the squibix family blog

You may wonder where I picked up a 24-hour stomach bug, seeing as I hardly leave the house these days. Well, like every other optimist in this new year I went to the gym yesterday. And there I lifted weights and pushed all kinds of buttons on the treadmill and most likely came into contact with hundreds of millions of bacteria, one of which managed to lodge itself in my gut and turn itself into a volcano.

But the gym you say, that's the pantheon of health. No, I think the word that you're looking for is paragon.

Anyway, thanks to the overall dehydration I'm down to my goal weight, so there's my new years resolution done. The rest of 2010: sleeping.

First the baby gets changed and clothed in something fleecy with feet. Then I lay his snowsuit on the chair and put him on top of it, but not in the snowsuit because the time in which his thumbs are unavailable must be compressed as much as possible to approach zero. Then I put on my boots (if I've slept in long-johns and put pants over them) or my snow-pants and then my boots (if I'm only wearing one layer). This ends phase 1: preliminary preparations, and begins phase 2: we're really doing this, quit barking at me, we're getting there. I fasten the ergo baby carrier around my waste and then zip the baby into his snow suit. He doesn't like the part where he's zipped up, and may cry until he's lifted high in the air and cooed at and strapped into the ergo carrier. Then we all breath a sigh of relief that that's over, and enter phase 3: outer-outer-wear. I put my down coat over both of us and I use a scarf as a belt to keep it tight around his arms. I find his hat and my hat (hopefully I found them before we started, since visibility is impaired somewhat by the baby front-pack) and I tie on his hat, then mine, then slip my gloves in my pocket, reassure that dog that we're REALLY going this time, and put on his collar and leash.

Sometimes I forget to put a fleece layer under my coat and then when we get outside I notice the wind whipping against my chest and neck. On these days I feel pretty stupid and we cut the walk short. Sometimes I forget a second layer on my legs and the effect is similar. In the fall there were days when I walked out of the house without my hat or gloves, but I learned that lesson quick.

I am constantly amazed by the dog and his ability to walk through a sixty-degree differential like it's no big thing. He looks at me as I'm tearing apart the living room to assemble our expedition gear and he's like, "Humans.... I just don't get it."

After several months of cold weather walking, I'm just starting to get to the point where this morning routing feels doable and not like some tortuous dance of the dead. It seems that most of the exhaustion and ill-humor I've experienced as a new mothers is really just due to the incredible amount of mental energy it takes to problem solve regular life. Like, I used to know how to get dressed to walk out the door... how do I do it while holding an infant? This takes more mental engineering than you think. Do it wrong and you risk provoking a screaming baby, or getting frostbite on your ears, or the dog peeing on the furniture. These considerations are not negligible. It's not just lack of sleep that makes new moms so tired.

But not at least I can say that I've got the morning walk down. This skill is firmly in my toolkit. Expert Dog Walker. Can I put it on my resume?

Then we picked up the baby, and as we drove home we continued our conversation on the unpleasantness of sugar in our mouths. In total I think we spent 45 minutes on the topic. Well, that and imagining what was happening at the party in our absence.

"I bet they're still eating and playing games."
"I bet they stay up till MIDNIGHT at it."

Oh God. We are so old.

With a baby it can feel like a crazy free-for-all all the time - you never know when the eating or sleeping or messing will occur, and it's all about surviving on to the next moment. But as Harvey approaches 7 months we can start to see glimpses of the little boy he's becoming. He plays, he gets context, he has an attention span for activities and he wants to be involved. And around him a family life is taking shape that's not just about caring for him but sharing with him the excitement and mundanity of every day together.

On Sunday night he drifted off to sleep next to me, his hair smelling of soap, his breath smelling of milk. It's an understatement to say it, but I love that little guy.

It got me thinking of a possible equation to explain this phenomenon. Clearly the delight I experience in your child decreases as the distance from his age and Harvey's increases. And I do like children generally, but less so when they're potentially dangerous to my little guy. So without collecting any data, I'd say that

My delight in your child = (some coefficient)the number of months distance between your child's age and my child's age - (some coefficient)the ability of your child to harm my child

But wait, upon re-read there are several problems with that equation.

The first is that it's not scalable. As my child gets older, I'm likely to continue to be delighted by children under his age, if only for the sake of nostalgia. Children at his age will continue to be cute and understandable in their motivations, but children older will continue to be irritating. So we'd need to change that part of the equation to be uni-directional, so only older children are annoying but not younger.

= (some coefficient)(your child's age in months - my child's age in months) - (some coefficient)the ability of your child to harm my child

The other problem with this equation is the possibility of collinearity between the age difference among our children (let's call it olderness) and your child's ability to harm my child (call it harminess). Obviously, as your child gets older his harming ability increases, so that olderness and harminess move in a collinear relationship. But it would be misleading to say that harminess is merely a factor of olderness, because harminess increases with factors unconnected to age, such as your child's inclination to harm my child (anger, sociopathic tendencies, bad parenting) or your child's enhanced ability to harm my child, such as whether he's wearing soccer cleats or carrying a big stick.

Also, is your child visibly ill? Germs add to harminess too. Indeed, we could come up for a seperate equation for harminess where

harminess = inclination to harm + weaponry + illness

So that our whole equation would read

Delight = coeff(olderness) - coeff(harminess)

and since we're subtracting all of harminess, the equation would break out into

My delight in your child = (some coefficient)(your child's age in months - my child's age in months) - (some coefficient)(your child's inclination to harm my child - weaponry - illness)

The more I think about this, the less it looks like a linear equation. I like your child more if he's closer in age to mine, but not so much that a perfect score in age would cancel out a charging sociopath with head cold. Indeed, if little snot-nose Samson is in the play pen with soccer cleats, then there's no measure of age empathy that will make me like him. Similarly if he's carrying H1N1. Which means perhaps that illness is not part of harminess and deserves its own coefficient.

And while we're at it, there are a myriad other variables that could improve the overall r-squared of the equation. Some ranking of the physical appearance of the child, vis-a-vis cuteness would certainly help. Also, am I in charge of your child at the time of measurement? Or are you, the momma, nearby? Do I like you, the momma? How much are you paying attention to the stick in your child's hand?

So there's still some flushing out to do with the math, and I think a trial observation might be in order to troubleshoot with some real data. I mean, an observation on other people and their germy nasty children.

Imagine... The speaker recognizes the republican senator from Massachusetts...

It is a bummer because we want better health care coverage in this country, and this will impair the passage of the current health care legislation. On the other hand, the current package in the senate isn't any better than the craptacular health care law that we have in Massachusetts now, a law which seems to do nothing for us but fine the uninsured. If Dan were to lose his job, we could choose to pay $600 a month on Cobra, or $300 a month in fines to the state. I think I missed the good news part.

So I'm totally over the stupid senate and their stupid legislation. Don't pass your lame half-assed healthcare mandate. Do your own health care! Steal your medicine! Don't reform the prisons, let the prisoners revolt.

Thinking about hope and faith and healthcare this morning got me remembering a story. A few days after Harvey was born I had some swelling in a private region of my private region, and the midwife determined that what was necessary was a shot of cortisone. This isn't exactly street-level stuff, at least not if you live on a street in Bedford, so she told me to go find a doctor to prescribe it. She could administer the shot, but as a home-birth midwife she can't actually get the medicine because blah blah blah this country sucks. Anyway, after bypassing the medical industrial complex for my entire pregnancy I suddenly had to go begging for someone for a shot in my hoo-ha.

First I called my regular gynecologist, the one I hadn't seen for over 10 months, and let's just say that she was not happy with my request. If you're brave enough to give birth at home you must also prepare yourself for getting yelled at. A lot. Plan B was the ER, so Dan and I prepared ourselves. We packed books, lunches, diapers for the baby, and headed over to our local hospital.

I presented myself to the admitting desk. "I gave birth three days ago and I have swelling in my la-la-la." She looked at me with a completely blank face, stared for a few seconds, and then said, "Go talk to the nurse. Around the corner."

I entered the ER proper through the large double doors and looked around for a nurses' station. There was a desk with a few ladies in scrubs standing around, so I addressed myself to them. "The woman at the desk told me to come here. I gave birth three days ago and I have swelling in my la-la-la." They looked at me blankly. "Ummmm," one of them said, "You'll need to talk to a nurse."

They called over another woman who was walking down the hall. "This lady wants to speak to a nurse" they said.

(Not to interrupt the story too much, but maybe a start to reforming healthcare in this country would be implementing an actual procedure of admitting patients to the ER... I'm no process expert myself, but this sort of thing might help as a time-saving measure.)

"I'm a nurse," the woman boasted, her chest puffing out in front of her as she sauntered over. It was as if we had called for Superman.

"I gave birth three days ago and I have swelling in my la-la-la," I said.

"Oh Brother!" she sighed. She looked me over like I was toxic. "Okay," she said with another big sigh. "Let's get this girl a room."

That's why people go into nursing I hear, because they loooove helping sick people. No, I'm just kidding! It's because they can't get into college.

"My husband is here with the baby, I'll have to get them," I said.

"WHAT???" She exploded. "You brought a newborn to the hospital? Tell them to get out of here right now!"

"Um..."

"Go tell them to go home! Then you come back here! This is no place for a newborn!"

(Not to interrupt again, but does anyone else see the irony here? I AGREE that a hospital is no place for a newborn, that's why I didn't give birth to one there.)

Anyway, here was my predicament. Three know-nothings inexplicably dressed in scrubs and Superman over-burdened the nurse wanted to put me in a room for an undisclosed amount of time, separating me from my three-day-old baby who needed breast milk every hour.

I walked back through the doors of the ER and into the empty waiting room. Dan was sitting there reading a book with a sleeping Harvey in his car seat. To protect from ambient germs, the car seat was covered in a linen blanket like a giant face mask for the whole contraption.

"Let's go," I said.

We went out to the car and called the midwife. "I'll lie down all day, I'll ice it, I'll apply salts. Can I please just go home?" She heard the trembling in my voice and she told me I could give it another day and reevaluate tomorrow. We drove back through Concord with the sleeping baby in the back. Diaper bag still stacked with fresh diapers. Wrapped up sandwiches uneaten. I bit my lip and felt like a moron.

We pulled into the driveway and turned off the car. Dan came around to my side to open the door for me. "Our hope is built on nothing less," he started humming "than Jesus Christ and God's goodness." The rest of the hymn continues: "I shall not trust the sweetest frame, but only rest on Jesus' name."

It's true. We know that home birth is medically safe - we have hard evidence. But we also know that medical evidence isn't the be-all end-all understanding of the universe. And that's the real reason we chose to begin our family far away from the judging eyes of nurses. They're not the ones who can bring life from death, even if they do think they're superman.

The chorus of the song goes: "On Christ the solid rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand."

The next day the swelling was gone.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to make anyone think that the way out of our nation's health care crisis is to voluntarily forgo medical treatment when nurses are bitchy. It's a different comparison that I was drawing in my brain. Everyone was so hopeful that healthcare reform would get passed, but then the politicians all mucked it up like they normally do, and the bill got watered down like it normally does, and now we've elected another republican to the senate which makes it less likely that even the crap version will stay in tact. And yet, are we that surprised? That the two-party system failed us? That something sucky happened in politics?

It's a bit early to look to the end of the age for help, what with so many politicians unsaved and all. But it's not too soon to put hope in a good repository of hope. It's worked out before. And so, at the commenters urging, I will ask Jesus to inspire our politicians to make nice with each other.

After all, if a little prayer can alleviate swelling in your normal every-day pussy, it shouldn't take much longer for the ones in congress.

I know just what you're thinking: "This sounds just like blah-blah-blah phenomenon. Leah's life would be better if only I tell her my brilliant diagnosis!" Yes, I've heard lots of suggestions of what I should to to remedy the situation. Change food/nursing combinations, establish a quiet evening routine, drug the kid. And boy howdy, I love it. Because you know what mom's love most? hearing your opinion on how they should parent better.

"Your child would sleep," they say, "if you mix this potion of herbs and rub it on your breast and then turn around three times and sing 'you are getting sleepy' to the tune of here comes the bride but backwards."

Or the other advice favorite, diagnose the problem with your infinite wisdom, and then stare at me benevolently. As if (in very Freudian logic) the diagnosis itself will solve the problem.

He's teething.
He's got gas.
His day is too exciting.
His day isn't exciting enough.
He's just going into a different phase.

A different phase? Oh I hadn't noticed. What with my uppity career I'm only in charge of him sixteen hours a day... that's obviously not enough time to know anything about what my son is like. Please, enlighten me.

Dripping sarcasm aside, I have tried out different amounts of all offered advice, and while nothing has worked to make him sleep, some things have worked to make me feel better about it. One initiative I started recently is to get Harvey on a stricter evening routine. I feed him in the high-chair, then bathe him, then play with him on the floor for a while while I get him dressed, then read a story and nurse him to top it off. If he doesn't fall asleep by the end of that (which happens about half the time), then Dan gets a turn for putting him to bed. It hasn't helped with the amount of sleep we get during the night, but it does help make our evenings feel a bit more tidy. And it has the added benefit that I now have an excuse for not going to the gym for the next ten to twenty years.

Of course, hope springs eternal. Harvey is sleeping now and he may well stay that way until tomorrow. My friends and relatives may find problems of their own to diagnose. I might lose my job and get time to nap during the day. You never know! The amazing might happen! Life is unpredictable!

Just like a seven-month old's sleeping patterns.

Then we were like "Oh well. My iPhone tells the time."

Anyway, it's nice to have a real clock ticking in the house again. And not only ticking, but chiming away every fifteen minutes. This way you know precisely how many quarter hours have passed when you're sitting up in the middle of the night with a 7-month-old who has decided that sleep is for the weak.

However, the clock still rebels against me and Dan and technological progress. (You'd think it would understand, as its sole purpose is to sound off the inevitable march of time). As if to tell us to slow down in our busy lives, the clock now chimes the hour immeasurably slowly. I'm talking several seconds between beats. If you're only counting with half an ear, it sounds like "One... Two.... okay I've stopped listening now... four... what, is it still chiming?... is that six?... sixteen? OKAY I GET IT! IT'S LIKE A BILLION O'CLOCK!!!"

Now I just need an earpiece that compresses the sound of the chimes to a more reasonable speed. I think there's an app for that.

But yes it's true. This morning I notice that my Eddie Bauer mom jeans were fitting a little looser than normal. Then I noticed that Eddie Bauer had conveniently placed a button on either hip with which to tighten the waste-band. Thanks Eddie Bower! All that prep scaling mountains has really helped you figure out your way around a woman's assular region.

Anyway, it appears that I have finally dropped the last few pounds of the fifty I put on during a certain person's gestational period (I won't name names...) I'd been within spitting distance since November, which is code for not-trying-anymore distance. or let-me-just-consume-the-remainder-of-this-baby-food distance, or I-never-leave-the-house-so-who-cares-anyway distance. But then in January we ran out of money, and I cancelled my credit card, and then frappachinos suddenly stopped appearing on my desk next to my keyboard. And really, that was it. No great act of will on my part to lose the last few pounds. I just started obsessively worrying about money all the time, and the pounds just melted away!

So despite the telltale dirt-stains of poverty on my clothes, I've been feeling pretty good about myself as I walk around the ole neighborhood. And it must show, because on the way back from the walk the NStar workman fixing the pole outside my house tipped his head and touched the brim of his hard-hat in a fashion I haven't seen since before I got impregnated. Indeed, perhaps nobody has seen since 1954. I mean really, who tips their hard-hat anymore? Outside of porn?

Oh Power Man, you're making me blush. I'm a married woman!