cribchronicles.com

i rang in the new year with an honest-to-god blizzard and the flu. if new year’s day is a harbinger of what the year will bring, 2009 is looking pretty cloistered…the plows didn’t even try to make it down our small street until this morning, so we had snow half-way up the front door and a wonderland blanketing the place. and, uh, me lying on the couch whimpering.

as i spent literal whole, entire seasons of 2008 lying on the couch, whimpering my way through bedrest and the Miss Cervix Universe Pageant…apparently 2009 was just trying to make me feel at home.

i did notice that a day of me stuck on the couch, unable to tidy whilst the toddler raged about amidst the Christmas detritus i’d hoped to spend the afternoon packing away, did not actually kill anyone. even my blood pressure survived. i found this mildly shocking…and a little disappointing, as it takes some of the urgency out of my directives to Dave to Put Things Away Or I Will Implode. oh well. he did bundle up the boy and drag him out in the yard to enjoy the storm, thus initiating him into his Canadian birthright of wintry freeze-yer-arse-off play and allowing sick mama and sick baby sister to sleep for, oh, ten minutes.

when they blew back into the porch, trailing snow like capes, Oscar’s cheeks were bright with that wet, rosy flush that comes from traipsing through thick, fresh snow, socks falling down inside your boots, nose running, skin so exquisitely cold it’s hot. just about exactly ready for cocoa.

and i looked at him and thought, yep, after today i get off the couch. after today, bugger the laundry and that pesky control impetus, i go outside too.

that is as good a resolution as any, for a new year as clean and untrammeled as the snow, just for now.

two sick kids and grandparents visiting while Dave’s away in England. my thoughts clot up for lack of time, for want of downtime in the 24/7 press of feeding and tidying and playing and doing. my house clots up with snot and baby wipes, despite the helpful extra pairs of hands who clean the shed and rake the leaves and shovel the unseasonally early snow and rock the baby. always the relentless present. i long to abdicate, say excuse me. please run my life for a few days whilst i take to my bed. i do not know how. my pride, my foolish pride. someday i will be an old woman tottering my last on spindly legs and i will make my stand by the laundry pile, stubbornly folding clothes until i drop not because i love laundry but because it makes me sweaty with shame and self-consciousness to admit, i cannot. i want rest. sloth, the deadliest public sin, the one i cannot bear to wear in other people’s estimation. the one i chase lustily, glutton-like, in the privacy of my head.

i spent a lot of today staring at the pile of thank you cards i need to write.

i got half of one written. it’s hard to write thank you cards when you’re it seems like you’re holding a nursing baby all the time. and i thought, in passing, how the hell did i get all these written so promptly when Oscar was born?

Oscar was colicky. i was overwhelmed and exhausted, and still reeling, blah blah blah. but i wrote the damn thank yous, put a photo of Oscar in each one, labelled and addressed them and divied them up, some to the mailbox, some for Dave to drop off at the university to the many people there who gave us gifts at his birth. because i try to do that kind of thing, and it’s still relatively de rigeur around here, in this last bastion of the fifties. and because those social niceties matter to me when people have gone to the trouble to do something kind…it is a point of pride for me to make the effort in return. yes, i was raised by Emily Post. but i busted my ass on those thank you cards, that time around. when i had very, very little reserve to draw on for that busting.

imagine, then, my face when i happened upon six or seven of those two-and-a-half-year-old thank you cards tonight, still sealed, never delivered, in the bottom of Dave’s filing cabinet where he sent me to dig for folder tabs.

Dave has a very bad habit of forgetting things.

part of me is mortified. the good people from the university who never got properly thanked for the fine and lovely gifts you gave Oscar? um…uh…yeh. guess it’s a little late.

the bigger part of me is furious. foot-stomping, arm-flapping, indignantly righteously ragingly furiously mad, teeth pulled back from my lips like a hyena. comical, i suppose, given that the statute of limitations on thank you cards is likely past. but i’m all…besmirched. i never went out of my way to thank most of these people in person, because i thought they’d received a pleasant card, replete with photo memento, so for two+ years i’ve been blithely interacting with these colleagues without so much as a “hey, that was nice”. that’s rude. and i hate being rude. and i’d spent hours of my sleep-deprived time and energy to prepare those cards and photo mementoes, and all Dave had to do was take them to work and toss them in the internal mailbox. that’s it. and he TOLD me he’d done it.

i am entertaining sweet fantasies of me slaying him with my bare hands and teeth, after a hearty smiting and some loud recriminations.

except then…um…who would help with the baby?

so, crucifixion being an unfortunately unreasonable option, i resort to public shaming. bad Dave. bad, bad Dave. mad, mad Bonnie. stamps foot. sulks. begs you all to wag your fingers at him gloweringly.

perhaps i will just make him write all the Posey thank you cards himself.

we traipsed into the woods like Hansel and Gretel…except, well, we were the parents. with our mini-me folk in tow. and there was no gingerbread house to be found.

that, and getting lost in the woods in PEI is damn near impossible because if you keep walking you will, indubitably, end up either on a beach or smack-dab in the middle of some nice farmer’s field. with cows.

but still, the woods. and we were trespassing because the only hiking trail i know of around here is part of a government park that’s currently – alas – for sale and locked down for the season so really we were far more wary of park rangers than witches but then, i have authority issues anyway. and there was the smell of pine needles and the slip of moss on old roots underfoot and i remembered coming out to this trail an angsty high school emo kid with my emo friends to write tortured poetry and commune with nature but damn, i did not remember the trail being so steep or my sad legs so jiggly.

nor did i remember the woods being so silent…not a squirrel in sight, to Oscar’s crushing disappointment. nor a birdsong to be heard.

and i wonder if the gumdrop houses haven’t eaten them all up.

pssst.  i have a secret.

i think i’m having a fabulous summer.

yeh, i’m more or less unemployed, with legs as weak as paper matchsticks and a belly the size of a Volkswagen.  yeh, laundry is frequently my most impressive daily accomplishment.  and stool softeners and Tums are my dearest, most beloved companions these days.  i am a glamour queen beyond measure.

but…with all this time off it’s been the first summer since we moved back here to this island vacation destination that i’ve actually had any time to spend with the myriad of people who descend on the place in late July and early August.  i had coffee with a girl i haven’t seen since high school, spent an entire afternoon taking up space in a restaurant with some fabulous women i don’t see often enough, discussed life, the universe, and everything with old friends from Korea, visited with aunties and a bunch of other people passing through in the seasonal glut of tourists and homecomers.  i’ve had time to pay attention, to linger, to collect myself between visits.  turns out working is hell on the social life.  i suspected as much.

tonight, Dave & Oscar & i are going out to a friend’s cottage for the night.  i’m not a lay-in-the-sun girl, but the beach at night?  some part of me was made for the beach at night.  dunes and cool night sand under my feet, stars, the crash of waves a few metres hence, a bonfire.  we’ll put O to sleep and then, with a few other parents, take turns minding the store while the rest abuse some old guitars down on the shore.  singing, maybe.  the mutter of side conversations and laughter.  but mostly just the licking, crackling flames and the ancient wonder of a fire…the first tv, the first happy hour bar, the first church of the human soul.

i’ll probably be the only one sober, and i’ll get tired first and lay my head down on Dave’s lap and worm myself into a little nest in the sand and become quiet, but my eyes will be open, rapt and locked on the glow of the little sparks dancing up into the blackness, until i waken cold and shivering when the party ends.

out. Saturday morning in the zoo-like crush of the local farmer’s market. old ladies and old hippies sweep by me, children push past. all our bodies are just a little too close – and mine just a little too large to accommodate the dodging i attempt – but the thronging mass is cheerful, busily engaged with wax beans and homemade sausages and shawarma with tabouleh, please.

i am standing, Oscar in my arms, his hands snaking over my shoulder to swipe at the display of chocolate chip cookies behind us. i am balancing my market bag and the giant lettuce i’ve just purchased – from which i half expect a Cabbage Patch Kid to emerge, yellow yarn hair and all – when suddenly i realize that i am actually doing this, this perfectly normal, multi-task-oriented, socially and commercially engaged juggling act. that i am standing holding thirty pounds of squirming kid on one hip with thirty pounds of bedrest and more offspring spread across the general middle of me and juggling a wallet and organic lettuce and the cookie that i seem to have managed to buy and begin to nibble on without even noticing, and that i am carrying on three conversations at once, and that it is all, like an intricate act of magic, working. my legs are holding. my back has not collapsed. i have not dropped the child nor the lettuce nor – god forbid – the cookie. and despite having not been out in public for more than four months, despite having hardly made chitchat with anyone in the interim, i’m saying hi to an old acquaintance and babbling about tomatoes to a vendor and keeping Oscar from stuffing his entire half of the cookie in his mouth all at once, and it is easy. natural. sheer body memory.

until i pay attention. then my eyes grow wide and glazed and Oscar leaps from my arms and runs into the crowd whilst i trip over my own bags and lettuce tumbles around me. suddenly, mechanisms exposed, it is all too much, exhausting, this press of people, this exertion. this normalcy. and for a second i want to flee screaming from the market like a bat out of hell, and retreat to the safe predictability of ye olde couch, sanctuary.

i mentioned to somebody early this week about how coming off bedrest is both exhilarating and discombobulating at first, because simple acts that you’ve taken for granted most of your life have, in the duration, become curiosities, foreign and unaccustomed. how they play themselves out in living colour, almost assaultive, because your protective filters have been turned off for so long. the response?

i’m sure it’ll be just like riding a bike.

i laughed, which i think confused my friend. but this friend has not known me so long as to realize that twenty-three years ago this week, at thirteen, i managed to fling myself over the handlebars of my bike on my way to work the very last morning of my very first summer job, a three-week all-day babysitting gig. i landed on my face. smashed the left side of my jaw into smithereens. split my chin open, and re-graded the gravel road with the lower half of my visage. knocked out a tooth that my just-removed braces had been working hard to align for years. bent the frame of my bike enough that it was unridable. spent three months with my jaws wired shut, carrying little scissors in my pocket to unleash the steel facemask in case i for some reason needed to vomit and wanted to avoid choking to death. had my first taste of the relief that is morphine, and the nastiness that is withdrawal. started grade nine looking like Bride of Frankenstein.

i have been on a moving bicycle exactly twice in the twenty-three years since. and both times, it felt both utterly normal and terrifyingly bizarre, all the intangibles of that delicate balancing act wrought vividly visible by the fear and cloistering that had separated me from the act in the duration between. i ride a bike like most of us would walk a tightrope; in a state of acute awareness and surreality.

this morning, i dusted myself off, caught my errant child, retrieved my enormous, slightly bruised lettuce, wiped some cookie crumbs from the shelf that is my belly, and headed back into the crowd, smiling to myself. i was nodding, noting internally, with great interest, heck, it IS exactly like riding a bike. it’s fun, and probably doesn’t look strange from the outside. but dude, it’s also crazy as shit.

as of 4 pm yesterday afternoon, i’m free.  the bedrest is officially over.

not only that, but i’m done with the IWK…that strange, cloistered otherworld where i’ve spent more than ten weeks of my life, where my first child was born and died, where Oscar and i spent our long, still wait together in ye olde Craftmatic, where this pregnancy was saved by a stitch in time.  at last count i’ve had at least twenty-four ultrasounds on the seventh floor of that hospital; Dave and i have made an almost equal number of four-hour drives to their doors and back.

it is finished, now.   barring delivery sometime in the next couple of weeks – which Miss Cervix Universe is giving no signs whatsoever of succumbing to – i get to spend the remainder of this pregnancy as a regular ol’ pregnant lady, waddling to my local doctor for checkups, getting my own water and groceries, picking up my kid and panting after him.  i get to relearn to sit up for long periods of time, get to train my poor calf muscles and enlarged carcass to walk around the block again without getting winded.  i get to carry my own bags.  i get to stop being dependent, stop planning every moment of my day around economy of movement and the boundaries of how far to push myself.  i get to stop asking for help all the time.  and i am profoundly relieved.  last night, at a rest stop on the trip back home, i was able to haul Oscar from the car and bring him into the washroom with me, lift him to the changing table, prop him up to wash his hands.  simple things, but it has been four months since i could do them for my boy.  walking back to the car with O on my hip, his legs wrapped around my awkward middle, my chicken arm holding him up, i felt ten feet tall and a hundred pounds lighter.

amd yet…and yet.  i hadn’t expected full release from bedrest until 32 weeks, another eighteen days away.  i had them counted; i was eager.  but i’ve spent the last seventeen weeks in an imaginary birdcage cobbled together of proscriptions and fear and uncertainty, and having it opened early has left me startled.  pleased, about all i can suddenly do,  but shaky.   i stood on my doorstep this morning, foot hovering above the step, blinded by the wide open space.  i froze.  for weeks, i have been sneaking tiny sojourns into my days, little walks halfway up the block, a drive to the pharmacy around the corner.  i’d become adept at balancing tiny tastes of freedom with my restrictions…took pleasure in responsible stretching of the boundaries. but having them melt away entirely leaves me feeling anxious, exposed, lost.  i feel pressured suddenly to revert to the normal person i have learned how not to be, and finding my way back is not so simple a matter as flipping a switch.  the who am i? of all this taunts me, shames me.  i have a little Stockholm Syndrome, friends.

i mourn not the reality of captivity, but the safety i had to convince myself it offered in order to abide by it.  they have freed me, declared that this baby no longer needs the birdcage.  this is success, i know.  this was the goal, and i am grateful beyond measure to have brought us both safe thus far.   but the panic that rises in my throat as i perch on my doorstep with the whole world open and dizzying before me reminds me that coming out the other side will be as complex and strange as the shutdown of accommodating myself to bedrest.  i am free.  i can do.  now i have to remember how to slip the bonds i’ve bought into, and free myself.

i am all ascatter.

my work is mostly done…my formal work, my paid work.  the paid part, at least, is totally done.  there are still a few finishing touches i’ve committed to finishing up as freebies, just ’cause i get this nifty sense of validation from being involved in things that exist outside the four walls of my house.  but these bits, these leftovers, languish now.  there is no drive, no rush.   after almost fifteen weeks on bedrest, i have actually unyoked myself from schedule, from the fetters of duty, from the little voice in my head that berates me with its ancestral refrains of Protestant Work Ethic virtues until i am compelled to accomplish, to complete, to drone away my days in busyness.  i have sent the voice away on a whisky binge.  i hope it is enjoying itself.

but i’m kinda lost without it.

i loll my way through my days, browsing the Baby Center naming boards, assembling photo albums, considering the abject state of my dish pile.  having to lay around in the sunshine reading books and whiling away the hours hydrating myself with lemonade?  um, yeh, it’s torture.  ahem.  or really, not at all.  but that same little voice that ought to be soused by now on its whisky vacation still seems to have left an echo behind it, a hollow sound that eats at my pleasure in all this unaccustomed time just to Be.

i am more than capable of filling the time.  but the fact that i spend half of it worrying that i’m not making the most of it and the other half trying to appear more productive than i really am suggests to me that i have a problem.

this morning i literally tripped over the root of the problem.  it skittered away from me across the hardwood, and i sank into the couch and stared at it, revelation dawning.  it was clear as a bell, and a beautiful blue.  it told me, friends, that my life is not actually my own, to enjoy or squander as i wish.  i have a colonized mind.  my life, o lo my brothers and sisters, is a Thomas the Tank Engine episode, and the narrator is eager to get my lazy ass redeemed, already.  my name is Bonnie and i am addicted to being a Really Useful Engine.

if you are not parent to a two-year-old boy, you may not be familiar with the smugly innocuous yet sanctimonious little morality plays that make up the backdrop to our waking moments here at chez crib – but if Oscar is awake and not eating, he can usually be found either carrying around a small blue train, begging to watch the same small blue train on YouTube or video, or demanding that someone read to him from his Big Thomas Book (a collection of righteous stories written – surprise! – by a post-war Protestant Reverend) or his Baby Thomas Book (a catalogue of Thomas products which Oscar’s parents could spend thousands of dollars to buy for him if only his mother were not so cheap and ironically Protestant in her attitudes towards material expenditures…and if she needed more things on the floor to trip over).

in nearly every Thomas episode, wayward Thomas gets distracted by mere petty enjoyment or vanity, and must be redeemed, brought back into the fold of industriousness by some mishap, train crash, or other teachable moment.  the Sodor branch line which Thomas runs has a disturbing number of crashes and mishaps, to be frank – i would not suggest anyone book their next vacation with them.

but i have the sinking feeling i’ve done just that.

i am not sure when this conversion to the Church of Usefulness happened to me.  i spent decades sleeping in, taking jobs in odd corners of the world because they offered a twenty-hour work week, drinking myself cheerful in seedy little bars and puzzling over obscure philosophy for fun, not credit.  i still paid all my bills and was sober for all my classes, admittedly, but i was free from the internal compulsion to validate myself by busywork, by accomplishment, by checking things off the to-do list.

is this part of motherhood, or am i just a loony shut-in?

first meeting of Really Useful Engines Anonymous at, um, my house.  soon.  send help, wisdom, or at least some toothsome sweets.

no angst today.  we’re all out.  i made 24 weeks today, safely past yesterday’s milestone of having had my water break at 23w6d the first time around, necessitating airlift and uncovering all sorts of previously unanticipated complications…

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.

we leave early tomorrow morning for Halifax, for the next installment in the Miss Cervix Universe 2008 pageant, the continuing saga.

this time we’re aiming for a daytrip…a zoom there, zoom back operation, wherein Oscar will remain with his sitter for the day and be picked up by Nannie for supper if we’re not back yet.  simple.  concise.  no worries of vomit in the backseat, no eight hours strapped in a carseat for the little monkey, no naps to time with the ultrasound appointment.  all good, we think.  easier on everyone.

and we should be home by bedtime at the latest, to tuck him in.

but i have this packed suitcase that i’m bringing with me just in case.  just in case they keep me, hospital bedrest, because we are rounding on the dates where that becomes a possibility and it has happened twice before and both times, somehow, it was still a shock.  my mind reels to think that suddenly, like fingers snapping, i might not be here for months, in this house.  i might not be here to see that the laundry currently in the dryer gets folded, ever, that the paper towel gets replaced, that my plants don’t wither and keel over dead.  i might not be here to sing O to sleep at night, to snuggle him close in the mornings, to stuff his daycare bag and put away the winter clothes when summer finally comes and make sure we have that oatbran cereal because he looooves it.  nothing life or death, these things i’d miss, these things i do.  and it’s only just in case, i have this suitcase…it’s only just in case.

still, i think he knows.  or suspects.