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Do all babies stand on their tip-toes? It seems an odd thing to do before more basic skills like walking, but Sophie likes to stand on tip-toe, to reach as far as she possibly can. She also likes to climb stairs, and furniture, and adults, and anything else available to be climbed. I’m a little frightened at how eager she is to grow up.
In Sophie’s view, the main thing that grown-ups do is hold spoons. So Sophie is in a big hurry to wield her own spoon. It’s adorable and messy.
She is anxious to feed herself, but she also understands that what grown-ups do is feed others. So Sophie spends a lot of time waving her spoon near the yogurt container, then near our faces – and she squeals if we actually pretend to eat from the empty spoon she is so generously offering. She doesn’t limit herself to food, either. She generously fed leaves to her six-month-old friend Landon yesterday.
She likes to take a brush and try to brush our hair. If Ben is around, she’ll take turns, brushing his hair and then mine. Then this morning, she seized the toothbrush and tried to brush my teeth – before deciding that maybe the toothbrush too could be used to comb my hair.
I don’t know if all babies go through this generous & messy phase, but it’s incredibly endearing.
Since she can’t talk yet, our only clue to how Sophie spends her Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays is what she brings home from daycare. And here is a short list:
- a small purple blankie that she won’t let go of
- lots of germs
- cuddly white-and-orange socks (she tends to have cold feet, so I guess her daycare-lady gave her these extra socks – I found them hidden under her own socks)
- a clean carseat (it had avocado stains on it when we dropped it off in the morning)
- a comb-over (I know I should be happy that she gets the physical attention, but I also find it odd that her daycare lady brushes her hair as if she is a bald man trying to cover up that baldness. Every day.)
- a strong smell of detergent
- a greater willingness to lie still on the changing table
- a marked tendency to actually share her toys with other children. (She used to be the piggy kid in the group who grabbed everything for herself, and/or the iconoclast who went off on her own to explore the most dangerous non-toy available — but since daycare began, she has been playing like a reasonably socialized, well-mannered child. I really don’t know how her daycare lady does it.)
- a well-restedness from having a two- or three-hour nap (at home, her naps are rarely longer than 90 minutes — again, I don’t know how her daycare lady does it).
- a desire to be held a lot
All in all, except for that last point, I think these signs point to a good daycare place. It’s a single lady caring for six children in her home. I couldn’t do it, but Sarah Smith has those six children trained to be both polite & affectionate, and manages to keep everything calm, safe, cheerful, and astoundingly clean, even while she also cooks homemade lunches every day. My biggest qualm (other than the aforementioned combover) is that Sarah Smith also plays Christian sermons for much of the day. But they seem to be reasonable sermons, and they probably don’t sound very different to Sophie than the NPR that I listen to. Our Unitarian sunday school will eventually teach her about Buddhism & Sikhs & Islam & Judaism & more to balance out the daycare sermons, I hope.
Last week, Sophie & I got to visit Maia, Soph’s old nanny, whom we had to give up on because our schedules didn’t match, and also I can’t afford a nanny for 3 days a week anyway. Maia warned me that Sophie would probably be angry at her. But Sophie wasn’t – Sophie was her usual smiley self, seeming serenely comfortable in Maia’s arms. Maia says this is the first former child she has met who hasn’t been angry. It’s a testament to Sophie’s wonderful temperament, I think, but Maia also says it’s a sign that Sophie is well-cared-for. I hope so.
It’s scary to relinquish my child to a stranger, so early, before Sophie can talk to me about it. But I suppose that bringing home fuzzy white-and-orange socks is a way of talking to me.
You, dear readers (there are 27 of you) can help settle an argument. I just made ice-cream, because I went orange-and-lemon-picking again today and had a lot of lemons, and lemon ice cream is tasty. But I hadn’t planned on having lemons or wanting to make ice cream, so I had no cream in the house. So I substituted cream cheese.
Ben thinks this is hilarious. Ben declares that it’s a good thing I’m not a chemist.
But I don’t think that it’s so silly. My recipe called for cream & buttermilk. That’s really just milk, fat, and something tangy. And cream cheese is made of milk, fat, and something tangy, right? It’s not really so liquidy, though, that was a problem, although I did heat it up in the lemon-sugar-water mixture to encourage it to melt. It didn’t fully melt, so I just mushed it around, but there wasn’t so much of it anyway (we were low on cream cheese) – so I also used milk and butter.
Yes, even I know that milk plus butter does not equal buttermilk. But it does equal fatty milk, and that’s all that cream is, right?
My ice cream is very tasty, by the way, despite the cream-cheese chunks. Even Ben concedes that, while laughing at me.
Sophie has her first ear infection. She got a cold at daycare, then it moved to a weird snotty discharge from her eyes, and now it’s in her ears — we know because she tugs at them a few times a day and looks bewildered. Yesterday at the doctor’s office, her temperature was 102 degrees. The fascinating thing is that Sophie responds quite sweetly to what must be disorienting pain. She just wants to be held all the time. She lifts up her arms and reaches for us, then wraps her little legs around our bodies, and, if we’re lucky, rests her downy head on our shoulder. She’s lethargic & oh-so-cuddly, and that’s just an amazing response to what I assume must be a strange pain, & loss of balance, & terrible discomfort.
It’s not all sweetness, of course. For the past three nights, she’s been waking up sometimes as often as every 20 minutes, and never less than every 3 hours, mostly because it’s hard for her to breathe through her snot-filled nose. But then she cuddles one of us & goes back to sleep, and this is tolerable because I know it’s temporary. At least I hope it’s temporary. Hooray for modern antibiotics. Hooray for Ben’s flexible-enough work-schedule that let him take off work early yesterday in order to get Sophie to the doctor. Hooray for having healthcare. It’s one of those many instances that makes me wonder: what do other people do? Families without healthcare, workers without flextime: that is a huge number of Americans, and it’s scary to think about.
The US is one of only four countries in the developed world that does not offer paid family leave to new mothers. Urge the presidential candidates to make paid family leave a priority with this mom’s rising petition
Google maps lets you find ways to drive there on back streets or take public transport. Wouldn’t it be great if google maps also had a “bike there” function, directing people to the most bike-friendly route? Ask for that here
And freerice.com isn’t a petition, but it’s a fun way to do some good. It’s an online vocabulary quiz that keeps giving you harder words each time you get something right. And for every word you get right, it donates 20 grains of rice to the UN world food program. My vocab level got up to 47, mostly because I knew “aver” and “turpitude” and “regnant,” but I got stuck on “grabble.”
Last weekend, my dad was here, so we went tide-pooling, and, for the first time ever in her life, Sophie squished wet sand between her bare toes. She got so wide-eyed & enthusiastic, wiggling her little feet, then plunging her fingers and then whole body into the sand, that it makes me remember how amazing wet sand really feels. She’s getting adept at communicating her feelings: love of wetsand, fascination with birds on telephone wires, triumphant discovery of cat-toys that I haven’t adequately hidden from her, horror at the stingray at the aquarium but mesmerization with the tropical fish… She is so aware, alert, & constantly changing that she’s like a meditator, already.
At her baby shower, people wrote messages to her on pieces of cloth that I sewed into a quilt. “Play,” someone wrote on her quilt, and “Enjoy.” “Sometimes life is more about the journey than the destination.” “Laugh often and love much…” (That last one is a quote from Emerson.) The amazing thing is that Sophie already knows this advice. There are only a few squares on this quilt that she doesn’t yet embody. “Plant trees. Strive to leave the world slightly better than you found it,” says one square, and — my favorite, written by my wise colleague Wayne Hobson — “Remember that you have free will but you are not alone.” She’ll grow into those, I hope, but for now, already, she inherently possesses much of the wisdom & delight that we wished for her in this quilt.
“I have always been regretting that I am not as wise as the day I was born,” says one of her onesies, quoting Thoreau, in another gift from a colleague, Pam. Soph doesn’t fit into this onesie yet, but the sentiment fits.
One of the biggest challenges of mommying, for me, is that I’m never alone, now. I have had to figure out: How do I take a shower without neglecting my baby? The answer, for me, is to strap her in to some immobilizing but hopefully engaging contraption that I would never have approved of before I had a baby of my own. Once strapped in, I can safely place Sophie in the bathroom with me. Hooray for her bouncy-chair, and hooray for her exersaucer, and who knows what I’ll use once she outgrows that exersaucer. But even that isn’t enough. I’ve recently switched to showering in the guest bathroom because it has glass walls instead of a shower-curtain, and Sophie cries less if she can see me. It’s odd that my baby has this much control over me.
The showering example is just one way to explain that I used to have lots of solitude, and now I have none, and this has been a giant transition for me. And yet I still feel lonely, at times, because Sophie isn’t exactly a scintillating conversationalist. At least not yet.
There’s an even bigger parenting paradox: I have this suspicion that everything I do as a mom is simultaneously trivial & momentous. I think that Sophie will remember very little of what we do together — except I fear that the few things that she does remember may deeply affect her for life. And I have no idea which is which.
Will she remember that we went orange-picking on Monday afternoon? Someone from my Unitarian fellowship announced that he had too many oranges, so we got to visit his fascinating SoCal estate filled with hundreds of pet-birds & several dozen citrus trees & the most wonderfully-smelling flowers. Lots of things around here get called “Rancho” — it’s typical developer-speak for upscale housing development, but this particular orange-tree-surrounded house actually merited the title Rancho. Sophie seemed as delighted as I was by the whole bizarre & delicious scene, and she clutched her oranges so cutely. But maybe what she will really remember is that on the way home, I temporarily gave her my car-keys to play with (in the moment, it seemed the best way to keep her happy) but then took the keys back to drive us home & I left her crying alone in her carseat. Or maybe what she will remember is that, once home, I let her eat a segment of these amazing blood-oranges we picked, and it might have been a scary color for her, or it might have been too acidic for her little tummy — or it might have been a delightful sensory experience. Or it might mean nothing in the long run.
You see the conundrum? There’s so much I can possibly do wrong, and very little that I can confidently do right, even when what I’m doing is such a seemingly simple and sweet thing as taking my baby orange-picking.
I think I have gotten this impression from reading too many memoirs. And maybe it’s not even true. We live in a blame-your-parents culture, but my own personal belief is to take more individual responsibility for our actions & responses & patterns.
I’m thinking about this because I’ve been trying to figure out where all this mommying pressure comes from. I keep hearing moms complain about how they feel constantly judged, and I feel this myself, but then I don’t actually see many people ever actually doing this judging. It seems like a bizarre self-imposed pressure. Is it the basic problem that we feel insecure about raising kids, unsure whether we’ll successfully inculcate in them the myriad habits & traits that it takes for them to even reproduce our own class status or simply feel a sense of comfort & happiness? Is it the fact that US society expects individuals to do what most other societies do collectively (working out family flex-policies each on our own, stretching to afford childcare & find time to spend with family…)? Is it the fact that there is so little actual research about parenting, but so much seemingly at stake in every detail?
For instance, we know that breastfed children have higher i.q.s, but we don’t know if that’s only because it’s the more educated parents who choose to breastfeed, or have the time-flexibility to breastfeed, or the necessary community-support to breastfeed. Everyone I know needed someone beyond the basic lactation consultant in the hospital: that’s how hard it is, even though we had previously thought that it was natural, intuitive, and joyous. Breastfeeding IS joyous, in the long-run; I’m already regretting the not-too-distant future time when Sophie will wean herself — but it’s also complex. And breastfeeding is just one little daily act.When should my child start wearing shoes? And how do I teach my child not to lick the toilet-seat? If I feed her real foods too early, am I inadvertently starting a potential food-allergy or am I wisely ignoring the paranoid hoopla that is most parenting advice? How do I keep her safe, and healthy, and hopefully curious & joyful too? And, while doing all that, how do I also take care of myself – since of course that’s fundamental to taking care of her?
I meant to post something more cheerful. Here, I’ll try again: Sophie and I got to pick oranges this week. It was fabulous. If you live anywhere near me, stop on by, these blood-oranges are delicious. I am so grateful that I have my community, and my cultural-studies analysis, because I couldn’t do this without that.
Maybe because it gets me right while skewering me, I find this blog eerily hilarious: Stuff White People Like
Lately, every time I commute to work I have to slow down for an immigrant check. And I don’t get it. There’s a sign, “Stop for US officers,” and there used to be this offensive “Caution” sign, too, because apparently a lot of immigrant smugglers let people out near this spot, a good forty miles from the international border, in the middle of a military base, next to a nuclear power plant – as if that makes any sense.
There’s only one highway through here, I guess that’s why it’s an immigrant inspection point. It’s a wide, five-lanes-in-each-direction highway, and the immigrants often came from rural places where they’d never seen such traffic. Apparently, people used to get killed here, regularly. So the CA highway commission thought it was helping by putting up these offensive signs, weirdly communicating “Mexican Crossing” just because it’s a shorter man, and a woman in a skirt, and a family that looks desperate. (One of my colleagues at Cal State Fullerton actually designed the sign.) It angered a lot of people, and even inspired some decent spoofs. I don’t think it protected anyone.
Eventually, they built a fence in the middle of the highway, and I’ve never seen anyone crossing, even though I drive it twice a week.
What I do see is the immigrant inspection, regularly. And here’s what I don’t get: what are the officers looking for? They work at random hours, but lately it’s been always during my morning commute. Traffic slows to 5 mph. A young guy, trying to look tough, wearing army-like fatigues and CHiP-like sunglasses, stands in the middle of the lane, peering at each driver & waving us through. What are they looking for? Okay, I know they’re looking for dark-skinned people crowded into older cars, but how is this legal? I thought they’re not supposed to judge on race or class? They always wave me through: I’m pale-skinned, business-suited, and driving a fairly new Prius. And I’m always furious. Not just because it adds fifteen minutes to my commute, but mostly because it seems so pointless, and so bigoted, and so very unAmerican.
