Background Noise

this is only a test

I made the most delightful lunch of scrambled eggs with shredded cheese melted on top and I felt like a really good mom while I was making it because eggs are wholesome and nutritious and warm and yummy and, best of all, a real meal made in a pan.  FOR LUNCH.   Joey took one bite of the eggs, chewed them up a little and then, upon deciding that eggs are not suitable for his palate, dug them out of his mouth and threw them on the floor.  He then cleared his tray of all remaining egg and cheese bits by flinging them across the room.

I ended lunch, took him out of his high chair and while I was cleaning cheesy egg bits off the carpet, he crawled over to the CD player, pulled open the door and started grabbing CDs out and flinging them across the living room floor.  I got him out of the CD player and while I was gathering up the thirty or so CDs he’d managed to free in less than twenty seconds, he got busy in the bathroom pulling the toilet paper off the roll.  I got him out of the bathroom and as I was rewrapping the toilet paper around the roll he somehow managed to pull my purse down off the table and started emptying it of its contents, scattering receipts and credit cards all over the dining room floor.  I caught him just as he was about to eat a penny.

These events all took place in rapid succession during only thirty minutes of my day, and it’s fucking exhausting.  I was talking to a client on the phone when Joey figured out how to get the tape off the baking supplies cabinet in the kitchen and as I rounded the corner, I saw him standing there staring at his hands filled with flour as if contemplating his next move.  Eat it or throw it all over the kitchen?  I tried to clean him up while continuing my phone conversation until he arched his back, slid from my arms and hit the floor in a puff of flour.  Then the screaming started, because everyone knows babies do not like to be disrupted when they are raising hell in the cabinets.  I did the only thing I could.  I left him there to play in the flour and finished my phone call quickly outside on the front steps.

The way this child has been acting lately is new.  Up until recently he’s been a very sweet baby but lately, ever since he mastered the ability to walk, he has been slowly turning into a monster.  He’s testing me, I know this, and everyone warned me that this time would come, it’s just I didn’t expect he would test everything, all the time, and with such tireless devotion.

And I just keep reminding myself that patience is the only thing that will get me through this day.  Not wine.

not complaining

We had a small party at our house on Saturday night as kind of a practice run at going out next Saturday.  I haven’t tested my meds against alcohol except for a glass of wine here and there, and next weekend we’re going out for real, with a group of people, out in public, and I need to know what to expect from a night of big drinking.  I wanted to be at home for my first time, so we had a few friends over and we drank lots of beer.  I’m happy to say that the meds don’t seem to have an effect on how alcohol acts in my body and the night went pretty much like usual.  It was snowing and our friends had driven down from far up north so they left around midnight, and since I was at home and had only a few (six) beers in me, I went outside and wandered around in the street looking for neighbors to come over and drink beer with us.  Turns out our neighbors are all boring parents like us who go to bed early because babies wake us up at the crack, and there wasn’t a soul to be found.

So I went to bed, which is best anyway, and then Sunday morning I got up and laughed at the drunken tracks I’d made in the snow the night before when I was wandering around in the street.

I didn’t end up with a hangover but I haven’t been feeling right for the past couple of days.  I don’t know what it is, but something feels off.  Like maybe the alcohol knocked something out of balance.  I feel restless, like I need to do something but I don’t know what to do, and so I end up pacing.  And worrying.  And feeling frustrated with myself.

The thing about taking care of a baby as your primary job is that the work is hard but you constantly feel unproductive.  In the bigger sense, of course you’re being productive; you’re raising a human being.  It’s just that the process is so slow that it’s hard to see results and there’s no real feeling of daily accomplishment because everything you do today will just have to be done again tomorrow.  Today’s bath just means the baby is clean today but he will be dirty again tomorrow and he will need another bath.  Each feeding is temporary relief from hunger, but in a few hours the baby will be hungry again and you have to present him with more delicious morsels that he will either chew up and swallow or chew up and spit at you.  I’m not complaining, just contemplating that for all that I do each day I don’t feel like I’m ever getting anything done.  Circles.

We put our Christmas lights up on Sunday and they came out great.  We have outdoor garland (the kind that’s flashy and metallic and looks like cheerleader pom-poms, not the kind that is natural and looks like branches), two strands of multicolor lights plus a string of dancing light-up snowmen, a big glowing reindeer and a fat santa pulled by reindeer for the windows that also lights up.  We have cords plugged into cords plugged into a three-way adaptor that fits into our front light.  If we make it through the holidays without burning the place down it will be a festive season for all who visit or drive by.   

As weird as it sounds, this journal makes me feel productive because I can sit here and write something and it is done. 

Done.

junk

Eli and I sometimes have very different approaches to this parenting thing.  We feel the same on big issues like sleep and discipline and fun, but there are other areas where we disagree greatly.

My son has a lovey.  It’s a little stuffed lamb he has had since he was born and sometime around when he was seven months old, he started to get very attached to it.  When we’d put him down to sleep, he would clutch it to his face and chew its ears while growling with pleasure at its lovely lamby softness.  He loves the lamb and knows it by name and will even crawl to the bottom of the stairs and offer himself up for a nap when it’s time because he knows it means some quality cuddling with his lamb.  When we noticed the bond forming, and the special sleeping powers the lamb had over our child, Eli and I both agreed that the lamb will never leave the crib.  I’ve heard all the stories about frantic parents losing their child’s lovey at the mall and not discovering it until bedtime when the child, so dependent on the lovey to go to sleep, immediately goes on a twelve day AWAKE spree full of night after endless night of sorrowful wailing.  That won’t be me.  So the lovey stays in the crib, and if you can imagine how your face would look after a few nights of a milk-mouthed drooly baby chewing on it, you can understand that the lamb is usually gross.

Eli thinks we should wash it every day because he is afraid of lovey germs.  He thinks that if we don’t wash it constantly the baby will get ear infections and colds and eventually POLIO.  He feels strongly that the lamb should always be clean and I always catch him sneaking it into the washer.  I, on the other hand, know a little something about lovey seasoning, and definitely enough to know that washing it too much ruins all the baby’s hard work.  When I was young I had a lion I slept with.  I drooled on his face and chewed his nose and rubbed my cheeks in the wet spots.  I would drift off to sleep every night with the lovely musty aroma of my own spit dancing in my nose.  That is until my mom would notice the funk and wash it.  Then it would be spring fresh and I’d have to start all over again, and it would never feel just right until after a few days of intense re-seasoning.

Eli is ridiculous.  You don’t get sick from a smelly lamb that lives in a crib.  Just like you don’t catch cold from going outside with wet hair or without a jacket.

Another thing we disagree on is food.  This one isn’t as bad lately because Joey is almost 13 months old and he can eat just about anything.  But when he was still new to food, I was reading a lot of books on baby nutrition and I became convinced that all babies are extremely sensitive to food and I was a big fan of avoiding the allergic reaction.  I did that thing where you introduce one new food, wait three days and then introduce another new food, and so on until all foods have been introduced.  The three day waitout is so that you can isolate an allergic reaction immediately.  During this new food phase I would always catch Eli messing with the schedule by letting the baby have a taste of ice cream or a lick off his tootsie pop.  I even caught him letting our six month old child gum the edge of a chocolate bar.  I think Eli is probably right in his relaxed stance on baby tastings.  It’s not like the kid drinks coke or eats raw sugar.  And we don’t have a history of allergies anywhere in our families.

While I'm talking about food... Eli is convinced that this child could never choke so he gives him huge food like a whole piece of toast or an entire banana.  Meanwhile, I am convinced that if I don’t cut his food to the size of a crumb he will get it lodged in his throat and die.  This is a tricky one.  I don’t really know who is right, and probably we’re both wrong.  When I cut the food into tiny little morsels, Joey will just scoop ten of them into his mouth at once so what’s the point?  But thinking that he will just hold a slice of toast in his hand and nibble it and then have to leap into action and dig it out of his throat when he takes it and crams the whole thing into his mouth is stupid too.

I thought there were more things we disagree on but now that I'm listing them I realize maybe it’s just because we argue constantly about the same two or three things every day that it seems like more.  Oh yeah, Eli calls the baby’s privates his junk.  I don’t know what he should call it, but junk?

peaceful easy feeling

I spent Saturday at a scrapbooking workshop.  Here’s the thing about scrapbooking: I used to make fun of it and the people who do it.  I think I disregarded it once as a vanity hobby where people with no design sense spend tons of money creating raggedy books about their cats that no one will ever want to look at ever.  So you’re probably wondering to yourself, hey bitter girl who hates everything, what were you doing spending a whole Saturday at a scrapbooking event?  Well, I have since revised my opinion about scrapbooking after seeing some really cool projects you can do with some paper and markers and a little imagination.  I mean, there are definitely people out there who do ugly scrapbooking where the main goal is to compulsively document every moment of your life like anyone even CARES, but there’s a certain type of scrapbooking that I love and can get totally into, and that’s what I’ve been doing.

Before my son was born, when I was looking around and trying to choose a baby book, I couldn’t find anything I liked.  Babies change so much during the first year of life that I wanted a book where I could record everything, write him messages, and especially document his firsts.  My own baby album is PATHETIC.  My mom kept it for exactly one week and then put it away in a box in the attic and forgot all about it.  All I can get from it is that I was born.  And trying to rely on an old lady’s memory from thirty years ago is useless.  I ask her things like when I took my first steps and I get a vague shrug, like, who fucking knows?  Or cares?  And when I stare at her in horror, she gets defensive about it, like, “You obviously did it because you’re walking now, so why does it matter?”  After my son was born I asked her so many questions about my own newborn-hood, trying to puzzle out the genetic link between me and this tiny shrieking blob in a blanket.  What did I eat when I was a baby?  Did I get rashes too?  Did I suck my thumb like my son does?  Did I start crawling normal or did I drag myself around the floor on my stomach for a couple of months first?  What were my first words?  I crave this information because I have a child now and watching his milestones makes me wonder about my own.  Does he do the same things I did as a baby or is he developing like Eli did when he was in his first year?

Anyway, the crushing reality that my parents can’t remember anything about me that goes any further back than the past ten years (unless, of course, it was some evil I committed and then it has to be reflected upon at every family gathering) strengthened my resolve to not do that with my child.  I decided to document his first year in a book made by me, with pictures and commentary and most importantly, attention to detail.  It is my gift to him that he won’t appreciate probably until he has children of his own.  I didn’t realize that my vision for the creation of the most comprehensive baby book ever is what people in the craft world call Making a Scrapbook.  And once I was assured that I didn’t need to use plaid stickers or write silly thought bubbles over the baby’s head in every picture, or fill the pages with saccharine commentary, I purchased some supplies and went to work. 

Before the baby was even born, I had the book set up with calendar pages and a small section at the front documenting my pregnancy.  A scrapbooker friend gave me a crash course on things like acid-free paper and adhesives and told me about things like page protectors and cutting instruments, and she helped me get started setting up a few pages in my book.  And as I got closer to my due date, the more devoted I became to the book I was creating.  I became a scrap scavenger.  I kept everything.  Ultrasound pictures, my appointment cards from the doctor’s office, and before I left the hospital after giving birth, I scavenged everything I could get my hands on for the book.  The name plate from the bassinet, a picture of the pain chart on the wall, receipts from the baby's first professional photo shoot, the security clip they put on his umbilical stem so no one could steal him out of the hospital...it was a scrapcraze.  I even tried to keep his umbilical stump when it fell off.  I figured I’d put it in a baggie and mount it on a page, and it all made perfect sense until Eli heard about what I was thinking of doing and threw the stump out one day while I was taking a nap.  He didn’t want decomposing human flesh hanging around the house.  And he’s probably got a point.  The cats would’ve eaten it anyway.

So after a year, I have a pretty cool baby book for my son.  I finished it up this weekend and now I can get out of the mindset that I need to save everything because it would be great for the book.

So we were in the car on Sunday and I was telling Eli what a great time I had at the scrapbooking workshop the day before and he looked at me sideways like I was talking about my devotion to Jesus.

Eli: I can’t believe this is you talking.
Jaeme: Why?
You’re so…different.
Different how?
More mellow.
I spend one Saturday with old ladies and now I’m mellow?
You joined a mother’s group, too.
I’m still punk rock
But your edge has definitely softened.
Are you saying I’m becoming elevator music?
Nah.  More like easy listening.

But it’s not just that I like the scrapbooking.  Lately, I like everything.  No matter what thing I do it’s the best time I’ve ever had.  We took the baby to the park on Sunday and I was sitting there on a bench in the sunshine getting high on fucking air.  I was just letting the breeze wash over me, taking deep cleansing breaths when I started thinking about how much I was enjoying the cool, crisp air and I almost had to wrap a swing chain around my own neck when I realized what a weirdo I’m becoming.

I hate the internet

I went to drop my prescription off at the drugstore this morning and when I approached the counter with Joey on my hip, the girl behind the counter smiled at him and asked sympathetically if he was sick.  I told her no, it’s for me.  Which I’m sure she figured out once she looked at my prescription and saw what it was for.  And while it’s technically true that I’m sick, it’s not like I have pneumonia or a hacking cough that would constantly remind me and so sometimes I forget.  Until I go to the pharmacy and pull out my insurance card. 

My pills would cost $5 each if they weren’t covered by insurance.  Which is why I am resisting the temptation to break one open to look at what’s inside.  It’s killing me, this need to examine the magic up close, but so far I’ve held strong.  But knowing what they’re worth, it makes me think of eating a five dollar bill every morning when I wash my pill down with coffee.

One of the nice things about my medicine is that it comes with all kinds of warning stickers.  But the bottle is never big enough to fit them all on, so they leave them on the information sheet for me to do with as I please.  So what I do with them is stick them on Joey's forehead and take pictures of him so that when Daddy comes home he can see what we did all day.  My favorite sticker is the one that says "Swallow Whole. Do Not Chew or Crush."  I dare myself to one day take the baby to the grocery store with that one stuck to his head. 

There’s a lot of scary stuff out there about medicines that alter your brain,  antidepressants specifically.  But every time I get scared about something someone has written on the internet about my drug, I have to remind myself that self-reports from MENTAL PATIENTS are probably not the most reliable information.  I read something one woman wrote about how the pills are toxic poison that have made her demented and ruined her life, but then if you read further on, you see that she is on the pills because she was diagnosed with bipolar, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety and severe clinical depression.  Yes.  The pills ruined your otherwise happy and well-adjusted life.

I fucking hate the internet when it comes to stuff like this.  I have a sick habit of looking things up and it’s just stupid because you start out looking for an explanation for your baby’s little belly rash and suddenly you’re convinced he has autism.  I once went looking around for information about ectopic pregnancy.  I’d just had one and I was looking for answers.  What I found was a frightening number of web page shrines made by people who wanted to share PICTURES of their barely developed fetuses with the world.  Never mind the fact that it’s weird, how would you get it out of the hospital?

I don’t mean to seem heartless.  A loss, even very early, is a horrible thing to go through and I’ve spent a lot of time myself wondering about my own experience.  Like, what did it look like when they went in there?  Was my baby still alive?  What did they do with my fallopian tube and the rest of what they removed?  Could they tell if it was a boy or a girl?  But those are things best left in your heart and not splashed up on some sick fucking web page for the world to stare at in horror.

I hate the internet sometimes. 

not so happy meal

Joey had his first happy meal today and as he was eating I was thinking, wow, I can’t believe my baby is eating a cheeseburger.  Look at us!  We’re sitting at the table eating McDonald’s like people!  And then a few bites in, almost as if to remind me that he’s still a baby and I shouldn’t get comfortable yet, his face got red, his eyes started watering and his lips curled into a soundless sputter.  I should mention that my greatest fear now that we’re past the SIDS risk, is the baby choking on food.  I gave him a couple seconds to cough it up himself, but I realized he wasn’t making any noise which meant he probably wasn’t breathing, so I threw down my chicken sandwich, ripped the tray off his high chair and threw it on the floor, and just as I was about to lift him in the air and start trying to save his life, he coughed, caught his breath and then threw up all over me.  Cheeseburger and milk and stomach acid all over my sweatshirt and a little down the front of my bra.  And then he started crying.  Not because he was scared or hurt or he realized how close he came to dying.  No.  He was crying for the food I’d dumped on the floor in my frenzied haste to save his life.  I gave him his tray back and he resumed eating, completely uninterested in dwelling on the fact that he was still sitting in his own vomit.

This kid continues to surprise me with his level of punk rock, I don’t give a fuck if it’s a spider or my own puke, give it to me and watch me fucking EAT IT attitude.  This is the second time I’ve watched him continue a meal immediately after vomiting.  The first time he was eating cheerios and milk and Eli and I were making him laugh by tickling his belly until he leaned forward and threw up all over his tray.  The smile didn’t even leave his face, and before I could grab a napkin to clean up the mess, he was shoveling puke-covered cheerios into his mouth. 

Anyway, I think he gets the choking from his dad.  Eli has choked in front of me three times.  Two were just harmless chokes on soda, messy but pretty much non-life threatening.  But the time he choked on M&Ms was terrifying.   He was eating M&Ms by the handful.  Just pouring them into his mouth like he always does because M&Ms are his favorite food in the world and it has become one of the most familiar sounds in my house--hard candy shell against teeth--and definitely the most annoying because I hear it all the time.  So he’s sitting on the couch shoveling them in and all of a sudden he starts coughing.  Like hacking and sputtering and then he stands up and walks to the kitchen to choke in private over the sink and he’s in there coughing and gagging and choking.  I was in shock at first and when he kept choking I started thinking I’d better do some Heimlich or I am going to watch my husband die on candy.  So I went into the kitchen and I tried to get behind him and embrace his body with my arms and he kept pushing me away and I was yelling, LET ME DO THIS! like I was some kind of fucking paramedic, when in reality I’ve never used the Heimlich before and I probably would’ve broken all his ribs.  But then he leaned over the sink, coughed up a huge ball of chocolate and then caught his breath and stopped choking. 

I was shaking by then and we both just stood there staring at each other for a few seconds in shock over what had just happened.  Then I heard crunching.  This crunching sound like someone’s chewing M&Ms and I see Eli’s mouth moving like he’s the one chewing M&Ms and so immediately I think he’s eating some of the M&Ms he just coughed up from his lungs.  So I shrieked, “ARE YOU EATING THE M&M’S YOU JUST COUGHED UP FROM YOUR LUNGS???” And he said, “No, I had some tucked in my cheek.”

Like father like son.  Scare the shit out of me and then go about your snack like nothing ever happened.

projects progress

The Loft

I finally cleaned the loft.  I know, my life must be pretty simple if all I have to angst about is a messy room in my house.  I forced myself to work on it the other night and it only took six trash bags, four moving boxes, and three hours of my time.

I realize that in order to appreciate the after picture, you should be able to experience the before.  Since I didn’t think to take a before, just imagine six bags of trash and four big moving boxes full of shit all scattered around, and about a gallon of dust delicately covering all of it.

Oh yeah, and this is my clean desk.

Alphabet Mural

I’m still in the process of finishing the alphabet mural in my son’s room.  I started it when he was born with some leftover canvas from another project and I thought, hey!  I can pick the things I want him to know and it will be magnificent!  I’ve been working on it here and there.  (Here and there means doing five tiles then taking a break for two months, then doing five more tiles and taking another break for six months…like that) I didn't realize how much paint it would take and I'm always running out of colors.  But if I don’t get my ass going and finish it, he is going to start reading and think the alphabet ends with T.

Wonka Bar inspired bathroom.

When we put the new tile in the bathroom, it clashed with the yellow walls, so we decided to paint them brown.  I got up early one morning and decided to tackle the project and get it all done before lunch.  I cut in with the finish paint, making sure to avoid getting any brown on the ceiling or moldings or cabinets.  I had a small paintbrush and I went over my work three times around the borders of the whole room, making sure everything was covered perfectly and there were no streaks.  Then I primed the walls twice just to prevent any yellow from getting through.  Then I finished up with two coats of finish color.  I went a little over on my timeline, and it took all day, but I had it done by the time Eli came home from work.  I was so proud of my work and I was standing in the middle of the room trying to decide if it needed one more coat of finish color when Eli walked over to my paint can and held it up.

Did you paint with this?

What?

Did you paint the room with this paint right here?

Yes.  But it might need another coat…

Jaeme, this is PRIMER!

I didn’t look at the cans carefully and I mixed up the finish color and the primer.  I won’t elaborate on what happened after the revelation that I’d painted the entire bathroom WITH PRIMER, but there were some tears and a late night of repainting.  I learned on this project that sometimes my excitement gets in the way of my ability to follow directions and apply COMMON SENSE to my home decorating.  And forever more I will slow it down and not waste my own time on stupid mistakes.

Kitchen

New tile floors, new stove and fridge (not pictured), and old cabinets accented with new gray electrical tape to keep the baby out of the spices.  We also keep the sugar in the taped up cabinets and so many days I go without sweetener in my coffee because it’s just not worth wrestling with the tape first thing in the morning and then fighting off the baby when he realizes that I’m in the cabinet.  Baby hearing is an interesting thing.  I can sit next to the kid and say his name: Joey.  Joey.  Joey, look at mama.  JOEYYYYY! and if he’s playing with something fun he pretends not to hear me, but the second I pull the tape, in a small corner across the house and far away from where he is playing, his supersonic selective baby hearing kicks in and two seconds later I’m trying to pull baby hands off sticky tape without also removing a layer of skin.  Supersonic selective baby hearing comes into play also when I open the dishwasher, open the bathroom door, or touch my keys and they jingle.  He hears any of those things and he’s all over me like a cat on a tuna can.

I've also painted the wall in the hallway downstairs, but I can't show a picture because I still have to spraypaint the doorbell box to match.  I don't know what's next on my project list, but I'm starting to think that I want to do something that requires a saw.

thoughts from the menstrual hut

I went to the grocery store last night to pick up some essentials and also something to make for dinner, but when I got there I just wanted to grab the milk and cereal and leave.  I looked around and everywhere there was this food that made me want to retch.  Cheese and bread and produce and bakery cakes, yuck.  It’s one thing to be in a specific place like McDonald’s or a Chinese restaurant and nothing on the menu looks appetizing, but to stand in a building that has every type of food ever invented and not feel hungry for any of it, even after not eating all day, is a whole other thing entirely.  I came home and ate a bowl of lettuce and a tootsie pop for dinner and then I went to bed.  At 7:40.  Throw in a sippy cup of milk around 6, and a few cheerios off the floor, and I’m on the same schedule as my baby.

I started worrying this morning when I could barely drag myself out of bed at 7, after almost twelve whole hours of sleep, and I still didn’t feel hungry.  I thought something was going wrong with my medicine.  My beautiful, life-restoring medicine.  After all weekend declaring my deep and abiding love for it, vowing that the bottle will have to be pried from my cold, dead hands before I will ever give it up, and praising the science gods of pharmaceutical chemistry for giving me my spirit back, it turns and bitch slaps me with this time-lapse side-effect?  And then I felt cramps and I realized maybe I was too hasty.  I’m pretty sure this is just the new experience of how my medicated body reacts to having my period.

Whew.

I’m still having trouble understanding what’s going to happen with the medicine.  Like, do I take the pills for a year and then I am miraculously cured so I stop?  How does that work?  Are the pills training my brain how to function normally and at the magical number of 365 days, my brain will not need the chemical help anymore and just start being good on its own?  My suspicious nature refuses to accept that will happen.  Every other medicine I’ve ever been on doesn’t work like that.  Advil, Tylenol, birth control…they all need to be taken to get the desired effect.  And if that’s the case, do I need the pills forever?  What happens if I’m in a plane wreck and I miraculously survive but I have to live on an island with the other survivors with no hope of being rescued and then my prescription runs out and I become such a miserable bitch that the rest of the survivors band together and eat me?  Should I really have tried to catch up on the whole first season of Lost in one weekend? 

Anyway, the most realistic worry I have is that I want to have another baby.  Eventually.  And I’m pretty sure I can’t do that while I’m on this medicine.  And that’s the damn thing about having such a sweet, good-natured first child.  They make you forget that it was so hard and convince you to give them a sibling.    Shifty little bastards.

A friend recently announced her pregnancy and it got me and Eli to reminiscing about my pregnancy and birth and what a weird process it was and how much my body went through in such a short amount of time.  And of course I was reliving every moment like some kind of warrior who fought through Ebola or something and eventually came out victorious, when Eli had to grab some of the glory for himself.

“I went through a lot with the pregnancy too, you know.”
“Like what?”
“You woke me up early every morning with your retching in the toilet.”

I stared at him at a loss for what to say and just as I was about to assault him physically for even suggesting that his pregnancy pain was even a fraction equal to mine, he smiled and said, “Just kidding, baby.”

house-work

I have a lot of work to do in my house.  My loft is torn apart from when we started cleaning it out a couple of weeks ago and got side-tracked by a big box of old pictures.  My kitchen is a mess, even though I clean it faithfully each week, because it has seen an enormous amount of food preparation lately.  I used to have to dust my stove I used it so infrequently.  And now I’m in there making oatmeal for breakfast, grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, quesadillas for dinner and pouring milk into sippy cups all day long.  And the laundry.  How do three people make so much laundry?  The baby is a slob and goes through at least two outfits a day, but he’s allowed because he’s a baby and still learning how to eat.  Also, his clothes are small.  But Eli wears two pairs of jeans and a sweatshirt and there’s a whole load of laundry right there. 

A few weeks after the baby was born, when he was doing that new baby thing they all do--peeing, puking and shitting all over everything every day, I was feeling exhausted, overworked and just pissed-off about how much time I was spending in front of the washer,  so I went on a laundry ban.  Just for Eli’s stuff.  I rationalized it in my head that since he was so fucking big, he could do his own damn laundry or lose some fucking weight and go down a couple of sizes and maybe then his clothes wouldn’t have so much material and take up so much room in the wash.  (I’d like to point out that this kind of thinking happened every day in the weeks following the birth of my son and it was entirely unreasonable.  I was a lunatic on a blame spree.) I separated everything out and just washed my clothes and the baby’s clothes and it was wonderful because we’re small and our clothes don’t take up a lot of room and I had lots more time for other important pursuits like watching over the baby while he slept to make sure he was still breathing and obsessively scrubbing the sink.  Eli’s stuff just formed this huge mountain in the corner of the basement until one night before going to bed, he looked into his underwear drawer and saw that it was empty.  The laundry fairy had failed to replenish his supply of clean underwear and clean socks.  And when he said something to me about the problem I told him to LICK MY ASS if you think I am your FUCKING SLAVE!  As you can see, things were a little rocky back then.

And then there are the projects that just need to be done like painting one of the walls downstairs, putting up the new baseboards in the entryway where we replaced the tile and fixing two holes in the walls: one in the living room wall from when I threw the phone at it in a fit of rage and the other in the bedroom wall from when I threw the baby monitor at it for the same reason.  It’s a good thing I got help for my mental state because I was acting like a monster and starting to destroy too much.  One day a couple of months ago I was driving home from work feeling terrible.  I tried to think about what I could do to feel better, and it quickly flashed across my mind that I could go home, pull all the dishes out of the cupboards and smash them in a big pile in the middle of the kitchen floor.  That would definitely make me feel better.  But the fallout would’ve been too extreme because Eli gets very distraught when things get broken when I’m mad.  He doesn’t understand it.  Anyway, I didn’t break the dishes.  If I had, I wouldn’t be writing this anyway, I’d be in a hospital recovering from a broken neck and multiple, hundreds, thousands of lacerations from being dragged through a pile of broken dishes.

I also need to Windex every solid surface from 3 ft down, like the sliding glass door, the oven, the dishwasher, the stereo receiver and the walls.  Now that the baby is wall walking, he smears his drooly, milky hands all over everything he can hold on to and when the sun his a room just right, it looks like puppies licked everything. There are also cobwebs, dust bunnies and carpeting to be edged.  We’re having a big party this weekend and that’s why I’m thinking about everything that’s a mess.  The real question is, why am I here writing this when I could be cleaning?  Because I’m not your FUCKING SLAVE.  That’s why.

the routine

I’ve never had such a solid routine in my life.  There’s no more going without sleep for three days, living on adrenaline and coffee and then crashing for a whole day when my body decides it can’t take anymore.  There’s no more doing things on a lark, like, hey let’s drive up to Vermont for the weekend or let’s sleep in on Sunday and then go to brunch or hey how about a little sex after dinner!  Now that we have a baby, we have a schedule that includes things like regular trips to the grocery store, 6:30 am wake ups every day, even on weekends and holidays, and taking showers quick during naptime.  And anytime we have somewhere to go, it takes the kind of careful planning, plotting and strategizing you’d usually see only in a space shuttle command center.

When the baby started eating solids we worried that he might never learn to use a utensil, since we were living on things like breakfast sandwiches and subs and value meals from McDonald’s—all things you just cram straight from the bag and into your mouth without the need for a fork or a knife.  So I started cooking dinners so he could learn that dinner doesn’t come out of a subway bag, and that food sits on a plate and it gets to your mouth with a fork.  Little things, yes, but if I’ve learned anything it’s that babies learn best when you don’t realize you’re teaching.  Take for example the cottage cheese episode at lunch today.  I am still picking curds off my neck and out of my hair and lunch happened over an hour ago.

I was happily feeding the baby a disgusting lunch concoction that he loves—cottage cheese with mandarin oranges mixed in—when he sneezed.  He sneezed three times in rapid succession with a mouth full of cheese and when it was over, we both sat and stared at each other across the high chair tray for a few seconds not really believing what had just happened. I looked down at the tray and my shirt and there was a spray of curds across everything and tiny bits of orange and creamy drool clinging to my hair.  And what happened next is the result of pure instinct on my part.  I laughed.  I laughed and laughed and laughed until I was choking and the baby, sensing that this was BIG FUN, curled his cheese-smeared mouth into a grin and laughed right along with me.  Great, right?  Mama and baby having a good time over lunch, what harm can come from that?  In my complete stupidity, I didn’t realize that I was teaching my child that it is funny to blow food all over mama and the next three bites I spooned into his mouth came shooting right back directly at my face while he sat there and giggled.

I’m getting off track again.  I was talking about routine.  So now I’m on this great medicine that makes me able to function in a routine and feel good all day long, but blankets me in crippling drowsiness that is impossible to shake around 8pm every night.  I can barely make it up to bed by the time the sleepiness hits and I’m unable to think about anything but sleep sweet sleep.  And this is ruining the physical part of my relationship with Eli because while he loves that my moods are stable and he doesn’t have to wonder what he’s going to come home to every night or fear me waking him up at 2am to play Monopoly, he’s also getting frustrated sharing his bed with a mumbling lump who can’t stay awake long enough to even kiss him goodnight. 

According to a guy on Oprah yesterday, I am setting the stage for a big affair because I am not satisfying my man.  I never used to cook or plan dinners or do laundry on a regular basis, but I could always be counted on for sweet lovin’.  Now I clean a lot and do laundry almost every day and go to the grocery store three times a week with a list of ingredients so I can make things for dinner like Tuscan Meatballs and Jambalaya and Lemon Risotto with Chicken.  Am I substituting homemaking for sex?  And I feel like I have to give Eli a choice of how he wants it.  Crazy and sex or stable and go get your sex from a whore.  Right now he’d probably pick crazy because he’s desperate and he probably doesn’t remember how crazy the crazy can get.

I guess the routine’s not perfect yet.