Flotsam

In case you are wondering how this impromptu hiatus happened, I’ll tell you: Simone stopped sleeping, and I stopped doing anything except fantasizing about spending a night a week two weeks in a hotel. I am told that this (the not sleeping, not the fantasizing about hotels, though in my experience the two go hand in hand) is common around nine months, Simone’s adjusted age. You might think that knowing other mothers all around the world had been through the same thing would be a comfort to me, and perhaps it would have been, if those other mothers had been in my kitchen at 3am, making coffee and cheering me with an off-color limerick or two, but they weren’t, and it wasn’t. Though, honestly, even if Simone hadn’t stopped sleeping, I suspect I would have become unhinged for some other reason. Four months of RSV quarantine, in case you are interested, turns out to be exactly the amount I can endure before my seams start to show.

I feel all out of practice after my time away (what is this Web Log you speak of?) so if you don’t mind, I am going to fall into the comforting embrace of bulletpoints to sum up what you have missed in the past three (oh my god) weeks. Because it’s so important, you see.

•    Desperate for rest, Scott and I decided to do what the pediatrician and that “Healthy Sleep Habits, Reduced Risk of Infanticide” book have been suggesting for months: stop catering to Simone’s every midnight whim. The first night, Simone started to cry, and after I had waited for an hour or two, gripping my arm with my fingernails, I lurched up to rescue her, glancing at the clock as I went. It had been exactly four minutes. Time is so stretchy when your baby is wailing. I see nothing wrong with letting a baby cry a bit, in theory, but knowing that Simone spent 96 nights alone in the NICU…I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. So I resigned myself to never sleeping again, and then Simone learned to crawl last weekend, and things improved dramatically. Meaning she only wakes up once or twice a night, and sleeps until 5:30 a.m., which seems almost luxurious. Almost.
•    Yes. She crawls. Simone had been able to make her way from place to place on her belly for some time, very inefficiently, but suddenly she can honest-to-goodness crawl, with proper form, on her hands and knees. And let me tell you, the child is FAST. I was ready to end my hiatus last weekend, but then the crawling started, and I was too busy dragging Simone away from powerstrips to do anything else. Shouldn’t there be some evolutionary failsafe that keeps babies from being drawn inexorably toward whatever would most speedily kill them? On Monday I turned my back for one minute (nothing good ever started with that collection of words) and then looked around to find that Simone had PULLED THE AIR FRESHENER OUT OF AN ELECTRICAL SOCKET AND WAS SUCKING ON IT OH MY DANCING WHORE. I screamed, snatched her up, and spent the rest of the afternoon retching quietly in fear of what Might Have Been until Scott got home and I could race to Target and deplete their stock of baby-proofing supplies.
•    In related news, I absentmindedly sprayed my daughter with the Water Bottle of Discipline we use for the cats. In my defense, she was chewing on my discarded boot, and I was very tired and confused. She didn’t seem to notice.
•    Trying to work on my book while providing even my customary substandard baby care is a challenge. Every time I get going, and the initial inertia has finally given way, some baby wants to be “fed” or “held” or “loved.” Honestly, I don’t know how Stefanie does it, and I am relying on my customary “is probably a robot” explanation. She has three children! And has written multiple books! And shows up on television with shiny hair!  It’s a cliché, I know, but it’s true: there are too few hours in the day. There are, in fact, TWO hours in the day, two hours that are not accounted for, and they fly at me in useless fifteen-minute increments. Are there more hours in California? Is the coffee stronger out there?
•    That little badge in my sidebar is no longer just for show: I registered for BlogHer. Last year Simone was still new and the novelty hadn’t yet worn off, so I foolishly turned down the opportunity to spend three nights alone by myself in a hotel. The year before, I canceled my reservation to pay for my IVF drugs after my insurance decided they wouldn’t cover them after all, and the year before that…I can’t remember. Anyhow, I’m going this time, though whether I will manage to tear myself away from room service and my king-sized bed long enough to meet anyone is hard to say.
•    Simone still doesn’t eat. She will have a day here or there where she chews a few spoonfuls of something, and there is much rejoicing, but the next day we are back to the drawing board. If you are wondering what the drawing board looks like, it features a wild-eyed woman surrounded by dozens of bowls of scorned foodstuffs, weeping over a jar of prunes. We finally had a visit from a feeding specialist who gave us a bizarre nubbly toothbrush to use as a spoon, and today—an uncommonly good day, food-wise—Simone ate two tablespoons of fruit and four irksomely-named Lil’ Crunchies. In case any of you are tut-tutting over the unwholesome nature of the aforementioned Lil’ Crunchies, let me assure you that I would much rather that the one item Simone can be depended upon to eat were a homemade puree, but at this point we will take what we can get. Also, I must confess that I accidentally ate half the box of Zesty Tomato flavored Lil’ Crunchies myself, as they are actually quite tasty and zero WW points per dozen.
•    Speaking of which, I have lost about eight and a half pounds since mid-January. I have a little less than 15 to go. I figure I shall reach my goal just in time to visit my mother in early May and eat my way through Switzerland.
•    Lastly, Simone has learned to clap, which she now does whenever she is excited. This is easily the best trick she has mastered yet. I promise you, there is nothing better than entering a room and being greeted with a round of applause from your very own baby.

I missed you all—I even dreamed Internet-y dreams, for instance that Heather B. and I were at a Hayden-Harnett sample sale together (we had a lovely time). After I hadn’t posted for a while I got hung up on having nothing to offer except complaints about how hard things are right now and how elusive money continues to be and what a lackluster job I am doing parenting my scrumptious daughter and here, how about a baby picture?

And then, happily, I remembered that none of you are being forced at gunpoint to read this (I hope! Because that would be terrible!) and so if I want to post whiny drivel for a month, well, no one will be harmed in any substantive way. And so I am back. Whiny Drivel, Ho! (Which, incidentally, could be my stage name).

I do have some more interesting things for next week, including some horrible dating stories I remembered after talking to my single friend (that works both ways, actually, which is sad). Oh my god, I hated dating. Only junior high was worse, and that is saying something.

I can’t seem to stop writing, but my little word count widget tells me that this is over 1300 words already, which is a shocking length for a blog entry. I can’t remember how I end these things. Do I just stop typing all of a sudden? Yes, let’s try that.

One from Alexa on Vimeo.

Sometimes it is tiring, being me, the way I manage to make even the simplest everyday occurrence into an ordeal. Like on Friday: We have cleaning people, a fact I have yet to stop feeling guilty about. They are from a reputable service (That uses green materials! They sweep with hay and scrub with fish scales!), and we pay them well. Simone’s respiratory issues demand that we maintain a level of cleanliness that is simply not realistic for us without help from trained professionals. I’m not proud of that, but there it is. Cleaning people: we have them.
The two-person team that comes to our apartment every other Friday is made up of two sweet, older Mexican women, and just to twist the guilt knife further, one of them has a grandson who was a preemie, and I have deduced from our linguistically garbled conversations that he had NEC and lives with an ostomy. They are perfectly delightful, and I have no reason to believe they wish me ill, but I cannot STAND to be in the house while they work, because of the guilt, and because I inevitably convince myself that they are mocking me in their native tongue. As well they should, because our house is filthy, even with the pre-cleaning-people cleaning I do before they arrive.

But this last Friday, they showed up early—at nine a.m. There had been no pre-cleaning-people cleaning. And so I shoved a befuddled Simone into her snowsuit and said loudly “I’M TAKING BABY TO THE DOCTOR NOW!” while rocking a faux baby and putting my hand on my forehead as if to feel for fever. The cleaning people smiled and nodded and I bolted out the door wondering where in the HELL I was going to go. Simone, you will recall, cannot go inside stores, restaurants, or, well, anywhere because of RSV season.
There is a drive-through coffee shop near my doctor’s office, across the river in West St. Paul, and we drove there, slowly. Simone started to cry, and I gave her an old crumpled receipt to play with (she loves paper, that baby). At the drive-through, I was so busy trying to decide where to go next that I forgot to order at the little speaker and instead sat dumbly in the line of cars until I pulled up to the window where you are supposed to receive your drink, only then blithely requesting a latte. The man was very nice about the whole thing, helpfully pointing out that my baby seemed to have gotten ahold of a piece of paper and was licking it, which news I pretended to be surprised by.

We crept home. It had been 38 minutes. Even I knew that 38 minutes wasn’t enough time to maintain my sad little “doctor’s appointment” charade, so I parked a few blocks away and sat, drinking my latte. Simone tired of her receipt and began to howl. I drove down the block and back. Wow, I really had to pee. I could see four or five establishments with bathrooms from where I was parked, but could go into none of them, because of the baby. I called Scott, who was at work—back across the river and 20 minutes away. When he finished sighing at my obvious insanity, he agreed that if I drove to his office, he would come downstairs to say hello. Though another idea, he pointed out, would be for me to go home and face the two harmless 60-year-old Mexican women like a man.

I think you know which option I chose.

So that was Friday. In the early hours of Saturday, I awoke with what was either food poisoning or some sort of flu. Scott seemed to have a much milder version, though whether his sickness was caused by an actual organism or by my using the phrase “throw up” instead of his preferred, less nauseating code word (“SAY ‘LAMBADA!’ SAY ‘LAMBADA!’” he cried all day) is unclear. At any rate, by Sunday morning, when I fainted dead away on Simone’s play mat, we were in pitiful shape. My temperature, which normally runs at a chilly 97.2, was 101, and I dropped my only child onto her head because my grasp was too weak to hold her writhing body.

I have felt poorly a few times since we’ve had Simone: sniffles, stomach aches, a migraine or two. But this was the first time that I was the kind of sick where the bathroom floor seems luxurious, where even standing upright requires an effort you cannot muster. I broke into my pregnancy stash of Zofran, I had panic attacks, and just to ensure that no organ was left unmolested, I got my period. I ate nothing but saltines until Saturday evening after a nap, when I bravely sipped at some chicken soup that turned my stomach so soundly I went straight back to bed. It was bad, is what I am trying to say, and being that sick when you have a child to take care of is an experience that defies characterization. No, I lied, I can characterize it just fine: BLLLAAAAARGHH.

Single parents are obviously robots. Even with Scott semi-well for most of Saturday, we just managed to cobble together some shoddy, Elizabethan orphanage level of care.

But we are fine now, having recuperated by watching lots of television and balancing things on the baby:





And how was your weekend?