the pieces of my life

Something comes over me when I enter a Costco. I. Must. Have. Everything! There’s something innately satisfying about having a house of full of food and paper things. If a major blizzard hits, we’ll be fine, eating our canned tomatoes and pooping into our size 3 Cruiser diapers. Of course, if I limited my purchases to food and paper goods, we’d be in much better financial shape. But I get caught in the aisles. Swayed by the gleaming quanties. Seduced by the per item prices. So, I also purchased over 100 bulbs that I really will plant (no, really!) as soon as the rain stops. I bought a raft of wrapping paper that will come in handy, as we know a zillion babies who all have birthdays coming up. I have enough deodorant and laundry detergent to keep me smelling fresh into the next decade.

Now, the one thing I won’t buy at Costco is books. I’m morally opposed to buying books at Costco. However, when passing the book aisle, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a board book version of The Monster at the End of This Book. I had completely forgotten about this book! But my sister and I certainly read it, and of course, I had to buy it for Doodles. It was sealed in the store, but once we got home and I pulled off the plastic, I had an incredible sense of deja vu. How could I have forgotten this book? I hadn’t realized how great Grover is until I re-heard “Monster in the Mirror” and then re-read this book. What a powerful lesson Grover has for all of us. The metafictional way Grover so cleverly breaks the fourth wall and so clearly refers back to the text is obviously Sesame Street‘s way of introducing literary theory to the tot set. “Wubba wubba wubba wubba woo woo woo. That monster at the end of this entry, he just might be you!”

Speaking of Sesame Street, this year is the show’s 35th anniversary. I watched this show from the start. My father likes to say that the root of my woes is Sesame Street. He says that my mother went out one day in 1969 and heard about this fabulous new kids show called Sesame Street on PBS. My mom made sure I watched it the next day. However, the show was already on the letter B and the number 2, and my father says I never quite caught up. (I just discovered that SS was originally developed to “educate poor children who didn’t go to preschool.” What a way to find out my family was poor!) Anyway, if you started watching the show when I did, try your hand a the trivia game. I did fine on the old stuff, but didn’t know the answers to most of the new things. So much has changed on the Street; I watched just a bit the other day and I barely recognized the old neighborhood! You know, if they put old episodes of SS (and Zoom and Electric Company) on DVD, I bet it would become an instant kids’ bestseller as all us parents who grew up on the show buy the real episodes for our children to enjoy (and one of these days I’m going to splurge and get Doodles Songs from the Street: 35 Years of Music [side note: Ursula 1000 does a remix on this album. I went to high school with him! How cool! I wonder if he actually got to hang out with Big Bird and the gang]). In the meantime, I already have the Replay set to record the show’s 35th anniversary special so Doodles and I can watch it together. Mr. Hooper lives on in all of us.

I don’t have much to say about Doodles this week, because things have been going pretty smoothly. A quick trip to the doctor proved that nothing more than waxy ears was wrong with Doodles (they’re so waxy, in fact, that we have to put drops in twice a day for ten days and go back to have the ears cleaned out; that’s Adam’s child!). The doc said that perhaps Doodles doesn’t need as much sleep as we thought, and sure enough, we’ve been keeping him up a little later and he’s been sleeping better (read: longer). I think there’s some definite teething going on because there has been intermittent fussiness, and he’s back to chewing on everything in sight. We have mostly easy days, but there have been a few monster days as well (sometimes the monster at the end of the entry is Doodles. If you haven’t read the previous entries, that statement will mean nothing to you, but you’ll understand by the end of today’s blog).

Now, I promised I wouldn’t call Doodles the you-know-what baby ever. However, I will say that on Monday we were at the annual HBS Dean’s party for kids, and unsolicited, a guy came up to us (a first year volunteering to help out at the party) in this room filled with babies and kids, and gushed, “He is the cutest baby I have ever seen!” He went on and on about how wonderful Doodles is, and of course, Doodles was happy to comply and be happy and smiley and just gosh darn adorable. So, I no longer have to make proclamations of my child’s beauty. Others will do it for me!

I love cleaning supplies. In my fantasy world, we live in a clean home. There’s no gunk on the stove hood, no dust bunnies beneath the sofa, no dried pureed peas on the dining room. The house would smell fresh and there would be no crunching sensation beneath my feet. So in my quest for this Martha-approved house, I buy cleaning products. I’m a sucker for cleaning products. I see the ads on TV, and I buy. Swiffer dusters? Got ’em. Clorox wipes? Check. Kitchen soaps, fabric refreshers, shower sprays, you name it. I can’t wait to buy the new disposable toilet cleaners.

So the problem? The problem is they are all sitting unopened underneath our kitchen sink. I never, ever use them. I buy them, and they sit. Because the truth is, I love cleaning supplies, but I hate cleaning. Every single week I think, “Wow, I should really vacuum the carpet upstairs, because I know the dust and crap that gets in there is really bad for Doodles.” And every single week, I think, “I’ll have time to do it tomorrow.” You know what? I have the time. I just have better ways to fill that time. If we didn’t have house cleaners that came every other week, we’d be in a certified sty. Believe me, you don’t want to be in our house at one week, six days.

In one area, I’m completely deficient as a female: I don’t get shoes. Never have. It was the one element of Sex in the City that never made sense to me. Shoes are the things I’m required to wear when I go out in public to keep the bottoms of my feet from getting dirty. I hate heels. I don’t long for strappy little sandals. I think spending ridiculous amounts of money (meaning more than, say $30) on something that clomps along the ground is ludicrous. In December 2001, I bought an ugly pair of gray Merrells that were the most comfortable shoes I had ever put on to wear in the Fernely warehouse while working the holiday rush. (And apparently I’m in the minority in thinking they’re ugly.) I love those shoes. I wear those shoes nonstop. When I was working at BU, I had to wear actual shoes. I have no shame in the fact that I shopped for said shoes at Payless (although, truth be told, I had a couple of good pairs from Nordstrom that I bought before interviewing for jobs in Boston). Then, toward the end of pregnancy, none of my shoes fit. I could only wear open backed shoes because my feet had swollen to elephantine proportions. On the weekends, I could happily wear my comfy Merrells. And then once Doodles was born, it was Merrells every day. As you can imagine, shoes that have been worn that much are probably in need of replacement. Actually, they needed to be replaced a couple of years ago, but I haven’t been able to find the exact pair again, so I stick with the same pair. But they are definitely on their last legs (so to speak). So this past weekend when I was at the outlet malls in Kittery, Maine, looking for clothing for Doodles, I bought, on a whim, a pair of comfy red mules at the Hanna Anderson outlet. So now I own a second pair of comfy shoes. But when I got home, it occurred to me, I have no idea what–besides white and black–I can wear red shoes with. I asked Adam what to wear him with–he has more fashion credentials than I do–and he said, “Yeah, I don’t know what you do with red.” So I have a lovely pair of comfy shoes that are going to sit at the bottom of my closet. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

We haven’t actually seen it happen, but when I checked a half hour ago, Doodles was fast asleep on his stomach. When Adam just checked on him, Doodles was on his back. Which means that either someone has been sneaking into our house and rolling our child over or he’s learned how to roll from his front to his back. Which is exciting. And scary. Because a child who can roll from his back to his front and his front to his back is officially mobile. Also, when Adam went to get Doodles this morning, he was on his hands and knees, rocking back and forth, a precursor to crawling. Luckily, it takes Doodles a very long time to get from one stage to the next, so I’m don’t think he’ll be scooting around anytime soon. The downside to all of this is that Doodles is waking during the night–twice on average, once at midnight, once at three a.m.–and screaming for about an hour at a time. We’re not sure if he’s teething (we read that the two upper teeth come in three to four weeks after the two lower, and, hey, it’s been about four weeks since those lowers poked through) or if these new developments on Doodles’s part is interrupting his sleep. And speaking of interrupted sleep, there goes the little squawk on the baby monitor. At least I know I won’t have to roll him over.

• Doodles is now seven months old. Which is not good. Because in the scheme of “nine months on/nine months off” for weight loss, it means I only have two months left to go. Granted, I’m within four pounds of my pre-pregnancy weight, but given the way my new body is shaped, I have more than four pounds to go.
  
• Speaking of “nine months off,” I did a little weight lifting at the gym. I used only a five-pound weight and did lots of reps. Simple, right? Right. I can’t lift my right arm now. I couldn’t figure out why my right arm hurt so much more than my left arm, and then I realized I carry an eighteen-pound weight everyday in my left hand (so I can have my right arm free to do stuff).
  
• The O.C. still rocks even if Paris Hilton did guest star. Everyone’s allowed a mistake occasionally.
  
• I just want to take a second to rave about the “thinking moms” out there. For starters, there’s the DotMoms blog, which is a great collection of mothers (of kids of all ages) writing about their experiences, good and bad. It represents quite a diverse range of moms and views and backgrounds, and I find reading it to be refreshing. Then there’s Brain, Child, which I’ve just started my subscription to. It’s a fabulous literary journal about motherhood (concentrating on mothers, not the kids). Mothers of daughters especially should run out and get the latest copy just to read the essay “The Vagina Dialogues” by Shaunna Harrington, which is hilarious and on the money (mothers of sons will like it too but won’t be able to relate in quite the same way). Parents, check out these two things! Okay, advertisement over.
  
• Is anyone else as upset as I am that Bob Edwards is being forced off of Morning Edition (the CNN version of the story)? Bob Edwards is Morning Edition. I’ve been a supporter of NPR for a while now, but all I ever listen to is Morning Edition. It may be time to reconsider that support.
  
• He’s cracking. Adam actually said this morning, “I’m not sure how I feel about Bush these days.” Heh heh. Before I’m done with him he’ll be reading The Nation and wearing Birkenstocks (not that I actually read The Nation or wear Birkenstocks, but you know what I mean).
  
• Curb Your Enthusiasm is such an incredible show. The season finale was one of the best episodes I’ve ever seen on TV. I thought I knew where it was going. I was cringing with the mishap that Larry David was getting himself into, that he always gets himself into. And, as happens in 99 percent of those episodes, the show totally took my by surprise. It was hysterical! They use their guest stars so well (in this case, Mel Brooks and David Schwimmer). (If you don’t know who Larry David is, he’s one of the co-creators of Seinfeld and the character of George Costanza was based on him. The interview he did a decade ago with Laugh Factory is one of the funniest I’ve ever read.) Watch this show! (End of second paid placement.)
  
• Doodles is now thoroughly enjoying his baths. I, however, am not. Because Doodles is obsessed with the plastic duck thermometer. It floats so nicely. It’s made of a very light plastic, which means it’s easy for little hands to pick it up. But my child doesn’t want to pick it up. My child, lazy little guy that he is, would rather lean precariously over in the water and stick his face on the floating duck to get it into his mouth. Picture bobbing for apples but with a duck instead. Which means I’m constantly on edge, trying to clean crevices and keep Doodles from submerging his face. No matter how many times I hand him that stupid duck, he drops it and leans over, with his mouth wide open. Water on his face doesn’t bother him, but it bothers me. So basically instead of him learning to pick the duck up, I’m learning that I need to check the bath water temp before Doodles gets in and then hide the stupid duck.

I hadn’t had a workday in a while, because last Monday we were coming back from New Hampshire and the Friday before that I was preparing for the trip. In years past, preparing for a trip meant spending five minutes tossing clothes into a duffel bag. Now it’s an hours long process involving sorting out which toys will keep Doodles occupied the longest, guessing how many outfits he’ll poop on, and trips to the grocery store to make sure we have adequate amounts of organic baby food. We seem to have had a lot of visitors lately, which is great, but it means that my days for work tend to get shuttled into getting-things-done-around-the-house days.

So I was psyched for last Friday because I have a number of projects I’m working on and I had a deadline this week. Besides, my e-mail backlog was getting out of hand. So I spent the morning attempting to take care of the most pressing e-mails, starting my challah (which I bake every Friday we’re home–nothing makes the house smell as good as fresh baked bread), and figuring out what needed to be done first. I just had everything organized and I started to get into the business of writing, when my cell phone rang. It was the day care. Doodles was being recalled. Apparently the flu bug hit again. He had diarrhea (and now that I have a baby, I guess I need to learn how to finally spell “diarrhea”) twice and I had to come pick him up. I think that child is conspiring with the fates to keep me from getting any writing done. Funny thing is, I took him home, and he was in high spirits. I didn’t see any diarrhea and he was in a bouncy, happy mood. Made me suspicious of the day care. My child was doing wonderfully.

On Saturday morning, Adam, Doodles, and I got in the car for the hour drive up to my in-law’s house. We were going to hang for the morning and Adam was going to help his dad install some software on his computer. We made it just over halfway there–just outside Newburyport–when Adam looked in the backseat just in time to see copious amounts of vomit erupt from our child. I pulled off and got into the backseat, and Doodles kept coming up with more and more vomit. I couldn’t believe he had that much in him. We debated whether or not to keep going, but ultimately decided to turnaround because I knew I’d have to feed him again and that I’d have to do it in small amounts (which meant I’d have to pump and feed him, and I didn’t have my pump with us). A quick call to the doctor confirmed this. She said we need to get some Pedialyte into him and monitor him carefully to make sure he had three wet diapers. I was to feed him a teaspoon of liquid (Pedialyte, breastmilk) every five or ten minutes. Yeah, like Doodles was going to like that. At first, he’d bat away any bottle with Pedialyte in it. We bought numerous flavors and kept trying them. After a bit, we tried the first one again (Gerber’s version), and he finally took it. We have three nearly full bottles of Pedialyte in our fridge if anyone needs some (and it kills me that they say you should throw them out after three days).

We got home and we maniacally checked his diaper. I’d grill Adam: “Was it wet? How wet?” He did fine the rest of the day, but then it was bedtime, which sent me into a minor tizzy. Doodles sleeps on his stomach now. Exclusively. If we roll him over, he rolls right back. He might spend a minute on his side, but his position of choice is facedown, on his tummy, with his face in the mattress. It’s a little freaky. I had visions of him puking in the night and then sleeping facedown in it. Yuck! And, to my mind, dangerous. So every time he made a peep, I ran in there (or sent Adam in) to check on him. He made it through the night with no puking, and I’m happy to report that it was not only the end of the stomach flu, but it ended in time to have the 24-hour symptom freeness that the daycare required for him to return. He’s back to his old self, with a huge appetite and plenty of giggles.

Thought I had a few nice things to say about being a Hah-vahd spouse in my essay for the HBS Survival Guide. Turns out I was wrong.

We have a Sara Hickman album called Toddler. It’s a good album (although I think I like Newborn better). However, there’s this one song on it that I can’t stop singing and it’s making me insane. The main lyrics are:

I know a wienie man

He owns a wienie stand

He owns everything from hot dogs on down

Someday I’ll be his wife

His little wienie wife

Oh how I love that hot dog man

The lyrics don’t do it justice–you have to hear it. I keep playing it over and over and over and when I’m not playing it, I’m singing it to Doodles. I may be causing great emotional damage, but I just can’t stop myself! It’s so catchy!