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Archives from 2002-2006

September 20, 2006

While I find myself occasionally mourning Riley’s headlong plummet into toddlerhood, something I definitely have not missed about the Very Wee Stage of Babyhood are the milk-horks. Spitting up wasn’t as gross as I had imagined it might be (it’s less of an Exorcist pea-soup blast and more of a quiet burble), but jesus god, the smell of urped formula….deadly.

Riley never spit up all that much, since our family was thankfully spared the hell of reflux (not that I would know firsthand, I’m just making a stab in the dark that a baby with reflux is a Mighty Goddamn Sorrowful Situation), but I went through those piles of little washcloths at a pretty good clip all the same. JB ascertained that a bit of spitup was a good sign, as it meant Riley had eaten just a smidge over the perfect amount and was only jettisoning the excess. Then again, he wasn’t the one doing twelve loads of laundry a day.

“Stopped spitting up” doesn’t seem to be something I made a notation of in my exhaustive efforts to document every single solitary moment of Riley’s existence, but he hasn’t done it for quite a while. So on the sunny afternoon of his birthday, while we were at the zoo and had stopped for a bucolic picnic lunch, it was fairly surprising when he started to hork.

Let me just…let me just give you some facts, here. He had eaten a large amount of, oh god I can barely type it, scrambled eggs that morning. He had a healthy quantity of milk in his belly, having hoovered down a few bottles throughout the day. And I had just given him some Honey Nut Cheerios.

Well, I don’t know exactly what went wrong, that afternoon at the Woodland Park Zoo. My theory is that he gagged on a Cheerio, which triggered the catastrophic events that followed. Basically, he started spitting up milk, and then, all of a sudden, turbo barfed an entire Lake Superior worth of disgustingness all over himself and the stroller.

I have no idea how one baby could contain that much volume; it was like clowns leaving a Volkswagen. It just coming and coming and I was flailing for the only thing I had on hand, a small paper napkin (!!), and I was freaking out that he was going to choke and man oh man, we had NO extra outfits with us.

After that he seemed perfectly fine, albeit slightly less adorable than forty seconds beforehand. We cleaned up as much as we could with a sheet I had packed to spread on the grass and a bottle of water, and drove home with the windows down, leaving a palpable trail of Stank behind us. Later, JB sprayed down the stroller with a hose, and if you have a better method of removing a kegload of semi-digested scrambled eggs from canvas, I’d sure like to hear it. Because truthfully, it still smells a little…not so fresh.

Overall, I learned that I vastly prefer the tiny-infant spitup to the larger-child Full Scale Vomit. I guess it’s just one more thing to get maudlin about when I sift through his 0-3 sized onesies and hum “Sunrise, Sunset” to myself.

:::

Apropos of nothing, I’d like you to know I am quite disturbed by Cecil Dill and his musical hands.

::::

Also: hey guess what? I made a new website, specifically for housing all the product-related conversations and pimpfests I so greatly enjoy. I plan to use it to tell you about cool stuff I like, and ask you questions about stuff you like, and generally indulge my deep, deep desire to talk about trivial consumery shit. It’s called sundrybuzz, and it’s right here. Come visit! Tell me if it’s horribly broken in your web browser, so that I may cry piteously into my monitor.

(Also also: only recently did I realize I named the site similarly to Melissa’s cool new column. I am an unoriginal dickmunch.)

September 17, 2006

Regarding my hideous-hair problem, you guys have awesome ideas as usual. I’ll let you know if something ends up helping; failing that, I’ll be sure to post photos of my Natalie Portman-esque pixie cut.

(Yeah, right. I haven’t had super short hair since I was a pre-teen and someone mistook me for a BOY. Scarred for life, I’m telling you…)

We did some more geocaching this weekend, which was totally enjoyable. There are two things I really like about geocaching: one, you tend to discover brand new-to-you areas – parks and trails and cool little nooks and crannies – while you’re hunting down a cache; and two, the idea that your very own neighborhood is full of hidden treasures, objects that wait patiently for discovery under leaves and rocks, that are just out of view, that you could walk by a hundred times and never know of their location, is sort of…beautiful? In some cheesy kind of way? Like the world is full of everyday magic and you just have to look for it. Yeah, like that.

This is a hobby with a fairly high nerd element. Lots of cache descriptions involve puzzles that you have to decipher before you can even get the GPS coordinates. Also, people who might be in a park where you’re looking for a cache, who are not fellow geocachers, are referred to as muggles. (And now I cannot believe I typed that “everyday magic” sentence. Pardon me and my twelve-sided die.) Muggles are NOT to be trusted with a cache’s location. Basically, if someone sees you picking up a cache, you have to kill them with your bare hands. It’s recommended that you gouge out their eyes first with your thumbs, that way even if they survive, they can’t make their way back to the cache. Then you lurk, drooling, over the cache and hiss “presssshhhuuss” at anyone who passes by.

So, as you can see it’s quite involved. Plus, in our case there’s the whole getting the boy in and out of the carseat and the backpack aspect, which is kind of tiring after a while, which is why I personally endorse having several Starbucks pitstops during your geocaching outings, especially if they offer Top Pot chocolate donuts.

I hope you are not able to sleuth out the cache locations from these photos, because my eye-gouging skills are seriously not up to par.

In other weekend events:

Cat was acting suspiciously, prowling around a bush in the front yard, and on closer inspection…

…we discovered a very small, terrified mouse clinging for dear life. We helped it escape, but as long as she/he hangs around, I think his/her days are numbered, especially since we found this just a couple hours earlier. God, it’s like “CSI: MOUSEAMI” out there.

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