Toddlers are both cute and difficult! Hey!

It appears that, as the toddler grows, the endearing behaviors must increase in direct proportion to the less-than-charming tendencies. If the toddler failed to kick his/her cuteness into high gear, one would simply leave the toddler on the side of the road, and skip away merrily, singing a little song to oneself, tra la.

So, for instance, we begin the day with the following uncuteness:

Henry decides he hates my breakfast, which happened to be a crumpet covered in almond butter. My crumpet! My breakfast-y delight, all my own, which was not bothering him one bit! He lunges at my plate and slaps at the sticky almond buttered top until the entire crumpet attaches itself to his hand, and then runs shrieking toward the dog, who is only too happy to help him out, crumpet-wise.

It was my last crumpet. I wanted that crumpet. Ever had a crumpet? They're good.

But before I can kick him to the curb, the above is canceled out by the extreme adorability of the following:

We run into Henry’s girlfriend E. (and yes, I mean girlfriend—I watch him running his fingers through her hair and covering her face in kisses and I want to either get them married NOW or lock him up until he’s 16) and her mother on the street; as we adults discuss our plans to escape someday to a Land Where No One Attacks Breakfasts, Henry takes E.’s hand and the two of them toddle down the street hand in hand, grinning. Then Henry turns to her and says, “Beautiful day.”

Can one abandon such a child on the street? It appears that one cannot. Once again the toddler wins.

Have you been half-asleep? AND HAVE YOU HEARD VOICES?

People! People! Do you think I would leave you just like that? I was just expressing some doubts, is all. I wasn't really going to up and close down the store. But thank you for your words of encouragement, your emails, and your presents. Sorry I had to return the pony. He had a soft, damp nose, and I named him Mr. Sparkles. But the co-op board said I couldn't keep him.

In other news, work (real, paid work! Egads!) continues apace. I wish I could give you the details, but if I have learned anything from the lovely Dooce, it's that talking about work on the blog is verboten. Suffice it to say that it's a dream assignment, both entertaining and well-paying, and I couldn't be more pleased. I'm a bit hard to take lately, in fact. I keep kissing my reflection and interrupting conversations with loud outbursts of "I ROCK."

Now, about Henry. If a 21-month-old can be obsessive/compulsive, Henry fits the bill. He's down with OCD, as they say. Certain items, people, bits of media, etc. seem to inspire in him a combination of terror and reverence that is all-consuming. Today's obsessions are BLENDERS, VACUUMS, and THE RAINBOW CONNECTION. He wakes up and demands to see the BLENDER. He wants to look at the BLENDER. Let him touch said BLENDER. Then he will make THE BLENDER NOISE. The BLENDER goes EEEEEEGH. Turn it on! he demands. But do not do it, for if you do, there will be tears, and much clutching at the neck, and your shirt will get all damp.

After breakfast, he wants to retire to his parents' bedroom, where the VACUUM lives. VACUUM, he says, and points. VACUUM. The VACUUM goes EEEEEEGH. The VACUUM sounds suspiciously like the BLENDER. But do not touch the VACUUM! Or go near it! To do so would bring much shrieking and upset and subsequent incoherent babbling about the VACUUM, not to mention the BLENDER. Speaking of which. It's back to the kitchen for both of you, where you shall look at and discuss the BLENDER. EEEEEGH. Do you like that sound? EEEEEEGH.

Before his nap, he must hear RAINBOW. Short for the above-mentioned song, of course. SING IT. While singing it, he will become both entranced and agitated, sweetly mouthing the words and gazing up at you until you think you might never make it back to the office and then GRABBING YOUR LOWER LIP while you're singing and crying MORE! MORE! until you want to scream I'M ALREADY SINGING IT, I CAN'T BE MORE SINGING THAN I AM CURRENTLY SINGING. You will sing it again and again and again, all the while wondering what was UP with Kermit, with his strange conviction that there's a connection between rainbows and--and what? What are the lovers and the dreamers and he rooting around rainbows for? And what's with the voices calling his name? NEVER MIND THAT JUST KEEP SINGING.

EEEEEEEGH.

Hey, dawn? I got a rosy finger for you RIGHT HERE.

Day 1

Today, it happened. We knew this day would come. We’ve been spoiled for so long, and why should the Gods spare us, when so many other parents have been suffering since the day their children were born?

Today, the boy woke up at dawn.

Okay, if not dawn, then sometime around then. Close enough. Dawn-ish. Listen, asshole, it felt like dawn, and this is my blog, so I’m calling it dawn. Sorry, was I being irritable? Sorry. I woke up at DAWN.

Which, look, on its own, not the worst thing. We can enjoy this fine summer day, in all its splendor! We can leave the house before the cancer-giving rays of 10 am arrive! We will be like the early bird! Surely that early bird doesn’t start the day cursing up a storm! But the thing is. Here’s the thing. We, the husband and I, are not the morning-loving types. We do not greet the day with a song and a smile. We stay up late watching “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” then we read for a while, then we eventually manage to find our way to sleep, and by then it's usually insanely late. We roll out of bed when the child wakes, which until now has been (and I write this, knowing full well that half of the Finslippy-reading population will have no sympathy whatsoever for us from this moment on) somewhere around 9.

9, or even later. Sometimes, yes, sometimes as late as 10. This is why I love him. I thought we had an understanding. He sleeps late, and I will continue to provide affection.

I tried to reason with him. When I heard his little voice singing out to us from his crib, and I saw that the big hand on the clock was at some obscenely low number, I went to him. I shook his hand, and I said, “Good sir, it is still yet an early hour. Would you not enjoy a few more hours of rest? Your parents would be most obliged, and we would start the day in good humors, and also, you’re killing us with this waking up early shit. Please, I beg you. I need more sleep. Please. I’ll buy you a car. Anything. Anything. Please.” He probably couldn’t understand most of it through all of my sobbing, but anyway, by the time I got around to “please,” he had already clambered over the crib railing, monkeyed up my arms, and settled on top of my head, demanding Cheerios and Elmo, tout de suite.

But maybe this is an aberration. Maybe—probably!—some unparalleled set of events occurred in his room, like a chipmunk got caught in the air conditioner, which shorted out, causing some some sparks to fly into the room and hit that damned stuffed animal that when you hit it, it sings DEEDLE DEEDLE DOO over and over until you feel like madness is seconds away, DEEDLE DEEDLE DOO DOOP; maybe all that happened! Which I didn’t see any evidence of, and I really looked, but you never know! Yes. Yes, I’m sure this won’t happen again. Oh please.

Day 2

Damn.

Damn, damn, damn damn.

Is it so much to ask? Is it so cruel of me to request that he sleeps until a decent hour? Or to ignore him until he goes back to sleep? Not that he would. Not that he did. I laid there for minutes that seemed like hours, listening to him singing “Momm-eee,” over and over, in this singsong that I used to think was so cute and you know what I think of it now? I think he’s taunting me. It’s like, “Mommy, you chump, get up! Mommy, you love me too much to ignore me! The beast has risen from its slumber, and so must you, Mommy! MOMMY!” A couple of times he stopped, and I thought, oh, thank you, Lord, I knew I could count on you. Then the dog would bark—WHY DO WE HAVE A DOG? Who let him in here?—or the people upstairs would walk around—who told those people they could walk? Why didn’t we hobble them years ago?—and it would start up again, the taunting, the “Momm-eee, Momm-eee.”

I walked around Brooklyn yesterday like a zombie. A zombie with hair sticking up all at weird angles, like antennae. I forgot to fix the hair before leaving the house. This is not something I forget, normally. You don’t know this about me, but I am all about the presentation. It’s not like I’m applying eyeshadow every morning, but mascara, that’s another story. But yesterday it was all I could do to apply sunscreen to both of us. I greased us up with SPF 3,000, threw him into the stroller, and lurched toward the playground, forgetting his drink, his snack, and my sanity. I stayed in the shadows and hissed at anyone who came near us. At some point Henry asked for some Goldfish, and I may, I just may, have said, “Fuck Goldfish.”

No, I’m sure I didn’t! Ha, ha! Wouldn’t that have been terrible, had I said it! Which I did not!

Day 3

[EXPLETIVES DELETED BY TYPEPAD MANAGEMENT. We’re not running a cussing factory, here. Although those were extraordinary. What’s wrong with you, woman? You’d think no one else ever had to get up early.]

Day 4

Me so tired. Me not enjoying this. Me not like baby. Me want compose poem, but me not remember how.

Me sad. So sad, me.

And now, some words about my boobs.

When I was pregnant, I was all about the attachment parenting. I thought Dr. Sears was neat-o. Yes! I will sleep with my child until he’s 23! No, I will never let him cry alone in a cold, dark room! I will wear him in a sling, also until he’s 23! (23 will be a hard year for him, but hopefully his career will provide a distraction.) I will Nurse Him Down and Night-time Parent and we will be so attached, our skin will fuse together and we’ll be conjoined and then we’ll need surgery. And I will nurse, oh how I will nurse! Yes, attachment parenting—yes I said yes I will yes.

The various tenets of Attachment Parenting were kicked to the curb by the time Henry was a few months old. The sling caused searing neck and back pain. Pain wasn’t mentioned in the Attachment Parenting rulebook. We stopped sleeping with Henry after I rolled over when he was asleep on my chest, causing him to slide off me and plummet to the floor. (Luckily, we were at my parents’ house, where they were wise enough to carpet their rooms in a deep, plush pile.) We began letting him cry it out (no angry emails, please! I’m sensitive!) because after a few months, he would not fall asleep if we were in the room. Would not. We tried and tried. We rocked and joggled him. He glared at us. We crooned lullabies. He found them hilarious—and stimulating. So we put him in his crib, or “prison,” as Dr. Sears put it somewhere or another, and he cried for a bit, then he fell asleep. Maybe he was more comfortable feeling like a convict.

But then, the nursing. How I wanted to nurse. I could laugh off most of Dr. Sears’ pronouncements, but not the chapters on nursing. When I was pregnant, I read book after book on the subject. Scott and I attended a breastfeeding class (where we watched a Nordic filmstrip featuring—I would never joke about such things—beautiful Scandinavians tweaking and massaging their nipples, all in the name of milk production). We practiced with foam boobs and rubber dolls. I had it down. I had a midwife who happened to be, and this is fact, Paulina Porizkova’s mother, and since she was hot, I figured my first post-birth nursing would be just like we saw in the movie—a gorgeous blond goddess helping me guide my engorged teat into the baby’s waiting lips, the milk flowing like the Hardanger Fjord.

As it turned out, after delivery my midwife was engaged in all kinds of postnatal unpleasantries. So when Henry was ready for his first snack, the nurse was the one who helped us out. And although I had done all the reading there was to do, although I had watched the soft-core breastfeeding film and practiced with the foamy boob, I laid there quietly while I watched this nurse twist my nip into some crazy point and shove Henry on in the wrong way, at the wrong angle; everything about it was all wrong. But I had just given birth and I was as helpless and weak as a newborn kitten, and Henry was getting something, so I said nothing. Then he was whisked away for warming and measuring, and I got an eyeful of my poor, poor nipple. And it was bleeding. Hey, nurse! Thanks! You suck!

Thus began four months of such pathetic, painful breastfeeding that even Dr. Sears would have reached out a fuzzy-parenting paw and handed me a bottle. First there was the bleeding, and the pain, dear God, the blinding pain. Then there was jaundice, which lasted and lasted, which caused Henry to sleep the days away and barely eat. So my milk supply dwindled, despite all the pumping. Then I was told he had a weak suck, and we did all kinds of insane mouth exercises. Then I was told he had a high palate. And he wasn’t gaining enough, so I had to supplement and pump more. Then, adding even more pain to the pain, I developed a YEAST INFECTION in my MILK DUCTS—which, unlike the yeast infections in the ol’ down below, causes searing, shooting hot daggers of pain, causing you to CRY OUT and CLUTCH YOUR BOOBS, often in public. And Henry had ideas about where to suck! And it was never anywhere near my nipple! I’d have to wrench his head in the right direction, and I learned that infants are strong little buggers. I would be sweating and cursing and crying and trying to just get him on the damn nipple, THAT’S WHERE THE FOOD IS, and he’d be all, “You’re not listening! It’s over there, by the armpit, I just know it!”

Throughout it all, my milk supply remained somewhere below a trickle. I pumped, I drank Mother’s Milk tea until I wanted to throw up, I took herbs that tasted a little worse than ass, I pumped more, and still, Henry would have a few halfhearted sucks, and then pull off to look up at me like, “Okay, this is cute, but seriously, where’s lunch?” Everyone thought I should stop nursing--everyone but Sexy Midwife, who was so hot that I figured her opinion meant more, right? I was convinced giving up would brand me a Failure as a Mother. Dr. Sear’s Baby Book told me that formula would make my son a bumbling half-wit (I may be exaggerating), and I cried and cried. I live in Park Slope, where the ratio of Women Nursing to Everyone Else is, at any given moment, 3:1. I would be shunned. Rocks would be thrown. Henry would grow up to learn how I had failed him, and he would struggle to forgive me. I had become a little nuts.

Then his four-month doctor’s appointment came, and I learned that he was only 11 pounds and hadn’t gained an ounce all month, and BAM, just like that, I gave it all up. I packed away the boobs, I set the pump on fire, I bought the formula. I wiped away my tears. And in the months that followed, I watched Henry change from a gaunt skritchy infant with visible cheekbones to a plump-cheeked, laughing baby who, miracle of miracles, no longer cried for hours every night. And I wasn’t even the least bit shunned. Although, while he was still using bottles, I made it a point to avoid Norway.