And Everything Else

My dad is back in the hospital. On Monday night he had a coughing fit while taking his medication (nothing super out of the ordinary -- he chokes very easily since losing his larynx to cancer) and aspirated a pill into his lung. He's now being treated for aspiration pneumonia. The good news is that he appears to be responding very well to the treatment and we're hoping he'll come home today. My parents got to "see" the baby via webcam a few hours before the accident, and I spoke with him on the phone yesterday and as always, he sounds great.

***
We're all sick too, although in a much less dramatic pneumonia-ish way. Noah came down with a bad, baaaaad cold last week -- he woke up wheezing on Thursday, and because Daddy was home scored himself a trip to the DOCTOR, where Daddy was told that it was indeed just a bad, baaaaaad cold. As we all know, Mama would never have taken him to the doctor, but would have instead smeared some Vaseline on his chest and called it a day.

***
I did take Ezra to the doctor yesterday, obviously because he's new and shiny and like soooo the favorite, and his weight is officially back up to 7 pounds, 8.5 ounces. I returned the hospital-grade rental pump and plunked down money for my very own Pump In Style, like a real breastfeeding mother with real boobs that work and sustain her child and stuff.

***
I feel the need to clarify my somewhat slapdashy post from Monday, the point of which was unintentionally hijacked by the idea that I actually sterlize my breastpump parts after every feeding. Which I promise you I do not. Not at all. Once a day, tops, and only because I HAD THRUSH ONCE, and once you have thrush you cannot ever forget having thrush, and I guess one of the lifelong side effects of thrush is a compulsion to sterlize pump parts in the microwave every morning. But that's it! The only time! Usually I just run everything under hot water for a bit and pile them up glamorously on a handtowel in our master bathroom. Anything to keep the romance alive, folks.

***

Don't even get me started on this one. Photos like this are the only thing keeping me from selling Noah to the gypsies. He's been challenging. Very, very challenging.

SYNONYMS: SEE ALSO: WILLFUL, TANTRUMMY, DEFIANT, BRATTASTIC.

But that's a topic for another day. Another day when I have two hands free to type and more than two hours of sleep to ruminate on my own failings as his mother and finite amount of patience and when I can actually bear to think about Monday, when I spilled an entire cup of soda on the legs of two well-dressed business people at the mall food court because I was trying to balance a tray in one hand and pull Noah up off the floor where he had melted into a puddle of NOOOOO I WANNA SIT OH DER with the other and everybody was staring at me, ME, the terrible mother who couldn't control her terrible kid and I apologized over and over to the man and woman who I'd splashed with soda but they just glared at me and I could tell she was mentally reminding herself to re-up her birth control prescription, and finally I hauled Noah off by the hood of his jacket and prayed that the ground would just swallow me up whole.

Towards the baby, he is nothing but loving and gentle and proud as can be. His teacher hasn't noticed any change in his behavior at school, and says that he loves talking about Baby Brother and has been more social than ever with his classmates. But towards US, he is downright awful. He yells, he tantrums, he laughs at our panicked faces when he slips away from us in a parking lot.

This isn't how Noah behaves, except that now it totally is, and I'm ashamed to admit that I am not coping with it very well.

The other night, after many time-outs and tantrums, Jason ordered Noah to an early bedtime and was trying to get him into pajamas while desperately clinging to his last bit of patience. I didn't hear the conversation, but apparently Noah started signing that he was scared, and said that he was scared of Daddy, because Daddy was always so mad.

The sound of Jason's heart breaking? Yeah, that I heard.

But...yeah. Let's save that topic for later. Let's all just look at this photo for awhile instead.

***

Thank you to Heather B, Nicole and Jessica for filling in for me this week over at the Advice Smackdown.

My Patented Formula: Post a Half-Assed Tantrum Then Frantically Backpedal When I Get Called on the Half-Assed Tantrum

Thank you, everybody, for your comments yesterday, and for indulging my moment of triumphant self-pity. I came very close to not even mentioning the situation at all, both because I thought some stiff-upper-lipitude would make it easier for my mom (I think, in fact, she was relieved to see that I actually DID want them down, since I guess I'd been a little TOO quick to assure her that I was fine! Fine with this! Don't you dare worry about me, because I am FINE!) and because I Know How Posts Like That Sound. Get some perspective! Things could be worse! Quit whining!

Which. Of course. A couple of you pointed that out. In SUCH a nice way too.

My intention is not to win gold medals at the Pain Olympics. My intention is to...I don't know. Throw words at the Internet to see what sticks, and yesterday I was very, very sad and things were hitting me in a bizarre delayed-reaction style -- my poor dad! my poor mom! what if this doesn't get better? who is going to take care of them? I'm not ready to take care of them because I still need someone to take care of me! I want everything to be just like it was last time! I need to find a way to fix this! I don't think I can fix this! I'm tired now!

I spent most of my allotted writing time working on a funny post about my dog peeing in Noah's bed. (Seriously. RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. Staring right at me with her beady I-know-what-you're-gestating eyes.) But...it wasn't really funny. It didn't work. It was tinged too heavily with the Stuff I Wasn't Really Writing About. So I deleted it, took a deep breath and just blurted out what was really on my mind for awhile until a nice cleansing cry came and I couldn't see the keyboard anymore.

Thus, my post was rambling, disorganized and unfinished. I knew I would get the "sack UP, ho" comments, because wah wah waaaah. I knew -- know! -- that this is a tiny, minuscule problem in light of what other families have gone through. Perhaps I should apologize for posting something raw and unfinished that dared reveal the 45-minute-long pity party I threw for myself, without spending hours making sure that I fully acknowledged that I was being a bit bratty and was aware of every single possible thing that could be worse.

(I still cringe a little, though, when I remember the shaming rebuke I got during my first pregnancy for bitching about our botched-to-total-hell kitchen remodel in the wake of Katrina, mostly because I could at least TALK about the kitchen remodel without crumpling into a little sobbing ball on the floor.)

(The floor that kept shifting and cracking. No matter how many times it was re-grouted. Because the contractor had cheaped out on the sub-floor and refused to acknowledge that he'd made a mistake and oh my God, I just wanted my canned goods out of my fucking living room.)

(ANYWAY, it stings, actually, the assumption that the simple act of devoting a few hundred words to a silly personal weblog means you truly think those hundred words are clearly the Most Terribly Important & Pressing Matter Of All Time, when really they are only a half step above inane stream-of-consciousness babble and barely scratch the surface of everything else going on in your life.)

My mom, as some of you may remember, was diagnosed with breast cancer during my first pregnancy, and for several months it certainly looked like she wasn't going to be there for Noah's birth either. But of course, I was mostly preoccupied with her being HERE, LIKE ON EARTH. My dad has had more serious health scares than I can even count at this point (cancer, aortic aneurysm, heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, multiple falls and head injuries and he actually doesn't have a voice box anymore, thanks to the cancer). And yet, they are HERE.

They were en route to the hospital with Jason's parents when Noah was born. I called my mom's cellphone from my room and didn't even recognize the trembly little-girl voice I used to ask how soon they would be there, and when they were farther away than I thought, I hung up the phone and cried. (My in-laws had decided that a not-very-quick trip to Whole Foods in PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY was absolutely essential before heading down to DC, where...you know, WE HAVE A LOT OF WHOLE FOODS.) There was absolutely no one else I wanted on earth more than my mom.

But then they were there. I remember my mom came and hugged me first before directing her attention to the baby, which took me by surprise. My dad and I watched part of a Phillies game together. I accidentally recorded over the video we shot of them holding Noah for the first time. I was happy we'd get a do-over.

After Jason went back to work, my mom came and stayed with us for a week. She was still recovering from her mastectomy -- she was worried that she wouldn't really be much of a help, which was ridiculous. We sat on the couch together, we drank coffee and ate junk food and talked about babies and watched movies. It took both of us, in our post-surgical-weakened states, to carry the stroller down the stairs and making it to the post office down the street was a huge victory. She knew exactly what I was going through with breastfeeding and offered no judgment or unsolicited advice or anything other than support. She insisted I take naps. She insisted Jason and I go out for dinner. She told me, over and over again, what a natural I was, what a good mother I was already, and how proud she was. When she left, I was strengthened and confident that I Could Do This.

So yes, I very selfishly want that again.

It's painful to watch your parents age, to get sick, to suffer.

It's painful when it's a slow, natural process, when it just sort of hits you that oh, did he always walk that slow? was her memory always that bad?

It's painful when it's a dramatic roller coaster of health scares, when you can't help but wonder if the next middle-of-the-night phone call will be the last of its kind.

It's more painful than I ever really thought it would be. I have friends who lost parents suddenly, in car accidents usually, but most of them have younger parents who are still healthy and fit. Traveling the world, inflicting the dreaded pop-in and being a giant nagging pain in their ass, year after year.

I was 25 when my dad had a massive aneurysm and almost died. Multiple times, actually, in the span of a few weeks. Jason and I had talked about MAYBE having a baby MAYBE when I was 30. WE SHALL MAYBE SEE. But then I sat next to my dad's hospital bed and had the most terrible, horrible realization -- my maybe hypothetical child might not ever know him. I thought of the few stories I knew about my grandfathers -- both of whom passed away before I was ever born -- and how little I knew about them, those men in old faded photographs who meant nothing to me, and I could barely even breathe. The thought of MY FATHER being a mostly irrelevant figure to MY CHILDREN, just another man in a faded photograph...oh my God. I went home and told Jason we needed to have a baby RIGHT THAT SECOND.

It took him a little while to get on board, and then it took my body even longer to cooperate, but let me tell you: my love and respect for my father -- and my absolute non-readiness to lose him -- are why we have Noah in the first place. And I know I should be well past the point where I let one or two trolls get under my skin and drown out the hundred other kind voices, but the accusation that my post yesterday treated him like an afterthought, that I was truly only thinking about myself and not my parents, well...that's got to be one of the most ignorant things anyone has ever said to me, and frankly, how fucking dare you. (And thanks for reading! Kisses!)

I DO take comfort in the fact that my parents are still here. It's not been an easy road to HERE, let me tell you. I know I can talk to them over the phone, over email, over a webcam, and that while a postpartum trip up to Pennsylvania is not what any of us would prefer, it's doable and by God we'll do it.   

But sometimes I still want to climb on top of something and shout that THIS IS HARD, I DON'T LIKE IT, MAKE IT STOP.

And the Village Burned to the Ground

I talked to my mom yesterday. My dad is not doing well. He's unsteady, dizzy, forgetful. A heart monitor found an arrhythmia. Everything keeps getting worse instead of better. The doctors think his symptoms are the results of his fall this past June and not the reason for his fall. They don't actually have any real clue why he fell but the fact remains that he might very well fall again. My mom stands helplessly by, knowing that she can't leave him, even though she can't catch him, either.

My head spun off in a million directions -- a million questions for the doctors, potential solutions to their living situation that would grant them the luxury of being able to leave the house, lamenting the lack of family near them, rehashing the conversation Jason and I had over the weekend wondering whether we should confront the inevitable and move back to Pennsylvania because clearly no one else will -- even though I could really only stammer my sympathies and a suggestion that Peapod might be have cheaper delivery fees for groceries than Acme. Mostly I just tried to dismissively wave off the real reason my mom had called.

I understand.

Well, obviously.

Of course he can't travel.

Of course you can't leave him.

Of course.

I understand.

I'm fine! I'll be fine. We'll figure something out. Totally fiiiiine.

...

And then today it really hit me. Like the snooze button kicked in, 12 hours later.

I'm having a baby and my mom won't be there. My dad won't be there. They won't be there at the hospital. They won't be there at my house, making the coffee or folding the laundry or picking Noah up from school or reminding me to shower.

I'm suddenly very scared. Very alone. Very heartbroken for all of us, and this loss of time and firsts that you never get back. I know they're heartbroken too -- I heard it in my mother's voice, how much this hurts her, and I'm still debating whether to publish this when I'm done because I'm afraid it will upset her -- and yet I just want to slam doors and stomp my feet and dramatically throw myself down on the furniture because I'm having a baby and my mom won't be there and I need her and it's not fair.

PopPop & His Boo Boo Hurt All Better, reports area toddler

Oh, Internet Peoples. Thank you for everything this week, the comments and emails and positive granola mother earth vibes or whatever it was y'all sent out. You guys are the wind beneath my wonderwall, or something.

My dad is FINE. Once again he pulled through something that could have very well killed him in record time and was eating hamburgers within 24 hours and bemoaning the lack of extra ketchup. He was discharged late yesterday because of a never-ending string of last-minute MRIs and EKGs and heart-monitory things in futile attempts to figure out why he fell (we still don't know, which is very frustrating, but I'm hoping one of the bazillion follow-up visits and consultations we've had to schedule will eventually reveal something). But for now, he is home and healing and complaining of nothing but a headache (you know, from all the SKULL FRACTURES AND WHATNOT) and that TiVo cut off the ends of all his Phillies games while he was gone.

My mother originally ordered me NOT to visit, on account of my delicate with-child condition, and I immediately pish-poshed her and tossed myself and my kid in the car and drove up there, where I proceeded to live on pure adrenaline for two days before crashing in the aisles at Target, clutching my parents' grocery list and nearly coming to tears over the stress of choosing Band-Aids for other people when you don't know what kind of Band-Aids they like, and when did fucking Band-Aids become so complicated? Flexible Fabric? Sheer? Antibacterial? Activ Flex? Do they prefer the 40-pack with the oversized wound patches? Or the 80 pack with those tiny little square ones that are probably only useful to people who routinely stab themselves in the thigh with freshly-sharpened pencils? Spongebob?

By the time I got to the cough drops and discovered that Halls now come in no less than 17 different varieties and then audibly yelped after Baby Tivo kicked me square in the cervix for the hundredth time that day, I realized that I was, maybe, just a tad useless and a little more delicate than I cared to admit.

Let's see, what else...oh, so while I've always figured that Noah would prefer if there was not a public blow-by-blow record of his potty training, I would like him to commend him for thoroughly proving my mother-in-law (and her Many Theories of Potty Training and How Easy It Is) wrong. I mean, sure, I would have LOVED to have gotten him back from her care on Tuesday completely trained, but I did get a tiny bit of perverse pleasure from the shell-shocked look on her face over the Crazy Delicious Stubbornness she witnessed that day. And then I innocently shrugged and said I was surprised, because he'd been doing SO WELL with me and it was just happening pretty NATURALLY, much like she sat on my couch once and shrugged and said she didn't understand why I was having such problems with breastfeeding, it always went SO WELL and happened so NATURALLY for her.

Wow. I sure do hold on to things sometimes, don't I?

(For the record, we went the cold turkey to cloth pants route, with disposable training pants for naps and bedtime only, a complicated give-and-take reward system involving a plastic baggie of spare buttons and chocolate, and an epic battle of wills. So basically, Potty Training in Less Than a Day, rewritten to be the slightly more accurate and yet no less optimistic Potty Training in Less Than the Rest of Your Life.)

I am now going to sleep. For awhile or so. In my own bed, free from the fear of my bedmate wetting it (my mother-in-law DID do a pretty good job with Jason, I'll give her that).

Coping

Thank you all so much for the prayers and kind thoughts. Noah and I got here yesterday afternoon and he promptly peed through every blessed pair of pants I packed. I've done laundry twice already, although one of those times may have been more because I forgot to add detergent. Maybe. I cop to nothing.

I got to visit with my dad last night -- he's conscious but not feeling super great (NEWSFLASH! NO WAY! WOW!), and looks like he and the pavement got into quite the barfight.

He's still in the ICU and undergoing a zillion tests to determine the cause of his fall (he didn't trip, it was more of blackout and a dead drop to the ground), but a CAT scan revealed that the bleeding in his brain is NOT getting worse. So. There is that, and y'all feel free to cue up the ER theme music in your heads right now. Doo doo doop doop, or however it goes.

I made some fabulous ratatouille for dinner last night, and then we ate the hell out of some ice cream. Noah climbed on my head at 6 am this morning and Baby Tivo is present and accounted for. We're heading back to the hospital now for what is sure to be a full wonderful day of cafeteria cuisine, weak coffee and inappropriate gallows humor from me.

My mother-in-law, meanwhile, who has been talking trash about how her boys were potty-trained by 12 months old since Noah's first birthday, will be handling that side of things today. It's like I had some master evil plan that is all coming to fruition, or something. I mean, it's a little more head-injury-ry than I would have liked, but still. HERE'S MY KID AND A COMPLETELY INADEQUATE SUPPLY OF DRY PANTS, HAVE FUN GOTTA RUN HA HA HA.

I just got a call from my mom and it wasn't a detailed description of the 27 little blue outfits she bought over the weekend, oh no, it was about my dad, who fell outside their house last night and is now in the ICU with a brain bleed and broken occipital bones and they think it's his heart but they don't know yet and anyway, I'm putting Noah in the car and driving up to PA just as soon as I can find my keys and maybe some clean underwear. PA is fancy like that, you know.

In other news, Noah is willing to keep his pants dry in exchange for spare buttons from my sewing kit. If that doesn't cheer you up a tiny bit even after the words "ICU" and "brain bleed" then I suggest you just start hitting the hooch right now.

Babies Babies Buzz Buzz Buzz!

Whoa. The harsh glare of the laptop screen. The pulsing bars of stray wifi signals. Yep. I'm back.

We spent the weekend up with my brother- and sister-in-law and our new delicious niece -- oh, my, lands, what a nummy little bundle of smiles and chub and coos -- out in the wilds of the Boston suburbs where I weirdly did not get cell service and the wifi was a solid brick wall of encryption and passkeys and possibly elvish riddles and while my brother-in-law offered to find me a network cable I opted to slip my laptop back into my luggage and go back to gnawing on his daughter's face instead.

I was VERY busy, clearly.

Completely entranced by the shiny, newer model of child, Amy completely ignores her knick-knack-destroying toddler in the background.

I am, ahem, just more than a little excited now about having a small squishy person of our own again this fall, although Noah's opinion of his cousin mostly leaned towards total indifference with just a touch of outright disdain. And then this happened...

...and then I died. The end.

I think some more stuff happened , although I fear I've probably already maxed out today's Cute Things My Perfect Child Did Including Behave Absolutely Impeccably On Not One But Two Seven-Hour Train Rides And Informed My Sister-in-Law That She Is Also Not Paid Enough And Had Long Conversations With Mickey Mouse Over The Baby Monitor quotient. So I'll save those for another day. But probably not tomorrow, because...

Ultrasound day! Will I be getting my grubby paws on my niece's adorable wardrobe or will I be that obnoxious person who demands all her hand-me-downs back from other people, or will this baby take an early stand against my exploiting his or her every move on the Internet and keep his or her legs crossed? Oh, the suspense!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

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.

They're Two, They're Four, They're $64.50

We arrived at the Thomas & Friends Presents: Day Out With Thomas: Great Discovery Tour 2008, Brought to You By LEGO/DUPLO, the Choice for Exxxtreme Plastic Interlocking Block Building, just as the life-sized Thomas engine pulled into the station. Noah managed to catch about a half-second glimpse and promptly lost his mind.

"THOMAS!" he screamed. "THOMAS! THOMAS!"

I thought for a second he was about to plum pass out from the excitement. Even the will-call ticketing folk, whom I imagine are sick to death of Thomas and Percy and Sir Topham Fucking Hatt after the 17th consecutive weekend of dealing with this nonsense, smiled at Noah's Beatlemania-level enthusiasm. Jason and I smiled like big old dweebs, because WE RULE. MAXIMUM MAGICAL SPECIALNESS ACHIEVED! GREATEST. PARENTS. EVER.

By the time we got closer to Thomas, Noah was speaking in tongues.

Thomas! from amalah on Vimeo.

And. That's probably when we should have turned around and gone home.

Note to the Greatest. Parents. Ever: when your child says no, he does not want to ride on the train, don't fucking make him ride on the train. Oh my God.

Then again, I'd ordered the tickets weeks ago for $18 each. Plus $3.50 in processing fees! Each! You are riding that train, child, and it will be MAGIC and SPECIAL and we will talk about the memories of that MAGIC and SPECIAL time we paid $64.50 to ride on an old MARC train for 25 minutes through some fields in Baltimore while a tinny Thomas singalong CD was pumped through the loudspeakers and the brakes on our car made a non-stop disconcerting grindy sound, and we will talk about these memories for YEARS, dammit. YEARS.

Noah's been doing so well with his little sensitive sensory quirky issues lately -- he's actually about to get kicked out of Early Intervention, the little smartypants valedictorian -- but oh, the train drove him batshit. He screamed and panicked and kicked and wept and he did not CARE that we were riding a train that was tangentially connected to a big blue Thomas engine, although technically Thomas was up THAT way and the train was moving in the OTHER way so...hmm. I am beginning to suspect that the Day Out With Thomas Great Discovery Thrash Metal Rock n' Roll Tour 2008 is possibly kind of a racket.

REST OF THE WORLD: Welcome, Amy! So glad you could join us.

Since we were 1) surrounded by families with toddlers, so like, eff them, right? and 2) $64.50! Sixty-four-fifty!, we did not get off the train during Noah's freakout but gritted our teeth and kept muttering that he'd be fine once the train started moving, oh God, just MOVE ALREADY. It was at this point that a elderly woman walking by felt the need to inform us that our child was "not happy."

What?! Not happy?  For real? Why...that means we've been doing this entire parenting thing COMPLETELY BACKWARDS this whole time? Dude, we're such BONEHEADS. And here I thought this was just laughter through tears.

Noah did settle down once the train started moving (slowly, without any realistic chugga chugga woo woos, and yes, I WAS looking forward to some realistic chugga chugga woo woos), so much so that he laid down on our laps and tried to go to sleep.

Back at the station, the gift shop was sold out of the preshus little conductor caps that we'd had our hearts set on for our non-hat-abiding toddler, the concessions were closed so I couldn't spend $5 on bottled water and when Jason went to inspect the family photos we'd had taken in front of Thomas post-train-ride he happily told me that they were ABYSMAL and we all looked LIKE ASS, and therefore he DIDN'T BUY ONE. Then we high-fived because SUCK IT, Thomas & Friends. We done outsmarted you in the end, we did.

Of course, Noah did have fun. He climbed on a Thomas made out of LEGO/DUPLO BRAND INTERLOCKING BUILDING BLOCKS! and got walloped by a 12-year-old on the moonbounce got involved in a turf-war/choo-choo-hoarding incident at the train table -- you know, the same train table WE HAVE AT OUR HOUSE -- and did you know that antique trains come with built-in Naughty Steps for overstimulated toddlers?

Woe.

Noah called this one "Mommy Thomas," and now all his trains at home are "Baby Thomas." That would be freaking adorable except for the fact that I just want to punch all the Thomases in the face right now.

Don't worry, she doesn't mean it. I still love you, Creepy Pixelated Uncle-Sized Thomas.

Fading...

Fading...

Done

After the World's Longest Nap I tried to get Noah to tell us about everything he'd seen that day, like Mommy Thomas and all the Big Trains and the Bouncy Slide and That Train Ride That Wasn't Really Death on Grindy Wheels After All. He seemed to be drawing a blank on it all. Except, of course, for the windmills. The windmills were AWESOME.

This is a windmill. It's...probably best if you don't argue with him on this one.

I Didn't Spare My Family Any Morning Sickness Details Either

Oh hi. I'm busy. Very busy. Very busy with various digestive quandaries, including: seriously, how hard is it to make a damn slice of toast in the morning, especially since you KNOW that's all it takes to stave off the vomiting, you frigging dumbass? and also: hmm, since I just threw up a still-eerily intact prenatal vitamin, does that mean I have to take another one?

That last question is actually rather complicated, since prenatal vitamins have gone ALL KINDS OF FANCY now, and I am now required to take TWO pills everyday. One being the run-of-the-mill multivitamin, and the other being a space-age omega-3 DHA capsule, and only the fishy-tasting DHA pill seemed to come up undigested but the two pills are sealed together in the little foil packets so I cant just take another DHA pill and aaaaahhhhhhh mah baby needs its brain pillz! Or could I maybe get away with a My First Flintstones? I do love the taste of purple.

I was describing the new generation of prenatal vitamins to my sister-in-law this weekend, and she was rather appalled. "So babies are already smarter than their parents by the time they're BORN?" she asked. "That's bullshit. I wouldn't stand for it. Mothers are entitled to being the smart ones for AT LEAST six extra months or so."

She's got a point. However, my family does have a lot of hopes and dreams riding on this next generation.

And how is that going, so far?

(You know, I still vaguely feel like I belong more on that couch than behind the camera. None of those kids even bother calling me "Aunt Amy" because I was always the young and cool one. I got free passes to Sesame Place and never knew what the going rate for birthday cash was so I always overestimated and I'd totally let you use my head as the center support beam for your Ultimate Fort. But now I am just another Old Person Barking High-Pitched Commands At Toddlers While Teenagers Silently Wish For Death.)

In less bershon-y moments, here's a sequence I call "And Suddenly, There Was Cake."

Oh, and PS:

Was not included in grandbaby photo. Was not given any cake. Hate this family. Going to poop in sumbody's luggage.