Into the Sunset

Oh, hi there! Things are getting a little cobwebby around here lately, as you can see. Work suddenly became very busy and exciting this fall, and I have had to take off my crocs and go out into the world to be a stern professional lady a lot. The rest of the time, picture me as a happily flustered mom, wiping pureed carrots off my yoga pants and playing peekaboo. Lotta people in my head these days.

So anyway, rather than let this poor little blog sink into the quicksand of neglect, I think it is probably time to just end it. I don't really have that much to say anymore, certainly not that much that a lot of smarter and funnier people aren't already saying on mommyblogs all over the internet. If you're looking for me, I'll probably be over reading Flotsam, actually. Or All and Sundry.

I like words and I know a lot of them, but I am pretty sure there's nothing in my vocabulary that really sums up how much old Dear Gherkin and all you folks out there in the internet have meant to me during my times of trial and celebration. Let's just say a bunch. A whole bunch. This blog has been my oasis of sanity in a desert of chaos, y'all. But my camel's drunk, my canteen is full, and I guess it's time to head for the horizon. Wow, that is a gosh-darn cheesy metaphor, and further proof that it's time for me to say adios. Be well, my friends.

May the information superhighway rise up to meet you.
May the firewall be always at your back.
May the glare from your monitor shine warm upon your face, and your fingers fall soft upon your keys.
And until we meet again, my friends, may the internet hold you lovingly in the palm of its hand.

The K is for Karma and She's a Bitch Like Me

There is nothing like running in the back third of a neighborhood 5K to really make you hate humanity.

I don't know what things are like up among the fast people, never having been there. The race must be over so fast you don't even have time to hate all the other people in it. Back among my people, I bet it must seem like we tootle right along in a spirit of underachieving goodwill and slacker joie de vivre, but alas no. Those back 5k are a Hobbesian nightmare: nasty, brutish, and long.

The back of a 5K race is more like a fire drill in hell than a competitive sporting event. At the beginning of the race, all the inexperienced people and packs of chattering middle-schoolers push past you in a burst of herky-jerky speed, evidence of a misplaced and ultimately tragic optimism. When those same people lose momentum and start walking, less than a kilometer in, it is hard not to feel a certain perverse satisfaction in passing them, even as they clog up the road, running in lemming-like little clumps of inconsistent speed, apparently having no idea how much more race they have in their futures.

We back-of-the-racers are a rude lot--the rule-breakers are all back there, their forbidden jogging strollers knocking against other people's heels. We are the people who throw the paper cups down on the road after we go through the water station, rather than pitching them off to the side. Most of us don't know any better. Some of us are just assholes.

There was one woman in particular today who I loathed, and believe me when I say that this seething hatred may have been the only thing keeping me in the race on a day when I felt like ass on rusty wheels. She would run ahead of me a little ways, then walk, and I swear she was watching for me to pass her, because every time I did, she'd start to run again--in shorter and shorter bursts. Oooooooh, I hated that. And like most of the walk/runners, she wasn't pulling off to the side of the course for her walking, forcing those of us trying to maintain a steady pace to detour around her, a maneuver I had to perform no fewer than seven times in five piddling kilometers. Granted, she had to weave around me, too, but that was eminently her own fault.

In the home stretch, I reached down deep for a final kick, and I beat her by ten yards or so. And that was pretty much the only satisfying thing about that race, as I ran more than a minute slower than my goal pace and my goal pace wasn't going to be setting any land-speed records in the first place--I mean, heck, my main competition was walking for large portions of the race.

So now I'm just going to sit around in the playroom with my newtlet for the rest of the day, possibly in combination with some light holiday-weekend drinking, and try to get my love for humanity back. If anybody asks me to do any physical labor today (and I'm looking at you Mr. Newt), I'm going to say "no," because I left it all out on the course. Nothing left in the tank but bitterness and a compelling desire to eat pie.

Next race: October 10.

Dude, where's my gin and tonic?

I'm playing a little game with myself. It's called: "Drink a cocktail while cleaning up the house at 3:00 on a Friday afternoon." Yeah, I'm better at making up games than I am at naming them.

As I walk from room to room putting laundry away and such, I keep misplacing my beverage, creating an ongoing scavenger hunt! As I retrace my steps to look for it, I have to keep tidying up each room I pass through. This is surprisingly effective, mostly because I REALLY want that drink.

Mary Poppins wishes she were me.

(Wo)Man in Motion

Sorry about the long silence, internet. When I disappear y'all must worry that I've gone and joined a Siberian nunnery or something. But do not worry. All of us Newts are home and fat and happy, uncommitted to any obscure religious orders.

Mostly I haven't been blogging because there's a, you know a *thing* going on at work that is sucking up a lot of my energy and time. Sorry to be so mysterious, but you know how it's a bad idea to blog about work. So, back to family.

Hmm...hey, so my mom and sister each have one of those Nike ipod chips you put in your shoe so the ipod can track your workouts and record them at a central website, right? They have been doing this for a few years, but I was pregnant and then unpregnant, etc., so I haven't done much running since I think 2006, and even then I was really daggone slow.

So slow, I should note, that I have intentionally refrained from mentioning my runs here on this blog, because some of you who read it are serious real athletes and my puffy little jogs are...well, you know how you can't actually see a glacier move, but scientists will photograph it one summer and then come back the next summer and it's six centimeters lower than it was before? Put that glacier in jogging shorts and that's me. Too slow for human perception, my runs can only be recorded with time-lapse photography.

But then this summer I needed a postpartum workout routine, so I bought my own Nike chip, and my mom and sister and I have been logging all our runs on the website so we can compare our progress. It's a great motivator because slow as I am, I really don't like it when my 59-year-old mother runs faster than I do, baby seven months ago or no baby seven months ago, you know?

So knowing we would get together this August, the three of us agreed to race a 5K during our family reunion. That's right, internet, I have been training all summer to race my mother. Gotta have goals, right?

Surprisingly, we are all just about the same speed. Going into the family reunion, there was less than 20 seconds separating each of our fastest 5K finishing times. Expecting a tight race, I made a special playlist for my pod, the "Ultimate 5K Speed List." I'm not sure why the 80's are such a source of great running music, but right now I'm really loving St. Elmo's Fire. Because, you know, you broke the boy in me but you won't break the man. Stirring stuff.

I'm trying to think of how to make the story of a race exciting, but basically we each put one foot in front of the other and tried not to slow down.

I won, the end.

There's talk of making the Newt family 5K an annual event, so basically I could spend all forseeable summers training to race my mother. That's funny to me no matter how many times I say it. Oh yeah, I'm a badass.

Or Zac Efron. Whichever.

The newtlet and I sometimes go to the public library for baby story hour because it's fun and it gets us out of the house. And that is how it came to pass that last month, as a lark, I signed the little man up for the kids' summer reading program, pledging to read 30 books by August first.

Good little library citizens, we went back on Friday to turn in our completed pledge card, and I was surprised to learn that the prize for summer reading success is a GOLD MEDAL. Like the little man had just won the baby Olympic luge event or something. I sat him down on top of the check-out counter, and the librarian made a lovely little ceremony of putting the award over the newtlet's neck, shaking his little hand, and congratulating him on his achievement. My son beamed.

(Here I was going to make a joke about how the newtlet insists on wearing his medal everywhere we go, but I feel obligated to note that that would actually be a choking hazard, so...joke redacted.)

Since I foolishly neglected to bring my camera to the library--little knowing there would be a podium ceremony--the newtlet insisted that we take a picture when we got home, with a sampling of his books arrayed artfully around him. So internet, here's the victory lap:


And now it's official: I have a champion baby.

Michael Phelps's mom is on a book tour right now, promoting her memoir about how to feed your kid 26,000 calories a day so he can swim really fast. I wonder if Random House would be interested in the inspiring story of Mama Newt, who sat in a squeaky rocking chair reading two, sometimes three board books a night, gently but firmly turning the pages even when the baby tried to put the whole book in his mouth, gritting her way lovingly through the linguistic contortions of Dr. Seuss's ABC's from Aunt Annie's Alligators to the Zizzer-zazzer-zuzz.

It could be a great Movie of the Week someday. Sandra Bullock could play me, and maybe one of those Jonas Brothers could play the newtlet. They seem like nice kids.

A Little Baby Sean Penn

One of the things that has surprised me the most about having a six-month old is the fact that this baby, this baby who can't walk or talk or wipe his own ass, really seems to me to have the most exquisite sense of humor.

I would have thought that having a sense of humor is something that develops when he's older, like in a rudimentary way maybe when he starts making fart jokes at age 3 or 4, and in a more sophisticated way when he starts making puns or something when he's 5 or 6? If I'm lucky. I mean, Mr. Newt and I used to laugh over the idea that our baby might not have any sense of humor at all, and we wouldn't know what to do with our serious little grumble-bunny.

Remember when Amy Poehler and Will Arnett were expecting their baby and they joked that he would be...wait, let me get the exact quote:

Poehler: We think we might have the most unfunniest child.
Arnett: We have always imagined that we'd have a Sean Penn-like child.
Poehler: A little baby Sean Penn.
Arnett: Real brooding, Method-y actor.
Poehler: Smokin' all the time....I hope my baby doesn't smoke. I don't know what kind of baby we're gonna have. I really should get on this.

Can you imagine? If Mr. Newt and I had a baby who would take the stage at the Academy Awards in a fit of self-important pique and berate Chris Rock for making a joke about Jude Law? A thin-skinned, sour-faced killjoy? That baby would put in a petition for new parents roughly in kindergarten. We pick on Jude Law all the time around here (when I can recognize him).

So anyway, humor. I've been kind of watching for it, but assumed it was too early to manifest. But I think I assumed wrong.


I mean, look at this face. This child is a conoisseur of the hilarious. You can call me crazy, but I swear to you my little pre-verbal drool factory here is like the Stephen Colbert of the diaper set.

Not only is he an appreciative audience for parental comedy (my inexpert reading of Sandra Boynton's Doggies: A Counting and Barking Book absolutely brought the house down at bedtime last night), but there's something adorably wry about his outlook in general. He seems to be looking at the world and waiting for it to make him laugh.

And lately, he also seems to be going out of his way to make ME laugh. When he does something funny and I laugh at him, he laughs back, and indeed looks very very pleased with himself. We crack each other up, sometimes so loudly Mr. Newt wanders in from the other room to find out what all the ruckus is about. I usually tell him, jubilantly, that the newtlet and I were just making fun of Jude Law.

So internet, I think this baby and I are going to have a lot of good times together, you know? And we haven't even started on the fart jokes yet.

Long Story Short

So, the newtlet and I are sharing a cold. It's nice when your baby has your eyes, less nice when he has your phlegm, but we're powering through.

Internet, do you ever have that thing where you cough, and the phlegm comes halfway up your throat and stops, and it feels like you're going to gag on it, and suddenly you're scared you are going to vomit a stomach full of mucous and DayQuil all over your bedspread and you can either swallow that slug of phlegm, which you really don't want to do, or take a risk and keep on coughing, hoping you can get it all the way up before your gag reflex is fully activated?

No? Just me? OK, then, let's move on and pretend I never said anything.

So this particular illness hasn't required a trip to the doctor, but sitting here in my nest of Kleenex reminds me of a question I have been meaning to ask you, internet, about medical care and whatnot. Mr. Newt and I agree on most things (it's spooky, really), but this is one of the few occasions when we tend toward marital discord.

OK, so every time we are checking in at the ER or at Urgent Care, there's always a triage nurse who takes down our vital information, and she asks "What is the problem?" Now, it is my firm belief that she wants the shortest possible answer to this question. "Fever." "Coughing." Something she can write down on the form and move on.

In addition to saving her time, this will also save ME time, because I'm going to be asked to repeat the answer to this question at least twice more--to the examining nurse, and then eventually to the doctor. I would just as soon save the long version for the doctor, who is the only character in this little psychodrama with the authority to assign us an official diagnosis and prescribe drugs. Efficiency, people. I like efficiency.

Mr. Newt, on the other hand, usually launches a charm offensive with every single medical professional we encounter, and tells each nurse in line (as well as any kind of technician or P.A. we might meet) the whole story about how the baby woke up at 4 and we thought he felt warm, etc. etc. Long version all the way, with lots of personable parent stuff thrown in.

This is partly a regional thing. Mr. Newt and I are both Northerners living below the Mason-Dixon line, and he has adjusted better than I have to the cultural necessity of maintaining chit-chat with the guy who comes to fix the cable box, etc. When I'm doing my job, I consider it a kindness to be left alone, but locals have repeatedly informed me that this is an abnormal attitude toward human interaction around these parts. Leaving people alone is considered hostile, for some incomprehensible reason.

But even beyond the corn-pone Southern thing, Mr. Newt theorizes that most doctors are going to treat us like hypochondriac first-time parents, and we must set out from the beginning of each office visit to convince them that our reasons for seeking medical care are valid, or we are just going to get a pat on the arm and sent home with the assurance that our baby is just fine, pat pat. Mr. Newt sees the nurses as our first line of attack: they will somehow signal to the doctor whether we are to be taken seriously or not. Get the nurses on your side, he thinks, and the doctor will come in prepared to treat you well.

I tend to think the best way to get the nurses on our side is to be as efficient as possible so they can get their work done and go home to their children or their World of Warcraft or whatever they would rather be doing than listening to me describe the particular color of my kid's vomit.

So, internet, here's your chance to bring marital harmony back to Chez Newt. Who is right? It's me, isn't it? You know it is.