Viewing posts for the category babytime

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!

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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!

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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!

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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?

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the halfway mark

Monday, nov. 23, 2009   |   0 comments

Half a lifetime ago, back when I was a dewy-fleshed twenty-nothing and heading off to enjoy a year of tea and rain and deeply fried things over in mother England, I arranged to meet my boyfriend (and future first heartbreak) one last time before I left the states.

He had moved back to Los Angeles by that time, and I was still in the Bay Area, so we decided to meet halfway, geographically speaking. I drove three and a half hours south, he drove three and half hours north, and we united in the middle of the middle-of-nowhere destination spot known as the Lemoore-Hanford truckstop off I-5. We got ourselves a $26.95 room at the Best Western and spent one awesomely overwrought night sighing and goodbying and pining in advance.

Twenty years later, I decide on a whim to take advantage of my final week of maternity leave and drive down with the baby to Los Angeles for one last-hurrah weekend with my best friends Sophia and Jonathan and their kids and chickens and budgies and cats and bunny. Desi and I leave early in the morning, just in time to catch his first nap of the day. After three heroic hours of solid snoozing, he wakes with a start and immediately starts demanding some service. As his keening ramps up in earnest, I point my car at the next offramp — Lemoore Hanford!

The Red Robin that the boy and I bonzai burgered at that heartached weekend long ago is now shuttered. There’s a Chinese restaurant there now, and though it’s new to me, it’s already been there long enough for the sign to have lost some letters. And while I very much like the sound of “Chin Food,” Desi is in no temper for a sit-down meal. Instead he nurses his lunch in the car, then I change him, we exchange some coos, and we finish up with a quick session of practice standing. An hour later, we’re back on the road.

As we drive away, I giggle with thinks about how boggled Yester Evany — she of the 100% youth-addled sureness of where her life was headed and who she was going to spend it it with — would be if she could see Evany of the Now, with her job at the bank and her house in El Cerrito and her fine upstanding man and this brand new traveling mate:

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Looks like somebody’s been enjoying the Chin Food.

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I'm not sure, either

Sunday, nov. 22, 2009   |   0 comments

From where I’m sitting right now in the living room, I can hear Marco back in our bedroom, inexplicably sing-songing at Desi, “There’s a chicken in your head! There’s a chicken in your head!”

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