4 posts tagged “evan”

Its been ages since I've written, I know.  So much and yet so little has happened.  I get up, I work, I come home, We play, I get spit up upon, I go to sleep.

The baby rolls over now.  For a while he kept getting his arm stuck underneath him, and it caused him no end of wailing frustration, but that phase has passed and now he holds himself up on his elbows like a bored boy reading comic books.  Locomotion is next, and soon, I fear.

With Mama

Here we are on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, at my Grandparent's farm, gathering greens with which to decorate my mother's house.  My Grandparents both passed away many years ago -- I'm ashamed to say that I cannot recall the year that either of them passed.  My Grandmother died before the baby's father and I were together, so it must have been 15 years ago or more now.  My Grandfather did meet My True Love many times before he left us.  My son is named for him -- and for his father, too.  Funny how these two most important men in my life shared the same name, yet neither were ever called by it (and my son is not called by it either).

My grandparents basically raised me, as my mother moved to Maine from NYC to raise her baby in a cleaner, more supportive environment.  So I had the luxury of growing up with three parents, and running free in the beautiful woods that surround the farm where my grandparents lived.  They bought 90+ acres of land in Maine in 1965 (including a ten-room farmhouse with attached barn and two outbuildings) for $13,000, and struggled for years to pay it off.  But pay it off they did, and after my grandfather died my greatest fear was that my mother would be forced to sellt the land for taxes and those beautiful woods and fields and rock walls where I roamed would be destroyed for sub-divisions, or worse.  Instead, my mother has created a land trust, so the farm will stay in our family for

Groovy Hat

Now I'm crying as I'm writing this.  So much love they had for me, and I am so proud to have brought this beautiful boy into the world.  I hope I can pass the love and reality of their lives on to him -- that they aren't just "my great grandparents," those people who live only in photographs on the mantle piece.  I hope, too, that he is able to learn to love the land at the farm as I do, even though distance and those pesky too-low ceilings keep us from living there full time as we would like.  I can't wait to show him the beaver dam, and the wide stone walls built by 19th century farmers as they tried to clear fields for crops, and the giant granite rock shaped like a dinosaur head that a glacier left laying on the hillside a million or so years ago.  I can't wait to teach him an oak from an elm from a birch tree, and to lie on the hill with him and watch the clouds and listen to the chickadees sing. 

But all of that will have to wait.  He needs to learn crawling first.

No photos today - I've taken some, but have not had time to extract them yet.

Poop yesterday and poop again today, however - and, as a bonus, both times while he was at day care.  Woot.

I have to admit, its days like today - global warming, loss of basic rights, impending war with lots of people - days like today that I feel quite guilty for bringing the Little Guy into this ugly world.  I know that all we can do is love him as much as we can, and hope, but I sometimes suspect that by the time he's an adult there won't be much of a world left for him to enjoy.

No cute photo today, sorry.  No poop today, either.

This was one of those very long days that I dread.  Up at 530 am, in a panic, because its 530 am and the Little Boy did not awaken me at 200 am or 455 am as he normally does so clearly he must be dead.  (He's not, obviously.)  Then get him fed and dressed and off to see The Lady (as we call his daytime care provider; her real name is Carol) with Daddy when Daddy goes to work at 700 am.  Then me showered and dressed and milked and off to work by 830 am.  Work until 500 pm, then a short car trip across town to my other job, where I stayed until 930 pm, then came home.  This morning he was basically asleep for the hour or so I saw him in the morning, and he was asleep when I got home. 

Given all this, plus my level of exhaustion, is it awful of me to wish that he'll wake up at 200 am, just so I can snuggle him?

When I got home the Dad was watching the tail end of Jericho on the Tivo, and I watched about a half hour of it, which was a total mistake on at least two levels.  First, good child of the Cold War that I am, I spent a great deal of my Junior High and High School years thinking in detail about what would happen if The Nukes were to come, which, given my very vivid visual imagination was detail to an amazing level, and having a repeating nightmare so vivid and realistic that I can tell you about it in painstaking detail even now, some 25 years later (but I won't).   Second, there was a baby in an incubator in several scenes, which is a big trigger for me recently.

(Side note, and slight spoiler:  Can someone explain to me why the healthy people got to stay in the nice tidy City Hall and all the sick people got sent to the Salt Mine???  That seems like poor prioritization to me.)

The Little Guy's Dad calls it the "CSI syndrome" and we discovered it right after the Little Guy was born.  Somehow the hormones related to motherhood have triggered in me some weird reactions when I see stories about babies or toddlers in pain - very strong, visceral reactions that I never had before.  We found this out when I was watching a Law & Order rerun which featured the discovery of an infant's skull, whereupon I promptly burst into tears and had to shut the TV off.  I suppose its normal - the protective reaction that nature wants me to have in order to keep my baby safe, but its damned annoying when I can't watch simple fictional crime dramas in peace.    And that's just fiction.  I made the mistake of reading a couple of news stories on-line about this homeless mother in New York whose four month old daughter drowned in a bucket of her mother's vomit at work (a story which I suspect will be dragged out in some argument against co-sleeping in the not-so-near future, I might add) and ended up spending 25 minutes in the bathroom, weeping.  So as you can imagine, the sight of this infant facing Nuclear Peril drove me from the room fairly quickly, and is haunting me even now. 

There are days, many days, when a vivid visual imagination is a pain in the ass - know what I mean?

About a week ago, we had to take the Little Guy to the cardiologist, to make certain that he doesn't have a serious heart murmur (he doesn't).  The waiting room was full of these tired, drawn looking parents and their sickly looking babies ... tiny babies, fragile looking things, many of them spindly and slightly blue and translucent looking.  Sad babies who, I'm sure, don't smile or laugh or even have the energy to look up at their mothers and fathers and coo adoribly.  And I know for a fact that all those exhausted mothers and fathers love their babies as fiercely as I love mine - more so, perhaps, because they know much better than I how fragile this is and what a risk they took just by deciding to bring this new tiny life into the world.

I'm thankful for ten fingers and ten toes.  For two perfect little shell-like ears.  For chubby baby thighs and that little button nose.  For wide toothless grins at 3am.  For burps that would do John Belushi proud.  For dimpled elbows and knees.  For a strong heart that beats.  For a rumbly little tummy.  For poopy diapers (when we get them). 

... and now I have to go, because I miss him despite the fact he's just in the other room.  I have to go stand by his crib and gaze at him again ...