Teeth

Remember how I claimed that five new teeth came in? It turns out that was not exactly true. First of all, I did not actually mean to suggest that five new teeth were coming in all at once; I meant that three new teeth were trying to join their two brethren. But even if I had made clear the actual number of teeth making an appearance and had not inadvertently implied that I am rearing some kind of mutant five-tooth-spurting… uh… tooth spurter, I still would have been misleading you. Because as it turns out, there weren’t any new teeth.

There are now, though. We have a confirmed new tooth sighting on the upper gum area. It looks like a canine is erupting, and I just now suddenly realized that this will make Jack look like a small vampire.

I hope the other canine is the next tooth to show up.

Some of my best friends are flakes

My recent post about my stellar memory evoked a first-time comment from Big Sister #4. I am not surprised by this. In fact, I think that most of my family will enjoy that particular post. Why? Well, I'm glad you asked.

There is a famous anecdote in my family about me in the first grade. You see, my teacher had been trying to teach the class something, and we were not getting it. "Why are you guys acting like such flakes?" she finally said in exasperation. This caused the class some confusion, because no one understood what she meant. Seeing this, my teacher asked "Don't any of you know what a flake is?"

Good student that I was, I shot my little arm high into the air. "I do!" I shouted. "My family calls me that all the time!"

War paint

This weekend was a productive one, in that we finally finished painting the landing. Of course, I am using the word "finished" in the Grad Lab Household sense of "not actually finished but with only smallish things left to do which will probably take us the next five years to complete." Still, the horrifying blue with white patches is gone. Gone I say!

Recall what the paint looked like when we moved in:







Lovely, no? And this is the very first room visitors see when they enter our home. (To answer your question, that filled in doorway in the first picture used to lead out to a second floor porch which is no longer there. Now, if it were not filled in, it would lead out to a doozy of a first step.)

Now the room looks like this:







So far, I've hung the mirror over the radiator and brought down my diploma and two frames of flower pictures from the attic. I figured I'd post the pictures now, though, because Emily has been pestering me for pictures of the new color, and if I wait until we finish hanging all the pictures and getting furniture that is not ugly and figure out a way to organize the office area so it doesn't look like a bomb went off, we'd all be dead of old age. Still the color is much improved, and I no longer have to force people to enter our home with their eyes closed.

Finally, I present you with a parting photo. We are doing some completely un-fun renovation work in the basement, so we had to take all the stuff out of there for the week. What follows, my friends, is the reason that I never ever ever ever ever want to paint anything ever ever ever ever again.

Cleverness in babies is overrated

Guess who figured out how to undo his diaper? Through his onesie?

Two thousand what now?

A couple of weeks ago, one of the moms in my playgroup asked me how long The Husband and I have been living in our house. This question always stumps me, because I have absolutely no concept of the passage of time. It was not until I had been dating The Husband for about three years (then again, who knows how many years?) that I figured out the main reason I was always late to everything: You have to account for the time it takes to get somewhere. For example, if a movie starts at nine, you can't plan to leave at nine. The Husband is a very punctual person, and those three years were very long for him. (Side note: The Husband was early for our first date. He was very early. He was a half hour early. I had wet hair and was still wearing sweatpants, and no one else was home to answer the door.)

But I was talking about my concept of the passage of time and how I don't have any. If something didn't happen within the past week, I have absolutely no idea when it happened. Two weeks ago? Two months ago? Who knows? Sometimes I can date events by where I was living at the time, but sometimes that only narrows the date range down to a certain window. I lived in the same place for about three of my five years in grad school, for example.

So when my friend asked me how long we'd been in our house, I didn't know what to say. "Um, two years? I think?" I tried to do the math, but that's when I ran into my second problem. Sometimes - not always, but sometimes - I sort of forget what year it is. I did not realize that I was somewhat unique in this until this conversation with my friend. "I think it's two years, but I always have trouble remembering. You know how sometimes you forget what year it is?" I said.

"Uh, no. I always remember what year it is," she replied. And she also gave me a very funny look.

I have been doing some thinking about this since the conversation, and I decided that this happens to me because I am always surprised that things that seem so fresh and recent in my mind happened so long ago. It can't be 2007, because that would mean I got my Ph.D. three years ago, and I only just graduated! Still, that's not really a good excuse for forgetting what year it is. So let's all hope I never hit my head, because the doctors will think I have a concussion.

"What year is it, you ask? Wait! I know this one! It starts with a '2', right?"

Bring me the soft one who sings!

A while ago, The Husband put Jack to bed, a job that is usually mine. Meanwhile, I went to Target, all by myself. Par-tay.

I came home to a house that was, to my immense relief, blissfully quiet and full of sleeping baby. I asked The Husband if Jack cried before he fell asleep. “Yeah,” came the answer. “It was rough going for a little while there. I kept telling him it was OK, and he would look at me and it was as though he was saying, ‘I believe you, but I am not comforted by you. BRING ME THE WOMAN!’”

“Tough beans” is a legitimate expression

I know that it is considered gauche to post an excuse about lack of posts. Tough beans.

Top three reasons I have not been posting much lately and won’t be posting much until two weeks from now:

1. I suddenly have to prepare a talk on the stuff I did in grad school. And I have to start by finding out what, exactly, I did in grad school. I haven’t looked at that stuff in three years, and I swear someone else wrote it. Did I really know all of that? Man, I used to be smart.

2. For reasons that remain unclear, The Husband decided last week that the entryway landing needed to painted right now. I am not complaining about this, as our entryway is so ugly that I feel embarrassed when people see it for the first time, but I do have to wonder, why now? Really? Right now? When I have a presentation to work on? It’s been hideously ugly for two and a half years, we couldn’t have waited another two weeks?

At any rate, my free time that is not occupied by relearning what I used to know has to be spent – God help me – painting, because I will not live for weeks with furniture scattered all over the apartment. I’ve done that before, and it is not fun. The good news is that the paint, which we chose and bought two years ago, is quite lovely. The lesson here is that I should not be allowed to choose paint by myself but together, The Husband and I can pick a good color.

3. Five new teeth. The end.

The world may never know

It’s raining, and this morning I saw a couple of birds fly to the shelter of a nearby tree. This reminded me of a picture book I once read in elementary school, called, Where does the butterfly go when it rains? When I saw that book in the classroom library, my curiosity was piqued. “Where does a butterfly go when it rains?” I thought to myself. It seemed to me that a butterfly is fragile enough that a heavy rainstorm could easily kill it, but they must do something, or they would not have survived. So where did they go? I eagerly sat down with the book and looked for the answer.

“Where does a butterfly go when it rains?” it began. I turned the page and read, “A bird covers its head with its wing, but where does a butterfly go when it rains?” I turned the page again. “An ant hides under a leaf, but where does a butterfly go when it rains?”

The book continued on in this fashion for several more pages. I found out where a caterpillar, a mouse, a bumblebee, and a squirrel go when it rains. That was all well and good, but I was not reading for information on squirrels. The book had posed a question, and now I wanted to know the answer.

Well, too bad for me, because the book never explained where a butterfly goes when it rains. Although the question was raised on every page, the answer was not forthcoming. And if that isn't false advertising, I don't know what is.

So does anyone know where a butterfly goes? Anyone? Anyone?

Bueller?

Lessons in probability

Area of my kitchen floor: 209 square feet
Area of a Cheerio: 1 square centimeter
Probability that I will step on the single Cheerio on the kitchen floor and grind it into fine powder: 100%

Science magazine comes out weekly, too

Am I the only one who is consistently surprised that I have to buy groceries every week? And clean the bathroom? And vacuum? (Not that I vacuum every week. Ha.) It just always seems impossible to me that I have to do any of these tasks when I clearly just did them last week.

And by way of explanation for my non sciency readers, Science magazine is just about the most prestigious journal to publish in, and it comes out every week. Every single week. So if you stick your copy in a pile to get to later, you will quickly have a small pile of backlogged issues to read. And then you will have a large pile. And then you will have a large lump that used to be a pile, but the pile got too big and all the magazines slipped and you won't even bother to try to straighten it up because you know they will all just slip again. And then you'll let your dues lapse for AAAS because it will be the only way to get them to STOP SENDING THE MAGAZINES.

Life in this, the 21st century

This is madness.

How The Husband Very Nearly Ruined Mother’s Day

I’m an easy going person. You don’t get much more low maintenance than me. Take my birthday, for example. All I ask is that my mother calls me The Husband gets me a card. No one else even has to remember it. And I even remind The Husband when it is coming up!

Valentine’s Day? Whatever. A card would be nice, but if he forgets (which has been known to happen), I don’t really mind. Hey, he brings me flowers for no reason all the time, so who am I to complain if he doesn’t bring them that specific day?

And yes, I’d be pretty upset if he forgot Christmas, but only because that would mean he’d had some sort of major head injury.

So for my very first Mother’s Day, I had fairly low expectations. It’s not like I thought I’d have the day off – I’m still a major food source after all. But still, even I have my limits.

See, the night before Mother’s Day, Jack had a rough go of it. Of course, I’m talking about “rough” for Jack; basically, he woke up just when we were about to go to bed and required holding and rocking for about ninety minutes. And because Jack prefers me in the night, The Husband was frustrated in his attempt to give me a break and get Jack back to sleep, and I had to stay up a bit later than I would have liked.

Then, the next morning, Jack woke up earlier than usual, around 5:30 or so. Given that it was Mother’s Day, I asked The Husband if he would go get the baby and bring him to me to nurse in bed. Somewhat grudgingly, he did so. And wooo-eee, but did that baby stink. So I nursed him, and then said, “Do you think you could change his diaper?”

The Husband groaned and said, “I’m really really tired. Couldn’t you do it?”

So I did. And with only the teensiest bit of martyrdom, because, honestly, The Husband looked much more exhausted than I felt. I actually felt like I’d had a reasonable amount of sleep. And naturally, there was a little stinky Mother’s Day gift in the diaper for me. So I had to deposit the baby back in bed with The Husband and then deposit the gift into the toilet and clean up the diaper. (Remember, we use cloth.) Chore done, I returned to bed for what I thought would be an hour or so more of comfy family dozing.

Yeah, no. Jack was UP. He was awake. He was kicking. He was poking me really hard in the eye. And, as far as I could tell, The Husband was oblivious, sleeping away on his side of the bed. Finally, I gave up, got out of bed, and started to get dressed.

See, this is where my line is. I didn’t mind that I got less sleep than The Husband did the night before my very first Mother’s Day*. I didn’t mind having to get up and start my day an hour earlier than I had expected. I didn’t mind – much – having to change a poopy diaper first thing in the morning.

But I did mind The Husband’s sleeping in while I got up to take care of the baby on my very first Mother’s Day ever.

Any other day, I would have happily let him stay in bed, because he was clearly exhausted. But on Mother’s Day? So there I stood next to the bed, looking down at my comfy family, and feeling the prickly little feeling of self-pity and resentment. Should I ask him to get up? Should I let him sleep? I didn’t really want to ask him to get up, because, somehow, that ruined it. I wanted him to offer. And even though I knew he was tired, I really didn’t want to let him sleep in.

But apparently, The Husband’s guardian angel was on duty, because he had a prickly little feeling of his own. Opening one eye, he asked me, “Do you want me to get up with you?”

“Yes,” I said. And he did. And he fed the baby while I steamed some plums for later. Then he surprised me with a card that he put on the flowers he had brought home the day before. And then he acted in the exact same way as he does on every other Saturday and Sunday, and made me breakfast to order.

He makes it so easy to be low maintenance.

*The Husband claims that he was awake the whole time I was in Jack’s room. Since I was actually dozing, I must have gotten more sleep than he did after all. But I did not know this at the time.

I know not these “early sixties sitcoms” of which you speak

On Monday, I was feeding Jack on the couch, watching some Gilmore Girls, and I spotted something out of the corner of my eye. I glanced over to the dining room, and what should I see but a mouse, casually walking along the baseboard behind the radiator, bold as brass. In the middle of the day! This mouse didn’t even have the common decency to be nocturnal.

I heroically refrained from screaming out loud into Jack’s ear. No, instead I just gasped and then got up to try to see where the mouse went so that I could catch it. Or, more accurately, try to catch it, but actually just to scream and flinch and let it get away.

Unfortunately, I lost a line of sight with the mouse for a second and it disappeared. Secretly relieved that I wouldn’t have to go through the charade of trying to catch it, I put Jack down in his crib and called The Husband in a panic. He did his best to reassure me and said he thought we had some mousetraps by the attic. We did not. So I was left wondering whether I should cancel my fun plans for the afternoon in order to buy mousetraps, or whether we would be OK without a mousetrap for a few hours. And that was when I saw the mouse again.

This time I did scream. And Jack cried. And the mouse ran. I screamed again and the mouse took up a position under the table by the window, and I began looking for a bucket or something to put over it and leave as a little present for The Husband. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, “Oh, come on! Your big plan was to leave it trapped under a bucket for five hours until your husband got home?”

Well you know what I say to you? I say yes. Yes, that was my plan. Except you forgot about the part where I was also going to leave the house in the interim.

At any rate, by the time I got the bucket, the mouse was gone again. So I went to get Jack and try to soothe him, and of course I saw the mouse make a break for the linen closet and screamed into poor Jack’s ear and put him back down in the crib, scared to death that his mother had gone mad. And as much as I wanted to scoop up the baby and make a break for it, I couldn’t stomach the thought of that mouse having the run of the house, so I went to get the bucket again.

But then I looked at the bucket and realized that the likelihood of my actually trapping the mouse was next to nothing, what with the flinching and screaming and all, and I was suddenly struck with the memory of the time my father made me help him catch a bat.

I know what you’re thinking. You’ve just finished reading about how I completely fall to pieces when faced with a loose rodent, and you’re wondering why my dad thought I would be any help in catching a rodent that flies. I cannot answer that question. To this day, I wonder what my dad was thinking. Had he not met me before? My entire life I have been a pointer, as in, “There’s the bug! There it is! There! There!” I do not squish the bugs. Other people squish the bugs.

So when my dad handed me a tennis racket and told me to follow him to the room containing the bat, I can’t imagine what he thought I would do with it. It would appear that he thought I would use the tennis racket to hit the bat, but he must have known that I would be incapable of this. What I did do with the tennis racket was to use it as a shield for my head whenever the bat made any sort of motion that could be interpreted as possibly flying into my general vicinity. I may also have waved the tennis racket ineffectually at the air with my eyes closed a few times when the bat was safely across the room, but, trust me, I was no threat to that bat.

But what does this have to do with the vacuum and the mouse in my linen closet? Well, once my father managed to stun the bat with his own tennis racket he used the vacuum cleaner attachment to suck it up. I very distinctly remember the ssscchhhhhllloooommp sound as the bat disappeared into dusty oblivion. And what is a bat but a flying mouse? So I thought that, while there was no way I’d be able to stifle the flinching for long enough to trap the mouse under a bucket, I would be able to stick a vacuum cleaner attachment near it.

So I got the vacuum out, set up the attachments, plugged it in, and, with one finger on the “On” button, I opened the closet door.

No mouse. But I did find a giant hole in the wall.

I put in a call to the exterminator, and my neighbor, who was out in his backyard, kindly came over and set a trap for me in case the mouse came back while I was out. I figured the mouse was coming in through the giant hole, so a trap in the closet would be sure to catch him.

But that very night, while The Husband and I were watching Heroes, I heard a soft rustling sound behind the bookcase in the living room. THE LIVING ROOM. What kind of mouse walks around in the day and then hangs out in the living room? The food is in the kitchen! Fortunately, The Husband was home to catch the mouse this time, which he did by trapping it behind the other bookcase and then, on my suggestion, sucking it up with the vacuum cleaner. I heard the familiar ssscchhhhhlllooooommp that let me know the mouse was no longer a threat to me, and then I made him change the bag.

During this process, I stood on a chair.

Shut up.

Incidentally, you get extra super bonus points if you know how this post got its title.

Congratulations, Maggie and Phillip!

Even though Maggie didn't get her week off between work and the baby, we're all very happy to see Jackson!

Congratulations, Cheungs!

Tupperware

We have a cabinet for Tupperware and non-brand Tupperware in our kitchen. It is chock full of containers and lids of a wide variety of sizes and shapes. We have tiny 3-tablespoon size containers and large 2-gallon containers.

Unfortunately, the number, size and shape of the lids bears no relation whatsoever to the number, size and shape of the containers.

Cringeworthy: Part deux

When I wrote the original “Cringeworthy,” I had lost the scrap of paper containing my cringeworthy memories. But I knew, I just knew, there were three of them. And I finally remembered the third one.

***
While in college, I once attended a classical guitar recital with an acquaintance of mine. He had to go to it for his music appreciation class; I went for the joy of hearing the music. I had never been to a classical guitar recital before, and this one was not very well-attended. Still there were maybe forty people in the audience.

I enjoyed myself, and at the end of the first song I started to clap, but no one else was clapping. “Oh, it must only be the end of the first movement or something,” I thought, and hastily stopped my boorish clapping. I had been embarrassed in the past by clapping at the wrong moment during an orchestral concert, and didn’t want to repeat that error.

So each time the musician appeared to finish a piece, I readied myself for applause, but waited for someone more knowledgeable in the way of classical guitar music to start us off. No one did. “I guess you just don’t clap till the end at a classical guitar recital,” I thought, and joined in the smattering of applause when the guitarist finally finished his last piece.

But now, looking back on it, I realize that the poor guitarist was actually getting more and more upset as he finished each song and not a single person in the audience clapped. Not one clap. Nothing. Silence. I don’t know if everyone in the audience was also waiting for someone else to start it, but I do know that the guitarist had a very, very bad night.

I'm probably doomed if we have a second one

Jack and I were at my sister's house on Monday, visiting. When brother-in-law #4 came home from work, we were all hanging out in the living room, and Jack was sitting on my lap, quietly observing the scene.

"Mo, is he always that quiet?" Brother-in-law #4 asked me.

I should probably take a moment here to mention that Elfin Nephew, Big Sister and Brother-in-law #4's eldest child, was a "difficult" baby. Not colicky, exactly, but he was a crier. He cried a lot. He cried whenever things were not precisely as he wished them to be. Whereas Jack cries... pretty much never. OK, sure, yesterday he got his 6-month shots, and he cried during the actual poking, but I gave him a bink and he settled right down. He also cried for a second when I accidentally stuck my finger in his eye today, but only for a second. And he was tired at the time. He's the easiest baby I have ever met.

So getting back to the scene in progress, Brother-in-law #4 asked me if Jack is always so quiet.

"Well, yeah," I told him.

Brother-in-law #4 considered this. Then he said, "I think I'm upset about that."

Cringeworthy

There are a few – OK, many – events in my life that still make me cringe when I think of them. Here are two.

***

The first and only time I have ever played Laser Tag was with Professor Lapp during our sophomore year in college. She invited me to go with her and a bunch of her friends, and I thought it sounded like fun. It was fun, too. It was fun right up until the point where I accidentally slammed my laser gun into Professor Lapp’s face as she rounded a corner. She tried to tell me that it was O.K., and not to feel bad. But it was hard for her to get the words out through the blinding pain.

Do you remember that, Professor Lapp? I imagine you do, as you probably still have a scar.


***

This one time in college, my friend Leah Lar and I were wandering the dormitory halls when we heard someone strumming a guitar out on the balcony. So we wandered on out to the balcony and struck up a conversation with him. The topic eventually turned to theater.

“Whatever you do, don’t go to any plays put on by the University Circle Players,” I told him.

“Oh, yeah?” he said. “What makes you say that?”

“I went to see their version of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead last semester, and it was just about the worst thing I had ever seen. That is until I went to see them do Waiting for Godot. I didn’t know it was the University Circle Players until after it started, but damn! Trust me, you do not want to see a badly done Waiting for Godot. And boy howdy! Those University Circle Players couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag.”

At first thought the balcony guy was just chuckling at my clever witticisms, but then something struck me as off. He seemed to be just a wee bit too amused. “What is it?” I asked him.

“I’m a member of University Circle Players,” he said. “In fact, I founded them. I actually directed Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.”

“Oh. Uh… oh,” I said.

***

Grad Lab Adventures: Where are they now?

A couple of weekends ago, we had a blast from the past at the Grad Lab Household. Grouchy Guy came to brunch! He has completed his post doc in Switzerland and is now a professor at my undergrad alma mater. Incidentally, it is also his undergrad alma mater. By crazy coincidence, Grouchy Guy and I actually went to the same college and grad school, and ended up in the same lab in grad school. It's funny, because I don't think we exchanged more than three sentences in undergrad. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure those sentences were, "Hey, Grouchy Guy! I heard you are going to Ivy League Grad School." "Yeah." "So am I!" Grouchy Guy was kind of reserved in undergrad. I didn't even know he was grouchy. (For the record, he also sported a hilarious moustache while an undergrad. I have our class picture, and this moustache* caused The Doktah great merriment indeed.)

But that is not the point. The point is that I got to hang out with Grouchy Guy for the first time in about three years. Living abroad must have been good for him, because Grouchy Guy is not particularly grouchy anymore. We had a very nice time at brunch. The Husband made omelettes to order, and I made a cheesecake and sangria. Also in attendance was Grouchy Guy's German girlfriend, whom I had never met, and my friend from high school, Loud & Cheerful. At one point, I had to excuse myself to feed Jack, and through the closed door I overheard the following conversation:

L&C (speaking to German Girlfriend): So are you planning to move to the States?
German Girlfriend: [inaudible]
L&C: Oh? What kind of visa issues?
Grouchy Guy: [inaudible]
L&C: What? Oh, I didn't realize! Well that's great!

There is a reason I nicknamed her "Loud & Cheerful."

At any rate, I didn't really give the conversation much further thought until I was walking L&C to the front door. "Why did you tell me German Girlfriend is Grouchy Guy's girlfriend?" she asked me.

"Huh? What do you mean?" I replied.

"They're married!" she told me.

"What? Grouchy Guy is married? But he told me she was his girlfriend!" I exclaimed.

"Oh! No, they got married. I guess it must have been recently." said L&C.

When I returned to the dining room, I confronted Grouchy Guy with this news. "Why didn't you tell me you were married?" I asked him.

"Oh, right," he replied. "Uh, we got married on Monday."

I offered my congratulations of course, but that Grouchy Guy sure is inscrutable. Because if I got married suddenly, I would probably lead off with that news. Maybe in response to, "How've you been?"

So, congratulations Grouchy Guy Who Is No Longer Grouchy and German Girlfriend Who Is No Longer A Girlfriend. I guess we know why the grouchiness has faded away!

*Confidential to Grouchy Guy: It is only hilarious in retrospect. It was perfectly normal at the time.

Overheard at the Grad Lab household every single damn day it seems

But I JUST CUT your fingernails!