Church Avenue Chomp

Pregnant! No, not me, silly. But a new friend of mine is newly pregnant, and this is very, very good news. Except that other day she indicated that she might be eating too much because at 10 weeks, her pants are getting snug. You are not supposed to be eating for two, the experts say, she says.

Hmm, are the experts enduring pregnancy when they say that? Are they hungry at 2am and relying wholly on cheddar bunnies for survival? Must the experts drink juice because water tastes like poison?

Are these experts making bones for someone else out of thin air, like miracle workers? I consider myself a pregnancy expert, because I lived to tell the tale of (complain about) my own pregnancy. I lived through the heartburn and the low blood pressure and the nausea and the nothing fitting. I worried about not being able to stomach my calcium, or any nutrient-rich foods, and what effect this would have on my child. Well, since I’d behaved myself before the onset of the glorious disease state of pregnancy, I got a glossy, gorgeous, fat, spirited baby.

My expert advice is that when you are pregnant, it is your job to take care of yourself, and during this brief period, taking care of yourself may include getting fat. This changed body state will help you to make a baby: one with bones inside of it, and everything. Do you know what you need to do in order to make bones? For someone else? You need to eat a lot of full-fat organic dairy, and take naps. You need to have a whole closetful of pants that don’t fit. No one is going to let you take a hot bath to unwind, or have a Tequila Sunrise, or even a caffeinated latte, so the only thing left to you is cheeseburgers, and you may as well have a few of those, because it will help the baby get bones and hair and all of the other stuff we wish for our children to have.

Slow down. Eat. Unbutton. Make bones!

Amen.

Post averse is not what I am. Rather, after the jet lag we got sick with a very special cold.

How can I describe the cold?

The cold was like a new-fangled firework, the sort that you watch with your mouth half open in amazement, awed by the strides of modern technology, and then just when you think it is over, it starts blowing up all over again, in a different color scheme. Except instead of being beautiful lights in the sky that were new colors, it was snot. And your mouth is open because you can’t breathe through your nose.

The smarties who are working so hard to design good fireworks should all be shunted over to a new project, which is to solve colds. Solving colds would be an advance truly worthy of its own holiday. Imagine being independent from colds, in addition to the British!

Not to mix metaphors, but let me also say that the cold was not just like fireworks, it was also like Row Row Row Your Row Row Row Your Row Stream etc. because different people in the house got it at different times and so, like when one is singing in rounds, it was easy to lose your place if you stopped to think about who was supposed to be at what point, and that combined with the double whammy effect was very confusing.

I have been in no position to post.

But now we’re on to the next complaint! Which is teeth! At least, I hope it is teeth. I like to think it is lots of big teeth coming all at once because what else could cause this sleep regression, after sleep finally normalized for 2 days?

Currently I am spending much of every night sleeping — no, sorry, not sleeping — on a futon on the floor that we have in Henry’s room. I would be sleeping, oh, would I be, and I admit that I am some of the time, like whenever my husband peeks in there and sees us in a cozy embrace, like a happy pile of snuggled up puppies — of course that is the part that he sees — but I assure you that whatever deceptively peaceful tableau you might catch us in, it is only momentary. Believe me when I tell you that MOST OF THE REST OF THE TIME I am wishing for some combination of showercap and goggles and shin-guards and noise-canceling headphones, and thinking “I could sleep so well if no one were touching my hair or trying to explore my eye or kicking my leg on the forward stroke and the metal radiator cover on the backward stroke, CRASH, CRASH, CRASH.”

Or, I think about how well I could sleep if I were allowed to lie on my right side, which I will no longer try, because I have learned the consequences by my sweet yet slightly tyrannical boy who strongly prefers me to sleep on my left. I suspect that this is so he has better access to my eyes. (“ICE! ICE! ICE!”)

At this point he is a great an independent sleeper unless something notable is happening, so I think it is probably something like teeth, because I am barely allowed to leave the room for a minute, and that is often what life is like during tooth acquisition when you are me. He will go to bed at night but is inconsolable if, when he wakes up and cries midway through, I try to leave the room again before morning.

Every time we have a sleep regression and I get really tired I think, “This is it. I will never spend a normal night again. None of us will. Somehow, I have ruined everything just when I least expected to do so, and this is how things will be from now on.” But then after some coffee or some ujjayi breath I realize that circumstances — travel, illness, teeth — are disturbing dear Henry’s routine, and that due to his age, and possibly his genetics, he can’t really hang in there during a disturbed night any better than an adult can. He just needs to be able to complain to me, just as I need to be able to complain to you, apparently.

In my rational brain, I know that at some point I will be allowed to spend the night alone again, or, barring that, I will at least be allowed to spend the night in the company of my husband, who is mostly very nice to me and a great advocate of me getting sleep, probably because he has learned that what is good for me is often good for all of us. This husband, this co-parent, will sometimes try to go into Henry’s room in my place to save me from him overnight, but that really infuriates Henry, as it happens. He is happy at all other times to see his father, but not when his father is trying to protect me from him. Why? Sigh. Because I am the lactater.

I feel like there was a vague expectation by someone I can’t really name that I would breastfeed until Henry was exactly 365 days old, at which point I would nurse him once in the morning and once before bed, and that at all other meals and snacks, he would drink cow milk from a cup like a perfect little gentleman. Bib-less and in a bow tie, mayhaps. Then at 18 months, he would be simply not ask, one day: he would be done. Weaning would have been a painless process, at least for him. The only person who would shed tears at that point would be me, for the closeness I had lost.

Yes, Henry is almost 20 months old. He can drink from a cup and he loves cow milk and hates bibs, but he is not stupid, and he realizes that the experience of milk from the fridge no substitute for the real thing. “Breastfeeding is more about recharging the batteries than about filling the tank,” some lactation loony somewhere once said.

So no, he is not weaned, though he does sleep very solidly through the night when something isn’t amiss. It’s not like I always feed him during the night, it’s really not. The kitchen is closed, etc. etc., we have been through all of the torturous sleep training, and it has been very effective. It’s just that when he is awake during the night, absolutely nothing else works.

His pediatrician congratulated me on doing what she called “child-led weaning.” In truth, what the child may be leading us to is a situation like that of our former cleaning lady’s sister in law, who was still nursing her son when he was seven, back in Poland. I couldn’t communicate with the cleaning lady too well, most of our exchanges being limited to “HOT! HOT! HOT!” when it was slightly warm to very warm outside, or “COLD! COLD COLD COLD!,” when it was not.

GAS! GAS! GAS????? was another one, and we needn’t discuss that further.

So I have no idea how she communicated the fact about the seven year old to me, but somehow she effectively did. I could tell that even and / or especially in Poland, you don’t want to be nursing your son when he is seven.

Henry does it a lot less than he used to, but he’s no quitter, not my son. I’m not  upset about it, though. I’d be crazy to be upset about it. The truth is that it is a time for us to snuggle and check in, and it requires no creativity or physical activity or even negotiation on my part. And what the hell would I be doing in the middle of the night if I had to actively comfort someone, rather than passively let them nurse?

“Breast feeding is like duct tape,” is another things the lactation advocates like to say. “It fixes everything.” What my husband thinks is that it is like needing a cigarette and getting cranky and rough around the edges but then you get one and everything is great. Latch onto that one, La Leche!

Every once in a while I am going to simply bubble forth about my son. It’s inevitable.

For a while he talked about bananas, for a while he talked about bubbles, for a while he talked about going outside, but at about 19 months this the roster of subjects that interest him:

Eyes

Kitties

Dogs

Babies

Keys

Cars

Airplanes and trains and boats and trucks, all called TRUCK!

Toes

Shoes

He also says hi to everyone now, even (especially?) if they are an animal. Though, for dogs, he inhales as deeply and dramatically as possible, then says, with great purpose, WOOF. To be clear, that is now one of my main activities, too. We do that together, and then laugh and laugh. He also sometimes does that for birds or other things that are . . . alive. Or might be alive, if they weren’t drawn into a book.

He’s not a huge talker, though. He’s often happy to rely upon nodding when asked a question. Sometimes he gives a very cheerful “YEHSS!” or the more casual “Ah-yay” or even shortens it to “aye,” like a sweet little Irish sailor. That is my favorite, no contest.

“No,” however, is said almost in an angry and perturbed tone of . . . yell. Even if I’m asking something he might genuinely like to do, I get the full petulant teenager treatment.

Today he started walking down the hall saying HELLOHELLOHELLOHELLO, but in an inexperienced enough way to have his tongue flop out of his mouth every time he gets to the “l” sound, so that the sound becomes off balance, and the LO becomes louder than the HEH. LOhehLOhehLOhehLO. Then he turned around and lunged in the other direction saying DOHBAI, DOHBAI, DOHBAI, DOHBAI which is goodbye in Henryese.

That was fun, but it got better later, when during bedtime prep he took one of his socks off (he likes to see his toes pretty regularly) and put the sock on his hand, and started crunching his hand open and closed saying “LOhehLOhehLOhehLO.”

In short, he made a PUPPET! A sock puppet!

This, and one other specific moment, when he pretended to eat a very small plastic cat at brunch the other day, by making gobbling noises and having it disappear to the side of his open mouth, make me think that this might be the start of imaginative play.

Pretending to eat small plastic cats with gobbling noises and an obvious effort to just stick them to the side of your mouth is right up my alley. That, and the sock puppet: this is fun.

As a reaction to the sad death of Tyler Clementi this week, and other stories like his, I’ve been working on a lengthy post about empathy and bullying and the growth process, but it is not coming together in a lucid enough way in a timely enough manner.

So I’ll post the jumping off point instead:

Isn’t it obvious that being gay is a far less shameful act than being mean?

We always have this problem when we go to Chicago. I get off the plane and start rushing in the direction of those famous hotdogs, the ones with the celery salt and sport peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers — ahh, Chicago. I don’t even need to leave the airport for a great hot dog!

Also, since I don’t drink any sort of caffeine when I fly to keep my anxiety at bay, I must get a coffee before I’m no more than 60 feet from the landing gate. But the problem is that we are getting picked up and need to pick up our bags and meet the people picking us up. And since I am traveling with my husband and it is his family picking us up, he is particularly eager to get outside. Also, we have a child, and the child has needs of his own, blah blah blah.

Last fall when we went, there was yet another distraction: right at the gate, a huge photo essay by this guy named Peter Menzel. I mean, it was a photo essay designed to make me late to the baggage carousel. The exhibit showed photos of people from around the world around their tables, about to eat.

Matthew dragged me away, and I rushed back to see it. And on and on.

Later, Matthew’s sister gave me a book by the same guy. It’s called Material World and has a similar premise: it takes a family from somewhere or other, and shows everything that they have in their domicile. It’s really colorful and fun stuff, but it prompts you think a lot about other people and the way they live, and why, which is basically the most fun thing you can do, I think.

TIME Magazine has published a photo essay called “What the World Eats” about what people eat in a week and how much they spend on food and what their favorite foods or family recipes are. You don’t even have to go to Chicago to see it! This blog is as good as Chicago’s finest airports!

A couple of observations:

1. Photo number 8 (which is the one pictured below) is subtly hilarious. Who can point out the elephant in the room?

2. People who eat sheep spend way less money than other people, weekly, on food.

3. Do you have other observations you’d like to share?

Click the pic, which I am using without copyright, to go to the essay! And buy Peter Menzel’s books so he doesn’t sue me for using his pic! (Peter, we were both born at Hartford Hospital. We both love to know what people are eating for dinner. Don’t sue me!)

What the World Eats