So at this point, he’s four and a half and I’m thirty and life is nothing like I expected and pretty much everything I didn’t know I wanted.
Co-parenting is working very well for A’s dad and I as it always has. I worry about the changes that will come from one/both of us remarrying someday but no matter what happens, our kid will always be one of the most loved humans on the planet and there’s not much more you can ask for, I think.
I’m not sure what this space will be but I know the archives are precious to me. Kid’s not getting a baby book so the least I can do is jot down memories here and there with a minimal amount of cursing, right?
I sure hope you’ve subscribed to my sparse space, because I can’t imagine clicking back over here to check for monthly posts. In fact, I’m fairly certain anyone reading this (besides my mom) already does. It’s nice to be back in your feed. Your reader is looking fiiine.
So yeah, things are awesome around here in Casa de Aggie. Andrew has decided to semi-potty train himself. That means that he becomes righteously indignant when presented with a diaper instead of a pull-up, but remains ambivalent about the different expectations for the wearing of each. (Translation: I am a bit flummoxed at how to best remove poop from a pull-up.)
His vocabulary and his self-esteem are both off the charts. When singing along to a Laurie Berkner song about how no one is perfect, he pipes up, “I’m perfect, Mama.” He also rates himself as funny. At least that time, he told me I was funny first. Boy knows his place.
He is completely fearless in the water, which I love and am terrified by. He is taking swim lessons, but believes that the baby class is an insult to his intelligence. I have to concur, seeing as they are practicing “patting the water” and he wants to “fling himself into the deep end kamikaze style.”
In short, he’s just a pretty awesome human being and I’m so glad he’s mine. In other news, I had a fairly rockin day today. I cleaned my entire house (sorely needed) and feel at peace l knowing that all my clothes are in their rightful homes tonight. Oh, but first I slept in, then watched a movie. Then came the cleaning part, but not the getting dressed part, which is how I came to be opening my blinds in my dining room and standing before a random neighbor in my cami and boyshorts as he let his dog do his business right beside my porch. I can’t be sure, but I think he was back about twenty minutes later, too.
After, there was much relaxing and then a solo dinner (sushi!). Small shelf installation, the baking of muffins, and well you can see why I’m too high on life to segue from the nudey story or wrap up this post coherently.
4:10 AM–dream that toddlerchild has been turned into a seal. No, that’s just the melodious sounds of his barking cough coming through the monitor.
4:10-? Toss. Turn. Contemplate the meaning of life what to wear to work.
5:51 AM. Snap to full attention. Was that? Did he? Is he? CRYING? Check monitor. He’s standing up?! WTF?!
5:53 AM Try to convince fully alert toddler that it’s still night time.
5:54 AM Give up. Go through ten step process to bring Barney to life without my glasses, while doing the pee dance because I was so flustered with the whole thing I forgot the most important first step. (New moms and future breeders, take heed: always, ALWAYS, pee first. Your child will not notice the thirty-second delay, and you never know when that chance will come again.)
5:55 AM-7:35 AM Take two hours to make it out of the house because I am fumbling around in a stupor, half doing ten tasks at once while being verbally berated by an indignant midget who has somehow decided that this whole undertaking is somehow my fault. (On the way to daycare, he screeched at me to TURN OFF THE SUN, MAMA. If only I could, buddy.)
It’s a good thing I used those early morning hours to decide on a very simple dress and heels for work, because I could not have been expected to make it out of the house wearing both a shirt and pants today.
What more can I add to the overabundance of Mother’s Day posts out there? Meh, let’s hit the high points, just for funsies.
I have a mom. She is fantastic. I abuse her good nature and take advantage of her giving spirit on the regular.
I am a mom. I get lots of breaks but I miss lots of moments. This makes me sit down for an entire episode of Dinosaur Train instead of loading the car before work, because A wants me to sit with him for “five minute.” It also makes me feel like I walk around half empty, half of my life.
My friends have lost moms. Some of the sweetest, best people I’ve ever met or e-met are experiencing the agony of the first year without a loving mom to give a card and a hug to. This makes me hug mine a little harder, and shed a tear for their loss that I can’t imagine facing.
This weekend, Andrew and I spent the whole time at the family compound since my mom had the nerve to be born on the 6th of May. Way to bookend those holidays, mom. Andrew and I sent her flowers and showed up on her doorstep. He was super duper excited to find out that Friday was her birthday.
A: “Mamie birthday coming up.” (Yes, that’s what he said in the car, unprompted. Weirdo)
Me: “Actually, it’s today.”
A: “TODAY?!” [insert toddler seizure of glee]
We enter the parentals’ casa.
A: HAP BURFDAY, MAMIE! WHERE CAKE?!
Ahh, so that’s what that was. Not elation over celebrating the woman who loves you the most (outside of the one who gestated you) but a desire for CAKE. I don’t think he’s that different than most adults in that respect.
Should I be supremely lazy and just bullet point the hell out of this thing?
As he was dozing off a few weeks ago, A told me that he loves his cousin Travis, his Daddy, and cheese.
I’ve lost those pesky pounds and become a semi-vegetarian. Turns out I’ll trade chicken for cheese any day. Guess that’s where he gets it from.
I made a concentrated and deliberate decision to focus on A tonight. I enjoyed riding our couch the train to Sodor and it was so nice to meet Thomas. It’s a shame that the monsters attacked us, but I’m glad the tiger made the responsible decision to get on the school bus so he could get a job.
Andrew said “‘M for mama!” and picked out the word “slide” from a choice of three. I hope he can do so well when he has to choose between three Ivy League schools in a year or two.
My child is hilarious and amazing and I am doing well, except for when I forget to do things like pay my student loans or clean out the refrigerator. I guess that last one isn’t really forgetting so much as avoiding, but whatevs. There’s something liberating about living alone and not having to feel guilty for your messes or your shortcomings. There’s no one here to see my overflowing hamper, no one’s toiletries being crowded off the counter. It’s the little things.
It’s time to get serious about what I eat (mostly junk) and what I do (mostly sit). For the last week I’ve made a concerted effort to reclaim my treadmill time now that I live in a beautiful apartment with the ‘perfect’ spot for it. The hulking beast (HB for short) has been liberated from the garage and is now wedged between my large dining room windows (yay!) and hideous garage-sale-reject table (boo!). I’m also proud of the food choices I’m making now–oatmeal, yes. steak burrito, no–because they’re realistic. On weekends, I will still be eating a delicious burger and washing it down with a fantastic beer. I won’t exercise every day. I know these things because I have done this dance, lived this life, before. I was in great shape, very content with my life, and I owned my choices.
When I got pregnant with Andrew, I was the thinnest I can remember being. I was paying Charles the Ambiguously Gay Kickboxing Instructor to kick my tail three times a week, and I was all South Beach all the time (lettuce is just like bread! Except, totally not!) and things were going my way.
Then somehow I decided growing a human gave me the right to grow another ass and proceeded to eat my weight in corn dogs. I gained 70 lbs while pregnant.
70.
7-0.
To be fair, A was 10 of those (9 lbs 15 oz? Really, nurse, you can’t fudge that a little?)but so were my three chins. I lost most of it through attrition and the breaking of the corn dog habit, but seeing as he’s two years old I can’t exactly call the last ten pounds baby weight any more.
Yes, it has become apparent that they will not magically fall off on their own, so here we go. Back to the treadmill, back to the healthy habits. I resolved today, while simultaneously loving and loathing HB, that I will not begrudge myself this last ten frame. These are happy pounds. They’re take A to the park instead of working out pounds. They’re beers with friends and celebratory bottles of wine (shared, don’t judge) and great discussions over creamy pasta dishes pounds. I own this weight. I don’t, however, own a scale and I never will. I only weigh myself at my parents house, so roughly once every two weeks. I can imagine that this might make following my journey, as it were, a little less…quantifiable, but hey, there’s the door.
Should you be answering the call of the treadmill as well, here’s a great song to motivate you. I actually started running when I didn’t have to during today’s workout because of this song. Please don’t let the live performance aspect throw you off. If this song can make ME run, I assure you that it will make you want to pick up the pace, too.
I keep waiting for some mythical inspiration, but I think I’m setting the bar too high. Maybe you’re satisfied to stop by and see crappy phone pictures of my giant-headed offspring shoving oranges into his gob at the park.
I told you his head was huge. Still above 90th percentile as his body drops to around 40th.
This is the look I got when I asked him to smile. The teenage years are going to be AWESOME.
Those aren’t just any oranges, by the way. Those are hand-selected by his loving great-grandparents, bigger-than-your-head (but not his) oranges from the Valley and he is smitten. Never again will he be satisfied with a paltry little clementine. Now, he says “I wanna orange. A BIG ONE.” and makes this huge O with his mouth because he is overwhelmed at the heft of them.
Oh, and the suckitude factor upstairs has diminished exponentially so YAY for that.
My upstairs neighbors have sucked sucked sucked since the day I moved in. They don’t get home until 9 or 10 each night, but when they do they stomp around and reinact Mexican wrestling matches until the cows come home. Night after night, I’ve cringed in my bed after ever slam/thud/shudder wondering if that’s the one that’s going to wake up A and send me over the edge. I envisioned snatching him up, running up the stairs in my underpants with crazy bedhead and confronting them. Luckily, I’ve seen enough episodes of nightline to know that beating on strangers’ doors isn’t the best course of action, so I have refrained. Each time I have vowed that I will call the apartment office the next day, but I never do. Maybe it wasn’t that loud, I tell myself. I’ll look foolish, I think. That’s a first world problem for sure, I say.
Not tonight. Tonight, I had enough. One too many thud/cringe combos and I dialed the courtesy officer before I could lose my nerve. He was so very pleasant and reassuring (Me: “They’re like stomping? On my head? and it makes me sad? But I don’t want to hurt their feelings?” Him: “There’s no reason for that. Call this number. We’ll send someone. It’s all going to be okay, ma’am.”)
And send someone they did. He was a strapping young man with a friendly smile, or maybe it was more like when dogs bare their teeth out of fear? I’d be scared too if a crazy lady threw open her door, revealing a completely dark house and her standing there looking like Weird Al on a bad hair day, with a towel held over her body to hide the fact that she was in her underwear and totally unprepared for gentleman callers. Especially if she then hissed at me that “my son is SLEEPING in the room right there” and gestured to the window,causing the towel to slip a bit, “and my neighbors may not know that I live here or they may just be raging assholes I’m not sure but can you please make it stop and I swear I’m not crazy kthxbai.”
I probably should have found a better way to introduce myself than by dispatching the cops to their door and I hope they don’t hate me. Maybe there’s a single female in the residence and she’ll appreciate the city’s finest on her doorstep. I don’t hold out much hope even then, because I’m pretty sure I just scared him off women forever.
Apparently, it’s really cold outside. And there’s lots of ice. That’s what people on facebook are saying. I haven’t crossed the threshold myself since Monday afternoon. And once a day, a friendly automated system calls me to say that school is closed and I am to remain under house arrest for yet another day.
Thank goodness Andrew and I heeded the warnings of of the weathercasters, who did everything short of standing on street corners with signs declaring the End Times to let us know It Was Coming (see: Weather Girl vs. Homeless Guy: The Similarities are Striking), and went to the grocery store before the Epic Weatherological Event. Truth be told, I didn’t really buy into the hype as evidenced by my failure to stock up on Diet Coke. Rookie move, self.
So yeah. I just finished up 48 hours of solitary confinement with a two-year-old, who enjoyed way more than his share of Barney and Elmo. We bounced back and forth between those, episodes of Thomas the Train and Bob the Builder, and baseball on the wii. He calls it “hit the ball” as in “I play hit the ball, mama!” and while he can’t hit for crap, the boy can pitch.
So there’s a parental confession for you. Instead of using this ample time to make our own soap or fold 1,000 paper cranes, I basically tethered my kid to technology. Most of that time, though, I was cheering him on or stroking his hair as we watched The Best of Elmo for the millionth time.
Once, I did get all fancy and try to capture him singing his ABCs. He cooperated through the letter G, then launched a projectile at my head just as my camera battery died right alongside my motivation.
I relinquished him into his dad’s care today and I cried more than a few tears as they walked away. But then I also caught up on American Pickers and took a nap and I’m okay(ish). Just found out school is canceled again tomorrow, so now we’re trying to work out the logistics of toddler juggling (dangerous!) and it looks like I may get some time with him tomorrow, too.
Guess I’d better get back to watching Pawn Stars while I have the chance.
There are moments in parenting that you fully expect to be loaded with emotion. The first step. The first “mama.” The first day spent in the care of someone else. Those you anticipate, steel yourself, embrace.
Then there are others that sneak up and take your breath away like a knockout punch to the gut. So much more powerful because you haven’t had time to prepare, haven’t been waiting .
Tonight I was sitting with A in the glider, thankful that my almost two-year-old still likes to sit with me at the end of the day and chatter aimlessly (“Mama” “Dada” “home” “yeah”). He still wants to curl into me before he drifts off, still wants to feel my warmth and my hand cupping his cheek. At the right moment–somehow you always know when it’s time to lay him down–I scooped one hand under his bottom and another under his head, and just like that he was cradled in my arms like a newborn.
He stilled instantly. He was suddenly fast asleep, completely secure and content in my arms. And he was so, so heavy. And in that moment, I began to weep. How did I come to be cradling a boy? Where did my baby go? I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I was mesmerized by his peaceful expression, unable to stand and release him into his crib. I held him tightly and I kissed his forehead for the upteenth time tonight.
How are we here already? His babyhood was too short, too fleeting. I tried to cherish every night, I really did. Still, the time feels like grains of sand through my fingers and I’m trying desperately to hold on but I know it’s futile. And the weight of that knowledge…it’s just so heavy.
There's a Child Out Here, People. That's the Reality. 