a solution for leaky baby bottles

(First in a series of posts I'm calling Brilliant Ideas at 4am because damn - my synapsis are ON FIRE when I'm sleep-deprived and bleary-eyed, feeding a hungry Max in the wee hours.)




For leaky bottles.


This:

And this:

And you have a little drip-catcher and no longer find yourself cursing a wet and sticky breastmilk-covered hand and pajamas.  I bought a whole pack of the little hairband thingies and keep them with my revolving supply of clean bottles on the counter, and wash the dirty ones in the sink with the dirty bottles.  Easy.

not about the bow tie

I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody.  Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it.  Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are comprised as a human being.  You're going to trip over that for a good part of your life.  -Maurice Sendak

I'll tell you what - I'm tired of feeling like the very sky is falling down around me, raining bits of blue-gray ceiling tiles onto my head.  I'm tired of worrying that I'll look up and find a hole way up there through which a yawning void of nothing threatens to invade.  I'm tired of feeling a clench in my stomach each time I anticipate anything that requires movement.  I'm tired of worrying over the when and the how.

Yesterday afternoon Max slept in his carrier (fresh from a trip to Target) while Alice brought me fistfuls of plastic food.  She made hamburgers and sandwiches and ice cream cones.  Fruit and eggs and maple syrup (for the hamburger, of course).  She ran to me with delight in her eyes and a smile on her face for the sheer joy of seeing me looking back at her.

Maurice Sendak passed away on Tuesday.  I'm sure you all know that, and maybe some of you don't agree with his politics.  And maybe some of you don't even like his books (Where the Wild Things Are, Little Bear, etc.).  But the man had a distinct sense of the side of childhood we don't often acknowledge - and I love him for that.  Because as I'm thinking so hard about the childhood I'm crafting for my own two little people - worrying over their naps and dirty diapers and developmental needs, I often forget how truly messy childhood really is.  And how messy, naturally so, parenthood is.  I try for perfection and really that isn't the best way to serve my little people.  They need the mess.  They need the bumps and bruises.  Because no matter what I do, those things are going to come for them anyway.

So here's to giving our children imperfection and revelling in it.  And here's to Mr. Sendak.  He will be missed.

I don't believe in children.  I don't believe in childhood.  I don't believe that there's a demarcation.  'Oh you mustn't tell them that.  You mustn't tell them that.'  You tell them anything you want.  Just tell them if it's true.  If it's true you tell them.  -Maurice Sendak

rusty

I keep trying to scratch off the rust--- doing my best to return to normalcy and documenting life here at The Creamery.  But the days have been so far from anything normal.  I'm on a different planet.  The topography, the geography, the astronomy--- all foreign.

I face the task of learning the map of this new place, and my location in it.

But for now I do my best to focus my eyes on the small square of earth beneath these feet.  I tell myself I know that there is grass here.  It is verdant green and rich with life.  There are birds singing somewhere in the distance.  And the children - the plural nature of these beings that inhabit this space with me, they are here and present.  Their needs and wants have been the pulse of my existence for the past eight weeks and now I must adjust my sight, try to unburden myself from the darkness and know that yes, I am standing here in this place.  And it's going to feel like home one day soon.




(tomorrow I will tell you why Max was dressed up in his finest; and yes that is a tiny baby bow tie)

twenty days after that

It's strange, the passage of days like river water over rocks: how time flowing over and around me softens the edges until the hours and minutes are something I can watch from a dream.  I'm in the moments but not of them.  And then there's Max.  His expectant face, so serious and intent.  Eyes that search vague shapes for faces that he knows: me, Chip, and Alice.  We orbit around this small, so new son.

Which is why the clock stopped spinning Thursday night.  I had been ordered to escape the house for a few hours with Linda.  We saw The Hunger Games.  And while we were busy consuming popcorn and discussing blue hair, Chip laid down next to a slumbering Max.  Chip had been asleep about 20 minutes when he woke up to Max choking and flailing his arms wildly in the air.  In the time it took him to pick Max up, the baby had stopped breathing altogether: white bits of foam on his lips.  Max's body was rigid, arched back like a sidways parenthesis.  Chip says it felt like an eternity of patting Max's back and watching his face go a dusky purple before he breathed again (we estimate it was between 15 to 30 seconds).

When I got home, Chip filled me in and then explained that after Max settled down again he drifted right back to sleep.  We didn't so much follow suit that night, laying in restless worry.  In the morning we took him to the doctor.  We anticipated that it was reflux: milk backing up into his esophogus and getting into his airways.  But his doctor worried about other monsters: a seizure, heart trouble, something with his lungs or airways.  Instead of heading home for ice cream and a long nap, we left the doctor's office with orders to take the baby to Seattle Children's Hospital.

And so it goes: gurgling waters suddenly come rushing in a white torrent that overwhelms the senses, pushing debris and muck into a tumbling mess of cutting pain.

We dropped Alice off with Linda and Mark, our two-person rescue party, and drove down to Seattle with a hastily-packed bag for me to stay overnight with the baby.

They were wonderful at the hospital, the best place to be when you are worried and unsure - when you cradle your very new baby and wonder what could possibly warrant a five-week-old to stop breathing.  There is so much more to the story: the nurses who danced for a young dialysis patient across the hall, the sound of Max sleeping so quiet in a hospital crib much too big for him, the long night spent on the couch in his hospital room, and the beeping monitors recording Max's breathing.

We are so lucky.  Nothing more serious was found except for a raging case of reflux (who knew?).  He isn't a spit-uppy baby, but there are other signs that we'd missed (again: who knew?).  Max was fit for a ginormous foam wedge thing for sleeping on (I'm calling it the space shuttle because it has a SEAT and SEAT BELT and all he's missing is a space suit).  We were given a lot of marching orders about how to feed him and when to feed him and ways to hold him.  But ultimately, my favorite order came from one of his nurses: Max, we hope to not see you here ever again.

Amen to that.

the mix

Chip made a list of songs for me.  Songs for the hospital, for those grueling hours of hoped-for labor and a starburst moment when Max would join us in the here and now--- changing our lives in the irrevocable way children do.

The plans we made and the things that happened are tied together in my mind in a cloudy mix of memory and wishes.

I listened to that mix in the hospital, but not in the way I envisioned.  In the hazy blue-gray of predawn I talked quietly to a tiny baby laying in solid weight on my chest.  The sounds of Chip's music filling our dark room.

And now in the weeks since his entrance, I've listened to that mix thinking about the way we plan to have our lives unfold versus the way the days fling forward in a carpet before us: messy, unkempt, sometimes painful, sometimes so sweet my teeth ache--- but always always always surprising.