Trans/plant/portation

My brother-in-law owns an extremely expensive camera with some sort of whatsafiggy that lets him take time-lapse video. He’s also a fan of nature, so he plans to trek up to Alaska and do some time-lapse filming on the side of a glacier wall. I’m sure the final film will be visually fascinating and pensive. He’ll probably win an award.

But I think it would be much more amusing to set the camera up in our house and film how many times Susanne and I get up out of bed though the course of the night to deal with one baby issue or another.

Yes, I wait for the Wee One’s cues: yawning, a hand reaching up to slowly rub an eye, that stern expression that tells me he’s starting to fight his tiredness. Finally, after roughly five months, he is getting closer to a schedule. I do have quiet concerns that we’ll never really be on an actual schedule, kind of like those graphs in calculus where one is only ever approaching but never reaching infinity. Read More…

Setting: Pajama party, 1985, East Windsor, New Jersey, in the suburbs. About six or seven teenage girls are hanging out in a family room, watching racy movies and nibbling at chocolate chip cookies and potato chips. It is something like 1AM. The movie ends and conversation starts up, mostly about who’s dating whom, which teachers at school are the worst, nothing terribly unexpected as topics go. And then someone arrives at the bright idea of playing truth or dare. Dares are written down on scraps of paper and tossed into a hat, should a game participant select dare over truth for their turn. Dares seem to be winning out as the choice of the night, and quickly all of the dares are exhausted.

I figure that we’ve gone through the worst of them, so when it’s my turn, I pick dare and consider myself the cleverest person of the evening. It only takes about five seconds to reconsider handing over my mantle.

“Put this chip clip on your boob.” She held it out to me. It was all bright yellow and innocent-looking. Read More…

On any given day, I need to get a lot of stuff done. Most of us do, after all. I’m living off from my to do list at the moment, because I tend to lose lists these days, what with half of my consciousness preoccupied with WHERE IS BABY IS BABY OKAY kinds of questions.

Also affecting my ability to get all of my stuff done is the baby himself. Emile is omnipresent in the house, mostly due to the fact that this winter, he does not prefer alone time. So he comes around with us as we operate in each room of the house. Yes, this slows down progress–for instance, I am making it through this blog post one sentence an hour.

To further entertain him but also to increase the odds that I can get stuff done, I talk to him, explaining whatever is going on around us. It’s banal for the most part, and when I do it while cooking I feel a bit like a chubby, trans Rachel Ray. But sometimes I surprise myself with the things that come out of my mouth. Read More…

Picture a frozen lake midwinter, freshly fallen snow clinging to its banks as brightly colored skaters twirl about, carving figure 8s in the ice, while a protective line of evergreens takes up the background mountain range.

It all comes crashing apart as a gigantic tongue descends from the sky, slobbering over the scene and crashing onto the crowd. In one saliva-laden, fell swoop, the landscape is obliterated.

I look at the crumbled remains of the sugar egg on my mother’s dining room carpet, and think about Humpty Dumpty. There’s no putting this delicate creation back together, either. Now the paper figure skaters look unimpressive, lying among the crumbs of sugar on the area rug under the formal long dining table. Read More…

Before Emile was born, I made promises to myself about what kind of limits I’d put on conversation topics that I’d heard from other parents over the years–things I never wanted to be caught saying in public. These included both specific statements and more general categories. Roughly, my list of verboten discussion areas included:

• Insisting my child was a prodigy of anything–music, verbal or written ability, athletic prowress
• Commenting on how my child would someday be a heartbreaker because he or she was extremely attractive or charming
• Talking about my child’s genome (hey, I’ve seen this parent) as evidence of future greatness
• Doling out details about my child’s defecation

I’m sure there are more things on the list, but it’s 4 in the morning and he’s just fallen back asleep. Read More…

I’m not sure on which particular day it occurred to us, or to which one of us, but at some point over the course of Susanne’s pregnancy somebody had the giddy-making revelation that we would soon have the opportunity to dress up our baby for Halloween. We had total control over the nature, cost, and cuteness of the outfit, because how is a 2-month-old going to stop us? It was a dizzying amount of power, really. Over the next several months, we returned to conversations about The Costume. A lion? Maybe a bumblebee. Babies dressed as bumblebees are pretty damn adorable. Or maybe a pea pod, Susanne suggested. I worried it would be too derivative of Anne Geddes’ work with infants, but it stayed in the realm of possibility, which, if I’m being honest, was about as large as half of Delaware. We considered every possible Halloween costume, even ones we’d need to craft together ourselves.

It’s not that we’re big on pagan holidays, although Christmas with the gift-giving and all is pretty spectacular. It’s more of a combination of wistfulness for our own trick-or-treating days, an excitement about the baby having his own fun, and well, costumes.

But of course, idealism quickly gives way to reality, and then crumbles into deception. Read More…

Baby experts and many parents have mentioned to us that Week 6 of babyhood is something of a nadir for new parents. The child’s night sleeping might be awful, dovetailing horribly with what is at that point moderate-term sleep loss for the caretakers. But bedrock being what it is, it’s also a sign that stress will soon lessen, life will feel somewhat easier, and soon enough, the baby will respond to coaching on sleep cycles and training.

Here is where I should mention that we have just entered Week 5. We’ve descended past chaos and stress and entered the realm of second guessing, especially now that we’re chronic participants in sleep loss. Whereas last week it was my foot-eye coordination, now some of my higher faculties are involved; I can’t do long division in my head right now, and yes, I double back on what I’ve learned about the baby thus far.

In some ways, this makes parenting more entertaining. Read More…

The consequences of moderate-term sleep deprivation are many: frontal lobe activity is surpressed, leading one to blurt out inappropriate statements at inopportune times; memory fails, rote calculations become just out of arms’ reach, which can be amusing when trying to tip a waiter; and manual dexterity decreases alarmingly. For those Dungeons & Dragons geeks out there, consider this loss on a scale of -5 or so, something along the lines of a major cursed item. For the rest of us, I have an illustrative story.

Last January, shortly after moving back to Walla Walla from Seattle—not the more popular of the population shifts between the two cities, to be sure—I embarked on a sundries and staples trip to Costco. The big box store is an hour away, but I deeply appreciate only buying toilet paper twice an annum, so being in a mood to stock up for a while, I ventured the crowds. Read More…

Today’s guest blog post comes from Kristina Martin, a Portland author, humorist, and comic, who is also a great cheerleader for other writers, and who can’t use more comics in their lives?

I am blessed with many people in my life. Ironically, right now a large number of those people are either pregnant, awaiting the immediate birth of a baby, or brand-spanking new parents. A few have asked me questions about what to expect as a parent but since I am known for “telling it like it is” I usually don’t field many follow-up questions about labor and delivery or life with newborns.

But if I did, I would tell that pondering person that babies are all about time.

Simply making a baby requires the type of precision normally reserved for marching bands practicing for the Rose Bowl. While not all egg and sperm “providers” are carefully watching calendars and clocks, a good many do.  And for those folks, making a baby is all about the perfect time.  I hope they enjoy that moment, because it’s the last perfect time they will have for a long time. Read More…

It seems a mite inappropriate to discuss my wife’s pregnancy using gambling metaphors, but saying we’re in the “home stretch” also strikes me as apt. There is some kind of race to the finish here. Maybe she’s trying to snap the yellow tape in a contest against the end of summer, I’m not sure. But as the doctor appointments increase in frequency—we’re now going to see the Sarah Palin lookalike every week—and now that Susanne’s belly is somewhere around three times the size of Susanne herself, it feels like we’re about to accomplish what we set out to do oh so many moons ago. Read More…