6 word memoir meme February 22, 2008

Got tagged with another meme by FightingWindmills, back a few days ago, and am finally getting around to posting this. In this one you’re supposed to write a 6 word memoir, and illustrate it with pictures, if you’d like.  Here’s the original post about it, with back story, and rules and such.

So here goes my attempt:

____-tinted lenses: nerd, geologist, infertile, parent

I toyed between using a hat analogy (wearing my geologist hat) and the lens analogy (viewing the world through my nerd lenses) and settled on the lenses. I like the idea of my experiences being something that colors my views of the world , rather than just something I wear. Plus, wearing two hats looks silly and three, well, if you can pull that off, I guess that’d be pretty cool, but looking through two lenses still makes sense - you’d see things in tinted with a third color.

When I see through my nerd lenses, I laugh at the nerdy jokes, I see my job at the library as being possibly the coolest job ever, and I see the kids at the cool table and tell myself that I wouldn’t want to be there, while secretly wishing I was. With my geologist lenses, the outcrops along the highway become dangerous distractions, and I pick up rocks and lick them to better see their layers. They also color my views on the environment, giving me a strong love for this world, but also disdain for those who say we need to save the earth. (Earth doesn’t need our saving. Earth’s been here for more than 4 billion years. It’s the ecosystem that supports our lives that we should be worried about.) My infertile lenses tinge pregnancy and new baby announcements with a touch of sadness, but then they have also colored how I view issues as diverse as gay marriage, reproductive rights, family planning and stem cell research. And finally the parent lenses, which I seem to wear all the time now, are giving me glimpses of how the world might look through 16-month eyes (that happen to wear glasses). Little hills are all of a sudden huge mountains that will be great for rolling down. A balloon is the best. toy. ever. A tea cozy is a great hat.

Anyone who wants to give this a try should consider themselves tagged. It’s a lot harder than it originally sounded, 6 words is not very many.  I’d also love to hear what lenses you view the world through.

why I shouldn’t be relied upon in the middle of the night November 30, 2007

Zoe woke up in the middle of the night last night - which would have been a totally normal thing, except that she had thrown up at some point. It was the middle of the night and I didn’t turn on the light so I didn’t realize it until after nursing for a bit, she threw up again (all over me). It was the middle of the night (sense a theme?) and I didn’t turn on the light, so I just thought she’d spit up a little and wiped up and kept nursing, until she sat up and threw up again. I catch on slowly in the middle of the night.

The book we have from the American Academy of  Pediatricians has a little section on vomiting. It talks about how hard it is to watch your child vomit, since they’re clearly unhappy, but there’s really not much you can do to make it better, and while you know it’s probably normal, but you worry there might be something going on. What the AAP fails to mention is that it’s hard to watch your child vomit because it’s disgusting. And then your child wants you to hold her, but both you and her are covered in disgusting vomit. Yes, yes, I worry about her health and hate to see her upset and do what I can to comfort, but, again, disgusting. Zoe seemed surprisingly chipper after all was said and done. As she watched Chris and I clean up a bit, she picked up a burp rag and started wiping the floor and the rocker herself. Such a sweetie.

So no eye doctor appointment today. Didn’t think it would be good for Zoe to go out in the cold and be upset by eye drops and bright lights - she hated that last time. And I didn’t think it would be good for anyone else to be exposed to a sick child. Zoe’s currently sleeping right now. I haven’t given her any solid foods yet, so after planning to try to get on something of a nursing schedule, we’re back to nursing whenever she needs it at least for the next day or so.

It all balances out? September 21, 2007

A friend who has had a difficult pregnancy mentioned that she hopes it will be balanced out by having an easy baby. Which got me thinking about things balancing out.

Maybe our infertility problems were balanced out by an easy pregnancy which was balanced out by an unwanted c-section which is balanced out by an easy time breastfeeding which is balanced out by a baby who doesn’t sleep through the night which is totally overwhelmingly unbalanced by the fact that I have the sweetest, cutest baby in the world.

Not a technique found in parenting books September 21, 2007

Zoe’s been sick with a cold and then a stomach virus, so we haven’t had much time to practice walking with her, since she’s been heading to bed so early the past few nights. But yesterday evening all three of us had a bit of time to play together in the living room, and Zoe was busy practicing both putting things in a bucket, and standing up and taking a few steps. Chris had a beer with him, and when Zoe noticed it, she started trying to get to it. It was then that we hit on the best motivation to get her to walk. That’s right, we got her to *run* for about 13 steps by keeping a beer bottle in front of her, just out of reach. This makes Anya’s previous comment quite prescient.

(to any nice child protective services people: we’ve never given Zoe beer, she just really likes teething on the bottles).

Mother of all Anxiety Dreams February 24, 2007

This morning I was recounting to Chris the bad dream I had last night. It involved Chris, Zoe, my brother and I going shopping at a huge K*Mart. Chris went to buy shoes that were on sale, so my brother and I were wandering through the store when I realized that I had no idea where Zoe was. I went back to the front of the store calling Zoe’s name and finally asked at the front desk.

“Oh yes,” the woman there says, “we saw your beautiful baby girl wandering loose through the store.”
“Where is she now?” I demand.
“Don’t know,” she answers.
“Did someone take her?”
“Don’t know.”
“Can some of your employees help me look?”
“I don’t know if that’s allowed,” she says, “do you think I can find our policies in Wikipedia?”

I go back to desperately searching for her while the front desk woman tries to find out if she’s allowed to help, and then wake up - happy to see Zoe sleeping soundly beside me.

Chris observed that the dream really hit all the anxieties: losing my daughter, dealing with bureaucracy, the misuse of Wikipedia as an authoritative source. “Oh yeah,” I reply, “did I mention that I was topless during the whole dream too…”

Logic January 13, 2007

Everyone knows that you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friends’ noses. It’s a little-known corollary that since you can not pick your child, you can pick your child’s nose. Now you might think that since you can’t pick your parents or siblings either, that you could also pick their noses, however, you’d be wrong.