Jul
12
July 12, 2007
In the last few weeks Riley seems to have given up his morning nap for good, and he’s also going to bed about an hour later at night. An hour doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, does it? And yet every night around 6:45 I find myself collapsed on the couch watching our son gambol happily around the living room making motorboat noises and babbling nonstop in a mixture of recognizable words and Toddlerese and thinking, would a carefully aimed air dart of Benadryl really be so bad?
I wish I could siphon off a tiny portion of his boundless energy, because I’m so yawny all the time lately (yet another early pregnancy joy, along with Normal-Sized Belly in the Morning, Carrying Triplets By Late Evening Syndrome), I’m so freaking tired that just observing a kid tearing ass back and forth like he’s on speedballs makes my eyes water for a nap.
The golden rule for a second pregnancy often seems to be “suck it up”, because there’s not really a lot of free time in which to nap or to contemplate what sounds better for lunch: a healthy salad, or an entire tin of New York Mints (guess which!). Life motors on, and there is a small child who is currently screaming at you because his Dobby Dobby (a plastic drumstick he likes to point overhead while shouting his version of “Abracadabra” . . . oh, nevermind) has rolled under the couch. Get off your ass, Preggo, there are diapers to be changed, snacks to be prepared, and Dobby Dobbys to be rescued.
Riley just isn’t supportive of my desire to lie around eating ice cream and flipping through magazines, sadly. The other day I dragged a giant blanket into the backyard so I could flop there in comfort while Riley played nearby; it seemed like a good idea in theory but backfired in that toddlers are just like nosy cats, they’re insanely curious about anything new or out of the ordinary. I might as well have hung a sign on my shirt that read “PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CRAWL AND/OR BOUNCE ALL OVER BOTH MY PRONE BODY AND THIS BLANKET THANK YOU MGMT”. It was about as relaxing as Jello wrestling, not only that, but having my head at ground level also gave me the uncanny ability to locate and identify by smell every single dog turd in the yard (“Hmm, that one’s about a week old . . . that’s a fresh one . . . that one’s dried out but was re-activated by the sprinkler last night . . .”).
JB does more than his share of kid-wrangling but there are times when his support skills fall a bit flat. Take last night, for instance, when I mentioned how glad I would be to get past the nausea stage, and he called me a whiner. So of course I ripped off his head and devoured it. Let my husband’s headless body be a warning to you all, boys: never call a pregnant woman a whiner, because she’s hormonal, prone to emotional flash fires, and CONSTANTLY HUNGRY.
Jul
11
July 11, 2007
After our week of vacation during which there was virtually no forward progress on the remodel, the contractors have responded to JB’s whip-cracking and have descended en masse. We have no ceiling in our kitchen right now, just some dusty, ancient boards and a solitary naked lightbulb dangling from a thin wire. The lighting it produces is indescribably unpleasant, all we need are some splashes of blood on the walls to really make it complete.
The demolition has caused every surface of the living room to be coated with a thick layer of wood/drywall dust, and our kitchen temporarily only has partial power—which I cannot seem to remember, and continually find myself attempting to toast some bread, brew some coffee, or turn on the range, and wondering why in HELL it’s taking so long.
Today they’re doing something exceedingly loud with saws, the kind that make that eardrum-shattering high pitched screeching sound, and the backyard is a cacophony of noise and flying sawdust. This is of course the only place Riley wants to be (“AHTSIDE! AHTSIDE!”), and in the meantime Dog is pathetically terrified of everything—the noise, the tools, the sweaty electrician who said, “Well, it’s all kind of a pain in the ass,” when I said he could leave the power to the range off if it would be too much of a pain in the ass to re-wire it today (to which I replied, “DON’T I KNOW IT”)—and creeps from one location to another, trembling and constantly offering me a paw.
This is all fairly inconvenient, but I am far too distracted by my waistline to get too het up about some pesky remodel annoyances. My clothes are barely fitting, all of a goddamned sudden. There’s this Belly, and it’s starting to make itself known (at nine weeks, which is craaaaaaazy). I fear its potential.
Also, because I’m a sucker for both teaser campaigns and viral marketing, so I give you my latest obsession: 1.18.08.
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