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In no particular order...
Humidifier Parts
Enjoy your visit and come again soon...
It's Sunday again and I'm pleased to be doing something that may become a habit: spending the pre-dawn hours hanging out in Paula's play room with cabbage and a hot water bottle on my left breast, a big cup of tea and a mystery novel.
Wait, did I say pleased?
I meant seriously disgruntled.
First off, I do seem to be fighting off another case of mastitis just one week after getting rid of the last one. Second, daylight-saving time has ended and left me with the bleak prospect of waking up with Paula at FIVE a.m. now instead of six. I'm sure you'll sympathize with my plight, especially since you are very likely better rested than I am and hence still possess mental powers beyond pointing and grunting.
Pointing and grunting is about my speed right now.
I'm so out of it. I barely have what it takes to take the cardboard books out of Paula's mouth as she treats them as edible and not just legible. Well, they're not legible to her. She loves loves loves eating that cardboard and all I can do at the moment is say, "honey, please don't eat that," and hope she'll put it down. Maybe if I
And I know I should technically be "in bed," since by all accounts avoiding another bout of mastitis requires plenty bed rest. But "resting" in bed with my very active daughter is putting my extremely painful left breast at risk of being mistaken for a foothold on a climbing wall. Not so good. So I'm trying to take it easy in here while she entertains herself until Joel gets up, which I'm hoping will be soon.
Until then I'll just grump along inside my head, cursing my boob, cursing the Halloween chocolate I won't be eating*, the spicy Chinese food I shouldn't have eaten*, the gallons of tea I need to drink to help flush out the milk in the plugged duct and the millions of grams of vitamin C I'll need to take to head off another fever. But most of all I'm shaking my fist at the non-baby-parenting idiot who came up with daylight-saving time. Harumph.
Autumn and Bebe are two girls who live down the block from me. I've gotten to know them because like most kids they love to see a baby, so whenever Paula and I passed their house on our walks this summer, they came out to say hi. Now they come ring my doorbell and ask for homework help or if they can come in and play with Paula. Today they brought me some shells they found on the beach at Lake Michigan over the weekend.
In a miserable ploy to fill this space - since my brain seems to still have mastitis, though the rest of me is just fine - I invited them to tell something about themselves here. My questions are in parenthesis when to omit the question would be confusing.
Autumn is extremely pretty, with dark black skin and almond-shaped dark brown eyes. She is a little bit shy, but once she gets talking she can be quite sentimental. She seems like a softy, which of course endears her to me. She's very devoted to her mom, who just got out of jail a few days ago. She and Bebe are cousins and live with their grandmother and a lot of other family members of all ages.
Bebe is a livewire and very talkative. She bounced her butt on my big green birth ball waiting her turn to tell me about herself and interrupting Autumn to explain things to me that I didn't understand. She also spelled everyone's names out for me so I would get them right.
Autumn (nickname, Fancy), age 6:
I was born in Chicago. (What kind of person are you?) I'm a black person. I listen to my mom. Her name is Feeveyes. I wish my daddy would come over and give me a whole bunch of money. My mom bought me an outfit.
I'm learning, I'm reading. I'm better in math - we do math in school. I know my numbers all the way to a hundred. And I'm so happy I came to your house. My teacher hit us with a book, she be cussing at us.
You know what I miss for Halloween? Cinderella. Cinderella is nice. Chas is my brother and he's going to be an ornery man for Halloween. (Bebe explains that an ornery man is like a criminal with lots of weapons). You want my sister's name? Angel. She's gonna be a queen for halloween.
I wish I was a white person. Why? 'Cause. (she gets very shy now and won't say more for a while.) I wish I was a star.
(What do you like about being Black?) Because my momma's black. We have twin cousins now that are white because their daddy's white. Tia and Tamera.
(Do you think they have it better because they're white?) Yeah, because my grandma's black and gives them anything they want.
I wish my cousin was a princess.
I'm happy for my mom's home. My grandma's happy her daughter's home.
Feeveyes (nickname, Bebe), age 8:
I like to eat cookies and stuff. And I like to play around at the park. I like to eat pretzels and stuff and I like to play with baby dolls. I like to play with great big balls. I like to have fun and stuff, in my house play with my Barbies and stuff. I like to play with my friends. And I like to look at mirrors and my face. I like to play with my big sister Gigi, she's 16, my baby brother Shawn - he's one year old. My big brother is 17 and my other big brother's 12. My mom's 34.
I'm gonna be a Power Puff Girl for Halloween. I'm gonna go trick or treating.
I'll be the first in line to tell you how great nursing is. How it's such a nice bonding time between me and Paula, how it reminds me to slow down and enjoy her while she's so young and changing so fast. I can go on and on about how there were times when I know I would have lost my mind if I had to get up in the middle of the night and make a bottle. And how I can comfort Paula with a little nursing when she bumps her head - it's just a really nice thing to have in my tool kit.
Nursing is great. It's terrific. I love it. It's killing me.
This is the thing. For the last few weeks my breasts have given me no end of trouble. I had thrush, then that went away. Then Paula cut three teeth, which meant a lot of gum-rubbing an occasional biting with the attendant soreness. Since then it's just seemed like every time I nurse, especially on my left side, it just hurts. It's hurt more and more and more lately, and finally yesterday morning I called someone about it.
Turns out I should have done that a lot sooner. I have a breast infection! I ran a fever last night, got achy and miserable, and worst of all my left breast has a big swollen lump in it and it absolutely KILLS. It hurts to touch it, much less have tiny, razor-sharp teeth clamp onto it. I'm working on re-teaching Paula to put her tongue over her bottom teeth when she latches on, but so far she just thinks it's a funny face I make, opening my mouth wide and sticking out my tongue. I say, "Stick your tongue out when you latch on, mama! Like this! AAAAAAAAAA." She just laughs, baring those little white teeth in all their menacing glory.
What's worse, it's important with this kind of thing to get Paula to nurse on the bad side a lot to clear out the blockage. She's not getting much out, but I figure it's always good practice for the next time I have a baby. She latches on, I stifle my scream. I breath deeply and attempt to think flowing thoughts.
Then there are the hot showers I take to loosen up the blocked duct and try to express the blocked milk, except it's more the consistency of Elmer's glue. Eew.
Yesterday Joel got home from school and said, "Let's get out of the house." He had had a bad day teaching and said it was worth it to him to spend a little money on dinner out if we could go relax together and have a little fun. I concurred. We loaded Paula in the car, yes, it was late afternoon, but we were brave and maybe crazy.
To make a long story short - did you ever think I would use that phrase seriously? - we had to turn around as Paula got sick of the carseat. I was starving so we went through the McD's drive-through for some fries, but were facing an evening in.
No, Joel got creative and suggested we wrap Paula in the big orange wrap with my coat over it and hoof it over to Gelatinas Cris. It's a little eatery that specializes in gelatinous desserts, Oaxacan tamales wrapped in banana leaf, and the odd fruit drink. We each ordered two tamales and my thoughts turned to a fruit or vegetable offering.
How about that drink they call the Tonic?
Apple, spinach and banana juice. Sounded kind of good to me, so I ordered it even though I was not impressed by my server's clarification that the apple was juiced but the spinach and banana were blended. What the heck, I thought. I'll give it a try.
I know you're wondering where this story is heading. Here's where it's heading: there was dirt in my drink. Not shmutz, but rich Midwestern or Southern or Mexican or Californian topsoil courtesy of the high-quality frozen spinach in my beverage.
It was a little gritty at first, but I didn't pay too much attention because Paula was getting irritable and we had to get a to-go cup and get home. At home I strained the beverage, then looked at the bottom of the see-through cup where the densest material had settled to the bottom.
Banana seeds? I wondered hopefully.
Ugh. Now when I was a kid, I ate dirt from our rose bed in front of the house. I ate dirt and loved it, and I got intestinal worms as a result. This is a fact that Joel occasionally trots out when he wants to needle me about my taste in food or something equally trivial. I really don't care. But in addition to the fact that I'm an adult now who is no longer in the habit of eating fresh, living black soil that smells like rain and tastes like what rain would taste like if it were in granular form, this dirt didn't taste like good fresh living black soil at all. It tasted like DIRT dirt. Dirty. That's how it tasted.
So now of course I'm wondering if I need to start taking something to ward off parasites or something. I'm so glad I didn't give Paula a taste of what would, if clean, constitute a great little treat for her, unlike her little potty, which I just discovered her mouthing. But seriously, I don't want to get parasites because the medicine you have to take to get rid of them tends to not go so well with breastfeeding. And jeez, I want to lose a few more pounds (I'm about 8 pounds over my pre-pregnancy weight, happy to say), but not like that.
When we moved to Guatemala my mom lost about 50 pounds in maybe four months. We had all gotten some intestinal bugs as part of our official welcome, but my mom's weight loss gave us the first of many ill-conceived ideas that ended up more as dinner-table jokes than anything else. We thought of starting a kind of weight-loss spa in the Guatemalan highlands where instead of exercising or dieting, our patrons would simply feast on poorly washed local produce and the clear, unboiled water from a local well. Voila! Plenty weight loss.
Another one consisted of a book of photos of rotting food that you had to look at while eating. Then there was the Diet Spoon. You could eat anything you wanted, but you had to eat it with a spoon the size of a quarter-teaspoon. Eh.
I guess R. Kelly has a song out that says,
"After the party there's the after-party."
Arguably the most inane lyric ever written.
Anyway, Joel has started singing to Paula when she's on her potty, "After the potty there's the after-potty."
What the hell does that mean?
So I made my own version:
"After the farty there's the after-farty."
Now that's comedy.
Before Paula was born my mom's close friend Joyce brought me a gift from her daughter Nancy, a childbirth educator. Joyce said we couldn't open the little gift bag until after the baby was born, and Joel had to put the gift onto the baby to show it to me. I was mystified, but I had other things to worry about.
I was pretty out of it for at least a day after giving birth, but then I remembered Nancy's gift and told Joel to put it on Paula. He held her up wearing a newborn-sized t-shirt with a green silk-screened image on it. The words said, "My mama's a birth warrior." It captured the pride and wonder I felt at having succeeded in giving birth naturally in spite of the many interventions that could have led to episiotomy, epidural or cesarean.
I didn't scrutinize the image below the words until we got home. It was a round maze that looked vaguely like a woman. A dot near the opening seemed to say "start here."
Later on the phone with Nancy, she said the maze is a symbol for becoming a mother. First you have to find your way into the center during labor, then find your way out into your new life with the baby.
I have called this image to mind countless times since then, lying in bed with my sleepy newborn, taking on the duties of a full-time homemaker, trying to figure out what I would do in life - who I would be - now that I have a baby. I'm still trying to figure it out.
But a few things have become clearer as Paula approaches the nine-month mark. One area that has changed dramatically is my social life. Aside from the fact that it doesn't exist after 7 p.m., the makeup of my circle of friends has gone through a transformation. A friend and former La Leche League leader warned me this would happen as I cried to her that a close friend for whom I have put myself out many times was blowing me off when I needed her.
Joel was out of town, Paula was eight weeks old and colicky, and I had a bad cold. I really needed adult companionship, someone to prop me up a little. This friend - a childless artist with a flexible schedule - was the only person I could think of who might be able to help, but she couldn't set aside her life as I had done so many times for her. Now I realize there was no way for her to understand the demands of taking care of a newborn, much less a colicky one. In spite of the history she and I share, we've drifted apart.
But other friendships have come to the fore. Women I had lost touch with as they had their kids have now come back into my life as mentors and wise elder sisters. I am still drawn to independent thinkers with unusual life stories, but now I also prefer to be friends with people who are making it through mazes of their own.
One difficult part of this maze is the search for role models. My mother is a lifelong social activist and homemaker who has inspired me to stay in shape intellectually and participate in the world outside my home. I'm thankful for that. At the same time I feel I'm part of a new wave of highly educated women who choose to stay out of the workforce while raising their children. I would give my eye teeth to hear someone who has done it list a variety of ways to quickly get rid of my student loan debt while working no more than 15 hours per week from home. But the odds are my eye teeth are staying put. Like in so many other aspects of life right now, Joel and I have to find our own way.
These are the harder parts of feeling my way into motherhood, but it's not all broken friendships and unbalanced checkbooks. I'm more playful, less controlling, more comfortable with everything from spit-up to spaghetti squash in my hair. And the love my daughter has brought into my life is beyond anything I ever imagined.
The big difference I've noticed between me now and my childless self is that I am much more stubborn about staying true to myself when it comes to work and money. I can't count the number of times in my pre-mothering life I allowed myself to be swayed into something practical, something that would satisfy others, instead of pursuing my true passion. But the strict economy full-time parenting requires has made me adamant that what I do to earn money must come from deep inside me. This newfound commitment to follow my heart owes a lot to Joel's respect for the work of mothering and his unflagging support.
Life these days has settled down to the point that what new junk food I'm eating has become my big news. But that's not to say my life is dull. On the contrary. It's just your garden variety nice life with a baby.
Most days Paula wakes up between 6 and 6:30, so I turn on the lamp and radio so Joel can wake up early and we can all just hang out in bed for a while before he has to get up for work. Paula gets so excited when she sees Joel in the morning, even though he is usually fast asleep still. She pushes herself up and lunges over me to grab his shirt, hair or eyebrow. I try to keep her from the last two, but sometimes she's just too fast for me. It's a rude awakening for Joel, especially compounded by the ear-splitting happy squeals with which Paula tells him good morning.
It's just that she wakes up so darn happy. The other thing she does when she sees Joel is call out what I believe is her name for him: "Ah-gheee!" This means daddy. We've been teaching her "mama" and "papa," which she silently mouths along with us, eyes wide, but when Joel walks in after work she takes one look at him and cries out, "Ah-gheee!" Her arms and legs flap as though she's trying to fly to him. And of course Joel comes and sweeps her up into his arms.
She has a name for me, too: Ah-booh. When she has been hanging out with dad for a while and I walk through the room, it's Ah-booh! I think of it as an amalgam of "I need to pee," "I'm hungry," and "I miss you." I'm not sure of its origin, but I wonder if it bears some relation to our numerous games of peek-a-boo.
But this name is used when she is with Joel and wants to come to me. During the day she generally sticks with the non-verbal communication, like the incredibly cute look she gives me when she has to pee. She fixes her eyes on me, then drops her chin to her chest in a series of little nods. When she's sure I'm totally captivated, she breaks out a smile that demolishes any thought but how endearing she is. Then I put her on the potty.
We go through our morning routine of tidying up before she takes her nap. She plays at my feet while I clean the kitchen, hides for peek-a-boo under the covers while I make the bed, rides on my hip down to the basement to throw in a load of laundry. I know routines aren't my strong point, but I figure Paula needs to have some sense of what's coming next in life, right? I mean, in less than nine months she's gone from being unable to even hold up her own head to crawling around on all fours putting everything available into her mouth. It's a lot of change for one little munchkin and I just want her to know that no matter what wild new skill she masters today - cruising? walking? signing? talking? - she can still count on a bath after dinner and before bed.
I know when I'm not drinking enough water because I start craving sweets like crazy. Ever since my Chinese doctor told me it was okay to have chocolate "sometimes," I've been partaking of it occasionally. Every other day is occasionally, right? I know I should be drinking more water and eating less chocolate, but at the store the other day I thought maybe a healthy sweet would be a decent compromise. Did you know that pumpkin has something like a million units of vitamin A per serving? So that makes pumpkin pie a healthy snack!
What do you need to make pumpkin pie... You need a can of canned pumpkin flesh and - read the label - a can of sweetened condensed milk.
This is where the prospect of actually making pumpkin pie gets hung up in committee.
Sweetened condensed milk. I know it's not a food, per se. It's not even a condiment. More of an ingredient, and one I shouldn't be eating since it's a dairy product, hence the name, MILK. But in the interests of healthy snacking I did actually buy a can of s.c.m. and it has now become a stand-alone food in my refrigerator.
It's just that I really can't resist that weird, powdered-milk sweetness of s.c.m. I never have been able to. It calls to me from inside its can and I open it, zombie-like, and begin eating it by the spoonful. I know it's wrong, but I can't help myself.
I did try to add some redeeming nutritional value by mixing it into the last of the all-natural peanut butter from the health food store and eating that with a spoon. Of course I had to hold it up, keep-away style, to prevent Paula from attacking it. She is now crawling on hands and knees about half the time, which makes her able to reach my momentarily neglected junky snack much faster. As far as she is concerned anything I eat becomes the Most Important and Interesting Thing Ever Created.
Now, I do generally pig out on fruit before giving in to the refined-sweeter, and of course I share that with Paula quite freely. There's nothing either of us enjoys more than her rubbing banana into her hair - well, except sweetened condensed milk. My problem is a lifelong attraction to condiments, mixes and ingredients. I remember as a kid eating lemon pepper out of the palm of my hand in my grandma Avoa's kitchen when she wasn't looking. I believe my cousin Lloyd was in on that, too. We made a practice of dripping water off a spoon into Avoa's powdered iced tea mix so we could eat the hard candies that resulted.
When I was a freshman in college, I had a habit of meditating first thing in the morning. I would just take a few minutes and sit on my bed in the morning, feet on floor, back straight, and quiet my mind as my roomate slept in. My meditation practice consisted of breathing deeply and visualizing a gold light around my solar plexus. A dull, sweet happiness seemed to accompany this visualization. It felt good so I stuck with it.
I lived in a dorm on the north side of campus, and after my morning ritual I walked along the path to the cafeteria under the yellow and orange leaves of maple tree branches that curved gracefully over the path. I remember an expansive feeling right around my solar plexus as I passed under those golden leaves. I can still recall the feeling acutely even after so many years and I wonder what made that time unique.
For most of the rest of my life I've had trouble keeping up with the more personal aspects of a religious practice, kind of like I have trouble sticking to an exercise routine. Always a sucker for the grand gesture, I've never excelled at the un-glorious routines of solitary prayer and meditation that are part of what make professions of religious or spiritual belief mean something when nobody is looking.
Of course the struggle continues now that I live with one of the Earth's oldest destabilizing forces: a baby. But I do still try, in the mornings, to sit Paula on the couch or bed next to me and give her a toy to play with while I pick short prayers from my prayer book.
One for her: "Oh God, rear this little babe in the bosom of Thy love, and give it milk from the breast of Thy Providence..."
One for me : "Oh God, refresh and gladden my spirit. Purify my heart. Illumine my powers. ..."
One for my parents: "I beg of Thee to wash away our sins ... and to forgive me, my parents, and those who in Thy estimation have entered the abode of Thy love..."
One for Joel: "O my Lord! ... Rain down Thy plenteous bounties upon him, intoxicate him with the wine of love for Thee..."
This usually happens only in morning. At night I usually fall asleep without remembering, and sometimes, I am sorry to say, I remember but choose sleep instead.
Some nights when I both remember and act, I repeat the short invocation that Baha'is use as a prayer, greeting, and word of praise. Allah'u'abha: God is Most Glorious. As Paula is almost always asleep on or near me, I whisper what Baha'is call the Greatest Name, try to clear my mind, breath deeply.
Steamed soy milk with toffee syrup and a bowl of apple slices from Starbucks: 6.10
Greasy egg and sausage breakfast from McDonalds: 3.29
Not having to cook for myself when I feel like lying in bed crying with my teething baby, and getting enough protein and fresh fruit to feel like a human being again:
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