Musings of a Bun Popper

Ominous Rabbit

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 21:02:23 GMT

Season's Greetings, plus low, low rate!

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:16:28 GMT

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!

I don't want to eat Dolly the sheep!

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:36:29 GMT

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.

The small naked drunk man in the bottom of my bag

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 21:33:39 GMT

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.

A lesson in procrastination

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:59:31 GMT

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.

tap tap tap

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 16:26:57 GMT

Is this thing on?

Congress threatens Oscar the Grouch

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 06:17:50 GMT

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.

The Return of the Keys

Thu, 19 May 2005 18:32:53 GMT

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.

Thu, 19 May 2005 04:40:24 GMT

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

Hard times

Thu, 19 May 2005 01:40:39 GMT

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

Vegas, baby

Wed, 18 May 2005 22:12:49 GMT

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.

Sesame Crypt

Thu, 12 May 2005 16:52:59 GMT

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.

Operation Tubby Bun

Wed, 11 May 2005 18:42:33 GMT

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.

The light at the end

Wed, 11 May 2005 04:18:55 GMT

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.

Holy crap

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 19:39:49 GMT

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

Shrimp job and the bun

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 18:30:18 GMT

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.

Not dead.

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 20:01:57 GMT

Yet.

Love letters

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 05:03:19 GMT

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.

Where we're going

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:58:10 GMT

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.

Raoul Duke, RIP

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 05:20:40 GMT

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*

The future

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 03:59:02 GMT

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.

You and who's army?

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 18:43:18 GMT

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.

Sick days

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 19:14:07 GMT

"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.

Dream a little dream

Sun, 13 Feb 2005 04:00:52 GMT

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.

Epic struggle

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 18:50:29 GMT

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