See monkeys

There are so many myths of perfection out there:
perfect health, the perfect marriage, the perfect job, perfect breasts, the perfect salad.

All of them suck. Except the perfect salad. Anything food related can be perfect, because then "perfect" means "highly pleasurable", which is exactly what food should be.

It is what all of those things should be, but my vision of perfection for each of the others is too sanitary, too unrealistic.

I started that playful parenting book I mentioned before. I've only gotten through the introductory chapter, but I'm liking what I see. It made me feel better about, well about being a goofwad in general. In particular it cast a new light on the time I made Anonybabe laugh by fake crying when she would "offer" me food and then pull it back at the last minute. The real belly laughs it elicited made me uneasy, and I thought, should I be encouraging this? Laughing at another person's pain? Albeit a very hammy and obviously fake pain?

Apparently I should. Supposedly it allows her to vent steam about always being the one from whom things are taken at will. This book postulates that apart from being fun, play is an incredibly healing way to help kids overcome and sort through their bad feelings. A Pan's Labyrinth therapy, if you will. Through fantasy, and sometimes an ugly, life-mirroring fantasy, the kid (or adult) can start to feel in control and confident again.

I'm a little perturbed that my first instinct was and probably will be to sanitize Anonybabe's play. Long ago, Anonyhub asked me what motivated me deep down. He thought it was funny when I answered, "You mean other than guilt and fear?" and then couldn't get much further. So that tells you a little something about how we were raised. It'll be hard to shake the shame-mongering monkey on our backs, but there's something about this idea of play that has promise.

Letting Anonybabe spend her first year in our bed was my first follow-my-heart parenting technique.

Making a religion out of joy and play seems to by my second.

I was hoping to get more of these clear cues from my gut than one per year, but I suppose I should be happy any of them are getting past those monkeys. Guilt and shame can run a mean defense.

Pass the Ham

I told you about Anonybabe's recent tendency to zerbert any exposed flesh that might be lying around. At first she did it because she liked the sound and feel of it. But now she's fishing for a reaction.

And when I fed her with her spoon this weekend and let her guide the bite to her own mouth, she would leave the spoon in, sticking out, and give me a look like "How silly am I? Huh? Yea?". To which I would give her the same blank stare she was giving me just a month or so ago.

I don't like it when she hams it up like this, but I know she didn't learn it from Anonyhub. My anything-for-a-laugh tactic of child-rearing is already coming back to bite me in the face.

Oh well. Maybe we can do an unfunny mother-daughter stand-up routine for show and tell, complete with zerberts, ridiculous dances, absurd make-it-up-as-you-go-along song lyrics, and spoons in our mouths.

Or maybe I can learn to break the cycle of unfunny by just letting us sit and frown a lot. That sounds slightly more palatable.

So....friggin....tired

......on top of losing an hour to daylight's savings and staying up late to do my long overdue Sunday homework



......Anonybabe woke up at 3:45am in the am after going to sleep at 11:00pm.



......and then didn't go back to sleep until 6:30.



......at least Anonyhub and I got to split the shift.



......tonight Anonyhub gets to go to the movies with his pals.



......I hope to god Anonybabe is sleepy.



I'm barely keeping it together on 2 cups of very strong coffee. I so want to go see....(can't...think...need....sleep)...Dan Savage and some other essayists do a reading tonight at the Lakeview Theater, but I don't know that it's kosher to bring even a quiet baby to one of those things. Plus, don't I need a lot of sleep? I'm willing to bet Anonybabe will be bright eyed and bushy-tailed when I get home, and being so close to the bed without being able to go to it is going to be torture.



Is this penance for celebrating Anonybabe's "smooth" transition to her own bed too soon? Doesn't matter. I'm beat.

Wait, did that just happen? Part 2

For the past three nights, as Anonybabe has elected to sleep straight through from bedtime to dawn in her own bed, I have regressed to the sleeping pattern I had when she was born. She slumbers peacefully while I keep waking up in a panic, to see what's happening, check her breathing, make sure she hasn't tangled a blanket over her head or caught an extremity in the bars of the crib.

I slept in a crib from day one, and when I was a kid, I didn't want to sleep in my parents' queen size. I liked being in my own bed, where I could whisper to my dolls, make a tent out of my covers, and toss and turn freely. My parents' bed was too crowded, too warm. Their bodies were loud, two adults breathing through their mouths and lightly snoring and smacking their lips and occasionally rolling over. Plus the bed smelled of them times ten. My dad's spicy sweat-tinged scent and my mom's sweet & sour aura hung in a heavy cloud over their bed. I would only go to them after a rare nightmare, needing their comfort, but not really comfortable until I could calm down enough to climb over them and back to my own twin bed, with its cool sheets and only the warm pocket I made with my body.

I kind of surprised myself by even considering "co-sleep" with Anonybabe. We live in a one-bedroom, and I figured we would all need as much private space as we could muster. But when the time came, my question to myself about it wasn't "did I want to sleep in my parent's bed", but would I want to know I was welcome there. And the answer - to my surprise - was a strong unhesitating yes!

Aside from being hella convenient, laying Anonybabe between Anonyhub and I was a personal heartfelt gesture of welcome. A symbol of openheartedness that I could hang all of my new conflicting emotions about parenting on. I may not have known what to do about anything else, but of this much I was inexplicably sure: welcoming Anonybabe into our bed had allied itself in my mind with welcoming her wholeheartedly into our lives. I decided to use co-sleeping to syphon this powerful sense of acceptance and love into my daughters life until it didn't work for us anymore.

The tide has turned, but not abruptly. We decided to give Anonybabe her little bud-bed attached to our own and as we all get more comfortable with it, it will break off into its own full-bloom bed, and then eventually it and she will branch off into their own room.

Can I celebrate this here? Doing something that feels right and having it work out? Because I try to do the right thing lots of times and can never quite feel comfortable with my methods or the outcome. Maybe I'll live to regret our sleeping arrangement, but so far I've enjoyed every moment.

Nutty Professor

I took a pregnancy test the other day for a couple of reasons, even though near celibacy, an IUD, and continuing breastfeeding mean I was being more than a little paranoid:



1. A friend of mine just got accidentally pregnant with her 3rd child. Her womb wasn't quite as safeguarded as mine, and she and her husband are definitely more randy, but it still freaked my shit out.


2. Due to the IUD and breastfeeding, I still don't really have periods, so how would I know? And if I were to get pregnant with an IUD, things would get ugly fast. As unlikely as it was, I wanted to make sure.


3. I went through a week of eating voraciously. Eating sugar and dairy voraciously. Lots of fruit juices, and lots and lots of milk...this also hasn't happened since I was with child.


4. I have been incredibly, incredibly spacey lately. As forgetful as I was during pregnancy, when I lost my keys a grand total of four times. (To be fair, I think my burgeoning belly and my maternity coat with its shallow pockets had something to do with that). Forgetting to take letters my husband asked me to drop off at the post office 10 minutes after he reminded me to take them. Forgetting to take the necessary pump parts to work and then driving to Target to buy more, only to realize that I've forgotten my wallet at home as well. And then today's coup de grace: taking our one and only car to work when I was supposed to take the train. This is after our household has been living, eating, and breathing a project that Anonyhub has been working on non-stop for a final class he has at the botanical gardens tonight. A class that he has to have the car to get to. I'll have to leave early today to get the car back down to him so he can then drive back up past where I work to get to said class in the north suburbs.


Yipe. I'm glad I'm not preggers but I'm a little frightened here.

Not that I haven't always been a little, shall we say, somewhere else. I remember, as a child, reading about that ancient Greek who was so preoccupied with his thoughts and/or mathematical theorems that he walked right off of the road into a ditch. And I remember thinking, woah. I hope that's my excuse. That I'm really really smart.

Alas, no. Mother nature doesn't always see fit to balance out her not-so-observant children with big brains to think with when they aren't paying attention to the present. She has, however, blessed me with more than my fair share of luck. So I can't complain.

Perhaps I just need a nap.

Wait, did that just happen?

So we finally broke down and bought a crib for Anonybabe...I dunno....a month or so ago? She'd been sleeping with us, an arrangement that I hadn't really planned on originally, but that felt really right when she was born, and felt extremely right later when I had to get up in the middle of the night to nurse her and then get up and go to work the next day. You can sleep and nurse, and by golly who wouldn't want to do that?

Then we spent a few unnecessary months enduring her tossing and turning because we just weren't quite ready to have her out of the bed. (Plus she still nursed in the middle of the night, which may have been because we still had her in the bed...but given the fact that I was away from her all day, I didn't mind the circular logic if Anonyhubby and Anonybabe didn't....despite Anonymom-in-laws assertions that they could "break" her of this if we'd just hand her over for a week. Thank you, no.)

Finally we bought a bed that transitioned into a toddler bed and then a full bed, with big, white curvy slopes of a headboard and side boards, and jarring chunky bars on the sides. When we put Anonybabe in it for the first time, Anonyhub told her she looked like a Lion from the circus, and her bed does look like one of those train car cages from Dumbo.

As a way to ease out of bed sharing (probably for me more than her), we made her crib into the toddler day bed and put it right next to my side of the bed, so she could easily crawl from one bed to another. Voila! We could lay her down in her bed to sleep but easily roll over and pull her into our queen sized bed for a 3am snack. She was a little freaked out even by this at first, opening her eyes from what we'd think was a deep sleep and crying out when we tried to lay her down. (The same response we got every time we tried to have her sleep in a Pack N Play, by the way.) Then she'd stay asleep but cry as soon as she woke up. Then she'd stay asleep and cry when she wanted to nurse. Then...and I don't want to jinx this by hanging up my "Mission Accomplished" banner too soon...but for the past two nights she's gone to sleep in my arms, I lay her down, and but for a little tossing and turning, there she's stayed until I pick her up again for a morning nurse before heading off to work!

She seems very comfortable in her bed. She plays in it, looks at her "buh!"s in it. Maybe this was a long slow torture getting her into her own bed this way, but on the whole, I've enjoyed the process.

Forget crying it out, I prefer waiting it out.

The Amazing Anonybabe!

Cute stuff she's been doing lately:

She has the sign for "milk" down (opening and closing her hand as if she's milking), but usually uses it only after we've started or just finished nursing.

This weekend she was able to grab a cup from her high chair, bring it to her mouth, and take big gulps of water without spilling! Of course, for every one time she didn't spill, she poured half a cup down her front or tipped water out of the side of the cup onto her seat. That didn't stop me from tearing up and making it sound like she'd discovered gravity when she managed to drink by herself.

She has discovered gravity, dropping every object she can off of the bed, off of her high chair, off of her exersaucer.

She bobs her head to music; she'll even take requests from her exersaucer, pounding the buttons until she find the song we've been mechanically humming as soon as we put her in the thing. When a certain song comes on, she practically head bangs.

She's discovered zerberting, and can get some really filthy sounding low ones going on my boobs and belly.

Vocabulary: In addition to "buh!" for book, we can now add "poo", as in Winnie the. Anonyhub has some Pooh slippers that have two huge stuffed heads on the toes. Anonybabe loooooves them. She'll see them from her high chair perch and immediately stop eating. Anonyhub has convinced her to call for Pooh (with much coaxing of course), and when he appears from beneath her high chair tray she'll laugh like a maniac and cover him with open mouth kisses and hugs. Just the first in a lifetime of loves I will never understand.

Yesterday she spent a good 10 minutes straight pulling a magnet off of the refrigerator and putting it back on. When she'd face it the wrong direction, she'd pick it up and try again. My but she's patient! She spends a lot of time in her high chair waiting for meals, too.