My house is filled with books. Like Elizabeth Bennet fictionally before me, I do not consider myself a “great reader.” I just love books. I love to buy them, check them out from the library, smell them, attempt to write them, touch them, look at them and occasionally dive in and read them. My house is filled with books.
My house is filled with books and there are over a hundred I have yet to read. I will find myself at a bookstore, online, at a garage sale, in the grocery store, staring at a book and it will pull me in with its tractor beam of knowledge. “I will be so much smarter, more interesting, happier, taller if I own that book,” my self says to myself. I then purchase the book and hold it and pet it and love it and put it on the shelf or in a pile by my bed where books go to die. My house is filled with books.
My house is filled with books and every so often I think it’s time to part ways with a few of them. Some have been sent to me to review and once I started to skim them, I realized that I was not interested in reading them. I don’t feel right selling a book that was sent to me for a review but went unreviewed because I did not think it would interest my readers. I don’t want to make money on that kind of booty so I keep the books. Some I think might be interesting to someone, somewhere, sometime and deep down in my heart I want to be the one to provide that perfect book to the person who wants it. In my pre-child bearing life I was a librarian. My house is filled with books.
My house is filled with books and I have truly convinced myself that I need to keep the collection going so that in post-apocalyptic Washington, my house can become the town library. I will sort and label and catalog all the books, even the ones I don’t like, because others on my street might like them. Should I keep the book on animal anatomy? Well. There’s a vet on my street and he might be post-apocalyptically interested in my animal anatomy book, especially if his books are all destroyed in the blast. My house is filled with books.
Today I made a decision.
Any book that I am only keeping around IN CASE I find myself in the position of being The Librarian of the Apocalypse is no longer welcome in my home. Today my house became filled with about 60 fewer books. When the apocalypse comes, you’d better have your own copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting because mine’s heading out the door. And also, what you can actually expect when you’re expecting during the apocalypse will probably not be covered in the edition I currently have on tap.
Dan and I wrap several presents for each other every Christmas. They’re mostly small things, DVDs, gift cards, a vegetable brush shaped like a tuna. On each present we place a stick-on gift tag and address it with a different set of cutesie nicknames.
To: Papa-sicle, Love: Mama-Pop
To: Computer Geek, from: Hot Blogger
To: Sugar Face, from: Googly Bear
To: Daddy Dan, Love: Mama Kate
These are meant to be funny, sometimes cute and always a teensy bit embarrassing. We stole the tradition from my parents who also frequently kissed while exchanging presents. I know. Gross. But here I am a parent myself and I’m doing the exact same thing.
Laylee disapproves of this tradition, not because of the gross shmooptitude or even the fact that it’s sometimes hard to figure out which present goes to whom at a family gathering. Her all-seeing eye of disapproval is turned towards us because we use sticky labels instead of making elaborate hand-written cards for each present.
She caught me doing this the week before Christmas and asked, “Aren’t you going to make a card for that present?”
“Nope,” I responded.
She looked disgusted. “Fine,” she said, “I’ll do it.”
I was confused. Afterall, it was my present to Dan. She took the name off the sticky label, “Daddy Dan” and incorporated it into this passive aggressive Christmas card.
The envelope:
“Because Mom didn’t want to.”
And then inside the card:
She then stuck this card onto my present for Dan over top of my sticky label. She made no secret that the actual present was from me but that due to my extreme laziness, she had needed to step in and take the gift to the next level.
I applaud her use of parentheses at the bottom of the card where she reiterates my lack of card-making desire. This mom person must be quite the shmuck, I’ll tell you what.
I hear a lot of parents talk about how their kids disagree all the time. Little disagreements burst into huge arguments that then become the bane of their parental existence. I have the opposite problem. The rough stuff around our house, the things that send everyone into nuclear explosion mode are the agreements. My problem is that the kids agree too much. My kids’ biggest fights are caused by agreements included in but not limited to the following list: [continue reading at Parenting.com]
Although we are far from “junior,” my sister and I made a run through the gauntlet of the Juniors department at Kohl’s recently. We were looking for shirts and sweaters and started in the Misses department but found that Vera Wang discriminates against women who have butts and whose breasts do not resemble those of an emaciated teenage boy. We found Vera Wangs, granny sweaters and everything in between but nothing was just right so we headed to the weird department.
In general, my size precludes me from shopping there at all but every once in a while I find an XL with my name on it. Pants are completely out of the question. Not only am I unable to fit my rear into any of the pants in juniors, NO ONE is able to fit their rear into any of the pants in juniors, not their whole rear anyway.
All of the clothes in Juniors seem to be made for a person with a 4 foot long torso, a 3 inch tall butt, and legs with the circumference of spaghetti sticks. The person must also be averse to consuming anything but unsweetened lemon juice. The current designs are mostly made up of faux vintage 80s rock star attire and pink and black items with skulls and crossbones on them. I am not a pirate, an 80s rock star, a misshapen freak of nature, or a 65 lb anorexic runway model interested in displaying plumber bum. So the pickins were slim.
We did however each find a normalish sweater we liked if we were willing to tolerate the brand names “Say What?!” and “It’s Our Time.” It struck me that each of these brands could also work in a senior citizens’ department, as in, “Say what, Sonny?! I can’t hear a word that’s coming out of your mouth.” Or perhaps a slogan for Depends, as in, “It’s our time. Why let embarrassing leaks stop us from doing the activities that are important to us?”
I’ve been feelin’ a wee bit tired of late but I really shouldn’t be.
Wanda sleeps beautifully. She eats beautifully. Most nights she sleeps around 14 hours with only one feeding in the middle. The problem is scheduling. She goes to sleep at about seven. I then stay up until around ten…er… eleven… er… twelvish? (If you thought you caught a niner in there as I was trailing off, you were correct) So I go to sleep after she’s been down for about 5 hours. Then she wakes up a couple of hours later to eat and it takes about an hour to feed and change her and put her down. “Put her down” sounds gruesome. Put her to sleep? Also very dire. Put her to bed? So then I get back to sleep at 3 or 4 AM and have to wake up at 7:30 if I’m being a very good mommy to get Laylee and Magoo ready for school while Wanda continues to sleep. I’m just not maximizing her sleeping hours so I end up averaging 5-6 hours of sleep each night with a 1 hour break in the middle. I’m tired.
I find that I am also sore. You may remember Magoo’s hugeness and the number he did on my body. I healed physically within a few months of his birth and expected the same or better this time. Wanda was normal-sized. My body was more fit. The delivery was easy. But here we sit at 4 months postpartum and I’m still in pain. My hips and pelvis aren’t doing so well. I have pain when I lie on my side or lift my leg to put on pants. Stepping over toys on the floor, if anyone ever left toys on the floor of my totally immaculate house which they never would because we are in all ways PERFECT, is a chore that requires careful planning and foot placement. It is uncomfortable to play on the floor with my babies.
The physical therapist says that if I continue doing my exercises twice daily, I’ll likely be feeling good in a year or so. That means 9 months of pretty intense pain during the pregnancy followed by a year of physical recovery. It’s rough but Wanda’s worth it. She’s more than worth it. She’s amazing.
She’s also likely our last.
I hope the physical therapist’s right. I hope my body is able to bounce back. I’m not sure. I’m really not sure if it could do this again. I’m eyeing my box of maternity clothes in the garage with a desire to say farewell and yet a fear of what that symbolizes.
Because tired, sore or broken, I love my babies. Sometimes when I’m feeding Wanda at night I get such a surge of excitement that I choke a little and catch my breath as I hear her little sucking noises and see her tiny fist clinging to my nursing bra like a handle. I always get baby hungry when my kids are around 3 months old and Wanda’s no exception. When she wakes up in the night crying, I go to her and she is overjoyed to see me. Her whole body grins and gasps and she looks up at me with total dependence and adoration. I am her best friend.
She lights up a room. She makes me hungry for more. And then after I catch my breath and squeeze her almost too hard, I realize that I’m a little broken and that I don’t know how much more broken I’ll be if I have another one.
And yet I’m hungry… for babies. I actually started fantasizing the other night about the smell of Tucks Medicated Pads and that sense memory was pleasant to me, making me think about our first several hours together, holding her and exploring her face, counting her fingers and toes. It didn’t make me think of hobbling to the hospital bathroom with the help of a nurse, in pain and bleeding from my body having recently done something that was both ridiculously hard and completely natural.
When I imagine that scent or look at that box of maternity clothes, all I can think about is my three little rays of sunshine, two of whom I sent marching off to bed with much relief tonight due to their foray into complete obnoxiousness, and how I’d like nothing more than to keep manufacturing them forever.
Does it ever stop? The hunger? Even if you know you’re done? Do you ever stop getting tears in your eyes when you pass by the maternity ward in a hospital, see a baby drooling completely vulnerable in his mother’s arms, or smell your older children’s hair right after a bath? Does the ache ever go away? In a way I hope it doesn’t. It tells me I’m alive, that what I’ve done, that what I’m doing, matters. Can I ever do anything better than making these three people? I’m not so sure.
