charming idiosyncrasies or grounds for divorce?

This morning Joey woke up screaming in his bed at 6:15. This is always the way. On the days I’m off Joey is up at the crack of dawn, but when it’s Eli’s turn to be home with him, I creep around the house quietly getting ready for work and later I hear fantastic tales of how the baby slept in until 8:30!!! I’m beginning to suspect that Eli wakes the kid up on my mornings home, and it probably happens when he is BLOWING HIS NOSE in the shower.

A while back I made a list of my quirks; the things about me that make me an annoying person to live with. And I promised to reveal some of Eli’s quirks, so maybe that’s where I should start. Eli is infinitely easier to live with than I am, I’ll just put that out there right off. He doesn’t trash the bathroom with his beauty products, he doesn’t soften his eyeliner on the lightbulbs, and if he lived here alone, the bathroom floor would be clean and smooth and not a sticky, gooey mess of spray gel buildup and hair balls. However, Eli is gross in his own special ways, and I should probably take a moment to tell you about it.

As I mentioned above, he blows his nose in the shower. Every. Single. Morning. And it’s not just a gentle little blow. It is a blow forceful enough to clear every sinus in his head and it tapers out at the end into a grating honk that sounds like the mayday call of a ship trapped in fog or a flock of geese being clubbed. It is horrible.

No matter what kind of shirt Eli wears, it can be a fuzzy sweatshirt or a plain old tee shirt, he ends up with a ball of fuzz in his belly button by the end of the day. The ball of fuzz is composed of stray hair and random lint and ever since I discovered this phenomenon (end of the day belly button scum) I go looking for it. I don’t know what’s special about Eli that he collects such an enormous amount of belly button lint throughout the day, but it disgusts and also fascinates me. I always have a clean button, and even if I tried to force a lintball to collect in my belly button by shoving starter lint in there in the morning, I’d probably still end up empty by the end of the day. I think it has to do with the depth of the hole.

Eli farts in bed and when it happens I fantasize about being in bed with a man who is still concerned enough about impressing me that he will hold his fire even if it gives him a stomach cramp.

He drinks the milk from his cereal. I know this is probably a very normal thing to do but it turns my stomach every time. I don’t like the idea of milk drinking to begin with, though I’ve made some adjustments to my anti-milk attitude since Joey came on the scene with his baby habit of drinking gallons of the stuff all day long. But at least Joey’s milk is contained in a sippy cup and I can pretend that it is water. But when Eli finishes his cereal, and brings the bowl up to his lips to gulp down the leftover milk right out in the open, my stomach rolls and I wish for him to choke so that I will never have to see it again. But I suppose that would be worse because I can’t imagine having to resuscitate a person with a coating of cereal scum milk still on their lips.

Every morning Eli makes sandwiches for his work lunch and leaves the knife he uses to spread the mayo on the counter. And sometimes the mayo smears on the counter and I touch it with my hand while I’m making my coffee and then I feel gross all day long. I didn’t realize I have a problem with mayo until he started with the sandwiches. This may be my problem.

Eli is losing his hair on his head but it’s starting to grow more rapidly everywhere else on his body. The most amusing thing to watch is Eli getting ready for a haircut. The first time I saw it I had to ask him what the hell he was doing with the razor on his ears. It turns out he grows long spindly hairs along the outside of his ears, you know, the shell part, and when he gets into the hairdresser’s chair the little hairs stick straight out and catch the light like his head is one of those glowing fiber optic balls. He also grows nose hair like nobody’s business and I’m surprised he can smell anything at all from the amount of hair packed up in his snout. I’m pretty sure he trims it because sometimes when we’re in the car I notice a stray hair that is creeping its way out of the protective shell of his nose and all I have to do is mention it and when I look the next time it’s gone. I’ve also caught him grooming his eyebrows with his razor. I suspect if he went natural for about a month his entire head, from neck up would be completely covered in hair. Except for his upper skull.

He will spend all day Sunday snacking on candy and when I suggest making something for dinner he looks at me like I'm some kind of hungry cow who wants to eat all the time. "I'm still full from lunch, aren't you?" And he will say this to me seven hours after our lunch of toast, while standing in the kitchen holding an M&M bag and chewing. Also on the same theme, he will drink five Pepsis and eat a pound of malted milk balls in the evening and then complain when he gets heartburn or a headache.

Hmm. I thought there were more. Oh! I thought of another one. This one is very specific, but troubling nonetheless. Sometimes when I am doing laundry at night, I tell Eli to take off his clothes so I can wash them. There’s nothing worse than finishing the laundry and then right before bed, Eli takes off his shirt and sweatshirt and jeans and socks and underwear and puts them in the laundry basket and then there’s a whole pile of dirty clothes when I just finished washing everything. So I tell him to strip and sometimes I touch his clothes too quick and they’re still warm from his body. Like warm socks and warm underwear. This one may also be my problem because I’m pretty sure Eli can’t control the fact that he has body heat. Now I realize I’m making it seem like I’m Eli’s maid, shuttling his clothes straight from his body and into the washer. But this only happens when I go on a cleaning binge and I’m having one of those days where I can’t tolerate having anything unclean in the house. This happens probably three times a year.

So those are Eli’s quirks and now back to what I was originally talking about before my tangent. Joey is screaming in his crib, and I’m trying to sleep since it is barely past six in the morning. So Eli takes Joey out of his crib and puts him in bed with me hoping that it will calm him down a little and he will go back to sleep in my arms. And it worked, because he calmed down and stopped screaming, but not because he was sleeping, but because he discovered my hair. A few strands had gotten loose from my ponytail and were swaying around in the air, so Joey spent a little time running his fingers over them before turning his concentration to freeing more strands from my pony tail. One by one, he slowly ran his baby fingers through my hair, tugging and freeing the strands, and yes, it was annoying, but not annoying enough to keep me from falling back asleep. I woke up twenty minutes later when Joey had managed to free enough hairs from my ponytail to wrap it around in his hands and start pulling at it violently like a rope. When I woke up, a big chunk of my hair was pulled out of my ponytail in the front and it was sticking out of my head in a frizzy mess from being caressed by little fingers. Kind of like when you run scissors along ribbon to make it curl. Except in this case, the ribbon was ATTACHED TO MY HEAD.

I don’t know what’s so fascinating to him about my hair but I’m thinking about cutting some off the back and making a pretend mama head for him to play with quietly in his crib while the real head sleeps.