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I swear to Od, Noah really is Jason's kid. Our mailman was a lady.
(My keyboard seems to be better, but still acts up after I type a lot. Which means I really have no choice but to post photos instead. No choice!)
And this one goes out to Amy H. and all my girls from Austin:
Seriously. He will smack you with his fabulous handbag.
Heylook. There shouldbea space in that title. Andright heretoo.
I plannedto write a little more about ournew house today, plus some city-to-suburbs angst with an extra scoop of whining,but my spacebar is notworking. Ihaveto hitit several times, really hard, BLAMBLAMBLAM, to get it to work,whichmeans this morning's Advice Smackdown column tookme about seven hours to write,whatwith all the blamming. And I still have to figureout ifMamapop and ClubMomare blam-worthy.
I am tired of blamming. So there will beno blamming orextra spacebarstrokes here.Noneatall!
I actually didtry to fix itmyself, andthought after I yanked thekey off andfound a tiny bit of foil from Hershey'sKiss (pink,for Easter!)underneath that I'dsolved the problem.But no. Keyboard still bein a slut bitch and oh crap, there oes the G key.
I don'tknow how orwhy,but I am bettin this isall Noah's fault somehow.He makes everythin sticky these days.
He's startin to mugfor thecamera.It'sprettyhilarious.
Dude, look at that messed-uphair. Where the hell is this poorkid's mother?
(I AMGOIN TOTHROW THIS LAPTOP OUTTHE DAMNWINDOW I SWEAR TO OD.)
Shortly after I posted yesterday, Noah and I took a quick jaunt to the pediatrician to confirm what I already knew (double ear infection! yum!), and then headed over to Target to fill the second prescription for him in the span of two days.
(On Sunday Jason went and got him some Baby Zyrtec. Did you know they make Baby Zyrtec? It smells like bubblegum, tastes like asswater and comes swaddled in your choice of a precious little pink or blue hankie.)
(Okay, I am just plain making shit up for no good reason now.)
I figured I'd drop the prescription off, wait a few minutes for it -- perhaps browse the nearby aisles to see if there have been any exciting breakthroughs in my OTC pain-relief options -- and then we'd be back home in no time.
Of course, I arrived right as the pharmacy was closing for lunch, which meant I had at least an hour and a half to kill.
Free time. To kill. In Target. That's like the most expensive prescription co-pay EVER.
TOTALLY REASONABLE THINGS I BOUGHT:
1) Underwear, because honestly. The tags on the ones I currently wear say "The Gap" but I don't think The Gap ever sold split-crotch panties.
2) Cropped lounging-type pants, for I am a fully-certified Professional Lounger.
3) Socks for to be wearing to the Gymboree, because otherwise I'd have to wear the Community Socks.
4) Some shorts for Noah.
AND THAT'S WHERE THINGS WENT TERRIBLY OFF THE RAILS:
5) New changing pad covers! Because I deserve them!
6) Plastic Dora the Explorer placemats! Because...uhh...
7) More sippy cups! Take & Toss bowls! Look how pretty and colorful!
8) A Raffi CD! What! The fuck!
9) A spare copy of Brown Bear, Brown Bear because ours always feels sticky.
10) A sundress for me, because if there's anything I love more than wearing a fabulous outfit, it's wearing a fabulous outfit that I got for $17.99 from Target. Except perhaps wearing it to Target. Oh yeah. That's good stuff.
11) Other miscellaneous stuff that I could not ever live without, except that now I don't remember what any of it was, but the next thing I knew Noah's prescription had been ready for over an hour and I was out more than $200.
Oh, and also a SpongeBob Squarepants ball, because if there is one thing Noah needs, it's another goddamn ball. I can count six...no, seven balls scattered around the living room right now. They're his favorite toy and also his new favorite word. "A BALL!" he says delightedly, even if he's holding two or three.
I realized, though, as we wandered through the toy aisles at Target, that he's actually just calling anything that looks like a toy "a ball."
"A BALL!" (Points at a puzzle.)
"A BALL!" (Points at a stuffed bear.)
"A BALL!" (Points at a plastic lawn chair.)
So I handed him the SpongeBob ball in an effort to TEACH HIM, to make Target shopping EDUCATIONAL, to reinforce what, in fact, A DAMN BALL is.
And of course, he promptly licked it. Naturally.
So while he may not know specifically what A BALL is, he's definitely on to me and my "you lick/gum/chew/smear snot on it, you buy it" rule. I am absolutely unable to put something that Noah has put in his mouth back on the shelf. Especially now, with a double ear infection and five hundred kinds of nastiness leaking out of his head holes.
The thing is, I know that other parents are probably completely okay with putting gummed goods back -- perhaps even this particular SpongeBob ball had been similarly French-kissed by some other toddler -- but...well. We WERE there to get Noah some antibiotics, so I figure it will all balance itself out in the end.
When Jason came home last night I was on the couch, wearing my new sundress with the tags hanging off, surrounded by otherwise unpacked Target bags, eating Ben & Jerry's from the carton. I had the decency to be embarrassed.
"How much did you spend there?" he asked grimly.
I told him, eyes on the floor. Oh my god, I have a problem. I am one of those people.
"Huh. That's exactly what I spent there yesterday." he replied. (THINGS HE BOUGHT: pajamas for Noah, t-shirts for him, photo frames, impulse-buy DVDs, citronella candles, realistic-looking fake flowers for the bathrooms that I accidentally watered already.)
(Oh, and A BALL. Help us.)
Dear God, am I still talking? Jesus. Lemme just post a picture and put us all out of our misery.
Noah: A BALL!
Jason: Crayons!
Amy: Crowns!
Noah & Jason: Ew. Really?
(Supercute shirt by Ellie's Party, btw.)
...because the past few days have gone like this:
Snot. More snot. Allergies? Zyrtec! Snot. Hmm. Sinus infection? Snot snot. Snot. Ear infection? Oh. Well, crap. And also snot.
Poor Noah. He is not well. And he has to deal with parents who call him "Snotface" in public, to the horror of other people in line at the Target pharmacy. It's a term of endearment, honest! Just like Pinchy McSquishbutt.
Don't ask.
Hey! Look! Here's the tire! It's still down in the basement.
Shut up, Tire. You're obviously drunk.
It's not just me, right? There's definitely something going around. Something in the air, maybe. Or in the water. Or in the multiple cups of coffee I drink to function during the day because I can't sleep at night.
Maybe it's that winter came back and ate spring and all the pretty little flowers that were blooming in my yard. Maybe it's because I even have a yard in the first place, and I miss our old condo and the cement and grit of the city. Maybe it's that Noah's nose has been leaking like a faucet for days now, that Jason's already sick and I'm trying not to even acknowledge the scratchy feeling in my throat.
Maybe it's the terrible news at Virginia Tech and my inability to turn of effing CNN.
I don't know. Maybe it's just all these Girl Scout cookies I've been eating. (Damn you, Tagalongs! Fill the void already!)
Whatever it is, I don't think I'm the only one feeling this way. (Right? Right? That's your cue, commenty-type people. Hello? Fuck.)
I'm sad. Anxious. Constantly on edge. I've been having nightmares. Stupid anxiety dreams mixed with full-on weird ones, like a recurring dream where I've killed someone and gotten away with it -- but then the Backyardigans start singing to me from the television about how murder is oh so wrong, oh so wrong! and I am consumed with guilt -- Dostoevsky meets children's television, folks. Only in my brain. So I just stay up all night instead.
It's hard to write when I get like this. I know it will pass, I know everything is fundamentally okay, and I know I would regret writing some overwrought, navel-gazing rumination on any of the stupid petty shit that's wigging me out, so I should just...I don't know. Shut up and post some photos or something.
I would, except I don't know which Photoshop filter gets rid of toddler snot-face.
So here. Hold this photo up to a mirror and discover the name of the one thing that pretty much delights me to no end. It's the amalah.com brain teaser placemat!
(God, but I am dumb. Physics! Objects in mirrors, and such.)
We still don't have our archives back after this happened, and we don't have a solution to the Open Thread/captcha quagmire, but damn, it's good to have the site back. Because where else am I gonna post stuff like this? The Muppets make everything so much better.
Despite multiple blog posts to the contrary, I am a pretty laid-back, non-neurotic mom. Shut up! I am.
We don't own flash cards or go to Mandarin Chinese lessons. I can call a spade a spade, a rip-off a rip-off and a Baby Einstein video a baby-crack de-mobilizing device. I am (relatively!) calm in the face of injury and illness and the only reason all my outlets have the plastic pluggy things is because we requested that the previous owners of our house leave them. (Seriously. It's in the contract. Plastic pluggy things to convey.) I believe that children don't really need to be pushed and entertained and enriched 24 hours a day, and that basically all my son needs is love, a (relatively!) safe environment to explore, free time to do that exploring, and a mother who doesn't eat all the Goldfish crackers.
We've never been to the emergency room or used our pediatrician's after-hours answering service. I shrug when he eats dirt and bathe him every other day. I believe that tantrums are an annoying but necessary part of a child's journey towards language, that milestone charts should be taken with a grain --make that a rim -- of salt, and that my kid doesn't need to be doing the same things your kid does.
I believe that I have been blessed with a healthy, normal and perfectly average child, and while I know I am not a perfect mother I believe I am damn good enough.
And yet something happens to me during the 20 minutes or so that I spend waiting for the actual doctor at Noah's pediatrician's office. Something...insane.
The nurse comes in, checks Noah's weight and height and head circumferance, asks a couple milestone questions -- and then says the doctor will be in shortly.
And that's when I crumble. I obsess and overanalyze. I become convinced that something -- no, EVERYTHING -- is massively wrong.
Linda wrote about those goofy milestone questions a couple weeks ago and confessed to being flummoxed by the block-stacking one. I felt a twinge of relief when I read that, because at least I know that Noah stacks blocks. He is a block-stacking genius. Five or six blocks at a time! Mega-Blocks stacked as tall as his head! This next visit will be a piece of cake!
And it was. At first. Noah's not much of a talker yet, but I felt confident that we fell within the "four-to-ten words" spectrum. He does not, however, know his body parts.
He will maybe lift his shirt to show you his belly, if you ask, and if he's in the mood. (Hint! He is never in the mood.) If you ask the question when he's naked, however, he just sort of...pinches his chest where his shirt would be. So I would not really count that as Harvard-level body-part identification skills there.
Oh! And this one: Can he drink from a cup without spilling?
Me: blink. blink blink.
It has never even occurred to me to hand Noah an actual cup. Why would I do that? It's madness! It's like when my mother-in-law gave me a set of FINGER PAINTS for Noah. FINGER PAINTS! That's bullshit, man. I graciously thanked her and then hid them in the basement, since I plan to keep Noah unaware of finger paints until junior high.
Wait. Why did she measure his height again after getting his weight? Oh, Jesus. He's underweight. Terribly malnourished. Look at him! You can see his ribs! His belly is fat, but...oh, Jesus. It's fucking DISTENDED. How did I miss that?
And then the nurse came back in after a couple minutes to re-measure Noah's head. Which meant...oh, Jesus. Look at him! Look at that gigantic head! He's a Q-tip! He's got fluid on the brain! He's got craniosynostosis! How did I miss that?
So for 20 minutes this morning, I sat in a small exam room, terrified out of my damn mind. My poor child. My poor underweight hydrocephalic cup-challenged child who couldn't find his nose with both hands and a flashlight. He deserves so much more. He deserves a mother who knows when something isn't right and calls the doctor right away. A mother who doesn't leave him to be raised by wolves or Noggin or the dustbunnies. A mother who will sit there with some body-part flashcards and GET HIM UP TO SPEED ALREADY.
I glanced through all the paperwork the nurse gave me (potty-training, vaccines, sample college application essay questions) and noticed that Noah was supposed to have a check-up at 15 months. Which he did not. Because I did not know that.
Oh, Jesus. Now they're calling Child Protective Services. Look, he has a scratch on his shoulder. Where did that come from?
I should have cut his fingernails. Maybe I can bite them off.
Noah! Let's sing a song! Look! There's Humpty-Dumpty! Mama will sing for you, my precious!
Seriously. I tried singing to him, like I was trying to cram at the last minute for an exam in parental involvement. Noah let me sing one line and screeeeeched for me to stop, shaking his head no and wailing in misery. I gave up and started fattening him up with Goldfish crackers.
Noah - 18 months
weight - 25 pounds even
height - 33.5 inches
head circumference - 19.5 inches
I've been blessed with a healthy, normal and perfectly average child, and that is damn good enough.
1) Hey! Localites! Next year you MUST attend the Share Our Strength/Taste of the Nation event. Was a great party. Great! So great that now, many many hours later, the only word I can think of to describe it is...great. Well, that and...fuzzy. Wine-soaked. Creamy polenta served with braised shortribs and some kind of mystery fried foodstuff on a stick that I kept seeing people with but was never able to locate, which pissed me off because one of my guiding culinary principles is FOOD + FRIED + STICKS = AWESOME.
2) Also awesome was the fact that Jason and I were invited as (bwah ha haaaa) press, which meant we were tagged with the Yellow Wristbands Of I'm So Blogging This. Didn't stop one cute little old guy from scolding me about my hair ("You have gorgeous blonde hair and look what you did to it! Why? Whyyy?"). But after I explained the whole Pink for the Cure thing, he graciously asked for my site address so he could donate. Which is when I realized I had no business cards or even a damn pen. MOST. AWESOMEST. NETWORKER. EVER.
3) Also most awesome: mah shoes.
Yeah, I was totally bleeding into the ankle strap by the end of the night, but they were worth it.
4) Hey! Look!
This was a total shock, actually, and I actually froze the first time I saw the logo projected on the massive screens around the event and just stood there pointing, all "eh eh eh hey!" Jason donates all his ad proceeds to different hunger-related charities every month -- and apparently his small check was enough to get him classified as a local sponsor.
That makes me kind of...sad, actually. It's really humbling to think about how much money we spend on food every month and how far the cost of just one meal out could go towards helping hungry children in our very own city.
*hangs head in shame, mumbles something about the getting the shoes on sale at least*
5) SPEAKING OF CHILDREN, here's a lesson for everyone: if you are going to have a conversation about how your child has never even attempted to climb out of his crib yet, about how it has never even occurred to him that it's an option, don't be all shocked when THE VERY NEXT MORNING you wake up to hear a terrific thumping sound, followed immediately by the wails of your baby who just fell ass-over-teakettle over the crib rail.
(Edited to add Thing #6: Mamapop. Argh. ARGH! Our server went boom. Or almost went boom, and then our host went GAR! SMASH! and yanked the site down and won't put it back up, or something like that. I couldn't really follow the whole story because my head exploded HOURS AGO. Basically: we're too sexy for our hosting provider. Also too popular. And way too obsessed with liveblogging Anna Nicole Smith babydaddy news. So the site will be moving to a shiny new server this week, and I could not love my safe little world of Typepad more at this point, because they never make me deal with scary things like server load times and CPU storage and blah blah talkyspeak blah.)
Ok, so it really does not take much to make me cry. Am hopelessly weepy and sentimental and I may be crying RIGHT NOW just from trying to think of an example of something lame and ridiculous that recently made me cry. Like that Free Hugs video. Or those Kleenex commercials with the couch. Or the heartbreaking beauty of my pizza bagel.
All of that setup to say NO FAIR WITH THESE COMMENTS. All the honesty and bonding and gorgeous tributes to your boys and your girls and Christ, my eyes got all blinky and shit while reading them. (ALL of them, plus the emails, every one, yes.) So...thank you.
In a similar vein, thank you to everybody who recommended the Ellyn Satter book after the OMFG MY KID WON'T EAT GOING TO STARVE TO DEATH IF I DON'T MURDER HIM FIRST post. (Uh. This one.) I finally went out and bought it last Friday (and bumped into reader Krista* while there, in a overwhelming confluence of Internetness) and spent the entire weekend reading it while slapping myself in the forehead.
A couple of the big mistakes I made:
1) Caring, obviously.
2) Doing the short-order cook thing, where I'd whisk away a rejected food and make him something else, and then something else after that.
3) Trying to force a spoon into his mouth because I figured if he'd just TASTE it, he'd LIKE it.
4) Entirely too much juice and milk between meals.
5) Completely unrealistic portion sizes.
6) Did I mention the caring? How very desperately I cared? Which resulted in hovering and hand-wringing and the renting of garments and probably some liver damage?
Wow, that's way more than a couple mistakes. I am a freaking moron.
Last night Noah ate chicken. And fresh fruit. And lentils. He gobbled up matzo brei (also known as the Hangover Special in our house) without even hesitating. Today he ate a meatball and applesauce and part of my pizza bagel. The Squish Test is no more. We smile at each other during meal times now.
I honestly cannot believe how quickly Ellyn's advice turned things around. He refused to eat a bite of about two or three meals, but I refused to care. I fought the temptation to make up for those meals with cups of milk or juice. And then...boom! He started eating. Tasting foods he's refused to even try for months now. Eating everything on his plate and then asking for more.
I'm just...dude. THANK YOU, INTERNETS.
Don't get me wrong -- he's still kind of weird. He eats his applesauce off the tip of his index finger because he refuses to use his spoon. I have to check his nose after every meal because of his penchant for shoving food up there. (THANK YOU to wilddreemer for the plugging-a-nostril-blowing-into-mouth trick: that saved us from at least two trips to the emergency room and/or having to explain why my son has a lentil plant growing out of his nose.)
Yesterday we gave him a little Easter basket -- I filled it with some cute Easter-related toys he has owned and ignored since being in utero and a few of those plastic eggs full of snacks. Cheerios, puffed rice and what I figured would be the big hit of the day, a couple Hershey Kisses. He tentatively licked the chocolate, smiled politely and then handed them back to me. The puffed rice was his favorite.
That's just weird. Luckily, I have no problem eating pre-licked Kisses.
Because that's not weird at all.
* And one final THANK YOU to Krista, for leaving out the truly SCANDALOUS detail from our meeting in your comment, which was that my hair was most decidedly un-pink. I feel the need to confess it anyway. I don't know whether the dye is losing its potency or my hair is getting resistant, but I'm having a slut bitch of a time keeping the color in. And after noticing that the full-head applications were turning my hair into crunchy straw I backed down to just a couple pink streaks. Weird suspicious looks from the neighbors are one thing, but crunchy straw hair is quite another. (Also: I am sorry, fuck cancer and all, but there was no way I was going spend the next five years looking at hot pink hair in my driver's license photo.) If I don't apply the color about every other day it washes out almost completely. It's a messy and time-consuming process, and with a fragillion blogs to update and the gentle soul of a child to nurture...yeah. Every other day doesn't always happen.
Anyway, we're a mere $990 away from our goal of $7,000 and my release from pink-zebra-stripe-hair-hell. I'm almost out of aluminum foil and my cuticles look like I've been marinating them in beet juice. (Yes, gloves would be smart. Remembering to buy gloves AT THE STORE instead of the minute I get home would be EVEN SMARTER.)
I apologize for all of my many hair-related deceptions. Here's a photo of me right now, freshly re-highlighted.
As always, I am incapable of getting my entire forehead in the frame. Brilliant.
