cribchronicles.com

so, i have this new kinda blog crush on Slouching Mom, whose site i finally made it to after seeing her comments on other sites for…well…about as long as i’ve been skanking around on other sites, basically. make that, like, a month. i’m a slow adopter when it comes to using new technologies to their fullest.

in fact, i’m a slow adopter - and adapter - across the board. particularly in my musical tastes. i have a deep affinity for music from the decade of my birth that is rarely matched even by people who were making music then. i’m pretty fond of the decade previous, too, and can tread water into the decade following. but once you get into anything released post-1984, when i hit eighth grade, i’m sunk. i’m hopeless. i’m a relic, replete with an ostrich head stuck in a sand dune, shouting “i can’t hear you!” and “turn that new-fangled crap down, will ya?!?”

this unburdening of my musical fogey-tude is relevant, i swear.

it’s relevant because when i finally got over to Slouching Mom’s site, i discovered that she does not, in fact, have or advocate bad posture…at least so far as i can tell, though i’m quite into bad posture myself…but rather has cleverly titled her blog “Slouching Towards 40.” this is, i think, a wicked, charming, funny allusion to the bleakly beautiful Yeats poem “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, and it makes me like her very much.

now, Slouching Mom tagged me for the music meme where i’m supposed to tell you all about the seven top songs on my ipod, if i had an ipod. which she doesn’t either, which is reassuring…but her songs nonetheless include artists like Jack Johnson and Fiona Apple. and i think of these as uber-hip choices, very current. they’re from a point in time after which i grew breasts. i’m feeling a bit outed here, folks.

when it comes to music, i live in a bucket. which is like under a rock, except more confined.

a few years ago, when Dave & i co-managed a fledgling English expat website in a small-ish city in Korea, i started a music column called “Bon’s bucket.” in my bucket, i had great intentions of going backwards through the alphabet, waxing euphoric about bygone musicians whose tunes made me weak at the knees. i started with Warren Zevon and Neil Young, tagged Johnny Cash as X since he happened - god rest his crooked little heart - to die the week i got to that otherwise awkward letter, continued through W which had to be shared between Tom Waits and Lucinda Williams, crowned the Velvet Underground - of course - with V, and fizzled out around T since i couldn’t for the life of me decide between Traffic and Talking Heads.

so this should probably give you a sense of where the following list of tunes is going to take you. yep, straight back to about 1975. though i shall try to get as…erm…funky as i can without hurting myself.

thus (insert drum roll) the top seven playlist on my record player computer:

1. Tangled Up in Blue - Bob Dylan (though i quite like the Indigo Girls version too…it’s from the ’90’s! practically new!)

2. Case of You - Joni Mitchell

3. Just a Memory - Elvis Costello

4. Lakes of Pontchartrain - The Be Good Tanyas (it’s from this decade! of course, the song is traditional and could have been written in 1875 for all i know…but the actual recording is 21st century. i’m sooo cool.)

5. A New England - Billy Bragg (or the Kirsty McColl version, both rock…)

6. Life on Mars - David Bowie

7. Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen (and no,while Rufus Wainwright, Jeff Buckley, and kd lang all have fabulous versions of this…i’m a purist here. only Leonard makes me hear the broken part of the Hallelujah, babee).

oh, and then there’s The Mountain Bed, which was recorded by Billy Bragg & Wilco to lyrics written by Woody Guthrie back in the day…yep, that’s gotta squeeze in there too. maybe one of the other songs can squeeze a cheek over and share its chair?

i know there’s other great stuff out there. i really got into Iron & Wine a few years ago, thanks to dear friends of ours who were saddened to see my taste atrophy on the vine, so to speak, and i know the words to a couple of Flaming Lips songs. i have listened to the Arcade Fire and liked them. i do realize it ain’t 1979, or whatever.

i’m just not convinced that that’s an entirely good thing. this is a very cozy bucket i’m in. great atmosphere, nice shag rug…why would a girl move on?

maybe the rest of you know why. this meme’s been going for awhile, but i don’t think Daffado, WhyMommy at Toddler Planet, Mayberry Mom, S at Bull in a China Shop, Cyn, Lady M, or Her Bad Mother have chimed in. the invite’s open. i figure my taste makes anybody else look downright hip.

yep, a new holiday. i made it myself, from scratch.

i woke up yesterday morning with two - yep, not one, count ‘em, two - massive pimples festering under my tender skin. these are not minor blemishes. these two are nasty and out for vengeance.

my attention was first drawn to the new tenants of my visage when Oscar managed to poke and scratch both of them during his morning feed…ah, tender moment. nothing like jolts of pain galloping across one’s face to really get the day underway. beats espresso…who knew?

since their debut thirty-six hours ago, the zit twins have personally absorbed all the nutrients i’ve consumed…which is kind of a bonus on the diet front, but not nearly as physically beguiling as it might sound. they’ve both tripled in size. one of them is competing with my nose for face space.

now, vanity hasn’t been at the top of my personal list of deadly sins since Oscar was born…days go by with me in the same torn jeans and smudgy glasses, and my hair is an overgrown straw bale that gets washed, but never really styled. i have a rotating collection of sweaters and hoodies that i like to pretend hide spit-up and my belly pooch, though deep down i suspect they ain’t fooling anyone. i’m rocking the mom look, day-in, day-out. Dave politely ignores this fact, and Oscar still smiles at me, so…who cares?

well, apparently, to my great surprise, i do. i had to laugh at myself this morning when i looked in the mirror at my two big ol’ pimples, and just like a thirteen-year-old, recoiled in horror. “oh my god!” i squealed in my head. “i can’t, like, go anywhere like this!”

then i remembered. right…i don’t have to. in fact, it’s -25 degrees again with the bloody wind chill factored in, and the car’s at work with Dave, so…i can’t. babies don’t do well with freezerburn.

sometimes housebound is a glorious gift, y’know?

so here i am, at home, in my hoodie and my grimy jeans, feeding chocolate to my zits and feeling, all in all, kinda thrilled to be a stay-at-home mom today. O is napping, bless his little heart, and the heat’s on and the cat’s in my lap, and as long as i don’t smile and stretch the swollen boil under my nose, i feel just great, and grateful. i think the blemishes even make me look younger, really…skin of junior high student, outfit of SAHM…all with a few wrinkles thrown in.  hell…it’s a niche look. worth celebrating with a holiday, friends.

so to all the rest of you out there in yoga pants or the same jeans you wore yesterday, happy international stay-at-home-mom day. screw adult conversation. this really IS the good life.

though i would kinda like to get out and get some Noxzema or something before these suckas actually take over the rest of my facial real estate. they’re vicious.

the house is quiet.

er…the house is asleep, at least. the snoring beside me and the purring from the corner chair are both quiet and rhythmic, comforting. the rain taps at our tin roof. the furnace drones on, two floors down.

an occasional peep squawks from the baby monitor as a small body tries to practice rolling over in its sleep. the two soft cylinders of that fine but nameless positioner thingy that keeps babies nominally in place in their beds are all that guard against Oscar’s nightly transition into a heap at the bottom of his crib. as said transition tends to result in him scaring himself awake, loudly, i wish multitudes of blessings and a watertight patent upon the wise folk who invented the thingies. and i wish O sweet, stationary dreams.

he will not be stationary too much longer now, my baby boy. he is about to launch himself into the world under his own steam, and the mechanics of how are the major focus of his days, these days. he rolls, though still erratically…and laughs every time he finds himself suddenly turtled on his back. when placed on his belly, he crawls round in a pivot like a little clock, crop circles of drool marking his swath. this migration creates crying, not laughing…apparently his goals are more linear than artistic.

we’ll be hightailing it out to buy those baby gates any day now, i think.

it will be strange, after all these months of knowing with confidence that Oscar can be located wherever Oscar was last put down, to find him suddenly mobile. funny how many invisible umbilical cords remain long after birth, still linking us. funny how bittersweet they are to sever, too, these vestiges of our once-vital physical connection. soon, he will be able to walk away from me. this baffles me…it is beyond my imagination. and yet, like all the milestones he’s already sailed past, it will soon simply be normal. Oscar the independent. such is the journey we are on, i suppose. what wonder.

but while O is a wild adventurer by day, at least in effort, by night he is still very much the same magical, feral, snuggly creature he has been since birth. i have just left him, laid him down after his “dream feed”…we are Baby Whisperer adherents in this regard, and give him his last feed at night without really waking him. this too, i will miss when he outgrows it.

the dream feed is a spy mission, of sorts. i sneak into Oscar’s room by the light of the nightlight, trying not to trod on the squeakier floorboards. i scoop the warm, wriggly little body from his crib, and we settle in the rocking chair room, me sssshhhing gently, him rooting. i nurse him - we’re still hanging on on that front - but usually bring a warmed bottle in as well. my milk supply never fully rebounded from the pill experiment, and if he comes to the end of the milk, he wakes up. so i bring plenty. and then, we rock, and he feeds, and i spy, with my little eye.

in the almost-dark, i see an impossibly round head, slant shadows of eyes, and tiny hands that flutter white and warm along my skin. his complexion, still unmarked by the scars we all get from simply living, reflects the light. with his face relaxed, he is ethereal as a baby alien. when he roots, though, he is fierce, a suckling pig feeding with his whole being.he smells milky, and faintly sweaty, like bedclothes. he grabs at my shirt, my flesh. he lets out satisfied little sighs. he grunts, and i shhh, and wrap my hand around a wide, fat little foot encased in sleeper, and i try to commit the scene to memory in surreptitious photographs of the mind. this is my baby. this is what i’ve been given. we are here. this is now.

the first time i read Robert Munsch’s beautiful tear-jerker Love You Forever, i was a college student, volunteering in a local kindergarten in hopes of convincing the Bachelor of Education acceptance committee that i was fit to work with children. i picked the book randomly from a shelf. it is, for those of you who may have been living under a children’s literature rock these past fifteen or twenty years, the story of spy journeys like mine. a mother sneaks into her sleeping son’s room to rock him, in his infancy, then in his childhood and teenager years, and throughout his life. in her old age, it is he who goes to her and cradles her. a simple refrain of abiding love between parent and child runs through the book:

i’ll love you forever
i’ll like you for always
as long as i’m living
my baby you’ll be.

i made it about three pages into the story that first time i read it before i burst out bawling. kindergarten students regarded me hesitantly. undaunted, i kept reading…and collapsed into complete emotional pudding. “i’ll love you forever, i’ll like you for always…” i choked, beaming, tears and snot streaming down my face, “as long as i’m living, my baby you’ll be.” i thought it was a truly lovely book. the children, who must now be teenagers somewhere, likely thought it was the scariest thing that had ever happened to them. one of them, dear child, did eventually fetch me a Kleenex.

i have never yet successfully made it to the end, aloud, without crying.

but beauty is often close to sorrow, and to tears. i learned last summer, listening to a CBC special in the dark wake of days after Finn died, that Munsch actually wrote the book after he and his wife lost two children to stillbirth. i think of Finn, and those children in whose memory Love You Forever was written, a lot these nights while i sit rocking Oscar in my arms.

we have our babies, as babies, for such a short time. even the healthy ones, the ones we are blessed enough to assume we’ll see through into their childhoods, and teenage years, and adulthood…the time we get, as parents, to sneak into their rooms and scoop them up and rock them is finite…and not nearly long enough.

the word “baby” in Munsch’s refrain, i think, is spy code…it means precious one; beloved. that is, so far as i can figure, the meaning of the slightly odd story of the mommy who stalks her adult son’s sleep - just that no matter how big babies may grow, or even how short their lives and growth may sadly be - they remain with us, loved always as they are in those first moments.

and as long as i’m living, i’ll remember Oscar’s sweet round face in the dark tonight. i’ve got the mental pictures.

my mom and i cleaned the baby’s room this weekend.

or, well…she cleaned, and scrubbed, and re-arranged, bless her heart. i mostly held a rag in one hand and waved it in the direction i thought things ought to go. one of the secret advantages of having spent all those weeks on bedrest is that nobody expects me to do much in the way of work these days. admittedly, i do get winded folding laundry, so their lowered expectations aren’t entirely unrealistic. but i still feel terribly pampered, like i’m getting away with something.

the problem with me supervising Cinderella Mom’s kind Easter gift of organization, though, was that i had no clue what half the things in the baby’s room were actually for. finding a place for baffling pastel cloths is not the simple task it might appear to be, particularly when they appear to have magically materialized in the nursery-to-be without instructions.

while i was away in the hospital for two months, kind friends and family (particularly my generous and enthusiastic ma-in-law…this baby has some keen grandmothers) came bearing gifts. many gifts. lovely gifts, but mysterious gifts. little blankies, and littler blankie-looking things, and plastic-covered blankie-shaped things that might be mattress pads…and a lot of other soft items, but not one of them with a training manual.

i like to think of myself as an intelligent person…i play a mean game of trivia, and am in an ongoing quest to actually figure out the internal evil workings of the CRA (Revenue Canada by any other name). but i find myself addled by infant products. i’ve managed to get my cloth diapers (which i am able, miraculously, to distinguish from the other square cotton blanket-ish things populating the nursery) all prewashed and softened, but the kitten hasn’t stayed still long enough to actually let me practice putting one on someone. and i seem to have six different baby butt creams sitting on the changing table Dave’s parents lovingly handcrafted - but no clue as to how to distinguish between them. i live in secret fear that i will get this baby home, bring him downstairs to display to visitors, and discover that i’ve got him swaddled in a changing pad and wearing diaper rash lotion in lieu of lipbalm.

i suspect, though, that i can’t be entirely alone in this discovery of ineptitudes i didn’t know i possessed. and i suspect the changing pad will be the least of my worries, given a couple of weeks. so…this Wednesday night, April 19th, 7 pm EST (8 pm Atlantic, my time), the crib will host its first live webcast, using Skype.

topic - things you wish you’d known before your baby came home with you. identifying products, choosing good ones, but also what newborns actually need and do, what supports new parents actually find helpful, how you felt in the early days after the birth…stuff like that.

how to listen - under the “webcast” heading on the top right of the page, you’ll find two links. the top one, “text chat room,” will take you directly to the chat, which will be open all during the webcast. questions, comments, and any problems with the live audio feed can be addressed in the chat. the audio itself can be accessed by clicking the lower link, “listen live,” which will take you to the audio stream - instructions for listening to the webcast will be there.

all welcome.