growth spurt

Joey is going through a growth spurt.  And we weren’t paying attention because one day we had defined limits and suddenly he was able to reach things we always thought were safely contained outside the baby zone.  I was making dinner the other night and it’s a recipe where you have to stir constantly at the beginning.  So I was standing at the stove, talking on the phone while constantly stirring, and I thought Joey was playing trucks in the living room.  But then I heard a noise behind me that sounded like cardboard against tile.  When I turned around I found out that’s exactly what it was.  Joey is now tall enough to pull stuff off the counter, and so to exercise his new special skill, he slid a carton of eggs off the counter and dropped it onto the kitchen floor.  But the drop to the floor only cracked all the eggs.  Joey had to then manually smash them by picking each one up out of the carton and throwing it against the floor. 

I had enough time to wrestle a dripping egg out of his hand, put him in his high chair with a handful of cheerios and then I had to be back at the stove, constantly stirring.  Eli got home five minutes later and walked in to me standing in the middle of ten broken eggs cooking dinner.  The whole floor was covered with eggs.  There were yolks oozing into the grout and pieces of gooey shell leaking under the fridge, and a big yellow lake of egg right in the middle of the floor.  He had to mop my feet while I stood there still stirring because I was sticking to the tile.

Later on Joey slid my library book off the table and ripped a page out of the middle.  When I saw what he did, I was tempted to tape all his fingers together into a giant paw.  At least until he can understand the concept of “other people’s stuff” and that even if we trash our own shit, we show the library books some fucking respect.

Every time I turn around lately, something is being ruined.  And it happens so fast.  It’s not that eggs are irreplaceable; it’s just such a pain in the ass to clean ten eggs off the kitchen floor.  In one day last week a cat knocked my bamboo planter (with its hundreds of little rocks) into the garbage disposal, the baby pulled a whole bowl of mandarin oranges off the counter, and my favorite coffee mug got smashed to bits on the kitchen floor (my fault for thinking that I could give the child a ceramic mug to play with in a carpeted room and he wouldn’t walk into the room with the tile and throw it down)

I’m trying to take my mind off the appointment I have to go to this afternoon by focusing on things that don’t matter.  I’m going to the doctor to discuss my blood pressure and my boobs.  And while I know the blood pressure thing is a definite problem, I also know it can be fixed.  The other, I’m not so sure.  I have needed more medical help over the past two years than in the whole rest of my life combined.  But I’ve also never felt so protective about my health.  I need everything to be okay.