Socializing

Husband and I recently went with another couple to a participatory mystery comedy dinner theatre show. It was sooo fun and I got sooo drunk (it has been years and years since I have had the opportunity to utter that sentence; also, by this I mean I had a glass of wine and a third of a glass of Long Island Iced Tea). Husband and I stood up in front of everyone (with a few others) and sang. There was lots of laughing and misplaced pairs of reading glasses.

We never go out like this. I haven’t been to the movies since the middle of 2006. We’ve gotten a babysitter to go out for pleasure only once, and that was really against our will; we just felt like we were supposed to. An exotic evening involves chess. This isn’t at all the result of Baby’s arrival; we, as a couple, have always been homebodies. I’d be somewhat more willing to do fun things out and about, particularly if they include Baby (I am not into the whole sitter thing); Husband can be a bit more misanthropic.

Baby and I go out a lot during the week to various events, however, and we get together with friends and I talk on the phone and have blogging, so I have lots of interaction with others. Husband, though, doesn’t seem to have any really good man-friends at the moment. He used to be buddies with my best friend’s husband, but that sort of waned, which is just as well, since I think being couple friends can be kind of hard. One of his best friends is from an old job is now his superior at work (this guy hired Husband away) which makes their friendship a little more touchy, I think, but they still work out together. Husband really misses his brother who is in Europe. Everyone needs a best friend to bitch to, but Husband thinks that complaining about me would be disloyal (though I’ve encouraged it). What’s sad is he hardly has time for friends, anyway, what with work and school. Poor Husband.

Blogging/Parenting

Recently, when I was visiting my mother, I happened upon the journal she wrote when I was a small child and we were living in China. One entry written when I was about the same age Baby is now mentioned that I was out visiting with my nanny and her husband, and that my mother was grateful for their help, that she needed a break from me.

I smiled at reading it. Of course she needed some time away from her one-year-old, especially given that she had recently moved to the other side of the globe with my alternately neglectful and enraged father. Any parent–any person–sometimes needs some time alone. But even in the privacy of some journal, it was obvious my mother felt uncomfortable admitting this.

But I wouldn’t, not at all. And I got to wondering if my experience of motherhood is different because of all the journals of mothers I read–all the blogs. Maybe I have a broader sense of the gamut of experiences and emotions that can attend mothering, and that’s only made me more comfortable with my own, and with sharing them. Certainly I get that from my “real life” friends, but without the barriers of geography, acquaintance, or socially-accepted practices of privacy, it’s a lot more frequent and possible from blogs.

I read an article recently about how blogging can affect bloggers’ children. The consensus was that the effect is bad. In my case, I only see how blogging has made me a more educated and relaxed parent, which I feel certain has benefited my darling child. I certainly don’t think I am exploiting her, or creating embarrassments for her in the future. She’s not the theme of my blog, though she’s a focus, and I do make some efforts at anonymity. I am not nasty about her. And I don’t depend on my blog as my only or even primary source of memory-making about her childhood–I don’t share everything here. Plus, I am not at all sure that my blog will even be around when she’s old enough to care about it. Technology changes, and our lives do. I would delete the blog if it affected her negatively without a second thought, but that’s hardly the case at this point. And I don’t depend on my blog, on my accounts of Baby, for money.

I enjoy blogging, and I enjoy writing about Baby, but the focus is my life, not hers. And my life has been enriched by blogging (by which I mean writing mine, and reading others’), and in turn, I think, so has Baby’s.

The end

Today I had to present my Master’s thesis. It wasn’t a defense or anything like that, but as the culminating event in my graduate program, it was a big enough deal. That’s why I was so delighted that the tech guy took so long setting up the computer/overhead that I didn’t get to start until seven minutes into my 20 minutes was up (even though I got there 45 minutes early to avoid such snafus), and that two slides in, the computer froze up entirely. I decided to soldier on without the damn slides, until eventually my adviser realized that perhaps she should ask the tech guy to help. In the end, I had slides for less than half of my presentation; all I had were my barely legible and comprehensible notes. I did fine despite it, I suppose, but it wasn’t as smooth as I’d have preferred. I didn’t need to go home and cry afterwards, but the situation did, however, warrant cheese fries and ice cream for dinner.

I still have a paper to write, but other than that, my schooling should be done. Everyone keeps insisting I must feel excited, but it’s been so long and slowly in coming that graduating hardly feels especially notable. This degree doesn’t seem to be making any kind of difference in my employability (okay, I haven’t tried that hard, because I am conflicted about working more). And, contrary to all of my expectations for the entirety of my life, I think I will miss school at least a little. It’s sort of nice to go alone somewhere one evening a week and talk about non-baby things. For example, if it weren’t for my latest gay German teacher school friend (there has, remarkably, been a series of these), I never would have learned about bears and twinks. As you can see, education is very important.

In health, semi-unfortunately

Somehow my husband has become an athlete. He runs five kilometers at lunch and drinks protein shakes for breakfast. He makes huge pots of beans-and-rice-and-veggies that he eats for days at a time. He lifts weights, though he’s always done this. But what’s new is the running. And what is it with people who run?: they like to talk about running all the time. As if it were somehow an interesting topic.

While this is all well and good for him, and his heart I guess, I wish he would cut down on all this exercising and eating right and sit around eating a little more butter. He’s getting positively skinny. I don’t like to weigh more than he does! Plus, I’m, um, well, just not that into skinny guys.

Thankfully I still find Husband quite attractive. Especially this one thing he does when he’s cooking: he’ll stand over the stove, stirring something with one hand, resting the elbow of his other arm up on the range fan, beer dangling casually from that hand. It is HOT I tell you, just irresistible. The very thought of it…actually, he’s cooking right now, so I’m gonna go run in there, and, you know, watch. (That’s the only kind of running that interests me.)

Media exposure

I’ve written before about how Baby does not watch TV. Now it looks like I don’t, either. A series of frustrations with the cable company (i.e. squirrels kept eating the cable hook-up down the street; they are changing the package to make us pay more money) have convinced us to do away with cable altogether. Apparently, and this was news to me, that means we also won’t get local broadcast channels. But really I only tape (DVR) random movies and a couple of shows a week, all of which we can get online or rent or just give up on entirely, so I guess it’s not really a loss. Half the time lately our TV hasn’t been working, anyway, and it hasn’t bothered me.

This will mainly be a problem for my in-laws who, when they come from Sweden and stay with us for month-long trips, usually spend most of their time watching horrendous daytime-TV (that or going to every Target in the area buying flip flops and T-shirts by the dozens). Actually, their absolute favorite channels is that one that scrolls endlessly through the schedule for the day; they’ll watch that for hours.

You know what I will miss the most? The radio stations that came with our cable. Baby and I love listening to oldies while we sweep, or to the 80s when we dust, or to salsa and merengue when we mop (and sometimes we just dance around). I guess this means I’ll have to start listening to the hundreds of CDs that have lain dormant in cases on the shelf by my husband’s ratty undershirts up in the closet. Imagine that–enjoying the use of items I already own. And we’ve decided to resubscribe to some magazines, like The Economist, so that’ll be entertaining, too.

In praise of growth

The past few months we have worked incessantly on improving our backyard. We have about an acre and much of it is flat and sunny and grassy, but the lovely shaded area where it is cool enough to play in the summer somehow managed, over the years we didn’t do anything to the yard when I was pregnant and then Baby was young, to lose all of its grass and become a vast, sad area of dropped leaves, errant sticks, and dirt dirt dirt.

In an effort to improve things, I raked up everything into a huge pile, intending to immolate it, but the drought meant we couldn’t burn yard trash and lo it sat there for many months until, well, most of it became mulch. So then Husband moved the leaves into the side yard, burned the sticks and branches, and Baby and I spread out the mulch all over the bare dirt (see picture #2). Somewhere in there Husband created a totally awesome play area with cypress mulch in it for Baby’s slide, sandbox, etc. Then we had a bunch of top soil delivered, and after a couple of weeks of backbreaking labor on almost entirely Husband’s part, it was all spread out, covered with grass seed and wheat straw, watered (semi-illegally), and set to grow. In the last two pictures you can see the grass coming in, beautifully green. The last one is from today.

This is kind of an Earth Day post in that it’s a pleasure to watch things grow and I think it’s amazing to see, kind of like watching children grow up, but faster and easier. It’s so wonderful to be able to enjoy the natural world, and Baby and I typically spend hours a day outside and we’re lucky to have an earth to do so in/on. And of course, spring is always a thrill. But in other ways, given the artificiality of grass lawns and the water and fertilizer etc. used to support them, well, it’s not all that earth-friendly, though the grass will help the erosion to abate. At any rate, it makes our backyard even more fun for Baby, and that’s my big concern in life–Baby’s fun-o-meter. I want her to love the outdoors, which she does, and I want her to continue to have an outdoors to enjoy.

Shoe obsession

Baby has a real obsession with shoes. If she sees some, and they are not being worn, she will find a foot and insist that the situation be remedied. If they are dangling casually off a foot, they must be properly fitted. If one is on and one is not in a picture in a book, Baby comments ceaselessly: “Uh oh!” Matching shoes are preferred but not necessary. She’s really quite adamant about it all. Once she found a lonely flip flop at the playground and ran around with it, waving it in the air, checking the feet of all the children, trying to put the shoe in its rightful place. Once I distracted her from that activity, as it was perturbing the other kids, she set about removing all the stray sticks that had dropped on to the mulch. She really likes things to be just so.

Anyway, I have my own shoe obsession. I’ll buy anything else for Baby used, but I seem stuck on the idea that Baby can only wear new shoes of a certain brand. It’s not like me at all.

Here’s her new pair of summer sneakers, which fulfill the following criteria:

–not insanely expensive (by which I mean under 25 dollars, which under any other circumstances would make me gasp as a price for such an ephemerally-used baby item)
–available in size 5.5 M, a little big for now but wearable and should last the summer (somehow we’ve gotten stuck on half-sizes rather than whole; her first pair of non-slipper type shoes were 3.5s)
–pink and green to go with most of her clothes (she also has a nice pair of white sandals for dress-up from her grandmother and a pair of red polka-dot sneakers her godmother gave her for the summer but which don’t have good enough traction for my taste–I am also very concerned with traction)
–great traction!
–close-toed, good for playing on mulch at playgrounds and in the dirt without getting stuff in the shoe
–but they don’t cover her foot altogether, so they won’t be as hot
–no tie-up laces, since nobody in the family has the patience for that
–CUTE

And wearing them to help Daddy water in the new raspberry plant:

And to clamber up the rock-climbing wall (Baby is quite athletic):

In the bedroom

My husband and I did the weirdest thing in bed a few weeks ago: we both slept in it at the same time. Except when out of town, we haven’t done that since late 2005. It was then that I was pregnant and up peeing and/or being nauseous at night, and so he moved into what was to become the nursery. Then after the baby was born, he moved back into the master bedroom and I moved to the twin bed in the nursery. A few months ago, annoyed at how my trips to the bathroom at night disturbed the baby, I moved into the guest room, next to her room, onto a hard and lumpy futon one can feel the frame bars through.

Throughout all this I made a few attempts to move back into the master bedroom, but my husband always breathed obnoxiously or tried to cuddle, which made me too hot, or I had to move him out of the way so I could get up to pee, or whatever, and so it never worked out. But finally it did, and I slept the whole night with him. It wasn’t bad. But I haven’t been able to do it since. I’ve slept half-nights there occasionally, either starting out there or moving there after I get up to pee, but it just doesn’t work well for me. I sleep poorly. He sleeps much better when I’m there and I know he would like me to sleep there all the time, but I just can’t so far. Still, I get a little lonely in my uncomfortable, cold little bed. How can I move back into the master bedroom?