group therapy

Tuesday, nov. 3, 2009   |   0 comments

Today was a rough day, one of those “up at 4am” brain-churn days full of frets, tears, and doubts…about my dread of leaving this teeny baby to go back to work at the end of this month, about the maybe brain-scrambling dangers of vaccinations, about the baby’s addiction to adult thumbs and violent swinging, about our ability to pay the mortgage, about the leaky roof and the upcoming rains, about burglars and raccoons and disembodied torsos…everything.

Luckily Tuesdays are the day that the ladies from my birthing class gather at a local bakery to chat and pat and coo on each other’s babies. And the fact that I had somewhere to go with all my worries sure did help a lot.

It’s a wildly varied group, our birthing class, and I don’t think we would have ever met if we all hadn’t gotten ourselves knocked up around about the same time. But unlike other random gatherings of strangers that life throws at you — traffic school, cuddle parties — the slender overlap of this group’s personal Venn diagrams, i.e., baby-having, has proved itself to be a commonality fertile enough to encourage actual friendships to grow.

And it really was such a comfort to be able to sit down today and hear that I wasn’t the only one who was feeling totally overwhelmed by the avalanche of contradicting baby books, or getting freaked out by friends with perfect-sounding babies, or catching themselves fantasizing about doing something ill-advised to their inconsolable babies…such as bounce him off the floor or toss her 600 feet into the air or gently push him deep into a magically permeable wall. See? All perfectly normal.

Plus there was chocolate cream pie!

thumbs down

Monday, nov. 2, 2009   |   0 comments

I know I keep talking about baby shit, but.

This morning I discovered a smear of Desmond’s shit on the back of one of my thumbs, and sadly it had been a good two hours since his last diaper change. Just call me Fecal Fonzie. Aaayyy?

So you know what this means: The people who came here back in 2003 searching for “shit thumbs” were actually in the right place, if six years too early.

My apologies to all you dirty Jack Horners for the delay! I hope it isn’t too late for us to be friends. Perhaps you would like to come over for a few rounds of Muddy Thumb Wrestling?

when I was your age

Sunday, nov. 1, 2009   |   0 comments

One of the things I’m looking forward to as a parent is the chance it gives me to bore my kid’s brains out with scintillating tales of how caveman crazy things used to be when I was little.

Like how no one had cellphones, which meant that if you were meeting a friend at the mall, you had to have your exact meeting place and time all figured out in advance, and you actually had to be there when and where you said you’d be.

Phones were tethered to the wall with long ringlet cords that got twisted over time, so you’d have to let the headset dangle periodically to unwind the cord back to normal. We still had the old fashioned finger dial, which meant you always dreaded making calls to numbers with zeroes in them because you’d have to wait five thousand years for the dial to finish its rotation and return to the starting point. And there was no Redial button, so trying to be the radio station’s Eleventh Caller was actually hard, sweaty work. There was also no answering machines or voicemail, and no call waiting — people just got busy signals. I bet you don’t even know what a busy signal is.

We didn’t have ATMs. The only way to get cash was to actually go inside the bank and get it from a bank teller, and you were always scrambling to get there before closing time, which as an absurdly early 3pm. Savings accounts came with tidy little passbooks that got stamped with each deposit and withdrawal.

We still had a black and white television, which had to be switched on a good half-hour before a show started because it took that long to warm up. Also we’d watch whatever show came on afterward, purely because changing the channel would mean having to stand up and manually turning the dial. (We didn’t have a remote!)

MTV was brand new and we’d stay up all night watching it, not letting ourselves go to sleep until a really great video came on, something totally surreal, like Pressure by Billy Joel, holy shit.

Kids didn’t sit in car seats, or wear bike helmets. And we walked ourselves to school.

I got $3.65 an hour at my job at the movie theater, where I sold tickets for just $5 ($3 for matinees). Gas was $.75 a gallon, and the Golden Gate Bridge toll was one measly dollar.

People would wave to drivers in other cars as a thank you for letting them merge.

Ziplock bags were this new invention, and only attractive, well-liked kids seemed to get them in their lunch bags. All the weird social-outcast kids in the too-short cords (here!) still had to use those baggies with the fold-over tops.

Frozen yogurt was new and weird and totally gross-sounding.

College papers were written on word processors, which had a little screen that held up to one line of text at a time, which you could actually edit before hitting Print and moving on to the next line — so much more flexible and forgiving and modern than the electric typewriters we learned on in high school typing class!

We held up lighters during slow songs.

We made mixed tapes by taping songs off the radio on our ghetto blasters.

And there was no email, or internet, or websites. Nor solemn mid-life-crisis blog posts about how quaint and strange this old world once was.

flying headlong into a spitstorm

Thursday, oct. 29, 2009   |   0 comments

Desi Baroz, your country’s newest superhero. Power? Rainmaker.

And my camera, it turns out, isn’t really waterproof:

three months and counting

Wednesday, oct. 28, 2009   |   0 comments

Three months ago today I was floating around the gigantic inflatable Lay Z Spa II (“an ideal way of relaxing in the afternoon or enjoying the ultimate romantic evening”) and throwing up into a plastic tupperware tub from Ikea.

I remember at one point, maybe twenty hours into labor, I completely broke down, crying pitifully on the corner of my bed, convinced I couldn’t possibly go on. It was as awful as awful can get — total Ultimate Westley-from-Princess-Bride Suffering — just the worst, most soul-splitting moment ever.

I also remember, just few hours later, stopping mid-contraction to apologize to my delivery team for my disgracefully unshaven legs. Most mundane moment ever!

I feel like I’ve been pingponging between those two extremes — small, regular-life baby moments intermingled with biblically epic moments — ever since. One minute I’m weeping over nightmarish thoughts of “What If This Baby DIED?” (I can no longer watch news stories or Law and Order episodes or Biggest Loser confessionals about babies dying, I just can’t.) The next minute I’m sitting peacefully, just watching the baby flap:

Happy three-month birthday, Bubbles!