The Wilds of Babywearing – An Introduction To The Amusing Intricacies of Babywearing Culture

Tags

baa, babywearing, carriers, ergo, fashion, lenny lamb, lenny on the loose, motherhood, ssc, tula, tula in the wild, wrapping

Now that I have a baby again, I am have re-immersed myself in the babywearing world, from which I have been absent for approximately 3-4 years.

HOLY CRAP, IT HAS CHANGED.

Or, I should say, the culture around it has grown and become more intricate, complex, and occasionally bizarre. I’m fascinated, delighted, and amused by it.

I would like to take you into the wilds of babywearing because it is a whole microculture that is entirely ignored by the rest of the world, including Wikipedia (to my surprise). So, for those of you who have never heard of babywearing, or are curious but have not yet ventured into it, here is…

WRITE ALL THE THINGS

Tags

motherhood, writing

This blog is six years old now and I miss it.

I miss writing. I basically haven’t done any in months. During pregnancy my energy levels decreased to the point where I could barely even read at the end of the day. Heck, by the last month before the baby came I was taking NAPS in the afternoons.

NAPS.

I NEVER NAP.

If someone wrote a blurb-like description of me, they would probably include “can’t sleep between the hours of 11 am and 11 pm” (along with “drinks a lot of diet pepsi” and “spends way too much time explaining stuff to people.”)

And this was with my mother in law, and then my own mother, to help out around the house. Even with someone cooking my meals, washing my dishes, and playing with my son, I still couldn’t summon the energy to focus on writing.

Now, I have slightly more energy, and I am burning with a hypothetical desire to write ALL THE THINGS.

I want to write a book on dog training for my dog training business, so that we can be the dog trainers who wrote a book.

I want to finish writing my fiction trilogy that parodies Twilight but with feminism and zombies.

I want to write on this blog and tell you about a zillion things.

I want to do a whole other blog where I do nothing but heavily overthink things.

Do I have the time for any of this? No! Because, baby! And four year old! Even with my mother in law to help, the fact of the matter is that it is very hard to type on a laptop while holding a baby.

I never sit at the desktop computer anymore, because that has become PH’s refuge from all the hustle and bustle in the rest of the house. It’s not like my first mat leave where I was home alone all day at the computer. Now it’s every now and then at the lap top with one hand.

Even when I do get to put the baby down for half an hour or so, I have trouble writing with the knowledge that the baby could wake up and interrupt me at any moment. It’s like falling asleep – you need to feel like you aren’t JUST ABOUT TO BE INTERRUPTED.

But I’m going to try. Because I love writing and I need it. I have so much to say.

But when I get half an hour – which do I write first?

In Which My Birthdaycation Is Somewhat Interrupted By Motherhood

Tags

birthdays, motherhood, mothers, parenthood

My mother is down visiting for our birthdays (I was born the day before her birthday, possible the only time in my life I have evinced great timing) and it’s been nice.

Owl is completely enthralled with her/her Samsung tablet, and demands her constantly, leaving me free to move about the house unencumbered in a way that I have not experienced in two and a half years.

I took a couple of days off of work, which was nice because I’m just SO TIRED. Now that I am working five days a week AND the post-Christmas puppy season is at its height, I had been really scraping the bottom of the barrel for energy lately.

I’m not feeling overly rested, because Owl has taken to waking up at five forty five in the morning lately, but I have at least had time to sit and not work and not train. It’s a really nice change.

My birthday itself was not all it could have been, though.

After three straight days of Owl in the house, even my mother was beginning to get her fill of “MORE PUZZLE, NANA. WATCH DAT VIDEO, NANA!”

We planned to drop him off at daycare and have a mother daughter day shopping.

It’s not that I didn’t want Owl around on my birthday. I love him and his company. But motherhood and fun birthday celebrations don’t really go together well.

Yeah, about that…

Twenty minutes after I dropped him off, Daycare Lady called and said that Owl was crying for me and she thought he might have a fever. Since Owl NEVER cries for me at daycare and since Daycare Lady hardly ever calls to ask me to come get him, I went right out there.

So we lugged Owl to the mall with us. He seemed perfectly fine, if clingy, and the thermometer didn’t register a fever. But anyone who has tried shopping with a toddler will agree with me that it is not the same experience.

Twice I had to leave my mother in a store to guard the things we had set aside in a change room for me and carry Owl halfway across the mall to one of the TWO restrooms.

We had to interrupt our shopping for his midday nap, and then wrestle him back into coat and shoes to continue it once he woke up.

The simplest exchange between my mother and me sounded like this:

“Oh, dear, I think that looks, Owl, don’t do that, come over here please, thank you. Yes, dear, I think that it looks, Owl, don’t pull on your mother like that.”

“Yeah, it feels comfortable but the material is, no, Owl, honey, I can’t pick you up right now, Mommy needs to take this shirt off. Here, do you think I should try the, no, honey, fingers aren’t for eating.”

“Do you want me to get a larger Owl, stop that, you’re going to knock me over.”

and so on.

By the time we got home, I had a new outfit and an ottoman that would double as a toy chest for Owl, so it was ultimately a successful day, but we were so wiped that PH and I cancelled our plans to go to a movie.

Taking my exhausted mother and saying “Okay, can you put him to bed for us, thanks, bye!” seemed a little too cruel.

So instead we stayed home and went to bed early.

That’s a MOTHERHOOD birthday, that is!

The next day was my mother’s birthday, and it went better. I dropped Owl off at daycare again and he was just fine. Mum and I registered my business license at the town hall, went to Chapters, went to lunch, downloaded and played my cousin’s game Diamond Find (a fun little speed-reading choose-your-own-adventure which is filled with his quirky humour).

We organized Owl’s toy chest, and put on a load of laundry.

It was a good day.

I like this not working thing. Yes, it’s exhausting dealing with Owl all day, but it beats trying to meet people’s expectations in the real world.

Mum leaves tomorrow. Next… Disneyland!

The real world can suck it for ONE MORE WEEK.

Potty Training, End of Week 1

Tags

child care, daycare, diapers, motherhood, parenting, potty chart, potty training, rewards, stickers, toddlers, training pants

Well, it has been a little over a week since we began potty training, so I thought I’d give you an update.

I was a little nervous sending Owl off to daycare, because Daycare Lady insisted on Pull Ups.

Now, we love Daycare Lady.

I lucked out with her in many ways, and probably in more ways than I realize. For example, she just mentioned to me recently that the woman who runs the daycare down the road from her claims that it “isn’t her job” to help parents with potty training, that she “just needs to keep them safe.”

Ladies, that daycare is Daycare One, from my daycare hunting days.  I never even thought to ask them, when looking for a place for my 11 month old, whether they considered potty training part of their job. It went without saying. Or so I thought.

SO. I lucked out, even with Helper Lady’s foibles thrown in.

But the diapers have always been a bit of a problem. 

Despite the fact that Daycare believes in non-toxic cleaning products and organic, from-scratch meals, her hatred of germs makes her heavily pro-disposable diapers.

Which means that she insisted on Pull Ups, despite the fact that The No Scry Potty Training Solution and Hannah from Hodgepodge have both warned me against them, and I know for a fact that Not Mary Poppins over at Daycare Daze puts them in underwear to train.

I pointed out to her all the arguments against Pull Ups – that they’re still diapers, so the kid won’t feel any different, that they are more absorbable than his cloth diapers so it would actually be a step BACK and so on.

We compromised on Pull Ups OVER his underwear, because she insisted that she couldn’t allow him in only underwear, due to hygiene concerns.

For the next three days, he came home wearing Pull Ups only, with the underwear in his diaper bag totally untouched.

By the third day, I was livid.

Meanwhile, Helper Lady was telling me at the door in the mornings that “Baby no understand. He good boy, but he no understand, Mommy.” (Helper Lady calls all the mothers “mommy”)

Oh really? Our potty chart begged to differ. 

In fact, the morning she told me that, he had peed in the potty SEVEN TIMES and pooped once, and we hadn’t had an accident in two days.

Daycare Lady told me that he was going fine for her, but not always for Helper Lady. Daycare Lady also suspected that Helper Lady, being older, was losing track of time and not taking him often enough.

And as Helper Lady pointed out, “You have one baby, Mommy. I have eight.”

Fair point. Plus, there’s a difference between running around the house with no pants on and the potty RIGHT THERE, versus having a diaper and pants on, a house full of kids to play with, and a baby gate between you and the bathroom.

But still.

It pissed me off, because I am a first time mother, and they are supposed to be the child care professionals. I felt like they should be better at potty training than me, not worse.

And then when I picked him up on Thursday, I was told that he had pooped in his Pull Ups and that it had burst out of his Pull Ups and gone all over the floor in a manner that I’m sure Hannah would sympathize with.

My first reaction was actually a mild schadenfreude. That’s what they get for putting this kid in disposables. Poop has NEVER stayed within the confines of Owl’s disposables. Serves ’em right.

I guess they figured the same thing, because the next day not only did he come home with underwear on under his Pull Ups, but Helper Lady informed me that he DID understand for pees!

So I would be triumphant, BUT…

Since the Poop On The Floor, not only has he been having poop accidents in his pants, but he bursts into tears when they happen, pointing at the floor and howling “NO POOP DOWN DOWN!!!!” and “Waaaah, MY POOOPED…” heart brokenly.

Witnessing one of these meltdowns on Saturday filled PH with so much fury that he began to talk about sending Owl elsewhere.

So Sunday we went to the dollar store and bought some crappy plastic animal toys. We put them in a clear vase on the mantle and told him he could have one every time he pooped in the potty.

When he finally had a success, we gave him ALL THE CANDY, and special BUTTERFLY stickers, and CARS sticks, AND A PLASTIC WOLF.

He was so delighted he kept sticking the plastic wolf in the potty and saying “Look, Wolfie, MY POOPED!”

Over the next hour he then proceeded to produce what Not Mary P would call “iotas of shit” in order to receive a hippo and a dinosaur. After his nap and before bed, he pooped one more time for yet another plastic animal.

We’ve done what we can to reverse things. I’m going to go put him in his undies and Pull Ups, and take him to daycare.

Wish him luck. 

Potty Training Your Puppy, I Mean, Toddler

Tags

2 year old, baby, conditioning, house breaking, motherhood, parenting, positive reinforcement, potty, potty training, puppy, toddler

So, when potty training Owl, I’ve been working off of the basic tenets of puppy potty training. I’ve received tons of advice for potty training Owl and have incorporated some of it into my program, but it’s always easier to work off of what you already know.

And so, for anyone else who finds dogs easier than kids, I present:

Potty Training Your Puppy Toddler

substitute dog with child and grass with potty

Step 1: Allow your  puppy toddler to roam around the house, while you watch carefully.

Step 2: Take your puppy toddler to the appropriate location on a regular basis, most notably whenever he/she wakes up, has played for 10-15 minutes, or has eaten.

Step 3: If your puppy toddler urinates or has a bowel movement in the correct place, make a big deal out of it. Have special, very high value treats that you dispense only when your puppy toddler has voided in the correct location.

Step 4: If your puppy toddler begins to urinate or have a bowel movement inside while playing, interrupt the behavior (by picking him/her up or simply saying “oops!” or clapping your hands to distract him/her) and immediately direct him/her to the correct location. Hopefully he/she will finish urinating or defecating there.

Do not punish mistakes; simply try to interrupt them. Potty training is about conditioning correct behaviors.

Step 5: If your puppy toddler manages to urinate or defecate in the correct place once redirected, throw a big party and dispense the usual treats, even though this started with a mistake. What your puppy toddler will remember is that urinating/defecating on the floor resulted in interruption, while urinating/defecating in the correct place was highly rewarded.

Further adjustments: Since puppies are naturally naked, it is easy to spot urination and bowel movements as they happen. For this to work with toddlers, they must be similarly unencumbered. A collar shirt is optional.

Further adjustments part the second: Toddlers seem to respond better to smarties and similar small sweets than they do to freeze dried liver or cut up hot dog, but this may vary from toddler to toddler.

Congratulations!

You have begun the process of potty training your puppy toddler! While you should see dramatic improvements within a few days, the process may take several weeks to months to complete. Consistency is key!

 

Perfect Husband Re-Earns His Name

Tags

amazing gifts, hotels, motherhood, Perfect Husband, relaxation, time alone

Poor Perfect Husband hasn’t been feeling very perfect lately. Sitting around doped up on percocet watching me take care of Owl, cook, clean, and work was hard on him, especially when I began to get sick.

Of course, he was ill, so while being a temporarily single mom was challenging, I didn’t blame him in the least.

But he still felt bad.

So what did he go and do?

He booked me a hotel room. 

 

A hotel room with a four poster king sized bed and a whirlpool tub, and a lot of Roman-style decor.

I said, “I have ALWAYS wanted to sleep in a bed with curtains.”

He said, “I know.”

He dropped me off at 4 pm, gave me a kiss, and said, “see you tomorrow around 10:30 or 11ish.” Then he took Owl’s hand and they went home.

That’s right.

I get 18 hours TO MYSELF.

In a deluxe hotel room.

With a jacuzzi tub.

When I arrived, I didn’t know what to do first. Blog? Read in the bath? Eat a pomegranate?

First I figured out the WiFi. I mean, priorities, right?

Then I dealt with figuring out and ordering room service, thus getting my daily anxiety exposure and any need for human contact out of the way as soon as possible.

Then I downloaded a new game onto my iPod. A 16 bit style Oregon Trail remix for the zombie apocalypse.

Then I wondered, “why am I still wearing pants?”

It’s going to be a good night.

And I brought supplies.

Now I just need to eradicate the guilt and I’ll be set.

No More Purple Pills

Tags

anxiety, busy, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, motherhood, stress, time management, welbutrin, work

I have been off of my Welbutrin for about three months now. I started to wean myself off in June, skipping the occasional day, until I actually forgot to take it at all for a week.

Then, when we went the the states, I left the pills behind, and I haven’t touched them since.

I’ve been doing fine.

I had a happy summer, loving my husband, liking my job, training dogs, writing on Elance.

I’ve been very tired. I feel very extroverted out.

I wish that I didn’t have to juggle work AND dog training AND Elance, but I’m not willing to give up any of these. I need them.

I need the work, the dog training is my insurance for the future when we have a second kid and full time work will no longer cover daycare costs, and Elance is extra money in my pocket while building my writing credits, which is REALLY part of my long term plan.

I spend my mornings trying to shepherd Owl into his clothes and into the car, I work for 9 hours with no break, and then I pick Owl up and entertain him while PH makes dinner. By the time we get Owl to sleep it’s 9 pm and I’m exhausted.

PH wants me to take more time to myself, to hand him the baby and say “YOU deal with it, I’m out of touch for an hour” but I rarely take him up on it. First of all, because I hand him Owl and then disappear training dogs a couple times a week as it is, and second of all because I want to spend time with my husband and son.

But PH thinks all this work is adding to my anxiety.

I haven’t really noticed it (maybe fish don’t notice water, much) but PH thinks it has been worse lately. I don’t know if fall coming on is beginning to activate my SAD, but that seems hard to believe, because it’s been warm and sunny an gorgeous outside lately.

So maybe it’s just all too much.

But I’m not quite sure what to do about it. We need money, and I need to make money while building a way to make money with fewer hours in the future. So I think this is just how it is right now, and I’m not unhappy or miserable.

Just a little stressed.

That’s within normal range, right?

A Little Child Should Seriously Lead Us

Tags

bad days, forgiveness, love, motherhood, parenthood, patience, toddlers

I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. No real reason for it. I mean, yes, I had started the morning at 5 am when a little hand smacked me excitedly and a tiny voice announced insistantly (and proudly) “PEE! PEE! PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! PEE!” until I eventually mumbled,

“Didjoupee?”

“Yes!”

“Goo’feryou. Thanksfor tellin’ me.”

I rolled over. The same small hand grabbed my nipple, and the teeny voice said “mush? MUSH? PEASE?” and a needle-teethed lamprey re-attached itself to my breast at a bizarre angle.

It was my usual start to the day.

If anything, it was a slightly better start than some other mornings, because after forty five minutes of:

• sitting on my head
• running around the room
• trying to open the door to the dog’s crate
• demanding help to get back up on the bed with me
• and insisting on “mush” whenever I tried to roll over

…Owl actually went back to sleep and I got an extra half hour shut eye.

But I still woke up with a big black cloud over my head. I blame the rain, because there was a lot of it, and I really didn’t want to walk in it.

Every morning I offer Owl the chance to choose his footwear and coat for the day.

It usually goes like this:

“Go get your shoes.”

“No!”

“Do you want to go for our walk?”

“…Yes.”

“Then you need to put on either your boots or your shoes.”

This simple logic always convinces him and he grabs one pair or the other. We have the same conversation over his coat.

“Which coat do you want to wear?”

He invariable chooses his raincoat, but then resists when I try to put it on him.

“Okay, we’ll stay in,” I always say, and start to hang up his coat. This makes him change his mind instantly and he cooperatively holds out his arms for the coat. Then we leash the dog and go outside for our walk.

 

Today, though, it was pissing rain, I was running a little late due to the sleep-in, and I was not loving the idea of trying to convince the dog to poop in the rain while Owl soaked his pants in the puddles.

Everything went wonky today.

I told Owl to get his boots. He didn’t budge. I set out his boots and he said “no.”

“Well, pick either your shoes or your boots,” I said, laying out the options for him. He stared at them and dithered and dithered while the time and my patience began to run out. So I made an executive decision.

“Okay, you’re wearing your boots.”

“NO!”

“Yes.”

“NOOOOOOOOO!”

I pulled his boots on him against his will while he flailed and wailed. When I finished he sat on the floor crying and pulling desperately at his boots. Within seconds he had them off again. Rather than re-enter that battle, I moved on to coats.

“Which coat to you want to wear?”

“SOOS!”

“Owl, which coat?”

“SOOS!!”

Most mornings I would have dealt with the shoe issue and then revisited the coats afterwards. But for some reason, today, my patience was still upstairs in bed, cuddled under the duvet.

“Okay, fine, no walk today.”

I put the dog out in the yard while a horrified and protesting wail went up behind me. Owl spent a couple of minutes throwing his “soos” at me, but quickly allowed himself to be distracted by his toys while I took a moment of deep breathing.

Skipping the walk put us back on schedule for time, if Owl didn’t dawdle too much on our walk to the car. I contemplated just carrying him to the car, but that didn’t seem fair – he should get at least part of his walk. I brought the dog in, put on Owl’s “soos” (pick your battles) and he cooperatively chose his raincoat and put it on without a fuss.

When he saw that we were leaving the dog behind, though, he realized that he had missed the morning walk, and that we were now headed right to school. He immediately began to whine.

“Nooooo! Da! Wa? Mama!!”

“Well, we couldn’t go on our walk because you wouldn’t leave your boots on and you wouldn’t pick your coat,” I snapped. “That’s what happens.”

I waited irritably and self-righteously for the tantrum. To my surprise, he just held up his arms and said “up!”

So I picked him up, and when his face was level with mine he studied me carefully. Then, gently, with a little smile, he leaned forward and gave me a kiss on the lips. Then he let me carry him out of the house, to the car, and into his car seat without a single complaint.

My son is 24 pounds and 30 inches tall, and he is a bigger person than I am. 

Go take a nap, Mama.

In Which Carol Takes Fiction Way Too Seriously

Tags

children, empathy, love, motherhood, movie scenes, movies, pain, parenthood, Sophie's choice, tears

So, there we are, having a nice evening together watching a documentary on Hollywood and the way it has presented the Holocaust. We found it on Netflix, which has a wealth of fascinating documentaries which we are slowly going through, because we are GIANT DORKS.

Anyway, we’re watching and it’s all well and good until they go and spring this on me:

A scene from Sophie’s Choice. Specifically, THE scene from Sophie’s Choice.

YES. THAT SCENE. Come on, even people like me, who have never seen Sophie’s Choice, have an idea about what her choice is. I wish to all things holy I still only had a vague idea.

I didn’t know details. Friends had told me not to watch the movie, and I listened to them. And then they went and sprang it on me anyway and now I feel like I can never get my brain clean again.

Have you ever watched a movie scene like that? Something that makes you wish with your whole heart and soul that you could do a complete Eternal Sunlight Of The Spotless Mind on yourself so you would no longer have that memory adding pain to your existence?

When I was a kid, most of those moments were to do with death and gore:

The dead body from Stand By Me, who shocked me with his open eyes.

A tv movie about Jack The Ripper, which only showed blood-spattered walls and a vomiting policeman, but which played on my imagination with all of the sinister genius of Hitchcock.

A shot of a dead soldier from the Gulf War, burned beyond recognition, who haunted me (especially in dark stairwells, where my imagination always placed him walking up behind me) for years afterwards.

Thankfully, I am getting better about my dead body phobia. I went through the Catacombs in Paris (terrified, but I did it). I only shudder slightly when I open the freezer at work. PH still can’t convince me to attend a Bodies exhibition, but that movie last night did spring a charred body in a crematorium oven and while I screamed, it did not haunt me.

But there is another kind of scene that has always tended to bother me, and that usually has to do with the death or a parent or the death of a parent’s child. You’d think it would be the death of animals, and it’s true that I will cry over Old Yeller far more than I will cry over Jack Dawson, and that the inevitable death of a German Shepherd is often the most bothersome scene in your standard thriller movie. But my real soft spot is children.

There’s something about the parent-child bond which has always triggered my emotions strongly.

I consider the parent-child relationship to be the “romance” of children’s literature, and I will weep over a child’s reunion with his parent in a way that I rarely do in adult romances.

I sobbed when I watched Juno and heard the words “would you like to meet your son?”

I burst into tears reading a For Better of For Worse compendium, when April is drowning and John is reaching for his daughter and thinks “if I do one more thing in life, please let me do this”.

Tears like that – they’re good. They’re healing.

But there are other scenes…

Like the scene from The Pianist, where the woman sobs over a baby she accidentally smothered when hiding from the Nazis. That one tormented me, and came flooding back years later when Owl was a newborn Babby.

Like the part of Schindler’s List (the book, not the movie) where a baby is dashed against a wall.

And just recently, a scene from a documentary on Hiroshima (yes, I know, I should probably stop watching war documentaries) where a woman retells the death of her child, and how she wasn’t brave enough to stay with her as she died. That scene broke both PH and me, and for days afterwards one of us would shout “OH, NO! THAT SCENE IS IN MY HEAD” and the other would come swooping in with a distraction as quickly as possible.

Well. I thought that Hiroshima scene was the ultimate in empathetic suffering. For a bit I felt as though my heart could never be whole again. That kind of scene tortures me in a way that a hundred charred soldiers never could. But thankfully time is kind, and the memory has faded a bit.

And then they went and sprang that AWFUL SCENE FROM SOPHIE’S CHOICE on me.

Guys, I know it sounds stupid, because it’s just a movie and it’s fiction, but I am in a lot of mental anguish right now. I can’t really explain why I find it SO BAD. I can’t blame motherhood, either, because I know it would have hurt me every bit as much if I had seen this years ago.

I keep alternately suffering the unspeakable horror of the moral dilemma, the unendurable guilt of the choice, and the heartbroken and terrified betrayal of the child as she is given to death and carried from the person whom we trust above all others to cherish and protect us – Mother.

To try and keep myself from falling into the mother’s place and then the child’s again and again and again, I read last night until I started falling asleep over my book (which NEVER happens). I spent all night dreaming up reunions between mother and child in which I was both the overjoyed mother and the unforgiving and traumatised daughter. I spent hours of dream time trying to inject a dog with morphine who, in my dream, was the little girl – I needed to numb her pain.

The pain of it is messing up my mind.

In driving between dog training appointments today, I ended up on the wrong road – and have NO MEMORY of how I got there. I WAS on the correct road, but I must have turned right at a stop light and continued up a totally different street COMPLETELY UNAWARE OF WHAT I HAD DONE. I didn’t realize my mistake for a good 2 kilometres, and how the mistake even happened will forever be a mystery. I can see making a wrong turn, but how do you make a completely unnecessary turn and not even know about it?

Then, during the appointment, I was supposed to go out, get something from my car, and then knock and ring the doorbell, to help accustom the dog to people coming and going from the house. I just walked right back in again, with no knock. I had totally forgotten the purpose of my being outside at all.

When I got home and reported all of this, PH took away my right to drive for the day. He’s a little concerned about me.

I’m pretty my reaction to the scene is not normal, otherwise there would be big disclaimers on the scene warning people not to operate heavy machinery after watching.

I mean, it’s a famous scene and it won Streep an Oscar, but when I google it, it is casually mentioned as a powerful and moving scene by people who rate the movie highly and “love” it. It is a powerful scene. Streep deserved her award. But I wish the movie had never been made, because then I wouldn’t be hurting so much right now.

I told you that PH has been trying to convince me to go to the Bodies exhibition in Vegas on our summer vacation, and my attitude has been HELL NO. But if I could wipe my mind clean of that scene… if Meryl Streep’s words and if that little girl’s scream of hurt and fear could be wiped from my brain… I would attend that exhibition joyfully.

What movie scene has affected you the most? What’s your achilles heel?

This

Tags

babies, language, living in the now, motherhood, parenthood, speech, thought, toddlers

Owl and I are taking our evening bath. He’s a little overtired, on account of taking an unusually early nap that day. In order to calm him down I hold him on my arms and lay him on his back, with my chin resting gently on his head and my arms around his scrawny little chest. We breathe deeply together for a while, and Owl seems to become fascinated with this new view of the shower head and the shower caddy above us.

Owl: Deesh? *points upwards*

Me: What do you see?

Owl: Deesh. O? P? Q? Deesh!

Me: I don’t know what deesh is. I see the shower head, and the caddy, and the soap bottles, and my razor, and the loofah, and the wall, and the shower curtain…

Owl: Deesh! DEESH! Up? A… B… C… I… J… Deesh? *points again*

Me: Tell me more.

Owl: O… P… Q… Esh… Deesh? WOW! Yeah. Deesh? Up? UP! Deesh!

Me: What’s “deesh?” Do you mean “this”?

Owl: Yeah.

Me: Do you mean “what’s this?”

Owl: No.

Me: You don’t mean “what’s this?”

Owl: No.

Me: Just “this?” Only “this?”

Owl: Yeah. Yeah. Deesh.

Me: Only this.

Owl: Deesh.

He heaves a contended sigh and we lay there snuggled together, staring upwards, and thinking about Only This.