And You Thought “Rock-a-bye Baby” Was Aggressive

Amongst the pile of hand-me-downs we got recently were a couple of baby buntings, just as I was looking online to buy one. This means I don’t get to buy a jungle-print bunting with my REI dividend (”I’ve never seen such a large dividend,” said the cashier–for IVF3 I decided to hell with privacy and put a lot of the fees on my REI VISA card). It’s just as well, since Zebediah will probably only need something that warm for a week or two around here.

I thought I might want to know the words to “Bye baby bunting” when Zebediah does wear his bunting, so I looked it up in the Annotated Mother Goose. The version in that book begins “Bee baw bunting.” A note says “bunting” was a term of endearment.

More interesting was another lullaby (?!) on the same page, “Baby, baby, naughty baby,” that threatens the “squalling” child with a cannibalistic Bonaparte:

And he’ll beat you, beat, you, beat you,

And he’ll beat you all to pap,

And he’ll eat you, eat you , eat you,

Every morsel snap, snap, snap.

I bookmarked the page for Mr. Luo. ZX doesn’t cry that much anymore–except when he’s home with his dad while I’m at group therapy, which happens to coincide with a fussy time of day.

Fascination

Ceiling fans are for infants.

The baby in the mirror is old news.

But the digital alarm clock with the big red numbers is AMAZING!

Cats are cool too. Especially sitting in front of the alarm clock.

That’s all.

It’s Not Fear of Commitment, Just Paranoia

Am I warped, or do other parents wonder about this?

How can I promise always to be there for my kid, when so many things can happen to prevent it? Aside from the fact that eventually, the best case scenario is that the parent predeceases the child, I could get hit by a truck tomorrow, or die of cancer in ten years, or who knows what.

Maybe I’ve read too many children’s books. All those orphans.

Amongst my friends, I know women who as children lost their mothers to suicide and cancer. Then there’s the old abandonment by father, but that is a choice, so it seems different. (Suicide may seem like a choice, but I’m counting it in the category of illness. I remember the slide, way back when, into believing that the people I loved would be better off without me. On the other hand, I didn’t let myself do it, because I’m stubborn, or as the doctors say, have a “strong superego,” so there may be an element of choice.) My father’s father died when he was a teenager.

And it’s not like the middle-aged people I know who’ve lost parents took it in stride, with an “Ah, well, natural order of things and all that, tally ho.”

I think Jody has it right. You make the promise through actions, not words.

And count me among those who found the book I’ll Love You Forever creepy. This was a few years ago, and I was assured that it was touching to all mothers, but I still think it’s a bit much, although I’m all for loving your kid forever and getting loved back.

Happy Buy Nothing Day

One of the differences between my husband and I is that I like the idea of “Buy Nothing Day” whereas he, Mr. Capitalist, does not. If he didn’t hate to shop, he’d probably buy things just to make his point.

In truth, I avoid most stores the Friday after Thanksgiving because I can’t deal with crowds these days. And if I happen to realize I’m out of milk or something, I don’t postpone buying it just to stick to Buy Nothing Day.

Today, we went to see a new medium-sized city park. We’d planned to take a family walk yesterday (as opposed to the normal Luo Lin and Zebediah morning walk), but between the baby’s choice of nap times and the glazed ham’s choice of how long to take to get warmed up, it didn’t happen.

As we were driving home, I spotted the bike store, and made a quick left turn. My husband needs some powdered electrolyte drink to take on our trip so that he can recover from his exercise. The plan was to get it Monday, but we’ll be very busy then, and since we were driving right by, and the store was open…

“We’re shopping today? What about Buy Nothing Day?” he asked.

Buy Nothing links:

Redneck Mother wonders if it is preaching to the converted:

Hermits like me stay home no matter what, while folks jonesing for bargains aren’t going to call off the hunt just because Adbusters says so.

Chicago Mama reminds us that “saving” might not be the right word for what goes on at the sales:

I feel a bit silly for pointing this out but…I wanted to make sure that everyone reading this blog has been told (at least somewhere) that they are, in fact, not saving money when they go out and spend money.

American Family gets sucked in to a sale:

I got home at 3:30 a.m. I doubt I will ever need to experience that kind of shopping insanity ever again.

Jody likes the Black Friday energy, but does her shopping at other times and places.

I know the sales rush is idiotic and possibly even evil, but I find the energy around shopping malls on the day after Thanksgiving strangely attractive.

I was hoping to give all the relatives baby pictures this year, but that means I have to get organized. It needs some “value added” (I’ve been reading Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle), since they’ve already received plenty of photos by email.

In theory, I believe we don’t need to get Zebediah Christmas presents, because he’ll get plenty from his grandparents and he has no idea what is going on and will be most happy ripping up the paper and we’ll be packing everything up to move shortly afterwards. In practice, I’ll probably see something I can’t resist in the next few weeks.

His present for next year is already picked out. We just discovered that Duplos, which we thought were for age 3 and up, are rated for 1 1/2 years, at least the “Brick Box.” Legos are an integral part of my husband’s pro-engineering propaganda. (Luo Lin, after reading Microserfs: “Are all computer scientists Lego fans like these guys?” Mr.Luo: “Of course”.)

For the life of me, I cannot remember how I got from looking at a play kitchen on Amazon to thinking “hmm, maybe I’ll double check the Lego site to see if it really is all for age three and up” (which was the impression we got the last time we looked).

Gratitude

This was supposed to be ” Pre-Thanksgiving Gratitude,”  but it’s past midnight again.

Just glad that we are not travelling for TG. We’ve got what I am sure will be a tiring trip coming up later, but today I got to listen to NPR talk about travel hassles while hanging out on the floor with Zebediah.

Now that it is officially Thanksgiving, I’ll add gratitude for:

Zebediah Xerxes  is here!

most of our extended families are healthy

things are going well with the house-buying adventure

my husband made chocolate truffles for our TG dessert (though I was sad to give up my holiday pie making)

Negotiating

I am mostly over the desire for everyone to like me, and I’ve never even met our seller yet. Still, every time we made a counter-offer and yesterday when we proposed a post-inspection addendum to the contract, I think of all the bloggers I read who have sold houses recently and worry that we are like the annoying buyers that they have complained about.

Exciting New Trend

Today Four days ago (?) at 4:00am, I read two blog posts that mentioned Shadrach.

Housing

Things I will not miss about our current home:

• The stairs. When I was a kid, I wanted to live in a house with stairs. Now I just think they are inconvenient at best, and a death-trap at worst.
• The carpet.
• The very steep alley/driveway, especially taking the trash cans down it every week.
• Certain architectural / acoustical features that make it so that in the bedroom you can hear everything in the living room. In fact, you can hear the living room radio better upstairs than down.
• UPDATE: and how could I forget the funky jerry-rigged dryer vent system…

Things I will miss:

• So many windows, although I don’t like cleaning them. (I can’t really say “I won’t miss cleaning the windows” because I don’t wash them very often.
• High ceilings.
• The driveway/alley, because I don’t have to back into the street.
• Our neighbor / landlady.
• Also, her cat.
• Also, having somebody else be responsible for repairs.
• Living only two miles from Fancy Grocery Store and the Yoga place (and the farmer’s market that we rarely attend).
• The view from the second floor deck, even if part of the view is of a freeway interchange.
• The feeling of privacy I have because even the first floor is above street level.
• The wooded lot behind us, which is gone now anyway.

After Midnight

Apparently my life is just too exciting and exhausting to get posts out. Lesson: stop waiting until after the baby goes to bed to post.

Small Pleasures

I finally hired someone to come and clean our carpets. Zebediah can’t crawl yet, but he can move around enough to reach the edge of his mat (by which I mean beach towels on the floor).

In an attempt to pretend I didn’t care that much, I would joke about it: “Don’t touch the cootie carpet, baby!” We vacuum and try to clean up the messes, but five years of a sick cat, a healthy cat with hairballs, and no end of food dropped off the table (whose bright idea was it to have carpet in the dining area anyway?) makes for a dirty carpet. It would not have been inaccurate to call it positively yucky.

So now it’s clean, and I hope the “organic” chemicals they used aren’t too bad. There weren’t any fumes that I could smell, but we aired out the house anyway. And vacuumed on our own after the floors dried.

There are still stains, but fewer cooties, so I’m happy. I will also be happy to be moving to a house with no wall-to-wall carpets sometime soon.

It did make me think about recent conversations from a month ago about hiring other people to clean one’s home. I don’t want to hire a maid, for some of the same reasons Jody wrote about (check back in a few years to see if I’ve held on to my scruples) but for an exceptional heavy job like this, the only reason I didn’t do it sooner was that I didn’t have enough energy to arrange it. I knew that if I rented one of those rug cleaners they have in supermarkets that I would get frustrated to the point of tears at my inability to get the carpet properly clean. With the professionals, I trust their judgment about the stains (”the Gatorade stain won’t come out unless we bring out the nasty chemicals”).

On the other hand, I got very annoyed at things like their inability to clean the corners. One of the things I noticed about my friends who hired maids in Old Colony was that they were often irritated when the maid didn’t do things exactly right. That may be a normal part of a service relationship-people get annoyed at waiters too.

But now I’m getting into things I am too tired to think through.