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December 6, 2002 - Mea Culpa
Is it too late to take it all back? Toby, Baby - I'm sorry for all of those things I said before. Two days later and it's impossible to believe I ever felt that way. Forgive me for making both of you look like obstacles to my happiness. You are my happiness - all my joy comes from the two of you. (Especially you, Baby Dear, when for two nights in a row you eat before midnight, sleep in your own room 'til 4 AM, and go right back to sleep after I feed you.) I don't think anyone has ever had less to complain about. Ê Two wonderful and long-absent forces have re-entered my life. The first of these is Clementines - I held out as long as I could, but now that the gray and chill has set in in earnest I had to heed their call. The second is my exercise man. Our cable service here doesn't carry his channel, but fortunately I have lots of shows on tape. As much as I complained about working with a tape before - how easy it was to put it off, etc. - I am glad now, because I can watch the show whenever I want. This turns out to be about seven in the morning, before my darling comes back to me from Dreamland. So I set the CD clock radio to waken me with the brisk and cheerful strains of the Benny Goodman orchestra at six forty-five, descend to the kitchen where a fresh pot of coffee awaits me, and hit the exercise mat for half an hour. Yes, I'm overjoyed that my net weight gain from the pregnancy turns out to have been about ten pounds. (When you lose fifty pounds, you tend to want them to stay mostly lost.) And it's great to fit into all my old clothes, and to skim around feeling as light as a feather. But the truth is I still need to shed fifty more pounds or so to be anything approaching a healthy weight. More importantly, the buildup of muscle tissue is what's going to keep my insulin levels down long-term. So, the exercise man and I are best pals again, and it feels good. Ê Some things I need to put down before I forget about them. First of all, the whole Fam came to us for Thanksgiving for the third year in a row. All the usual goodies: the round bread with the spinach dip in it, Tofurky, cheese cauliflower, stuffing, mashed potatoes, the mashed turnip my mother makes that no one eats, sweet potatoes, green beans, cider, my homemade cranberrry sauce spiced with cloves and cinnamon, my homemade pumpkin cheesecake, a pumpkin pie, and a cake from the same bakery that's provided our cake for three years running. It was a very happy Thanksgiving. I love to cook, and with so many hands eager to hold Baby, it was easy for me to get it all together in the kitchen. We ate to bursting and gradually recovered in front of the fireplace. Ê Toby's folks showed up the day after that. (Yes, I produced a second, identical dinner for them all by myself, supplemented with leftover desserts and mashed potatoes.) My mother-in-law stood frozen, open-mouthed at the sight of her granddaughter, eager yet half-fearful to hold her. She did fine, though, and Baby seemed enchanted with her second pair of grandparents. Anita came all the way up from New York to stand with us at Baby's naming in the synagogue that Saturday. Baby wore a lacy white outfit, complete with booties and rose-pink ribbons, that I crocheted for her during our stay in Maine last June. I was overjoyed that it fit her for this occasion - it took weeks of work, and I had no idea if she'd ever be able to wear it. She was wrapped in a pink fleece blanket my mother made for her, and a pink one with hearts on it that I crocheted. And everyone was absolutely charmed by her. My mother-in-law wept through the entire ceremony. I spend a lot of time thinking about ways we can visit them at least four times a year. Obviously my family is going to be a constant presence in Baby's life, and I want my in-laws to get equal time. Ê And now, let me tell you about our baby's day. She wakes between seven and eight, eats, and sometimes stays awake and sometimes goes right back to sleep. Up again at ten or eleven, for longer this time. Again at one or two - usually falls right back to sleep, and again around four or five. This is heading into Cranky Time. After the seven o'clock feeding, she's usually pretty unhappy and sometimes cries right through to the nine PM one. After that one, I hand her off to Toby and head for bed until 11 or so, when she eats again. As of now, she's slept 'til four for the past two nights. She feeds, goes down with minimal fuss, and wakes about seven-thirty to start the new day. Really, it's not as exhausting as it sounds. And the times when she's awake - particularly in the morning - are wonderful. Just recently I've made the shift from dreading her next awakening to being impatient for her to be with me again. She has a playpen in our bedroom, and I put her in it for "tummy time" while I make the bed. Then we lie together on the bed and play. I fool with her hands and her small hot feet, lie her on her stomach and watch her try to raise her head, gaze deep into her deep blue eyes. There's a sound she makes now, it goes "ha-GEE" (g as in "agree"). So that's what I call her half the time. Also I look at her and say, where is my tiny baby? where did this huge baby come from? And then we take all the outfits out of her closet and I hold them up to her and ask, where is the giant baby who's going to wear these? She loves to be near windows and always turns toward the light. Babies have very poor vision and see at first mostly high-contrast black, white, and red. So her current favorite "toys" come from my small lighthouse collection. I never set out to collect lighthouses, but somehow it just happened. I've got a large candle in the shape of a black-and-white striped lighthouse, and a nightlight with the same color scheme. She stares and stares at them and will follow them with her eyes. No reaching, no intentional smiling, and only ha-gee to say. And thank God she can't turn over yet. Toby just told me, though, that he could flip from stomach to back at four weeks. Guess that little seatbelt contraption on the changing table is going to come in handy after all. Ê It snowed yesterday. Tonight is the Sabbath. The world is covered in snow, and everything is wonderful.
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