teamwork

I jinxed us by writing about Jake's sleep on the internets. Any progress we had been making seems to have gone out the window in the last few days, and I am spending a lot of time in the wee smalls sitting in his rocking chair, wretchedly reminding myself that he will eventually sleep through the night, even if that eventuality is several years away. Ugh.

However, the universe has been awesome, by which I mostly mean people I know. Kat gave us her glider, so I have a place to rock the baby in the middle of the night. Paul drove me out to Kat's to pick it up. Jenny took Jake overnight last Saturday so we could get some sleep. Folks have sent me sweet notes about my parenting abilities. And as a cherry on the top of it all, I found this website:

http://www.askmoxie.org/

Behold! A parenting website where people discuss their parenting experiences instead of screaming at everyone else about how they're doing it wrong! It's a miracle. Now if I could only figure out how the spambots are defeating my word verification for comments, all would be golden.

safely back in the world

"my heart's not new
I'm not like you
I've loved and been loved
well and badly too
my body's been
through everything
I've used and been used
I got over it
there's something that you learn on a tightrope
just outside the spotlight,
there's a big net waiting"
Tanya Donelly
I'm Keeping You

I'm listening to my son making little sighing noises in his sleep. It's been three and a half days, and I still can't quite believe he's here. I probably do not have time to tell you about his birth before he wakes up, but I can tell you that it was one of the most challenging and most rewarding experiences of my life, that spook showed me a depth of devotion and care that I can still hardly fathom, that although I was terrified that it would somehow be too much for me to cope with, it was not. And now he's here with me.

the basics

"Put a pillow between your knees when you're sleeping," my midwife said. I do, faithfully, gradually getting used to the weirdness of sleeping on my side. This morning it feels like my femurs might just pop out of my hip joints, bitey crescents of pain.

On the other hand, the shrimpbaby is doing flips, occasionally booting me with an elbow or a foot. Hi, buddy. Fifteen more weeks. I woke thinking about how I was hungry, was suddenly worried that he would be hungry, and then thought "No, no, that doesn't come until later." And then I thought about how freaky it must be to be born, and then to be suddenly cold, and hungry, for the first time in your life, with no idea what it is or if it will ever go away. I realize this is not a new thought, but it was new to me, or new to me in a way--in the sense that it was the first time I'd ever gotten inside the thought. Little dude, I can't save you from the scary feeling of getting hungry, but I will always feed you.

my family just got bigger

This is Nico, second of my World's Most Gorgeous Nieces.

(not my) parenting story

Jen and I were friends in university, and stay in a sporadic sort of touch via facebook, so I was excited to see this story about her family featured in Toronto Life. Go read. It's cool.

Call for submissions (a newly human first!)

Despite the giant pain in the ass that drafting and signing a donor contract turned out to be (a saga which I may someday relate, because it seems like it might be useful to somebody out there), I have to say that I really like my lawyer. I would happily and confidently recommend her to anyone in Toronto looking for a queer-friendly family lawyer. She is the bomb.

I'm aware that there's a whole bunch of stuff I want to tell you guys about our decision to have a baby and our process for getting there, actually, because when we started trying to do it I realized that I could find all kinds of stories about queer families, but no Canadian ones. I know a handful of queerfolk my age who have kids, but either I don't know them well enough to ask a bunch of crazily intrusive questions, or I failed to connect with them when we were in our information-gathering stage, and it was...kind of a crappy, alienating, lonely experience. If putting my story out in the world would make it less that way for other people, that would be a good thing to do.

So, writing about intending to write about something is a bit peculiar, but if I put it out there on the internet, I have to make it happen. It also allows me to petition you folks for your stories. Did your family come about in a way that was off the beaten path? D'you want to tell that story? If so, leave me a comment and I will figure out how to feature you as a guest blogger (or link to your blog, if you've already written about it.) I'm hoping for some specifically Canadian stories, 'cause our law is different, but I'm happy to hear from everyone. Tell your friends!

quiet/loud

Two things you must know in order to appreciate this story: one, Lucy is obsessed with dogs. She has that toddler gift of spotting a dog at a hundred paces, on a leash, in an advertisement, going by in a passing car, and she remarks on all of them. She does not seem to have any trouble with the idea that a Chihuahua and a Great Dane are the same kind of animal, and I can't discern any preference for one or the other. They're all dogs. Uuf uuf. Two, there is a little white dog who lives next door to Lucy, and this dog excites much interest, especially since she can sometimes see him from the window of her living room. You'll catch her peering out the window, standing on tiptoe to get her little chin clear of the sill for a better view. Frequently our conversations on the matter go like this:
"Are you looking for the dog, Lucy?"
"Uuf." [signs DOG]
"Where do you think that doggie is?"
"Homa." [signs HOME]
"That's right. The dog is in his home."
Last Tuesday I looked over to see her standing at the window for the third time in an hour. "Whatcha doin', Lucy?" Without taking her eyes off the yard, she signed WAITING.

***

"Has she been playing the game where she gives you nothing?" Adam asked me this morning. Apparently, one of Lucy's new things has been to go down the hall and pretend to pick up the light from the digital readout on the carbon monoxide detector. Then she'll deposit the light in your hand, proclaiming "Ta ta." Lather, rinse, repeat.

She did this several times at top Lucy-speed, bolting down the hallway in her staggering run to grab at the light and place it carefully in my open palm, laughing. (On the cuteometer, this is at least a seven out of ten, edging into the eights when her laugh turns into a chortle.) The one thing this game had not taken into account, however, was the reset/test button, located a mere centimeter or two below the glow of the display.

I can now say definitively that Adam and Chelle's carbon monoxide detector works.

Lu is a pretty laid-back kid. When the piercing shriek of the alarm screeched through the hall, she didn't cry. I thought I might, for a few seconds, frantically looking to see if I needed to do something to make it stop. Several earsplitting tones later, it stopped on its own. I looked at Lu. Her eyes were perfectly round. Solemnly, she intoned "Beep beep."
"Yep, it went beep beep. It was quite--" don't say scary-- "alarming."
"Beep beep," she said, a little more certainly, and then signed "All done."

There was no more carbon monoxide detector frolic today. We are all done with that terrible noise, apparently. (Other things Lu is "all done" with: the inhaler she has to use to treat her cough, her last several lunches, donkeys. All done with donkeys.)

exhale

"I'm not good at failure!" I sobbed. Greg kept rubbing my back, giving me space for my abject, snotty misery.
"It's not your failure."
"I'm not that good at other people's failure, either. In case you hadn't noticed." There was a hiccup, and then we both started laughing, and I got up to get a kleenex, and now, my belly full of reassurances and the pasta that Lizbeth made for dinner, I can finally breathe again, air this time and not the stale sense of disappointment in myself I was suffocating on all day.

I'll be glad when the Christmas season is over this year. It is not going well. I can hardly get my bearings for bailing out the boat. What is going well, though, is that there seems to always be someone there to pick me up and put me on my feet again, and I am very grateful.

endurance training

One thing that children require: stamina. Today I read Dennis Lee's poem "Alligator Pie" nine times in a row. When Lucy said "More!" (or more accurately, "Muh!") for what seemed like the zillionth time I resolved to teach her to say "Again!" and so that was the lesson for the afternoon. Along with repeating "Can you say 'please'?" over and over, to be rewarded with her little voice piping "Peez!"

Oh, I love her. I love her so much.

So that was my today, Lu's head pressed hard against my breastbone as she leaned back into my lap while I read stories and picked out important words when she got impatient and turned the pages really fast and repeated and repeated and repeated.

p.s. "Eg!" Success? You decide.

never let 'em see you sweat

Today, a day that included both slamming my hand into the corner of a table hard enough to leave visible bruising and falling off a ladder, was the best day of my week. This is, in part, due to Greg's motivational speaking skills--apparently I just needed someone to tell me "You will have a good day tomorrow" in a confident manner. I did not finish all the things that needed to be finished, largely because finishing them would have defied all laws of nature, but I did knock out a few things that had been bothering me. There was a terrible Oh Hell No moment, but Mathabo swooped in and rescued me. I think the rest of my calm came from knowing that no matter what I did or didn't accomplish, my workday would be over at two, and I would get to go home to my snuggly sheets and my room-mate and my boy and my cats.

My cats who are very busy auditioning for a buddy cop movie. Tish is the hardbitten veteran who doesn't want a new partner, dammit, Max is her fresh-faced rookie sidekick and Roo is...maybe the dispatcher. Or that woman in the office who hands them the right file at the critical moment. In support of this theory, Roo has been trying to operate the remote control, walking over it to change the channel to "Lethal Weapon" while Elizabeth was trying to watch "Jon and Kate Plus 8."

Bitch, please.

Lately, in a way that hasn't been the case since I was a much younger woman, I have been needing to read about people like me. I have the privilege of an awesome network of friends who nurture and support me, and so most of the time the fact that I don't see myself reflected in the wider culture isn't that troubling. The people who love me are a good mirror. They argue without deriding; they empathize rather than sympathizing. Most of the time, that's enough to keep me afloat. But every once in a while, I go to fill out a form and discover that none of the boxes reflect my answer. Sometimes it's something the people I know can't help with, because they haven't been through it, and it's important to know that I'm not crazy, not the only person who's ever experienced it, not the only person who hated 300.

I was thinking about this while reading Megan's article about cohousing in Xtra, not because we are buying a house any time soon, but because reading it gave me the pleasure of recognition--if we ever do own, it is unlikely to be in the traditional configuration of man + woman + optional kid and picket fence. (I was thinking about it, too, when I read her blog post about how she and her co-housers had purchased a car together, the three of them, and then discovered that it was legally impossible to list all of them as owners. That's what I'm talking about.)

It's ironic, then, that the next link I clicked told me that Bitch magazine is in serious danger of folding. For those of you who don't know Bitch ("Feminist Response to Pop Culture!"), you should check it out while you still have the chance. And if you feel compelled, donate. I already have, because I have been reminded of the worth of seeing my values make it to print.

in which I get concussed, drown, and am crushed by beer bottles

We're back from the cottage. I love cottages, because what I really want to do on vacation is lie around reading my book, swim, cook, and argue with my friends. It's true. I'm funny that way.

It's also neat what things you learn when you spend a few days living in the same space with people. For example my friend Greg, who is much admired among those of us who know him from work for his handiness at any number of tasks, built the most crazy-ass incompetent fire I have ever seen. Sorry, dear, but you know it's true. Some kindling, and then some juniper branches, and then a giant log plopped right on top.

Greg: "I'm waiting for all the apologies I'm going to get when this burns."
Thea: "I'm rehearsing, wait: 'You got lucky.'"
Peter: "If that actually catches fire, I will walk into town, buy the ingredients, walk back here and make you a pie."

Alas, I foiled my own chances to get pie when he kept adding more and more and more juniper, and cardboard, and then some juniper branches approximately four feet long, draped over the fire with their ends dangling.

alex [quiet, but incredulous]: "On top?"
Me [laughing hysterically, intervening]: "Oh my god, stop. Stop. Stop."
Greg: "It would have worked."
Me [stuffing kindling into the hot part at the bottom]: "Seriously, no."

It rained all of Sunday, so of course we had to go get in the lake and toss a frisbee and a miniature football back and forth. I can neither throw nor catch, which caused no end of trauma in gym class, but it was very pleasant to play with people who didn't care. Eventually Greg and Peter started throwing rocks at each other again (Me: "Use your words!") and I got cold and got out and went back to reading my book.

The hijinks did not extend to the food, the brilliant food, at least not unless you include the addition of copious volumes of butter. So it was with a heavy heart (but grateful arteries) that I got in the car to come home yesterday morning. I was shaken out of my melancholy by the necessity of fitting myself into the front seat with the better part of the 120 beer bottles we were returning. I'm glad to be home. I missed Lizbeth, and I wanted to sleep in my own bed. But you can bet I'm plotting next year's trip already.

more things I ought to have grasped by now, but somehow hadn't

Dudes, Lucy is sick. Not, like, horrifically sick--like "summer cold" sick, which seems to leave her 95% her usual even-tempered self, thank you god. But it's so sad to hear her make all these little snorgully noises trying to breathe through her nose, and also, it's about the baby snot. So. Much. Snot. Which she helpfully wipes away, getting it all over her hands and face and the next twelve things she touches. I am now one of those hovery grownups with an ever-ready diaper wipe, trying to swoop in and clean her little walrus-tusks of snot away at the first appearance without traumatizing her with actual swooping. Because seriously, if someone kept lurching at me with a wetwipe, I would find it freaky and annoying pretty fast.

I know you're glad I shared. I just. Eep. Now that I am surveying Parenthood as though it is a country I might live in sooner rather than later, I'm amazed all over again at what kind of stuff isn't on the label. Babies are sweet, magical little beings who will get snot on your clothes!

keep calm and carry on

My friend Geoffrey, in his capacity as my boss, keeps taking my hand and earnestly repeating "Not more than the usual amount of fretting," until I say it back to him. Not more than the usual amount of fretting. What I failed to take into account is the equation for "how much is the usual amount of fretting" in regard to what's actually going on in my life right now.

Work, although it is much more under control on my front since I started working the early shift, is in all other respects a runaway train: we're undergoing a renovation that hasn't even started yet and is already a week behind schedule. During this period we need to be hiring and training roughly fifty seasonal staff. The Christmas product will be arriving any moment. We're down two managers, although I did learn today that we've hired a general manager who will get to start in early October, lucky her. (I did put out a general call this morning over unpacking to ask could we please, please, not put on our judgypants for the first few weeks while she adjusts to working with new people in a new company at the worst possible time of year to start a retail management position--pretty please?--and after that, I don't care, judge away! Go nuts! But if I have to listen to my beloved and generally quite awesome co-workers display their worst, pettiest behavior in the middle of the rest of this I will go batshit crazy and start screaming, fret-levels be damned.)

Then there's the ongoing conversation with the dear friend who's offered to be my sperm donor. The conversation isn't a problem, it's finding the time to sit down and have it. Granted, negotiating the use of someone's semen is awkward, even if you thought you'd got all the possible awkward out of the way in university by doing hideously insensitive things to one another and then processing for months. (Writing songs about your feelings optional.) It's not like it's a prerequisite, but there is probably no better preparation for this kind of awkward than having shared a decade of overearnest and yes, strangely literal friendship peppered with conversation about the big things: values, ideas, girls. But the hideous stress-taffy that is emailing about something important makes me feel bad, and feel bad about adding stress to my friend's busy life, and in the meantime I'm full of crazy anxiety-born thoughts about my age, and my reproductive health, and my dubious qualifications for parenthood. It feels like the stress is sitting on my brain and squishing it out my ears, such that my response to a most recent email in which he says that we could possibly talk on "the non-zoo day" caused this moment of panic:

wait, there's a zoo day now? what about the zoo? am I going to the zoo? is this a metaphorical thing, like "things are a zoo around here?" how can I possibly not know if zoo-related activites are going on? why did I buy a damn daytimer anyway, if not to help me out of this kind of confusion? is there any way to ask about this without sounding like a total crazy person?

Uh, no.

In an apparent non-sequitir, we just got back from visiting Jennifer in Ottawa. Jen is one of those friends that overwrought maniacs like me cherish due to her ability to calm me down by treating me like a lovable doofus and giving me advice in short, easily understood sentences*. In this case, I am ordering for myself the very poster that hangs in Jen's living room



although I may order it in a seafoam colour. More calming still.



* I cherish Jennifer for other reasons as well, as she knows, but it just looked a little cold sitting there. I thought I'd clarify.

"Up!"

This new imperative brought to you by my niece, the incomparable Miss Lucy. It's one of the apparently gazillion things she's learned to do since last Tuesday.

No, seriously.

Today she said "ball," which as far as I know she's never said before. She's started laughing in this abrupt, hilarious "ha!", every syllable its own world. I spent our walk home from the early years centre composing a goofy song around the sentence "Nobody rocks the house down like Lucy's marching band," and then when I sang it later she banged toys together more-or-less in time. When I do something she thinks is funny she will lean toward me to get her face close to mine before favouring me with her giant grin. She blows my mind, is what I'm trying to say here, people.

the best part of my new job

you and I know/ if Weezer can go/ on holiday then so/ can we, let's go

Some random thoughts about my vacation:

now my seat back is up, tray table stowed and there’s nothing to do

Pearson Airport will suckerpunch you every time. There is nothing to eat in Terminal Three, at least once you're through the gate, with the exception of Tim Hortons. (There are also the kinds of airport cafe which charge ten dollars for a crappy roast beef sandwich, but I refuse to acknowledge these.) But think about what this means: there is a place on earth where the fast food burger has no foothold. This is amazing.

sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell

I saw fewer animals on this trip out. Some of this was no doubt the weird spring they're having in Alberta (wet, cold). Some of this was (new vocabulary alert) that we weren't out much at the crepuscular hour so popular with wildlife. The animals I did see, however, were exciting: two black bears, several elk, numerous deer, and a mountain goat. Some of my excitement was probably trepidation, as they were all so close to the road as to cause the kind of useless shouting that I am known to engage in during times of stress. "This is a terrible place for a bear! What are you doing here? Isn't there something tasty a little farther from the whizzing cars!?" The only exceptions to the close-to-the-road experience were an elk we saw on our walk across the Larch Islands, and a deer and coyote which were actually on the road--both, happily, ambulatory and remaining so after what I considered to be their brushes with death. :hyperventilates:

Above 3,000 feet in altitude the lower atmospheric pressure will affect cakes.

We did a beautiful hike by Lake Louise, up the mountain to the Lake Agnes teahouse. The views were breathtaking, as was the hike itself. Literally. You would think that when you agree to walk up a mountain it would be self-evident that it was going to be uphill the whole way, but my mind somehow skims over this every time. Probably because if I remembered it, I would never agree to it. Fifteen minutes in, I said to spook in a carefully not-whiny voice "it's not all going to be like this, is it?"
and he said "No, no." And paused. "I mean, I don't think so." The grade did become less alarming, but I was still puffing like a toy engine by the time we got toward the top. The only thing that kept me going was the embarrassment of seeing happy elderly couples coming down, and knowing that there was only one way up, and I was currently on it. I am no paragon of physical fitness, but I'm damned if I'm going to be shown up by seventy-year-old tourists. So when the switchbacks got abruptly steeper after almost two hours on the trail, I may or may not have made a sound like a terribly distressed puppy. "We're almost there!" spook chirped unconvincingly as we came around a last bend. I looked up and saw stairs. Not just any stairs. Stairs of a steepness that constitutes profound marital betrayal.



"I forgot about the stairs," spook said. I stared at him in mute horror for several long moments, but somehow the stairs were still there when I looked again. What kind of person forgets about the stairs? Moreover, what did this imply about the athleticism of my partner's early life? It was like finding out that he was secretly captain of the high school volleyball team. At the teahouse I was distracted from the horror of those last sixty feet by the world's most shameless chipmunks. Is there anything that would keep you from feeding them some of your cookie? I mean, besides the facts that a) it is a bad idea, and probably illegal, to feed animals in provincial parks and b) that cookie cost four dollars?

"Something else. Also terrible."

I saw Cloverfield, and despite its iffy reviews, I really liked it, shaky-cam and all. It was creepy, and featured people behaving in ways I could believe, both for good and ill. I liked the intercutting of the "date" footage from the month before. There were one or two silly moments where I don't mean "silly" in a good way, but overall I thought it was a solid piece of work.

I promised random, you get random.

Nothing you can say that can't be sung.

Yeah, that meltdown I was so successfully sidestepping in my last blog entry got bitter about it and tripped me. So I have not been posting, due to being flat on my face in a puddle of meltdown. It's a bit better now. You want to know part of what's making it better?

This.

Have I mentioned lately that I love my house? I love my house.

I love spook, and I love Lizbeth, and I love the Many And Irritating Cats of Disaster.

Also, dudes, I am so sick, and I should really be in bed, so I'm gonna go do that now.

p.s. for your amusement, a recipe for Schadenfreude Pie.

hot water and Kitty Jesus. never a dull moment.

Hot water update: spook came home and looked at it with me, and he managed to find--get this--a youtube video explaining where the pilot light was located and how to light it. Who says the internets can't teach you anything? So, several hours later, we had hot water again.

I was also supposed to tell you about the dream I had wherein Bird (one of our many cats) was playing the role of Jesus Christ in a pageant. To that end, he was towing a little wagon full of buckets of goulash. ("Was he feeding the poor with it?" E asked, incredulously. Yes. Yes he was. My subconscious is like that, okay?) This wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been worried he was going to wake up Adam and Miche and their many, many children...who were apparently already up to surprise their parents by installing the shelves that they had built with my grandfather...