Leery Polyp

Krazy Straws Can Only Be a Greater Disappointment

Today, whilst nursing:

Sophia: MMmmmmmMMMmm...

Me: ?

Sophia, dejectedly: It's too big.

Me: Too big?

Sophia: Can't blow bubbles in it. Have to have milk in a cup for blow bubbles!

Me: Ah. Yes.

Shangalangalangri La La La

If you've ever undergone a striking physical transformation (in a societally desirable direction), you've probably had the experience: someone you haven't seen in a while does a goggle-eyed double take and drops the verbal equivalent of a wolf whistle. "My gosh, you look aMAzing!" They never finish the sentence, which goes something like "...without that extra fifty pounds/embarrassing haircut/insistence on dressing in Big Smith overalls and Dr. Martens regardless of the occasion," but we all know what they mean. And they mean well! They really do! The compliment is genuine. But as my brother-in-law once said, "Damn, how bad did they think I looked before?"

Whatever. I'm not complaining. I'll take a kindly-intended fweeeet-wheeeew! from the mishpucha anytime. The fun part is what comes next: diet-obsessed women sidling up to me, Diet Coke in hand, to inquire as to my secret. Now, I've lost a large amount of weight on three separate occasions, and each time managed to spark a family fad by revealing the glories -- once of Atkins, once metformin. (Of course the family does nothing halfway. They actually went to the Atkins Center for individualized attention! And several were disappointed to learn that they could not be prescribed met as a weight-loss drug.) Curiously, nobody has ever asked me the secret of gaining it all back -- miscarriages /depression and unbridled pregnancy weight gain, respectively -- but then I suppose everyone has his or her little tricks for that.

Anyway. This last time, the big post-pregnancy weight-shedding, has been both the most striking and the least painful -- and somehow, the one that the family is least interested in replicating. I currently weigh what I weighed at 18 when I went off to college, except I think my muscle tone is much better from all the baby-wrangling. For those who care about numbers, here's the rundown:

Height: 5'5"
Peak weight during pregnancy: 210-ish
Six weeks postpartum: 193 (guess it wasn't water weight)

Present day: 144, creeping slowly downwards despite dietary indiscretions
Size: 8 or 10, depending on cut and maker

Total loss: 50 pounds (I am rounding. Sue me.)

The many factors involved include:

• Cutting out wheat and dairy. Yes, I do cheat not infrequently, but avoiding them does seem to change something in my metabolism, as I've been losing weight without watching carb intake otherwise (although most carby stuff is wheat and/or dairy).
• Chasing/hefting/nursing a toddler.
• Living in a house that is effectively 3 stories high.
• Walking around town a lot.
• Metformin, my faithful friend.

And finally:

• The Shangri-La Diet

If you're interested, do read up on the theory behind the diet and the methodology before you try it. In practical terms, it means I take 1-2 tablespoons of flavorless oil (extra-light olive oil or grapeseed oil) every day, during a window of time in which I haven't eaten or tasted anything for an hour, and won't eat for another hour. That's it. It seems to have helped my break through my set points (I have them at 185, 165, and 152 -- and here at about 144) without any sort of effort, and keeps me from doing the thing where I eat food just to taste it. I don't get cravings when I'm doing the oil, and I don't have a hard time keeping to reasonable portions. It's really, really weird, frankly, but it truly does seem to help me.

Yet I am met with utter disbelief at family gatherings. "You drink...oil?" they stammer. "Yep," I say, and tell them the name of the book, but so far nobody's bitten.

Back in Olsen Days

There are many unnerving things about the Olsen twins, but one of the more minor and yet most compelling is how they always manage to be photographed making a sort of pouty-wraithy face. After careful perusal of several somewhat water-rumpled next-to-the-toilet issues of In Touch, I can report that a large part of the expression is due to their faithful observance of that good old teen magazine standby tip: Put a dab of darker lipstick right in the center of your mouth, over a sheeny lipcolor, and you will always appear as though someone has just placed a tantalizing corporate dessert, possibly one of these or one of these, directly in front of you. Also you are being filmed at the time.

So that's part of it, and the rest seems to be linked with a certain E.T.-style neck thrust (I mean Extra Terrestrial, not Entertainment whazzafuzzis) designed to sharpen the jawline. The combination renders them freaky in a kind of Cruella DeVille, cartoony way.

But then you catch one of them unawares, and she actually looks sort of like a normal person.

Who gives a Why is this relevant, you ask? Long ago, in a sandbox far far away, some other toddler's mother suggested that Sophia looked a lot like the Olsen twins.

"Grx," I said. "Ahuh."

"I mean, like, when they were little," she clarified.

"Ah," I said. "Thank. You?"  (Shatneresque.)

She nodded happily. Compliment received! Huzzah! The children continued ignoring each other, and we were once again free to do the same.

Now, I spent a good part of my childhood rooted in front of Full House like any red-blooded American latchkey kid, and along with countless jars of Chicken Tonight!, I sucked in the image of Tiny Olsen², appearing periodically onscreen to canned "Awwwww!"s. As I was a chubby prepubescent bookworm, that alone was enough to fill me with revulsion; I was given to rants about how It resembled nothing so much as a tidied-up troll doll.

And yet...and yet...I do kind of see what the woman was talking about. Just a little. A tiny bit. (Although, dude, my kid is way prettier than the Olsen Twinnage.) 

However, the resemblance will certainly dissipate as Sophia ages. It is not in her genes to have a small, dished-out nose. Oh ho ho no. The best she can hope for is not to inherit Gene RL -- the one responsible for nose hairs the length and thickness of Roach Legs. With any luck, I won't have to sit her down before junior prom and explain that the little cuticle scissors I gave her last Christmas aren't for cuticles at all.

Foo.

Whoa, dude, was that not the insane-est comment spam ever? (It's deleted now, so no need to go looking. If you saw it, you know what I'm talking about.) I was in the Land of Dial-Up and Crappy Semi-Functional Windows Machines so I mostly focused on reading as many books as fast as possible while Sophia was playing with Grandma, and holding my old friend's new baby. Damn, new babies are cute! And little? Man. I totally want one. You know, someday, in about five years, when my period returns. Sigh.

But really: in my imaginings, it seems like a totally different ballgame, second time around. There's not so much of that whole radical-restructuring-of-self thing; you've already negotiated a lot of the different parenting role things with your partner if you have one; you are no longer susceptible to grandmotherly hysteria regarding (mild, dammit!) jaundice to the point where you rush to the hospital with your three-day-old baby only to find her bilirubin is, like, four. Ehem.

Ernyways, I plan to be exceedingly boring over the next few weeks as we move. Because interesting would mean that interesting, possibly inconvenient things would be happening to us, and I am looking for a move/submission of application to school/rest of summer as boring as the non-chocolate kind of Malt-O-Meal. By the way, is chocolate Malt-O-Meal still sold anywhere in the U.S.? Since moving eastward fifteen years ago I haven't seen it on the shelf. The lumps! The faint cocoa flavor accentuated by the chocolate chips and quarter-cup of sugar my mother allowed us to add! God, it was good.

Too Due

I don't know that summers were much less busy when I was little, although with three little kids my family wasn't seeing the USA in our Chevrolet (it was a Citation, and into the paint on the hatchback was scratched the word "LOANNA"). When you're a kid you don't sense all the planning that goes into every family trip, every two-week day camp, every vacation Bible school curriculum (and puppet show! My mom wrote the puppet shows, and they were awesome). You just go to bed at eight-thirty and then the next morning somebody is handing you a sack lunch and dropping you off at the church.

This summer feels like the busiest one yet, not least because even on an uncomplicated day with a toddler getting anything done is like wading through heavy surf. Everything is good, really good, it just...whew. Yeah. There's a lot of traveling in various directions, and then in the middle of that we are moving, to a place VERY NEAR an undisclosed blogger, no you will never guess so do not even try, but we are very happy about this in our house.

So there is a lot of packing to be done, as you can imagine.

I have all these little Sophia stories, but it's hard to know if I'm striking the proper note when sharing them. We have some nice conversations, she and I. Today she informed me that "nuk come out of it" when pointing to my boob tattoo. We're working on the precise machinery of lactation around here. Last week, during a lazy pre-bed nursing session, she pointed at the other nipple. "Mmfmrl," she said.

"What's that?"

She released the first nip. "Nee have...nose," she said wonderingly. I could see where she was coming from, but I just explained about nipples and how that's where the milk comes out. I guess signals got a little crossed, so we went over it again tonight: breast makes milk, milk comes out of nipple.

"Uh-huh," she said. "Nee come up off of nipple!"

We're still working on prepositions. She's pretty good with "for," though. Last week we walked past a baby crying in a stroller. "Baby cryin'!" she said, distressed. "Baby cryin'...for NEE!" Aww.

Let's see: other cutenesses...so for many months now, she's had this concept of "friends" which as far as I can parse means "two things together." She held one bottle of (forbidden) nail polish, wanted the other, said, "Friends nail polish!" Sometimes during the aformentioned lazy nee sessions, she demands a special treat: "Nee friends!" That means a truck-driverish appreciation of TWO BOOBS AT ONCE. "Nee friends! Friend nee," she says. Yesterday there were "Almeen nuk friends" on the table, since almond milk was on sale at the co-op.

The litterbox is endlessly fascinating, all the more so for being forbidden. Therefore whenever a sandbox or heap of potting soil or gravel driveway presents itself, and there is a shovel to be had, the name of the game is "Pick up Pico poopoo!"

She can do this for hours. She squats in the sand, digging methodically to the bottom of the sandbox, filling buckets to overflowing, murmuring, "Pickuppicopoopoo. Pickuppicopoopoo." God knows what the other mothers at the park think we do at home.

Whatever they think, I bet it's not "nee friends."

Love, Joanna

Dear Internet,

I never dreamed I could write anything that anyone else would read. I never dreamed I could write without a filter, without an overcautious hypercritical internal editor looking constantly over my shoulder, and then -- wonder of wonders -- have people read it and like it! Or hate it -- the ability to inspire loathing (or even a declaration of indifference!) still feels magical to me. The whole enterprise feels like a Thursday night doing dishes, singing loud as I dare along with Michael Penn's March and not caring whether the neighbors hear, and all of a sudden here comes someone from a record label with a contract and a microphone and maybe a stylist because this is what The People want to hear.

Maybe I'm dreaming big. Maybe I'm imagining small (how many people even remember "No Myth"?). Still, it's far beyond anything I dared to conjure up when March first supplanted the KKRD Top Ten at Ten on my walkman. Thanks, Internet, for reading.  Sometimes I aspire to bigger publication, but at the end of the day, this is more than good enough.

Dear Virginia,

I fell out of Kansas, a misfit misfit who didn't quite fit in with the youth group cohort (my former Life in Christ) or the metalheads (the dreggy remains of the punk scene thereabouts), and there you were with a high school full of kids who were cool but not cold, who weren't afraid to hang out with their younger siblings or invite you to dinner with their parents, but who had a line on the burgeoning indie scene and whose conception of art and music ranged beyond Andrew Lloyd Webber. You took me in, showed me how to use a bong, taught me to write a cogent English paper. If it weren't for you, I don't know that I would have thought to write in the first place. You taught me the sultry joy of breathless humidity, you showed me coal trains and weathered mountains and kudzu. You grew fig trees. Dear Virginia.

Dear Kansas,

Oh imperfect parent, oh flawed home of Pizza Huts and buffalo wallows and wind. You gave me my best things, you hold the tatters of my family still, but I am gone from you and my sisters and mother are gone from you and it is for the best. We are unsuited for your climate, it seems. We are xenoscape. We didn't know until we left that we were transplants from the start.

But I would never be myself without you. I would be lacking in breadth, in views without telephone poles or paved roads, I would never know horse hills. The only God I know is in the grama grass and big sky, the intrusion of rest stop into the rolling green grass-sea. The Almighty resides in the improbable shark teeth embedded in an extinct ocean of chalk, in my oldest friend who is everyday urging me on to a more worthy self.

Dear Kansas, I will never want anything more than to come back to you and find you as you are in my memory. My prairie heart, you have been obliterated since before I was born.

MotherTalk Book Review: The No-Cry Discipline Solution

I don't know about the title. I certainly cried when I read it, because it was a little disconcerting to feel so understood by an inanimate object. Although I suppose Elizabeth Pantley would object to the characterization; but I was talking about her book, The No-Cry Discipline Solution.

Look, if you have a kid or two and don't have days when you feel a little grateful for those women who whap their kids in Target because at least someone is a shittier mother than you, I don't want to know you. I try my damndest but there are days when the tiredest parenting cliches escape my lips, and my kid isn't even two. I haven't been at this long enough for battle fatigue! But Elizabeth Pantley understands.

My favorite chapter in the aforementioned book is "Why Do Parents Get Angry at Their Children?" Believe it or not, the answer does not include the words "little assholes."  Pantley totally gets that children are "inexperienced, naive, and narcissistic." Meanwhile, we parents can be "stressed and constantly busy" and experience "discrepancies between expectation and reality," setting "high goals  for ourselves without even being aware that we are doing so." Preach it, sister. But Pantley understands. Rather than glossing over the possibility of angry responses to normal but infuriating childhood behaviors, she offers chapter after chapter of solutions. Anger management plans in general, specific plans for common everyday solutions (and, oh my God, how did she KNOW?), she's got it covered.

She also focuses on the long-term goals of parenting. Patterns of parenting toddlers are tied in to teenage behaviors, and let me tell you, the long view is sometimes just the thing I need. Maybe I need to spend every minute making sure my daughter doesn't upend a cup of water onto the cat's head right now, but by gum, someday this will make her a considerate human being! Probably!

I am the first to admit that I have issues with anger and rage, and consequently I have read reams of paper on discipline and parenting and appropriate expectations by age group. But no book has consolidated the issues as ably as this one; no other book has left me feeling quite as competent. I feel like I have an adequate overview of discipline, without the niggling feeling that I've forgotten some particular technique that I get with other books.

Each chapter provides the following sections: Think About It. What to Do. What Not to Do. Really, what more do you need? This woman gets it, folks. If you have the slightest question in your mind about discipline, I suggest this book. In the few weeks I've had it, it's been a lifesaver. I am considering shipping a box of cookies to Ms. Pantley, as a matter of fact. So do check it out.

It'll Last Longer

I promised you what? Eh, well, I forgot to take a picture of the self-inflicted bald spot in the middle of my hair, and now it's grown out to the point that (I assume that) nobody but Kateri can see it, even if it did make her burst into guffaws in the Barnes & Noble elevator because the Patch was surrounded by extra-long hair all around. One might forgive me for being too terrified to cut anymore after I enbaldened a quarter-size piece of fishbelly-white scalp, but one might also poke gentle fun at me for thinking the longish pieces to either side would camouflage the razorial indiscretion, much in the fashion of a bald man who grows the sides out all long to distract the eye from the shining pate above. Either he combs it over or he doesn't; it matters not a whit, because that shit looks ridiculous disirregardless. Kind of like a wilty discount Bozo the Clown.

I am having a good time coining words. Please don't mind me.

So now that the back of my head looks more or less reasonable, I am faced once again with the Hair Change Addict's dilemma of SHOULD I GROW IT OUT? CUT IT AGAIN? which is something you get to do every six weeks if you have hair like a cartoon monkey. Ook.

And then I was thinking: You know who has all the answers to these difficult beauty questions? Movie stars! Have you ever seen a movie star (or more properly, celebrity; half the people in In Touch never made it into anything with credits at the end) in any kind of awkward growing-it-out phase where all their hair is at the tops of their ears and they look like a very fashionable mushroom? No. No, you have not.

They must be getting extensions, right?

So why couldn't I? (Well, because I do not have $500 to spend on my hair.) But really, is this something that can be done? To fine, short, Caucasian hair? Hair Police would seem to suggest it is possible, but is there some secret network of salons that could tie little pieces of fake hair to my own hair? Would it look at all realistic? Or do I need to keep with the cartoon monkey look?

Romper Bomper Stomper Boo

Tell me tell me tell me true:

If you were going to San Diego or thereabouts in August, where would you stay if someone else were footing the bill? 'Cause I could surely use some recommendations.

Also, if you are waiting for a package from me, I am going to the post office toDAY, I totally SWEAR, I've written everybody's addresses down on the back of this unpaid parking ticket in teeny little letters and I am putting it in my pocket RIGHT NOW.