Friday, September 30, 2005
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Why do I not read parenting books?
Because they promote lies like this:
"Your child's understanding of the world is growing rapidly. For instance, he no longer thinks crayons are something to eat."
"Your child's understanding of the world is growing rapidly. For instance, he no longer thinks crayons are something to eat."
Friday, September 23, 2005
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Happy First Annual Harrison Day!
All week, I've been mentally preparing to write a very detailed post about today--First Annual Harrison Day!
It was a year ago that I, Doug, Lori, and our parents sat in a waiting room at Strong and hoped to find out that all they needed to do to fix our child was slice open his head in a hairband of ear-to-ear stitches and cut out a cyst from inside his forehead. It's a terrible thing when that is the good news, but considering the alternative, we were so relieved when the neurosurgeon came out and confirmed that that was all that needed to be done. Instead of going into great detail about Harrison's surgery and its aftermath, I'll just share a few of my most vivid memories:
The moment when the young resident came to get Harrison was absolutely the worst moment of my entire life. We had thought that one of us would be able to accompany him into the surgical unit, but we couldn't, so we waited in the staging area with him and then the resident came, we said our goodbyes, and then he picked Harrison up and carried him through the double swinging doors.
I will also never forget seeing Harrison for the first time after his surgery, propped up in the PICU on the big hospital bed, still sedated, looking perfectly fine except for the giant, bloody zig-zag sliced into his head.
Finally, I remember, just a day after the surgery, how the wonderful nurses in the regular peditric unit brought Harrison a play gym and he went crazy laughing and smiling and batting that thing, even though his head had by then swollen up to the size of a watermelon and he could barely open his eyes. That was when Doug and I knew that everything would be alright.
So that's that. I'm going to leave it behind and move onto the big news of the day, which is that last night Harrison gave Doug a big fat shiner!
You know in the old cartoons when, say, the Coyote's plans would backfire and he'd get hit on the head with a big rock or mallet and a bump would rise up to the tune of an ascending slide whistle? Well, you thought that was fiction, folks, but that is exactly what happened to Doug's upper cheekbone just after Harrison head butted him. I was in the kitchen finishing up dinner when I heard Doug run into the bathroom yelling, "Harrison just gave me black eye!" I laughed, thinking he was just kidding, but when I went out there there was this inch-wide, inch-high, dark blue, um...ball right under Doug's left eye.
He looks pretty tough today. Too bad he has to admit that he got beat up by a one-year old.
Happy First Annual Harrison Day!
It was a year ago that I, Doug, Lori, and our parents sat in a waiting room at Strong and hoped to find out that all they needed to do to fix our child was slice open his head in a hairband of ear-to-ear stitches and cut out a cyst from inside his forehead. It's a terrible thing when that is the good news, but considering the alternative, we were so relieved when the neurosurgeon came out and confirmed that that was all that needed to be done. Instead of going into great detail about Harrison's surgery and its aftermath, I'll just share a few of my most vivid memories:
The moment when the young resident came to get Harrison was absolutely the worst moment of my entire life. We had thought that one of us would be able to accompany him into the surgical unit, but we couldn't, so we waited in the staging area with him and then the resident came, we said our goodbyes, and then he picked Harrison up and carried him through the double swinging doors.
I will also never forget seeing Harrison for the first time after his surgery, propped up in the PICU on the big hospital bed, still sedated, looking perfectly fine except for the giant, bloody zig-zag sliced into his head.
Finally, I remember, just a day after the surgery, how the wonderful nurses in the regular peditric unit brought Harrison a play gym and he went crazy laughing and smiling and batting that thing, even though his head had by then swollen up to the size of a watermelon and he could barely open his eyes. That was when Doug and I knew that everything would be alright.
So that's that. I'm going to leave it behind and move onto the big news of the day, which is that last night Harrison gave Doug a big fat shiner!
You know in the old cartoons when, say, the Coyote's plans would backfire and he'd get hit on the head with a big rock or mallet and a bump would rise up to the tune of an ascending slide whistle? Well, you thought that was fiction, folks, but that is exactly what happened to Doug's upper cheekbone just after Harrison head butted him. I was in the kitchen finishing up dinner when I heard Doug run into the bathroom yelling, "Harrison just gave me black eye!" I laughed, thinking he was just kidding, but when I went out there there was this inch-wide, inch-high, dark blue, um...ball right under Doug's left eye.
He looks pretty tough today. Too bad he has to admit that he got beat up by a one-year old.
Happy First Annual Harrison Day!
Monday, September 19, 2005
Uncle Matt
Harrison's honorary Uncle Matt visited Saturday. He leaves for Mozambique and the Peace Corps a week from Wednesday, so Harrison will be three when they next meet.
We will miss you, Matt. Two years is a long time, but Doug and I will make sure that Harrison knows you when you return. We'll tell him about the good work that you are doing and how proud we are of you. We'll get out the big atlas and show him where you live, on the other side of the world. We'll show him Japan and Vietnam too and tell him about our time together there. We'll tell him how we wouldn't have met without you and how you and Aunt Lori played matchmaker, and we'll show him pictures of our wedding and point out how you stood with us as we were married.
Stay safe, Matt. Write when you can. We love you.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Babelfish
English/Harrisonese
Mama/Mama
Dada/Dada
Hi/Hi
Ball/Bah
Bubbles/Bahbah
Bye Bye/Bahbah
Banana/Bahbah
?/Beebee
Updated 9/19:
Kitty Cat/Bahbah
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
The Bottomless Pit
According to everything I've read, a child's stomach is about the size of his fist. So how is this possible?
Two slices of cantaloupe, a soy sausage patty, a half-cup serving of black beans and rice, and a mountain of wax beans.
Gone.
Two slices of cantaloupe, a soy sausage patty, a half-cup serving of black beans and rice, and a mountain of wax beans.
Gone.
Friday, September 09, 2005
Overwhelmed
As I mentioned in my last post, I've been having a hard time getting my shit together this past week. To be more precise, I embarked on my current funk about 10 days ago when the news started coming out of New Orleans—too many pictures of mothers and babies separated, reunited, dejected, and forgotten. So much has been written about the tragedy there and the reasons behind it, that I won't make an attempt since I couldn't do it justice, but I will say that I was fully cognizant of watching, reading, and hearing the reports out of the Gulf with motherhood-colored glasses. And I am angry. Angry that this happened, angry at Bush, angry at FEMA, angry at a system which does not value all of its citizens equally, angry at people that are so surprised that this is their America, and most of all angry that Harrison will learn about all of this someday. And when I say "all of this", I don't mean just the government's disgraceful response to Katrina, but the whole thing. Katrina revitalized the feelings of sadness and dejectedness I've been quietly carrying around since November.
On Labor Day weekend in 2000, before the days of Harrison and mortgage payments, I took Doug to New Orleans as a belated birthday present. We wandered the Garden District and the Quarter, had beignets and coffee at Café Du Monde, and listened to the jazz at Preservation Hall. We read in our Lonely Planet about how New Orleans was one of the most segregated and violent cities in the US, and we were a little afraid when we visited Saint Louis I Cemetery, because LP warned that its location on the Quarter/ghetto border made it dangerous for tourists.
Five years later, this Saturday morning (like most) we went to the Rochester Public Market—our favorite place in the city. I've written about it before. Like Saint Louis I, the market is located in one of Rochester's poor, primarily black neighborhoods, but not far from the thriving, urban, primarily white East, Park, and University areas. Yuppies, immigrants, neighborhood people, elderly couples all rub elbows there. The produce vendor at the end of the first set of stalls yelled,"BONANAS!" like he does every week. He called out "Three red peppers for a dollar! One dollar! One dollar! One dollar! One dollar!" and on and on until he'd run out of breath and everyone clapped and cheered. Everytime I'm there, it reminds me of the open-air markets in Vietnam, in Italy. It makes me think of places I've never been, Elizabethan markets, markets in Baghdad, or ancient Alexandria. It makes me feel connected with the diverse people that are there and all those that have come before. It is bustling with commerce in its purest and most innocent form, bursting with harvest and life, and it is invigorating.
When we returned, while Harrison napped, I learned that my coworker Linda's 19-year-old son Lee had been killed in a motorcycle accident on Friday. This family had also lost a 17-year old son seven years ago to cancer. That so much tragedy could befall one family, one wonderful mother, is impossible to fathom, and I cried thinking about Linda and her husband and the mere whisper of the possibility of ever losing Harrison, or two Harrisons.
That afternoon, we went on to a family reunion at Lime Lake and things were good, surrounded by Doug's sister, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and my three beautiful nieces and nephew. Harrison and Zoe played together on the beach and in the water.
Tuesday, after spending three straight days with him, I missed Harrison terribly, and all I could think about was that he was in his first day in the Toddler room. Things were chaotic there when I picked him up, and they had run out of daily reports, so I didn't have a good sense of his day, when he'd napped, how he'd eaten, whether or not he had pooped. There were 7 hours of his day that I didn't know about, that I couldn’t get back, which was hard, especially this week when all I wanted was to have him close. Once again I felt a crushing guilt that I had abandoned him with strangers and was a bad mother.
Then there were the idiotic and telling comments from the government, from Chertoff and then from the Bush family. On Tuesday, the California legislature passed the bill legalizing marriage between "two persons", but yesterday the Governator said he would veto it.
How is it possible that in such a short time so much has happened, to me, to friends, to strangers? That one thousand religious pilgrims died in a stampede in Baghdad? That my lovely friend Terra gave birth to the beautiful baby Beatriz Grace? That so many people in the South lost their homes, their jobs, and everything they knew? That Harrison has learned to run? That on Saturday I held him in the water and he experimented with weightlessness, pulling his feet up from the bottom and giggling, looking up at me and the sky with glee while he floated and I swished him around by his arms. That Wednesday after Lee's funeral, Linda and her family had to go home without him, but on that same night before I put Harrison down to bed he reached up and touched my lips and laughed when I smiled.
Life is terrible and full and beautiful all at once.
On Labor Day weekend in 2000, before the days of Harrison and mortgage payments, I took Doug to New Orleans as a belated birthday present. We wandered the Garden District and the Quarter, had beignets and coffee at Café Du Monde, and listened to the jazz at Preservation Hall. We read in our Lonely Planet about how New Orleans was one of the most segregated and violent cities in the US, and we were a little afraid when we visited Saint Louis I Cemetery, because LP warned that its location on the Quarter/ghetto border made it dangerous for tourists.
Five years later, this Saturday morning (like most) we went to the Rochester Public Market—our favorite place in the city. I've written about it before. Like Saint Louis I, the market is located in one of Rochester's poor, primarily black neighborhoods, but not far from the thriving, urban, primarily white East, Park, and University areas. Yuppies, immigrants, neighborhood people, elderly couples all rub elbows there. The produce vendor at the end of the first set of stalls yelled,"BONANAS!" like he does every week. He called out "Three red peppers for a dollar! One dollar! One dollar! One dollar! One dollar!" and on and on until he'd run out of breath and everyone clapped and cheered. Everytime I'm there, it reminds me of the open-air markets in Vietnam, in Italy. It makes me think of places I've never been, Elizabethan markets, markets in Baghdad, or ancient Alexandria. It makes me feel connected with the diverse people that are there and all those that have come before. It is bustling with commerce in its purest and most innocent form, bursting with harvest and life, and it is invigorating.
When we returned, while Harrison napped, I learned that my coworker Linda's 19-year-old son Lee had been killed in a motorcycle accident on Friday. This family had also lost a 17-year old son seven years ago to cancer. That so much tragedy could befall one family, one wonderful mother, is impossible to fathom, and I cried thinking about Linda and her husband and the mere whisper of the possibility of ever losing Harrison, or two Harrisons.
That afternoon, we went on to a family reunion at Lime Lake and things were good, surrounded by Doug's sister, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and my three beautiful nieces and nephew. Harrison and Zoe played together on the beach and in the water.
Tuesday, after spending three straight days with him, I missed Harrison terribly, and all I could think about was that he was in his first day in the Toddler room. Things were chaotic there when I picked him up, and they had run out of daily reports, so I didn't have a good sense of his day, when he'd napped, how he'd eaten, whether or not he had pooped. There were 7 hours of his day that I didn't know about, that I couldn’t get back, which was hard, especially this week when all I wanted was to have him close. Once again I felt a crushing guilt that I had abandoned him with strangers and was a bad mother.
Then there were the idiotic and telling comments from the government, from Chertoff and then from the Bush family. On Tuesday, the California legislature passed the bill legalizing marriage between "two persons", but yesterday the Governator said he would veto it.
How is it possible that in such a short time so much has happened, to me, to friends, to strangers? That one thousand religious pilgrims died in a stampede in Baghdad? That my lovely friend Terra gave birth to the beautiful baby Beatriz Grace? That so many people in the South lost their homes, their jobs, and everything they knew? That Harrison has learned to run? That on Saturday I held him in the water and he experimented with weightlessness, pulling his feet up from the bottom and giggling, looking up at me and the sky with glee while he floated and I swished him around by his arms. That Wednesday after Lee's funeral, Linda and her family had to go home without him, but on that same night before I put Harrison down to bed he reached up and touched my lips and laughed when I smiled.
Life is terrible and full and beautiful all at once.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
The last dog days
Between a weeklong cold that is still kicking my ass and feeling overwhelmed and sickened by the reports and images of the horrible goings-on in the South, I've been negligent in posting.
Here are some images of a different sort from our much-needed long weekend.
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