Adventures in the Pointless Forest

They say parenting changes you.

It turns out that it is because one now lives with a two-foot-tall mad genius set designer and wardrobe director.

Our remote control is currently lovingly wrapped in two thirds of a sheet of crumpled white paper, secured with a rubber band. The handkerchiefs are mostly in use as bulky diapers (folded and tucked by me, on demand -- "Diaper please") wrapped around the hind ends of toy cars. There is now always a full laundry basket at the foot of our bed, excellently positioned for tripping on and swearing at, because Jane is short and our bed is tall, and she understandably feels that standing on a basketful of clothing is the best solution to this problem. A tidy row of wooden trucks can often be found tucked under the edge of the quilt, where Steve would like to slide in, and the shampoo is filed on the bookshelf between Dashiell Hammett and Jack Vance.

We can all frequently be seen around town with sprightly little bows in our hair. Jane generally prefers to put the fuchsia one on Steve. It must be said that he is the member of the family who carries off the bow with the most style. It's very fetching against his dark brown pixie cut.

I have no pictures for you, of these events or otherwise, because all my photos are currently trapped on another computer, the trackpad of which is not working thanks to some strategically splashed milk, and I haven't yet dug out a mouse from the depths of wherever it might be hiding. Fortunately you've all gone off and done other things, or moved to Peru, or turned to dust, or however you most like to respond to centuries of nothingness, so you won't mind. But I've missed you and am sorry to have been so delinquent. Tomorrow night I get to fly on a red-eye to Ohio. Without trying to wrangle a toddler at the same time, yay! But in a middle seat, BOO. Will the extremity of my general state of exhaustion permit me to sleep even so? Can the magic of Benadryl conquer the horror of the middle seat? Time will tell. 

Status report

Tired. We are tired. 

Jane has been transformed into a fountain of snot, and though she is being pretty good natured about it, she is still not quite the very pinnacle of well rested good humor, and neither am I. Yet for some reason I decided today would be the right day to clean the front porch, which had gone happily uncleaned since before we moved in.

I should have taken pictures before I started, because it was comically encrusted with

• mysterious black clinging dirt on every surface
• drifts of leaves and twigs and other kinds of more silty dusty dirt
• cobwebs EVERYWHERE 
• really, everywhere

These were dense, creepy, luxuriant cobwebs. They would be the envy of any Halloween propmaster. They covered every window corner, every intersection of planes. They stretched from the back of each chair leg to the floor, and across each gap in the railing.

Some were fairly small and just held more of the black clinging dirt. Others were larger and bedecked with gnats and dried leaves. The biggest one, right by the front door, was about the size and shape of a substantial colander, and full of dead moths.

Oh, look, I missed a corner:

Just multiply that times EVERYWHERE and you get the idea.

Anyway, having strategically waited until it was well into the hottest part of the day, not to mention, of course, the twelve months of cobweb ripening that I'd waited before that, I made my move.

I swept and brushed and swabbed and whacked and toiled and missed that one corner while Jane stood on the other side of the screen door, rattling it and gushing snot, suggesting "Out! Out! Out!" alternating with an occasional "Cheese?" And now the porch is merely ramshackle and dusty (except for that corner) rather than shameful and haunted.

And I am sweaty and stinky and tired and pleased. Mediocrity hooray!

Weighty.

I have just been putting together a very heavy and sturdy piece of child-specific furniture given to us by Steve's parents for my birthday. Jane is not yet quite big or old enough to make use of it, and it remains to be seen whether it will be an albatross or the opposite.

When I was pregnant with Jane, Steve's parents bought us a crib. I hemmed and hawed and suggested that we wait until after she was born to see what we wanted, but that clearly made them feel extremely uneasy. So as her birth approached and they began gnawing off their limbs from anxiety, we caved in and I found a crib that we thought looked nice. It was not cheap. I felt a little discomfort about this, but it arrived and we assembled it and it was quite attractive and the grandparents were happy.

Then Jane slept in our bed for six months and in a portable baby tent at the foot of our bed (or other places around our house and the houses of others—it's portable, after all) ever since. She has spent about four naptimes in the expensive crib and hated every one of them. In the tent she sleeps like—who is a famously good sleeper? Not Rip Van Winkle, because she wakes up appropriately. Like a cat, maybe, or a newly pregnant woman. Anyway, she sleeps and is happy and so are we, except for the guilt about the expensive crib. 

So, have Steve's parents bought us yet another guilt-inducing large item, to my specifications, that will never get any use? Time will tell!

For now I am feeling a complex emotional brew of tired satisfaction in the wake of all that manual labor, a shimmering liminal sheepishness in anticipation of the albatross outcome, optimistic anticipated enjoyment in the case of the alternative outcome, and some trepidation over their rapidly approaching visit, which naturally is what occasioned my assembling the thing now despite its unsuitability to Jane's current developmental moment.

On the other hand, a friend says that he has been eying the selfsame child-specific furniture because his daughter always wants to be up! up! up! in the kitchen to see what's going on. This gives me hope, because (as you know) "up! up! up!" is both the majority of Jane's dialogue and her well-conceived moral and political philosophy. Up with upism!

PS. I recently got and deleted some spam from "Leaky Bowels." If you are feeling sorry for yourself, imagine for a moment what it would be like if "Leaky Bowels" were your real name. 

PPS. I searched for "famous sleepers" and found this. "Perhaps because of the fame and brilliance of these chronic sleepers, it is considered socially acceptable, and even chic, to sleep during conference, colloquium, and seminar talks."

Animation: a plea

I really want a tiny little, sleek, super high res screen that I could slip a micro SD card into, so that I could have a magic locket of pictures like this:

Please, someone, make this for me. Please!

I know this makes me a giant dork, but it would be great. Imagine a screen like the newest iPhones, all pixel-dense and shiny. The pictures would come out about about an inch and a half across and be like something out of Harry Potter. I want this so intensely. Help meeeee.

Thoughts at four a.m.

[In the darkness: three thousand half-baked but heartfelt anxieties about the future, my general competence, the rushing onward of time, etc.]

GO BACK TO SLEEP

[Fruitlessly reiterated frets]

THAT ISN'T HELPING

You should write more! Think better! Time's a-wasting! The baby is getting older ALL THE TIME and what are you doing about it? Death, the abyss.

What is wrong with you? Other people are fully capable of performing the simple task that is sleeping through the night. The baby can sleep through the night. She's sleeping perfectly right this minute. Why can't you? 

You know, every minute you waste being uselessly awake right now is another minute LOST FOREVER when you might have been sleeping uninterrupted. 

If you're going to go so far as to get out of bed and type things, why aren't you getting a start on the work you have to do tomorrow?

Shut up.

You'll be sorry.

NNNNG.

No! I CAN SLEEP. You aren't the boss of me, ...me. So there! (Wish me luck.)

Postscript: That worked surprisingly well. I went back to bed at last and slept in a peaceful, orderly fashion (I hate disorderly sleeping, don't you?) until the baby woke us, around seven.

And now here that it is daytime, I would like to note that there is nothing in particular to be anxious about at all. I mean, yes, there is always good old death to worry about, and I have always been the sort of person to lie awake contemplating my own oblivion, but otherwise I am actually unusually on top of things all around and even have clean clothes to wear. I wonder what chemical my body is dumping into my bloodstream at that ungodly hour to make my eyes fly open and my mind race off in search of something, anything to get worked up about. It seems like a design flaw.

Ats.

Tomorrow is Jane's first birthday. With my usual inimitable sanity, I have made party hats for the party we are not having.

Note that there are in fact more hats than people to wear them. Also, I took long enough at the store choosing the paper that I made the baby cry. Excellent parenting.

Steve and I put the hats on ourselves, of course, while she was sleeping. 

Soignée.

Admirably focused on his work. 

Then I put everything away before Jane could wake up and participate in any way herself. No birthday hats for you, baby. It's not your birthday yet, now is it? When she's older, we should make sure to ride her Christmas bicycle for her every night in Advent, and dogear the pages of all her books before she can read them. It's just more thoughtful that way.

A cake in the throes of love.

I finally got it together and finished that illustrated book I was working on way back when. Remember that? It was in the era when the baby stayed exactly where you put her. No longer.

I wrapped it up and sent all the files off to the self-publishing outfit Lulu. Then I gave them some money and waited around for a few days, and they sent me a real live book.

I don't seem to have messed up any of the formatting, either, which is a relief. The paper is a bit thinner than I would ideally choose for a picture book, but only a bit. It's nice! The pictures look good. The printing is pretty. I'm pleased. 

The photos are a bit wan and fuzzy after all the shrinking and jpeg compression, but the real thing is as crisp and saturated as one could possibly desire.

I'd had the idea, when I was first working on this, that it might make a nice Christmas present. But now that it is done, I realize that this feels way, way too weird for me ever to do. It's deep into an uncanny valley between homemade and mass produced, with an unhealthy gloss of vanity press over the whole thing. Merry Christmas! I knew you'd love a copy of my self-published airport novel in which Harry Potter and a beautiful violet-eyed new student at Hogwarts uncover a conspiracy that links Opus Dei with radical libertarian terrorism and my cat, Mr. Snugglebottom. (Spoilers!)

So, you know, oh well, it appears that I will have to think of proper presents to give everyone, after all. Thank goodness I have devoted absolutely no thought to this project whatsoever. Maybe they would like some artisanally hand-gathered pocket fluff. You can never have too much.

It also occurs to me that I have no plans to render the house seasonally festive in any way. We have not so much as a bough or an advent calendar. Is this bad, do you think? Or is it actually a clever stratagem designed to take advantage of the last time, or at best the penultimate time, that we can get away with such laziness? 

(If you really want to know, the thing is available on Lulu's website over here. You can't get at it through their search function, because I don't want Mervyn Peake's estate to get mad at me. Please don't get mad at me, Mervyn Peake's estate! It is not priced to generate profits; I just cleverly picked a format and degree of full-colorness that Lulu charges a fair amount for, to start with. You don't want a copy anyhow, so just enjoy gawping at the sale page.)

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.

No, actually, it's Jane who has a cold, but I still sure do love that story. I, too, have a cold. Steve does not have a cold, and I'm sure he hopes it stays that way. Nemo also does not have a cold, but he does have a bladder infection. Hooray!

Actually we are all in fairly good spirits, if you don't count the cat, and aside from when it's about four in the morning, and really it's not four in the morning for very long in any given day. 

Heidi expressed interest in the details of my baby food concoctions. At the risk of being tremendously boring, I'm going to oblige. Currently these fall into three main categories:

(1) Fruit, baked, cooled, and then cut up into pea-sized pieces ideally suited for an infant to chase around the rim of her plate with her tiny pincer grip. Apple, mainly. One cored apple plonked into a little dish with an inch of water and baked for an hour or so provides at least three breakfasts or luncheons for the discriminating miniature human. Obviously you can do more than one at a time.

(2) Crumbled unsalted rice cake. Mm! "Food"! She likes bits of toast too.

(3) What I have come to call "Highly Palatable Baby Chow". This is, I guess, not something you want to make if you are worried about egg allergies. If you're not, full speed ahead?

The principle is that you take about a cup of unsalted cooked vegetables that you've tried the baby out on before. Sweet potatoes, say, or regular potatoes. Peas, squash, spinach, red peppers, cauliflower, chickpeas, that sort of thing. One or a mix that sounds nice. Generally I just keep something aside from whatever grownup food I'm making.

Roughly mash or chop very fine, depending on what seems best suited to the vegetable in question. Then mix with a few tablespoons of that enriched rice cereal stuff, a beaten egg, a fat pinch of baking powder, and some tasty herbs or spices (highly palatable!). No salt. I often include some minced green onion. A little olive oil, if I think of it.

Then I just cook this in spoonfuls on a nonstick skillet, two minutes per side, in an odd fifteen minutes or so, and put them in a container in the fridge. Then I have many little neat portable baby-friendly foodcakes ready to deploy at any time. At home we break them up and let her go after them with the pincer grip, out and about I tend to break them up and handfeed them to her bit by bit, for the sake of tidiness.

Does that sound insane and elaborate? Maybe! I find the small amount of fussing about involved kind of fun. Also I figure I may as well enjoy this brief window in which she likes my cooking.

Koala components

Ingredients: one pre-made fleecy hat with ears, two flat shiny black beads with an uncanny resemblance to an unblinking marsupial gaze, some cheap felt, needle, thread, and (this was the bit I was proudest of) some upholstery fringe. Also one naptime. 

It is not clear to me what the intended proper purpose of that sort of fringe is. Lampshades? The edge of a pillow? Anything I can think of seems kind of lunatic. (Lunatic FRINGE! Oh god. I didn't mean to do that, but it's so brilliantly stupid I think I'll leave it.) 

Add one infant. Result!

Why a koala, particularly? Oh, right. She's missing the rest of her costume there--namely, me.

That's better.

If only I'd thought to gather some fallen eucalyptus boughs last time I was on campus. They might have been good for beating down the cold I've been brewing up all weekend, too. (Go away, cold.)

There were lots of cute moppets in costume on display downtown in the afternoon, but it seemed at first that trick or treat was a huge bust, and I was very sad. Morose, even. But no! Everyone was just waiting long enough to psych me out. There was a good hour or so of very concentrated activity, starting later than I was used to.

Earlier today, R. at the coffee shop, who first suggested the koala costume you see here, said, "What is up with all these kids in Scream outfits? Have they even seen Scream?"

And truly, there were a lot of those masks out there. Soon enough, there was a group of at least five eight-year-olds in varying states of Scream deshabille on our own doorstep. "Ah, a whole bunch of Screams!" I observed.

"How did you know?" said the lead kid, amazed. "Have you seen that movie?"

"Yeah. Have you?"

"Yeah! I saw Scream one. And two! I wanna see three."

So I guess that clears that up. And now all the little kids have given way to teenagers and older on their way to parties, so we have closed up shop. As Steve said, "When it turns into 'Hey bitch! Cross the fuckin' street! ...ooh, can I have some candy?' it's not really trick-or-treating anymore." Maybe they will be horribly yet self-referentially murdered. Sorry, teens! If you had stuck with koala hats, Skeet Ulrich might have spared you.

PS. The subjects of this Wikipedia "photo of bears doing it," as Drew put it, are hilariously desultory. Just thought you should know.

Riddle me this.

I have:

1. A sewing machine.
2. Demonstrated ability to thread said sewing machine, change its foot and needle, wind a bobbin, and sew a seam.
3. Good scissors!
4. Some straight pins.
5. Not much else. Oh, a washer, a dryer, and an iron, I suppose. But no fabric, say, or patterns or experience.
6. A scattering of infant naptimes.
7. Pickiness.
8. Impatience.
9. The internet and a credit card.

Tell me, friends, what should I make, and out of what ingredients?