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in the weeds
In which our young heroine finds she was given a real baby, a waker-baby. None of this magic sleeper-baby stuff, like always falling asleep while nursing (Lux) or sleeping 5+ hours by one month (Lux) or never ever spitting up (Lux). No, this time it’s a real baby who wakes up every three hours to the dot, and would like to be held all the time extra please, who hasn’t the faintest idea how to fall asleep and gets rather upset about it, who detects a whiff of caffeine in my breastmilk and can not abide it.
It will never be this overwhelming, I said to myself last Monday morning after Joe had left and Lux was begging to go to the playground and Joan was fussing. This is it. The pinnacle of overwhelmingness has been reached. The next time I have a baby, I’ll have a four year old and she will make lunch for all us. Right?
I see normal, I see the glimmer of it, though I think it might still be two months away.
I hate repetitive conversational pleasantries. I’ve probably heard some variation of “zero to one is the toughest” or “one to two is the hardest” one hundred thousand times. THE POINT IS PEOPLE, I would like to interrupt, IT’S A NEWBORN. I remember how I felt with Lux. I remember feeling overwhelmed. THIS is the pinnacle, I imagine I probably said.
There are times in the day I have to say to myself, quit it. She is a newborn. She doesn’t have to shape up. She doesn’t have to get with the program. She can do whatever she wants. I think I perhaps see her worst, through a glass darkly, at 6pm. I’m not seeing her, I’m just seeing all the stuff I haven’t gotten done. The absolute rumpus Lux has piled around me and throughout the entire apartment. The lack of dinner plans. The two emails (just two!) I was hoping to respond to.
But I see her best at 6am. She wakes up to the sunlight. She coos and stretches next to me and I wake up too. It’s quiet and everyone else is still asleep and we’ve made it through the darkness to this very second. I love that moment, a moment when I manage to open my eyes to the present instead of chasing something else in my mind, when I can watch her facial expressions and notice that her eyelashes flit out like a Disney chipmunk’s. When I wonder who she is right now and who she will be.
My mom once told me that she took up sewing when we were young so she could point to something and say “here’s what I accomplished today.” That’s probably why I find myself in the kitchen, baking something that doesn’t need to be baked by hand, dancing a very fine line where Lux is engaged and Joan is briefly asleep but perhaps soon to wake, but will it be after the dough is safely pressed into pans, or before? Last week I found an index card I had scrawled on years and years ago. “Finnish bread” it said at the top, which sounds absurd because it was always “homemade bread” when I was younger. I asked for it weekly from Mrs. B, a Dutch woman who started helping out my mom around the time when there was four of us kids. Before I left for college I finally asked her to walk me through the recipe, and I made scattered notes on this index card. And after I put it in the oven the kitchen smelled exactly as it used to when she made it.
Toast with butter and honey? Who could forget this delicacy? And what about cinnamon sugar toast? My college cafeteria used to keep shakers of cinnamon sugar casually on hand by the salad bar (like, you can have salad, or you can have…cinnamon sugar!). Throughout the semester, on not so good days, I would make a neat stack of white toasted bread with cinnamon sugar and sit down with a cup of coffee for lunch.
When people come visit our apartment, and a rather lot of them have been lately, which is lovely, when they make it up to the 5th floor after the two heavy doors that noisily buzz them access, after the tiny rickety elevator that lifts them four floors, after the small red carpeted flight of stairs from the kitchen they found themselves in after the elevator—they often look around and call it a treehouse. The ceiling is vaulted like an old attic, the windows are mostly enormous, and the tops of trees are visible everywhere. A treehouse that smells like fresh bread.
I think of this as a very easy bread, hard to mess up, leaving you with basic tomato sandwich makings or, of course, steady toast supply. I sometimes abandon the dough for more than two hours, if babies demand. And I particularly like the short baking time–fresh bread so quick!
Makes Two Loaves of Mrs. B’s Homemade Bread1 package active dry yeast (or 2 1/4 t from a bulk container)2 cups whole milk (or skim)1 cup whole wheat flour4-5 cups white flour2 tablespoons butter1 tablespoon brown sugar2 teaspoons saltDissolve the yeast into 1/4 cup lukewarm water with your finger and let it sit for a bit. Mix together one cup of the white flour and all other dry ingredients. Microwave the milk for 1.5 minutes and then drop in the butter to melt.Mix the bubbly yeast into the dry ingredients. Mix in the melted butter and milk. Add 4 or 5 cups white flour and mix it with a wooden spoon. Dump the dough out on to the counter and knead it for a bit, adding flour if it’s too sticky.Leave the dough to rise for 20 minutes under a damp towel or a bowl.Split the dough into two sections and drop them into bread pans. Let rise for two hours.Bake at 425 for 30 minutes. -
the birthing of Joan Bea
Joan Bea was born on a Monday morning after twelve hours of serious labor. The labor began on Nantucket and ended in Cambridge Hospital in a room with enormous windows, their curtains pulled back to show first the stars watching us all night, and then the sunrise. It took me three hours to push her out after I had completely dilated and at times I believed I did not have the energy to do it. But I did do it, and the low moments only further buoyed my final high—a euphoric satisfaction fueled by the endorphins racing through my bloodstream, and a brazen pride in myself and what we had done.
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oh life
Because each day of My First Week is uniquely woven with its own challenges, such as:
- go outside
- go outside and go to the pediatrician
- go outside, get caught in rainstorm, find out Joan hates rainstorms
- drive to the midwife and gently rear-end someone and resolve that midst newborn screams
- go the grocery store with one in the cart and one in the sling
- (and it’s only Wednesday!)
…I’ve been trying to jot down daily life notes more frequently. Of course this is the same goal I’ve had for awhile, and to that end I’ve used this easy set-up offered by Oh Life since last year:
Nice notes, but tragically widely interspersed, right? Once you sign up, Oh Life emails you at the end of every day and asks “How’d your day go?” Just respond to the email and they compile it all for you in a pseudo-journal (skeuomorphism!) style. Despite all our complaining, the internet is still full of great free things, I think.
It’s decompressing for me too. I find that the wonderful moments bob to the surface of my memory once I’ve written down a few of the more embarrassing and chaotic ones. For example, in the case of the unexpected rainstorm: after we arrived at our friends house totally drenched with Joan screaming, I settled on to their couch and watched Lux learn to cut out hearts and airplanes in sugar cookie dough. Soon it smelled like baking cookies and my sling, Lux’s shorts, and bunny (of course) were spinning in their dryer, and I decided I didn’t need to go to the grocery store that day after all.
And that’s really all this week adds up to, I think. Feeling embarrassed, exposed, disorganized, messy, and learning to love it or ignore it, as the case might call for.
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at home
July babies. Both my girls have come in the heat of the summer. Their rumblings will forever be tied to clammy nights under the steady breeze of a fan, to walks on heated pavement ambling from shade to shade; the slow avalanche of their births both begun on heady evenings when the sun had only just blinked to dark. Boston is drifting under a week-long heatwave right now. I do so love these cooped up mornings: no expectation of leaving the apartment, the windows closed to the heat and one or two air conditioner units humming away.
I have mentioned before that I like to imagine motherhood as the lazy summertime of a woman’s life. With Joan Bea’s arrival last week, again I encounter the bliss of a day less full, a project not started, a voyage left for another time. We all have voices within us that speak louder and even compete at times: the creative urge, the rowdy adventuring spirit, the maternal leaning, the enthusiasm and passion of a new idea, the quiet tug to rest and be still. I am happy to tell you that it is significantly easier with the second baby to relax and enjoy, to listen to the voice that says cherish, relish, savor.
I know Boston’s isn’t the only city anticipating a heat index over 100 today and tomorrow. Let’s all have a tall glass of water and savor the breeze when you discover it.
I’m so grateful for this project from Sakura Bloom–I fear that many of these moments would not have been captured without it! I’m wearing the Sakura Bloom pure baby linen sling in twilight. -
the tiniest birthday party
We are honored and shocked to have a two year old in our midst. My weekly email newsletter about her age group (somehow every pregnant woman in America manages to sign up for these emails) switched over from “your one year old” to “your preschooler.” I don’t really believe in preschool, so STOP THAT NONSENSE, Baby Center.
I’m sure it’s no news to you all that two year olds are tiny wonderful gremlins who move into your home and bring havoc and delight wherever they go. They don’t fix up your shoes or clean your kitchen while you sleep, but they do find pieces of paper and tear them into a dozen pieces and leave a small trail of confetti across your living room. While you make dinner, they delight in hunting down a neat pile of folded blankets and unfolding them into a pattern only understood by their whimsical minds. They don’t bake cookies in treehouse kitchens, but they do accompany you on every bathroom visit, and bang down the door if you accidentally happened to lock it.
We love ours. <3 <3 Happy Birthday Lux. (and yes, it’s true: Joan Bea was born just two days before Lux’s birthday! Anyone have experience with very very close family birthdays?)
and, a birthday gift: a vintage tea set. bunny is appropriately attired because water was everywhere.
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babymoon
I pulled out my computer to write a post and the last window left up my screen was the ferry schedule to Nantucket. Last Friday we taunted fate and caught a boat to the island three days before my due date. On the boat I told people I wasn’t due for a week or two so they would leave me alone. I bought our tickets and the lady told me it was “outside seating only” so we sat in the sun at the back of the boat and Joe and Lux were misted with saltwater for the hour ride over. I kept looking over to see Lux licking her lips to taste the salt. When we left Boston the city was turning into something of a steaming bowl of broccoli fresh from the microwave, every day. We would wake up and it was already 80, with the threat of rain, which meant a sticky 90 degrees by lunchtime and even with AC going in the bedrooms you would find yourself torpid and uninspired for the rest of the day. The ocean breeze and dramatically cooler nights, plus just a little time with wonderfully refreshing friends, were exactly what we needed. Science still doesn’t know what starts labor (they think it’s the baby’s initiative) but I wonder if it might be a deep moment of contentment and peace that triggers the fusillade.
Our friend David moved out of his bedroom, the one off the kitchen with a window that is perpetually open to the sound of the backyard, and slept on the couch while we were there. We came with our pack n play, our bathing suits, and our books. I often like to bake things before we go out there and arrive with fresh bread or banana bread with chocolate, or snacks. But this time it was too hot and I was too pregnant to do any of that. So we arrived and bought what we needed from the grocery store–steak tips, marshmallows, corn on the cob, an enormous watermelon, fresh portuguese rolls, and those cheddar and peanut butter cracker packs that everyone should eat once a summer. Because of fog the island fireworks had been postponed to the 5th, and that night we found a spot on a dune atop an almost abandoned beach to watch them. They were downwind from us, so there was almost no noise, and it felt a bit like we were watching a light show on another planet, like the Little Prince. The next morning I woke up hours before Joe and Lux and went to get donuts from our favorite spot.
Then, on Sunday morning I woke up with more serious contractions than I’d had so far, and I said, we’d better go.
We’ve been home for a few days and I’ve done little besides lounge on my bed, read, and eat. Medium rare steaks from Paramount and Toscano’s (also a banana caramel shake from Paramount….genius), eggs benedict and bacon from the Whole Foods breakfast bar, lots of kefir (attempting to make up for the all the probiotics lost with the two rounds of penicillin I had to get), several bins of blueberries, and chocolate chip cookies. My mom’s been to the grocery store a dozen times, and Joe and my mom alternate with taking Lux outside on adventures, doing the dishes, vacuuming, and cuddling Joan while I nap. In short, it is the babymoon we all hope for and I am relishing it. I’m quite sore, my milk rushed in which means now I’m sore in two places, and I swing from moments of complete contentment to moments of total fatigue and retreat. Lux has burst into tears more times in the last few days than in the last months combined. Joe and I are trying to be patient but we also find ourselves looking at it each other, wide eyed with befuddlement and shocked by her outrage over whether she wants help taking off her shoes. Like me, she has mood swings. She has been ignoring Joan, but in a respectful way, like “I don’t know what this is, so I’ll just leave it alone.” So far my best idea has been to ask her to “go check on her” which she jumps up and sprints off to do. The last time I asked her to do that, she stood in front of the crib and shouted back to me that the baby was still napping. : ) Joan just had her first night of trying to stay up at preposterous hours, but it makes it much easier to relax when you know you can sleep in the next morning.
This birth was everything I hoped it would be—without fear, without pestering, a climatic incredibly intense 12 hours within my own body with Joe at my side. If you’ve had a birth that wasn’t what you hoped, I can tell you that I’m right there with you and I know how you feel. I can also say that perhaps you will decide to have another, and perhaps it will be exactly what you hoped. It’s not too much to tell yourself that.…more on that, I promise. : )
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Nesting
This weekend was a nesting weekend. I had written up a list of all the things I wanted to get done, some of them enormous–ORGANIZE CLOSET, FINAL LIST OF NAMES, LABEL FOR DOORBELL– and some of them rather arbitrary–CANCEL CREDIT CARD, WASH CARSEAT COVER–though every last thing seemed equally important as its kin in my mind. Joe had a mental list of things he’d been hoping to get done in the next six months that he decided to accomplish immediately as well. We went to the South Bay shopping center, one of those awful Sim City big box outposts with a shared parking lot that you believe never should have been developed, but then when you frequent it once a year they feel like the answer to everything. Wood for pantry shelves, a little metal hook for the bathroom door, hangers for Lux’s closest, storage bins for baby clothing, a new electric toothbrush, nursing bras, a pair of shorts for Lux, lanolin…. One of those shocking lists that bridges three stores and you know you need everything on the list, nothing is whimsical, and yet somehow is there so much of it?
Halfway through our Saturday epic I shared a hot dog and a box of Pizza Hut breadsticks at the Target Cafe with Lux. Lux asked for a second hot dog and then decided she wanted to be carried to the counter while I bought it for her. I refused, and we had that moment, the one you’ve all seen: a crazily pregnant woman watching her toddler dramatically throw herself to the ground in front of a clear cabinet of fake-dough pretzels and weep as if she’s never had a good day in her young life. SOS, I texted to Joe. But we got through it and the breadsticks tasted exactly as I remembered them from childhood (did they trademark that spice mix in 1990?) and now I don’t have to eat at Pizza Hut, or (pray to God) Target, for another four years.
An involuntarily primal love was tapped as Joe bustled alongside me on Saturday. It was the mess before the organization, each of us creating small piles of chaos only systemized to our eyes, dragging things from one end of the apartment to the other. He sorted through an entire shelf of excess cleaning supplies inherited from the previous tenants (there is nothing I like less than dealing with cleaning supplies as it is my personal opinion that none of them should exist, they are all toxic and harmful to our environment), built a hanging rod for Lux’s closet, outfitted and built a pantry into a closet, reorgnized our kitchen in some magical way that made it appear 10x bigger, and carted two loads of laundry down and back from the laundry mat. Nesting is the hormone you don’t ask for, and when it arrives, it’s a thirst that feels so relieving when quenched. Seriously, it was like a 7UP ad over here.
The Lux Clothes Archive is now housed in eight plastic bins, each labeled with a small index card. I think of these bins as I think my Gmail Inbox: it gradually grows with no foreseeable end and no cause for examination. Have you ever seen an ad for Gmail? Very clever—it shows how much gigabyte storage you get for free, and as you stare at the screen contemplating a new email account, the number keeps growing before your eyes. In my mind I can see 10 neatly stacked plastic bins, then 16 bins, all somehow lining the upper shelves in her room. This baby will use everything Lux did (though unfairly marked from the beginning with the avocado stains of her ancestors–the clearest visual of the phrase generational sin as I’ve ever gotten), and then–will there be another baby after that, using them again? And as that happens, Lux will grow and there will be more sizes, as yet unlabeled and unbought. I am more befuddled by this steadily accruing clothing collection than I am at our actual family size.
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joy, mine and hers
true story: the newborn days were not joyful for me. I know some women are able to love it and bask in their well earned status as new mother of a milky babe. I was pretty confused about what Lux needed, what she wanted, what I was supposed to be doing. Joy was a word a lot of old people exclaimed to me on the street. “What a joy she is!” they said. I scrunched my eyes shut and tried to imagine how they saw her. Where was that ethereal glow, that leapt into their eyes at the sight of her, coming from? They grinned at me expecting an eager nod of agreement, but received only a smile and few fuzzy blinks from my tired eyes. This rumored joy of being a mother felt like an elusive promise in those early days.
I suppose my greatest moments of joy have come from sharing the work of raising Lux with Joe. Watching how he responds to a situation when I am at a loss, learning what inspires him about her, and most especially watching their long-lost-best-friends reunion every evening when he comes home from work. And–that wonderful feeling when you think, “oh I don’t know if I have it in me for this right now,” but wait! Your partner appears and handles it for you, in a way far different from what you would have done. A sigh of relief, and you sit back, watch, and learn.
Meanwhile, toddlers spend at least five minutes every day in a state of sheer joy. We go to a carousal in our park quite frequently. It’s a treat, but not an exotic one for the kids in our neighborhood. The animals are nicked here and there from overlove, but glossy with paint and bedazzled with jewels, and in the evenings they turn on the rows of bulbs and from across the park you can see the ribboning lights spin by. Lux’s current favorite is a rabbit with a pink collar and blue eyes who is completely missing one of his ears. Anyway, yesterday, as soon as the gate opened, Lux took off in a sprint around it, her arms thrown back as she circled the wooden animals. She was completely overjoyed at the prospect of the ride and did a full lap of glee. I watched her mini celebration of the moment in awe. Learning from her, learning from Joe, that’s where I finally stumbled on the promised joy.
This is the third in a series of posts for the Sling Diaries. I’m wearing the Sakura Bloom pure baby linen sling in twilight.
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On not waiting
I have always been one to strive forward, ready for the next thing and the next level, breezily leaving the past behind the bend and looking to the future. The woman we’ve hired as my doula suggested I try to cherish these last weeks with only Lux by my side; to focus on the ending of something instead of the impending beginning. The three of us were sitting next to each other with our feet in the murky duck pond of the Public Garden. It was 90 degrees, and Lux was periodically jumping up to gather sticks and then tossing them into the water, joyfully shouting “stick!” with each throw. She was almost completely soaked with pond water and she was loving it. Lorenza said words like “cherish” “dwell” and “relish.” I was sweaty and thinking about how many diseases Lux might be contracting from the water which contained at least three different kinds of bird poop.
But later, when the heatwave finally broke and as the rainy days have come, I have engaged this intention. We stroll through June’s afternoons, rainy or not. We stop to sit on stoops along our street. We pet whatever dogs have the time (according to their owners) to stop and talk to us. We wander on for ‘treats’ (one of Lux’s first firm words), trying chocolate croissants across the city, lemonade from a street vendor, a new box of cereal at the grocery. We climb into bed with a pile of books and share the pillows. (Somehow our hand sign for share turned out like most people’s ‘hang loose’ so I find myself reminding Lux to both share and just relax, dude). We sit in the garden behind our building and meow, hoping the nameless neighbor cat will hear us and climb over the wall, as he does every now and then. “I wait,” she says when I ask if we should give up and head inside. “I play,” she says when I suggest it’s time for lunch instead. We buy strawberries and melons and eat the whole thing in one sitting. We finish our dinner so we can have popsicles. We discuss when Dad will be home, and how he took the train to work, and how he’s probably going to be all wet because it’s raining.
It’s a season of receiving advice, most of it terrible, some of it is gold. My midwife Connie finally told me to quit it with trying to talk to Lux about the baby.”You’re just stressing her out.”
What a relief. I thought back over the times I’d attempted the conversation, all of them met with confusion, anxiety, or denial. The future is a frustrating concept to someone Lux’s age. It better be five minutes away, or don’t bring it up.
And it’s a little hilarious to imagine what I thought all that prep work might ideally add up to: was a screaming infant going to arrive in our apartment and Lux was going to walk up and say “soo good to see you! at last! just what I’ve been waiting for, someone to completely screw with my life and schedule!”
Connie also suggested I encourage Lux’s interest in talking about the baby growing in her belly. A parallel imagination game that, I’m really sorry to say, I’ve so far been correcting. “No, I have a baby, you don’t have a baby,” I’ve actually said. In hindsight, I feel like a real jerk. Now, we’ve started talking about the baby in bunny‘s belly. It was Lux’s idea, but to me this feels like a very wise and safe proposal: a tiny fluffy baby from bunny could hardly do us any harm, right?
So here we are, we’re not waiting. We’re relishing. One of us might be a little tired, a little sore in the back, and little overstretched, but we’re relishing all the same.
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Memory at Haymarket
oh, the memories we all have of food! When do they form? I think of just summer alone: salty chips and candy bars at a beach stand, strawberry ice cream on a hot afternoon, lemonade after a long swim, cheeseburgers with friends, tomatoes off the vine and sprinkled with salt, corn cobs spun in butter, cold oysters mingled with tart mignonette, melty peach pie in evening, hot doughnuts in the morning…. We seem to pull our strongest memories from childhood, the flavors melded with moments, locations, the presence of loved ones, all of it recalled in an instant with just a taste or a whiff.
Toddlers seem to me to be nearly fruitarians. They just love it. Look for them at a party and you’ll find them all round the fruit tray, pinching watermelon squares, bundling blueberries into their hands for later, telltale strawberry stains long since dried on their shirt collars. To love something as a toddler is to want it over and over—a book only gets better on the 3rd read; a lunch, then a dinner, of only fresh raspberries is never refused.
Imagine the wonder of a market to a toddler’s eye: the fruit heaped, piled, trays lining tables, tables forming rows fading off into the distance. The fruit of Boston’s Haymarket is not farmer’s market fruit: fresh from the fields and only just ripe to sell. Instead it is overripe, really on the verge of rotten. It is opulence from grocery stores across the city, an order that was overestimated and must be sold quickly or wasted altogether. The vendors will warn you, “eat these right away,” as they hand over a bag of mush-soft avocados. If you’re planning a party that night and want an enormous bowl of guacamole, a margarita pitcher sharp with fresh limes, or mojitos brimming with trampled mint, it’s perfect. Otherwise, think fast.
I remember coming to Haymarket when I was due, so very overdue, with Lux. I bought lemons and made a lemon cake. Though I’m now only at 33 weeks, I still feel a bit like the fruit piled here. Bursting at the seams here and there, even softer in spots than you might expect. Getting dressed in your third trimester, I’ve always felt, is a bit like slipping a rubber band over a ripe peach. Abundant, and preposterous.
I’m wearing Lux in sakura bloom simple silk in amber. All of these photos were taken by Cambria Grace, a dreamy Boston photographer. Lux and I had so much fun wandering the market with her and Joe and I are absolutely over the moon about these photos (she got smiles from Lux we never seem to managed to capture!).