Some things in your life, you do them and think sadly, "Well, that's two hours I'll never have back." Last night, hearing I was sick, Carrie and her boyfriend Willie brought me a 12-pack of Sprite and a sackful of videos. The videos were a good selection; so good that I had seen most of them about as many times as I wanted to. But then, in the bottom of the bag, I saw...Godzilla. The recent Matthew Broderick version. Now, I had heard that this movie sucked, but sometimes a movie that sucks when you pay for a ticket is perfectly enjoyable when you watch it at home on video.
This was not one of those times.
The best part of the movie was when I had to leave the room to do something, and when I came back I discovered that I had forgotten to pause it. So I hit rewind and watched in fast reverse as Godzilla un-destroyed New York. If you ever see the movie, I recommend that method. By 2/3 of the way through, I was watching on fast forward, doing my own commentary..."OK, they think that hallway is safe...but here they come running back out pursued by 27 hungry baby Godzillas... Matthew Broderick makes a dry joke about their hopeless situation...Now they're out of the building.... And the army bombs it to kingdom come...Matthew Broderick and the only girl he ever loved but from whom he was tragically separated eight years ago kiss...they're happy...they've saved the city, what's left of it, the smoking rubble...but no!...it's Godzilla's mate rising from the ruins of Madison Square Garden! And he looks hungry! It's not over yet!" But for me, it was. I switched over to the Olympic Ice Dancing competition, the only "sport" in which hair and makeup matter as much as physical prowess. That made me feel much better about my use of that precious resource, time.
At one point in the movie, a helicopter pilot attempting to escape from a rampaging Godzilla continued to fly at exactly Godzilla's nose level until Godzilla ate him, helicopter and all. I'm no aviator, but there's this thing I've heard of called "altitude" and I think it's a variable. It reminded me of the many times in Star Trek when the Enterprise is surrounded by a ring of enemy ships and can't escape. Now, I'm just going to let you think for a minute about outer space...and a ring of enemy ships...and this crazy thing called the third dimension. A word to the wise is sufficient.
My problem is that I am at that stage of my cold during which I feel fine as long as I'm sitting down. So I get bored sitting down, and start thinking I should be doing things. But doing things fatigues me instantly--I just nearly collapsed from carrying Eric up to bed. This is a bad cold that has had me operating at a fraction of peak efficiency for four days now, and I'm actually getting tired of reading and watching videos. If you can imagine.
Here's a non-sequitur: my maternal grandmother grew up in southern Ohio, the part that is practically Kentucky, and she used a lot of hillbilly idioms in her speech. I don't think I ever actually say any of them out loud, but my internal monologue often includes sentences like, "When I heard him holler, I come a-runnin." I think "I come a-runnin" captures the urgency of a situation much better than, "I ran as quickly as I could," for instance. Today, Eric managed to get himself standing in the inside of his Crawl-n-Cruise Playground, and stayed upright for a good 10 or 15 minutes exploring all the dials and wheels on the top of it that were hidden from him when he was a lowly crawler. Then he made his way into the kitchen, where he figured out how to open the drawer where I keep plastic food storage containers, and had a great time pulling them all out and scattering them over the floor. Then he made his way back into the TV room, where I was folding laundry, and amused himself for a long time banging on the side of the laundry hamper. Then he came up into my lap, where he spent another twenty minutes exploring the hamper from the top: opening and closing the lid, looking in at the clean clothes, reaching for them so enthusiastically that at one point he was hanging upside down on the side of the hamper by his hips. And then, although he had only been up from his last nap for 90 minutes, he crashed like a bad NASCAR driver, and as I carried him up to bed, my internal voice said, "Poor little feller. He's plumb tuckered out."
Other than a very nice pearl choker, that is my Grandma's legacy to me: a hillbilly in my head.
Eric can support himself one-handed while standing, and once today he even managed to lean back against the Crawl-n-Cruise so he had both hands free, but that was an accident. He's better at cruising with his hands than his feet, so more than once today his hands continued to explore while his feet remained stationary...so he deviated further and further from the vertical until he was hanging by his hands like a cheap hammock.
A little white ago, I set him on the rug while I went into the kitchen to fix a bottle, and he came inch-worming after me calling "Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Mom, Mom, Mom, Ma, Ma, Ma." I'm not making any claims. I merely relate the facts as I witnessed them and leave you to draw your own conclusions.
Eric is getting his two front top teeth. They're giving him more trouble than his bottom two did. I don't think he noticed those bottom two coming through at all, but he's been chewing more with these two and has one spot on his gum that looks a bit inflamed. I can't call him Mr. Two-Tooth anymore.
Eric seems to be coming down with my cold. Not surprising, since I have been caring for him solo since Thursday, and one of his favorite activities is to put his hand in my mouth and then put it in his mouth and then put it in my mouth again. We call him Our Little Vector of Infection.
We went to worship today. I was the most annoying Quaker ever. First, I was late, and guessed wrong when I tried to remember which door into the meeting room doesn't creak. Then, I had a bad cough, which I attempted to silence using my pocketful of cough drops, individually wrapped in crinkly paper. Some days I wish we had an order of service so that I could unwrap a cough drop discreetly while, for instance, the church's hard-of-hearing organist hits the rousing opening chords of "The Old Rugged Cross." Instead, I retreated to the First-Day School room, where I helped the 5-year-olds make paper stars and re-create the little dipper on the classroom floor while the FDS teacher read them a book about how slaves used the "drinking gourd" to guide them to freedom. Now all the kids in Meeting are infected with this bad-ass Montana virus I brought home with me.
The First-Day school room today had five kids in it, including Eric and Devin, who is 4 1/2 weeks old, and five adults, including the two Brazilian teenagers who do childcare for the kids who are too young to have a lesson. That's an efficient ratio.
Matt S., age 5, reported on our activities to the meeting. He said that we read a book and made the Little Dipper out of paper stars. That's true, but I had to laugh because their reports always sound like everything was so orderly, but it was more like, "Matt and his dad made paper stars while Teagan, who has just learned how to cut out hearts, made valentines. Matt and Teagan made a semi-polite show of listening to Matt's dad read the book, but Matt was busy directing Su, whom he had ordered to draw a picture of him, in getting the color of his hair right, and Teagan was having a spat with Aidan about who got to use the pink crayon, a dispute which was only resolved by their moving on to a debate about who got to play with the dinosaur hand puppets."
At potluck, I gave Eric some Cheerios. He loves Cheerios, and just in the last couple of days has figured out that they can be eaten as well as being tossed to the floor and studied to see whether a dog will eat them before Mom accidentally grinds them into the rug with her heel. He was more interested in the plastic food storage container they were in than in the Cheerios themselves, until Aidan came along and decided that Eric's Cheerios were much more interesting than his own plate of fruit and bread. Aidan reached over and took the container, and Eric let out a furious yowl and grabbed for it. Mari said, "Wow, that's really impressive for his age, to be mad when someone takes a toy away." I thought, "Great. The one thing he's advanced in: not sharing."
Adrianne and Carla moved into their new rental house on Saturday. It seems to be helping a lot to have a home again. Every little piece of normal that they can manage makes them feel a little better. Eric and I are flying out to visit during my spring break, just two weeks from now.
I dread flying with a baby so much that I had a bad dream about it last night. But I think it will be OK. Eric has his own seat, and he's pretty mellow. While I expect there will still be both practical and emotional things for me to help with once we get there, I am looking forward to having some time to just hang out with Adrianne and Carla and admire each other's babies.
I can't help wondering whether anyone donated a guest bed. Eric can sleep in his Pack-n-Play, but I hope I don't have to sleep in there with him.
Speaking of sleep, I should try and get some. I didn't manage much last night, with coughing, but tonight I am doped to the gills on decongestants, cough suppressants, expectorants, and antihistamines. The inside of my head feels like it's been scraped clean with a melon-baller, but I'm not coughing, and with any luck, not coughing=sleeping.
Posted by Su Penn at February 17, 2004 12:59 PM | TrackBack