I’m Jealous Of My Nanny
It’s a working mom’s cliché, being envious of the nanny. But really … can you blame me? Not only is my nanny younger and thinner and a bit more ballsy, but she actually she gets paid to drive my car, swim in my pool and play Candy Land all day with my kid. Where can I get a job like that?
Oh right … I have one. It’s called Being A Mom. (So how come “mothering” only seems like a real job when you pay somebody else to do it?)
Of course, the truth is, I don’t really want to spend my days playing Candy Land and doing crafts, especially since I have absolutely no talent for craft projects that involve anything more ambitious than peel-n-stick foam pieces. But while I’m fine with outsourcing certain aspects of childcare,to someone with more patience, not to mention facility with a glue gun, it’s still hard not to envy, just a little, the very necessary bond that gets forged between my child and the Mommy Stand-In who allows me to spend my days the way I want to – writing in my office.
To read more, please click here, and follow me over to HealthBistro at Lifescript where I’m guest blogging today and the second Friday of every month about my late-in-life parenting adventures.
And what about you? Are you ever jealous of the people who care for your kid all day while you’re at work? Please leave a comment after the post and tell me all about it.
And while you’re at Lifescript, take a look around. You’ll find tons of great health info for women there.
Photo credit: Patrick Heagney
HEY — DID YOU MISS THESE POSTS? CHECK ‘EM OUT HERE!
*And There Were Three In The Bed …
Summer Holiday Parties>Strange Bedfellows>
Add me to your rss reader
Become a Fan on Facebook
Summer Holiday Parties
Every family has a go-to holiday house – the place where everyone always gathers to celebrate the occasion du jour. Growing up, it’s what I loved most about spending holidays at my grandmother’s in Cleveland. There were always baked-from-scratch goodies in the oven, assorted aunts and great-aunts bustling in the kitchen and far-flung cousins I rarely saw any other time to play with. That was how I always hoped my house would be. But as adults, it was my sister who earned the holiday destination designation. Her cozy home, always decorated to reflect the season, was where we congregated to eat turkey on Thanksgiving and brisket on Passover, to break the fast with bagels and whitefish on Yom Kippur and fry latkes on Chanukah, make breakfast burritos on Christmas and barbecue before the fireworks on the Fourth.
But once my husband Stewart and I settled into our new house, I wanted in on the action. I had wedding china, and I wasn’t afraid to use it. I started campaigning for a holiday of my own.
To read more, please click here and follow me over to HealthBistro at Lifescript where I’m guest blogging today — and the second Friday of every month. Today, it’s all about finding a niche in the family holiday rotation — even with a wicked case of cooking ADD.
How do you celebrate the summer holidays? Please leave a comment below the post, and tell me all about it!
And while you’re at Lifescript, take a look around. You’ll find tons of great health info for women there.
Summer Holiday Parties>Strange Bedfellows>Strange Bedfellows
My 4-year-old’s hand, when balled up in a fist, fits perfectly in my eye socket. I know this because on more than one occasion, deep in the middle of the night, when we’ve all been sound asleep, his silky soft little boy fist has landed there with such force, I’ve been jolted awake to see the kinds of stars the Grucci fireworks masters would be proud of. Call it Shock And Owwww!
That’s what wimpy parenting gets you. In this case, it’s my just desserts for allowing my wily child to take full advantage of my sleep-deprivation to barter uninterrupted slumber for entry into our bed. I caved; he triumphed, and 18 months later, he’s still camped out quite comfortably – not to mention horizontally — between me and my husband. There must be some peculiar theorem of sleep physics that states a child will always sleep perpendicular to whomever is in the bed next to him. Meanwhile, we cling to the sides of the mattress, dodging flying fists and (in my husband’s case) knees to the ‘nads.
To read more, please click here and follow me over to HealthBistro at Lifescript where I’m guest blogging today and the second Friday of every month about my late-in-life parenting adventures.
In today’s post I talk about accidentally falling into a family bed and liking it — even though I was opposed to group snoozing before our son was born. It’s amazing how many pre-conceived parenting notions crumble in the face of post-conception parenting realities. Has real-life parenting reversed any of your pre-baby ideas? Please leave a comment below the post and tell me about it!
Meanwhile, while you’re at Lifescript, stay a while and check it out. The site’s got great health info for women.
Summer Holiday Parties>Strange Bedfellows>I’m Baaaaaaaack!!!
First, a big – and much belated – Hi There! to all of you patient readers who’ve periodically checked in with me and said encouraging things like I love your blog! It’s so funny! And When the f— are you going to get off your ass and post some more?!?
I appreciate the support, the loyalty. And the much-needed butt kick. Yes, yes … I’ve been lax. Ridiculously, terribly, embarrassingly lax. But no more. Since I clearly need someone else holding a whip to make me get my blog posts done, starting today, I’ll be flogged … no, wait …I made the deadline … I’ll be guest blogging about my parenting adventures and mishaps for the Health Bistro blog at Lifescript.com. Click here to join me today and the second Friday of every month! While you’re there, be sure to check out the rest of Lifescript, which is loaded with other cool health info for women – and, incidentally, where I also write about sex and relationships, which, is probably how I got into the parenthood game.
Up this week: Picky eating! In case you missed the first two links, click here to learn how culinary spin tactics can make even the strangest foods palatable to a preschooler. Got your own tricks for encouraging reluctant eaters? Please toss in your two cents in the Comments section at the end of the post.
Thanks for joining me at Health Bistro today! Leave a comment to let me know you stopped by – and what you think!
Summer Holiday Parties>Strange Bedfellows>Book Envy
My friend Kevin tells me that he’s making good on a New Year’s resolution and “reading again.” Then he quickly rattles off a list of authors he’s finished recently that would make any honors comparative lit professor proud: E.L. Doctorow, J.M. Coetzee, and…
Okay, I confess I do not remember the rest of the tomes. Each impressive title he ticked off was such a reminder of how much I don’t read these days, I had to stop listening — La la la … I can’t hear you! — or I’d want to take a header out of my office window. Jealous much? Yeah, maybe. Just a tad.
See, I love to read. And once upon a time, I read volumes. I’d find an author I loved and devour everything they’d written. There was a John Irving phase. An Edith Wharton period. For a while I was seriously hooked on Gloria Naylor and Howard Fast. I even — though I’m embarrassed to admit it now — had flings with Stephen King and (blush!) Danielle Steele. And okay, okay, on the recommendation of a college friend, I also consumed the Harry Potter series en toto, like a fat girl tearing through a Whitman sampler. All right … so my taste isn’t always exactly high brow. At least the books weren’t made of cardboard and filled with pictures. (Except for … well, maybe … The Better Built Bondage Book. But that was strictly educational.)
Alas, my read-for-my-own-pleasure days were predominantly pre-child. When Fletcher was born, my friend Joel gifted me with Haiku Mama, whose very prescient tagline goes “Because 17 syllables is all you have time to read.” Sigh … I usually don’t even manage that. These days, I consider myself extra special lucky if I get 10 uninterrupted minutes to skim a Parents or Redbook. And usually those moments are stolen in the bathroom, with sudden — and completely invented — attacks of diarrhea or constipation. Oy! The lengths I’ll go to just to get through a “Modern Love” column in the Sunday Times! Back in the pre-Fletcher days, Sunday mornings were for languidly perusing the Times … under the umbrella … by the pool … on the patio … with a French press of French roast steaming beside me. Now, I read frantically and on the sly — grabbing a page here and there — like an adolescent boy rushing to “finish” with his Playboy before someone bangs on the door. Though since Fletcher learned how to turn the handle and roust me from my commodal sanctuary — Mah-meeeeee! Whatcha doing?Are you going poop or pee? — those moments, too, are becoming exceptionally rare.
Even perusing my friends’ bookshelf pages on Facebook is an exercise in envy and frustration. Jessica is deep into Broken For You. Jeff is bured in The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University. Cliff is paging through Aldous Huxley’s Point, Counter Point. Kelli is actually reading … Moby Dick. To a once-avid reader, this is like being the diabetic at Magnolia Bakery: You can appreciate how scrumptious those cupcakes are, but … No Cupcakes For You!
So, the last actual book I read? Trucks Roll. It’s a primary-colored paen to the massive gas-guzzling, hardly eco-friendly 18-wheelers that haul “books and bulldozers, dolls and clocks …through mountains, over rivers, past towns … around blue sky curves through rain pouring down.” The book has about 170 words in it. I finished the whole thing — aloud, natch — while Fletcher gnawed through his bagel and cream cheese this morning. (Hey, it was a whole wheat bagel with low-fat cream cheese —what kind of mother do you think I am?!)
If you’ve got kids (boys!) in your house, chances are you know what I’m talking about. And chances are equally good that the novels and nonfiction that used to pile up on your nightstand have been shoved aside by these:
*Green Eggs & Ham, The Cat In The Hat … really, anything from the Dr. Seuss oeuvre.
*The complete Curious George collection — even the paperbacks repackaged from the PBS show.
*Anything from the construction genre. Besides Trucks Roll, house favorites include My Truck Is Stuck, Truck Town, I’m Dirty, Bob The Builder (Duh!) and Big & Noisy Trucks and Diggers, which — bonus!! — comes with buttons that make honking, jack-hammering, crushing, clanging, banging construction sounds throughout the story. We call it Migraine in a Book.
*Thomas The Tank Engine. Count your blessings if you only have the books. There are also tons of mind-numbing DVDs (those with George Carlin narrating, excepted), not to mention the miles of track and bazillions of toy trains and stations to go with it!) You can literaly drown in Thomas crap.
Any and every book about dinosaurs, like the brilliantly fun Dinosaur Circus, which has the added attraction of allowing you to customize the story so that your kid’s the hero (available from StoryTots).
Goodnight — anything. Moons to gorillas.
If You Give A Moose A Muffin … A Mouse A Cookie … A Pig A Pancake … A Cat A Cupcake … A Mom A Martini (Okay, this last one’s not a kids book. But I find having one (or several) makes the kid lit go down easier.)
Hippos Go Berserk, Horns To Toes And In Between, But Not The Hippopotamus, and just about any other screed by Sandra Boynton, who (like the good folks at Pixar) creates children’s books that parents can read again and again, without wanting to dip a syringe into the black tar heroin. And for that we are forever grateful.
So … what’s in your library? Post a comment … or email me!
[Oh, by the way, the lovely photo, above, is by jpmgrafika]
HEY — DID YOU MISS THESE?
*And There Were Three In The Bed …
Summer Holiday Parties>Strange Bedfellows>Double-Shot Tuesdays — June 23rd Edition
It’s Tuesday, and that means … time to dip into the blog archives for a double shot of some old favorites from back in the day — before I discovered the beauty and the power of the Share button.
Last night as my friend Jordan was helping me navigate the intricacies of social networking sites, he asked me, ”So how’d you come up with your blog name?” Oddly, he hasn’t been the only one to ask me that in recent days, so in honor of The Ever- Helpful Jordan, who thankfully works for brownie slabs and advice about girls, and for other curious readers, here’s how my blog came to be named Don’t Put Lizards In Your Ears … because, in fact, not everybody’s old enough to know better.
Don’t put lizards in your ears.
Who would, right? I mean, that’s a pretty weird thing to say. Good advice, but a bit incongruous. And really, how often do those words actually come together in conversation? In my experience … uh, never. But I’m finding that as a new mom — and a late-in-life mom at that — I say a whole lot of things to my 2-year-old son, Fletcher, that I never — not in all my wildest college-era hallucinogenic-fueled dreams — thought would tumble out of my mouth. Read more …
[What's the most bizarre thing that you've ever said to your kid? Post a comment or email me!]
Meanwhile, while we were flying home from Denver last week, Fletcher commandeered my laptop to watch Stuart Little, which gave me a chance to catch up on my New York magazines. (Truly, the bathroom and the cabin of an airplane are the only places I can read in peace these days … though I don’t recommend an airplane cabin bathroom!) I was transfixed by Jeff Coplon’s “Five-Year-Olds At The Gate,” about the incredible lack of public school seats available for the city’s exploding kindergarten population. A close friend recently told me that her youngest had gotten wait-listed at several public kindergartens and she wasn’t sure what would happen come Fall. “What am I paying taxes for?” she wondered. All of which made me grateful that, much as I miss it, we don’t live in New York anymore … and that I only have one child to worry about getting into school. Even as one of my cousins is contemplating having a third, once again, here’s why one’s absolutely enough for me.
When I got married the first time, I don’t think the wedding band was on my finger 15 minutes before my father asked, “So when am I going to have a grandchild?” Well, 12 years, one divorce and another wedding later, he finally got a grandson. And barely a year later, I started getting from all quarters, “So, when are you going to have another one?”
Huh? Are you kidding me?!?! I’m still adjusting to this one.
My standard reply alternates between “We don’t want to have more kids than we can afford to send through graduate school” and “Well … maybe if we’d started earlier …” Yes, I’m aware that women in their late 50s are having babies, thank you Aleta St. James. Hey, if you wanna be pushing 80 at your kid’s college graduation, go for it … and I hope that in the excitement of watching your progeny receive a diploma, you don’t trip over your walker and break a hip. But, as far as I’m concerned, this factory produced a single model and is hereby closed to business. Read more …
[What's your ideal family size? Post a comment or email me!]
Summer Holiday Parties>Strange Bedfellows>Double Shot Tuesdays
It’s Tuesday, and that means … time to dip into the blog archives for a double shot of some old favorites. This past weekend my youngest cousin got married in Denver. Being surrounded by my other cousins’ new babies — seems everyone had babies all at once! — put me in mind of my very early baby experiences. So without further ado …
My Misadventures In Breastfeeding … Or How I Learned To Love Baby Formula
“So, are you breastfeeding?”
When I was a new mom, I got asked that a lot. It’s the kind of question — along with How much weight did you gain during your pregnancy? and Are your nipples chapped? — that even complete strangers feel is well within their rights to ask if you’re toting around a baby. And given everything we know about the health benefits of breastfeeding — the higher IQs, the lower risk for infections, allergies, and a host of other problems including obesity and diabetes — the expectation was that I’d say Yes. Because of course I’d be foolish . . . make that down-right selfish, to deny my baby the precious elixir of breast milk.
Until . . . I couldn’t do it. Read more …
(Did anyone else have trouble breastfeeding? Please post a comment or email me!)
When I was pregnant, I was convinced — 1000 percent positive, actually — that we were having a girl. My husband Stewart would refer to my growing belly as “he” … and I’d routinely correct him. “No — She.” These back-and-forths usually played out when we were in a department store’s baby section, and I was mooning over some ridiculously frilly powder pink dress that no baby could conceivably be comfortable in.
Not that there was any rationale to my insistence that there was a girl baby cradled in there. My thinking ran along the lines that my sister already had two boys, and I figured, with the kind of twisted logic that makes Lotto addicts play the same combinations day after day, convinced their numberswill come up … someday, that it was simply time for our collective family to have a girl. And thus I was carrying her. So certain was I, we’d already picked out her name — Quinn. I wasn’t even thinking about boy names, because … well, why bother? Obviously, we were having a girl.
And then around about 14 weeks, I had my amniocentesis. Read more …
(Anyone else get “surprised” by their baby’s gender? Please post a comment or email me!)
Summer Holiday Parties>Strange Bedfellows>Vomit
I was at Orlando International Airport when my cell phone rang.
“Hon –”
It was Stewart. My husband. He’d just dropped me off at Jet Blue’s curbside check-in. In moments I’d be headed for New York. My first business trip back to the City in six months. I’d just gotten done with the requisite shedding of shoes and electronics at Security, where my favorite high-protein-low-carb-low-sugar-Greek-strained yogurt was carefully scrutinized and ultimately confiscated by the TSA. Have a nice breakfast, I thought, exasperated, as I watched my $2/cup yogurt disappear. It was just 7:30 in the morning, but I could already taste the martini I was planning to down that night at the Campbell Apartment.
But back to my cell phone … which was ringing … insistently. Jeeeee-zus … Can I not get five minutes to myself? C’mon! I already shower with my preschooler parked right outside the (glass) stall, banging away on his toy synthesizer piano. And I’d long ago given up peeing and pooping (also known in Mommy Circles as — Shhhhh! — hiding out and reading) in peace and solitude. I’d been off Mom Duty for exactly 23 minutes. I hadn’t even left Orlando. Is it time to board — and turn off my phone — yet?
Sigh. I flipped open my phone.
“Hey — ” I answered, fully engrossed in CNN, where the news was all about an Air France flight that had disappeared somewhere between Brazil and France the night before. We can photograph car license plates from space. How does a plane just drop off radar? That couldn’t be good. And how nice that I’ll be watching this airplane disaster unfold as I flew to New York.
“Uh … Hon?” Stewart’s voice pulled me back. He sounded concerned. Guess he wasn’t just calling to say I love you before I took off. “Uh … Fletcher threw up all over himself … and the car seat … and his blanket … and Cee Cee.” [Cee Cee is Fletcher’s never-go-anywhere-without-it stuffed hermit crab lovee. Hey, when your dad’s a marine biologist, you get toy sea critters, not teddy bears.]
“How bad?”
“Remember Linda Blair in The Exorcist?
Head spinning. Spewing green goo. Disgusting stuff, really.
“This. Is. Worse!” I could hear the slight panic in his voice. It was a little funny actually, considering that this is a guy who, when he was curator of The Dolphin Habitat at The Mirage in Las Vegas, once KY’d his entire arm, then stuck it all the way down a dolphin’s throat and into its belly to retrieve a toy car it had swallowed. But a vomiting child — his vomiting child — that was freaking him out. “What should I do?!?”
Was it wrong that I took some perverse pleasure that this was happening on Stewart’s watch? Just when I was moments from fleeing the city on a big ol’ jet airliner? For five whole days?!?
Not that I was at all happy that Fletcher was sick. What mom, apart from the crazy Munchausen types, ever is? But a teensy part of me was doing the happy dance that this time, it wasn’t on me. Literally. It’s got to be some twisted Murphy’s Law of childcare that kids will get violently (and repeatedly) sick when you’re the only one around to clean it up.
(Show of hands — or comments — Moms if you’ve mopped up and hosed down more than your fair share of kid throw-up while Dad’s doing the three-martini business dinner at Peter Lugar’s on the company expense account? Post a comment or email me!)
Of course, immediately, reflexively, I snapped back into Battle-Ready Mom Mode as I ran down the checklist of things to do to forecast whether we could expect more projectile vomiting or if this was an isolated spill.
“Clean him up. Take his temperature. Keep him quiet. Monitor his activity level,” I instructed. “Lethargic and uninterested even in WordWorld or Sesame Street? Definitely sick. Hopping off the couch to play with trucks … and puzzles …. and race cars … and dinosaurs? Demanding waffles for breakfast? He can go to school.”
Of course, current behavior was no guarantee of future performance. Fletcher’s played possum before — or maybe I should say reverse possum. Not too long ago, after another random bout of vomiting, he’d seemed fine. Fine enough, anyway, to go see Mamma Mia!, then clamor for a cupcake at our favorite bakery/gelateria. But as the day went on, he began complaining about a tummy ache and that it hurt when he peed. Which is how we ended up at Night Lite Pediatrics late on a Sunday afternoon where, because he hadn’t yet learned to pee in the potty and they needed a urine sample to check for a bladder infection, they snaked a catheter up his baby penis. Now that is a fun time. And if you haven’t experienced that yet, I recommend skipping it.
If I had more Mom Experience, I probably would have sensed that things were gonna go south earlier in the day when Fletcher climbed into my lap as I was using the bathroom. (Remember what I said about never going alone?) It’s universally understood that I have a teacup of a bladder — seriously, Fletcher can hold it longer than I can, the little camel. So all dressed in workout clothes, I was making my last pit stop before setting out on a power walk with Fletcher in the stroller to provide extra resistance. He crawled into my lap, snuggled his sweet little head into my chest … and then vomited. All over me. Repeatedly. There was no warning. No Mommy, I don’t feel well that might have prompted me to quickly hop off and yield the bowl to Fletcher. Nope. He seemed fine one minute; the next, he was spewing like the Exxon Valdez. You know you’re a mom when you’ve had warm toddler vomit gush between your breasts, spill down your legs and soak into your cross-trainers.
All this is by way of saying that I’d been fooled once into thinking that a little vomit was no big deal when it really heralded a tenacious bacterial infection that had Fletcher spewing out one end or the other for more than a week. Vomit is just that much more special when it’s accompanied by its cousin, explosive diarrhea. There’s just nothing like opening your son’s diaper to find that he’s sitting in a puddle of diarrhea that comes nearly to his waist. It got so that I had to cover his changing table with a tarp. ‘Course, that didn’t help much the day Fletcher woke from his nap, crying because he, and the bedding and his clothing and his stuffed animals were covered in — you guessed it! Shit! Hours later, after I’d stripped and bathed Fletcher, then stripped and Lysoled the crib, washed all the bedding and the soiled clothing and stuffed critters, there was another, um … blowout. And I had to do it all again.
Just so you have a little better understanding about why I was — maybe callously, then again, maybe not — dancing the joy jig at the JetBlue gate, let me explain that the Great Vomit and Shit Storm of ’08 occurred while my wonderful husband was away for six weeks on business. Six! Weeks! For six weeks, I held the fort in the Shit Swamp without complaining (though you can see I’m making up for it now!) I figured Stewart could hold his own against a little projectile vomiting for what? A few days?
But just to make sure he didn’t get too bad a drubbing — and because I figured Fletcher would probably go to school after all — I called the nursery school director and left the longest list of In Case Of Emergency numbers — Stewart’s cell, the nanny’s cell, my parents’ cells, my sister’s office and cell and a few other random folk who could be counted on in the case of an unexpected relapse — in the history of childcare. The list went on (to quote playwright/screenwriter Tom Stoppard) for the length of a Bible. Okay, maybe I wasn’t immediately available, but I was still neurotic.
Then having done all I could by remote, I got on the plane. And I turned off my phone. And basked in the sweet, sweet silent bliss of no one asking for juice. Or help with the potty. Or one more episode of Sid, The Science Kid, Pleeeeeeze , Mommy before bedtime. Or to hose down the vomit-covered car seat
Two and a half hours later, when we landed at Kennedy, I checked in with the nursery school director. “Fletcher’s fine,” she assured me. When I got into my hotel room, before my first business meeting, I checked in with the nanny. “Fletcher’s fine,” she reported, then raced off to accompany him on some adventure, involving Play Doh and dinosaurs. And later that night, I checked in with Stewart. “Fletcher’s doing just fine,” he promised.
So, ‘twas just a touch of carsickness. A combination of too much chocolate milk early in the morning and a bumpy, twisty, turny ride on a turnpike perpetually under construction. As they say, “Shit (and vomit) happens.” But this time, I’m sure as hell glad it didn’t happen to me.
Summer Holiday Parties>Strange Bedfellows>Double-Shot Tuesdays
I’m taking a page from Scary Mommy. She (though I’m sure she’s not alone in this) has instituted Flashback Fridays on her wondrously funny blog in which she recycles a past crowd pleaser on Fridays.
Nice. But given as I’m time pressed with actual writing that’s keeping the lights on in our house, Wells Fargo from repossessing our Volvo, and my kidlet in Montessori school — and since my early stuff has hardly gotten wide distribution because I started blogging before I learned the virtues of the Share button — I’m going to offer TWO — count ‘em! — of my personal favorites that people who are not my mom (or otherwise related to me by blood or marriage) have deemed good reads.
And yes, I realize that last sentence borders on the Faulkner-esque. Thank you, Grammar Police. As a side note, I’m sure that my eighth grade English teacher is still shocked and amazed that people — and by that I mean bona fide magazine editors — actually pay me to write stuff, given that in middle school I could not diagram a sentence to save my life. Ms. Eighth Grade Grammar Teacher, you’ll be happy to know that 30 years later, I can spot a misplaced modifier at 50 paces … even if I can’t map it out.
But now without further ado … and in that true pop radio tradition of giving airplay to two songs in a row from The Same Band, here’s my double-shot tribute to Tuesdays.
Read ‘em and … well, please SHARE them, DIGG them, and by all means COMMENT on them or send me EMAIL about them.
Thanks!
How New Moms Bond
So, my new friend — we’ll call her Brooklyn — was telling me about her fourth-degree anal tear. “…and the doctor’s down there for what seems like ever, making these sewing motions. I’m like, Hey, whatcha doing down there? And he says, Oh nothing …. But when the anesthetic wore off, like Oh … my … God! I didn’t think I’d ever want to get pregnant again.”
Did I mention that she was telling me this while hugely pregnant … with her third?!? Hey, guys tell war stories. Women tell birthing stories. It’s how we bond with other new moms. Park a stroller in a food court, at the playground, under a shady tree with your newborn and if there’s another new mom within 50 yards, she’ll parallel park her Bugaboo and after a few pleasantries — How old’s your baby? Is she sleeping through the night yet? – will launch into My labor was hor-ri-ble. Let me tell you … And she’s off to recount the kind of extremely graphic details that you’d only be privy to if you were, say, a regular watcher of those reality birthing shows on Discovery Health. Within minutes you’ll know more about your new pal’s vagina than if you’d hooked up with her at Dinah Shore. Read more …
Circum-Decision
You know how you take certain things for granted and just assume that your worldview on a particular subject is universally shared by all … or at least by the man you married and who supplied the other half of your kidlet’s DNA? And then you find out that that’s totally not the case … that in fact, said DNA-Contributor has a completely different take on something that’s so diametrically opposed to yours that you can’t even believe anyone would think that way.That pretty much sums up my pre-baby discussion about circumcision with Stewart. I had taken it as a given, in the way that I take it as given that the sky is blue, the grass (when we remember to water it) is green and that Paris Hilton will eventually do something even more crass and unbecoming than flash her hoo-ha at the paparazzi. In other words, we’re having a boy, so, duh, he’ll be circumcised.
Stewart apparently, was of a different mind altogether.
Here’s me: So after the baby’s born, we’ll get him circumcised in the hospital.
Here’s Stewart: Um …I don’t think we should. What????? Read more …
Summer Holiday Parties>Strange Bedfellows>And There Were Three In The Bed …
Every time I get into bed at night I think of Roy Scheider. Not that way. I mean, yeah, he was hot — especially in All That Jazz. But I’m thinking of Jaws. You know when he’s out at sea with those two other guys, and he gets his first really good look at the shark and the enormity of just how fucked they are hits him full on. And then he says: We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
I know what he means. We need a bigger bed.
When Stewart and I bought our stupidly expensive, ludicrously tall queen-size mattress with the six-inch pillow top, and the gorgeous cherry-wood sleigh bed frame to go with it, I certainly felt that even with the bed’s shortcomings (too soft for my back; so high that when I was pregnant, I needed a step ladder to climb into it), it would at least be big enough for two slender adults and three cats. Okay, so the cats are pretty huge for house cats, but still. There was plenty of room for all of us to pile in. And then came …
Ah, ah, ah … with this essay’s provocative title I bet you’re thinking (hoping maybe?) we seduced our nanny into a permanent ménage a tois. Nope. So sorry to disappoint. The third in our bed is our child. And now, I wish with all of my interior design-challenged heart, that we’d splurged on the California King. Perhaps someone with more Mom Miles under her high-waisted jeans than I have can explain why it is that kids insist on sleeping perpendicular to whoever else is in the bed with them. My kid roams the bed at night like some pint-sized Ferdinand Magellan and flip flops more than John Kerry campaigning for the White House. And for one so small — not quite 3 feet and under 30 pounds — he takes up waaaaay more than a third of the mattress, leaving Stewart and I pushed to the edges, clinging to the sides like some ancient cliff-dwellers.
(Is anyone else having co-sleeping issues? Share your comments below or email me.)
Honestly, I still can’t quite believe it, but somehow in the six months after Fletcher graduated from crib to big kid bed, our bed — the marital bed! — became the family bed. I know … I know. At best, you’re thinking we’re some kind of hippy-dippy ’60s-wannabe parents who went to Oberlin College and wear tie-dyed hemp clothing while making our own tofu and whistling Kumbayah all day. At worst, you’re thinking: You guys are wimps!!! Spineless wimps!!! Hint: I hate tie-dye. Which leaves …. Yes, I know! We are wimps!
Not in a bazillion years would I have ever thought I’d have a family bed. Growing up, I’d often crawl into my sister’s bed when I got the willies at night. But my parents’ bed? Absolutely off-limits. No kids allowed. Period. End of story. Might as well have been Area 51 for as close as I could get to it. I carried this bias into adulthood, in the same kind of knee-jerk way that even though I don’t keep kosher, I still can’t stomach eating a slab of ham or drinking milk with a burger. Once, back in my magazine days, when another staff editor casually mentioned that she had a family bed, my reaction to this revelation was immediate, visceral (and mercifully contained in interior monologue): Your kids sleep in the same bed with you and your husband? Gross! And then: How do you guys have sex?
So, you can see I was an unlikely candidate for group snoozing. After all, we weren’t nomads living in a yurt somewhere. We were three people living in a house with four bedrooms, for god’s sake. There was plenty of space to crash. And in the early days of Fletcher’s arrival I was adamant about the whole separate bed thing. During the long stretch of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. feedings, I kept Fletcher close, but terrified of the SIDS risk that comes with co-sleeping, always in his own little bassinet parked on my side of the bed. Even when we eventually moved him upstairs to his own room and his own crib — at 8 months, which was not soon enough for my husband and still too soon for me — he did okay on his own. Well, all right … he did okay after our steadfast nanny loaned us some backbone and helped us sleep train him. (Which, by the way, if you’ve never sleep-trained an infant yourself, it’s an agonizing process, known as Ferberizing, that requires nerves of titanium, ice water in your veins and construction-grade ear plugs to get through.) But after five days of steeling ourselves against Fletcher’s howls of abandonment, we were home free and sleeping soundly.
And then the whole megillah unraveled when we swapped his crib for his new “big kid” bed.
Naturally, the first night in the new bed went off without a hitch. That should have been my first clue that the situation was way too good to be true. Instead, I was lulled (naively I see now) into an utterly false sense of He loves his bed … This will be an easy transition! Uh-huh. How many ventures have been doomed by such gross under-estimations? Sure, Fletcher loved his new bed. In the daytime. When he could jump on it. Or off of it. He’d even nap peaceably in it. But at night, he wanted nothing to do with it. Once the novelty of the new bed wore off (about 24 hours after he got it), we found ourselves faced with a brand of toddler defiance that makes Daniel Craig look like a wuss. “Go ‘night, ‘night in Mommy and Daddy’s bed,” he’d insist.
Now here’s a bit of insight that I’ve gained through my anthropological study of toddlers, otherwise known as living with one. They may have the attention span of a Tsetse fly. But when they want something, then they’ve got the tenaciousness of a Jack Russell terrier, the lung capacity of an opera singer and the endless tears of Tammy Faye Bakker. And by the way, their ability to last you out rivals the decomp rate of a Twinkie. (Sure it’s easy to say Let ‘em cry it out when it’s not your kid wailing. When it is your kid wailing as if he’s Caesar to your Brutus, letting him cry it out is like being slowly filleted with long knives.) Even when I knew I was being played for a sap, I’d still crumble. And so that’s how we got sucked into taking turns laying down with Fletcher in his new bed until he fell asleep.
Of course, I could still pretty much count on being rousted from my bed nightly by the 2 a.m. cries of MOMMY! … MOMMY! MAAAAH-MEEEEE! That would be my cue to sleep-sprint up the stairs, scoop him up, and take him back downstairs to our bed. It was so predictable, I was practically on autopilot. But once potty training got under way, our nightly dance grew more complex. Now, there were trips to the bathroom to factor in. Diaper changes. Even wholesale switch-outs of sheets and pajamas. Sleep walking? Not anymore. I was double-espresso awake. And after the umpteenth week of fractured sleep, I was so dog tired I would have sold the kid to the gypsies for a solid 8. Like a Gitmo psych ops expert who deprives terror suspects of sleep in order to break them, Fletcher was wearing me down, down, down, down, down.
Now for those of you rolling your eyes and tsk-tsking at the gullible, newbie parents, I’m aware that we were cultivating a little Sleep Nazi. Our Munich came when Fletcher got sick and we let him, feverish and miserable, back into our bed to convalesce. The plan was to return him to his own bed after his recovery. But when that time came, he dug in. We gave him an inch, and he wanted Eastern Europe … aka our bed. And mounting our own resistance was turning bedtime into an escalating battle of wills.
Then at school, Fletcher’s teacher, Miss Evie, a sweet young gal with silky black hair and a spray of red stars tattooed up her neck, took me aside for a chat. Fletcher seemed weepy and out of sorts. He was hitting, kicking, acting out in ways that were completely uncharacteristic of the sweet-tempered child she’d come to know. Was anything going on at home? She asked in the way that one inquires if there’s been a death or a job loss. Were we, perhaps, beating him regularly? Her tone wasn’t exactly accusatory. But she let me know that whatever was going on at our house, it was spilling over into the classroom. And she’d taken note.
Now on top of exhausted, I was also concerned. Once upon a time when I was working on a magazine article, a children’s sleep specialist had shared with me that profound sleep loss in children is often mistaken for ADHD. In many cases, he told me, kids behaving badly were being doped up with Ritalin when probably all they needed was some more shut-eye. That gave me pause. With that in mind, as long as Fletcher was sleeping, was it really that important that he sleep in his own bed?
So I tried an experiment: That night when Fletcher made his nightly bid to sleep in our bed, I let him. And whaddya know? For the first time in I don’t know when, there was no 2 a.m. potty break; no Mommy! screams in the middle of the night. He slept like the proverbial baby. And so did we.
In the morning, he was in a great mood. And that afternoon, I got a thumbs up from Miss Evie.
After that, really, it was a no-brainer. To borrow from Robert Evans: the kid stays in the bed. When I confided to my friend Stephanie (who’s got two boys of her own) that I’d succumbed to this unorthodox sleep solution, she nodded, understandingly, but cautioned that whatever I was doing at this critical point, I’d just better be prepared to do it for a long, long, long, long time to come. She knows from when she speaks: For years, she slept with one child while her husband slept with the other. But, really, I don’t expect this situation to last all that long. At least not compared to the time it takes, say, water to carve out a canyon or for mountains to form. Meanwhile, it’s not lost on me that we all sleep better now that we’re sleeping together like nomads in a yurt.
And as for sex … well … thank goodness we’ve got three other bedrooms.
