Ne plus ultra

I've done some calculations with the available data, and I’m pretty sure Ben is the Cadillac, as they say, of husbands. Forgive my boast, but as far I can tell (and I’ve been watching him closely for close to a decade), this guy is the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s Fifth, the Hope diamond, and that ancient sequoia in California that they call the General. He asks for so little, gives a lot, works crazy hard, and shows his love for Bee and me in a thousand ways.

Lest you believe I’m purposely shorting you, Dear Reader, on the real details of what makes my fella so special: it suffices to say that the man is honorable, compassionate, and brilliant; in fact, he is the most honorable, compassionate, and brilliant person I know. Because Ben is who he is, I endeavor to be a better me. There! Now you know some things about my guy, and about me, too.

Anyhow, Ben's sensational enough that I’m occasionally inclined to wonder what keeps him around, to tell you the truth. It’s certainly not my financial prospects, my housekeeping, or my hearty good health. Because… it just isn’t. Oh, wait, it has to be my rainbowy disposition every morning! Except that I’m a colossal bitch before having my coffee. (Welcome to EVERY MORNING FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, sweet husband. I'm sorry!)

So, to summarize, I’m both messy and grumpy, I accidentally break stuff all the time, I lose things (including, on one infamous occasion, an expensive thing), I get sick a lot, I spend our money on yarn while he hesitates even to buy shoes for himself, and, if I may exaggerate slightly, I owe a million dollars on student loans. Also, I’m pretty lazy.

So, see what I mean? Don’t get me wrong, I’m told I have my splendid qualities, but, really, I can take me or leave me. But Ben – there’s a personage I can really get behind!

Bee, of course, loves both of us devotedly. But she, like her mom, appears to worship the ground Ben walks on. It is sweet, Dear Reader, to witness! She grins open-mouthedly and ear-to-ear when Ben gets home from work, gazes at him with pure delight, and chatters with her papa in a joyous language only the two of them comprehend. And have I mentioned that Bee has spoken her first word*? Although I've been joking (because I am hilarious) that she is actually referring to her favorite nihilistic art movement, it has become very, very clear that when Bee says “Dada,” she means Ben. And as one of the people who have taken care of this baby since she came into the world, I’m amazed and fascinated by the creature’s ability to produce an actual word, with, you know, an actual meaning that she understands and intends. Not baby babble (although she does lots of that, of course), but a word: a verbal and conceptual representation of a thing (and in this case, a person).** She labors so hard to get all the parts of that little pink mouth into the right position to create the sounds. To hear her produce the word “dada” as she looked into her dad’s eyes (once in particular, last week – the first time I was convinced of the true word-ness of her first word) was, Reader, one of my most breathtaking parenting experiences so far – a zenith.

* It's on the early side, but we're convinced. Doubt if you must.
** Speaking of language and semiotics, we have been using a few signs with Bee since around six months, but it's not clear whether she's picking up on them. She might recognize some of the signs, but hasn't used them herself, as far as we've noticed.

Milestones

My Bee is experiencing her share of the typical baby benchmarks, and, as her mother, I naturally find these milestones compelling. (Basically, I’m having delusions of interestingness.) So, in honor of the baby's nearly nine months of life, I thought I’d catalog a few of her, and our, recent triumphs.

Bee eats puréed sweet potatoes, acorn squash, applesauce, cucumbers, pears, coconut milk (wait, is that normal?), bananas, carrots, peaches, fava beans, and other “solid” foods. (I may have also given her some maple syrup, causing her to freak out until I gave her more maple syrup.) She makes all kinds of cool sounds, including “da da da da da,” which may or may not signify. She’s been to the swimming pool, where she kicked and splashed maniacally. Bee can roll* anywhere she wants to go. And my dexterous girl effortlessly transfers stuff from hand to hand and can pick up, using a tiny thumb and index finger, the most miniscule bit of bitty bittiness, which means I really need to be vacuuming more.

One of the more pathetic milestones, though, is Bee’s recent semi-habitual practice of sleeping for a full hour without waking up. No, not sleeping through the night – sleeping for sixty minutes. Our kid is almost nine months old and when she sleeps for a full hour (not in our laps! zomg!), Ben and I are in the living room dancing a freaking jig. (A very quiet jig.) So, nowadays he and I can generally count on a single hour (another way of looking at it: a whole hour!) per evening of sitting on the couch, eating ice cream/watching a DVD**/conversing like grown-ups. Compared to every previous day of the last eight months, it’s pretty much glorious.

This recent innovation on Bee’s part, insufficient though it may be, is a big deal for us. It came about after we put into action some advice from this book, an anti-cry-it-out manual that will forever have a place of honor and affection in my heart.*** And while sixty minutes of undisturbed sleep might not be the most stunning milestone you’ve ever heard of, Ben and I try hard to stay positive (and caffeinated). Yes, I’ve wailed the words “I can’t go on like this!” almost every day since last fall, and Ben and I would prefer (strongly prefer!) to see more radical improvements to the whole family’s sleep schedule, but what can I say? At present the oracle has not spoken.

* That’s right, instead of crawling, she just rolls everywhere. It’s not the most efficient mode of transport, but it’s original. As for crawling, Bee seems to detest her own grueling attempts, and bawls her way through each and every effort. For her, crawling involves literal kicking and screaming.

** Reader, Ben and I now have the option of watching the same DVD at the same time, together, snuggled on the couch, instead of resignedly taking turns with everything Netflix sends us. (Yes, we’re still enjoying the DVD option. I know, lame. It will be yet another milestone in this family when he and I finally commit to the streaming-only option. We came of age in the roaring ‘nineties, you know; we think DVDs are shiny and cool.)

*** It’s the only baby sleep book that I haven’t wanted to cut apart with kitchen scissors. Elizabeth Pantley ponies up options other than “put her in the crib and let her cry” or “live with it.” Yays!

The expanding universe

After a long Minnesota winter, our rivers have begun to run again, and the ice atop our ten thousand frozen lakes has long since fractured and softened and vanished. The sun even glows warmly most days, although we’ve had, I’m afraid, a rainy June, including a number of truly impressive Midwestern thunderstorms (I missed those something awful when I lived in Seattle, an otherwise perfect city where all you get is a bit of sad drizzle). But we’ve had enough warm, dry, glowy days to buoy our spirits, justify flip-flops, and coax out the zucchini plants. So, mustn't grumble!

Bee is getting bigger and merrier by the week. As spring evolves, at long last, into summer, and our number of daylight hours per twenty-four climbs upwards of thirteen (yes, we definitely keep count), our little enthusiast welcomes her expanding world with evident glee. Our surroundings are new and improved! Now with sunshine! And HEYIWANTTHATTHINGYOUHAVEINYOURHAND,
CANIPUTITINMYMOUTH?

Now that she knows there’s more to this plane of existence than our happy little house, Bee loves to be outside, and I sure as hell can’t blame her; born to a prairie family at the head end of a long, bitter winter, my little girl didn’t get out much for the first half of her life. So now, when she and I go out on walks, or to run little errands, she gets to, you know, see new stuff. There’s more to this world, she begins to realize, than mommy and daddy and the turtle quilt and NPR and her wooden abacus and this thing. There’s so much more. The barista’s auburn beard and a bag of red lentils hold Bee in the same state of fascination as birds on branches and teenagers on ten-speeds; dogs and toddlers and mail trucks are amazing, as is the cool, breezy, and verdant arboretum, rambles through which (with aid from the Björn, of course) keep our girl fairly spellbound.

My world grows vaster, too. Parenting a newborn (which is no longer what we’re doing, thank Jesus!) is utterly absorbing and exhausting, requiring a both a crash course and a sort of laser-like focus on one’s subject matter: for the first several months, we exclusively changed diapers, fed, scrubbed, cuddled, and tried to induce sleep (and also tried to get Bee to stop constantly flipping out). Now that our girl is a little bigger, older, and more able to interact with us and others, Ben and I have expanded, joyously, the scope of our activities and our attention. I mean, everything we do is Bee-oriented, of course, absolutely, but we can do more with her now – take her more places and interact with her in more apparent (and often more fun) ways. She entertains us, and we [try to] entertain her. As she grows, so grow our many ways of teaching her, communicating with her, and enjoying her company. Having a slightly older baby is “absorbing and exhausting” too, but at least there’s a little more variety.

And it would take a year’s worth of overwrought blog posts to even scratch the surface, dear Reader, of the subject of my always-broadening understanding of myself as a mother. For now I’ll only admit that which will surprise no parent: namely, that the PURE CHAOS of parenting a baby casts my own foibles and strengths in an entirely new light – sometimes flattering, and sometimes not. Of course, I’ve no notion of using my expanding awareness of Self to improve my character in any fashion; with my kid’s outrageous sleep habits, there’s not enough coffee on the continent to prepare me for that kind of reflection-based self-improvement. Sorry, self.

Mon petit chou

Straightaway, let me reveal that my daughter has a Cabbage Patch Kid name.

This is a subject I’d been looking forward to exploring when I foisted last week’s post on you (remember, the rigorous and intellectually stimulating epistle on the subject of library storytime for babies?), but I ran out of time, and my tale was already getting longish. So today my theme will receive its due attention.

The subject, dear Reader, is names.

Specifically, baby names. A certain genre of name, you know, is prevalent among Bee’s immediate peers. Usually old-fashioned, often elegant or literary, and certainly never plain, these sweet, quirky names are generally not as far afield as, say, the unfathomable Gertrude, but are significantly off-center of Emma. I’m talking about, for example, Astrid and Finnegan. And Hattie, and Eleanor, and Pearl. Not everyone’s cup of tea, maybe, but, what can I say, I find these names adorable. Ben and I refer to them as Cabbage Patch Kid* names, and have noticed that the parents of babies of Bee’s age and socio-economic-cultural group tend to embrace them.

In fact, it was at library storytime, surrounded by tiny Mabels and Hazels and Archies, that the prevalence of these pretty, heirloom-y names first became clear to me; all those Astrids and Henrys and Violets and Stellas make you feel like you’re perusing 1933 census data. And I appreciate and approve of these antique names, having given my own daughter an indisputable Cabbage Patch Kid name that shall not be divulged herein. (I know, believe it or not, her legal name is not actually Bumblebee Carrot-flower, as I may have implied elsewhere in the archives.)

Ben and I chose Bee’s name because it’s pretty, it’s distinctive but not (in our opinion) weird, it’s thousands of years old (and ancient is even cooler than old-fashioned!), and it’s rife with potential nicknames in case our girl wants to shorten it. And I’ll say right now that reactions to Bee’s name tend to range from genuine delight, to confused surprise, to resigned silence. Sometimes strangers even chuckle, although I’m never sure what’s so funny. I can’t imagine what kind of reactions the brave, long-suffering parents of Henriettas and Ursulas encounter each day.

What do you think, dear Readers? Did you (or shall you) give your little one a Cabbage Patch Kid name?

* Xavier Roberts famously gathered the names for his CPK dolls from a 1930s book of baby names, and I hereby dedicate this footnote to Cabbage Patch Kids I have known: Bronwyn Janet, Jocelyn Ardra, and Clarissa Edina.

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Everyone loves a good storytime.

Home alone all day with Bee, I’m so often dogged by simultaneous boredom and exhaustion that a mother-daughter trot over to the library starts to seem like as good a way to occupy ourselves as anything else, including “relaxing” at home. (I can’t explain it to non-parents, but, at a certain point, it’s just as easy to pack a diaper bag and hit the bricks as it is to stay home. Or, more accurately, it’s entirely as exhausting to stay home as it is to just go somewhere.) And library storytime occurs during what would normally be Bee’s mid-morning nap, but for the sake of talking to other grown-ups exposing Bee to educational activity, I gladly take on the problems presented by a) a cranky baby and b) having to get a six-month-old to a particular destination at a particular time.

A line of strollers parked outside the library* is the first sign that it’s time for Kathy, the children’s librarian, to do her thing. Babies and mommies (and a couple of daddies) show up for storytime, almost invariably late and flustered. Haggard parents greet one another like weary travelers who have finally reached a safehouse. Somehow, it is reassuring to be around other unimaginably tired people.

So: we all sit in a circle on the carpet, kids in our laps, and sing a bunch of cute, dippy songs, some of which involve our kids’ names (thrillingly, to the kids old enough to realize they have names). Librarian Kathy does her best to lead us in some children’s songs she downloaded off the internet, and then reads us some stories, usually those crappy Sandra Boynton board books with all the animals? And it is good, and the babies and kids love it.

When Kathy runs out of stories and songs, the morning degenerates into the across-the-board bedlam and lawlessness that is “toy time.” That’s when the library's toy collection is produced and it becomes crystal clear that Librarian Kathy's lack of showmanship during the singalong portion of the morning is more than compensated for by her no-nonsense stoicism during toy time. The library’s impressive assortment of playthings includes a treasury of wooden puzzles, several xylophones, a tea set, some propaganda from the Princess Industrial Complex, a range of plush toys I wouldn’t let my baby touch with a pair of 16-inch barbeque tongs, a million toy telephones, and a truly respectable selection of things designed to be banged on other things. The kids love these fabulously unfamiliar toys, and to tell you the truth, it’s pretty sweet.

Bee generally gravitates toward a certain wooden abacus. As she slides wooden beads about with laser-like precision, I watch toddlers cheerfully rip toys out of one another’s arms, trip gamely over boxes of blocks, and blithely discuss the important issues of the day, such as the color of one another’s socks (“pink!”). Bee is currently among the youngest attendants each week, and every now and then I’ll notice that she’s searching my face for clues about where the hell we are, who these high-spirited bigger babies might be, and why on earth it is so very noisy. Overall, she seems to enjoy it. My girl wears this thunderstruck, wide-eyed expression during toy time, and I remember that she and I come from what several of our houseguests have described as a “very quiet” household, and that Bee is probably wondering why she hears the sound of mayhem rather than the gentle murmur of NPR.

It’s a weekly event filled with irrepressible excitement. There’s an air of general gladness: even the tired moms and dads are usually in great moods. I know I always am, because I’m out of the house and no one is judging my badly combed hair, or policing my “outfit” (and by “outfit” I mean yoga pants and hoodie). It’s nice to be among my people, that’s all, and fun to see my Bee having fun.

And, you know, despite the exhilarated maelstrom, I fairly marvel at how infrequently all hell actually breaks loose. A kid or two will cry or whatever, but it’s not a huge deal, and, incredibly, I’ve never witnessed a Walk of Shame there so far. The boisterous kids and the tired parents all just kind of go with the flow, and everyone survives the meltdowns amicably enough. And the library staff has had the good sense to place us in a sort of annexed area of the building, slightly removed from the library proper and its patrons’ perfectly reasonable expectations of quietness, uncrazy behavior, and deference to property.

By the end of our hour, Bee has gotten her fill of random stimuli and the abacus, and I’ve had the chance, if I’m lucky, to chat with a couple of other parents. Bee is usually tired and sorely missing that skipped nap, so we head out. And as I retrieve our stroller from its spot out front, I say a quiet prayer that neither rain nor sudden influenza nor miscellaneous appointment will deter us from returning next week. Because, I admit it: I love storytime.

* We live in a quaint small town, so parents just park their strollers outside the library and no one steals them. Not even the sweet-ass jogging strollers. Magical!