J. Crier

The first time I was pregnant, I was tired all the time. It got better after the first trimester was over, and got worse again as the due date got nearer. This time around, I didn't have that first trimester wipe-out, and have been feeling fairly normal even up to now (week 20!). But there are other things about this pregnancy that are different too, and one of the most notable is the fact that I cry at the slightest provocation. I have always been an easy crier, but since this fetus came along, it has become an absolute pathology. So if the first time around was the sleepy pregnancy, this one, it seems, is the weepy pregnancy.

What makes me cry, you ask? First, just about any item on the news. Soldiers who thought they were coming home this month are redeployed until July. Wah! And again, any time they give the slightest personal detail about a soldier killed in Iraq. Wah! He had a mother and two sisters! He had a ten year old son! But of course it is not just bad news. When the two guys in New Jersey or whatever caught the toddler that fell out of of his fourth story window? Wah! Last week DURING THE TRAFFIC REPORT, they guy explained that the slow-down on I-5 was because someone had to pull over and give birth to a baby. Nice! I cried the rest of the way to work. Just now I was watching some of the video contest entries on the intranet here at work (don't ask), and one of the videos from some guy in India showed a young techie go-getter mountain biking through a rural village, where a mother was holding a very sick child. WAH! Of course the techie uses his technology to get help, and at the end of the video, the kid is frolicking. More tears from me!

There is a song on the mix CD I got from a way-too-nice classmate once (she gave one to everyone in the seminar!) called "Last Fare of the Day," and I can't remember the name of the artist, though if you're reading this, CW, feel free to remind me with a comment. The song is about a cab driver who picks up this couple who are in a really bad place (you know, emotionally, or whatever, not a bad neighborhood), and then later in the song he picks up the same couple (at least in my mind, it's the same couple), and they are just leaving the hospital with a new baby, and flowers and balloons. And things are a lot better with them, as you may imagine. (Here's the line, so corny, which sends me over the edge: "I asked about her name, and we all laughed when he said 'Hope' and she said 'Grace.'") Even when I wasn't pregnant, I teared up for this song, but now that I am? Forget it. I think it actually frightened Jim once, how hard I cried when this song came on. He claims he can't understand the words, so obviously he is somewhat less affected by it. One morning when it came up in rotation on the drive to work, I thought, oh, I can handle it. Then I heard the first few strums of the guitar and had to immediately turn it off. That's how bad it is with me and this song. And these hormones.

I am reminded of my hyperextended lachrymosity today because of a little breakfast tableaux that has had me dabbing at my eyes two or three times now, at random points during the day. Naomi has been talking now and then about babies being born, how they are in their mommies' tummies, then they come out and that means they are born! And they're on the outside! My friend's baby is due any day, which we talk about a lot, and Naomi is also starting to get it that I have a baby in my tummy, too, so it's all good with me if she wants to talk about the miracle of birth. This morning while she was eating her mini-bagel, she said, I was born! I was in your tummy, then I came out! And I was born! We talked about what it was like when she came out, how it was light and Daddy was there and I held her on my chest and we named her.
Then I told her that I was born too- that I used to be inside of Gramma's tummy (which I'm sure was a stretch for her, but she seemed to go along with it), and then I came out and was a little baby. I said, you know, because Gramma is MY mommy. She thought for a second, then she said, where is Gramma's mommy? Oh, man...really? I said, right, Gramma had a mommy too. Gramma was a little baby once too. And she said again, where is Gramma's mommy? What I did not say is that Gramma's mommy was a beautiful person and an excellent Gramma herself, with a cute Swedish accent, who passed away in 1997 at the age of 92. And what I did not do was try to figure out whether Naomi had any sense of what she was actually asking me about. I just said, Gramma's mommy is not here anymore. At which point, naturally, I had a huge surge of crydrenaline and had to whisk my cereal bowl off to the sink to avoid weeping all over my unsuspecting kid (who of course has seen me cry before, an embarrassing number of times- no strong as steel mommy in this family).

Fortunately, she moved right on to something else. Like gleefully pointing out for the fifteenth time that she had both a milk cup and a water cup. Luxury! I went through a hundred quick thoughts at once, that I missed my Gramma, and that I wish Naomi could have known her, and that she could have known Naomi, and that yeah, my mom was once a little baby, just as I was, and that was almost as hard for me to imagine as it probably was for Naomi to imagine her big, giant mommy in Gramma's tummy. None of these instantaneous musings were much good for stopping the crying. I got my act together, we finished up breakfast and got on with our day. When I think of the things I get to enjoy when this pregnancy is done, I hope a slight cessation in the weeping is one of them. Otherwise you will find me, greedily eating cold cuts and soft cheeses and sushi with a glass of beer, crying over whoever got eliminated from American Idol.

The Khoolest

A post about our trip to AZ is forthcoming. In the meantime, is there a cooler baby than this one? Hard to imagine.

Again with the Daycare-Related Post

Thanks to all who gave me their thoughts on the situation described in the previous post. I have thought about things a lot, and I think I am overreacting. The teachers really have been nothing but nice when I'm around, despite having a crazy bunch of little guys to ride herd on. So what if the voice volume is a little higher?

I still have some concerns, though. The main one is that Naomi, normally a fan of school, has said every day either that she wants to be in the other class, or that she doesn't want to go to school at all. This is probably normal considering that she's getting to the age where she has figured out that she doesn't always want the same things for herself as the things that are frequently thrust upon her. School is thrust upon her every day, so it's not surprising that she has started to have something to say about it. On the other hand, wah!

It's hard to hear that she is not as happy now as she has been in the past.Her first transition, from the baby class to the teeny toddler class, was hardest on me. I actually cried on her last day, and made ridiculous personalized presents for the teachers so they would never forget my kid. Ha. For her part, Naomi talked about her old teachers a lot, but she seemed to really like being in the new class, and playing on all the great new playground equipment, and doing the songs and activities that went along with being a slightly bigger kid. For some reason this second transition, to the two-year-old class, is harder on her. She is the littlest in the class, one of very few girls. And I know she misses her teachers from the teeny toddler class, who were very sweet to her. Even so, it was clear for the last few weeks she was in that class that it was time to move up. There was a new influx of tinies from the baby class, and seeing all of them together made me realize that it was going to get frustrating and boring for her (am I really saying this?).

My other concern, which may or may not be related to the main concern, is that I've heard Naomi say a few things to her animals, usually when she is putting them down for a nap (a favorite past time), that were a little surprising. "Get that head down!" "Look in my eyes, you hear me?!" Yipes. This makes me think that naptime in the new class is not as relaxing as it should be.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will relate that I spent a year as a preschool teacher. My class was the "young 4's." Man, were they cute. The place that I worked had a very yelly head teacher, and she set the tone for how we interacted with the kids. This was particularly bad for me, as I can be a wimpy chameleon in work and social situations, so there were times when I got yelly too. Frequently, at naptime, I was determined that all my charges would sleep if I had to give myself a stroke making it happen. I am sure I said "Get that head down!" or worse tothese little ones. The result was that a bunch of kids that were probably developmentally ready to stop napping developed the ability to lie still and quiet for an hour or more in the middle of the day. Not necessarily the most useful skill outside of a monastery, but there you are.

Right. So getting all worked up over hearing Naomi bring home nap-coercion techniques that are (I promise) not learned from her parents feels on the one hand like my job as a mom, and on the other hand like a certain pot casting aspersions on a certain kettle. It is not going to be the first time that Naomi picks up something we're not crazy about. And the next time she does, rather than looking at Jim with horror and saying, did I just hear her right?! I will talk to her about using kind words with her animals, and with people. In the meantime I will ruminate endlessly about this very long test that is constantly being administered to me, wherein I have to decide whether to continue doing everything in my power to protect and shield my child within a world that is endlessly safe and kind and loving, or whether (and how quickly) I have to accept that she is part of the actual world, and everything that goes along with that. How lucky for her and for me that our version of the actual world is still so safe and kind and loving. Not so, in so many other places.

Old Yeller

Naomi is in a daycare that I really like. The facility is not too big, not corporate, nice setting, secular, calm, kind, good teacher to kid ratio, etc. Recently she moved up into the slightly bigger tiny kid class (she's almost two!), and now has two new teachers. They also seem kind and caring. Here's the sticking point: one of them is a yeller. She speaks in a normal-to-loud voice to me, but when she addresses the kids, it is all yelling all the time. I don't mean to say that she is mean (when I am there), I just mean to say that she is LOUD. Given that the classroom is propotionately small, even with a busy play buzz going on, you would only have to raise your voice just a bit to be heard at the other end. But when she is right in front of us, when we arrive in the morning, she says hello to me, and then she shouts HELLO to Naomi (who occasionally cowers back into my leg).

Naomi is at an age where she is just starting to understand the concept of rules. She says them back to us all the time, even things we said three weeks ago, sort of off the cuff, that normally we wouldn't think we would need to make an actual rule around ("We don't lick the couch. The couch is not for licking."). This is exciting in a way, because it feels like she recognizes the need to think about her behavior and what effect it will have. It's a little bit discomfiting as well, though, because it shows us how often we are decreeing, and about what ludicrous household minutiae. Yikes. Because it seems like she is starting to sort out her response to authority and internalizing some of it, and also simply because my gut tells me that a loud and shouty environment is perhaps not the ideal one for any kid to spend long hours in, I am uncomfortable with the fact that her authority figure and primary caregiver in the daytime hours displays the "American talking to a foreigner" behavior each and every day.

Which leads me to a fork in the road. Do I accept it's not that big of a deal, and just concentrate on teaching Naomi the difference between an inside voice and an outside voice on my own time, hoping for no hearing damage while she's in this class for the next six months? Or do I say something? If I say something, whom do I say it to? It would take a lot of courage to say something directly to the teacher herself. The alternative is to say something to the administrator (although I believe the owner is off having a baby this week). But unless I convince the person I talk to about this not to mention my name in connection with the feedback, that would mean the teacher knows who the feedback is coming from. My fear, of course, is that she might then see Naomi differently from the rest of the kids, or treat her differently than she did before she found out my opinion of her pipes.

I have read other daycare dilemmas on message boards, and I remember some angry retorts from caregivers who claim that they would never, ever treat a child any differently because of something a parent said or did. I want to believe that. But I know how people are. If you feel resentment, which a person might if they were told that they have a big giant mouth, you tend to let it out somehow.

Now I am flashing back to Crucial Conversations, a book I had to read back when I was in the lowest rungs of management (rungs I let go of, dropping gracefully back where I started). The authors talked about a common mistake people make, which is assuming what I seem to remember them calling "the sucker's choice." This makes it hard for people to deal with a situation because they think there are only two choices- in my case, say nothing, or say something and risk alienating the person who takes care of my kid. But maybe there is a third way? Maybe I can tell the teacher that Naomi has been shouting more at home (which she has a bit), and that we don't shout at home (we really don't, barring the occasional call to another room), and that I was thinking perhaps it was due to the fact that there are so many boys in her class (in Naomi's new class, girls are outnumbered five to one. This is a good ratio to get used to if she ever decides to follow in her mom's footsteps and get a job at a software company...). See how I assume the mantle of sexism and take the teacher out of it completely? I could ask if she would mind just practicing quiet, inside voices with them a few times a day, and see if Naomi adds this to her list of a thousand rules. Could this work?

I can't resist adding here that Naomi has made a verb of the word "loud" and has created a rule out of it, a simple one - "No louding." Ha! Maybe if that rule has already taken hold, we really don't have anything to worry about. No amount of shrilling and louding from Ms. Yelly will shake it loose!

Your Personal Penguin

Although Naomi very much likes both the book and the song (shout-out to gift bestowers C & B!), and although I admit to being surprised by how much better the song is than I suspected it was going to be, and although I am glad to know that Davey Jones is still getting work, still I
can't help wondering if it was a mistake to download "Your Personal Penguin." All day long I have been singing it to myself in my office (with my door closed, yes). I am about at the end of my rope. "Lots of other penguins seem to do fine in a universe of nothing by ice. But if I could
be yours and you could be mine, our cozy little world could be twice as nice."

We are finally emerging from our universe of nothing but ice. For the past week, the weather in Bellevue rather resembled...the weather in Minnesota. At least the weather we remember- who knows what it's doing this year. Last Wednesday afternoon, the work hallway buzz was that it was starting to snow, and that people were having trouble getting up the ramp out of our subterranean parking garage. I decided to join the herd and get on the road. I left at 4:30 to a traffic jam in our own little parking lot (and a beautiful, fluffy snowfall). I had to wait ten
minutes to get out of my parking space. Traffic is a strangely big deal here, and is rabidly tracked and reported on. But normal traffic is meaningless as compared to what happens when any sort of precipitation other than our normal warm rain enters the picture. People here simply do not do winter driving. Collectively, we lose our nerve. In our defense, of course, we can cite the hilly terrain. When I finally got out of the parking lot and around the corner onto the main road, going up the long, steep, impressively iced-up hill to the freeway at a slow crawl was a little nerve wracking, especially as we had to snake around cars with tires making that futile RRRRRrrreeeeeeeee sound, and other cars that had been outright abandoned. (Abandoning one's car is a common response to winter driving conditions here.)

The freeway was easier to navigate, but when I got back off, things were similarly nuts. On a stretch of road that normally takes me four minutes to drive through, I sat behind a burgundy Ford Explorer, stopped sometimes as long as five minutes before we would creep forward another ten feet. The Explorer had a DVD playing, and at first I thought it was "Air Bud," because I don't know of any other movie that has a cute yellow lab as the main character. Then of course there was scene after scene of lots of cutie cute yellow lab puppies running around. I have never seen "Air Bud," but I know it has something to do with basketball, and there didn't seem to be any sports in this puppy-centered film. Was it the yellow lab version of 101 Dalmations? You can have that one for nothing, Disney. I could tell who the bad guys were, because, just like in the dalmation movie, they were always sitting in some kind of van. The puppies somehow found the last functioning drive-in movie theater in the country and for reasons unclear to me, invaded the snack bar. A woman ordered a large popcorn and a moment later a cutie cute yellow lab puppy burst out of it. What a mess! But, cute! All the while, George Bush addressed those of us with the radio on about his brilliant plan to fix a much messier and much less adorable popcorn spill far, far away. That's when I started to regret that I couldn't actually hear the 101 Yellow Labs movie.

Normally, if I leave work at 4:30, I can pick up Naomi at her daycare and still be home shortly after 5:00. On Wednesday I didn't get to her daycare until 6:15. There were only a few kids left, and two teachers, and Naomi's biggest concern was that she had just received some snack food, and surely I wasn't going to make her leave it there! I stopped for gas, milk, string cheese, and cheezits (the selection of nourishing food at this quikstop was about what you would expect). We sat in traffic, munching our snack food and drinking our milk, singing songs, and talking about snow. There is a strip mall near our house with a big empty K-Mart (classy, I know), and as we drove past the vast snowy parking lot, a Subaru wagon with the windows rolled down was doing harcore doughnuts. It looked like fun, but I felt like Naomi and I had about reached our winter excitement peak. Parenthood can really wreck some of your thrill seeking instinct. We got home at 7:30.

Nothing can make this already long story short, but to bring it to a close, I will report that both Thursday and Friday were "snow days," meaning that Naomi's daycare was closed. Jim and I both went to work for a half day on Friday, passing the all-wheel drive Audi baton. The snow
stayed all weekend, bolstered by a troop surge on Tuesday, resulting in another snow day. Now, finally, the temperatures are rising out of the low thirties, the snow is disappearing in the way that it normally does in the first four hours after it falls in these parts, and we are weirdly looking forward to an actual 5-day work week... barring unforeseen circumstances, of course. To the other parts of the country (and now Europe) who are having similar run-ins with this big bad winter, we stand with you. That's the real reason we abandoned our cars.

Now is the Winter of Our Discontent

I remember thinking to myself, just a few weeks ago, that it was so nice that Christmas was a season, rather than just being a day. When I was a kid, the day was everything, not just because of the presents (though I admit they were a factor), but also because it was possible then, in a way that it seems not to be so much now, to feel entirely immersed in the thrill of it being Christmas or your birthday or the day you go to Disney or start your vacation or whatever. The thrill is on you like a cloak, or in you, pulsing through your circulatory system. It's real, and it's really good. As a somewhat more grown up person, I don't have easy access to that feeling anymore, so I appreciate even more having the whole season, the preparation, the decoration, the cookie making, the parties, the candles, to experience. I like me some Christmas.

Why, then, a few weeks later, did I find myself feeling happy that there was a Day, and not just a season? Why did I put a lot more stock in how the day itself came out, whether Christmas Day was a success? Friends, I will tell you why. Because our Christmas season sucked, a little bit. I have already disclosed the wrong-week trip out of town, inviting and uninviting neighbors to an open house situation. The trip was great, of course, but getting the dates wrong like a big dope messed with my plans for shopping, preparing the house, getting gifts mailed, etc. No big deal- I had the following weekend to make up for it. Or did I? The great windstorm of 'Ought Six struck on Thursday night, knocking the roof off our garden shed and taking out the power for most of Bellevue (and lots of other Puget Sound areas). Judging by the swarm of people at the only open grocery store in the area, and the crazy half-mile line of cars at the only open gas station, I am pretty sure Bellevue collectively scores a D minus in disaster preparedness.

Jim thought I was insane for planning to go ahead with the open house in the frigid half-light of our powerless house, but after the previous week's head fake, I wasn't going to let my neighbors down. As if they cared. But five families did come over. We all left our coats on and drank punch and ate cookies and sang carols by candlelight. Except for the singing part. A relative success under the circumstances. We had just finished packing our things to spend the night in Seattle with friends who were less powerless than we when our own power surged back to life. Huzzah! Jim could return to his medieval war-making computer strategy game. And I could put Naomi to bed without going in to re-cover her every half an hour. Sweet modern conveniences!

So now, everything was back on track. The darkened stores would turn their lights on once more. The locked down post office would hum back to life. It was only a couple of days delay! I could overcome it! Sunday morning we tried take a Christmas card photo. I was a little embarrassed to learn that I couldn't tell that Naomi was under the weather until I saw her in the photos. In every one of them, she was staring glassy-eyed in the wrong direction, through pink drooping eyelids. I know cold does not cause colds, but two days of consistent fifty-degree interior temperatures surely didn't discourage whatever viruses were visiting at the time. We scrapped all the family shots and put another sweater on the bunny.

Naomi seemed OK on Monday, and went to school. Tuesday, she stayed home. Wednesday, we decided to take her to the doctor. Normally I am not an advocate for going to the doctor for a cold- I know that there is no treatment, and for kids under two even more so. It just seems like a waste. So although Naomi was clearly SICK, I went not expecting much. Not expecting, that is, for the doctor (one we didn't normally see) to listen to her lungs and start using words like hospital and pneumonia. Youch! She had me give Naomi a nebulizer treatment (which involved a LOT of crying and howling from Naomi, who told me half way through the epic struggle, with tears running down her face, "Mommy, I need a nap!"), listened to her lungs, and then had me give her one more. Hooray! Her lungs had improved. No pneumonia. By this time I had called Jim and made him join me at the doctor's office, since I hadn't predicted we would be there for three and a half hours. We were to give her the nebulizer every four hours for the next five days, or something ridiculous, in addition to another round of antibiotics for her forever infected ears. (We normally don't give her antibiotics for ear infections, since they don't bother her and eventually clear up, but we were feeling a little vulnerable on this visit.)

That afternoon was the worst, with Naomi half asleep and half awake, feverish, breathing fast and shallow. She got used to the nebulizer, thankfully, so we didn't have to wrestle every time. After she went to bed that night, Jim went to the airport to pick up his sister and her hsuband, who were coming for Christmas. We had been so excited about this visit, because we hadn't seen them since our Malaysia trip in early 2004, and they had never met Naomi. Now we were just worried that it was going to be the biggest letdown for them, as they sat around the house watching us blow our noses and give nebulizer treatments to their lethargic niece. Augh!
Naomi got a little better each day, and after one more day of fever, seemed to be over that part of it, thankfully. Because her cough was so terrible, though, she woke up every two hours or so during the night. We were reminded, and not happily, of the olden days, when little baby Naomi needed to eat every two hours or whatever. Zzzz. Needless to say, I got what she had, and as we got closer to Christmas, and I got sicker and sicker, and more exhausted, and I had a very strong feeling that I needed to leave my home and go to the hospital and just check myself in there and sleep for twelve or fourteen hours, and then come back. I skipped church on the morning of Christmas Eve and went back to bed. Because I could not get it together to make hot pot (our Christmas Eve plan), we just went out to Szechuan Chef, where they have hot pot (and everyone there had ordered it!). It was only so-so, but I loved it because... I didn't have to put it together!

Naomi betrayed her kid tribe by sleeping in very late on Christmas morning. When she got up, we opened our stockings and presents, ate some really wonderful banana bread that a neighbor had brought over to make up for missing our little cave party, listened to Christmas carols on Jim's fancy Mac Mini jukebox setup, cooked up a massive brunch, and did nothing for a few hours. There may have been napping- I can't remember. In the afternoon we went to our friends' house in Seattle, where they treated us to more presents, awesome tamales, and these little white chocolate pretzel clusters that are my coveted Christmas treat and that I was unable to find this year. Unfortunately I was not able to taste the food, however, I was assured that some of these little pretzel jobbies will be saved for the day when I can, again. Hooray!

So, Christmas turned out swell after all, despite all obstacles. The best and worst part of tribulations is the realization that you really don't have it so bad. We kept talking about the people in Iraq who get by on one hour of electricity per day (in addition to, you know, the even worse parts of living there!), and when Naomi was sick, I thought, geez, what if I had a really sick kid? One that really did have to go to the hospital regularly? Man oh man! Of course that detracts from the delightful experience of feeling sorry for ourselves and complaining, which believe me, we did. But our gifts are many, and we know it. As I was getting Naomi ready yesterday, I asked her who she was going to see that day at school. She said, "Baby Jesus!" Heh. I said what I always say when I am using my feeble don't-squelch-the creativity approach. "Yeah, maybe!"

NYC, The Rest of the Story

(I'm just cramming the rest of my NY trip into one long post. Set aside a minute for this. Or don't- your choice.) Friday...after an unexpected but lovely sleep in and some tasty oatmeal, we boarded the subway for another day in Manhattan. I should mention that although the first day was surprisingly warm, the second day was not just surprisingly cold in comparison, but surprisingly, health-threateningly cold, (my Minnesota-thickened blood has thinned down after just one winter away!), with a brutal wind. We braved the temperature (along with a huge mob of other teeth-chattering merry-makers) to admire the Christmas display windows outside of Macy's. Then it was off to H&M for a cold weather shopping spree. Liv got a winter coat for $50, I a terribly cute hat for $10 (we had one good day together, the hat and I, until I lost it somehow that night between the coat check at the Met and the subway ride home). Our wardrobe sufficiently bulked up, we headed toward Bryant Park, which not only had a cute ice skating rink and a little Christmas market (full of really, really devoted merchants, who probably each lost a toe or more to frostbite that day), but also is directly behind the gorgeously amazing New York Public Library. The lobby of the library was beautifully decorated for Christmas, as was, curiously, only about half of the grand light fixtures in the reading room.


After the library, we shivered our way to Grand Central Station for an admiring look around and lunch in the dining concourse. Afterwards, off to the gallery on Madison Avenue where Liv's friend D. works. The gallery is a single small room, covered floor to ceiling with frames. In each of the hundreds of frames is a photo or drawing of a famous person (famous enough where there was no one I didn't recognize), and framed in the same mat, some document that the person had written or signed. My favorite was a simple typed letter, presumably in response to some exuberant fan mail. "Dear Sir," it read, "Thank you for your enthusiasm. Sincerely, Katharine Hepburn." There was a letter written by Winston Churchill, a full page and a half, to a man who was procuring faucets of some kind of him. The last line says "I would not shrink from using (whatever variety) of faucets." Hee! If I had a great deal more money than I do, I would have brought home for Jim the original decree confirming certain land grants that had been made to the Knights Templar. And D. showed us a page of musical manuscript with a few notes on it, written by Mozart. Apparently when Mozart died, there was a scene similar to something out of the movie, a room with pages and pages of musical manuscript strewn about, and whenever another bill came due, Mozart's son or someone would sell a few pages to hungry collectors to settle the debt. This page, with its few little notes? $175,000.


Liv and I headed next to Central Park. Did I mention how cold it was? There was a handful of truly intrepid New Yorkers strolling briskly, and even a group of kids playing soccer. But I had my fill of Central Park, regrettably, after ten or fifteen minutes. Fortunately, our next target, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was in sight. We had cake and scalding hot tea in the American Wing Cafe, saw the Chinese art, including some calligraphy scrolls that were amazing not only in the obvious variety of styles, but also in the explanations for why these style variations were so significant. One big set of scrolls from the 1400s were a gift from the artist to his friend, and he jokes in the writing about how his friend's habit of heavy drinking can be considered a form of political protest. As is, ahem, mine. Somehow. We also saw the incredible Temple of Dendur, strikingly displayed in a specially built wing and carrying its own history of political intrigue. It's also covered with the graffiti of British and American tourists from the early 1800s. Quite the human drive, to leave one's mark, it seems.


Every Friday night at the Met, they place tables around the second floor balcony of the great hall and open a little wine bar, complete with a string trio. Here we met up with D. for cocktails and several small bowls of the free snack, olives, which, there in the heady surroundings of the Met, seemed to me for the first time ever to be a tasty and agreeable food. After drinks, it was back to the museum for a tour of the medieval faces exhibit and a quick breeze through some of the painting galleries. D. pointed out the Drue Heinz gallery, funded by the ex-husband of John Kerry's glamorous campaign-bankrolling wife. I particularly liked a Vermeer I had never seem before, of a woman dozing at her table. Liv particularly enjoyed showing off her knowledge of ancient buildings by pointing out which paintings of classical scenes were anachronistic in their inclusion of some arch or column that was actually constructed one or two hundred years after the event. D. told us which of the medieval heads she and her colleagues had picked as likely fakes. Sometimes you just need to know who to go to the museum with.

After some engrossing subway dish on a wealthy book collector D. had dealings with, we parted ways so Liv and I could get a train back to Brooklyn. We stopped off at a very nice little restaurant for Mediterranean food, where I continued my unbroken streak of eating moussaka that just isn't very hot (though it was certainly tasty). We finally returned to Liv's apartment, where I had a short but glorious fantasy that she was roommates with the Chinese foot rub guy. Oh well. Off to a sleep well-earned.


Saturday, we walked to a Brooklyn neighborhood called Cortellyou Road for brunch with Liv's lovely friends Luke and Willow. The restaurant was called "The Farm on Adderly," and according to the owner, this referenced a funny South African saying one uses when referring to a something that is a long shot, as in, if that works, I'll buy you a farm on Adderly. Ok? Ok. The brunch was tasty and everyone but me seemed to have a crush on the owner. Afterwards, Liv graciously agreed to let me lie around for a while, and I treated myself to a rare nap. When it was ended by a call from an old grad school friend I had been trying to see, who gave his regrets that it probably wasn't going to work out, as well as a little disappointment in my clumsy failure thus far to adopt "texting." Whatever.


We got our coats back on, headed back to the subway, and rejoined the fray in Manhattan once more. First we hit a flea market that sets up each weekend in a mercifully heated parking garage. There we saw many interesting things, but the most interesting by far was...the same kooky little old lady from the kitchen shop, using her same bargaining wiles, such as they were, on the flea market vendors. I don't need to tell you, there are a LOT of people in Manhattan. And there is a lot of Manhattan, for that matter. Nevertheless, we found her. It was a little piece of weird NY magic. After the flea market, we went to an architectural salvage place with amazing huge light fixtures and staircase bannisters and fire places that have been saved from demolition, as well as the usual assortment of ten zillion doorknobs and hinges and whatnot. Neat!


We needed to find some dinner, and after blocks and blocks of fruitless searching, we stopped at an "Irish Pub" and decided to just brave whatever was inside. If you find yourself in an Irish pub in NY that is brightly lit, crammed with tourists, decorated by the good people at Denny's, and staffed by a depressive Irish waitress whose Paxil prescription has run out and whose benefits have not kicked in yet, friends, you are not as hungry as you think you are. Take my advice, wander a few more blocks, and settle on something else. Learn from my mistake.
My next piece of advice: Stay out of Macy's at the holidays. Maybe even all year round? But for sure at the holidays. It's worth it to go to Macy's to see the fantastic window displays, but do not be tempted, even by the promise of the famous wooden escalators, to go inside. Because first of all, it is a crazy mob scene. And second of all, it's just a Macy's. You want it to be all historic and graceful and marvelous, but it's not. On the scale of Macy's' I have known, it ranks between ratty and decent, with both extra points and demerits for having so many floors (demerits because when one of those famous wooden escalators stops working, the ten thousand people who are trying to go down them at the same time start to pile up tremendously between floors six and seven).


After struggling through the sweaty masses at Macy's, it was time to hit the subway again for a trip to Harlem to attend a party at Liv's friend's apartment. She had a wonderful view of the city, but no elevator, so I found the good-sized Christmas tree in her apartment all the more impressive and festive when I learned that she had carried the thing up the six flights of stairs herself. I ate too much cheese and crackers, and too many cookies, as well as fulfilling my big party fear of saying something...stupid.
Girl I don't Know: I am so jealous of this big fridge!
Me: Oh? Do you have a small one?
Girl: I have this tiny studio in Chelsea, so my fridge is the kind that fits under the counter, with the tiny freezer that doesn't freeze anything.
Me: Where you, like, can't even fit a ben and jerry's in there?
Girl: Exactly.
Me: Huh. I live in Washington. State? And, uh, I have a pretty big refrigerator.
Girl: (Walks out of the kitchen).


Ah, parties. Back on subway, change to other subway, walk past OTB and storefront church, back to apartment, throw up party food, bad fish and chips, go to bed.

The next day, Liv had terrible news- her tutor, mentor, and friend from Oxford had passed away. We talked about it for a while; she had been planning a book and a conference in his honor, and fortunately had told him about it just a few months before. Isn't it great when you don't miss the chance to say something important to someone who is important to you? Anyway, then I had to get into the town car for the long ride back to La Guardia. The driver, in a barely intelligible (to my untrained ears) Carribbean accent, chided me two or three times for not being more talkative. Which seems like a weird thing to get in trouble for with a town car driver. I had time to get a ben and jerry's cone in the Minneapolis airport (though my preference would have been for someone to meet me at the airport with a Byerly's Killer Brownie). The highlight of my travel day was seeing Jim and Naomi waiting for me by the baggage claim, and seeing the crazy-ass outfit that Jim had put our innocent toddler in. I should have taken a picture of that!

That was my trip. What did I learn? I am not the tireless young traveller I once was, but it still felt great to be in an amazing new place, soaking up the sights and sounds and (subway) smells. Best of all, of course, was catching up with Liv, who appears to be rapidly aging in reverse, and despite recent stresses, has her life beautifully put together. Shout out to Liv! NY agrees with you, sister. Thanks for a wonderful visit.

Thursday in New York

Last Wednesday night, I took the red-eye to New York City to visit a dear friend (shout out to Liv!) and explore the big apple at Christmas time. After a night on two airplanes, the morning cab ride from La Guardia to Liv's apartment in Brooklyn seemed to last forever, but it was still exciting to be in the city, and passing countless weirdly named small businesses and churches (my favorite of course being the Christ Alive Flower Shop). The cabby looked at the map I had given him about every forty seconds. Hardly reassuring, but we found it.

It was strangely warm when I arrived, and as we planned our first outing, down to Brighton Beach, I debated leaving my coat. I was grateful that my hostess had convinced me to bring it, when, after purchasing our requisite Russian pastry from one of the many, many pastry-selling Russian ladies on the sidewalk and heading out to the strand to commune with the gulls, the sea breeze asserted itself with one endlessly vigorous gust. We walked down to Coney Island to admire all the seasonally abandoned rides and attractions (as well as one intrepid burger/hotdog/buttered corn/kebab/cold beer/pretzel etc. stand that was open, though it didn't appear to have any customers).

When we had our fill of Russian pastry, seagulls, and sandblasting, we took the long subway ride into Manhattan. In Soho, we wandered into bookstores, shoe stores, and a kitchen shop, where we encountered an unusual little woman, older, with a longish gray buzz cut and a nice looking coat, practicing an unorthodox method of bargaining with the staff of the store. Seems she wanted a $70 copper-bottomed saucepan for twenty dollars. She was relentless, and had this distinctive, nasally plaintive (and loud) voice. "You don't like old ladies? Why don't you give it to me? I want to buy it! I have the money! I have the $20! Why won't you let me buy it?" We left the store before we got to find out the resolution. From the way things were going, though, I'm pretty sure they didn't give her the discount.

For dinner, we settled on Lombardi's, which claims to be the oldest pizzeria in the city. Perhaps to emphasize their historical position, they accept no payments but cash. However long they have been at it, they seem to have the pizza part down. Yum. After pizza, it was off to the Chinese massage place for a ten minute back rub (Liv) and a ten minute foot rub (me). If you are looking for a good way to spend $10 in Manhattan, and there are many, you could do worse than a ten minute foot rub at the Chinese massage place. I'm just saying. Rejuvenated, we headed to a dessert place that combines the fat and sugar of ice cream with the carbohydrate punch of a plate of fried rice. "Rice to Riches" offers something like 30 flavors of...rice pudding. We had chocolate hazelnut topped with cherries. My Swedish Grandma would have been proud. And probably a little confused.

Next time: Freaking Cold Friday...

Dear Diary,

A problem with waiting so long between posts is that you then hardly know where to begin with all the minutiae that has (have?) accumulated over the past month. The only November post was about Halloween, thus technically an October post. And now we are in December, and a fair way in at that. So there is nothing to do but throw in everything I can think of and hope the feeling of being somewhat caught up inspires me to a little more diligence. Or not.

So, the “morning after” exhilaration of the election has faded, but I will still cheerily submit that I hosted a “call for change” party the Saturday prior, wherein a handful of local lefties came to my house and used their cell phones to get out the local vote (when did air quotes become real quotes?). We lost the battle (sorry, Darcy), but I really didn’t mind too much considering the nation-wide results. The next day, very unshowered, I was chasing Naomi as she demonically pushed the teeny kiddy cart around the produce section of the Whole Foods when a man came up with a notebook and started asking me questions about the election. In a display of really shameful political self-aggrandizement, I told him that when I was calling voters just yesterday, it seemed that they WERE unclear on what Darcy stood for, though I also had just seen some of her newest tv ads that seemed to try to take that on, blah blah blah, stem cell research, blah blah blah. He took my name, and told me his- Bill Y., a reporter for… wait for it…the New York Times! Yea, baby! Of course, when I looked up his article a few days later, it was three short paragraphs and did not contain quotes from anyone, let alone a disheveled mother of one in the Whole Foods produce department. Still, neato!

On the work front, we are coming to the end of the moving walkway. The big project that we have been working mandatory 45 hour weeks to finish is…finished. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I really like to be busy, and having a frantic, coming up on a deadline kind of work experience is enjoyable to me, in some ways. Now, I’m back to the point where I do… I am not sure what. Think about the big picture and sign up for training, or something. Work is going very well for Jim- he is starting to work on creating schedules for his small team’s part of the project, and that means he is learning new skills and also showing his handsome, capable face in meetings with muckety mucks. He will probably censor this paragraph after he reads it (so humble is he), but in the meantime, I will confide that I am proud of him. Even more so this week, when, despite being famous (around our house) for taking a sick day when he so much as feels a cold coming on, he went to work so sick that even I conceded that he could have used a sick day, loaded himself up with dayquil, and stayed the whole day. Way to go, man.

Naomi has been hard at work herself. Just last night she came home from her sweatshop job with glue in her hair. When I dropped her off this morning I got to see why- she had been gluing toothpicks to a little construction paper hedgehog, of course. Last week things seemed a little off with her- she slept an extra one and a half to two hours a day, woke up grouchy, seemed out of sorts. After about three days of this, she seemed to be shining more brightly all of a sudden. She talks more articulately, in longer sentences. She can sing nearly entire songs that we haven’t heard her sing even parts of before. Everything is pretty and beautiful, too, including the “Chrisums tree”, the picture of Gramma, her tiny transparent plastic purse with a flower on it, and mommy and daddy. In the car on the way home from school, she said, “My miss Mommy. My love Mommy.” Aww. My miss you too, cute little Frankenstein talker.

And now I will close with an anecdote that illustrates just how big a dope I can be, like you didn’t know. The weekend of the 15th I had a trip planned to NYC to visit my friend the urbane professor, and bask in the joyful holiday goodness that abounds in that city. Hooray! So this weekend, on the 9th, I planned to throw a little holiday open house. There are still a few neighbors we don’t know, and a few we’d like to get to know, so on Monday morning I sneaked around in the pre-dawn darkness and delivered all the invitations (that is, stuck them on everyone’s front door). Two hours later, I got to work, checked my yahoo mail, and saw the note from Expedia with my itinerary for my December 7th trip to NYC. Wha, wha wha? That’s right, I had the dates wrong. And had already invited neighbors, most of whom I don’t know, to my house on the Saturday I’ll be watching the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center (is that where they ice skate?) Shit. So today I have to go around and un-invite everyone, hoping they can make it the following Saturday. Fun! And I had planned to have a four to five day word of mouth campaign to convince Naomi that it was going to be so neat to have Daddy take care of her for four days while Mommy visits aunty urbane professor, which must now be compacted into two days. Rats. But still, NYC at Christmas time! More on that in an upcoming post.

Happy Halloween!

A few weeks ago, Naomi’s daycare teacher informed us that they would be holding a Halloween party, at 3 pm on the ghoulish day, and that there was a sign up sheet for snacks. I signed up to provide cookies. In my vision of the party, all the parents of the tots would congregate in the room, sipping cider and eating cookies, trading tot stories and mingling while everyone admired the tots in their costumes. The teacher was non-committal about the whole thing, saying that there would be snack, the kids would dress in their costumes, and there would be a “pumpkin hunt.”

Because I know how prone I am to overdoing it, my original plan was to opt for the slice and bake cookies with the pumpkin or whatever in the middle. Americans have apparently gotten too lazy even to perform the slicing part and are now called on only to place the cookie disks onto the pan. The Halloween themed version of this “home-made” treat calls for applying white frosting and an “edible decoration.” Ew. I bought the kit anyway. And at the suggestion of a friend, some rice krispie treat fixings (food coloring included).

Monday night’s pumpkin carving went well- Naomi was fascinated by the pumpkin innards, and Jim’s jack-o-lantern art fell comfortably into the category of traditional/cheery. With Naomi in bed, the kitchen antics began. To make rice krispie treats is to participate in a peculiar alchemy of solids becoming liquids becoming solids again. It’s even more magical when you squirt drop after drop of yellow and red food coloring into the bubbling marshmallow goo… I used a pumpkin-shaped cookie cutter on the treats, so they were not only orange, but appropriately shaped and sporting a frosting gel expression. Spooky! I used the vanilla frosting in the sugar cookie kit to freehand some ghosts (according to a friend who graciously took home some remnants, they were really quite spectral).

Does it sound like I am boasting? Wait until I describe the costume! Naomi agreed that it would be fun to dress up like one of her favorite stuffed toys, the blue-footed booby bird. I bought fabric. I fumbled around with my sewing machine. I lucked into some little blue pants that prevented me from having to sew an actual item of clothing. I refuse to detail the frantic retail scavenger hunt that took place after the white hooded sweatshirt I ordered off the internet proved ridiculously large and made the innocent wearer look like a South Park character.

Halloween arrived. With my two large bags, one with cookies and orange crunchy marshmallow pumpkins (which, because of the decorations, have to be packaged in many separate containers), one with the unconvincing husk of a Galapagos squawker, I arrived at the daycare to see that all the other kids minus two were dressed in their costumes, all full body, one-piece pajama zip up affairs, a monkey, a lion, a giraffe, a Dalmation. I put the cookie bag down, and raced to get Naomi into her costume. Which she was totally not into at all. It was not until it was all the way on her that the difference between a homemade costume and a store-bought stood out so dramatically.

Wow. She looked goofy. Then one of the wings fell off. She started tugging at her beak/visor. About two minutes after putting her costume on, all that she was wearing was the hoodie, the pants, and the blue feet.

Snack was served- to the kids. I did not get it that the cookies I was bringing were only for the kids. They ate their melon and baby corn and pumpkin pie, supplied by less foolish parents than myself, and I sheepishly put a handful of rice krispie pumpkins on a plate and put them on a countertop. For the TWO other parents that showed up. Not two sets of parents. Two parents.

The kids had a great time- the teacher filled up a corner of the room with shredded paper; apparently this is some kind of invitation to fun for the toddler set. There was much gleeful shrieking. No one ate the cookies, of course. And I didn’t even open the rest of them up- just took them home, along with the little gray broken wings and blue fuzzy feet smeared with pumpkin pie.

So, the spookiest part of this year’s Halloween was the illumination of how my tendency to overdo things is magnified by the factor of my beloved child. In the evening, I pinned Naomi’s costume back together, wiped the pie off her feet, and took her to a couple of neighbors’ houses.

She was a champion trick-or-treater (although our practice of saying the phrase was for naught- she clams right up around strangers), held out her bag for candy (and, poor girl, has not gotten to eat any of the six pieces she scored),

and was appropriately frightened by some of the decorations. She also got to carry a flashlight supplied by her dear friend, Carmen’s mom.

(Carmen was an adorable pirate.) Until next year, Happy Halloween.

Lazy Postday

It is so, so lazy of me just to post another cute photo when there really is so much to write about. What about our visit to the pumpkin patch on Sunday? What about the fact that my company is bought up for real now and I find myself with 330,000 new coworkers? What about all the thoughts I'm having about Naomi's language skills and her cognitive skills and what kind of gap does or does not exist between the two? What about my concerns about not immediately going to the the little sleeper when she cries out in the night, and the ensuing muses on the metaphor of stern parenting for our own thoughtless refusal to meaningfully engage with the countries in the world that clearly demand some meaningful engagement? What about the fascinating research essay on the origins of Halloween that I just read today? What about the incredibly amateurish Halloween costume that I am attempting to sew for Naomi? What about the fact that Jim finally brought home the xbox he has been threatening to buy for the last few months? I could go on and on, but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm just going to post another photo.

The Bunny

Our Neighbors to the North

The fact that a few hours of driving puts us in a different country seems to be an irresistible lure for us; again last weekend we found ourselves in Canada. This time we eschewed the ferry ride for a road trip complete with a long, long wait at the border crossing. Our destination? Vancouver. This trip was inspired by my friend, who purchased a night’s stay and a horse-drawn trolley ride package at a charity auction we attended together. Honestly, she wasn’t bidding to win. But when she did win, I began plotting how we would all sneak away to Vancouver for a beautiful fall weekend.

The hotel location was a little hipper than we really required. Needle exchange? Gay book shop? Cecil’s Exotic Show Lounge? All within a one-minute walk. On the first night we walked across the street to the Two Parrots, which looked like a tiki-themed restaurant. In fact, it was a tiki-themed bar. When we asked for a high chair, the waitress looked at us for a long minute, as though to help us understand how absurd the request was, before answering in the negative. We thought it would be alright, ordered ourselves some pints and some dinner, and watched Naomi fling herself around on the grimy bar chairs with the singular sort of hyper energy that only a very tired small child who has just spent four hours in a carseat can really master. We got the food packed to go, pounded our pints (which is a good way to get your money’s worth, if you know what I mean), and went back to eat amidst the strange juxtaposition of a gigantic king-sized bed in a tiny closet-sized room.

On Friday we took a funny little boat (Aquabus!) to the Granville Island public market. It has all manner of tasty foodstuffs, including a famous sausage place and a doughnut place that, if it’s not famous, is at least famous with me. When naptime encroached, Naomi and I jumped the Aquabus back to the hotel side of “False Creek,” while Jim left the food building and explored some of the art galleries and shops. It was after naptime that things really picked up, with a trip to the Capilano suspension bridge, north of the city. When you see the bridge (if you are not Jim, who has a pathological fear of heights), you really don’t think it is going to be a nerve-wracking experience. It is marketed as an attraction, not a thrill. But when you get out to the middle, holding a squirmy toddler as tightly as you have ever held anything in your life, deciding it’s more important to keep both hands on the toddler than it is to use one of those hands to attempt to steady yourself with the swaying, creaking cables, keeping your eyes fixed on the far side even as sweat drips into them, well, that’s when you realize that your safety-loving, height-fearing husband might actually be on to something.

On the far side of the bridge, though, was a “treetop adventure”, where we walked around on even more elevated, swaying pathways, and admired monstrous trees and trout-filled ponds. Was it worth the trip? I think so. On the way back over the bridge, I put Naomi in the back pack carrier, held on to her leg amid great complaint, used my free hand for the cables, and did some deep breathing exercises. Then went to the gift shop for some fudge.

Saturday was another trip to Granville Island, with our newly arrived (and about to depart) friends (who ended up in a smoky room with no crib, and decided that one night of that was just about enough). And another doughnut. In the afternoon, we enjoyed our absent friends’ free carriage ride around the beautiful Stanley Park. Our driver and tour guide kept shushing us (Naomi), as part of the ride experience was her witty and informative monologue (the driver, not Naomi). If you’re ever out somewhere and a toddler is making a lot of noise, and you think to yourself, geez, can’t those parents keep that kid quiet? The answer is no. They really can’t. Which is why we mostly avoid situations where a short and inappropriately loud chatterbox will be considered déclassé. But once we got on that carriage, we couldn’t just hop off and attempt to find our way back through the miles of park road. So, she chatted. And flirted outrageously with the woman behind us, who was the sort who calls out witty answers to the tour guide’s questions, and who definitely appreciated the attention from the crazy baby in front of her. The driver tolerated us. Did I mention the weather was perfect? It was a good day to be at Stanley Park.

Saturday night, Jim and I ate a weird but admittedly delicious tower of cream puffs from “White Spot” restaurant (which is like a swanked-up Canadian Denny’s) and pay-per-viewed The Davinci Code. In an ironic twist on the possible liberation from gender roles and restrictions enticingly dangled by the sacred feminine, I was unable to stop obsessing about how perfect Audrey Tatou’s hair looked. If you haven’t seen the movie, it is one of those “real time” narratives that takes place over the course of just a few days, and the characters are always on the move and don’t have a chance to change or shower or freshen up, as far as I could tell. Nevertheless, Audrey’s hair is a masterpiece in every scene. Those French women have it made.

Sunday morning, woke up, ate breakfast, drove home. Another good visit to our neighbors to the north. Canada, you do right by us.

Chicken Walk Tea Party (Attire: Diaper Casual)

25th Percentile!

For parents who were taught as children to place a great deal of importance on their report cards, the periodic, regularly scheduled doctor’s checkup provides the analogous experience projected onto our teeny offspring. At every visit, the nurse measures the kid’s head circumference, length, and of course, weight. Yesterday was Naomi’s 18-month-old visit, and after struggling along since January in the 7th (seventh!) percentile for weight, we have finally succeeded in chunking the kid up to the 25th percentile. Hooray!

There was something about being in the bottom ten percent that made us feel like we were seriously failing at our parental jobs. The doctor, however, kindly chalked it up to the four bouts of horrible stomach flu the bunny endured in the late winter. Further good news- her chronic ear infection is cleared up, so no ear tubes for the bunny! Her height is holding steady at the 50th percentile, and her melon head is still riding high in the 95th percentile. My mom is quick to assume that is both cause- and effect-related to how smart her granddaughter is, ignoring the fact that her granddaughter’s father and mother both have big giant (though not particularly smart) heads of their own.

The nurse also ran through a list of things Naomi should be able to do, and I was a little flattered at the way she breezed through it- I took this to mean she was sure Naomi was doing fine. Can she stack blocks? Does she have at least 20 words? She asked whether Naomi can stand up and sit down when we tell her to, and we both looked at each other and wondered, can she do that? Because we haven’t really ever told her to stand up or sit down, that we could remember.

Anyway, here are the milestones of the past few months that the nurse didn’t ask us about. Some are charming. Some are not as charming.

• Naomi likes to put imaginary sunscreen on us. When we are cooking (me), playing the piano (the maestro), sitting around, whatever, she comes up and starts rubbing the stuff onto our legs.
• Naomi can count to…two. Which in a way is not much better than not being able to count at all, and in a way is kind of a huge difference, really. She also likes to march around the house shouting “1-2! 1-2! 1-2!” If she has two similar items in her hands, she will look at them both and say “Two cups!” Of course, she thinks five comes after two. So we have not applied for her mensa card yet.
• She knows yellow, red, blue, green, and purple, and I suspect also brown, white, and pink. Orange is a toughie, for some reason.
• If I am on the computer or Jim is playing the piano, she will take our fingers and tug us away from our chairs, saying “Daddy, all done. Mommy, all done.” Meaning, we are done doing what we were doing, and it’s time to stop it and start playing with her. Sheesh.
• Luna the dog is in constant attendance whenever Naomi eats (or does anything, pretty much), and for reasons I am not that clear on, Jim likes to loudly send her away or scold her. Every so often, we will hear a much smaller voice saying, in the same stern tone, “Loooonha, NO! No no!” Luna minds Jim about 40% of the time; she minds Naomi 0% of the time.
• Naomi has learned the second line of “Twinkle, Twinkle.” Instead of singing it, though, she recites it over and over, all mashed together, with a lot of emphasis on the last word. So it sounds like “UpabahwodsoHIGH! UpabahwodsoHIGH!”
• Occasionally, Naomi will sit down and open a book, and begin gabbling away, very earnestly, as though she were reading the book aloud. Her voice is weirdly monotone and none of the stuff that comes out of her is recognizable as words. It only lasts for twenty seconds or so, but it is pretty engrossing.
• After a trip to the zoo, where we saw an armadillo in the nocturnal exhibit, Naomi fell in love with the word. Armadillo! Armadillo!
• In addition to endlessly pretending to feed us, her animals, and herself, Naomi now pretends that she or her animals have owies that require the application of imaginary ice. This gives you some idea of what goes on in her hardscrabble daycare world…
• Sometimes when we put Naomi to bed, she says, “Bye, Honey!” Hee.

Whistle while you work...

In honor of Labor Day, I am going to hang on to the theme of the last post, my job. It seems I am not the only one who is taking a look at her workaday world this month. One friend has determined that her dream life of research in academia is perhaps a bit more selfish than she wants to be, and that shifting the focus to teaching is a good alternative path. Another friend is thinking of leaving her hectic, low-paying service-to-others job to get a higher paying, less hectic, service-to-paying-clients job. And I know I am not the only person who has asked him or her self this month, what job do I really want to be doing?

When I had my big job epiphany last week, it wasn’t that I had arrived at the elusive answer to that question. When people ask how my job is, I equivocate. It’s OK. You know, it’s not the most interesting thing in the world. And so forth. Last week it occurred to me that my job really has so many good things going for it, and I need to start viewing it that way. The commute is short, and I am only about 12 minutes away from the bunny’s daycare. The boss is dreamy about flexible hours and working from home when necessary (I abuse the flexible hours a bit but have been very conservative on the working from home option). The building is across the street from a swanky shopping center where I have fifteen lunch options and a nail place where I can get my eyebrows waxed and be back at my desk within twenty minutes. (Even when some other part of my face also gets waxed, thanks to the plain talking aestheticians at “Finger Paints”: “You sure you don’t want that waxed? You got a lot of hair!”) I have an office with a door, free coffee and tea, and bagels every Friday. And with the afore-mentioned buyout on its way, who knows what other kind of swag! I am challenged, somewhat, by the work, and for the most part, I have almost no job-related stress. I needed to face up to the truth: my job rocks.

So, right. That’s where I was last Monday. On Tuesday, the person handling some high profile, time sensitive documentation task was out sick, and I was randomly selected to be her understudy. And my stupid email program kept telling me I couldn’t send more email because… I had too much email already. You’re using our program a little too well! No job-related stress, did I say? Because I had heard this document needed to be finished that day, and because no one was answering my questions about whether the further changes needed to be added, I was preparing, at the end of the day, to drive the twelve short minutes to the daycare, bring the bunny back to my office, buy her some animal crackers from the vending machine, and get back at it. (She has visited the office before, and thoroughly enjoys playing with my plastic plate and jar of peanut butter.) That scenario was averted, but the stress level continued through the end of the day Wednesday. More lively than usual? You bet. But threatening to my new outlook.

Also threatening to my job love was a bizarre bathroom encounter that occurred right in the middle of the stress patch. As I was walking into the Ladies’, someone was walking out of the Gents’. I said hi to the person, walked into the bathroom, and was suddenly aware that someone had walked in behind me. I turned around, and it was…the guy who had just walked out of the men’s restroom. Wha wha wha? Here’s where the story gets really embarrassing, because of what my brain offered to my mouth to say: “So, you’re just going to walk into the girls’ bathroom?” What? GIRLS’ bathroom? Anyway, the guy stopped, and said, “Must have eye trouble.” He then took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes, to really drive the point home that something was wrong with them, rather than just getting the hell out of the bathroom. The GIRLS’ bathroom. He repeated his line about eye trouble, but by this point I had walked back to the door and opened it, and gestured him out. He put his glasses back on. I think he said he was sorry on the way out, and I think I said something like, it’s alright, goodbye now.

But, ugh! It was not alright! I have walked into the men’s room on more than one occasion, usually at a bar or restaurant after I had a few, and two steps in I see the urinal, have the split second moment of realization, gasp, and flee. Not so this man, who seemed confused as to whether he was in the Ladies’ (Girls’) or at the optometrist. Plus? He had just gone to the bathroom, in his rightful place, with the urinals and all. He was done! So what was up next for him? Did he think they had moved his desk into the ladies’ room? Was he looking for the free coffee?
So yeah, happy Labor Day, fellow workers of the world. I’ll be celebrating my day off by using my luxurious in-home bathroom without the fear of anyone walking in on me. OK, anyone over the age of two.

The Corporate Life

Last week I learned that the company I have worked for since March (Company A) will be purchased in the coming months by gigantic Company B. Today, in addition to providing us with some really nice bagels and fruit for breakfast, Company B bussed us to the swanky Bellevue Westin for a little rah-rah and some free lunch. And a benefits discussion. The light fixtures in the Westin’s grand ballroom are at once amusing and extremely distracting- they are basically large circles of glass globs suspended on wires, like luminous water balloons dangling from the ceiling. For the first part of the day, we sat at long tables draped with black cloths, with notepads, pens, and water at each seat, and every so often a cosmo glass full of tiny, delicious foil-wrapped fruit candies. Which I totally meant to pour some of into my purse before we left, and forgot. Damn!

Of course, we opened with a video, showing headline after headline (after headline) of the acquisition, backed by rousing rock-n-roll. Newspapers and websites all around the world are covering this acquisition! And Company B has a really on-the-ball public information department! Then the video switched to scenes that I assumed were meant to represent the many industries that use our products, which included astronauts, oil wells, and people scurrying around the sidewalk, maybe in the financial district? Then, more astronauts.

When the CEO of Company A addressed us on the phone, his slides flashing on the big screen offered a perfect opportunity to play “a picture is worth a thousand words,” wherein you attempt to identify the real message of the slide by studying the seemingly random photo that always seems to go along with the bullets. “What drove the decision?” asks the slide. And the picture answers, “A view of the blue sky from within a small grove of tall trees.” “We wanted to be a billion dollar business,” says the slide. “I wanted to be a shiny, mirrored-glass skyscraper, seen from below at a sharp angle,” says the picture. “What does this mean for the company?” asks the slide. “Why, it means a beautiful suspension bridge, dramatically lit, in the rosy dusk,” says the picture. Or dawn. Whichever. “What does this mean for you?” asks the slide. “It’s a two-lane highway, stretching toward the horizon,” says the picture. The “Opportunities at Company B” slide declares, in the photo, that I could join the cast of yet another L&O spin off. And “Our Rewards” are that we get to sit around a glass table and smile for a camera that is directly over our heads. Cheese!

The free lunch was, I must say, delectable. They had some kind of marinated grilled veggie antipasto that could have been improved only if the people ahead of me in the buffet line hadn’t taken all the eggplant slices before I got up there. I am still a little jittery from my flourless chocolate something or other and cup of decaf. I confess a weakness for sitting in giant hotel ballrooms and eating some tasty trifle accompanied by coffee that has been carefully poured into my tiny hotel coffee cup by a uniformed banquet server. Dessert just tastes a little sweeter under these conditions.

After lunch was the benefits discussion, led by an HR manager from Company B, who was in general quite likable except for his unfortunate over-use of the phrase “at this point in time.” I had the guy next to me ask whether Company B covers maternity leave as short term disability (Company A does not). He said Company B gives you 100% pay for six weeks if you have a baby. Sweet! Not that this information is any more relevant to me (at this point in time) than it was to my seat neighbor, though he did get a laugh by asking the question.

Weirdly, none of the seven hundred questions we lobbed at the boogie woogie bugle boy concerned stock options. Back in the day, tech people considered stock options to be part of their entitlement in life. Free coffee! Subsidized soda machines! Stock options and lots of them. Now, there seems to be a don’t ask, don’t tell attitude emerging about stock options. Company A gave me exactly zero options when I started here (but I was loathe to say anything as they came miraculously close to matching my previous salary). What will you do for me, Company B? Make me love you. I’m just saying. Oh, and thanks for the lunch.

Once Bitten...

When I got home from work on Monday, Naomi and her dad were sitting on the front steps. Naomi always gets the cutest, biggest smile on her face when she sees me after a long time apart- it has evolved a bit from when I used to pick her up at daycare and she would signify her recognition (and happiness?) with a gaping, wide open mouth. I can only guess that I made a similar face at her? Like an open mouth of wonder and surprise? Something? Anyway, now she smiles a really beautiful and definitely genuine smile (which I stress only because lately she has become the biggest fake laugher ever). In contrast with this little sunbeam, though, was a particularly grim expression on Jim.

“You’ll never guess what happened today,” he said. “Look at her face.” Looked pretty cute to me. He turned her head so I could see her cheek. There was a round red welt- it looked like she had fallen asleep on something hard and painful, and this was the result. For a minute I didn’t know what I was looking at. It made me think of the old Phantom comic strip, with the guy who wore purple all the time and had a ring in the shape of a skull that left a nasty and unmistakable imprint on the jaw of whatever villain he socked. Was Naomi in a fistfight with a superhero? Or a gangster?

Jim must have sensed that I really would never guess. “It’s a bite,” he said. Augh! Apparently some kid at school was hugging and kissing Naomi (cute!), and then decided to get all Cape Fear on her (wait, not cute anymore!). She did not seem to be in the least bit traumatized by it, but for a few minutes, I really was. I didn’t feel angry at the kid, really, but I did feel upset. And weirdly helpless. When I talked to the teacher the next day, she said the biter was really into hugging the other kids, and just got carried away. Um, can I assume you’re planning to keep Toothy from getting huggy and kissy with the other kids from now on? She said they were going to try. So reassuring.

In the interest of full disclosure, about three weeks ago, Naomi bit… me. We were goofing around and laughing, and during one playful jostle, she just opened up her mouth and chomped down hard on my upper arm. It really hurt at the time, although she didn’t break the skin, and I had a little round bruise for a few days. I know that she didn’t bite me to hurt me, and I know that she wasn’t really aware of what she was doing. She was just worked up and excited, and that manifested itself as a chomp. I should probably have viewed it as the gift of a teaching moment; instead it was more of a yelling moment. But she hasn’t bitten since then. The point, I guess, is that I know kids bite. They are puppy-like in their scrappiness and in their manifestations of play and exuberance. But there is part of me that would have liked to have a similar teaching (yelling) moment with the tot who bit my kid’s face.

A postscript: in past idle surfing, I have come across some parenting bulletin boards that contain cheerful anecdotes from parents who claim to have cured their biters by… biting them back. I didn’t give this sort of crackpottery a second thought, but now that I have had a biter (and bitee), I am reminded of that advice, and all I can say is, Ewww! Is there really someone out there biting their baby? Stop that right now!

The Evening Good News

You know how sometimes it seems like you just get one piece of bad news after another? Well, not today! Because when I say this, I am actively omitting everything I hear on the actual news, and because the stars are lining up nicely for many of my friends and loved ones, I find myself in a situation where I keep getting one piece of good news after another. It’s great! So, ready yourselves for some unnecessary exclamation points, ladies and germs…here comes the good news!

Jim’s sister and her husband have adopted a baby girl. Just like that- Naomi has a new cousin, and we a new niece. We have seen her already through the magic of Skype. Naomi calls Jim’s mom “Ah-ma” and after we saw her on the computer with the new baby, Rachel, Naomi would periodically, throughout the day, say, “Ah-ma, Baby.” Hee. Rachel will be one month old in a few days. Teeny!

Jim’s other sister and her husband, who are living in Canada now, have bought a house! We don’t have many details yet and I am sure they are feeling a little overshadowed by teeny Baby Rachel, but it is still great news for a couple of M’sian transplants looking to put down roots in Canada. Oh, Canada!

My own personal sister had recently been diagnosed with skin cancer, and has since had all of it removed and is apparently none the worse for wear. Hooray!

My other sister and her husband and kids returned this month from a ten-day trip to Washington DC. The kids are just at the right age to get the most out of this trip (13 and 10), they got to stay with our wonderfully gracious aunt and uncle in Maryland, and they never, ever take vacations. Knowing all of this about the trip had me completely jazzed for them, and of course, the trip was a big success. Welcome home!

Another pair of good friends in Chicago have put a bid on a condo, and are waiting to hear whether all their fix-up demands are going to be met. I don’t think I am jumping the gun in considering this good news, as they have been mulling over becoming landed gentry for a while now, and it is so good that it is happening for them. From all descriptions, the condo rocks. Good job, C and B!

We got a piano!

Our friends in St. Paul had a lovely baby girl, Eleanore Marie, just before we got back to MN for a visit. And they had their house totally redone. Crazy! Congratulations, D and R! Incidentally, nearly everyone in MN seems to be expecting a child. Good for you all!

None of the great news is really ours (other than the piano), but having so much good news in just a few weeks makes it feel like things are going great for us, too. Naomi has started in her new class at “school.” She is a little early in moving up, and is smaller than everyone else, although one of her baby class compatriots who moved up at the same time has the same not-quite-there hair in a blonde shade, so Naomi is not the baldest looking toddler in her class. Heh. She seems to really like it, although every day when I ask her what she did in school, she says “Water.” I don’t know what that means, exactly.

OK, some of the good news is ours- Naomi’s friend Carmen brought over matching rainbow ponchos made by a friend of her mom. Thanks, Carmen’s mom’s friend! These ponchos are the bomb!

The Spirit Realm, or One Completely Random Post

Feel free to skip this long blathery post, which is unlikely to make much sense. Lately more thoughts of a philosophical or metaphysical bent than are usual have popped into my head. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. One is that I re-established contact a few months ago with a friend of mine from college, who told me about his faith (paganism) and also told me a lot of his thoughts on Christianity and the Christian God (nothing like a new perspective!). Another is our own search for a new church after we left behind one that we really liked as part of our big move. Another, of course, is just the unavoidable desperate headscratching that one is forced to engage in when paying any attention whatsoever to the big news stories of the day (war, another war, genocide, child soldiers, starvation, the missing Baby Suri). Lately, the news reports about psilocybin experiments, that left test subjects feeling as though they had gone through a profound mystical and religious experience, have caught my attention (and someone’s blog that mentioned this also caught my eye, but more on that later). Throughout all these things, I start to wonder if there is something in people, and specifically in me, since I have no way of knowing how these things feel to other people, that inhibits spirituality and connectedness. For the sake of this post, I am tying these concepts together, but it could be connectedness to God, if God is specifically your thing, or connectedness to the great life force, or to the universe, whatever. In my ramblings, here, spirituality is what enables the connectedness, and I am wondering what it is that either makes it more difficult to find the connectedness, or turns one away from it altogether. In a class a few years ago we read Brian Swimme’s book The Sacred Heart of the Cosmos. Swimme proposes that consumerism is the current cosmology, the thing that gives meaning and purpose to our lives, and that in place of that, we should be watching the sunset with our kids and explaining to them that we are rolling away from the sun, not that it’s setting, but we’ll see it again when we roll back around, and that we are fortunate little semi-sentient whiffs in a vast creation that is given by the great generosity at the heart of the universe. I loved reading this book, despite my clumsy summation. It does seem important to try to instill in the youngster the importance of following the credo of generosity inspired by creation, whoever we believe is responsible for it. But for me, there is definitely something in the way a lot, and if I were the same believer I was as a child, I would know it was the devil, or original sin, keeping me from God. I don’t know what it is, now- laziness? Inertia? Consumerism? Still original sin?

On a slightly different tack (but related in the sense that it is in this same misty realm of thought), my sad habit of clicking “next blog” over and over, after I catch up with the affairs of my blogging compatriots, led me to this blog, which had posted its first and only entry just that day. It caught my eye initially because the writer was talking about those psilocybin experiments, and it had only been a few days since I heard the NPR report about these tests (I couldn’t find that story on the NPR site, but here’s something similar on CNN. The experiment was so interesting to me, because it made me wonder if there is some part of the brain that is in charge of the spiritual and the mystical and the whole connectedness thing, and whether we have been slowly losing access to it. Anyway, the writer of this blog posed vaguely similar questions, which was cool, but also declared that his work was in investigating claims by children that they had had a previous life. Wha…? It sounds like some kooky stuff, except that he is not a “researcher,” he’s a real Researcher, at the University of Virginia. I know, being connected to a university isn’t any kind of guarantee that you’re not a complete kookoo pants, but it does offer a check on the work that you do, to some extent, and a legitimization (he admits in his blog that his work is “out there”). Anyway, why was this so intriguing to me? Because in all my recent musings, I felt like one manifestation of this spiritual “blockage” that may or may not be prevalent in society (rather than solely within myself) is that while lots of people may be out there thinking about these things, it seems like it’s unusual for people to be talking about them, and it’s difficult for me to write even a quarter of the way to the things that go on in my head. Yet here was a man whose JOB it was to investigate claims made by children that they had been someone else before. Thereby, you know, making the discussion of souls or life force or at any rate, human beings separate from the body they ride around in for a time, into a genuine study. Neat!

Silly blog reader that I am, I asked the guy whether he thought it was possible to try to wire up a kid right, so that they could connect more easily to that part of their brain, or whatever it was, that would give them a greater sense of connectedness and unity throughout life. This sounds like a crazy question now- it was spur of the moment. But he responded that it seemed like the thing to do was to raise the kid with an openness to spirituality. I put it on my list, but I sure wouldn’t mind more help with this one.