I’m a generalist, or maybe just undecided.
Happy Birthday, Zebediah Xerxes!
I still haven’t written out a birth story, but one year ago this time, I had been in the hospital for about eight hours, with another 12-plus to go before the c-section.
Zeb has, amazingly, been getting to sleep for the night before nine the past few days, so I hope he will not be up at 10:33 pm tonight to celebrate the exact time of his birth.
Updated to add: Of course he stayed up late tonight. Also, it was apparently 10:34, not 10:33.
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.
Zebediah’s got 78 books on his LibraryThing catalog, and almost all of them are gifts, either new or used. One of the hand-me-down books is “My First Animal Board Book.”
The blub on the back says:
The best-selling first word and picture book of animals that helps children develop essential vocabulary.
The blub is surrounded by pictures taken from the book: a tiger, a starfish, a caterpillar, a salamander, and a clown fish. All good words and nice pictures, but essential?
Don’t worry. I’m not trying to drill my almost-five month old baby in vocabulary. He likes to grab the book, or turn its pages, or chew on it about as much as he does his other books.
When he spots a cat who is not in motion, Zebediah gets quiet and just stares at her intently for a long time, and maybe makes a short little cooing sound.
When the cats get near, he tries to touch them, by which I mean grab their hair. We don’t let him, but I have to say if the Princess waves her tail in his face, she is just asking for it to be grabbed.
On the other hand, the Goddess has walked right over the two of us while we were nursing, and Zebediah didn’t seem to notice. At least he didn’t wake up.
In other cat news, the cooler weather or a second wind or something seems to have perked up the Goddess, as we caught her up on the counter eating the Princess’s food. This means we have to go back to the old system of separating them at mealtimes, which nobody likes.
A friend gave us a onesie for Zebediah that has “Made in [State We Live In] on the front (and the title of this post on the back).
Of course, although he was born here, he wasn’t “made” here. It got me to imagining a gift shop next to Alma Mater Clinic’s fancy new offices selling onesies with mottos like “Made with pride* at AMC” or “Excellently ICSI’d in NYC” or “Designer Baby by Midwest PGD Lab.”
The problem would be placement of course, because the gift shop would have to be out of sight of all the women going through their ivf cycles, and of course the pregnant ones and the parents aren’t hanging out at the clinic anymore. Maybe they could send mail order offers along with the form letter follow up.
*I typed this as “made with price,” which might also be appropriate.
