This Modern World
May 12, 2008
My one Mother's Day request was to finally go to the baby store and finally buy some goddamn shit for this baby already. I bought several packs of plain white onesies, a nursing cover, some cabinet locks and a Mr. Incredible crazy straw for Noah.
We wandered the aisles for a long time, boggling over all the advancements in baby-related gadgetry -- amazing that in just three short years the process of raising children has become even more plug-and-play and battery-powered, although the dearth of Baby Einstein and non-video/movement/breathing monitors and the sold-out display of Born Free bottles also suggests that the Neurosis List is just as long and all-consuming as ever.
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Jason spent 45 minutes installing a single child-proofing latch to a single drawer in the kitchen, only to have it snap and break the first time we opened the drawer to retrieve the scissors.
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We also bought Noah a backyard climber with a slide this weekend, an expense we've always resisted but can now justify because hey! We'll have a whole other toddler who can completely ignore it for years still to come.
Noah spent a few solid hours on it, screaming "A PLAYGROUND!!" at the top of his lungs from the upper-most platform, before the rain started.
Jason took a razor to the box the climber came in and made Noah a ramshackle shantytown in the basement. It's hard to judge which structure is winning as The Greatest Thing In The History Of The World at this point, although I have to admit a slight preference for tea parties inside the cardboard box.
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The rain kept up all weekend, until we finally lost power last night. Jason wandered the house with our one and only flashlight looking for the bag of Ikea tea lights that I swore were in the basement somewhere while I looked for pajama bottoms using the illuminated screen of my iPod.
We lit candles and discussed baby names and paint colors until the rain lulled us to sleep.
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The power came back on around 3 am, in a cacophony of beeps from appliances and blinding light from EVERY LAMP IN OUR BEDROOM, which I'd inadvertently turned on in an effort to make sure all the switches were in the "off" position.
10 minutes later, the house alarm system went off, retroactively alerting us to the fact that the power supply had been messed with and oh hai, there might be an intruder with a hell of a head start on his way to bludgeon y'all to death, sorry.
The alarm woke Noah up from a bad dream involving monsters and some kind of terrible mortal injury to his knee, and we were completely unable to snap him out of the ensuing hysterics. I plugged in another night light, offered him every toy and lovey in his room, turned on some music, supplied him with a special middle-of-the-night episode of Blue's Clues via the On Demand menu, but not less than 20 minutes after getting him back to bed he woke up again, crying about the same monsters and the same joint-related growing pains.
This time I simply got him a drink of water and told him he could spend the rest of the right in mama and daddy's bed, where he'd be safe. He didn't make another peep until 9:30 this morning.
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I told him if he ate a good lunch he could have some chocolate milk with his special Mr. Incredible crazy straw. (Chocolate milk actually being some kind of space-age sneaky fruit-and-vegetable powder from Whole Foods, of course, because we can't possibly just buy some Nestle Quik and be done with it.) He misinterpreted this as a promise that he could WATCH The Incredibles if he ate a good lunch.
We never watch movies during the day -- they're a weekend Family Night special treat -- and while he professes his love and most favoritest affection for The Incredibles (or, Da Increbulls, as he calls it) day in and day out, I always can't help but wonder if his bad-dream monsters POSSIBLY resemble some kind of Big Giant Superhero Blasting Scary Robot, like, YA THINK?
It's still raining. He had his chocolate milk, and now we're curled up in a blanket his grandma knitted for him, watching Da Increbulls.
