Feeding the Machine

Posted on 5/22/2008 by cheesefairy

I walked alone around Costco last week, wheeling my squeaky cart with abandon around tight corners, stopping to finger t-shirts and 6-packs of organic chicken stock, smiling blankly at people, speaking only to excuse myself when they tried to get around me.

Bliss.

Once, my solitude of choice was found in a notebook and a pen. That was how I retrieved my centre. Notebook, pen and coffee. Notebook, pen and wine. Notebook, pen and music. Me, notebook, pen.

These days, when granted an hour of free time, I choose to get in the car and head to a big box store. Truly. The week before last, it was Superstore. The groceries I picked up were incidental (except at Costco I do go specifically for the kilo of chips). I went for the Quiet. Yes, in the middle of Costco, with seventeen different noises assaulting my tender ear and surrounded by women in hairnets offering me warmed appetizers and lemonade, it is quiet as if I had applied airport-grade hearing protection.

The philosophy of the big box store is balm for my over-stretched skin right now. I am no one at Costco. No one is anyone at Costco. You find what you need, you pay your money, you get out. No one is going to ask to help you. No one is going to offer to carry your stuff. There isn’t even an express line for 12 items or less. Suck it up. It’s Costco.

As I have become less form, more function in my new gig as mother to two, sometimes it is soothing to slough it all off and become a ghost, wandering the isles lined with sky-high shelves stacked with hundred-packs of pens and notebooks, not even seeing them, much less considering their possible use.

Perhaps this silence of anonymity partially explains all those terrible stories where a person is murdered in broad daylight and none of the many bystanders steps in to help. Perhaps all of those bystanders have lives too noisy, too needy, too responsible and they have gone too far in the other direction, to a place where they apply blinders when they leave their homes so that they may have a few minutes of non-responsibility, non-needy, non-noise.

Probably I could get it together for five minutes to call 911 if I saw someone being murdered in the street. But that guy whose shopping list dropped out of his back pocket in front of the cases of tomato soup? When I’m off-duty, he’s on his own.

Posted in more about me!, the parenthood, two! children! | 7 Comments

Typing with Two Hands for Five Minutes Equals One Special Treat

Posted on 5/20/2008 by cheesefairy

This Tuesday morning, a steady drizzle has lately become heavier and the sky is getting darker. Against the sky, the trees seem a particularly bright shade of green. That was lightning. And that was thunder. Ha! The cat is scared. Ha, cat.

I didn’t come here to talk about the weather. That was an exercise to see if I could still type with two hands. With one hand, it takes a very long time to get the words out and usually I give up before I get to my point. That’s one reason there haven’t been very many posts here in the last month.

MONTH.

Yes, Fresco is one month old. He has already grown out of a couple of sleepers.

Oh yes and I named him Fresco. Blame the hormones.

That means that this is the last week of full-time dual parenting. Next week, when SA goes back to work, Grandparents Eastern are coming for a visit and when they’re gone, I’ll be going to five blades.

That’s been the theme of the past month. Every time we think we’ve taken all we can take, one of us says, “FIVE BLADES” and then we laugh and then we cry and then we drink and then we sleep the sleep of the damned; a tantalizing 90 minutes at a time. Reason two that there haven’t been very many posts. I have started many and woken to find my face glued by drool to the laptop keyboard, the computer making its error beep (Trombone calls it a “frog noise”) and my witty content destroyed by a page of llllllllnnnnnniiiiiiiiiiiizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The other day I saw a neighbourhood woman who has the same stroller as us – but in apple green – and a toddler a wee bit older than Trombone. The last time I saw her she was still pregnant but the other day she had her newborn nestled in the newborn slot and her toddler perched up top in the toddler slot and she also had her dog, a yellow hound-type. We had been feeling pretty proud of ourselves for making out of the house before 10 am with both kids, our snacks and sanity relatively intact and then I saw her; by herself with the two kids AND with a dog. “Dammit,” I said, “She’s gone to five blades!”

Time’s up.

Posted in Fresco, the parenthood, trombone, two! children! | 3 Comments

Shiver Me Timbers

Posted on 5/14/2008 by cheesefairy

Red letter night; the size – what, 8? – “full figured” Whitney won America’s Next Top Model tonight. Hoorah! But I think the best part of the show for me was when Tyra, reviewing the photos where the contestants posed in a puddle of water, said, “Oh, it’s Cletus the Fetus!” and then made a grunting noise and a popping noise and said, “Look, it’s my baby!”

Tyra?

Miss Tyra?

Miss All-Knowing, All-Holy, All-Everything Tyra?

You are fucking nuts.

Now I have to go to bed because Saint Aardvark and I agreed this morning that we would stop being stupid and acting like we don’t have two children with vastly different schedules. We’ve been staying up till 11 every night saying “we can sleep tomorrow” no actually we can’t, we can NEVER SLEEP AGAIN so I must hie away but before I do, I needed to share my brilliant idea.

OK so you know how there’s the blogosphere (this is disputed in some circles, ahem, like in my brain where that is the stupidest fucking term)? And you know how there are mommybloggers god help us I also really detest that term – another post for another day. Well today I decided that the place where the mommybloggers (and daddybloggers too, to be fair) do their bloggging? Should be called the SPROGOSPHERE! Ha! Right?

The Cheeseblog: Because if you hate the bastardization of language, you should totally participate in it!

Posted in bloggity!, language, television | 4 Comments

The Reason This Blog Has A Category Called “Ew”

Posted on 5/12/2008 by cheesefairy

I looked at my referral logs today and noted that the following search string had led someone to my site: “infant welts on legs below diaper elastic.” Strange I thought, I have not blogged about the baby’s skin issues. OR HAVE I? I almost thought I might have, you know, and forgotten about it, but when I followed the link to the page of google results I discovered it was actually my post about stay-ups that got the spiders’ attention, it having used the words “welts,” “elastic” and “legs” in a sentence.

However, this leads me to one of my least favourite things about infants: their belly buttons.

What? Who hates belly buttons? They’re adorable! Is she mad?

Let me be clearer: not the belly buttons of babies or small children. Not the little swirl or pokey bit that you coochie coo or zerbert to make your kid giggle. The belly button of a newborn lies hidden beneath the inch-long chunk of umbilical cord that remains attached to the baby once the rest of the cord has been disposed of. The cord stump is the grossest thing ever, poking out so strangely from a sea of lovely soft baby flesh. It’s an eyesore, frankly. I mean – the whole umbilical cord is no picnic either – life-sustaining, yes, but ropy and vaguely intestine-like and attached to the giant slab of placenta –

sorry –

anyone still reading?

When you’re about to leave the hospital (or as you lie back in your bed if you never went to hospital) a nurse / midwife / doctor / community person will tell you, “The stump takes a couple of weeks to fall off. It dries up and drops off on its own. Just keep it dry and clean and don’t bother it. And mind it doesn’t get infected.”

You’ve basically amputated something from my kid and then you offer no bandages, no creams, no nothing – you’re leaving me with a floppy, soft infant with this black, horrid stump of dead flesh hovering dangerously close to the volatile Diaper Region? Oh and it needs to stay dry? Thanks. Will do my best.

(Raise your hand anyone who has ever encountered an infant penis. Was anything about your encounter DRY? I didn’t think so.)

With Trombone we used cloth diapers and we could not keep things from touching the cord stump and rubbing up against it in what looked like a very uncomfortable fashion. The diapers rubbed right against it (and because they were cloth, they trapped the moisture against it too); the covers nudged up against it; he wasn’t even wearing clothes because it was so damn hot but it took 3 weeks to dry up and drop off.

With Newbert’s birth weight a full pound less than Trombone’s, we weren’t going to attempt the cloth diapers right away. We applied those stinky little newborn pampers and folded down the top so they were away from the stump. Just the way the nurses had. And yet, a week and a half into his life, Newbert got a blister on his belly, where the top of the diaper was rubbing against his skin. Then he got another one where the diaper elastic met his right thigh. The blisters popped on a Friday, two days before his 2-week-irthday. We fretted. I applied a dry, non-stick dressing to the top blister to keep it from being rubbed against by the diapers; when I removed the dressing, the skin peeled off and the raw area doubled in size.

I know! ACK!

We fretted more and spent Friday night with our little guy diaper-free, to give the patches access to air so they could dry out, but by Saturday morning, the patches had taken on a rather, well, infected look about them. Also, the top one had annexed the belly button, whose stump had fallen off at some point in the previous days but was still – oddly enough – not looking delightfully kissable.

Check the Kensington Children’s Walk-In Clinic, for those of you in the area (Burnaby, New Westminster, Coquitlam). It’s staffed by pediatricians and open 7 days a week. I got the pamphlet in a package of community health information when Trombone was born and it’s been on the fridge since but we’ve never gone before. The doctor said, “Ooooh, yep, that’s infected all right,” diagnosed impetigo, a bacterial skin infection, and prescribed an oral antibiotic. Then he told me to come back the next day because he wanted to follow up and make sure it wasn’t getting worse. What a guy.

Oh how we beat our guilty brows that night, discussing at great length: what kind of parents manage to infect their child with groin strep in its second week of life? The BAD KIND. (discussed at lesser length: what kind of parents take their child to a doctor at the first sign of a possible infection? The GOOD KIND.)

However, the infection started to clear up almost immediately (within 3 or 4 doses) and now, 9 days later, you really have to squint to see where the new skin is growing in. Not that you want to because you’ll get an eyeful of pee.

Boy this turned out a lot more detailed and disgusting than I had intended. I’ll spare you the newborn-on-antibiotics poop talk.

Of course, you know who I blame. Medical science, for failing to come up with anything better for newborn belly buttons than “just let it dry up until it drops off.” Come on! Gimme magic bandages. Fancy dries-up-faster cream. Maybe excise the whole thing right after delivery? * Damn, people, we put a man on the moon. Let’s do this.

* mostly joking

Posted in babby, ew, the parenthood | 7 Comments

A Shooting Star Across the Sky

Posted on 5/9/2008 by cheesefairy

We live near a large park and equally near to a community centre. Most of the people I pass on the street in a day are runners. Tight pants, tank tops, music players, ponytails, puffed out cheeks like fish: running. Sometimes I see the same person three times in a block because she’s running laps and I’m ambling.

In Trombone’s first year, when I was most often pushing him around the neighbourhood in his stroller, I physically tilted after the runners. My chin followed them wistfully. I smiled at them and coaxed them on silently and thought soon I will run again.

I wasn’t always a runner. I was never an exerciser, a worker-out-er, a person who gave a flying fig in a rolled donut about cardio or upper body or heart rates. I was a drinker, a smoker, a midnight toker (perhaps not all of those at once) and I had the metabolism of a farmer’s daughter to help me stay pretty much the same size no matter what I did or did not do.

Add to that recklessness a first desk job and a commute by car, not to mention sudden disposable income (all the CHEESE!) and there I was, late 20-something and having put on 20 lbs. Or something. I didn’t actually ever weigh myself. But one day it was time for new pants and then it was time for new pants again and then suddenly, holy crap, new pants? Already?

I arrived, in my late ’20s, at a healthier weight than the one at which I had spent my early ’20s and teens. Definitely. A steady diet of coffee, beer and instant noodles will keep you in size whatever pants but that wasn’t my goal. My goal was to drink as much beer and coffee as possible in a 7 year period. Goal = achieved! Still, though, having “settled down,” I wasn’t any healthier for being heavier, if you know what I mean.

There was no way I was dieting. I didn’t know how. So I started exercising. Swimming, every day, on my way to work. It was awesome. I didn’t actually know how to swim because I had dropped out of swimming class as a kid, not wanting to put my head in the water. I was very good at dog paddle but dog paddle is not very good at getting you from one end of the pool to the other in a timely (ie: not passed by all the very old people also in the pool at 6 am) fashion. Luckily, my job at the time positioned my desk very close to a former lifeguard turned software salesman (hey, it happens) and he, in his slow moments when he was not Always Being Closing, gave me acted-out-in-the-office swimming lessons, which I interpreted each following morning in the pool until finally, weeks later, I was putting my head in the water, breathing properly and doing a passable breast stroke for 45 minutes a day. Thanks, Phil the sales guy!

I had a Nike suit, a swim cap, goggles. I was hardcore. But I got a bit bored. I wanted something out of the water, something I didn’t have to pay money to do, something that wouldn’t make my hair turn funny colours.

Around the same time, I got laid off from the early morning job and so going swimming at 6 am was no longer a reasonable thing to do. I started running, following a learn-to-run-in-several-easy-steps program. Then I got a job and stopped running. Then the job offered me a running club so I started again, eventually working my way up to a 30 minute non-stop run and then, after a year’s rest I ran three or four times before getting pregnant with Trombone. I had just bought a new pair of running shoes. I think I wore them once.

Over time I had really grown to love running. Learning to pace myself and set reasonable – and meetable – goals went a long way toward that love. It worked so well I even applied the running principles to writing fiction. So last year when I looked at the people in the park so longingly, it was with the certainty that I would get back to being a runner. I would take – and welcome – that time to myself again. Somehow I would work it into my busy schedule. But then, I went back to work, the killer of best intentions, and then boom boom diddim: pregnant again.

These days, I don’t quite trust myself not to toss the buggy, babies and all, into the bushes and take off full tilt like an unleashed dog. I feel so strong, physically, that I have to remind myself when walking around our neighbourhood and eyeing the runners that I am only 2.5 weeks post-partum. Exercise is not recommended until at least 6 weeks, no matter how totally healed I feel. (not to mention that I am chronically sleep deprived to the point of delusion and prone to forgetting to eat.)

I don’t want to run to lose weight or to tone muscles. I want to use the muscles. I know you can exercise when pregnant but I just couldn’t do it and so all but the essential muscles in my body feel as though it’s been years since they flexed. And it’s the rush I miss, the feeling of pushing past the last milestone and going another few feet, the ache in my lungs where the air is being circulated, the ritual of warmup, run, cooldown. The part after the run where, when walking home, I would always thank each of my body parts for helping me achieve that day’s goal. The solitude. Sweet heavens, the solitude, of course. The thinking. The pure, quiet moments with only my own breath and my own brain. The freedom, too, yes. No one on me, near me, needing me.

It will be a while yet. I hope my shoes still fit.

Posted in more about me!, the parenthood | 4 Comments