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Here is Sophie, holding Ben’s skate-board-wheel, standing in front of Ben’s surfboards, and wearing a temporary tattoo that Ben gave her.
She spent all of today with Ben because, for a change, I had to go to work and he didn’t. He took her to the toddler-open-gymnastics romp at our local Y, and then out for fish tacos, and then — this part was brilliant of him — he took her shoe-shopping, since trying on shoes is one of her favorite things to do. Usually she’s just grabbing other kids’ dirty shoes at the park. I never thought to take her shoe-shopping, where she can try on clean shoes to her heart’s delight. They ended the day at the beach, both covered in sand.
And I ended the day with new sympathy for Ben. It’s hard to work all day, then come home to a tired happy family who just want to play all evening, without a break.
Do you think it’s possible for a baby to eat too many blueberries? Sophie loves the way frozen blueberries feel on her teething gums. She loves the sweet way they burst in her mouth. She loves, I think, the way they turn everything purply-blue. She asks for frozen blueberries at every meal, and really every time she passes our freezer. She knows they live in there, and she’s trying hard to open the freezer to get them out herself. The other day, she saw me put them in the grocery-cart, and she threw her first grocery-store tantrum because I wouldn’t let her eat them right there and then. (They’re too messy for grocery-store eating. Trust me.)
We try not to let her eat more than one measuring-cup-full of frozen blueberries at a sitting. We try to steer her to frozen blackberries and strawberries and peach and pineapple – and fresh foods too. I try to get her to eat dairy and protein and carbs, not just fruit. But she’s been on a frozen-blueberry kick all week. She’s eating lots of everything, lately, her cute little belly is getting swollen out like one of America’s founding fathers — but mostly she’s eating frozen blueberries.
Our baby toilet came with a free subscription to Parents Magazine (really), but I’m already ready to throw that magazine in the toilet. It exists only to make readers paranoid and consumeristic. Last month, the “It happened to me” column featured a mother declaring, “My baby lost his fingers when I pushed the shopping cart too close to the grocery-store door.” Yes, you, too, now get to worry about being that bizarre mom who didn’t notice her child’s screams in time to avoid severing a finger. I know that all women’s magazines exist to induce paranoia and consumerism, but somehow I wasn’t quite prepared for the anger that Parents Magazine arises in me. I don’t need new things to worry about it. I have quite enough already.
Here’s another example: a recurring ad features a baby dressed in business attire, with the tagline, “Don’t irritate your new boss.” Yes, moms, you are your child’s servant. Don’t you forget it. Now go buy the expensive supposedly non-irritating diaper-wipes that this ad is for. Don’t even consider the fact that the least irritating thing is also the cheapest, environmental option: a plain washcloth spritzed with water. Your job as a mom is to shop and cater to your baby, that’s it, stop thinking now. Don’t even start to think about why Parents Magazine consistently assumes that “parent” means “mom.”
But there is one redeeming feature. Last month’s Parents Magazine led me to the mom-101 blog, with the absolutely perfect tagline, “I don’t know what I’m doing either.” And that led me to my new favorite mommying post ever, which sidesteps the entire Competimommy, “My baby can already sign all of ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm,” and the Sanctimommy, “What do you mean your house isn’t perfectly childproofed yet?” and instead enumerates the real games that children actually play: Water-spitting, shrieking, poke-the-dog, put-your-hands-in-your-poo, try-to-see-what-you-can-choke-on. It’s hilarious.
“Why is your baby sucking on your boobie?” asked the four-year-old at the picnic table next to ours.
“Because she’s eating,” I told her, “That’s how some babies eat.”
The four-year-old screwed up her face at me, trying to gauge whether I was joking or whether I was really crazy enough to believe that my baby somehow cannibalizes my body. I just pulled the cloth of Sophie’s sling further over us, trying to go on breastfeeding calmly and discreetly. But then the four-year-old asked the obvious next question: “If she’s eating, then why are you hiding it?”
We just spent one last wonderful summer weekend in Big Bear. I’m not sure whether Sophie is astoundingly courageous or just absolutely ignorant of the idea of danger — or maybe both, and probably the appropriate label is just a typical toddler. She’s pretty darn cute, though, and managed to get through the weekend with only one skinned knee.
She loves B&C’s cabin and B&C themselves. The air smells so good up there, the views are incredibly calming, the food is decadent, but, in addition to those adult delights, what Sophie really likes is that the stairs are carpeted.
While we were there, Ben won his bike-race overall for the season. He’s got his own description of it here.
Sophie wanted to race too. 
She also got to enjoy her first boat ride, out on Big Bear Lake. 
Okay, maybe “enjoy” is too strong a word. She hated that infant life-jacket. But eventually she couldn’t resist her delight in the waves and ducks and fish and sky and all that wind in her hair. 
Here she is at Ben’s mountain-bike-race, covered in dirt and watermelon.
And here she is exhausted on the drive home.
Lately, any chance she gets, Sophie will do a back-bend. Sitting in her sling, scrambling on her little jungle-gym, anywhere she’s close to my hands because she knows I will help spot her: she will bend herself backwards and then start laughing at the head-rush upside-down-world. She’s got a better urdhva dhanurasana wheel-pose than me, probably because she has very little fear. She likes me to help her upright again. She likes to do this at least three times in a row, like any good yogi. The other day we were out walking, and Sophie was laughingly backbending from her seat in the sling, and a stranger said, “What are you doing to that baby?”
Sophie has a best-friend at daycare, Macy. They actually spend hours babbling to each other: “Blip blip bleu bleu kolloo,” they say. Daycare Teacher suspects that they may be talking about her. One time we ran into Macy at a coffee-shop on a Saturday, and Mace nearly jumped out of her stroller, eagerly lunging at Sophie. They’re pretty good friends.
But earlier this week, in an overabundance of friendship, Sophie pulled Macy’s chair on top of her foot, cutting her own toe pretty badly. She’s got a pus-filled blister on that toe now. She wisely tries to hold that whole foot out of the bath-water, because it stings her so much. My normally barefoot-loving baby now insists on wearing some really solid white shoes that Daycare Teacher gave her after the chair incident. Sophie even asked to wear her orthopedic-looking old-lady shoes to bed last night.
Then when I was putting neosporin on her festering blister, she seized her favorite thing in the medicine cabinet: baby tylenol. Sophie is a baby-tylenol addict. She’s getting pretty fond of neosporin too, now that it’s making her toe feel better, but, to Sophie, baby tylenol is even more enticing, because it’s got a delicious rubbery medicine-dropper top that she prefers to any pacifier. I let her chew on the closed tylenol bottle while I put her pajamas on last night. Usually, as she nurses to sleep in my arms, she’ll let go of whatever toy she’s clutching. But she would not let go of that baby tylenol.
Ideal Mom would have simply seized the toy and still managed to get her baby calmly to bed. Ideal Mom would have never let medicine become a toy in the first place. But I’m Real Mom. I thought, “How bad would it be to let her take Baby Tylenol to bed? It’s a child-safe bottle, right? It’s just like a pacifier. What are the chances that she’ll chew through the rubber and overdose on tylenol?” Yes, I actually thought that. I actually calculated the risk in my head, before I came to my senses and decided that I really couldn’t let her sleep with a medicine bottle. But I couldn’t remove it either. So I twisted the top off, licked the dropper clean, and left her with the empty medicine dropper to soothe herself to sleep.
It’s maybe not the worst thing a mom has ever done. But oh so far from ideal. This morning, Sophie was still enjoying her medicine-dropper top so much that she kept trying to stick it in my mouth, too. I think her molar teeth may be coming in, so every last drop of tylenol that she can extract from that dropper is something she wants. Ben has started calling it her crack-pipe, but, he points out, at least she still shares, even her crack-pipe.
I’m trying to teach Sophie words, but she tends to mis-define things. For instance, I’ve been tapping myself and saying “Mommy” — and now apparently Sophie thinks that “Mommy” means “tapping.” At least, she only says “Mommy” when she is tapping. It’s almost cute.
She has started hitting, now, hitting us and then looking to see how we’ll react. Sometimes she even hits herself, then checks for our reaction. This may be the beginning of the terrible twos. So far, it’s not so bad: it just means we have to keep correcting her, which isn’t terrible, it’s just parenting.
She does have some positive new skills, though. This morning, she put her puzzle-pieces into her puzzle on her own, and she was so proud. This morning, she also climbed onto our bed all by herself, and played peek-a-boo with the cat under the sheets while I was attempting to change the sheets. Any chore takes longer with Sophie around, but it also often becomes more fun. Sophie was squealing with delight every single time she relocated our cat under those sheets.
I’m a little afraid of school starting in two weeks, because I will no longer have these leisurely mornings with her, at least not on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I know I can’t complain – I get to work from home three days a week – but still, I had been anticipating an easier schedule this fall. I was planning to begin teaching at 11am, but one of my classes was under-enrolled, so I have to teach an extra class that requires me to be there at 9:30. This would be nothing to complain about except that it’s a 70-mile drive with bad traffic before 9am It’s SoCal bad traffic, which is orders-of-magnitude worse than anywhere else I’ve lived. There will be whole hours of going less than 10mph. So mornings are going to be hectic for the fall semester. And days are going to be long: getting Sophie up and dressed and fed, getting the house neatened and plants watered, getting Sophie to daycare, getting myself to work on time, teaching a very long day, getting home, picking Sophie up, making dinner, enjoying Sophie for a brief play-time and then getting Sophie to bed suddenly seems like something that will be hard to do, at least on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s not even mentioning the work of planning classes, grading papers, dealing with administrative tasks, finishing my own research, or getting enough sleep. It’s a typical story, I know, but it shouldn’t be this hard, especially not given how flexible my work schedule truly is.
In other news: last night, marauding teenagers knocked our mailbox down, so now we have something else we have to shop for when we break our buy-nothing pledge. It was an old mailbox, it probably would have needed replacing in a few years anyway, but still, I’m disappointed to think that I live near people who get pleasure from destroying mailboxes. I’d much rather focus on Sophie and the cat joyously playing peek-a-boo together on our half-made bed.
In between cleaning baby-poop out of the bathtub, I am also a professor. So I live with the “publish or perish” pressure that you’ve probably heard about in academia. But — this is the ridiculous Pollyanna side of me — it’s not that bad. I teach at a second-tier university, so I don’t have the pressure that others have. (Also, I get the benefit of interesting students: they’re often the first in their families to go to college, they are diverse, and they haven’t yet discovered that learning history means more than memorizing. It can be fun to turn them on. But it’s also a lot of work, and I have a slightly heavier teaching load than my colleagues at more elite institutions.) Still, I don’t have to publish two books before my tenure review. I don’t have to publish “a field-changing book,” as junior profs at Princeton are told to do. I just have to publish four decent articles or, preferably, one book.
Yesterday I had an article accepted for publication. This is a big deal. Academic articles take me at least five months of working every day on research and writing. And since I don’t have that kind of uninterrupted time, this particular article took me all last summer and half of this summer — and it was something I had begun way back in grad school. It’s wonderful to have it finished. I still have to acquire illustrations, which means dealing with permissions and stuff, plus proofreading queries and more, but it will be printed in a few months, and then I get to hear feedback, which is the fun part. Even better, I think it may be my best article yet. It’s one that I started the year that I was heartbroken, and of course it has nothing to do with that heartbreak except that it has some unconventional, truly original ideas.
As part of the publication process, one of the anonymous peer-reviewers called my article “brilliant,” but then proceeded to give me two single-spaced pages of challenging advice about what I needed to change. It actually took me weeks to even re-read this peer review, which was more disheartening to me than it should have been — but this review also arrived right when Sophie’s sleep went wacky. I had to write to the journal’s editor to say, “Thanks for the feedback. Now how long can I take on this revise-and-resubmit process? Because my baby won’t sleep through the night.” He was incredibly understanding; he told me I could take up to two years. Sometimes academia turns out to be family-friendly after all. I am glad to get it done, now, only six months or so since that peer-review. In my case, lifting the pressure actually makes me more productive.
I am about to enter my fourth year of teaching at my large state university. Tenure review comes in my seventh year, but now that I have done three good articles since beginning the tenure-track, I only have to aim for one more article. Or, of course, a book. I’m working on it. But my summer will end in two short weeks, and then there’s an entirely different kind of pressure of teaching.
We bought Sophie some new summer-weight shoes. She had one pair of shoes, already, but they seem to make her hot. She kicks them off, then refuses to put her bare feet on dirty ground, fastidiously lifting her feet up high whenever we try to lower her down outdoors, carefully holding her feet out of the way and giving us a look like, “Mommy, can’t I please have some flip-flops?” So we went and got her new shoes, breaking our buy-nothing pledge. Then, since it was broken already, we went out for dinner. I felt guilty out of all proportion to this minor transgression. Ben joked that he was honoring buy-nothing month by ordering a small beer instead of his usual large.
We’re visiting B&C in their Big Bear Cabin this weekend, and I suspect that it will be hard to transport the cloth diapers (washing & drying them every day is fine at my house, but at someone else’s?), so I think I may buy plastic diapers for that trip. And we’re starting to need laundry soap, body-soap, and deodorant. One of my favorite things about buy-nothing month was that it kept me from having to make trips to annoying big-box stores. My local farmer’s-market supplied all my needs. Unfortunately, that only lasted for half a month.
At least the buy-nothing exercise meant less trips to annoyingly large stores. It meant some creative thinking: yesterday, when B&C gave us 40 wonderful plant-cuttings that we don’t yet have room to plant, I wasn’t sure what to do until I remembered that our neighbors had a “free dirt” sign on a pile in their yard. I had enough spare pots, saved from earlier plants because I’m just weird about throwing out stuff like that. So everything got planted in pots, and we avoided the ridiculousness of purchasing dirt — or even the ridiculousness of purchasing plants, when they do grow free. That was a benefit of buy-nothing month.
Also, we kept giving and getting free stuff. That felt good. And we learned that our lifestyle is already pretty minimal, pretty non-consumerist, except for going out to eat. And baby shoes. And, soon, diapers, deodorant, and soap.
