placenta-da!

Saturday, nov. 28, 2009   |   4 comments

Today’s Desi’s four-month birthday! And to celebrate, we did possibly one of the most hippiest, dippiest thing ever (aside from the whole birthing tub/homebirth extravaganza itself): Marco dug a hole in the backyard and we planted a wee baby lemon tree…atop the baby’s placenta!

I know. I know! But really, on the tie-dyed rainbow of insane things people do with placentas, a spectrum that includes placenta pills, placenta jerky, and surprise placenta-chili parties, planting it in the backyard was actually fairly tame. And somehow it didn’t seem right to just dump this loveable medical-waste blob that kept our baby going lo those nine+ months in the trash? It deserved better than that. A nice, decent burial. (Maybe should I be worried that I’ve somehow managed to anthropomorphize a placenta? Don’t say yes.)

And just think how much money Desi’s going to rake in from his organic placenta lemonade stand!

babies are so selfish

Friday, nov. 27, 2009   |   4 comments

I so dearly wanted to spend today doing traditional day-after-Thanksgiving things like lolling under the covers with a book, something nice and low-brow with the author’s name in bigger type than the title. I wanted to eat pie and take nap after nap, and watch television until my eyes bled. Baby be damned!

Instead I spent the day reading slender tongue-twisting books aloud, and swabbing baby parts, and hauling my boobs in and out of my shirt, and playing endless rounds of Scarf Face.

It wasn’t even a bad day. In fact, it’s been one of the better baby days I’ve spent with him. My Fraudulent Parent feelings were at an all-time low — usually I feel like a bad actor playing the role of Mommy. But today I almost felt natural as I cooed and clapped and sang my weird self-narrative songs (“Now mama’s eating cold stuffing with her hands!”). But it definitely wasn’t the all-about-me day I was hungering for.

When I first got knocked up and started to consider what it might actually be like to have a baby, I figured I’d miss the impromptu nights out…the dinners with friends, the movies in actual movie theaters, the strip clubs. But in practice, I’m finding that more than anything I miss the plans-free, pants-free days at home doing disgusting amounts of nothing at all. It’s hard to imagine getting a sitter just for one of those kinds of blank days. In fact, planning in advance to have such a day would defeat the whole purpose.

Stupid babies. Ruining my nothing!

thanksgiving moment

Thursday, nov. 26, 2009   |   4 comments

Sitting on the couch after a long, kitchen-hot day, sipping white wine on ice, patting my pumpkin-bread-pudding packed middle, and listening to Marco and Tom Geck passionately and meticulously rehash their all-time favorite ongoing argument: Which Is the Better Band, Led Zeppelin or The Who?

thanksgiving eve

Wednesday, nov. 25, 2009   |   8 comments

What’s that you say? It’s 9pm the night before Thanksgiving and the baby refused to nap all day and you didn’t get a chance to bake or slice or dice or anything? Commence frantic late-night back-aching bleary-eyed pie bake-off jamboree!

My family pie dough recipe is thankfully sleep-deprived-simpleton-proof: 1 cup flour plus 1 stick of butter plus 3 ounces cream cheese. That’s it!

After rolling out one pumpkin pie bottom and one apple pie bottom, I didn’t quite have enough cream cheese to make a third pie shell to top the apple, so I made two-thirds of a recipe and cut it up using my set of variable-sized scalloped cookie cutters.

Now the gaps between dough seem purposefully artful, versus poorly planned and depressing. At least that’s what I tell myself, in the quiet voice usually reserved for calming frightened animals, as I gently pat my own head.

We’ve only had to make two emergency missing-ingredient trips to the grocery store. And we only set off the fire alarm once! So far.

growing concern

Tuesday, nov. 24, 2009   |   4 comments

Desi had his four-month checkup today, and he now weighs in at just under 17 pounds — enough to feed nine adults and five children, according to the Buterball portions calculator. He’s grown four whole inches since he first debuted, meanwhile the circumference of his head (and who knew they measured or cared about the circumference of babies’ heads?) is in the 90th percentile, meaning his melon is now larger than 90% of the heads of other lesser babies.

Last night, after four months of camping out with us in our room, he went to sleep in his own room for the very first time (if you can call waking up and yelling until your parents to come to your crib and let you suck their thumbs until their arms go numb every forty minutes “sleep”).

And he has a special new ear-piercing, air-vibrating scream, which he sounds in times of both extreme joy and darkest rage. Marco and I shudder whenever we hear it, knowing as we do that we’ll be hearing such shrieks for many years to come, uh-oh.

He’s also starting to roll over, and grab at things (hoodie strings, newspapers, lips), and scornfully push away his parents’ hands. Almost all of his baby hair is gone now, and coarse, Marco-and-Evany troll-doll hair has grown in its place.

And he smiles now, all the time.

Watch, next he’ll be drinking Manhattans and picking up the drycleaning and converting to a Roth IRA. And flossing. Flossing!

Do you think if I bound his entire body in tight, tight straps to force him to stop growing, that would make me a bad mommy?