Category Archives: Parenting

Bathtime

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Tonight I am inspired by my daughter’s little shoulderblades.

B and I have been spelling out B-A-T-H so much that soon it will be a code for nothing and just another way to tell her that it’s Time. We tell her it’s time for a bath and she runs straight to the tub. Even though she doesn’t need to, she bathes every day because why not? Babies know simple pleasures better than anyone else.

I count 1-2-3-4-5 when she stands up in the tub. She’s usually down by 3. It shouldn’t surprise me anymore when she follows my rules, but I’m still awestruck when she does what she’s supposed to do. Watching her learn and retain is miraculous. Once she didn’t even exist. Then she did. Then she was born. Then she started understanding us. Then she started minding us.

Sitting alongside the tub, I like to get right up in her face and examine her profile. With her pacifier out, I can see her lips and appreciate her jaw when it’s not tightened by the constant sucking. She usually splashes me away because I get too close. Sometimes she smiles under the paci and her eyes beam.

She stretches to get to the rubber duck. Her tiny shoulderblades flex back and forth, a motion that illustrates her body working in harmony. I remind myself to change the lightbulb in the bathroom so I can have more light to see her move.

It is her custom to call out DA-DA when she’s done with her bath. He comes in and dries her while I get her toothbrush ready. She sucks out all the toothpaste before any serious brushing occurs. I act annoyed but knowing that those teeth are connected to those shoulderblades diffuses me. She runs buck naked back to her room. She just learned to run so we let her.

The running, the shoulderblades, the beaming eyes: they are all my C.

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Diapering Memorandum

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Dear Ms. Baby,

We regret to inform you that when you opted in to the Eating and Drinking Program (EDP), you also opted in to the Diaper Changing Program (DCP). For each meal/snack you consume, you will have to report to the changing table roughly two times. As long as your parent/guardian continues to feed and clothe diaper you, these numbers are expected to rise. The anger you have been expressing recently on the changing table may worsen.   However, we understand your frustrations and are here to offer some constructive pointers on improving your situation.

Perhaps you would like to persuade your parents to start using disposable diapers more frequently so as to cut back on potential trips to the changing table. While your mother and father are ever so smug about the environmental and financial savings they incur when they wrap your lower torso in reusable garments, they are knowingly creating more work for themselves and for you. Each time they haul you off to the changing table to change your soiled prefold diapers, they are tearing you away from the pressing matter of removing every single item from every single drawer in the home. Please notify them that by switching to disposables, they will not have to change you nearly as often.

Frequent diaper rashes may be the source of your frustrations when your parents insist on laying you upon the slab. If this is the case, we suggest you procure yourself a tube of diaper cream and have your guardian apply it liberally to your underside. Note: we advise against you performing diaper cream maintenance on yourself. The urge to eat Desitin is just too great and poses many threats to your still-developing innards.

As you know, the time you spend on the changing table can be tedious. If the doldrums persist, consider bringing something to entertain yourself with while you’re lying on your back. Entertaining items include but are not limited to:

• Your mother’s filthy set of keys

• An abridged copy of War and Peace

• Plush bunny

• At least four (4) pacifiers

Should you find that having your diaper changed is too unbearable, you may be a prime candidate for transfer to our Early Toilet Training Program (ETTP). Using a potty is indeed a sign that you are a VBG (Very Big Girl). If your expansive vocabulary of da-da, bye-bye, ma-ma, and mooooooooo does not sufficiently convey to your parents your desire to transition to the toilet, we recommend that you simply drop trow in the middle of the living room and go for it. Your parents will likely get the hint.

Yours,

The Management

"Yeah, so, no. I'm not going to lie down."

“Yeah, no. I’m not going to lie down.”

Mothers Day is great and sad. Twosies.

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Even though Sunday was my second officially-sanctioned Mothers Day as a mom, it was effectively my first one. Last year, C was only about five weeks old on Mothers Day and I had no energy or desire to celebrate. No one was sleeping, no one was eating well, no one felt like a human. I was paying my dues in the New Baby Club and stocking up on the experiences that would make me truly relish the return of sleep. If this was motherhood, I’d take a pass on celebrating it.

I had something to toast to this year. I celebrated my survival by sipping my coffee and eating pancakes B prepared for me. I sneaked a Dove chocolate between them. It was melty and perfect. I celebrated while lounging on the sofa and watching C and B screen an episode of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood on YouTube. I celebrated by fighting the urge to call and apologize for my tardiness when I ran long at my solo date to the coffee shop. I celebrated by showing B how to make fish tacos for us all for dinner. He only cut his finger once when he sliced the avocados.

We put C in her crib at 6:45. She woke up around 9:15, crying from a bad dream. She rarely wakes in the middle of the night anymore so I jumped at the chance to see her and be there with her. B and I had been discussing only a couple days ago how nowadays, we simply put her away at 6:45. We go about our after-hours routines and have to remind ourselves that she is indeed in the other room sleeping and living. By the time we turn our own lights out at 11, we have almost forgotten we’re parents.

She cried out and I held her. She nestled into my chest and I smelled her head. She’s a lanky baby but she is still so slight in my arms. Mere months before, it would have taken hours to pull her together and meet her needs. On Sunday night, it took no more than ten minutes. By 9:25, she was back in her crib.

I felt sad. At some point, this all got kind of easy. It made me pine for the days where I was regularly put through the fire and earning my keep as the parent of an infant. It made me sad for my own parents that they know exactly what it’s like to be needed intensely and then, in the blink of an eye, just standing by in the other room waiting for me to cry out. All we want is to be needed longer.

Parenthood is heartbreaking.

Let’s drink mimosas.

I miss this.

I miss this.

Dining With C

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This will be what I call a Grandmother Post, as in you may have to be C’s grandmother to be interested. We are going to talk about her diet.

In detail.

Fair warning.

I am the proud owner of a terrific eater. And yes, I own my child. I lug that incredibly leggy toddler around like an expensive purse. Only I don’t put my tube of lipstick in her mouth like it’s the little zipper pouch inside the bag.

What.

C eats really well. She has yet to go on a macaroni and cheese hunger strike, which is good because my husband has some strange aversion to the boxed variety and starts retching whenever he sees an ad for it on TV. I don’t even know. I ceased making separate meals for her once she turned one and now she eats little bitty portions of whatever we’re having. This is a win-win situation because I don’t have to work at making an extra set of kid food, and I’m more motivated to make something halfway healthy, ie. no mayonnaise sandwiches. Not that I ever ate mayo sandwiches to begin with, but you know. Small victories and all. I also never murdered anyone.

*Pats self on back.*

Most mornings, she has yogurt with fruit and cereal. For awhile, I was buying her little readimade fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt cups because one of those super couponing people gave me a TON of coupons while I was staring at the massive yogurt selection at the grocery store. Seriously. She was one of those people who carries around massive file binders full of coupons at the store and buys like 74 rolls of Bounty and 38 boxes of frozen garlic bread and ends up paying $2.75 for her entire purchase. But who am I to judge because she gave me a fat stack of coupons for a brand I occasionally buy, claiming that she only buys the kind with M&Ms. Can’t judge her for that. Anyway, we finally ran out of coupons, and since I’m not going to clip them myself because I’m too busy thinking about blog posts I could write about Bob the Builder and how one of the little songs on that show reminds me of “Like a Virgin”, we are back to good ol’ plain yogurt mixed with Cherrios and blueberries I’ve cooked down a little into a thick, syrupy consistency. She likes it.

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Post-breakfast pic. Also, who is the mom who just now updated her little one-ply infant spittup bibs to proper scoopy toddler bibs? It’s me, it’s me.

Lunch and dinner menus are pretty interchangeable. She usually has something proteiny like peanut butter, beans, or a little pork or beef if we have it around. She likes whole wheat bread, pasta, cucumber, tomatoes, strawberries, chickpeas, and cheese. AND BANANAS. Oh Lordy, does she like bananas! She really likes pesto, so sometimes I spread some on a piece of toast and put some sundried tomatoes on it and melt a little cheese. Yum. I may or may not totally bogart her meals those days.

The best thing about eating the same thing as her is that it gives me the excuse to buy really good, high-quality, grass-fed, free-range, ubiquitously-hyphenated meats. I’m pretty sure I’ve told you before about how we live literally 45 minutes from the largest pork packing plant in the world. And I’m not exaggerating. The entire world. So suffice it to say, there is a ton of scary cheap genetically-modified pork in these parts. We instead pay a bit more for the good stuff at the farmer’s market because you can’t put a price tag on unknowingly eating pig snouts. We talk to the guy who raises it and feel good knowing that we’re supporting him and not putting nasty hormoney animals that lead miserable existences in our bodies.

Salads have made a major resurgence in our lives as of late. B dislikes many salads so I imagine salads and macaroni got together and bullied him when he was a teen. What an after-school special that would have made. C likes salads, though, and she often joins us when we eat baby spinach sprinkled with goat cheese, cranberries, and walnuts. I put a little vinaigrette on it and she om-noms it. She also likes spinach sauteed in a little olive oil and garlic, since she’s a gourmet and all. Or a freak of nature? Let’s stick with gourmet.

Snacks are where this child really shines. Sometimes I fear that her tongue isn’t working properly because some of the things she really shouldn’t like are her faves. B and I are obsessed with wasabi peas because we like to pretend we’re exotic and fancy when we eat them. We usually class-up our feeding frenzy by dropping most of them on the floor. C inevitably gets them and goes.to.town. She licks them and swirls them around in her mouth. She is also a big fan of limes and lemons. The tarter, the better. She sucks on them and then usually comes to ask for more once she’s efficiently removed a couple layers of enamel off her seven baby teeth.

C's first round with Korean food was a big success. Truth: her diaper was a little rough the next day, though.

C’s first round with Korean food was a big success. Truth: her diaper was a little rough the next day.

B and I don’t pretend to have anything to do with C’s very open palate. We are both equally amazed at mealtimes when she actually eats most of what is put in front of her. It will definitely be a confusing and sad day for us when she learns that Dora the Explorer yogurt exists and refuses to eat anything else.

What else should I offer to her? What are some strange foods your kids like? 

Populating Life

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I’m coming off a high induced by playing a rudimentary version of Hide and Seek with C. After dinner, I put in The Fox and the Hound just to see if she was interested in watching it. She wasn’t, but she was wily. She was ready to play that brand of play that possesses babies like the Holy Spirit at a big tent revival. There is something about the interim period between the end of dinner and the beginning of her bedtime ritual that makes the air electric and charged with that same guileless air she wears so effortlessly all the time. We all become possessed and absorbed in hunting each other down and possibly devouring each other.

I was seized when I was in my closet putting some clothes away. Something primal clicked in the reptilian part of my brain, and I just hid. I pushed myself between hanging sweaters and shirts, clicked off the light, and just waited.

And waited.

And waited.

“Heh-EH?”

Tiny fingers wrapped around the door frame and peeked inside.

BOO!

The sound of a toddler screeching in glee is what is keeping the human race going. I was afraid her face would turn inside-out, her cheeks could physically not contain the grin it held.

I rushed across the apartment to her bedroom and hid in the space between her open door and the wall. I learned that in the twenty or so years since I earnestly played Hide and Seek, I evidently never outgrew my inability to giggle while I waited to be detected. She humored me, though, and basically passed out in sheer hysteria when I jumped from behind the door with my arms outstretched like a good-humored Boogeyman.

♥♥♥

Sometimes I have the inclination to apologize for the good things that happen to me. I have been told that I am not very good at taking complements. When joy and good fortune enter my life, I often pass them off as something I never really earned.

But I am embracing the beauty of my life, including this little girl whose joy is so raw and unrefined and inherently her. I recently started reading Happiness Is Not a Disease. Every time I see its title in my Reader, I talk back to it as if it’s reminding me personally that my happiness is not on loan. It is my own, paid in full.

“Happiness is not a disease.”

“That’s true. It’s not. Stop apologizing for yourself, Emily.”

This happiness we experience every day is nothing to feel ashamed of. The electricity of a game of Hide and Seek is not an element outside of myself that chooses to overtake me when it pleases. It is part of me, and I am allowed to celebrate it even if the world outside of the walls of my life is screaming at me to put my own happiness on hold and mourn for it. It is when scary, disturbing things in the world happen that I am in most need of the safety net of an after dinner game with my baby. By relishing her joy, I am made a better human for the world that needs me.

I am populating my life with moments of joy and allowing myself to savor them.

What is your happy place? 

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Disingenuous Elmo

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Disingenuous Elmo is not the opening act of the opening act of the opening act of MGMT at Coachella. It is the theme to much of my first year of parenthood.

One of the real neat things I do when I get thrown into a situation in which I have no idea what I’m doing is play make-believe that I have control. I put on a $9 wig from Party City and trot around like it’s totally normal and gorgeous. I eventually get swept up in the charade and convince myself that my farce is real, which I guess might be the entire point of pretending in the first place. Playing pretend that we have everything figured out is a coping mechanism. We cling to images and symbols that sound right and we want for ourselves. But when those symbols – take Elmo, in my case –  don’t jive with reality, I have to snap myself out of my pantomime and start living as a real person rather than an actor. My neon blue curly wig is not fooling anyone, and it’s only setting me back from embracing my own graying roots.

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No Elmo in sight in this Season 16 cast picture Source

Elmo was still a minor character on Sesame Street when I was a child. In the ’80s, he was just a minion in the Bird Bird Army. But then, when I was in ninth grade, Tickle Me Elmo came out. Little kids got the Crazy Elmo Eyes and parents became equally possessed with Elmo fever, essentially slitting each others’ throats on Black Friday to acquire one of these toys for their kids. I absorbed the Tickle Me Elmo wars as they were recounted on the evening news. As a side note, just remember the next time you are throwing a shoe at your TV for reporting “news” about skateboarding pigs that this has been going on for years. Fluff journalism is nothing new.

I could not have known it at the time, but observing the fixation that both children and parents had on Elmo in 1996 was shaping my view of parenthood, which I wouldn’t enter myself until 2012. I filed Elmo away as the kryptonite of all crying children, and the vibrating doll became the symbol of parental appeasement.

When my day of reckoning finally did roll around and I pushed C from my loins in a moment of triumph with a splash of what-the-eff-have-I-gotten-myself-into, all those old images of Elmo came back to me like the smell of my kindergarten lunchroom. I clung to them and assumed they were collective parenting Truth. I sincerely believed that if things got really bad one day – like, the baby was screaming from dawn to dusk dawn, totally angered that she had gotten stuck with me as a mother – Elmo was the trick to fix it all. All I’d have to do was switch him on and she’d mellow out.

This is as delusional as it sounds. Obviously. Elmo was the furthest thing from C’s mind when she was hungry, tired, or just frustrated. All my attempts to thrust that little red monster on her were met with contempt and ire. This is no surprise, of course. It’s also not the moral to the story.

I continued to perpetuate this image of her that she just loved Elmo.  Look at my cookie-cutter baby. She is so cute and obsessed with a little red monster. Yes, she is just so attached to him and isn’t that just darling? Thank God for Elmo or I’d never get rest! LOL LOL LOL. Platitude after platitude. It was all fabricated by me because I was panicking that I didn’t know who my kid was. Elmo was this symbol I latched onto and perpetuated in my everyday dealings with other parents and in my writing because I didn’t want anyone to know that even though I loved C, I had no idea who she was. No idea. Some days, she was happy as a lark and then she’s have a Jekyll and Hyde moment and turn into a seething teething monster. Her preferences were fickle. Just when I thought she was developing an attachment to a particular toy, she’d scorn it. She really, really liked that damn Gangnam Style, but that didn’t fit in with my image of things babies should like. So I disingenuously convinced myself that Elmo meant something to her even when she couldn’t give a crap about him. All I wanted was a good, safe symbol.

It has been my experience as a parent that all births come in pairs, even if your child wasn’t a twin. First, you give birth to a little screaming salami. Then, in the bloody, mucousy afterbirth comes another screaming infant: yourself. That person is just as foreign to you as your baby. During your childless years, you were in utero preparing to be pushed forth into a foreign, cold world of parenthood. Just like your baby, you baked long enough to survive on the outside, but surviving is not the same as thriving. You still have to figure out who you are and whether Elmo or whatever you selected as your arbitrary mascot is actually yours. You have to shoot spitballs to the wall and see if any stick. And if they don’t, you have to let it go and forgive yourself for not living up to your idealized version of your parent self. Let that effortless love you have for your baby leak into the dwindling supply of love you have for the parent you, that other new baby. Forgive yourself for not being able to anticipate who you would be.

But then, move on.

It took me a year to realize that Elmo was not ours. More importantly, it took me a year to realize that it’s OK to have moments  - nay, weeks – when I look at her and feel like I’m staring at a stranger. Even though I may feel like she changes every day, there is a thin, strong, invisible fishing wire threaded right through her that makes her essentially her. As her mother, I have the ability to find it better than almost anyone else, but only when I stop looking for it and observe her as a whole.

I’m stripping away the Elmos and finding a relationship with my daughter that is better than anything I could have ever seen on the news when I was thirteen.

Sweet Relief

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C’s heart murmur is innocent.

I had just put her down for a nap when I heard my cell phone ring in our bedroom. The curtains were shut and the air had just cut off, leaving the room in a state of solemn coolness. I saw the local area code pop up and I knew the results from her echo cardiogram on Tuesday were in.

The call took less than 45 seconds. Forty-five seconds to let me exhale and know that she is OK. It almost seemed counterintuitive that good news could be shimmied into such a brief period of time. I called B to tell him right away.

“I always knew she was alright.”

“How did you know?”

“Because she’s happy. And even if she wasn’t healthy, she would still be happy and perfect.”

These are my people.

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Pro Tips

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Is it just me, or does the phrase “pro tips” completely sound like the name of a nail salon run out of a trailer park?

Today I am sharing some tips on taking your toddler to Ikea on The Official How To Blog. I am here to help you whether you are a parent of a small child yourself, would like added encouragement to remain childless, or your babies have grown. However, I have to warn those of you in the last group that my post may trigger flashbacks of the worse kind, should you chose to read it.

IKEA

How to find the post:

Click on this link.

Innocent

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So, April. April, April, April.

Last April I was worried sick over my new baby. I didn’t talk much about it in real time because 1, I was exhausted from sheer lack of sleep and 2, because I was busy convincing myself that it was completely my fault that we were struggling like whoa with breastfeeding. It took C six days to gain back her birthweight. I was racked with guilt for supplementing her with formula. I detest admitting fault (even when it’s not my fault) so I swept the entire topic under the rug and pretended that I was completely in control. Hint: I wasn’t. Another hint: no one is (except on those rare occasions that they are.)

Fast forward one year. Today C had her one year checkup. In the waiting room I checked off all the boxes on the worksheet that proved that I have One Healthy Child. It was a wonderful feeling to know that my baby is perfect perfect perfect and that this set of papers was just the document to prove it. She’s walking. She’s babbling. She’s expressing love and care. She’s feeding herself.

They checked her heartbeat.

“Hmmmm. It seems like there is a little murmur. I wouldn’t worry. This is very normal and most of the time it’s an ‘innocent’ murmur.”

Innocent. Like it’s just hanging out in her heart, waiting for the bus. No, ma’am, I don’t mean to cause any trouble. Move along.

But just to be sure this murmur is minding its own business and is really only at the wrong place at the wrong time, being accused of something that it has no intent of doing, C is going in for an echo sonogram next week. I’m worrying over a probable nothing and this is likely days-old April breastfeeding all over again.

It got hot within the last 36 hours. I took C out in her stroller for a walk this afternoon and put on my Teva sandals which I haven’t worn in a year. The leather on them is worn and soft because I traipsed all over Seoul in them during the Korean rainy season. They know my feet but my feet are acting like they are foreign. I had a blister by the time our one-hour walk was over. My feet and my mind are the same. Whenever life introduces a hiccup much like all the other hiccups they’ve known before, I am completely discombobulated. I worry and stress (what’s new?) over small things that will likely be completely remedied by infant formula, meds, and a bit more walking.

This, I am learning, is parenthood. I will worry. Sometimes it will be over small things that are innocent, and sometimes it will be over big nasty beasts that I will remove my gloves and bloody noses for. But I will always do what is best for my girl and care for her every time a new blister boils up.

To All the Words I Haven’t Written Yet

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I was thinking about you tonight as I gave the baby a bath. She squirted me with her rubber duck and babbled an incoherent phrase, and my mind went to you because even though you don’t exist yet, you will soon enough and you will be as big a part of me as this girl who I am a willing slave to.

Some of you will be easy. You will commandeer my fingers and trick me into believing that I am wholly responsible for you. You will be neat and clean and minty and we’ll get along well because you’ll never ask me to help you move, but even if you did I’d be there at 8:00 AM on a Saturday morning with the truck.

Some of you will be hard. You will seem like a good friend when I first think of you, but then I will invite you for coffee and learn that you are completely cracked-out and that when I went to the bathroom you took my wallet from my bag. You will seem like a good, lost soul though and I will become patient with you and keep you around against my better judgment. I’ll eventually publish you in a misguided effort to pawn you off on someone else.

Some of you will be serious and intense. I will develop a crush on you and want to be around you all the time and drink you in because it is with you that real change will be made in the world. I’ll grapple with you and try to impress you, only to spit out ideas that merely hint at your hugeness. You will make me wear a black beret and shirk off tomfoolery and just focus for once on something that has depth and meaning. You’ll take me to rallies and motivate me to say things that triumph Truth and Dignity.

But then I’ll cheat on you with your twin brother: words that are funny. I’ll meet you funny words on the sly and admire my ability to recognize you in nearly everything that’s ever happened to me. I’ll be ashamed to admit that you were there at every funeral I’ve ever been to. Don’t you have any sense of decency at all? Couldn’t you have just realized your place? If you weren’t so likable you’d be a menace.

Some of you will get really popular. Everyone will like you because they know you too. I will briefly become popular by association. I’ll be your date when you get elected prom king. The only thing is, I won’t be elected prom queen. Someone else with poofier sleeves and fifty pounds less girth than me will get that distinction. But I’ll still be proud of you because I know you’ll be leaving with me. I gave you strength and resonance and taught you how to wax on and wax off.

Some of you will not be as popular but you’ll be OK with it because you are secure in who you are. Your grace and eloquence are inherent, and you will take stock in your depth. You will love me for me, laugh at my inside jokes, and allow me to cry and vomit you all out in a messy but necessary way. You are patient and delicious and your soul is old.

Some of you will be a mess of the hotness variety. You will look like you applied mascara and drank a blue Slurpee while participating in a rodeo. People will humor you because you mean well but they are all really wishing you’d just go away and leave them alone and stop raving that the moon is made of rubber bands and that Cap’N Crunch is the lovechild of Thomas Jefferson and Zsa Zsa Gabor. I’ll bring you home, sober you up, and take you out for breakfast the next morning and tell you to get your act together for goodness sake.

Some of you will be long. Some of you will be short. I will regret saying some of you. I will be proud of myself when I say others.

I will love you all. You all will be important. You will help me continue creating a world that makes sense to me. You will grow up with my own fleshandblood child and help me be a better parent to her. You will complete the story I’ve already started writing.

And one day when I’m gone and one or two people are trying to pin down just who I was, they’ll call you up and invite you for coffee. You’ll both laugh and talk and cry and think, and in some way I’ll know of your meeting and be happy.