neverbeenbarbie

I'm on Day 5 of a seven-day cleanse...

2009-09-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

... and I feel like I'm on steroids. SO. MUCH. ENERGY.

Don't know whether I should run up the side of a mountain or pick a fight with a stranger.

KAPOW!

Meet Morris

2008-06-14T10:24:00.000-07:00

Morris Frederick Emmerson was born at 2:23 June 08, 2008.

In the 6 days since his arrival, Morris has been a totally mellow little baby, staying awake for several hours at a time each day (and night, alas) while contentedly examining the brave new world in which he now finds himself.

Here's how the main event last Sunday morning went down...

(Warning: if an open and frank discussion about girly bits or, um, things of a more scatological nature make you go "eeew" you might just want to look at the pretty pictures instead.)

At about 7:30 p.m. on Saturday June 7th, I felt a gush that suggested my waters had finally broken. At least, that's what I thought had happened. I'd already experienced about a million false alarms ("Oooh, yay, I'm having contractions! Oh, wait a minute, no I'm not. Yes I am! Nope, guess not. Am! Not! Am! Not!" Sigh... NOTHING tries one's patience more than waiting for a baby to arrive. Seriously).

At any rate, I wasn’t sure whether I'd actually felt what I'd thought I felt, so I just continued to hang out with Rob and Milo and see what happened.

Sure enough, by 8:30 I was experiencing regular contractions that were coming every 5 minutes or so and lasting about 45 seconds.

I called "Oz," my Australian-born midwife at 9:00 p.m. to let her know this was happening, and she said she’d come over and see how I was doing. I’d had several false labour episodes in the days leading up to this, so we knew that this might be the real thing – or not.

Oz showed up around 9:30 p.m. and checked me out. (This was my first – and last – internal exam.) Turns out I was 3 cm dilated, and about 50% effaced. By this time the contractions were coming every 4 minutes and lasting about a minute. They were pretty strong, but I could still talk through them and walk around no problem. (I was having lots of fun bouncing on my yoga ball – it definitely helped keep things loose down there.)

Oz said she thought this was probably the big lead-up to the main event and that I would be having the baby either that night or the next day. Since she lives only 10 minutes down the road, she went home to sleep for a couple of hours and suggested we do the same, to make sure we were well rested when the time came. She told me to call her when the contractions were 2-3 minutes apart and had become too strong for me to talk through.

Rob and I went to bed and lay down to listen to my “hypnobirthing” relaxation tape. I found it really helpful to listen to a whole bunch of positive affirmation messages, such as “relax and let yourself open to the sensations flowing through you,” and “trust your body and your baby – they know what they’re doing” -- and of course, that old chestnut, "I'm good enough, I'm strong enough, and gosh darn it, people like me."

(Kidding on that last one.)

By the time 11:00 p.m. rolled around, I was feeling too restless to lie in bed any longer. The contractions had slowed down somewhat – they were back to happening every 5-6 minutes or so – but they had become significantly stronger, and I figured it would be better to climb aboard and ride that bullet train to Babytown than continue trying to relax – especially as “relaxing” was getting less relaxing by the minute.

So I told Rob we should get back up and start preparing for the baby, as it was coming soon. He still wasn't sure whether to believe me or not (!!! Note to men: when a woman says "this baby is coming SOON" you had best believe her, or at least act like you do. If you value your life, that is.)

But despite his skepticism -- or mere reluctance to get up from a cozy bed -- Rob got up and went downstairs to light a fire in the wood-burning stove in our family room (aka ground zero) and start gathering all of the stuff we needed for the home birth.

Meanwhile, in between my ever-intensifying contractions, I called the midwife and told her she should probably come over. She was back at our place by 11:30, by which time I had gotten to the point where I could no longer talk through contractions and it was taking all my concentration to deal with them. I could no longer sit comfortably on the birthing pool or walk around during contractions. From this time on, I spent most of my time on my knees (on pillows) leaning against more pillows piled up on the couch, while Rob pressed a hot water bottle against the small of my back.

(That poor guy… he was running around trying to do a million things at once – all things I’d asked him to do – yet was forced to drop whatever he was doing and come back to help me through all the contractions, which were coming a minute apart by this time!)

The midwife got busy setting up all her equipment and Rob started filling the birth pool with hot water. By this time I was bellowing and mooing like a cow through each contraction, making sure to keep my voice low and the rest of my body as relaxed as possible. I tried to practice non-focused awareness and concentrate on what the rest of my body was doing and feeling, e.g., What were my fingers touching? Was my mouth loose and relaxed? Could I wiggle my toes? And gosh, where the heck is Rob with the FREAKIN' HOT WATER BOTTLE ALREADY – that sort of thing. Phrases from my hypnobirthing relaxation tape kept on coming back to me, and helped me deal with the overwhelming force of each contraction. Every time I reminded myself to relax INTO the pain, I would have a wicked strong one – but I could really feel that things were opening up down there.

... But maybe they were opening up too much? Suddenly, I had felt an intense need to go poo. "Oh, this is embarrassing," I thought.

I told the midwife and she said, “Okay, it’s time for me to phone Petra (the other midwife).”

Silly Oz -- she thought the pushing stage had begun.

I, however, was still convinced I was about to poo, and thought I'd better get that over with before the baby came. Somehow I managed to get to my feet and go to the toilet -- where I remained for many long and frustrating moments. The contractions were coming on so fast and furious I simply couldn’t move. Oz kept saying, “You DON'T want to have this baby on the toilet.”

I just looked at her, dumbfounded. There was no way I was moving. Besides, I still REALLY needed to take a poo.

Then she asked me to feel inside myself to see if I could feel the baby. I reached up and felt something very squishy inside me. "I think I feel the umbilical cord," I told Oz.

Her eyes grew huge. "What?!" she asked, clearly alarmed. "Uh oh," I thought. Oz reached inside me and then smiled. "That's the head, Erin," she said.

The realization that the head was so low helped me find the strength I needed to get off the toilet. Once Rob told me the blow-up pool was filled with water, I somehow managed to stumble my way out of the bathroom and into the pool. As soon as I got into the deliciously warm water, my entire lower body relaxed and I was soooo happy no longer to be on the toilet.

The second midwife showed up just a few minutes after I was in the pool. The pushing stage was really intense this time around and the position I was in for my first boy wasn’t doing it for me, so I did some moving around until I finally found a position that worked. The next thing I knew, I was bellowing my way through an enormous push and dimly aware that Rob and the midwives were saying something like, “Here it comes! Here it comes!”

For a second there, I thought they were talking about my poo. A small grenade exploded between my legs -- "Ewww, that can't be pretty. Does that mean they're going to make me get out of the pool now?" I dimly wondered -- then to my utter disbelief I heard Rob and the midwives say, "There's the head! You're doing awesome!"

"Geez, I hope it doesn't have any poop on it," I thought.

The rest of the body came out on the next push, and then my midwife was placing the most beautiful little boy on my chest. His eyes were wide open and he was staring straight at me, just the most chilled one-second-old baby on the planet.

And of course, he didn't have even the tiniest speck of poop on him.

Morris was born after 7 hours of labour, from start to finish. Three of those hours were pretty intense -- including the 30 minutes of pushing I did -- but just like that it was all over. I couldn’t believe how quickly and how well it had gone.

After I was out of the tub, the midwives left Rob, Morris, and I alone to bond and introduce Morris to a very important -- and very enlarged -- part of my anatomy:

After about an hour, Oz and Petra came back to check on Morris and me and see how well we'd survived our ordeal. I needed a few stitches, but pffft! Like I could feel them, after everything I’d just been through. Morris scored 9 - 10 - 10 on the Apgar Scale (which basically means he's rocking some major good mojo). He, Rob, and I finally crawled into our bed to go to sleep at around 5:45 a.m.

... Only to be awakened just over an hour later by a sleepy-headed Milo, who came into our bedroom at 7:00 a.m. rubbing his eyes and holding a book he wanted Rob and me to read to him. Milo, that hero, that superstar, that all-around fabulous guy, slept through the entire thing.

Needless to say, he was blown away to discover he suddenly had a new baby brother.

Since then, one of the midwives has come by to examine Morris and me every day, to make sure we’re recovering well. (That’s one of the best things about having a home birth, in my opinion – the post-partum home visits!)

I must say, I’m amazed at how well my recovery is going this time around. Even though I had stitches, I’ve experienced very little perineal swelling and almost no pain or discomfort. I think I can thank Arnica (and, um, Tylenol 3 and Ibuprofen) for that!!!

So that’s how Morris made his grand entrance into the world. And a pretty grand entrance it was, I must say.

… Now, if only the little mouse boy could learn that the hours between midnight and dawn are NOT super-fun stay-awake party time...

A movie just begging to be made

2008-05-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

... Here's hoping it doesn't get the Afternoon Playhouse treatment:

http://www.money.co.uk/article/1000390

Note to self: Never, ever, EVER forget Milo's birthday.

Not just another reason to spread 'em for strangers

2008-05-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

The cervix: a body part whose existence you're entirely unaware of, until you have a baby jumping up and down on it, sending you a very clear message: "LET ME OUT ALREADY!"

Linda Blair paid us a midnight visit

2007-12-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

You know that feeling you get when you say something aloud -- then immediately wish you could swallow those ill-considered words because you know you've just put a horrible jinx on yourself?

Yes. Well. That's exactly the feeling I had when I bragged to my mother last month that my 2 1/2 year old Milo had *never* been sick. Not to the point of vomiting, at least.

Fast forward to last Thursday: Rob and I were awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of Milo crying. Not so unusual -- he wakes up once or twice a week and calls for us because his precious blankie has fallen to the floor (or, much more rarely, because he himself has fallen to the floor).

So I got up, stumbling and squinty-eyed, and made my way to his room. When I opened the door, there was Milo sitting in the middle of his bed, wailing as if he'd just awakened to discover himself on a sinking raft in the middle of shark-infested waters..

"Mommy!" he sobbed. "My tummy hurts! And I spilled something on my pillow!"

Insert ominous music here...

Sure enough, the little guy had thrown up all over his bed. And himself. And -- horrors! -- his beloved blankie. So while I got him changed and held him close (even as he continued to vomit into hastily grabbed towels), reassuring him that he was all right and hadn't done anything wrong, Rob stripped the bed and threw everything into the washing machine. Even the blankie, the presence of which Milo usually considers to be as necessary to his survival as oxygen.

But the poor boy was so zonked out by the whole experience that he just wanted it to GO AWAY. "I want to sleep! I want to sleep!" he cried, over and over again. So when the vomiting was done, and the sheets and pillows were replace with clean ones, we laid him down and let him sink immediately back into sweet, sweet oblivion.

For Rob and I, of course, it took a lot longer. We were so wired by the experience that we couldn't relax enough to fall asleep, and every rasping cough from Milo's room jolted us back into heart-pounding alertness. The positive side to this was that we were still awake when the washing machine finished its cycle, so Rob figured he may as well get up and threw everything into the dryer, just in case we needed to change Milo's sheets again in the middle of the night.

So when Milo woke up a couple hours later, crying for his blankie, I was overjoyed to run downstairs and grab a clean, soft, warm fuzzy dry blankie. "This'll trump anything he gets for Christmas," I thought. And when I put it into his outstretched arms, his chortle of glee told me that we were all going to live to see the dawn.

Sure enough, when I went into his room to get him the next morning, he greeted me with a cheerful, "Milo's feeling better, Mommy! Not sick anymore!" And then he proceeded to scarf down an entire waffle and half an egg. Ah, the resilience of youth.

... I certainly wish *I'd* been able to recover as quickly when the same damned stomach bug struck me down on Saturday night.

See all the fun you're missing, all you childless people out there?

To sleep, perchance to dream some really messed-up shit

2007-11-19T13:35:00.000-08:00

If you've never been pregnant, you probably have no idea what happens in the subconscious mind of the impending mother-to-be.

... Frankly, neither do I -- but I can tell you this: it does make for some pretty fucked-up dreams.

Last week, for example, I had a dream in which I relived the entire 2 1/2-hour final episode of M*A*S*H, which I haven't seen since it first aired in 1982. (Okay, so I'm dating myself.)

I woke up sobbing into my tear-soaked pillow, silently crying, "But it WASN'T a chicken, Hawkeye! It was a BAAAY-BEE!"

Harrumph.

And then last night, I dreamed I was Cordelia -- the spurned daughter in Shakespeare's tragedy, "The Madness of King Lear." (Speaking of "pretty fucked up," that describes King Lear in a nutshell.)

In the real play, Cordelia gets banished because she doesn't want to compete with her two evil sisters in a contest to describe how much she loves her father the king, who plans to give the choicest parcel of his kingdom to the daughter who claims to love him most.

(Cordelia thinks the contest demeans the love she really feels for him. Stickler. Whereas her harridan sisters, who feel no love for the king at all, suffer from no such compunction.)

And so because Cordelia refrains from waxing poetic, her self-absorbed daddy kicks her out of the kingdom in a huge huff -- and then gets punished for his hubris as his two remaining daughters plot and scheme to de-throne him, destroying his sanity in the process.

(Amazing how a king can be taken in by a smooth line as easily as a teenaged girl. "But... but... you said you loved me!" )

In my dream version of the play, Cordelia got banished because her sisters set her up to make it seem that some small deceit on her part resulted in the death of a man. Lear didn't care about the man who died -- he just wanted to get me (Cordelia) to admit my guilt. And when I refused to, he accused me of lying and got so pissed off he booted me out of the kingdom, while my two evil sisters looked on, smirking and giggling behind hands held over their mouths.

Again I woke up sobbing into a tear-soaked pillow, my protestations of innocence falling on deaf imaginary ears.

Then I spent the next two hours trying unsuccessfully to get back to sleep, because I couldn't stop myself from plotting elaborate revenge fantasies against the two evil sisters who set me up.

Bitches.

When I finally DID fall back asleep, I ended up having a dream in which I had to interrupt a couples massage two of my ex-boyfriends were getting, in order to extend a lunch invitation to the one I still considered a friend -- but that's a tale for a different day.

(Pregnancy: Time to bring out the crazy!)

The glass is 99% full, dammit

2007-11-13T16:15:00.000-08:00

So I went to see my very nice (and very male) family doctor a couple of weeks ago to tell him I was pregnant.

(I will be continuing my prenatal care with a midwife, but as Milo was due to visit the doctor for his much-belated two-year-old check-up, I thought I may as well get the ol' stethoscope treatment, as well.)

After congratulating me, the first thing to come out of the doctor's mouth was, "So I guess you'll be wanting me to get you started on your tests, then?"

Oh. Right. The tests. The not-so-joyous part of being pregnant.

Thanks to the wonders of western medicine, doctors are now able to test for certain birth defects while the baby is still in the earliest stages of development, so excited young mothers- and fathers-to-be can discover within weeks of conception whether their child to be is going to be stricken with a chromosonal abnormality such as Down's Syndrome.

The risk factor for such chromosonal abnormalities increases dramatically once a woman passes the age of 35.

I'm 37. And I'll be 38 when this baby is born.

Which is why my doctor quite strenuously advocated that I undergo all possible testing. Just "in case."

Never mind that I do yoga and ride my bike to work four times a week (a 13-km round-trip journey). Even given my state of optimal health, my ability to pass on healthy chromosones is apparently decaying with each passing day.

Meanwhile, merely contemplating the remote possibility that something might be wrong with my baby is enough to make me wrap my arms around my burgeoning belly and run to the hills, to find a nice dark cave to hide in for the next seven and a half months or so.

Yet despite my doctor's well-intentioned fear mongering (backed up with statements like, "Well, my wife and I just had a new baby daughter two months ago and we had the testing done." -- Yeah, dude, but you spend ALL DAY considering all the myriad things that can go wrong with the human body! Me, I'd rather not), I keep reminding myself that the "dramatic increase" caused by my age means going from a 1 in 178 chance (for women who are 35 years old) to a 1 in 100 chance of having a baby with birth defects (for women who are 38).

Which means there's still a 99% chance I will give birth to a perfectly "normal" healthy baby. Those are the odds I'd prefer to put my money on -- not the 1% long shot.

But even if I do go ahead and get all the testing done -- and the results come back and confirm my worst fears have been realized -- what then?

What does one DO with that kind of information?

Is it better to know ahead of time -- so I can spend the next seven months resenting the malformed child growing inside me?

(WOULD I resent the child, in such a case? Or would I research the malady and prepare myself so I could be a loving and welcoming mother once the baby had been born? Could I ever be that much of a saint? That's something I honestly don't know.)

Or is it better to go through my pregnancy, cheerfully anticipating the arrival of a perfect newborn -- and then be crushed when the baby doesn't meet my expectations?

(WOULD I be totally crushed? Or would I learn to love the baby no matter what, once I held it in my arms? Again, it's impossible to say.)

When faced with such unanswerable questions, all I want to do is close my eyes, plug my finger into my ears, and scream, "LA! LA! LA!" at the top of my lungs.

Ignorance is bliss.

Holy crap, here we go again

2007-11-07T12:32:00.000-08:00

I'm pregnant.

Yes, once again, after a grand total of one, count 'em, *1* time of officially "trying," the Dread Pirate and I have managed to hit the jackpot.

And once again, I knew I was pregnant within roughly 30 seconds of conception.

The only difference THIS time around was that whenever I said, "I think I'm pregnant" during those two long weeks between conception and being able to take a home pregnancy test, instead of rolling his eyes and saying, "Don't be ridiculous -- we only tried once!" or "How could you possibly KNOW that?" the Pirate's response was, "Of course you are." -- accompanied with the occasional deep sigh or rolling of the eyes.

(He's now convinced that I'm able to impregnate myself on demand, with a little help from him and his wee "pals," of course.)

And so here I am, sitting in front of a computer at work, biting back yawns and pretending to work while surreptitiously Googling "cloth diapers" to see what new and wonderful hemp-fleece-pockety creations have appeared online in the past couple of years.

It's going to be a long 30 weeks, I tell you.

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the opportunity to become reacquainted with some long-lost friends... my boobs.

Nice to have you back, girls!!!

This is me in May 2005, when I was about 8 months
pregnant with Milo... I'm currently only at 10 weeks
and already my belly feels bigger than that. Whee!

You don't know what you've got until it's gone

2007-09-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

Milo graduated from his crib to a big boy bed this week.

His grandparents brought Rob's old "super single" waterbed -- which has spent the last 20 years languishing in the crawl space under their house -- over on the ferry this past Monday, and Milo slept on it for the first time that night.

Of course, being the procrastinators we are, Rob and I didn't get the new foam mattress for the bed, like we were supposed to.

(Um... can I just say in our defence that we've had other things on our mind lately?)

And so -- once Rob and his dad hauled the bed into the house and put it together in Milo's room -- we decided to put Milo's crib mattress in it for the time being, just until his new foam mattress gets delivered on Saturday.

That poor little mattress looked lost inside the waterbed's huge cavity -- which hammered home the point that Milo's big boy bed is indeed VERY BIG.

Assuming he doesn't try to set it on fire at some point over the next 16 years, he'll probably be sleeping in that thing until he graduates from high school.

Just think of it: He's now sleeping in the bed in which he'll probably experience his first wet dream.

He might even lose his virginity in it.

Gaaagh!

Excuse me while I wash out my brain with soap and water...

Okay, I'm back.

So we filled the cavernous space around that tiny little crib mattress with blankets, pillows, and stuffed toys -- whatever would help ensure that Milo wouldn't roll off and go "thunk" in the middle of the night.

Thankfully, Milo took to the bed like a fish in... something... and has been enjoying blissfully long sleeps every night.

The person who hasn't been adjusting to this new situation very well is ME.

After he went to sleep that first night, it hit me. I will never see him standing in that crib again, rubbing his blankie under his nose as he waits for me to pick him up and bring him to my bed or the couch for a snuggle and some milk.

The sight of my little string-bean sleepyhead standing in that crib was one of my favourite things in the whole wide world.

And I never even took a picture of it.

You know you've had a great walk in the woods when...

2007-09-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

... You go home covered in ice cream and blood.

freebird

2007-08-29T17:02:00.000-07:00

I was killing a bit of time at work yesterday (it was during my lunch hour! I swear!) and I had a sudden masochistic urge to see if Trevor, my first "real" boyfriend, had his profile listed on Facebook. I plugged in his name, and there he was on the second page of results.

Holding a baby.

If ever there were someone who SHOULDN'T contribute to the gene pool, that would be Trevor.

I met Trevor a month before the end of my first year at university. He was the friend of a guy my friend Jenn was seeing at the time. His main selling point was that he was interested in sleeping with me more than once -- sometimes even while sober! And that was pretty much it.

Trevor was an 18-year-old high school dropout whose mission in life was to shock and offend as many people as possible. (In retrospect, I suppose that going out with me must have figured into his grand master plan in some way.)

He enjoyed doing things like: spitting half-chewed food into my mouth while we kissed, climbing construction cranes while stoned off his gourd and terrifying the onlookers below, and "dining and dashing" from restaurants for kicks.

Yep, he was a real charmer.

"Then why did you go out with him???" you might be wondering. Did I mention he was interested in sleeping with me more than once? That made him a prince among men at that particular point in my life.

( Needless to say, it wasn't a particularly HIGH point in my life.)

Despite the neon-billboard warning signs, I decided to spend the summer with Trevor tree planting in the northern wilds of British Columbia. Why? Mostly because my family scoffed at the idea. My brother had spent the last couple of summers tree planting, and based on his stories my parents didn't believe I'd be able to endure the hard work and harsh conditions for longer than two seconds.

Well. If there's one sure-fire way to get me to do something, it's to tell me I'm not capable of it. ( Unless you're talking about brain surgery. Or pulling off a chemical experiment without breaking something or blowing something up. Those things, I cannot do.)

And so, despite my parents' misgivings, I hopped on a Greyhound and went to Prince George, where I hooked up with Trevor and the rest of our tree-planting crew -- most of whom were Alberta boys who all went to the same bible college.

Well... you can guess what they thought about the one girl on the crew who -- gasp! -- was sharing a tent with a boy who wasn't her husband!

WHORE.

What little respect they might have had for me plummeted once they got to know Trevor and discovered exactly what calibre of guy I was willing to share a tent with. They didn't talk to me much after that.

That made for a pretty lonely summer. Especially since Trevor decided soon after we got into the bush that he didn't really want to be my boyfriend, after all. The novelty of screwing a socially awkward university girl had apparently worn off.

Being Trevor, his break-up strategy was to repulse me so badly that I would flee back to civilization, screaming.

He started off by eating live tadpoles. He'd reach right into a muddy puddle, scoop up a handful of wriggling creatures, and pop them in his mouth -- then wait for my shrieks of disgust.

It was, indeed, a very effective way to make me stop kissing him. But it wasn't enough to get me to crawl back home to my parents.

And that's what Trevor hadn't bargained for: my stubborn refusal to admit defeat.

I soon became numb to the sight of Trevor eating tadpoles. My lack of reaction disappointed him, and so he upped the stakes. He started eating actual frogs. I turned around one day after he'd called my name and saw him stuff one into his mouth. He watched me, grinning, as one little frog leg kicked feebly between his teeth.

I heaved a long sigh. "Trevor," I said, fighting to keep my voice calm, "Please don't eat that."

And then he did.

It's amazing, the things to which one can become acclimatized over time. Like watching your boyfriend eat live frogs, for example. I soon became desensitized to it -- after all, how much worse is eating a frog than playing "frog baseball" -- smashing defenseless frogs into a million pieces with a shovel while shouting, "Batta batta batta SWING!" -- like all the bible school boys did? (Putting their God-given dominion over the natural world to good use, of course.)

Not so much worse, it turns out.

At any rate, I became increasingly bored with Trevor's amphibian-eating antics, and he became increasingly bored with me. After all, what good is a girlfriend if you can't make her yell or scream or cry?

Trevor was the one who finally ended up caving. He woke up one morning, rolled over in his sleeping bag and announced to me, "That's it -- I'm outta here."

As he packed his bag, he explained that it wasn't ME -- it was him. He was like that guy in Freebird, he told me. He wasn't made to stay in one place with one woman for too long. And that bird, I could not change. Lord knows, he could not change.

And so he left.

At least he didn't take the tent, I thought.

The last time I saw Trevor was the following summer. For obvious reasons, I decided against tree-planting that year, choosing instead to spend the summer at my folks' place in Chilliwack, waitressing at a Greek steakhouse.

Trevor blew through town one day on his way to Vancouver with one of his stoner buddies. He found me through the phonebook (there were only six Whalens in Chilliwack at the time).

I had to work the night he called, but agreed to meet him and let him drive me to the restaurant, "for old time's sake."

He showed up in an orange VW bus. Turns out he didn't look me up simply to get some ex-girlfriend nookie. He and his pal were funding their cross-country tour by selling acid, and he wanted to know if I could hook him up with any buyers.

I told him no.

Undeterred, he asked if he and his pal could do a dine and dash in the restaurant where I worked. I turned down that request as well, even though it was clear that both Trevor and his friend were in desperate need of some decent food. But hell, it wasn't going to come out of my pocket.

That was the last time I ever saw him.

Over the years, I've morbidly wondered whatever became of Trevor. Honestly, I would have put money on him ending up in jail -- or the morgue -- by his 25th birthday.

Yet there he was on Facebook yesterday, balding and pudgy, and holding a baby.

Heaven help us all.

What a Hitchcockian way to start the day

2007-08-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

As I was riding my bike to work, I had to duck TWICE to avoid birds that seemed bent on flying straight into my face -- with wings outspread, claws stretched toward my eyes and everything. One was a pigeon, the other a seagull.

I'm thinking maybe I should switch my perfume from Eau de Roadkill to something else, perhaps?

Quote of the day

2007-08-27T20:06:00.000-07:00

Brought to you by Mr. Short-Term Memory...

"Where's Milo's pants go, Mommy?"

That's my boy: running around and acting crazy, having the time of his life -- then all of a sudden looking down and realizing he has no pants on.

He's more like me than I care to admit.

Hugga wugga

2007-08-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

We have a new favourite Muppets episode:

It rocks even harder than Alice Cooper singing, "School's out for summer!"

At the crossroads

2007-08-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

You know those times in your life when you're approaching a huge change -- be it graduation, a new job, or marriage -- and you know you need to step up to the plate and grab that bull by the horns?

(And mangle a few metaphors while you're at it?)

This is one of those times for Rob and me.

And I swear to you, we're going to grab that bull's horns, swing ourselves over its head and land standing on its back -- then wave our mouse-eared hats with a flourish and shout "Olé!" at the top of our lungs.

Sheer brilliance

2007-08-22T17:28:00.000-07:00

This woman is my hero:

http://www.myspace.com/melissamindy

She ALMOST persuaded me to sign up for a MySpace account, just so I could subscribe to her blog.

Almost.

monster

2007-08-21T14:57:00.002-07:00

One of my good friends, Cindy, asked me why the memory of the boy who died in my swimming pool floated into my thoughts recently. (Nice metaphor, Cindy.)

Here's the answer...

I went into Milo's room one day last week after he'd awakened from his nap. There he stood in his crib, holding on to his blankie and blinking sleepily, his mussed-up hair a wild halo around his head.

I asked him if he'd had a good nap -- and he looked up at me and said, "Monster, mommy!"

"Monster?" I repeated. "Did you just have a dream of a monster?"

He shook his head, then pointed down at the space between the wall and the bottom of his crib. "Monster down there."

The boy is barely two years old and he already has a monster under his bed.

So it begins.

The good news is, thanks to his newfound-inspired addiction to the Muppet Show (we recently bought the entire first season on DVD and it still ROCKS), the monster under Milo's bed is definitely friendly.

It probably goes by the name of Sweetums and looks something like this:

Whereas the monster that lived in my closet during most of my childhood (only to be replaced by the bearded axe-murderer discussed in this previous post) looked something like this:

... And no one ever called him "Sweetums."

The appearance of Milo's new bedside companion got me thinking about the faces we see in the shadowy corners of our lives -- are they friendly or menacing? Angels or devils?

When the aliens appear, will they be benevolent teachers or ruthless overlords holding well-worn copies of "To Serve Man" in their tentacled grasp?

All this basically translates to how we apprehend the unknown -- in the world at large, in the people we encounter in our daily lives, and most especially within ourselves.

For too many years, I saw demons wherever I looked.

I mistrusted the motives of others. I expected the worst-case scenario to be the logical conclusion to any situation. Strangers were potential enemies. Pointed looks and whispered conversations were always about me -- and they were always insulting (but laser-accurate, of course).

It wasn't until I hit my 30s that I finally came to like myself for who I am, as opposed to despising myself for not being who I thought I should be. (And not to go all hippy on your ass or anything, but I give full props to yoga for my mental paradigm shift.)

Lo and behold, the universe became a friendlier place -- shadows, strangers, and all.

Now, I know Milo is going to encounter evil in this world. I'm not sure I would keep him sheltered him from it, even if I could. After all, how will he learn to overcome adversity if he never encounters it?

But if he's lucky -- and I desperately hope he is -- the monster lurking in the dark corners of his life will always be "Sweetums."

How about you? What monsters are hiding in the shadowy regions of your life? And are they friendly or sinister?

Life sucks when...

2007-08-16T07:07:00.000-07:00

While at work, you feel yourself becoming inescapably, gut-wrenchingly ill, but you can't leave because there's really important work that must be completed by deadline -- so you stick it out, get it all done between all the messy and embarrassing visits to the bathroom -- until finally you're able to leave, so you get on your bike and pedal home oh-so-slowly because you have absolutely NO energy and you don't want to precipitate another visit to the bathroom (especially when there AREN'T any bathrooms en route) -- and when you finally get home, you rush into the bathroom without saying hello to your child or your husband, who you're sure is going to act as your knight in shining armor and take care of all the supper and putting-kid-to-bed details so you can collapse on to the bed and writhe around in fetal position -- anything, anything, to make the horrible feeling go away --

And then before you're even finished in the bathroom, your knight in shining armor bangs on the door and says, "You got to get out of there! I'm about to be sick!"

Apparently we both ate the same piece of bad fish.

If I were REALLY rude, I'd make some sort of nasty reference to a "c*m shot"

2007-08-15T15:25:00.000-07:00

For anyone who's ever lived in Japan, this will make perfect sense. Because when insane people enjoy insane things, it's perfectly logical, right?

Click here to discover what I'm talking about: Mayo margaritas???

Ch-ch-ch-ha-ha-HA

2007-08-14T14:47:00.000-07:00

When I was 10 years old, my family moved from Deep Cove to Chilliwack.

One of the things that made this move bearable for me was the fact that our new home had an in-ground pool. Sure, I was moving away from the forest and the ocean and the mountains -- not to mention my friends.

But hey! At least we were getting a nice pool.

A few weeks after we moved to our new home, my mom brought my brother and me to the local pool supply store to pick up some pool-cleaning chemicals. The man who worked there was obviously familiar with all the pool owners in the small town that was now our home, and since he'd never seen us before, he asked us where we lived.

My mom told him the name of our street. Grimacing, he responded, "Oh yeah -- the old Buchanan place. Where the kid drowned."

Turns out a group of neighbourhood kids had been playing hide-and-go-seek the year before, and one of them -- a three-year-old boy -- had crawled under the fence into what was soon to become our backyard, then had slipped and fallen into our pool, only to become trapped beneath its vinyl cover.

Just the kind of story you REALLY want to hear about your new home.

We were pretty freaked out... But not enough to stop swimming in our pool.

As I floated lazily in my innertube, or swam from one end to the other without taking a breath, the little dead boy would sometimes surface in my thoughts. I'd stare through the pool's clear depths and wonder how he must have felt in his last moments -- whether he'd known what was happening, if he'd screamed, and if so, if anyone had heard him.

Then I'd scramble out of the water and rub myself down so hard with a towel, I'd leave carpet burns on my skin.

Still, I'd thought the creepiness of it all was something I could deal with -- something that lent a certain gothic charm to an otherwise normal suburban home.

And then -- at the beginning of the summer I turned 12 -- I made the mistake of watching Friday the 13th.

You know... the pre-Jason original, the one with the psycho-killer mom who murders a bunch of innocent people in revenge for her son's death by DROWNING years before?

Yep. Didn't relate too much to THAT particular tale.

All of a sudden I began to take notice of the little dead boy's family (because yes, they did still live just a few houses down the street).

His older brother was just eight years old -- by the looks of it, still too small to go about stabbing people in their sleep. The mother was pleasant enough, and seemed far too busy chasing around her toddler daughter to entertain thoughts of bloody revenge.

But the father... He was big and seldom smiled. And he had a beard.

The facial hair clinched it. The man was a psycho killer, and he was out to murder my family.

That whole summer, I was afraid to stay in the house by myself. Every creak was a footstep, every breath of wind was the satisfied sigh of the hunter closing in for the kill.

(Of course, my pre-teen addiction to Stephen King novels didn't help.)

I tried to share my fears with my family, but they pooh-poohed my concerns and told me I was just imagining things. Which I was, of course. Logically, I understood that.

But logic didn't stop me from bolting out the front door whenever I heard the slightest unexplained noise coming from some other part of the house.

Even now, I can feel how my heart used to pound as I stood at the foot of our driveway and stared at our house, willing myself to believe there wasn't an angry bearded man with an axe hiding in the downstairs bathroom.

Eventually, I grew out of my fear. Grade seven finally began, I started spending more time with friends, and the inexplicable noises that had struck such terror into my heart fell mysteriously silent.

Then -- during the great ice storm of 1985 -- the pool's pipes cracked and broke. My parents never bothered to fix them. The pool fell into disrepair, eventually becoming home to countless frogs whose midnight croaking prevented my parents from sleeping.

Years later, while I was away at university, my parents decided to fill the pool with dirt and give it a proper burial. If you were to visit their house now, you'd never guess a killer pool lay concealed beneath the grass in their backyard.

Just like the pool, the terror it once spawned is still buried in my mind, lurking beneath the fertile soil of my imagination.

Except now that I'm a mother, it's not MY death that has the power to terrify me.

It's Milo's.

And suddenly, I feel a strange sense of sympathy for Mrs. Voorhees. Because the lengths I'd go to in order to protect my son from harm?

They don't bear thinking about.

How does he KNOW?

2007-08-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

So I was having a dream in which a certain handsome dark-haired pirate and I were in a hotel room in some kind of Disneyland/Las Vegas-like holiday locale, and a bunch of other people were in the room with us, and we REALLY REALLY wanted them to leave so we could start getting friendly with each other -- but the others wouldn't leave, they just kept yammering about all the places they wanted to visit, food they wanted to eat, shows they wanted to see, and they wouldn't take our pointed hints indicating that we wanted them to get the fuck OUT of there and leave us alone already.

And then, when they DID finally saunter out of the room, each lingering over one last long drawn-out goodbye, and the handsome dark-haired pirate and I were finally able to close the door and fall into each other's arms --

-- a voice called out to me from the room next door: "MOMMY! Get up! Milo awake!"

Sigh. Even in my dreams, we can't get lucky. I'm pretty sure that boy is angling to be an only child.

Tsunami

2007-08-07T21:35:00.000-07:00

Do you ever get the feeling that a huge wave of upheaval is about to crash down on your head and sweep you away to alien shores?

I can't shake the sensation that I'm gearing up to do a WHOLE LOT of dog paddling some time in the all-too-frighteningly-near future...

Because Meg told me to

2007-08-07T16:30:00.000-07:00

In response to Meg Fowler's latest call to action. Never shall that woman be called "listless"...

1. What is your favorite word?

Serendipity

2. What is your least favorite word?

Fug or fugly

3. What turns you on?

Pirates, duh.

4. What turns you off?

Unrelenting tentativeness

5. What sound or noise do you love?

Milo's dinosaur roar: "Rah!" (It's identical to his monster roar, his lion roar, his bear roar, his alligator roar -- you get the picture.)

6. What sound or noise do you hate?

Fork on a plate -- pure torture

7. What is your favorite curse word?

I have to CHOOSE? Fuck that!

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Archaeologist

9. What profession would you not like to do?

Brain surgeon

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

"Took you long enough!"

I wish he weren't so darned ambivalent

2007-08-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

The question: "Hey Milo, do you want a drink of this water?"

The answer:

Inscrutable as stone, that boy...

My work here is done

2007-08-05T19:03:00.001-07:00

Milo just walked into the living room -- legs stiff, arms outstretched, and head jerking from side to side -- intoning, "Monster boy! Monster booooy!"

I feel like I've accomplished all I ever could have hoped for as a parent.

To hammer the point home, here's Milo's latest all-time-favorite YouTube video:

That's my boy...

Nature's bidet

2007-08-03T17:05:00.001-07:00

It happens every time.

We come to Rob's folks' place on a hot summer day and eagerly await the receding tide, so we can go play on the sandbar behind their house.

We gather up our sand toys and head down to the beach, gingerly picking our way through the seaweed-covered rocks until we reach the rippled sand.

And then it happens -- I step close to a seemingly innocuous quarter-sized hole in the sand, and a giant three-foot spurt of water shoots from the hole, straight up into the leg of my shorts.

I shriek and take another step -- and a second fountain squirts up the other leg of my shorts.

Geoducks: the perverts of the bivalve world.

Yoga and hangovers don't mix

2007-08-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday night, I went out for dinner with my good friends from university, Liz and Tracy.

It all started out very civilized, with white wine and scintillating conversation about the joy of owning really cute shoes and how hard it is to find a hairdresser who really knows how to cut good layers.

But at some point in the evening I think we started to believe we were still in university, 15 years younger than we actually are. And before we knew it, we'd polished off a couple bottles of wine, several pints of beer, several more glasses of wines, and a few mojitos just to spice things up.

The last hour (or two?) of the evening is a complete blur.

I don't remember getting home. I think there may have been a cab involved -- although I could have been piggy-backed home by a hunchback and still be none the wiser.

All I know is that when I woke up yesterday morning, there was a trail of clothing leading from the bathroom at the back of the house all the way to the door of my bedroom.

And I was still drunk.

Staying home from work wasn't an option -- I had an article to write for the weekly newsletter, and its deadline was set in stone. So I somehow managed to stumble my way to the Skytrain and get to the office (only half an hour late). Then I did something I haven't done for YEARS -- I tried to soak up the remains of my alcohol buzz with a greasy, greasy breakfast from A&W.

And then I tried to write.

Do you know hard it is to write coherently when your head feels like it's home to a swarm of angry bees?

When lunchtime rolled around, I decided to take a break from my drunken writer's block hell and clear my brain by taking part in the weekly yoga class I'd signed up for. (It's pretty sweet -- a yoga instructor actually comes to our office and does the class right there.)

Well. You know how they say that yoga helps rid your body of all the toxins and negative energy blockages in your body? After the previous night's debauchery, my body was apparently in serious need of some purging.

Halfway through the class, in the middle of "downward-facing dog," the nausea surfaced with a vengeance. I was able to make it to the end of class -- barely -- but as soon as we'd all said "namaaste" to each other, I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I stumbled as quickly as I could to the four-stall public bathroom -- and then gaped in horror as one of my coworkers insisted on coming into the bathroom WITH ME.

And so -- with no other options available to me -- I surrendered all dignity and puked up every last morsel of my greasy, greasy breakfast, as my coworker listened on in horror.

(The sound of a flushing toilet can only drown out so much...)

She was kind enough to offer me a cracker afterwards, which I declined. I didn't have the strength to tell her that I was a. not dying, b. the author of my own misery, and c. actually feeling better now that I no longer had a belly full of toxic fast food.

However, I'm pretty sure that when I return to work on Tuesday, fully half the women there are going to think I'm pregnant.

Nope, ladies. Not pregnant. Just stupid.

Oh yeah

2007-08-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm wondering, at what point in the evening did I forget I HAD TO WORK TODAY???

Udder bullshit

2007-07-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

I'm the first to admit I have juvenile taste in movies.

After writing my guts out all day and most of the evening, the last thing I want to do is watch something that taxes my brain -- or my heart, for that matter.

I mean, I'm already aware of the evil people are capable of inflicting on each other. The non-fictional media do a great job of demonstrating that every day. Why would I choose to wallow in man's inhumanity to man in the world of make believe, as well?

Thanks anyway, but no.

On the rare occasions I sit down to watch something on TV or DVD, I prefer it to be as escapist as it gets. Which is why Rob and I tend to watch so many kids' movies.

I try telling myself I watch them in the name of "research," since I'm still toiling away on the never-ending story. But who am I kidding? I watch them because I LIKE THEM.

(There. I said it.)

So when Rob said we'd just received the movie "Barnyard" in the mail, I shrugged and agreed to watch it -- even though I vaguely remembered it receiving awful reviews.

"Ehhh, it's done by the same studio that did Jimmy Neutron," I thought. "How bad can it be?"

Very bad, as it turned out. Worse than bad.

It wasn't the cardboard characters or lame, predictable plot that got me (though it was painfully obvious poor ol' Daddy Cow was going to bite it Lion King-style within the first two minutes of the movie).

Truth is, I barely paid attention to those glaring flaws.

No. What had me choking with horror from almost the very first scene was the fact that the main character of the movie is a he-cow.

A HE-COW, people.

Not a bull. A cow. With udders. That just happened to be male.

Like so:

There's absolutely no logical reason for this creature to have udders. None of the other upright-walking animals had anything resembling sexual organs on their body. I'm mystified as to why the movie's decision-makers felt obligated to make the poor he-cow the exception.

Were they worried the audience wouldn't be able to identify the character as bovine without the telltale udders hanging out? Or is there a subversive pro-tranny message hidden in there somewhere?

Or is Hollywood REALLY that far removed from reality?

My money's on the latter.

Alien invasion

2007-07-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

Throughout Milo's life, we've been careful to limit his exposure to television.

(Yes, I have been brainwashed by the studies that suggest too much TV scrambles the brains of children, leaving them twitching and drooling on the rec room floor, incapable of sustaining a thought for longer than 1.7 seconds. Rob thinks I'm overreacting, but hey -- look at what it did to ME.)

However, being the computer geeks we are, we never guessed that introducing Milo to YouTube might be a dangerous thing to do.

Silly us.

After watching just one clip from Sesame Street, he was hooked. Now, at least 50 times a day (and I'm lowballing here) he demands to watch, "Farm spaceship, Mommy! Farm spaceship!"

Even if I acquiesce one out of every ten times, that still means we're watching the same 4:20 (heh) long clip five times in a day, which equals 21 minutes 40 seconds -- and that's just a minute and a half shorter than a regular 1/2 hour children's program (minus commercials).

So much for protecting his tender developing mind...

Although to be honest, it's not so much his brain turning to mush that worries me. It's the fact that when the alien invasion finally happens, Milo's first instinct won't be to run for the hills like everyone else.

Instead, he's going to march right up to our tentacled future overlords with his arms outstretched, saying, "Yip yip yip yip uh huh uh huh uh huh..."

All cleansing no beer make Erin go crazy

2007-07-27T19:28:00.001-07:00

So my 12-day cleanse is over and I SURVIVED!

And all I have to say right now is this: "BEEEER! Unnnnnngh."

(I'm on my second.)

It's times like this that I worry about how much I have in common with Homer Simpson...

Happy Friday night, all...

Forget about mucoid plaques...

2007-07-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

This atrocity is FAR stinkier... and scarier, too:

11-Year-Old Girl Wants to Be Like Jordan

Okay, so I don't know anything about "Jordan," other than the fact that she's a fake-boobed plastic bimbo. (Who knew they had them in Britain, too?)

But I do know this: if MY child ever expressed the desire to emulate such a stellar example of the WORST women have to offer society, I think I'd have to take her out to the back field and shoot her. Or at the very least, give her a partial lobotomy.

Kidding... but only sort of.

All right, enough with the lovey dovey stuff

2007-07-26T09:22:00.000-07:00

It's time to talk crap again.

As part of this cleanse I'm doing, I've had to cut all yeast out of my diet. Last night, I began to wonder why. Why is yeast so bad? What has it ever done to be shunned and denigrated so?

I decided to go online and search for answers.

And then I got sidetracked and stumbled across this site.

(Warning: not for those who have weak stomachs or have recently eaten. Or who suffer from nightmares.)

YIKES. I thought MY cleanse was thorough. I never knew such... things could come out of the human body (without said human body being sliced open, that is).

It kind of makes me want to keep on doing this cleanse forever, to ensure I never have one of those monstrous "mucoid plaques" growing inside me.

... Though given all the trans-fatty foods I've eaten over the years (curse you, Pringles potato chips!) a mucoid plaque could be incubating inside me -- and you! -- RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE.

Cue the Twilight Zone theme...

Love

2007-07-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

In response to my Meg Fowler's challenge, here are things I love:

Milo's non-stop narrative, describing exactly what he's doing at any given moment of the day: "Milo running fast! Milo climbing! Milo read a book! Milo hitting Mummy!"

(Okay, so I'm not so particularly fond of that last one.)
The miracle of being allowed to sleep to 7:30 a.m (It's happened about three times since Milo was born)
When writing, getting so into the world I'm creating that I actually forget myself and time ceases to have any meaning
Doing yoga and listening to birds celebrate the sun rising
Riding my bike to work
Sitting on a patio with a cold beer and good friends, watching the sun go down
Bras with straps that don't slide down my arms
Freshly washed bedsheets
Watching a really great sci-fi show with Rob, and actually being surprised by a plot twist (Happens all too rarely)
Grilled asparagus, sprinkled with lemon, salt and pepper
Walking in the woods -- in any weather, at any time of year -- and marveling at the countless shades of green
Going to the park across the street and having all the neighborhood kids shout, "Hi Milo!" on our arrival
Prawns and all things shrimpy. I KNOW they're horribly overfished and we're all going to die soon because the ocean is being scoured of its inhabitants, but god help me, I love the shrimp.
Random run-ins with friends I haven't seen forever -- and realizing that the passage of time hasn't weakened our friendship one bit
Books that make me laugh
Books that make me think about things in a new light

And finally...
Pirates.

What a load of crap

2007-07-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

I'm currently doing my first herbal cleanse. (The Wild Rose one, for those who care about such things.)

Right before every breakfast and dinner, I squirt 30 drops of brown liquid into a glass and then use it to wash back six foul-smelling pills.

And then I wait...

... until my belly tells me it's time for the first of many, many trips to the bathroom that day.

Oh. So THAT'S why they call them cleanses. My insides have been scrubbed so bare, you could probably eat off them.

(All together now: ewwwww.)

I will say this: I've had more energy every day for the past 11 days than I've in months. Instead of fighting the urge to collapse each night at 8:00 p.m -- then feeling like I've just emerged from a four-year coma when the alarm goes off each morning -- I'm like the Energizer Bunny.

I spring out of bed at 5:00 each morning thinking, "Yeah! Yoga!" and have to force myself to go to bed at 10:30 or later, just because I know I'll be getting up in 6 1/2 short hours and sleeping is what a sane person would probably do in my situation.

(OK so 10:30 might not seem very late to those of you who don't have a two-year-old and don't get out of bed at 5:00 IN THE MORNING. But it is. Trust me.)

However... Part of me questions whether the increase in energy is worth the pain of going without wheat, sugar, and dairy. And who knew how much I loved yeast and all things fermented! Already I'm salivating over everything I'm planning to eat and drink on Friday when this 12-day cleanse is finally over.

Basically, all the things that made me so darned toxic in the first place.

Crap.

Still alive, still kicking

2007-07-24T21:05:00.000-07:00

Hi! Whatcha been doing for the past 16 months?

Really! You don't say?

Well, I won't bore you with the story of how I was sold into slavery for almost a year and a half and forced to perform unspeakable acts of horror. Yawn. How typical.

But I will say this: I'm back with a new name, a real name, and a new look. And I'm here to speak my piece.

(I've spent so many months writing in other people's voices, it's time I remembered what my own sounds like...)

Creepy crawler

2006-03-28T09:46:00.000-08:00

Batten down the hatches, folks -- Milo has become independently mobile.

Yep, that's right, the boy is crawling. The world is no longer safe -- the world up to eighteen inches off the ground, at least.

He'd been working up to it for a few weeks before he figured out how to make all his parts move in the right direction. First, he learned to push himself backwards, grunting with frustration as he moved away from the toy he was trying to reach, instead of moving closer to it. More often than not, he ended up wedged beneath a footstool or sofa, a sight that never failed to make me giggle and him squawk loudly at the indignity of it all.

Then he learned how to get up on to all fours. Once he felt stable enough, he'd begin to rock back and forth on his hands and knees, looking as if he were revving himself up to make the big leap forward. Either that, or attempting to do something lewd and unspeakable to the floor.

After that, he started experimenting with his limbs. He'd move his hands forward, but his legs would refuse to follow, and so he'd flop on to his belly and start howling with frustration. Or he'd move his legs but not his hands, and end up pitching forward and landing on his face. Again with the howling.

A couple of weeks ago when we were down at a kid-friendly cafe on the Drive, he finally put it all together. We were sitting at the edge of the stage at Cafe Deux Soleils with a mom friend (hi, Niki!) and her little baby, when Milo's eye was caught by a toy at the back of the stage, near the wall with the chalkboard. He moved a hand forward, and lo and behold, the opposite leg followed! He moved his other hand, and the other leg came up behind!

We watched, amazed, as Milo painstakingly made his way across the stage to the toy, falling to his belly a couple of times in the process, but determinedly lifting himself back up on to all fours and continuing the journey until he had reached the toy. He turned to look back at me, as if to make sure that I had witnessed his mind-blowing trip. Then, satisfied by the stunned look on my face, he turned back to play with the toy.

A few moments later, I look over at him and noticed something odd about the drool dripping from his open mouth.

"Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?" I said to the other mother, as I got up to cross the stage and check on Milo. Sure enough, the boy was dribbling sky-blue drool down his chin. Seemed like he'd gotten his hands -- and then his mouth -- on a small piece of chalk.

Later that same day, I also pulled an elastic band from his mouth. And then a fridge magnet. And then I had to pull him off Nell dog's bed just seconds before his mouth closed around the dog tags hanging off her collar.

Ah, the joys of independent mobility. Looks like Milo's well on his way to living up to his ancient hunter-gather heritage. Guess I'm going to have to make sure the only forms of prey within reach are those that won't poison, choke, cut or maul him.

Now, if only the boy could learn how to roll over.

Narcissus

2006-03-07T09:19:00.001-08:00

Looks like Nell has a rival for Milo's affections. He has fallen deeply, irrevocably in love with someone else -- namely, himself.

It all started when he began to realize that the gorgeous little creature he saw every day in the various mirrors around our home was actually him.

I was there when the epiphany struck. He was sitting on our bed, staring at the mirror, entranced by the moving figures he saw in it (i.e., him and me), when all of a sudden he started waving his arms wildly in the air, clearly watching his own reflection.

He stopped waving his arms, and the figure in the mirror did the same. Started waving them again, and his reflection followed suit. Stopped -- ditto.

And then commenced much leg slapping and shrieking of glee. I could almost hear his thoughts: "That's... ME! It's me it's me it's me it's me it's me! And I'm MARVELLOUS!!!"

If that boy knew how to crawl, I swear he would gone right over the edge of the bed in his hurry to get closer to his newfound love.

Since the first moment of infatuation, Milo's love has continued to blossom and grow. Whenever he's upset about something, all I have to do is plunk him down in front of the mirror in our living room and his tears are instantly replaced by smiles and laughter.

His image doesn't even have to move to enchant him. If he catches sight of himself in a photograph, more high-pitched shrieking and flailing of limbs ensue.

The other day, I was holding him in my arms and dancing to the Scissor Sisters and Fat Boy Slim while watching Rob upload a bunch of photos from the camera on to his computer. When Milo noticed that most of them were photos of him, he went nuts -- waving his arms, kicking, and shrieking with delight every few seconds.

There's a photo we have of him at three months that he particularly admires. It's standing in a frame on an amp in the living room, close to his play mat. He'll spend many minutes in his Jolly Jumper swinging toward it with his mouth wide open and his eyes filled with hilarity. He looks like he wants to swallow the picture whole and knows how hysterical it would be if he ever actually managed to do it.

(Point of fact: Milo wants to eat all the things he loves. When he wants to show affection for me, he bends toward me with his mouth open as wide as possible and lowers his head so that his forehead touches my lips. I'm not sure if he's presenting his forehead for a kiss or trying to eat me but fortunately has really bad aim.)

The only thing he likes better than seeing himself in a mirror is seeing himself in THREE mirrors, which he does whenever we go into the bathroom together. I pull out the mirrored cabinet doors to the left and right of the center mirror and position them so that Milo and I are able to see all three of our reflections at once.

The first time he saw his own image in triplicate, he almost lost it. He'd been focusing on the foam tropical fish on the wall beside the counter when he caught sight of himself in the nearest mirror. That made him happy.

Then I tapped on the center mirror to draw his attention to it. When he saw his reflection there, he literally (and I mean that in the literal literal sense, not the marketing literal sense) jumped with joy.

When he saw himself in the third mirror, he started making these little high-pitched excited sounds at the back of his throat, like the sound a dog makes when she knows there's a treat coming.

His gaze kept flitting back and forth between the three images: to the right -- then the left -- then the center -- then the left -- then the center -- then the right again. He kept patting his image in the closet mirror, as if needing to constantly confirm that something so wonderful could actually be real. I finally had to get him out of there because I was afraid his brain might explode.

That kid, he'd be perfectly happy playing patty cake with himself all day long, if only I'd allow it. But I'm his mother, and I think he's far too young to spend all his time with just one person. I'd like for him to, you know, play the field a bit before settling down.

Geez. I thought his obsession with Nell was bad.

(Another point of fact: I always knew he'd get involved with a self-centered bitch at some point in his life, I just didn't expect it to happen so soon. With our dog.)

But this! The way he leans toward the mirror, bending his head and pressing his forehead against its cool glass -- it's as if he's giving the mirror a kiss, just like he does to me.

I think he's really fallen for himself.

And the truth is, I'm happy for him. Honestly, I don't think he could have found a more wonderful person to love. I hope he and himself are very happy together for many long years to come.

The Great Leap Forward

2006-02-13T12:54:00.000-08:00

Milo has started to hold his arms out to us when he wants us to pick him up. It took us a while to catch on to the fact that he was doing this -- that he was communicating a solution to a need he was experiencing. But last night, there could be no mistaking it.

He was sitting on his foam play mat, batting away all the toys we were offering him and squawking impatiently, wrinkling his nose and making a face that clearly said, "I'm SO not pleased with the manner of entertainment you're providing for me," when all of a sudden he turned to me and lifted his arms in the air and said, "Eh! Eh!"

Rob and I looked at each other with goofy smiles on our faces. Milo was speaking to us! Okay, so he had the wrong vowel sound, and he didn't properly enunciate his "p", but we got his message. His arms very easily conveyed the meaning his mouth couldn't yet express.

Our boy is growing up, all right. At seven and a half months old, he's right on the cusp of becoming a cruiser. He's always on the go, wiggling and flailing and twisting in all directions, whether he's in my arms or on the floor. And he's becoming increasingly frustrated by his inability to move from point A from point B without a little help from mom or dad.

When he sees a toy he wants to play with, he throws himself toward it. Holding him, I'll let him follow through with the movement and will lower him on to his belly right in front of the desired toy. But as soon as his belly hits the floor, he starts kicking and flailing his arms, pushing himself away from the toy instead of towards it. And then, of course, hysterics ensue.

He no longer enjoys lying on his back for more than a minute or so. It's obvious he'd rather be crawling or walking. The only problem is, he doesn't know how to crawl or walk, and it's seriously beginning to piss him off. I try to help him out by getting him on to his hands and knees, but as soon as he makes a move, his arms and legs shoot out from underneath him and he ends up flat on his belly, doing the jellyfish.

Needless to say, this does not please the young master. He has discovered gravity, and it does not amuse him.

Part of me is hoping that he learns how to crawl fairly soon, so he doesn't end up being one of those kids who doesn't figure out how to do it until they're like, eleven or twelve months old. Oh, I know, I shouldn't be comparing Milo to other babies, they all have their rate of development that doesn't typically mean anything in terms of their future physical and intellectual capabilities, blah de blah de blah blah blah.

It's not like I think he's a slow learner or anything (I tell myself over and over again as the ghosts of ingested substances past come back to haunt me). It's just that I've seen lots of babies his age or younger that are doing things -- cool things, nifty things, things that are engineered to bring tears of pride to a parent's eye -- that Milo hasn't yet shown any interest in learning. And I'm just so freakin' excited to see him do these things.

Yesterday, for example, when I was at the local parent & baby drop-in class, a little girl just two days older than Milo was clapping on command -- and the command was being issued in Hebrew, no less.

I'm not even sure that Milo is able to recognize his own name yet, let alone comprehend directives being issued in a foreign language. Sure, he sometimes looks up at me after I've said "Miiiiilo! Miiiiilo!" several times in a sing-song chant, but I rather suspect I could recite the day's news headlines and get the same rate of response.

And when I try to show him how to clap, he blinks and looks at me like I'm clinically insane. "Why are you making that sharp cracking noise right in front of my face, boob lady? I like not the harsh sound of it. Cease it at once!"

Of course, we are making progress in other areas. I recently started keeping Milo awake longer in the mornings in an effort to get him down to two naps a day instead of three. I know, I should have done this months ago. *I* was the reason for the boy's slow development in this instance -- I just thought he'd be more obvious about no longer needing to go down so early. You know, I figured he'd say something like, "No thanks, mumsy-wumsy, I'd rather sit here and play with my toys" instead of continuing to get all cranky and impatient like he always does when he's tired.

Well. After a few days of keeping him up an extra hour or so and then putting him down, his naps are now well over an hour long. Take this morning, for example. I put him down at 10:15 and it's now 11:42. Gasp! This, coming from the 45-minute catnapper, is nothing short of a miracle.

The whole "solid food experiment" seems to be coming along quite well, too. Milo has made the transition from eating random assortments of mush to eating something that more closely resembles "real" food. He likes chopped-up fruit -- cantelope, kiwi, and banana -- in his oatmeal. He really digs overcooked fish & pea "stew." Chicken rice soup has been a big hit, too.

It's weird... Before we started feeding him solids, I thought I'd be sad to no longer be his sole source of nourishment. But when he's sitting in his high chair, kicking his legs and making little whimpering sounds as he strains to bring his open mouth closer to the spoonful of food I'm holding, I feel more than ever like a mama bird feed her chick.

And just like all mama birds, I'm eager to see my baby fly with his own two wings. Yet the thought of kicking him out of the nest fills me with utter horror.

So it goes... the further he gets from me, the louder I cheer, and yet the more tightly I want to clasp him to my chest. And that's why, I suppose, Rob and I had such goofy grins on our faces when Milo held up his arms in order to be picked up. Here's hoping he keeps on wanting us to pick him up for many more years to come.

Milo, meet peas

2006-02-06T21:14:00.000-08:00

Peas, meet Milo.

...Pea green is a pretty good colour on him, don't you think?

Funniest baby video EVER

2006-02-03T12:43:00.000-08:00

Seriously. You've got to check this out.

If Milo learns to walk like that, he'd soon find himself an orphan. Because I would LITERALLY die laughing watching him do it.

Milo in the moment

2006-01-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

Milo just turned seven months old last week. He cut his first tooth the very same day.

Yes, that's right. He has a tooth, people. A tooth. A razor-sharp little cutting tool poking up from his gum. I'm simultaneously proud and horrified. Proud, because my little boy is growing up. Horrified, because my little boy is growing up. Natch.

In other new developments, Milo has finally figured out how to bring his toes, those beloved objects of desire that until last week seemed to be so far beyond his reach, up to his mouth to suck on them. At last! Victory is his!

And yesterday, for the first time ever, he rolled over from his belly to his back. We'll see how long it takes for him to repeat this mind-defying feat.

He's recently become obsessed with our dog, Nell, and shrieks with delight whenever she enters the room. When he's on the couch with me, he'll keep his eyes glued to the far edge of the family room table as he waits to catch a glimpse of her lying on her dog bed on the floor beyond the table. He knows she's there. He can hear her deep doggy breathing. When she finally does lift her head off the bed to look over at us, he shouts with laughter, his entire body shuddering with glee.

He's now able to sit up by himself and play with a toy for long stretches of time. He reaches for things and passes them easily from hand to hand, examining them curiously from all angles before stuffing them into his mouth to discover what they're really like.

He's also stuffing his mouth with some actual edible items these days. His favourites are peas, bananas, and oatmeal, but he also likes rice cereal, carrots, split mung beans, and sweet potato. Barley cereal is considered tolerable, but only when mixed with something tastier, like peas. Avocados are NOT considered even remotely edible, and should not be brought within a five-foot radius of Milo for any reason -- except for making mama giggle, of course. (I've discovered that there's a direct inverse relationship between Milo's fondness for a particular food item and the extent to which I enjoy seeing the facial expression he makes upon tasting it. I'm trying really hard to refrain from sadistically manipulating him for my own amusement, but sometimes it's difficult.)

Speaking of food, I'm overjoyed to announce that Milo no longer needs his 11:00 p.m. "dream feed." He's now sleeping from around 7:30 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. without waking for a boob fix. This means that I no longer have to stay awake until 11:00 p.m. every night. For the first time since I got pregnant, I've actually been able to sleep for eight unbroken hours at a stretch. And the heavens opened and choirs of angels sang...

(The downside to my liberated evenings is that I haven't been compelled to blog quite as often these days. Sorry folks, but when my choices are: A. going to bed early with my man or B. staying up late in front of a computer, option A definitely strikes me as the sexier of the two options -- as much for the extra sleep as for any other possible bedroom activities, alas.)

We've even launched Milo down the slippery slope of scheduled activities by signing him up for swimming lessons. First infant swimming... then baby sign language... then Mother Goose story time at the library. Next thing you know, he's going to be learning karate while playing baseball at violin practice, all the while performing sleight-of-hand magic tricks while riding on a unicycle.

Okay, so babies don't come with an off switch. I've been forced to acknowledge the truth of this. But wouldn't it be nice if they had some kind of toggle switch that allowed us to vary the speed at which they grow up?

It feels to me like Milo was shot from a cannon seven months ago and has been hurtling down the baby Autobahn at a gazillion miles an hour ever since.

It's all happening way too fast.

Could someone please tell me where the off ramp for the scenic route is? Please? Now that my mat leave is more than half over (NOOOO!), I'd like the following five months to meander along as slowly as humanly possible. The windier the route, the better. I know we'll get to our destination eventually -- I'm just not willing to hurry the journey. I don't want to miss a single moment of it.

He like to move it, move it

2006-01-14T08:50:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure that Milo thinks he's a lemur. A lemur on crack, that is.

Whenever I change him these days, as soon as I get his pants off (a difficult feat made even more challenging by the fact that he likes to rapidly kick and cycle his legs as if he's trying to do the back stroke across the changing mat), he grabs on to my nearest arm with both hands and pulls it down to him so he can chew on my sleeve. Then he proceeds to wrap both his arms and legs around my arm and cling to it like a marsupial hanging from a tree branch. He gets the most hilarious expression on his face when he's doing this, as if he's thinking, "Ah-ha! Victory is mine! Now, if only I open my mouth wide enough, I'm positive I can swallow this entire branch in one go, orange cotton leaves and all..."

Admittedly, he looks pretty darned adorable when he's doing this. However, with one arm basically out of commission, I do find it a lot more difficult to finish the job of changing him. What with the boy's mind-bending strength and incessant penchant for wiggling, what should be a simple two-minute job can stretch upwards of fifteen minutes these days. Good thing I don't have anything better to do.

Truth be told, playing with Milo on the change table is one of my favourite things to do. Unless, of course, I'm trying to get him ready to go out and we're in a hurry. Then it's torture. Or an exercise in patience, which usually amounts to the same thing.

I'm just glad the boy didn't come with a prehensile tail... Otherwise, he'd spend all day swinging off the rafters butt-nekkid. And that could make for a rather messy situation.

Milo's First Christmas (1)

2006-01-05T17:26:00.000-08:00

Here's a brief recap of what we did during the holiday season. Enjoy! We sure did...

On December 23rd, we stopped by Milo's Great-Nana's place to drop off some presents and enjoy a cup of tea. Milo and Nana had lots of fun checking each other out.

Then it was off to my folks' place, where we stayed from the 23rd until Boxing Day (the 26th, for all you non-Boxing-Day-celebrating cretins out there. I mean, really -- who in their right mind would say no to an extra paid holiday?)

And YES, we did make Milo wear his Santa suit as often as possible over the holidays. Hey, it cost me a whole $16!!! I had to make the most of it.

Christmas Eve was a special day -- Milo had his first taste of solid food!

We gave him organic brown rice cereal for his first meal. He seemed to like it just fine, though half of it ended up on his bib. That was mostly my fault -- trying to stick a spoonful of food into the mouth of a wriggling baby proved to be about as easy as threading a needle while drunk on a roller coaster.

Christmas morning rocked, of course. Not only was it the Big Day, it also happened to be Milo's six-month birthday! As freaky as it is to believe, he's actually a full half-year old now.

The lucky boy had not one, but two stockings waiting for him on the hearth. Apparently Santa thought he was twice as good as all the other little boys and girls. I guess the ol' geezer wasn't aware of the many times Milo has pulled his mama's hair or waited until his diaper's off before letting loose with the firehose.

Not surprisingly, Milo's parents and grandparents tended to be more impressed with his presents than he was. (Give him a year or two...) However, there was one toy that definitely caught his attention.

Thanks to our new friend, Shinosaurus Rex, the poor kid's probably going to have dinosaur stalker nightmares for years to come. The fact that Rex plays Mozart tunes will only serve to heighten the horror, I'm guessing.

CONT'D...

Milo's First Christmas (2)

2006-01-05T17:23:00.000-08:00

The perennial BC coastal winter rains gave us a break in the afternoon on Christmas Day, so Rob, Milo and I took Nell dog on a walk around the park right behind my parents' house.

Milo's sporting one of his new Christmas presents in the photo; apparently, my mother and I share the same love of goofy hats for babies.

After a quick overnight pit stop at our place on Boxing Day, we packed up our bags again and headed to Rob's folks' place on Vancouver Island.

Milo had a great time on the ferry. He was fascinated by everything he saw -- the other passengers, the designs on the seat cushions, the other little children playing in the kids' area, even the raindrops streaming across the window beside us.

At least one of us was able to derive some enjoyment from the rain...

Milo's Gramma and Poppa were very happy to see him.

Make that, **REALLY** happy to see him.

And of course, Milo was a perfect angel the entire time we were there.

CONT'D...

Milo's First Christmas (3)

2006-01-05T17:22:00.000-08:00

While staying at Rob's folks' place, we took advantage of a break in the rain to take a walk through Miracle Beach Provincial Park, which is right up the beach from where they live.

Unfortunately, we forgot to bring the Baby Trekker, so Milo had to go off-roading in a stroller.

We spent the rest of our time there mostly just hanging out and looking good.

CONT'D...

Milo's First Christmas (4)

2006-01-05T17:21:00.000-08:00

On December 30th, we left Miracle Beach and went to Hornby Island, to visit with our friend Cari, who runs a bed and breakfast there together with her son, Kaie. She'd shut down the B&B for the holidays and invited a whole bunch of her friends to come hang out for the holidays.

We joined up with our friends Tallulah and Chloe at the Buckley Bay ferry terminal. Chloe was really happy to get to the B&B and roast some marshmallows in the open fireplace...

... and hang out with her friend, Kaie, who she hadn't seen in a while.

On New Year's Eve, we all went for a walk down to the beach. It wasn't raining, but was extremely windy and cold.

Did I mention it was cold?

Despite the weather, some of us still decided to pay homage to baby Jesus by imitating his "walking on water" trick.

CONT'D...

Milo's First Christmas (5)

2006-01-05T17:20:00.000-08:00

Milo was absolutely fascinated with the big kids, which helped when it came to feeding him. At least when he was staring at Kaie or Chloe, his mouth would usually remain relatively stationary and I wouldn't end up painting his eyebrows with rice cereal.

Milo was a very good boy and went to bed nice and early on New Year's Eve.

The rest of us, of course, stayed up partying. After we'd counted down the old year and cheered in the new, the big kids went outside and played with giant sparklers.

The next morning, Milo was the first one awake. Of course he was.

We took the 11:00 ferry from Hornby, just to make sure we'd make the 3:00 boat from Nanaimo. Milo played cutsey with the girls in the backseat for most of the trip.

All in all, we were amazed at how great he was, being carted around from place to place like that. Still, there was no denying how excited he was to find himself back at home that evening. He sat in his bouncy chair for what seemed like hours, squealing with delight at the familiar surroundings.

And of course, he was most especially excited to become reacquainted with the giant glowing boobie.

The kid's like his Dad, I tell you. He's got a one-track mind.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that 2006 has fabulous things in store for each and every one of you.

Milo and The Man

2005-12-25T15:47:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, everyone! And if you don't celebrate Christmas, have a happy holiday, a humdinger of a Hanukkah, a merry winter, a super season, a cool Kwanzaa, and fabulous Festivus.

Feel the love, y'all!

Would you like some eggs to go with that ham?

2005-12-23T09:22:00.000-08:00

Milo has discovered the joys of goofy expressions, thanks in part to Rob's dad...

I can already tell he's going to be a HUGE hit with the girls in high school...

The Pirate's Hit the Big Time!

2005-12-22T08:50:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Laycock, editor of Search Engine Guide, has mentioned Dread Pirate Robert in an article about her "The Lactivist.com" 30-day money-making blog experiment. She says nice things about him, too!

Three cheers -- I mean, three "Avast, ye scurvy dogs!" for the Pirate!

I'm the new "it" girl -- it's true!

2005-12-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

So there I was, strolling through the blogosphere, dum de dum dum, don't mind me, when all of a sudden Ms. Mama snuck up behind me and whacked me upside the head, shouting, "Tag! You're it!"

Okay... it didn't pan out quite that way. But tagged I am, nonethless. And I feel compelled to follow through with it, otherwise I just know I'll get seven years' bad luck or the guy who I have a crush on will never ever like me back.

Here goes...

Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot.

1. Running2Ks
2. Queen of Spain
3. Becky
4. Ms. Mama
5. The Diaper Pail

(Okee dokee... that wasn't too hard.)

Then select five people to tag.
1. Dread Pirate Robert
2. Laurie
3. Daddy L
4. Dak-Ind
5. William

(Heh heh heh... passing the buck! And now with the questions...)

What were you doing 10 years ago?

I was working as an English teacher in Japan. I'd been living there for four months and was suffering my first real bout of culture shock. I couldn't get over how the Japanese just plain did everything WRONG -- from refusing to obey any kind of traffic rules while walking on the sidewalk (just pick a side and STICK WITH IT, PEOPLE!!!), to standing uncomfortably close to me while in elevators or waiting to cross the street, to insisting on having the windows kept open in classrooms during the winter in schools that DIDN'T HAVE CENTRAL HEATING. (They said it was character-building; I said it was torture.)

(Needless to say, I began to find Japan much more bearable -- and I'm sure the Japanese found me much more bearable -- when I finally realized that it was ME who was doing everything wrong. When in Rome and all that...)

Ten years ago to the day, I was actually in Indonesia, taking a much-needed holiday from Japan. It was the first real trip to a foreign country I'd ever taken (I was so thoroughly chaperoned in Japan that I never really felt unsupervised -- I knew that if I was ever in danger of falling down and going boom, there'd be someone there to catch me. Japan: a lovely country, provided you're not going through culture shock.)

My friend Amrit and I had a marvellous time in Indonesia. After freezing my ass off in non-central-heated-character-building Japan for the past couple of months, I was delighted to be somewhere warm. And I had the best coffee I'd ever had in my life while there--served piping hot every morning, accompanied by a plate of fresh fruit. Mmm...

We went to the islands of Bali and Lombok. I remember Bali as being a land of bright floppy flowers and innumberable stone statues of all the local dieties, peeking out through the greenery. Lombok was a little more subdued, but we enjoyed it more because it was further off the beaten track. We had an especially entertaining time one night when a couple of island boys took us on their motorbikes to an old Dutch colonial plantation house on a hill overlooking jungle and coffee farms and we spent the evening there drinking moonshine made from rice alcohol and staring at the stars.

What were you doing one year ago?

Eating a fried egg on whole-grain toast. Perhaps two fried eggs on whole-grain toast. And when I wasn't eating fried eggs on whole-grain toast, I was wandering around in an exhausted, first-trimester daze saying to myself, "Holy SH*T! I'm pregnant!"

Five snacks you enjoy
1. Fried eggs on toast -- still to this day
2. Samosas with tamarind chutney
3. Spring rolls
4. Antipasto on Triscuits
5. Sweet, dark cream ale (it is TOO a snack!)

Five songs to which you know all the lyrics
1. "Dreaming" by Blondie
2. Anything from Pink Floyd's "The Wall"
3. "Buenos Tardes" by Ween
4. "Love on the Rocks" by Neil Diamond
5. "Rainbow Connection" by Kermit the Frog

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire
1. Party!
2. Party!
3. Party!
4. Give generously to deserving charities
5. Party!

Five bad habits
1. Overusing exclamation marks!!!!!
2. Eating WAY, WAY, WAY past the point of being full
3. Reading a trashy novel in the bath when I KNOW I should be cleaning the house or cooking dinner or starting up my own home business or doing any of those other things that nicer, better, more dedicated people do with their free time.
4. Drinking orange juice straight out of the container
5. Forgetting to put on one of the two lovely watches my husband bought for me and then spending the rest of the day repeatedly asking him to tell me what time it is.

Five things you like doing
1. Writing
2. Hot tubbing
3. Walking in the woods
4. Swimming in mountain lakes
5. Starting the day off right with a hippy speedball

Five things you would never wear, buy or get new again
1. Leg warmers
2. A leopard-print string bikini (Okay, I was 16 and had terrible judgment, people -- though I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse)
3. A V-necked shirt worn backwards
4. A thin leather tie
5. A nose piercing

Five favorite toys
1. Milo
2. Rob
3. My computer
4. My bicycle
5. Rob's iPod

There! Done! Time for someone else to be the new "it" girl or boy.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Yes, Milo, there IS a Santa Claus

2005-12-15T20:58:00.000-08:00

He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.

PLUS, he just bought us a brand new Nikon Coolpix S4 camera, so we could take lots and lots and lots of pictures of your very first Christmas. Score!!!

I'm thinking that Santa is going to find something more than milk and cookies when he comes to visit this Christmas Eve. The jolly old geezer might even get lucky.

Elf Boy is in the house

2005-12-14T20:52:00.000-08:00

My little Mowgli

2005-12-13T10:32:00.000-08:00

As you can see in my profile, my last name is Whalen -- a fine old Irish family name that is a modern variant of O'Faolain, which once upon a time meant, "of the wolf clan."

I only found this out a couple years ago, but it made perfect sense to me. Finally, I had an explanation for all those werewolf dreams I had as a young teenager -- dreams in which I was the wolf, running through the woods and hunting down my victims. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, if Freud were still alive he would no doubt chalk it up to unrealized sexual longing or some such thing. Stupid Freud.) It also explains why my family likes dogs so much, and why my brother and I both could be described as loners who nonetheless enjoy traveling in packs.

In keeping with my canine heritage, a couple years ago I convinced Rob that we had to adopt our downstairs neighbour's dog, Nell. The neighbour was moving to a new place and couldn't bring Nell with him. It didn't take that much convincing; Nell was practically our dog anyways.

Our neighbour loved animals and had a kind heart but wasn't home a lot of the time. Since he also had three cats (one of which was blind, another missing a leg, and the third afflicted with a serious drooling problem), he usually left Nell out on the back porch when he was gone from the house. We took pity on her one day when she was outside shivering and let her inside to hang out with us.

And so it began. Once that envelope was opened, Nell, starved for companionship, had no intention of letting it close again. She started spending as much time as she could upstairs with us, insinuating herself into our home and hearts.

Part Labrador, part Staffordshire terrier (i.e., one of the four distinct breeds commonly called "pit bulls"), Nell was a pound dog who wasn't at all socialized when our neighbour rescued her from certain doom. He soon discovered that she was extremely dog aggressive and frightened of strangers. Our guess is that she was an abused "puppy farm" dog, and was trained to fight any dog she saw from an early age, before she ended up at the SPCA.

Of course, a large, muscle-bound dog that's frightened of people tends to display that fear in the form of growling and teeth-baring, so Nell often made people just as frightened of her as she was of them. (She freaked the holy bejeezus out of my mother AND my mother-in-law, but those are stories for another time.)

Over time, however, as she spent more and more time upstairs with us, she gradually learned to trust people and see them as sources of food and affection. It was a fascinating process to observe; whenever we had friends over, she'd stand at the entrance to the living room and watch us, clearly wanting to come in and join us, but reluctant to move away from her escape route. If someone startled her by getting up too suddenly from a couch or chair, she'd quickly bolt downstairs to safety. Whenever she misbehaved by growling or baring her teeth at someone, we'd boot her back outside. A number of our friends have children, and we knew that if Nell were to continue to spend time in our home, we'd have to adopt a no-tolerance attitude to any sign of hostility on her part.

It didn't take her long to realize that whenever she acted aggressively she was deprived of warmth, food, and attention, and so she learned to behave herself better around new people.

The fact that every single person who entered our house was encouraged to give her a dog biscuit certainly helped. Soon she was as excited to meet a new stranger as she was to greet us when we returned home from work.

So yeah, when we heard that our downstairs neighbour was moving and needing to find a new home for Nell, we told him she already had a home -- with us. And she's been with us ever since.

We have been amazed and overjoyed to see how far she's come over the past few years. People who used to be terrified of her now love her to bits. She's a really good dog for the most part -- doesn't steal food or chew up our possessions -- and she's simply awesome with all of our friends' kids, who fight over the privilege of feeding her dog treats and getting her to do tricks. Really, if it weren't for her unfortunate tendency to pick a fight with every dog she sees, she would be the perfect dog.

And yet, when I found out I was pregnant, Nell very quickly became my primary source of anxiety. How would she react to the baby? Would she become jealous or hostile? Would she (god forbid) harm the baby?

I read every single thing I could find about dogs and babies, and I have to say, nothing reassured me very much. All the baby experts and dog experts said that anything could happen, no matter how gentle the dog, and stressed the importance of NEVER LEAVING THE DOG ALONE WITH THE BABY FOR EVEN A SPLIT NANOSECOND.

As you can guess, this did nothing to ease my worries. Especially when I read things like, "Be especially vigilant if your dog enjoys chasing small animals, such as squirrels."

Nell absolutely LIVES for chasing squirrels. It's her sole reason for being (well, that and tummy rubs). All of a sudden my pregnant brain was filled with images of Nell chasing a wee baby up a tree, and leaping up at the trunk until the boughs of the tree broke and down came baby, cradle and all. I started envisioning her using the baby as a chew toy, or taking it out into the grassy area between our house and the one next door and burying it in the dirt, like she would a bone.

Okay, so my imagination was doing overtime. What can I say? I was pregnant.

I knew that if Nell ever got aggressive around the baby, that'd be it for her. She'd be gone from this house the very same day. I steeled myself for that possibility, even as I prayed it'd never happen. I absolutely love Nell and am so happy to see what a great dog she has become, but if she ever hurt my baby I'd kill her with my own bare hands.

Thankfully, she has been an absolute DREAM with Milo. I'm not sure if it's because she's female or not, but she has adopted a protective, almost maternal stance towards him. When he was first born, she would come and stand beside us whenever I breastfed him. If he's crying and I'm in another room, she comes and stands in the doorway until I get up, and then she leads me right to where Milo is crying. She frequently licks him on the face and hands, and I swear it's because she likes him, not just because she thinks he's delicious (although she seems to find some of his bodily fluids to be more palatable than I really wish she would).

In the past few weeks, Milo has become fascinated with Nell as well. He'll stare at her, transfixed, whenever he catches sight of her. And when I call her over for some petting, he reaches out toward her. I always move him closer to her, so he can touch her fur and so she can get used to him grabbing for her. ('Cause I know it's going to be a whole other ballgame once he becomes independently mobile and can chase after her.)

Yesterday, while Milo and I were playing, Nell was beside us, clearly wanting a belly rub. Deciding to combine some Nell time with some quality tummy time, I put Milo down on Nell's dog bed with his face right up against her belly, while I scritched her chest. Milo lay there for several moments and I sat there beside him, congratulating myself yet again on finding another way to maximize his tummy time, when all of a sudden I heard a familiar sucking noise.

Yep. You guessed it. Milo was apparently trying to suckle Nell. Whoops. That was probably taking this whole "dog+baby=happy family" thing just a wee bit too far.

I grabbed Milo and lifted him off Nell just as she was turning, startled, to see exactly what the hell he was doing to her. I'm really glad they both seem to like each other so much, but I'd rather she wasn't his wet nurse.

Nell checking out Milo when he was still just a week and a half old.

Unngh... I hab a code

2005-12-12T12:43:00.000-08:00

Will he catch it or won't he?
Time to see what Milo's immune system is made of...

It's the first cold I've had since I was pregnant. Rob came home with it on Thursday and very kindly gave it to me while we were out partying on Friday night. And this, after I'd been bragging to my parents that afternoon about how Rob ALWAYS gets colds and I BARELY EVER do. Grumble grumble... it never pays to brag about good health.

Usually when I catch a bug, the moment I feel that first tickle in my throat I call in sick to work and spend the next 24 hours sleeping as much as possible, waking only to suck on a zinc lozenge and drink a cup of hot ginger tea. After a day of living in snooze mode and letting my body use all of its available resources to combat the bug, I always feel much better and usually have the bug out of my system within the next day or two.

However, things have been different this time around. Instead of lying in bed all day Saturday, I had to get up and take care of Milo, after having just five and a half hours of seriously broken sleep. Ditto on Sunday, though I was at least operating on a bit more sleep.

And to make matters worse, the lack of sleep and ridiculously low energy levels have made it impossible for me to get up to do my daily yoga routine the past couple of mornings. No yoga = even less energy, so I feel like I'm caught in a downward spiral and won't be able to feel truly healthy again until I'm able to get a full twelve hours' sleep. Or Milo starts kindergarten. Whichever comes first.

Hmm. I knew babies were demanding little sinkholes that devoured all your time and energy (not to mention money), but who woulda thunk they were actually bad for your health?

Come to think of it, I suppose that makes Milo no different from any of the other addictive substances I've been hooked on over the years...

'Tis the season to go drinking, fa la la la laaaa la la la la

2005-12-11T11:44:00.000-08:00

The Pirate and the Dame, all primped and prepped for their night on the town. Please note the lack of spit-up on our clothes and the ol' ball and chain bouncing away in the background...

Friday night was our company Christmas party. And by "our," I mean Rob's AND mine. Since mid-November, he's been working at the same company I work for**. Doing the same job I do. Drinking from my coffee cup, surrounded by all my office cubicle art. Nepotistic? Yep! Verging on incestuous? Sure is!

My parents came over to babysit Milo while we went out and tripped the light fantastic. It was the first time that anyone other than me or Rob was to put him to bed. I was just a wee bit nervous, seeing as how Milo hadn't been very happy the last couple of times Rob has tried to feed him with a bottle -- and Friday's babysitting duties involved giving Milo not one but TWO bottles, his all-important pre-bedtime feed at 7:00 and his dream feed at 11:00.

I wasn't nervous enough to consider not going to the party, however. Nuh uh. Mama needed to go out and play. With her man, for a change.

Thankfully, my parents acquired lots of babysitting experience while taking care of Milo's little cousin Nadia back in the late summer-early fall, so they now think of themselves as total pros. I knew they wouldn't call us to interrupt our evening unless, say, Milo sucked back a bottle of liquid Drano and had to be rushed to emergency. Even then, I'm not sure they would have called us unless they were positive they wouldn't be able to get back from the hospital before we came home from the party.

So yeah, I was feeling pretty good about going out, since Milo was being left in capable hands. So good, in fact, that I rushed out the door with Rob to catch the bus downtown without even saying goodbye to my baby. Does that make me a bad mother? Hmm.

(We called my parents from the bus about 10 minutes after we'd left the house, to ask if Milo was still okay. They laughed at us.)

The party was held at the Vancouver Aquarium, which was a truly awesome place to throw a party (the whole "whales in captivity" controversy aside). After all, who needs decorations when the walls are filled with fishies?

I spent a fair amount of time trying to get the sharks and piranhas to notice me. They just played hard to get; must be a "top-of-the-food-chain" sort of thing. The giant flounder, on the other hand, was a total attention whore.

The food was good. The company was great. And the dancing was absolutely fabulous. Even Rob got into it, and that boy really knows how to shake his booty when he feels like it.

It was the first time since Milo was born that I danced without a baby in my arms. I barely knew what to do with myself -- I just felt so darned light.

And you know what? I only missed him a wee little bit.

It's not that he wasn't on my mind all night. On the contrary; he rarely left my thoughts. For the first time, however, thinking about him while out didn't make me anxious or want to run home to hug him tightly in my arms. It actually made me want to party harder, to celebrate his existence by pouring another glass of wine and clinking glasses with Rob to toast our incredible fortune at having been gifted with such a wonderful baby. And, of course, for having survived the past five and a half months of "Boot Camp for Parents."

We finally stumbled through the front door just before 2:00 a.m. My mom woke up just enough to tell us that Milo had been an absolute dream. He'd sucked back both bottles of milk and gone to bed without a fuss. Apparently, he hadn't noticed our absence at all.

It occurred to me that I could choose to feel slightly hurt by his lack of need for me, but I quickly shooed that thought away. The more independent he is, the better. After all, isn't the whole point of parenting to raise self-sufficient children who can lead personally rewarding lives and hopefully in the process make the world a better place? Of course it is.

However, I'm not quite ready to be rendered obsolete just yet, thank you very much.

Not that I have to worry about that. Milo woke up at 4:30 that morning, just a few short hours after we'd gone to sleep. Then he woke up at 5:00... and again at 5:15. He refused to fall asleep until I personally went into his room to give him his soother and shush him back to sleep. As soon as he saw me, he gave a little shriek and wiggled with delight, then was asleep ten seconds later. Clearly the boy still has some need for his mommy.

Needless to say, the rest of the weekend was payback for the great time we had on Friday night. I spent most of it fighting to keep my eyes open as I tried to recover from the lack of sleep. I'm so tired right now that I'm yawning as I type this and am actually TOO TIRED to expend the effort necessary to get off my chair and go to the bathroom to take out my contacts and brush my teeth so I can finally go to bed (until I give Milo his dream feed an hour from now).

So, yeah. Independence, when it comes, will be a good thing. Only then am I sure to be guaranteed a full eight hours' sleep.

**Of course, I'm not working at the moment, seeing as how I'm still on maternity leave and will be until sometime next summer. Canada: it might not be the land of the brave and free, but it IS the land of kick-ass one-year mat leave.

So many Milos, never to be seen again

2005-12-08T21:07:00.000-08:00

We've lost our digital camera. Dear lord, we're parenting blind. We've gone DAYS without taking a picture of Milo -- days and days and days. Rob's going into withdrawal. He's developed a permanent twitch. It's not pretty.

We've torn the house upside down, looking everywhere for the silly thing, so far without any luck. Meanwhile, Milo keeps on getting older. And older. My god, he's almost five and a half months old -- and we haven't taken a picture of him since he was just over four months old. Garrgh! Over 20% of his life has gone undocumented and will forever be lost in the foggy haze of unrecorded history. For if we can't provide physical evidence of it, how will we ever be able to prove it really happened?

We weren't able to take a picture of his first ride in the jolly jumper. We haven't yet captured any images of him doing his modified version of the bow pose during tummy time. And we have no video of him babbling his first string consonants ("Da da da da da da da!").

Do you SEE what kind of crisis we're dealing with here???

Thank goodness Christmas is right around the corner. Here's hoping that Santa has us on his "nice" list...

A rare photo taken of the elusive pumpkin-pelted Milo Man, taken with his Gramma's camera

Lookee here!

2005-12-07T22:31:00.000-08:00

I done got me a new look!

Okay, so it's not the most professional blog out there. I must admit to knowing sweet diddly about HTML or web design. But I promised you a DIAPER PAIL, dammit, not a rose garden. Or a well-designed blog, for that matter.

I must give kudos to my wonderful Pirate for having helped me so much with this redesign. He found the three-column template online and helped me make the switch; he also figured out how the hell to add graphics to the title bar. You'd think it'd be easy... but you'd be wrong.

We'll be continuing to work on the look of this blog over the next weeks and months. If any of you gentle readers have any thoughts on design or suggestions you'd like to share, please do! I'm learning as I go and would greatly benefit from your no-doubt superior wisdom.

For example, I'd really like to know how to make this body font smaller. I figured out how to change the size of the header font, the sidebar font, even the "leave a comment" font. But do you think I could figure out how to change the size of THIS font? This font RIGHT HERE? Noooooooo. Suggestions, anyone?

In the meantime, I'm off to bed. I've been messing around with this blog for hours now and my eyes are crossing.

Sweet dreams, all.

p.s. Milo is still ridiculously adorable, exhausting, mind-blowing, brilliant, infuriating, and cute.

I'm alive!

2005-12-07T10:52:00.000-08:00

Not dead!

At least, as not-dead as someone whose thankless ingrate of a child has decided it'd be fun to start waking up again in the middle of the night to the tune of five wake-ups between 11 p.m. and six o'clock in the morning can be.

(Is he teething? Maybe. Is he being awakened by long bone growth pains in his legs? Quite possibly. Is he actually the Anti-Christ cutting his evil fangs on his poor unsuspecting parents? I wouldn't bet against it.)

I'm actually currently working on a new template for this blog and will hopefully have it up in the next day or two. (Milo the A-C willing...)

Stay tuned!

The #1 argument in favour of teen pregnancy**

2005-11-30T09:55:00.000-08:00

A few Sundays ago, we went out to dinner with Rob's family to celebrate his Nana's 90th birthday.

Needless to say, Milo was the life of the party. He's Rob's parents' first grandchild, and they are stupid-drunk in love with him. They passed him back and forth between them all night, walking around the restaurant whenever he got the least bit restless and introducing him to the other diners. By the time we left, I think everyone in the entire restaurant knew his name.

Nana was pretty good about being upstaged by her great-grandson at her own party. She was thrilled to be surrounded by three generations of her descendants. As I sat there beside her, I couldn't help but feel a twinge of envy. Chances are slim that I'll ever know any of my grandchild's children (assuming, of course, that Milo will one day decide to put those family jewels of his to some use other than diaper soiling).

Like so many other women these days, I waited until I was in my mid-30s to have my first child. I certainly don't regret that decision. I was WAAAY too immature in my 20s to even think of having kids. There's no way I would have been able to take care of a baby -- I could barely take care of myself. (Seriously. I once spent two years surviving almost entirely on food from the local 7-11. Granted, this was in Japan, where convenience store food puts most North American grocery store offerings to shame, but still. I think most of the vegetables I ate during that time came in dehydrated soup broth packets. And let's not even talk about the times when I showed up for work wearing clothes I'd gone to sleep in.)

Thankfully, the scant amount of wisdom I actually did manage to acquire by my mid-20s made it glaringly clear to me that I had a lot of growing up to do before I could even consider taking on the responsibility of having a baby. And that was a good thing. In the process of doing all that growing up, I got a Masters in English, I worked abroad for several years, and I traveled to a handful of different countries in Asia. I learned a lot about different cultures and different people; but I learned far more about myself.

I cherish all those different experiences. Without them, I know I could never have been a good mother to Milo. And honestly, I'm glad I wasn't in a hurry to grow up. By the time I was ready to start a family, I had really gotten a lot of sh*t out of my system. I had become bored with doing the same old things with the same old people night after night. Don't get me wrong -- I love my friends to death. But it had begun to seem to me like we were always doing the same things, having the same conversations, and nothing ever changed. And that's how I knew I was definitely ready to evolve.

So here I am, a 35-year old woman (who still feels like she's playing at being an adult) with a five-month old baby boy, and I really couldn't be happier. I feel like I became a mother at precisely the right time in my life.

And yet, when I think of Rob's Nana (or his other Gramma, who also has a small posse of great-grandchildren to her credit), I can't help but feel a bit wistful. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to watch Milo grow up and someday have children of his own. But it's unlikely I'll ever know their children. That's the price you pay, I guess, when you spend too much of your own life being a child -- you miss out on the childhoods of your descendants.

However, the upside to all this is the fact that Rob and I made our parents wait SO long for a grandchild that they're now doing backflips to see him and are willing and eager to come babysit for us at the drop of a dirty diaper. So there's a silver lining in every cloud, I guess.

** I do not mean to suggest by this title that either of Rob's grandmothers were teenaged mothers. It's actually meant to refer to MY descendants -- for only if Milo knocks up his high school girlfriend or one of his kids is a teenaged parent will I ever get to meet my future great-grandchild...

Keeping up with the Junior Joneses

2005-11-27T20:29:00.000-08:00

I was enjoying a post-workout coffee with the women from my Stroller Fit aerobics class the other day, when one of the mothers asked me if Milo had started sucking his toes yet.

I shook my head, alarmed. "No. Not at all."

I searched the other woman's eyes for the slightest hint of surprise at my negative response. Her son is just a couple of weeks older than mine. And he sucks his toes.

How long had he been sucking his toes? I wondered but did not ask. Was toe-sucking one of those developmental milestones that all babies were supposed to reach by the time they hit a certain age? Was Milo close to that age -- or had he already passed it?

I always vowed I wouldn't do this.

Of course all babies develop differently and acquire skills at their own individual pace. Duh. That's so obvious. All babies are unique, and are interested in exploring different abilities according to their own experiences and natural inclinations. The fact that a baby learns to crawl at eight months instead of six months, say, or figures out how to talk at ten months but doesn't walk until the fifteen-month mark doesn't have any bearing whatsoever on his or her later physical or intellectual development. That's what all the books say, and therefore, it must be true.

Take a look at Einstein, for example. He didn't talk until he was three years old. But when he finally did start talking, he spoke in full sentences.

When I was pregnant, I promised my unborn child that I would never impose upon him or her the kind of horribly unrealistic expectations I tend to set for myself. I know what it's like to feel like a failure for not getting 100% on an exam. That's not something Milo ever needs to know.

At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

And yet, whenever I hear other mothers mention a skill their babies have acquired that Milo has yet to master, my chest tightens a wee bit. I can't help but worry why Milo hasn't learned that particular skill yet. What does it mean? How will it affect his future? And how am I to blame?

Is it because of my genes, or something I ingested back in my carefree days of youthful indiscretion? Or is it because of something I'm doing now?

Have I not been talking to Milo enough or playing with him enough? Am I not providing him with a suitably stimulating environment? Or am I simply expecting too much of him?

Yep. I suppose that'd be the one.

Sometimes I forget to relax and enjoy my baby for who he is now and get way too caught up in worrying about who he's going to become. Thankfully, those moments never last too long. Whenever I get lost in my fretful musings, Milo always pulls me back to the present with a squawk or a shriek or a coo. I look at him and he stares back at me, wide-eyed, sticking out his tongue or sucking furiously on his lower lip, and I just have to laugh.

After all, this isn't about me, here, it's about Milo. And Milo is simply perfect at being Milo. That's more than good enough for me.

The perfect presents for the kids on your naughty list

2005-11-25T15:30:00.000-08:00

Why go to the bother of trying to find coal in the barbecue off-season when the nice folks at W.A.T.C.H. have compiled a list of alternative stocking stuffer ideas for you?

Love me, mommy, love me -- or else I'll poke out your eye with my killer lipstick wand.

Though I must say, if those "kickaroos" thingamajiggies came in adult sizes, I might just have to buy me a pair. They look hysterical.

You'll never look at your neighbour in the same way again

2005-11-23T21:03:00.000-08:00

So today I decided to check out my blog stats and look up my top keywords, to see what kind of phrases people are plugging into the search engines to get to my blog.

The results were a bit disturbing. Here, gentle readers, is a sampling of the things people are searching for information about online when they accidentally end up in the Diaper Pail:

poopy adult diapers (eww -- ed.)
women going crazy at male strip joints (double eww -- ed.)
dippy diaper (And what exactly makes a diaper dippy? -- ed.)
ecstasy unable to pee (*giggle* -- ed.)
what kind of diapers does Angelina Jolie (Indeed. But shouldn't the question read, "What kind of diapers do Angelina Jolie?" -- ed.)
pail or shots to increase booty size (Because that's what the world needs: bigger booties -- ed.)
gay poop diaper (Of course, the poop only *thinks* it's gay -- ed.)
hot chicks in diapers ('Cause most hot chicks just LOVE wearing diapers and in fact can often be found lounging about in them in their chaises longues, with their high-heeled feet thrown casually over the arm rests -- ed.)
picture of a grown man in a diaper (And here we are back at eww -- ed.)

And, my personal favourite, the age-old stumper:

what makes Buddhists tick?

My thoughts exactly. What DOES make Buddhists tick? Something tells me it's probably not shots to increase booty size or pictures of a grown man in a diaper. Though you never really know, do you?

The #1 reason why the human race probably should have gone extinct a long time ago

2005-11-22T15:40:00.000-08:00

Those nights when your baby thinks it would be REALLY REALLY fun to wake up at 1:45 in the morning and then stay awake for no good reason at all for the next two hours.

That's what Milo decided to do in the wee dark hours of the morning when today had barely begun. He woke up and loudly started demanding my presence, so I stumbled into his room and gave him his soother. He spat it out. I gave him the boob. Wasn't interested. Nope. He wanted to play the "Peek a boo, look at me, check out how totally wide awake I am!" game. For. Two. Whole. Hours.

It's a darned good thing that babies have those ridiculously addictive laughs going for them; because if they didn't, and they continued to pull stunts like that, no one would ever, EVER have a second child. The world's population would be halved with each successive generation until there was only one person left and that person wouldn't have anyone to come running into his or her bedroom at 1:45 a.m. to provide free food and entertainment. And all those angry squawks and cries would be like so many trees falling in the forest without anyone to hear them, though not nearly so Zen.

Pointless middle-of-the-night wake-up calls: the stuff extinctions are made of.

Milo had BETTER let his mother get a good sleep tonight if he's ever hoping to get a little brother or sister...

The #1 reason why the human species has yet to become extinct

2005-11-21T20:53:00.000-08:00

Baby laughter. It's addictive -- especially when it's your own baby who's laughing. Most people will do almost anything for it. They'll drop serious craploads of money, make embarrassing faces, even dance and sing ridiculous songs in a high, off-key falsetto for it.

Yep. Baby laughter. It's the most intoxicating drug ever.

Think about it. What are you willing to do or pay for your highs? For example, would you sing and dance in public for a bottle of wine or a 24 of beer? I'm talking in front of total strangers here -- teenagers, intellectuals, old Italian men, restaurant servers, people in dark business suits, you name it. Or would you prefer to spend the $10-$20 and spare yourself the embarrassment?

Well, when it comes to hearing your baby laugh, you don't even notice those people watching as you gape, snort, chuckle and hop like a crazy person in order to score another hit. And if you did notice, you wouldn't even care.

This is how they suck you in -- and by "they," I mean, all our successive descendants. This how the human race has managed to regenerate itself. Compared to other species, we produce young that are pathetically ill-equipped to survive on their own. Baby chimps are able to hold on to their mother's fur from the moment they're born. Baby tigers start hunting on their own when they're under a year and a half old. And baby gazelles are practically born running.

But what can we do? We can't run. We can't fight. We can't even walk until we're almost a year old. Forget about learning how to feed ourselves -- most of us don't figure that out until we're in our twenties. And by then, most other species have spawned several more generations of themselves.

Not us. The only thing we humans have going for us, biologically speaking, is our enormous brains -- and even they're a liability when we're infants, because thanks to our huge noggins our skull bones aren't even fused when we're born. And those huge noggins are so top-heavy, they'd wobble right off our frail little newborn necks, if our parents didn't do everything in their power to prevent it.

In short, our parents have to do everything for us during the first few years of our life. They have to feed us, clean us, keep us warm, safe, and healthy, and carry us everywhere they go, thus sacrificing the use of at least one of their limbs for many hours on end. They basically have to give up the better part of their lives to ensure we survive.

And why are we as humans willing to do this for our young?

Baby laughter. It's the stuff that drives our evolution.

Somebody likes me!

2005-11-20T08:58:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to fellow blogger Elizabeth of This Full House, who named me Mommy Blogger of the Week for this past week! Huzzah! Huzzah! I'm very honoured.

See? See? And I didn't pay her or anything!
At least, if I DID pay her some undisclosed sum, I'm going to keep my trap shut about it.

I think I'm going to take a screen cap of her site and blow it up to poster size and tape it to my wall. My moment of fame, immortalized for all to see!

I'm also very grateful that so many of you blog readers are willing to put up with my all-too-often obnoxiously slow loading time. I'm working on it, I swear! Rob and I are messing around with creating a new template with this site, but since his return to the working world, our progress has slowed considerably. Patience, dear Prudence...

He's my very best friend in the whole wide world. Plus, I own him. **

2005-11-19T20:11:00.000-08:00

Or at least, I used to...

It's been a tough week for me here at the diaper pail. My man has up and left me.

It's true.

Up until this past week, the Dread Pirate Robert was here at home with me, helping me remain sane as I learned how to cope with the often exhausting job of taking care of a new baby. He completed his university courses on the very day my water broke (which was also *supposed* to be my last day at work), and since then has been unemployed but looking for work.

It was pretty sweet timing, actually. Honestly, I don't know what I would have done without him. Hats off to all you mothers who had to learn how to do it all on your own.

But, as of Monday -- yay! sob! yay! -- Rob has got a real live full-time job. This is very good, as it means that we won't be forcing Milo to beg on the street corner to get us the money we need to buy his Christmas presents.

(We had rather dim expectations of Milo's fundraising abilities anyhow, seeing as he hasn't yet learned how to sit up by himself. He probably would have tipped over behind the "Need money for smokes" sign and no one would have been able to see him. And I'm sure he would have had problems keeping the other street kids from stealing the coins in his begging bowl.)

So yes, we're all very happy that Rob is now working. Except... except... now from Monday to Friday, I'm the only person in the house who's capable of making consonant sounds. And there's no one around anymore to wash the breakfast dishes or read to me while I'm feeding Milo or hold him while I take a shower, not to mention play with him so I can spend an hour or so blogging every day.

I've finally had to learn how to do by myself all those things I've always relied on Rob to help me with, like folding up the stroller or putting Milo in the Baby Trekker. I've even learned how to go to the bathroom and fasten my pants back up while holding a baby the entire time.

Yes, I know I've been spoiled. No one knows it better than I. In fact, I'm so spoiled that I have never ever had to wash so much as a single one of our cloth diapers. (But sssh, don' t point it out to Rob, I don't want to jinx a good thing.)

Of course, all good things must come to an end, and so Rob has ventured bravely forth into the wild corporate jungle in order to bonk some beasties on the head and drag them home for baby and I to feed on. We're all very excited and wish Rob the best in his new job.

But still... I miss him. I miss him most when I'm breastfeeding Milo and he's not there to read to me. I miss laughing with him at lines like, "Rachel didn't ever want to get her head chopped off. People said it hurt terrible fierce."

Ah, well. I guess that's what weekends are for. That and blogging, that is...

Whither thou goest, my pirate?

** The title of this post was taken from an episode of "Home Movies," a very funny cartoon that everyone should watch at least once.

That boy will do anything to keep fitting into those cute newborn outfits

2005-11-15T20:51:00.000-08:00

I think Milo might have an eating disorder. I'm very concerned about this. The boy seems to binge and purge after every meal.

As soon as he wakes up from a nap, he starts fussing and whining for his next feed, like he can't get my boob into his mouth quickly enough, and then he gulps down as much as he can stomach without even bothering to chew.

And he eats, like, six or seven meals a day. Okay, I know the Canada Food Guide suggests that people eat three main meals with a couple of small snacks throughout the day, but Milo treats every single feed like he's a condemned man and it's the last meal he'll ever eat.

Sometimes -- I kid you not -- he tries to gobble everything down so fast that the milk comes out of his nose.

Now, do these sound like the eating habits of someone who has a healthy relationship with food?

But it gets worse.

Between one meal and the next, Milo tries his very best to regurgitate every last bit of food in his stomach. It all starts innocently enough, with a few innocuous wet-sounding burps. But the burps just keep getting wetter, until large quantities of clotted white liquid are streaming out of his mouth and pooling in the folds of his shirt.** Or on my shirt. Or my pants. Or on the duvet cover. Or the floor. Or the dog. (I won't gross you out by telling you what Nell doggie does to the little puke puddles she finds scattered around the house. Suffice it to say, she is in no danger of developing an eating disorder.)

I'm beginning to suspect that all this vomiting might be intentional. Ever since Milo discovered his fingers, he's been sucking on them relentlessly, often sticking them so far down his throat that he actually gags. I catch him doing it several times a day.

The irony is, he's still gaining four to eight ounces a week. When will he learn that this kind of extreme eating behaviour just won't work? Silly monkey. Everyone knows that eating less and exercising more is the only real way to take the pounds off and actually keep them off.

But I'm worried that Milo might be a "quick-fix" kind of guy. As soon as that kid starts to walk, I'm making sure the laxatives stay on the TOP shelf of the medicine cabinet.

** Rob seems to think that I'm exaggerating the amount of vomit that Milo actually spits up. But to my way of thinking, ANY amount of vomit is too much. Am I right, folks?

Just call me Jaime Somers

2005-11-13T14:53:00.000-08:00

The following information is classified as TOP SECRET ... TOP SECRET... TOP SECRET...

Before Milo was born, I was worried that I might be going deaf. All too often I'd have to ask people to repeat themselves or get Rob to tell me what Jon Stewart had just said, so I could find out why he was laughing so hard. It made me feel a bit ridiculous at times -- especially when I'd find myself smiling and nodding at someone without hearing a word they said, but being way too embarrassed to ask them to repeat what they'd just said for a fifth time... or a sixth.

( Ah, how the sins of our youth come back to haunt us. My poor hearing is almost certainly due to all those hours I spent as a teenager aimlessly driving around on isolated country roads with AC/DC blaring on the stereo in my 1980 Ford Pinto. Yeah, that's right. I was hugely into AC/DC back then-- in fact, I was an AC/DC snob, preferring to listen to Bon Scott belt out classics such as "Dirty Deeds" or "Highway to Hell" than have to endure ol' whatisname crudely holler all that "Who Made Who"-era shite.

Oh, and my Pinto was cherry red with a red Starsky & Hutch stripe blazoned across its sides, and it had a nasty tendency to overheat on the highway. Yep. I was the height of cool back then.)

These days, however, I've become convinced that someone must have implanted a bionic hearing device in my ear when I was in the throes of labour, because I can hear EVERY SINGLE SOUND MILO MAKES, no matter how soft and insignificant. My ears have become permanently attuned to his every utterance, it would seem.

Rob and I can be in our bedroom listening to a loud "car races and explosions" kind of movie and I'll still be able to hear Milo in the next room over, sighing as he slowly comes awake.

"Shush!" I'll hiss at Rob, gesturing for him to turn down the volume. He'll comply with a dubious frown, clearly about to tell me I'm imagining things, when all of a sudden Milo will make another noise, louder this time, and Rob will raise his eyebrows in surprise.

"Well, whaddya know," he'll say. "I guess he is awake."

Of course he is. I knew he was. His tiny little gurgles and squeaks are as loud as a foghorn to me.

No matter how deeply I'm sleeping, the moment Milo makes a sound, I'm jolted wide awake. I can hear him squawking in his crib when I'm in the shower. Once I even heard him fussing when Rob and I were in the office jamming to Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict " -- and as anybody who's ever listened to that song can attest, being able to hear one tiny creature squawking in the midst of that kind of auditory chaos is surely a superhuman feat.

I feel like a walking, talking Who song -- except I can hear for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles. I almost believe that I could even hear Milo's heart beat, if only I listened hard enough.

I'm beginning to fear that I'm not going to get a decent night's sleep until Milo's gone to college.

Hmm. So this is what motherhood feels like.

Yep. I jinxed it

2005-11-11T09:40:00.000-08:00

Kind of... Milo woke up this morning at 6:00 and I was just SO not ready to greet the day yet, so I gave him his soother and that helped him fall back to sleep for another hour and a half.

Clearly, the soother still has value.

Third night in a row without a pacifier

2005-11-10T20:44:00.000-08:00

And the eleventh day in a row that Milo has slept through the night.

Hmm. Do you think I'm jinxing myself for even mentioning it?

Milo went to bed tonight wearing a gorgeous new organic cotton terrycloth diaper. This thing is as soft as a high-quality bath towel, but three times as absorbent. It's a Motherease Sandy's fitted snap diaper. I'm going to write about it and all the other purchases I made at Discount Diapers in Vancouver in my cloth diaper blog tomorrow.

Yes, for those of you who weren't aware, I've been two-timing you with another blog. That one's dedicated solely to my um, cloth diaper obsession. Now please don't worry, I'm not a cloth diaper snob or anything. I don't care about the kind of diapers you use. I only care about the diapers I use. Some would say a little bit too much, perhaps... but mostly because they're just so damned cool.

There are some really amazing diapers out there that don't stink, don't stain, won't cause rashes and won't leak at night. They're cheaper than disposables in the long run because one diaper can last a baby pretty much from birth right through to age two or three. And they totally make your kid's butt look styling.

But I don't want to bother you with my monotopical rantings here... that's what my cloth diapers blog is for.

We now return you to all Milo, all the time...

Um, hello? I thought we were supposed to be talking about ME, here.

And the heavens opened and choirs of angels sang

2005-11-09T20:01:00.000-08:00

I just put Milo to bed without a pacifier. It's the second night in a row he's gone down without his usual sleep crutch and I'm quite ridiculously psyched about it.

I HATE pacifiers. Hate 'em. Binkies, dummies, soosies, call them what you will -- to me they just scream "gateway addiction." First the babies start with the pacifiers... next thing you know, they're smoking in the boy's room or shooting up in some dank, urine-soaked alley on the outskirts of Chinatown.

Okay, that might be a bit extreme. I know my aversion is unreasonable -- lots of babies need soothers to calm them down to sleep or when they're in unfamiliar situations. I know a number of children who were hooked on their binkies during the early years of their life, and they eventually managed to give them up without a problem. They don't seem to have suffered any debilitating after-effects from their addiction, either.

And yet... and yet... every time I see a toddler crying frantically for his or her pacifier, I can't help but shudder inside. It's totally a me thing. There's something about that naked desparate neediness that makes me want to go out on to the back porch and smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in one go. And I don't even smoke.

So of course, after Milo was born, I resisted the lure of the soother. Even when he spent hours fussing and crying and refusing to settle down to sleep, still I resisted. Even after Rob went out and bought a couple of soothers on my mother's suggestion after a particularly trying two-hour screaming session between one and three in the morning, still I resisted. It wasn't until we were visiting Rob's folks on the island for five days and I was desparate to show his eager-to-be-doting grandparents that Milo wasn't a miserable, chronically fussy child whose mother clearly didn't have the first clue about how to make him happy that I finally caved in to all the peer pressure and gave him a soother.

And oh, the silence, the blessed silence of a calm baby. I couldn't believe how long I'd been willing to live without it, when all that time it was just one little piece of rubber and plastic away.

So yes, I started using a pacifier. Whenever Milo would get the least bit fussy, ploop! In it would go. It would quiet him down immediately and allow him to remain calm enough to suss out his surroundings and try to figure out what the heck this whole "reality" thing was all about. Finally, I began to work up the courage to take him out of the house for long periods of time. And with a soother, I could put Milo down for a nap or to sleep while still awake and could be reasonably sure that he wouldn't wake up an hour later crying, wondering where the hell he was or how he'd got there.

But still... whenever I'd plug that soother in Milo's mouth, I'd feel like a pimp or a pusher man. I worried that I was inviting a rabid monkey to hunker right down on his back and never leave. Heck, I felt like I was providing that damned monkey with building materials and floorplans so he could build a condo and rent out space to all his rabid little monkey friends.

I've got a terribly addictive personality myself, you see, and so I couldn't imagine a future in which a child of mine would be able to wean himself off a habit that made him feel good.

Well, whaddya know, despite all my worries and fears, my little boy has gone and proven me wrong. Twice! Not once, but twice! I'm giggling as I type this. MILO'S SOOTHER IS GOING THE WAY OF THE DODO!

Of course, Milo's currently developing an equally powerful addiction to sucking on his own fingers now, and that could be dangerous, because if he turns into a constant thumb-sucker he might eventually deform the shape of his palate and develop speech problems, and it's not like I can ever take his hands away from him. (Well I could, but I don't think that limb-reattachment surgery is covered by our medical plan.)

So we'll just have to see how this all pans out. For now, I'm just going to sleep happy tonight, knowing that my baby has proven himself capable of getting over one addiction, at least. I'll worry about the heroin and the crystal meth some other day.

Faced with increasing neglect, the pacifier couldn't help but
suspect that Milo was cheating on it with someone else...

And it was right. Caught -- in flagrante delicto!

A cursed inheritance

2005-11-08T19:37:00.000-08:00

Generally, I try to refrain from gushing about Milo, for fear of bringing an ironic Twilight Zonian curse down upon his head. I fear that if I admit how adorably cute I really think he is, I'll accidentally trip and drop him face first on to our George Foreman grill; or if I brag -- even silently, within the confines of my own mind -- about his obvious superior intelligence, a gigantic block of frozen airplane pee will fall from the sky and hit him right smack on the head.

Okay, so I'm a little superstitious.

Still, there's no denying it. That little boy definitely won a sizeable jackpot in the gene pool lottery. He seems to have inherited the best that Rob and I have to offer. He's got Rob's long, lean frame and my almost-reaching-Angelina-Jolie-proportions mouth. His wide, perceptive blue eyes could have come from either side of our family. Ditto for his high forehead and mischievous grin. His hands are huge and long-fingered and his ears are perfect. And his strength, oh my, have I ever mentioned his strength? His adamantium-reinforced skeletal structure could only have been inherited from Wolverine. Not really sure where Wolverine fits on the family tree (though Rob's chest is pretty hairy), but Milo's got to be related to him somehow.

Of course, Milo's not perfect. But I was prepared for all the less desirable traits we'd pass on to him. Or so I thought.

I expected him to be stubborn and impatient (and he is). I'm sure that as he gets older, he'll also reveal himself to be indecisive and overly self-absorbed at times. Possibly even judgmental. And oh yes, I'm already steeling myself for the inevitable trip to the optometrist's office before the age of 10, where he'll be told he needs glasses. Thick ones.

But one trait that I HADN'T been expecting to pass on to him -- that hadn't even occurred to me as a possibility -- was the feet. The stinky, sweaty Whalen feet. The feet that really make it infinitely more polite NOT to take your shoes off at the front door of an acquaintance's house. The feet that can drive coffin nails into what might have been a promising first date. The feet that can cause loved ones to gag.

Yes. Those feet. Milo has inherited them, I'm certain of it. The poor kid is only four months old, and already when I pull his socks off, they're damp with sweat, and even smell a bit sour.

What evil have I wrought upon my poor, unsuspecting progeny? Will he ever forgive me for the curse I've so thoughtlessly bestowed upon him?

Dear lord, I forgot about the feet.

I'd better get my kisses in while he's still willing
to be in the same room with me...

Future girlfriend? Check. Future career? Check. Future rehab clinic? Currently scoping out the options...

2005-11-07T21:29:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday night, Rob and I escaped the house sans Milo to go see our friend Luke Doucet play his phenomenal brand of alt-pop rock 'n roll at Richard's on Richards, a bar in downtown Vancouver.

(A thousand thanks to Milo's Grammy and Grampy for cheerfully agreeing to babysit. I love Milo to death and all that, but still, sometimes it's nice to hang out with the big kids in a place where babies aren't allowed, even if it is Dick's on Dicks.)

Luke rocked the house, as usual. He's one of those uber-talented people that makes you want to bang your head against the wall until it bleeds, because his consummate skill with his chosen instrument of expression (read: geetar) is so transcendant that it makes the artistic attempts of us mere mortals seem like feeble kazoo squawks in comparison.

When Luke's not touring the world promoting his music, he can often be seen onstage alongside of Sarah McLachlan. He's been the lead guitarist for most of her live shows for over a decade now.

Personally, I've never been particularly drawn in by Sarah's music, but I've got to say this for her: the woman has taste. In guitarists, at least.

Yes, Luke is that good. Kind of makes you sick to see so much talent packed into "136 wet dog pounds of skinny white boy," to quote the man himself.

So you can imagine the audience's surprise last Wednesday when Luke was totally eclipsed by a guest singer he'd invited onstage for the last song of his set. For the duration of that song, everyone forgot about Luke. All eyes were fixed on the pint-sized performer on the stage beside him: his nine-year-old daughter, Chloe Winkelman Doucet.

When Luke introduced Chloe and she first bounced up onstage, the audience was clearly charmed. She's a tiny little bird of a girl who looks just like her dad, and she was clearly thrilled to be onstage in front of a crowd of hollering concert-goers.

Scanning the crowd, I saw that most people were smiling indulgently at her. "Aw, how cute," is probably what they were thinking.

Then she opened her mouth and began to sing, and all those indulgent smiles widened into egg-shaped O's . The sound of jaws hitting concrete might have been audible, had it not been drowned out by the far more impressive sound of Chloe belting out the opening verses of Tom Waits' "Gun Street Girl."

That little girl's got pipes, I tell you. Already, at the tender age of nine, she can sing circles around all those vacuous over-produced bubblegum pop stars that usually tend to dominate the music charts.

Hardly surprising, when you consider the fact that her dad's a rock star and her mom, Tallulah Winkelman, is herself a talented actress. Ever since Chloe was born, everyone around her has been counting the days until she takes center stage in her own right. Clearly that day is not long in coming.

And so, as I watched Chloe upstage her own father and wildly surpass all of her biggest fans' expectations, only one thought dominated my mind: "Oh, sh*t. Sh*t. Sh*t. Sh*t. Sh*t. Sh*t."

Just a couple of months ago, when Chloe was telling me about a band that she and some of her friends were putting together, I jokingly made her promise that as soon as he was old enough, Milo could become a member of her band as well.

"Sure!" she cheerfully agreed. "He can play the drums! And when I'm 21 and he's 13, he can go on tour with me."

Suddenly, that proposition doesn't seem nearly as far-fetched as it did back at the end of summer. Chloe's definitely going places, and I can all too easily see Milo wanting to hitch on to her star and go along for the ride.

He's already showing a definite ear for music. He wiggles and squeals when I play my djembe for him and he watches Rob with wide-eyed amazement when he sings and plays guitar. We've got no shortage of musical instruments in this house, and Rob and I are going to do our very best to encourage Milo to learn how to play every single one of them.

And so, against my better judgment, when he turns 13, I'm going to remind Chloe of the promise she made. I feel I owe it to my son. I mean, wouldn't nearly ALL teenagers kill to travel the country with a rock band fronted by pretty girl with a wicked voice?

Lord knows I would have. That was my dream growing up. Of course, in my dreams, I was the pretty girl with the wicked voice. But alas, the Fates decreed otherwise, and so I leave it to my son to do what he can to fulfill my unrealized dreams for me. Damnit, if Joanie Cunningham couldn't go on tour with Leather Tuscadero, and if I couldn't sing backup vocals for Bon Jovi (who, now that I think of it, has borne a marked resemblance to both Tuscadero sisters at different points in his career) , then I swear by all that's good in the world, Milo's going on tour with Chloe!!! Just you wait and see if he doesn't!

And yet I can't seem to shake the fear that some day in the not-so-terribly-distant future, I'm going to be calling up the Betty Ford Clinic to ask if they have a cot available for a washed-up, strung-out 13-year-old drummer boy.

He heard the siren sweetly singing...

My boy won't ever lack for partners at those Friday high school soc hops

2005-11-06T11:11:00.000-08:00

He's already mastered the white man's overbite:

Now all he needs to do is learn how to shuffle his feet from side to side and he's set.

Things that wouldn't strike you as examples of learned behaviour

2005-11-05T19:39:00.000-08:00

The musician tunes his instrument...

Back when I was pregnant and trying to imagine what life with my new baby would be like, I always conceived of it in terms of all the different milestones (or Milostones, heh) he or she would experience during the process of developing from a newborn to child.

I wondered what it would be like to play with Sitting Up Baby, to chase after Crawling Baby and wipe sweet potato off the chin of Learning to Eat Baby. I imagined how magical it would be to stretch out on the day bed and cuddle with Breastfeeding Baby. I anticipated how happy I'd be to meet Sleeping Through The Night Baby, how excited I'd be to be able to chat with Saying First Words Baby, and how throat-chokingly awestruck I'd be to watch the accomplishments of Taking First Steps Baby.

What I never appreciated was how many different stages of development there'd be, or how surprising most of them would be. I mean, who would have thought that shivering when cold or being capable of being tickled were acquired skills?

Milo has gone through countless incarnations while learning all these new abilities over the past four months. Just this week, for example, he has become:

Biting Lower Lip Milo
Exploring One Foot With The Other Milo
Puckering Up To Whistle Like Gramma and Poppa Milo

...and, last but most certainly not least,

Staying at Home With Grammy and Grampy Without Freaking While Mom and Dad Go Out To Trip The Light Fantastic Milo.

I'm sure you can imagine how happy Rob and I were to meet that last incarnation... Much as we adore our son and love getting to know all him in all his different guises, still, sometimes it's still fun to be able to go out and play with the big kids.

tabula rasa

2005-11-03T21:35:00.000-08:00

Why, Mommy? Why?

I made Milo bleed the other day.

It happened while I was trimming his fingernails. My parents were coming over that afternoon, and I knew I had to declaw him so he wouldn't leave permanently disfiguring gashes on their faces.

It was all going fine until I got to his right thumb. Oh, that thumb, the way the skin clings so adamantly to the nail. No matter how much care I took in trying to insert only the nail between the two sharp blades of the clipper, some skin managed to sneak in there as well.

Finally, I repositioned the clipper one last time and decided to hope for the best and make the darned cut. 'Cause that's what I would have done if it had been my nail.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

As soon as the nail clipper went "click," I knew I had made a serious mistake. Milo's eyes flew wide and his mouth opened in a round "O" of shock. His quivering lips pulled down into a pathetic little "m" and then opened again to let out the second loudest howl I've ever heard him make (go here if you dare to learn the story of the loudest).

I looked down at the injured thumb, and sure enough, saw a thin line of red welling up where the end of the fingernail used to be. I grabbed his hand and shoved the bleeding digit into my mouth, hoping to suck away the pain like snake venom.

Milo got over his injury within a few short minutes, but my pain lingered on for hours afterward. I felt like I've failed some sort of test. Clearly, making your child bleed isn't something that mothers are supposed to DO.

Oh, I know that Milo is going to experience pain and suffering in his life. There's no escaping it. If you listen to the Buddhists, they'll tell you that's what life is all about, and if you want to discover how to truly enjoy life, you need to learn how to deal properly with pain and rise above it in order to prevent it from developing into actual suffering.

(I love how Buddhism makes a distinction between pain and suffering. One is clean and sharp like a blade and can strengthen the character of the person who experiences it. The other festers like a gangrenous wound and saps a person's soul.)

I know I can't completely protect Milo from pain, be it physical, emotional, or spiritual. That's impossible. I only hope that I'm able to help him learn how to cope successfully with the pain that life will inevitably bring him.

Yet when I look at my little boy and imagine all the cuts, bruises, abrasions, and broken bones that will someday mar his beautiful blank slate of a body (not to mention the more painful wounds that will one day be inflicted on his heart), I can't help but wish for a magic wand that would erase all possibility of anything bad ever happening to him.

Even though I know that all the unpleasant experiences awaiting him will help him acquire more character and wisdom than all the hugs and kisses that I could ever possibly give him, still, I wish.

At the very least, I wish I could learn how to use those stupid nail clippers properly, so that it won't be me who continues to be the bringer of pain.

Why do I get the feeling there's a demon somewhere in Hell who's got an IOU with my name on it ?

2005-11-02T21:33:00.000-08:00

Milo has just slept through the night for three straight nights in a row.

I should be overjoyed. And I am! Oh, yes indeedy, I am!

And yet I can't help shake the feeling that one of Satan's minions is now the proud owner of my soul.

evil runs amok

2005-11-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

Here you see the bastard child of Skeletor and Pumpkinhead toying with his latest victims, Death Row Dad and Brain-Dead Zombie Mom. First he eats his thumb... then he consumes his ghoulish prey... and then he devours the entire WORLD!!! Moo! Hoo! Ha! Ha! Ha!

And yes, that is a glass of beer in BDZM's hand. It's Guinness and my midwife TOLD me to drink it. She says all that iron, potassium, and magnesium is good for breastfeeding moms -- helps the milk come in. So yeah, I drink beer. Pints of it. But I'm doing it for the baby! I swear!

(Okay, so maybe my midwife didn't explicitly tell me to drink pints of the stuff. But hey, we live in North America, the land where more is always better. Right? Right?)

Why wait years for the hangups to develop when you can start cultivating them today?

2005-10-31T15:28:00.000-08:00

Okay, so if anyone has been thinking that I'VE been evil in terms of the embarrassment quotient associated with some of the things I've written about Milo on this blog, I suggest you check out what his FATHER has been writing about him.

That picture is going to cost us thousands of dollars in therapy sessions alone.

tongue-tongue weeps

2005-10-30T13:31:00.000-08:00

For he has only one tongue with which to taste an entire world...***

I'm beginning to suspect that Milo has cannabilistic tendencies. I'm pretty sure he wants to eat me. And I'm not just talking about breastfeeding. Every time I get my face near his, he grabs my hair and pulls me closer, lifting himself up off the bed, change table, or bouncy chair as he does so, and tries to suck as much of me into his open mouth as possible.

(Have you ever had someone suckle your nose? I know, it sounds gross, but it's also kind of hysterical to see a little four-month-old baby stuck on to the end of your nose, looking around the room with a wide-eyed expression that seems to say, "Dum de dum dum, don't mind me, I'm just sucking on your nose here.")

Of course, it's not just me he wants to eat. It's everything. Whenever I give him something -- whether it's my knuckle, a toy, a blanket, or even a cloth diaper -- he stares at it with a happy smile of recognition and then hungrily tries to stuff as much of it into his mouth as he can. All the while wearing the same innocent, "Gee, how did that get in there?" look on his face.

He isn't the least bit daunted by the size of the object he wants to eat, either. I've seen him eagerly attempt to fit his mouth around toys that are three times the size of his head. And when things don't work out the way he expects, he gets quite perturbed.

He probably has no idea that some of the things around him are bigger than him while others are smaller. Some fit in that gulping baby-bird mouth of his, and some don't. My guess is that his ever-developing ability to comprehend is still so firmly situated in the realm of the senses (What's this feel like? What's that taste like? How does this form compare to that form, and what the heck's making that noise? And oh, look -- moving food machine thingy! Moving food machine thingy makes funny sounds and makes funny faces and carries me around to different places. I like moving food machine thingy!) that he doesn't yet have any real understanding of the concept of relative size.

He probably thinks that he is the entire universe, and that everything he sees, hears, feels, smells, and tastes rightfully belongs inside of him. Oddly enough, I'm inclined to agree.

Must... eat... favourite toy... or fist... or toy... or both... yes, both... but how the heck do I get them both to FIT IN HERE???

*** Tongue-Tongue is a character that appears in an episode of the animated cartoon series, The Tick. If you've never seen The Tick, oh my goodness, you have to keep an eye out for it. It's the FUNNIEST. CARTOON. EVER. Where else can you meet characters like "Can O' Man" and "El Seed," not to mention goofball superheroes like Sewer Urchin and Der Fleidermaus"? Or watch episodes named, "The Tick vs. Prehistory," "Evil Sits Down for a Moment," or "Leonardo Da Vinci and his Fighting Genius Time Commandos!"?

Would you trust this guy to feed your baby?

2005-10-28T12:48:00.000-07:00

I just walked in on Rob making himself a snack in the kitchen.

“Peeuw, what’s that smell?” I asked.

Then I looked at what he was eating: microwaved potatoes and gravy.

“Ohhhhhh… I don’t think you should eat that, honey,” I said, referring to the gravy.

Rob looked at me, perplexed. “Why not?”

“Um, because it’s from Thanksgiving.”

(Canadian Thanksgiving, for those of you not in the know, occurs on the first Monday in October. Yep. That was almost four weeks ago. Now granted, we’re mostly vegetarian, so our gravy didn't have any turkey juice in it, but still. That stuff was waaaaay past the “best before” date.)

Rob leaned over his bowl and inhaled deeply. “Smells fine to me.”

I took another cautious sniff. “No, it doesn’t. Trust me.”

He shrugged and took a bite of gravy-smeared potato. “Tastes all right.”

I shuddered and left the room. He ate the entire bowl of potatoes, no doubt thinking that I was overreacting once again. He thinks that so long as you boil or nuke something long enough, it’s perfectly fine to eat.

I'm beginning to suspect the guy has no taste buds.

I always feel like somebody's watching me

2005-10-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

And I get no privacy...

So I was just typing up an e-mail to a friend, dum de dum dum, when all of a sudden I felt like I was being watched. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The very air around me seemed laden with malevolent portent.

I turned around to see if Rob was perhaps giving me the evil eye from the kitchen for not washing out my breakfast cereal bowl (I couldn't -- the sink was still filled with last night's cold slick-slimy dishwater, something that instinctively makes me throw my dishes down on to the counter and flee to the furthest room in the house and hide behind a large piece of furniture), but he wasn't there.

So I turned a bit further and looked behind me and what did I see but Milo in his floor rocker, suck suck sucking away on his soother, his eyes wide and staring at me.

The horror.

He's SUPPOSED to be sleeping. I only put him down for his nap fifteen minutes ago. I'd been planning to use his nap time to parent-proof the house in time for my mom and dad's arrival later this afternoon.

(They're going to babysit tonight while Rob and I go to some big Casino Night bash my office is throwing for its employees -- yep, we've been having a good year. It's going to be Rob's and my first night out ALONE since Milo was born. Yay! Sob! Angst! Yay!)

But now he's awake, and it doesn't look like he's about to go back to sleep any time soon. In fact, it looks like he's the one who's ready to party.

Sigh. If only I could figure out where his off-switch was located.

This is what Milo's SUPPOSED to look like right now. Alas, he does not. Off I go to feed and otherwise amuse him...

se7en

2005-10-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

I've been tagged. I feel somewhat like a drugged polar bear, wondering why my left ear hurts.

But when a Queen commands you to do something, there's no ignoring the royal summons.

I got to tell you, though, if it had been a mere commoner who'd asked me to do this, I probably would have refused. Lists scare me. They hurt my head. I end up spending far too long on them, wracking my brain for the best possible answers, always certain that there's a better one out there IF ONLY I COULD JUST THINK OF IT.

All right, here goes... But I just know that as soon as I go to bed tonight, a million better answers are going to occur to me.

7 things I want to do before I die

Finish my frickin' book already (and get it published -- aye, there's the rub)
Go on an onsen tour of Japan
Poke around inside the Great Pyramid
Ride a horse in a place without fences -- without a paid guide there to smirk at my ineptitude
Learn how to make my grandmother's fudge
Learn as many languages as I can
Help promote a "word of mouth" revolution that results in the demolition of an economic system dependent on the production of countless tonnes of crap and instead promotes the value of quality over quantity

7 things I cannot do

A cartwheel
Bake a pie
Design my own web site
Tolerate intolerance
Mow a lawn
Make pretty things with textiles (e.g., sew or knit or crochet)
Believe that there's only ONE right way to access the Divine, and that all other ways are WRONG WRONG WRONG

7 things that attract me to the opposite sex

Intelligence
Sense of humour
Confidence
Groundedness
Open-mindedness
Musical talent
Skill in the kitchen

7 things I say most often

"Who's my little cutie pooty pie?"
"Oh! I think I hear the boy."
"I'm tired."
"I've DEFINITELY got to do yoga -- tomorrow."
"Can you hold him for a minute? I've got to go to the bathroom."
"Inuyasha ga daisuki desu!"
"It's probably up your ass." (It's true. I do say that quite often. But never in a dirty way.)

7 celebrity crushes

Dean Ween (WEEEEEEN!!!)
Gene Ween (WEEEEEEN!!!)
Luke Doucet
Danny Michel
Steven Colbert
Don McKellar
Owen Wilson

7 people I want to do this (for those of you who don't blog, you can post your lists in my comments)

Meg of Blogcabin (Hah! Yet another opportunity for you to indulge in your list fetish!)
Pinksaturngrapes
Sandra Smith (not the one who was the last woman to be hanged in South Africa)
Cindy Lou
Laurie
Ms. Mama
Zandperl

Ha! Now YOU'RE it!!!

Things that make you go, "ewww"

2005-10-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

So in case you're one of the few people who haven't heard me go on and on and on about my new obsession, we're using cloth diapers with Milo.

Whenever he graces us with a poopy diaper, we usually throw it into an ice cream bucket before rinsing it out in the bathroom sink and then tossing it in the diaper pail along with the rest of the soiled dipes. We usually try to deal with the poopy ones right away, but sometimes we forget, and they sit in the ice cream bucket for a while before we remember to rinse them out and put them in the pail.

Fortunately for us, our exclusively breast-fed son's poo doesn't smell (much... yet...), so a poopy diaper out in the open doesn't make our house smell like a charnel house or anything. Too bad, almost -- if we had some sort of olfactory reminder of the poopy diapers just sitting there, we'd probably be more vigilant about rinsing them out right away and putting them in the diaper pail, where they belong.

And that would be a good thing.

Yesterday, after we'd returned from taking our dog Nell for her afternoon walk, Rob and I were in Milo's room, taking off his little bomber jacket while both marveling at how cute he looked in it (as only lovestruck new parents can do), when suddenly we heard this noise behind us: slurp slurp slurp.

This isn't the kind of noise you want to hear when there's a poopy diaper in an open bucket on the floor and a dog in the room.

Sure enough, I turned to look, and lo and behold, what did I see but Nell with her head in the ice cream bucket, chowing down on a big ol' helping of diaper pudding.

Okay, so I'm the first to brag about how my baby's sh*t doesn't stink... but I draw the line at suggesting it might be tasty.

The needle and the damage done

2005-10-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

We took Milo for his second round of immunization shots yesterday. Now, I've never been one to fear a needle -- they're so thin, and the point of insertion is so tiny, and the blood that comes out is such a pretty shade of prom dress red -- but even I get squeamish when we take Milo for his shots. When compared to Milo's tiny little squishy four-month-old thighs, the needle takes on the relative dimensions of something you'd expect to see stabbed into the haunches of a horse (or a professional athlete hoping for the stamina or muscle mass of a horse).

It wouldn't be so bad if he had to have just one shot, but no, he had to have three -- two in his right thigh and one in his left. Thankfully, his objections were dampened somewhat by the infant Motrin we dosed him with prior to leaving for the health office. He screamed bloody murder as he was given each needle, but recovered fairly quickly. Yet another example of better living through careful chemical management...

All in all, I'm sure the whole ordeal affected me more than it did him. After I'd rearranged him in my arms to prepare him for the final shot in his left thigh, he recovered from the tears caused by the first two shots and looked up at me, wide-eyed. Just as his mouth began to stretch tentatively into a smile, the nurse stabbed him a third time. The look of betrayal in his eyes was far more painful than any stupid old needle.

"HOW COULD YOU LET THIS HAPPEN TO ME???" it screamed.

Somehow, the "it's for your own good, sweetheart" excuse just didn't seem to cut it. Sigh. I feel like I just gained official membership into the parent club.

Stay tuned for future quality acts of parenting, such as the one in which I tell a much older Milo that Santa Claus doesn't exist....

If I didn't know better, I'd almost think Microsoft had something to do with it

2005-10-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

Flashback: Milo 1.0

Now introducing Milo 3.8
Complete with new hardware and accessories!

Milo has recently discovered that my face and my breast are both part of the same person. During his feeds, he likes to pull away from my breast from time to time to look up at me and make sure I'm still there. When he sees me smiling down at him, his eyes grow huge and his face splits into a wide, toothless jack o'lantern grin. I can see how pleased he is to have his expectations confirmed.

Last night, when I was giving him his bedtime feed, he stopped eating for a moment, looked up at me with an incredibly earnest expression on his face and said, "Awoo."

Then he said it again. "Awoo." And again. "Awoooo."

He stared at me for a long moment, then his eyes slid away from mine and looked out through the bedroom doorway at something in the living room beyond. "Awoo," he said thoughtfully to himself. "Awooo."

His eyes widened as if he'd just been struck by a sudden realization. "Awoo," he said, louder this time. "Awooo! Awoo! Awoo! Awoo!"

I watched him, spellbound, as he very clearly and distinctly said "awoo" at least 30 times in a row. He said it loudly and then he said it softly, slowly and then quickly, rolling it around on his tongue like a wine connoisseur sampling an expensive claret.

I'm pretty sure it was the first time he'd ever made a meaningful sound and was aware that he was the one making it. He consciously repeated it over and over again, experimenting with it, fully aware that he was in complete control of it.

Each "awoo" was pregnant with meaning that only he could understand. He tried several times to convey that meaning to me, but all I could do was smile at him and try to keep my heart from breaking from the sheer stupendousness of it all.

And so it goes... Every day brings another "first" for Milo, and I'm constantly dumbstruck with wonder as I watch him make new discoveries that help him make sense of his environment.

But with each new accomplishment, an older version of Milo is forever lost, and every time I have to say goodbye to one of those obsolete Milos, my heart feels like it's being torn to shreds.

Where's the little newborn who slept in the bassinet in our room and kept us awake with all the zombie-sucking-skull-marrow noises he made in his sleep?

Where's the baby whose tiny head wobbled so dangerously within the car seat's padded head rest? Or the baby we washed in the bathtub on the kitchen floor? Or the tiny floor giraffe who could be completely hidden in the folds of his yellow hooded bath towel?

How about the Milo who needed to be dosed with Ovol after every feed, to help him cope with his gas pains? Or the Milos who wore all those cute summer outfits that were so hysterically huge on him, or the Milo who laughed without making a sound, just crinkled his eyes and opened his mouth as wide as he could and then waited expectantly as if some other entity was responsible for making the laughing noise for him -- where did they go?

Gone, gone, gone, to be replaced by a Milo who can reach for things and roll over on to his side and who no longer needs to be fed in the middle of the night and who squeals with delight when I go into his room in the morning to pick him up from his crib and bring him back to bed with me for his first feed of the day.

Don't get me wrong -- this is a pretty good Milo we've got right now, and I wouldn't trade him for any of those obsolete versions. I know that every time I say goodbye to one of those old Milos, I'm also saying hello to a new one who can do more things and interact with me on a higher level and is better able to make sense of the world around him. I'm thrilled with all the progress he's making, and every morning, I wake up excited to see what new Milo awaits me.

And yet... I can't help but miss those old Milos. Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock so I could hug and hold their tiny little newborn bodies just one more time.

But I can't, and so I content myself with hugging and holding the Milo I have now. For I know that this little baby will soon be replaced by a bigger baby who's able to walk and talk and say "dada" and "mama," and that baby will be replaced in turn by a little boy who's able to run and jump and talk in full sentences and then that little boy will be supplanted by a big boy who will one day become a man.

It's all too much for me to wrap my head around at times. Faced with such irrefutable evidence of life's fundamental transience, I find there's only one word that comes even close to expressing my overwhelming sense of awe: awoo.

Awoo.

It all makes sense to me now.

My baby like the raunch

2005-10-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

Whenever Milo gets close to the melting point -- once his gurgles and coos have devolved into dissatisfied squawks that are threatening to become howls of rage -- I take him dancing.

No, I don't take him out to a nightclub or salsa bar. (Though I often wish I could. They have some stupid law in this province about not allowing babies into drinking establishments, which has seriously limited my ability to go to shows. What, are the authorities afraid that Milo's going to suck back a few too many highballs and then trash the place? O Lord, protect us from hordes of drunken babies!)

Instead, I bring him into our home office and crank the iTunes on Rob's Mac. Of course, the ambiance isn't as great here as it would be in a club -- there aren't any strobe lights or go-go girls in cages -- but we make do. I hold his long little 14 1/2 pound body against mine and shake my booty while he contentedly settles in for the ride, staring at lights and shadows on the wall.

Recently, however, I've begun to wonder whether I should be worried about his taste in music. There are certain kinds he enjoys and certain kinds he most definitely doesn't. If I try to dance to reggae or punk, he'll squawk and wiggle fretfully. If I play alt rock or 80s' tunes, he'll kick his legs and start to cry. In fact, the only two kinds of music he seems to enjoy are hip hop and disco. Hmm.

What's even more unsettling is the fact that the naughtier a song's lyrics are, the more he seems to like it. He's only 3 1/2 months old and already he's showing a marked preference for albums that have parental warnings on their covers. Though, as Rob points out, given his sole food source and main form of comfort these days, it shouldn't come as any surprise that one of his favourite songs is "Tits on the Radio" by the Scissor Sisters.

He's listening to bands that are telling him to "get retarded" or "move his booty." More specifically, to "shake that thing like we in the city of sin." He's learning that "all the freaky people make the beauty of the world." And he's often accused of being "an acid junkie college flunky dirty puppy daddy bastard."

I mean, really. What's a mother to think?

Here's my own mother, trying desperately to get Milo interested in a more wholesome sort of music. Clearly, he's having none of it.

p.s. My husband has just informed me that Milo likes dancing to reggae when he's holding him. He seems to be suggesting something, but I'm not really certain what. Surely he couldn't be implying that my taste has some bearing on Milo's musical preferences. I like my music to be a little headier than that. Yeah, that's right. Sure I do.

Warning: site contains adult content

2005-10-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

That's what it says about my blog in the directory at BlogExplosion, an online blogging community I sometimes visit. If you look up blogs under the category heading, "Kids and Family," there mine is, with a big, red, bold-faced "ADULT" written in the site description.

Kind of makes me sound like a sicko, don't you think? I mean, what kind of weirdo writes adult content about a wee little baby?

At first, when I saw the "adult" rating, I thought it was a joke. How could anyone say this blog has "adult" content? Cripes! I don't even use swear words (note the exclamation immediately preceding this sentence) because I know my mom occasionally reads this blog and likes to think her daughter still retains some vestiges of ladylike behaviour (sorry, mom, fat chance).

I debated about contacting the moderators at Blog Explosion to tell them they'd made some sort of mistake. But then I started thinking about some of my recent posts, and how often they mentioned the word, "penis." "Oh, how ridiculous," I said to myself. "To classify a site as being 'adult' just because it involves a frank and open discussion about circumcision!"

I mean, really. Should I have refrained from using the "p" word and instead referred to Milo's little wee-wee? Should I have called it his willy, his little birdy, or his fireman? His peter or his cute widdle mannikin? Sheesh!

So I got myself all hot and bothered and started venting about it to Rob, who listened to me rage on about uptight puritans who refuse to call a spade a spade and probably still dress their table legs in frilly stockings. Then, while I paused to catch my breath, he reminded me of an entry I'd posted a while back that had certain pictures that were more likely to blame for my "adult" rating than anything I'd actually written.

Oh yeah. Those pictures. S**t.

P.S. My husband's other site, which has numerous nipple shots on it (being that it's all aboutsuperfluous nipples) got by the censors just fine. B*st*rd.

Mama's got the mange

2005-10-05T12:24:00.000-07:00

What comes out of your head when you shower?

My hair is falling out. Actually, "falling out" is an understatement. It's committing mass suicide -- literally jumping off my scalp and throwing itself to its death.

I'd be a lot more disturbed if I hadn't been expecting this cranial exodus. See, when you're pregnant, your hair stops falling out. It's pretty cool, actually. Back in the days when Milo and I were one, my hair was thicker and shinier than it's ever been in my life. I kept on telling myself, "Don't get attached to it, it's not going to last, it's going to start falling out again as soon as you have the baby and be as limp and fine as it ever was."

But I didn't listen. I couldn't listen. Heck, I was shaped like a WATERMELON -- how could I not be a little vain about the one aspect of myself that wasn't bloated beyond recognition?

Well, the time has come to pay the piper (or rather, the hairdresser, as soon as I can manage to get Rob to babysit Milo long enough for me to take a trip to the salon). As soon as Milo turned three months old, just like clockwork, my hair started fleeing my scalp in droves. You'd think there was some kind of 30-story lizard monster residing up there or something.

The carnage is everywhere. There are long, dark wavy hairs all over the floor and the furniture. Huge, gnarly clumps of it are clogging my bathtub drain. I'm even finding it in my food. Mmm... fried eggs and hair. My favourite!

Not even Milo is safe from it. Every day, I pull at least 20 hairs from his tiny clenched fists. I find them pressed to his cheek when I take him out of the crib after his nap. I even find them floating in his bathwater, trying to wind themselves around the folds in his chubby little neck.

And just a couple nights ago, I was presented with this fresh horror: I'd passed off diaper changing duties to Rob (because I knew Milo had taken a poop, heh heh heh) and was playing around on the computer when I heard Rob call out in a sing-song voice.

"Oh Errrrrrrin... guess what I just pulled out of Milo's butt???"

Yep. You guessed it. I've seen some pretty strange stuff come out of that boy's butt, and I'm sure there are much stranger things to come, but this one I wasn't expecting.

Apparently Milo's expression as the foot-long strand of hair
was extracted from his sphincter was really quite amusing.

Mmm... serve me up another slice of that yummy crow pie

2005-10-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

I bow to your superior wisdom, O Enlightened Ones...

Since we're on the subject of books written by baby experts, I felt it was time for me to do a bit of mea culpa kowtowing. A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog entry expressing extreme frustration over my failed attempts to get Milo to conform to the kind of eating and sleeping schedule advocated by many baby experts and sleep specialists. You know, getting young infants to eat every three hours and sleep for at least an hour after every daytime feed -- that sort of thing.

Well, at the time it seemed like all my attempts were getting me nowhere and leaving me with a chronically fussy child to boot. This was mostly due to the fact that Milo's digestive problems were preventing him from getting enough to eat in one sitting and leaving him hungry and unable to sleep properly during his naptime. He was constantly hungry and tired -- a recipe for disaster, when it comes to dealing with a newborn.

And so I abandoned my attempts to get Milo to adhere to any sort of schedule and started listening to his signals for a change. I fed him whenever he wanted and only put him down for a nap when he actually looked sleepy, rather than when the clock was telling me to do so.

Well, within a week of me letting Milo do his own thing, he started following a fairly regular routine all on his own! He started eating every two or three hours, his naps became longer and more consistent, and he began going to bed at around the same time every night and settling very easily into sleep. He already had a schedule; it was just a little different than the one I was trying to force him to follow. But if it weren't for the books I'd read, I wouldn't have been able to recognize it.

Wouldn't you know it, I'd commited the first cardinal sin of childcare -- I had neglected to listen to my baby and take his individual needs into account. And this is something that all those baby expert books warn against, time and time again. If I'd only listened to THAT particular piece of advice, Milo and I might have achieved a happy equilibrium a whole lot sooner.

On top of that, I know I have baby experts Tracy Hogg (aka "the Baby Whisperer") and Dana Obleman to thank for teaching me how to get Milo to sleep so well at night. Their books really helped me understand the importance of implementing a consistent bedtime routine. Because of them, Milo now understands that after his bath and last feed, it's nighty-night time, and more often than not, he settles down in his crib without a fuss.

Of course, me being me (e.g., woefully imperfect), I'm still not following their advice to the letter. The Baby Whisperer advises against nursing right before bedtime, and Dana Obleman strongly cautions against using of soothers, and both of them believe that babies should always have their naps in the same place they sleep at night. I'm currently breaking all three of these rules. I let Milo have some of his naps in a little floor rocker we have, just so he can get used to sleeping in environments other than his crib. And, as I said before, Milo's a very sucky baby, and until he finally perfects his fist-sucking technique, I'm going to let him use the soother -- it's the only thing that settles him when he's seriously freaking out.

These "weaknesses" might come back to bite me on the ass someday, but for right now, Milo's happy and mama's happy and both of us are having good sleeps (most nights).

Milo and I might have our own ideas on how to deviate from the routines suggested by the experts, but it's only because we're building on the strong foundation of their advice that we're doing anything right at all.

So, three cheers for the baby experts! Thank god they're around to give us some ideas on how to deal with our babies when they start acting all wonky on us. Otherwise, there'd be a whole lot more only children out there, I'm sure.

Milo's very happy to hear that he might one day get a little brother or sister, provided he keeps up the good behavior. Dad, on the other hand, might be somewhat alarmed at the news.

p.s. I know that a lot of you moms out there tend to lean more towards the Dr. Sears' school of attachment parenting (e.g., co-sleeping), and that's totally cool, too. Whatever works for you and your baby is best. Milo and I, we wouldn't do so great with the whole co-sleeping thing. He's WAY too noisy and wiggly while sleeping, and I'm WAY too light a sleeper. He'd be having to deal with zombie-mom 24-7, and that wouldn't be good for either of us.

Look at all them cute little piggies!

2005-10-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

Good news, people -- for the past couple of nights, Milo has reverted back to his normal sleep patterns, e.g., going down without much of a fuss and waking once during the night (excuse me while I pause to knock all the wood within arm's reach) , so I'm hoping that the growth spurt or whatever the heck it was that was disturbing his sleep has worked itself out of his system. I bow to the superior wisdom of Hetty Vanderijt and Frans Plooij, the doctors who wrote
The Wonder Weeks, the book I mentioned in my last post.

I actually think that Milo's little hissy fit WAS due to the kind of intellectual growth spurt described in the book. In just the past couple of days, he's become far more aware of his surroundings, and is demonstrating a tremendous increase in dexterity. He's now watching Rob and I very closely, and monitoring our movements as we walk around the world.

He's also taking notice of our dog Nell for the first time, and is quite clearly seeing her as a cohesive moving object, rather than just a random collection of canine body parts. And he's started moving his fingers independently of each other. After paying them scant attention, all of a sudden he LOVES grabbing and batting the toys dangling off his little "Tiny Toys" activity center (that thing's a godsend, I tell you -- he can entertain himself in it for a whole half hour at times!) . He can even amuse himself by playing with his own fingers.

And just this morning, I'm pleased to announce, the little guy discovered his toes! It was quite hilarious. He was sitting on my lap during our little post-feed chat time (during which he usually flails and squeals and I try to imitate the sounds he makes -- impossible -- and do my best not to laugh TOO hard at his hysterical facial expressions), and his whole attention was focused on something near the end of his leg.

Then I realized it WAS the end of his leg that had him gripped so completely. He was flexing and curling his toes and staring at them intently with one eyebrow raised, as if struggling to wrap his head around the fact that yes, those tiny little sausage things were actually attached to him, and yes, he could actually make them move! On command! Through the sheer force of his own indomitable will!

It was quite the moment, I tell you.

To sleep, perchance to SCREAM

2005-09-29T22:08:00.000-07:00

I need brains! More BRAINS! BRAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIINS!

Well, it seems like the good times are over – for the time being, at least. After having been an incredibly good sleeper for the past eight weeks or so, Milo has decided to revert to his “Night of the Living Dead” style of sleeping. The “Living Dead” being me, of course.

Until just a couple nights ago, Milo’s nighttime schedule looked like this: going to bed around 8:00 p.m. with nary a fuss, being given a “dream feed” at 11:00 p.m. while still asleep, waking up for a quick feed around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., and then drifting right back into slumber land and staying there until waking for good sometime between 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. The only time his schedule deviated was when he actually slept through the night (the Holy Grail of parenting) instead of waking up for the 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. feed – and this he did at least once every couple of weeks.

Yes, he was a good little sleeper, and boy, did I ever exult over the fact. Whenever someone would inquire about his sleeping habits, I’d positively gloat.

“Oh, he’s a great sleeper,” I’d breezily announce to the person who asked (as well as anyone else within earshot), “Goes down like a charm, wakes up only once in the night – if that – and goes right back to sleep as soon as he’s done feeding. Just a dream, really.”

Well, the dream has become a nightmare. For the past couple of nights, he’s taken to waking up about shortly after he’s been put down for the night and refusing to go back to sleep for the next hour or so. Then he’s awakened on both nights around 10:30 p.m. (before I can give him his 11:00 “dream feed”), then again at 1:30 a.m., and then again at 4:30 a.m.

And then this morning, he decided to wake up at 5:00 a.m. AND 6:00 a.m. as well, waiting just until I’d finally fallen back asleep from the previous wake-up before shattering my dreams with another one of his high-pitched “Hey! HEY! WhereamIandwhatthehellamIdoing
aloneinhereandwhat’sthisfunnyfeelinginmybellyandwhyisn’t
someonecomingtohelpmeHelpMeHELPME!!!” hollers.

I swear, the only thing that’s kept me from throttling the little devil is a book that one of the women in my “Parent & Baby” class recently lent me. It’s called The Wonder Weeks and it’s all about the eight main stages of mental development babies experience during their first 60 weeks of life, and how these intellectual leaps make babies act all wonky as they try to make sense of their rapidly changing reality. Well, wouldn’t you know, Milo just happens to be going through one of them right this very week. Hence his incredible wonkiness.

According to the book, when babies are about 12 weeks old (or 14 weeks, if they were born two weeks early like Milo was), they start being able to comprehend “smooth transitions” – continuous changes in sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. All of a sudden, nothing in their world seems to stand still any more.

For the first time, they’re able to watch an object move from one place to another, such as a ball rolling across the floor, or their hands waving in front of their eyes, or their zombie moms crossing the kitchen to pour themselves a cup of coffee before they realize in their sleep-deprived state that they CAN’T drink coffee because they’re breast-feeding, and if their child is already acting like a miniature Linda Blair, peeing and puking and shrieking demonically, heaven only knows what he or she would be like all jacked up on caffeine – so no, they couldn’t even possibly consider drinking coffee even though they’ve never needed a hit of that sweet, sweet java SO VERY MUCH in their whole damned lives!

But I digress. The point is, at this stage of the game, babies are suddenly able to make a lot more sense of the world around them and it totally blows their tiny little minds, so much so that they become a lot fussier and more clingy and, if they’re Milo, unable to sleep for longer than a couple of hours or so.

So I can’t blame the boy for his disrupted sleep patterns over the past couple of nights. Being a newborn has to be like the craziest acid trip EVER. The kind of intellectual leap he’s currently experiencing must be like seeing our three-dimensional reality suddenly sprout another dimension. Heck, I’d be freaked out, too.

Thankfully, the authors of The Wonder Weeks say this rocky period of transition usually only lasts a few days, so I’m hoping that Milo will return to his old, champion sleeper self by the end of the week. After all, a couple of Dutch doctors who’ve spent 25 years studying infant development can’t be wrong, right? Right? Right?

If they are, I’m going to trash-talk their book like you wouldn’t believe.

His left hand knew not what his right hand was doing

2005-09-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

A thousand thanks to everyone who weighed in on the “to snip or not to snip” debate. Rob and I still haven’t made a decision yet; however, I’m inclined to believe that our reluctance to put an end to our indecision is a kind of decision in itself.

That being said, Milo almost took matters into his own hands last night – literally. I had him on the change table just before his bath time, and he was gooing, kicking, and flailing like he always does (the change table is still pretty much his favourite place to be… oh, how that boy loves to have a bare butt. He’s like his father that way). I was tickling his cheeks and making faces at him, when all of a sudden his eyes bulged out of their sockets, his face turned purple, and he let out a piercing shriek the likes of which should never be heard beyond the confines of Hell.

I gasped, wondering how my smiling boy could turn so quickly into a screaming demon, then let out a shriek myself when I saw the reason for his sudden transformation. The poor guy had one of his tiny fists clenched around his penis and testicles and was squeezing them with all his might – and that kid has a pretty good grip on him, let me tell you. Hence the screaming, the horrible, horrible screaming.

And, since tiny infants have no real understanding that their hands are actually part of them, Milo had no idea that he was actually the one inflicting the pain on himself. The more it hurt, the tighter he clenched his fist, and the louder he screamed. I thought the poor kid’s eyes were going to shoot out of his head and go splat against the ceiling. I had to pry his fingers away one by one – going back to re-pry the ones that he had clenched back into a fist – before he finally was able to let himself go.

Then the tears began, the inconsolable tears he shed for having discovered that this strange new reality in which he found himself could involve such terrible suffering. His shocked eyes stared up at me through the tears as if to say, “Why didn’t you WARN me?”

Sorry, kiddo. There are just some things you’ve got to learn on your own.

Fortunately, Milo’s memory is about as developed as his fine motor skills, and by the time he’d finished his bath, he’d completely forgotten about the injury he’d inflicted upon himself. Thank goodness. What a nasty way to learn the inevitable lesson that you’re your own worst enemy.

So, yeah. Having witnessed that, I’m even LESS inclined to put the poor boy’s penis on the chopping block. Unless Rob gets pushed off the fence or experiences a sudden steeling of the will, it looks like Milo will remain as nature intended him: unedited, in his original default mode.

Hmm. Come to think of it, maybe Milo wasn’t being as his own worst enemy, but was actually acting in his own self defence, suffering a smaller evil so that a bigger one might be avoided… I wouldn’t put it past him, the little monkey.

R. Milo Emmerson – accidental self-mutilator or seriously wily dude?

To snip or not to snip

2005-09-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

You wanna do what to my WHAT???

That’s the question we’ve been wrestling with since long before Milo was born – to circumcise or not to circumcise, to put our baby boy under the knife just so he can look like his dad and have a pretty penis for the girls (or boys, should he decide to swing that way), or to keep his one-eyed cobra hooded? Is a certain genital aesthetic worth the pain and suffering that he (and we) will endure if we go ahead with the procedure? Even if the answer is yes, do we really have the right to make that kind of decision for Milo, simply because we’re his parents?

Tough questions with no easy answers, damn it. Me, I tend to prefer the problems you can solve simply by consulting the answer key at the end of a textbook.

If we’d had Milo in the hospital, (and had given the go-ahead, of course), the circumcision would have been done as a routine part of his hospital stay. By now, his wound would already be long healed. But since we had him at home, we weren’t given the “easy-out” option, which means we have to do a lot more planning if we want to go through with the procedure.

That’s where the problems arise… Rob and I are notorious procrastinators, and neither of us feels particularly strongly about the issue one way or another. We’ve both been sitting on the fence so long I’m sure we’ll still be picking splinters from our butts when we’re sitting in our wheelchairs in a nursing home.

Right now, Rob’s leaning a little to the “let’s do it” side of the fence. He’s circumcised and so naturally would like his son resemble him. (“Aargh!” I hear him say in the privacy of his own mind. “We be the Emmerson men! Come, admire our rose-tipped bare bodkins!) My guess is that Rob doesn’t want Milo to look at him in the shower one day and say, “My GOD, Dad, what’s wrong with your wee-wee?” or even worse: “What’s wrong with MINE???”

Both sets of grandparents tend to be “pro-snip” as well, mostly because they had their children in a time when getting circumcised was the norm. I’ve already heard them voice the main arguments their doctors used with them: e.g., that circumcision is “cleaner” and prevents infection and penile cancer.

Apparently, however, most of these medical arguments no longer hold water. In fact, the Canadian Paediatric Society now recommends against routine circumcision, and a growing majority of newborn baby boys are leaving the hospital with their foreskins intact.

Recent studies show that uncircumcised men aren’t any more likely to suffer from infections or cancer than their circumcised counterparts, so long as they know how to clean themselves down there. Other studies show that circumcision reduces the risk of being infected with HIV or human pampiloma virus. And then there are those studies that contradict the findings of all the previous studies.

In the face of all this conflicting evidence, what's a confused and squeamish mother to do?

When I was a kid, most of the boys in my class were circumcised (don’t ask me how I know this). By the time Milo’s in school, the opposite will be true. And, as our doctor pointed out, who will he be more likely to compare himself to – his father or his classmates in the locker room?

As you might have figured out, I’m starting to lean toward the “let’s DON’T!” side of the fence here. I think the Canadian Paediatric Society’s anti-circumcision stance was the clincher. If there’s no medical reason for doing it, then why bother? Right now, it seems to me the only advantage is that Milo will one day be able to advertise himself as “8 inches, cut” in the classified ads, should he choose to become a male escort later in life. I’m not really sure that’s worth the grief I'll have to endure if I have to watch my baby boy be strapped down to a cot with full body restraints and scream with fear and confusion as a total stranger slices off a significant chunk of his most sensitive organ.

And yet, and yet… circumcised penises are just so darned pretty. Do I, as a mother, have the right to deprive him of one, just because I’m scared to see my darling baby suffer for any length of time? Maybe I’d just better toughen up; otherwise, how will I endure the broken bones and spouting gashes of childhood and adolescence?

So there’s our dilemma. If we keep stalling on making a decision either way, I suppose the “DON’T” side is going to win by default, and both of us will secretly be relieved.

Before it gets to that, however, Rob and I would both love to hear other people’s thoughts on the matter. What do YOU think? Has circumcision become an unnecessary, outmoded procedure with only minimal aesthetic benefits, or will our son thank us in years to come for permanently unsheathing his sword? Feel free to post anonymously, if that makes you more comfortable. Just please oh please make up our minds for us, because clearly we’re not doing that great a job making them up for ourselves.

Do or do not

2005-09-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

There is no “try”…

Back in the days when I was still pregnant, I read a book called “Buddhism for Mothers.”

In the book, a Buddhist mother of a newborn likens parenting to the mental and physical rigors of spiritual training:

And at the center of it was the crazy wisdom teacher in diapers, who assigned more demanding practices than I had encountered in all my travels in India. Like "Tonight you will circumambulate the living room for two hours with the master in your arms, doing a deep-knee bend at every other step and chanting, ‘Dooty-dooty-doot-doot-doo, dooty-dooty-doot-doot-doo.’”

At the time I read it, I thought the analogy rather cute; but on the night I spent a full hour rocking Milo and singing, “The Rainbow Connection” in a desperate attempt to get him to sleep, I realized how apt the observation really was.

Yoda’s got nothing on this kid, I tell you.

Every single interaction with Milo is a learning experience, and many of the lessons require a great deal of time and effort before the “Eureka” spark is finally ignited. And all these lessons are serving to illuminate the chinks in my character – the weaknesses I’ve struggled with my entire life but have never managed to overcome.

Again and again I find myself butting heads with my own ego (ME ME ME, look at ME, aren’t I GREAT?!), my impatience (I want everything to be perfect right NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW!), my overly judgmental nature (There’s only ONE best way to do it and THAT’S NOT IT!), and my tendency to dwell obsessively on the gap between reality and some idealized state of perfection that simply doesn’t exist (But if only you TRIED HARDER and and weren’t SO SELFISH and SACRIFICED more and were an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PERSON altogether...) -- Shaddup already!

I had rather been hoping that I’d be able to continue coasting through life without ever having to confront these weaknesses head on. I've become very good at putting my hands over my ears and humming, "La la la, what glaring character flaws, I can't see them!"

All my life I have looked away -- to the future, to the horizon. Never my mind on where I WAS.

But thanks to Master Milo, I'm learning to live in the moment, to focus on the now, on what IS instead of what was or one day will be.

And you know, it ain't half bad.

Ready, are you? What know you of ready?

Mi nutrimento es su nutrimento

2005-09-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

M. de Poop Machine smiling as he cooks up another dollop of diaper pudding

Okay, it’s like this: the day after I’ve scarfed down a bunch of spinach or other dark leafy greens, Milo has these huge poops that are such a bright, deep shade of emerald green, it’s as if all the world’s remaining rainforests have crawled up his butt and died there – or at least decided to hide there until the logging companies find some other natural resource to pick on.

At first, this didn’t strike me as being particularly unusual. Of course the nutrients from the food I eat get passed on to Milo. Duh.

But then I started thinking… the milk that comes out of my body is WHITE. It’s not like there are little flakes of spinach or kale in it. By what strange alchemical process does white breast milk, in its passage through Milo’s body, turn into dark green poop? The mind wobbles!

Publish or perish

2005-09-07T20:32:00.000-07:00

It’s been all blogging, all the time, over here at the Whalen-Emmerson household – ever since my beloved husband started writing not one, but TWO blogs of his own. You can find his words of wisdom at Dread Pirate Robert with links to Milo pictures. There is also his sillier site, The Superfluous Nipple, if you're curious about that.

Rob is a humourous, insightful writer whose postings offer valuable commentary on the human condition. Plus, he has three nipples, and one of them is pierced. Really… what more could a girl want?

That being said, I’d now like to castigate my beloved husband for ALWAYS STEALING MY BLOG IDEAS BEFORE I GET A CHANCE TO WRITE THEM UP AS POSTS!!!

It’s just a tad frustrating, I tell you, to check out one of Rob’s blogs and discover that the whole time I’ve been trying to settle Milo down for his nap, HE’S been writing a blog entry about the VERY SAME TOPIC I was planning to tackle as soon as Milo was asleep! Sheesh! Sure, he may have fathered Milo and washed every single load of diapers since the day he was born, but I figure I still own the intellectual property rights to the boy.

So, in order to remind Rob who has first dibs on all Milo-related topics, I’d greatly appreciate it if you copied and pasted the following text and left it as a comment on one of Rob’s blogs:

Dear Rob, while you are an incredibly perceptive writer and while I enjoy reading your posts and seeing pictures of people with three or more nipples, I must confess to feeling a certain sympathy for your poor wife, who – due to her endlessly self-sacrificing devotion to your son – is unable to spend as much time in front of a computer as you, and is therefore unable to post her blog entries about parenting young Milo as quickly and often as you are. For this reason, I think it advisable for you to submit all future blog ideas in writing to your lovely wife for approval PRIOR to posting them on one of your blogs, in order to refrain from inadvertently stealing any more of her ideas. Better yet, why not spend several hours a day acting as her scribe, typing up her blogs for her when she has her hands full with your son. Because if you don’t, tiny birds will peck out your pupils and strangers will spit in your soup. Yours truly, a Concerned Reader.

There. That should do it.

You see how he's horning in on my territory?

The great baby boom of summer ought-five

2005-09-04T17:58:00.000-07:00

Milo and Korae: First they play hard to get...

...then they succumb to their overwhelming mutual attraction and play super happy-smiley face with each other.

We’ve been dealing with a whole lot of firsts in the past couple weeks. First goos, first smiles, first trip to the doctor, first night alone with Dad, first self-inflicted rattle smack to the head, etc. – the fun never stops, I tell you. Just last weekend, Milo had his first trip to the beach – AND his first “date” with an older woman. Our friends David and Donna were there with their second child, Korae, who was born on June 14th, 11 days before Milo decided to grace us with his presence.

The two babies were ridiculously cute with each other. We sat them down on our laps so that their faces were only a foot or so away from each other. As soon as they caught sight of each other, they were captivated. They sat there staring at each other, smiling, flailing their arms, and trying to play footsy with each other for at least 15 minutes. In baby terms, that’s the equivalent of a 9-½ week love affair. All they were missing were the strawberries and whipped cream.

Meanwhile, it’s all I can do to get my son to look at me most of the time. Our white bedroom door and the light coming through our orange curtains are infinitely more interesting than the face of the woman who brought him into the world.

Sigh. I always knew that Milo would end up casting me aside for another woman… I just hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.

However, Milo’s going to find he has a lot of competition for Korae’s affections. He’s certainly not the only baby boy that’s come into the world over the past few months. This summer has seen an unprecedented number of new souls join our extended circle of friends and family. I can count ten new arrivals in my little world alone:

Korae was born to David and Donna on June 14th
Wayland James was born to our friend Scott and his girlfriend Heather on June 21st
Milo the Man was born on June 25th
Oscar was born to Teresa and Steven on July 1st
My friend Tracy’s cousin Erin had a baby boy a couple of weeks after Milo was born
Milo’s cousin Nadia was born to my brother David and his wife Roxanne on July 8th

(hmm… can anyone say, “kissing cousin”?)
Isis was born to Osha (Donna’s sister) and Paul in the beginning of August (another set of cousins!)
Emily and Tyler (TWINS!) were born to my coworker Cheryl on August 20th
Finally, my friends Stew and Kelly were brave (or insane) enough to have their FOURTH CHILD, a baby boy, sometime in August.

And those are just the babies that have come into MY world. One shudders to think what the first day of kindergarten is going to be like, when all those five-year-olds show up and the teachers realize they’re going to have to ship in a dozen portable classrooms to hold them all…

Oh, cripes, that reminds me – I’d better go right this minute and start getting Milo on to about a bajillion daycare waiting lists. What have I been thinking? The boy’s already two months old! If I don’t get him into the right preschool, he’ll be ruined for life!

(Speaking of preschools, did you know that the rate of expulsion in U.S. preschools is TRIPLE the K-12 expulsion rate? Egads! Why do you suppose they're getting kicked out? For biting? Fighting? Dealing drugs? Worshipping false gods? Refusing to stand up for the pledge of allegiance? Something tells me I'd rather not know -- I already spend far too much time analyzing Milo's current behaviour for signs of nasty habits to come. Lord knows I don't need any others to look for...)