Photo by Henry

What I see...

What they see...

A little woo

Late Sunday afternoon, I headed off for a solitary trip to Dirty Kroger. When I left, Peter was in the kitchen with Henry, James in his arms. Grocery shopping alone has become one of my luxuries, and I enjoyed myself plenty picking out tapioca starch and a new toothbrush. But when I was standing in line to pay, I was hit by a sudden lurch of panic, as if I were supposed to have the boys with me but had accidentally forgotten them somewhere.
Of all the hundreds of things I get scared about regularly, this is actually not one of them. I'm convinced that the intense and harrowing early weeks postpartum were, in part, nature's design to make sure that I never ever ever could forget from then until I die that I now am a mother.
A friend of mine who lived in LA told me once that a certain area of her brain was given over at all times to tracking traffic patterns so whatever else she was doing, humming along behind the scenes was her brain, working out how to get where, when, by which route. My brain now operates in the same way with respect to Henry and James, so that even when I am reading, or cooking, or talking to a friend, or crying my eyes out, I am also always keeping a mental eye on where they are, what trouble they could be getting into, and what needs to happen when to move them along to the next thing. In other words, the panicky feeling at Kroger was not just unpleasant, but truly surprising.
When I got home, I immediately started telling Peter about it.
"That's very strange," he said. "Because the whole time you were gone, Henry was inconsolable. He was crying and said his stomach hurt and that you were not going to come home. It was like he had some kind of panic attack."
I said something vague, and hopeful, about attenuated attunement across space, thinking a little about gold to airy thinness beat.
"A psychic tentacle," suggested Peter. He then went on to float the theory that the barometric pressure was awry and acting on us each independently in a similar way.
Oh, OK, fine. Still, the whole thing seemed very strange, as I kept feeling the need to say all evening. And I felt, momentarily, ever so slightly nudged back toward the optimistic agnosticism about the mysteries of the human condition that used to be mine.

James at nine months

Height: 28.25"
Weight: 19 lbs. 4 oz.
Head circumference: 45.4 cm.
Which puts him in the 50th percentile right down the line.
His iron levels are a little low. I'm following roughly this approach to feeding him and would prefer not to mess around with iron-fortified cereal or supplements, so I'll make sure to give him more meat and do more cooking for him in cast-iron. He'll be rechecked in December.
Meanwhile, he remains as stinky a sleeper as ever. We were up seven times before 4:30 this morning, and I haven't been back to sleep since. His otherwise satisfactory doctor has nothing to suggest beyond leaving him alone in a room in the dark to cry. (When we were going through similar troubles with Henry, the doctor told his responding to his cries would--and I quote--"create a monster.") Leaving aside my profound discomfort with following that advice, it is a practical impossibility, in our 2-bedroom, 900-square-foot house.

In which the Swedish dancing girls make an appearance

Things have been really difficult around here the last few weeks. James's sleeping habits have gone from bad to worse--night after night he wakes up eight, nine, ten times or more. And oh, I have a lot to say about sleep, sleep-deprivation, motherhood, rage, expert advice, toddlers and discipline, and the difference between child-abusers and the rest of us (hint: it involves being able to get help when you need it), but writing all that is just too damn exhausting.

So here's what I've got instead.

Postprandial conversation on the near west side.
Me: I'm thinking of going to a movie on Thursday night. That OK with you?
Peter: Oh! (Expressive of amazement, because I haven't gone to a movie in the theater for more than 3 years). Sure. I guess we can have our frat party here.
Me: Call in the Swedish dancing girls.
Henry: I want to have the girlie party Wednesday.
Me: That's nice. You want me to feel included, huh?
Henry: I want to have a girlie party RIGHT NOW.
Me: Who's going to come to your girlie party?
Henry: Girlies! (Duh.)
Me: Who are the girlies?
Henry: The girlies are aminals. Who live in the water.
Me: What do they look like?
Henry: They look like lily pads with frogs on them and the frogs go up up in the sky.
Peter: I think this sounds more like an acid party.

Snips and snails etc.

Henry was ranging freely around the house this morning in the altogether, stroking his arms & his belly, the way one does, when he suddenly stopped to ask a question.
"What am I made of?"
Oh, dear. I made a stab at it. "You're made of skin and blood and bones and organs."
Which seemed, mostly, to satisfy him. He did want to see how far I was sticking to my story, by asking me what every single other person he could think of that he knows is made of. And then he threw in what he clearly knew was a trick question, slyly smiling. "What's Planty [Mom's cat] made of?" I said he was made of the same stuff as the rest of us, plus fur, at which point Henry moved on to another disquisition on butts for James's benefit.

(That's the same James, by the way, who is now pulling himself up to standing and then letting go--so that he can clap--and not falling down.)

Eight months of James

For James on your monthday: Eight of the uncountable things I love about you.

1. The manic chortle you give right before I nurse you.
2. That I am, right now, your alpha and omega.
3. That I won't always be.
4. Watching you watch your brother, and seeing the seed of a relationship quite independent of me. (I hope it's a good one.)
5. Hearing you work the expressive possibilities of a single syllable, "bla," from joy to irate complaint.
6. The slightly anxious look you sometimes get after you've been smiling as beamishly as possible, as if you aren't quite sure that you're doing this new "emotions" thing right.
7. Your new-found love of clapping.
8. That you needed me and nuzzled me and tied me to the future right through the saddest week of my life. And you're still doing it.

Because I'm worth it?

 Since I am woefully behind in my posting, I will just throw out a few random vignettes of our lives from the last few weeks.


1. My dear friend Ray was visiting last weekend. A tale-spinner, a phrase-turner, a word-coiner, a musician, a polymath, he also happens, by day and for pay, to be a historian, the author of a book about police in post-war Germany. So his gift to Henry was a perfect choice, coming from him: a toy police car. Ray was laboring under the misapprehension that Henry's passion for garbage trucks & mailmen reflects a prejudice in favor of civic officialdom, and that he would therefore rather have a police car than a Caterpillar truck. Henry in fact has an equal passion for all noisemaking motorized vehicles. In any case, he is completely smitten with the car, and takes it to bed with him at night. He speculated aloud about who might be driving it. "Maybe it's a police man," he said. And then, gladdening my feminist heart, he added, "Or maybe it's a police woman." Further thought. "Or maybe it's a police boy."
If I were a police department, I would definitely look into that. Sort of like candy-stripers.

In the poppin' hole.

2. One day at naptime, Henry was in his room building himself a poppin' hole, his term for a nestlike construct of blankets & pillows. The pillows were refractory, and he called out for me to come help him stack them up to his orders. I said I thought that was a job he should handle himself, and that he could do whatever he needed to with the pillows. "No, mama," he said. "I'm a little tiny boy, so I don't can do it."

3. One evening he & I were looking out his bedroom window noticing how pink the sky looked as the sun was setting. Henry listened, properly unconvinced, to my vague speculations about the trajectory of the sun and clouds and the Earth's atmosphere, then he proposed his theory: "Maybe a digger came by and made it pink."

On the move

4. James! He's on the move! Just in the last week, he has started crawling, sitting up on his own, pulling himself to standing, and occasionally taking naps.  Henry now spends a lot of his time rushing around officiously snatching away anything he thinks James might possibly be about to crawl to/touch/put in his mouth, saying "No, James," in an ultra-bossy tone. He likes to educate James, holding up objects and repeating their names loudly and with unnatural clarity, as if he were a missionary amongst the savages. Example: one day, we were in the bathroom changing diapers, and Henry turned his backside to James, pointing at himself and enunciating over and over, "Butt, James. Butt."

5. And finally, on one of our near-daily trips to the Banneker Community Center and its huge playroom filled with toys, a 7-year-old boy I'd seen there several times before seemed finally to get up the nerve to ask me a question that had been bugging him for a while now: "How come your hair's so gray?"