it IS a fashion statement. it says "I give up!"

I was really, really happy about buying a pair of jeans that fit me. Wearing maternity clothes when you are no longer pregnant is just depressing. And oh! The novelty of pants with a zipper! So why, you might legitimately ask yourself, did I also buy a pair of sweatpants?

TO HORRIFY STACY LONDON.

What are you doing, 'col?

Well, I'm doing laundry, which hardly bears mentioning, since I'm always doing laundry. Unless I've given up on the laundry, in which case spook is doing it. This morning he said that he had put in all the laundry last night, and I thought no way, and then I discovered that all the laundry did not include the two sets of sheets and mattress pad that have been waiting to be washed, oh, since Jacob was born. I don't want to diminish his achievement; there was a lot of damn washing to do. He also washed all of the bottles and all of the breastpump paraphernalia, no minor feat. So today I'm trying to get through the aforementioned sheets, and to assemble all the diapers and put them away. For ten seconds we could have clean diapers.

Can we talk about cloth diapers for a second? They are not nearly the nightmare that I was afraid they would be. When I told Adam about it, he said "You're doing all that folding?" Incredulous, wide-eyed. I know there are people who do all that folding and think nothing of it, but I am not of that tribe. No, in fact, we bought the BumGenius diapers (I am embarrassed just typing that), a diaper described to us (more embarrassment coming up) as "the Cadillac of diapers." No lie. These are pretty awesome, and totally straightforward, a big plus for me since when the Diaper Lady was demonstrating prefolds for us, I realized that I would need a degree in engineering just to understand how the damn thing was supposed to go together. The other big factors in the ease of our cloth diaper experience are:

1) Flushable liners. You wouldn't think this would matter much at the infant poop stage, but they cut down on the rinsing.
2) A spray head for our laundry sink tap. Thank you, Jenny. Before this I could not get the water pressure high enough and had to scrape poop out of the diapers by hand. (Ew. I know. But babies are gross, so stay with me.)
3) Laundry in our apartment. I cannot stress this enough.

The other thing I've been doing lately is reading a lot about food. I just finished Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. He says in the introduction that he wrote it after The Omnivore's Dilemma was published partly in response to the reader questions he received: now that you've done all this research about food production, what do you think we should eat? What do you eat? So it's two parts critique of the way nutrition science filters into the public imagination and one part his guidelines about what he thinks makes sensible eating. His ideas feel possible to adopt, unlike the dogmatic and rigid thinking which makes up so much of food discourse. Instead of feeling squashed by impossible standards, I came off the end of this book feeling inspired to change our food habits--both shopping and eating.

iterative development

Here is what I have learned in the last four weeks: the first month, all you will do is feed the baby, change the baby, and try to sleep. Seriously. Over and over and over and over and over again. If you do anything beyond these parameters, it is a fucking miracle. This is especially true for people who are single parents, or for people whose partners have to return to work right away.

With the help of our massive supporting cast, we have done some other things. Thanks to spook's job, which allowed him to be home (with the exception of a few days) until this week, we managed quite a bit of the housework. (We also had volunteers do some of our laundry and dishes.) Thanks to being strongly motivated to not go crazy, we went for a lot of walks, both to calm the baby and to get ice cream. Thanks to fairy godmother Jenny, we got a chance to go out to dinner, just the two of us. So I'm not trying to discourage you, folks who do not have kids, so much as telling you to keep your expectations super-low and then congratulate yourselves like mad on every small achievement. It feels much better that way.

This first week by myself is interesting so far. It's a lot less possible to get things done when there isn't a second set of hands around--and I'm cheating, because once again fairy godmother Jenny steps in so that I get to eat lunch. Lunch which she makes for me. I am completely spoiled. But today I count as a victory that I was able to take a shower, something which has previously only been possible when spook is home because it breaks my heart to put Jake down if he's crying, even for five minutes to get clean. But y'know, showers are awesome, especially at such a sticky time. (Not ten minutes goes by without me getting some substance all over me--drool, breastmilk, toast crumbs, and--rarely but unpleasantly--poop.)

My mind feels a little bit gone, although it's actually better than it was early in my pregnancy when I felt so sick all the time that I seemed to have been sublimated by my wretchedness. I do the same repetitive tasks and it's hard to get my brain out of that loop to talk about anything else, so I hate listening to myself, because even though I kinda knew I was going to be one of those people who's all the baby the baby the baby, I didn't want to be. And gradually, I guess, I won't be. There are non-baby activities in my life, even if a lot of them occur simultaneously with breastfeeding: watching HBO's Rome and the NFL preseason, playing Scrabble, visiting with friends. Today I'm going to rent National Geographic's documentary about the Romans in Britain. (Yes, it's a kick I'm on, all right?) It will mean a walk in the beautiful fall weather and a chance to look around at the slightly wider world. Baby steps.

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.