I am on hold with Sprint. For the first 3 months we had our cellphones, our bill was wrong (to the tune of hundreds of dollars) every month. Now our bill is finally right, though it took me ten minutes to figure that out. Cellphone bills make no sense at all. But, it turns out they never signed me up for my Northwest WorldPerks tie-in, and I want my 5000 bonus miles! The only way I'm going to get to Montana with my baby this fall is if I have enough miles to upgrade to first class, and I will have enough miles if they'll only credit my Sprint tie-in miles. Past experience says I may be on hold for up to 90 minutes. At least it's not like my credit union, which prompts you every 90 seconds to "press 1 to continue holding, or press 2 to leave a message." That's annoying.
Last night Eric ate around 8 p.m. I went to bed with him at 9:30. He was still awake, but I have figured out that if he's in an arm-and-leg-waving mood, he's just as happy to do it lying beside me in bed as anywhere else, and I can doze. He went to sleep around 11, I think, and woke up to eat at 2 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. For the third day in a row, I feel practically normal. Last night, David and Scott did the grocery shopping while I had the pleasure of an evening during which I had nothing in particular to do but felt pretty good. I think I wasted the evening holding the baby and thinking, but that's the kind of thing you can do when you have nothing to do.
David and Scott keep telling me what a wonderful job I am doing with Eric and in general. I finally asked David what was so wonderful about it. He said that I am patient and loving with Eric. It's no wonder; I am listening to a daily guided visualization which tells me about 600 times that I am patient and loving, but he also said, "You're very diligent in the performance of your duties." That made me laugh. He meant that I keep up with Eric's laundry and the dishes, so that, for instance, we're never out of clean bottles when the baby is crying to be fed, but still. "Diligent in the performance of her duties" sounds like it comes right out of a letter of reference for a 19th-Century housemaid.
Did I ever tell you that when the lactation consultant was here for a home visit, she asked about what kind of support I had, and I said, among other things, that we had a housemate. She thought I said "housemaid" and for a minute there she was really impressed. Don't you just wish? Adrianne and I were recently talking about wanting to have assistants, minions whose duty it is to do pretty much anything we tell them to. I think it would be great to have someone I could make, for instance, be on hold for 90 minutes (I finally got through, by the way, and am now supposedly signed up for my miles. But that's what they said three months ago), or run errands like taking a broken screen in to be repaired, and so on. Or deal with repair people.
Eric's collection of book club books came the other day, and I have been reading them to him. The other day I read him Green Eggs and Ham, which was a favorite of mine when I was a child. But I am appalled by it now! Here is this poor guy being harassed by Sam-I-Am, and no matter how many times he says, "Please leave me be!" Sam-I-Am continues to harass him, practically to the end of the earth. Finally, after being hounded--stalked, really--for a long time, and near drowning after a train wreck, he agrees to taste the eggs and ham. It's hideous! Should we not be teaching our child a value of respect for other people? When a person says, "I don't want you here," should you not leave? I was telling Scott and David, I may have to change the ending of this book. Scott says Eric will get in a fight on the playground someday about how Green Eggs and Ham ends, come home and examine our copy closely only to discover that I have removed a number of pages with a razor and used white-out to "correct" the dialogue.
I'm not too thrilled with Cat in the Hat either. What are those two little kids doing home alone all day in an unlocked house? And the poor fish, who keeps saying, "your mother wouldn't like this, the cat has to leave," but gets only abuse for its pains! Again, in the Cat we have a character who does not respect the boundaries and wishes of others.
Eric and I have an appointment tomorrow to have our car seat checked by a car seat technician at AAA. I am sure we will be reviled for having the car seat behind the driver's seat instead of in the center, but David and I could not get the base snugged down adequately in the center of our back seat.
I managed to give Eric a bath all by myself the other day. It went fine. He needs another one today; he is downright sticky. I also clipped his fingernails but not really. Apparently I was so tentative about it that all I did was go "snip snip" with the clippers in the air very near his fingertips. David had to do it over later. Maybe if I keep trying I will eventually manage to actually trim a nail or two.
Did I tell you I read a book on how to keep house? Quite the hefty tome. It included everything from the chemistry of how cleansers work (that was interesting) to the right way to fold your laundry, from 3-piece-suits to dishtowels, complete with illustrations. I had to laugh because the author was careful, in her introduction, to say that she was realistic about modern life and housekeeping, but then she went on, for instance, to include wiping out your refrigerator (including all the bins) on the list of "essential" weekly housekeeping chores. Vacuuming the rugs was not on the weekly list, though. It's daily. And your kitchen floor needs to be swept several times daily.
My favorite, though, was the tablecloths. Though it is possible to avoid ironing in general, she says, you're just going to have to knuckle down and do it for the tablecloths, of which you will have at least 10. You'll need a fresh one every night at dinner, and you can't be sure it will stay clean enough to see you through breakfast and lunch the next day, too. Not only am I supposed to serve my family dinner on a tablecloth every night, but I am supposed to clear the table and scrape off the crumbs before I serve dessert. (Scott said, "I hadn't wanted to be the one to bring it up...") Also, there are to be no "commercial containers" on the table. This means, for instance, that any condiments we might want to use should be put into bowls. The author kept asserting that, because we all have washers and dryers and dishwashers, it is no problem to dirty additional dishes or linens. But I think there is a difference between doing one load of dishes and doing two loads of dishes. Call me crazy.
I learned some useful things about how to clean various items, which is the main reason I read the book. Also got some helpful tips about managing to cook dinners when pressed for time. But much of the book was just plain funny.
Her claim that it's no trouble to do more laundry and dishes reminded me that in the attachment parenting book I read, the author claimed that laundering diapers at home was more convenient than buying disposables. I thought, sure, if you live in, say, remotest South Dakota, it's 148 miles to the nearest Wal-Mart,and your only mode of transportation is a rusty unicycle. And you have a laundry maid. But otherwise?
One thing I love about libraries is that they give me the freedom to read dumb books, or books on strange subjects. Books I wouldn't want to buy.
Speaking of which, the library just left a message that a book I requested is in. It's either Adrienne Rich's new book of essays, or yet another parenting book.
Adrianne said that Carla's formula for vacuuming is that it should be done once a week for each occupant of the house. I wonder if that includes pets; if so, we should be vacuuming...16 times per week. That is probably about what it would take to maintain clean-looking rugs. I'm not sure I think the formula holds up for people, though. We don't shed as much as the animals do, and almost never drop our feathers on the floor.
Eric ate a bottle and went to sleep a little while ago. I love how he smiles as he falls asleep; I call it a preview of coming attractions. Many of the books I've read still attribute early non-social smiles to gas, but I'm skeptical. Gas is much more likely to make Eric emit little high-pitched shrieks of pain. Scott's developmental psychology text book calls them "REM smiles" and says they're associated with little bursts of activity in a happy part of the brain. That seems truer to me, since for Eric smiles are a feature of going to sleep and of dreaming.
I am looking forward to that first social smile. Some time in the next five weeks, almost certainly. I get so happy when he smiles because he has a burst of brainwaves that I will probably swoon from joy when he actually smiles at me. When I was in Montana last winter, I got to see how Noah would just scream with delight when he saw Carla coming through the door at the end of the day. Carla said, "Someday your baby will do the same," and I look forward to it. At the end of Meeting for Worship, the kids come in from First Day School, and the little ones all make a beeline for their parents and hop into their laps, and for years, as I've been thinking about having a baby, I have watched and thought how great it would be to be one of those parents. Someday I will be.
I am getting so used to having people outside my windows that I have been at my computer half the day today while the contractor works his way around the outside of the window-encircled room replacing rotten trim. But he is about to get directly opposite me, and that's a little too intimate. Besides, Eric and I need to bathe and get ready to go to my doctor appointment--time for my 6-week post-partum checkup, a little late because when I showed up for it ten days ago, my appointment had been cancelled but nobody had told me. Oops.
Off I go.
Posted by Su Penn at July 16, 2003 10:31 AM | TrackBack