Mar
6
Nothing good comes easy
Filed Under Uncategorized | 69 Comments
I have this vague, partially-suppressed memory of Riley’s 18-month stage being really tough — the tantruming, the half-assed mobility, the inability to communicate — but hoo boy, Dylan’s either an early achiever or he’s going to be absolutely intolerable in a few more months, because at one year and change this child is siphoning away my will to live on a daily basis. Our good-natured butterball has been replaced by a mercurial creature whose moods fluctuate wildly based on such mission-critical variables as the amount of milk sloshing around in his round belly, the precise alignment of the planets, and the accessibility of the television remote. He still laughs easily and is quick to flash his ladykiller grins at the things that delight him — his brother, the cat (“gee gah!”), his parents crawling around acting like damn fools in an attempt to distract and entertain — but his forays into the Land of Contentment are achingly brief, not nearly long enough to enjoy a full cup of coffee or empty the dishwasher or go check Twitter in hopes of hearing news from Jonniker.
He is in a high-maintenance stage for sure, and if he’s not howling or furtively attempting to swallow a shoelace or managing to shake every last drop of milk from bottle to carpet, he’s falling facefirst into sharp wooden objects in the amount of time it takes to blink an eye.
Immediately after this happened I saw a giant cut flap of skin on his nose turn white and for a moment I thought it was EXPOSED BONE and I DIED. Then it started oozing blood and I was all, whew! And then I was all, OH MY GOD.
It was our entertainment stand that he fell into, and I’m starting to wonder if the thing has got some kind of Christine taste-of-flesh demon vibe going on because Riley had just fallen backwards into it not 12 hours before, giving himself a massive lump on the back of the head. No one’s hurt themselves on this thing before, so . . . I don’t know. I’ve got my eye on you, Shelfy.
Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but babies have weirdly sped-up healing abilities for things like cuts and bruises and Dylan already looks much better, but then just this morning I observed him crawling under the kitchen table, attempting to stand up, smashing his skull into the bottom of the table surface, then doing it AGAIN, HARDER — wailing all the while — before I managed to drag him out of there. Babies = the ultimate fail.
It’s definitely frustrating to be constantly chasing, soothing, and generally trying to figure out what in the blue fuck is wrong. Is he hungry? Tired? Teething? Disappointed by the lack of talent on this year’s American Idol? Humiliated because daycare sent him home in this astounding shirt yesterday, thanks to his loser parents forgetting to bring in extra clothes?
But I also feel bad for Riley. I mean, he loves his brother and they spend a lot of time playing together, but by necessity it seems like Dylan sucks up most of our attention and Riley is constantly being told to hang on, just a minute, you’ll get your juice when I’m finished feeding Dylan, etc. Or worse — and this is hard to admit — my patience is often stretched paper-thin by the whining baby and the barrage of “whys” and “but I waaaaaaaant tos” from the 3-year-old send me flying right over some kind of edge and I bark TO YOUR ROOM! at Riley when in fact I would like VERY much to send DYLAN to his room.
Ah, none of this is easy. I don’t know. I know I could be doing better, but I hope I’m doing okay. I hope both my kids know how much I love them, and how rich and stupidly blessed I feel as their mother. If there are moments when everything seems shrill and brittle and on the verge of complete disaster, there are so many more when it simply doesn’t seem as if there is enough room in the world for all the good things I have at hand.
Mar
3
Bests and worsts, one year
Filed Under Uncategorized | 103 Comments
My least favorite things about one-year-old babies, or more specifically, in case you think I’m slagging on YOUR one-year-old baby, who I’m sure is faultless in every way, MY one-year-old baby:
• They walk, yet they are babies. This is a horrifying combination and should be forbidden by nature. I feel it is a massive Darwinian fail to design babies to be able to heave themselves up on wobbly legs and stagger around like PEOPLE, when they are clearly INFANTS, as evidenced by their total lack of knees/knuckles and their propensity for ferreting out every single choking hazard in the entire house and cramming it in their cry-holes.
• Speaking of, they put everything in their mouths. Here is a partial list of what I have fished out of Dylan’s mouth in the last 24 hours: a Curious George sticker, a Band-Aid, a small rock, fifty thousand pieces of paper, a pen cap, his brother’s shoe, a chunk of what I fervently hope was dried mud, and one mysteriously non-Duplo-sized LEGO that must have manifested itself out of another dimension because I swear to GOD I already got rid of the too-small bricks what the FUCK. This is the same baby, mind you, who gags on RICE CRACKERS and mostly turns his nose up over chunky foods, probably because I didn’t WIPE THEM ON THE FLOOR FIRST.
• Oh, and the gag reflex? COME ON. I am so reluctantly experienced at dealing with a Surprise Cough-Barf I have an entire honed, efficient Tactical Action Plan involving paper towels and Mrs. Meyer’s Lavender Spray and baking soda and simultaneous bath-preparation and laundry-starting activities and frankly, this is not one of those life skills I want to be good at. Dear child: yes, post-nasal drip is gross, but re-enacting the pea soup scene from the Exorcist is infinitely more disgusting for all involved parties.
• It’s been a full year — over a year, at this point — and he’s still waking up more than once per night. I guess I’m mostly resigned, because I don’t seem to be willing to take any steps to make the situation better (lie there wide awake and vibrating with anxiety while he cries, or get up and deal with him then go back to sleep? I go with Door Number 2, every single time) , but I never imagined he wouldn’t be sleeping through the night after twelve long months. And no, I do NOT want to hear about your child who is ten now and still wakes up every half hour, are you trying to KILL me?
• They are emotionally unstable. Whine, whine, whine. I can’t reach that ball, someone took the pen cap out of my mouth, I don’t like these shoes, this diaper change is filling me with rage, I’m riddled with invisible demons and I don’t know what the hell my problem is so I guess I’ll just scream for about a goddamned hour straight. God, it’s like their brains are still forming, or something. Like they have limited communication skills and get easily frustrated and are constantly bonking their heads on things. SO IMMATURE OMG.
And, okay, fine, some of my favorite things:
• They dance. There is nothing, NOTHING like seeing a 12-month-old bopping along with Eninem’s “Crack a Bottle”. Uh-oh uh-oh, bitches hoppin’ in my Tahoe.
• They love to laugh. Like when you get down on your hands and knees and pretend to be a bear and crawl after your baby going RRWAAR!, and their eyebrows shoot up and they go shriiiiiiiiiiek with pure insane joy before they laugh so hard they fall over and hit their head on the entertainment center? That’s pretty rad.
• They talk all the time, about GOD KNOWS WHAT. “Ba blah da doe blmphz da DER DER pah gee DOH,” they say, and you go, I know, right?
• They are in the perfect sweet spot between actively choosing to be cuddled (vs the passive human-represents-food pleasure of the newborn) and figuring out that almost any other activity is more fun than snuggling with Mom. They run full-tilt into your arms. They press their cheek against yours. They sit back to drink you in, then lean forward to sigh happily against your chest.
• Their butts are ridiculous. I defy you to gaze upon a 12-month-old’s naked bottom and not feel certain the world is in fact filled with unicorns and rainbows.
-
My product review site:
[