Some firsts I'd rather skip

The first year of your child's life is just a series of milestones, one after the other. The first smile. The first word. The first steps. The first trip to the emergency room.

Yes, last Sunday, The Husband and I had the delightful pleasure of taking our baby to the ER to make sure he had not jammed his teeth back up into his head possibly embedding them in his brain. (Short version: He hadn't.) It had happened very suddenly. We had just gotten back from church and The Husband was making grilled cheese sandwiches while I searched for a recipe for cranberry bread and Jack played in the cabinet with the pots and pans. The next thing we knew, he had fallen on his face and blood was pouring from his mouth. Mouths bleed a lot, people.

This was not our first experience with this phenomenon, because Jack has fallen on his mouth at least four other times this year. This was more blood than I had seen, however, and I find bleeding from the mouth particularly troubling, as it is very difficult to see the extent of the damage what with all the crying and wailing and blood pouring out and all. Does he need stitches? Who can tell? At any rate, I held Jack upside down to try and look in there and in the brief flashes I could get, it looked to me like Jack's two front teeth had receded into his gums by at least 50%. I said, "That's it, we're going to the emergency room," and off we went.

I should take a moment here to tell The Husband's side of the story, which is that I "panic" every time Jack gets hurt. He bases this claim on the way I say, "Oh! He's bleeding! Oh! Oh! The blood! Does he need stitches? Should we take him to the ER? How do we clean it? Oh, he's swollen! His lip is swollen! The blood! The blood!" and things along those lines. But it is my position that I do not panic, it's just that I let The Husband be the one in charge of determining the extent of the damage while I take over the job of comforting the screaming, bleeding baby. I do this because I can let him be the one in charge. He's right there, all ready to take charge with his cool, calm, former lifeguard head. If he were not there, however, I would be quite capable of cleaning up the blood and driving to the ER all by myself, because I'd have to be. So no, I don't panic.

So. The ER. The Husband and I were pretty sure that Jack's teeth were probably fine, because he wasn't even crying anymore by the time we were packing him into his car seat, but we weren't going to take any chances with his teeth. He was triaged and registered within 20 minutes of our arrival, and then we had to settle down to wait. The Husband bought Jack a muffin because none of us had had lunch, and Jack had no problems chomping away at it. By the time we were finally seen by the nurse practitioner, Jack was biting a paper cup and pulling on it with his hands, further convincing us that his teeth were fine.

When the NP took a look, he told us that Jack had split his funiculus (that piece of skin that connects the top lip to the gums), but that his teeth looked fine to him. His gums had just swollen up, and that was what made me think his teeth had been jammed. The NP did suggest that we get a dentist to take an x-ray to make sure there was no root damage, and we did that on Saturday. Actually, we didn't. We took him to the dentist, but the dentist said an x-ray wasn't really necessary since Jack's teeth weren't even chipped.

And so it all ended well. Jack's teeth are fine, his funiculus appears to have healed, and we've all agreed that he has filled his quota of accidents for the next year and there will be no more falling on his mouth. We've AGREED.

It won't... stop... beeping...

There was a period of time when I was in high school that I slept in the attic. During this time, I also worked at a small convenience store as a cashier, and occasionally I had to work the 6am-11am shift on Saturdays which required that I get up at 5:30. Now, I am not one who rises easily, so this was, to put it mildly, a challenge. I typically set my alarm - which was always set to the horrible screeching buzzer and never to the music that stood no chance of awakening me - for 5:00 so that I could hit snooze several times before being late. Since I usually had no memory at all of the first and sometimes second times I hit snooze, I felt this 30 minute cushion was a necessity.

My brother, who slept in the room at the bottom of the attic stairs, felt differently.

"Mo," he said to me one Friday night. "If your alarm goes off more than once tomorrow morning, I am going to have to kill you." He was very polite about it, but he really felt he had no alternative. So that night I set the alarm for 5:20 with great trepidation, but also with the full intention of getting up as soon as it went off to spare my brother the morning Chinese alarm torture.

HONK! HONK! HONK!

I awoke with a start, leapt to my alarm and started hammering the snooze button. I wasn't going to use the snooze button, at least, not in the way God intended it to be used. I just wanted to silence the alarm until I had enough coordination to turn it off permanently. But the noise didn't stop! I pushed the snooze button. I pushed it again. I tried tapping it really quickly, and then I tried holding it down really hard. Nothing.

I finally remembered that to turn the alarm off, I had to turn the dial to the left two notches. I turned the dial. No change. In desperation, I turned the dial all the way to the left, then all the way to the right. To the left! To the right! Left right left right left! It was still honking! Wait! Unplug the clock! UNPLUG IT!

I unplugged it.

HONK! HONK! HONK!

Frantically, I looked around the room. Ever so slowly, my powers of deductive reasoning were returning to me, and I was able to determine that the noise was not coming from my alarm clock. It was coming from the window. What was in the window? A fan. I ran to the fan. "I have to turn off the fan," I thought to myself. "That will make the noise stop." But the fan wasn't on. No problem! I just turned on the fan. That way, I could turn it off and make the noise stop.

Astoundingly, this did not work.

I considered the situation. Assuming there was some sort of short circuit causing the on/off switch to fail, I decided to unplug the fan. Hey, it didn't work for the alarm clock because the alarm clock wasn't honking. The fan was honking. So I unplugged the fan.

HONK! HONK! HONK!

"It didn't take!" I thought to myself desperately, and plugged the fan back in so I could try it again. I unplugged and replugged the fan a few more times until a tiny shred of reason managed to penetrate my sleep fogged brain. "Wait," I thought, and held still, plug in my hand. "FANS DON'T HONK."

My father found me a few minutes later, with the window fan on the floor and my face and hands pressed tightly against the screen. I had finally deduced that the honking was coming from outside, but I couldn't shake the feeling of responsibility for the noise and I was trying my best to stop it using only the sheer force of my will. Unfortunately, I had made so much noise storming around my room trying to track down the source of the noise that I woke everyone up. My father gently assured me that the neighbors' malfunctioning car horn was not under my purview, and, thusly relieved, I went back to bed.

I did get up with the first alarm, though.

***

And so I have reached November 30, the last day of NaBloPoMo. I did it! Technically! OK, I totally cheated. Remember this entry? And this one? So I'm not going to put an icon on here that says I did it, because I don't feel like I did it. Well, that and because I don't really know how to make changes to my template. Nevertheless, I wrote a lot more often than usual this month, and that's got to count for something.

But, being incredibly lazy, I will probably slide back into my habit of writing when only I feel like it in December. Plus, I'm going to work on a super secret exciting blog development that I hope to reveal by January, and that will eat up some of my computer time. The rest will be taken up by my mindlessly clicking "Refresh" in my Gmail window.

Why don't people email me as often as I click "refresh"? You should all email me more.

Hi, Honey, I've reentered the domestic habitat!

The following conversation is a near word-perfect transcription of a typical conversation between me and The Husband as we discuss our days.

THE HUSBAND: You know antifreeze?
MO: Uh... yeah?
TH: I froze it today.
MO: Well, everything freezes eventually.*
TH: We had to run a test at -40 Celsius --
MO: Which is also -40 Fahrenheit!
TH: I know! One time I tried to convert -40C to Fahrenheit in my calculator, and it came back as -40! I did it three times before I realized.
MO: Well, the lines aren't parallel! They have to intersect at some point, right?
TH: Yeah. So anyway, antifreeze freezes at -50F, and we had cooled it so quickly that we overshot -40F, and it froze.
MO: That's pretty cold.
TH: So we're going to run it with ethanol instead, since that freezes below -120C.
MO: Ethanol or ethylene glycol?
TH: Ethanol.

*The Husband helped me remember this conversation, and he maintains that not everything freezes. I said that even hydrogen freezes at absolute zero, and he said no it doesn't. I still think it does, but I suppose he might be right, now that I'm typing this, because I guess that freezing is not the same thing as a cessation of molecular vibration. And yes, I'm typing this footnote as an excuse to write the phrase "cessation of molecular vibration," because I like to show off sometimes.

Hi, Honey, I've reentered the domestic habitat

The following conversation is a near word-perfect transcription of a typical conversation between me and The Husband as we discuss our days.

THE HUSBAND: You know antifreeze?
MO: Uh... yeah?
TH: I froze it today.
MO: Well, everything freezes eventually.*
TH: We had to run a test at -40 Celsius --
MO: Which is also -40 Fahrenheit!
TH: I know! One time I tried to convert -40C to Fahrenheit in my calculator, and it came back as -40! I did it three times before I realized.
MO: Well, the lines aren't parallel! They have to intersect at some point, right?
TH: Yeah. So anyway, antifreeze freezes at -50F, and we had cooled it so quickly that we overshot -40F, and it froze.
MO: That's pretty cold.
TH: So we're going to run it with ethanol instead, since that freezes below -120C.
MO: Ethanol or ethylene glycol?
TH: Ethanol.

*The Husband helped me remember this conversation, and he maintains that not everything freezes. I said that even hydrogen freezes at absolute zero, and he said no it doesn't. I still think it does, but I suppose he might be right, now that I'm typing this, because I guess that freezing is not the same thing as a cessation of molecular vibration. And yes, I'm typing this footnote as an excuse to write the phrase "cessation of molecular vibration," because I like to show off sometimes.

Uh oh, it's magic!

Nanoposting is almost over, and I am desperately trying to hold my head above water over here. I had no idea posting every day would be so taxing. Well, that's not true. I did foresee difficulties which is why I wasn't going to sign up, and I knew that if I did sign up that I would moan and whine about it, because that's what I do. I'm a complainer. Still, it's been really hard! Did you know that Thanksgiving is in November? And our anniversary? And that I am nursing a cold I've had for over a week and am considering taking Mucinex even though the commercials for Mucinex are the most disgusting commercials ever and I wish not to support them? But still, here I am, slaving away at the keyboard. And it's all for you, Internet! All for you!

Last night, The Husband and I watched Night at the Museum. We thoroughly enjoyed it, despite getting a little over-invested in the plot. (Warning: Extremely minor spoilers ahead. Well, not technically minor in that I sort of give away the end, but if you couldn't have guessed how it ended you have never seen a movie before. Or read a book. Or interacted with humans.) We were both incredibly concerned that the T-Rex and the other museum displays would get stuck outside at sunrise. It seemed impossible to us that Ben Stiller would be able to round them all up. How could he do it? There were too many! Ah, but there was one thing we had forgotten. We had neglected to account for the possibility that magic could solve everything in this story about museum displays magically coming to life. Crisis averted!

I would like to think that it is because the movie was so well done that The Husband and I were so worried. Yes. That must be the reason. Because the only other explanation is that we are both idiots.

When Engineers Cook

Sometimes, we improvise. Like when I couldn't find any "turkey laces" so we had to make do with what was in the pantry.





(In case you can't tell, that there is a gingerbread man cookie cutter.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tagged

On my last day ever at the house I grew up in, Big Sister #4 and I took our kids for a walk. My parents' house was on the border between two towns, and the town line marker that was across the street. As we approached it, I called Elfin Nephew over to show him the initials of the two towns. "Look," I said to him. "See? There's an 'M' on this side, and an 'S' on the other!" My sister looked at the post, then looked at me, shocked and horrified.

"When did you do that?" she cried. My initials, you see, used to be "M.S." She had never known that the post was a town line marker, she just thought it was an old granite fence post or something. But that's not the funny part. I can't fault her; I didn't discover its true purpose until I was an adult either.

No, the funny part is the idea that I had somehow, at some point, perhaps in the dead of night, sneaked out of my house and carved my initials into city property. I, the rule follower, the teacher's pet, the bookworm. I, who never so much as dropped an apple core on the street. The worst thing I ever did was to lie to my mother about watching an R-rated movie when I was naught but 14, but I was so torn up by the guilt that I confessed it to her, through choking, shame-ridden sobs, that very night. She didn't even punish me, I was so pathetic. So to imagine that I would have dared to graffiti at all, never mind graffiti that required a hammer and chisel, is so ridiculous as to be laughable.

And my tag would have been way cooler than that.

Blog fodder

Today Big Sister #4 came over with her two kids, Elfin Nephew and The Spitfire. They came to take Jack off my hands for a few hours and give me time to get the place ready for Thursday. When she first arrived, I took the opportunity to vacuum while there was another pair of adult eyes around to make sure Jack wasn’t sticking his hands in it while I used the attachments. Then she offered to take all three kids to the park, so we spent fifteen or so minutes bundling them up and then we all trooped outside. I was with them only to get Jack’s stroller out of my car; as such, I brought my car keys but not my house keys.

While I was unloading the stroller, I heard Elfin Nephew say, “How come the door is open?”

“Oh, because I’m just going right back inside,” I told him. You see, normally when I run outside for a quick thing like this, I check the door handle to make sure it’s not locked, leave it hanging ajar, and do my thing.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

Today, I did not check the door handle, and today, Elfin Nephew helpfully closed the door while I was unloading the stroller. So there I was, in the freezing cold wearing naught but my thin cotton 3/4 –length sleeve sweater, locked out of my house.

It could have been worse. I might have left the oven on, or Jack might have still been inside, or my sister and I might have left our car keys and cell phones in the house. Fortunately, none of these things were the case, so we were able to put Jack’s car seat in my sister’s car and drive up to meet The Husband to get his key. Still, it put a bit of a damper on my grand plans for the day.

Sigh.

Incidentally, it turns out that the kitchen hutch lock may not have been designed to withstand professional thieves, but it could withstand two engineers unwilling to damage the hutch, and we couldn’t pick it. But in a stroke of luck, The Husband discovered the key tonight inside a postal box that he was breaking down for recycling. So… score!

Bad timing

I knew it was a bad idea to let Jack play with the key that goes to our kitchen hutch, but I did it anyway, and now it's gone and all of our serving dishes and teapots are safely locked away. There they will remain for Thanksgiving, which is at our house. Have I mentioned that?

OK, I'm exaggerating for comedic effect, because it's not like the lock to our kitchen hutch is designed to keep out Nicky Holiday and his gang of burgling models. he Husband is picking it as I type. But still.

Not just geek humor, bad geek humor

Every time I try to type or say "NaBloPoMo," it comes out as "NanoBloPoMo." In noting this, I said, "That's when you have to write really tiny entries every day for a month!" The Husband replied, "Yeah! And it's held in February, because February is the shortest month!"

And oh, our sides. They were splitting.

Some things

So I signed up for NaBloPoMo at the last possible minute, and now I have to post every day. Every day! Even though I am tired! And a wee bit tipsy! Because The Husband and I went out for a fancy dinner for our 4 year anniversary! And I just spelled that "anniversrary" which means I am actually slurring my typed words. So here I am, posting. But if you think I am going to post something coherent, you have another think coming. (I said "another think" on purpose, because it is funny to me.)

***

When I'm driving and let someone cross the street in front of my car, and out of courtesy the person runs so as to minimize the amount of time I have to wait, it amuses me to think to myself, "Yeah, you BETTER run."

***

Emily asked for some help finding shoes that "might be cute for upcoming holiday parties and a date night or two," and I recommended these, and she wants to get them in gray! Instead of red! So you should all leave her comments telling her that she is crazy, because I am way too emotionally invested in her shoe purchase, and I need her to get the red ones.

***

Speaking of shoes, I have been commissioned to find Maggie a pair of black heels, because Maggie has no black heels! I know! And although the implication there is that Maggie asked me to help her find shoes, the truth is that she admitted to having no black heels and I very pushily started taking over because I like telling people what to do. And also because it would appear that I have a bizarre interest in other people's footwear.

***

Arwen linked to me yesterday, but this time she was complaining about a post of mine in which I expressed my concerns that I was creating a monster baby, addicted to being rocked to sleep. She said that when she read that post, she sort of wanted to smack me. But I am not offended, because, as I reread that post, I also sort of wanted to smack me. When I think of the energy I wasted worrying about things that were not problems, energy I could have spent on researching shoe purchases for other people, I could weep.

***

And that is all for tonight, my friends. Tomorrow I have to go to a baby shower in Maine, but I will try to put together something a bit better than this for my post. One can always hope.

It's one of those posts again

Jack is teething again, and it’s having an effect on his digestion. Yesterday, I asked The Husband if Jack’s morning diaper was poopy or not, because the best days are the days that Jack poops once, and The Husband cleans it up. The Husband may not agree with me here, but he’s wrong.

“Yes, of course it was,” said The Husband.

“Was it all gross?” I asked, because for the past several days it’s been… not normal.

“Yes, it was gross and sticky like it has been lately,” he said. Then he added, “But I don’t want to have a conversation about the consistency of Jack’s poop.”

“I hate to break it to you, but we just did.”

***

On a completely unrelated note, The Husband is currently playing pinball on the computer, and I feel the need to tell you all that I once scored over nine million on computer pinball. Nine million! And when you get a score that high, the gravity goes wonky. It’s very cool.

A shot in the dark

On a trip to Cape May in 2003, The Husband and I played some skee ball, because I have a general rule to play skee ball whenever given the opportunity. It is similar to my rule of playing air hockey whenever possible. The difference is that, while I just play skee ball for fun, I play air hockey to WIN. I am really good at air hockey.

But, as there were no air hockey tables to be found in Cape May, we were forced to stick to skee ball. We decided to save up our tickets for the whole week and get a good prize. Maybe even a back scratcher! On our last night, we pooled our tickets and scanned the prize counter to see what we could afford. Five minutes later, we were the proud owners of a superball and a shot glass silkscreened with the words “Cape May” and a picture of a lighthouse.

That shot glass inspired us, and we decided to start a collection of shot glasses from every place we visited. It seemed like a great idea; shot glasses were small, cheap, and useful! About fourteen trips later, I started to have second thoughts about our plan. We had just moved into our new house, and displaying twenty shot glasses in our formal dining room didn’t quite achieve the look I was going for. I was trying to go for “classic contemporary,” not so much “frat house.”

So it’s just as well that the collection has stagnated, as we no longer go anywhere. I relocated the shot glasses to the more casual china hutch in the kitchen, and they made fabulous practice cups for Jack. The whiskey really seems to calm him down.

Objection! Hearsay!

I often catch myself making sweeping statements about legal procedure before realizing that, in fact, all of my legal knowledge comes from watching episodes of Law and Order.

Searching for Mr. Pickles

This is Mr. Pickles.


This is Mr. Pickles's brother, Mr. Pickles.


This is Mr. Pickles, and Mr. Pickles's brother, Mr. Pickles.


Mr. Pickles entered my life on Easter, 1998. My mother had placed a few of these tiny yellow chickens in the Easter lily, and, because I kept talking about how adorable they were, she sent one of them back to college with me. At the time, I was sharing a house with four of my friends. Somehow, a game evolved in which one of us would hide the chicken somewhere unexpected, say a cereal box, and let the owner of said cereal box discover the chicken later. Sometimes, it would be several days before the unsuspecting owner of the cereal box would find the chicken - maybe she had bagels for breakfast instead - but it was absolutely crucial to avoid any and all questions about the chicken, even seemingly innocent questions such as, "So... have you had any cereal lately? Don't you want to have some now?" The Chicken Game relied on the element of surprise.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "What a stupid game." But see, you're only thinking that because you've never experienced the joys of finding a small yellow chicken peeking up out of your cereal, or hiding in the medicine chest, or secreted away in your coat pocket. The Chicken Game is awesome.

I brought The Chicken Game with me to grad school and played it with my roommate during my first year. Then, once I joined the lab, I started playing it with my lab mates. That's when Mr. Pickles earned his name. By that point, my mother - a big fan of The Chicken Game - had given me lots of new chickens, and I had two of them on my shelf in the lab. "They need names," said The Doktah, (of course it was The Doktah) and she came up with "Mr. Pickles," for the simple reason that "pickles" is an inherently funny word. Pickles pickles pickles. See? As for Mr. Pickles's brother, Mr. Pickles, I outright stole his name from the Sesame Street characters "Mr. Noodle and Mr. Noodle's brother, Mr. Noodle" because that is comic genius, my friends. Comic genius.

So. Now you know who Mr. Pickles is. And every Easter, I stock up on packages of Mr. Pickleses so that I can continue to play The Chicken Game with my friends and family. Currently, there are two wine glasses full of Mr. Pickleses in my china hutch*. As long as I have extra Mr. Pickleses, I am free to leave Mr. Pickleses here and there as I go through life, in places like a friend's bathroom, or Muffet Niece's pillow. With a stockpile of Mr. Pickleses, I can also mail a Mr. Pickles to one of my college housemates or to The Doktah, if the mood strikes me.

If you're lucky, maybe I'll mail one to you.

*Where do you suggest I keep them?

In the meantime

I'm working on a real post, honest. It's just been difficult to keep up with the blog lately, because, and this may come as a huge shock, raising a baby is hard work! I know! No one told me either. And lately I've had to do actual work stuff at night, and I'm trying to make a year-in-review video of Jack a la Amalah, so my computer time has been accounted for. Also we've been having internet issues. (The Husband tried to explain what he did to fix it, and there was something about the router and the modem and a direct connection which bypasses the electronic whoozywhatsis and blah blah blah, and my eyes glazed over and I said, "Um, I don't actually understand any of the things you are saying. Does the internet work? Yes? Does the wireless connection? No? OK.") Also I am TIRED. Also, Jack skipped his morning nap today. SKIPPED. And then he tried to only sleep for 40 minutes in the afternoon, but I was having NONE OF THAT and rocked his little self back to sleep. One nap a day? I AM NOT READY FOR ONE NAP A DAY.

That being said, I am very sad that I have wasted the linkage from Arwen whom I was lucky enough to meet last week. Because she is not a slacker like me, she actually wrote about this meeting and linked to me twice! Arwen is an internet rockstar, so this shot the number of pageloads for those to days from my average of 30 to a record high 8 billion.* And what did all of these new readers find? The most boring page in existence. And now they'll never come back.

But now I am posting this, so if they do come back, they will find this bizarre stream-of-consciousness post about nothing in particular. Right. This is much better.

Edited to add
Also also, today I got a huge glob of Desitin on my shirt, and I ONLY HAVE THREE SHIRTS. Does Desitin come out? It probably never comes out. (This is true if the word "shirt" implies a shirt that is not a sad sack of faded, shapeless cotton. If you count the sad sacks of faded, shapeless cotton, I have at least six shirts.)

*I was going to quote the actual numbers here, but Statcounter won't load up. Did Statcounter go out of business or something? Why won't Statcounter load up? How am I supposed to keep track of the 7 people who read my blog?

But... she doesn't even know the words to "Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra!"

Two weeks ago, The Husband and I went on a date. As in, just he and I. Out. Together. Alone. With cocktails. It was pretty nice, yeah. It was, in fact, the first time we had been on a date since I gave birth. Actually, I should say it was the first time we had been on a date since The Bathroom Remodel, because Lord knows there was no time for romance when there were walls to put up and cabinets to rehang.

This date was the first of our attempts to follow the "One Date A Month" rule we established for ourselves in, oh, April. But the months, they fly by! And the babysitters, they get busy! You have to book early with these babysitters. They have social lives too, you know. But we finally managed it two weeks ago. We called the babysitter a whole week in advance. We located the restaurant gift card we received as a baby gift from my choir. We checked to see what movies were playing. Because we were going to do this date thing right. Dinner AND a movie. We were going to live the life, baby.

The babysitter, a delightful high school sophomore, arrived promptly at 6:30. The Husband and I were dressed, Jack was fed and pajama-ed. So The Husband ran through the emergency numbers and then hilariously tried to make small talk with the 15-year-old girl in our kitchen while I nursed Jack. ("Why, yes, that is a large mixer. They sure are heavier than they look, those mixers.") After Jack was done, I went over the bedtime routine, kissed Jack goodnight, handed him over and... we left.

Now, both The Husband and I are relaxed parents. This was not even the first time we had left Jack with this babysitter; we had had her over twice before to make sure Jack knew her. But this did not stop us from feeling, albeit ever so slightly, as though we were abandoning our baby in his time of need. It's bedtime! No one but us had ever put him to bed before! What if she forgets to read Barnyard Dance last? And, oh heavens, I forgot to tell her that I always say, "Now we get comfy cozy and we sing our good-night song," after we turn out the light! Oh nooooooooo! But we stifled these feelings and focused on the promise of a dinner with cocktails, a dinner blessedly free of the command, "No shrieking."

We thoroughly enjoyed our dinner, heroically resisting all temptations to call and check in on the babysitter. Afterwards, we headed over to the movie theater and bought tickets for The Bourne Ultimatum. The reviews for Bourne were full of phrases like "pounding, pulsating thriller" and "constant adrenaline surge," so I was looking forward to an exciting movie. And according to The Husband, it was very exciting. His adrenaline: It surged. You will have to take his word for it though, because I fell asleep. It seems that 10:00 pm is 10:00 pm, no matter where I am, and that, my friends, is what time I fall asleep.

At any rate, we came back home to a nice, peaceful house. There had been no problems at bedtime whatsoever. Naturally, I was thrilled by this. Someone else successfully put Jack to bed with no issues! I am free! Free to leave the house before 7:00 pm if I so desire. Free to fall asleep on my friend's couch at 10:00 pm if I want to. But even as I reveled in my freedom, I could feel a twinge of... what was that? Offense? Hurt feelings?

You mean he didn't miss me at all?

Aragog junior

We have had a spider living essentially on our back door for the better part of the summer. The web stretched across the topmost corner of the door and didn't really get in the way of anyone trying to go in or out. And since spiders are known to eat other, peskier bugs, The Husband and I were more than willing to allow this spider tenancy on our back door.

Now, the back door is not one I use very often, but The Husband uses it once a week when he takes out the trash. For the past several weeks, he has been returning from the trash duty with reports that the spider was getting larger and the web more intrusive.

"Pish tosh!" I always retorted, because The Husband is well known to have a thing about spiders. "How big can it be?"

I found out yesterday when I had to bring our trash down to the garbage bins outside and was very nearly killed by the biggest spider I have ever seen. Its web stretched across the top third of the doorway, and when I opened the door, I apparently caused the web to shake and the spider scuttled down extremely close to my head to find out what tasty treat it had snared. Naturally, I screamed and slammed the door shut, because I am well known to keep a cool head in these sorts of circumstances.

I could not bring myself to pass under that web, so I found an old stick (the back entryway is where we store our leftover wood from our never ending home improvement projects) and attempted to swat the spider off. Unfortunately, I was only able to manage to knock of bits of the web in between ducking behind the door to protect myself from the giant spider who was rebuilding the web even as I destroyed it. I could actually see the silk coming out of the spider's butt. I ended up taking an old stick and going out through the front door and around to the back so that I could knock the spider off from a safe distance, because I could not bring myself to walk under that web. What if the spider had landed on my head? WHAT THEN?

This post is brought to you by Emily who inspired me to write about my own spider incident. Sadly, I do not have a picture of my spider, but it was almost as big as Emily's and a sort of speckled tan. Emily definitely wins, however, since her spider was black and hairy and IN HER KITCHEN.

Just call me Tim Rice

I like to sing, and, as such, I sing to Jack quite a lot. His favorite songs are "Five Little Ducks," "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," "Shake Your Sillies Out," and "Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra." He also likes a few songs of my own creation: "Clean Pants" (to the tune of "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean;" just substitute "clean pants" for "bonnie"), "Darlin' Angel," which is just "Earth Angel with one word changed, and "Stinky Butt."

In fact, "Stinky Butt" may just be his favorite song of all, and I came up with the lyrics entirely by myself, thank you very much. It goes like this:

Stinky, stinky, stinky butt!
Stinky, stinky, stinky butt!
Stinky, stinky, stinky, stinky,
Stinky, stinky, stinky butt!

It's a little bit better with the tune. But not much.

The times, they are a-changin'

Well, lots of things have been happening 'round these parts, Internet. My parents, for example, finally, finally sold their house. It had been on the market for THREE YEARS, people. That, my friends, is a long time to live in an open-house-ready home. A looooong time. We (meaning my sisters, brother, sister-in-law, and brothers-in-law) are all thrilled for my parents, but that doesn't change the fact that my parents are moving out of the home they have lived in for 37 years, the house that was my home for the first 24 years of my life, and I went there for the last time ever last Wednesday. That evening, as I was bundling Jack into his car seat, I felt like there should be some sort of grand ceremony marking the the last time I was ever to set foot in my childhood home, but there was only my own shouting through the kitchen windows for someone to come move Big Sister #4's car. So while I am filled with relief on my parents' behalf that their three-year ordeal is over, I can't help but feel a little sad. This is because I am against change. All change. Even change for the better. Back in my day, we didn't HAVE change, and we LIKED it.

I am, of course, lying, because there is another change occurring right now that I am in love with. I am a little bit afraid to discuss it because I don't want to jinx* anything, but Jack has undergone a Sleep Renaissance. About three weeks ago, Jack started waking up every night and requiring two hours of holding and rocking before going back to sleep. Then he started taking longer and longer to go to sleep at bedtime, keeping me stuck in his room rocking and singing for an hour or more. And finally, in exhausted desperation at 10:00 one Tuesday night, I decided to let him cry for 15 minutes so I could lie down for just a little while. Then I gave him 15 more because he was tapering off. At the 31-minute mark, just as I was swinging my legs out of bed, he fell silent and made nary a peep until 6:30 the next morning.

Well.

The next time we had to use this technique was in the wee sma's the following Wednesday, after The Husband and I had each taken a turn rocking him for an hour. I set the timer for 31 minutes, and he yelled angrily for 11 of them, rested for 4, then let us know he was still mad, but FINE, he'd go to sleep. And he did. Until the next morning.

The night after that, he took two minutes. TWO MINUTES. I'm positive. I timed it.

Despite these obvious signals from Jack that he no longer required me to rock him to sleep, The Husband and I still planned to ease him into this new routine, probably because I hate change. Jack, on the other hand, is all for change, and over the last week I have come around to his point of view. He's just too big to be comfortable in my arms when I rock him; he needs his bed. So now for naps, bedtime, and any night-wakings, I rock and sing for a few minutes, then I put him in his crib and shut the door on my way out. He usually yells for a minute or two, and that's it.

The part I can't stop discussing with The Husband is how sometimes he falls silent mid-yell. I'm used to babies whose cries slowly taper off as they settle down to bed, but about 25% of the time, Jack says, "Aaaaaaauuuuggghhhh! Aaaaaaauuuuggghhhh! Aaaaaaauuuuggghhhh! Aaaaa-..... (silence)." It is extremely bizarre. The other part I can't stop discussing with The Husband is how unbelievably awesome this new system is. I know how long it is going to take to put him to bed for the night! Where I used to have only about 75% assurance that I'd be out of his room in 40 minutes or so, I'm now positive. And of course I realize that sometimes he'll wake back up or have a bad night or whatever, but this life is so much better than before. The odds that I will be stuck in his room for hours are next to nothing, because whatever the case, I'm going to have at least 31 minutes off.

Even better, Jack is obviously much happier. There was one morning during the weeks of bad sleep where I found him in the morning with dark, dark circles under his eyes. The poor child looked like he'd been up all night chasing No-Doz with shots of espresso. There are few things sadder to see. But these days, he's active, alert, chatty, and smiley**. And he knows the right answer to "Where's Mama?" even though he refuses to prove it for an audience. Ah, yes, life is good.

Dear God, I hope I didn't jinx it.

*My belief in jinxes is an interesting little idiosyncrasy, because I am not superstitious, and I am very disdainful of people who are. I'm a scientist! Superstitions aren't real! I am the type of person who demands to see a data set tracking the number of odd occurrences at different times of the month when someone attributes weird behavior to a full moon. I will always point out that people just count to three and then start over in response to the claim that bad things happen in threes. I walk laughingly under ladders in the house with my umbrella up while smashing mirrors and spilling salt, but when someone says, "Well, at least it can't get any worse," I cry out, "Shut up! Do you want to jinx it?" Because, apparently, I am also the type of person who is a hypocrite.

**And his smiles involve four teeth! Yes! The top two teeth I've been talking about for months have finally broken through! In an unrelated note, I find that a cool washcloth is wonderfully soothing to tiny teeth marks on my nipples.