December...

my little boy is 1. I can't believe it - it's been the longest and shortest year of my life. He's still in the bed with us, for those of you who are still wondering.


He has started saying "mama." I don't know if he means it yet, but the important thing to me is that he's making the sounds. We knew he had "dada" down. and "t" for the cats. Also, believe me or not, on the morning of the election results I said "let's go find out who the president is" and he said "president" in garbled terms, but three syllables with a "p" sound at the beginning. Good enough for me!


We had his birthday party today. I made a multi-tiered cake for his actual birthday on the 11th, but bought his cake at Joseph's in Southie for the party -- couldn't take the chance - cake is important. So, everybody had a great time and there were kids everywhere - Sean started cranking out at around 5 - next year we'll start the party earlier, like at noon.

Sean received a lot of presents and I realize the pitfalls of having a birthday party right on top of Christmas. Lots of presents two weeks later, then a whole year of no presents. December will be his favorite month, I'm certain.

We picked up our tree from Eric's uncle Bobby's Farm Market in Newton last weekend - so exciting! I didn't think we were going to manage that task. We even have a wreath up and some other decorative greens around the house. Score!


We had our family portrait done two weekends ago by Jack Foley, who took our wedding pictures. I don't know how I look in them. Is it because I'm 35 that I've started not to like pictures of myself? I'm considering a reshoot, much to the horror of my husband and Jack. What am I thinking? Should I just deal with the pictures already taken? It's just me I don't like in the shots.

That's the update - thanks for reading!

xo

Birthday...I can remember your birthday...

As my 35th birthday barrels toward me at the end of this month, I'm starting to plan Sean's 1st birthday party for December. My friend Kirsten advised me not to bother with a first birthday party, that kids don't remember it; but I have to. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do this or handle what looms as a monumental task. We live on take out. The sink is always full of dishes. The floor is dirty. I've always relied on my mother to do the entertaining. Now that she lives in FL, my sister Kathy has taken on hosting Thanksgiving, Christmas & Easter. God love her. I'm good for cleanup alone. Happy to do it.

Back to the birthday party: to the rescue are Kathy and my mother-in-law Pat who are going to help with the food (this makes me feel lame somehow though I know there's no way around it). My step-sister Lori offered to bring something too, even though she has her hands full with her daughter Maeve who's a month older than Sean (note: Maeve's birthday party is this coming Saturday; I am bringing a present). So it falls on me to get the house clean (gak), get party favors/decorations/party hats for the kids, get or bake a cake, and buy some chips and dip. Yikes: do I have to prepare kid-friendly food?! NOOOOOO!!!!

You might ask: why can't she get it all together? Good question. I'm going to fall back on the fact that come tomorrow, I'll have clocked 11 months of little sleep. The thought of getting a party together makes me want to not have one at all. Before having the baby, there were no responsibilities...I brushed my teeth and got dressed and whatever else happened with the day - shopping, work, anything - was easy! Anything went. Now there exists the pressure to project normalcy = what kind of mother would I be if I didn't throw my baby a first birthday party? We're already committing a sort of faux pas = family is taking a backseat on this one; we're inviting friends with children rather than doling out obligatory invites to family who only see us once a year if that. So, for family it'll be my sister and her husband Dan (Sean's godparents) and Eric's mother and her fiance Bob and Eric's father Charlie (my parents are living in FL - in separate counties and sadly and inconceivably will not be there = how did that happen? sigh). I'd love to have everyone here so there are no hurt feelings, but my house is simply not big enough to do a huge party. I think it's important for Sean to have kids around him. The family met him at his Christening. Am I rationalizing my guilt? Probably. But we are having a party. Now, if I can just get to the post office to buy some stamps and get out the invitations...

Halloween

I've been thinking back to some of my Halloween costumes over the years...the first and best one I remember is when I was Princess Leah when I was 5. My mother twisted two coffee roll buns out of my hair on each side of my head, and made me a little white robe that had a braided rope around the waist. It was genius.

The rest of the costumes come in a blur, sort of a montage of all the years mixed up, recalled from photographs burned into my memory. I was a jelly bean bag one year, with a clear plastic trash bag wrapped around by body, my head poking out of the top. Balloons filled the bag and my mother & I sat in church (did anyone else have to go to church on Halloween night - what the hell was that all about?!) and the balloons were periodically popping and I was horrified. Another year I was a smurf. I was in white pants and a white sweatshirt and a white winter hat and had this awful thick blue face paint which coated my face and smelled horrible. Another year I was Pac-Man. I forget how that costume came about - I think it was leftover from one of my cousins the previous Halloween. It was made of cardboard and painted yellow and it covered my whole body minus my legs and arms and face. It was awesome. Another year I dismembered a large bunny rabbit stuffed animal I had and pulled the stuffing out of the head and put it on mine and wore pink fuzzy pajamas with the feet attached. Oh yes, and one year I was Cleopatra; I wore this turquoise gown embroidered in gold (which was my mothers) and pounds of her gold costume jewelry on top of it. I had this matching headpiece that resembled a veil and more makeup on than any 6th grader should be allowed to wear. Another good costume.

I wonder why only some costumes stick out and the majority of them fall away into oblivion. I mean, I must've worn at least 15 years worth of costumes, right? I definitely wore a costume or two in my twenties too. But I don't recall those. How is it that only a select few exist in my mind?

Sean is going to be a spider for his first Halloween. His black costume has legs and everything. We're going to take him around in his stroller and get ourselves some candy! I fell into the Sears web (haha) again, bringing him to have his pictures taken and hoping to get out of there by buying the $9.99 package but no - couldn't choose one shot...lo and behold the pictures were all awesome and I had to buy them all. Damn those Sears photographers.

The spider costume surely won't be the one of the few that Sean recalls when he is 34, but he'll at least have his Sears pictures to remember it by.

xo

cattle call

Today I became one of those mothers who stands in line with their baby for 2 hours trying to get them an ad campaign. Baby Gap was holding a casting call at the mall right down the street so I figured what the hell, take a chance! Tonight the pictures were ready to be downloaded. The "photographer" didn't wait for one smile from Sean, and cut his head off at the hairline in every shot! I can only assume that this is what he was going for, maybe to show what Sean would look like in a winter hat?!

I got there 1 hour and 15 minutes before the action began. At least I wasn't the first one there; I was 8th. It was actually kind of fun chatting with the other mothers while we waited and the excitement of our children's burgeoning modeling careers grew. Sean was well behaved. It was a good thing I got there when I did, for by 10 AM opening time there were hundreds of mothers and a few fathers with their kids ages 0-10 snaked around the entire mall. If I had arrived and seen that, I would've surely retreated to my car.

I wasn't taking any of it very seriously. Sure, I made certain that Sean didn't have food on him and that his hair wasn't sticking up. Yes, I was grateful he happened to not have any self-imposed scratches on his face. I dressed him in a comfortable dark blue Gap sweatsuit with bright yellow Baby Gap lettering across the chest (the photographer made sure to incorporate this perfectly into all 5 shots alloted). Looking around, I noted that some mothers were clearly insane, checking out the competition with tight smiles and darting eyes, holding their kid's outfits in plastic dry cleaning bags until the very last second.

It was our turn pretty quickly. I had to plop Sean down on a stool amid a set up that was lit brighter than the sun. I had to crouch down behind him (again, thanks to the photographer for getting my fingers in the shots!). The 5 frames were over in a second. I asked how Sean did; "real good" was his assistant's answer.

So, tonight it sinks in that we wasted 2 hours for 5 so-so pictures. We'll chalk it up to modeling experience.

xo

YAWN.

Things have reached epic proportions around here. When I say things I mean the fact that we haven't slept in nearly 10 months. When I say we I mean Sean & I. Eric just recently started losing sleep, for instead of waking up every hour and moving until I feed him, Sean has added crying out to the repetoire, which disturbs the whole queen sized bed. Before that, Eric slept through it all. We are all sick with colds and for the past few days I haven't been able to muster enough energy to play with Sean, much less lift him and change him and feed him. Don't worry, I'm still doing those things, but at a snail's pace. A really fucking slow snail with bags under its eyes and a headache that's lasted for days no matter how many pain pills it takes.

Sean was born in December. He started out in the bed because we were afraid he wasn't breathing right due to the congestion he had as a c-section baby. We had him propped up and everything. And from then on we kind of just kept him there. He liked being there and we liked having him there. But over the past couple of months it has ceased to be enjoyable. We used to laugh in the mornings and marvel at this tiny boy in our bed, but now we just growl at him when he starts talking in the darkness of dawn. I hate feeling this way.

Today I finally placed a request at my library for Dr. Ferber's book. I know a little about the method and have tried to let Sean cry it out for 3 nights but it was a disaster. Each night was worse than the last. We went for the gentler approach that I read in a book called Good Night, Sleep Tight that Sean's pediatrician recommended: sitting in the room while he was in the crib (yeah right - picture him reaching through the slats of the crib towards us, banging his head against the heavy wood, confused tears shaking in his eyes); we tried going in repeatedly, rubbing his back, anything (yeah right - this only upset him further, like why won't you idiots take me out of here?) Now, we are at a complete and utter loss. The few books I have read on the subject pretty much agree that sleep begets sleep. So you can imagine that since Sean doesn't get restful sleep, he doesn't beget any during the day. If I'm lucky, he'll nap for a few minutes in his swing, which I learned from a book is a crutch, not real sleep anyway, but as real as it gets around here. And he'll be outgrowing that swing in like a week. I have no idea what I am going to do then. Oh, and breastfeeding is a sleep crutch too. A crutch we both rely on to get him to sleep and back to sleep and to stay asleep. If only I could rewind time and ease him into his crib. My mother warned me about this. I had no idea how awful this would be. I'm going to read Ferber's book and see if I can agree with the method. It just seems so barbaric. The three nights I already put in turned Sean into a shaky, shuddering leaf of a baby. I swear he is still having residual clinginess and crankiness from those three nights.

I am so very, very tired. I want my son to be a well-rested baby. But he is not. He is cranky and tired and yawns all the time during the day and I don't know how to fix it. He fights sleep so willfully it is frightening. He wants to be happy, you can see it; he laughs and smiles but in a second it's tears and whines. I feel quite helpless. You might be thinking just stick him in his crib but we've done that. It is far more complicated than I ever imagined.

xo

I missed it...

Sean has an interlocking playmat he spends a huge amount of time on. He figured out how to disassemble the mat the day after I got it and loves to chew on the probably toxic pieces. I'm forever putting the mat back together. Anyway, a plastic gate surrounds the playmat and lately Sean has been grabbing at the holes in the gate and getting on his knees, kind of holding himself up a little. So, I'm on the phone this morning and I look over and there he is: standing! Wobbly while grasping at the gate, but standing on his two little legs nonetheless! I could tell he was thinking: great, now what? I climbed in the pen with him to make sure when he came down it was a soft landing. If only they could all be soft landings.

xo

Pictures

I used to look at all the baby pictures leftover from my childhood, wondering if my mother and father ever came out from behind the camera to play with me. I felt slightly annoyed that they felt compelled to document every little moment on film. Now I get it. In fact, I have surpassed the photo insanity. Thanks to the digital age, I have more pictures of Sean from just nine months of life than exist in my entire collection. Hundreds of pictures of Sean live in my computer, several frames of the same shot with slightly different variations that I just didn't have the heart to delete. It reminds me of that commercial where the kids are asking to be freed from the camera. Does anyone print pictures anymore?

I have a baby book for Sean that needs to be updated with newer photos. When I print out the pictures at home I miss the quality of the good old days of photo shop printing - I know I could run down to CVS for chosen prints but it's still not the same. Remember square pictures? Or the row of flashes that burned out? How about doubles? What a waste. Maybe there would be a couple good pictures in the lot that you just paid ten bucks for. Inevitably there would be a picture of a thumb, or the pictures would all come out black for some reason (you still had to pay for them), often the pictures would be double exposed with conflicting images. Remember the negatives tucked neatly into the front fold of the package? Now I treasure the dull matte paper my baby shots are on. Sean appears only in high gloss.

I took Sean to Sears last week to have his 9 month pictures taken. Before that, I had his 8 week and 6 month pictures taken at Kiddie Kandids (sic). But Sears sent me a coupon I couldn't resist. As I mentioned, when I take pictures of Sean I don't have to get rid of any; even the not-so-great ones remain on my computer. But I need to make selections when the professional photo shoot is done. For someone as indecisive as me, this can take its toll. As the flashes go off, I pray that only one or two shots come out good, but inevitably there are several that do and I sit there long after the photographer has lost patience and moved on to another client (or two...or three) and Sean has launched into a hungry, wet-diapered tirade. The first two times I managed to make my selections within a couple hours, mostly because I bought most of them. This time was different (I like to blame 9 months of little sleep). I actually went back to Sears twice after the shoot to pick out pictures...luckily, Kenny the photographer, was cool, stating "crazy is the new normal." I could've played it safe and ordered a full body shot, but I took a risk and ordered a 10x13 of this way close up picture of Sean's face. Even Kenny was like "whoa." And of course, now that all is said and done I'm still recalling the shots I left behind, particularly one of Sean on his stomach making this grumpy face at the camera that is totally him. Or the one of him biting his lips. But I didn't want to repeat the past of buying most of the pictures to avoid making a decision. I drew the line this time. I have to remind myself I get to see him every day and these are just pictures.

I'm happy that I have until December to recover until I have to go back for his one year pictures. And after that, I'll take him once a year, on his birthday.

I'll be picking up his new prints on October 10th. I can't wait.

xo

Cheerios

Sean is 9 months 11 days old today. For longer than that I've been telling myself I'll keep track of his babyhood in writing so we can remember what happened when but I've found that writing is a luxury I haven't been able to afford on a regular basis, so it exists piecemeal in a few pages of a journal, loose bits of paper, and on a word document somewhere on my computer. Maybe I'll leave these where they are, maybe I'll transfer some of these thoughts to the blog. I hope the blog will prompt me to write more. I said hope.

Here's a short and pathetically incomplete update of a few of the happenings in Sean's life so far: he's been saying "hi dada" for 4 months now, but it's directed toward lots of things, including Eric; he also says "mummm" but it's when he is unhappy, like when he wants to get out of his pack & play. I swear he said "cat" last week while pointing to the cat but I haven't heard it since. He holds vocal notes for long periods of time: "ahhhhhhh....ahhhhhhh....ahhhhhhh" which I call singing; he likes Amy Winehouse's music; he likes watching Yo Gabba Gabba! on TV (save the lecture); he has 4.5 very white, very little teeth; I've let him fall off the couch once and the bed once (a heavy thud you never want to hear, especially twice!); he rarely naps and if he does it's for a moment only; he doesn't sleep in his crib and breastfeeds all night long in our bed, forgoing liquids during the day no matter how much I try to reverse this - he refuses all kinds of formula (he knows what's good, I guess); he plays a little red piano with both hands - sometimes he just bangs on it, other times he plays gently which breaks my heart a little; for a few weeks now, he's been doing this wounded soldier's crawl, dragging his left leg behind him, which makes me worry he has hip dysplasia like I did as a baby. Time will tell.

Now to the Cheerios. For about a week I've been feeding Sean Cheerios, one at a time, holding my breath hoping he doesn't choke (I envy other mother's abandon in feeding their babies). Sean likes the Cheerios, he gets a thoughtful look on his face as he moves the little toasted circle around his mouth while it gets soft enough to swallow, though he still gags a little as he does. So...this morning after breakfaast I leave my post at the kitchen sink to wipe Sean's mouth in his high chair. And lo and behold, almost from the corner of my eye I see him place a Cheerio into his mouth successfully. Before this, the furthest he got was getting the Cheerio to stick to his fingertip before having it fall to the floor.

So this is the latest. This is our big news for today.

xo

Poem for Sean Logan

Poem for Sean Logan @ 6 months old

I lean in -
Your wet mouthed mess
Cools my shirt and face.

You emit space
Ship noises, syrupy
Sighs, monkey cries.

You stare out the
Window at leaves,
Wavering.