Hall Pass

Today was the first day I really did not want to be a mother. And it wasn't about Madigan and it wasn't about motherhood per se. I just didn't want to care for anything that suckled, cried, or whizzed and then failed to clean up after itself. I have done so now for 79 days straight, with some excellent help, and while I'm not looking for an award, sometimes I do just want a hall pass. Today, instead of being a mother, I wanted to:

- Rake some leaves. Pick up branches. Do some general yard workage. - Finish a project I promised my editor I would get to in December. Of last year. - Watch a cooking show on On Demand (we're trying not to let Mad watch TV before she's 2 so there's no televizzling while she's awake). - Go for a walk where I suddenly break into a jog and not because I'm running across the street with a stroller and trying not to get hit. - Eat a well-made salad without dropping lettuce on the lapbaby. - Go get my nails done without thinking of the irreparable damages of the nail salon chemicals to Baby Girl's respiratory system. - Sleep in past 8a.m. and feel rested. What is that like? I can't remember.

But as soon as I heard her barnyard animal cry, and I went and peered down at that little face, those almond-shaped eyes gave me pangs 10,000 times worse than all of the Adopt-a-Pug posts on Petfinder and I was certain that it was Madigan and not the earth that was the gravitational force, reversing my rotation away from self and back into her orbit. God help me if I don't think she is the North Star, or at least she is the brightest apex of the constellation she formed out of the dimmer points in her daddy's and my life.

99 Bottles of Milk on the Wall

I've resorted to drinking songs. Baby Girl has been high-maintenance this week, which in my case means that she's been hyper-alert and attached and responding to my attentions and affections. It's kind of like I was an unknown rocker and my cover of "Jenny's Number" just got forwarded by a bazillion tweens on youtube and now it's exploding on itunes and this is all I've ever wanted but the fanship is really out of control and people keep prank paging my cellphone with "Please call 867-5304." Yeah, or. I guess it's not really like that at all. Since I only have a fanbase of one and she doesn't know how to text message yet. But she's a fan of me, and it's all I've ever wanted, but all at once, all day every day, and man would I just like to dust a bookshelf during the daylight hours.

But instead she's really being a bit of a mom hog of late.

She's striking a nice routine with me, though. Falling asleep at more of a seventh-grader's bedtime - an improvement over a college freshman-just-tasting-freedom-for-the-first time's-bedtime. However, now that we're nailing an earlier bedtime, this means less frequent and much shorter naptimes during the day. And when it's time to go down, oh I know it, because she starts pawing at her face and quakes back and forth, kinda like she knows the skinny jeans are never going to fit, but she's going to try to wriggle into them anyway.

So we go back to her room and sit in the glider, pop the binkey in and we sing.

Since this happens several times a day now, you can imagine there are only so many songs that I can work into my rotation. I try to sing her hymns to drive home the whole God loves you as subliminally and as often as possible into her little ears. But the truth is that I don't know the words to that many (and hoisting up a hymnal whilst holding all 13.3 lbs of this lump of love is ruff stuff) and I was only in one musical in my life, so I'm jumbling a lot of "Twinkle, Twinkle" with a lot of 865-5309-ee-iii-een.

Which is why I've started in with "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall." It's not that I want to encourage drinking to excess. I don't even drink, ever. But at least with this song, the repetition sort of lulls her, and it's not as though the lyrics are exactly complex. And tell me you don't feel proud when you can report back to Lovey Loverpants each day, "We were only at 67 bottles and she was totally down for the count!!!"

If you give a parent a cookie...

My mother is getting remarried in a couple of months. Although she and her fiance have roughly a Chinese dynasty's worth of marital experience, they still have to go to marriage class since they are getting hitched in the Catholic church. So there they are, my mom and her man, both in their fifties, looking the total chaperones of Marriage 101, learning about the importance of not blowing the grocery money at the Clinique counter and remembering that the days of surfing match.com are over. So the priest teaching the class is trying to address the importance of Christian modesty and not dressing all skankalicious and he's basically shooting Hail Mary baskets in an attempt to make this relevant to the class. He says, "What if you had just walked out of the shower and you saw your grandmother -- how would you feel? What would you say?"

My mother pipes up, "I'd say, 'Oh Grandma! I thought you were dead!'"

She prudently kept mum the rest of class.

***

Baby Girl got a visit from her Pampa and Nana Jake (whom she met on her first day of life in the hospital) and also got to meet her Auntie TP for the first time. We had a very good, albeit short pow-wow. Walked the Harborwalk around JFK Library. Told the same stories about my poor grandmother with dementia for the eleventieth time. Converted TP to the ranks of Girlicious fans. Ate a small cow at the Vietnamese restaurant in celebration of Papa John's 29th birthday. No, really, he's really 29.

Pampa and Nana are over the moon with Madi and hang on every sigh and coo. They have always been very supportive of me; my father would sometimes make the four hour roundtrip visit to have dinner with me when I was in college just because he missed me. However, it's a whole different ballgame with a grandbaby. They drove a total of 20 hours to be here with Baby Girl for about 10 total. At one point, she smiled her wide gummy grin (the one that continues to make me feel like I've just been told by Carson Kressley that I already look good naked and don't need to be on his show) for a fleeting instant and Pamps remarked, "Oh thank you. That was worth the drive."

***

A few snaps from the happenins with my little alfalfa sprout & co.