the pieces of my life

So today was Doodlebug’s official due date. And yet, here he is, almost three weeks old. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had he made it till today. Things worked out so much better with his early arrival, with Adam being off for a week and a half. But it feels like a milestone, making it to September 10. I’m going to celebrate with some frozen yogurt (I’m currently off of chocolate, as it seems it makes Doodlebug gassy). Doodlebug celebrated with his first real poo bomb (which inspired a round of the Tom Jones’s song “Poo Bomb,” but beyond, “Poo bomb, poo bomb. You’re my poo bomb!” we couldn’t remember any of the other words). A celebratory day all around.

On Monday, I was so sleep deprived, I couldn’t fall asleep. It happens you know, when you hit that point that you’re just too tired to sleep. So I broke down and did the unthinkable: I turned on daytime TV. Oh my, if you ever want to feel better about your own life, just watch a bit of daytime television. First a side note: I find all the commercials on daytime television to suddenly be alarmingly relevant to my life. Ouch. Okay, back to my point: Out of a morbid curiosity, I watched the premiere of the Ellen, Ellen Degeneres’s new daytime talk show. Right up front, I have to say, I think Ellen is funny. She’s one of the few stand-up comedians who can routinely make me laugh. Well, until now, at least. The show was so embarrassing, I was cringing for her. Jennifer Aniston was her guest and the conversation was excruciating. They discussed which way toilet paper should be hung. Seriously. And to make matters worse, they got it wrong! (They are both devout over-the-roll people, when any sane person knows that toilet paper needs to be hung under the roll.) I didn’t make it through the entire episode, because I can’t stand watching people make compete jerks of themselves. And it cured me of daytime TV!

All the baby books insist it doesn’t matter if you can sing on key, babies love to hear singing. Which is fine because 1) I love to sing and 2) as the cliche goes, I can’t carry a tune in a basket. I know some people say they can’t sing and then they open their mouths and something resembling a song comes out. Not me. Imagine cats in heat in the middle of the summer in the dead of night. I almost sound that good.

Anyway, I’m determined to sing to Doodlebug. But it turns out, I know the complete lyrics to exactly eleven songs, only six of which I can remember at any given time, and only three of those which are appropriate for a G rated audience. It turns out, I know between 35 and 73% of a whole lot of songs, but it’s discouraging when you get to that part where you just sort of trail off, because you don’t know what comes next. So, the songs I know that are okay to sing to Doodlebug are a mangled version of “Hush Little Baby” (my mother never knew what the lyrics were so she made up her own version, which I’m passing along), “The 59th Street Bridge Song,” and “Cruising Down the River” (a song from the ’40s that my father sang to me when I was little, because he didn’t know the words to any songs either). Then there are the okay songs, songs like “Satan Is My Motor” and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” And then there are the definitely-inappropriate-but-I’m-singing-them-anyway-because-I-don’t-know-what-else-to-do songs such as “F*ck and Run.” The Tweedle Twirp and I have spent the morning singing various lines, asking, “Do you remember what comes next?” I’m guessing it’s not going to be in Doodlebug’s future to be especially musical.

Doodlebug, like most babies, does this thing where he, out of nowhere, begins to wave his arms around wildly. Then, just as suddenly, he’ll stop. It’s some sort of baby reflex. When Adam saw him doing this, he said, “Awww, Doodlebug is conducting the baby orchestra!” Which I thought was funny, because when I saw Doodlebug doing it, the first thing that came to my mind was the opening of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?” Then it was quiet again. […]”What the hell are you yelling about?” [my attorney] muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” […] No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

Doodlebug’s seeing bats. I’m sure of it.

Have you missed me? Somehow things like blogging–and eating and sleeping–don’t seem to rank as a high priority right now. However, Adam has set up a laptop with wireless for me, so maybe I can quickly blog between feedings. Although considering that I started this blog entry a full day ago and it has yet to be posted, maybe I’m being a tad optimistic. Things have been a daze, although I survived the bris, which I had my doubts about. Doodlebug came through it with flying colors, as was to be expected. We had twenty people over, and I think some of them were traumatized for life. Before the bris, Adam said to me, “I’ve seen you awfully anxious before, but never anything like this.” Of course! They wanted to hurt my baby! I kept whispering to Doodlebug, “All you have to do is say the word and I’ll whisk you off to Paris and we won’t tell anyone we’re Jewish!” but he said nothing. After the bris, I told Adam that I realized why babies are circumcised when they’re just a few days old; had Doodlebug been old enough to talk, I would have been promising him anything he asked for: “You want to go to space camp? You got it! A new Playstation? Absolutely! You need your own pony? What shall we name him?” The onesie in the picture came from the Tweedle Twirp’s boyfriend (if you can’t read it, it says, “I had a ritual circumcision and all they gave me was this lousy onesie”). He gave us a whole bunch of adorable onesies, although my favorite is the one that reads, “I (heart) my emotionally detached common-law uncle.” (He and the Tweedle Twirp are indeed common law–together twelve years and living together for seven; she lives a party-girl life, but in a very stable kind of way).

Other random notes from the past week and a half:

• The hospital was a complete blur and even though I wasn’t heavily medicated (I gave up the Percocet early–it just wasn’t doing it for me), I was certainly not with it. Case in point: Adam would go home during the day to take care of things and take a shower there. But on the last day, he showered in our hospital room. After his shower, he said, “Did you realize that you actually didn’t bring any shampoo with you? You have two bottles of conditioners in there.” Um, no, I hadn’t noticed, and I’d taken four showers. But I had noticed that my hair was remarkably shiny and full.
  
• After the first day in the hospital, Adam and I kept falling into the trap of saying “But he never…” “He always…” (as in “He’s never fussed like this before!”) until the other would point out that twenty-four hours hardly constituted an “always” or a “never.”
  
• The hospital has an online nursery that is just filled with pictures of ugly babies. And no wonder! The photographer comes to your room, puts your baby on a hard curved table, expects the baby to stay upright, shines a light on his nose (for placement), and then shoots! What baby could possibly take a good picture like that? And the compound that with the fact that 75 percent of those kids were born vaginally, which means their heads are most likely still misshapen. It’s a cruel thing to do to a child.
  
• Doodlebug has a darling trick that we call P.O.D., pee on daddy. Today there was a minor modification that was less amusing, P.O.M., but he’s so innocent looking as he lets loose all over me, the changing table, the nursery that we can’t help but laugh. Of course, it also necessitated his second sponge bath.
  
• Surprisingly, I haven’t yet had a drink. I was told that having a glass of wine or a beer while breastfeeding is fine, but oddly enough, I’ve had no desire to imbibe. So that just goes to show all those who thought I’d be wheeled out of surgery and asking for my martini!
  
• I thought I’d have a really hard time not calling Doodlebug, Brown Brown. And for the first couple of days, it was a struggle. However, he’s acquired so many other nicknames (Doodlebug, Squeaker, the monkey), that Brown Brown has really fallen to the wayside. Although, I keep telling him, his name may be Medros, but really, he’ll always be a Brown.
  
• I’m dreaming of nonmaternity clothes. I have no idea when I’ll be able to move back into my regular clothes, but I can tell you now, it will be nowhere in the near future.

Oh, look at that. It’s time for the twelfth feeding of the day. My time goes quickly when you’re a human milk machine. One of these days I’ll post again. I hope….

Have you noticed that the Red Sox have won the last four games? Did you know that I gave birth to our son four nights ago (okay, technically three nights ago, but work with me)? Coincidence? We think not.

Not acupuncture nor pelvic tilts nor bags of frozen vegetables on my abdomen got him to turn, but he decided he wanted to come out anyway. Friday was both mine and Adam’s last day at work, and we had planned on spending the following week getting ready for Brown Brown. Adam had a final internship outing on Friday night: a cruise ride around the Newburyport Harbor (which is 45 minutes north of Boston). I waffled until the last minute on whether or not to accompany him, and ultimately decided I was just too tuckered out. It was a really stormy night, so after a quiet last day at work, I went to the video store to pick up the evening’s entertainment and headed home. I had a long to-do list, but I took one look at our filthy house and decided I was really too tired to do anything, so I lay down on the couch to watch trashy TV. At about 7:45, I decided I should have something to eat. Yet, I really was too beat to get up. I made it as far as the five feet to the chair in the living room, while I thought about dinner. All of a sudden, I realized, “Hey, there’s something really wet going on.” To avoid too much information, let’s just say it took about 15 minutes or so for me to realize I wasn’t peeing in my pants. I called our OB, who said, “Come on in!” I told her Adam was a good hour and a half away, and could I wait for him?, but she said, “Actually, you should get here as soon as you can. As long as there are no contractions, you can drive yourself.” And so I did but only after calling a very bedfuddled Adam who was in the middle of the harbor cruise and incredibly unsure of what to do. I made it to the hospital somehow (the drive is one big blur) and as I was checking in, the nurse assured me, “Your husband called. He’s on his way.” I’ll let Adam tell his side of things, but I sat in the waiting room, feeling very self-conscious about being alone and wet. Luckily, I got to jump to the head of the line, which was great because Friday night was a packed house in Labor and Delivery. According to my OB, stormy nights are always busy; there’s an unscientific theory that the barometric pressure helps water break. Anyway, I was sitting there when I heard one of the nurses say, “The breech rupture goes next.” Never have words such as “breech rupture” sounded so good. “That’s me!” I said, jumping up. I was ushered back and tests were given, ultrasounds taken, and soon Adam showed up (yeah, he didn’t speed much). To condense the story here (because the Doodlebug really wants to get fed soon), he was still breech and a c-section began at 11ish. At 12:02 a.m. on August 23, Doodlebug was pulled from my womb butt first. Our own little Macbeth baby. A real Red Sox rally monkey. He was six pounds, ten ounces, and nineteen inches long with a full head of black hair. He’s been an incredibly fussy baby who doesn’t want to be put down for more than a second, but that’s okay because I’ve been an incredibly fussy mommy who doesn’t want to put him down for more than a second. It’s an incredible, surreal, amazing, emotional, awe-inspiring thing, and really, there’s no point in blogging any more about it because there’s no way to put into words the feeling of holding your very own child. Things are going to be a little quiet here in blogdom for awhile. (Side note: I won’t be responding to e-mail until we’re home from the hospital, and expect me to be slow about it.)

If you recall, once upon a time, I had comments on my site. I took them down because I found I was compulsively checking them while at work. Well, I’m not going to be working for a while, so I decided to experiment with putting them back up. It may take a try or two for me to get these working right, so if they’re not working for a bit, just be patient with me. If I find I’m still compulsive about it, they may go away again. Also, just so you all know, I have no qualms about being a comments nazi. After all, this is my blog and there is no freedom of speech here. If your comment rubs me the wrong way (it’s irrelevant or mean spirited), off it will go! But for now, comment away.

So, now that I’m doomed to evenings on the couch, I find myself addicted to VH1’s I Love the ’70s show. While I can’t stay up late enough to watch both episodes (as I could have in the ’70s, if only my parents would have let me), I find that the ones I have seen transport me back to my days as a South Miami kid, when Morgan Freeman was best known as Easy Reader and I knew that as a woman I could bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and never, never let you forget you’re a man (although the show hasn’t shown that commercial, it’s deeply imprinted into my brain as representative of all things 1970s).

Of course, while this show brings back many childhood memories for me, it only reinforces the fact that Adam is almost five years younger than me. “Remember the bicentennial?” I asked him. Nope, not a memory of it. And why should he? He was only four and a half. But I remember it. I remember collecting the bicentennial quarters. I remember going to watch the fireworks on a small hill in a park by a high school, and my sister crying and crying and crying because the fireworks were so loud (I also remember that the bathroom stalls had no doors and making my mother try to block me from view. I didn’t understand why there were no doors at the time and in retrospect realize that Miami, even in the ’70s, had crappy scary high schools). I remember the patriotic cover my elementary school yearbook had that year. Adam claims I couldn’t have that many memories of the ’70s, but he’s wrong: those were many of my formative years. So, in what will be one of my more self-indulgent posts, here are some of my strongest memories of the 1970s:

• My mother explaining to me why Anita Bryant was a bad person and what “homosexual” meant and why it was okay for my school teachers to be “homosexual.”
  
• My allowance didn’t cover the entire price of a Mad Magazine, which was 50 cents (my allowance was a quarter). By the time the monthly magazine came out, I wouldn’t have been able to save the whole 50 cents. My father would give me my allowance on a Friday, and then we’d go to the newsstand in the next morning, and I’d spend my allowance generally on a Richie Rich or an Archie comic book or a candy bar. However, my father, a closet Mad Magazine reader himself, would generally take pity on me and kick in the extra quarter for the magazine (and eventually the extra 35 cents when they raised the price to 60 cents).
  
• Geoff, my best friend Charlotte’s older brother, explaining to us why it was so shocking for Eric Clapton to be singing “Cocaine” on television and what, exactly, cocaine was.
  
• “Oh no!” “No Coke, Pepsi” Noogie-patrol. “Baseball been a berry berry good to me.” “Candygram.” “And she had a teeny tiny drop of sweat on the tip of her nose and I wanted to say, ‘Hey, Barbara, knock that drop of sweat off your nose!'” “Jane, you ignorant slut.” “Never mind.” The Bass-o-Matic.
  
• Finally getting a Little House on the Prairie skirt in a lovely shade of peach.
  
• Being forced to sit through “Black Dog” before my dad’s 8-track of Led Zeppelin IV would get to “Stairway to Heaven.”
  
• Buying my first 45 record–“Run Joey Run”.
  
• My mother trying to explain the Watergate trials to me, but my being infinitely more interested in The Six-Million Dollar Man (which actually came on Sunday nights past my bedtime, but I was my father’s excuse to watch the show so I was allowed to stay up late to see it. At the end of each episode, he’d say, “Time for bed,” and I’d say, “Scenes, scenes, scenes!” and I’d be allowed to stay up just a few minutes longer to see the scenes for the next episode).
  
• My mother explaining (she did a lot of explaining to me in those days) what those words written on the bathroom walls of her school meant (she was getting her fine arts degree at the University of Miami in those days), and why it was okay to say those words–there was no such thing as a “bad” word–(and she did–and still does–say them frequently) but not at school and not in front of my grandparents.
  
• Not even having the concept of a seat belt in my dad’s MG convertible as the Tweedle Twirp and I sat on the back perch when the top was down and yelled, “Fast around the corners! Fast around the corners!” as my dad screeched around the corners making my sister and I shriek.
  
• Wanting to be Anne of Green Gables; wearing tinted glasses with my initials in gold in the corner of the lens; “Mother, please, I’d rather do it myself!”; safety being the orange flag my mother made me put on my bicycle; my first crush–on Donny Osmond; “And they told two friends and they told two friends”; my father’s misguided mustache; the orange and brown stripes my mother painted in our hallway; seeing Grease five times in the theater but having no idea what the line “she’s a real pussy wagon” in the song “Greased Lightnin'” meant; wanting to go over to Cindy’s house because she had her own princess phone, a waterbed, and Pong; “Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, all on a sesame seed bun”; and my father taking me to see Saturday Night Fever because he thought it was a good movie and an important movie for me to see, but making me swear that I wouldn’t tell my sister that we went, because she was still too young for it.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, my office (my office until tomorrow evening that is!) is in Kenmore Square and from my cubicle window, I have a picture perfect view of Fenway Park (and I’m still not sure why Adam got so angry with me the other night when I saw a news report that teased, “Improvements are being made at Fenway,” and I said to him, “What? They’re going to bring in a winning team?”). I believe I’ve also mentioned that our hospital is just on the other side of Fenway (if I weren’t such a waddling mess and it weren’t 90 degrees, the hospital is actually walkable from my office). I just never put the hospital and Fenway together until this morning, as I noticed for the first time as I was driving to work the new banners on the street lamps in the neighborhood. On them is a picture of a baseball with a Band-Aid on it. Beneath it, it reads, “Beth Israel Deaconess: The official hospital of the Boston Red Sox.” Apparently, this coalition didn’t begin until April–after we had picked the hospital–so I can’t accuse Adam of insidiously trying to indoctrinate Brown Brown into the culthood (yes, it is a cult) of Red Soxdom. However, I will say I’m not real comfortable with this alliance. After all, what happens if Pedro is injured the same day I go into labor? What will Adam do? How does he choose between a glimpse of his hero and the birth of his son? I mean, hey, if we were at the official hospital of the Miami Dolphins, and I had to choose between giving birth or hanging with Dan Marino, I gotta say, I’d probably pick Dan. Luckily, I think Adam is made of stronger stuff than I am.

The timer has gone off–we’ve reached full term. The baby is fully baked, and now just resting in the oven. Anyone’s guess on when he’ll decide to make his exit (I was looking for another baking metaphor there, but it hurt my head too much, so just forget it).