Another first step
Last night Carl and I left Noah with my mother in law, who was down for the weekend, and went to a concert at the TSO.
!!
We did it with surprisingly little fanfare too; got the tickets at the last minute (it was a special concert geared towards a conference of music educators here in town that they opened up for the public). I was hoping Noah could be convinced to go to bed at 6:30 before we left at 7, but there was no way. He did fine though; he watched a couple of Signing Time videos with her and then fell asleep around 8:45 which is late for him, but not terrible.
I was quite nervous until the concert started and then that took over. Lynn was like… a desert soaking up the rain (ugh how overused is that analogy?). Obviously we need to arrange more concerts for her. It was a nice programme too with the highlight being the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony. (We thought it would be the Beethoven piano concerto (4) but the pianist was a bit off her game in the first movement and I, anyway, never got over that.)
The whole experience of being out at the concert was surreal in many ways. First of all: 3 hrs without a toddler making demands or chores or work! That was crazy! And then I realized that Carl and I really didn’t do much concert going after we sold the house (and not much after Emily died before that either) so it had been a long time, for people who had a subscription for the 5 years before that. And then I was sort of struck by a wave of sad, because I had just a very visceral memory of the night we traded in regular tickets for box tickets to the Rach 3, because I was so very pregnant with Emily, and she moved around inside and we plotted out her future trips to the symphony.
At intermission Carl and I talked about Noah and music, and music, and Noah. Ha. Well at least we got some music in there. We came home to a happily asleep child and a clean kitchen. Go my MIL!
I do feel remarkably refreshed this morning. This may be a clue as to where to go from here, ’cause I’m still feeling a little stuck right now. I also see though that as Noah gets older and can be babysat, that really will make things easier.
Angst, inc.
I feel pretty good about me as Noah’s parent. That is to say, although I live in fear that I am messing him up and can point to 20 different ways I failed yesterday at being tuned in and all that, and I need constant improvement, overall I think I am in that space where I’m working at it and doing ok.
But the rest of my life feels really yuck right now. Unbalanced. I don’t feel like I’m at the top of my game anywhere else, and I don’t seem to be getting anywhere:
- I’m still not totally satisfied with the work I do at my job, nevermind whether it’s a good job or not
- I’m working on professional development in small ways but haven’t gotten it together for summer classes or started working on ‘what to submit to broader markets’
- my fiction is totally stalled
- I’m not doing that Masters this year, ok, but do I want to try for next?
- I am eating better but exercise? what exercise? and my body is not happy and my thin jeans are too tight again and have been for a few months, I just didn’t mention that *cough*
- interpersonalrelatiowhats?
- most importantly I am not having fun. It’s March. So that’s ok. But I want to fix it.
Just a minor whine.
The tenor of our days // 19 months, sort of
Thanks everyone for kind comments & emails. I am sucking at answering things lately. April is my month of reform for that, so watch out in your inboxes. :)
Since gathering life up again (and coming to the end of the funerary rites, on that strange other track in my head), Noah and I are back to our intense little pod, broken up by V.’s time.
V. continues to be the best thing since sliced bread, by the way. He was happy to see her, although Monday he did cry after about an hour just ’cause, I think, but today he was just his normal self with her and wasn’t even all that concerned about my reappearance. And the more I hear her interact with Noah the more I like what I hear, even if that deep wounded part of me keeps checking him over for damage or bruises or anything amiss. And she arrives when she says she will and is careful and thoughtful and generally just a complete gift. My main concern is that she’ll dump us.
But after she’s left both days it’s been toddlerville again and wow, that is intense these days. Yesterday Noah was a little clingy and very ambivalent (shall we play trucks? Yes, he says, but if I would touch one he would cry! Well okay then!) and would not, simply not, go to sleep. Instead he told me about the bug I squashed (sign: bug; sign: all gone; say “awwwSHHH” which is squash; lather, rinse, repeat) about 50 times. It made an impression!
We also really cooked together for about the first time. I made a crockpot stew and he was fussy about my attention being on chopping, so after that was done I got out pancake mix (evil, I know, but we keep it for emergencies) and omitted the egg so it would be safe (it works without the egg just fine, by the way) and he stirred the batter up with much glee and sloppiness and then I put him up on the stepstool at the counter where he could see the griddle, and he ate a whole pancake with much excitement after all that. And the stew, later. And after the pancakes we played in the sink to wash up. All that was way better than toys, but then he was really not understanding why he could not then use all the adult toys and the day sort of dissolved at the end into way-too-many-nos.
Today I took him out to tire him and head the bedtime woes off at the pass, despite cold weather and lack of car (parts are still being ordered), so we walked alll the way down to the bus stop (or I should say, I did, since once I decided to forgo both stroller and Ergo, he refused to take a step), and Got On A Bus! Lo! The Excitement! and went to the library. And to the coffee shop for a milk and a cookie. And then we did the Bus! thing again, and then he did indeed walk the two blocks to the house, meandering up several driveways and being picked up as strange dogs came near in between. And it worked. And it was a lot of fun.
His favourite games this week though are all pretty much separation games: various rifts on peekaboo, shutting doors on me to have me open them, hiding from me and jumping out. He seems to go back to these whenever we’ve had a big change, and I guess that makes sense. As long as I’m there when the door opens, we’re good.
His verbal development also picked up again as soon as we walked in the door from vacation… literally. The combination of signing and verbal stuff is weird, because he has pretty much the basic toddler vocabulary down in sign and isn’t all that keen to transition yet, but then he fills in other words like… squash. Drip (’dip’). Straw (’tahhw’). And then with the animals he does the sign and the animal sound concurrently, so he’ll do the sign for dog and go “woof” at the same time. Of course his animal sounds are a little… weird. He knows the following: a cow says “moo” a dog says “woof” a snake says “ssss” and a dolphin says “eeee eee eee” (and a rubber ducky).
Pigs, cats, sheep, goats, chickens, rooster, lions, tigers, bears - no interest in them at all, as far as noises go. Oh except purring. Cats do not go meow, they purr. But he does have those signs down, along with squirrel, monkey, rabbit, turtle, fish, crab, bug, butterfly, shark, whale, deer, hippopotamus, wolf, and a few others I’m forgetting. The zoo’s been good for that, on top of the DVDs.
I’m not sure whether to count signs as sentences or not. But he does use sentences if so, like “cat play peekaboo.”
Gross motor skills: he can pretty much run, and he’s hard, hard at work on stairs. Dangerously so as he likes to try to walk up and walk down them (we’re working on at least going down on his bum now that he won’t go down on his stomach). He’s also trying to jump without a whole lot of success except in his crib. He stands on his head, sort of, with his feet still on the ground and his arms out to the side - not sure what that’s about. And he can kick a soccer-sized ball, which I find impressive. And throw but let’s not get into that, since we’re sort of downplaying the throwing toys bit.
And of course we know he climbs everywhere. Third shelf of the linen closet. Top of the change table. Kitchen counters. Those crash helmets are starting to look good.
Fine motor is where I find him scary though. He can plug my cell phone charger into my cell phone, a move I occasionally miss, and he can thread the shoelace through the firemen’s hands in the Melissa & Doug fireman set. He can unscrew any lid he has the strength in his hands for - water bottles, spice bottles, (empty) Honeybee honey bottles. He can eat with a spoon and a fork, although he can’t always keep the food on them between bowl/plate and mouth (but he can get the food on, no problem). He can draw the letter O although it’s sometimes wobbly and/or spirals in on itself. (He is obsessed with the letter O and finds it everywhere and then says “O” and signs it. It’s not a reading thing, it’s an object thing.) He can open doorknobs (woe is me). And use a key, if the lock is not too stiff and we help him get the key right side up. He can shape sort most of the basic shapes. Stack alphabet-sized blocks 5 high. Take apart almost anything. And zip and unzip Ziploc bags, which he now does for me because that is not one of my top skills. :)
The thing I sort of wish he could do, whether developmentally appropriate or not, is sing. He shows interest in music and he mimics sounds like the alarm clock sound, but so far no singing.
And one thing he sometimes seems to be doing is decoding phonetically? But can that be? I don’t know enough about language acquisition and so I’m assuming it’s more confusion than anything else. But an example is that we were on the bus, and he kept signing “bug.” And I kept saying, no, “bus,” and making a driving sign. But he was pretty insistent, and I’m reasonably sure he wasn’t seeing a bug. Another example is that I said his bum looked “sore” and he signed “sorry.” Now that second one I figure is because usually if he’s getting a rash I say I’m sorry he has a bum rash, but I dunno. This kind of thing is recent. He couldn’t possibly be decoding/encoding at 18 months? And wouldn’t the signing, not being based in sounds (duh) unless you finger spell (which we don’t, double duh), confuse that if so? I dunno.
Emotionally he is definitely volatile, but I wouldn’t say we’re into full out terrible twos yet. But man, is he… persistent. I suppose that’s a given, given his parents. :-) But Noah is also painfully gentle and tender at times. His latest thing is to come up and stroke mine or Carl’s back, tenderly, and then lean against us. It’s to die for.
So things are pretty good on the parenting front. More after deadline on other fronts. :-)
Emotional trip report
Before we left on Monday we of course went to the cemetary.
This year, year three, what would be Emily’s third birthday, is the year of bitter, I think.
Perhaps this is a good time to let everyone know that we did not pursue legal action against the hospital - we pursued it pretty far, enough to know that it was going to be a fairly brutal dog fight (centering around the lost tracings from the monitor, and questions of why Carl and I did not freak out more during labour, which was the real sticky emotional point) and we did not have the time and energy for that, as well as worrying a bit about money. (For my American readers, I’ll reiterate that the largest settlement ever in this province for a perinatal loss was $50,000 per parent. That is not missing a zero. The result is that very few lawyers will take it on a contingency basis (get paid if you win) and so we were looking at paying out of pocket. That was not our most major consideration, but things are so different up here I thought I would go into more detail.)
So this is the year I bitterly regretted that reality and decision. I am not a huge believer in fair, since, you know, it is not fair that I was not born in Ethiopia or Rwanda, etc. But that doesn’t mean I don’t experience moments of that cry inside and standing in front of Emily’s headstone on her birthday, with the memories of Noah’s very lively, family and cake filled birthday still fresh, it felt vastly unfair that she did not get that, and that we did not get that with her.
And I was very very angry all over again and bitter at the hospital and myself. It was a bit of an ugly mess inside my head. I have been sad before and angry before but it didn’t feel quite this dry and edgy. I hope that does not continue to be a theme.
Once we got up to the inn there was all the distraction of settling in and good food and not having to be quite so grown up. I think it’s in Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven that Taylor narrates something like “once you become a mother you can never be the baby again, not even for ten seconds” and that is in my 18 month experience so true. Except, of course, if you happen to have scrimped and saved (and be lucky to have that excess) to land at a resort for fairly rich people where you get fed and your room made up for you and activities planned if you would like to join in and spa services available.
(Unfortunately it was this babying state of mind that led to the car debacle, but hey.)
So some of the bitterness wore off and just left the usual empty. Having spent the last two seasons of grief up there too, there’s the corner I cried in the first year; the chair I moped in, the walk I took into the woods during Noah’s nap last year. It’s strange because Emily was never at this place (although while pregnant, Carl and I did drive up to that town alongside the lake, which is why I picked the inn in the first place) but it is becoming one of the places I most associate with her, almost like she is a long-lost relation and these are her grandparents’ things, or something.
The days always seem to tick by in split time for me. All those hours at the hospital and the NICU were always marked by institutional wall clocks: the times we visited her, the times doctors came, the times nurses didn’t come to check on me, the hours family members arrived to support us, the long time spent staring at the clock alone at the hospital, messaging Idaho on Carl’s Blackberry in the middle of the night, the hour at which the annoyed nurse brought me the Ativan. The minutes I was pumping breastmilk and watching the clock. All that seems burned into my head and so it’s like that’s going on in the background while at the inn it’s breakfast buffet, lunch buffet, swim time, and so on.
This year it was just as fresh. At any moment anyone could have asked me what I’d been doing in 2004 at that minute and I could have said. And as usual I felt a bit of a relief because there is no forgetting, after all. Emily’s life was short but it is still there, in some way.
Monday night, then, the night of the 12th, the night after labour when we still had a lot of hope and Emily was still at East General, Noah had a not too bad night but not great - of course, it being all new - and so I held him a lot and brought him into our bed around 1 am. It was good, really good, to hold him and feel him breathing against my skin or nuzzling around for a nurse. Not healing precisely but soothing.
The 13th was spent exploring the house and grounds. I got a manicure and Carl and Noah went swimming, and then in the afternoon I took Noah all around to the various common areas and sat with him and had coffee and showed him animal pictures and rode in the elevator up to the tower and all those things.
The night of the 13th though was the night I’d opted to stay at East General, because I was still having trouble walking and was in shock and there was no doctor to release me and really just didn’t know what to do, the Ativan night, and this year I also did not sleep really. Noah was a trooper - down at 8, only up to feed around 1 and then at 6:30 - but after the 1 am feed I could not sleep and was awake until about 4:30, worrying about everything under the sun. Mostly worrying that Carl will die - he has gained a lot of weight since we lost Emily, and doesn’t take care of himself a lot and lives an unheathy lifestyle where he is overworked and doesn’t get exercise, and we have been arguing about this in mild ways. But really if you name something I worried about it. That Noah will get leukemia. That his future wife won’t like me. That the planet will be drowed in the melting ice caps. You know, everything.
I almost wished for an Ativan, but it was one of those times to ride it out, so I did.
The next day was also filled with Noah goodness, but I also watched way too much television, including Bringing Home Baby. I guess that is completing the cycle: after Emily died I watched An Adoption Story, which always ends with a happy adoption, and then while pregnant with Noah I watched A Baby Story which always ends with a reasonably healthy baby birth, and now I watched the newborn story, where the newborn always ends up happy and hale and the parents get confident. These shows are that fake reality where (as noted in the group I attended last year) labour always starts 20 minutes into the show and ends 28 minutes into the show, no matter how crazy it actually was. And it’s very soothing, that Disneyesque baby universe.
Noah loved the little babies too. There is starting to be a little bit of mounting pressure (is it ever done?) from various quarters about the question of another baby. And somehow some layer of numb has come off, for me. I brazened through Noah’s pregnancy on determination and numbness with a layer of sheer terror, but I am not certain I can ever, ever do that again, even if I did think I could handle two children, which is in serious doubt some days.
And at the same time I had this thought a long time ago that now, having been through that grief and loss, I’d be scared to have a single child who would have to lose Carl and I and have no sibling later in life. (Yes, I know there is no guarantee they would get along.)
All of which is to say though that watching the baby show my main thought was: I might be able to do the newborn stuff again but I cannot ever again go through nine months of uncertainty and another labour. And this after Noah’s easy easy birth. But that was the thinking, right then, and it was oddly huge and panicky, as if it rose from 2004 with extra strength because I’d ignored it at that time. So I spent a lot of that day panicking about how awful things were/might be, in that weird trauma way that makes you twitch at shadows.
Carl meanwhile was doing his own traditional sinkhole into online gaming. We make a strange couple up at this beautiful inn, who hole up in our room a fair amount and eat chips. What surprised me was that Noah was actually hugely content with that for an afternoon - he toddled between us both, had a nap, climbed all over the furniture, occasionally watched some of the television, and showed me birds and squirrels out the window. At home we don’t watch tv and usually one of us is actively interacting with him more, but he was just fine without that, at least for a while. It helped that the room had been pretty easily babyproofed with a few outlet covers and rearranging of things.
Carl and I did take Noah swimming in the afternoon and that helped me too, the feel of the present on my skin. He got a cut in the men’s change room though, and although it was a tiny one it bled a fair amount and the red blood really was a bit freaky. He also chewed off his bandaids and re-opened it twice, so I ended up having to sit with him and keep pressure on it on and off for about 45 minutes (for my peace of mind). This made a huge impression on him and later when he got strawberry on his finger he wanted pressure on that one too.
He also rushed at dinner and choked in a minor way (coughing), and then the little monkey made a “funny sound” after that was like inhaling with a wheeze and then stopped to see if we would laugh and I -freaked out-. For the all of two seconds he wasn’t making any noise I lived in that horrible void that things could go wrong all over again, and it was awful. Carl saw it in my face and we agreed it is too bad that with breastfeeding I can’t have a stiff scotch because damn, would I have ordered one. Noah started misbehaving around then (possibly partly because of the tension) and I just took him back to our room and Carl brought dinner up after.
And then Noah would not go to sleep, and I got a little frustrated and took him outside in the Ergo, but it was rainy and cold so we had to come in. And I marvelled that I could even care whether he slept, when his continued health and breathing should be enough. And of course as soon as I had that thought, he curled up on my shoulder and passed out.
That night I did sleep too.
The 15th, of course, is always the longest day. That was the day that started with the technician crying and ended in baptism and us holding Emily as she drifted further and further away. I thought I was doing remarkably okay until dinner, when the little girl at the table next to us started laughing and I just lost it, tears all down my face. Noah noticed and got very frowsy. Then he wouldn’t sleep again, and I took him outside again (no rain) and he was almost asleep when the biggest whitest rabbit jumped out of the dark cedars right in front of us. Noah was wearing his hat and was all bundled up in my coat and he snapped his eyes open soooo wide and then this little hand came up out of my jacket and he started signing “rabbit” frantically. So I laughed and we walked along making the rabbit move a bit ahead of us, not chasing but giving reason for it to move. And he was incredibly excited for about 10 minutes and then went down okay.
Then I sat in front of the tv and cried for a bit. Carl turned off his game and we hung out in nice ways and then went to sleep.
The next day was the day of bereftness and it always seems weird to be pulling out of the inn around the time that we left Sick Kids for that empty drive home. But of course all that was pre-empted with clouds of antifreeze pouring into the car and getting stuck and towed and brought home. That felt sort of okay though (well I was not that calm at the time, but underneath): the gears of life starting up again underneath with a few jagged moments before they caught.
And now we are back, and of course Emily is still not. All this has been very about me, this post. As for Emily I still remember what a fighter she was, breathing against the ventilator, clinging onto each stage of life so hard. I remember the feel of her in my arms and the smell of her and then how she was so much lighter at the end. Bathing her after she died, and making her hand and foot prints. Choosing her coffin (really a chest) on Yonge St. Wrapping her up in her quilt and putting her in it. God, we miss her. What would she have been like at three? Three is so big, it’s hard to contemplate at all, and three is all about that child’s personality, and we don’t know much about that. And this is the year of bitterness that we will never know.
Less emotional trip report
This is the bare-bones report.
On the way up we had a little cloud inside the car. No, literally: a little gaseous cloud making mist on the windshield. We both commented on how odd it was, the weather inside the car. Of course once we got there we noticed a little pool of fluid at the front of the car on the passenger side. After some discussion Carl assured me that it was the A/C and not connected to the engine coolant…
… you see where this is going. Apparently in Volvos…
… it’s the same thing, or something, and anyway this morning ten minutes away from the resort I have come to consider my winter residence, the ENGINE OVERHEATING light came on, just after a massive cloud of coolant was released leaving me frantically opening everything to get it out away from MY BABY. And we were stranded at the side of the road. Of course in ancient times we would have put water in, or something, but we are modern yuppie folk and so we whipped out our cell phones. Carl called CAA and our Plus membership (free tow to 200k!) came in handy and I called my parents to come get us at the dealership. CAA kindly sent a flatbed double-cab truck so that the carseat would fit, and Noah was AWED! at the awesome truck! with mummy’s car on it!
Got to Volvo 15 min to close, so they determined that it will be a big (probably $1,xxx) repair and they will not start ’til Monday. But at least we stopped driving, although there was some snickering that we had, you know, laid down newspaper over the Leaked Coolant. We are bad. My lungs hurt, but it is probably psychosomatic.
Today is the day Emily died, you know. Oh wait this was the unemotional version. But even so I have to say I felt like a) we were bound to die at the side of the road and b) that there should be a rule that forever after nothing even inconvenient can happen to us. But you know, it is real life, and no one hit us, and we are all fine. Except my lungs, *cough cough*.
~~~
Travelling with Noah turns out to be like travelling with a drunk guy. He slept on the way up (through the first cloud). Then we got to our room and he was like WOW! A CHAIR! I will climb on it! WOW! a couch! I will climb on it! WOW! A mirror! This is great! Happy! Everything is great! Wow! Flagstone covered walkway! Wow!
Until meals, when he turned into the nasty drunk guy slurring and spilling stuff and howling in rage at being confined in some horrid highchair! We were kept on our toes trying to keep him occupied at meals. I wished I’d caved to consumeristic impulses and bought him a dozen new toys. But out of the four nights we made it through three dinners with only a bit of fuss. The fourth night, I had Carl bring my dinner up after and left with Noah.
Breakfasts and lunches, being buffets, were at least a bit faster. We were seated around other families with similarly-aged kids and no one was disturbed, if anyone was wondering. :)
Also, Noah apparently finds the following acceptable in any venue: milk, any fruit he would normally eat and some he wouldn’t, broccoli (he ate reams of broccoli, as if I had been keeping it from him forever), carrots, cauliflower, beans, crackers, and some forms of bread. He also condescended to eat some mushroom risotto with duck, and a little bit of chicken with rice. Mostly, however, he eschewed protein altogether (except milk and breast milk). He would not eat grilled cheese, pizza, meatballs, any normal stuff like roast chicken or steak, or any pasta. A tiny bit of tofu, but only because he was distracted at the time. I am as confused as you are, but hey. He didn’t starve. He also discovered chips and chocolate in small quantities.*
And Elmo. I turned the TV on a few times so if he gets ADHD or autism now, it will be my fault. I do not like the preschool programming I saw, but Elmo had an episode on babies and Noah was awed that someone else shares his obsession with BABIES. Oh and bananas.
But mostly our days were spent walking everywhere. The house and grounds were cosy enough that we could walk around easily; we never took the stroller out of the car. And Noah walked everywhere, all the time. Up stairs and down stairs. And we swam at least once every day, although he asked to swim about eleven times every day. The many levels of the place provided hours of toddler entertainment as long as one of us didn’t mind riding herd, and when that failed he could watch the big kids playing ping pong or just watch the birds and squirrels out of the window.
It was great that way; hugely relaxing.
And sleep? He did pretty well; he took to their portacrib thing fine, although he had a bit of trouble falling asleep every night. And usually around 5 am he came into our bed, but that’s usual for him.
Of course vacationing en toddler is totally different from the way it used to be. I did experience the odd twinge of nostalgia for when I used to be able to say, leave my room after 8 pm and go down to the bar and have a drink. But I read some books (gasp! I finally made it to The Virgin Suicides only a few years after everyone else) and slept as much as possible at night, which I needed to do. And as a family we had a good time, at least, as good as we could given the reason for the retreat.
I also broke the spa barrier and had my first professional manicure (I know, I know, but it’s never been my priority), which was - ok, but not something I would do all the time, and I/Lyr had our first professional massage which I would do every day if I could. :) The massage really helped with that “touched out” feeling we sometimes have with Noah, which was interesting. Although I got totally lectured on the state of my back; we really need to hit yoga.
There was a lot of stuff around Emily that I think I will chew over posting; it seems a bit repetitive, but that is how it is, grief; it circles itself. I cried in public only twice, and not embarassingly so. But oh, the lack of her. And because of the towing we didn’t get to the cemetary today (it was closing as we left the dealership) and that is odd - usually we go on the way up, which we did, and on the way back, which we didn’t. But she was definitely present in our thoughts and hearts today.
* Yes, I’m a little horrified this happened at 18 months. The chocolate was completely accidental - he found a dropped M&M - but the chip (a low-fat plain Pringles, as if it matters) was completely my doing. I handed him one. He loved it. He’s clearly my kid. My excuse is that hotel rooms don’t count. :)
Emily’s week
… and a much needed pause in our daily lives.
We will be back Friday but probably not online much ’til Saturday night. I have in the past posted from there, but this time am not taking my laptop (Carl is taking his though, so you never know). And then I will have Tales of Travel with Toddler.
Hope everyone has a good week. Hug your loved ones.
Zoo days
Yesterday I’d intended to get organized to leave on Monday, make lists for the weekend, and generally be domestic. Until JY called and said “let’s take our kids to the zoo!” (We both have memberships and it is about 10-15 min away:))
So I threw some stuff in a bag and bundled Noah up against the cold-between-pavillions and headed out. It’s been a few months since we went and it was amazing. Noah and JY’s daughter (she has a baby too) get along really well - the age gap is such that Noah gets bossed but thinks it’s playing. :)
The mummy orangutang (sp?) was up against the glass in the upper observation area (Noah climbed the stairs gleefully) and her baby was riding on her and when she saw Noah’s pear slice she came over for a look, and Noah went wild with delight, signing ‘baby baby baby.’ He laughed at the turtle swimming, signing turtle turtle. He signed duck for ducks. He toddled all about gleefully and made it his job to climb all staircases 5 or 6 times. But the best part? The plastic door hanging-bits that dangle down to keep the birds & butterflies from flying out. That cracked him up totally, that you could walk through what looked like a solid thing.
He’s totally interactive with the zoo now and it’s so cool. Plus I got hangout time with JY which is always nice.
By 12:30 he was ready for a nap and we came home and I got a chore done that’s been hanging over me for a looong time and that was great. Later we went to the library to load up on books for vacation.
So it was a wonderful end to the week. Noah was wriggly happy babbly and although he took forever to go to sleep, so full of monkeys! birds! turtles! was his head, it was cuteness all the way down into slumber. He’s so close to putting himself to bed now; he asks to go into his crib after his story, so we put him in, and he babbles and thrashes around and almost goes to sleep, snuggling up with his pillow and blanket, and then at some point gives up and asks to come out and then it takes 5 minutes of either rocking or nursing to go down. Our vacation will interrupt all that but I see light at the end of the bedtime tunnel, eventually.
Except, of course, there’s that little counterpoint running in my head lately. I’ve been waking up in nightmares about labour, nightmares about Noah, nightmares about not being able to breathe, and still aching for Emily. I still have dreams where I lost her, where people come up to tell me that I forgot my daughter behind. And yesterday I was both sad and angry that my zoo day was undercut, not in a selfless mom wishing Emily got to go to the zoo way, but a very selfish, me-oriented anger that MY day was also including bone-tiredness and sadness and a sort of being sick - sick at myself, a little, but angry that all this keeps coming in.
Which is ok I think. I think. It’s not very evolved but then grief isn’t, always, is it?
Today I have a zillion things to do and can’t concentrate, but they will get done.
Okay, okay, I will post this (edited)
Everyone I’ve told this to has said “ah HA HA he is YOUR KID” so I guess I’d better share.
I brought down a rubber duckie that Noah wanted (it had somehow migrated to a high shelf) and he said as clearly as possible, “Dddd uCK!” Which was very exciting, so I said, “Yes, that’s a duck!”
“DddUCK!” says Noah
“Right!” I said, and of course unwilling to just leave it there I said, “And what does the duck say?”
“EeeeeeEeeee!” squeals Noah.
“Close! But no, the duck says quack, quack,” I say, good mum that I am.
Noah gets pretty insistent, “DdddUCK! Eeee! Eeeee!”
“No,” I say, just a faintest touch of a hint of perfectionistic smarm in my voice, “the duck says QUACK, QUACK,” honey.
Noah grabs the duck and squeezes it and lets go.
The duck says, “EeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeee.”
~~~
Added: School scores are out on these province-wide standardized tests (not like NCLB but not especially benign either). I know the tests are only one way to get information about the school and I’m not sure I set too much stock by them overall. But but but.
Our local elementary school? Scored in the usual high end for its grade 3 students. But the grade 6s? Seventh percentile. WTF? I suppose I’d be labelling myself a problem parent already if I called now and said “Hi, I have an 18 mo old in the area… WHAT THE FUCK is going on in your senior grades?”*
The French Immersion school in the area? Dead last in both. In the PROVINCE. Oh yah I’ll be sending Noah there… not.
Sigh. Education angst. Already. Time to start saving.
* I actually sort of want to, because it’s a small school and I’m guessing either a girl-spat hours before the test, or stomach flu the day of. But - ??? I’ll be watching next year’s scores for sure.
Registration: an olympic sport
I got Noah into his programmes this term, yay. I was on the computer at 6:57 (registration starts at 7 am) but all the sessions were full, so I sat hitting redial on the phone (busy) and refresh in my browser ’til I got in. Honestly? I’m competitive enough that I kind of get peppy about it. There is no way to measure good enough parenting until Noah’s like, 35, but in the meantime at least I can say I was alpha mom enough to get my ass online on registration day. :)
It’s nice to live in a city with inexpensive or free programmes, and nice that people take advantage of them… but crazy that to get into swimming you have to be right there at the moment of early registration. Summer’s worse though (and has been forever; my mother remembers lining up at the centre at 6 am).
Anyways, so Noah’s registered for: tiny tumblers on Sat mornings; a drop-in play programme for one of V.’s mornings; swimming Wed morn and Fri aft to give us some choice (the mom-tot times get progressively suckier in spring and summer, as lessons take over the pool time). No music this time; I wasn’t that thrilled with the programme, so we’ll have to see what the Early Years centres have.
Whee.
P.S. For the curious, fees for all classes combined totalled under $100, and that includes the summer term for the drop-in.
Housekeeping (of the physical sort)
Keeping house with a toddler who still puts things in his mouth about is a bit of a challenge. No cleaning fluids really come out while he’s awake, which means after bed time is bathrooms and floors right now.
And tidying is a challenge as Noah loves to dump things out - put any two objects in a larger one and that is an open invitation to turn the larger container upside down! On the plus side though he also loves to help and actually is getting - well - helpful. He can bring a cloth or put the shoes vaguely where they go.
What is it about toys though? They multiply dreadfully by the hour, it seems - and I can’t really figure out where they all come from. I don’t buy Noah stuff when we’re out, usually. He hasn’t had a birthday recently and Christmas is receding quickly. I haven’t ordered anything from eBay. And yet the toys, they appear. At the auto show he got a hot wheels type car from Ford and suddenly his male relatives managed to produce 4 more of them. We have 5 dolls now, largely due to my complaining about lack of boy dolls (so now when people have run into boy dolls they have brought one in). We got a bin of second-hand stuff from a friend.
I find myself oddly reluctant to completely declutter the toys, too. I pick out the obviously wrecked ones and recently I put a box of truly baby toys away in a closet, and then I rotate the ones we have around. But why can’t I just pass on a decent truck toy to someone else when we have two equally decent ones? Part of it’s sentimentality, and part of it’s fear that Noah will want that one. But there’s some other strange mechanism at play that I haven’t quite figured out yet, some concept of toys as things you keep.
Of course looking at what comes out of my parents’ attic, I can guess where some of that comes from.
Also because the kitchen is in constant activity. Snacks, drinks, pot-banging, water-play, and crafts all take their daily toll and by the end of the day it often looks like a bomb went off. Add in to that that I’m trying to make most things from scratch and use real vegetables (the kind that come with dirt, peels, and non-edible bits) and some days it seems a bit Sysiphean.
The house seems a couple of rooms too big for the amount of time I really have to clean it. The workshop is a dreadful, dreadful mess, and Carl’s office stands between me and the hidden kitchen, so those three rooms are just write-offs. If I had an extra day in the week I’d get to them but as it stands I just guiltily run in to dust/vaccuum now and then and every time my MIL comes down I think “okay, while she’s here to watch Noah I will sort those out” and never do. It may have to wait.
On the plus side of the ledger, if I hadn’t discovered FlyLady before kids, I would be so screwed. But luckily I did and so the rest is pretty manageable - swishing and swiping happens, clutter is generally tossed, the bills are paid and filed, the laundry is done, and generally things are decent enough (especially if you can ignore the fact that play food is strewn from one end of the living room to another).
And, and, and.
I am sick of it.
Truly sick of it. I can’t find my zen in it much anymore, except the odd moment at 10:30 pm when I look at the washed floor and the empty dishrack and then, yes, I feel that peace with my environment that I had so enjoyed the last couple of years. But during the day when I am cleaning up the sunflower seeds Noah spilled or wiping the nth milk drop off the floor? No. The pleasure in it is largely gone and I find myself actually starting to deeply understand the feminist movement of the 60s.
I figure that some balance will come back at some point, but right now it’s really not balanced
I’d like to change that.