November 13, 2001
Quick summary of events at our house:
David has bronchitis.
Also laryngitis and pharyngitis and probably some other itises too gruesome to be named in a family publication.
I'm about to be fired from my job for not grading student papers fast enough.
Well, OK, I'm not. But I probably should be.
Eric's first tooth (lower right front) peeked above the gum yesterday. It's easier to feel than to see, but if you can manage to get his mouth open and his tongue out of the way (a pretty big if) you can see the faintest gleam of white.
Another milestone: Eric's first self-inflicted injury while playing. He was on my lap yesterday, playing with (clean) diapers in a laundry basket next to us on the couch, and he conked his head on the side of the laundry basket and cried. This is not the first time his head has been conked; it's just always been my fault before. Like when I boosted him up to my shoulder too vigorously and he vaulted right over me and hit his head on the back of the rocking chair. Also assorted car entry and exit mishaps.
Penelope Leach says that the floor is a good place for a baby to play at this age, "unless you have a house full of dogs or toddlers." But she doesn't go on to say what those of us with dogs or toddlers should do. An irritating omission.
Eric is working very hard on pre-crawling activities (which don't, I understand, necessarily lead to crawling. Some babies never crawl at all). He gets up on all fours and bounces vigorously, and this morning in bed with me and David he managed to propel himself a good two feet backward over 5 or 10 minutes of hands-and-knees activity. Not crawling; just the effect of getting up and down, and up and down, and up and down on his hands and knees. We had been joking that he would never be able to crawl because his tummy is so round that if he lay on his stomach his hands and feet wouldn't touch the ground. But apparently they do.
The funniest thing when he is playing on his stomach is that every now and then his head just gets too heavy for him, and he has to put it down for a second. But he can't lower it gently, so his playtime is punctuated by the periodic "thunks" of his head hitting the deck.
The other weekend I was talking to my mother on the phone, and I relayed to her a recent culinary triumph: I mentioned that I had figured out that if I cut the bacon strips in half, they fit in my pan better and cooked more evenly. My mom said, "Did you ever think, first, that you would care about a thing like that, and, second, that it would seem like a fit topic for conversation?" Well, no. But I can imagine myself chatting with the other housewives in the neighborhood over coffee: "I cut the bacon in half. It fits my pan better." "How clever! But nothing beats an electric griddle. You must get one." "Perhaps David will get me one for Mother's Day." All of us in wrist-length white gloves and pillbox hats, of course.
The truth is, having a baby can turn you passionate about things that are, frankly, a bit embarrassing. David and I, for instance, have strong opinions on burp cloths, and are so pleased with the ones we settled on (large single-layer birdseye weave cloth diapers) that it is not uncommon for us to mention it to each other. "Aren't these great burp cloths?" 'Oh, my, yes." We like them because they're absorbent, cheap (so you can buy two dozen and carry them around in the diaper bag without worrying about losing them), and big enough to both provide good coverage and serve as a baby blanket in an emergency. We also have strong opinions on baby clothes: if it's not a one-piece, don't even bother to show it to me. And it's best if it snaps--not buttons, not zips--open all the way down the front. David has a strong preference for footed outfits and a venomous hatred for putting socks on the baby (socks are either too loose and come off easily, or too tight and leave little marks around Eric's chubby ankles. We rarely manage to find a pair of socks that fits just right).
And I would be very happy if I found an audience willing to listen to a short lecture on my diapering procedures. For instance, did you know it's best if you match the wipe to the diaper if the diaper is poopy? In other words, for a poopy diaper, use cloth wipes with a cloth diaper and disposable wipes with a disposable diaper, because then in either case you can just tuck the wipes into the diaper and toss the whole mess together into a single diaper pail.
If the diaper is merely wet, cloth wipes are always appropriate.
Adrianne is preparing to return to graduate school for a doctorate in neuropsychology. Julie is in seminary, presumably spending most of her time thinking big thoughts about God and church management. I'm thrilled that I figured out to cut the bacon in half on Saturday mornings and that having two diaper pails (one for cloth, one for disposables) has not turned out to be dauntingly complicated. I'm doing the most important work in the world!
David is great. He never comes home from work and says, "Why didn't you do X?" Rather, when I complain that I didn't get anything done all day, he says, "That baby sure looks healthy and well-fed."
Except, you know, he's so good it makes me mad. I've been depressed, which means I haven't been getting things done and I've been cranky. And it drives me crazy when David is Mr. Calm and Loving when I'm being the Screaming B*tch on Wheels. It just makes me feel guilty. Like the way he did all my chores all weekend, despite feeling very sick with what turned out to be bronchitis. Thanks, David. Just rub it in.
But he can't win, because if he lets himself get cranky back at me, I get mad at him for not being sympathetic to my troubles. That's the beauty of it all: he can't make the right choice, because I'm irrational. It's the only thing that gives me any pleasure at all these days.
I was supposed to start grading half an hour ago; I have procrastinated on these papers to the point that, if I don't give them back tomorrow, I really do deserve to be fired. But, heck, it's only 2:30 p.m. It would be pretty typical for me to start grading at, say, 5:30 a.m. tomorrow. I was going to do that yesterday so that I could get the papers back to them in class, but Eric woke up for a bottle just before 6, and after he finished eating I sat there holding the sleeping baby for a long happy time...and didn't get the papers graded.
Speaking of the sleeping baby, he's been napping for a long time. I guess a full morning of butt-ups tired him out.
Sunday, David assured me (when I got out of bed at noon) that Eric had been playing vigorously all morning and was ready for his nap, so that if I took him to worship with me he would surely sleep straight through. Ha! Eric does not sleep if there's anything interesting going on, and he finds worship very interesting indeed. He spent much of the time grinning with idiotic adoration at Mari Douma, who was sitting next to us, and when he wasn't doing that he was yelling "Buh! Buh!" and laughing. I took him out once, and he settled down, and then he started chatting again as soon as I came back in. Mari leaned over and whispered, "They're always quiet in the hall." I would have left him with the childcare provider but I couldn't find her. I'll be able to find her next week, though, because Mari told me after worship where childcare is.
Our Quaker meeting is terrible about giving people nuts-and-bolts information like that. I've been attending since, oh, maybe 1994, and I still don't know where the library books are kept.
When David and I went out for my birthday last month, I had a gin-and-tonic, and I really liked it. I also got very drunk on it, since I hadn't had alcohol in something like 20 months...let me do the math: Eric is five months old, I was pregnant for nine months, and hadn't had a drink for at least five months before I got pregnant. Yeah, 19 or 20 months. Now I'm in a gin-and-tonic phase (by which I mean I've now had three of them in the last four weeks). I almost bought the fixin's for gin-and-tonic when I did my grocery shopping last week, but I'm afraid to have it in the house. Given my history with alcohol, which is that I have mostly drunk only sporadically and only single drinks since a very brief flirtation with beer in the spring of my sophomore year, you may laugh, but since I find gin and tonic very tasty and am also depressed, I could see myself getting slowly plastered in the afternoons. Too risky right now.
It's bad enough I lacked the willpower not to have a second glass of Coke at lunch today--it tasted so good! Now I'm in some kind of caffeine haze, complete with eyes so wide open they hurt. I predict a restless night tonight.
Well, it will be just as well if I can't sleep, as I'm going to have to get up so early to do my grading anyway.
Eric has now been sleeping for a couple of hours. He would do that on a day when David is home from work, giving the impression that all our days are easy and that I could get lots done if only I weren't watching the soaps and eating bon-bons.
OK, I am going to go do a few things now: finish folding my laundry. Load the dishwasher. Take a bath, if David will agree to watch Eric (earlier, when Eric needed a poopy diaper changed, David said, "Take this baby. It's a work day; I'm not even here."). File at least part of the big pile of stuff that's slowly toppling over to spread across the office floor. And, yes, grade some papers, because at this point, what choice do I have?
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