Babies Are Absurd

Posted on August 30, 2012 by The Waiting

I was washing the dishes yesterday with Miss C in her little Rock ‘N Play thing next to me, just watching me. And it occurred to me.

Babies are ridiculous. Truly ridiculous.

Pocket-sized counterintuitivness

I think it’s like when you say a word over and over and over, and eventually it sounds like martian-talk. When you think about babies, really think about them, they are absurd. I needed to wash the dishes, but unless I was in her direct line of sight and could entertain her while doing so, she was going to get upset. So there I was, scrubbing the pots, with a person parked next to me. She had nothing else going on. Just looking at me, washing the dishes. She makes those people who play World of Warcraft 24 hours a day look downright industrious. But that’s where the silliness begins; even though she’s just sitting and watching and listening to me make dumb sounds at her, she’s learning more than I did in an entire semester of college.

The lunacy all begins with labor. You have a little person inside of you, but it can’t fit anymore, so you have to push it out. YOU HAVE TO PUSH A PERSON OUT OF YOUR LADY BITS. It’s nightmarish and science-fictioney, but it’s standard protocol. It’s how things work, and that’s absurd to me.

The person comes out, and it’s the shape of a human, but there is nothing remotely human about it. It has a head, two arms, two legs, and a torso, but it has absolutely no control whatsoever over its gelatinous state. If an adult were so schlumpy, it would be paralyzed. But being a 7-pound bag of Nickeldeon Gak is normal for newborn babies.

The silliness just compounds as the baby gets bigger. It throws up about 200 times a day, but this constant regurgitation doesn’t upset it as it would a normal person. No. What does upset it is if you don’t sing “Baby Beluga” for three hours nonstop. Well that makes sense.

All the baby really has going for it for awhile is that it is cute. It’s a good thing too because it can’t go to bathroom by itself, can’t feed itself, can’t talk, and can’t walk. It’s basically a rock that cries. It can’t sit up. I mean, come on. The kid can’t even sit up. It couldn’t even be a greeter at Walmart if it wanted to.

But it’s adored beyond comprehension. Ridiculous amounts of money is spent on it and its parents are obsessed with it. B and I are about to cancel Netflix mostly because we’d rather watch her make silly faces than watch Mad Men, and that’s saying something.

Grandparents may even buy shoes for it. Shoes. Think about that for a second. Miss C can’t even walk, but she has a pair of Toms. I don’t even have a pair of Toms. Miss C has more clothes than my husband has, and I obsess over finding cute new ~~outfits~~ costumes for her to wear, despite the fact that she will grow out of them within four months.

For awhile, the baby eats only one or two things; milk and/or formula. My baby has only ever tasted two things. She’s the equivalent of a sad college student who eats ramen noodles and Kool-Aid everyday and doesn’t even question it because she knows that’s her life. But to her, it never gets old. She still gets the crazy eyes when she sees me lift my shirt or prepare a bottle. Babies get so excited over eating. It’s ludicrous. Sometimes her gums hurt really bad and I give her some cherry flavored suspension gel to ease the pain. HOLY CRAP when she sees me take that stuff out she goes BANANAS. Have you ever looked forward to taking an Advil? Like you wish you had a cramp or a headache so you could whip it out? Probably not, because you’re not an insane baby.

Your life turns upside-down when you have a baby. You will likely have friends who do not envy your new position as a parent at all, but the absurdity is all worth it. My life is a madhouse, but the featured performer makes it all worth it.

******

Thanks to everyone who responded to my post yesterday and went over to Le Clown’s blog to vote for my blog! Honestly, I thought I would *maybe* get two or three people to go over and root for me, but I was astounded by the outpouring of love from your guys. I’m now in third place and up against some SERIOUS competition. (Dude, it’s Le Clown’s blogroll; of course people want on.) If you didn’t vote yesterday, please go check out my entry into today’s Mad Lib challenge. If you like it, simply comment “like” on it. And write your own Mad Lib too! C’mon. All the cool kids are doing it.

Le Clown, Indeed

Posted on August 29, 2012 by The Waiting

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Sorry, that was Miss C. She’s a tad annoyed with me this morning because I am more interested in getting on Le Clown’s blogroll than, y’know, washing her diapers. Looks like she’ll be wearing her Up&Up Target brand diapers for a couple more hours, much to the chagrin of Greenpeace. Mama’s got priorities, and making soup in the washing machine is not on the top right now.

That was really gross. Sorry.

Anyhow, Le Clown’s blogroll. I am competing to get on it because being Freshly Pressed twice just isn’t enough. Having a healthy, adorable child isn’t enough. Being married to my best friend isn’t enough. No, apparently I also need the approval of this cheeky Canadian clown:

Again, priorities. As of this morning, I am in second place in the race for one of five open spots on the blogroll for the more mild-mannered alter ego of Le Clown, L’eric. I’m just as surprised as you are.

If you are so inclined to do these sorts of things, please mosey over to the nomination post on A Clown on Fire, find my comment where I nominated myself (I am my own best cheerleader, ha.) and “like” it. Vote for some other cool blogs too. It’s fun!

I’m Glad I’m Not Patricia Heaton

Posted on August 27, 2012 by The Waiting

See how miserable she looks? Source

Remember that show “Everybody Loves Raymond”? In it, Ray Barrone lives in Queens across the street from his overbearing mother (Marie) and grizzled father (Frank) and has to deal with constant clashes between them and his wife Debra, played by Patricia Heaton. I can no longer watch this show because it stresses me out beyond belief. My viewership was one of the casualties of getting married and having a child myself.

I assume that the big idea behind her constantly-bedraggled character is that she is no June Cleaver or even Clair Huxtable, for that matter. The life of a stay-at-home mom is challenging, and it’s made even more challenging when you marry into crazy and crazy lives across the street. But she frustrates me because in the multiple seasons that the show was on the air, she adamantly tries to “fix” her husband and her mother-in-law. Inevitably, her plans to cut the cord between them never ever work, and she just ends up yelling and clenching her jaw by the end of the episode. Give it up, lady. This is the hand you were dealt when you decided to marry an eternal man-child.

My life is not Debra’s, though. Here’s how:

1. My child is present.

Did you know that Ray and Debra have three – count ‘em – THREE kids, two of which are twin boys? Where the heck are they? They are brought out whenever there is a back-to-school episode but that’s about it. They aren’t even usually around for Christmas or Thanksgiving episodes. Since her kids are never around, I cannot understand why Debra is always so stressed out. I guess she’s too busy hating Marie that she forgot they existed.

2. Apartment living

I complain about my apartment a lot, and I’ve gone on the record saying that the idea of owning a home isn’t totally reprehensible to me. However, Debra does a great job of keeping my head level about the advantages of living in an apartment. Despite the fact that sightings of her kids are as rare as the Loch Ness monster, that place is too big for her to keep it neat. The proliferation of bric-a-brac is worse that at the Salvation Army thrift store. At least our several rooms are manageable.

That first pillow on the sofa passed out in horror when it saw the Barones bring in a snazzy Thomas Kincaid print. Source

3. I get along with in-laws and they are not insane.

Even if I did live across the street from my mother-in-law Sidney, I wouldn’t lose my mind. Sidney is one of my favorite people ever. She has always seen me as my own person, not as B’s girlfriend/fiancee/wife. She got to know me from the beginning, and as far as I can tell, never felt like I took her son away from her. And she ~~likes~~ loves to spend time with Miss C. That’s another thing I never really got about ELR; the grandparents are more preoccupied with their middle-aged sons than their grandchildren. Weirdness.

4. I have a blog.

There is an episode that stands out vividly in my mind where Debra takes a little time out to do some cathartic crying. Marie sees her doing this and freaks out because she thinks there is something really, really wrong. Debra explains that it just feels good to cry sometimes.

I am occasionally a crier too. Sometimes it just feels good to weep about nothing and everything at the same time. I did it a lot when Miss C had just come home. But I also have a blog, AKA a hobby. Maybe if Debra got herself a blog or another hobby she wouldn’t be so dead-set on the fruitless task of making her husband behave like, oh I don’t know, an adult.

5. My husband isn’t an idiot.

Guess who doesn’t love Raymond. Ding-ding, it’s me. The central positive relationships in his life are with his dopey brother and his mother. His wife does not get the best parts of him, and when they do have a conversation it’s about his jacked-up family. I can’t help but wonder if Ray and Debra will both look back on their lives when they’re old and cherish the years when their kids were young. Probably not. By then their own kids will be living across the street from them, and they will be busying themselves with ruining their lives too.

****

Genius

Posted on August 23, 2012 by The Waiting

Listen to the full album here.

Pet Sounds, the Beach Boy’s eleventh album, was released in 1966 as a response to Brian Wilson’s enthusiasm for the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and his inability to tour sans drug-induced panic attacks. He focused his attention towards creating an album devoid of “filler” such as cover songs and comedy tracks, and perfecting arrangement and production. Even though it wasn’t a runaway hit when it was released, it is now regarded as one of the best rock albums in history.

For good reason, too. This is the stuff that dreams are made of. It’s sometimes called a “concept album”, as if each track needs the others in order to make any sort of artistic, cohesive sense. This isn’t the case, though. The album opens up with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” which is critically regarded as the track most akin to the Beach Boys’ pre-psychedelic work. From there, the album (namely, Brian Wilson) meanders into more pensive climes. This is a working album, because it’s work to figure out who you are, especially if you’re Brian Wilson.

The album makes little to no mention of cars, girls, or surfing. It’s just not that kind of machine. Is Caroline a California Girl like Rhonda presumably is? Maybe, but that’s not the trait that she is known for. You listen to the music and you know it’s the Beach Boys because of the unmistakable harmonies, but there is just very little tying it to their work from the early 60s. Tracks like “That’s Not Me” and “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” have an element of adolescence to them, but it’s the flip side of earlier tunes like “Be True to Your School” and “Little Deuce Coupe.”

I started out obsessing about this album a few weeks ago because of those stark differences between Pet Sounds and all the music of the Beach Boys that precedes it. I’m more a fan of the later music than of their early stuff. My thought was, if they had started with Pet Sounds and then shifted to their more bubble gummy surfer music, we would say that they had regressed or jumped the shark (an anachronistic way to describe it since the Fonz wouldn’t pull that feat until the mid-70s.) I wanted to write all about how I can’t waste my time listening to their older stuff when such goodness is there to be had in Pet Sounds. The idealism of Surf City is such a stark contrast to the reality that is Sloop John B.

I had these thoughts, but the more I dwell on them, it becomes clearer to me that the Beach Boys can be both because they were both. Their depth and versatility was what makes them worth listening to. It’s what allows people to toss around the word “genius” when describing their music, but in this case the word has merit.

Genius. What is it anyway? Is it the order of what you do? Is it anticipating the trajectory of your life or career and optimizing it, so Surfin’ Safari comes before Pet Sounds? Is it your versatility to make both? Is it the process of creating something palatable and fun that has timeless depth and resonance?

I’m not even going to attempt to answer that one. I think there are so many interpretations of what genius is, that it does a disservice to limit them. But I have no problem passing the question on to you. Thoughts?

Finding Flow

Posted on August 20, 2012 by The Waiting

When we were there, the national motto for the Philippines seemed to be “please bear with us.” There were handwritten signs at the resort with that line, asking us to have patience with certain doors that weren’t functioning correctly or credit card machines that were on the fritz. The currency exchange booths – which were essentially refrigerator boxes manned by a young woman with a folding chair, a cash box, and a calculator – also had these signs. You had to wonder whether they were ever taken down. Perhaps most disturbing were the “Please bear with us” signs at the ticketing desks at the airport. At one point, a woman in a polo shirt bearing the insignia of Cebu Air came out to the line of mostly Korean passengers and started collecting everyone’s passports. We handed ours over, the woman disappeared, and immediately we started wondering why the heck we had just done that. Oh, but there was a sign that asked for our patience. That’s reassuring.

Lately I’ve been feeling like the Philippines. I’m trying my hardest to be a better version of myself and to get things started, namely this supposed book that I’ve set out to write. Since last Wednesday, I’ve written about 2,500 words. When I step away from my computer, I’m pleased with what I’ve written, and then the next day when I reread it, I’m dissatisfied with it. The problem is that from one day to the next, I shift from being a beautiful place where everyone is friendly and the beer is cheap, to an island rife with violence and people getting their heads chopped off.

Neither are “bad,” as long as it’s not my head and the beer is mine. Both are interesting and make for good reading.

But which one do I want to be? Which one will this book be?

The answer is that it will be both, but the real challenge is creating something that isn’t completely disjointed and random.

So bear with me. I’m going to be trying out some new-for-me styles on the blog just so I can feel my way through them and see what works best for a long format piece. Your comments, as always, are heartily appreciated and extremely helpful. Have I told you all lately that I love you? Because I do.

Houses

Posted on August 16, 2012 by The Waiting

A couple of weeks ago, we visited Kendra and her husband in Charlotte. It was the first time we had been to their new house since they moved from Salinas, California and we were impressed with their new digs. They live in a grown-up house.

Not their house, but close enough. Source

Their house is what you think of when you think of a place to raise a family. Front porch, a big family room, an upstairs that enables everyone to have their own space. Some of their neighbors even really have white picket fences. The place is beautiful and spacious, and I’m proud of my friends for working hard and being able to live in such a place.

We drove there on Saturday morning, and when we arrived around three, Miss C was her regular genial self. In about an hour, though, her impending teeth got the better of her. She was inconsolable for several hours, more inconsolable than she’s been in months. B and I tag-teamed her upstairs so that one of us could hang out with our friends, but around the 2 1/2 hour mark, I got upset and worried that it was something else. Thus those mama tears started flowing. Bedtime was an ordeal. She’s usually down by 8:30ish, but that evening was harder than usual because she had refused to eat when she had been so upset. Plus, she was in a different place. She finally went down for the night around 10:15. And I was harried and relieved that the day was over.

She would have cried the exact same way if we had been in our own apartment. Those teeth don’t care. They come wherever she is. She has since cried that hard at our apartment. But it was easier at Kendra’s place. Her place is big so C’s cries have more space to roam and my head has different things to focus on. At Kendra’s house, you can put the baby in a stroller and walk her around the neighborhood until she settles. At Kendra’s house, it takes three minutes to make the gauntlet around the place, as opposed to the 45 seconds it takes to slowly stroll through our entire apartment.

I hate our place when C cries. The apartment does a poor job of containing her frustrations. Or, more likely, my own frustrations. I sit on the sofa with her in my lap, doing everything I can to sooth her, and the opposite wall that’s ten feet away infuriates me by its close proximity. I get up and waltz her through her room, the living room/ kitchen, our room. B is there, not seven feet away, and it feels so crowded. “Can you try?” He takes her and jiggles her while I sit on the sofa, annoyed and tired of the wall. I miss every other place I ever lived.

My brother and I grew up in houses. The first in Memphis, the second in Oxford, the third one in Murfreesboro, and then the last one in Germantown where my mom still lives. Those houses seemed big, but then again I was small when I was there. I knew kids growing up whose families lived in apartments and I always felt sorry for them. I equated apartments with divorce and day care and eating Domino’s for dinner not because it was fun but because the parent didn’t have time to prepare something.

And of course, here we are living in an apartment. Not a great one, either. I often whine to myself that it’s not fair that my dad never even finished college, yet we always lived in houses that my parents owned. B and I both have master’s degrees and we live here. But who am I whining to? The world? The world doesn’t care what’s fair and what’s not. And it certainly doesn’t give one iota that we spent some of our own time getting educated. Would we ever want to even own a home? We tell ourselves that we wouldn’t. It’s too much work to maintain. It’s a long term investment that may never pay off. It ties us to jobs we will likely want to leave. Those things aren’t worth it just because I don’t want to stare at a wall ten feet away from me and because owning a home when you have children is just what one does. No, not for those reasons alone.

We were driving home from Charlotte the following day and B ask me, “So what did you think of their neighborhood?” Coming from him, such a question wasn’t as innocent as it sounds. We’ve had many cynical conversations about home ownership, so he was just gauging me to see if I still felt realistic about where we live.

“It was really beautiful.”

I left it at that. Right now, our life is a small apartment and I will be content.

You look as though you need a case of warm-fuzzies. I am here to remedy that.

Posted on August 14, 2012 by The Waiting

I knew before we had Wee Cee that Sesame Street was soon going to make a resurgence in our lives. But one can have worse problems, right? So come to find out that every single episode these days has celebrity spots. Celebrities were a common occurrence back in the day as well, but back then they were few and far between. Maybe I just didn’t get the references when I was little so they seemed to not be as common. Anyhoo, sometimes the current celebrity spots nail it completely, like when Will Arnett plays a magician, some not so much.

Not to get all “things were so much better when I was a kid” and all, but seriously, Katy Perry has nothing on John John and Bert. This clip is so tender, so sweet, that it’s on heavy rotation at our place these days, even after Miss C is sleeping.

Enjoy.

The B Word

Posted on August 10, 2012 by The Waiting

You should always have an ongoing project. Last year, my project was being pregnant. And it’s funny, but when I was pregnant with C, actually having a baby was still a hypothetical thing to me. This is probably pretty common among first pregnancies. It’s hard to wrap your brain around the immediacy of actually having a child in your life because you have nothing else to compare it to. You actually have to be selfish because everything revolves around you and your body because of the baby who’s inside. You are hot; you are hungry; you are tired; you are cranky; you are having a baby shower. But in a way, that focus of attention on yourself prepares you for the absolute focus you’re going to have on the baby once it comes. From labor day onward, it’s not about pregnant you anymore. It’s about the thing that made you pregnant in the first place.

Just a point to ponder.

So yeah, last year it was about the pregnancy. But what now? Miss C is my highest priority, so what can I be doing for myself to make me better for her? Ah, good question.

This blog is very important to me. I think that’s pretty obvious, considering that more and more these days I am actually blogging about blogging. How very meta. I’ve always enjoyed writing and I finally have some people who want to read what I have to say, and that’s a huge boost to my self esteem and it encourages me to keep going.

Thus enters the B word.

No, not that B word. The other one.

I am going to write a book.

I have about 1,000 ideas that I need to get out of the ephemera of my brain and I am finally going to do it. What I don’t have is an outline, a schedule, a timetable, or a lot of practical knowledge of the proper course that I should take in fleshing out my plan. But what I do have is the will to do it and the knowledge that going through the exercise of writing a book will be 100% worth it. The longest thing I’ve ever written up to now was my senior thesis in college. At 35 pages, it was the product of an incredible amount of studying and thinking, but I was extremely proud of it when I finished it. Still am.

So that’s the long project. One of my shorter term goals is to start freelance writing. Lately, B and I have been talking a lot about Miss C’s education and what we want to provide for her as far as that goes, and the thing that we keep going back to is homeschooling. We don’t know where we’ll be living once she reaches school age, but we feel strongly about our abilities to educate her. However, if this plan is to transpire, one of us (likely me) will be home with her full-time, which limits our earning capacity. And what would I do if I could do anything, professionally? Write from home. I started looking into doing this last year, but my resolve diminished the bigger my uterus grew. Yeah, it was a teensy bit distracting. But now it’s time to get moving with that.

So these are tall orders. However, I look at my daughter in amazement with the thought that I made her. Even saying those words – my daughter – still leaves me dumbstruck. I have a daughter. B and I end our days talking about our baby, and the very fact that these conversations occur leaves me with with disbelief that this beauty is my life. I have come so far already, so I know that I can meet my resolve to just say some things in a written document. Words are small, but when you put them together properly, they get close to reproducing the joy of life.

I’m gonna try.

Tales of the World: Get Obsessed

Posted on August 8, 2012 by The Waiting

Gather ’round, kiddos. It’s time for another installment of Tales of the World for Wee Cee!

When I was in elementary school, once a month the teacher would hand out a Scholastic Book Club order pamphlet. Printed on fragile bible paper in full color, these handouts detailed books, books, and more books that could be yours if your mom deigned to order them for you. Which my mom did. By the dozen. She was (and still is) awesome like that. My own take-home lesson from this post is to just get my kid the books she wants. Reading never hurts.

Source

In third grade, Scholastic made a mistake and sent me a book I hadn’t ordered: Exploring the Titanic by Robert Ballard. Blessed Scholastic, blessed error. By the end of the day, I was wholly entrenched in the Titanic disaster and there was no chance I was going to send the book back. It was terrifying and majestic. It was at the bottom of the ocean. It was covered in rustcicles. It was called Unsinkable, and it sank on its maiden voyage. The irony blew my eight-year-old mind. Just think about it for a second and it will blow your mind too. It was called Unsinkable, and it sank on its maiden voyage. Come on. You can’t make this stuff up.

The pictures and photos in the book were eerie and frightening. Such grandeur and life were lost all because of an iceberg and foolhardiness. There was one picture of a porcelain doll head that was just laying on the ocean floor among all kinds of other debris. Its clothe body and hair had been eaten away years and years ago. It was creepy and bizarre.

We didn’t have The Ring when I was a kid. We had this. Source

Thus I became obsessed with the RMS Titanic at eight years old. I couldn’t resist the draw of this modern-day catastrophe of biblical proportions. I drew pictures in art class of the ship going down. I read A Night to Remember and was genuinely surprised when my classmates weren’t reading it too. I knew the history of the ship and could give you a hourly account of its descent into the abyss. I knew the number of rivets holding her hull together. I was fixated.

The thing that strikes me now is how morbid my fascination with the Titanic was. The movie was still years away from coming out, so it was not through the guise of a romantic narrative that my interest was sparked. That would have made sense for an eight-year-old girl. Instead, it was through the images of a slowly disintegrating passenger ship at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean that I became obsessed with human frailty and the remnants left behind when disaster strikes. I allowed myself to be engrossed in the events that brought her demise, and in a way that (perhaps) made it less likely that I’d ever have to go through such a catastrophe myself. Studying an event from the comforts of my own home disarmed it a little and made it an abstraction rather than a reality.

Becoming fixated on a person, an idea, or an event as a kid is a function of being young and having a safe, comfortable life. You can make time for a childhood obsession when you have moments to spare and brain matter open to devote to such superfluous things. The big, huge daunting world becomes a bit smaller and easier to digest when you can look at it through the lens of one small aspect of it. You can delve deep into the depths without leaving your parents’ side.

B and I often wonder what Miss C will latch onto when she gets older, what she will become intrigued with. Whatever it turns out to be, we will feed it. Childhood curiosity is delicious and we will cater to her whims, whatever they end up being.

Related Posts:

Tales of the World: Bad Dates

Tales of the World: Just Saying No

The Waiting

Turns out, it's not the hardest part.

Monthly Archives: August 2012