Leery Polyp

Internet Diet

Thanks to a family history of midwestern farm-wife ethos I am in the habit of delivering a daily progress report to Sean as soon as he walks in the door:

Sophia: EEEEeeeeeee! (flaps hands)
Me: Today I did yoga! And baked cheese bread! And I did two loads of laundry, and the plumber fixed the toilet, and we went on a walk and your castile soap is on the table, and I picked up the dog poop in the yard!
Sean: (removes backpack)(inhales)
Me: And and and! I put some ladybugs on the aphid infestation in the nasturtiums, and there are more mulberries setting on the tree so in another week I'll make another pie! Sophia ate some lamb today!
Sean: Um. Hi!
Sophia: Adadadadada eeeeeeeeee!

I prefer to do this on the busier days. I generally let him put his backpack down after a day of trying to get the baby to nurse with her back to the television so I can watch Dr. Phil or something equally horrible.

Anyway, the rendering above is actually accurate: I did all of those things. Really.

"How'd you do all that?" Sean asked.

"No internet," said I. It is astonishing what a difference that makes.

So I think for the rest of the month, up until our Beach Vacation Which Will Actually Take Place Inland at My Mother's House But At Least We Could Drive to the Beach If We Wanted, I will try to keep it to one or maybe two posts a week. (Not that I'm exceeding that goal at present.) But that'll mean one to two DAYS per week where I'm going near that cute little fox icon at the bottom of the screen.

Pot Roast Vigil

I was so busy walking around being all numinous and shit that I left my library books at the house of the people whose baby I watch. How's that for a long and boring sentence?

So now I am facing the prospect of a weekend in Long Island without the latest tome on climate change and its effect on culture, which, let's face it, is piggybacking pretty heavily on Jared Diamond, without the clarity of argument and the preponderance of footnoting, but still. I have already culled my favorites from the family bookshelf (How Green Was My Valley in one weekend, oh the weeping I did, and I am so not feeling up to Richard Hell's novel, my God) and now am going to have to re-read Chris Bohjerkoff's Midwives, and God almighty I hated that book. Maybe I'll take a red pencil and a copy of Varney's to it, and mail it back to its, and I use the term loosely, author. Maybe I'll circle the courtroom scenes in Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World and send it along with a note saying, This is how to do that RIGHT, you dipshit.

My grandmother is back in the hospital, tanked up on other people's blood since all of hers was hell-bent on escape thanks to a combination of her own stubbornness, Dr. Dorkhead (my mother named him that) and his Medical Ministrations of Maladroitness, and Dr. Only Became a Pharmacist So He Could Get Access to All That Contraband Sudafed for Making Meth. Mind you, I am not discounting the role of the first item. Grandma and Grandpa's inability -- or refusal, does it matter which? -- to adjust to the new demands of their long-time-coming old age, which include, respectively, not preparing a pot roast with MSG-laden gravy on a ninety-degree day in a house that's at least that hot because somebody wants to save money on the electric bill, and that was after the heart attack, as well as remembering to eat something other than these because you are diabetic, dammit, and you can't go twelve hours on a marshmallow ice cream cone. No, no. People are often all too quick to blame their failing health on the doctor or the pharmacist, when there is a great deal of personal responsibility that factors in, as well as good old gettin' old, and a lot of the time the doctor's doing all she can. However, it is also worth mentioning that Dr. Dorkhead and Dr. Only managed, between the two of them, to get my grandmother on a double dose of blood thinner and not notice. (Dr. D has been fired by my dad.) Does that personal responsibility extend to the firing of physicians for medical mistakes? Why keep going back to the guy who diagnosed your heart attack as indigestion? Whatever. Dr. Dad to the rescue. Thank God for that privilege. Meanwhile, Grandma's hemoglobin is inching back up, and my willfully ignorant redneck relations are buoying her spirits with, and I am not making this up, burgers from Spangles, with "the works," delivered right to her hospital bed.

If it didn't mean leaving my husband behind for a few months, I'd be in Kansas right now. Frankly, if these were the pre-Sophia days, I'd be there anyway; but she is devoted to her daddy, and I am a piss-poor parent without relief, which has been a difficult thing to accept, kind of like I am in denial about how gross my feet have become, all dry and cracked and peely. I ought to hie me down to the drugstore for some Zim's Crack Creme (hee!), but instead I will sit right here in the muggy Northeast and wax nostalgic when I hear a story on NPR about the terrible drought in western Kansas and how the wheat is not much to speak of this year. Listen to the wind in the background out in Ellsworth. Listen to that accent.

Maybe I ought to make a pot roast tonight.

Surreal Summer

Most days I can't shake the feeling that I'm not approaching thirty but rather fifteen, or twelve, or eight or five. It's strongest in the summer: I'm sitting in the overheated way-back of the dinged-up white station wagon, headachy and chlorined from hours at Rockwood Pool, ready to go home to air conditioning and tuna salad with egg. On the radio is Steely Dan, "Hey Nineteen." Or maybe Edith Piaf; those were my mother's two tapes. It took about ten years for me to figure out what "Cuervo Gold" and "fine Colombian" were. Why couldn't they dance together? Allez venez, Milord! Pass the Otter Pops!

Or I'm sixteen and up to no good in the breathless heat of a July night, throwing up the fermented Kool-Aid of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill against a telephone pole in the bad part of Wichita. Or I'm at church camp in what seems like the forest primeval but is really a timber stand in south Kansas, electrified from the loudness of cicadas and the nearness of boys, off of whom roll waves of salt scent and what might be aftershave, outsize like a father's jacket. Counselors strive to identify the haze of general arousal as the Holy Ghost, not dead but alive. I feel Him all over me, and only Him, at least for a few more years. But after the slow singing and swaying around the bonfire at the end of the week, embraces of ostensible agape last, by milliseconds, into Song of Songs territory.

Or: making "cigarettes" with my cousins out of reeds from the Cowskin Creek, dipping their spongy tips in vanilla extract, begging our parents for a light. They oblige, and we "smoke." Mosquitos as big as finches swarm near the creek, which has once again overrun its mucky bank to flood the bottoms. In the exhilarating dusk the lightning bugs are bumbling and slow, easily caught even by unathletic me in my enormous purple-rimmed glasses.

What is it, what is it about the thick heat and the long light of summer? Thanks to the school year it's a liminal period, neither fourth grade nor fifth, the time of air conditioned branch libraries, hot afternoons that sack you out like a dose of Benadryl, a tremendous whirring of bugs that drowns out all the other ordinary neighborhood sounds and makes the world paradoxically quiet. Stacks of books to devour uninterrupted, hours and hours of playing pretend. And later on, mix tapes weighty with implication, streets deserted enough and warm enough to stretch out on your back and talk until it really, really is time to go in or you will be so grounded.

Here I am coming up on thirty. Here I am with a daughter of my own, and in my mind I am listening to "Night Moves" facing the wrong way in a hot car, I am suntanned and tired and easy in my body, I am outdoors, I am standing on the diving board shivering in the constant prairie wind. I am kissing a boy in church, during a tornado, in one of the darkened VBS classrooms. I am riding through the Appalachians for the first time, leaving that life behind, or so I think. The world is numinous, fictional; time compresses like an accordion and stretches out again when the baby wakes from her nap.

When You're Slidin' into First

Sick baby. Oh man.

She was running a fever of about 102 for a couple of days; it's gone now, but the diarrhea, it lingers. Though not in the same green eight-times-a-day form.

Also got two top teeth coming in. (I think the fever and diarrhea are viral and not related to the teething, for a variety of reasons.)

Anyway: I'm fried. Just fried.

Sharing, Caring, Tired of Scaring

You've been warned. Repeatedly. By me, and an armada of links, about lead and tuna fish and peak oil and resistant staph and climate change and plastic (on which subject, go San Francisco! Thanks to Sonya for the link!). I even deleted an especially horrifying post on some recent cases in which birthing women became ill (in one case, fatally so) with hospital-acquired infections and received some criminally bad medical care in the bargain, just because I couldn't bear to talk about it any more.

Instead, I thought it was time to talk about the things that don't matter. No, wait: these are things that (in most cases, anyway) do matter. They matter very much. They are very important issues, some of them, and every responsible citizen must needs pay close attention to them.

But I don't. On some of these topics I am shamefully ignorant; on some, baffled despite my best efforts. Some of 'em I know better and just don't give a shit (guess which!). Whatever the root causes, below I list:

Those Things Which Just Aren't On My Radar, Even Though I Know They Ought to Be

• Israel-Palestine conflict
• McRib (CHOMP!)
• Mommy Wars (I'm a draft dodger!)
• Immigration
• what not to wear (the practice, not the show. Really. You should see me some days.)
• dessicated oatmeal under stove burner grate
• flavored vodkas, newly available wide assortment of
• asthma, my own or the larger clinical picture (you'd think I'd have a handle on like I do PCOS. Nope.)
• baby pee on floor, potential for (I leave that baby diaperless as much as possible at home, and not because of elimination communication. My mother did it with us, my sister does it with her daughter -- we just like no-pants time).
• TR?$T344
• baby typing on expensive keyboard (see above -- the impressive thing is that she held down the shift key to make the capitals)
• sweatshop labor inherent in Old Navy wardrobe
• how much of my boob you see when I'm nursing

What don't you give two shits about?

Lead, With a Side of Pestilence

Sophia had her state-mandated lead test last week. Finger prick, washed her hands first, doctor had to milk the finger a little. (She hardly cried, and loved the band-aid.) The result?

4.

Not bad. Not alarming. But not great either. I got to wondering. And then I got to the hardware store for home tests. It was vaguely reminiscent of my pregnancy-test purchasing sorties, particularly because I had to ask for help finding the damn things (the local CVS kept them under lock and key, and you had to get a counter person to come get it, and carry it to the front register for you, which was not humiliating at all), and because the basic setup is the same: activate, stare as though by force of will you can make a certain result appear, feel stomach drop to knees, stare some more.

Our present domicile is a rowhouse built in 1958, at which point lead paint, while still legal in America (fucking paint lobby!), contained much less lead and was not as widely used. Most of the paint in this house is in good shape, and the window sashes are set into aluminum sliders. We take off shoes at the front door to mitigate the effects of the construction/restoration project down the street, as well as the ubiquitous paint dust and gasoline residue from the outside world.

But still: 4. Got to be coming from somewhere.

Checked the phone cord Sophia tries to chew; negative. Glazed ceramic fruit bowl: negative. House keys: negative. Windowsills: negative, even where there's some chipping from water damage. Dust by front door: negative. Small worn place on back door exterior frame: well, that'd be positive.

Which wouldn't be so sickening, save for the fact that we've had that door open since it got warm out, and Sophia's been standing against the screen door, right in the doorwell, where all the paint bits and dust hang out. And crawling around in it. And putting her hands in her mouth. And...yeah.

My first reaction was to swear! and freak out! about why we even bothered moving in the first place? if it was going to be a problem here too! Then, of course, I realized, with a little help from Sean, that there's really no comparison. Last place: chipping hundred-year-old lead paint in kitchen cabinets. This place: 1980s wooden cabinets. Last place: windows (painted all around, in painted frames) sporting fragments of original paint circa 1880. Chunks showering down into window wells and onto floor when you open or close. Wells impossible to wipe out because of their own splintering coat of heavily leaded paint. This place: not so much. Last place: interior doors covered with chipping paint on wear surface (where the edge of the door meets the frame, with new piles of chips every morning. This place: hollow-core 1950s doors recently painted in Landlord Cheap White. Basically we have one or two small trouble spots; even with the worst-case dust ingestion scenario, her level was only 4.

That night, thirsty after many hours of discussion and planning, Sean requested a glass of water, since I was headed for the kitchen anyway. I opened the cabinet. Removed a glass. Carried it to the refrigerator. Looked inside it as I hefted the pitcher to pour.

To see A GIGANTIC COCKROACH that had apparently become trapped in the glass. Oh, how I did scream. Oh, how quickly I did invert the glass, slamming it to the kitchen floor and incarcerating the hideous skittering fucker. Sean dispatched it later, in the yard. He asked if I wanted to hear the details of his innovative low-contamination cockroach-smushing method.

I did not.

So we cleaned the entire first floor with special attention to the kitchen, stuffed all the bags of flour and sugar in the freezer, washed all the upturned glasses in the Cockroach Cabinet, wet mopped with Simple Green, did the windowsills for good measure, and made plans to slap some special primer on the worn spots (which we happen to have handy from our previous residence). And vowed to continue the cleaning regimen. Of course, while a lead level of 4 is a matter of great concern to me (though evidently not to the pediatrician), it is certainly, in the bigger picture, within the bounds of acceptable.

The presence of a cockroach, on the other hand, is not.

Throwing Signs

I can twist my fingers up so that they form the word "bloG" (kind of like the hand sign for the Bloods! Except you use your left hand to make a capital G...) but honestly, I'm usually supporting a baby's thigh in one hand and holding a blunt martini bag full of dog poop in the other.

We need a sign, yo. Go visit Kateri and cogitate on some sort of secret decoder ring for the bloggitudinous...

It's *Like* a Book Tour.

Reading with Babies, Toddlers, and Twos by Susan Straub and KJ Dell'Antonia.

You all probably know me well enough by now to realize that I'm sort of an asshole about some things. Literature, for one. I'm a book snob, prone to snide remarks about Oprah selections (and horror when a beloved book -- say, Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone or Steinbeck's East of Eden -- shows up in the New Paperbacks section sporting that damn O). Oh, sure, I might sneak a Jean M. Auel novel once in a while, but I have the good sense to hide it under the bathroom sink in shame. This petty snobbery extends to children's literature, especially since I grew up reading my mother's scavenged 1940s Childcraft series, full of quality poetry and weird postwar childrearing advice. (There was also a set from the 1960s, of which my favorite volume was Guide for Parents because of its full-color photographs of various infectious rashes and how to know them. Which is probably why the prospect of measles or mumps doesn't faze me; I grew up thinking that of course they were a normal part of childhood, despite the fact that neither I nor anyone I knew ever seemed to contract them.)

In that uppity spirit did I open this "Guide to Choosing, Reading and Loving Books Together". I figured, hell, what could some book tell me what I didn't already know about children's books? Yeah, sure, nice for people who didn't know much about it, but me...and then I'd trail off, distracted by that guest on Dr. Phil who didn't love her unattractive daughter as much as the beautiful one. (You see how my highfalutinicity don't necessarily translate to action.)

I was thrilled and slightly deflated to discover that it is actually a very useful little book, easy to page through but equally suited to more in-depth reading. There's a smattering of theory: why to read, how to do it to keep the littles engaged, how stories work and how children learn to interpret the visual world, as well as notes on developmental stages and what type of books or reading techniques might work well at those times. Rather than breaking suggestions down by chronological age, they are (wisely) divided into stages like Heads Up, Cruising/Walking, and Talking.

Book recommendations are frequent and offered topically as well as by stage; there are books about color, books about shape, books about feelings and bedtime and common toddler obsessions. I have to give credit, too: these are quality book recommendations. I recognize enough of them to trust the ones I haven't read yet, and I'll definitely use this book as a starting point for adding to our (tiny, chewed-by-a-single-tooth) library. There are also a few featured books with capsule reviews, and mini-interviews with featured authors and artists. From a layout standpoint, and this is important to me after years of doing actual paste-ups of a college paper whose managing editor aspired to employment at Raygun, this book is awesome. Easy-to-read fonts, judicious use of bolding, shaded boxes for different things (but the layout of the boxes is consistent -- kids' top ten lists all look the same, featured author boxes all look the same!), and (joy!) an index of booklists in the back make this a layout nerd's dream book. Seriously. It's what design ought to be: thoughtful, useful, and unobtrusive.

(At this point I should tell you that all I got out of the deal was a free copy of the book. No wining and dining, no squirtgun pressed against my spine: it's an honest assessment. I just really, really liked the book. Ha ha! I got it free!)

My only criticism is of the chapter on television. I know, I know, that stuff is so ubiquitous these days, kind of like particulate matter pollution, and there are so many crossovers from books to television (and, less felicitously, TV to books). But was it really necessary to taint the sacrosanct world of the printed word with TeeVee? Am I just a crotchety bastard? Is it just a question of aesthetics?

Well, no. While I agree that "No one is going to die if you plop the kid down in front of Noggin to take a breather," I felt my adrenal glands kick into high gear when I read about how kids really do learn from TV. The bulk of the research on that subject demonstrates that learning from TV is much less robust than experiential learning. I mean it's one thing to admit most of us use TV from time to time, but to attribute benefit...eh. To the authors' credit, they approach the issue sensibly, with lots of discussion of how to minimize television time, limit the effects of commercials, and why Baby Einstein is a pale imitation the real thing.

It's a small enough quibble that it doesn't affect my overall assessment of the book. Which is positive. It's designed cleverly enough that I'm sure I'll refer to it in the future, when I need a suggestion for a book about big-girl beds, or when I want Dr. Seuss deconstructed (for real!).

And I won't have to hide it behind the spare toilet paper.