November 26, 2001
Another tidbit from a student paper: "One of the advantages of abstinence as a birth control method is that it is almost 100% effective."
I also liked, "Nobody knew anything about it until it was anomalously leaked to the newspapers."
Eric will be six months old tomorrow, which means, since he was born just after midnight, it was six months ago today that I was in labor. I'm glad I wrote a big thing about it right after he was born; I've forgotten a lot. For instance, I often forget that I was on oxygen during most of my labor, except that one of my images from the day is of David gently helping me put the mask back on after I had ripped it off during a contraction. And I tend to think of my labor as encompassing the time from when I was moved to the LDR room (Labor, Delivery, Recovery) until Eric was born--I don't think much, thankfully, about my time in triage or in Special Obstetrics.
My memory of labor and delivery now is mostly a set of images. I wish I were a visual artist. I could paint them, or make a movie: the resident, Dr. Birthingstool, touching my arm as he talked to me about putting in the internal monitor; Scott placing a new cold cloth on my forehead; David standing by the bed; my IV in my left hand and the wires from the internal monitor in my right hand as I waddled to the bathroom; my first view of Eric, face down in Dr. Maney's hands, blue from head to foot; the pool of bright red blood that gushed out of me the first time I stood up after giving birth; Eric on my chest with the oxygen mask lying near his face; David standing by as the nurse from the nursery checked Eric out and took his measurements.
There's a lot I don't remember, though. What was the nurse doing all the time? Were David and Scott standing up all the time, or did they have stools or something? Did David and Scott ever get bored? Did we ever see the doctor between when we first got to the hospital and when she showed up just barely in time to deliver the baby?
I remember the next night, alone with Eric in our hospital room, watching him sleep and wanting to pick him up but not being sure I should. And then, all of a sudden, I thought, "This is my baby. My baby. I can pick him up any time I want!"
I still have "I'm the mother!" moments--times when I am wondering about something: should I put a warmer outfit on him for bed? Should I risk waking him from a nap by changing his diaper, or risk having to change his outfit when he wakes up if the diaper leaks?" And then I think, "I'm the mother. It's up to me."
I was putting some new photos in the Doting Mother Photo Album the other day and went back to look at the earliest photos--and something had happened to all of them! In the earliest pictures, some Photoshop Commando went through and replaced our beautiful little boy with some skinny, squinty, swollen, blotchy baby!
Eric rode in the shopping cart at the co-op today. Just a week ago, I put him in the cart (without his car seat) as an experiment, and he slumped to the side, obviously held in a semi-upright position only by the convenient safety strap. But today he sat right up on his own, and he seemed to enjoy sitting up, looking at things, charming people, and grabbing at things.
I'm on hold with Social Security, trying to find out why Eric doesn't have a SS number yet. 26 minutes ago the little automated voice said it would be 10 minutes. I can't get anything but a busy signal at our local office. Your tax dollars at work.
Eric is a great baby to run errands with. He usually either sleeps, or enjoys looking around. My only complaint is that he is no help at all at remembering where we parked. This was especially a problem when the Camry (slogan: "The world's most generic sedan!") was newer and I couldn't distinguish it from all the other Camrys and practically identical sedans from competing automakers. Every time I have to wander a couple of aisles, scanning the rear-ends of cars for our rainbow flag bumper sticker and the little red Elmo doll lying forlornly on the back window shelf (we can never do anything else with Elmo or I will never find the car), I think, "At least I do know what kind of car I have." When I was young, my dad got a company car as part of his compensation. This was back when working for the auto company had so many perks we called it "Generous Motors." Anyway, the engineers all got to drive company cars, but had to drive a different car every week and write little reports on how they performed in the real world (my dad worked at the Proving Ground. Testing the cars was part of his job). Mostly they were GM cars, but every now and then my dad would have something else, a Honda, say, or once a British thingamajig with the steering wheel on the right.
Since we lived a distance from civilization, if my mom and I wanted to go to the mall (the mall being what passed for civilization in our neck of the woods), my dad would tell us to take the company car, which ran, conveniently enough, on company gas and on which could be inflicted company wear-and-tear. So my mom and I would drive to the mall, spend the day shopping, exit the mall laden with packages, and stop dead as we stared at the vast sea of cars, all American since this was Flint we were in, after all, in the early 80s, and realized that we had no idea what we had driven in. "Blue," I would say. "A Buick?" And my mom would say, "Gray, I thought. A Pontiac." And we would start roaming, our packages getting heavier and heavier. Sometimes we would only recognize the car by the manufacturer plates (which, conveniently, said "manufacturer" on them), and we might not be absolutely sure (this was a GM town, after all, with lots of people driving company cars) until we tried the key and it fit. Life got a lot easier when the Proving Ground instituted a hang-tag system; after that, we could find the cars much more readily by way of my dad's picture dangling from the rearview mirror.
Eric has moved himself to his crib almost completely for nighttime sleeping. I feel a little sad about it; he's so sweet to cuddle, and I miss having him beside me. But he prefers to sleep on his own in his own little cage. I hope as he gets older he'll decide sleeping with mom and dad is fun, and come back into bed with us sometimes.
Eric has a social security number! We just never got the card. "Lost in the mail, I guess," said the nice lady at the SS Administration. "Already a victim of identity theft," I thought pessimistically.
Eric just let out a little high-pitched squeak in his sleep. He did the same thing in worship yesterday, alarming a whole circle of people around us. I guess he dreams that somebody pinches him or something.