quite sure how he acquired this trait, the only dancing his parents can do is the nervous up-and-down Sprockets white-kid hop of their late-80s youth, but there it is. Matt played him the Ghost World Bollywood outtake, the one with the crazed bouffanted line dancers in domino masks, and Flanny boogied frantically, then yelled More moh moh and signed the same. Must acquire more Bollywood. This morning, snuggled against me on the pillows, he heard a brief line of Parliament Funkadelic between NPR news segments and boogied, as best he could in a prone position, then demanded More moh moh and was most aggrieved that I couldn't produce it. I'll skip over his newfound obsession with "Elmo's Song." It's my fault. Damn YouTube.
———
Sunday, returning from Codornices Park—have I mentioned how much I love my town's kiddie parks? There are so many of them, and they're all so great, sunny and clean and full of toys. There are five good ones within walking distance of the house, and now that the interminable fucking winter monsoon has ended, we can visit them again.

Anyway. Sunday, we were on the vertiginously sloped part of Vine Street, heading home from the park, and we ran into a man walking with his family, an acquaintance with whom I've had a handful of conversations over the years. He was wrangling a recalcitrant preschooler while his pretty wife walked ahead with a slightly older girl whose pleased expression made it clear she'd precipitated whatever kerfuffle her brother was in. I stopped to talk with him and Flanny companionably offered the kids the rest of the Cheerios in his snack trap. We talked about the usual: the good weather; the spirited defiance of Berkeley's insane housing prices to global financial meltdown; the crowd density in the park we'd just left.

I walked away from the pedestrian conversation amazed, as I always am, at this man's resilience. He survived a horrible burn as a child, and he's blind and essentially has no face. And yet he seems happy, has kids and a wife and lots of friends, is a leader in the local lefty temple, and is a successful researcher. I cannot imagine how he's done it. Had a similar thing happened to me as a child—well, I'm not even sure I would have made it to adulthood. The burden of those scars would have overwhelmed me. And what happened to him was no accident—it was done to him. A stranger looked at his four-year-old face, all those decades ago, and threw acid into it. How do you overcome the rage that must follow such an event?

I asked a friend who knows him well. (I felt rather, well, voyeuristic, but I couldn't help myself.) His mother, my friend replied. Apparently he has this ferocious tiger of a mom who never let him fade into the shadows, who got him out there and got him every scrap of help she could and never let anyone treat him badly. It worked. He lived; he has a life. She gave him back, in a very real sense, the face that was stolen from him.

I can hardly bear to think about his story, especially when I look at Flanny's beautiful soft flower of a face, his huge blue eyes so alert and aware—and yet it's fascinating. He encountered both the very worst and the very best that the world can offer a child, the dark side and the bright side of the moon in one life. Children's strength is astonishing.

At my chamber door

2009-03-02T11:26:00.000-08:00

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

Well, not forgotten as such; I dipped back into Ferber this weekend after many white nights of Flanny crash-and-burn sleep. I like Ferber, not as much for his concepts as for the brevity and direction of his prose. The man can write (or his editor can write) with enough precision and authority that he convinces even the wincing, febrile amoeba that is the parental brain on 2.5 hours of sleep of the wisdom of his ways. And he’s refreshingly free of the oochy-poochy wuddly snuggliness of Pantley—oy, even her name is annoying; the lilac-scented granny panties it conjures up!—and the bullet-points-gone-wild cracked-egg mess of Weissbluth. Seriously, how does anyone find anything in Weissbluth? I imagine the developmental editing process behind his book: author delivers a 500-page ramblefest that Marketing demands must be cut to no more than 200 typeset pages with Lots! of! Parent-Friendly! Tips! that can be excerpted in catalog copy and tear sheets, and the editor dutifully whips out several twenty-page developmental memos sounding ascending notes of desperation, none of which are read by the author, who is incommunicado and snowbound in a retreat lamasery sans wi-fi, and then the 22-year-old editorial assistant who has never met a baby and certainly doesn’t want to meet any babies—how would they fit in her crappy Red Hook studio anyway, and how would they be generated given that all the boys she meets are hopeless or bi or broke or terminally wandering-penised?—rewrites the manuscript after-hours/after-bar into a series of hazily connected informational chunklets.

{Sunday is for fezzes.}

Ferber has a concise little chart of children’s average sleep needs. Flann’s cohort sleeps 11 to 13 hours out of the 24, with a 1.5- to 2-hour midday nap. There’s significant individual variation, natch. So, let us calculate. Flann takes a 2-hour midday nap. I’ve put him to bed at 8 for the past several months, aiming for a wake-up time of 6 (a goal that has been cruelly foiled for many weeks). Thus I’m expecting a 10-hour night, or a total 12 hours of sleep per day. Within the range but perhaps not accurate for this baby. If he is on the low end of the range, perhaps he needs only 9 hours per night plus the 2-hour nap (the latter I’m unwilling to shorten due to my inability to handle a face-clawingly unrested baby in the early evening), totalling 11 hours per day.

{And soba noodles.}

So, the options: move back his bedtime or accept the 5 am wakeup. And I am a bit psychotic when woken up at 5; I am not patient, nurturing, or even nice. Thus I put him down at 9 on Saturday and Sunday nights. He woke up both nights ca. 10:30, yipping and yowling, but those wake-ups were perhaps caused by our rewatching Lord of the Rings in the adjacent living room and forgetting just how loudly Ringwraiths shriek in battle. Then he slept through till almost 6 am. (He woke briefly ca. 3 this morning, but sobbed once and fell asleep.) So the experiment will continue.

The trade-off: the 8 to 9 pm period has been Me Time for many months. Matt returns home ca. 9, so before he returns I wash dishes/pay bills/pack daycare lunch/shower/brush teeth—all the things I cannot figure out how to do with an awake boy clamoring Uppy Uppy Uppy! underfoot. We eat together at 9, then watch something soporific and fall asleep. If the 9 pm bedtime continues, I’ll lose time for both husband and chores. I am not sure how to squeeze blood from the stone that is our schedule.

At his 15-month appointment—the child is growing like a weed, or more accurately like an air plant because he never eats anything yet has rocketed into the 75th height percentile (from the 40th) and the 95th head-circumference percentile, while holding firmly to the 20th percentile in weight; do you think he’ll tip over soon?—his doctor recommended some cry-it-out and also the impossible dream: sticking the kid in his own room. His crib has been in my room since birth. We have a two-bedroom apartment, but the conversion of the study into a nursery has never happened, for reasons too involved and frustrating to relate. The kid needs to sleep independently; he needs to master the minor self-soothing that will get him through the night without intermittent maternal pats and shushes. He’ll never do that in my room. (Yes, cosleeping, yes, I know it’s lovely for some; it’s unworkable and insufferable for me and him.) If I cough, he wakes up; if I roll over, ditto—and so I sleep with a sentry-box level of anxiety that I think explains some of the new gray emerging on my temples. And I have incessant and sad little fantasies about creating a space that’s just for him. I would like to paint a room for him, make a little art area with a table, buy him a real dresser, find posters of spaceships and fantasy-land maps for his walls. I want him to have a little refuge, a happy merry messy nest of his own. Someday? Sigh. Next year in Jerusalem as they say. For the moment two peaceful nights are a comfort.

Gitmo

2009-02-28T12:48:00.000-08:00

Flann's sleep has been for crap since his first birthday (that's three long months now). After his ear tubes were installed and his hearing went from muffled to normal - he passed his follow-up scan with straight As, or at least all the little checkmarks in the gray-shaded "healthy" areas of the audiograms - he began waking up several times nightly. Tedious but no really big deal; a pacifier and a pat and down he'd go again. Oh, those halcyon days.

At the start of February (did I mention I hate Februarys? I. hate. them.) he began waking up for the day ca. 5 AM again. And then he began waking up at 1 or 2, and not going back to sleep until 4, after lying in bed and kicking me for two hours (the only alternative to leaving him shrieking in his crib, which I simply can't do in the middle of the night). And now he wakes up four or five times before midnight, then stays awake from 2 to 4, and STILL wakes up at 5. I'm so tired that the word exhausted seems far too mild. Erased, abolished, extinguished.

It is not teething. It is not a developmental spurt. It has gone on too long to be either of those things. Cosleeping, Ferber, Motrin, midnight milk, heater on, heater off, blankets/no blankets, pillow/no pillow...all permutations have been tried and failed. Either this passes, or it won't. Either I shall be a functional human again, or I shall be a grease stain on the sidewalk of life.

A wee rantling, with resolution

2009-02-24T14:18:00.000-08:00

No one I know has ever come right out and said that I shouldn’t have had a cesarean, or that I wouldn’t have had one had I done x, y, and z: having the kid earlier in life; doing more prenatal yoga; hiring a doula; not clearing out the storage closet a week before my due date; etc. The most insulting comment I received was—compared to stories I’ve heard from other women who had c-sections—fairly mild: a La Leche volunteer, clearly a poorly trained one, whom I consulted four days postpartum told me the c-section meant I’d never breastfeed properly. (That fear was promptly dispelled by the lactation consultant I saw thereafter.)

Yet I’m inclined toward defensiveness about most of my parenting decisions, and the rather dogmatic atmosphere of Northern California parenting makes me question a lot of my choices. And maybe such questioning is a healthy thing. Is it okay that I night-weaned the boy at seven months, didn’t cosleep except in the early months when it seemed necessary, weaned entirely at ten months, vaccinated per my pediatrician’s schedule, use disposable diapers (I don’t have a home laundry machine and can’t afford a cloth service), and give the kid a pacifier? Am I an abomination because I’ve let the kid cry it out or given him white flour/sugar/salt on occasion, or because I stopped using slings once he grew heavy enough to hurt my back? I don’t know. I don’t have a control group, a test baby for whom I could make different decisions, just as I don’t have a second, c-section-free birth experience that I can compare to the first.

Yet my hackles always go up when I read articles decrying the c-section epidemic in America. Some of these articles are very well reasoned and researched indeed. Others are not. Some seem authored by people who based all their conclusions on a single viewing of The Business of Being Born or a quick skim of Ina Mae Gaskin. I suppose what really pisses me off is a recurrent underlying message: “Even if you were happy with your c-section, even if you believe it was the best and only choice you could make for yourself and your baby, you were in truth victimized by the medical establishment.” Sometimes writers decrying c-sections also imply that all c-sections, by definition, cause lasting physical and mental harm to the baby and mother, even if she doesn’t consciously realize it, because they tamper with some mystical, essential-feminine ideal of childbirth.

And so I’ve worked myself into a lather and written long rebuttals to several articles, offering myself as one (admittedly anecdotal) data point: I honestly believe the cesarean was the best decision; it was not forced on me by doctors but instead was jointly decided upon by me, my husband, and the medical staff after I’d labored, with broken waters and rising temperature but without progression, for three days; my recovery was very swift and nearly painless; the baby was fine and scored nine points on his Apgars and latched on pronto; and my hospital experience was almost uniformly positive. (There was one stupid substitute nurse who wanted us to supplement with formula. There’s always one stupid substitute nurse in anyone’s birth story, though, and she did no lasting damage.) I try to point out that while there probably are too many c-sections in the U.S., and sometimes they are driven by doctors’ malpractice fears or bad hospital policy, there are also many women who had c-sections and feel just fine about the experience. Women who think mostly about the healthy kid that was its end result, and who don’t much care about missing out on natural birth. And I try to point out the ugly implications of the "c-section moms are unconscious victims" attitude: it is as disempowering, as insulting to women, as the medical monolith these writers critique. (Even whacked out on morphine, I retained agency/was a demanding little bitch. Yes indeed.)

Sometimes I’ve received empathetic and intelligent responses from the articles’ authors. Sometimes I’ve received radio silence. And sometimes I’ve received condescension and scorn. And in the past few months I’ve put my pen down and tried to skip over articles that make me feel defensive; after all, I won’t change anyone’s mind. I’m not a medical professional, and I’m not a researcher. I’m just this person who had a c-section, one birth story among a kajillion other birth stories.

Now that I’m reading without furiously typing rebuttals in my head, something has become clear to me: I was actually fortunate. My doctor was responsive, available, intelligent, and open-minded. My hospital is in a major urban area, and has not only some of the best ob-gyns and pediatricians in the country but, because the urban area is a wealthy one, also incredible amenities. Plush birth center. Food that’s not just edible but good, including separate menus of Chinese and Russian food printed in Mandarin and Cyrillic. Endless classes in baby care, birth preparation, breastfeeding, parenting, husbanding, on and on. Physically gorgeous setting—I went through early contractions leaning against a plate-glass window and watching the November sea fog roll in across Golden Gate Park, swamping the tower of the DeYoung museum—and even physically gorgeous staff. (Their uniform loveliness grew kind of hilarious as the hours progressed. My anesthesiologist looked like George Clooney; the woman who demonstrated the breast pump for me looked like a tiny, svelte young Liz Taylor. Even my ob-gyn, as my husband observed, “looked like a Prada model.”) To a one they were respectful, solicitous, helpful, and informative. No one pressured me to take meds, to stay in one position, or to stop screaming my head off or behaving, basically, like a total ogre once the Pitocin-induced contractions started. No one threw my husband out of the OR (he watched the surgery over the drape, the stout-hearted lad) or snatched the baby away from us.

Some things were crappy, of course. I couldn’t shower for two days, and smelled like a cow in summer by the time I could. The catheter hurt, and the staples pinched when I laughed (husband read Ricky Gervais dialogues to me while the kid slept). And I wanted to keep the baby in bed with me because he screamed like a banshee when set alone into his uncomfortable rolling bassinet, and Stupid Substitute Nurse said no. (Other nurses pretended not to notice.) Minor annoyances.

They’re nothing, though, compared to what I’ve read of other hospital birth experiences. Doctors who wouldn’t respond to pages; doctors who browbeat or insulted parents; hospital staff who were rude, bound up in schedules and rulebooks, or simply nonexistent. I think that hospital births, including c-sections, in the U.S. are often kinda crappy because healthcare in the U.S. is often kinda crappy. Why was my experience different? In part, because I live in a city. In part, because I live in a wealthy city where women can choose among many competing hospitals. And in part...bingo, because of the very “dogmatic atmosphere of Northern California parenting” I whinged about at the start of this post. The same people who make me feel guilty about my non-attachment parenting, and pissed off about even unspoken judgments of my c-section, are also the people who helped make my hospital what it is, who agitated for classes and a good birth center and nonjudgmental staff and friendly treatment of parents and babies. An ironic sort of feedback loop, and I’m glad that my defensiveness is easing enough for me to recognize it. Sometimes what pisses you off most is also what helps you most.

Beep. beep. roar. beep.

2009-02-12T12:39:00.000-08:00

Have not posted a thing in weeks now. Not sure why. Would rather read others’ blogs than peck at my own. Other people’s lives have more narrative arc than mine does, at least at the moment. Outside it is chilly damp February, the bad month of the year, the month in which all of my life’s minor handful of disasters have occurred, and although this particular February has been uneventful (so far, says the interior Voice of Doom), it remains a month during which it’s best to batten down the hatches, to hole up with three-pepper pizza and DVDs and the little boy bundled into three layers of fleece and a beanie to defeat the nippy air of our California-crappily-insulated apartment.
---
The boy has a pair of truly monstrous new toys. Several weeks ago I complained to my neighbor about Flann’s inability to permit me to cook a meal—as soon as I approach the stove he remembers that he is, in fact, a foundling, a foundling with no one to love him, a Little Match Boy bereft of warmth and home, and he bawls until I pick him up and lamely try to sauté with a single hand. (Yesterday the New York Times ran this great article about computerized prosthetic arms. I want to install one so that I can Zaphod Beeblebrox my way through motherhood, housemaid-ing with the robot hand while the other two entertain Flanny the Friendless.) Anyway. The neighbor proferred a pair of toys she’d picked up in Narita airport to entertain her toddler. I’m not sure what they’re called; “karaoke books” seems to be the closest translation from Japanese. They’re paperbound folders, one side of which is lined with colorful picture-book buttons that play little songs and sounds. The other side holds an electronic drum and a Japanese lyric book, and there’s a small microphone so tots can sing along. “Borrow them,” my neighbor said. I didn’t heed the slight edge of desperation in her voice.

At home the toys revealed their demonic nature. One book is about Things That Go. Trucks. Planes. Chainsaws (yes, I’m serious). Fire trucks. Ambulances. You can hit buttons that play bus horns, sirens, loudspeaker announcements. One emits the sound of a 747 at takeoff. Another makes the sound of a truck backing up (“Takashima, takashima,” warns a pleasant, nurselike voice above a blaring backing horn); another plays squealing brakes. And there’s no volume control. These things must be hurled out windows all over Japan by deafened, nerve-shattered parents. I’ve tried to return them to the neighbor several times. “Oh, please keep them a little while longer,” she says, backing off from her door.

Flann, of course, loves the things. He even allowed me to steam him a tamale and edamame for supper last night while he repeatedly punched the button for a song whose title my neighbor hesitantly translated as “Song of the Happy Working Cars.” Its page in the lyric book, though, is disturbing: ambulances and fire trucks are stuck in Tokyo traffic, sweating from their cutely anthropomorphized hoods as a skyscraper collapses in flames on the horizon. In the sky a helicopter and bird make adorable “Oh no!” faces. The tune is bouncy and full of cheerful electronic blips. It is audible, probably, all the way to Topeka.
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I’m considering turning off the tap: the babymaking tap, that is. Since Flann’s advent I’ve tried several different birth-control methods, which have all disappointed. First I returned to our friend the progesterone pill, which I used happily in pre-Flann days. But it tanked my milk supply, even though the ob-gyn swore up and down it wouldn’t. Then I tried a hormone-free copper IUD. But it was about as comfortable as a Christmas tree star up the works, and though I’d enjoyed twenty-six years of trouble-free periods, the IUD brought that to a tummy-clutching end. So out it went, and I returned to the Pill. But on Thanksgiving day, while we were hiking at Briones reservoir, I glanced at the sky and noticed an eerie, shimmering starburst in the center of my vision. A migraine aura.

I hadn’t had one in twelve years, since I moved from combination pills to progesterone-only ones; my auras back then received much alarmed and solicitous attention from my ob-gyn, because their appearance in young(ish) women on the Pill can herald calamities like strokes. I was stuck in an MRI machine, and my cerebral ventricles duly praised and judged problem-free. The auras departed when I switched pills, and I thought progesterone-only was the one for me. But no more, alas. In my newly improved body, permanently altered as it is by the pregnancy hormones that caused me to puke for nine months and turned my complexion into that of a really unpopular teenager, progesterone too sparks auras.

(The auras were, mysteriously, never followed by actual migraines. Just shimmering circles that slowly expanded, over the course of an hour or two, until prismatic disco balls—lovely, actually—filled my entire field of vision. Like a free ride on psychedelic mushrooms, without the unfortunate side effects of puking and crying and then calling ex-boyfriends and keeping them on the phone for six hours.)

So I’m at the end of the line, birth-control-wise. I’ll never return to barrier methods; don’t trust some, just hate others. And although I’m forty I’m from a family of relentlessly fertile individuals and I know I could still get knocked up. Too bad we’re a bunch of depressive atheists; we would’ve made excellent Quiverfull whackaloons, me and my relatives, what with the bazillion unplanned pregnancies that festoon both of my family trees. We could’ve repopulated whole countries. And I’m too old and way too poor for more babies. Anyway (again). I’m considering tubal ligation. Haven’t decided yet. Have whole sheaf of informational pamphlets (full of photos of Smiling Professional Ladies making eyes at Smiling Professional Men—“Hey, visiting auditor dude! I’m barren! Wanna schtup me on the conference table?”) and need to peruse them.

They make me a little sad. In an ideal world I’d have a daughter to set beside the boy. But I rolled the dice once already, having a baby in my very latest possible thirties, and I won; my prize is right here, tossing his toys down the front steps and saying, “Oh, no!” in mock distress. And waving hi to every pretty girl we pass on the sidewalk. And punching the buttons of his infernal karaoke books. He’s enough; he’s plenty.

His Russian cousin

2009-01-28T12:34:00.000-08:00

Maksim, born 0230 Moscow time. 3 kilograms, 50 centimeters, vocal and voracious. (His dad is my middle brother, Peter, valiantly reproducing for the second time at the age of 47.)

Russian hospitals employ a Tutankhamen-esque swaddling technique that covers the head; Peter claims it's a method borrowed from the Mongols, and who knows about that, but it seems wise given that it's ten degrees below freaking zero there. Welcome to the icy world, little one.

Brush wars

2009-01-26T15:37:00.001-08:00

Flann encountered his first dentist on Friday morning. He has a fused tooth; two of his lower front choppers realized, while still budding underground, that they were too much in love to part, and so they emerged from his gumline together, with only a small groove to mark their fusion. Fused teeth are a problem because (1) the groove tends to decay unless zealous parental brushing is employed, and Flann is convinced toothbrushes harbor dangerous explosives and must be avoided at all costs; and (2) they often indicate a permanent tooth bud is lacking. He’s also on iron supplements, which have the alluring side-effect of staining teeth a Dickensian gray.

Of course, the same child who yips and howls when I attempt to brush his teeth behaved like an open-mouthed choirboy angel while the dentist investigated his wee fangs. Then the dentist—a man of truly impressive eyebrows; you could sweep out a chimney with the things, and their awesomeness kept Flann well distracted during the exam—sat back and offered much horrifying advice on how to protect the fused tooth and prevent iron stains:

No more dried fruit. (Which, of course, the boy loves.)
Definitely no more raisins. (Which ditto, and plus they’re one of the few iron-rich things this child will eat.)
No more soft-spouted sippy cups. (Flann’s love of his BornFree is exceeded only by his love of his pacifier.)
Limit pacifier use. (Here I began to giggle internally, just a bit.)
Twice-daily brushing. (Louder giggling.)
Floss. (And here I abandoned all dignity.)

Back home I squirted fluoride-free fruit toothpaste onto a glow-in-the-dark Japanese baby toothbrush given to me by my neighbor, and Flann consented to chew on it for a while during his evening tub. Then he threw the brush out of the tub and sealed up his rosebud lips.

I suppose I should force the issue, and simply brush his teeth twice a day whether he likes it or not. But I fear turning him off toothbrushing altogether, and setting up a battle that could become truly titanic once he’s an older, more willful toddler. I am a wimp parent.

I’ve recently made headway in another battle, though: he takes his nightly asthma inhaler with less fuss. For the first five months of administration, I had to set him face-up on my lap, pin his arms down under my legs, and force fifteen breaths of corticosteroid into the poor kid’s screaming face. Finally I took him to my neighbor’s to watch her toddler take his own inhaler with mature dispassion, and that did the trick. I also turn on the television—the only time he watches it! I swear! Except maybe for the inauguration, and also a few presidential debates. I know, I suck!—and he gets to watch a few minutes of MacNeil-Lehrer or a Seinfeld re-run. I figure the TV exposure must be less damaging than the horrible Mommy Smackdown of previous times.

Anyway, I feel too battle-scarred to force two new wrestling matches into our daily routine. I’ll just let him continue to chew on the toothbrush, and I might experiment with some fancy-pants ScoobyDoo electric jobbie, too. He’s a fool for anything that spins or flashes or makes noise.

I wish I could somehow incorporate toothbrushing into his tickle-fights. The kid loves nothing more than being turned upside-down, tickled under the chin, boofed with couch pillows, and hauled around the floor on full bags of clean laundry. He loves bopping people with the foam roller I use for my back, slapping water out of the tub, tipping over chairs, running in circles till he’s dizzy, and bashing into things. He’s such a boy. If I could only find a toothbrush that manages to blow raspberries on the soles of his feet, make farting sounds, and throw him in the air while removing plaque, I’d have this problem nailed.

Validation

2009-01-16T13:14:00.001-08:00

I've tried a dozen times to read Flann The Runaway Bunny. It's a classic. It's practically a parenting necessity, much like Where the Wild Things Are, and Goodnight Moon, and a dozen other kiddy books that have always given me the creepy-crawlies (for varying reasons: the hideous hangover color scheme of Goodnight Moon, banishment to rooms that suddenly morph into jungles in Wild Things, and Freudian-level smother-mothering in Runaway Bunny). But he just doesn't like it any more than I do.

I feel very validated by this Babble piece. Gratifying to know that so many other parental tummies are turned by the baby classics, that I am not - or not merely - a cynical bitch. Perhaps I should move onward; think he's too young for Gravity's Rainbow? I'm sure he'd like the rockets.

Sun and air

2009-01-13T09:42:00.001-08:00

It’s downright Day of the Locust out here today, with temperatures in the mid-seventies and bright skies and warm winds off the Central Valley and nary a shred of fog. The air’s so clear this morning that from the steps of Flanny’s daycare I could see, far across the bay in the Marin headlands, the sparkling tops of cars cruising down the Waldo Grade toward the Golden Gate in the Marin headlands and, far beyond the bridge, the twin humps of the Farallon islands. In January Northern California is usually blanketed in damp gray, and storms line up off the coast like sulky giants to douse us with sad all-day rains. Not this winter. Another years-long drought is slouching its way toward Bethlehem to be born, and though we’re already on water rationing, the EBMUD will certainly tighten the noose and raise our rates come summer.

I enjoy the weather anyway (especially after reading something like this; when I went to grad school in the Midwest, January was like a protracted war, days of subzero temperatures, black-ice sidewalks, frostbitten earlobes, and frozen eyelashes). It means I don’t have to wrestle Flanny into a jacket, layer him in three sets of pajamas—our apartment isn’t insulated, hardly any place out here is—or fight our way through rainstorms on our walks to daycare. The nightly news is full of grim hydrologists touring reporters around emptying reservoirs, and unhappy ski-resort owners, but in my little selfish world, with my barefoot baby in his sunny stroller, I’m happy.

Meanwhile Flann is adjusting to his new, entirely audible existence. He wakes up frequently; I think he slept well earlier in life because he was half-deaf. Now he can hear us in the kitchen and living room, and the car alarms on the street, and the obsessively vacuuming upstairs neighbors, and the toddler next door doing windsprints in his hallway. Daycare called me yesterday morning, alarmed because Flann was crying inconsolably, but eventually we determined he was frightened by another, piercingly loud baby’s yells (it was her first day back after the holidays, and she’s being weaned and is profoundly pissed off about that). That kid wears an allergy mask on dusty days, so they simply popped it onto her face, muffling her yodels, and Flann settled immediately. He now glances up when he hears planes; he turns around when trucks pass; he claps and waves to piped-in music in stores. He hears a bass solo on a jazz station and bounces excitedly—it was his low-range hearing that was missing before the ear tubes went in. All these are ordinary actions, of course, but they’re new to him.

I’ve been re-reading Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, which once seemed to be mostly about the misprojections of romantic love but now reveals new layers. The narrator is teaching a computer to listen, to talk, and eventually to think, to create its own human mind out of the music and words fed to it through a microphone. Near the end the computer is quoted Caliban, from Tempest: “The island is full of noises; Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight.” In these bright sunny weird windy days, Flann is listening to the new noises of his island, and it seems he finds the place both frightening and delightful.

A milestone. Of sorts.

2009-01-05T14:30:00.000-08:00

I haven’t posted for so long that I’ve sort of forgotten how. Do I praise my kid? Turn his foibles into witty anecdotes? Bewail my/his failings? Stare with great and self-indulgent prolixity at the lint in his navel and my own? Hell let’s do it all.

I’ve been home with him for two weeks—one of the publishing industry’s few perks, now that the three-martini lunch is dead, is a lengthy paid holiday closure—and this reminded me how demanding stay-at-home mothering is. My hat is off to all those who do it. It is, for me anyway, far harder than working four days a week. Toddlers are so intense, and Flann is so mobile now, and his attention span so short, and his need for entertainment and stimulation and wrestling matches so attenuated, that my brain is but a limp, sodden rag. Handling him is like handling a very amusing and adorable stick of dynamite: it might go off at any second.

Over the past two weeks, he cut four molars, called me “mama” for the first time, battled through two head colds, manfully endured a six-hour roundtrip to the windswept barrens of the Central Valley for Christmas at the in-laws’ (who are great fans of fragile tchotchkes, and thus we spent the first two hours of our visit minesweeping their holiday decor from floor level to tabletop and mantelpiece), decided his stroller is an instrument of toddler torment, received his first pair of big-boy, non-Robeez shoes (the toes of which he scuffed raw in five days), learned to run, and finally, mercifully, abandoned his habit of waking up for the day at 4:30 AM.

He also threw his first tantrum, the prelude to which is documented below.

Flann can now walk down the street, and he does it with relish, with a certain swagger, a boulevardier in the making.

The headgear here is known as Puppyhat and is courtesy of my stepmother:

Here the mighty trekker reaches our intersection, which though it appears suburban and placid is in fact menaced by the cars of drunken college students, the sneakily silent Priuses of wealthy Berkeley hills-dwellers, the giant tractor trailers servicing two nearby supermarkets, the magpie shopping-cart caravans of the homeless, and the stop-sign-running bicycles of the self-righteously car-free:

And here our hiker runs, blurrily, off the rails. Tarmac! Let’s walk on it! Sidewalks are too limiting; they are but the straitjacket of The Man.

I made a futile attempt to grab his hand, visions of all the sweet local toddlers I see strolling hand-in-hand with their parents dancing in my head, and the boy threw himself onto the pavement, arched upward, and began to yell. Freedom! ¡La lucha! ¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido! I carried him inside before neighbors could peep out windows to see who had gone a-child murderin’ on Vine Street.

It’s time to read up on tantrum management, the ignore/remove/bribe/negotiate battle tactics that I see other parents so calmly deploying in shops and playgrounds, all of them seeming such weathered and wise veterans. This is a strong-willed kid. I need chops to manage him. If only I could arrange for all his future tantrums to occur while he’s wearing Puppyhat. It’s impossible to take a meltdown seriously when the meltdowner is attired in floppy brown wool ears.

Baby in the bubbles

2009-01-03T20:47:00.000-08:00

I owe this blog a longer post. Until then, here's Flanny at the Discovery Museum, behind some display that involved frogs and bubbles and test tubes and buttons and plainly had high pedagogical intentions even if they were not exactly realized:

Worst mother, ever

2008-12-15T12:22:00.001-08:00

So yesterday was a frantic but basically cheerful rainy-day blur of household chores (fold laundry wash tub fold laundry dash to drugstore/road-test new Maclaren stroller rainshield fold laundry wash crisis-level dishes post-Matt culinary extravaganza of roast pears and chickens and this shredded Brussels sprout/pancetta thing he makes in which I want to be entombed; also fold laundry) and baby entertainment. Fortunately Flann is still at the stage where he can be amused by ordinary household items for a full five minutes at a time—ooo! hairbrush! clicky pen with barrel removed! running socks!—and so I’d kind of toss things down to him on the floor occasionally, like a zookeeper tossing antelope shanks to a bored lion, while I changed sheets and vaccumed and flea-doped the cat. Then I had the stupid idea to let him play with an empty wastebasket.

The offending item is a cheapo black-wire basket from Ikea bought in pre-baby days when I didn’t equate sharp-edged domestic items with Flanny Peril Alert Level Red. He’s in this strong-man phase where he likes to heft heavy stuff and lunge around the house with it, like an Edwardian-era circus performer hoisting a kettle weight. (Yesterday he chased the kitten through the kitchen with the five-pound kibble bag, trying to feed her, I think, like Sam-I-Am yelling Eat them! Eat them! They are good!, and with predictable reaction of fear-and-loathing on her part). He staggered around the bedroom with the wastebasket for a while, quite impressed with himself. Then he slipped, and the far edge of the basket—finely honed, wicked little edge; did the Swedes intend it to double as a paper shredder?—smacked him right between the eyes.

I carried the screaming boy around the house for several minutes, watching a red and black buboe emerge between his eyebrows (so pathetically delicate and feather-light by contrast) and trying to convince him that ice would help the situation (Sure, mama, stick ice on my head after letting me play with Waskebasket of Doom! Why not just hand me the matchbox while you’re at it?). Then I shone a flashlight in his eyes to check his pupil reaction, made him walk down the hall so I could see if he was dizzy, dosed him with Motrin, and hid the wastebasket under the bed as if that would somehow undo the situation. Also I apologized a bunch. Not accepted, said Flanny.

This morning he looked like he’d gone a few rounds with Sonny Liston but was otherwise his usual self, so on the way to daycare I practiced my explanation of his war wound, trying for a tone that wouldn’t make his teachers call Child Protective Services (“She says he walks into doors and wastebaskets a lot. And she’s got shifty eyes”) or think I was an irresponsible slattern, even though I am. The first kid to greet us through the doors, a bouncy three-year-old, had a shiner and a cut on his cheek. “Fell out of the car door,” his mom said casually in passing. I shyly pointed out Flanny’s buboe: slattern solidarity? “You call that a bruise?” the other mother said, stooping to peer at him. “You ain’t seen nothing yet. When my kid was learning to walk he had a Band-aid on his face for, like, two months straight.” Clearly she’d learned to cope with any child wound short of limb loss, but I’m a long way from such guilt-free living. I kinda want to keep him in a foam box now.

Ear-ectomy

2008-12-11T14:53:00.001-08:00

Yesterday we took Flanny to Children’s Hospital for the scheduled plumbing of his ears. I loaded up a bag with every comfort item the kid might conceivably need: two “softs” (fleece blankets), three binkies, a sippy of milk that the nurses declined to let me feed him, graham crackers and fruit which ditto, his stuffed rat, and an obese teddy bear, a grandparently birthday gift bestowed this weekend.

Per his usual behavior in any medical setting, Flann became ravingly social and happy, waddling around the outpatient surgery waiting area to goggle at/befriend/drool upon assembled strangers, clambering up chairs, crawling through the corridors, and rattling the wall gratings that look out upon a five-story indoor atrium populated by enormous papier-maché butterflies, palm trees, and ring-tailed lemurs. He was certain he could fly, if only we’d remove the gratings and let him try.

We waited for ninety minutes before the surgery; occasionally we were pulled into the inner sanctum of offices for a blood-pressure or temperature check, and to dress Flanny in oversized green surgical pajamas that made him look like a tiny lump of melting pistachio ice cream (if pistachio ice cream could crawl at forty miles an hour down hallways). In the waiting area the televisions were tuned to Dora the Explorer. At Children’s they are always tuned to Dora the Explorer, as if the whole hospital is taking graft from Hasbro Inc. Flann didn’t watch; there were too many people to stalk, too much furniture to scale and tumble off. We took turns: one of us chased the boy around, the other recuperated with trashy magazines, and repeat repeat.

Finally Flann’s surgeon, the hound-dog-faced Ear Tube King of Northern California (“I’ve performed ten thousand of these over the years,” he informed us laconically), appeared. He was bored in just the right way: the sort of boredom you love to hear in the voice of airplane pilots when you’re flying through a thunderstorm, the sort of boredom that says, “This is nothing. This is a walk in the park. Now lemme tell you about the time I performed a craniotomy under artillery fire in the Ia Drang....”

We took the child off for his anesthesia, the only really unpleasant part of the process. A team of about fifteen blue-suited anesthesiologists surrounded the lad, who’d just woken up from a nap, affixed a mask to his face, and sent him struggling straight back into dreamland. He was pissed.

The surgery itself took perhaps fifteen minutes. We were not permitted to watch (this seemed unfair, especially given my recent memory of Matt observing/commenting upon my C-section, but some parents, understandably, get a bit unhinged when watching scalpels wielded on their tots). We could tell when it was over, though; into the waiting room drifted yells of a particular Tyrannosaurus rex pitch that could have been produced only by our dear baby. We went to gather him up. He was hot. He was angry. And he was hungry: the surgery was preceded by an eighteen-hour fast, and he was about ready to eat the leg off his attending nurse. She plied him with free stuffed animals; he was having none of it, and hollered until silenced by a bottle of apple juice.

So: it all went well. No complications. They suctioned out the gunk behind his eardrums. The tubes will stay in for nine or ten months till they drop out on their own. By that time his immune system will be stronger, so he’ll be less prone to infections; and his head will be larger, so his eustachian tubes will better perform their eustachianly duties.

At home he ate about six pounds of roast pork, babbled up a storm, and loudly declined a nap. Clearly no worse for wear. Same old Flanny, but now with improved audiophonics.

Oh, in the middle of all this I turned forty. Yeah, whatever; the best cure for “God, I’m fucking old”-type anxiety is surgery on one’s baby. We had kind of a party on Sunday, mostly in honor of Flann. Matt made cochinita pibil. People brought wondrous gifts. There were about six toddlers crammed into our closet-sized living room. And Flanny remained confused by this whole blowing-out-the-candles business.

Now you're all better, sweet one.

Fall down go boom

2008-12-04T15:16:00.000-08:00

Flanny took a backflip off the bed this morning, landing first on his rear and then, with a fearsome thunk, on the back of his head. He was trying to climb off the bed backwards—he’s quite good about flipping butt-foremost when descending stairways and slides and sofas, but the little guy is a lousy judge of heights. E.g., he butt-scooches down tiny prominences that don’t require it, such as hillocks at the park that he could easily crawl down, and he tries to butt-first it off high surfaces without realizing he’ll fall. Our floor is wood, and the bedstead is about three feet high. I’ve worried about him falling since he was born, but this is the first time he’s really done it (a few weeks back he tumbled off while jumping around in the pillows like one of the proverbial five little doomed monkeys, but he only fell onto the nightstand). He seemed okay, mostly pissed off and indignant that the world, that heartless bitch, had smote him so cruelly.

He’s taking his lumps these days, the poor newly walking babe. It’s impossible to predict where and when he’ll tumble: he does quite well toddling around toy cars and such at the tot-lot, climbing in and out of them with aplomb. (Someone recently abandoned a whole fleet of nasty toy Hummers and Jeeps at the park; they’re black and camouflage-green, sporting Nine Inch Nails and “Punx Not Dead” bumper stickers, and of course Flanny loves them and will not be distracted by the innocent, friendly Fisher-Price cars among which they hunker like thugs at a kindergarten picnic.) And then he’ll decide the tub, where he’d never fallen, is a great place for a stroll, and he’ll cut his lip open against his new side incisors when he stumbles into the faucet (yes, I was watching him, but didn’t grab him in time).

His falls don’t deter him, though. He Frankenstein-shuffles through the apartment, jubilant and crowing, often ferrying us things he thinks we need—this morning he decided Matt desperately required a little waxed pumpkin, a Halloween souvenir that usually lives on the dresser, and he carried it from the bedroom into the kitchen, giggling and waddling along in his pale-green dino footie pajamas, hair sticking up everywhere in most grevious bed-head. Last night after dinner my neighbor and her two-year-old, a rompy oversized kiddo whom Flanny passionately loves, came over to play, and Flann ferreted books off the shelves to deliver to them, clutching heavy hardbacks in both hands and advancing with a sort of gleefully grim determination to dump them in our guests’ laps. Then he spent time walking back and forth with blocks, stuffing them one at a time under the couch. He’s like a small postman making his rounds, distributing matter according to his own tiny, obscure schemes, but constantly thwarted by the incessant tidying of parents. Surely the Cheerios belong under the chair, not in the box; surely it’s best when crayons are strewn across the bedroom rather than hidden away in a cabinet. Someday, he feels sure, we’ll see the wisdom of his ways.

Volume

2008-12-02T15:28:00.000-08:00

Flann’s a loud kid. He cries loud, he crawls loud (he sounds like a herd of buffalo stampeding down the hall), he walks loud (he likes to hang onto a doorjamb or table and stomp one foot), he even eats loud (he goes MWAM MWAM MWAM MWAM! when chewing anything tasty, and I’m amused and half-deaf by the end of the meal). In the hospital he had a stellar rep among the nurses as the loudest baby on the floor. There was no mewling out of him as a newborn; when unhappy he shrieked like Maria Callas. You could hear him from the sidewalk in front of the house. He flipped out on the subway once as a three-month-old, and the conductor, two cars up, paged our car to ask if someone had been shot or fallen out the door.

Meanwhile everyone else’s babies seemed so gentle and meek. At postnatal yoga the infants lay on their blankets peeping like birds while Flann practiced happy ambulance-siren sounds. Other babies slumbered in Bjorns on their parents’ chests in the coffee line at Peet’s; Flann made my sternum twang with his yells. Matt came home from Berkeley Bowl the other day and told me he’d seen a guy shopping with a newborn, which lay in its stroller softly weeping mew mew mew. “The baby thought it was making tons of noise,” he said, “but you could barely even hear it. Why didn’t we get one of those?”

I was pondering this the other night—for the past six weeks Flann’s sleep has gone round the bend to hell and back again, and he wakes up to yawp ca. three times per night and then rouses for the day at 5 AM. There was a golden, Elysian stretch from July to October when he went down at 8 PM and slept through till 7 AM, and over those weeks I began to feel human again. Then the poor mite had a bad run of colds, ear infections, croup, and diarrhea, all of which required much night-time parental comforting, and then he figured out how to walk, which is so exciting that he wants to hop around in his crib all night, and then we decided to reduce binky usage—see above re. ear infections—and now we’re all haggard and bedraggled and underslept once again. Sometimes I haul him into bed with me at 5 AM and he sleeps for a while, between enthusiastic head-butts and kicks and fists to my nose and eye sockets (how do people co-sleep with toddlers? Do they drug them? Is it only my kid who sleeps like a gymnast?).

I’d attributed Flann’s volume setting to the resonant skull and big lungs he inherited from Matt, who has never been an especially quiet individual (he whoops along to music sometimes in the car and I always fear the wheels will fall off). But yesterday I picked up Flann from daycare and found the smallest, skinniest kid in the baby room—a wee Chinese American girl who greets me by taking off one sneaker, sitting in my lap, and helping me put it back on—was having a meltdown. Her mom had arrived during a messy blow-out diaper change, and the kid was ready to nurse and had no time or patience for any monkey business with the wipes and Huggies. Holy crap, but that kid can yell; tune a ship’s horn to the C above C above high C and you’ll have a faint idea of her glass-shattering power. And this is a baby with the bone structure of an especially delicate fairy, who probably weighs 19 pounds with both sneakers on. Her mother waited in the background, smiling patiently and calmly, her hearing no doubt entirely blown from 14 months of shrieking. It put Flanny’s racket right into perspective; next to her, he’s a rank amateur.
—
He’s working on a few more words. Dada is mastered, though he’s never sure where to leave off; Dadadadada! is the polysyllabic version he uses when torpedoing into Matt’s study for a hug. Apple is on the list, too, though he just likes its plosive—a-puh! a-puh!—and perhaps doesn’t connect it with the fruit. Kakuh is his word of approval when I pull out the graham crackers. And his old standby, kah!, said when pursuing the poor long-suffering cat around the house, has reappeared.

He hasn’t had an ear infection for over a month now, though he’s had a few colds. I pulled him off cow dairy several weeks ago when he developed lactose intolerance following a bad bout of diarrhea; apparently he can have it again after another month passes. I wonder if there is a connection, whether despite my pooh-poohing of the dairy = more mucus = ear problems equation, the switch to soy has actually helped him. There’s no way to know. Next week, he undergoes the ear-tube procedure. It remains necessary because schmutz is gobbed up behind his eardrums and must be drained. A five-minute procedure, they promise me; five minutes and tiny, tiny bead-sized tubes that will fall out on their own after about nine months. But they have to put him under general anesthesia, and I’ll probably need a martini or two after watching that. Or maybe beforehand. Would they mind if I simply brought along a flask?

No more a freshman

2008-11-26T10:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Flann hit the twelve-month mark. He celebrated with some serious, authentic bipedalism, waddling across rooms and down hallways, even turning a corner or two without a butt-plant. Swanlike grace, he is not yet the picture of: he doesn’t bend his knees but instead pivots along straight-legged like a compass measuring off distances on a map. And he extends his arms at shoulder level for balance (someone on a baby blog noted their newly toddling toddler resembled a zombie in quest of brains, braa-aaa-ins!, and it’s such an apt image that I hereby plagiarize it; apologies all around). And of course his walking is still only occasional and experimental. When he truly wants to move, he flops down and crawls.

Nonetheless, watching your baby walk, actually locomote the way real human beings do, is a breathtaking experience. From the puffy-lidded, helpless newt he was just 365 days ago to this upright animated person: it’s like watching one of those tiny wadded-up toy sponges that come in capsules transform in the bathwater into a triceratops or a fairy-tale castle or a flower. Hello, child; it seems you have arrived.
—
His daycare crowned the wee dauphin for his party—the baby who will not wear a hat, who takes issue even with jacket hoods, sported his crown all day long, right through dinner and a visit to the grocery store (where delighted deli clerks gave him a Necco) and playtime with his dad at home:

(The creature on top is a bear. Each kiddie at daycare is assigned a mascot, like a Jungian power animal for babies; its image is stamped on their diapers and placed on their cubbie and drawn onto the corners of their fingerpaintings, and the babies recognize their symbols and, I dunno, gain a sense of identity and place in the world. Such is the theory.)

He encountered cupcakes for the first time, pure, cocaine-strength sugar-n-fat topped with mysteriously flaming wax cylinders:

and at first was taken rather aback. But he recovered his wits and dove in nose-first, as a good bear does...

...and soon the cupcake monster was slain and devoured, and lo, the princeling cried out to his servants for more:

Giant steps

2008-11-18T20:07:00.000-08:00

Tiny ones, actually. The first two I've witnessed, taken in hesitant but surpassingly proud fashion across the living room while clutching his stuffed javelina. Correction, my stuffed javelina, the one Matt bought for me (before Flanny was even a gleam in our collective eyes) out of a bin in a resort gift shop while business-tripping in New Mexico, or Arizona, or wherever it is that javelinas roam the desert in wee ferocious packs, menacing pet dogs and devouring voles. Flann knows his steps mean something; I can see new mischief and delight in his eyes as he takes those staggering little strides.

(He recognizes the word "javelina," by the way. Also "frog," "elephant," and "ratty ratty ratty," the last the name of his bedmate, a lanky and now very dirty pink rat given to him by a former colleague of ours who is not only one of the country's longest-lived HIV survivors but a wickedly scatological essayist whose bons mots still provide, oh, a third of the zingers Matt and I exchange.)

The boy turns one next Tuesday. Perhaps in celebration I'll finally write a post about the multiday saga that was his birth, although there is no real reason to revisit the twists and turns of that bizarre experience except to commemorate its happy ending: the tiny blue-eyed boy who was laid next to my well-morphined head by his father on a foggy San Francisco Sunday afternoon, and who changed everything, forever.

Prick up your ears

2008-11-13T19:55:00.001-08:00

On Monday I was told that Flann couldn't be scheduled for a hearing test until April. Yes, April, as in spring 2009. I quite nearly strangled the (entirely blameless) scheduling assistant who informed me of this bullshit, and who sketched vague portraits of audiologists mostly mythical in nature who commute among Los Angeles and Honolulu and San Francisco and are as rare and ineffable as unicorns. But after much on-phone whining and a bit of tactical weeping, I scored not only a hearing test but an ENT appointment for Flann TODAY.

So I bundled the little boy into the darkened testing chamber at Oakland Childrens Hospital, where lights flashed and small boxes lit up to show bears clanging cymbals and mysterious headphones were dropped onto the head of the (oddly) compliant Flanny. The testing process was actually quite intriguing, like a puppet show staged by Svankmajer.

Short answer: he has hearing loss due to fluid buildup in the inner ears as a result of repeated ear infections. His lower registers are not, uh, registering as they should. Thus his failure to imitate sounds, though he clearly recognizes at least some words.

Afterward I rolled Flann around in the sunshine outside the hospital for a while, weeping a bit but also profoundly comforted by the words of his audiologist - who turned out to be a friend! a woman I prenatally exercised with in the prenatal pool at the prenatal Y! - who hugged me and told me that the hearing loss was totally mild, reversible, nothing to worry about, and that I can call her/cry to her/ask her for interpretations of jargonistic audiograms. "This is NOTHING!" she kept saying. I was tempted to polish her shoes with my hair.

We went off to a baby cafe in Temescal for a while, where Flanny ate two bananas, took a header onto a doll crib in the play area and cut his occipital bone, threw a toy cucumber at a waitress, and briefly sucked on the nose of a little boy named Sasha (so much for infection prevention). Then we returned to the hospital to see the ENT.

The ENT was great. Brisk, to the point, reassuring, and quite direct: we could keep the kid on antibiotics indefinitely (FAIL - his latest antibiotic embarked him on a two-week diarrhea and diaper-rash festival), or we could put in ear tubes. He confirmed that altering diet wouldn't do a damned thing, because the chronic pus buildup in the inner ear is not affected by dairy, or anything else, going into the boy's craw. Ear tubes it is. Five-minute procedure. Early December. We're locked and loaded, and I am SO ready for this boy to be healthy, and talking my own ears off.

Excavating parents and children

2008-11-10T09:36:00.000-08:00

My dad sent out several cartons of old kids’ books extracted from the depths of his Maryland basement last week. They were a motley collection that didn’t include my absolute childhood favorites, probably because I loved those favorites into early deaths, to the point of reading them in the tub until they were so sodden they resembled old baklava, but the cartons sported some weird old gems. My favorite: two Alice in Wonderland volumes, clothbound editions printed midcentury with the original Tenniel illustrations in which Alice looks not like a charming moppet but like a pissed-off Dalton schoolgirl on a bender, with her great mass of blonde hair snapped strictly off her forehead and her inquisitive, angry aquiline nose.

My father bought these books at the Portsmouth Navy Base commissary as a twenty-three-year-old Navy lieutenant, circa 1955, and the commissary’s stamp is smeared over their title pages. He didn’t yet have kids; he didn’t even have a girlfriend. He was a skinny, lonely, intellectually snobbish former farmkid, and I believe he thought the Alice books were an essential part of educated childhood that he had missed in his schooling amid the snowdrifts and cows and dour German Lutherans of central Michigan. I like this image: my father reading the books in his bunk aboard a destroyer in the North Atlantic, trying to shut out the midshipmans’ unseemly yawping about getting drunk and blown by hookers once they pulled into Batista’s Havana in two weeks.

Still she haunts me phantomwise
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes

I don’t know if these lines affected him at all, but they still make me cry. Alice drifting in a rowboat in eternal humid melancholy midsummer; Alice unobtainable both to (rather pedophilic) Lewis Carroll and to the sad summerless workaday life of the adult mind. I look at Flann now and know that he is moving under those summer skies, even at times like this week, when he’s inconsolable and clinging and sleepless (teething? yet another ear infection? missing Matt, who is in Texas for work?). And his moments of baby peace and beauty are inaccessible to me, because I am too old to experience them. I can only observe them from a distance.

My relationship with my father has long been strained. But sometimes, just sometimes, I can glimpse the soft, hopeful aspects of his young man’s character. Buried under the cynicism and judgments of his old age is that goofy antisocial lieutenant, reading children’s books as his destroyer moans and rolls toward its beams in another frigid midnight gale.

Also in the carton were songbooks; my mother was an adequate piano player and sometimes sang to us when we were particularly cranky. Most of the songs are early-twentieth-century chestnuts about industrious crows and kittycats in the sun, but there are some blues songs in there, too, illustrated with politically unacceptable black-and-navy-blue line drawings of fieldhands and mammies. Among them is “House of the Rising Sun”—not the Animals or Dylan version, but the old one in which a ruined prostitute tells her young country sisters not to follow her to New Orleans, not to do what she has done. An odd choice for a suburban housewife to sing to her kiddies in 1975, but it casts a little beam into the mind of my mother, who’s been dead for thirty-one years and whom I never knew well.

I wonder about the ciphers we’ll be to Flanny. Will he know us? Or will he construct our personalities—part real, part dream-architecture of unmet needs and wishes—out of fragments of books, song lyrics, cartons of old paper? We build our parents like the blind men describing the elephant, one telling the legends of its legs, another the sagas of its tail, the third the tales of its trunk, none of them able to assemble the whole lumbering gray mystery from the single part he knows.

Baby, you can drive

2008-11-05T13:41:00.001-08:00

It’s entirely possible that Flann will learn to drive before I do. At the tottering age of thirty-nine, I do in fact possess a California driver’s license (with a weight listed on it that’s now entirely fictitious; hello, 115, I miss you so), but remain incapable of driving more than a block without a textbook panic attack. This is, uh, inconvenient, and probably dangerously irresponsible, when one is in possession of a baby.

My attempts to learn to drive are epic. They extend over decades. They range in settings from a corn-fringed South Dakota highway where a slightly hyperactive boyfriend tried to teach me stick amid a motorcycle pack headed to the annual Sturgis rally (I stalled out on an exit ramp, wept, and didn’t try again for years) to relatively calm suburban streets in Maryland, where my dad looked at me (weeping behind the wheel, as usual) across the front seat of our behemoth ’83 Olds station wagon and asked, in honest mystification, “What is wrong with you?” A question that remains unanswered. What is wrong with me?

I flailed along, living in cities and college towns where one doesn’t need a car. I finally managed to procure a license in my late twenties, when I was writing and editing for Lonely Planet. Yes! A travel editor who can’t drive! The hilarity. Should we stick a disclaimer in my books? (Also comic: my fear of flying, now somewhat transcended via the aid of Klonopin and this phenomenal class at San Francisco airport where mechanics and pilots and air-traffic controllers talk you through the incredibly reliable technicalities of flight and then take you up in the control tower to watch Air China 747s slamming off the runways and out over the blue Pacific and listen to the speed metal that SFO controllers, all of them tightly wound ultramarathoners in flippy-ass running split shorts and pirate T-shirts, apparently relish whilst holding the souls of multitudes in their hands.)

So I got my license in order to work on a travel guide to the Great Lakes. A very patient and only faintly lecherous retired California state motorcycle cop talked me through enough lessons that I was able to take the test. I passed the written portion with ease, of course. I got every question right! Can I show you my GRE scores while I’m at it, oh please? If only driving required just a pencil and a bubble-form, I’d be Mario Andretti. And I passed the driving portion, too, with a minor mark-down for a wide right turn onto San Pablo when the tester distracted me by pestering me for travel tips to Australia.

And then...I didn’t drive again. I didn’t own a car, so I couldn’t practice without imposing on friends who, while sympathetic, didn’t want me destroying their transmissions and clipping lightposts. Or weeping on their steering wheels. A few years ago Matt (who learned to drive in utero, like most Californians) and I bought our first car together, a zippy red Mini running under the alias Rosalinda, and when I got pregnant I tried once again. I bought lessons from a San Francisco school specializing in fretful lunatic adult drivers like me (as well as immigrant Chinese and Russians who are neither fretful nor lunatic but simply new to car culture). And then...I bombed out. Again. The details are too shaming to relate, but no one died and no property, automotive or otherwise, was damaged.

Each failure has added another layer of scar tissue over my basic fear of driving. Each time I fuck it up, trying again becomes harder. But somehow I must figure this out, for Flanny’s sake. There are birthday parties. There are playdates. Eventually there will be soccer. Movies. Monterey Bay Aquarium. He’ll probably hate me if I can’t drive him. And eventually we’ll move out of Berkeley, and I’ll need to drive on the daily errands that I now do on foot—at present we live half a mile from a subway stop, two blocks from two grocery stores, the pediatrician’s office, and two good drugstores, ten minutes from my office, and twenty minutes from Flanny’s daycare.

The logistics—how to pay for lessons, how to practice without the baby in the car, on and on—are daunting. But how lovely this scenario would be, a scenario that other mothers simply take for granted: It’s a sunny morning. Flanny is five years old, and he needs new shoes. I pack us a picnic lunch, put him in his booster seat, drive him down to Emeryville to pick out fabulous new tennies with dinosaurs all over them and those flashy-flash widgets in their soles, and then drive to Mount Tam for a long and exhausting hike on the sage-scented dry trails, up and down to the Pelican Inn at Muir Beach. I drink a cider; Flanny has hot chocolate. We go to the beach and watch a gray whale breach far offshore. Flann’s tired, happy, sandy-footed and soggy-pantsed. He sings in the back seat as we drive home, but by the time I’ve finished negotiating the crazy turns of Highway 1 up and out of Green Gulch, he’s fast asleep. In the rearview mirror, I see on his face perfect contentment, and trust.

Da vote

2008-11-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

{Halloween bear, in ball pit at Big Baby Party}

Tomorrow, though rain is predicted (damned rain; I know it’s good for plants and farmers and Hetch Hetchy and my utilities bill and all that, but parents of toddlers should be exempted from rainfall, especially parents who live in small apartments without yards and depend on tot-lot parks to exhaust and entertain said toddlers, and this was the longest and most unforgivable parenthetical interjection I’ve ever written), I plan to haul Flanny to the polls with me.

Voting in California is so much fun! Not only because everyone in the Bay Area fleshpots is a hellbound liberal just like me, which lends poll visits the cozy self-satisfied glow of a Girl Scouts fireside sing-along, but because California is the home of the whack-ass voter initiative. When I voted in other states (Maryland, Michigan, DC, Iowa), there would be maybe two of the things. But out here there are always about twenty on the ballot, state- and local-level ones. Pre-election voter information booklets are as big as medium-size city phone books. They range from the plodding (“Should we dispense monies earmarked in 2005’s bonds for expenditures in 2009?”) to the culture-war crazy. There always seems to be one about parental notification for minors undergoing abortions. There always seem to be at least three more about The Gays, oh my God what are we going to do about The Gays and their Marriages and the Children, think of the Children. I think these are sponsored by three or four lunatic Christian denominations in Southern California and funded by lunatic Christian denominations in other states where crops of the intolerant grow in richer plenty.

I’m unsure why gay marriage upsets these folks so much; I can say from personal experience that the women-couples and men-couples I know who have legally wedded in the past few months are far more traditional and dependable folks than me. E.g., they own houses, houses with lawns that they actually mow; they go on walk-a-thons and stash away college money for their kids and buy cottages at Russian River and just are generally way better as both citizens and taxpayers than I am. Married lesbians have in fact held my very own infant son and visited upon him woolly hand-knit bears and stuffed piglets, and as far as I can tell he has neither sprouted horns nor developed a fondness for show tunes as a result. So I shall hold his little hand up to the ballot and have him vote against Proposition 8 (how appropriate that “eight” and “hate” rhyme), in memory of all the truly excellent toys he’s received. And I suppose in twenty years he’ll spite me by becoming a born-again Republican. These babies.

Deadlift

2008-10-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

Before they vanish into the mists of sleep-deprived memory, I want to record some of Flanny’s odder and most endearing habits. “Babies: they’re like crazed midgets!” I forget who said that (these days aphasia eats all kinds of factoids; last week I realized I can’t remember the capital of Congo. Or the name of the actress who played Pussy Galore. These things are essential, dammit! What if I suddenly find myself on a flight into central Africa seated next to an elegant aging blonde and confusion reigns?). But the sentiment holds true.

He’s decided it’s time to stand free, without supports. A man needs to stand on his own two feet! In his own two boots! Surveying the rangelands. Anyway there is a textbook way to accomplish this; to wit: pull up to standing while holding on to something steadfast and sturdy (chair leg, couch arm, Russell Crowe’s quadricep). Then release one hand. Then release the other. Bingo, free stand. Ah, but Flann’s method is the Romanian Olympic deadlift routine: sit in the middle of the floor, get into a crouch, and power yourself to free stand using only the muscles of your legs. Allow expression of gleeful victory to cross face. Venture a step, then flap hands like a seagull caught in a power line. Fall face down, split lip against teeth, sob until comforted, and merrily, illogically repeat.

He’s also discovered his back. I suppose he always knew he had one; he just didn’t realize it was, in essence, the fourth plane of his body. Now he takes great pleasure in rolling toys and bottles from the crown of his head to his butt. Last night he sat before the toy basket and guided giraffe-hippo-wormie-froggie-bunny down his spine. At dinner it was Cheerios that needed to be rolled into the back of the onesie.

He’s discovered that remote controls are, well, remote controls. Generally we keep them out of his grasp, as nothing pleases him more than jacking the stereo volume above Spinal Tap’s “this goes to eleven” setting, thus convincing neighbors the earthquake hath come. Last night, though, he was feeling poorly, so we allowed him to sit in quiet contemplation with one remote, carefully pushing buttons and glancing at the stereo to see which lights flashed and how the sound modulated. He remained focused for a long time. Perhaps he will be a sound-board guy one day. He’ll look like Walter Becker and sleep with unsuitable Rock Chix. Oh, well. As long as he shares his weed.

He likes to be bopped on the head with things. Pillows; the long foam roller I use to ease my creaking, editing-ravaged back. Then he bops me back, and hilarity ensues. Another vision of his future: a Society for Creative Anachronism guy, one of those pasty dudes whapping other pasty dudes with padded medieval morningstars down at the Berkeley Marina. I love these little pillow fights, though; I hope he never outgrows them.

He rejects cut-up fruit, but he loves to sit around with pears or apples the size of his head and work them over like a tiny sewing machine, creating heaps of fruit skin bits on the floor. Eventually he slings them aside, sad flayed things that look like they’ve been ravaged by carpenter wasps, and in an excess of thriftiness I wash them in the sink and devour the remainder.

What else? When he feels lovey now, he bites; my shoulders are pocked with little purple tooth-bruises. When he’s finished his bath, he waves bye-bye to each tub animal in turn, especially the fat pink pig. He takes great joy in removing his socks; he’s always surprised to find feet in there. He crawls around with his stuffed rat clenched in his jaws like a victorious terrier. He’s developed the most heart-meltingly charming grin, deployed mainly when I’ve told him not to climb the glass-topped end table or harass the cat. It’s a smile of mischief and deviousness and joy; he’s realized he can affect the world, he can sometimes bend it to his own little-boy ends. It cannot be resisted.

Odious otitis

2008-10-23T15:05:00.001-07:00

Otitis sounds like the name of an idiot man-child in a southern Gothic tale, the one who wanders the fields howling at night and hides behind hedges to frighten pretty schoolgirls and occasionally runs amok with an axe. Otitis media, his even more uncouth cousin, has slouched his way into Flanny’s eustachian tubes yet again this week: his fifth ear infection since early August. Each is preceded by a cold; last week he had the most mild of sniffles, a transient, almost festive trickle of crystalline snot. It didn’t bother him as long as he could wipe the boogers all over my sleeve. But on Tuesday night the sniffles turned into a raging stereo ear infection, and the poor boy’s right eardrum perforated (I found a sad little flower-stain of blood-tinged discharge on his crib sheets). He’s back on heavy-duty antibiotics and twice-daily doses of Motrin. And cold season is just starting.

I know that ear infections are, to quote my doctor, “the most common chronic infant ailment.” Though painful, they usually cause no long-term problems. But once a kid reaches a certain benchmark—one or more infections per month—ear tubes should be considered. And Flanny’s at that benchmark now. Chronic ear infections and attendant fluid buildup can affect hearing and delay language development. I think Flann’s hearing is okay. He was a champ at his newborn screen. He responds to noises, recognizes his name, and clearly understands book, cat, Mommy, Daddy, no, Give me that, Don’t touch the stereo, and Don’t eat the kitty’s dinner. But he doesn’t imitate sounds, never has; and he doesn’t babble very much. Those damned developmental checklists say he should be babbling nonstop by now, imitating our words and intonations...but he doesn’t. He likes to imitate raspberries and mouth farts, and eagerly mimicks gestures. But words? Uh-uh. He said cat for about a week, then stopped.

So. I’m worried. I probably don’t need to be. I worry about everything, to a degree that annoys people. If Flanny were cognizant of my worry, he’d probably be annoyed, too. I spent part of my lunch hour with Dr. Google and found no viable alternatives to the tubes should his infections continue. You can keep a kid on prophylactic antibiotics, but that’s a bad idea, for obvious reasons ranging from tooth stains to gnarly superbugs. Hot compresses are recommended, but those would, I think, work only on an older kid—you’d have to lash Flann to the floor to keep a compress on his head. And of course people chime in with recommendations for acupuncture and ayurvedic oil drippings and craniosacral therapies and eliminating every last bit of dairy/wheat/sugar/yadda from the baby’s diet, to which I say foo, hooey, and balderdash.

As a kid grows, his head gets bigger and the eustachian tubes expand and change position. So, Flann will likely grow out of his unfortunate acquaintance with Otitis, that slack-jawed scythe-dragging slope-browed yokel. Until the dawn of that happy day, though, I’ll worry. I want him to talk and yap and annoy me with eighteen thousand questions about why some dogs are brown and others have spots, and sing along to his father’s secret guilty stash of Wings albums, and tell the same poop joke over and over again. Go away, Otitis; this baby has work to do.

Back and forth

2008-10-14T09:46:00.001-07:00

Flanny and I had a long weekend together, a four-dayer due to his daycare closing for—uh, training day? sleep-late-without-squalling-toddlers day? Whatever, they’ve earned it. The weather was hot and windy and strange, “wildfire weather” as these Californians call it when they’re not squinting into the Indian-summer sun and prognosticating earthquakes, as if the Hayward Fault could somehow sense an atmospheric temperature spike and buckle and topple in protest. (Our earthquake kit consists of two gallons of water shoved deep into the overcrowded storage closet. We’re doomed.) Angel Island was on fire mid-bay; from the top of the play structure in the park, to which Flanny climbs at great velocity as if he’s going for a speed record on Half Dome, we could spot spirals of smoke rising in the hot sapphire sky. And the Blue Angels were in town for Fleet Week, screaming in obnoxiously low formations over the treetops and the distant city. A hallucinatory, end-of-days scene.

More prosaically, it was quite a bad hair weekend in baby-land. Flann went swimming at the Y (“swimming” is an exaggeration; we carry the babies around in a knee-deep warm pool, singing “The Mighty Duke of York” while they chew on starfish and sea-horse bath toys) and after an encounter with the bath towel he became known as Propeller Head:

Yesterday Flann discovered that he can feed me rather than simply vice versa, and we shared a companionable meal of a Fuji apple in the living room. He’d gnaw off a bite, hand the sticky thing back to me, and watch expectantly until I took a bite and passed it back. This felt feral and cuddly, like a monkey sharing fruit with her infant high in a tree. Then the apple do-si-do inspired him to start passing me all kinds of things—a pacifier cap, his green Tyrannosaurus rex, his hat, the headband he’d just wrenched off my head—and jump up and down in anticipation until I returned it. Stuff goes back and forth! Who knew! Hurrah! He’s baby Marcel Mauss, disquisitioning on the reciprocity of the gift.

Eating in general, though, is not going especially well. After rejecting formula for umpteen weeks, it’s now all he wants. Waffles yogurt cheese apricots chicken can all piss off for the moment; he wants only the sippy. I proffer a spoonful of perfectly minced, sweet-as-cake organic plums that his father shlepped all the way to the farmers’ market! on a hot day! on foot! to buy, and he shakes his head vehemently and turns away, nose tipped up, like Brigitte Bardot spurning the advances of a clumsy beau. Mépris, he says. (And yet he tries to eat ants at the park, and bits of bark, and old chewed gum, and dead leaves. Babies have no palate.) I think, though, that he is getting sufficient calories; he has shot up in height recently and his legs and arms have grown long, like a kid’s, not a baby’s.

And he loves his push-car again. Back and forth he goes across the living room, stiff-legged and waddling; Matt says he looks like a little compass. Back and forth, back and forth. So much practicing a baby must do, so much repetition and fine-tuning. Laps and reps and splits and sprints. There are no lazy infants.

Parenting in the Great Concavity

2008-10-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

Well, the economy is tanking, Palin is a condescending idiot vampire-bat, my 401(k) and 403(b) resemble snuff porn outtakes, and last night the Mini Cooper, with only 65,000 miles on it, dropped its transmission on an Oakland byway to the tune of, oh, maybe eight thousand bucks, exact cost TBD pending diagnosis by Hans und Franz’s German Automechanikerinnen Haus. I wish the End Times could’ve held off until Flanny was out of infancy; it will be hard to hunker in the storm cellar with a semiautomatic, fending off the bands of Mad Max feral gasoline raiders, with a baby still too little to walk, or pass me fresh clips.

On the bright side: Babyman has learned to climb down stairs, not just up them; he figured out the swivel-butt-side-downward maneuver without any coaching from me. A new word, or sound, emerged last night: “Uh-oh,” spoken when hurling the TV remote behind the couch in an exciting game of Watch Mommy Retrieve Stuff. He’s developed a new obsession with touch-and-feel books, about which he coulda given a damn not two weeks ago, and now That’s Not My Tractor—perhaps the most boring book in existence despite its appliques of sandpaper and rubber and velcro, intended to depict the various bits of tractors manqué that a small mouse rejects in his quest to locate the John Deere of his dreams (the better with which to run over the burrows of his field-dwelling relatives?)—must be read at least five times a night.

Speaking of baby books, he now also has the mandatory obsession with Good Night Moon. What is it about this book? Does it exhale fumes of baby crack? Why does every baby love this thing? Personally I do not. It’s done up in acid orange and green, clashing colors not at all conducive to sleep. It’s downright creepy, too: the framed picture in the bedroom that depicts one bunny fishing in a stream, rod baited with carrot, for another, smaller bunny (what is this? Lapine cannibalism?); the unnamed “old woman whispering hush”; the pair of kittens too dumbass or lazy to catch the giant mouse that’s rampaging around the room, eating from the mush bowl and dangling from bookshelves; and, most of all, the framed picture of the Three Little Bears on Three Little Chairs. They sit glowering with their arms crossed in a barren featureless room like three Jersey mob bosses planning a hit in the back room of a docklands warehouse.

And yet to Flanny the book sings sweet sweet songs of Nepenthe. I read it to him each night after giving him his asthma medicine—a kinda awful procedure that involves pinning him down and delivering fifteen breaths of corticosteroid through a mask inhaler. Afterward he’s pissed off and crying, with sweaty hanks of hair standing on unhappy end, so I bundle him up against the couch with a sippy of milk, his “soft” (i.e., his green fleece blankie), and that strange strange book. By the time the mouse is up on the windowsill—no doubt signaling to his confrères outside that the coast is clear and they can now swarm the Bunny homestead like something out of Ben—he’s a relaxed little lump against my chest, ready for bath and jammies and warm safe crib.

Time, gentlemen

2008-09-30T12:43:00.000-07:00

He nursed for the final time Sunday morning. I sense that he’s sad about weaning, although I was nursing him just once a day over the past week, and even then he was too busy twisting and crawling to eat properly. He’s been clingy and weepy, and I’ve taken to preparing his dinners with him wadded up in the Bjorn he’s now far too big to use. It calms him. He philosophically watches me chop up fruit and reheat his macaroni shells; he chews on a strap for comfort as my lumbar spine goes twing twing tweet.

Happily, he finally figured out the mysterious principle underlying BornFree Sippy Cup operation this weekend, too, and he’s been guzzling down formula from it ever since.

I feel a bit guilty that I did not nurse for the full, AAP-prescribed year. And most other baby-mamas I know—well, not the ones who are working, to be fair—plan to nurse into toddlerhood. But I think I did everything I could. Between his activity level and the dampening effects of pumping four days a week, my supply had fallen dramatically. He never reverse-cycled (for which oh thank God; it sounds like hell), and I sure wasn’t waking up Mister Finally-Sleeping-Through-the-Night to encourage him to do so. So night nursing couldn’t make up the daytime lack. I reckon I could’ve undertaken superhuman efforts. I didn’t up my pumping to, say, eight times a day. I didn’t email a New Zealand pharmacy for a domperidone prescription. I didn’t quit my job (and soon thereafter relocate to a nice new home in a cardboard box in Golden Gate Park). And I didn’t drink quarts of fennel tea. But...I managed ten months, four of that while working full-time. Surely there is a tiny merit badge for that? With a wee gold tit upon it.

I need to go buy cabbage leaves. More later.
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Another reason for weaning—I feel like I’m writing a legal brief in my own defense, like La Leche or the Berkeley Parents Network is coming to kick my ass; why so paranoid?—is my insomnia, which reached truly epic proportions on Saturday. Perhaps it is weaning-hormone-related. Perhaps it’s malocchio or the phases of the moon; who the hell knows? But I awoke at half past midnight, after retiring ca. 10 PM, and lay awake until 5:30 AM. I’ve often suffered insomnia of the 3 or 4 AM variety, but never before had I lain awake for Five. Solid. Hours. Sunday was a stumbling, miserable wreck. Matt did all the chores and the week’s laundry, but I was so exhausted I could barely pick up the baby, raise a fork to my mouth, speak a coherent word. Sunday night I took a not-safe-for-breastmilk sleeping pill and slept seven straight blissful hours. Last night I did the same. I am again a functional human being.

I’m a bit sad, too, though. After nineteen months of my body being about someone else, it is returned to me. And it will always be mine now, up until the day it stops being at all. On the one hand it is good to cast off the restrictions of being someone else’s hotel and buffet table. Bring on the allergy pills, peanuts, second glass of wine, and retinol sunscreen. On the other hand it is...lonely. Is that the right word? I feel a bit un-tenanted now; the resort hotel is shuttered for this season and all the ones thereafter.
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I bought him a little blue-and-red push-car after I saw him walking with one at daycare. He walks behind it—actually stumble-runs behind it—like a drunk guy mowing his lawn two seconds before a thunderstorm. He crashes it from one end of the tiny living room to the other, weeping when it fetches up against the bookshelves or dining table. He both loves and hates the thing; it is his bitch goddess. Walking itself, I think, is the cause of this uproar. He wants to walk. And he’s scared by the prospect. He senses the Future approaching now. Will it be abyss or forest path? Bridge or cliff? How is a ten-month-old to know? There is no page in the baby book for First Existential Crisis.

Bloogs blowing by

2008-09-15T09:44:00.001-07:00

Think up a black sea
Think up a white sky
Think up a rowboat
Think of Bloogs blowing by.

On Saturday night I lay on the living room floor reading Seuss to the boy, who was perched alertly on his knees studying the book as if it contained holy writ; he has become very attentive to books, and has definite favorites and pulls them off the shelves and complains when they’re over and demonstrates in many small nonverbal ways that we should simply open the cover and start reading again from the beginning, and immediately please. Matt came into the living room to tell me David Foster Wallace had committed suicide the night before, and Seuss’s sketch of the Bloogs—small ghostlike things that emanate from crags in the sea to menace and delight the furry Seuss-creatures rowing their rickety boat across dark waters—got blurry in my vision.

Not a day passes that one of DFW’s stories or strange twists of phrase both conversational and lapidary or dark and hilarious images doesn’t drift across my mind. He thought up some very fine Bloogs, he did, and the black sea down here seems bleaker and colder in his absence.

And in the beginning was the word

2008-09-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

The word cat, to be precise. Flann loves our grumpy skittish none-too-bright tabbycat more than anything except maybe sucking on cellphones. He lights up when she cranks her way into the room complaining that her bowl is only half-full of the wrong brand of kibble or that I’m holding that human kitten again rather than petting cats, my true and proper function. He chases her down the hall with protestations of love, and she flicks her tail, vaults the baby gate, and escapes out the back door. (I hope this does not predict his future relationships with women. Maybe he’ll be the poor schlub playing “In Your Eyes” under the window of some hot airhead who ignores him except when she wants to copy his math homework.)

Anyway, I’ve been pointing at the cat and telling him “Cat, cat, kittycat!” for about a month now, and this weekend? He got it. He pointed at her from the highchair and announced, “Ka!” His first word, his very first. To prove it wasn’t a fluke, he did it again while he was crawling around the bedroom floor and she was stomping around the bed pillows. And once again in the back alley, where she was sharpening her claws on the fence around the neighbor’s Jacuzzi and girding her loins for another doomed battle with a fat gray cat that lives down the street.

Ironically, we’d been thinking about giving away the cat. Her behavior issues have only gotten worse since Flann’s advent, she sheds like a sheep in the shearing barn, and I simply don’t have enough love or time in my meager storehouse these days to give her the attention she needs. I had visions of finding a friendly spinster who could spend days worshiping the animal as she requires. But how can I give away the apple of Flanny’s eye? His belle dame sans merci? The first female—before his mama, even!—whose name he spoke?

Nine months out

2008-09-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

The kid’s now been out in the world for a longer stretch of time than he spent on the maternal factory floor. Stats: 19 pounds, 9 ounces (45th percentile); 28 inches (50th percentile or thereabouts); head still huge at 85th percentile. Given his big head/feet/hands, I keep waiting for him to shoot up in the height percentiles, but perhaps he’ll just be an average dude with mitts and flippers and a ten-gallon cranium. Odds are even: His father is tall, his paternal grandfather is tall, and back still further in the misty Campbell lineage are towering Highlands creatures of six-eight. But on my side are determinedly average guys of five-ten on a good day. With their loafers on and their hair foofed up.
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Eating update: It goes without saying that after my post re. weaning last week, Flanny threw one of his patented curveballs and began to refuse bottles at daycare as well as at home. (He did this in June, too, while cutting his first teeth, and his strike was so deep and protracted that he lost weight.) I again tried to bottle-train him over the holiday weekend, but the experience was so profoundly frustrating that I gave up and started nursing him again and pumping at work (though my supply remains meager). I now hate bottles as much as he does.

The nuclear-strike option of denying him boob altogether remains open. I have no heart for that during this bottle strike, though. He’s a strong-willed little cuss, and his pediatrician doesn’t like the idea, given his weight loss in June. Straws don’t interest him; he thinks sippies are chew toys; and he’ll take only an ounce or two from regular cups. So I guess I must keep nursing/pumping until this bottle strike passes—and I assume it will pass, as soon as his next set of teeth appears. I keep sticking fingers in his mouth, trying to feel for teeth in his top gum, and he bites me good and proper with his fangy lower chompers until I retreat. Hurry up, teeth. Subito and vite, goddammit.
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Coughing update: We returned to Lung Palace, a.k.a. the pulmonology department, last week, where they inspected and questioned the boy again and sent us home with a different dose of corticosteroid and the suggestion that silent reflux or a swallowing problem might be causing his cough. Aspirated fluids/food would cause chronic lung irritation, the thinking goes. Yet he doesn’t cough while drinking from breast or cup. He splutters sometimes when eating solids, but then so do most babies new to the process.

Regardless, they also prescribed Prevacid once a day. So far no changes. Coughs during the day; slight stridor on inhales but only when he’s particularly excited and yapping about something. Nighttimes continue largely cough-free, for which unending gratitude and jubilation.

Next step:a sweat test to rule out cystic fibrosis (highly unlikely), and a two-pronged swallowing test. The latter involves me feeding him a bottle—a bottle! hilarious!—with a trace isotope or some such newfangledness in it; they watch the liquid’s course on screen. And then they feed a nasogastric tube into the poor wee mite and, I dunno, do the same thing from a diffferent angle. We haven’t managed to schedule the swallow yet; the HMO hasn’t provided authorization and the hospital is too busy filing its nails and texting its boyfriend to hassle the HMO.
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On Saturday the boy stood unsupported for the first time. I was lying on my stomach on the living-room floor, dozily watching him ransack his toy basket in the sunny corner by the windows. He pulled out his Giggle ball, a rubber doohickey that sounds like a Victorian hysteric when it’s squeezed, and shook it with both hands. I watched him for several seconds before I realized he wasn’t holding onto anything else. After a while, without rush or fuss, he placed a palm on the toy basket rim and lowered himself to the floor. I told him he was the most brilliant baby ever, and he tossed me a quizzical look, like, “Lady, you don’t need to tell me.” Little princeling. He bestrides the world like a tiny, tiny Colossus.

Summer Saturday, nine months out

2008-08-30T20:33:00.001-07:00

Weanie weenie little McBeany

2008-08-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

Sooner than I expected, sooner than I would prefer, the nursling, just nine months old yesterday, is weaning himself. Over the past six weeks his interest in all things breastlike has declined steadily, and so, of course, has my milk supply. Flann nurses for perhaps fifteen seconds before flipping over and crawling away at lightning speed, or sitting up on his knees to mouth-fart my tummy, giggle, and climb the bed’s headboard. At times he’ll nurse when tired, but if the letdown dawdles he turns away (something on the order of a beer tap might suit him better). And at times he can be wrestled back into position, but my attempts seem increasingly pointless. I can lead the foal to water, but I can’t make him drink.

This isn’t a nursing strike. Nor is it a passing phase—six weeks is an epoch, not a fleeting mood, in a young baby’s life. I never wanted to nurse into toddlerhood, but I’m awed now by people who manage to nurse two- and three-year-olds. That must be like nursing an electron zipping around the room.

Of course, Flann being Flann, there’s a twist to the story: he won’t take bottles from us. From the daycare goddesses: yes, fine, bring ’em on, but from us, no way. And he won’t take breastmilk or formula from a sippy or standard cup. Juice, water: yes please, more please, but nourishing creamy stuff, no way.

Thus he’s drinking sufficient amounts of formula or the frozen stash (I’m barely pumping anymore; my supply is so low that Lady Medela cannot coax a letdown) four days a week at daycare, but three days a week he coasts on fumes. I have resorted to such trickery as mixing formula powder into rice cereal, dusting it onto dampened Cheerios, and stirring it into hummus. (Kiddo loves hummus. He has garlic breath worse than a cabbie’s.)

The greatest surprise of motherhood is the complexity of feeding babies. On its face the process looks so simple: child is hungry, child is fed. But factor in breastfeeding and its many pitfalls, bottle-feeding and ditto, pumping and its gear and time-suck, the slow and tentative début of solid foods, the tango of the high-chair power struggle, the whimsical and mercurial nature of baby appetite, and—really it’s just a wonder the human race has survived. Yet Flann still seems to thrive. He happily ingests hummus, sliced chicken, mozzarella perlini, pitted and chopped olives, Babybel cheese-lettes, wheat waffles, refried beans, tortilla bits, sundry root-vegetable purées, cream-top yogurt, corncakes, mooshed-up minestrone soup, and, last night, in the culinary highlight of his life to date, vanilla-flavored crème Chantilly on the patio at Sea Salt. He needs only milk, human or artificial, to complete the meal.

Convincing him to take the bottle from us will require strong-arm tactics (perhaps I should send Luca Brazzi to have a discussion with him). Rather than weaning via the standard method—replacing one nurse per day with a formula bottle—I’ll have to stop nursing entirely, leaving him with no option but the plastic nipple. And I might try to teach him to drink from a straw; some say straws’ novelty persuades stubborn cusses like Flann to drink milk. This weekend I sat him down with Your Baby’s First Year and showed him the highlighted passage that reads, “400 to 500 calories of your baby’s daily intake should come from formula or breastmilk until his first birthday.” He chewed thoughtfully on my arm for a while, then said rude things about the American Academy of Pediatrics and crawled off. Okay, kiddo, them’s fightin’ words. A weanie with a straw you shall be.

PortaFlann

2008-08-21T14:00:00.000-07:00

He has learned to love his new Kelty frame carrier.

Sleeping:

Awakening:

And beholding new vistas:

Weeko horribilus

2008-08-11T15:41:00.000-07:00

Last week was a perfect storm of stresses large and small, medical and familial, developmental and attitudinal. My dad and his wife stayed for eight days and were uncharacteristically low-key and accommodating. They didn’t insist on meals at high-toned slow-food palaces three times a day, and they didn’t make tiny cutting comments about my parenting skills. In fact they enjoyed the kid, and he enjoyed them, especially my stepmother, whom he followed around like a puppy dog. Yet the week just...didn’t work.

On the Thursday they arrived, we took Flann to a pulmonology assessment (an early appointment scored for us by his godlike pediatrician). The child was palpated and inspected and then splayed out in an iron maiden restraint device while x-rays were snapped of his chest. We hid behind a lead shield and watched. Flanny looked so small on the table, spotlit in the dark room with the heavy bulk of the machine hovering over him. He coped well; x-ray machines exert the same fascination as dump trucks upon the infant male brain. Verdict: uh, asthma maybe sorta but who knows. Some “peribronchial thickening,” a term of art for lung irritation. They upped his corticosteroid dose and sent us on our merry way.

Friday, after a dinner at Sea Salt—one part perfect oysters and crab cakes, two parts infant whooping and mashed-yams spluttering—Flann woke at midnight and started to scream. And scream. And scream. Heart-rending shrieks of pain that we couldn’t do anything to soothe. He hadn’t cried like that since the earliest days of infancy. At two AM we broke down and schlepped him to the emergency room at Children’s. Where we waited. And waited. And waited. Doctors and nurses were no doubt present in the hospital, but they must have been very shy, as not a single medical staffer showed his face in the time we were there. The hours were enlivened by a young mother informing her weeping, feverish toddler, “Be quiet. No one cares” without looking up from her Sudoku. No one did care, apparently, so home we went.

In the morning after a refreshing fifteen minutes of sleep we took Sad Sad Baby to his pediatrician, who in her godliness offers Saturday hours. A peek in his left ear revealed the problem: big-ass ear infection. Motrin and amoxicillin were poured down his throat and we were dispatched. I kept my dad, his wife, a visiting brother and nephew, and a whole recently discovered illegitimate wing of the family (long story) at bay for the next twenty-four hours, until some rest had been procured.

Flann was better by Monday, so we packed up and headed to Mendocino with the folks. Along the way we ate broccoli rabe sandwiches at a lovely garden café in Healdsburg, where Flann discovered that he hates restaurant high chairs and I discovered the joys of being yelled at by restaurant patrons whose meditative teatime solitude has been disturbed by squalling babies.

Just before ripping Healdsburg a new one:

About Mendocino, the less said the better, except that romantic fogbound oceanside spa towns are really not ideal baby-airing destinations. We had a haunted hotel room, too: the TV blew up and started to smoke after we tuned it to white noise to soothe Flanny to sleep; a fakey maritime sea-scene picture tumbled off the wall precisely at midnight; and the hot water tap broke off in Matt’s hand. I’m surprised the dead sailors from The Fog didn’t show up to axe us to death. On the plus side, we hiked down to the beach with Flann in his spanking-new Kelty carrier, and the kid loved it.

Upon our return home, Flann decided the time was ripe for trotting out new toddlerish attitude. He yelled in his stroller. He yelled in his Bjorn. He complained in the tub and caterwauled in the high chair. He discovered that food can be rocket-launched from pursed lips, and he decided that any diapering or clothing change was a perfect occasion for heart-stopping shrieks. And because my folks were still in town, he had ample opportunity for working his new schtick for an audience. I did a lot of weeping and complaining too, mostly at Matt, who graciously has not divorced me yet.

But the wee man is much calmer now. He’s smiling and babbling more, his ear is on the mend, and meals are no longer a wrestling match in a rice-cereal pit. And, oddly, he seems older. There’s a new light in his eyes. He’s more alert, more talkative, more active. Even his posture is straighter and taller. He looks like a kid, not a baby. Perhaps all this turbulence was merely the slipstream, the comet’s tail, of his increasingly rapid passage out of infancy.

Snagglepuss

2008-07-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

I thought Flann had three teeth: the two lower central incisors plus the lower left lateral incisor. But last Friday I realized he has only two. One central incisor is oddly shaped, like a two-trunked tree, and thus before it emerged fully above the gumline, it looked like two separate teeth.

On Friday I showed it to his doctor, who was unimpressed and said it seemed healthy and that I shouldn’t rush him off to a dentist. The oddest thing about it: Doctor Google says nothing. How is this possible? Doctor Google knows about all conditions. Albinism? Dicephalic terata? Extra buttock? He’s got you covered. And all kinds of freakshow tooth photos are on the Web, certainly, but nothing quite like the bifurcated chomper Flanny is sporting.

I’d post a photo of it but of course Flanny will not hold still for any photograph, especially one in which I’m prying his jaws open with my free hand. The archives of Web dentistry are poorer for it.
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Tomorrow my father and his wife arrive from the East Coast to meet Flann for the first time. That they haven’t yet met him seems strange, but my father is elderly and doesn’t often travel, and I am too broke to spring for a plane ticket back east. I’m apprehensive: their past visits revolved largely around eating and drinking, which was great not only because I ate free meals in many San Francisco restaurants I could not otherwise afford, but because we get along much better when alcohol is on the table. So I’ve made unnaturally early (5:30) reservations at a couple of restaurants said to be not completely infant-unfriendly, in that they do offer high chairs and don’t Gorgon-glare you into dust when you walk through their door with a baby.

In truth I’m not worried about the restaurants’ reaction, should Flanny melt down in public; I’m worried instead about my father’s and his wife’s reaction. Their opinion of me ranges from “generally good kid” to “stain on our particularly nice hand-tufted white New Zealand lambswool rug.” Add a wriggling crawling drooling giggling baby, with his messiness and his schedule both chaotic and rigidly organized, and their opinion might tip permanently into the latter category. I kind of want to stash them in a nicely panelled wine bar for the week, and just check in occasionally for a glass of pinot.
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He’s learned to clap his hands. Whenever he develops a new skill he practices it obsessively for a few days; thereafter it either becomes part of the daily repertoire (e.g., pulling up) or he seems to forget it entirely (e.g., mouth farts). He claps his hands during diaper changes, in his inflatable yellow duck tub, when he’s trying to feed himself Cheerios, and when he’s pissed off and standing at the baby gate screaming like a small gorilla. He is an applause track in search of its sound editor.

First and hopefully not only

2008-07-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

For the first time since November 22, 2007—the night on which, after much noshing of leftover Thanskgiving chicken and a marathon of old Northern Exposure episodes, my water broke—I’ve slept through the night. From 10:30 PM to 6 AM. Just like a regular, functioning human being does. This was because Flann, today traveling under the alias Champion Best Baby Ever Ever Ever, also slept through the night. Didn’t wake up and need his binky replaced. Didn’t wake up in a coughing fit (he saved that till the morning). Just slept like a drugged possum from bedtime till dawn, then stood up in his crib and politely announced his presence.

Now that I have recorded the fact, I wonder if another eight months will pass before he repeats the feat. There should be a god of baby sleep whom I can propitiate, or at least a minor saint. There are saints of everything else, saints of hangnails and telephone-line repairmen and charcoal-briquette purveyors, so there should be a saint of baby sleep. A female one. St. Hagatha. Commonly depicted wearing sweats with a milk stain on the boob. Clutching a binky attached to a rosary in one hand, a copy of Weissbluth in the other. Martyred in the predictable way, spontaneous combustion after prolonged sleep deprivation, no Romans required.

Anyway, this is odd timing because he contracted yet another cold over the weekend—from the Baby Gym at the YMCA, I think. He got his first cold there, at three months old, but like a fool I took him back to that primary-colored swamp o’ germs. And his coughing was dreadful; on Monday and Tuesday nights he barely slept longer than an hour before another coughing fit awoke us both. Yet last night golden slumbers filled his eyes.

On Friday his pediatrician suggested corticosteroid inhalants twice a day. I read briefly what Dr. Google has to say about these drugs, namely that at high doses they can cause cataracts and retard growth, and then I stopped reading right away. The dose is as low as his pediatrician can prescribe. I can’t tell if they’re effective yet, due to his cold. We’ll see. The pulmonologist, meantime, has merrily embarked on vacation and pushed Flann’s assessment back to the end of August. Fuckers. There’s exactly one pulmonology clinic the HMO allows us to see, and every kid in the Bay Area is backed up with appointments there. Its receptionist implied we were lucky to get in before Christmas. A great comfort, ma’am, and thank you.

I still find it hard to believe he could be asthmatic. He is so vigorous. He stands up on his strong little baby legs, holding on to furniture with just one hand in an increasingly casual, babe-I-don’t-really-need-you fashion. He’s figured out how bend his knees and sit himself down again whenever he wishes. He crawls up the carpeted stairway of the apartment building at a good clip, pursuing toys left on the risers by the neighbor toddler and smiling cheerfully as people step over him. At the park he holds on to the swing chains and hoots with glee when I push him, and changing or clothing him is like wrestling a very strong eel. And despite all his head colds, he radiates pink-cheeked, bright-eyed Gerber baby health.

So perhaps there’s a happy ending to the Cough Chronicles. Meantime he’s happy as a clam at his new daycare. God do I love his new daycare. To get there we take a beautiful peaceful stroller walk across campus, the lad often taking his morning doze beneath a light-green fleece blanket. If he’s not awake by the time we arrive, I sit on a bench outside the track-and-field stadium and watch Coopers hawks in the redwoods until he rouses. The daycare is in a little building between St. Marks Episcopal and the wonderfully decrepit and creepy 1920s Faculty Club manor, and it was founded by a former paleontologist. It’s named for her biggest find—a woolly mammoth—and the outside is decorated with mosaics of other beasties. It’s small. Flann is one of just two babies; the other dozen children are one to five years old. Two young and incredibly voluble women run the place and seem to truly adore Flann. He’s getting kissed there more than he ever will as a grownup guy, that’s for sure.

When I picked him up from his former daycare at the end of the day, he was usually unhappy. Cranky, hot, and hungry. Now he’s cheerful. Happy to see me but not desperately clingy. I can collect his bottles and clothes without clutching a screaming boy in one arm. Yesterday, in fact, I showed up to find him standing by the toy shelves, enthusiastically flinging wooden puzzle pieces onto the floor, supported only by a firm grip on the left boob of his young, pretty Honduran teacher, who was sitting next to him reading a fire-engine parable to the toddlers. He grinned at me but stayed right where he was. All was right in his world. And in mine.

Big mamas

2008-07-17T15:33:00.001-07:00

I’m working on a trade book about whales and dolphins, and the travails of cetacean maternal life just whomp hell out of anything human mothers must endure. This is useful perspective because last night Flanny decided that three AM is, in fact, wakey-wakey time. E.g.:

- Sperm whale mothers suckle their babies for up to thirteen years.

- Killer whale sons stay with their mothers their entire lives (they live till ca. seventy).

- Blue whales have to produce nearly 500 pounds of milk each day for six months. By the time a whale weans, she’s transferred 88,000 pounds of milk to her baby. The calf’s weight gain in its first six months: 37,500 pounds.

- Blue and humpback and gray whales produce milk that’s up to 53 percent fat (for comparison, whipped cream contains just 30 percent fat).

- Pregnant blue whales pack on a third of their pre-pregnancy weight during gestation, so by birth a mother weighs about 130 tons.

- Whale mothers, on average, lose a quarter to a third of their body weight while nursing (actually, this sounds dandy).

- Adult gray whale females are either pregnant or lactating 80 percent of their reproductive lives. Their migration patterns force them to fast completely for as much as six months while pregnant and nursing.

- Gray whales have to schlep their calves from Mexico to the Arctic and back every year (13,000 miles round trip). Many are lost to killer whale mother-calf hunters along the way.

- Sperm whale calves nurse through their blowholes. In other words, through their noses.

- Dolphins carry around their young by swimming so fast the babies are sucked along in their slipstreams (Bjorn, schmorn). Childless dolphins steal babies by slipstreaming them away.

Other fun facts:

- Right whales have one-ton testicles.

- A blue whale produces over four hundred gallons of sperm when it ejaculates.

- Dolphins in swimming-with-dolphins programs avoid contact with women with boob jobs. (Apparently they can echolocate the fake mass and it bothers them.)

- Postmenopausal sperm whale grandmas babysit calves while the mothers feed at depths the babies can’t reach. Free daycare!

Now, I wonder if whales sleep-train....

Baby maw

2008-07-15T14:46:00.000-07:00

The kid has gone from hunger striking to eating like a trucker turned loose in a hofbrau. I used to bring four bottles to daycare; he’d drink maybe three. Now he drinks five bottles, and my pumping can’t keep pace and the freezer stash of Medela bags is thinning out fast. Plus, he’s eating three solid-food meals per day. Where is all this food going? Perhaps he’s having a growth spurt. Perhaps he’s burning it all pulling up on everything in the house. Perhaps there is some titanic, Earth-destroying-asteroid-sized poop just biding its time. Perhaps I should hide under my desk, just in case.

Nursing, on the other hand, is a shaky house of cards these days. The neuron that dictates CRAWL AROUND CONSTANTLY wars with the one that demands NURSE, so he sucks maybe twice, scoots around the room like a deflating balloon, and then complains that the boob has not somehow contrived to follow him. He would prefer a feedbag.
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He’s become a binky addict. He always liked binkies well enough, they were nodding acquaintances, but now if he doesn’t have a binky within arm’s reach he fusses and follows me around like an unhappy golden retriever puppy, pulling at my pantlegs. I pick him up, and he looks at me questioningly, as if to say this hugging stuff is all very nice, lady, but give me an Avent and give it to me now.

I don’t disapprove of binkies; he’s never had an ear infection or thrush. But I worry that if he chomps binkies all day, he won’t practice babbling. All those stupid books that I really should stop reading say that “mama” and “dada” should be just around the corner, and I haven’t heard anything like that from him. Instead he blows loud mouth farts, hums, and, sadly, cough-babbles (he has been coughing for so long—I still don’t know what’s wrong, so I’ve scheduled a pulmonology appointment for next month—that he thinks coughing is how people talk). Perhaps I should de-binky him now before it causes speech problems? I don’t know. He’s just a little guy, and binkies make life sweeter and safer and softer. I still have my childhood security blanket (tattered and disgusting and hidden under the bed pillows), so I’m not one to judge.

Sleep is my other, selfish reason for considering debinkification. When he wakes up and finds his binky has fallen out of his mouth, he rocks and wails like a mourner at graveside until I plug him up again. I sprinkle his crib liberally with glow-in-the-dark binkies, but he ignores them, wanting only the specific, spit-warm binky he was sucking when put to bed. Sometimes this happens just once a night; sometimes it happens six times a night. He doesn’t nurse at night anymore, as I managed in half-assed fashion to night-wean him a few weeks ago, so it seems that only the binkies stand between him and the Promised Land of a ten-hour stretch of sleep.

But I’m a coward. Will he ever sleep again if I pull the binky plug? Will he ever nap? And how will I get dressed in the morning, or pull his onesie over his head (something he hates like fire), or drop him off at daycare, or wipe off his face after dinner, without the magic silencer of the binky? What to Expect, that encyclopedia of parental guilt, lectures that mothers shouldn’t use binkies simply to shut a kid up. And yet I do exactly that. Oh, well. I’ve already flouted so many of Heidi Murkoff & Co.’s proscriptions and prescriptions that I’m probably in some appendix of bad parenting they’ll affix to a future edition.

The librarian

2008-07-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

Flann is named not for a Spanish pudding, as most people (annoyingly) assume, but for the Irish novelist and playwright Flann O’Brien. That wasn’t actually his name, it was Brian O’Nolan, and he also traveled under other aliases such as Miles na gCopaleen, but we weren’t going to name the kid na gCopaleen, so there you have it. Although it means, charmingly, “of the little ponies,” and we coulda called him Naggy for short. Which would’ve been fun.

Anyway Flann decided to reorganize the works of his namesake last week...

I see you’ve mis-shelved the Beckett once again.

Things look better in heaps.

The Third Policeman, and my three new teeth. A job well drooled.

Bonk

2008-07-07T16:13:00.001-07:00

I’m trying to figure out how much head-bonking is normal for a baby. Flann tries to pull up on everything, and seeing as he has only a seven-month-old’s judgment, he often picks a flimsy item such as a blanket hanging off the couch and topples right over. His balance is also not exactly that of a prima ballerina yet, so sometimes when he’s standing proud he lifts one arm in sort of a here-I-am-world wave and promptly pratfalls to the ground. He’s slammed his head a few times on the blue foam playmats that have replaced the living room rug, and he cried for a bit but seemed basically fine afterward. He also bops his head into stuff when he’s crawling around, and often it’s stuff that can’t be moved or childproofed, such as the wall molding. Again, only short-lived tears result. Sometimes, in fact, he doesn’t give a damn until he notices that I look concerned, and then he realizes that he’s a terribly tragic victim and must sob a bit in self-pity.

The prospect of spending at least the next several months watching the poor guy fall over/bash into things is a little daunting. I know that kids get scraped up in infancy and toddlerhood and that Barney Band-aids exist for a reason. And I know that the occasional scrape or bruise can even be a sign that a kid is healthy: active, curious, exploring, testing. Still, the little splats and bonks and thwacks that make up the soundtrack of the newly mobile baby can be unnerving.

The group

2008-07-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

I miss my moms’ group. It met at Alta Bates hospital once a week. It was facilitated by a child development expert who was refreshingly ecumenical about the Parenting Theory Wars that rage over the Bay Area and who brought us free chocolate. There were separate groups for little babies, medium babies, and toddlers. We got to stay as long as we wanted and ask every dopey question that haunted us at 2 AM, like why babies sleep with their eyelids at half-mast and does that mean they’ll grow up to act like rabid wombats, and nobody cast cutting glances at the maternity jeans we still wore two months post-partum and nobody laughed when we said we’d cried when we couldn’t figure out how to assemble the stupid Graco swing and had in fact called it a cheap-ass piece of plastic shit. The group was just way better than the informal moms’ groups that I tried out because rather than merely venting at other women, we had our concerns soothed by a facilitator who knew whereof she spoke.

The group still exists. But it meets Thursday mornings, the only morning of the week that I have a standing, cannot-be-missed meeting at work. And so each week while Marketing complains about a jacket design or Acquisitions complains that Editing drags its feet and why can’t this book be out in time for the Northwestern Entomology and Malformed Frogs conference, I look southward out the window toward Alta Bates and wish I was there. Amid the ground-in Cheerios and babies chewing on one another’s feet.

Most of the women in the group were great. Smart and nonjudgmental and supportive and funny. But to comfort myself with sour grapes, I try to remember what flipped me out about moms’-group culture....

Women who change their email addresses to announce their mommy identity. E.g., “hannahsmom@gmail.com.”

Women who refer to their babies in the royal first person. E.g., “We woke up three times last night. And we’re learning to eat with a spoon!” There was actually only one woman in the group who did this. But: ick.

The fact that we all unknowingly bought the same damned toys for our kids. Everyone hauled out identical Manhattan Toys Winkle balls and Infantino wrist rattles at meetings like they were state-issued and mandatory.

The fact that we all unknowingly bought the same damned gear. Skip Hop changing mats. Haba wooden-bead pacifier cords. Zutano onesies with prints we thought were funky and devastatingly original until we saw eighteen other babies in the same thing. Robeez shoes with devil faces and dog butts on them, about which ditto. I never before felt like such a marketing demographic. Thirty-something urban middle-class white first-time mother, number 1342890. I guess there’s some larger lesson here about brands telling Americans who they’re meant to be, and which club they belong to.

Anxiety proliferation. I didn’t worry about vaccine schedules or crib-slat measurements or talc inhalation until someone brought them up at a meeting.

Subtle baby-development competition. Everyone kinda envied the chick with the super-tall baby. Everyone kinda envied the other chick whose baby could sit unsupported and drink from a cup at four months. None of it mattered, but we (I) secretly obsessed about it anyway.

And that’s all the complaining I’ll do. It really was a great group, the highlight of my week during my leave. I don’t mind being back at work; I like the adult companionship. I like earning money again. I like being able to pee without worrying that someone will chew through a lamp cord while I’m in the bathroom. And I like engaging with book text again; it’s satisfying to ponder a revised dissertation about Iranian modernity after months of pondering diaper contents. But I wish I could be in two places at once.
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And here is the bear cub, crawling somber-faced onto my lap to show me the booger he then refused to let me wipe:

Flannstands

2008-06-30T08:48:00.001-07:00

First official pull-up-to-standing, inspired by his desire to assault the Sunday Times and scones just out of frame.

Jaune giallo amarillo gelb

2008-06-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

Flann’s favorite colors, as evidenced by the things he most desperately tries to grab and eat, are orange and yellow. It is impossible to diaper the twisty little beast these days without allowing him to hold the orange Alba Unpetroleum tube, with its pokey baby-unsafe edges, and he simply will not be tubbed without the company of several small, chewable yellow duckies. He is obsessed with raw unpeeled carrots, sometimes dragging one around the floor with him while he practices crawling. And his favorite foods (“favorite” being a term of hyperbole for someone who eats only three teaspoons of food per meal) are squash, corn, and sweet potatoes.

This is all richly ironic because during the nine months of unrelenting nausea called pregnancy—I threw up for the last time on the day my water broke—I found the colors yellow and orange torturous. I was sickened by ordinary things, such as all foods except muffins and Thai coconut curry, and all scents except lime, but other, weirdly random stuff worsened the nausea, too. The musical oeuvre of Belle and Sebastian. The Boston accents of the Car Talk guys. The feeling of lipstick on my mouth. Paper still warm from a photocopier or laser printer. And anything in a sunset color...most especially yellow cars. I avoided the parking lot across from my office because a luridly saffron-colored Mini Cooper was parked there (our own Mini is bright red, a color I experienced as neutral). I always walked to work on the west side of Shattuck Avenue because on the east side was an apartment building whose open-air carport held a hideous yellow Hummer that I thought of as the Dickhead Deathmobile. I averted my eyes when yellow cars passed us on the highway. I tried to surround myself with cooling blue and silver items. I stuck a Hannukah garland and Ace Hardware paint chips in Ballroom Blue and December Dawn over my desk.

I think Matt was alternately intrigued with and annoyed by this phenomenon. One Saturday when we were driving south through Vallejo on our way back from Stinson Beach (a trip on which I horrified the Midwestern tourists on turny-churny Highway 1 by publicly puking on a picturesque roadside cliff above the sunny blue Pacific), he warned me to look away because a seemingly endless parade of yellow vehicles was in the northbound lanes. I don’t know what they were—a funeral procession for chickens, attendees at the National Butter Convention, an outing of the Lemon Lovers of America? Regardless they were out only to torture me, and I closed my eyes until we were well clear.

Yellow doesn’t bother me anymore. When I see a yellow car, I experience only a shadowy dislike, a feeling mercifully mental rather than visceral. It’s like seeing someone you once fought with, but whose name you can’t now recall. I’ve even ridden in a taxi. Flann has a couple of yellow onesies, and I still love him when he’s in them.

Perhaps he’s attracted to yellow and orange only because they’re bright, loud colors. Blue and purple and green things might seem dull to the novelty-seeking baby brain. Or perhaps this is the first blush of his inevitable attraction to things I don’t like. Maybe he’ll be listening to violent hip-hop soon, or playing golf, or insisting we move to Contra Costa so he can have a golden retriever and a pool and date girls named Teena. Kids are drawn to what their parents dislike; they sense what irritates you most; they find all your unprotected corners and soft spots and unguarded doorways and drive right through them in their little yellow cars. I’d better get ready.

Up up up

2008-06-23T20:05:00.000-07:00

Flanny's contractors visited before 7 AM today. As promised they blew through the apartment like a fast gale, throwing in latches and gates and hooks and making reassuring noises and vanishing as quickly as they came. One skinny small guy was the brains, talking a mile a minute and peering into drawers and inspecting windowsills. One big lumbering guy was the brawn, wielding an electric drill and communicating via occasional rumbling bass monosyllables. Together they did a fine job, didn't charge as much as we'd feared, and made the apartment at least somewhat safer for the wriggler.

The rest of the day was a ridiculous Keystone Kops routine. I took him to daycare, where I learned there had been an outbreak of roseola in the infant room - oh, great joy in the morning - then went to work, where I was promptly recalled by the daycare because the milk I'd left in their fridge over the weekend had all turned sour. So I had to schlep the child back home again, and we spent a silly afternoon playing with my friend Lisa and her new Tibetan terrier puppy, a creature called Booger who very very very much wants to lick babies' faces. Fortunately my book load at work is still light, so my deadlines are in order despite all this missed time.

Now that Flann can crawl he's teaching himself to kneel, grab low shelves, and push himself up into a standing tripod posture, legs flung out to either side for balance, a horse stance I've seen his father take when he's tired. He locomotes up and down the hall from living room to kitchen, pausing to slap the floor where its composition - wood to tile - changes. When someone sits on the floor Flann assigns himself the task of crawling over their shins like a soldier advancing over an earthen berm. I'm feeling vertiginous again. Just a few months ago he was this little cocoon, a guy who couldn't do much more than hold up his head. Now there's a small commando in the living room.

Friday night

2008-06-20T19:52:00.000-07:00

After a few days of us using the inhaler with mask, he came down with another cold. I've lost count - this perhaps is his tenth, I think. So we don't know now whether he's coughing because of the head cold, or because of...whatever it is. At the doctor's yesterday I learned that he'd gained back five ounces, which yahoo hooray, and was introduced to a machine of medieval horror called the nebulizer. It forces air through the asthma-medication drug and creates a gas, which in theory the baby breathes through a little mask. The process takes about fifteen minutes. I would, however, like to meet the designer of this machine, and find out exactly how many babies have successfully used it. Flann had hysterics in the office when the (highly uninformative and none-too-kind male nurse) held the mask to his face and I gripped his fists and locked his legs between my knees and his head in my armpit, and after about ten minutes I was crying too. Flann was exhausted afterward, and hellishly wakeful all night. His naps were nearly nonexistent today, and though I just put him down he's crying and I keep saving this draft to go pat him and rebinkyfy him. A side effect of the medicine, I suppose. And yes, still coughing coughing coughing.

I tried the nebulizer twice here at home today. Neither time did I manage to nebulize all the medicine. He cried so hysterically that he threw up into the mask, and I had to stop the procedure, wash the mask off, cry in the kitchen, and try again. The pediatrician recommended I try the mask while he's asleep, which I did, and promptly woke him from his sole twenty-minute nap of the day.

Despite all the torture he's pretty active and happy. He figured out how to move his arms and knees in opposition, and he is now actually crawling in the classical form. Today he found out how to pull things off the coffee table, too, and how to get stuck between a box and the wall and yell for help. He doesn't yet know that he can't fit through spaces smaller than his body. If he can see daylight on the other side, he charges right in.

And he doesn't cough during all this activity. And he doesn't wheeze. So maybe all this is bullshit, and he doesn't have asthma at all. Maybe it's something blessedly benign, like a postnasal drip that just happened to go on for nearly two months straight.

A-aa-and now he's crying again. G'bye.

Hitches in his giddyup

2008-06-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

Friday I took Flann to the pediatrician to inquire about his occasional cough, which has persisted for about six weeks now and often wakes him at night. I’d grown used to the comforting pattern of pediatrician visits. First I ask my nine million neurotic questions: What about x? And y? And z, there on his toe? And then I’m reassured that everything is normal-normal-fine-fine-fine. So when she said he might have asthma I was stunned.

For diagnostic purposes she prescribed us an inhaler with a mask; if the bronchodilator drug works, he probably does have asthma (possibly triggered by a viral infection contracted at daycare—much guilt. But, weirdly, studies also show that infant daycare is a predictor of not having asthma: kids are exposed to lotsa bugs there, so they develop strong immune systems). Using the inhaler is a nasty, often two-person procedure in which you hold the baby down, pin his arms and head, and hold the mask on his face for about a dozen breaths. Really I’d rather pour boiling water on myself, but we’ve managed to use it several times now. No effect yet. Should I be relieved or disappointed?

Apparently some babies do have persistent non-asthmatic night coughs. It can be caused by allergens: dust, pet hair, pollen. We’ll see the doctor again this week and run through steps to improve his sleeping environment. I hope that “Ditch the tabby cat” will not be among them.

As if this particular Spanish Inquisition were not enough, I also spoke to the pediatrician about his daycare bottle strike. We stuck him on the scale. The pediatrician looked at the number and said, “I’m not concerned yet, but...” He’s lost weight. Shit shit shit. I did everything I could (I think) to acclimate him to bottles, pumping and feeding him one a day for at least two months before he started daycare. He was always reluctant, but everyone reassured me that babies acclimate to bottles when they have no other choice. Not this kid. I drop him off at eight, and he’ll often wait till two to drink four ounces. Then he’ll drink perhaps two or three ounces more before I collect him at five-thirty. The daycare wants to feed him more solid foods, but he doesn’t much like them yet. And a half-jar of strained carrots is no nutritional equivalent to a bottle of breastmilk.

So, short-term measures: I dropped him off today with an assortment of bottles and nipples and asked the staff to experiment with them (although I played with them over the weekend without success). He’ll drink a bit from a cup, so I included one plus a bouquet of frozen milk bags so they’d have plenty for him to spill/drink. I also took away his stash of jarred food so that neither he nor the staff could substitute them for milk. And I spent the entire weekend pouring calories down his throat, nursing him as often as possible and supplementing with rice cereal, full-fat cream-top yogurt, and all the sweet potato-squash-corn strained foods that he would eat.

And long-term measures: His doctor strongly suggested changing his care situation so that I can nurse him during the day, should his bottle strike continue. I made sad noises about not being able to afford a nanny (pretty much true) and the three-year waitlists for campus daycare (definitely true). But a present was waiting on the voicemail at home: my original first-pick daycare center, a small cheerful place just across campus from my office, is promoting us off the waitlist. Flann can start there in July. It’s cheaper, we can walk there and home every day (rather than taking four buses, as we’ve been doing), and he’ll be close enough to nurse should that be necessary. I have my usual roster of anxieties—will he adjust to the new setting? will he ever learn to like bottles? if he needs asthma medicine, will they be amenable to adminstering it?—but I think this might be very good news. The new place has just two babies, and a much smaller pool of virus-laden older children. It also has big windows, good ventilation, and a riotously jolly curriculum with lots of baby art projects and mess-making and field trips to parks and petting zoos.

Knock wood for me. I kinda need it this week.

Hot thing

2008-06-11T14:28:00.001-07:00

For the past several days proper hot summer weather, the kind that East Coasters bitch about and just don’t fully appreciate, has prevailed in the Bay Area. Ordinarily this would make me giddy, as I love heat and would gladly live in a steam bath in the middle of a tropical rainforest were I allowed to, but Flann is having a hard time. I think some babies are not skilled at regulating their body temperatures. When I pick him up from daycare he’s very hot, unhappy, and slightly feverish—though I like the place, it’s partially below-ground and thus poorly ventilated and sorta miserable in warm weather. They run a few fans but have no have air-conditioning (to be fair, few structures in the Bay Area do. Why bother? It’s generally gray and foggy). They strip him down to his onesie, and they say they sponge him with cool water a few times a day, but the late-afternoon result is still a sad little guy. He won’t drink more than a couple of bottles all day long, and he won’t take solid foods, either. Coupled with his burgeoning separation anxiety, his hunger strike and heat sensitivity have turned me into a guilty little wreck this week. I feel like I’m ditching him in the Black Hole of Calcutta every morning. Hopefully the climate will soon return to its usual Scottish Highlands setting and ease matters.

Once he’s home and wiggling across the floor in his diaper, though, he’s cheerful. He’s fallen in love with peeled whole carrots; I put one on the edge of his playmat and he crawls over to it like a seal galumphing down a beach and mouths it with desperate joy. If I take it away, he mourns loudly. He’s happy just sitting with the thing in his hands, in fact. It is a strange little love affair. He’s also fallen hard for the cat, after months of ignoring her—he rocks on his hands and knees, shrieking and smiling at her, until she’s so unnerved she flees the room. She senses that the Grabbing Days are soon to begin.

We hired a contractor—the Childproofer.com—which will assess the apartment for childproofing needs, and install latches/gates/etc., in a couple of weeks. I hope it will save us agida, but I also think they’ll look around our place and laugh. Eight bookshelves crammed to their gills; more teetering stacks of tomes everywhere; stereo and DVD player and TV on cabinetry two feet off the ground; glass-topped end tables; road bikes, pump, and cat box in the kitchen shielded only by a flimsy shoji; overloaded dressers, nightstands, closets, happy garlands of electronics cables all over the joint. And yes, we live a mile from the Hayward Fault. We’re a What Not to Do illustration. We’re not pack-rats; it’s just that the place is small and we went through thirty-nine and forty-two years, respectively, of accumulating the crapola of modern life. Our neighbors across the hall, who have an identical apartment layout, didn’t need to childproof because they own, basically, nothing. A few pieces of furniture. They are a wonder to me. How do you reach adulthood without possessions accreting to you like lichens?

Book and website advice on childproofing is overwhelming. It boils down to “Burn your house to the ground, install an unfurnished concrete box in its place, and then strap your child to the floor and post armed guards over him, just to be safe.” I’m drawing comfort from friends who tell me they didn’t childproof much and the example of my own parents, who didn’t childproof a damned thing and yet still raised several mostly unscathed children. (Eric did manage to stick his arm through a glass door and sever an artery, but, hey, he lived.) I’m particularly awed that we survived their stairway, an open-riser, banister-free affair backed by a two-story window and hovering over an unforgiving tiled basement floor. I remember crawling through the risers, hanging by my fingertips, and then free-falling into the dog’s padded bed. Well, there were four of us. I guess my parents figured they had spares.

Random thoughts Monday

2008-06-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Flann kept snagging away clothes while I folded laundry on his play mat, gumming and mauling them as if to provide sufficient inspiration for the next load. Occasionally he’s driven to practice his laughing, checking it off on his baby to-do list right after peeing on the bed, and he found the laundry completely hilarious. He got a sports bra tangled up on his head, which sent him into snorting paroxysms, and each time I pulled it off his face he stuck it right back on and cracked up. An emergent frat-boy sense of humor, clearly; soon he’ll be telling fart jokes.
———
You spend a lot of time looking into mirrors cheek-to-cheek with a baby when you’re carting one around. When I put him in the Bjorn to take him to daycare or out to run errands, I check our reflection to make sure his sunhat’s on straight and he hasn’t spat up on himself and isn’t sporting flagrant trails of snot that will reveal me to the world as a slatternly mother. He laughs at his reflection (I don’t think he yet recognizes that baby as himself), his fresh tiny face beneath my own, a strange bicephalous mommy-baby beast about to set out on its rounds. He’s a vision of perfection: velvety skin, clear blue eyes, glossy hair. And I’m a raddled hag in comparison: sun damage, sleep-deprivation undereye circles, graying temples, the developing wrinkle between my eyebrows. The last time I suffered such mirror anxiety, I was trying on prom dresses in the Bloomie’s dressing room with Leigh, head cheerleader and bitchy queen bee of my high school, with her walnut tan and impeccable hair and slightly menacing white toothy grin. Oh, well. At least Flann doesn’t point out that I’m too flat-chested to pull off a strapless cocktail dress.
———
He’s developing separation anxiety, I think. Over the past four weeks I’ve been able to plop him on the rug at daycare, stick a few toys in front of his face, and make a leisurely departure without him shedding a tear. Now he’s clued in. The minute I set him down his face screws up plaintively, and he cries like a homeless kitten in the rain. So I keep him in the Bjorn while I swap out his bottles in the fridge, stick clean clothes in his cubby, and replenish his diaper stash. Then I hand him over, say a quick good-bye, and bolt out the door. He cries afterward, the staff says, but I just can’t handle leaving while he’s upset. If he’s crying, I’ll fiddle around, nursing him one last time, sticking a pacifier in his mouth, woggling toys at him, and basically driving the staff nuts. They’d rather deal with two minutes of sobs than with twenty minutes of anxious mommy plus sobbing baby. They are a stern and hardened tribe.

I found some in his eyebrows later

2008-06-06T20:25:00.000-07:00

Halfway there

2008-06-03T15:47:00.000-07:00

Stats on the kid at six months: Ca. 17 pounds. Ca. 26.5 inches. Big old head, the size of a one-year-old’s (he has inherited his father’s rhomboid Celtic cranium). Big feet. Healthy except for damnable interminable daycare kennel cough. He showed off for his pediatrician, doing lots of downward dogs and hands-and-knees rocking on the table, and tried so hard to play tablas on her (quite cool) computerized lab book that she simply sighed, switched it off, and handed it over. But she was duly impressed, and told me he was as active and coordinated as the average eight-month-old (which made me irrationally proud) and then made stern noises about childproofing (which made me irrationally nervous).
———
I’m getting much better at doing things in my sleep. The boy has been waking up every hour to two hours for the past week and a half—teething? another cold? another whothehellknows?***—and I just stagger to the crib, feed and/or re-pacifier him and switch on his mood music, and slump back into bed without ever truly waking up. Or I hide under the pillows and let Matt deal. I feel like I’ve been run over, but that feeling is so familiar that it doesn’t bother me too much. I’m irritable and cry too much and don’t look so good, but, hey, those are familiar things, too. I wish only that he felt better these days. It is hard to see him dispirited, and to not know what is bothering him or how to fix it. I want my laughing baby back.
———
Last Sunday—before the current spate of crankiness—we took him on his first long hike, up and down a ridgeline out at Briones (where we were stalked by a grazing cow; I didn’t know cows could stalk). He loves being outdoors. He laughs without provocation, just because he’s happy in the woods. It’s hilarious and moving. On a hilltop we set him on Matt’s shoulders and he was overcome with glee, grabbing the bill of Matt’s ballcap and giggling down at me as they bounced down the trail. I smiled so hard my zygomatic muscles hurt on Monday.
———
***Wednesday update: Teething it was. His lower right front incisor broke through last night. His first tooth! And he grew it all by himself.

Tag, you're it

2008-05-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

The delightful Oz of Knocked Up tagged me with this meme:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.
6. Let your tagger know when your entry is up.

(I hereby tag Jeannie, Calm before the Stork, I Will Be Your Father Soon, and Robin. Just four, ’cause I’m too shy to tag people I haven’t met in nonscreen life and I don’t know many bloggers; also, Jeannie gets a bye because her new little one, Christian, was born on Friday.)

Since Flann turned six months old on the twenty-fifth, the timing is fortuitous. In honor of his Un-Birthday, here are six places that, someday, I’d like to take him.

1. The Outer Banks of North Carolina. When I was very small my family spent a few summer weeks there each year, usually at Kitty Hawk or at Cape Hatteras near the stripey old lighthouse (and a beached nineteenth-century shipwreck that, spookily, bore my own name: the Laura Anna). My parents read on the porch of our rental house or sunbathed, and my three older brothers and I ran unsupervised through the dunes, which are covered with condos now but all those decades ago were barren and endless. We excavated dangerous tunnels through wet sand, dug with our toes for metallic-tasting clams in the Sound, built a Sphinx of sand around our patient collie, flew kites shaped like bats and warplanes, got caught in riptides and didn’t tell. A few wild weeks away from our suburban home, a vacation to the borderland between Lord of the Flies and a prelapsarian Eden—I hope I can give Flanny a similar gift.

2. The Museum of American History in DC. My parents hauled us from the Maryland suburbs to the Smithsonian on most rainy weekends, not knowing what else to do with us. My brothers of course preferred the Air and Space, with its styrofoam-flavored Astronaut Ice Cream and pre-IMAX surround-sound flight movies. But the basement of American History was this crazy warehouse, a throwback to the wonder-cabinet era when museum collections weren’t curated or planned but simply grew. Old steam locomotives. Random bits of mill equipment. Crackpot rainmaking inventions and infinite-motion machines. Enthusiasms and schemes. It looked, in fact, like the inside of a little kid’s mind.

3. The annual flea market in the town of What Cheer, Iowa. Acres of old baseball cards and quilts and strange glassware figurines and crappy “primitive” oil paintings and, really, whatever random stuff people pulled out of their attics that year. I visited years ago (when I was getting an MFA nearby, at the place Matt refers to as the Iowa Writers’ Camp on account of the shnogging, drinking, and general not-writing featured on its curriculum) with a friend who collected old 78s and the wax rolls used in player pianos, which we bought from a man with no hands. I bought a tiny pearl pocketknife from a woman in a fright wig and Groucho glasses. Then we ate bratwurst in the beer garden, where dogs in tutus danced on their hind legs. It was as close to an old-fashioned, David Lynch-toned country fair as you could get in the modern Midwest. A kid would love it.

4. Catalina Island. I went there two years ago on a solo hiking trip in midsummer. No one else was on the trails because it was approximately eight million degrees out, so it was a perfect loner’s holiday. Now and then, from a hilltop or ridge, I’d see little specks bobbing in the bright water offshore: kids learning to snorkel or scuba-dive or body-surf. Tiny whoops of delight rose in the still air. I imagined my own kid down there, exploring a kelp forest for the first time, gold garibaldi fish nibbling his fingers and clouds of silver anchovies switchbacking through seaweed and sunlight slanting down in cathedral bands—the purest picture of wonder.

5. The sixteenth-century Grande Mosque in Agadez, Niger. I climbed it eighteen years ago. It is made of mud daub, bristles like a porcupine with the lateral beams that brace its skeleton, and is shaped like an attenuated pyramid. Inside, after you pay the attendant, he guides you up a winding staircase: as it ascends it shrinks and its steps grow steeper, so you feel that you are burrowing into the ground rather than rising above the earth. The tiny open-air platform at the top is barely fenced with a knee-high wall. I would keep a tight grip on Flanny’s shoulder up here. He’d squint down at the tin roofs of the town, menaced constantly by the desert sun, and then we’d go next door to the hotel run by Italians and eat gelato and drink lemonade and buy the weird little camel-leather toys sold by a kid at the front desk.

6. The house where his parents met. It is on Castro Street in San Francisco. We met there at a party on the night of a blackout that took out most of the West Coast. The old Victorian, rented by friends, was painted with Sicilian curses and evil eyes. Out back was an amoeba-shaped pool bordered by tall sunbathing pedestals covered with bright Nikki de Saint-Phalle tiles. It was a relic of 1970s San Francisco, and atop the pedestals the memory still hovered of pretty young men waiting for sun to break through the fog. The rooms were lit by candles and lanterns. It’s still there, the house, but now someone has painted over the curses and eyes and, probably, replaced the crazy pool with a sedate garden. Maybe we’ll knock on the door. They’ll let us inside, and we’ll go to the kitchen, where, among the new zinc fixtures and polished granite countertops, ghosts of the two people who made him still glance at each other and smile for the first time, unsure of what to say.

Secondhand

2008-05-20T15:30:00.001-07:00

I buy almost all of Flann’s clothing at secondhand baby-gear shops. There are two excellent ones near my house, and shopping there makes me wonder why anyone pays for new baby togs. New onesies can cost twenty-five dollars—especially the all-natural-fiber, hand-printed kind popular in Berkeley—yet babies wear them for about three seconds before outgrowing them, or shit-bombing them beyond viability. The secondhand shops sport nearly new, amazingly cheap goods: onesies for two dollars, good-quality pants for three dollars, plus hats and socks and toys—everything, really, short of furniture and diapers. So Flann is a generally well-dressed kid; his clothes might be a little baggy, with a few loose threads, but no one expects much, sartorially, from a baby.

Yet I ruin the essential thriftiness of this scheme by buying him too many clothes. He has far more than he needs. Despite the redundant outfits stashed everywhere—at the daycare, in the diaper bag, in the auxiliary diaper bag—in case of poop/drool/pee/spit-up tsunamis, excess clothing still spills out of his (tiny) dresser and heaps up atop it. He goes through perhaps a quarter of his wardrobe in a week before laundry-day starts the cycle again. I’ve taken unworn outfits back to the secondhand shop, mailed them to friends, and donated them to Goodwill.

Once upon a time, I bought excess clothing for myself. I shopped at secondhand stores then, too—they are legion in the Bay Area—and justified the overage via the savings. (I don’t do this anymore. Trying on clothes with a baby in tow is impossible. And the outfits suddenly look so coochie, ridiculous on a thirty-nine-year-old, tight in the wrong places and spangled and fluffed and eminently victimizable by an infant. And it was much more fun to drape new clothing over a size four frame than a size-whatever-I-am-now-don’t-wanna-know frame.) Experimentation, redecoration, heaps of discarded clothing like tinsel off last year’s Christmas tree—shopping was cheap sport.

But I shop for Flann out of different motivations. I don’t really care about how he looks, as long as he is clean and warm; I don’t care if other people think his clothes are cute or fashionable or (again, this is Berkeley) woven out of politically correct fibers. He looks basically the same every day because everything I buy is blue, or striped, or striped and blue. Instead, at some irrational level, I believe all these clothes protect him. I still feel that I don’t understand my role as a parent; I do not know what I am doing. I’m driving in a snowstorm, navigating by the few blurry feet of highway illuminated by the headlights. I read baby books and advice websites constantly, and all their conflicting opinions cancel out one another. I ask friends and the pediatrician and random strangers for advice, and forget it as soon as they tell me. As a baffle against my confusion, against everything I can do wrong, against everything that I fear, I’m building a soft little fortress of blue cotton and fleece. At the center of the fortress is this tiny prince, this magical smiling chubby baby, miraculously alive and thriving, day after day.

Why I need hobbies

2008-05-14T16:24:00.000-07:00

Pumping is sorta like standing around waiting for a train—in this case, the letdown—and as I am now waiting for ca. four trains per workday, here in my tiny office with the door shut and a menacing Do Not Disturb stickie pasted on its non-lockable knob, I’m having lots of idle thoughts....

First, my pump is really loud. For the first time I’m glad that my chosen field is a pink-collar ghetto; most women in the office suite understand what that loud grinding sound is and don’t ask me if I am, perhaps, running a wood sander in here.

You can discern all kinds of things in the white noise of the pump, just as you do when playing Beatles records backward. Probably each Medela says its own particular thing, but mine goes: “Poor Donna Reed. Poor Donna Reed. Poor Donna Reed....”

Boobs have unique pumping personalities, yes they do. Café Droite (as Matt used to term it when Flann was a newborn, as in “The menu at Café Droite never changes, son!”) is a slow and steady producer. I could pump all day on the damned thing and the same single white jet would keep lollygagging its way out of the nipple. Café Gauche, on the other hand, is a snappy little thing. Letdown within ten seconds in a big Las Vegas casino-fountain way, and then nada. Yet they end up making the same amount.

Medela should produce a defogging spray for its pump parts. There’s no real way to know if you’re producing once room-temperature part is clamped to body-temperature boob and the horns and bottles fog up. I’m constantly squinting downward, wondering if that’s a splash down there or something is floating across my contact lens again.

Pumping has its own Murphy’s Law, in that once you get fed up/need to answer email/feel compelled to finally do some work and unlatch yourself, the next letdown begins and drips on your shoes.

And, finally, whoever coined that bromide about not crying over spilled milk never spilled five ounces of hardwon baby rocket fuel onto her keyboard when reaching for the phone.

Dodging the sleep gods

2008-05-09T16:21:00.001-07:00

Because I've noticed that the surest predictor of Flann's sleep going to hell in a handbasket is a blog post from me saying that he's sleeping well, I haven't mentioned his sleep in weeks. And to confirm this suspicion, for the past few weeks his sleep has gone well. One waking per night, or maybe two. Falling asleep without tantrums or even much mommy input. Sleeping from eight till two quite reliably. Zonking out immediately after his wee-hours nursing. I've avoided even thinking much about this happy pattern. I do not wish to call down the wrath of the gods.

I can write about it now only because last night sleep was a fickle bitch and he cried from 11 till 1, falling asleep intermittently in Matt's arms only to wake and shriek whenever he was set in the crib or on the bed. Even his passionate old love, the Graco swing, failed to soothe. I thought he might be teething and knocked him out with Tylenol, but in retrospect, I think he has stopped-up sinuses: lying down meant he couldn't breathe well, and he slept only when propped up against Matt. Another daycare-vector contagion, I suppose; I've got it, too, and sleeping is indeed difficult for me as well. (I don't shriek about it, though. He's so immature.) Daycare: it might look all bright and happy, it might be chockful of teddy bears and sweet teachers singing Brahms's Lullaby, but secretly it's the lepers' ward in some horrible documentary about Calcutta charity hospitals in the 1920s.

Nonetheless he's doing really well there. He scrambles on the playmats with his new best friend Grayson. His teacher sings him opera. He drinks all of his bottles and sleeps in his crib and rolls around in the outdoor play-yard. What's a little bubonic plague amid this sunny scene?

---

The photo below is one we're going to post for him at daycare - it's us at Chichén Itzá in the now impossible-to-recall Days Before Baby (also the days when I was much less fat).

Each kid gets a "family wall" of photos, which the teachers show to kids when they get grumpy. Each kid is also assigned a cubby decorated with his own photo. I told Matt about this system, and he turned to Flann and said, "You got the cubby of the dead kid."

This doesn't sound in the least amusing, but it made me sneeze tea out of my nose. The daycare Dead Kid, haunting the diaper room, moping around on the playground, hiding all the crayons at night. The Dead Kid is the one who eats all the goldfish crackers, kills the classroom hamster over holiday break, unplugs the terrarium, and pees in the corner. No one sees him, but he's there all right.

Things that are saving my butt this week

2008-05-06T11:19:00.001-07:00

This post from Ewokmama, and this schedule from Work and Pump. It is easy for me to become overwhelmed with checklists and to forget essential bits of gear, and these people have really helped me maintain sanity this week.
---
He had a much better day yesterday. Cried only occasionally, and drank three bottles. The kid just does not like bottles - apparently he held out drinking one until 12:45, although my last nursing session with him was at 7:45 when I dropped him off. He made up for it in the afternoon, though (when I walked in he was happily ensconced on the director's lap, drinking a bottle and smiling at me), and drank about 11 ounces, which I think is probably adequate.

I am not sure how my supply will match up with his daily intake. I've so far sent about sixteen ounces to daycare with him each day. The first day he drank nine; yesterday, as noted, he drank eleven. I'm pumping nearly twenty ounces a day, which is a lot, but I assume I'm producing that much because he does indeed drink that much when he is home nursing with me for the day. I hope that my supply does not drop, and that he grows accustomed to his bottles and starts to drink more of them.

Either way, it was a joy to find a smiling baby yesterday afternoon.

Sunday

2008-05-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

He's asleep on the bed in the afternoon sun, rolled up in his raggedy blue quilt. Behind and above him, among the pillows, the cat broods like a protective deity. He's better now.

---

I place him on the blue mat in the living room and he lifts himself completely off the ground on straight arms and his toes, like a yogi in plank position. His big toes - always ridiculously out of proportion to his body; they're as big as thumbs, completely un-babylike - splay out to the sides, scrabbling for balance. He yips excitedly, returns to earth, scrambles backward, lifts up again, leaving a trail of drool spots on the mat as he moves away from his starting place. A little shining archipelago of spit that makes me think of the Hawaiian islands, growing above a hot spot on the ocean floor and drifting away to the northwest as benthic plates shift over eons. Babies incline you to grandiose metaphors, and abject tasks: I move forward, swiping at the drool with a cloth diaper, as he moves backward. A messy and sweet little dance.

First day, in media res

2008-05-01T16:10:00.000-07:00

Today is Flann's first full day at daycare. Only fifty minutes before I can pick him up - yippee! Most of the day has been spent:

1. Pumping

2. Trying to find someone else's quiet office in which to pump because IT work-studies are crawling all over mine, my hard drive/monitor having been spirited away by elves in my absence

3. Yattering at other parents in the department about pumping, babies, and pumping

4. Missing Flanny

5. Missing Flanny

(Repeating 4 through 5)

No calls from the daycare. I hope all has gone well. There's a parental potluck at the center tonight, but I don't think I can attend; first because cooking anything last night was totally out of the question, what with running around with gear-not-to-forget checklists; and second because I just want to spirit the boy away and remind him that his parents still exist.

---

Update Friday: Well, he is sick already. Fever, congestion, diarrhea. Oh boy. And apparently he cried a lot yesterday, and was very reluctant to drink bottles (took only two in a nine-hour day). This gets better, right? right?

Tiny Land

2008-04-26T20:15:00.001-07:00

On Monday I sat Flann up on the bed, and he fell over immediately. By now, several days later, he has mastered the concept, and props himself with his arms in the classic tripod position. In five days he learned how to do something radically new, something he'd never done before - thinking about the complex neurological wiring involved makes my own head spin. When you watch a baby, you realize what intricate choreography directs every movement that we perform: chewing, moving one hand independently of the other, turning one's head at the sound of a voice. Being a baby is not easy. He works very hard; much harder than his parents, probably.

---

Yesterday, Matt's forty-second birthday, we left Flann with a sitter and went to Oliveto for dinner (fourteen years in California, but I'd never been there). It was my first evening away from him, and he did just fine without me. In the restaurant, though, I was very disoriented. All these grown-up people having adult conversations, and me without a drop of spit-up on my shoulder and my hair actually brushed. I kept looking around at the other diners, mostly wealthy people who didn't look wealthy, in the classic fashion of Northern California, and I wondered where everyone's children were. Did they not have any? Did they have dedicated teams of night-nannies? Were their children safely off in grad school on the East Coast? Over dinner we had a conversation about politics and wine, and I felt stilted and tongue-tied, my vocabulary reduced to a few basic phrases. It was hard not to grunt, and at one point when I meant to blow a kiss at Matt across the table I blew a raspberry instead, because I do that all day long at Flanny.

I've forgotten about life outside the world of babies, the world of this baby; I think of it as Tiny Land, and its borders are closely guarded. You can't visit it and leave. You can't live there for a few years in the way you'd check out a new city after college graduation, abandoning it casually when you meet a new boyfriend or take a new job, or simply on a whim. Nothing I've done has changed me as irrevocably as having a baby, this person I want both to flee and to be with all the time, forever. I am a permanent resident.

Last day

2008-04-25T09:36:00.001-07:00

This is my last full weekday with Flann before he starts daycare. I'm feeling sad and pokey, but the kid himself is happy and shiny as a new penny. The first of many separations, as Matt reminded me last night; I wonder if this one is the hardest.

Vertical

2008-04-21T20:11:00.000-07:00

I keep trying to post an entertaining sequence in which Flann sits up briefly and then tumbles slowly onto his face (the things that amuse parents!). But Blogger grinds away on the photo-posting tool and won't let me do it. Grrr. I choose to blame Blogger again, rather than my inability to save photos in the correct format.

---

He's eaten winter squash for the past two days. At first he made his tragedy-mask of great disgust and loathing, and then he realized it was good and devoured an entire jar and squeaked for more. I'm not sure any of it stayed down - he spat orange rather than the usual white afterward - but he certainly seems to dig it.

As I spackled the food into his mouth and tried to keep him from spraying it all over himself, me, the tray, the chair, the cat, and the floor, I thought about the hall-of-mirrors procession of meals these first few spoonfuls of squash set in motion. I imagined him at forty: tired, on a business-trip layover somewhere - the Kansas City airport, or a nondescript hotel in Calgary - ordering a mediocre steak, eating it while reading a novel, and leaving most of it on his plate. Or at twenty: the platter of clams he shares with a new girlfriend at a raw bar on Nantucket. Or at eighteen: the two sugary, greasy doughnuts he eats at dawn before taking off on a cross-country road trip the month before college begins. There will be the best things he ever ate - the beef tartare, the Thai shrimp salad, the fresh-tomato pasta his roommate makes, with a bottle of really good Chianti. And the thousands of ordinary meals, the bread and meat and greens and fruit that will build him into an adult, a dear stranger such as all children eventually become.

Little creep

2008-04-16T10:12:00.000-07:00

He's officially a creeper now. He can't cover vast acreage or anything, but he can scoot backward - a few inches, anyway, and only on the living room floor (no other surfaces please the little emperor). He seesaws enthusiastically on his tummy, grunts and whoofs, and pushes himself backward with straight arms, sometimes losing his balance and flopping onto his side.

He's working so hard at moving. All his little baby thoughts seem dedicated to it these days. Other skills, such as sitting up or eating solid foods, can go blow as far as he's concerned. He just wants motion. "Get your motor running!" he thinks, straight-arming the floor and wriggling like an iguana stuck in road tar. "Head out on the highway!" Next he'll want to drive the car.

This means I must think about babyproofing. I'll spare myself the rant about how it's impossible to babyproof a small apartment (no storage space in which to hide the valuables/dangers; no spare room to purge and turn into a baby play yard). I have to buy a mat to cover the living room floor; we have wool Oriental rugs there, which are just so many sieves to trap cat hair and leaf crumbs and all kinds of other crap that I'm already tired of cleaning off his drooly hands and face. We need soft corners for the coffee table (ah, our coffee table! Our one Design Within Reach of Semi-Millionaires purchase, financed by a Chronicle freelance check for editing a tome called The Stripper's Guide to Looking Great Naked several years ago. Tip: glitter on yer nipples). And covers for the outlets. And a baby gate or two, to keep him penned in the living room as needed. And I need to tightly repack the books on the bottom shelves so he can't pull them out. One problem: Matt has lots of beautiful old record albums, for which we had shelves specially constructed. I'm not sure how to protect them from incipient Baby Doom.

Other problems lurk in other rooms: cat litter box. cranky cat. bikes. high high parental bedstead. Okay, now I'll stop.

---

On Sunday Flann saw his first kites. We took a picnic to the Berkeley Marina; the day was unseasonably hot, clear, and windy (almost like fire season, but everything is still too damp from winter rains to burn), and every kite-flyer in the Bay Area was down there. Jet fighters, butterflies, fighting dragons, abstract Jean Arp-looking things, and even a few classic diamond kites were romping around the skies. A kite vendor had two enormous show balloons up: a white-and-black puppy, its haunches billowed and rippling in a disturbingly lifelike way against the distant green hump of Angel Island, and a pair of woman's legs clad in thigh-high black stockings. The latter was really eerie: the truncated torso wore a red teddy, and the whole thing looked just like the Black Dahlia murder.

But Flann was taken by a long-tailed rainbow kite soaring directly over our blanket. Clearly he thought it was a celestial crib mobile, hung just for him: he grinned like a maniac and reached for the sky with both hands. Could he sense that the kite was a hundred feet above us? Or did he think it was just over his head? And what did he make of it, this weird scrap of bright colors scudding across the sky? How wonderful to be totally confused by the world and yet take delight in it anyway.

---

We have two Pilates balls upon which to bounce the lad when he's deep into his fussy cups. One is a modest purple ball, adequate for me but too short for Matt - it jams his knees. So I was tasked with purchasing a larger ball. I ordered the biggest size off Amazon, good for people up to 6'10". When it arrived, I was stymied by its instructions, equal in complexity to those for launching a weather balloon, and left the job for Matt.

As he inflated it with a foot pump, our alarm slowly grew. The thing is titanic, at least twice as tall as the baby. And it's bright red. And it is a distinct, menacing presence in our little apartment now, like a mentally unstable roommate. It won't stay in a corner, and it lurches slowly across the floor to tap us softly on the back or threaten the cat. It very much resembles the prison-guard device Rover on The Prisoner, the one that roars softly just before it attacks your face and suffocates you.

But the boy, predictably, loves the thing. So stay it will. It's crammed against the bookshelves now. Biding its time.

Grace

2008-04-14T20:33:00.000-07:00

I take evening walks with Flanny from 6 or 6:30 till 7: the hour of the "sundowner blues," as one couple we met out strolling memorably termed it. Lately it's been clear blue evenings, and everything is in flower. We walk through the Edible Schoolyard to look at the chickens (he loves the black one with feathery feet), or down Hopkins Street past the pizzeria and the outdoor cafe, or just through the tiny streets near the apartment, looking at all the marvelous houses and strange gardens, each one unique, as far from the tract-home sameness of my own childhood as they could be. The lilacs are blooming deep purple and blue and dying as they bloom, and they make me feel all Proustian and weltschmerzy and reflect on the brevity of their blossoms and of my time with Flanny in his infancy, and yadda yadda. Tonight, coming back up Vine Street, I looked at the enormous spreading pepper tree across from my house, with its great billows of tiny creamy blossoms against the fog descending on the hills, spot-lit by the sunset streaming through the Golden Gate. I thought about Annie Dillard's "tree with the lights in it," and how easy it is to find grace in such visually compelling moments, and how much grace I'm finding in my time with Flann now. And I want to be able to find that same grace at other moments, when he won't let me sleep, for example, or when he's bitching in public and I just want him to stop stop stop and let me have a peaceful conversation. I want the tree with the lights in it then, too.

Writerly babies

2008-04-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

My best friend from graduate school had a lovely baby on Friday. She's in New York and I'm in California, but one of the greatest things about being pregnant was emailing her every day and comparing knocked-up notes. I wish she were next door so the babies could roll around on the grass and steal each other's Tonka trucks and, I dunno, what else do baby boys do? Bop each other on the head with sippy cups, scheme for world domination. I miss her.

---

Fine father-bloggin': Another New York friend is expecting his first baby in the summer. He writes about it in enviably gorgeous form here.

---

It seems that everyone in my age cohort is pregnant this year. Matt's best friend, and the woman who played his "best man" in our tiny courthouse wedding. My old friend and housemate from college (seventeen years ago; oy). My best childhood friend. And a whole slew of coworkers (in a company that, on average, is well past the age of menopause). We're all well into our latest possible thirties, and the door is closing on us, but somehow we all, with merciful ease, have nipped across the threshold and into the land of parenthood.

Anxiety list

2008-04-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

If I list all the scenarios that cause me agida in re. Flann starting daycare May 1, will it make me feel better? Or will it just help me mindfuck everything to death? Here goes....

1. Maybe he'll freak out en route every day. Public transit is our only way to reach his daycare: I don't drive, and even if I did, Matt must take the car several days a week, and even if he didn't, there are no parking spaces at my office. But lately Flann cries hysterically on BART. I do not know if this results from fresh-blooming stranger anxiety (about which more below) or the train's noise. BART didn't bother him during his first few months of life, but lately even a single-stop ride is near impossible. I tried riding a bus with him today. He did okay, but the bus wasn't crowded and we didn't have to wait. We'll try the bus down Telegraph to his daycare next week at rush hour. Wish us luck.

2. Maybe he won't eat. I ran into a friend at Thursday farmers' market who said she must come home from work several times daily to nurse her son, who will not take bottles from his nanny. And that has gone on for two months. Flann has taken bottles from his sitter, but he's skittish about taking one from Matt. Will the unfamiliar setting of the daycare combined with an unfamiliar bottle-wielder send him into strike? I can't visit the daycare each day to nurse: see above re. the transit situation.

3. Maybe he won't have enough to eat. Lately I've had a hell of a time getting a decent let-down while pumping. This wasn't a problem until the past month, and it's not a supply issue, because I can drop the pump, stick kid on boob, and watch him drink a full meal, so whafuck. I have only ten ounces of frozen milk stashed away: i.e., enough for one workday. And Flanny has decided he hates the very formula upon which he loved to snack until last week. And he's not ready for solid foods: I put a dab of rice/milk on his lips a few days ago, and he actually shuddered in disgust. So: argh.

4. Maybe he'll get sick constantly. Babies in daycare do. And maybe he'll have to stay home, with me, constantly. I have practically no sick leave left because I chewed it all up in maternity leave. So my boss will make increasingly impatient noises. And then fire my ass. And then we'll have to go live in a drainage culvert and wear grocery bags for shirts.

5. Maybe he'll cry and cry until the daycare invokes the "failure to adjust" clause in our contract and boots us out to scramble and wait-list once again. In the past two weeks, especially in the late afternoon and evening, he's lost his marbles near strangers. The farmers' market friend mentioned above, who's the least threatening person in existence (a five-foot-two rosy-cheeked apple dumpling of a girl), received a frown and frightened crying when she greeted him yesterday. On Monday night, I made the epic mistake of taking him to a parents' meeting at the daycare; he shrieked so much I had to dash out, babe under arm, in a frenzy of embarrassment. I know daycares are used to crying babies with separation anxiety, and that he'll likely adjust after a few tough days. But what if what if what if. I drive myself crazy with what-ifs.

I could continue, but it is best that I don't. The daycare is full of happy sprats, so surely Flann eventually will become a happy sprat there, too.

Happy morning treat

2008-04-09T09:04:00.000-07:00

It's the Lost "What?" compendium!

Last June, when I was poleaxed by nonstop morning sickness (also afternoon, evening, and wee-hours-of-the-morning sickness), I sneaked home a rental DVD of Lost's first season from Elephant Pharmacy. "Sneaked" because I was sure Matt, who generally watches obscure films that feature, e.g., medieval Japanese peasants carting around their elderly dying mothers on their backs, or dialogue-free midcentury French noirs, would not approve of my trashy taste. But the next day I found him watching episode after episode in the living room with the shades drawn, and he too was hooked.

We sprinted through all the available seasons on DVD in about three weeks, then cold-turkeyed it until early December, when last season finally became available. I have blurry, hallucinatory memories of nursing newborn Flanny to the accompaniment of Jack shouting, "Let's head out!" and all the tan buff beautiful people grabbing their guns and sprinting into the jungle. I sympathized with Locke: who would ever want to leave the island? Everyone's pretty on the island. Everyone has gorgeous tumbling hair. No one has to go to work. Although there is little food, no one ever seems particularly hungry. No one gets the flu, and unless you've been shot to death or mangled by the smoke monster you're healthy as a horse (even Claire seemed to progress through unmedicated forest-floor labor in five easy minutes). You can swim in the surf every morning, and watch Desmond walk around shirtless. What could be better?

I think I might buy the entire slew of disks once the show finishes in a few years, though surely it will have begun to suck enormously by then. I'll foist an episode or two on teenage Flann, saying it reminds me of his babyhood. He'll think it's totally lame, as dorky and dull as, say, My Three Sons seems to me, nowhere near as interesting as the neural downloads he gets automatically through the cerebral infotainment port that everyone will sport in the backs of their skulls by that time.

The changing of the template

2008-04-08T16:40:00.000-07:00

I just could no longer stand Blogger's persistent mucking up of the leading in the old template, so I changed to this one, which is acceptable but uses a dreaded sans-serif font. Every Blogger template with a serif font (and serif fonts are the only truly legible ones, sez I) also had weird first-paragraph leading issues. Re. the leafy bucolic banner photograph: I have no idea what that's about, it came with the package. It seems suitably springlike and baby-ish—new growth, buddings, pea blossoms 'n' lilacs la la la etcetera—but if anyone knows how to replace a Blogger template banner photo with a real one, please let me know.

Babblefish

2008-04-06T19:50:00.000-07:00

Flann spent this weekend turning on the babble-stream. BWA BWA BWA BWA! he proclaims. Also BOO-AH BWAH BABABA! He's very commanding about it, gazing directly into our eyes and flapping his jaw like, as Matt says, a toothless old guy complaining that his cocoa wasn't properly warmed.

The past week has been amazing. Everything is happening so fast. He turns and rolls. He yaps. He tries to get his knees under himself and half lifts his stomach off the bed. He lifts his arms like he's body-surfing. He can even scoot a few inches backward when he really sets his mind to it. It's like watching a flower unfold at warp speed in a Nova special.

Blueberry eyes

2008-04-03T09:37:00.000-07:00

Photo credit: The Husband.

Turn turn turn

2008-04-02T20:03:00.001-07:00

The kid has figured out how to turn the pages of books. We lie on our backs together and I hold a board book above his head, one page flapping temptingly, and urge him, "C'mon, baby. You know how. Turn the page, turn the page...." One spitty hand emerges from under his chin, and he knocks the page aside. Today he turned hell out of Baby Happy Baby Sad; were there a Pulitzer for board books, this one would win it. He particularly likes the page on which Baby Happy scoots around butt-naked while Baby Sad is bundled and immobile in a snowsuit and mittens. We plan to investigate the author's other works, which include such incisive tomes as Blanky Binky and Yummy Yucky.

---

Sleep training has gone the way of all flesh. His wee-hours squeakfests progressed into full-throated screaming sessions - the opposite of the pattern Ferber says should emerge, in which a baby learns to sleep longer stretches. If anything, the training was damaging what sleep skills he had, particularly since he began sleeping longer in the morning to make up for sleep lost to crying at night. And the crying - oh, the crying was really, really impossible to bear. I can't explain its effect on me (and on Matt). When I was little I had a doll called Tuesday Taylor, the top of whose skull could be rotated to change her from a blonde to a brunette. But I liked to leave her skull half-rotated, so she looked like the victim of a terrible beauty-parlor trepanning accident. Flann's crying made me feel like my skull was half-rotated, permanently so.

We'll try again in a couple of months. He must not be developmentally ready. Matt's colleague suggested we read Sleeping through the Night, a copy of which I already own. I cracked it this morning after another hellish night (I got two hours of sleep, and I have the flu), and its basic proposition is that once a baby can get to sleep easily at bedtime, he'll naturally begin to sleep through the night. Fuck! Flann's only sleep skill is falling easily asleep at bedtime: by himself, in the crib, without swaddle or rocking or nursing. But the rest of the night is a train wreck.

---

Lip-sucking has begun in earnest. He draws in his lower lip, cocks his head up in this sorta Mae West come-hither pose, and blows the most enormous, spitty raspberries. Then he waits for me to laugh, and does it again.

Roly poly

2008-03-31T20:32:00.000-07:00

Today in mommy-baby yoga, I set the kid down on his back, as usual, then did a bunch of stretches. But when I looked down, he was on his stomach, happily chomping his Bingle. I imagined I must've put him down on his stomach and forgotten about it; sleep deprivation and all that. But he rolled from back to stomach five more times during the class. He got a lot more out of the class than I did; my core muscles are so weak I can't do much of anything. Oh, well. I can still roll better than he can, at least for a few more months.

We came home and I put him on the living room rug, where he executed his flawless barrel rolls a few more times, forgot how, got stuck on one arm, and lay flailing his legs from side to side and yelling. After a nurse and a nap, he remembered. Such a smart baby.

Sleep training, night 4

2008-03-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

I asked Moxie about apartment living and sleep training with babies. She and her many readers came through with a wealth of ideas and reassurance; this was delightful, like having fifty friends visit with tea and cookies. Anyway, they pointed out that contrary to Pottery Barn's view of things, most of the world's residents don't live in three-bedroom suburban homes with luxurious nurseries and yet their kids turn out dandy - it's the quality of family life rather than the physical parameters of that life that matter most. I now feel better about our space limitations. She also observed that most kids have a sleep meltdown around four months and thus this is not the optimal time to train. On the other hand, I return to work soon, and my brain will turn into warm Velveeta cheese if it doesn't get some rest. Much to ponder.

Last night was another squeak-fest, starting hourly at 9:15 AM and narrowing to quarter-hourly by 5 AM, at which point I stomped into the living room and had a charming little nervous breakdown at Matt. Today, at Flann's four-month check-up, his pediatrician suggested his truly lavish reflux might be contributing to his sleep problems: while he is gaining an appropriate amount of weight, he might sleep better were he able to keep more calories in his stomach. She suggested a bit of Zantac, plus adding some rice-enriched Enfamil to his every-two-hours daytime breastfeeds (and establishing separate rooms; sigh). We'll give it a shot, and perhaps I'll refine my ideas about the realities of four-month-old sleep.

Update: He hates the Enfamil. Alas.

Sleep training, night 3: The midnight squeaker

2008-03-25T15:31:00.001-07:00

I didn't keep the Flanny sleep log last night because it would be all "11 PM: Woke up and squeaked for ten minutes. 1 AM: Woke up and squeaked for ten minutes. 3 AM...." He fell asleep well once again, and I kept him to his midnight and 4 AM feeds, but I'm as sleep-deprived as ever. Ferber is of no assistance. He assumes kids wake up and CRY CRY CRY, not make sounds like un-oiled jalopies and then go back to sleep while their insomniac middle-aged parents lie awake, desperately trying to return to that dream featuring three thousand tabby cats and Javier Bardem in Central Park.

Sleep telemetry for the obsessive parent

2008-03-24T15:41:00.001-07:00

Like charts? Try this one: http://www.trixie.tracker.com/tour/sleep.

Sleep training, night 2

2008-03-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

8:00 PM: Into the crib after his bath. Tonight, to his pale-blue sleep sack and onesie, I add a light-blue chenille cardigan. It's most unmanly-looking, it's like an old lady's shawl, but he seemed cold last night. With his trailing blue sleep sack, he looks both lunar and ridiculous, a little priest about to perform Mass on Mars. I put him down without a pacifier.

Matt's making salad nicoise in the kitchen. I perch nearby at the table, nervously re-reading Ferber, alarm clock in one hand, fortifying glass of pinot grigio in the other.

He falls asleep immediately! Not a tear.

9:12: Okay, one tear. Matt readies himself to check. Kid sacks out again before he goes in. Hooray! He seems to have weaned himself not only from his swaddle, but from his pacifier. (He's not showing much daytime interest in it, either. All our thousands of Avents, rattling around the house, stuffed under bookshelves and into the back of the closet by the cat....)

We eat and put on Terry Gilliam's Brothers Grimm. Flann's quiet, but our neighbors' baby is having a terrible night, sick and screaming, and we're all aurally confused and keep turning off the movie to ensure it's not our kid who's crying. Movie kinda sucks. I fall asleep.

11:26 PM: Flanny speaks! I'm torn: nurse him now, or wait till midnight, his first designated night-feed time? He cries for a few minutes, then trails off into the cranky, squeaky-door noises he's developed lately. It's lazy-guy crying: enough amplification to show us he's annoyed but not enough that he has to exert himself or anything. Back to sleep he goes....

2:10 AM: Let me repeat that: 2:10 AM. He sleeps until after 2! To quote Uma Thurman: Goddamn, I said goddamn goddamn! He nurses the right side, and it's back into the crib.

4:20 AM: Up again. 4:00 AM is his second designated night-feed time, so I go ahead and give him the left boob. I'm nervous. We're into the wee hours now, which was his usual wakey-wakey-nursey-nursey time. But back into the crib he goes, and the great god Hypnos smiles upon the house.

5:45 AM: Cranking mixed with small sobs begins. I wait three minutes, then rub his tummy. He yells at me. I get back into bed. More squeaky-door noises until 6:10 AM while I lie awake with the clock in my hand. Ferber doesn't address squeaky-door noises; what shall I do? Ferber also suggests that you simply get up if the kid keeps complaining just before dawn. Don't wanna get up. The kid squeaks himself to sleep.

7 AM: Matt fetches the boy out of his crib. He's smiling, so clearly we didn't damage him too badly. A happy breakfast ensues.

I am afraid to say it, but I think this is going well. I'm fantasizing now about cutting out the 4 AM feeding - which I won't do until I've talked to his pediatrician, and assured myself that he doesn't actually need to eat at that hour. Someday soon, I could sleep from midnight to 7! I said goddamn goddamn.

Sleep training, night 1

2008-03-23T11:55:00.001-07:00

Last night we took the plunge and began Ferberizing. I'm going to create a few (hopefully, only a few, depending on his progress) logbook posts about his sleeping....

I chose Ferber mostly because it's the only sleep-training book I can understand in my muddled state. The No-Cry Sleep Solution program sounds great, but there's not much of a step-by-step solution in it, just endless anecdotes about how well her (skimpy) program worked for various babies. And the Weissbluth Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child frightens me. He devotes part of his first few chapters to telling readers that if their children don't sleep well, they won't develop well. Pressure and guilt on top of my titanic sleep-dep: uh, no thanks. His program is also complex and hard to follow, with a squillion bullet points and tactics, and about as user-friendly as, say, the battle plan for the siege of Stalingrad. Again, no thanks. Ferber is well-written, crisp, clear, and logical. And there are plenty of online testaments to the fact that while Ferber-style crying it out is unpleasant, it's short-lived, usually works, and doesn't hurt the baby. So I signed on.

His baseline

Prior to training, he fell asleep in his crib, swaddled, around 8 each night. I didn't nurse him down; instead his bedtime ritual was boob-bath-song-crib. Generally he fell asleep quickly and well, with only a few minutes of crying, if any at all. He then slept a wildly varying stretch of time: perhaps only two and a half hours, but once as long as six. So, somewhere between 10:30 PM and 2 AM, he ate, fell asleep again, woke up around 3 AM, and thereafter woke every hour to ninety minutes and got nursed back to sleep.

I responded to him quickly, never letting him cry more than a minute or two. He used to sleep in our bed, but for the past week and a half I've been trying to return him to his crib after each nursing (I can't sleep well with him in the bed; he thrashes and squiggles and squeaks). This went relatively well, but sometimes he refused to return to the crib and thus stayed in bed with me or, on a few miserable nights, slept in his swing next to the bed.

He generally woke up bang at 7 AM each day, and got his first meal of the day thereafter.

The goals

To reduce his nighttime wakings and feedings to two, at ca. midnight and 4 AM; to wean him from his swaddle before he's able to turn onto his stomach at night (suffocation hazard); to teach him to sleep in the crib rather than in the bed or swing.

Night 1 log

8 PM: Down into the crib after feeding and bath. No swaddle, just a sleep sack and long-sleeved thermal onesie.

8:10 PM: Crying begins. I check at three minutes, Matt at five minutes, me again at ten minutes. Matt's cooking sausages and kale and onions in the kitchen between checks. I drink a big glass of red wine for courage.

Ca. 8:30 PM: Asleep.

9:30 PM: Crying begins again. We're trying to watch a silly popcorn movie as distraction. We trade off checks at three minutes, at five minutes, at ten, and then almost ten again before the crying stops. The boy is sad and frantic and turned around in his crib. We rub his belly, tell him it's okay. I cry too. He falls asleep again.

12:06 AM (precisely): Wakes up for midnight feeding. I nurse him on one side; he grips my hand frantically while he eats. He sacks out, and goes back into the crib. I fall asleep in our room, next to his crib. Matt's in the living room.

3 AM: Begins sobbing intermittently (in three-minute stints) until 3:45. I had planned to do the second feed at 4, but I succumb at 3:45. He nurses on both sides and goes back into his crib.

6 AM: Wakes up and sobs ca. 5 minutes. Falls asleep again before I can roust myself to check on him.

7 AM, his usual wake-up time: Sobs quietly, and I pick him up immediately. We nurse one-sided in bed, and we both fall asleep for two more hours. I should keep him awake thereafter, but he's exhausted and I'm exhausted.

His nap schedule has been rather wacky today, probably due to his fatigue and late waking. He fell asleep while Matt and I strolled him through the Oakland cemetery/columbariums (we'd never been in there before; damn, it's a huge complex) and has slept for more than two hours. I have to roust him now. Wish us luck tonight.

Micro and macro

2008-03-19T09:09:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we were finally promoted off a wait list at one of the big, good daycare centers. They will begin Flanny-wrangling on May 1, the day I return to work. They charge a few hundred more per month than the highly mediocre home daycare I chose earlier, and their location transforms my morning commute from a ten-minute amble into a ninety-minute BART-and-stroller fest, but hooray and yippee-ay-yay; I feel that I'm leaving him in good, expert hands. I must eat the deposit I left at the home daycare, and I hope they don't get bitchy and demand the first month's payment, too, but I am giving them a month and a half of notice, and they should be able to fill the vacated slot with ease. Knock wood.

---

On the rare occasions I am outside without Flann, my field of vision expands. I have grown so used to staring at small particulars: the top of his head, the position of his hands, his socks and whether they're falling off his feet again, his pacifier and whether he's yanked the Elmo tether off it once more. Indoors the focus is also micro: I spend my days clipping tiny nails, picking sock-fluff out of tiny toes, wondering whether the little rash on little shoulders is eczema or something more benign. We have small conversations; we take short trips from room to room, window to window. He is an exercise in miniaturism.

Without him the world widens. I look far down the street; I look at the upper floors of buildings; I see the hills again, and the fog hovering above them. I feel both freed and untethered. Without him my feet aren't connected to the ground any more. I don't think they ever will be again.

---

He has become both a yowler and a whisperer. He yowls not when he's upset, but for vocal practice, going up and down the scale, curving his upper lip to focus the sound. And he whispers into things: his hands, his burp cloth (still his favorite toy), the breast. He's telling them small secrets, I think, or talking trash about one to the others.

Baby v. pachyderm

2008-03-17T09:16:00.001-07:00

Nostalgia

2008-03-15T20:15:00.000-07:00

I left Flanny with a sitter, for the first time, on Friday morning. She was a delightful woman, a reformed art chick with an invented last name, a substitute science teacher four months pregnant with her first child. Flann was fine. Me, not so much.

I was an anxious wreck the whole four and a half hours I was away from him, and I couldn't even determine the reason for my anxiety. I trusted the sitter: I hired her through a service that performs background checks, and I was basically confident she would not sell him to gypsies, drink our Scotch, or rifle our file cabinets to steal our Social Security numbers. I'd left him fed and changed and smiling, with a ridiculous number of bottles in the fridge. Yet I felt inexplicably guilty. I flew through my morning appointment and tried to eat an enjoyable lunch at a Mexican place Matt and I frequented when we was a-courtin', even ordering what used to be my favorite food on the planet, Al's New Mexico Egg Enchiladas. They didn't taste right. I agitated for the check, and went home early.

After a lot of pondering (and hugging Flanny, to the point he protested and wiggled away), I decided I'm sad about returning to work May 1; I have premature nostalgia for the time I'm now spending with him. Though staying home all day with a baby is incredibly tedious, it's also incredibly rewarding. My work, on the other hand, is sorta tedious and only somewhat rewarding. Unfortunately it's also integral to the household budget, so back to work I will go. But he's just entering the golden phase of babydom, when he will learn and develop at an astonishing clip, and forty-five hours a week of that development will be observed not by me but by a daycare worker who probably won't care so much, having seen it in eight bazillion babies in the course of her work. He won't be able to nap next to me, petting my sweater as he falls asleep; he won't be able to watch the cat licking condensation off the windowpanes in the morning; he won't be able to stare out at the plum trees and passing bicyclists from my arms when he wants to calm down.

And I already miss him, though he is asleep only two rooms away.

White nights

2008-03-11T20:10:00.001-07:00

Ben Katchor has a cartoon series about an imaginary Anti-Sleep Society. In a drafty Lower East Side warehouse, failing mid-level salesmen and impoverished doctoral students and crackpots of various flavors gather in all-night meetings to both denounce and ward off sleep, just as an AA meeting denounces and wards off the urge to drink. Anti-sleep evangelists rant endlessly at the podium and the listeners sit in cheap metal folding chairs, drinking coffee and smoking endless cigarettes and propping open sore eyelids with their fingertips.

I think I'm in a small Anti-Sleep Society these days, headed and run by one fifteen-week-old baby. While he's always marvelously well-rested and bright-eyed, ready to meet the world and drool on it, he also wakes up shrieking and demanding the boob at least five times between his eight o'clock bedtime and six-thirty wake time each and every night. I can't stand reading baby manuals anymore, because they all burble happily about how babies of this age are now learning to sleep for long stretches! dropping night feedings! giving their parents a glimpse of the Promised Land of Nod! I actually threw the American Academy of Pediatrics' Your Baby's First Year across the room last night. Nobody told this baby he's supposed to sleep.

I know it's almost time to Ferberize or sleep-train or whatever the hell. But I don't know how we can do it. We live in a small apartment. The apartment is in a building. The building contains neighbors. (In fact, our neighbors across the hall, who have the identical apartment plan, tried to "cry it out" with their eighteen-month-old about nine months ago, both of them sleeping in the living room with earplugs and doing the whole Ferber fandango. It didn't work. The kid still sleeps in their bed, and he still wakes up at least twice a night to eat.) And my husband has to be well-rested for work; he's our main breadwinner, after all. And Flanny could shriek Ferber himself out of the house, I have no doubt.

My brother visited from Russia last week and spent the entire first day asleep in his hotel room, recovering from both jet lag and the ferocious pace of his worklife in Moscow. I was overcome with envy: a whole day to sleep. I would travel ten thousand miles for that, too.

I used to fantasize about travel: my own version of 1,000 Places to Visit before You Die. Even though I worked for years as a travel editor, I didn't go much of anywhere. Usually my fantasies involved deserts or snorkeling, or snorkeling close to deserts, or hiking in deserts just before going snorkeling. Also eating a lot of lobster. If you could sorta stick the Red Sea next to the Belize cayes next to Baja, you'd have my dream destination. I still fantasize about travel, more frantically than ever now that I am pinned down and penurious in Babylandia, but now I want to travel for sleep.

My favorite dream involves a Japanese ryokan, a hot-springs resort in the mountains. I want to visit in midwinter, spend days hiking (alone, hmm) through pine forests blanketed with snow, then eat a kaiseki meal in a quiet room, sit outside in a steaming cedar tub beneath the black sky, and then sleep for years on a silk futon. I add purely imaginary details, too, like some Toshiro Mifune-looking dudes standing guard outside my chamber to growl and stomp and ward off anyone who might disturb my sleep, and a couple of calm-voiced women to bring me jasmine tea before I turn in. After about ten years of this, I'd return to Berkeley, where, magically, Flann would still be the exact age he is now. I would pick up the thread of our life again, only with a brain that had been rested and washed and cleaned and soothed.

Happy conceptionversary

2008-03-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Flann:

Three hundred and sixty-eight days ago - I'm writing this a little late, and 2008 is a leap year - on March 7, 2007, you wiggled your way into existence. (Your mom is an obsessive charter - have you noticed that I still track your every feeding and every wet diaper in a logbook? - so she's sure of the date.) You weren't much to look at then, just a spitball of rapidly dividing cells, but you had a certain something. You were a blastocyst with a plan.

During the next few weeks you did your thing quietly. I had no idea you were there until noon on March 23, when I went running out of the office bathroom (yes, I did the pee-stick test at work; see above re. obsessiveness) to call your father and tell him of the manifestation of the fabled Two Pink Lines. Your dad was on his lunch hour at the Ferry Building, shopping for Mexican oregano in that spice store run by incredibly bitchy gay boys who once chastised me for taking a chocolate doughnut from the display bin, not the sales bin, but they were always sweet to your father, a man who also has a certain something. I don't think either of us did much work the rest of that day. In the evening your dad took me to Cesar, where I felt virtuous and proud as I declined a glass of wine.

Two months later I had my first look at you, a distinctly baby-shaped blob with an aquiline nose and waving fists, on the ultrasound screen at the super-swanky baby-monitoring place, which resembled a plush office suite with its deep carpet and mahogany doors. You swam around vigorously in the cone-shaped beam of the ultrasound, like a magic fish deep in the dark water of a well jacklit by a flashlight. You looked like an image beamed from the surface of the moon, ghostly and etched and strange, not one occurring just a few inches below my own navel. And sometimes I look at you now, beautiful little alien, and you seem just as strange and miraculous. How did you do that, create yourself from nothing?

Love,

Mom

How it's hanging

2008-03-05T20:56:00.001-08:00

I shouldn't write about my boy's junk. Should he, circa 2027, stumble across the fossilized remains of this blog, it might shame him. But what's a mommy blog for if not to shame our children?

He's uncircumcised, a decision we ambled into based mostly on Matt's opposition (he even sings a little anti-circumcision ditty that runs "My foreskin, my foreskin, my just-a-little-bit more skin..."). I was neither virulently pro- nor anti-snipping, but after spotting a circumcision board (a baby-shaped plastic dish festooned with straps to restrain a baby's arms and legs; it looks a bit like an iron maiden) in my ob-gyn's office, I got the queasies and acquiesced. I was convinced we made the right decision when, amid the overworked madness of the newborn weeks, I read a baby manual's description of all the tending one must do of the newly circumcised penis. Meanwhile under "Uncircumcised Penis" was only the heartening line "No special care required."

But because my experience with the male organ unsnipp'd is limited to one misadventure with a supercilious German circa 1995, Flanny's junk sometimes confuses me. In the midst of a diaper change I occasionally call over Matt to ask, "Does this look normal to you? Is there supposed to be, like, a seam running up the underside? Does the foreskin look kinda red? What is this thing, anyway?" Sometimes he's able to reassure me; sometimes, as a guy born in the 1960s and quickly barbered thereafter, as men of our generation were, he's not. So off I go to the pediatrician once again. "Does this look normal to you?" She roots about with two forefingers as if befriending an especially tiny earthworm. "Yep, that's how they look." Then I go home and get confused once again.

Flann already seems rather schlong-conscious, or perhaps that's just how men are, even baby men. He's learned that he can terrify me by grabbing his penis during diaper changes and yanking on it like it's a daisy he's trying to uproot. Put him in the tub and he instantly pees like a faunlet in a Bellagio fountain. He was born with an erection (sez Matt; I was too zonked on morphine and fentanyl and and and to notice). During his first detailed ultrasound, circa 18 weeks, there was no doubt about his identity; he was all spraddled-legged and proud, and the queeny ultrasound tech said something like "Oh, my" as he illuminated a little arrow labeled "Boy" next to the wee sproutlet and Matt said fondly, "That's my guy." Sigh. In twenty years Flanny will probably be one of those guys compelled to pee his name into every snowbank.

Bubble boy

2008-03-05T16:35:00.000-08:00

This boy chuckles. Laughter begins in his belly, rolls past his double chins, and emerges far back in his mouth. He sounds like Falstaff in his cups.

Asshead.

2008-03-04T13:38:00.000-08:00

Flanny performed like a champ this morning at YMCA daycare, meaning he didn't cry at all while I tried to work off my extra twenty pounds (oy) on the elliptical trainer. When I stopped by to pick him up, one daycare chick asked how old he was.

"Three months." "Really?" she exclaimed, as if I'd said he was twenty-five and working on his doctorate. "He seems so, I don't know, little and fish-like." Fish-like? Whafuck?

"He's developmentally normal," I replied, at which point she backtracked frantically: "That's not what I meant. I mean, he seems like such a baby." Huh? He's three months old. He is a baby. Did she expect him to be shooting hoops?

I snapped at her because her assheaded comment - I mean, the chick must not have spent any time around small babies - played directly into all my dark anxieties about baby development. He's totally fine, he's just like all the other babies in his cohort, but a part of my twisted psyche is convinced that because he's my child, some grave defect must be biding its time before emerging. Poor little boo. He'll win the Nobel and I'll be the hunched crone in the audience in Stockholm still waiting for his developmental insufficiencies to make themselves known.

But seriously: who makes such comments to a mother? Why would a daycare worker think I'd want to know whether she thinks my child is small or underdeveloped for his age? Occasionally other strangers have made stupid comments to me - "I would've guessed he was younger. He's very small" (which he's not; he's now jumped so many weight percentiles that he's bigger than average) - which, of course, reveal nothing more than their unfamiliarity with infants. Before I had a kid, I too wouldn't have been able to tell a three-month-old from an eight-month-old. But the assheadness of offering these comments stuns me. It reminds me of coworkers who exclaimed, "You're so huge!" or "You walk like you're carrying a great weight" while I was pregnant. They were outnumbered by those who told me I looked wonderful, but of course it is always the dis that sticks in one's mind.

---

He has a rash. Raised little hives on his knees, calves, and right shoulder. The pediatrician diagnosed some nonspecific allergic reaction: perhaps to soap (I changed from nicely scented baby wash to boring old unscented Dove), laundry detergent (I changed from Planet to a baby-friendly brand called, weirdly, Dreft, which sounds like the name of an idiot man-child in a backwoods murder movie), or something in my diet. Milk? Chocolate? To test the latter hypothesis I'm eating lots and lots of chocolate-chip cookies with a big glass of milk...any justification in a storm.

My fan base

2008-03-02T15:32:00.000-08:00

He's become the amazing nonsleeping baby again. At the moment he's in his swing, which we've parked right next to the crib, perhaps only to comfort ourselves ("Though he won't go in the crib, he is at least near the crib"). But he wails intermittently, every twenty minutes or so. When I go in to check on him, he's wide awake, blue eyes blinking in the dark. He drops his pacifier and flashes me a huge grin.

He also is undergoing an I Love Mommy, Only Mommy, and Hate Everybody Else stage. He weeps plaintively when I try to leave him with the nice women at the YMCA child-watch. He cried when Matt came into the bathroom to watch the nightly ablution. He cried when the kind facilitator of my moms' group had the temerity to smile at him. He cries when I don't nap right next to him and for the full duration, no exceptions, of his own nap. This is annoying but also profoundly flattering. No one's liked me this much since Christa McCarthy, back in kindergarten, threw fits when she couldn't sit next to me at circle time.

---

Turnaround time: He now faces front in his Bjorn. For the past two weeks he's been bitching and moaning in the old, face-to-chest position; I could get barely half a block before he was thrashing and weeping. It was like walking with a seal pup - a loud seal pup - on my chest. I thought he was too young for the big turn-about, but then I noticed parents with even smaller babies facing outward.

At first the damned flap on my new, fancy-ass lumbar-strap ergonomic Bjorn would not stay folded down, the way the manual and website blithely assure you it does. I folded it, put him in it, and it popped up and whacked him in the nose. I sewed on a snap; it tore loose, and the flap whacked him in the snoot again. Then I stopped Bjorn-wearers on the street to ask them how they kept the flap down. To a one, they said they were wearing the older, non-ergonomic style of Bjorn, which doesn't have suspender straps, and some of them had in fact abandoned their new Bjorns for their older ones because of the front-flap problem. So I gave up and simply sewed the damned flap into position.

It's working well, though. He bobbles along on my chest now and makes nary a peep, so busy is he gawping at the world. Disadvantages: I have to rely on strangers to tell me when he's spit up (which he does, copiously and happily) and thus I appear, once again, to be the most hapless and ignorant parent in Berkeley.

---

While at the lactation consultant's office last week, I noticed her wall calendar by Nikki McClure. I'd seen her stuff before; the hipper of our editorial assistants has eight of her wall posters ranged around her cubicle. But in my new, hormonally sensitized state, I fell in love with her work, which is incredibly evocative: single words accompanied by strong papercut images that conjure up whole narratives. (I would post a sample, but that would be, well, wrong.) So I just spent seventy-five dollars buying all of her children's books, plus a crow-adorned onesie for Flann and a T-shirt for me. I like to imagine Flanny, one day in the not too distant future, spinning mental narratives from her images as he flips through the books. Or, more likely, ripping the pages out and eating them, slowly and contemplatively, perhaps appreciating her strength of line before he swallows.

Funky chicken

2008-02-29T14:23:00.000-08:00

Tedious recounting of details of no interest to anyone but the lactating:

I've stashed a small bank vault's worth of milk in the freezer. The yellow-white ranks of frosty Medela baggies gave me a my-ass-is-covered sense of peace whenever I opened the door - until yesterday. I started to feed Flanny the oldest milk (from January; it's supposed to keep a few months), and he spat out the nipple and basically informed me that the wine was corked, and how dare the kitchen foist such a bottle upon a man of his stature and reputation? He was right: the milk was funky. It smelled like cod-liver oil and tasted like old pennies. His daily Bottle School lesson, imposed in order to prepare him for daycare in May, collapsed in tears.

This could be a lipase problem. If so, I must throw away my frozen stash, and weep hot tears of regret. Then I must scald fresh-pumped milk before freezing it; the process reduces the nasty taste but also fries some auto-immune properties. Much experimentation is now in order: will he take older refrigerated milk? newer frozen breastmilk? milk frozen in the back of the freezer rather than the freezer door? It's gonna be Frankenstein's laboratory around here for a while.

Today he took milk pumped and frozen just two days ago. That's encouraging: perhaps I can simply keep the frozen stuff in quick rotation. I can't scald after pumping when I return to work, after all; the set-up there is ridiculous. I'd have to scurry mouselike from my tiny office to the supply closet, where the ratty old microwave lives, heat the milk while interns and mail clerks wander around clodlike asking what I'm doing, and stash it in the public fridge - and then repeat the process three more times per day. Or I could simply accumulate fresh, nonfrozen bottles in the fridge. It keeps for a week. I also noticed that the funky stuff I had fed him was from a bag that I had thawed and then re-frozen, in flagrant violation of the Medela Bylaws.

---

Trying to decipher Flann's chronic nursing freak-outs, I trotted to a high-priced lactation/baby consultant today (Janaki Costello; so worth the money). She diagnosed overproduction plus fast let-down, which results in Flann gulping, overeating, spitting up, and developing a bit of reflux. He's also become rather spoiled. Since he is used to milk pouring down his throat without much effort on his part, he gets pissed off on those days when the let-down is a bit slower. Cure: nurse more often, so he deals with less milk at each feeding; nurse lying down or with his body fully extended in another posture; and stop the automatic hand-expression that I was taught to do in the hospital but really shouldn't do now, since I'm drowning the kid anyway. Also stop self-medicating with fenugreek capsules and nursing tea, which I started taking in January under the delusion that I wasn't producing enough.

To test her hypothesis I waited two hours between feedings today, then gave Flann a bottle and pumped. Six ounces resulted. I can see why the kid feels like he's trying to drink from a hose. Who woulda thought that my eeny-weeny 32A boobs, the target of much adolescent merriment in junior high, could've become such dairy farms? Perhaps I should abandon book editing in favor of wet-nursing. Could the pay be worse?

---

Milestone updates: he rolls from stomach to back with ease now. This short-circuits his tummy time, which he hates anyway. I place him on his stomach; he squawks indignantly and rolls like a fat pillbug onto his back. His first laugh arrived yesterday under mystifying circumstances: he'd been yawping and weeping in his car seat for twenty minutes, and when I took him out of it he burst into chuckles and grinned his ass off. Afterward I made monkey faces and burped and jostled him, but there's been no repeat performance. And he's become increasingly boylike. This is hard to explain, but he's all wrassly and physical now, squirming and arching and punching and kicking. And he whoops and hollers like a frat boy. It may be time to hide the beer.

Eight hours!

2008-02-27T08:17:00.001-08:00

He slept from 6:30 PM to 2:30 AM last night. And he did it in his crib. I take back any trash I've talked about this boy; he's clearly a genius.

Thirteen weeks, thirteen pounds

2008-02-26T12:26:00.000-08:00

Flann passed his three-month check-up with flying colors, although he's having Crankfest 2008 today and cried before and after the appointment. (He also yarked three times on the table, so perhaps it was just a bad gastric morning.) He's made great bounds in height and head size. Such a clever baby. He got a polio stick in the thigh and barely made a squawk, so he's clearly making great bounds in stoicism, too.

The doctor and I talked about sleep for a long time. The sleep arrangement as it now stands is untenable, but I don't see a clear path to fixing it. He sleeps from ca. 7 to perhaps 9:30 or 10:30 or, miracle of miracles, 12 last night, which permits me to shower and eat dinner and actually talk to my husband. But Flann won't necessarily do this stint in his crib. (Last night's marathon he spent only in his swing, which made me feel horrible and slatternly, like Britney Spears feeding Doritos and Hi-C to her children.) Then he wakes up to eat.

Afterward, out of exhaustion, I take him into bed with me, and Matt sleeps on the couch so that he can actually get some rest before getting up at 5:30 to drive to Palo Alto. Flann is swaddled but thrashes a great deal anyway, which keeps me awake for the rest of the night. And he wakes up to eat about every two to three hours, or simply awakens at 3 deciding the day has begun and that I'd damned well better wake up, too. His crib is in our room, at the foot of the bed. To place it in another room, we'd have to completely reorganize the apartment. (Or move, which we can't afford to do.) Even on nights when he sleeps relatively well, I can't sleep. Some freaky mama insomnia has colonized my brain; I can't drift off to sleep knowing that I'll be woken up soon.

So it was quite clear to the pediatrician that I'm exhausted and basically subsisting on adrenaline and shorted-out nerve endings, and she recommended we begin some sort of sleep training. She put it off with her own daughter and told me it just gets harder and harder once the baby can stand up and scream for you and even climb out of the crib. But what, exactly, should I do? There are a million contradictory theories and ideas out there, and the people for whom they worked swear by them and the people for whom they didn't cast great aspersions and calumny...so I don't know which to choose. Most also base their advice on the blithe assumption that the kid is in his own room. There seems to be no book called The You're Poor as Hell and Don't Have a Room for Your Child Sleep Guide. "Visualize your goal," she told me. "Imagine simply saying good night to a six-year-old and turning off the light." This is sensible but feels like visualizing a holiday in Tahiti without an airplane or a boat at hand: it's lovely, but how do you get there?

Struggles

2008-02-21T19:01:00.001-08:00

He has now graduated from size 1 diapers. The size 2s don't quite fit yet, though, so I tape them tightly around his waist until he looks like a corseted 1890s belle.

---

The boy had a good day despite the renewed rainstorms and our confinement to the house. I bought him baby art cards, and he fell hard for the zebra. The kid is definitely visually alert - this weekend I bought him Zutano monster-print pants and later noticed he was staring intently at his knee, at a squid-snake monster who says, "Yikes" and "Watch out!" in squirrelly little speech-balloons, and trying his damnedest to corrall it with one flailing paw. I show him cut-outs from a Matisse book, and he responds eagerly to those. Matt tried him on Andreas Gursky photography this weekend, and he went for that too. He even responds to Berndt and Hilla Becher's fantastic industrial photographs. But Anselm Kiefer: not so much.

---

Yesterday and last night were hard, hard, hard. For several weeks he's occasionally screamed at the breast; about one out of every three nursing sessions, he completely loses his mind when the let-down slows, and although he's hungry he will neither move to the other breast nor take a bottle. Various lactation consultations and sobby phone calls to the pediatrician have not resolved the issue; everyone is confused that a three-month-old is having nursing troubles. How immature of him. Nursing troubles are for newborns.

So he cried intermittently starting circa 2 PM, forcing early decampment from my rather chaotic but fun weekly mothers' group hang-out (I didn't find them, they found me; I wandered into Tumble and Tea, a parents' coffeehouse in Temescal, looking for a baby-wearing class that was supposedly to be held and wasn't, and they invited me to their table - I felt like the dorky kid saved from lunchroom isolation). The sobbing proceeded until 8 PM, and he finally succumbed in the swing after Matt came home to save my ass. Then he cried again at 3:30 AM, and Matt (out in the living room, conked out in front of the TV) heard me crying before he heard the baby.

I am so exhausted sometimes, so crazy-animal trapped. Last night I wanted nothing more than a flock of sympathetic scolding soothing grandmothers to swoop in and take away the baby for a day, then tuck me into bed with soup and tea. I have never before longed for a huge extended family. My family is estranged and far-flung: DC, England, Moscow; one grandmother is dead; the other is ninety-five years old; Matt's parents are, well, out of the question; my mother has been dead thirty-one years as of last weekend; my father, while enthusiastic about Flann, is three thousand miles away; and Matt works fifty-hour weeks and some nights in Palo Alto and commutes four hours a day. So there's no local rescue squad, and I haven't been away from the baby for more than four hours since his birthday.

But each day Flann is entirely new. He's forgotten all about the bullshit of Wednesday, and he spent today blowing bubbles at me and declaiming "Blooooo" in authoritative tones. He bitched only when I took him to Andronico's in the Bjorn and spent too long picking out chicken breasts and attempted to silence him with his ducky pacifier. Apart from that he was a model citizen. He's in his crib now sleeping the sleep of the just.

So I have to try, too, to forget bad days once they're done, to step hard on the neck of my natural pessimism and sadness so that he won't inherit them. He has my chin and my eyes - and that's all I want him to have of mine. He can grow his own sadness someday, if he wants to, but no black cradle gifts from Mommy for this kid, that's all I ask of myself.

Fatface.

2008-02-19T19:55:00.001-08:00

He's round about thirteen pounds now. Good to know that, should it become necessary, he can take the cat in a fight.