>If April showers
Bring May Flowers
Then May snow
I don’t know…
Sorta blows.
In other news, my first full month of blogging produced 23 posts. As 23 is the cosmic number, that makes me happy. I’ll try not to let my current obsession with Deadwood interfere too much. Although I can see that happening. We have watched 6 episodes since Sunday.
>Luke: Mom, if a tree grew up underneath my bed, would it push the bed up, or break the bed into pieces?
Me: I think it would push the bed up.
Luke: No, I think it would break it into pieces.
Daddy: What’s wrong, Jack? You don’t like having your diaper changed?
Jack: (Grabs pacifier out of mouth and throws it aside.) Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga!
>Dave spent a night in Arizona last week, so I took the kids out for dinner. We had sushi because we are a good yuppy family. We were seated in a tiny booth and the wall next to us was one giant mirror, and when Luke turned to say something to me he got distracted. “I thought there was a boy at a table next to us that looked just like me!” Luke likes to look at himself in the mirror. I give him the option of taking his time outs in his room or mine and he always picks mine. Recently, he was crying quite dramatically and Dave gave me the “What the heck?” look. I said, “Five bucks says he is standing in front of the mirror.” Oh yeah, Dave, you owe me 5 bucks. But back to dinner. Soon he noticed there was a mirror on the other wall too. “I can see myself over there! And I can see six Lukes!” (Reflection of a reflection and so on.)
I didn’t plan on the meal taking quite so long, but what with the mirrors and the chopsticks, and the looking at yourself in the mirror using chopsticks, it was quite the leisurely affair. And this meant that Jack wanted to eat, and yeah, I didn’t bring his/my privacy blanket. No worry, the linen napkins were on the large side. So I was trying to feed Jack, and I had us covered with a linen napkin, and I looked in the mirror to my right and we were clear, and I looked in the mirror to my left and we were clear. I looked back to the right, and back to the left. Clear. I made eye contact with the waiter, and if he’s able to make eye contact, then good, he’s not seeing anything else. And I look down and make eye contact with Jack, who has stopped eating and casually tossed off the linen napkin. And I don’t need to look in the mirror at the 6 copies of myself to see that I am exposing myself to the entire room. I covered Jack up and started over and the entire process was repeated about 3 times.
I am not the most modest person in the world, but I think all the mirrors did me in. Because the next day I was pumping in the lactation room and I heard someone talking really loudly, so loudly it seemed like they were in the room with me and I thought, “Oh. My. God. I forgot to shut the door. I am in the lactation room, pumping, and the door isn’t even CLOSED!” But the door was closed. I think I was just delirious because it was late afternoon and all I had packed for lunch was Luke’s leftover kid’s meal, which was a tiny square of tofu and about 7 edamame, and I had eaten it at about 10:30. And someone was talking really loudly right outside the door.
>
Today we did some yard work, played some baseball in the yard with a few neighborhood kids and then headed to the park for a family outing. Very All-American. I can’t believe I didn’t think to make apple pie today! But I did make granola yesterday so, close enough.
We packed some snacks, the stroller, the sling, sunscreen, a picnic blanket, a magazine for me to read, and Dave’s fishing stuff and headed to the park. The picture above is from two summers ago. Good times.
This park has a great playground and the first thing Luke wanted to do was talk through the intercom. You can’t see from one speaker thingy to the other, which I guess makes it more interesting. We had this conversation:
Me: Hi, can you hear me?
Luke: Can you hear me mama?
Me: I can hear you, can you hear me?
Luke: Yeah.
Me: This is fun. What do you want to do next?
Luke: Dada
Me: Daddy is fishing. Do you want to go on the slide?
Luke: Dada.
Me: Are you saying dada?
Luke: Mommy, I’m behind you. A baby wanted to use the intercom, so I let him.
Nice – he left me talking to a baby.
Then Luke wanted to be pushed on the swings, which was really fun. I had Jack in the sling, and every time I pushed Luke, Jack laughed hysterically. So cute.
Then we walked around for a while, picked the perfect spot, laid out the blanket, got Jack out of the stroller, started to get the snacks out, and “Mama. I have to go to the bathroom.” Okaaaaay. So I packed everything and everyone back up and we walked all the way to one end of the park where the bathrooms are, but they were not yet open for the season. So we walked all the way to the other side of the park where there are two porta potties and three young baggy pants wearing gentleman. As we approached, I saw one go in one of the bathrooms and one start to go into one of the bathrooms but then change his mind. We had this conversation:
Me: Is that bathroom really gross?
Young Gentleman: Yeah.
Me: OK. We’ll wait.
Young Gentleman: Well, uh. I think it’s gross. You might not.
Me: Do I look like I have lower bathroom standards than you do?
Young Gentleman: Sorry.
Regardless, I am glad I had Purell with me.
In other news, we went to see our friends’ brand new super cute 8 pound 6 day old baby. It’s been a little over 5 months since my 6 pound 10 ounce baby was born and I have a good memory, but I don’t believe Jack was ever that small. I think my friends’ baby maybe really only weighs 4 pounds, and they are just a little confused. Or else the gravitational pull on the earth has shifted and 8 pounds is different than it was 5 months ago. That might explain my own weight too!
>
No, don’t worry, I am not going to sully this blog with some boring American Idol commentary about how bad the dread lock guy’s rendition of Memory was this week, and how he said, “A cat sings this song? I had no idea.” (More bad use of quotes since that is just what I vaguely remember him saying, and not what he actually said.)
No, I want to write about memories of real people that I actually know, like my children. I was putting Jack to bed last night and he fell asleep in my arms. He really snuggles into the crook of my arm, with one arm around my waist and the other grabbing the neck of my sweater with his fist. He has quite a grip, and today I started calling him Pinchy. His cheeks were rosy, eyes were closed, and he smelled sweet. I noticed all of this out of the corner of my eye because, while I was holding him with one arm, I was holding my book with another. I tend to read a lot. When I turned 16, I sat in the driver’s seat of my parents minivan and looked out the window for the first time. I didn’t know how to get around town, but I had gotten a lot of reading done over the years.
I can remember painting a sign with my grandma that she hung on the door for my mom to see when she came home from the hospital with my baby sister. I was three and my job was to paint little evenly spaced lines of green across the bottom to represent grass. My lines got bigger, longer, spaced further apart and, in general, messier as they crossed the page. My grandma said, “Oh no! Paint the grass like this.” I looked at her grass and my grass and thought, “It looks easier than it is.” The point of this story is that I have a great memory. I am the official expert on everything that ever happened. I am so good at remembering things that some people think I just make stuff up.
So you’d think that I would not need to worry about whether or not I am going to have vivid memories of everyday life with my baby. But my worrying skills rival my memory, I’m that multi-talented. Currently, when I try to ingrain a tender moment into my brain, I also think of memories of Luke. I probably have 3 or 5 or maybe only 1o vivid memories of nursing Luke. So I worry that I am doing too much reading and not enough memorizing of every moment with Jack. Pictures help, but this morning when I tried to capture the look on Jack’s face when I went in to get him in the morning instead of capturing 1000 words I got maybe 5. Those 5 words were “Oh. there’s the camera again.” What I was trying to capture was that his eyes are still blue, with a glint of joy, a little devil, that he was happy to see me, but also that he had been content to look at the mobile before I got there, and maybe wants to glance back at the mobile right this second; a shade of worry passes over his brow, but then it’s gone as he breaks out into a big smile, which is also fleeting, and then he’s overcome with the joy that one can attain only by seeing how much blanket can be crammed into ones mouth, and then I snap the picture. OK, words aren’t going to do it either. But the process of trying to come up with the words or the picture may be what helps me with the memory.
And I guess if I have 10 vivid memories of Luke five years later, that’s pretty good. And I did a lot of reading when he was a baby too.
>
Jack is not napping well at daycare. Or at home. But at home, if I want to get a lot of work done, I sometimes let Jack nap in my lap. That allows him to sleep for over an hour and forces me to work instead of foraging for snacks. However, for some reason, Dave told the daycare about my bad parenting and I got lectured. Then I had to avoid three consecutive drop off/pick ups because I don’t like to get in trouble.
Short story long, yesterday Jack took one OK nap in the crib, one relatively good nap in the crib, and one fabulous nap on my lap. As I was falling asleep last night I was strategizing to myself. “Just tell her he slept fine. No, tell her you made him cry it out with mixed results. No, tell the nap stories accurately as to length and location, but say you were forced to let him nap on your lap because before you got a chance to put him down you ended up on a two hour conference call and you don’t have a cordless phone. Yes! That’s it!”
Stress much?
Why can’t I just take this fabulous advice I got from a good friend:
“The daycare just needs to pick a consistent routine for him there. He’s smart enough to follow a routine with them and then be treated like a king at home.”
(The picture is from yesterday morning. He slept from 8 until 6:30. Then had breakfast in bed and passed out, milk drunk.)
>
“Bean” was a pleasure to have. That is what it said on the note from the kennel. Dave wondered about the use of quotes around his name. I suggested that maybe the kennel thinks “Bean” is Bean’s nickname. But I really shouldn’t make fun of them for two reasons.
1.) I started to look up proper and improper uses of quotation marks to research this blog “article” that I am writing here. But then I got sort of lazy and decided to “give up”.
2.) I should probably have put quotes around the first sentence since I am quoting a line from the note from the kennel. Is that right? I don’t know – see point 1.
I should also not be making fun of the kennel because they let me take Bean without paying since I forgot my wallet. “Oh, we trust you! We’ll see you soon.”
Regardless, I think that a more accurate sentence would have been, Bean was a “pleasure” to have. Just “kidding” Bean!
In other Bean news:
Today I brushed Bean’s hair and got such a big pile of hair that I was thinking of taking it to someone I know who spins fiber into yarn and then weaves things out of the yarn and asking her to make Bean a dog hair sweater. I wish I could take credit for this fabulous “idea” but Dave and I have been joking about the “dog hair sweater” ever since I overheard that same person accepting a zip lock bag of dog hair and saying, “I can’t wait to work with this and see what kind of yarn I can make.”
Lastly, I thought a “funny” blog sidebar to have would be something along the lines of “Bean has gone N days without an accident in the house.” Where N=number of days. But then I realized that it would just be so depressing to keep resetting that number back to zero. On the other hand, I guess the number would go up more often than it would go down. And today we could be celebrating “1” day without an accident. Yea “Bean”!
Update: While I was dropping Luke off at daycare this morning, Bean ate a granola bar and a mocha clif shot (contains 50mg of caffeine). Dave is out of town, so if history tells me anything, I should be rolling up the rug and covering the floors and walls with plastic. (If I had been blogging at the time, I could now link to the “eating everything out of the refrigerator incident”, the “eating the care package from Beth incident”, the “eating a bag of chocolate chips and jumping out of the window and running away incident”, the “eating a bag of whole wheat flour incident”, the “eating a bag of brown sugar incident” and everyone’s favorite, the “eating a box of Malley’s Chocolate and you don’t even want to know the rest of the story incident”.)
>
Where’s my pacifier?
There it is!
Let’s play again!
Where’s my pacifier?
There it is!
>I jinxed myself the first night by hoping for warm weather. I think it’s safe to say that since I came to my senses, stopped winter camping in the snow, and bought a Eurotrashvan, I have never shivered through such a cold night of camping. Luke did a lot of tossing and turning but every 2 hours or so I said in a loud whisper, “LUKE. If you are too cold, come sleep down here! Do you hear me? Are you too cold?” He never answered. Once, around 5am he said, “Mommy, I’m freeeeeeeeezing.” But Dave told him to get all the way inside his sleeping bag and to pull it up over his head and he’d be warmer. Jack slept the whole night and didn’t even fuss when I checked his head and hands to see how cold they were every half hour or so. Dave also slept really well, and only stirred every 15 minutes or so when I quietly whispered, “Dave! Do you think everyone is too cold? Should we make Luke come down here and snuggle? Or would he roll over on top of Jack? Do you think Luke might be smothered inside his sleeping bag? Dave?”
We did get have some great cuddle time in the morning though.
And Dave refused to get up and “start the long laborious process of making my coffee and breakfast” until he could see someone out the window wearing shorts. I’m not sure the person in shorts ever materialized but Luke and I begged and pleaded and Dave finally got started on breakfast at about 9:30am.
But the best part of the day was when Dave put Jack in the stroller and Luke and I hopped on our bikes and did some serious mountain biking. Luke said, “I love camping because I love to mountain bike.” I was very proud of my little mountain biker.
Two quotes.
Luke: I was climbing the tree and the highest I had gotten was level 5. I was about to go to level 6 when I noticed people were packing. I said, “Are we leaving?” And Daddy said, “yes” and then I started crying because I didn’t want to leave.
Jack (when we got home and he saw his mobile over his bed): Aaaah!
Yes, it was a good time, and it was also nice to get home and sleep in our warm, soft beds.
(Click on any of the pictures to see the whole album in a normal size. You’ll see that it did warm up.)
>It’s National Poem In Your Pocket Day.
We’re off to camp
Cuz in Boulder, it’s damp.
In Fruita it’s not
I hope that it’s hot.
MetaMegan 