and that was how i first stumbled across Vicki Forman. Vicki wrote a column called Special Needs Mama, part of the Literary Mama e-zine family, about parenting her son Evan.

in an ensuing email exchange the likes of which i never seem to engage in anymore, alas, i discovered that Evan’d had a twin, Eleanor, who died a few days after birth. and that Vicki’s elder daughter was Josephine.  had Finn been a girl, i wrote back, he’d probably have been Eleanor. or Josephine.

it was early 2007. it was the first time i had seen any shadow of my own reflection – in name tastes or in loss. and i found the idea that Vicki was out there somewhere immensely comforting, normalizing. i also found it thought-provoking.  she brought dignity and unflinching matter-of-factness to her narratives of Evan and her role as parent to a significantly disabled child. she did not pander to people’s pity, or expectations of a fluffy, inspirational happy ending. reading Vicki, i began to take steps towards writing my way out of a box i’d seen no other other exit to.

one of the most surreal parts of having lost Finn, for me, was the silencing effect it had. it created a space around me that felt filled with cotton batting, or a choking kind of insulation.  a dead baby is the conversational equivalent of a cement truck. i did not know how to introduce the subject in relation to myself, did not know how to negotiate the weight it carried without feeling awkward or skinless or somehow miscast. i was neither serene nor destroyed, which were the main culturally available motifs for my new role. i was simply…messy, then.  too messy and too vulnerable to even begin to invite attention to it all. and so this tremendously important part of me, the struggle with my grief and anger and fear and sorrow, became isolating and…unspeakable.

i was lucky, in that i was surrounded mostly by kindness. but people who knew me and knew of Finn skirted the subject, probably afraid of hurting me with reminders, probably afraid of saying the wrong thing.  i understood that. but in the midst of all that well-intended ignoring of the elephant in the room, i sat smothering under the silence and the elephant itself; the face i presented to the world a mask that ellided everything underneath.

i’d allowed my grief to be socially relegated to a little airless box, and i was choking in that box.

so i started to write about it, face-on, to allow myself to begin to explore here the things i desperately wanted to and needed to, but couldn’t, not aloud. and in doing so, i started to integrate my inner life back into the face i wore to the public, even this small, semi-private, semi-anonymous public out here online. it was enough.  i believe writing here kept me from suffocating  in my own bewildering loneliness and sadness.
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mostly i think i’ve absorbed Finn’s death. sometimes, though, i’ll catch a scent in the air at a particular time of year, or read a story, or hear a pregnant woman dismiss risk as if she were immune, entitled, and scenes crash in on me, the horror reel of it all going wrong.

the grim neonatologist who came back to the delivery room to tell us, bluntly, that he would not make the night and then walked away. my baby’s tiny, punctured chest, only an hour old and already his body breached and bloodied while we were not even there to comfort. the machine-gun gasp and pound of the ventilator.  the  nurse who told me his blackened fingers and toes were a sign of something congenitally wrong, then the other nurse – when i finally got up the courage to ask – who stared at me surprised and said, no, he’s perfect, it’s just oxygen deprivation. the swell of fear and rejection that backed up in my throat the first time i saw him there in his isolette, splayed out, red-raw, so compromised, and how my mind hissed you’re going to die at my newborn son before my hand reached out without me and touched his and his fingers wrapped around mine and i was lost, in spite of myself, to wonder and tenderness, to loving him. the confusion of it all, the helplessness. the feeling of somehow having being stripped of the right to compassion by the crisis, and stripped of the right to hope.

all these swarm in and punch me in the gut and i am left gasping, stunned by what my memory has secretly stashed away.

i thought maybe i was crazy, the kind of closet cat lady who looks perfectly bland from the outside but one day snaps and ends up on the nightly news because the picture bombs in her head finally exploded.

apparently not. apparently it’s just my amygdala, a part of the brain “so ancient and original it’s present even in lizards,” where the raw fight-or-flight emotions triggered by significant trauma are preserved and kept alive. the brain cannot integrate or defuse those emotions. there they sit, preserved in neurotransmitter amber.

i have Vicki Forman to thank for the comfort of the amygdala, because Vicki published a book this summer, a book called This Lovely Life: a memoir of premature motherhood.  and i ordered it and ate it up and found myself reading it half in her world of the summer of 2000 and half in my own of spring 2005. and then she explained the amygdala, and i felt…once again…just a little more able to breathe.
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Vicki’s book is not an easy read.  there’s no enlightened, illumined mama guru enriched by the smiling happiness of her disabled child. rather, the book tells the story of the trauma of the twins’ birth, Ellie’s death, and the unfolding story of Evan’s blindness, seizure disorder, and survival in a light that most of us would shrink from shining on our egos, our mother roles.  it is one of the most honest and troubling and beautiful stories i’ve read in a long time, and though Vicki is the figure at its centre, it is the evolving relationship between her and her son that the book stands as paean to.

in one of the cruel twists that life deals out sometimes, it seems that Vicki had just finished this book and landed a publisher when Evan, days short of his eighth birthday, died suddenly and without warning.  i read the book knowing that the child whose survival seemed so uncertain would grow to become the boy his mother wrote about at Special Needs Mama, but also knowing the heartbreak at the end of the story, the coda that even the writer of the reflections in its pages couldn’t see.

i want to thank Vicki for sharing Evan. i want to thank Vicki for consistently, at Special Needs Mama and in This Lovely Life, carving out a space of words and dignity that has helped me with my own processing, my own healing, my own understanding of how vast and fraught and boundless the word mother can be.

i want to encourage you to read this book.

two separate flu bugs in the first three days of 2009 actually started the year off with weight loss, for once. worry not. i’ve made up for it since…those Christmas chocolates were at risk of spoilage.

food is my crutch, my weak spot, my pleasure, though we try to have a straight arrow relationship these days. Posey’s digestion seems depressingly sensitive to what i eat, so i’ve cut dairy and most legumes from my diet entirely. add in the fact that my gourmandaise star turn into artichoke cauliflower soup the other evening turned her little gut into a kettle of gas, and we’re back to keeping the cruciferous vegetables in check too. for ethical/environmental/financial/ colon cancer prevention/save the children reasons i’m also trying to rein in my rather outlandish meat consumption, and yep…the prospect of making dinner with what’s left drives me to break out the chocolates again.

unfortunately, as i learned – however unwillingly – from Mad a few months back, chocolate isn’t exactly a food choice without a footprint. i kinda knew that before, but i was ignoring it. thanks to the Lorax The Just Posts, i am now trying to green my chocolate purchasing. i won’t single-handedly end child slavery, but i need to at least take responsibility for not making the problem worse.

i’m still coming to terms with the idea that not only does everything i eat impact my body, but it comes from somewhere. it impacts the earth, it impacts an increasingly global system of capital and resource exchange, it impacts what seeds farmers can plant in rural India and whether kids eat in Botswana.

i like the idea of the hundred-mile diet.

then i look out my window at the five feet of snow blanketing my neighbourhood and i quake at the notion of ever seriously adhering to something so…disciplined. i live on a small island in Canada, people…unless i want to go out and jig for fish under the ice six months of the year or subsist on sprouted spuds all winter, my options end up even more limited than they are already. yes, we have a fine farmers’ market and some local organic growers, but i’ve asked about out of season products at the Saturday market and discovered that their fat spring blueberries come from Chile, just like those at MegaGroceryMonopolis. except more expensive.

though, everywhere, even MegaGroceryMonopolis, food seems to be more expensive these days. part of me laughs and says, good thing we all resolved to eat less for January, huh? part of me knows the distance of irony is a privilege. the inflation will mean some hungrier kids, some emptier food banks.

i’ve been wandering the aisles of my local grocery stores noticing that all the produce – even the goddam potatoes, in a province almost synonymous with spuds – are from locations crazy far away. i also noticed, just yesterday, that while all the apples at MegaGroceryMonopolis A are imports, even the Macintoshes, which grow locally and should still be quite nice this time of year, the organics were actually the same price as the non-organics. this is the first time i’ve ever seen price equity. and the whole web of supply and demand is so complex that i don’t even know if that’s a good thing. it’s good for me. it means Oscar will get his beloved apples sans pesticides without us eating up more of our budget to buy ‘em, and since apples are one of the few things still left for me to bloody eat, they’re a significant part of that budget right now. i guess it means that if more people buy organic apples, maybe more growers can go organic, thus indirectly and eventually creating less profit for companies like Monsanto, and maybe less pressure for farmers to subscribe to ecologically and financially ridiculous proposals. but these organic apples still appear to have been shipped thousands of miles to make it to my fruit basket.

maybe i should’ve tried to be more hundred-mile and, uh, canned the pile of apples we picked at the local organic orchard back in September. but who eats canned apples?

i dunno what to make of all this. i don’t want to spend as much on food as i do. i don’t want to eat as much crap as i do. i want to make informed choices wherein what ends up on my plate has logged as few travel miles and oppressed as few living creatures as possible, while still being, y’know, delicious. and preferably chocolate.

i need ideas. ideas about what to eat that’s non-dairy and non-gassy and preferably grows somewhere at least in the northern-ish zones of North America without massive amounts of pesticides. cheap would be nice. recipes would be awesome. and in the interest of full disclosure, i am that odd Maritimer who actually does not eat fish or other sea creatures. they’re gross, don’tcha know? except tunafish from a can, but that’s all full of mercury and endangered to boot. sigh.

what do you eat? what are your priorities in terms of making choices…cost? health? environmental impact? likelihood of toddlers to actually consume it? tell me what you love, what you know, what you eat. because stew and spinach huevos rancheros (sans cheese, sniff) are getting waaaay tired up here.

or rather, i feel like my house is drowning…to the outside observer, it more likely looks a little cluttered, overstuffed. and dusty, definitely dusty. but i can live with the dustbunnies…we reached a detente years ago, where they keep to their corners and i keep to mine. it’s the clutter, the sense of being crowded in on by stuff, stuff everywhere, that makes me batshit crazy, turns my voice shrill and my eyes all deer in headlights. i have more tolerance for dental drilling than i do for clutter, especially clutter of the sort where there’s really nowhere left to put any frigging thing and you can no longer keep track of what half of it is for or where it would go.

i blame the children.

Josephine, it appears, was born with six suitcases worth of stuff to her name. i swear i didn’t buy it, much…it just materialized with celebrations and kindnesses, donations and gifts and hand-me-downs and my occasional breakdown in the face of wee smocked dresses on sale. Oscar, too, owns more clothes than i do, and seems to sing toys from the sky like birds.

or bird droppings. scattershot, they adorn our den helter-skelter, while i flap about the house trodding on Thomas the Tank Engine and squawking “confusion and delay!” in my best – if unintentional – Sir Topham Hatt imitation. Thomas at least has spent a solid year enthralling my offspring…the charms of others have not been so enduring. i didn’t realize how quickly kids outgrow their toys…that the Little People farm will not do him until he’s twelve, no matter whether i spent fifty bucks on it or not. in any case, old toys are banished to the shed to lie in wait for Posey or for loan to little cousins, and new ones arrive to take their place. the task of trying to squeeze them back into the house when Poe is ready looms like a date with my own personal idea of hell.

yesterday my half-sister, bless her, brought her rainforest swing for Josephine. it’s a gorgeous swing, almost new. the baby loves it. and it has a footprint the size of a small zeppelin…i’ve slept in rooms smaller than the floorspace that swing eats up. i’ve been hyperventilating since it arrived, trying to figure out which wall to knock out in order to make room for the bloody thing. i want it, don’t get me wrong. but i don’t want to give up the room for it. and when your house is twelve hundred square feet, room is not in infinite supply…thus clutter happens.

so much has come so easy. fifty years ago, families of four and five and six children were regularly raised in houses precisely this size, likely with fewer lamentations and a lot less clutter. my mother, who has not hesitated to inform me more than a few times that she got me through to toilet training with only a dozen thin old diapers and a wringer washer, stares in thinly veiled horror at the largesse of toys and outfits that her grandchildren possess. i shrug lamely and swear i didn’t buy it all, and she and i both recognize how lucky i am to be freed from the worry and want that haunted her all through my childhood.

but it’s too much, people. it is a joy and privilege to be able to give my kids some nice things…creature comforts, imaginative toys, cute clothes. i am in no way above the materialism of my world and my time…this age of indulgence that’s crept over all of us – or at least all of us who can lay our hands on credit – has left me thinking little of dropping dollars on things that please me. and things for my children please me. but when we live more simply than most people we know and i still have nightmares wherein colonizing, primary-coloured plastic toys eat me alive whilst playing tinny nursery rhyme tunes, there’s a problem somewhere. and maybe it’s not just that i’m disturbed.

recession scares me, sure. the shitkicking my savings have taken over the past month or so leaves a little tang of fear in my mouth so sour that my brain prefers not to consider the subject at all. but, at the same time, the Scots pioneer deep down in my soul feels freed by the prospect of reckoning, of forced frugality, of a retreat from a culture of such excess that my not-quite-six-week-old owns more stuff than whole families not so far from here whom fortune has not treated so generously. parenting as a consumer pastime is not what i want to be. i need less, folks, less than what i have.

we may all have to make do on less, and i don’t want to paint that as falsely rosy. for some, there is genuinely no wiggle room. but for many of us, less is a very relative term at this juncture…our less still more than any generation before us ever considered having, and much of it unnecessary. i hope our culture can use this downturn to do a little needed paring of our bloat, our clutter. i do not want my children to mistake all this for entitlement, or for happiness. and – for the sake of my sanity – i do not want to step on another godforsaken toy train.

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are you drowning? in stuff, or fear of what a downturn will mean?

she doesn’t need much.

milk, Zantac for her nasty, nasty reflux, diapers, a warm chest to cuddle into. she wears her brother’s preemie-size handmedowns for now, mostly blue…though kind friends and family have ensured she will have more pink than i ever dreamed of to grow into once she gets out of doll-sized clothing. which should be soon…she’s back up to her birthweight as of today, clocking in at about the weight of a diner lunch. she’s pretty enamored of her car seat, way more than the sweet little nest of a co-sleeper by the bed, no matter how i prop it up. but mostly she sleeps on me. and since this is our last time around the baby block – and i’d sell my hindquarters cheap right now just for unbroken rest in any form – i’m cool with that.

she has old soul eyes, this one. she stares, searchingly, like the one thing she needs is to know the world is a decent place. it’s a tautology to tell her that it seems that way to me because she’s in it. i look around me and all i got for those eyes right now is the weary, abiding love in this little zone of sanctuary and the sweetness new babies bring out in the most unlikely people and i pull what is precious to me tighter and hope that her serious, wary gaze finds beauty to light on in this life.

that’s what i’d like to give her.

but a beloved old buddy is throwing a shower – my first, ever – since we work amongst mutual friends now. and people are asking what this baby needs, what i need, in the manner of things that can be wrapped and opened. and i am grateful…but terrible at these things, eternally gauche when it comes to being the gracious recipient. my instinct is to tell everyone to just bring baby wipes or a donation to charity…or yeh, gee, that $150 swing in the catalogue looks gorgeous. erm, yeh. i have wants, see…but guilt, too. there really isn’t anything we need…we’re lucky. very, very lucky. plus my Scotch Protestant roots demand we get “good use” out of everything i’ve ever bought so it’s painful for me to retire any item before it yelps and sags and cries “uncle”. and yet…this time around i splurged and bought a cheap nursing rocker with footstool, and i’m already kicking myself for thinking i didn’t need one with O…no wonder i had that backache for three months, nursing on a futon couch after eons of bedrest. so sometimes stuff is good. somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous, there’s got to be some cool baby stuff that’s moderately green-ish and not too greedy that we’re missing out on knowing about here at chez crib? or at least that i can tell people about so they can bask in the joy of shopping?

leak the good stuff, friends. if you had cool baby items or can’t-live-without things for your babies, what were they? what made life with a little one easier for you?

it’s been a bit on the rainy side, and mindless wandering around the local timewarp that is The Mall is morbidly depressing, so we haven’t necessarily filled our time with as many outings as we’d imagined.  but amidst the walks and the swims at the park, we checked out a couple of local attractions and brunched and had tea and took O for his inaugural bumper car ride with Daddy.  big fun.

everywhere we went there were kids’ menus.  and christ in a handbag, no wonder our culture has an epidemic of childhood obesity.

truth is, the amusement park probably hasn’t changed its menu in forty years: hotdog, hamburger, or deep-fried chicken bits, all with a side of fries or onion rings and pop.  not health food, but as an occasional treat, no biggie.  especially if a kid only gets out for a treat a few times in a summer.

but everywhere has menus like this, these days, at least where we are.  and when on holidays, one can be everywhere – eating out – more than a few times in a summer.  i have apparently been living in a bucket, happily oblivious to the contents of these craptastic wonders, because i haven’t had a child old enough to be interested in eating from them until now.  but suddenly Oscar has reached an age where he’s noticing that other kids aren’t eating the yogurt or dish of cottage cheese dragged from mommy’s bag; where pilfering dad’s toast & eggs at the diner is not entirely a sufficient meal unto itself.

and it seems that the rite of passage of having his own plate means he can now choose from a wide array of white-flour-based, deep-fried, nitrate- and preservative-saturated foods.  in quantities that would suffice for most adults. oh, independence.

i’m really not a sprout Nazi, or anything.  my kid likes Elmo crackers, and eats cupcakes now and then.  but for the most part we do try to make sure his diet has more nutrients in it than unpronounceable additives. we just don’t buy white bread or white pasta.  the store-brand organic breakfast cereals around here now cost less than the brand-name non-organic Raisin Bran or Shreddies, and we made fudgesicles this summer out of chocolate soy milk.  if Oscar liked hamburgers – he’s gone off meat, our little Smith’s fan – i’d happily serve them to him.  but seriously?  with fries and pop?  when he’s two?  even when he’s ten, i’d really like him to have a few more alternate options.  healthy choices shouldn’t be something that magically appear with puberty.

to me, when McDonald’s appears to have the healthiest kids’ menu in town – because you can at least get apple slices and juice with your white-bread-wrapped grilled cheese – there’s something kinda weird about that.

i know, first-time parent naiveté.  i do get that a few meals out is not going to destroy my child’s health or digestive tract, and that with some kids, getting them to eat anything at all is a huge success.  we’re lucky that way – O turns up his nose at a lot of things, especially vegetables, but would live on tomatoes and avocadoes if we let him.  that’s just how it turned out.  but he also had his very first non-soy hot dog only last week, so the options he’s been given do have something to do with the tastes he’s developed.  is it just where we happen to live – in one of Canada’s fattest provinces – that circumscribes the kids’ menu options to such blatantly and exclusively unhealthy fare?  is it just me who thinks this kinda sucks?  or do most kids between four and twelve in North America live on a steady diet of processed snacks and sugar and hotdogs?  seriously?

shine the light for me, people.  am i fighting a losing battle on this one?  when you eat out – if you eat out – what do your kids eat?  what’s your philosophy regarding kids and diet?

Oscar after his nap…soft around the edges, little body still bleary and warm.

i love this photo. alas, i did not take this photo. Kate came over for an afternoon a few weeks ago, and the lens she pointed at us offered up faces of my son i’d never seen before. she has a wicked eye. she also has a wicked camera.

i once, in the last days of film, invested a few years training my own eye to frame and capture photojournalistic images of the lines and structures and stories that hid in plain sight in the exotic places i journeyed…i have a photo essay of the sectarian murals of Belfast, one of the rooftops of Busan, South Korea, and one of the cats of Istanbul. but i never did master the details of focus and aperture and lighting enough to get my old warhorse K-1000 to take great shots of people, particularly children…they’re twitchy little creatures.

i’d like to try. Dave & i have been talking, and the truth is there’s not much we plan on buying for this new baby. some kind of nursing rocker, oh yes o aching, withered core muscles, oh yes…but beyond that, we’re into hand-me-downs and intend for O and Bebe to share a room, at least for awhile. so we thought maybe we might spend on this child in the place that second-borns – or second-brought-homes – get notoriously shortchanged: photos. we’re in the market for a good camera.

what we have right now is a little hp Photosmart R817…fine for snapshots, but slow, and the light and focus are never great. i want something i can manually adjust. i want something quick, that can capture a first smile rather than the blur of a turning head three seconds later. it doesn’t have to be top of the line. it doesn’t have to be the deal of the century, either. i want advice.

what’s your camera?  what do you like about it?  what doesn’t it do well?  got any recommendations?

so today i’m just breathing, grateful, good.

and in celebration, i’m doing laundry.  because i really AM that much of a party animal, yep. and because it’s a sunny, windy day, and Dave put up a clothesline a few weeks ago, and the ten foot walk to the back deck from the washing machine is a fine form of exercise for those who have no musculature left.  and because this bedrest thing has meant there’s been a slight, erm, build-up of laundry in our home of late and now that i’m allowed to do a little, i feel it’s incumbent upon me to save the hamper from utterly self-destructing under its own weight.

but also because i want to do a little public service announcement.  i think there’s probably little so misunderstood in the entire parent-sphere (blog or real-life) as cloth diapers. and having just laundered some, i’d like to counter some of the rumours.

i keep hearing about how they’re hard, how they create a lot of work.  i can see the reasons behind those assumptions – my own mother, who owned a total  of twelve cloth prefolds during my entire pre-potty-trained existence and used ‘em, day in and day out, with a wringer washer, believes Pampers are some kind of miracle of Jesus.  i get that.  i’m not above disposables – we use them sometimes when we’re travelling, and they have their place in my canon of Reasons i’m Happy it’s Not 1970.  but what i want to lay out here, just in case there’s anybody out there waffling on the fence about diapering options…cloth is actually no big deal.  not a lot of work, not a lot of gross, not a lot of waste water.  seriously.  it does seem to end up sounding like a lot of work nearly every single time i hear about it in media or on discussion boards or at baby showers, unless the person speaking is some kind of earth mother goddess type…but i call bullshit babyshit on that.  it’s a myth that keeps us comfortable, societally, keeps us consuming, keeps us thinking we’ve got it good.  but it’s a myth that makes a mountain out of the molehill of work actually involved in cloth diapering, and a myth that ends up perpetuating a fair amount of, um…waste.

this week, as public radio helped me while away the tedium of collating the final report for the project i’ve worked on all year, there was a show on about some Canadian dude who’s gone to England to recycle that nation’s disposable diapers, because a) Canadians aren’t nearly so interested in the whole recycling thing and b) England only has nine years max of landfill available for nappies before, well, babies are just going to have to stop pooping or people are going to have to change their practices.  sometimes i suspect all this space we have around us here in North America doesn’t exactly channel our better angels.  in any case, the companion piece to Mr. Diaper Recycler was a panel of three moms from across this country discussing the diapering choices they’d made.  and while all were making efforts to be greenish in various aspects of their lives, the discourse around diapers was pretty familiar.  the mom using cloth was a serious eco-hippie, kudos to her, who’s also used elimination communication with her kids and had them totally trained and probably growing patchouli and playing guitar by the age of two.  the mom who used disposables had intended otherwise during pregnancy but got overwhelmed by a colicky baby and now “just doesn’t think about it and doesn’t feel guilty about it.”  and the mom using compostable g-diapers mentioned the waste of water resources that go into cloth in any case.

of all of them, the one i identified most with personally was b…the overwhelmed one.  i’m not the natural mama sort, not by nature.  when it became clear that i had a child intent on crying and not sleeping for the first three and a half months of his little life, i struggled.  i was not a pretty sight.  and we’d been sent home from the NICU with a crapload of preemie and newborn Pampers, so i used ‘em and into the landfill they went, and i felt a wee bit nasty about that but seriously, when you’re not sleeping, eco-footprints can go screw themselves, especially if you don’t see an equally simple option at hand.  when the Pampers ran out, O was about two months old and coming on ten pounds and starting to look like he might not swim in the prefolds and wraps i’d bought…so i tried them.  and they leaked, and it was a bit of a disaster and i very gravely contemplated throwing the whole venture into the landfill just out of spite.

it was mostly the fact that i had a friend who’d used cloth successfully that kept me going.  this wasn’t just some crazy thing that nobody i knew actually did.   i had someone to ask, to learn from.  and so just in case any of you might need that person in order to give cloth a try, assuming you even you want to, here’s me uh…being that person?  or volunteering to try, at least.

there are a few things i needed in order to be able to use cloth as much as i have and as long.  most important was a washer (and preferably a dryer too, though i try to line/drip dry a few loads a week to save energy).  had that washer not been conveniently located between my kitchen and my back deck, it would have been a more daunting workload, for sure.  the second most important, particularly once i went back to work, was a sitter willing to try cloth.  i’ve been lucky on both counts.  but mostly what i needed was just to work out a system that i could keep simple.

here’s what we use:

1) we used prefolds and wraps for the first six months or so because i’d been given a bunch of prefolds and i’m cheapish.  i never did find great wraps but all of them starting working better and leaking less once i started washing with Arm & Hammer green, because we have hard water here and “free”-type detergents just add to the build-up on diapers.

2) around six months, i retired the prefolds and ordered pocket diapers: eight Fuzzibunz mediums and six Happy Heinies from an online Canadian company.  pocket diapers are brightly coloured covers which you stuff an insert into – we got some terry “Thirsties” inserts and some hemp.  Thirsties have been better inserts for us (O is a heavy wetter), though a double-stuff with one of each work great at night.  all of them work best if they go in the dryer at least every second or third wash.  Oscar is still wearing the Fuzzibunz mediums – when he turned a year i ordered twelve size larges as well, as he was beginning to outgrow the the Happy Heinies.  all but one of our stash of twenty Fuzzibunz have held up beautifully, despite hard and constant use.  they’re a little bulky, kind of like having two disposables on at once, but are cut slim between the legs unlike some cloth options i’ve seen, so they’ve never impacted his walking or comfort, just give him a cute little bubble butt that is occasionally hard to get those pesky toddler skinny-jeans over.

3) Kushies makes biodegradable liners, which i put in most of Oscar’s diapers (especially if a poop is due).  when i change him, the liner and its contents just flush away.  if there’s anything runny that’s gone beyond the liner’s borders, i swish the whole diaper in the toilet while flushing.  two flushes max per poopy diaper, if that.  my hands seldomly get poop on them, but if they do it’s no more than they would in an infant blow-out.  i wash them after, or use Purell.

4) i have a green $5 plastic bucket with a snap-on lid in my bathroom.   wet and dirty diapers go in there.  i do not soak them.  i just rinse the bucket every second wash or so with water and a bit of baby shampoo, in the tub.  if i remember.

5)  we also have a purple “wet bag” (also ordered online, about $12) which goes to the sitter with Oscar everyday, along with 4 or 5 pre-stuffed diapers.  the stuffing and packing in his daycare bag takes max 4 minutes – his sitter sends home the wet bag (which is fabulous and holds all smell in despite having been washed nearly daily for the past 14 months) in his daycare bag, and it gets opened and the contents dumped directly in the washer or in the diaper bucket, if we’re not washing that night.

the system that works for us, basically, is that most nights all the day’s diapers (4-6, depending) and O’s pajamas from the night before and any underwear or socks or tshirts lying around the house, plus any sheets or towels or baby facecloths that need washing, all get dumped in the washer with the wet bag.  all together.  i do one single large load of wash on hot, with a cold rinse, a small amount of detergent, and (at least once a week) a shot of vinegar.  when Oscar was smaller his clothes got washed in there too, as they were frequently rather bodily-fluid-stained themselves.  mine too.  clothes and diapers come out clean and sweet-smelling.  they go in the dryer or get hung to dry.  the wet bag hangs out for the night and goes back in the daycare bag in the morning.  we do this wash four or five times a week, and end up with clean socks and underwear and whatever else in the process.   particularly when Oscar was smaller and making a mess of clothes all the time, it was literally no more wash than i would otherwise have been doing anyway.  and there’s never a stink build-up, because we don’t leave them lying around for more than 36 hours or so.

i dunno.  it’s taken me four times longer to write it all down than it would to do it.  and maybe it’s not very convincing…or maybe it’s just not for you in any case, and that’s your business.  but just, please…don’t believe it the next time you hear cloth diapers are so hard, or that they’re just as bad as disposables because of the water usage (unless, perhaps, you live in drought-stricken Australia and never actually do laundry).  the truth is, our society just hasn’t done a very good job of supporting people in learning to use them.  even with me on bedrest, they’ve added up to perhaps a half-hour of work per week for Dave & i over the last few months.  we don’t spend money on diapers (or haven’t since i got the last twelve on Ebay for $160 thirteen months ago).  we never run out.  we’re not even doing a lot of wash that we wouldn’t otherwise be doing.

just sayin’.  there’s a learning curve, for sure.  but if anybody wants some assvice or some support trying to get there, you are welcome to pick my brain until the cows come home.  because i do think that financially and ecologically they’re a worthwhile option, and one i’d love to see more families trying rather than being intimidated out of it before they ever even get started.

why, oh world, do little kid pants suddenly stop coming with elastic waistbands once they hit the size 2T? why, exactly, does a not-quite-two year old need to be wearing narrow, slim-hipped jeans that cling just like i wish mine would an Olsen twin’s? is everyone else’s offspring sprouting into a lithe, willowy, diaper-less supermodel the minute those 18-24 month sizes start getting a bit snug?

you hear what i’m really saying here, right? is Oscar the only husky little short-legged munchkin in Canada whose cloth-diapered derriere still requires cute little bubble-shaped baby pants?

am i emasculating and infantilizing him by being blind to his need for big-boy streamlined skinny jeans?

or is the consumerist marketing fashion machine just evil? is Pampers designing for Old Navy these days? cause sending O out to daycare with half his diaper hanging out the back of waistband and his cuffs rolled up to his fat little knees seems to be the only option available to us once he’s outgrown those last wee tot rags we’re still squeezing him into.

i mean, dudes. he’s not even two. he doesn’t need tight back pockets to slip his pack o’ smokes into, now does he? he just needs some fanny in his freaking pants.

dignity, folks. dignity in children’s clothing. where do i buy that?

we stayed home. in the rain. no first birthday party for Oscar’s baby cousin, no Cirque du Soleil, no hanging out at the beach on a real-live blog date with the achingly sweet and salty Kate…no gathering with some Belgian beer and our boys, big and little, corporeal and longed-for. no snibbling at the new baby softness of tiny Ben, no watching O chase irrepressible Evan. nope. too much fun for us.

we went to the local Sears though, in the kind of traffic this city only ever sees on a rainy Saturday during the heighth of tourist season. whee.

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Oscar’s ears or teeth are bugging him and he’s been tippy and cranky and demanding. we’ve just switched him from cow’s milk to soy, in an effort to see whether or not the folk wisdom about dairy and ear infections holds any water…certainly ear infection #1 cropped up just around the time i stopped nursing him and switched him over to cow’s milk, but that was also more or less the time he started going to the sitter’s full time, so really it’s just a shot in the dark, a “hope this will be the healthier choice in the long run” kinda semi-grounded decision that my parenting seems to be rife with. that my living is rife with, now that i mention it…

O’s sitter, who is lovely and kind and apparently far more organized and even-tempered than i will ever be in this life but also has, on some days, six babies and a four year old under her care, mentioned when we picked him up on Thursday for the long weekend that he’s gotten grabby, that he’s not responding to “no,” that he’s fixating on stuff and taking it from the other kids and howling if he doesn’t get sole possession AND NOW.

okay, the emphasis on the last bit is mine. ’cause he’s gotten like this at home, too. and it bites. this morning i introduced him to crayons for the very first time. he wasn’t so keen on their colouring powers, but wow, did he ever want to HOLD each crayon in his grubby little mitts, with no other human hand hovering nearby.

my child has become a junior hostile takeover on short legs.

so i thought, well, he’s growing up as an only child thus far, and so he doesn’t have a lot of experience with sharing or needing to be considerate of others, maybe, other than with Dave and i…and Nannie…and the cat…but clearly these aren’t working. then i had a moment of genius.

we would buy him a doll.

it would be a small creature he could tend to. we could use it to talk about feelings, and he could snuggle it in his arms, and feed it his empty bottle in the morning instead of stuffing the nipple in my mouth (which is cute and all, but i’m not that into soy milk). i was right into this doll, though, right away. i figured at worst it would give him something other than my head to bang on when he wants to identify eyes and noses with his powerful, pointy, not-quite coordinated sticky little fingers.

except, of course, we live in a small city with limited retail availability, and had i actually had coffee before this brainwave short-circuited all my reasoning i would have realized that the chances of finding this wonder-doll anywhere in a town Dave likes to refer to as “this place you brought me too” were slim to none.

because we’re snobs, you see.

i say we, though our snobberies are separate. Dave’s is quite defensible, especially in light of the current massive toy recall. he’d like to buy something local-ish, or handmade, or something about which we could research the conditions of production and be reasonably sure that the people who worked on it were paid a decent wage and were over twelve and preferably not lead paint afficionados.

myself, i think all this is quite right and i want it too. except, well, i want a doll i can like way more. i want a humanoid doll, kinda cute, something more person-like than his cadre of stuffed animals, something smaller than he is. i’m not into the hyperreal “Baby Sucks and Pees” variety of doll, because to me, they do little to inspire love and appeal in small children. i also don’t really want some wool sock with eyes sewn on from the local Farmer’s Market, bless its granola heart, because…well…he already has those and they’re not doing the trick. we looked for a Cabbage Patch doll for him last Christmas, during a brief bee-in-my-bonnet i had about encouraging him to be nurturing…but came up empty. locally, humanoid baby dolls are really only sold in any quantity at Walmart, which we try to avoid like the plague…but i hypocritically and happily sucked up all my semi-grounded qualms and went, only to discover that all the boy Cabbage Patch dolls at our one local purveyor had absolutely terrible names. i am not buying Oscar a little friend who comes with the handle Blayden Mortimer…i wanted to be able to pick one with a nice name. couldn’t. left.

i have a son. he may only own one or two dolls in his childhood, given the gendered nature of consumerism these days, and the implicit pressures that places on children and parents to toe a line. i am likely to be spared the decision of whether to buy Oscar Bratz, and that’s just dandy. but what i do buy him, this doll…i want to enjoy this purchase…it’s special to me. and i want it to be special to him. i whiled away hours of childhood interacting with my dolls, enacting life scenes with them, exploring love and anger and kindness and all sorts of crap that’s lost now to memory but is still there, part of the masonry of the person i became. i want this doll not to poison him and preferably not to come from the sweat of another child’s brow, but mostly…i want it to be a doll he can invest love and trust in. i want it to be a friend.

and i want to enjoy buying/procuring/stealing him his damn friend. is that too much to ask?

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the Sears trip today was our last local shot. they had a Bob the Builder doll about twice as big as O himself, and some Barbies. no go. plus Oscar screamed the whole trip home in the car, probably because i wouldn’t let him hold onto (read: rend into sharp plastic shards) the hangers of the cheap sleepers i picked up on sale while we were there. because, you know, a boy needs to clutch and destroy hangers when he has no dolly to play with…

oh internets, friends…i turn to you.

tips for a doll for a nearly-sixteen month old boy? an online hand-whittled order from Gepetto would be ideal…but all suggestions very welcome. except those that imply i might consider making the doll myself…see above note on sock puppets.

and…tips for helping same sixteen-month old boy become a little less, erm, acquisitive of all items within sight?

all advice gratefully received.

alas.

the ceramic fish i painted in grade seven art class during my brief affair with the colour peach? gone to Jesus, fisher of men.

the gigantic red and white ashtray commemorating Canada’s centennial that i haggled relentlessly for at a flea market during my college years, because squishing roaches out on the faces of Canada’s early prime ministers was just too much fun to be passed up? now lost to history…though i suspect a long-ago ex-boyfriend of having snuck it into his box when we split at graduation.

the clown cookie jar that sat leering on top of the fridge all through my mother’s childhood and my own? crashed to the floor one day, finally, having outlasted its rightful life span by about four decades in a family this awkward.

the streamlined bowling shoes, circa 1962, Jetson-style, that i kept wistfully when my grandmother could no longer bowl because i secretly hoped my feet might shrink? given to Goodwill with good wishes, when i eventually came to terms with reality.

oh my treasures, my beautiful treasures…i miss youse.

i am the only child of an only child, and my home is filled with old things handed down, but few of them – to my surprise, when i really took stock and looked around – are nearly as kitschy or bohemian or just plain funny as i’d thought they were.

except, perhaps, this.

it’s a very, very old vase, about eighteen inches high and repaired in many places, which currently sits at the foot of our bed (safely on the floor, kinda). Oscar likes to drop things in it. Dave likes to hope it will shatter and disappear, leaving less garishness in its place. i just like it. it was a wedding gift given to my great-grandparents when they married in 1901, from the old couple across the street, who had been given it at their own wedding some indeterminate number of years before…apparently regifting ain’t new. my grandmother kept it in a place of honour, on a table at the foot of her staircase, for many, many years…where her many, many cats repeatedly knocked it from its perch and into pieces on the floor. it’s worth little, monetarily, despite its age…and yet i value it. i find it cheerful, and odd, and kind of beautiful. i will carry it with me through my life, if i can, and bestow it upon Oscar or some sibling of his like a noble albatross some day, even if he comes to see it with his father’s aesthetic eye.

i wanted to show it to you…but i know, it really isn’t kitsch, per se, except to Dave and his philistine ilk.

on that front, unbelievably, i got nothin’. if you’d only asked ten years ago, Mad…oh, i was rich, i swear! but time, the devourer, has eaten my kitsch.

i got to get me to some yard sales, clearly.