Mirrored from Dailies.

Piper and Addie laughing

Above, Addie and Piper sharing some chuckles at dinner last night.

Mirrored from Dailies.

It begins with my toes. It’s November 24th, 2008. Monday morning, 5:15 a.m., and my toes are beyond my reach. I stretch every day before biking down the western edge of Manhattan to my job at New York Public Radio, WNYC, but this Monday I’m awake in the ink-stained dawn, sitting on the living room floor, and I can’t reach my toes. The backs of my legs are tight, like lines holding sails in a stiff breeze. Taut, even when I lean against them. There’s no way I’m getting there.

Puzzled, I push a little and then sit back. There’s a faint electric tingle in my toes, but other than that, the only unusual thing is this sudden lack of flexibility. I shuck off my biking clothes, change into jeans, and take the train south, down the island.

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I am not sure if I will be able to adequately explain this for non-parents, but bear with me.

You are standing and watching your child sleep – their miniature motions and rustlings – and realizing that one year ago today, the human being in front of you was in all likelihood still an even power-of-two number of cells. Just beginning. A very slow, very small Big Bang, still expanding in front of your eyes and creating an entire universe of new rules and physical constants.

And then, just as this metaphor occurs to you, the child lets out a resounding fart that makes the cat turn his head. It sounds uncannily like a truck hitting the air brakes in your kid’s diaper.

That’s parenthood for you, alright.

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The alarm hisses static at me at 4:45 a.m., inexplicably never waking Kate or Piper, but sending my arm out frantically groping for the button to swat it on the nose and send it slinking back to its crate. A moment of silence in the cool darkness as my arms and legs fall back to the same warm chalk outline in which I’d just been asleep, but I am wary of too much stillness, knowing that the countdown to my morning has been resumed, and Mission Control will be watching.

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Note that while she’s found that she likes to put her hand on the texture of the cosleeper’s mesh wall, she has not yet figured out how to use that hand to pop her pacifier back into her mouth. That’s occasionally a source of some frustration to her.

Of course, once she can put her pacifier back in her mouth, that’ll mean that she can put her socks in her mouth, the cats in her mouth, bottles of wine, leftover green beans … the sky will be the limit. So maybe the idle scratching is okay for now.

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Piper-Notes-2

Here’s the next installment of our Piper Notes. Included in today’s installment:

• A failed attempt to get a laugh out of her using bathroom humor, and our lamentations that she is not our trained monkey
• A review of her accomplishments in the last six weeks, interspersed with
• random coos, cries, and snorts, painstakingly hand-collected by Kate and me
• Some overly sentimental ramblings about the virtues of single-tasking and multi-tasking
• and a post script, recorded on the ferry coming back from Governors’ Island some weeks ago.

There’s less crying in this one, anyhow.

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When Piper’s slowly ascending from the depths of sleep (and given the horrors inherent in getting the bends, a slow ascent is advisable) she’ll sometimes squawk a few times. Kate or I will wait a minute, and then go into the bedroom. If her eyes are open wide, she’s up. If they aren’t open, or if they’re at half-mast, we’ll avoid looking directly at her (so as to avoid social engagement, which wakes her up right quick) and gently tuck her pacifier back into her mouth. This usually wins her another 10 minutes of dozing, and us another 10 minutes to finish whatever ill-advised time wasting we’re doing instead of sleeping.

We refer to this process as “hitting the snooze button.”

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Mirrored from Dailies.

Yesterday is chasing me down the island, south, into today
Last night’s ill-advised late dinner turned into a series of IEDs as I drove towards morning
and dreams of guilt and frustration woke me, head aching, long before the hissing alarm
but the two bellows I left breathing in the bedroom are still facing the coals,
glowing – now brighter, now dimmer – in the crepuscular dawn.
One a flailing, snorting concertina; one the woman I stood to marry these many sunrises ago,
ahead of so many befores.

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Me: I assert that my blended combination of ice cream, milk and flavoring summons any and all males to my immediate proximity, and that the quality of my frozen treat is superior to all challengers.

Lamont: it would be possible to instruct you as to my method of blending such frozen treats, but I am afraid that I would require some form of pecuniary recompense.

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(Direct link to audio:
http://web.baz.org/~adam/dailies/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Piper-notes-1.mp3)

Our first, rough audio letter for Piper. It’s long (7 minutes you will never get back from your life), and includes:

• Sir Paul McCartney,
• Piper wailing,
• and the sound of me being very, very wrong about our daughter’s gender only seconds after she was born.

You’ve been warned.

We took too long recording and mixing it, but before I spent a month polishing it and wanted to record another, I figured we’d post it and be done. Behind the cut, the original notes we jotted down. (We found we sounded too scripted if we read from it, so we wrote the notes and ignored them as we spoke.)

( Read the rest of this entry » )

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Piper’s just today crossed some development threshold: she’s smiling in a way that seems almost, barely, on purpose. Or maybe it’s “vaguely in response to external stimulus” … or maybe Bob is the cognition-fairy. The smiling is way far from consistent, mind you, but there’s noticeably more of it than yesterday. Either that or all the books which say that babies start social-smiling at six weeks have influenced our sleep-addled brains and now we’re just interpreting the same facial tics and grunts as something new.

Also, after a long period of comatosity this morning while we brunched with Bob, she’s refused outright to nap this afternoon. Instead, she’s been lobbying for gazing adoringly at our faces (cute), crankily alerting us to imperfections in her diaper (necessary, though hardly endearing) and acting as an impromptu carpenters’ level by creaking whenever she lists sideways (this gets old quickly).

Earlier in the week, I took a trip up to Helen Hayes — at the request of the staff — to talk with a patient with GBS. Had a long and cheery conversation with her, with the strange double-vision of seeing the same halls and rooms I’d lived in through her eyes. She seemed to me to be in great shape, soon to return to school and very upbeat about her recovery. We talked about feeling constantly warm, foot pain, how friends react to odd and prolonged illness, and about the survivors’ guilt of the recovering paralytic amidst slowly- or non-recovering people.

On the way out, however, I ran into the family of another patient there with GBS: a guy who’s not nearly so sanguine. Found myself talking with him about how frustrating the relentless optimism of one’s family is while having to fight back the reflexive urge to tell him that he’d certainly get better from where he is now. Also found myself thinking about how, when I’d been at HHH for one week, I’d practiced a sort of … “active acceptance” of where I was, right then. I couldn’t sit up, it hurt to lie on my back, I was still sporting an active tracheostomy… and every single day I really tried not to look any farther ahead than that evening. Or lunch, some days. Had I looked any farther out, I’d have felt astoundingly helpless in the face of all that unknown.

And as to feeling helpless… Last night, on the way home from Queens, we had a very minor fender bender. We were stopped at a stoplight and a car tapped us from behind at probably 3 mph, no more. It was a solid jolt, though, and it startled the hell out of us and immediately woke Piper to squalling, dozing in her car seat. We made sure she was okay, got out, looked over the damage (nearly nothing on our car, and some nasty crunching on the grille of the ancient P.o.S. that had hit us), exchanged numbers with the driver, and weighed whether or not to call the cops and file an accident report, ultimately deciding not to. (The folks who hit us seemed eager, to say the least, not to have to involve the police or insurance, and since the damage to our fender looked minimal, we decided to take their offer of having our bumper fixed at their expense and not sit around waiting for police and paperwork. Naïve, maybe, but we’d had a long day and just wanted to go home and go to bed at that point.)

As we drove home, every other car on the road looked like a threat. All the vehicular motion around us was menacing, and the walls of our car felt paper thin. Piper was cranky and hungry, and her announcing this kept our nerves jangling. (I craned my arm around and volunteered my pinky finger as an impromptu pacifier, with which she happily calmed down, though my shoulder was not crazy about the angle of exertion required.) Got home, found a parking spot, and called the pediatrician just in case. They asked us some behavioral questions, wanted to make sure the latch on Piper’s abdomen hadn’t bruised her, wanted to make sure she wasn’t concussed, and then confirmed what we already intuitively felt like: she was fine.

That ride home, however, where we realized just how helpless we were before whatever the world threw at us, has stayed with me today. We went out walking to brunch; I jumped when cars drove by. A bee flirted with Bob and Bob’s breakfast at the table; I wondered where my long-expired epi-pen is living. It’s a hard thing, recognizing and accepting the limits of one’s power in the world, and it’s clearly something that needs to be practiced often if one is to retain calm in the face of motion, whether too much or not enough.

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Piper’s started to offer a new game to us, which we call “I’m going to wail, whine, and whoop while you try to guess what’s bothering me, and then I’m going to allow my ire to slowly subside and then fall asleep while you scratch your head and try to figure out what, if anything, changed.”

For all we know it’s plate tectonics she’s objecting to for 3-4 minutes at a stretch, or gerrymandering, or Orly Taitz, but when we know she’s well-fed, changed, not too warm and not too cool… at that point we pretty much resort to gentle mockery (at her) and going on with our lives (us). We’ve had to make some modifications — I ate my dinner standing up and bouncing with Piper wrapped to my chest and my dessert leaning back at a slight angle with Piper in full-on space heater mode, crisping all my chest hair with her mysterious heat emanations — but hey, tonight we managed to microwave leftovers for dinner and watch at least half of Harry Potter and the Even Longer Movie Than The Last One. Now we’re shoving the piles of clutter out of our way and collapsing into bed. Go us.

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… says, paraphrased, that the simplest explanation for things is generally right. Here are some explanations for things where, I’m hoping, Occam (or “William of Ockham,” per Wikipedia) is getting it wrong.

• Piper is sneaking out of the bedroom while we’re asleep and eating fistfuls of turmeric.
• Piper is sneaking out of the bedroom while we’re asleep and telling the cats to steer clear of her or she’ll use this shiv, understand?
• Water, especially lukewarm water on washcloths, is actually highly corrosive to babies and burns, yes, my precious, like acid on their skin.
• Breastmilk served out of a bottle tastes like an ashtray-flavored Italian soda.
• Eons ago, only the young of our species who ripped the most chest hair from their fathers survived and thrived.
• Repeatedly whacking yourself in the face feels awesome and looks great!

Off to find some bleach for these brilliant-orange-stained diapers. Seriously, now, wtf.

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After two weeks of delightful, delirious babymoon, I returned to work yesterday. It felt weird to slip back to my old morning “routine” — I’m not sure I get to call it that, after the 8 months we’ve had — of Irish breakfast tea, The Takeaway playing from my laptop as I pad around the kitchen assembling a bowl of cereal and fruit and yogurt, the dash for the shower as the second hand of the clock shuffles me out the door. I always check my man-purse before leaving the apartment: keys, cellphone, wallet, WNYC badge, Metrocard. I close the door firmly behind me, as the latch rattles a little.

But this time felt different. This time, I left the apartment with the words “my daughter” still as unfamiliar in my mouth as a new tooth. I’ve been watching this little person every day for two weeks: all potential, flailing hands and oddly steady eyes. Now I have to miss out on 9 of her daylight hours? I know it’ll get smaller, but 9 hours is a noticeable fraction of her total time on this earth so far, so I’m a little frustrated by it.

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Koan du jour: Why is my iPhone in the cosleeper?

So Kate and I went over to Kathryn and Ryan’s apartment last night, for $100,000 chicken and our new favorite cookies. Piper took her second ride in a car ever, and handled it with aplomb.

So much aplomb, in fact, that she was completely and bonelessly asleep when we got to the Hechts’. We brought her inside in the car bucket, put her within earshot, and commenced to the chatting and cooking and laughing we normally pursue when we meet up with the BFFs.

And pursue it we did, until close to midnight. Piper did most of her night’s One Big Sleep while we were stuffing our faces, unfortunately, which meant a) minimal cuddle time for Piper with Kathryn and Toni and b) a frisky, lively baby for a lot of the rest of the night and morning. Both Kate and I feel like we’ve been stuck on “Frappé” for the last 10 hours.

The clutter and detritus on the surfaces around the apartment is starting to encroach a little; the urge to just sweep all of it into garbage bags and then toss the lot is running high, but I suppose we’ll sort the fruit and cats from the envelopes and stick blenders before throwing them out.

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• Squally Squallersdottir, the Icelandic pop star
• Scrofulus McZitface, the molting and acne-prone Irish baby
• Princess Mixed Messages, the inconsistent cryer
• Madame Squashedface, the faceplanting napper

She wants the truth? She can’t handle the truth.

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Anyone who’s had a pet will appreciate the feeling. You come home from the shelter or the breeder or wherever, with a living creature you haven’t met before. It’s nervous, you’re nervous. You’ve got the right food and water, you think, and the extra supplies (leashes, litter box, bridle, nail trimmers, terrarium, mirrors, play toys, etc) that you can predict you’ll need… but still, there in the back seat is a beating heart you didn’t know yesterday. And you’re going to need to learn how to deal with its shit. Not only that, but you’re responsible for its life, too. Oh, not every bit of the moment-by-moment stuff: that’s clearly up to it to work out. But the big arc? That’s on you, at least for a while.

Also, getting the right name can be a total bastard.

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The infant strapped to your chest is in the same moment yanking on a closed-fistful of your chest hair, attempting to suckle on the end of your nose, pooping herself, and gazing adoringly into your sleep-bruised eyes. How, then, can you drink your tea?

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It turns out that a gallon-sized plastic bag of loose change overbalancing and pouring itself off a high bookshelf makes a really remarkable noise. I’d gather the change and replicate it for you on tape except it’s going to be a huge PITA to gather it together in the first place, so you’ll just have to imagine it.

I was in the living room when I heard the ringing, clanging, clattering sound, and could only think that Piper’s cosleeper must be collapsing, and her in it. I went lunging into the bedroom only to find Piper dozing only 2 feet away from the silver cascade. She blinked her eyes open and merely looked a little quizzical at the sound.

In other news, Daniel Craig’s steely-blue eyes or no, “Quantum of Solace” was nowhere near as good as “Casino Royale.”