June 6, 2007: Eight Months (and one day) Old

If someone had told me a year ago I would be this obsessed with sleep, I would have laughed. “I know tired,” I would have said. “I can handle it.” What a fool I was. Sleep consumes my thoughts, my conversations, my prayers. I dream about sleep. For a few weeks, in a bright little sliver of time between the eighth incisor and the latest teeth, you were sleeping beautifully. Not “through the night,” as so many people ask, but deeply and with only occasional waking. During the days, you were active and content. Then the dreaded molars reared their ugly heads. Fat as pencil erasers pressing on your gums, these teeth have been causing you – in fact, the whole family – more than a little misery.

When you were a newborn, it was simple to hold you all day and comfort you on demand. That was 12 pounds ago, before you became a gold medalist in baby gymnastics. You want to be held, but you also don’t want to be held, so you twist and wrench yourself around and backwards, trying to find. . . what? Some elusive position in which the pain evaporates away and you are happy baby again? I imagine sleep is the closest you come to this. When you fight yourself to sleep, finally, I can tell you are rejuvenating. Your mouth falls slack, your teeth forgotten. You wake in the morning with a fluttering smile and a whispery razz, ready to crawl up to the windowsill and gaze out at the day.

Although I am concerned that you have spent four of your first eight months in pain, I am not too worried about the impact this may have. Between bouts of crying, you are just as curious and joyous as ever. Climbing over, through, and under things is your latest passion. I know there is a straighter route across the kitchen than through the tangle of chair and table legs you frequent, but you do not seem to mind the circuitous journey. Usually your howl informs me of your latest imprisonment behind the cross-bar of some piece of furniture. Backing up is not your strong suit.

You still need a little help in the getting down department, too. You have figured out how to pull up and even onto some pieces of furniture, but gravity seems to be your tool of choice for returning to earth. The hollow thumps I hear throughout the day send me scurrying over, as they usually precede a brief but mighty fit of sobbing before you are squirming out of my arms and wriggling back to your latest discovery.

During your exploring, the range of your noises of joy grows just as quickly as your cries of discontent. You squawk and screech while banging blocks on chairs, repeat a noisy chorus of muh-muh-muh’s and buh-buh-buh’s while tossing stuffed animals off the bottoms shelves and onto the floor. When you grow mellow and sleepy at bedtime, you hum and grunt all over the scale as your eyes glaze over. And then, such sweet quiet. I stay right beside you when you sleep, resting as much as I possibly can when you are out. I can’t imagine actually getting up and transferring you to a crib. That would waste precious minutes when I could be napping next to you.

In your quieter moments, you have started taking note of our faces. These expressive, noisy objects that have been hovering around you for the past few months have suddenly become real, living things. You gaze not just at our faces, but at the parts that make them up. On my lap, your stare fixates somewhere below my eyes, and you reach out, stroke my nose. The texture and unpredictability of mouths is amazing to you, the flick of the tongue sure to send you into giggles. You squeeze at eyebrows and even venture around to the ears. Some connection is forming between your experience and our expressions. In the doctor’s office yesterday, the nurse needed to take a drop of my blood. She pricked me, I winced, and you, watching closely, burst into tears. It may be a stretch to say you are gaining empathy, but maybe this is where compassion begins. You are certainly an expert in physical discomfort, and maybe your mind is beginning to understand not just how pain feels, but how it looks. Pleasure is easier. Most moments, all it takes to elicit a smile from you is to beam one your way. When a sting of discomfort wakes you at 3:00 in the morning, often just a bleary gaze through the cool dark at my smiling face gives you the reassurance you need to plunge back into dreamland. A sweet trick, and one I will continue to use shamelessly.

May 27, 2007: News “flash”

It has officially begun. Forty-five fresh-faced young adults, spilling over with enthusiasm for the summer, are currently undergoing full-scale camp indoctrination up in the Lion’s Lodge. I knew all the counselors had touched down, ready to rock, when Eliot and I followed the hollers up to a massive sunset kickball game two nights ago. Twenty-odd people bounced around the rust-hued gravel outfield while another two dozen queued up, cheering wildly as each took a chance at pounding out a run.

While camp is experiencing an adrenaline infusion, I am going through a rather severe case of spouse withdrawal. The boudoir is the place I see my dear husband most often these days, but that’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds. Toby regularly crawls out of bed 7:00 to shower and head up to the dining hall. He returns to collapse on top of the covers sometime around midnight. I can visit Toby when I wander up to the dining hall for meals, and countless eager arms await a chance to cuddle “the cutest baby ever,” so life is not so lonely as all that. Still. How many conversations sounding about like this: “Look at the kitty! See the kitty? Let’s watch that kitty scare the pants of the doggy!” can one moderately thinking person tolerate?

Sure, life in a cabin in the middle of a national forest offers its own quiet abundance of sensations. But access to information, to the daily pulse of civic life, is not one of them. I had not really noticed how sparse our contact with the doings of the world when Toby was around in the evenings to play yahtzee or just respond to me in a comprehensible vocabulary.

The absence of internet, television, and even radio is now quite stark. Can you imagine a world without NPR? My car radio receives a station out of northern Colorado for about 10 minutes on the mountain road into Woodland Park, before the altitude pulls me beyond the tentacles of the signal. The voices of Noah Adams and Ira Glass are sweet lozenges providing momentary comfort but melting into the crackle of competing Christian radio stations far too quickly. And I suppose we could have internet at our house if I weren’t too cheap and lazy to bother with the complicated satellite setup procedure.

And as for television, who needs it? Our weekly Time Magazine provides us with a little dose of outdated information – entertainment enough for our little family, I suppose. Plodding along on the treadmill at the YMCA a few months back, I watched a debt-makeover victim on reality TV moan in despair when the debt-basher required her to cut off her $50-per-month cable. “What kind of person lives America in the year 2007 without television?” she wailed. I was flushed with a healthy mix of shame and pride (and, of course, not a little exertion). I don’t know what kind of people we are, really, other than the kind who simply don’t care. I’ve been without it for so long I don’t really know how my universe would be different with it. Maybe when people refer to Gray’s Anatomy, I won’t experience that odd moment of disorientation when I assume they are talking about the hefty tome left over from my sister’s freshman physiology class when she still entertained notions of becoming a neurosurgeon.

Camp Shady Brook’s news reads something like a homesteader’s farm report. The horses have come to camp for the summer, and Eliot met the new arrivals yesterday morning as they grazed in a small patch of pasture. Below the paddock, the dam holding silt from the lake has collapsed. Silt mounds border the creek-bed where heavy machinery roars, attempting to repair a tangle of failed culverts. Rainfall is more abundant than anything this region has seen in several drought-ridden years. Though the creek groans at the onslaught, the rest of our corner of the universe delights in the damp. Afternoon thunderstorms dump thirst-quenching rains and occasional mothball-sized deluges of hail on our camp, and the lilac bushes and native grasses are drinking deep. And baby Eliot continues to break new baby-tooth records by starting on his molars 6 months early.

May 13, 2007: Setting the Bar Nice and High

For my first official mother's day, not only do we have the pleasure of a visit from Gramma Genie, but we are taking full advantage of a gorgeous spring weekend at Camp Shady Brook.

Toby's easy confidence keeps Genie steady on a wobbling cable.

Adrenaline and stubbornness are a good mix when you are hanging out 25 feet above the earth.

A little baby boost to ease the tummy and steady the knees.

Walking across a log is no problem when fording a stream, but fording sky is another story.

Mozart is the latest addition to our family. The purring, curious cuddle-puss may be too sweet to excel at the mouse-eradication job for which she was conscripted.

Bring on the hugs!

May 5, 2007: Seven Months Old Today

Since your eighth tooth arrived a few weeks back, we have seen you emerge, as if from a chrysalis made of pain and fuss, into a delightful, joyful creature. We are meeting you all over again. You, our intrepid traveler, embarking on a new adventure across the small universe of our home every chance you get.

The early ease of simply holding, changing and feeding you has given way to a more complex existence. Even the decision of how to dress you is complicated by how we will spend our day. Meal planning coincides with wardrobe planning. Greens and blues for peas or avocado days; browns, reds, and oranges for sweet potato or carrot days. All outfits on the yellow-white end of the color spectrum are out, as your constant scooting turns you into a little dust-mop for the fine Rocky Mountain dirt whispering through our screens and settling on every surface. While I am sautéing veggies at the stove, you disappear under the kitchen table and pop up again by the back door, streaked in red-brown dirt and kicking your legs in ecstasy.

Despite my attempts at baby-proofing, I have, so far, pried the following items from your tight little fist and/or mouth: half an almond, a pebble, a band-aid wrapper, the little knob that fits over the screw on the bottom of the toilet, a suspiciously moist kibble of dog food, several wads of paper, a clump of Fenway fur, and an electrical cord (since re-located). These are just the things I have caught before you managed to get them down your throat. If you are eating the discoveries you make along your journeys, you do not seem worse for the wear. Much to my astonishment, you continue to spill up and over the little package I think of as my baby. Your legs dangle long over the edge of your jog stroller now, and when you scoot across me in the bed, you are draped there, a sinewy, lanky-limbed monkey. I cannot fathom how the little curled-up snail of you once fit inside of me. I can hardly hold your wiggling, curious body in my arms these days.

We are learning your dance, this little family of ours. Even without words, your vocabulary has grown immensely in the past few months. I can decipher the signals in your body, your moans and cries, even in your stillness. You bounce and squeal when something you want crosses your line of sight. When Fenway walks into the room, for example, you arch into a stalk of attention, wheel your arms, and let out a high-pitched hah-hah! You do the same thing when I get the bottles ready for the breast pump (I always let you chew on the funnel after I’m done), when we pass by a mirror, or when we lay down in bed and get ready to nurse. Your dissatisfaction is equally clear. You turn away, seal your lips, and give a low-pitched hmmm which intensifies if I ignore your signal. For having only been a part of our world for seven short months, you have an awful lot to say. 

Twice in the past month, you have lasted the entire stretch of morning in mom’s group childcare. Two and a half hours each time! I snuck up the first time to check on you, certain you would be scarlet with rage at my prolonged absence. Instead, you were so fully engaged in the intricate social workings of nursery life, you failed to notice me completely. I sipped at the bittersweet cocktail of pride and remorse, flavored with a twist of relief, as I snuck back down to re-join the delicious adult doings down in the fellowship hall. The moms and grandmas working childcare take big breaths of joy when I drop you off, cheering your arrival. “It’s Eliot!”  Like you, they barely notice when I latch the baby gate behind me on my way down the hall. Independent of your parents, you are making a name for yourself, your own set of friendships. The web of support and love holding you grows stronger every day. And this, my boy, you are weaving with a grace and artistry all your own.