Preemptive strike

I’m supposed to be taking a nap right now, but I’m not. It was a Sunday afternoon present from Mr. David Copperfield. He is sweet that way.

I asked the kids to have the laundry put away by the time I came out of my room. It had all been folded and was stacked in neat piles on the sewing table, and I have this crazy notion that I might actually sew something this afternoon. Or next month, whenever.

Just now someone slipped a note under my door. (And it’s a good thing I wasn’t trying to nap because you just KNOW the little shooshing sound of paper sliding on a hardwood floor would have roused me just at that delicious moment when I was sinking into slumber)

All the laundry on the table is YOURS, the note says. Proclaims, one might say. Firmly. Not quite belligerently. Sternly, perhaps. You have assigned us two contradictory objectives, is the subtext. Your instructions cancel each other out, Mother. There is no way we can leave you alone for a little while so you can get some rest AND put away *all* the laundry. It is physically and even metaphysically impossible for us to do everything we are supposed to do at this point in time.

To which I say: Welcome to my world.

Time (and) flies

It cannot possibly be mid-September already. Before yesterday, the last time I posted to this blog was in August. Of 2007. I don’t understand how that happened. I think it’s possible I still owe thank-you notes for some presents from Christmas ’06.

I had to take my blogroll down because half the links were outdated. I hadn’t noticed before because I do all my blog-reading on Google Reader now. Boy, people sure did move their blogs around a lot this year. Sometimes I wonder if one of the reasons so many stay-at-home moms have blogs now is because of the easy makeoverability. Painting my bedroom is way too overwhelming a project to contemplate. All those books to move, and I’d have to face the herd of dust buffalo under the bed and the dead fly in the corner of the windowsill. I have been avoiding that fly for three months, sort of hoping in the back of my mind that he’ll just, I don’t know, decompose into oblivion or something.

I guess he’ll be there until I delete him. Just like this blog.

No wonder I got soaked during the last invisible rainstorm

Her Royal Highness comes to me with her hand upraised, fingers curled around something that isn’t there.

“Dis my um-rella,” she informs me gravely.

“Oh! That’s your umbrella?” I echo, because that is what mothers are supposed to do for their two-year-olds; that is what the two-year-old expects and, indeed, demands.

But this two-year-old is looking at me like I have an umbrella where my head should be.

“No,” she says in tones of exasperation and bewilderment—how could I be so silly?—”Dis my fish.”

Why he deserves me

“Who’s the love of my life?” he whispers, snuggling closer, nuzzling my neck.

I arch my eyebrows and glance pointedly at the sleeping toddler on the other side of the bed, her hair tousled and sweaty, her mouth pursed in a little o. He adores her almost past sanity, and we both know it.

“No, she’s the joy of my life,” he says. There’s a pause, while we fill in the words so deeply understood there’s no need to speak them aloud. She’s his joy, I’m his love.

“And she’ll leave me someday,” he says. “For some jackass who doesn’t deserve her.”

I smile, stroke his hair. I hadn’t noticed how much gray there was in it.

“I hate him,” he mutters. He looks like he might bite me, but it wouldn’t be me he was biting. It would be the future.

His face is buried in my hair. “But I love you,” he says. “You are the love of my life.”

I’m not sure if he said it out loud. But I heard it.

Somehow I think the message got garbled

The six-year-old, explaining to me why she would have to bite her sister in retaliation, if her sister bit her first: “Daddy said! He said, ‘Do unto others as they do unto you.’ “

I think the word she’s looking for is “leech”

Overheard: Child watching a cartoon mouse attempt to cook and eat the Pink Panther.

“That bloodthirsty little lech!”

If I never fold another pair of socks, it will be too soon

In fact, I think I will just stop folding them altogether. I mean, our family devotes an entire laundry basket to unmatched socks anyway. Why not just have that be the permanent home for ALL socks? The kids can go fishing every morning. I don’t even care whether they match. My girls go around looking like Punky Brewster half the time anyway.

(Speaking of what not to wear.)

And speaking of speaking of, speaking of Punky Brewster—oh, wait, never mind. I’m getting my former child stars confused. I was going to write about how cool it is that Soleil Moon Frye (aka Punky B) has a blog now, but the person I’m really thinking of is Quinn Cummings. She blogs at The QC Report and has a line of (I love her for this) baby carriers.

It’s a bit stupid of me to confuse them; they’re a decade apart. Quinn is about a year older than I am. I wonder if we had babies around the same time. I tried a bunch of different baby carriers with my first child…a Guatemalan rebozo, a Baby Bjorn, a hip-carrier thingie with plastic buckles and a strap that cut deep into my shoulder the one and only time I ventured out with it. Unfortunately I was seven subway stops from home before my cruelly strained shoulder muscles began to scream. They screamed so loud the rats were running off the train, not that any of my fellow (human) subway riders noticed, enshrined as they were in their protective New Yorker force fields.

Then I tried a homemade contraption called a “Baby Bundler,” which turned out to be the most idiotic concept in the history of textiles. You take several yards of fabric—I think I recall it was supposed to be something with a bit of stretch to it, but natural fibers only, of course—and cut them into wide strips and sew them together into one very very long wide strip which you then wrap around yourself in a specific and complicated manner, like if you were trussing a turkey with flannel stockings instead of twine. The baby gets wrapped up in the middle of this procedure, a little Cornish game hen strapped to the turkey. She is positioned facing out, her back against your front, all snug and comfy and subconsciously absorbing contentment vibes through the warmth of your body and the beating of your heart.

Then you take a step, and you discover that the baby’s itty bitty widdle tootsies are perfectly positioned in front of your thighs so as to jiggle and thunk against them when you walk.

Before you reach the end of the block, you will have matches bruises on those thighs. Turns out those widdle bitty snookie-wookie baby heels are made of LEAD.

When you hobble back home, you will spend ten minutes trying to untruss yourself from the infant with the brass knuckles in her booties. Thus your first encounter with the Baby Bundler shall be your last. Make sure you are very fond of the fabric you choose when making this nightmarish contraption, because you’ll wind up turning it into throw pillows and baby blankets and sarongs and dinner napkins and Lord knows what else.

After that fiasco, I finally found my way to a plain old baby sling, the kind with padding and an adustable plastic ring on the shoulder, otherwise known as my BFF. Together we have toted five babies all over the doggone country. My sling knows I would never betray it, so that is why I am comfortable saying that IF I had occasion to need a new baby-carrier (which I DON’T, my darling), I would totally give Quinn Cummings’s version a shot. I mean, come on, it comes in toile.

But I don’t need one. I’m good to go. As soon as I go dig some socks out of the laundry basket and put on my trendy jacket made from recycled Baby Bundler.

What Not to Watch

I’ve been reading the Baby Shower posts for Liz, Christina, and Tammie, and cracking up over the collections of stupid parenting advice people are posting in honor of the event. This made me think of some of the dumbest advice I’ve ever heard, which I witnessed the other night when I watched an episode of What Not to Wear. In my defense, I was trapped on the couch with a wakeful baby. All 347 other channels in our cable package were airing either sports highlights, infomercials, or infomercials for sports-highlight DVDs. What Not to Wear was, I thought, the only reasonable option for keeping myself awake while getting the baby to sleep.

So I watched this show with the two snarky hip New Yorker hosts sniping their fashion expertise at the supposedly ugly duckling they’d lured into their Room of Humiliation with the promise of a Whole New and Very Fashionable Wardrobe. And at first I thought it might prove mildly informative, because this week’s guest sucker was a thirty-something mom like me. I’m the first to admit I could use a clothing makeover. My wardrobe pretty much amounts to a uniform these days: Eddie Bauer V-neck tee over jeans or capris. Naturalizer Mules coming apart at the seams. Sometimes (forgive me) a cardigan because I run to the chilly.

A fashionista I ain’t.

But this show, it made me want to scream. First we had to listen to twenty minutes of Stacy and Argyle (I cannot for the life of me remember the male host’s first name, but it doesn’t matter because his whole identity is expressed by his sleeveless-sweater-over-short-sleeved-button-down anyway) brutally mock their makeover subject for her bulky sweatshirts, nondescript jeans, and basically for being such a dumb cluck as to have ever allowed children to affect her waistline, her budget, or her daily schedule.

“You’re more than just a mom,” they kept telling her, the condescension dripping like blood off their pointy, bleached, metrosexual teeth.

It was clear Stacy and Argyle have swallowed some Mommy Wars line about all the poor women who’ve “lost their identities” through having children. They were on a mission to do more than de-frump; they quivered with sarcastic zeal to rescue the club-hopping twenty-two-year-old they seemed certain was trapped inside a prison made of minivans, Christmas sweaters, and diaper bags.

And all the time I’m watching this attractive, intelligent, good-humored woman talk animatedly and happily about her life, which involves both raising her children and serving as spokeswoman for the American Heart Association, and it is perfectly obvious she has no identity angst at all; she’s very happy with her life and basically just needed a hot outfit for an AHA event where she was going to make a speech.

“Here’s the real you,” Stacy and Argyle informed her, decking her out in an “everyday” outfit consisting of $200 pair of jeans, a smart blazer, and high-heeled boots that probably cost more than a year’s worth of Huggies.

I saw the “more than just a mom” suppress a smile, which was a charitable response in the face of such idiocy. Stacy, honey, if you think a thousand-dollar outfit is necessary for personal fulfillment, I weep for you. Twenty-five bucks at Target and a baby smeared with cracker crumbs will fill your heart with more mushy happiness than the most fab pair of boots ever ripped off a cow’s back.

Look, I like to look good. In fact, I feel somewhat obliged to make an attempt at looking, if not on the cutting edge of fashion, reasonably well put together and attractive. I like to bust stereotypes, you know? It is possible to have five kids and still be hot. In fact, the fact that I have been impregnated numerous times probably attests to my hotness.

But Stacy, Argyle, DUDES. Guess what. I am more than just a MILF. I am also the owner of this thing called a BRAIN. It is so highly advanced that it can, you know, reason. And do math. Like this equation: $1000 outfit + 2T (where T represents number of toddlers under same roof) = complete waste of money.

In which my girls make some new friends

I went bra shopping this weekend for the first time in years. I’ve never actually been fitted for a bra, until now. It wasn’t the least bit embarrassing, though I had always imagined it would be. Even with my stretchy post-baby skinny-girl-had-a-baby-and-now-she-has-chicken-skin belly wrinkles peeking over the top of my skirt, and even though the fitter was a pert young nineteen-year-old, I didn’t feel self-conscious, except to be sort of self-consciously amused that I didn’t feel self-conscious.

This was surprising. Discovering my current actual bra size was also surprising. I am a full two inches and one cup size smaller than I thought. But it’s not like I was just deluding myself or anything—the darn things keep changing size on me. I can’t keep up.

Junior year of college I was shocked to discover I was underestimating my bra size. I’d been a late bloomer, really late, as in barely needing a training bra until senior year of high school. When puberty finally finished doing its thing on my bod, I wound up in 34B territory, and I thought that’s where the train stopped. But junior year, I had a new roommate, and one day I was changing and she started to laugh, and she said, “Do you know that bra is totally too small for you?” I thought she was nuts and then, looking down, I awoke to the fact that the cup was stretched across my breast like a string bikini. Hey, look at that! I’m a C cup now!

I’ve considered 34C my official bra size ever since. When I’m pregnant, though, my rib cage expands and I have a couple of 36C bras stashed in the back of the drawer for a little extra breathy room during the last couple of months. Then, about a week after the baby comes, I balloon to a D and have to move to those annoying nursing bras with the scratchy hooks that you never can fasten one-handed, no matter what the package claims.

I really hate those things.

It’s always a relief when, a month or two later, my body has figured out how to produce just enough milk and not too much, and I can downsize the bra. I ditch the whole nursing bra concept at that point and just go back to my everyday 34C. That’s been the pattern through five babies now, and I thought I had a handle on the whole brassiere situation.

But ugh, all the bras in my drawer were threadbare and milk-stained, plus I always forget to obey the cardinal rule of brassiere-laundering, and I keep putting them in the dryer. Which is the worst thing you can do, according to all the experts. Oh yes, there are bra experts out there; I have seen them on TV; they are always full-figured women who speak with furrowed brows and authoritative tones, and I look at their enormous bosoms and think, in this area, I trust you.

So this weekend I surveyed my drawer full of ratty old dryer-fried lingerie and had a sort of Norma Rae moment. Hardworking breasts unite! Demand better conditions!

Thus the trip to Macy’s and the tape-measure-wielding nineteen-year-old .

Knock me over with a feather: She told me I’m a 32—thirty-blooming-TWO—B.

32B!

When did that happen? The baby’s a year now, but still nursing gung ho. I still fill out a sweater nicely. But lookie there, Tape Measure Girl brought me some 32Bs and they fit just beeyootifully. Oh, the lift! The bounce! The perfect cupping! I am a new woman.

I bought four bras, and I promised them I would never, never put them in the dryer. They are my new BFF  (breast friends forever). They support me in all I do, and they are always close to my heart.

Sometimes being a mother makes you a little bit stupid

I have done this with all of my babies, and although every time I laugh at what an idiot I am, I do exactly the same thing the next time. It’s like this: the baby is down for a nap, and that quiet nagging anxiety beast that lurks in the brain of even the mellowest mama starts up with a sneaky whisper about what if she isn’t sleeping, what if she just stopped breathing.

So of course I have to go check. And I peek into the room, not wanting to wake her if she is still asleep, because I have ten places to put every free-handed minute.

I peek so silently, and I stare at the pink-cheeked infant lying perfectly still.

She isn’t blue: she is fine. But. Wait. Is she breathing? Seriously, I don’t see her chest moving. She is too still. What if I just happened to check on her at the exact moment that her respiratory system shut down?

Do I tiptoe in for a closer look? But then I’ll wake her. If she can be awakened. Oh my Lord, I really don’t see her chest moving. My chest is moving, because my heart is pounding. Is her shirt rising? No, I don’t see any rustle, I can’t tell…

And then, here’s how it happens every single time. Something will twitch, her tiny fingers, her chubby toes…a twitch, pulling my glance away from her chest, and I’ll think: Hold still, I’m trying to see if you are breathing.