Does the Bumper Bonnet come in adult sizes?

At the playground this morning, Henry head-butted me, without warning or provocation, smack dab in the mouth. I was holding him (obviously; he’s not that tall yet) and chatting with an acquaintance, so when I first felt the impact I thought someone had playfully chucked a bowling ball at my teeth. Before I could have a second thought, tears began springing from my eyes; Henry was also bawling (why did her hard teeth hurt me like that?) and the acquaintance stared and asked, “Why is your face wet?” and I said, “Those are called tears,” and she said, “You hu-mans are so complicated,” and with that she glided away on her titanium casters and Henry and I sobbed all the way back to our apartment where we ate cream cheese and pumpkin spread on toast and felt a little better.

Now for some related trivia:

1. My acquaintance is not really a robot! She has feet, not casters.

2. I always want to write the past tense of “glide” as “glid.” Why isn’t that right? Has anyone looked into this?

3. Henry has hit me way harder than this before. His head-buttings have caused facial bruising and even a (slightly) bloody nose. Yet after those brutal assaults, I remained tear-free. I cry at everything else, though.

4. Once I cried at a tampon commercial.

5. A girl was trying out for the cheerleading squad, and she was sure she wouldn’t get in, but then—she did! I’m not sure how it related to tampons.

Couldn't they at least make it a cool color?

Here's the saddest child-safety product ever (sadder, even, then the Toddler Tether, which, frankly, I can now sort of appreciate)--the Bumper Bonnet, a thickly padded helmet designed to keep your child from spilling his or her brains all over your new carpet. I'm not saying I haven't at times wished my child's head was wrapped in swaddling cloths. But this thing looks like someone wrapped a diaper around the baby's head and then affixed it with some masking tape.

And what about this baby's mother (reeling out of frame in the background)? Can't she, say, watch her kid instead of padding his head? Does she have to watch soaps and get drunk every morning while her child bashes his be-cushioned brainpan against the sideboard? Does he have to grow up asking why Mommy drinks so much Mommy-juice if the Mommy-juice makes her sad? That's all I'm asking.

I'm kind of a poet, and I'm aware of it. Wait, that doesn't scan right.

If you can find it, if your local bookshop is lucky or pretentious enough to carry it, please be on the lookout for the forthcoming Rubber Band Society Gazette, a broadsheet published by the Russian art team Komar and Melamid. The first issue featured such luminaries as Ian Frazier, Rick Moody, and Jamaica Kincaid; this second issue features a luminary whose name is: ME.

Strangely, my contribution to the RBS Gazette is a poem. I’m not a poet, you see. In this case, I managed to sidestep that roadblock by not actually writing the poem.

Months ago, when my arms were ineffective little flippers—it’s a long story—I wrote using voice-recognition. The software made writing possible, but it also got every fourth or fifth sentence crazily, infuriatingly wrong. I amused myself by collecting the mangled lines my software invented. It was that or smash the computer to bits, and the flipper-arms didn’t weren’t up for smashing. At one point I was trying to get the day’s date written, and the evil software kept coming up with crazier and crazier phrases that happened to rhyme. And I thought, hey, this looks like a poem! And I spent a few days arranging those lines with some other lines from the pages and pages of mangly bits, and then I sent them to my friend Emily, an editor at the RBS Gazette, and here we are today.

So: Find it, and read! You will be amazed and horrified. You will laugh, and then cry, and then throw up a little, and then giggle, and throw up again. A lot. How can you resist?

Babies don't sleep, but then they do.

Our friends’ baby Tallulah is now eight weeks old. She’s kicking her parents’ asses with her newborn I’m-a-baby-so-I’ll-think-I’ll-cry-instead-of-sleep attitude, but—and this is important—she’s not mine, so I feel pretty relaxed about it. I recently said to them, “Boy, these first few weeks sure have gone by quickly!” and they were like, hmm, it’s been crawling by for us, what with the sleep deprivation and the, you know, crying. And then I mentioned how Henry sleeps 13 hours a night, and takes a two-hour nap every day, and how that day we all overslept because we forgot to set the alarm and Henry didn’t wake up until 10 a.m., and, well, it turns out that wasn’t something they wanted to hear. New parents are so sensitive.

Actually, I think our tales of Henry’s record-breaking sleep habits cheer them up, because I’m sure that they, like the we of 16 months ago, don’t really believe that Tallulah will ever, ever sleep through the night. Luckily we are here to give hope to the hopeless, perspective to the not-perspective-having.

Until Henry was around 4 months old, Scott and I were so sleep-deprived, we were probably clinically insane. Henry would sleep for, say, 45 minutes at a time, then wake up and remain awake--awake and pissed off--for hours. I would tell people that I now understood child abuse, then I would shriek “JUST KIDDING!” and laugh maniacally until they backed away. I spent all day graphing charts of Henry’s sleep and then staring at the paper as if a 3-D solution would eventually wobble into view.

We were tired.

Turns out that not sleeping makes you stupid, too. Scott and I fought all the time, but we were such morons that it was hard to take our conflicts seriously. We would have the kind of asinine, confused fights that you might have with someone if you’ve both just been awakened in the middle of the night and you’re trying to communicate some kind of dream-agenda, although you can no longer recall what you’ve said as soon as you’ve said it. Our fights went a little like this:

Setting: The living room. 7 p.m. I’m staring longingly into an empty brownie pan. Husband is glaring at the TV. Henry has just fallen asleep in his car seat.

Me: Did you do that thing? The, um…

Him: What?

Me: You know…(sigh).

Him: Wha--? How would I know? Wha--?

Me [glaring]: The thing! The—Jesus, never mind.

Him: What are you saying?

Me: Shut UP.

Him: Don't tell me to--God!

Me [sobbing]: Shut up shut up! Shut up!

Henry wakes up.

Me: [incomprehensible syllables amid sobs]

Him: [kicking coffee table]

And now! Lookit lookit! Henry sleeps, and our fights have become more sophisticated, with completed thoughts and proper nouns! There are several ways that we could probably take credit for this, but in the end, he just needed to get a little bigger. I guess it happens that way for everyone, or else some of us would be 34 and still need to be rocked and swaddled every night. And that would be creepy.

On a somewhat related note, I love this quote (From a non-news story on President Taft, of all people: “Taft's Nodding Off Attributed to Illness”)—the article notes that President Taft “was the most obviously sleepy person to ever inhabit the White House.” Apparently other presidents, like, say, Rutherford B. Hayes,* were drowsier, but better able to hide it.

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*I love Rutherford B. Hayes.