Twitch

Psst!

Over here, behind the couch. Shhh! I'm hiding from all the....you know...opinions.

Is it safe to come out yet?

Oh ha, how I kid. All the advice and impromptu product reviews were super helpful...you know...to a point, until my head started spinning and I found myself getting irrationally annoyed when someone would show up and totally bash the product that everybody else seemed to like because they were fucking with my consensus. Don't fuck with my consensus! Or...hmm...that's a really good point you made actually, so maybe I should get out a piece of paper and start making hatch marks in Pro and Con columns for all the different strollers and slings and then my eyeballs started bleeding, the end.

I feel like we have a pretty good handle on the stroller situation and will be sticking with our plan to wait awhile on that purchase -- at the very least to see how the New One takes to babywearing, although...well, if a Phil & Ted's shows up at our local hoity-toity consignment store I will most likely hurl my body at it and start hissing and spitting at all who approach, RAWR, MINE.

Otherwise, total grace, dignity and fiscal restraint. Ahem.

No surprises on the carrier front -- just like every other blog post I have ever read about them, there's no consensus, just some trial-and-error and seeing what works best for you and your particular flavor of baby. We're definitely going with the Ergo, and I am now kicking myself because there was TOTALLY a new-with-tags Ergo on the shelf of the consignment store the last time we were there and I wasn't ready to commit and I called the store and it's long gone and RAWR. NOT MINE.

As for those of you who graciously offered to sell and/or give away certain items, uh...give me a few days to go through the comments again and I shall be contacting you to obtain more information, because AWESOME. Oh! And thanks to everybody who offered the local resources for slings and support groups for people who are too dumb to use slings but like to think they aren't. I will also definitely be checking those out.

But for now, I would like to maybe stop thinking about it all for a few minutes. Whew.

OTHER EXCITING NON-STROLLER UPDATES FROM THE PAST FEW DAYS STROLLER STROLLER SLING MAYA WRAP GAH:

1) After four months of taking my prenatal vitamins, I finally discovered that the "Open at Inside Corner" instructions on the foil packets actually mean ANY inside corner, not just the inside corner that has the little arrow pointing at it. This is terribly exciting, and may have just changed my life completely.

2) Noah will occasionally walk up to you and declare that "I NOT PAID ENOUGH," complete with an exasperated tossing up of his hands. I have no idea what bitter and overtired person first taught him about unfair income disparity in relation to the division of household labor, but I am grateful that she managed to bite her tongue before adding "FOR THIS SHIT" onto the end of that phrase.

3) Yesterday Jason surprised me with tickets to see Ben Folds. He scored them that morning on Craigslist, and people, we were in the fifth row, and honestly he might have just been playing the piano in our living room, if we had a piano in our living room. Which we don't. THE POINT IS I could see his fingers. And the fingers of the nice Wolf Trap sign language interpreters, so I now know the signs for a lot of bad words. Sweet.

4) We're going to Boston to visit family tomorrow. I kind of forgot about this, so I have not packed, and we're taking the train, which means I can't just throw a lot of shit in the car and hope for the best. Plus my in-laws are coming to watch the pets and I think my mother-in-law will be painting some rooms? Rooms for certain small people? THE POINT IS they will be here unsupervised until Monday and I need to put away all the dildos and meth labs. So. Uh. Bye!

19 Weeks & the Obligatory Halfway Point Meltdown

So the pregnancy. It continues.

The baby kicks, mostly at night, when I'm already struggling to find a comfortable position and properly position a pillow between my legs and huffing and puffing like I'm in the third trimester or something. My belly is small and round and (if I must say) rather cute and I like it. It's high and all in front, just like last time, although I still feel curvier everywhere, and hate the way my thighs look in photos. I've only gained a couple pounds, just like last time, and I had to work for them, forcing myself to eat every few hours and not fighting the second serving of strawberry shortcake Jason insisted I eat last night, and oh, but life is SO HARD.

I'm also wracked with the same sort of hand-wringing anxiety as I was last time -- this ever-nagging wait for something to go wrong, for the worst-case scenario to happen. The lack of weight gain, far from being any kind of HA AM AWESOME bragging right, was scaring the crap out of me, and I convinced myself that my belly was far too small for this far along and clearly the baby had some kind of growth problem -- we should have known from those early ultrasounds that consistently measured small! woe! fie! -- until I finally dug up a photo of myself from about the same point last time, and...oh. I look exactly the same. Never mind.

One minute I refuse to let myself assume that we'll actually have a baby at the end of this, and the next minute I freak out because WE NEED TO ASSEMBLE FURNITURE! I HAVE TO ORGANIZE CLOSETS! GO GET THE SWING FROM THE ATTIC RIGHT THIS MINUTE SO I CAN GET THE SERIAL NUMBER AND SEARCH THE PRODUCT RECALL WEBSITES!

So. Yes. Also just like last time. Reruns! How boring!

In between the panic attacks, however, I've managed to spend quite a bit of time overthinking the few pieces of baby gear we need to purchase this time. Namely: slings/carriers and strollers.

EVERYONE WHO DOES NOT ENJOY COMPULSIVELY OFFERING ADVICE RE: BABY GEAR PLEASE FEEL FREE TO WANDER AWAY NOW, BUT I KNOW THIS IS LIKE PORN FOR SOME OF YOU (AND MEEEEEE) SO THAT SORT OF PEOPLE SHOULD STICK AROUND.

Here's my current brilliant plan, and all I ask is that you be KIND when you rush in to point out its many flaws:

I'd like to avoid or, at the very least, put off a new stroller purchase for as long as possible. We made the mistake of buying a stroller while I was pregnant last time, after merrily wheeling it around the store for a few minutes. Not exactly a real-world road-test, when you're trying to drape a heavy diaper bag over the too-wide handles, or navigate over cracked pavement or through tiny city store aisles or fold and lift the damn thing while recovering from a c-section and lugging a 10-pound newborn in a carseat and ARRRGH I hated that stroller so very, very much.

(Peg Perego Aria XT, or something, in case you are curious. Our particular model was discontinued the following year. We picked it because it felt the lightest in the store, only to discover that once you load a baby and a bag onto it the front wheels would lift off the ground and you'd basically be trying to steer while stuck in a permanent wheelie mode. It folded flat but wide and was light but unwieldy and generally just sucked at existence.)

(After that we ordered some rugged European Bugaboo Wannabe called the i'Coo Infinity, sight unseen, because we became convinced that the crappy plastic wheels and lightweight frame on the Peg were the source of all our troubles. The thing weighed 400 fricking million pounds and would only stay folded if you took the time to buckle it shut and everywhere I went I left a path of destruction on either side of me because it was far too big to take anywhere that was not a wide open field, which is all the awesome online demonstration video had shown, ha ha suckers. Try wheeling it through the Gap and suddenly you're dragging three dresses and half the display of fabric belts behind you.)

So now we have a Maclaren umbrella stroller, the love of my life. Sure, it'll tip over if you leave your diaper bag hooked on the handles and remove your child, and the handlebars are starting to wear a bit and I'm not sure the brakes work so well anymore, but it folds up practically pocket-sized and you can sling it over your shoulder and I now every time I see a young, sleep-deprived couple out with a gigantic color-coordinated travel system that outweighs their newborn by a good 30 pounds I shake my head and give them six months before they realize that the crushing, pressing need to downsize totally trumps any prenatal belief that your preshus baybee needs to be surrounded by as much plastic and padding as possible at all times.

So. I plan to strap this next kid onto my body as much as possible for the first year or so. Noah honestly doesn't even ride in a stroller much anymore, and with a late October due date I'm thinking we can probably make it a good six months before the weather warms up enough to really deal with long outdoor two-kid activities that might require the use of a double or tandem stroller.

Thus, mah questions, for the four of you who made it through all that yakkity and are still with us:

1) Recommendations for a good newborn sling or wrap? One that is easy to figure out and would allow me to nurse while the baby is all snuggled in? I've been leaning towards the Moby but am a little concerned about how hot all that fabric might be in the DC humidity and also that I might be kind of too dumb for it, since I've seen mothers at the playgrounds with them and they're practically walking pieces of cotton origami and the kid is still dangling somewhat precariously off their body. Then there's the K'tan and Hotslings and all sorts of gorgeous homemade ones and wheeeeeeee, I'm off to silently rock in a corner now.

2) Recommendations for a six-months-and-up carrier? I know the slings promise to be so ultra-versatile you can carry your kid to college in them, but I still think I'd like a Bjorn or an Ergo for when I don't feel like swaddling up like a mummy. Plus, I know Jason would be more comfortable with something more...uh...buckle-ly and manly. We had a Bjorn last time but not, apparently, the RIGHT Bjorn, the expensive one with the back support, so it killed my back and Noah outgrew it in length awfully quickly. So I'm curious if anyone has used both the Bjorn and the Ergo, and which one you'd recommend.

And while we're at it, we might as well talk strollers too. Side-by-side doubles are just...no, for us, but I have still managed to come up with a frillion different possibilities. A literal frillion! True story!

3) Anyone have the Joovy Caboose? How do you like it out and about in the real world? Is it easy to steer? Noah really dug it at the store but alas, we've learned our lesson that linoleum does not really exist out in nature and the stroller aisles at Babies 'R Us are about four times as wide as a REAL store aisle and they do this on PURPOSE. Because it is all a RACKET and they HATE YOU. Also, is there really any difference between the regular and the lightweight model? Because neither one felt all that lightweight to me, frankly.

4) Jason saw a Phil & Ted's tandem stroller this weekend and fell in love on the spot, but I am loathe to spend that kind of money on YET ANOTHER GODDAMNED STROLLER MAKE IT STOP. Particularly since we just don't use a stroller that much, and I have all these Grand Plans Of Babywearing. But. I could possibly be talked into it, if it's the greatest stroller ever and makes all other strollers look like Hitler. Plus there's a local consignment store that always has the ultra-expensive strollers for sale, so between that and Craigslist I could probably get one used.

5) My OTHER grand idea is to just keep the Maclaren and attach one of those little wheeled platforms onto the back of it. The obvious downside is that Noah couldn't sit down, and I know that once he sees the new baby getting pushed around everywhere he may regress a bit and suddenly WANT to ride in the stroller. Or he might not, or he might constantly try to step off the platform and drive me insane and I'll wonder why I ever passed up the chance to have him buckled in with a 27-point harness or something.

6) Oh. And thoughts on a used Snap-n-Go? For any infant pushing emergencies? This was the one piece of baby gear we DIDN'T get last time and I really regretted it, but I wonder how useful it would be the second time around, since I certainly couldn't use it while out by myself with both kids. UNLESS! The wheeled platform works with it? But by that point maybe I should just get over myself and buy a new damn stroller already?

Okay. I think that's it. I remember that I will need 4,586,029 cloth diapers and about the same number of Soothies nursing gel pads; that there will be very little sleep and that there is nothing wrong with shoving a pacifier in a cryhole if you need to, unless you are okay with a non-hungry-but-screaming newborn using YOU as a pacifier for six hours at a time, and seriously, I let Noah do that to me at the hospital and even became FURIOUS when I found a pacifier in his bassinet after they brought him back from a checkup or something, but then again the hospital lactation consultant came in, took a peek at my bloody butcher's-counter nipples and said yep, everything looks okay here! and then sent me home.

Oh, and the hospital now has a whole new wing with private rooms, so I will not have to deal with someone else's diarrhea and the endless drama that it can cause.

(SHE WOULDN'T FLUSH THE TOILET BECAUSE SHE WANTED THE NURSE TO LOOK AT HER RUNNY POOP FOR SIGNS OF INTERNAL BLEEDING. THE TOILET THAT I HAD TO USE AS WELL.)

Oh God. I kind of repressed that one. Quick, assvice me up, babies. Help me spend my non-existent money before I wonder what exactly I have gotten myself into here.

I used to sleep in on holiday weekends

But man, what a waste of time that was.

Happy Memorial Day, y'all. Now let's all go eat the shit out of some barbeque.

We're LATCH Compatible

So, we've shared a lot this week -- we've loved, laughed, learned! -- and I think we've all made some excellent progress towards Better & Fulfilled Marriages, most specifically in the areas of trust, vulnerability, communication and compromise, but I would just like to say that sometimes it is still all about the winning.

While Jason's suggestion of going a few months without a car payment was indeed fiscally responsible, and while I have no doubt that his offer to "work from home anytime [I] needed the car" was both sincere and well-intentioned, I calmly and rationally and lovingly explained that if I had to clear AND justify every single vehicular-based movement with him for so much as a goddamn week, I would stab him in the ears with a fork while he slept.

Sorry, I cannot blog today. I am far too busy thinking of places I can drive my hot new sensible momcar to. Look out world, it fits TWO carseats and features rugged all-weather mats for maximum stray-Cheerio collection. Wicked sweet, dude. Perhaps I shall go challenge some area minivans to a street race.

Out Californee Way

My Internet died yesterday morning, very suddenly, but I didn't think it was anything unusual -- I get bumped off our wireless router occasionally and it's never anything some random plug-jiggling or power-cycling won't fix -- but yesterday was different. I couldn't get back on. I power-cycled everything from the router to my laptop to the refrigerator two rooms over and still, no Internet. I sent some frantic emails from my iPhone -- helpless-sounding ones to my husband ("can I like...plug something into the wall? all old school and shit? does the Internet still sometimes work like that?") and profanity-laden ones to everybody else ("MAH LIMBS HAVE BEEN REMOVED! I NEED WIKIPEDIA! ALSO HOW DO YOU SPELL SCHADENFREUDE?")

And then my phone's internet capabilities died in the late afternoon, as if a black cloud of non-connectivity had settled over the entire house, and I was completely lost and unable to find anything to amuse myself with, so I watched the Food Network and attempted to reboot the router once every 3.218 minutes, just in case that suddenly did anything.

Finally I managed to find an actual network cable in our basement and plugged it in and voila! Internet! Provided I didn't move more than two-and-a-half feet away from the router, which is...not near any chairs. I pulled up a chair and sat down and prepared to make up for all the lost hours ("BLOG BLOG BLOG JEZEBEL GOOGLE NEWS FARK BLOG ADDICTIVE FLASH GAME BLOG") but found myself just staring at a blank Typepad page in bafflement. I couldn't write anything. I was stuck. That damn network cable was strangling the flow of ideas and this chair was uncomfortable and not my normal blogging couch and anyway, that's why I never got around to writing a follow-up to Friday's entry and all the awesome comments and responses, because all I could finally think to write was a tantrum about not having Internet, and I felt you deserved more than that.

The Internet mysteriously started working again 30 seconds before Jason got home and has been fine ever since, which: obviously, because how else could you be reading THIS tantrum about now having Internet, i.e. exactly what I just said I could have written yesterday but didn't but MY POINT IS, I'm really not getting much sleep lately.

So I don't really feel like I'm at my sharpest or wittiest these days, and I've been struggling to come up with a response to Melissa's comment:

But also, this really scares me. I'm a lawyer, fiance is a lawyer, we both work long hours, and no way we can work these hours once we decide to have kids. It's clear I'll be the one to cut back the most (although he'll frankly have to as well, because seriously, we were both up until 4am working last night). Anyway, your comments about staying home and its effect on your opinion of yourself scare me. Your comments about feeling like you're always working to meet deadlines but yet you feel like a drain on the finances scare me. Comments about it not occurring to him to put the kid to bed or brush the babies teeth scare me. And the 345 comments agreeing with you scare me. I don't want to resent myself. Or my husband. I don't want to feel like I can't go to as many happy hours as him b/c what I do isn't as important. But I look at you and everyone else and it seems like it's simply inevitable? Scary.

Dude, I know, right? It IS scary. It scared the ever-loving shit out of me three, four, five years ago. It scared the shit out of me Thursday night, while I sat at Chipotle alone, both relishing the damn LUXURY of sitting alone while also feeling a tad terrified at my aloneness -- what if Jason and I ever had a really big fight? What if there was ever a fight where I wasn't sure of an inevitable resolution and calm apology from both sides? What if he cheated? What if he left me? What would I do? I mean, screw the heartbreak and all that shit, what would I do? How would I pay bills, rent, car payments?

(I would like to remind everyone that I got myself into this state all because he DIDN'T BRING HOME A BURRITO LIKE I WANTED. Menfolk, please take note of Exhibit A of the Female Mind and FEED US ACCORDINGLY.)

I'm just gonna take a deep breath and toss this out there now: our marriage almost ended once. Years and years ago, long before Noah. We got through it, obviously, but...it was bad. Awful. We never talk about it and yet I know neither of us will forget it, and we both blame ourselves for letting things get to that point. We got married young. We grew up and apart. We settled into a day-to-day roommate rut before we were out of our mid-20s. We were always working late, he was always in meetings and too busy to talk, then we got home and watched TV and went to bed and then woke up the next day to jockey silently for the shower and he'd go back to work and meetings and I would go back to work where a married guy friend lavished me with email and IM attention all day and we would go out for lunch and listen to my stories and make me laugh and whatever, we were FRIENDS and he was MARRIED and SO NOT MY TYPE, ANYWAY. Then Jason would IM me during the day to remind me to pick up the dry-cleaning.

Sigh.

No, I didn't cheat on Jason or have any type of physical affair, thank GOD, but the betrayal was still there. I didn't really want the other man who was sending me text messages on my phone, but...I liked the text messages. I liked feeling like I was interesting and new and someone you looked forward to seeing in the evenings, regardless of whether or not I remembered to bring home the dry-cleaning. Those are all hard requests to articulate -- sort of like Emily's story about her husband bringing home flowers after she asked for flowers but that's not really the point because...uh...I want you to want to bring me flowers. Or something like that.  It felt easier at the time to just disengage from my marriage than to save it.

When the situation finally became officially Ugly and Ultimatum-Like, Jason looked me in the eyes and grabbed my hands and told me that I was worth fighting for.

And I was shocked, because never in my life have I felt like such a bad, worthless person.

And all that happened when we didn't have children, when I worked and showered everyday and got promotions and bonuses and plenty of sleep.

I guess I'm telling this story just to say...it's ALWAYS SCARY. None of us want our relationships to fall apart or be anything different than they are on the glowy day of the proposal or wedding or when you first collapse on a mattress on the floor of your first home, surrounded by paint cans and champagne glasses and dreams of coming home to candlelit dinners and one day gently laying your newborn in a crib in the spare bedroom.

Jason and I talked a lot about what happened on Thursday. I plagiarized y'all copiously -- I hope you don't mind -- using Kara's stomach flu analogy to explain my rocky relationship with food and Starbuck's assurance that we are simply in the most financially draining time of our life, no way around it, but it's not forever. I connected the dots between his 3 pm "oh I'm going to happy hour, won't be late" email with the fact that a girl's night out for me gets planned a month in advance if at all, and that his recent suggestion that we just go "a couple months" without a second car after the lease is up was just salt in my already-isolated, never-leave-the-house, its-not-like-YOU-have-anywhere-to-be wound. It was a good talk, one that we needed to have, all very calm and therapeutic and we baked a batch of chocolate-chip cookies while we talked. 

At some point, however, the self-mockery many of you gently chastised me for on Friday reared its ugly head and I jokingly said something like, "I promise I won't ALWAYS be this much of a drain!"

This made him put down the spatula and step away from the stove in shock. He looked me in the eyes and grabbed my hands and told me I wasn't a drain, he has never thought that, not once.

So yes,it's scary. You put your faith in the other person to not cheat on you or hurt you. You let them make the mortgage payments while you pursue a law degree or a writing career or stay home and raise the children. You trust them to celebrate your successes and to always be on your side and to never hurt your feelings in public. To forgive you when you mess up. To put up with you even when you're driving each other ABSOLUTELY CRAZY ABOUT <UNRELATED TOPIC>. And to remember that you are worth it, worth talking to, worth fighting for.

And likewise, you promise to remember that they're worth it all too, and to take a deep breath sometimes and just let yourself get a little speechless over the loveliness of your imperfect, frustrating, wouldn't-change-it-for-a-billion-dollars life.

Night of the Meatloaf

Last night, I sat alone in a corner booth of a fast-food burrito joint, with black mascara streaks all over my face.

It was awesome, as you can probably imagine.

Jason sent me an email in the afternoon to tell me there was a work happy hour he had to go to, but he wouldn't be too late.

I sent him an email reminding him that, in typical end-of-the-week fashion, we had no food in the house, so could he pick something up before he came home? Burritos from Chipotle would be good, I suggested.

Mmmm, Chipotle, I thought, after hitting send. Chipotle would be very, VERY good.

And so I waited. I fed Noah his dinner, lamented the lack of ANYTHING ELSE EDIBLE in the house, at least anything edible that wouldn't 1) turn my stomach or 2) spoil my appetite for the sure-to-be delicious burrito that would arrive any second now, and then I spent an hour engaged in a completely pointless and circular argument with Noah about exactly what potty-related business was worthy of an M&M, and no, you don't get one for just sitting there, and stared at the clock.

7 pm.

7:30.

God, I was hungry.

At 8 pm Jason came home. That would be...late, in my mind. I struggled to hoist myself off the bathroom floor and almost blacked out. My blood sugar was crashing through the floor but thank God there was something to eat in this damn place now.

When I got downstairs, Jason was putting groceries away. He'd gone grocery shopping. There was no Chipotle. I asked him what he'd gotten for dinner and he gestured towards the packages of raw meat on the counter. Raw meat that would all need to be cooked.

And never mind the fact that I am eating almost exclusively vegetarian these days, because meat -- the look, texture, taste of all of it, including fish and poultry -- makes my still-delicate stomach flip-flop. I will eat it, usually when we go to some food event that Jason signs us up for, but these nights invariably end with me dry-heaving in a restaurant bathroom. If I am not expressly in the mood for it, I might as well be choking down grubs on Survivor.

Last night, something about the sight of all that raw meat just made me lose. My. Mind.

"IT'S EIGHT O'CLOCK!" I railed. "EIGHT! AND NOW I'M SUPPOSED TO COOK? I TOLD YOU TO BRING SOMETHING HOME! YOU TOLD ME YOU WOULDN'T BE LATE! I'M ABOUT TO PASS OUT AND YOU BRING HOME MEATLOAF MIX? THAT TAKES OVER AN HOUR!"

I stormed around the kitchen, coursing with hunger and hormones. Jason shrugged and told me to uh, get over it, he didn't pick up Chipotle, too fucking bad. Here, have some pita chips, or some cheese. I reminded him that dairy has also been particularly unkind to my digestive tract as well. As for the pita chips, well...I just didn't want any damn pita chips.

"What is your PROBLEM today?" he asked, referring to an email I'd sent him earlier about something completely unrelated, in which I declared that he was Officially Driving Me Crazy About <Unrelated Topic>, Oh My God.

It was your typical male-female fight. He saw the literal issue at hand, which was not a big deal. He went to the grocery store, so just pick something else and eat it.

I saw hours-long abandonment and a refusal to listen to me or take my pregnant needs seriously, even if to him they sound trivial. No matter how many times I've told him about the meat thing and the food cravings thing and the food aversions thing, I still get the sense that he thinks I'm just trying to be difficult. And gee, you know what? I'd like to go to happy hour with adults some time too! But I don't! Because that would inconvenience YOUUUUU and make you leave work early and WE ALL KNOW how much more important YOUR JOB is and I paced and stewed and composed eloquent tirades in my head about why this is about SO MUCH MORE than burritos and going grocery shopping when it's already late and not calling to find out if there was something I needed or wanted at the store and I never ask him for more than a glass of water while he's already up...but instead of saying any of these things I grabbed my car keys and diaper bag and told him I needed to get out of the house for a little bit, just like every hysterical pregnant lady in every movie who grabs her purse and announces she's going home to her mother.

What can I say? I was really, REALLY hungry.

I got in the car and started driving. Within a few minutes I was crying, even though I didn't know why. Well, I did. Narrowing it down to a single reason was what I couldn't do.

I have no idea if this is true for other stay-at-home-moms or women who altered their careers after having children, but even the most innocuous, run-of-the-mill argument can sometimes really drive home the power disparity of our household, and how financially dependent I am on Jason, how the majority of my contributions don't get assigned an hourly rate, and how this has changed our relationship and my opinion of myself in ways I didn't expect.

Money is tight right now. Not "we can't pay the electric bill" tight, but tight. I don't think I can afford to go to Blogher (AGAIN), our savings have never been lower and the list of unavoidable boring expenses looms large in the distance. The deck needs refinishing, the screen door is busted, the car lease is up and preschool deposits are due. A couple months of not watching out for every dollar or properly spacing big expenditures stupidly got us here in the first place; a lack of advertising checks and a huge tax payment have made it hard to climb out of the hole. We'll be fine, of course, but it's uncomfortable. There will be no vacations or anniversary plans or push presents or spoiling of the new baby. Next year looks like it will better. But as for right now, it's not a financial situation either of us enjoy or are really used to.

And it's during times like this that I am painfully aware of how little I contribute to our overall budget, despite feeling tied to the computer for hours a day, deadlines day after day after day, with no sick days or vacation time or retirement account, all so I can watch Noah grow up over the ridge of my laptop screen. But then I did insist on a bi-monthly housecleaning service, which is both an incredible help and an incredible guilt-raiser, especially when one of the cleaners mentioned that she went into labor with her last child while vacuuming a client's house.

Oh, the angst of the modern woman, balance, having it all, the topics of a million self-help books and feminist arguments -- all too much to ponder during a single car ride to the Chipotle down the street.

I knew I was being ridiculous, that I was letting myself blow something small out of proportion just to cover for the zillion other tiny anxieties currently keeping me up at night, along with my pregnant bladder. I felt stupid, so I turned my head away from the other cars at stoplights, just in case anyone was able to see me and my blubbering.

I pulled into one of those expectant mother parking spaces and took a deep breath. See? How nice! This is just what I needed. A guy on a cell phone held the door for me and I ordered my vegetarian burrito with hot salsa and sat down to a leisurely meal.

There was no high chair to juggle, no one demanding bits of my tortilla. The burrito tasted every bit as delicious as I'd hoped, and I sat there for awhile after I finished it, picking stray bits of rice off the foil wrapper and wondering what I could possibly say to Jason when I got back home. Do I just admit that I was acting crazy? Do I just blame pregnancy and be done with it? Do I try to maybe mention that I could use a little bit of extra sensitivity right now? Do I really feel like a night of talking about my pregnant little feeeeeeeelings and that just because everything is magnified times a zillion it doesn't mean I shouldn't ever get taken seriously, even if it really is just a request for a vegetarian burrito that gets answered with prepackaged meatloaf mix?

I thought about killing more time by wandering the aisles of CVS, but decided the evening didn't need to get any more melodramatic or Britney-esque. I got back in the car and that's when realized I'd neglected to check my makeup before and that's probably why I got some weird looks in the restaurant.

I got home around 9:30. I walked in and immediately saw Noah in the living room, wide awake and still dressed. He was watching Cars.

I felt my brain slowly make the switch to FLIP YOUR SHIT again (what, am I REALLY the only one who pays attention to bedtime? must I ALWAYS be the non-fun parent? does no one else here REALIZE what it's like to be trapped all day with a off-his-schedule toddler who is NOT gonna just sleep in tomorrow morning to make up for the lack of sleep?) but NO, I was not to let this night get the better of me again. I wordlessly walked upstairs and filled the bathtub.

I climbed in, along with a three-year-old bath ballistic from LUSH (ever wondered if those things expire? yes. they do, and sigh.) and laid there for awhile in the disappointingly tepid water. (Add hot water heater repairs to the list, and sigh.) I surveyed my fat belly and stretch marks -- I'm getting new ones already, ugly purple ones across my stomach and down my thighs, nothing like the spiderweb of thin white ones  -- that I didn't even get until 38 weeks -- from last time. After 10 minutes I drained the water because I didn't want to look at myself anymore.

Around 10 o'clock I heard Jason put Noah to bed. GAH GAH GAH, my head chanted, as I resisted the urge to remind him to brush our child's teeth. I turned on the TV in our bedroom to watch Lost.

Jason finally came in and asked if I was feeling better. I wasn't, but I shrugged and said I guessed so. I was too exhausted to explain any of it. He wouldn't understand. Hell, I barely understood.

He sat down on the bed and gingerly rubbed my leg and told me to get some sleep. I blurted out that I missed Julie, my friend who moved to California back in February, and started to cry. I could tell he was valiantly and desperately trying to find any connection between this and the thing about burritos. He told me to get some sleep again and retreated downstairs.

I tried to sleep, but the burrito gave me terrible heartburn.

***
It's 2 pm right now. Noah went down early for a nap, and I'm unshowered and still in my pajamas. It has just  occurred to me that I forgot to eat lunch. Minutes ago, Jason came home early.

He brought me flowers and chocolate ice cream.

So. There's This Book. With the Word "Amalah" On It.

After I got my share of the book advance, I went out and pumped myself a full tank of premium gasoline, and then I stopped at Wendy's for a chocolate Frosty and a small order of fries. 

And that was the end of the book advance money.

Every once in awhile it occurs to me that I will at some point be holding a book in my hands that contains words that I wrote, and the first emotion that sweeps over me is complete and utter terror, because words on paper are very different than words on a computer monitor, and quite honestly I usually feel my words are better suited for the latter.

I don't remember exactly which entries appear in the book -- Rita (who made this whole thing happen, start to finish, I think I signed a piece of paper along the way and then got right back to the vitally important business of wiping a butt) asked if I'd be okay with her submitting a couple entries from Noah's newborn days and I just sort of...waved my hand in the direction of the archives and told her to have at it. Like I've said many times before, re-reading my own writing seriously gives me hives.

I remember going back and expanding on her semi-final picks, rewording some of the more inelegant prose, trying to make them more "stand-alone thoughtful essay" and less "blawg blawggity blawg that I blawgged with one hand while attached to the breast pump."

I remember when I wrote the original entries, though. I remember how shockingly thin-skinned and vulnerable I was, how terrified I was of the depth of emotions I felt towards my new little baby, and how frustrated I was that I couldn't ever seem to find the right words to describe it all.

Thus, if you are so kind as to order yourself a copy of the book, be prepared for some mighty fine hand-wringing and new-mother neuroses and oh! MAH BAYBEEEE! I JUST LOVEHIMSOMUUUUUUCH! The good news is that they applied some professional-type editing, so perhaps my writing will contain a better punctuation-to-word-count ratio.

Then again, Rita never doubted that my words and the words of other bloggers belonged in this book, on paper and everything, and the story of how hard she worked to make this happen is inspiring to me in more ways than one.

I had a literary agent, once. A lovely, patient and experienced agent who wanted nothing more than to help me write and publish my first novel. I had an idea, a plot and an outline. She cheered me on and told me to get up on that bitch and start writing.

And so I did. And then I froze. Not more than 20 pages in. I hated it. I hated everything about it. I went back and rewrote chapter one so many times I'm not sure I ever even made it out of chapter two. The characters were all wrong. The dialogue was stilted and the pacing was atrocious. The story got lost as I skipped ahead to the rejection letters and terrible reviews and ultimate placement in a secondhand store's bargain bin, a pulpy testament to why bloggers shouldn't get book deals. The agent stopped bothering to email me, and I've since lost the early drafts I wrote to a busted hard drive.

When Rita asked for my entries for a book SHE was putting together, that SHE would pitch and sell and bear the brunt of rejection and criticism, I had nothing to lose. Why not? It probably won't happen, anyway, but it's worth a shot, eh. I signed on to contribute but was certainly never a big shiny ray of optimism about it. I am not really a writer. Blogging does not translate. I only have readers because of dumb luck and a lot of workplace boredom. Rar rar rar ur cerebral cortex thinks u suck!

And yet, here we are. Some stuff I wrote made it into a book. Along with the writing of many other bloggers writers from all over the pageview map. It's available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and independent booksellers. Maybe one day I'll stop cringing long enough to actually read it. In the meantime, I guess this means I can stop trying to explain "blogging" to my dad. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go wipe that butt again.

With Asses Roundly Kicked

Noah just officially passed the standardized articulation test at "age-appropriate levels." He has no detectable delay or difficulty that would "inhibit his ability to learn and function in a mainstream school environment." He is "one smart little guy there, like for real, wow."

This Modern World

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.

***
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.

***
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.

***
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.

***
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.

***
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.

Subterfuge

Noah was a tad ornery this morning (perfectly understandable considering days of rain and the head colds that struck each and every one of us down this week, also the fact that I wouldn't let him lick the flatscreen), so I banished him to two minutes on the Naughty Step. He sighed but obediently trudged off and once again I congratulated myself for getting my child-rearing techniques from quality reality television. That shit just works, people.

Two minutes later, when I went to fetch him, I found this:

Incidentally, it turned out Noah was off sitting in for Mr. Turtle at the SATs.