The next Mary Lou

Yesterday Doug was in the nursery with Harrison when he called, "Help, help, help—I need your help!" Now I'll save the gory details for any coprophiles that specifically request them, but let's just say that what I saw when I went in there will forever be known in our household as The Poop Handstand.

Image: his pal al

Image: men

Victory!

He said it! After months of motherly coaching, Harrison finally says “mama.” Well, actually it’s more like “mamamamamamama,” but I’ll take it! Doug has been working to get him to say “dada” first, but he failed!

That is indisputable, scientific proof that Harrison loves me better.

(Of course, he has been saying, “babababa” for weeks, which is the Vietnamese equivalent of “dada,” but we’re in America here, folks, so under both US diplomatic and international law, I win fair and square.)

My precious

The other day Doug was observing the otherwise naked, bediapered, and devilishly grinning Harrison crawling on the couch and noted that he looks a lot like Gollum.

And he's right!

Reflections on Our Weekend

Bad:

Being woken up by a shrieking demon at 4:40 AM. (Doug reminisced Saturday that bars in Buffalo don’t even close until 4.)

Only having time to take a shower on either Saturday or Sunday, but not both.

Realizing at 8:45 PM on Saturday that for the fourth day in a row, even though you have talons on your fingers and toes, you just don’t have the energy required to cut your nails.

Discovering that after 8 hours of crawling, singing, standing, playing with toys, pulling up on furniture, playing with baby-safe household objects, looking out the window, playing with marginally dangerous household objects, and reading 27 board books-- there’s nothing new left to do. And Harrison’s bored. And you’ve still got 4 hours until bedtime.

Best:

Having the time to bring Harrison into our bed when he first wakes up. (I would write, “when he first wakes up in the morning,” but I object to classifying 4:40 AM as morning.) He almost always falls back asleep, and he usually gravitates mama-ward, until he’s practically on top of me. This smooshedness forces me to balance on the edge of the mattress, so close to falling out of bed that I often can’t fall back asleep. It also makes me swoon with Bubby-love. I may not be able to breathe with his head pressed into my face, but his hair smells oh-so-good.

Once he’s awake, it’s what Doug and I call Party Time. He roams around the bed. He terrorizes the poor cats. He scales the headboard. He comes at you, open-mouthed, and leaves a path of drool across your face not unlike snail goo. He squeals and yells and laughs. He stands up and jumps up and down like a kangaroo. He hugs, cuddles, and nuzzles blankets, pillows, and humans.

Sigh…wish I was there now. . .

Image: bed

Enabler

Lest you think I have no competition for the title of Parent with Most Inappropriate Sense of Humor (PaMISH), behold these new children’s books Doug’s cooking up, inspired by one of Harrison’s favorites: Caillou Takes a Bath

Caillou Pimps Out His Sister
Caillou Breaks His Crack Pipe
Caillou Brings a Gun to School

He’s genius. Genius, I tell you. Mwah ha ha ha!

Harrison is so screwed.

Somebody please think of the children!

Yesterday, Harrison had his nine-month well-baby visit with the pediatrician. His checkups always start out with a visit from the nurse. We’re asked to strip him down completely (read: no diaper) before placing him on the scale. This is always a bit daunting, especially since at a prior visit he peed all over the wall, Kleenex box, paper towels, and sink. No golden showers this time, and Harrison continued to place in the featherweight class: 18 pounds, 6 ounces and 27 inches long--somewhere around the 20th percentile. His head circumference, though, continues to push the 70th percentile.*

My son is a Bobblehead.

The next part of the exam consists of a Q&A: how much does he sleep/eat/poop; is he crawling/talking/standing/waving etc.--all the standard questions to determine whether Harrison is developing normally. She then asked us if we have a car seat and whether or not we read to him. This probably strikes you as odd, right? And troubling that apparently there are some people out there who have been driving around for nine months with their infants loose in the car? And parents who don’t read to their babies?

The advice to play, sing, talk, and read to your baby is everywhere. It comes in the mail as part of promotional materials with baby merchandise: “Babies need stimulation: Buy this Fisher-Price hunk of plastic! Talk to your baby!” It’s on the leaflets that the pediatrician hands out: “Things to do with your 6-month old: Play with your baby. Hold your baby.” Seriously. Does this mean that I could have skipped the playing and the holding in months 0-5? There’s also a new public service announcement campaign in Rochester that shows real mothers singing, cooing, and dancing with their infants: “Babies minds don’t develop on their own. Play with your baby,” the voiceover says.

My grandmother once advocated that people should have to successfully raise and train a dog before they could apply for a childbearing license. I think she was on to something…

* That should explain the difficulty I had pushing him out. Speaking of pushing, a coworker-friend’s sister just had a baby last week and broke her tailbone during labor. Apparently, this is a freak occurrence, but it also happened to her other sister a few years earlier. Needless to say, my coworker, who has yet to have children, is a bit worried that there’s some mutant weak-tailbone gene in her family.

Image: daydreaming

Image: squint

Scar

The experience of pregnancy, birth, and raising an infant obviously effects both a physical and an emotional transformation on the parents. Reaching that conclusion is not rocket science. However, it’s becoming clearer that people assume that the transition to parenthood also implies a personality transplant, emphasized by a complete lack of cynicism or sarcasm. Making fun at the expense of my child seems to be the biggest no-no, and surely the sign of a bad mothering instinct.

Pollyanna motherhood might be an assumed natural instinct, but isn’t it also human nature to prey on the weak? Face it—Harrison is an easy and defenseless target for parental mockery. And this kid doesn’t know the word ma-ma from the word da-da, so what’s the harm? I tell him that if he pulls my hair one more time I’m going to send him to the orphanage or leave him in a basket on the church doorstep. I ridicule him for orally pleasuring the base of his Fisher Price stacking rings. I occasionally refer to him as The Beast.

Again, let me emphasize that for all Harrison knows, I’m reciting the benign adventures of Noah and his ark. Yet voicing this sort of commentary in front of others usually provokes some sort of disapproving reaction. I’m sorry, but the fact of the matter is that, beloved though my boy is, when he sits there forcefully banging his head against the wall and smiling, he looks like a mental patient. “That’s not nice,” someone said to me the other day after I made a similar observation. When I noted that Harrison’s head scar would garner him street cred as a juvenile, Maureen, our day care provider said, “Aww… “ with pity. Was she feeling sorry for Harrison that he has such a horrific scar or that he has a mother that would make fun of it? I think it was the latter.

You should not think that these benevolent expressions are meant to save Harrison from maternal abuse, for usually they are made when Harrison is not even there. Sometimes they are made in reaction to a comment that I make to another adult over email. Like most parents, I believe that my son is hyper-intelligent, and maybe he does somehow understand me when I call him “Monster,” but I am not so delusional about my son’s abilities that I believe he can read. Or use a computer. Or hack into my email.

Please don’t be worried that Harrison’s going require lifelong psychotherapy when I write to you about my son, the mental patient. You should instead be thankful that I haven’t morphed into a saccharine June Cleaver. That would be more disturbing.

Experiment

It's comforting that Ashley agrees that "firstborn" is just a euphemism for "Practice Kid."

Hold on a minute. . .that means I was the Practice Kid.

Freud was right

Yesterday, on Oprah's show about controlling mothers and their estranged children, she said something to this effect: "Psychologists agree that the nature and success of all--ALL--of one's relationships is determined by one's relationship with his or her mother." Not parents. Not fathers. Mothers.

Feeling no pressure. Nope. None at all. . .

Image: bed

Image: baby jail

Forty

Around 10:30 tomorrow night, Harrison will turn 40 weeks old. This birthday is probably of significance only to those of you who have ever been pregnant, for a baby’s due date is determined by measuring out 40 weeks from the date of conception. Harrison’s due date was May 4, 2004*, though he stubbornly refused to vacate the premises even though his lease was up. As too many of you witnessed first hand, it took a vacuum extractor suctioned firmly to his slippery head to finally evict him from his cozy abode after 41 weeks and 1 day of residence.

The point of the matter is that in just a few days, Harrison will have existed longer externally than he did internally, and that makes me profoundly sad. He has hit all of the milestones—grasping, rolling, sitting, crawling, and now pulling up—as if he had them scheduled in a PDA, but despite the feelings of wonder and pride that these accomplishments have engendered, it’s hard not to also realize that his babyhood is slipping away and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. When Doug pointed out Saturday that Harrison’s first tooth was finally erupting, I lost my shit.

While I was pregnant, some author I was reading theorized that the aim of all that we humans do in life is to get to a place where we feel as secure and happy as we did in utero. Perhaps mothers are likewise always yearning for that same, pure emotional connection--that perfect ability to protect their children--which they had while pregnant.

I don’t mean to romanticize either my 41 weeks of pregnancy or Harrison’s first 40 weeks in the big, wide world, but for mothers, and for mothers alone, the 40-week mark is a different kind of milestone, a bittersweet one, and that deserves a mention.

Happy forty-week birthday, my baby boy.

*which, conincidentally, is baby Yanoski's due date in '05

Image: at eight months

Launch

Well, it was inevitable. Me blogging, that is. I've been lurking on dooce and finslippy for a year now. Besides, Val, Tara, and Ash are all doing it, and I want to be one of the cool kids. It's time to add my voice to the electronic fray. So, here it is--a place for me to unsystematically and sporadically archive random minutiae for all you Harrison-lovers out there. This blog will be dedicated to him, my little hellion.