Those of you who once read this journal, hello.

I just wanted to let you know that in this terrible economic climate and season of fear, we can be reassured that there is change afoot in the hallowed financial institutions of this great nation.

My four-year-old son just got his first credit card offer, and bless his heart IT'S A GOLD CARD! Nothing is too good for our scion, so I'm extremely pleased that the financial institutions who have brought us to this great moment in history (you know, the one that everyone calls "The worst since the Great Depression") are making dutiful reviews of how they conduct their business. Now, it's not just the middle class or poverty-stricken who can buy a television with no money down, but my son can too!

Which is good, because he has no money.

So here's to you all. Season's Greetings and see you in the soup lines!

Tags: amex, credit card offer, financial shenanigans

Wow. Been a while, hasn't it?

I don't really have anything of interest to write here, other than that I, as a red-meat-eatin', reformed vege-ma-tarian draw the line at eatin' me some cloned critter. And if you're not all, "I love Blade Runner! I want ALL our animals to be clones!", you should tell the FDA you're not interested in eating CC the Cat either.

This is what I wrote:

I am gravely concerned about the use of any genetically altered foodstuff in our groceries, and I remain even more concerned about the possibility of cloned animals entering the food supply.

While there may be little or no discernible difference between a cloned sheep and a regular sheep, the fact is we actually don't know what the differences might be. There simply hasn't been enough time to examine the issue in depth.

And even if the evidence comes up inconclusive or positive, we are forced to ask the question, "What is the benefit of using a clone rather than a natural animal?" Hasn't our knowledge of animal husbandry reached a sophisticated level? Aren't we advanced enough to, through tested breeding practices, create the animals we want to consume?

It is a slippery slope, a trite euphemism but one that is apt here: If we introduce cloned animals, it opens up a whole avenue of dubious ethical practices to the marketplace, ones that inevitably will benefit the business people in charge of R&D, but few of the consumers left with little or no proper information or resources regarding their food supply.

Please do not allow this practice. It is at its root an unnecessary conceit. Remember the maxim: "Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should."

Yours,

Write to them because you love to eat meat that doesn't resemble Aldous Huxley's worst nightmares.

Eons ago, when my husband and I were footloose and fancy-free, we took our belated honeymoon to Italy. It was several years after we were married, but no less sweet and we thoroughly enjoyed all the pleasures that Italia had to offer.

Not least of which were the fabulous ruins at the base of Mount Vesuvius, magnificently petrified in violent hails of ashes and mud. We went to both Pompeii and Herculaneum, and because we were trying our best to shed our American dollars to the tourist industry, we had to purchase a few doobobs and trinkets to bring back for the folks back home.

My personal favorite bauble was a keychain of a statue unearthed in Herculaneum of the god Hercules. Apparently freshly returned from hunting (or playing cricket), his club is swung over one shoulder and he's got a nice animal skin to show for his prowess. The statue is remarkable for it's realism: you can practically smell the fumes of wine leaching from Herc's pores as he teeters back with his Johnson in his hand to take a whiz. He's been celebrating, it seems.

Anyway, I loved it so much I bought a bunch of them and gave them away to slightly quizzical friends and family. I'm the only one that actually used Herc for a keychain; everyone else quietly tucked them away in the bottom of their junk drawers and promptly forgot that a god was taking a leak in them.

Hercules has been dangling drunkenly from my keys until a few months ago when his little metal ring broke and he began swimming unmoored amongst the receipts and lip balms in my handbag. Every now and then I would find him, linty but no less loaded, and think about affixing him again to my lonely keys who missed the endless party. But I never did, and Hercules has been pissing unfettered in my purse ever since.

The not-such-a-bun-anymore found him the other day. The bun has been completely entranced by the occult mysteries of "the handbag" of late, and I think that the discovery of my little drunk buddy didn't disappoint him in the inscrutability of the feminine purse. He held him reverently in his hands and turned him over and over again, looking at this little man peeing endlessly with sincere awe. I wondered how I would explain what he was doing there. Obviously too young to understand what being loaded is, I had no idea what he thought of him, my little idol to the carelessness of youth and revelry.

I suppose it doesn't matter. I just hope that three years from now when Herc is still floating around down there awash in those same receipts I've never chucked that the bun doesn't pick-pocket him and take him to school for show and tell.

It seems that we took matters into our own hands a little too late.

The bun, who is really far less bun-like and more boy-like these days but closely resembles the gravity-defying high-flying squirrel monkey, is not really talking as of yet. It seems it's not a priority with him; instead he reserves his energies for learning how to climb onto the counter to play with the coffee maker, dismantling the safety gadgets employed to keep him from being electrocuted, and hauling the kitchen step stool from one verboten area to the next in search of new dastardly and daring feats to keep his parents on their toes. In this he is very effective.

But talking really hasn't been a pressing issue for him. He signs the important words: "cat" is well represented as he chases them through the house at top speed and they flee in terror. His few vocal utterances include a variety of words that sound the same: juice, shoes, keys, cheese, represent generally important parts of his world. He calls me "Imama" instead of "Mama," which is really my fault since I would always point to my chest and say "I'm mama!" His father is either "Papa" or, more mysteriously, "Arf" which we have to conclude is from a book in which Lars would read the concluding lines "I'm a dog! I'm a dog! I'm a dog!"

"Star" is very clear, although sounds a lot like "Stick" which seems to have been conflated in his mind; both are now "St-rck." Moon is "Nononono" which is confusing since I'm never sure whether he's talking about the moon or vociferously questioning the moon's existence. And of course he says "No" like a champion. If you're going to have a word, that's a good one to have.

But the rest of the English language doesn't seem too important to him. Occasionally he'll pop out a new word unbidden and we're thrilled, although he may retire it as quickly as it came. Other times an adopted word clings to him like a barnacle and he repeats it over and over, lulling himself to sleep with it, singing it like a mantra during car rides, showing it off for all admirers.

Take, for example, his newest word, "Fuck." Or more precisely, "Oh, fuck."

That one popped out in a car ride in which his papa, almost getting blind-sided or missing a turn or something said quite naturally, "Oh fuck!"

A clear, high note rang from the back seat: "Ofuck." We looked at each other. The prophesied early curse word had sprung from the lips of our darling boy, tolling the ribald words of a bawdy house in the dulcet tones of innocence. "Ofuck. Ofuck. Ofuck," he intoned in the back seat as his eyes gazed out the window at the passing landscape.

We realized we were too late. Just the week before we had been talking about the necessity of curbing our colorful language around the bun. But it's difficult to take an amorphous deadline seriously, when the guardian of the deadline hardly says anything at all. We had time, we thought.

We were wrong, apparently. Now we're scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, and every time we hear him say, "Ofuck," we say, "Truck? Where's the truck?" or "Duck? What a nice duck!" but he's no dummy and our pathetically belated ministrations seem doomed. Even though we've more or less eradicated the ever-useful, always practical "Fuck" from our vocab, just yesterday "Oh, shit" propelled from my lips as a bottle of some viscous, sticky goo was administered to the floor through the diligence of our young scion. He hasn't mastered "O-shit," but he recognized enough similarity of experience to pull out that old chestnut, "Ofuck" from the small but mighty arsenal of words at his disposal.

Sometimes we hear him practicing to himself in his crib over the baby monitor, honing each syllable with razor-sharp precision. "Ofuck," he sings to himself. "Oooohfuck," he says more slowly, rolling the sounds around on his tongue. Of course the irony is not lost on us that he can barely say our names ("Imama" and "Arf") but can pronounce the one word we wish he wouldn't say with perfect clarity.

Is this thing on?

Hi. It's been a while. I'll go into that some other time.

For now, go to MoveOn.org to sign their petition urging Congress not to cut funding to our beloved public television and radio programming. The first items on the block are near and dear to my heart because they are near and dear to the bun, namely Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow.

These last bastions of non-commercial media are threatened, and I don't want my son to grow up in a wasteland of commercial television with no alternatives. And when he gets older, he should have the choice between CNN, FOX, MSNBC crap-tastic News or NPR. We will be a gravely impoverished country without these last resources.

So even if you never listen to NPR, or watch Sesame Street, please remember your own youth and the (hopefully) fond memories you have of Oscar singing the praises of trash.

He wasn't talking about trashy television. No one needs more of that.

Oscar and Ernie need you. I need you. The bun really, really needs you. Thanks.

Not quite epic, but close.

I actually tried to reason with the bun this morning by showing him his father's keys, a picture of keys, and asking where mine were. He just took dad's keys and put them in the bookcase between The Insult and A Catcher in the Rye.

Meanwhile, Dad looked in the last place possible, a sealed trash can which had boxes on top of it. Too difficult for the bun? No way! He even replaced the lid so we'd never suspect that my keys were festering there.

Interesting. I wonder what else is missing.

If you were a thirty inch imp, where would you put your distracted mother's keys?

The signs of desperation include, but are not limited to, feeding the bun cheesecake for dinner to which he turns up his nose.

Went to Vegas for a wedding with the tot. Now he's running around the house with a pair of my panties (clean, thankfully) on his head and laughing hysterically.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

I think that the human characters Luis and Maria from Sesame Street have been cryogenically preserved. It is otherwise impossible that they still live on Sesame Street.

It's been a month since we've been plumping the bun. We stick him on the scale every day and wish another ounce on him. We chase him around with buttered bread, milk with half and half in it, pasta with cheese and egg sauce. He laughs and eats more fruit. I think he's just about the same as before, but my husband, traditionally both more hypochondriacal and more pessimistic about doctors in general than I am, has been optimistically seeing the ounces inch up. Tomorrow we'll see who's right; the bun's got a follow-up doctor visit.

Either way, we've decided that cheating is the only sure-fire way to get them to leave us alone, so no matter what we're putting rocks in his diapers for the weigh-in.

Where does one begin? With the mortgage debacle, days to closing on the new house and learning that we may not be approved for one of our loans? Or maybe the movers dropping our furniture on the pavement? Perhaps the foundation problems that were discovered in our old house after putting it on the market, when we couldn't go ahead and fix it, but had to wait for all the inspectors to give estimates of the enormous sums of cash it was going to take to make the problem go away? How about carrying three mortgages while waiting for one house to sell after already moving into the other?

Or maybe I should just begin at the end of all that. Maybe that's where the story resumes.

Because that was the day that we took the bun to the doctor for a routine appointment for his booster shots. It was an errand that was completely innocent after dealing with the minions of evil called loan officers trying to get our house taken care of. We had other fish to fry. A couple of shots? No big deal.

The nurse weighed him and measured him at the start, as she always does. And then she eyed him and his chart suspiciously. She weighed him again. She measured his head. She looked at the chart again. She chatted in that sing-songy way that belied the fact that there were concerns. She took the chart with her and left my husband and me to stew, the bun fidgeting like a greased pig in a diaper.

"I don't think I can take one more thing," I said. "I think I'm going to snap." Running from the office was preferable to anything I could learn from the doctor about the fate of my little boy because I was literally incapable of handling it; months of stress and virtually running on fumes, I was left with no reserves of sanity to deal with the possible ramifications of health problems.

And then the doc came in, usually so cheerful that he bordered on annoying, but now wearing his studied "Doctor bestowing news" expression. He grilled us about the bun's diet. He asked us if he ate meat, eggs, cheese, vegetables. How often did we feed him? How many snacks? What was he drinking? When were his naps? How much did he sleep at night? Poop color? Smell?

As he grilled us, I began to shut down. Words filtered through my head in bursts, but they attached to nothing concrete, no sensible diagnosis: "potential liver concerns," "tenth percentile," "could indicate heart problems." The words were alarming but made no sense: the bun was running us ragged, he was so strong he could burst free from our arms with hardly trying, he raced non-stop from dawn until dark when he finally dropped from complete fatigue every night. My husband was paying rapt attention to the doctor. I was staring at the industrial carpet.

"...failure to thrive..."

The phrase pulled me out of my wide-eyed coma. Failure to thrive? Where were we?

When one thinks of children cursed with the failure to thrive, you imagine the distended bellies of starving children in the Sudan. Maybe you picture preemies who were born two months too early. Chinese infant girls in orphanages, or post-Soviet bloc Slavic countries beleaguered by war for years. But this was our son. Taking a good hard look at him, you could hardly accuse him of not thriving.

He was smart and funny and mischievous. He wriggled and wiggled and ran and laughed and made mockeries of our own health every single day. He was engaged and engaging and curious and intense. He hardly seemed like he was "failing to thrive."

But this baby, our bun, had been so fat that he topped the percentiles for his first months. Now he had dropped into the tenth percentile for length and weight. He hadn't gained a single pound in six months.

They ran tests. Blood tests, urine tests. They taped a plastic bag to his tender little johnson so that they could get a urine sample, and then gave him his shots hoping that a good dose of pain would ramp up the pee response. Knowing an insult when he sees one, he simply shrieked. Determined to get the pee, they kept the baggie on when they drained him of his blood just like the vampires they are, but by his nature contrary just like his parents, he gave them nothing. Not a single yellow drop. I was very proud.

However, this left us with the task of catching a pee sample from a 15 month old. Cursed with the terror of having a baby with a "failure to thrive" we now had to chase him around the house with a tupperware container as he ran naked gleefully through the house, sprinkling as he went. The tiny target was too quick for us, and though we plotted the best possible course of action for trapping toddler pee, the upstairs was christened with a number of puddles and an unfortunate nugget before the night was through. Finally, as his papa showed him how the big boys do it, with me poised under the bun's nethers, I trapped a scant millimeter of pee. I put the lid on. It seemed an awful lot of work for such a little reward.

That night was another sleepless one. Most nights that I'm plagued with insomnia, I just pretend that eventually I'll fall asleep and toss and turn in bed. But that night I just got up, knowing that all I would think about was our baby. Was he dying? Were we starving him? Was he failing to thrive because we were terrible terrible parents? How was that possible? How could he be dying? I painted the entire kitchen that night.

When the tests came back, they were, as the doctor said, "as boring as boring could be." We assume this is a good thing. We know that we have to be concerned about his weight, and the doctor himself prescribed what for us weight-conscious adults can only regard as the "dream diet:" a high fat, high cholesterol dairy delight. Cheese, butter, eggs, fat. Ice cream. Sausage. Full cream yoghurt. It was possibly the finest prescription I had ever heard, and yet the bun would never fully appreciate the glory of eating pasta carbonara without a care in the world.

With the gift of time, I have begun to panic much less. I recognize that the doctor was being alarmist to some degree. There are concerns, but if you just take a good look at us, his parents, we're no giants. I'm five feet tall. What do they expect? Kareem Abdul Jabar? The fact that he was enormous as an infant might have as easily raised red flags as his small size now. Glandular problems? Could have been! I mean, he was a PORKER! He was enormous! He was downright bizarre!

It has been educational, as they say. The houses have been dealt with, I've been painting every waking moment that the bun isn't tugging on my pantleg (meaning, I only paint when he's sleeping), and I'm assuming that the bun, despite the doctor's misgivings, is doing just fine because he keeps me on my toes and I'm pretty sure I'm no slouch. He's adorable and funny and just started saying his first words "Buh-bye." He signs like a madman, dances like a champ, and loves hide and seek behind the new curtains. We chase him around with triple-cream French cheese and quiche, pasta with cream sauce and kefir. All he wants to eat is mango and raisins. But at least he likes fruit and vegetables; some kids think you're trying to murder them if you slip them a green bean. I figure we're ahead of the game.

Hope all is well with you. We've finally come out of the tunnel, I think. I hope. Cheers.

It's official. We're in debt up to our asses.

Okay. There are moments when you have to ask yourself, "Did I encourage this behavior? Did I create a monster?"

That sinking feeling comes when you note that your normally well-balanced tot is lying on the floor to get a close-up on your bare feet so that he can chew on your toes. And you move your toes, because, well, ick. But he follows your feet trying to track the elusive piggies, and you realize that you're embarrassed in a way specific to events like someone's pet parrot pooping on your shoulder or a toy poodle humping your leg at a party. You want him to spontaneously scoop himself up from the floor rather than to push him away yourself, losing interest in your digits, and you wonder why on earth he wants to suck them in the first place?

And then you realize, you chew on his feet all the time. You and your husband may have, in cheerful innocence while making diaper-changing less boring, created a foot diva by chewing his tiny little toes in mock ravenous hunger. "He's going to be out with some adorable girl and she's going to say, 'You know, you're really cute but I don't know about the shrimp job thing,' said my husband.

The truth is, it's all in good fun. I'm sure we're scarring him in plenty of other ways that are less overt than making a foot fetishist out of him.

Yet.

As predicted, moving with a bun is less than optimal, although I haven't decided to trade him in yet. Unfortunately, I also have the worst case of laryngitis I've ever had (not even a squeak could pass these lips until about an hour ago--and now I'm back to silence again) which renders loan discussions pretty much moot, and I had to use my husband as a translator with a contractor which was pretty much a comedy of errors.

Trying to corral the bun when I can't holler a good "BUN!" at him for effect has forced me into creative discipline. Shiny things have their place; I can dangle them in front of him and hope they distract him enough that he doesn't yank the glassware that I just packed over on himself. It's worked so far.

So being sick and mute, while packing and chasing a tiny force of nature from room to room? I felt just about ready for a soak around 4:00 pm.

Leaving him in the exhausted arms of my husband, who has also been chasing him hither and yon, I drew a hot bath and tucked in with a Harper's. But the bun has, on top of being a "sprinter" and an "explorer" been a "whiner" and a "back archer" today, flinging himself to and fro like a petulant starlet dissatisfied with the service. And so my bath was punctuated by ear-pricking keening and the occasional fit of pique.

My poor husband kept trying to keep him from the door, but the bun knew where I was. He couldn't stand my being right there without access, and even with my husband dragging him away numerous times, he knew the route.

Finally, fed up with my near-away-so-far absence, he sent me a little message. Under the door like a spy he slid his secret sign, a yellow star from his shape-sorter. I saw his little fingers push it hopefully as far as he could through the crack. Would his signal receive a response or would there be radio silence?

Naked, sick, soaking in the tub wishing away the stress, and still I couldn't resist. I got out and shoved it back under in a different spot. Back and forth it went, me dripping on the floor, my bath steaming behind me, passing a plastic star back and forth with a very happy tot.

I have to admit, I was pretty moved.

If I've been absent, you will understand since we're out of our tree.

Or, into a new house, which equals the same thing if you're also trying to wrangle a cyclone on two legs. I will try to remember that it is a fabulous house when I'm packing up boxes as fast as the tot can unpack them.

Hunter S. Thompson was one of the last great iconoclasts. He raised hell through thirty-plus years of shitty administrations, crappy culture, and warped ideology to reflect the mirror back to us in the form of some of the most insane, rewarding "journalism" to ever grace the American landscape.

He changed the way we saw ourselves. He changed the way I saw the world.

Gonzo journalism indeed:

What was I doing here? What was the meaning of this trip? Was I just roaming around in a drug frenzy of some kind? Or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story? Who are these people, these faces? Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used car dealers from Dallas, and sweet Jesus, there were a hell of a lot of them at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, still humping the American dream, that vision of the big winner somehow emerging from the last minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

*pours 40 on the ground*
*huffs ether*
*sees bats*

You don't imagine that you're going to be the parent who will improvise your kid's lunch out of half a hamburger bun and some almond butter. But once you spread the butter on the lesser half, a vivid future lunchroom scene unfolds in a mental tableau: cruel schoolyard teasing heaped upon your undeserving progeny as he opens his embarrassing lunch bag filled with broken graham crackers, an unappetizing apple and a sandwich that doesn't even use proper bread. And after the vision fades to black, you will realize you are only following a long, ignoble family tradition.

Also, you never suspect that putting a diaper on, much less PANTS, will become a trial worthy of Job. A trial that you will often choose to avoid by letting the little savage run around naked rather than fight him for supremacy in epic sartorial struggle. You will try to time his nudity so that there might not be any unpleasant surprises as he leaps onto the sofa. Sometimes you will be successful.

You might not realize it yet, but you will also be the person who lets your tot play in the lid of the dishwasher while splashing (mostly clean) water everywhere. And you will view it as killing two birds with one stone because the water will clean the kitchen floor when you wipe it up.

You don't see these things in your future, but they're there.

Yesterday my husband was changing the bun when he said, "It was just about a year ago exactly that we were standing here and I asked your Mom a very important question."

I racked my brain. We were already married, so that wasn't it. It wasn't a question about the bun, or at least not that I could remember. And then he reminded me: it was a question about international policy.

A year ago at this time our house was reminiscent of a war zone. The bun was barely a month old, and I wasn't yet comfortable changing diapers. My boobs had misbehaved terribly and even a month into our adventure they were loaded for bear but firing indiscriminately. The house was a wreck since neither of us realized that we could set the baby down to put away the dishes. I hadn't gotten out of my pajamas in weeks. We were living primarily on take-out that my husband got and we were both suffering from massive French cheese intake. My body still resembled a hit-and-run victim and walking was strenuous.

It was here amongst the anarchy in our house and the overwhelming stress that he posited this question.

"When I was studying international relations in college," he began, "I had this professor who told us about the conference at Yalta during the Second World War." My husband was pulling the bun's diaper off and working more efficiently than I ever had. "At the conference, where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt decided the fate of post-war Europe, Roosevelt suggested getting the input of Pope Pius the XII." He expertly wiped the bun's bum and fastened the new diaper while I listened attentively.

My husband grabbed one of the little footless nightgowns that made changing diapers a snap but that I hated because they had to be pulled over the bun's little floppy head. "Stalin sneered. 'Where does the Pope keep his armies?' * asked Stalin, implying that the Pope could offer little in the way of military assistance and thus would be of no use to the Allies." He pulled the gown deftly over the bun's fragile noggin. "Roosevelt sat silently until the room was crackling with tension."

He gently pulled the bun's hand through the cuff of the gown. "After careful consideration, Roosevelt replied, 'In his sleevies!'" **

I blinked.

It was the dumbest joke I had ever heard.

I laughed so hard my stomach hurt and tears swelled down my face. I laughed for ten minutes at least. Later, when I changed the bun and looked at the gown with its sleevies dangling loosely around the bun's tiny hands I laughed again. I laughed for days because of that joke, sometimes in the middle of nowhere, sometimes out of complete silence.

Because of the timing and my husband's dead-pan delivery, it broke through the stress that had been preying on us since the bun was born. New parenthood is not for the faint of heart and we had forgotten how easy-going we usually were. Pulled as taut as drums those first few weeks, the dumbest joke I had ever heard broke the spell.

"That was a glorious moment in my life entertaining your Mom," he said to the bun as he pulled his one-year-old army through his sleevie. The bun suffered the indignity just barely; he didn't care where his army went.

But I know where they go: the same place the Pope puts his.


*The story that my husband recounted is true, except for the phrasing of the question. What Stalin actually asked was "How many divisions has the Pope?" The implication was the same.

**I couldn't actually remember the Yalta story until my husband retold it tonight; all I could remember was the punch line. That he knows about who said what to whom at Yalta, then spontaneously improvised history to make a joke, and finally dead-panned it while pulling the bun's army through his sleevie is a testament to my husband's enormous brain.

I find that extremely sexy.

"There will never be another time when he'll be so easy to amuse," said my husband as the Fed Ex envelope full of property titles fell off my head for the umpteenth time, the bun shrieking in delight.

Too true. He's just coming out of a bad virus, and he's been logey and listless for the past two days. He's spent virtually every waking minute in our arms, big purple rings under his foggy eyes, limply gazing at nothing. Even when you're helpless to help and desperate to ease the suffering, there's a tinge of contentment when you're needed in such a basic and elemental way. The fever sapped him completely and we spent the time just curled up together in a little family ball. But today he was laughing with vigor.

Before he got the fever, he was behaving very oddly. He was whiney and miserable most of the morning, and then uncharacteristically desperate to fall asleep two hours before his usual nap. I expected him to sleep for an hour, but it stretched into a super-nap. When he woke up I became nervous because every time I set him down he seemed unable to get to his feet, his knees buckling under his tiny frame for no discernible reason, crying with confusion. He had been walking like a champion before the nap, and now he couldn't even stand up, his legs folding up like noodles after shaking like a leaf. What was wrong with him?

Because there were no other symptoms, I was pretty sure an exotic neuro-toxin had been transmitted via his clean crib sheet somehow. Or maybe his spinal fluid had disappeared for some reason. He was having an amino-acid deficiency which made him fine one day and weak-kneed the next. I called my husband less hysterical than I felt and said that I thought something might be wrong with the bun. He said he'd be home in a few minutes to check on him.

I put him in my lap and read him a book. As the kitten chased the moon again, I started to cry. He was miserable, but I couldn't see what was wrong. I was in the dark, helpless to fight against an enemy I couldn't see. Sure, it was probably just a cold, but how could I know? There wasn't any tell-tale snot, no coughing, bupkus! And he couldn't tell me what to do for him or what was wrong.

I was relieved when he got the fever. At least I knew I could give him Tylenol and that he wasn't wasting away with some parasitic disease from god-knows-where. Or if he was, there was now a symptom to identify something.

He's on the mend. I know because he's regained his curiosity in the gas line behind the stove and the power cord on the lamp. And he's laughing at the idiot with the envelope on her head.

Sometimes the most important events go by unheralded. After waging battle with sleeplessness for a year, when it finally resolved itself, apparently I was so ecstatic (and sleeping) that I forgot to write about it.

I haven't gotten more than four straight hours of sleep since the incept date of the bun. I've slept more than that a night (on good nights--and when my husband would bail me out in the mornings by letting me stay in bed) but I haven't had an uninterrupted night of blissful slumber to call my own in so long I can't remember what they're like. While you may not have suspected that I was on the brink of utter madness and desperation, there were many strained and tearful conversations about what the hell we were going to do about sleep in this house. I got sleeping pills (which I couldn't take for different reasons--a cruel irony when one is insane with fatigue and prone to temptation) and we were just getting to the point where we were going to have to make some drastic changes in the bun's sleeping arrangements. Talk of anti-depressants was common.

It wasn't the bun's fault. It's true that he hasn't been a great sleeper. He would sleep well for the first part of the night, but like clockwork would wake up about three or four every morning. This was unfortunate but not the end of the world; however, because of my own bad chemistry when he would wake up, I would wake up. And stay up. And stay up and up and up, until I wanted to cry and scream and beat my sweet husband for being able to snore blissfully while I was counting blue veins in my eyelids, trying any mental trick to fool myself into a coma.

Insomnia is brutality personified, a torture program designed by yourself, for yourself. It is claustrophobia in your own head, the water-torture of self. For something so physically painless (I tell myself, even though I've broken down and gotten a jar of old lady face cream that reputedly sends those increasingly deep eye lines into recession, if not complete remission) it feels like a personal Inquisition which despite utter and complete fatigue (or in fact hastened because of it) is destined to repeat ad infinitum until it has destroyed both your sanity and your family.

Things were desperate around these parts, and I increasingly thought that self-lobotomization was a sensible idea if it would garner me the good brainwaves that seduced the sleep fairy. Counting backwards in multiples of seven just wasn't a heavy enough sedative any more. Even when the bun didn't wake up in the middle of the night, I did. So bedtime, no matter what, was a lose/lose proposition.

Illness came to my rescue. I was so sick last month that for a week I slept through my own bad brain chemistry. I was ill enough that the bun's wake-up calls went by unnoticed, even when I got out of bed and fed him, numb with chills, coughing my lungs out. But goddamnit, I'm just happy as can be that I was struck down by a virus. If it could break the siren's song of insomnia, I was pro-tuberculosis all the way!

Ever since the crud, I've been sleeping moderately better. There are still some pretty gawdawful nights* and the bun, who coincidentally started sleeping through the night on a more regular basis around the time I got deathly ill, still has moments which drive me back into the arms of my old abuser, insomnia. But I'm not about to rip my synapses out one by one with fatigue-induced madness, so we have to call this a victory.



*My husband can attest to this. Just last night I had, for the first time in days, fallen asleep without aid. And then the bun woke up, which usually means that I have a long, grueling night of self-flagellation to look forward to, but for some reason I managed to lull myself into sleep a second time, virtually unheard of around these parts. But the bun still didn't have blankets, and my guilty mother-conscience began ringing in my head: "MUST PUT BLANKETS ON BUN."

Rather than tempt fate and wake up completely a third time, I poked my husband dreamily and asked him to do it. He agreed. But being beyond exhaustion himself (and blissfully free of my sleep problems) he fell immediately into a deep sleep again.

Poke poke a few minutes later. "Could you put the blankets on the bun?" I pleaded. "Yeah," he gurgled. I might as well been asking Sir Francis Bacon to do it--maybe even raising the dead would have been quicker. By this time I was climbing rapidly and sadly into consciousness, and was pissed that I couldn't get this fleshy lump to do one thing for me. When after a couple more minutes it appeared my husband had retreated back into the warmth of Endymion, I charged out of bed to do it myself.

"I'll do it," he murmured from the deep covers.

"I asked you twice!" I snarled. I marched into the bun's room, put the covers on him and knew I'd had it--I was cooked.

He begged mercy when I climbed back into bed twitching and completely awake now. "I'm so sorry, honey," he gurgled.

The depth of my ire was delivered in the withering, unforgiving but utterly non-committal "Whatever" I spat before turning over to sulk and count backwards for a few hours. I knew he was completely fried himself, and I wished I could be sympathetic but what I really wanted was to poke him awake so we could suffer together. Or poke him awake just so he could suffer, period.

It takes a certain sort of hero to be married to me.

It took the better part of the morning to get pants on the bun.

I have the luxury of spying on the bun. I can actually say that it's in his best interest at this point, and he won't accuse me of not trusting him or invading his privacy.* In fact, if he knew I was there he'd probably just want to play rather than to slam the door in my face and not speak to me for a week.

We've been in a night-time transition these days. That's a little misleading since it seems every week is a transition, but at least this one involves a little less of me than before. Because I never know what's going on in the bun's room once I close the door, I have to assume he's doing just fine in his little jail-house accommodations.

When I've put him to sleep the past few nights, he's cried out for me. Once in a while it's downright bloodcurdling desperation, but there's been less of that lately: sometimes it seems that he has to pretend he's bummed out that I'm leaving, to drum up concern, as though to say, "God, it's about time she left. Oh yeah, I gotta make it seem like I need her, better cry." And I feel terrible as I close the door, while he's just cooling his jets as my footsteps fade away.

Sometimes when he climbs up to grasp for me on my way out the door he hits the button on his crib aquarium, and the lights come on with the cloying, saccharine music. I always assumed he hit it by accident. Tonight I learned the truth.

From my secret lair behind the bathroom door, I watched him. And there he sat, staring at his fish tank, sweet as can be. There was no crying. He wasn't asleep. He was just watching the fish bobble back and forth to the sappy tune, thinking about god knows what. When the song ended and the lights went out, I assumed that he would just lie down and go to sleep, but he turned on the fish tank again, completely willfully, completely independently. It was his "Tonight Show," and he wasn't quite ready for bed yet.

I watched this for three different cycles. Eventually the fish tank wasn't enough and he turned on the bird house, presumably the "Late, Late Show" of bunhood. I was completely mesmerized. Either my husband or I am with him virtually every waking minute, and I assumed that his time in his crib was spent either complaining that we weren't there, waking up somewhat crankily, or sleeping. Instead, he's having a little "me" time--a little break from the parents and taking in some relaxation.

I would be lying if I said that I was unmoved by it. But I also have to admit a little discomfort. Since he was born we've been the center of his world. We still are. But every day that passes is another day closer to his complete independence; his ability to entertain himself alone in his crib is a step closer to that ultimate goal and I'm both terribly proud and terribly sad. One day he won't need me to tuck him in at all.

...



Maybe I can still spy on him when he's sleeping.


*Another great feature of the bun's inability to defend himself is the fabulous scape-goat he provides. My husband, who has a density several times greater than earth gravity and therefore sucks any liquid to his shirt in a matter of milliseconds recognized this valuable feature tonight when I commented on how messy his t-shirt was. He looked at the bun. "It's his fault," he smiled.

I foresee the bun being the "cause" of many spills in the near future, at least until he can protest.

This article (written for a conservative journal) highlights the fears of fascism on the rise from within their own ranks. I've been wondering for a long time where the conservative critics were, and now I see there are some. This is a relief. What is a little alarming is how nervous they are too.

Maybe I'm not just paranoid after all.(Via MetaFilter)

In better news, our planet is being invaded by the Cuddly Menace.


...




On second thought, maybe they're one and the same.

Dear Bun,

LET GO OF MY LEG! Just for a minute or two. Just long enough for me to keep this scorching hot pan from sailing down on your head or at least long enough to make you some dinner. I can't walk when you're hanging on like an octopus. I can't get you milk (not that you drink it anyway). I can't get you crackers (which are crunching underfoot in the most unlikely of places). I can't actually do much of anything when you are HANGING ONTO MY LEG! So please let go. Just for a sec.

Also, the "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" sound is a little over the top. I can appreciate the need for non-language based forms of telling me you're frustrated, but this particular vowel can feel like a nail-gun being shot through my cerebral cortex.

You can keep the new facial expression, though. It's pretty fabulous. A mixture between "Omigod!" and excited elation, it melts the ice of my heart after you've been clinging to my leg for an entire afternoon. It's far better than the glare which was seriously beginning to freak me out. I'm glad the glare has been dragged to the dust-bin of bun history. Its replacement is an overall improvement.

So just let go of my leg and we'll be fine.

I love you,

Mom

PS: Tonight's display of walking was really something. Keep it up. But I was just giving you chunks of cookie to keep you from jumping in my lap one more time. It was my moment of truly bad mothering. Don't get used to that much cookie--and you can climb all over me as usual tomorrow after I've gotten a better night's sleep.

Back before I joined the club with the lowest standards for membership ("Just forget to wear your rubbers!"), I used to go out socially once in a while.

One night a few years ago, we went out with all of our friends to "Karaoke from Hell." It features a live band that has a repertoire of a couple hundred songs for which you become the lead singer for a song or two. You flip through their selections, write one down, and when you're called to the stage they hand you a ratty sheet of paper with the lyrics. They play loose but fabulously energetic versions of an eclectic mishmash of songs and you're a rock god for three pop-song minutes. It's enormous fun.

I don't sing, as a rule. But all of my friends are actually musicians in one form or another, so each of them got up and sang a selection. Our hulking, rugged friend who's a guitar tech sang an amazing version of "Fever" by Peggy Lee. Our petite slip of an Edwardian lass sang a Cars song. My husband performed a rousing punk rock version of The Who's "My Generation."

But it was our 1920's Sensitive Jewish Intellectual friend who brought down the house. He got up on stage and stood there, grasping the microphone like a drowning man with a lifesaver. He had picked "The Rainbow Connection" and he sang it quietly, quaveringly and perfectly. Something about his personal style which is so gentle, and his funny stage presence, which was serene but completely charismatic, turned a song which could have easily been played off as a cynical ironic goof into a surprisingly breath-taking moment. The boisterous, raucous insanity of the club became hushed when he was on stage. Total hipsters and cranks turned and watched. Everyone was completely smitten with the pathos of it. We were collectively verklempt.

Our sensitive friend moved this fall to New York City. We miss him something fierce. He went to go get himself some education, which I can appreciate, but we wish that he was here to hang out with the bun who could benefit from such a sweet male role model.

I bought a CD for the bun the other day that has entertaining versions of kids songs by a variety of popular artists. Tom Waits, bless his craggy heart, does a version of a lullaby that might only lull old drunks to sleep in New Orleans. Cake does a fine rendition of "Mahna Mahna" that remains stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

The third song on the CD came on as I was dancing with the bun in my arms. I began waltzing with him to the familiar melody line, and then the soft feminine voice of Sarah McCla

[We interrupt this post to give you the bun's first computer stylings:

6NQTNV C N CVFGFV

We now return you to the entry already in progress.]

...and then the soft feminine voice of Sarah McLachlan began singing the sappy but utterly charming lyrics to "The Rainbow Connection." I was turning in time, ONE two three ONE two three, back and forth around the living room bathed in golden wintry light, the bun laughing as he threw his head back and gave in to the dizzying joy of spinning around in circles.

Something about the confluence of experiences, the nostalgia about my friend who bailed on us in pursuit of higher education, the schmaltzy but masterful version of a very poignant piece of my history, and the surpassing in this moment of all my expectations about being a mother made me leak like a faucet. Waltzing through the house humming "The Rainbow Connection," the bun bent akimbo, back arched with his hair blowing like Muppet fluff, I was overwhelmed by the simultaneity of the sorrow and joy I was feeling.

My husband walked out as I was concluding the perfect dance. The bun had no idea I was a mess, but my husband certainly did. "Look at your mother," he said. "She's so sweet! She's a complete nut, but she's very, very sweet."

Now I have a Pavlovian response to the song. Every time it comes on I either have to assiduously ignore it or walk out of the room. If I sit still or just look too long at the bun, no matter whether he's climbing the toilet or eating cat food off the floor, I start to blubber like a little girl. Motherhood reduces me with alarming regularity to a bleary-eyed romantic goober.

Have you been half asleep
And have you heard voices?
I've heard them calling my name
Are these the sweet sounds that called
The young sailors?
I think they're one and the same
I've heard it too many times to ignore it
There's something that I'm supposed to be

Someday we'll find it
The Rainbow Connection
The lovers, the dreamers and me

I've never heard a melody so sweet.

( In which I wax pathetic about being linked )

We had a full length mirror once, but when we rearranged the house to accommodate the bun we lost all our wall space. We always intended to put it back up, but days passed, then weeks, and we just kept putting it off. Now we don't put it off; I actually can't remember where it is.

My mother watched the bun this afternoon, and I almost sprinted out of the house to go shopping. Once upon a time I wasn't a shopping person, but now that I don't have time to do it at all, I can't think of anything that would be as enjoyable for a couple of hours as trawling up and down the rows of clothes, talking to no-one, touching clean fabric, relishing that I don't have to slowly explain to an unsympathetic audience why he can't eat the electrical cord or the cat food or the ancient avocado that is black with cat fur.

I raced to Anthropologie to find pants I've been lusting after since I got the catalog, and found myself plundering aisles of clothes almost like a starving person faced with the buffet at the Hotel Bellagio. Clothes! All new, none with yoghurt stains or eau de derriere on them. They weren't out of date by two (three? four?) years! They weren't even on deep discount in the bargain bins!

It was crazy. I was completely overwhelmed.

I took stacks of clothing to the dressing room. I had one hour-- I had to maximize my time. I had four or five different changes of outfit, and I wanted to make sure, for the first time in my life, that they fit since I might literally never have another hour to return them.

I stripped down and began throwing clothes on my body: plaid pants with a flower print shirt. Brown sweater with yellow pants. It was chaos, anarchy. It was every article for itself, and I took no prisoners. I felt like a kid cut loose in Wonka's factory: I was crazed, delirious from the consumer madness, drugged from the stimuli, slightly ill from being so wound up. It was intoxicating and disgusting, buzz and hangover, rolled into one.

After the initial high of wearing clothes that hadn't yet lost their shape due to over-washing, I caught a glimpse of my mostly-naked body in the mirror that stretched from floor to ceiling. It could have been worse. But I got a good, long look at a terrifying sight.

Baggy, limp, grey, shapeless, stained, stretched-out.

My bra was like a hobo personified by lingerie.

When I bought these bras a year ago, they were function over form, one hundred percent. White, cotton, no under-wire, good support, comfortable, your basic nursing bra. They were a beacon of functional design, a paeon to utility. They wouldn't win any awards on the Paris runways, but I could sleep in them and whip out the udders from the completely un-sexy, unflattering peek-a-boob flaps in an instant, and it was one less thing I had to think about.

I've lived in them 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a year. And it shows.

The nursing bra phenomenon is a necessary evil. In the beginning, you need anything that will make your boobs seem less an enemy to you when they bloat up, leak and misbehave at all the wrong times. The flaps seem ridiculous before you have to stick your boob in the face of a squalling infant; but after a couple of days, you realize that anything that will make your boobs more accessible are a heaven-send. Tuck in an absorbent breast pad, and you've met your new best friend. Eventually, I forgot that my bra was even separate from me.

Now, a year into my adventure, I forget to latch up the boob-flaps all the time. I've constantly got wrinkles under my shirt from the sagging cotton and unhooked buckles; at times it's like I've got a wandering nipple or the skin of an elephant sagging around my chest. I've worn these bras so long that I've forgotten what it's like to let my boobs fly free as they were meant to be in a state of nature. The bras are literally a second skin.

So it was pretty alarming to turn around and discover how pathetic they were. There I was, one slightly dingy boob-flap hanging down, the other one latched but dimpled and baggy. The straps were stretched out and I had never bothered to tighten them up again. It was perhaps better than looking at myself in control-top panty-hose over a pair of granny pants, but only by the slimmest of margins.

I came home with a few new clothes and a grim appreciation of the need for nice undies. I told my husband about the event and scratched my head in wonder: "I had no idea what I looked like in my bras," I said. "It's been literally months since I've seen myself from the neck down in a mirror,"

He gazed off. "It's been months since I've seen you in your bra too," he said dreamily.

This is completely untrue, of course. He sees me in all states of undress, often with one boob unceremoniously hanging out after I've forgotten not just to latch the flap, but to even pull it back up over my nipple. He sees me wandering through the house topless, clad only in boxer shorts or pajama bottoms that don't fit and these hideous nursing bras. I think he blocks it out mentally. If he took a good look, he would get a retinal burn and possibly never recover.

Oh, he's seen me in my bra, all right. He just hasn't seen me in any nice ones.

The bun and I were playing on the sofa in front of the living room window when I looked at him and realized, "He's my son." While it seems utterly absurd that I would stumble across this particularly obvious statement of fact, it was profound. I could sense in a real way that he was mine--that no matter what befell any of us in our lifetimes, no matter what sort of teenage angst was in his future, no matter what personal successes and failures, adversity or joys he would face, that he would be my son, and I would follow him through each one with my heart in my throat and on my sleeve. And so would his father.

It's amazing how relatively quickly we became accustomed to having a bun around. For the first few months, it seemed like everything was hanging in the balance and disaster barely averted moment by moment from our tiniest and most fragile of beings. There was a sense of holding our breath, a superstitious belief that if we didn't watch him every second and continue praying to the manifold gods of wee things that the four seconds I turned around to grab another cup of coffee would be the four seconds that he discovered the ancient art of knife-throwing. Which may or may not be true; uncannily, he gravitates toward the most dangerous object in the vicinity, no matter how careful we are.

But at a certain point, we got used to the third person in our lives and he became just that: a person. Less an anomalous freakish miracle, or helpless magical bean, instead he's just a little human, sharing our lives. I still look with wonder at him, but it's less mysterious to me now. He just is.

But there are still moments of crisis management. After the bun had fallen asleep last night, my husband broke a glass on the floor and it shattered into a hail of tiny razor blades. While I was un-phased, having seen many glasses come and go and expecting many to perish in my future, my husband seemed genuinely panicked. We meticulously began scanning the floor for minute shards, but he kept apologizing. And then getting angry. He was actually going through the seven steps of grief over the glass.

"We need to get more expensive glasses. These suck!" He gasped.

"These were expensive." Department store expensive, not crystal expensive.

"But the glass was so thin!"

"Thin can indicate expense," I said.

"Then we need cheap thick ones," he grouched. "Or we need to put these ones away until the bun gets older."

He was stewing. I could see the gears of his mind working: first, the one shard of glass that remained on the floor was going to get embedded in the bun's hand. Then, because the shard was so small, it would go unnoticed for several years, festering. Two outcomes, both tragic, would develop silently: either the sliver would get infected and the bun was going to die of blood poisoning or some exotic biological toxin; or the glass would eventually dislodge from his hand and go straight to his brain where he would drop instantly from an aneurism.

To avert this disaster, we needed to rally and treat the scene like a hazmat site. The floor needed to be meticulously cleaned to a high-buff sheen which could handily serve as dinnerware if need be. Most importantly, we needed to get rid of the glasses, dishes, and, just perhaps, the windows too: they could be replaced by sheets of plexi. It was all coming together in his mind.

I looked at him, personally slaying the dragon to protect those small crawling bun-knees. "I'm not going to revert to complete incivility and drink out of plastic cups while he grows up," I stated. I had to cut him off at the pass, or we were going to live in a rubber romper room by sunrise.

He didn't answer but kept scouring the floor with his eyes. I watched him as we both crawled back and forth, crossing each other's path multiple times. "We can't panic over broken glasses, honey," I said.

"But he's the bun," he said. I know. He's the bun. He's the amazing gift we could never have imagined being so perfect, so vulnerable.

""If we panic over glasses, we're going to be stark neurotics by the time he's five. We have to harden our hearts just a little."

I'm not sure if this is true or not. It made me feel callous and mean-spirited when it came out my mouth. These past couple of weeks we've been struggling with getting the bun to sleep by himself, and there are often tears as a result. And I've had to harden my heart just a touch to walk out of his room when he's crying his little heart out, looking at me with watery eyes and reaching for me as I close the door on him. It kills me, but the sleeplessness kills us all so I do it.

And then I walk out to my husband, who is also looking at me with watery eyes because it kills him to hear the bun cry out in the dark, alone.

The truth is, being a parent is about making these decisions that seem designed to make your heart ache. Now it's the simple ones, like getting him to sleep and listening to the tears, but soon there will be harder ones. I dare not imagine them. I know that if I do, I will become the neurotic I prophesied to my husband. But they're out there, in the future, rising up to meet us as we try our best to shield the bun from the hail of glass with our naked, fully exposed hearts.

We got the bun a Fisher-Price zoo* for his birthday, complete with lion, seal, polar bear, elephant, a monkey who jumps up and down and a freakishly large blue bird which whistles "Hail to the Bus Driver" for some perverse reason. I bought a couple of extra animals so that it was more abundantly critter-filled: a zebra, camel and kangaroo now round out the menagerie. Two kindly looking chubby people are the zoo-keepers, presumably with cheerful dispositions who never groan over the mountains of plastic lion and elephant dooky.

We were playing with it today. That is, I had brought it out, the bun had chucked a couple of animals across the floor, and then moved on to the next thing.

"Look," I said to my husband as the bun jumped off his chair, ignoring us completely. "The gates to the pens are so easy to get into that the animals can come and go as they please."

"As they should," he said.

"And when they get sick of the food, they can turn on the keepers."

"Rise up!" said my husband. "Fight the power!"

"And then they can organize resistant movements which seek to elevate the quality of living for all plastic animals. Or perhaps it will end badly when the animals imprison the keepers in these zoo enclosures: pogroms for Little People, the animals taking over the whole shebang."

"It could happen."

I paused and watched the drama unfold in my mind. "We might be some complicated role models," I said.




*I love this zoo. I might have bought it for myself rather than the bun. But I have a complaint.

Each of the animal dens has a button you push to make an animal noise. The seal barks, the elephant trumpets, etc. And while the bird who whistles "Hail to the Bus Driver" is pretty strange, I find the lion and bear's respective sounds to be a little pathetic.

Perhaps Fisher-Price in its wisdom decided that a real lion roar would be a little too scary for a toddler. I don't think it would, but what do I know? I've only had the one kid. But you'd think that they could have gone out of their way to make a slightly more convincing sound effect than going down to shipping and receiving and getting the loading bay clerk to mumble into a microphone.

"Roar," says Jerry from shipping in the lion's den.

"Roar," Jerry says again in the bear's cave.

That's it? "Roar?" Not "ROOAAAAARRRR!" or "RA-aaaaaar!" or a good growl?

You think it would have killed them to make a little effort and pillage "The Lion King" for a couple of sound effects?

You might think that your first kiss as a gangly teen, laden with awkward intensity, ghastly overwrought emotion, and no small dosage of hormone poisoning, is the most important kiss in your life but you'd be wrong. The most important kiss in your life is the first kiss that your tot gives you.

Even though it's more akin to having your face sucked by a remora.

The bun's first birthday has come and gone, and it was full of loveliness. Now I'm sick as a dog (hence the absence) and trying to come up with something pithy to say about it.

We threw a big party for the bun on Sunday afternoon. In many respects we knew that it would probably be the last big party we threw for the bun in which the guest of honor didn't care who showed up. So we invited all of our friends. I made tapas and sangria and ordered a big expensive cake (also knowing that we probably have a future in icky grocery cakes from here on out) so that the grown-ups could have a nice afternoon.

About four families with kids came; the rest were childless adults who were game enough to show up. And while there was plenty of chatter and liveliness, I realized that I have become one of those people who has nothing to say other than that the bun is fabulous. So I meandered from one person to the next, asking questions about themselves so that I wouldn't have to explain in graphic detail that my life was indeed so boring that I couldn't come up with what I had done recently other than laundry.

I have spectacular moments though; they just don't make good anecdotes at a party. Moments that are far more important than the crap I used to do when I got paid by the widget makers; it's just that somehow the American urban cultural environment doesn't look as kindly on familial pursuits as it does on professional ones. So everyone talked about their careers. I remained pretty mum, except to other parents. And because I'm a spaz, I'm sure I offended some of the parents by accident, what with the sailor's blue language I still throw about quite casually.

After the party (virtually no food left, no sangria left either), my husband and I fed the bun a veggie burger, put him to bed, and collapsed on the couch. And then my throat closed up. Within three hours I went from being hostess at a Spanish tapas party to being a complete invalid. My glands popped out of my neck, my lungs filled with garbage, my head began to throb. By midnight I was completely done in, with body aches and coughing fits. The hour of the bun's birth rolled past with me trying desperately to fall asleep despite the shattering of my bones and the aching of my muscles.

The next day was the bun's true birthday, which we celebrated by me sleeping. His pop opened all his presents for him which the bun enjoyed almost as much as the boxes they came in. A little dinner was had (which I don't remember) and then it was time to go to sleep.

We got him ready for bed like any other night. My husband had been baby-wrangling all day because I was sick, and this was the same: he changed his duds, dressed him in his sleeper, wiped his hands and face. And then he set him in my arms so that I could put him to sleep. As he went to the door, he whispered, "Happy birthday, little boy." I looked down at him. There he was, one year older than the little peanut who visited us last year. It's been an amazing year. I began to sing "Happy Birthday" to him. His pop joined in, and the bun sat in my arms looking at us with contentment and just the barest edge of confusion: this wasn't a part of the usual nightly ritual, but it wasn't bad. One stanza, and then lights out. His birthday was over.

It was one of those moments that make lousy anecdotes at parties. But it was the most important part of his birthday, bar none.

We've been waiting for the moment so long that I almost missed it once it came. That's how casual the bun was about it. One minute he's standing there behind his wagon, the next he's walking with staggering confidence over to the coffee table to grab a nice shiny bag of cat snacks.

And then it was over. He had walked.*

I stood there pondering what I had just witnessed. We've been joking about it for weeks, making up exceptions and rules for what constituted an actual "walk." Two steps with only one parent present wasn't a walk: a "walk" had to be more than four steps, and falling down didn't count as the last step.

This was definitely a walk. But he wasn't doing it for me, which, you know, surprised me. When you think of "the first walk," you imagine that your tot will make those first tentative steps towards you or your partner with wide open arms and a wavering confidence, collapsing in a heap in the warm embrace of an absurdly proud parent. But this kid just meandered off from Point A to Point B, with no by-your-leave.

Apparently cat snacks were enough to push him that extra mile.

Anyway, I sat there thinking about it for a second before I called my husband. I mean, he wasn't here for it, right? And he would be leaving work scant minutes after the bun's maiden voyage; that just didn't seem fair. But on the other hand, it's not like I could keep this a secret, right? He walked.

I called him. He said, "I missed it."

I said, "I'm pretty sure he'll do it again." If I've ever cast a safe bet, this was it. It wasn't as though there was going to be only the one walk. Or at least we hoped.

When he came home, I faithfully re-enacted the bun's stroll. It wasn't the same, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. My husband wistfully smiled and nodded.

As I was giving the post-game analysis (reviewing that it was not me but kitty kibble that received the gift of primary momentum), the bun pulled himself up on my legs, turned, and with his arms open wide and a huge grin on his face, he stumbled into his father's warm embrace. There was laughter, there were tears. There was much joy.

The cat snacks were merely a prelude. It was like the dress rehearsal before the opening act, and he couldn't show off his chops yet in front of everyone. I understand. A maestro such as himself has to get it just right before the show can go on.



*In terms of major events, this has been a helluva week. The bun seems to be firing all the synapses at once, and he's picking up new skills like mad. While the walking clearly takes precedence, because our lives are officially over now, he's also making signs to us about a few different things. The lights go on, he makes the sign for "light;" I hold up a snake, he flicks his tongue in and out like a reptile; I show him a frog, and he puffs his cheeks out. It's unbelievable.

I was suspicious about the baby-signing thing, and the public embarrassment of making overt ridiculous gestures to an infant sometimes made me a little sheepish, but now that the bun can sign back, months of embarrassment seem worth it.

Thankfully, his father still hasn't gotten him to make the boob-signs yet: there has been neither "Gadoooo-ga" nor "Ding Ding Ding Ding" yet. We shall see.

The neighbors behind our house keep reaching new heights. They're sort of like hick-hippies, and each new addition of crap in their backyard makes me yearn for a Berlin Wall between our properties.

All told, we have two hand-constructed corrugated tin-and-stick huts to look at (presumably where they do their scientific experiments on the aliens that fell into their yard), which are both falling apart (naturally), two enormous piles of refuse full of dead wood and brush probably collecting a nice community of rats, a newspaper box pilfered from god-knows-where, various and sundry pieces of scrap wood, broken bicycles, blue tarpaulins thrown here and there, and the recent addition of a landscaped, straw-lined path leading from one refuse pile to another. But they have decided that something was missing.

Yesterday afternoon we watched in horror as the proprietor set up a small tent in 30-degree weather outside his back door. A tent. In January. Who was going to stay in the tent? Their aunt Enid? "One of these days they're going to make a fire pit back there," my husband said. "And then we're screwed."

We were cooking dinner, and our kitchen looks right out over their yard. It was extremely unappetizing. But like a car accident, we couldn't pull our eyes away. The tent was wobbly, but definitely up. The neighbor shook one of the poles to test its integrity but didn't opt to improve upon it when it listed to one side.

Then he toddled off in the direction of a new pile in the yard. He grabbed some straw from the path and began fiddling with it. Smoke rose up in a small puff.

"I think you got your wish," I said. Indeed, the neighbor, ass-crack in the air, was huddled over a hastily dug hole lined very poorly with jagged stones. He was lighting his hole on fire. He had built a fire pit.

We couldn't believe it. There he was, three feet from his shoddily constructed tent, five feet from two different tinderboxes of old brush which could go up like sticks of dynamite, surrounded by trees of all types adjoining other peoples' property, casually lighting a fire in a dug-out on a windy afternoon in early January.

What are they doing in their fire pit? Roasting Tofurkey? Sacrificing hemp and flaxseed clothing to the ghost of Jerry? Regardless, we didn't know what to do. We called Public Safety, but it seemed too meddlesome, too uncharitable, so we didn't make a report. On the other hand, they are actually a threat to public safety, sitting in the middle of so much kindling that their house could go up. Worse, they could take others' houses with them.

The light faded. An orange glow surrounded our neighbor who kept feeding his paltry fire with more straw from his path. We watched attentively as we made tacos. We wondered what was going to happen.

Night fell at last. An hour after he had started, our neighbor being blessedly free of any real Boy Scout skills, never got his fire going and went inside. But the fire pit remains.

Tune in to discover whether or not the fire marshall is going to become a part of our story.

Like Pee-Wee's Fun House, the bun has a word of the day which invariably sends him into paroxysms of laughter. The tricky part is figuring out what the word is.

We first discovered this phenomenon when I said, "Duuude" and he laughed so hard I thought he might break something. I showed him off to his pop, and we both said "Dood" all night long while the bun laughed and laughed.

But the next day we couldn't even raise a half-cocked smile. Stone-faced sobriety countered our goofy "Dude" antics, and in desperation we changed the tone, the pitch, the timbre. Like a head on Easter Island, he gazed through us, beyond us. We were crushed. Doesn't anybody remember laughter?

Days passed. During one spectacularly eventful feeding, I noted that the bun was an extreme mess-maker. His father looked at him in jocular accusation: "Mess-maker!" The bun laughed. "Mmmmmmmess-maker!" He laughed harder. Both of us said it: "Mess-maker!" and the bun, covered in mess, bobbled with glee. We had found the word of the day.

We've learned that it's never the same word twice. We can throw in a "Dude" or a "Mess-maker" to test the theory, and if it's not the right word, he looks at us with curious detachment waiting patiently for the real word of the day. And to keep us on our toes, the bun has thrown in variations. We must be creative to mine the cleverly hidden key to the bun's giggle switch.

The other night the bun was wallowing on his Pop like a lemur in a jungle tree, hopping from branch to branch, and falling back with all his weight onto his recumbent father. One good karate-chop in my husband's throat expelled a strangled gargle, "Ackghh" and the laughter began. It was a difficult challenge to replicate the sound of a herd of dying sea lions, but my husband is a dedicated man, and he thoroughly explored the "word" of the day while I documented it all on tape. The bun crossed over into hysteria he was laughing so hard.

For Christmas his Grandpa bought him an enormous goat for a stuffed animal, one Capricorn to another. This eerily life-like critter stands around the house looking goaty, and often surprises us behind corners because for a moment we believe there's a stray farm animal who snuck in the house when we weren't looking. And the bun, who's learning to walk with the aid of his Radio Flyer push wagon, loves to push his little cart to and fro past the goat-sentry.

"Baa-aah," said the goat as the bun passed him on his circuit of the living room. "Baa-aaah" said the goat as the bun passed him again coming in from the kitchen. "Baa-aah," said the goat as the bun picked up speed, stumbling forward inexorably towards the Radio Flyer's destiny with the cats' water dish. And then with a somewhat sickening thud down went the goat, stiff legs up in the air like lightening-quick rigor mortis while my husband, channeling the goat's pain said, "Baaa-aaauugh-ggaaarghhhh...."

I don't know if there could ever be more laughter from something so disturbing. Maybe it's not the word of the day, but the Three Stooges moment of the day, or the Warner Brothers anvil-on-the-head day.

Whatever it was, we just kept saying "Baaahh-aaaurrgghh-gurgle-sputter" to eke out one more laugh.

This baby thing is still pretty new to me, and I'm often surprised at the little things I discover (or re-discover) that will make our lives easier or more fun.

Case in point: it took me a full year to remember the joy of bubble baths for a kid. A FULL YEAR! Something so simple had been overlooked all this time when we could have been making little Van Dyke beards and bubble mohawks on our small son for months.

So yesterday I bought some bubble bath. I was excited, and the bun was doing a bang-up job of covering himself in nut butter just so we could have a fine excuse to give him a nice, fluffy dunk in the suds after dinner. My husband undressed him as I ran the water and tried to get a good head of bubbles going (which were pretty disappointing, really. Maybe it was because I got nature-bunny bubbles instead of sticking with the classics and filling the tub with ol' Mr. Bubble himself). The bun was delighted in his naked form; he's a big fan of the bath now, and loves to share his excitement by splashing the H2O on everyone. The bubbles grew and I told my husband to bring in the bun for his ceremonial bubble-baptism.

The joy on the bun's face crumpled into a look of questioning suspicion as he spied the tub from his airy perch in Dad's arms. When my husband bent over to dip him into the bath, the bun more and more vigorously tried to climb up his body like a monkey in a tree, trying to flee the tub, grabbing at anything that would get him further from "the white menace."

Eventually, like scraping off a barnacle, my husband plunked him in. He looked like he was being threatened by piranha that were lurking just under the fluffy innocuous surface of foam and grappled at us to get him out, scrambling up the porcelain sides, his mouth making the shape of the perfect 'O' scream in slasher movies.

We panicked. Was the water too hot? Was it too cold? We both dipped our hands in, then just our wrists. It was a balmy tidepool temperature, perfect for his tiny hiney. We were mystified.

I pulled him aloft and we decided to drain the tub of its bubble-fun, refilling it just enough for a quick dip to get the leftover suds and almond butter off him. My husband rinsed the sides, and I stood there, holding a deeply insulted and suspicious baby. The drain took forever, and the bun clung to me like rubber cement, watching as the Bubbles of Malvolio drained away. I set him in the empty tub and he screamed again, seeing some residual specter of terror which was invisible to all but the most sensitive. Resigned to a bathless, bubbleless evening, I set him on my hip again and he peed in relief.

I don't get this baby-business. He hates bananas, too.

This time last year, January 6th, my husband and I were trapped in the house. We were buried behind a foot of snow and ice, which day after day kept thawing and re-freezing following weather reports which in typical calamitous fashion kept underestimating the length and breadth of the storm's duration. "Thawing expected tomorrow followed by warmer temperatures," they would say, looking sheepish with that sort of home-spun yokelism that was meant to endear but just enraged as the ice grew thicker and thicker on the roads. And the snow would thaw, as predicted, but there would be no warmth, so the frigid temperatures would add a few more millimeters of ice each day to the slalom death-track that engulfed the city. We waited for the storm to pass as patiently as we could, giving up our destinies to the caprices of nature.

Of course, the storm meant a little bit more to us, since my due date was in a week and my stomach was ponderously gigantic. Each day we would look outside at the white, white world where not even snowplows dared to tread and grimace. Would our son, who was now so big that he made every inch of me ache, hang on for a couple more days, or would we be faced with one of the greatest challenges of our lives, trapped in our own home with little chance of making it up the two-lane road to our mountainside hospital? I cooked spaghetti with red sauce each night since it was all that was left in the house, and each morning we ate cereal or french toast. Rations were getting low, but we still had the heat, we still had each other and we had a baby, who was hopefully not chomping on the bit to make his way into the world--just yet.

"I want you to know," I said, "I want you to know that I have faith that you can deliver this baby." We discussed game plans. We read chapters about home delivery. We followed the weather reports with a calm resignation that whatever came, including a baby, we could do it together. That's how concerned we were. That's how deep the snow was. That's how few services were getting through.

My husband laughs now. "HAHAHAHAHA!" he guffaws. "Omigod, that's so amazingly ridiculous." He stops to reflect on the birth of our son, a scant week after our city dug out of the snow. "As if I could have delivered the bun!" he chuckles. He's not knocking his own ability to rise up to a challenge; he's remembering my birth coach conducting me like a choir of seasick cows lowing their hearts and guts out. He's also remembering, with the benefit of hindsight, the pediatric unit that swept in and carried our son off for his first minutes and thinking that there are some things which, no matter what the challenge, one might not be able to handle by themselves.



****


I was in labor for 24 hours. The first 16 were spent at home, contractions ebbing and flowing but not really progressing all that much. Finally we called my mother to bring us some Chinese take-out for dinner; it looked like the bun-show was suspended and we were going to have to wait another day.

We were watching "The History of Britain," a foppish but enjoyable documentary that we had been following for nine episodes. This was episode ten, the last one. Just about the time Winston Churchill was leading England through World War II we realized that we weren't going to have the baby that afternoon. I said, after a lull of about 20 minutes, "I don't think it's gonna happen today."

Nature, fickle bitch that she is, changed her mind as soon as I spoke and decided to bring on the contractions so fast that my husband couldn't keep up. His neat spreadsheet in Excel was forsaken for the back of an envelope with the times between each contraction and a little notation if it was particularly strong. Pretty soon they were all so ferocious that he couldn't tell where one ended and the next started. He began making preparations to fly me to our destiny, and called our midwife and birth coach, gathered our bags, and told me that we had to go, NOW.

It was rush hour on a Friday. My husband didn't care. It didn't register to him. We flew out of our driveway and past my mother and her beau's car, which was just pulling up with the now irrelevant Chinese take-out. He flew through bumper to bumper traffic like a hot knife through butter, and if I weren't mewling like a wounded sheep in the back seat, I'm sure I would have recommended a slower pace. But as it was, I was preoccupied.

Things unfold out of time when you're having a baby. Chronology of events became hazy to me almost immediately; if it weren't for the recounting of the tale later to others, and being corrected on certain inconsistencies, I wouldn't know what happened when or if it had happened at all.

But I do know this: when my husband dropped me at the ER and promised to meet me in the delivery room, an orderly plunked me in a wheelchair in the center of the lobby while the desk clerk called up to the delivery ward requesting a nurse to wheel me up. They cheerfully babbled at me. "So, is this your first?" they asked, eyeballing the clock and each other as I gasped through a jolt of sheer animal nature. Patients with a wide range of moderate maladies gaped at my public grunts and my obvious imminent delivery. If there was no room for me, how did that bode for them and that splinter in their eye?

My husband parked the car, and was surprised to discover I was still parked like a dirigible ready to deflate in the ER waiting room. No one had come to get me yet, and while I wasn't completely coherent, I remember the hushed but increasingly emphatic tones the clerk took on the phone while looking purposely away from me. "Um, yeah," she'd say. "We're still waiting for a nurse from Delivery. She's pretty far along." She'd glance back. "Hurry."

Finally, they hauled me up to delivery.



****


Those of you who've done this before know the score; those of you who haven't know that you cannot fathom what your body is being asked to do, and would rather not be reminded of that fact until through willfulness or purpose or sheer stupidity you find yourself in the same predicament.

When I arrived in the delivery room, the midwife took one look and said, more or less, that I was ready to go. We mentally prepared for the next hour which seemed to be all about having a bun.

But the bun was coming down the pipe with his head cocked. He couldn't make that last turn. We had to wait.

The hours began to blur. I remember only patches, and usually in the wrong order. Six more hours passed. My husband has to tell me what actually transpired and when--some events contract while others become elongated and absurdly painful. But through the time, I remember tapping out. I also remember incompetence, arguing nurses, and bizarre tension between the nurse who couldn't agree with the midwife, while I waited for something to happen.

Finally I couldn't wait anymore. I had been in labor for 22 hours and I was exhausted. Physically, I was battered. Emotionally, I was ready to die.

My coach began to sense my desperation and tried to get the midwife to move things along. "I don't think she can wait any longer--can she start pushing soon?" she said. The midwife came to me. "How are you feeling?" she said. "What are you thinking about right now?"

"Give me a c-section," I said. I wasn't kidding. I wanted the ordeal over with, and if the c-section was the way to go, after 22 hours, wheel me in: I was ready for the anaesthetic.

There were a few loaded glances between the staff. "It would take longer to get the doctor here than for you to have the baby at this point," they said.

It appeared I was going to see this thing through the old fashioned way: no drugs, not even an aspirin, in the dark, by the light of a flashlight. The medical staff decided I was okay to push, thank god, and they tried to ease me through my shoving a porpoise through parts unnameable.

They told me to ease back, to hold on; the bun had passed meconium into the fluid and they had to suction his nose and mouth so that he didn't suffocate. While my husband and I were watching this outrageously amazing act of life, the medical team couldn't get the vacuum to work. I wanted to strangle everyone, but I was a little distracted. Finally, mysterious forces tucked behind a curtain swooped in and handed the nurse a functioning vacuum, and the birth continued apace.

They still insisted that I take it slow. They were trying to ease me through the final steps. But apparently I was ready, and though they were counting patient measured breaths for me to follow, I couldn't wait any longer and shot the bun out of me like a tiny cannon.

And there he was.

He arrived with the sleekness of a fish but he was tremendously hairy. He had a cap of the blackest hair I had ever seen, and he was purplish. He was amazing. He was human. His hands were gripped into tiny fists.

And then he was gone. The Pediatric Unit that was called in for every birth in case of some trauma had been tucked behind a curtain waiting for the event far more patiently than I had. They had, in their angelic way, handed the incompetent nurse the functioning vacuum. And when our son arrived they swept down in an elegant choreography to do some art which at that point was far beyond me. I had done my job, but the damned nurses were telling me that I still had more to do and couldn't turn my attention to the guest of honor just yet.

I had been battered in ways that make both women and men alike shiver in horror. Parts of me tore that should never be pained. The midwife assured me that I was going to be stitched up good as new, but that it was unusual, the way I tore. They needed time. My husband was so worried about me that he forgot what was going on on the other side of the room until my coach nudged him. "You're all he's got right now; he needs you." He left my side to look upon the person he had been waiting for all this time.

Finally, after they stitched me up and made sure the bun was in tip-top shape, they handed us our son. He was screaming. He was screaming so loud and with such vigor that we were shocked. They laid him on top of my chest, and he kept screaming. Minutes passed. He screamed and screamed and screamed. My husband and I looked at each other with a sinking gaze--was this it? Was he going to scream until he went to college? What had we done?

And then, exhausted, he fell asleep. It was three-thirty in the morning. We made it. The wait was over.


*****


He never screamed again like he did those first 45 minutes. From the moment when he woke next, he proved himself to be a mellow, gentle soul. He seemed far more adjusted to his new reality than we were, that was for certain.

A couple of days after he was born, the only nurse we had any real affinity with was trying to assess the bun's eating habits. He didn't seem to be eating enough; indeed he seemed a little tuckered out, not that interested. Not that I was an authority; I didn't know what the hell was going on.

She said, "He had a pretty rough entry. It's not surprising that he's not that energetic. Just keep offering him the breast and he'll be okay."

We decided to press a little about the "rough entry" comment.

"No-one told you?" she said.

There is no other statement that you want to hear less when you've just had a baby than "No-one told you." We shook our heads.

"He was bagged when he was born, they had to get him breathing. He wasn't breathing because he was born with the cord around his neck. Plus the meconium."

She told us that our son had to be revived. She told us that our son wasn't breathing when he was born.

In hindsight it's actually good that they didn't tell us. Because there was very little trauma and he had only been without oxygen a short time, information that would have made us hysterical was withheld while we tried to adjust to the mere fact of having a third human in our lives. The pediatric unit did their jobs flawlessly, revived our son, and moved on silently down the hall to the next birth. All in a days work, I guess.

For us, we were never more relieved that we lived in the 21st century. We had a team of people who knew what they were doing when it came to our son, and they made what could have been a rather dramatic and miserable end into a beautiful, almost banal beginning. We carried him off to the maternity ward none-the-wiser about his tenuous start, and it's just as well. Because there was no prolonged damage, the only thing it would have done was to make us panic. We were all too tired for that.


****

Now we're waiting again. He's almost a year old. There is talk of snow, but we don't have anywhere to be so we don't worry about it. Now we're waiting for him to walk.

He's taken a step or two, toddling gingerly towards one of us and then giddily falling on his butt, not quite sure of himself or his balance. But my husband is primed with the video camera, and now after months of not using it is firing it up at every opportunity, hoping against hope that those first steps are going to be forever frozen, documented for eternity. But he's taking his own sweet time.

He can take as long as he wants. We'll wait.