The Zombie Baby Lament

So, yeah, I'm pretty sure my son is a zombie. He is teething, which I understand makes him want to put things in his mouth, but I wasn't quite prepared for the fact that his first choice of tasty teething device was going to be, well, me. Whenever I am near him, he literally lunges for me, desperate to chomp his little gums down on any exposed body part he can reach. I think it's good that we've weaned now, and the only exposed body parts he tends to have access to are my arms and hands and sometimes my neck or shoulders--or my shins, because he's kinky like that.

Exhibit A:

Do you see that crazy glint in his eyes? That is his lust for human flesh.

Inspired by those immortal classics All the Babies Go to the Mine (Lowered in Buckets) and Oh I Wish I Were a Little 'Lectric Eel, I have composed a new song about the newtlet and his undead habits of personal consumption. Think of it as a lullaby of sorts.

(It's sung to a kind of marching beat. Not knowing anything about music, that's the best I can explain it.)

Zombie baby's coming for me; he wants to eat my flesh. Grrrrrr!
Zombie baby's coming for me; he wants to eat my flesh. Arghh!
He wants to bite my fingers and he wants to bite my toes. Grrrrr!
He wants to bite my shoulder and leave drool stains on my clothes. Arghh!

Zombie baby's coming for me; he wants to eat my flesh. Grrrrrr!
Zombie baby's coming for me; he wants to eat my flesh. Arghh!
He does not want sweet potatoes, squash, or brussels sprouts. Grrrrr!
He just wants to gnaw my bones and spit the gristle out. Arghh!

Zombie baby's coming for me; he wants to eat my flesh. Grrrrrr!
Zombie baby's coming for me; he wants to eat my flesh. Arghh!
It is futile to present him with a teething toy. Grrrrr!
He will only be contented with the real McCoy. Arghh!

Zombie baby's coming for me; he wants to eat my flesh. Grrrrrr!
Zombie baby's coming for me; he wants to eat my flesh. Arghh!
Right now he's not dangerous; this habit's just uncouth. Grrrrr!
But I'm scared of what will happen when he gets a tooth. Aaaaaaaaaaaaarghh!

It's best if this last "Arghh" is sung in a very theatrical, descending scream. Babies, as you know, love that sort of thing.

Homophone

Internet, I am writing to you today to protest the apparent monopoly enjoyed by the Winnie the Pooh franchise as regards infant merchandise.

Please understand that I have no particular objection to Winnie the Pooh himself. I confess, I dislike his voice in the cartoon versions, since it's whiny and too slow and generally not euphonious, but this is a small thing.

Mostly, I am a fan. I like the old-fashioned graphics, and particularly appreciate the gender-neutrality of the color schemes. I am emphatically pro-honey. I am fond of Eeyore and Tigger and especially Piglet.

No, Pooh is not a problem in himself, internet; it's the ubiquity of Pooh that rankles.

To wit: having made no effort to collect Pooh merchandise, the Newt family finds itself in possession of two Pooh crib sheets, a Pooh receiving blanket, a Pooh rattle, two Pooh sleep gowns, a Pooh teething ring, a pair of Pooh footed pajamas, a Pooh hat, and a Pooh paci clip.

And besides the simple overload of a single character in our lives, Mr. Newt and I are starting to be bothered by the frequency with which we find ourselves saying the word "Pooh," which--due respect to A.A. Milne--is not a pleasant word.

Here are some things we wish we had never heard come out of our mouths in the last month or so, in speaking to our cherished son:

• With respect to the P.J.'s: "Do you want to wear your Pooh?"
• With respect to the rattle: "Try to hold onto your Pooh so the dogs don't get it."
• And most egregiously, with respect to the paci clip: "No, sweetie, don't put your Pooh in your mouth."

Ahem. I rest my case.

It's Simple, Really

Click to Enlarge

Sleep, the Final Frontier

Oh my gosh, my little baby is five months old! First he was a little wrinkled bleary-eyed newborn, and now he can roll over, put his toes in his mouth, eat from a spoon, shriek and coo, reach out and grab toys, scoot a bit, recognize himself in a mirror, sit up with just the tiniest bit of steadying, and oh yeah...SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT, Y'ALL.


Yeah, you heard me, internet, that baby has finally got his sleep on. Hallelujah, praise be, the baby is sleeping! Really sleeping! At night! All night! We put him down between seven and eight, and unless there is something specifically wrong like a leaky diaper, he has been sleeping until five or six the next morning. If we're lucky, he'll take a bottle then and go back down for another hour or two of BONUS SLEEP. DO YOU SEE HOW I AM USING ALL CAPS? THAT IS BECAUSE I AM EXCITED, Y'ALL.

It's like we hit the baby jackpot, and it feels so good. It only took five agonizing, grinding, mind-deadening months! And we doubtless have some sleep regressions still ahead of us (oh teething, please be merciful), but I'm choosing to celebrate anyway, because seriously people, my baby is sleeping 10 or 11 glorious hours in a row, regularly. I'm happy for him, as much as for me. He seems happier, is napping better, smiles and laughs all the time--look at this magnificent baby! The picture of cool contentment.


I know you're going to ask me how we got here from where we were back in April, when he slept so badly we seemed to be getting up every 45 minutes all night long, and I frankly don't know. He got older. We did some sleep training (this did involve letting him cry some, but never to hysteria and never without frequent checks). He started solid food.

I know all the expert publications say it's an old wives' tale that rice cereal makes babies sleep longer, so maybe this was a coincidence. But the first night we started rice cereal, the newtlet's first waking pushed back from 2:30 to 3:15. And as we added sweet potatoes and he started spitting out less and swallowing more, that night feeding crept forward pretty quickly up to four and then five and now sometimes six. So I don't know, I think the solid food helped. Me, I tend to believe old wives. Who knows more about babies than old wives? Old wives are your go-to resource on stuff like this.


Heck, I'm a wife of advanced maternal age my own self.

Happy Anniversary, Mr. Newt

This is Just to Say

I should not
have woken you
to change
that diaper

at three
when you probably
were dreaming
of books

Forgive me
it was awful
so stinky
and so green

In Praise of Mom Jeans

And so, internet, the time has come for some reflections on my post-partum body. It is different. I suppose this should come as no surprise.

I was never a skinny girl, but I used to be roughly average size, clothing sized medium, although pear-shaped and five foot three, which is a tricky combination. I managed, partly by wearing heels pretty much all the time to make my legs longer. Even writing that makes me sort of confused. Heels, really? It seems so foreign; you might as well tell me I used to wear pearls while I vacuumed, like Donna Reed. But there you go.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand: my new body. Sadly, it's not one of those "new bodies" like C-list celebrities on the cover of People Magazine are always getting, with the toned arms and the bikini and whatnot. Alas, no.

Having a baby has not made me taller, and it has certainly done nothing to revise my proportions in a positive direction, so now I'm still pear-shaped, still five-three, heel-less, and exactly two pounds heavier than before. Long after their cohorts have departed, these two pounds have been holding on stubbornly, like a pair of flabby jellyfish clinging to my belly.

Two pounds doesn't sound like much, but they seem to be made of some kind of miracle fat that redistributes all the other fat on my whole body. My butt seems fatter, my gut seems fatter, even my chin has ballooned downward a bit. My old pants definitely do not fit. In the interest of my self-esteem, I have stopped trying to put them on.

I keep reading blogs written by fitter women than I, and feeling odd pangs of regret that I'm only getting to the gym for a pleasant workout a few times a week. I have toyed with the idea of getting in shape for a 5K, and then followed that idea exactly nowhere. The truth is, I just don't mind my post-partum body that much. Maybe this is how the long slide into age and infirmity begins? I don't know--right now I am not getting enough sleep in the average 24-hour period to lose any of it over the condition of my gut.

Hence, the fact that I seem to have settled in and stopped fighting my post-partum body has resulted in some predictable but nonetheless somewhat sad accommodations in my wardrobe. To wit: I am wearing mom jeans. Here is a sampling of the waistbands that greet me from the pants drawer each morning:


In case you can't read the labels, let me translate. There on top we have some Bermuda shorts in a style called "mid-rise curvy." That's a nice way of saying there's extra room for your butt. The second selection is a pair of Lees with something called a "comfort waistband." This is pretty much what it sounds like--these look like plain old mom jeans from the outside, but when you put them on they somehow feel like sweatpants. Sweatpants with pockets.

My world? It is rocked. These are futuristic miracle pants.

I used to have jeans that didn't cover my belly button, internet, but that was when I used to have abdominal muscles. Now? It is time to raise the denim flag of surrender. I tried to resist the siren song of elasticized waistbands, but alack, I am weak. You know how on Star Trek it always looks so cozy the way the characters run around in some kind of tailored polyester pajamas all day long? My friends, the future is upon us.

Oh, but wait, it gets worse. Behold the shoes:


Yes, those are Crocs. They are the faux-ballet-flat Crocs, rather than the clown-shoe crocs, but I don't harbor any self-deceptions. I wear plastic shoes. LOTS of plastic shoes. And I own them in a variety of neutral colors, so I can wear plastic shoes pretty much every day. Not only do they give my clumsy self good traction for walking around the house with a baby on one hip and a laundry basket on the other, but on my wood floors they make no noise. Sorry, heels. Naps are sacrosanct around here.

Also, the closed toes allow me to neglect my pedicure. What can I say? I work from home.

And, in case you thought there was any remaining daylight between my wardrobe and that of a comfort-loving septegenarian, I give you the grand finale, the masterwork, the piece de resistance. Internet, I have traded in my bikini for one of those heavily elasticized one-piece bathing suits from Land's End that might as well be a coral spandex chastity belt.


This takes ten minutes and a shoehorn to get on, because the...what's the word? girdly? fabric is so very firm it doesn't readily stretch when you step into it. But once it's on, nothing jiggles. Ever. It's like Wonder Woman's steel bustier, this suit. Bullet-repelling bangle bracelets and lasso of truth unfortunately not included.

So, internet, there you go. All it took was a baby and two lousy pounds to turn me into Betty White. If you need anything, I'll be catching the early bird special down at the MCL Cafeteria. I hear the banana pudding there is divine.

The Day the Music Died

So, internet, when I was a little kid, my family had a paltry vinyl record collection. This was in the days of vinyl records--I still remember when my sisters and I received a cassette tape of Thriller as an Easter present in 1983 and it seemed like a giant leap forward in both content and technology, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was born in 1973, and for the first ten years of my life we listened to records that spun around on a little machine, and getting the needle into the groove without scratching the surface was tricky business and our options of what to play were limited both by my parents' disinterest in popular music and what I must say was their appalling taste.

We had Peter and the Wolf, and Mary Poppins, and the Muppet Movie soundtrack, which was all well and good. But I remember only two non-kid records in the set. You ready? One was the latest Barry Manilow, and the other was this, our beloved Hit Explosion record, as seen on TV. My sisters and I loved this record.

We had two favorite tracks, and try to keep in mind here that we were three girls between the ages of eight and eleven, and our other choice was Barry Manilow. Be gentle, is what I'm saying, internet:

I Only Want to be With You, by the Bay City Rollers

and

You Are the Woman (That I've Always Dreamed Of) by Firefall

And despite the clunky sentence-ending preposition, and probably because of the crippling banality of the lyrics, this latter one really appealed to my dreamy pre-adolescent romantic side. I loved the bit about the star--

You are the woman that I've always dreamed of
I knew it from the star
I saw your face and that's the last I've seen of my heart.

I had this whole vision of a guy walking along at night, and suddenly this star appears to him, and there's a woman's face in the middle, a celestial vision of love. My ten-year-old heart swooned.

Thankfully, this song must have gone into a twenty year hibernation, because I can't remember hearing it any time between 1983, when it got replaced by Thriller, and yesterday, when I was leaving the YMCA and heard it on the cornball music station they play there so as not to bother the old people. Awwwww, I thought to myself. It's that song from Hit Explosion! Gosh, that takes me back.

And I actually stopped in my tracks, because all of a sudden cynical adult Newt realized what surely you knew all along, internet. Dude's not saying "star," he's saying "start." He knew it from the "start." "Star" doesn't even rhyme with "heart"!

(Although, in ten-year-old Newt's defense, if a guy is going to end a line with "of," in defiance of all grammatical and aesthetic logic, I guess you can't put a clunky near-rhyme past him).

So there you have it, internet, another cherished childhood illusion shattered. I blame my parents. My parents and Barry Manilow.

Romping.

From last weekend's Chicago Tribune Style Section, some good news for women with butts:

Two words: one piece. For a change, this spring's must-have item -- the jumpsuit -- won't leave you wondering how to dress your other half, the way bolero jackets or stirrup pants might have. All you have to do is hunt down today's adult onesie in the version that suits you best. And, boy, do you have options.

Oh yes, the "adult onesie," just the fashion item that women with regular bodies have been waiting for. Soooooo much more wearable than the dreaded bolero jacket, thank goodness.

At first I thought these things should come with some kind of disclaimer announcing they are not to be worn by anyone over the age of 17 or weighing more than 96 pounds, but if a Chicago Tribune Fashion Reporter* says the adult onesie is "this spring's must-have item," then who am I to argue? I think I'll buy this one. It looks so light and festive!

Won't my neighbors be delighted running into me in the frozen foods section of the Piggly Wiggly in my carefree and practical romper. "That Newt," they'll say, "She's so carefree and practical." "And that adult onesie doesn't make her ass look like a basket of rottweillers at all." I might even get voted homecoming queen.

It's nice to know, too, that the newtlet is perfectly stylish this summer.

He looks crabby, but baby pilot here is actually enjoying the simplicity of one-piece dressing. Ah, to be four months old again, and not know that horizontal stripes make you look fat.

We even have a special name for baby rompers around here, thanks to Mr. Newt. One day, just as the weather was warming up, I was lounging in bed at the glorious hour of seven or so, listening over the baby monitor as Mr. Newt got the baby up for the day and dressed.

Spying on my boys is one of my favorite activities.

Newtlet: Coo, coo.
Mr. Newt: So, what do you want to wear today? Time to get out your summer clothes.
Newtlet: Coo, coo
Mr. Newt: Hmmm . . . frogs? Fire trucks? Oh, look at this . . . it's a little action suit!
Newtlet: Giggle! Coo. Fart.

And so, internet, from that day forward, one-piece outfits for daytime have been known in our household as "action suits." If the newtlet grows up to be a superhero, it will almost certainly be his father's fault.

*********

*I feel bad picking on this probably underpaid lifestyle journalist, who didn't invent either the trend of romper dressing or the onerous term "adult onesie." As penance, I'm going to point you toward the same author's much better article on how you can turn to Etsy for a budget shopping fix. I love Etsy! Or this one, about what to do with your old bridesmaid dresses, which is quite funny. Given this oevre, I can only assume that the romper article was written with tongue at least partly in cheek. Or else Ms. A is delightfully deranged. Either way, I'm a fan.