Posts made in 2010

Shh! Baby’s Sleeping.

I am sitting in our family room in the dark, listening to my baby cry in her nursery, just as I have for the last hour. At ten months we are finally, supposedly, teaching her to fall asleep on her own, and apparently it involves tears. Her torment is incessant, a tide of misery building into giant, shuddering sobbing fits and then subsiding, only to rise again. It is impossible to listen to, and unthinkable not to.

At regular intervals I slump into her darkened room to check on her. Each time she is standing at the foot of her crib, bawling, loudly waiting for my return. I am sweet but firm, a difficult combination with all this guilt clawing at me, urging me to end her sadness, to try this process again another night. Instead I murmur to her, brush her hair from her wet face, lay her down, and rub her shuddering back until she quiets. And then, as advised, I back out of the room to let her figure out how to sleep without me. Her howls follow me down the hall.

I feel cruel and selfish and desperately tired. I swore I would never leave Sunshine to cry it out, but those were pre-parent vows, the promises of someone on the other side of all of these sleepless nights. I am doing the right thing. I am. I know I am.

On my web browser, ten tabs open to articles about sleep. The words are different, but they almost all say the same thing: let her cry. Let her cry, and she will fall asleep. It’s not mean. She has to learn. It’s only a few nights. It’s time. I read through them again for affirmation. Still, I nearly rise and go to her a dozen times before the clock says I may.

Finally, her cries slow to an intermittent whine, a tired drizzle. And then…nothing. I blink into the silence, torn between relief and worry. I can go back to bed! Yay! But is she okay? Did she just fall asleep? Did it actually work? I can’t check now, risk repeating all this drama tonight. Tomorrow will be soon enough. And, yes, we will have another round of this tomorrow night. And the following. And, all those websites assure me, a few nights after that. But we can do this. For now, baby’s sleeping. And soon, I hope, so will I.

Table for One

“Just…one?” The hostess eyes me, a long sweeping look, as if trying to figure out what’s wrong with me that I have to eat out alone.

I used to answer, “Yep!” with a smile, all peppy and bright and for God’s sake don’t look at me like that, I have lots of friends, I’m fine, I’m great. Or I’d hold up my notebook or stack of papers, maybe even a pen, and explain self-consciously, “I have stuff to get done. Had to get out of the house. You know how it is.” All the while, I would cringe at my urge to lower my eyes, to explain, to make jolly and nice.

Over the last year, though, I have decided that it is Not Their Business if I decide to take myself out to lunch. Not the hostess who tacks on “just” and a judgmental pause before the “one”. Not the waiter who snootily asks me if I’ll need another water glass and menu, or if it’s just (there’s that word again, as if I’m not enough) me. Not the couple in the corner, who eyed me and whispered when I took my booth alone.

It may be immunity born of necessity – the more there is to do at home, the stronger my need to go elsewhere in order to be loose and creative and writerly. Or perhaps this confidence comes from motherhood. When you’ve had too little sleep, and you’ve changed and laundered hundreds of diapers, and you’ve contorted your face into this many silly poses just to make an infant laugh, well, eating alone isn’t such a big deal. Or it could be the realization that it’s just food. It’s eating. You do it three times a day, and often alone in your kitchen or dining room or in front of your TV or at your desk at work. A restaurant is just another place to do it. No different from going to the library or the bank alone, only, you know, with food.

Mostly, though, there’s the comfort of my writing. It is so nice to work on it again, and if it means I have to put up with an occasional smirk or up-and-down glance in order to enjoy a little quality time with a notebook and a bowl of pasta, well, so be it. I’m not alone, anyway. I have my imagination and the characters I’ve created. Together we make a whole crowd.

Staying Ahead of Sunshine

I can easily spend an hour each day sprawled out on the floor, nose to carpet, examining the pile for lint, leaf bits, and the random fluff that floats around any cat-cluttered house no matter how many times you vacuum. Just step over me. I’ll be there for a while, putting all those specks in my pocket, trying to get to them before Sunshine (formerly The Schnooks) does. At nine months old she’s a crack-up, a mooch, and the household’s chief fleck inspector. She’s also mobile and voracious; I feel like I’m on suicide watch, anticipating the next item she’ll grip in her tiny fist and shove into her mouth.

It doesn’t help that our vacuum bit the dust, so to speak, and now spits out more specks than it sucks up. And I guess I don’t think like a baby, since I’m almost never right about what Sunshine will eat, especially when we’re outside or visiting someone. Or maybe my vision is just off, and I simply can’t see what she sees.

Even at home it’s impossible to always stay ahead, though it’s easier when she inadvertently warns me. She goes still and stares at something, then wiggles her ample booty, wrinkles her nose, and lets out her happy Beavis “heh heh heh”. A moment later she’s off, scooting across the room in adapted military fashion, forearm, hand, toe, toe. At times like those, I swoop in, examining her path for any chokeables or other hazards.

When she quiets, though, her mouth pursed closed, her little jaw working, I know I’ve missed something and am about to fight a baby who’s determined to chew, chew, swallow anything small enough to fit between her teeth. All four of them. Sometimes she wins, downing it before I get to her. If not, I squeeze her cheeks, fish-lipping her, and examine the piece. Let her swallow it? Scoop it out? Depends on if it’s worth the struggle.

Staying ahead of Sunshine is never easy. Still, the scooting’s cute. It may even be worth the constant vigilance.

Not Entirely Metaphor-Free

Extended metaphors make me itch. This means I could never write straight nonfiction, because the extended metaphor is the nonfictionist’s crack. Just look at early parenting books, and you’ll break out in red hot hives, too. Not since those two-in-the-morning if-you-were-a-shrub-what-type-would-you-be college discussions have I heard human beings so frequently compared to plant life. Babies, apparently, can be roses, sunflowers, even soybeans, based on a few cringingly flimsy criteria. And these metaphors do not last just a paragraph, but flourish and build for four hundred pages, twining from chapter to chapter, mixing freely with wholly unrelated metaphors, breeding at will. I could go on, but I see myself slipping from simple metaphor to extended, and I cannot let that happen, if only because of those hives.

That said, let me make just one (moderately) quick and almost metaphor-free comparison to something I haven’t even brought up yet. During my high school years I had a room of my own. ‘Had’ is an inadequate verb, really. I lived in my room, loved it, haunted it, possessed it. I made it mine. I misspent many math classes rearranging furniture in my mind, re-appropriating graph paper so I could sketch out a visual representation, then hurrying home after school to shove around my bed and night stand and bookshelves according to my not-to-scale scribbles. Then re-taping all my posters. Then rearranging my knickknacks.

Then doing it all again three weeks later.

Until my room had been subjected to intense interior redecoration, I could not do a single homework assignment. It was urgent and glaring, and never more necessary than when I had a big project due. I believe I told myself it helped me think.

I’ve outgrown a lot of my younger tendencies. I feel no need to draw comparisons between humans and horticulture, for example, and I never use graph paper. Graduation took care of most of the rest, including all the homework I once pushed heavy furniture around to avoid. But one thing prevailed: the urge to redecorate. Hence my new website. And this blog entry. Nothing like a good template switch-up to inspire a new post.

Well. You didn’t really think I could do a massive site redesign and not write about it, did you?

Introducing The Schnooks

It’s nearly our baby’s 12th weekaversary, and I’m back on the blog. I’d have been here earlier, but I’m too lazy to type one-handed, and since I have our little one in my other hand most of the time (when I’m not at work, that is) that’s my only option these days. And so in lieu of my own hobbies, I’ve been catering to The Schnooks’s. She’s developed an extensive collection in her three months outside the womb, including:

1) Filthifying fresh diapers

2) Conversing with her mobile

3) Using the promise of smiles to coerce adults into making silly faces and ridiculous sound effects

4) Ignoring the cats

5) Getting kicky to music

6) Ogling books ((yay!))

7) Eating ((sumo wrestlers would envy her physique))

Mainly, though, we are her hobby. Whatever we do, she must do it with us, and she must have our undivided attention the entire time. And so we read her piles of silly books full of rhymes and colorful pictures. And we sing rock songs, unplugged and with questionable skill (but plenty of enthusiasm). And, of course, there’s the usual daily maintenance.

But those details can wait. First, a FAQ. After all, I had one when announcing her impending birth, so why not a reprise?

1) You couldn’t possibly have named her The Schnooks, right? Right.

2) You do know that schnooks is unflattering – ‘pitiable and gullible little simpleton’, I believe it means? *Sigh* Yes. Now we know. But we didn’t have a clue when hubby made up the nickname ((or so we thought… )) two days after her birth. We just thought it was a miniature version of schnookums. Which actually isn’t a word, according to my spell check.

3) Stats, please! Here goes: 7 pounds, 8.5 ounces at birth. 20 inches long. 15 hours of labor. Loads of brown hair that defies gravity without the help of gel. And most definitely a girl. At three months she’s in the 50th percentile for weight, 75th for length, 90th for head size, and a whopping 99th for hair circumference. If they measured hair circumference.

4) How’s she sleeping? Maybe I should have put this one first since that seems to be everyone’s number one question these days. The truth is, I’m scared to say, since I don’t want to jinx things. The last time I posted a bragatory status update on Facebook she didn’t sleep for two nights. So I’ll just say…plenty. She’s sleeping plenty. Thank you so much to the gods in charge of sleep cycles, firm mattresses, and alarm clocks, amen.

5) If she’s keeping you so busy, how are you able to blog right now? It’s my new strategy: I wrote most of this long-hand with my writing group, and am pushing my WPM skills to the limit entering this while she takes her (very short ((usually half an hour if we’re lucky. In fact – no kidding – she slept for 33 minutes and is now stretching and eating her hands and staring at me expectantly. Which means that I’m back on baby duty. Why, yes, it is before 9:00 on a Saturday morning and we’ve already been awake long enough for her to play, then get tired, then take her first nap. Before The Schnooks I rarely saw the world beyond my eyelids by this time of day.))) morning nap.

Anything else?