The Big Move

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www.mamahearsawho.wordpress.com

Sick.

Being sick is no good when you have no one to take care of but yourself. But being sick when you have a child is even worse. And I am really not even in a position to complain since this particular sickness came on a daycare day -- one where I didn't even have to teach.

I was up all night, tossing and turning and feeling very, very sick and by morning, when I heard The Who rousing, I enlisted my wife's help in getting him up. Help. That's funny. It wasn't so much asking for help as it was completely foisting the morning routine onto her as I slept. To my credit, I did drag my sorry butt out of bed to put up the gate so The Who could wander from room to room without our worry that he would tumble down the stairs.

 

I was not this sick today.

I must have fallen back to sleep and when I woke up, the house was silent. I reached for my cell phone and called our house phone. No answer. Called my wife's cell phone. Nothing. I got out of bed, all bedhead and woozy and looked out the window in the guest room to see if my car (the only one with a carseat) was still there. It was. I exhaled. I was kind of panicked about m* taking The Who to day care this morning because today was the first day with his new teacher and I thought that too much messing with the routine wouldn't be good. So I called downstairs and, when I heard that they were still there, I dragged on some pants and ran my fingers through my dirty, sick hair and told m* that I would take The Who to school.

Which I did. But not without an effort of epic proportions. I don't really get sick like this. Stomach viruses aren't my thing and so when one pops up, it really knocks me on my ass. So, I dragged us both out to the car, squinted even behind my sunglasses as my migraine grew from lack of caffeine, and got him to his classroom. I introduced myself to Miss Stephanie, the new teacher. The Who looked woeful, but I just didn't have it in me to spend much time in there. I kissed his head. I made sure he was in the loving arms of a teacher he was familiar with, and I came directly home and to the couch, where I stayed for the entire rest of the day. Grading be damned. I slept some. I took a few sips of Vitamin Water and I fretted about the time when I would have to go pick The Who up at the end of the day.

Luckily, the Tylenol kicked in, the fever lowered, and I missed my little Who just enough to really want to go get him. I can't even imagine how this day would have gone if I had to care for him all day. Blessings. Counting 'em.

Just a Suggestion...

"No" is merely a suggestion at this point.

The Who's been a toilet-paper unfurler in the past, so we keep it off the roll and on the back of the toilet. It's been like that for a couple of months now and today I thought, "well, maybe..." and since he was in there with me when I put it back on the roll and has been semi-decent at understanding stuff lately, I put it on and said, "this is just for Mommy and Mama. Not for The Who." And he repeated his name in that very cute way he's been doing lately and said, "no-no." He gets it, I thought to myself. "That's right," I repeated. "No-no." He smiled. I smiled.

 

No-nooooooooo

But two seconds later when I headed for the door and said, "Let's go downstairs!" I turned around and saw him...unfurling. Still smiling.

"No-no!" I said. And then: "What did Mama say?"
"No-nooooooooo!" he repeated, all happy with himself. But he kept unfurling.

Ok, Who. Lesson learned: while you might get the concept, it's still merely a suggestion. Got it.

Irv, Cleanup on Aisle 5

I am a neat freak.

(How many of you who know me personally are laughing your asses off right now?)

But seriously, something has Happened to me and I can only attribute it to being a mom since that is really the only thing that has changed between the time I was a happily self-proclaimed slob and now. Now, I can't start my day for real until the dishes are done. (What?) Now I can't sit down and relax with my laptop after I put The Who to bed until all his toys are cleaned up and the dinnertime slime has been wiped off the table with a Clorox wipe. Now I can't sit and read books if there is an empty-but-unwashed bottle on the floor. Even if it's covered. Even if it was just finished.

 

Ok, ok. Have your fun, but hurry up and finish so Mama can clean it up!

One of the newer words in The Who's vocabulary is "dishes." He knows it because I say to him, nearly every morning, "No, I can't pick you up right now; I have to wash the dishes." Just for a frame of reference: once my roommates piled my dirty dishes out on the back porch because they sat in the sink for so many days. And, as a teenager, I once got grounded for throwing away dirty forks instead of washing them. For real.

The other night when I announced that it was time to go to bed, The Who, excited to climb the stairs and take his bath, first took the time to return the book he was reading to the book crate. "Clean up," he said. Cue our mouths falling open in wonder. I mean, I have been intentionally teaching him to clean up after himself since he was too little to know what it meant because I feel like that's a lesson I somehow missed along the way. I paid dearly for it as a kid and young adult, too. I can't even tell you how many marathon room-cleaning weekends I had growing up and tidying has been a major point of contention in my marriage.

Now, it's not really like I've become Type-A overnight. I still leave my dirty laundry strewn all over the dressing room and I am still perfectly content to walk wide circles around the several pairs of shoes I leave right where I stepped out of them, but some things just get under my skin now in a way that they didn't used to. I really don't know for sure what changed. Maybe it's some maternal instinct that refuses to let my kid live in filth.

Good instinct, I guess.

Gimme a Head with Hair; Long, Beautiful Hair...

The Who was born bald. Ish. He had a few wisps of almost reddish hair, but nothing to write home about. Frankly, I didn't expect much. My mother tells me that I was "bald 'til I was 2" and while I am pretty sure she was exaggerating (I've seen pictures, Ma) I probably would have been a decent candidate for a baby wig.

It's amazing to me how a kid can go from virtually bald to haircut-worthy in less than a year, but here we are.

 

1 week old. Not even eyelashes. So sad.

 

1 year old. Positively shaggy.

And so there he was, in the barber's chair. (Ok, ok. It wasn't a barber at all. It was a froo-froo lady hair salon. He came out very pretty. That's how secure we are in his masculinity. Next time, we're getting him a paraffin hand wax, too. Maybe a facial if he is very, very good.) Anyway, right. So, first haircut. When we first talked about a haircut, m* and I decided that we liked that shaggy-hair look on little kids, a la Levi McConaughey and we were going to let it grow. It got cuter and cuter, curling up around the ears and at the nape of his neck, but then the hair in the eyes started to bother me. That and the fact that he looked slightly ridiculous when I put a baseball cap on him. And spring is coming (dammit, I insist that it is, despite the 6-foot snowbanks at the end of our street!) and I am partial to baseball caps in the spring. Visions of a summerful of hat-head began to creep in and I was not at all pleased. So, off to the salon we went, ziploc bag and camera in tow for the baby book memories.

Now, I have heard first-haircut horror stories: "I've had kids threaten to kill me. Seriously, this one toddler pulled out an Uzi" (hyperbolically speaking.)

The thing is, I wasn't even worried about The Who. He's so mellow. Ok, he's been holding his own in the toddler tantrum department lately, but in a group of kids his age, he is almost always the most laid-back. (Yes, I know how lucky I am. Yes, I know he's not 2 yet. Or 3. Yes, yes, I know.) But the fact remains: I plopped him onto a tall chair, they wrapped a towel around his shoulders like a cape, sprayed his head with water, and started clipping. He barely peeped.

And now my baby's a man. Or, well, a boy anyway.

Cooooold.

I'm pretty invested in "photo ops", for better or worse. And it really is for both better and worse. It could easily be argued that while it probably isn't great for The Who for me to constantly have a camera in his face, it is pretty great that we have all these memories of him. The constant struggle, of course, is always wondering if the bad outweighs the good. Like, did he suffer any long-term emotional damage when I directed the video camera on his tiny face as he nursed? I won't probably ever know that, but I do know that I will now forever remember the way his lips pursed and his eyelids fluttered as he suckled in those first few days, something I'm sure I'd never remember otherwise.

 

 I'd like to show you a picture of The Who nursing here, but not as much as I don't want to put a picture of my breast on the internet.

Anyway, there are a few things that are just classic "childhood" that I want to capture images of. Of the "guts and glory" of parenthood, these things are part of the glory. (I'll spare you the details of the "guts"...for now.)

Mostly, these things are the firsts. First time meeting the cats. First bath. First Patriots game.

 

First Presidential Inauguration!

Then there are the obvious ones: first steps, first haircut, first teeth. My wife and I sometimes argue about how often I have my camera at the ready (and with a digital camera and a Blackberry, that is pretty much all the time.) She recognizes that I am the family historian and that without some of these shots, we'd forget a lot of the sweet little memories, but she wonders (and now, so do I) whether we are doing some kind of damage. I don't know. Do you?

At any rate, this past weekend, the mid-Atlantic saw the first of two major snowstorms of the winter. (Well, actually, it was the second of three, but we were out of town for the first one.) The Who had seen snow from inside his house and inside a hotel room and he'd been carried past it from the house to the car. He knew enough of snow to wake up, look out his window, and say "noooooooo! coooooold!" but he had never actually been out in it.

 

First actual snow.

It was time. I bundled myself in a double layer of pants and socks and sweatshirts, and packed The Who into his A Christmas Story snowsuit and we ventured out. It was one of those "firsts", so of course I had my camera and I'm glad I did, because his discovery of snow is something I never want to forget.

 

 

 

  

 

What I Am is What I Am; Are You What You Are or What?

I grew up in Boston, surrounded by culture and history and a whole gaggle of family members who also grew up there. My mother walked me around Downtown Crossing, recalling the times she had gone to the "Johdinz" there with her mother. I worked at a pizza joint that my father used to go to when he was in high school. Every member of my family spent time at The Children's Museum, The Science Museum (where it's fun to find out!) and the New England Aquarium (I can walk like a peeeeenguin!) There is this collective memory bank that we've all made deposits into over the past however many years.   

   

Jim Rice! (my dad and me at Fenway c. 1985)    

Who's Jim Rice? (my nephew at Fenway c. 2008)                    

When I was pregnant with The Who, it was odd and disconcerting to think of any kid of mine not being a Bostonian. He wouldn't get to experience all these things that I was so fortunate to have experienced. He'd probably never go the Museum of Fine Arts, probably never go to a Patriots game. Hell, he's probably going to be an Eagles fan and have that dreadful Philadelphia accent. It took me almost the whole 9 months (and then some!) to come to terms with the fact that The Who is not going to have my exact childhood. It took me a few more months after that to realize that this is probably a good thing (right?) because I am not my kid and my kid is not me. (Right?) I think, actually, a friend of mine recently wrote a post on this very topic.

As The Who gets older (and he is getting older, dammit. Where is the time going?) and we get to experience more of what Philly has to offer, I am so grateful for being in a different place than where I grew up. Sure, I want to offer him some similar experiences. There are plenty of things I did as a kid that I think I would love to share with him, but being in a new place means we get to experience new things together and create new memories. In many ways, raising a child away from family and away from childhood familiarity is wicked hard. Even sad, sometimes, but being here instead of there means I really can't foist my experiences onto him. It means he gets to forge his own path.

Cool.