Letter B

Reveling in my Parental Self-Absorbtion!

Apparantly blogging about your children is a new-fangled fad. Again the NYT styles section has revealed me to be nothing but a zeitgeist zombie acting in tandem with thousands of my demographic brethren. Read about it here.

Calgon, take me away.

Today i did not want to be the mommy. Or the wife for that matter. I just wanted to put the baby in the closet, take the batteries out of the husband and leave the house. I do get plenty of breaks but there is always the tug of the baby when I am away. This gravitational force is not always unpleasant but it is always present. So today I just wanted a few hours of amnesia where I have no baby and no husband and no dog and no apartment. Just space and time and maybe a manicure. So when this did not happen, and when I realized that it will not be happening um, ever, I have to say I got a little cranky. I am really beginning to appreciate the wild look in my sister Kara's eyes when she would recommend never having children. She would say "you don't HAVE to have kids Alana. You could have a great life without them. You could do whatever you want, you could go wherever you want..." and then she'd trail off mumbling incoherently. And I thought she was just trying to humor me, since I was sure (for good reasons) that I was unable to have children anyway. Turns out she was serious. I know she is happier that it turned out this way (the pleasure of watching my highs and lows with a new baby far outweigh the vicarious pleasures of my former life) but I understand why she wanted to make sure that I REALLY wanted this.

Non-Lowell Post

I swear. I will not mention my son in this post if I can help it. Ahem. Dum de dum... Hm. It seems i have very little to report these days that does not involve the grub. That's his newest nickname. When we have him all swaddled up and are begging him to go to sleep he looks like an angry larva. Oh crap, I'm talking about him.

Okay, now, I swear, nothing more about the baby. I do have a very rich interior life that i could be sharing here. It's a life that does not involve poop, spitup, sleep deprivation or laundry. It is filled with poetry and sublime thoughts. It is. Honestly.

Check the album for Yet More Pictures Of Lowell.

We are to going to excursion today.

Matthew and I went on an adventure with the boy today which included shopgirls fawning over my be-bjorned husband and me breastfeeding in public for the first time. We went out to run some errands and then stopped for lunch at the Tea Lounge in Park Slope. Lowell's internal hunger signal was activated right on time as I was tucking into my egg salad sandwich. (Since birth as soon as I start to eat he demands to be fed as well). Matthew handed him over to me and was breathless with anticipation for my first public display of nudity. Now the Tea Lounge is like a La Leche League opium den so there could not be a more supportive place to breastfeed on the east coast but i still felt nervous as I positioned Lowell and lifted my shirt. Of course Lowell was totally nonplussed so that helped. It was fine, and i know soon enough I'll be whipping them out everywhere but it was still surprisingly nervewracking.

mmmmm...

At about 6am after feeding Lowell he was still fussy and not wanting to go back to sleep. I put him on my chest and he fell asleep instantly. It was a very tender moment; baby nestled under my chin, breathing peacefully while birds chirped in the early morning dawn. Then my son threw up almost all the milk i had just fed him down my neck and into my hair. I heart motherhood.

Sounds like...

Sleep deprivation definitely affects one's ability to speak English with one's usual acuity. Here is a conversation today between my husband and friend on the phone in front of me while I was changing the boy wonder:
M: We just got done bathing him and we have these cute little bath cloth things...
Me: They're called towels.
M: yeah, towels. And they have this pocket on them for the head...
Me: Hood, honey, they're called hoods.
M: Yeah, hoods. And it's got the head of a cow.
Me: It's a hippo. Not a cow.
M: Yeah, a hippo...
You get the gist. This went on and on. It's actually really fun for us to try and figure out what the hell the other one is saying. It's like living on 10,000 Pyramid (or whatever the amount is these days) without the cash prizes.

Ye olde colick

So yesterday we had our first episode of "unconsolable crying" aka "colic" aka "screaming like a miniature banshee with full-size banshee lungs." Since Lowell is 6 weeks we (and by we I mean the one who spends most of her time reading about this stuff while compulsively scanning urban baby posts) have been expecting this. Most people will tell you that 45 minutes of a screaming baby is not "colic" and we should be so lucky. They are right but we are new at this and 45 minutes of screaming baby is about all we (and by we i mean we) can handle.

And what the heck? "Colic?" It's one of those old-timey illnesses that has survived unlike "gout" or "dropsy." And why has it survived? Because they still don't know what the f*&k causes it or what it actually is. Anyway, I hope Lowell's touch of the colic miraculously goes bye bye.

Yessir, that's my baby!

Went to Prospect Park today to meet up with some friends. We put Lowell in the bjorn and walked across the long meadow - a beautiful day. We met up with Mila and Joey and Marian and a few other folks we'd never met. One of the women, a mom, came up to us with that baby-lust glazed eye look and said "is that your baby?" I felt an instant flush of warmth, pride and wonder. It is still a total shock but yes that beautiful little muffin is ours.