Good days

Yesterday, we slept in, played with the little one, met some friends for coffee and cookies, made a new 5-year-old friend, went to the park, got the baby to take 2-3 naps (short, but still, naps!), put him to bed at 7:30, made delicious dinner, baby slept until 3:30am (8 hours!), and then again until 6am.

The dinner was beggar’s pasta. And baby mama went from ‘no thanks, I don’t like cooked fruit in food’ to ‘wow, that smells nice’ to ‘Ok, maybe I’ll have a third helping.’ The dish is incredibly aromatic, looks beautiful, tastes unusual and delightful. I used apricots and figs, with pistachios and pecans. I would substitute raisins for the apricots next time, as the apricots are pretty overpowering. And a little orange zest on top. And cheese. And salt and pepper. We got the shelled pistachios at Fairway, that was the only thing hard to find. The dish tastes heavenly.

We hear people often tell us some version of ‘OMG, the baby, it goes so fast, you need to really enjoy him while he’s little!’ This is the kind of day I will remember.

Baby’s room is finished

Ha. Ha ha. Haaaahahahahahaa. Actually we haven’t even started to clean it up and out to make it into a baby’s room. Our poor little 3-month-old will have to suffer in his current digs for a little while longer.

But this is just an excuse to say that I one day fantasize about having the baby’s room decorated with some of these decals. To see what it might look like in the right hands, these intrepid expectants have made awesome out of birds.

Signs and trains

There are street signs you see only when you have reason to see them. The clearance signs that dot the nation’s highways, for instance. Only when I was driving a big U-Haul truck from Chicago to New York did I actually notice that these signs are in front of all bridges. In a car, who needs to know? And not needing to know, I didn’t see.

So it is with the little one, and blog entries around the web that have to do with serious child illness. I’m finding that these pop up on my radar, and knock me over.

I go from this tutorial on making an iPhone web application, to this blog chronicling the author’s child’s medical disorders – the tech guy’s son.

The Dreamhost blog has a post by the CEO, chronicling his boy Wren’s birth and death. Unnecessary fucking death, due to a home birth and lack of awareness of Group B Strep infection.

And Whoorl shows up in my RSS reader, and today she marks the death of her cousin’s daughter, 2 months after diagnosis, of a malignant brain tumor, DIPG. Five years old, diagnosed in January, passed away Sunday.

Our baby turned three months on this past Sunday. These stories hit me like a train, or a serious punch to the stomach. I found myself crying in a coffee shop over a little girl I never knew.

I don’t search for tragic stories of the deaths of children. I promise. I think they have always been there, and that in this age of blogging the private trials that people go through are oh so much more public. I read these posts not because I’m obsessed with death, but because I don’t want to turn away from the grief that having a child opens you up to. I would want people to read it if I was writing.

So anyhow, back to the business of living. But I think I’m doing the equivalent of driving a new kind of truck, newly attentive to low clearance. And universe? I would appreciate it if bad things would stop happening to kids, please. I can’t really take it.

Feels like it’s been a while

I know, right? 5 days, and I’m feeling like I’m neglecting my journal. The pressure to keep up, man, it’s tough. I continue my campaign of daily, impromptu forms of kindness. A good friend chimed in on some tempest in a teacup thing with some travel arrangements, noting that he refuses to get upset at things that don’t upset him. Hells yes, good advice. I refuse to get upset at stuff that doesn’t upset me.

To clarify about Portland, it’s a combination of a real place we often consider moving, but also our shorthand for a place that we might move to if we were un-moored from NYC and didn’t know where we wanted to land. We learned that others think of this as Philadelphia. Some even think of Queens. But there is definitely a sense among our friends that if we could get it together with some friends/family, we would collectively move somewhere. I read this as a desire for more community, that many of us really lack, as well as the warm-fuzzies that we often feel when we spend time with people whom, you know, we actually like. Also, it’s an acknowledgment that our lives are really not tied to anyplace right now.

What else? Sleep has now occupied that space in Baby Mama’s brain where the latest anxiety/project/obsession goes. I’m continually impressed by her ability to fill this space with varied stuff (breastfeeding, the state of our apartment, housing, her job, whether to have a child). And though I often make fun of her for never letting this space stay empty and, well, make her less anxious, I do also benefit pretty dramatically from her anxieties. I know, right? Win-win. I get to make fun of her for her anxieties, feel superior to her for it, and then benefit from the spate of activity that happens as a result.

So, right, sleep. As a marker in the sand, the baby is now 3 months old, as of yesterday. And he has slept, over the past 2-3 weeks, from 7:30 or 8pm to about 12:30pm (last night was weird, with Daylight Savings Time, and he slept until 11:30). Then we feed him, and he goes back to sleep, until about 4 or 4:30am. Then we feed him again, and he sleeps until 6:30-7:30am. Sometimes he’ll go back to sleep after that, but it’s really hit-or-miss. But it’s generally a 5 hour, 4 hour, 3 hour pattern. And we feed and change him in between each period.

Baby mama is equipped with expert opinion and a plan, to make him sleep more and longer. I am a big advocate of the rear naked choke (i.e., the Sleeper Hold), but this apparently is not on the table. Which is bullshit, because that bad boy is proven by Science™

And so it was…

And so it came to pass that an email was sent, and a letter was written, and our lives are potentially again in flux. It’s possible that we will continue on, apace. And it’s possible that we’ll soon live in the Pacific Northwest, and I’ll have to change my tagline to ‘A Brooklyn Dad Keeps it Real in the Land of Portlandia’…

Date Night

And so it came to pass that two crazy kids made it out to dinner by themselves, leaving their baby home with grandma. Hangar steak and whole, grilled branzino, chocolate bread pudding, and even some cocktails. High times were had by all, and BB slept blissfully through the whole thing. Grandma watched movies.

It’s like, a life, man. A life.

indignity

Our baby has a bit of blood in his poop, which is apparently attributable to tiny cuts by his anus and possibly allergies to something or other that baby mama is eating. So now baby mama has to cut out dairy (the loss of cheese, not just unpasteurized cheese, is brutal), and we have to do some wash/clean/ointment deal for his butt cheeks. I wish I could make some of this shit up, but it’s all very real and happening.

And for a certain friend, baby mama went to the pediatrician with a bag of pooped-in diaper. So, yeah, it’s high times in the Brooklyn Dad household.

Nanny time

In my memory, I grew up in a household where my dad worked, my mom didn’t, and my brothers and I were raised by my mom. My birth mother, who died when I was 7 or so, may have had a job (I think she was a teacher). But I mostly recall her being a volunteer for Women’s American ORT – an organization originally devoted to job training education for Jews worldwide, now devoted to tech training for Jews and non-Jews around the world. My step-mother, who mostly raised us, was also a former teacher (of high school music). So my brothers and I were raised, in the suburbs, by a stay-at-home mom, and a working dad. A typically upper-middle-class existence.

But memory is a stupid, faulty, reconstructive monster, rewriting the past through the lens of the present. In reality, there were people who have always stood behind this memory. Pat, who used to wield a wooden spoon for when we misbehaved, and once tried to lock my oldest brother in the basement (he broke the door in response). Julie, our ‘summer girl’, who took vacations with us – maybe to the Lake of the Ozarks, in Missouri? Could it have been to Mackinac Island, in Michigan? To Hilton Head Island, in South Carolina? Pete, a seminary college student, took us hither and thither throughout high school. So did another woman, whom my mother called Helga because she was Norwegian, and whose name I can no longer remember. These babysitters, summer girls, and college helpers were prevalent in my childhood, and yet they were absent from the formal family structure of our lives. We never called them nannies. But maybe that was because they were White. But they certainly were caregivers, and they weren’t family.

I’ve had Pat and Pete, and Julie and Helga on my mind. We have decided to hire a nanny for our Brooklyn Baby. Three days a week, as baby mama goes back to work and I finish out the semester, to take care of our little one. The evolution of childcare, from ‘I’ll do it,’ to a day care center, to a home day care, to a part-time nanny, is just one more thing in the ever-growing list of things I never imagined that I would do in my life. I don’t like to hire people to clean our house – it feels like we should pick up our own junk and clean our own toilets. And now we’re hiring someone to take care of our child. It’s fraught, man, just fraught. I’m willing to outsource the feeding of my family, the education of my family, sometimes the house-cleaning for my family, but not the care of my baby. That line is such a moving one.

Adding insult to injury, my wife has, like most women, done the vast majority of the work in securing someone to care for our baby. It wasn’t supposed to be this way – last fall, while we were overwhelmed with the list of baby stuff to do in anticipation of our bouncing baby boy, I took on the responsibility for finding childcare. A long series of procrastinations, too-timid outreach, failed sign-ups, and overly optimistic self-assurances, I ended up passing the task back to baby mama a month or so ago. She left my sad excuse for task management in the dust, with a cyclone of phone calls, center visits, pre-screening phone calls to women, reference checks, and try-outs. So basically, I took on a responsibility, wildly underestimated how much time and energy it would take, failed at it, and then passed that responsibility back to my nursing, sleep-deprived wife.

This is also why many men’s (or at least my own, to the extent that I do make them occasionally) claims to ‘equal childcare’ are so obviously silly. The 1-2 punch of breastfeeding and finding childcare means that I’ll never catch up, no matter how many diapers I change or baths I administer.

At the end of all this, we have a nanny, that most ambivalent of childcare professionals. She is a woman of color, and a Caribbean immigrant. All signs point to her being filled with awesomeness, and she will be a boon to us as baby mama and I both figure out what to do next for long-term employment. We don’t know at this point how things will work out in the short- or long-term future, so it’s a little premature to angst over the whole matter. It solves the problem in the immediate future of what to do about childcare. I do wonder if our baby will remember the lovely Black woman whom we hope will help take care of him. I hope so.

And now, for those keeping score, regarding the ‘raising a normal kid in Park Slope’: hyphenated last name? Check. Classical, yet top 20 most popular name? Check. Nanny? Check. Bottle heater-upper? Check. What’s left? A spot at the Berkeley Carroll, natch.