Pre-Cut Jitters

Listen, kid. Just because I'm feeling PMS-ey, and it turns out we just noticed the heater isn't like, working and everything, and it happens to be the night before the anniversary of the second time someone cut a (very large) small person out of my belly, we are not in the habit of performing re-enactments around here.

Yet somehow, I was just able to say to your father, "It's almost exactly like one year ago today: I'm bloated as hell, the baby is kicking around like crazy at 10pm, I can't do what I want, and we're kind of stressed in general."

I love you. I love you. Go the f**k to sleep.

Slimer

Cormac is teething again, hard, so he's miserable, clingy, drooly, miserable, snotty, drooly, snotty, and clingy. Not necessarily in that order. He also sort of walks, and he crawls at zombie-fast speed. So being in his presence means dealing with his unidentifiable woes (WHY are you moaning and tugging at your ear? Oh. Your jaw is radiating pain. Re: the moaning - carry on).

We're also preventing him from trying to kill himself by opening cabinets containing medium-sized appliances, shutting himself in the bathroom, closing the magnetic-lock baby gate on his hand/foot/face, climbing the couch, taunting the mentally challenged dog, eating electrical cords (but only when they're plugged in), choking on bites of food larger than dust motes, and bodily inserting himself between the balusters of the basement staircase railing. He's a scientist.

Iris started dance class three weeks ago, and I've yet to take a single photo of the thing. I have literally spent every dance-class-Saturday saving Cormac's life (for all of the reasons listed above), and not photographing anything.

Dance class is tomorrow morning. Wish me luck.

Bueller?

So... hi. I apparently am still here. Maybe you are too?

I think facebook has taken the place of this blog. Everyone I know is on it, and I can now officially share all photos and clever anecdotes in easy to digest quips, leaving no one out. I blame Cormac's baby shower (which was the impetus for Grammy to finally succumb to the great FB in the sky). She was the last meaningful holdout, and now I fear I have nothing to say here. Not sure yet, but I do know that I will not skip Cormac's one-year post.

So maybe this is the second-to-last post ever, but I've pretended to quit before, and that didn't exactly work, so I guess the answer is: we shall see. Yes, we shall.

The Monitor

In the old house, Iris started out sleeping in the guest bedroom downstairs, if she ever really was able to sleep away from my person. This was mainly because it was closer and less noisy to get to her if she woke up and had the potential to be coaxed back to sleep. The creaky stairs to the finished attic would have, at the time, killed any ability to reestablish sleep if there was one. Still, in a bedroom, behind a door just a few feet from where we were, Iris always slept with a baby monitor.

I remember people rolling their eyes at me for jumping to tend to her when, to most, there was nothing happening. She always sounded just as asleep as she had moments before to anyone else, but to Kyle and me, she sounded awake, because the monitor allowed us to hear the moment her breathing changed from "deeply asleep" to "going to wake up in 5.3 seconds." We were not wrong. Even just the few relatively silent steps we had to take to get to her once we noticed the breathing change always overlapped with her zealous scream of wakefulness. The thing is though, that change in breathing which allowed us to act short seconds faster than we could have had we waited to hear an actual cry, always meant the difference between relative ease in reestablishing sleep, and the unholy terror that is infant Iris, righteously pissed off that you dared to wake her. Even though she likely woke up because she did something like stab herself in the eye with the points of all her fingers and then sit up (while still asleep).

When she was older and much better at sleep, and she did sleep upstairs in her own room, we still had to keep a monitor on her. She was gated from the stairwell, so even though she was of an age where most children wake up and then walk down the hall to let their parents know that nap time is over, she was trapped a few feet away from the top of a 60 degree-angled stairwell of doom. The only way to know that we had to go get her was to listen to the monitor. So we did.

Then we moved to the Ugly Brown Ranch (shush. you know I love her, but she is ugly. and brown.), and Iris' bedroom was merely down the hall. No monitor needed. I mean, where would we be? The kitchen? She was fine. I was 64 months pregnant, so I wasn't exactly moving from wherever I'd parked my butt once she finally passed out.

We lived in this house for like a week and a half before Cormac was born. I managed maybe 15 days of monitor-free life before I had a brand new baby who almost sort of liked to sleep alone, and who subsequently needed to be monitored. Let me tell you, those days of monitorless life were really awkward for me.

Almost without break, I have been listening to the soothing sounds of white noise via oscillating/box fan through a monitor for three years. Every moment I have to myself, truly to myself, alone reading or pretending to care about chores or something, I have heard the sound of rushing air through a baby monitor. I'm listening to it right now. I have come to the point where I actually, literally and completely cannot relax unless I can hear the monitor buzzing away next to me.

Sometimes I almost grab it when I'm gathering small purse items before I leave the house. I sleep with it cranked up to "it even annoys the crap out of white noise-obsessed husband" volumes. I take it to the bathroom with me. Kyle and I had a rare night away on our recent anniversary (THANK YOU JENNIFER PARKER, YOU ARE THE BEST PERSON EVER), and I found myself standing outside the hotel with Kyle, lamenting that I couldn't quite relax because I couldn't hear the monitor.

As I sat here tonight with my monitor-cum-binky, I realized that someday, because we now live in the Ugly Brown Ranch (bountiful and beige though she may be), I won't actually require the use of the monitor anymore.

I'm not completely sure what I'm going to do when that day comes.

Biting

It's about 11:30 here. Cormac woke up again, sad, and I rubbed his back till he felt better about things, but I have no idea how long that will last. He's been far less barfy lately but a lot sadder, and we kind of don't know what to do. Hugs make things better for a bit, so there's that, but after awhile he just goes back to Very Sad Time. Poor Sad Cormac. Little babies shouldn't be sad.

After I tucked the wee one back in I went to check on Iris. She's always been a sleep talker, but tonight was kind of intense. She was definitely asleep. Eyes closed, not moving, but talking, she started muttering about biting. Then she said "Ida was biting me and she was so angry." I tried to tell her (with her eyes closed, while she was sleeping) that Ida wasn't going to bite her; in fact, Ida routinely trots into the kids' rooms while they're asleep and checks on them, but she repeated it again: "Ida was biting me." So finally I just said, "I'm so sorry. I'll tell her not to." Apparently I said the right thing because she heard that and relaxed and fell back into deep sleep. 

Iris usually wakes up at some point in the night and comes to our room. Her typical reason is that bugs are in her bed and they are biting her. This is fully my fault. My dad used to say to us every night before bed, "sleep tight; don't let the bedbugs bite." It was sweet and I thought it was a lovely, heartwarming tradition to uphold so I said it to Iris one time. Once. One. Time.

That's all it took to convince her that bugs lived in her bed and would bite her while she was sleeping.

Heartwarming, no? 

There was a monster who lived in the hallway, and a witch who lived in the bath tub, and a wolf who lived in her closet. All were treated as real, producing actual fear, and providing good reasons to never go to the places they inhabited. We've managed to quash almost all of the random mythological creatures' influence on her routine, but I'm not sure how to handle this "Ida bites me in my sleep" thing. I mean, she doesn't bite Iris. Not even kind of. She trots into her room, checks to see she's there, then goes back to lying under the chair in the living room. Not really sure what to do here.

I think I might get her a wand; teach her to cast spells and banish spirits. If she believes it, I'll move on to giving Cormac a spray bottle containing "sad repellent" and let him squirt the hell out of anything he sees fit. Wish me luck.

Phone does tricks; takes the fancy movin' pikchers

I swear, when the camera is off, this child is a non-stop chatterbox. Well, he is when he's the only child around - gotta fill the void and all that, and a pretty significant noise void is created when Iris leaves the house. Anyway, I just downloaded the camcorder app for my iPhone, since it's a hand-me-down from a friend and only happens to be a 3G (anything newer and it would have had this function already)(not that a hand-me-down 3G is anything to spit at. I LOVEEEEE my free iBrain. Also spitting at phones tends to make them stop working). So this was an adventure! A totally lazy, unshowered, couch surf of an adventure. I'm very active in my free time, you see.  

Since Cormac is normally this completely jumpy, effusive noise box when he's in his exersaucer, I thought I'd try to get a few minutes. He makes a few sounds here and there, but I must warn you that this is about a minute forty of basically nothing much happening. I said like, "hey" or something to him once in an attempt to get him to do some kind of interesting baby trick, but I didn't want the whole thing to be a silently staring Cormac with my voice screeching in from the ether going, "Say hi to Mommy! Say hi to Mommy's camera, Cormac! Cormac! Cormac! Baybeee Cormmm-nessss!!! Cormie, Mommy's over here! Over here! Over here! Overhereoverhereoverhereoverheerrrrrrreeeee!!!" Which is what normally works quite well, actually, but wouldn't have this time because I was filming, and obviously he knows it, and really needed to win the stare down.

SO. Here is Cormac... chewin' on stuff. 

Six Monthiversary Anew

Dear Cormac,

Well dude, today was crazy, was it not? You and your sister have (hopefully) hit the bottom of your behavioral spiral down to what I can only describe as the human child equivalent of sad drunk penguins, fighting to play a single ukulele.  The volume/frustration/barf output parallels are uncanny, really, and as much as I love you crazy doodles, I am glad you're both feeling peaceful now. I mean, you have to be if you're asleep, right? 

You know, when I first found out that you were on your way, I was very sure that I knew you already; that, as your  mother, I could feel who you were through my skin. I knew you were a boy, I knew you'd be my good sleeper, and that you would be calm and sweet. I knew this the way that I knew your sister was a girl before I met her, the way that I knew your dad was supposed to share his smiles and his hugs and his last name with me before we'd even known each other a week.  

I could list the bad things I didn't know about (take for example, the general relativity of the concept of "calm"), but let's not focus on the negative here.  Today is your yesterday was your day of half-babyness, and I don't want to bring us down any more than I already did with that unstable avian comment. The moral of this story is that you are all those things.

You crack jokes with your little raised eyebrows at skeptical situations. You can crawl, but you don't because doing so would require that you remove both fists from your mouth, so you move in these lopsided half-circles like a one-oared canoe.  You don't really cry outside of sleep battles, but you are so loud. The other day I heard you grunting and happily screeching from the living room while I was in the garage, in my car, with the windows up.  To be fair, it's a thin wall, but dude - you're loud. 

I started writing this letter to you three days ago, knowing I would need a lot of time. On three separate occasions, I have written and deleted the comment, "you are sleeping now," because each time you woke up a few seconds later. Ahem. You are currently lying on a blanket next to me on the floor, and the last time I wrote that phrase was ten minutes ago. 

It's good to hang one-on-one like this though. You and your sister passed out this evening at 4:30, and I was really discouraged to learn that it seemed like you were both pretty serious about calling it a day and actually going to sleep for the night (hah - "the night"). Iris is, of course, dead to the world for at least eight hours, and while that's not great for my 11pm futureself, I got to chill for a couple of hours with you on the floor while you sang songs and played with my eyebrows. 

I know I won't always do the greatest job of slowing down enough to give you my undivided attention like this, but I hope you know that you are so worth every ounce of love we squeeze you with. Your babyhood is no less precious to us simply because we've done this once before and you are no less special because you happened to be the little brother.

(Hey, I'm trying to make sure you get equal representation in the photo annals, but your sister WAS sitting on my back, hanging from my neck when these were taken. Hope you didn't need really good photo history of your forehead at this age.)

You have now entered the second half of the first year of your life. You love hugs and your squishy baby doll and your big sister. You are known as Cormac, Mac, Cormie (God help us), Big Daddy C, Daddy Mac, and of course, DJ Squizzles. Someday you will be taller than me, shaving your face, and trying to convince your sister to buy you beer (which will not be happening will it, Iris Luella? No it will not, chicklets. No it will not). Remember that to your dad and me, you will always be our baby, our Cormac Michael, named after your grandfathers and born on yet another auspicious Thursday to tearfully grateful parents.