The MomSpeak

I think every parent suffers from selective memory to a certain degree. My labor story gets less painful-sounding with every telling – I remember excitement and intensity and awe at what my body was doing; my husband remembers me howling and gasping in pain and shaking from head to toe. Huh. And honestly, if any of us REALLY remembered what newborn sleep deprivation REALLY feels like (HINT: like smashing your sinuses with a brick), would we be so willing to sign up for it all over again?

But even I’m a little surprised at how much I’ve forgotten in the three years since I last had a newborn.

THING #1: YOU NEED TO BURP BABIES.

I know! You totally do. But I forgot. A nurse reminded me about…oh, 12 or 24 or 36 hours into Ezra’s life, when he seemed AWFULLY spit-uppy and she saw me pop him off my breast and then just…sort of…sit there with him.

THING #2: YOU NEED TO CLEAN THEIR BUSINESS.

Both of my babies have been boys, so I have absolutely no excuse for this one. I also don’t think I need to elaborate, except that I got yelled at by the pediatrician.

So, I work from home. Most of the time, this is the perfect arrangement: I enjoy writing, I enjoy my children, I enjoy showering after lunchtime.

I won’t lie, though: working independently from home requires massive amounts of self-discipline. There are a zillion distractions and no one but yourself to keep you on task. I’ve never even met a good number of the people I work with now — or even spoken to them on the phone, now that I think about it. I might go six months or more in between face-to-face meetings with my employers. I work hard to maintain a reputation of being reliable and diligent and good at what I do…but…there’s also writer’s block, the Nintendo Wii, another cozy nap with the baby, and what was the name of that guy in the movie about the thing at the place? I should go check that out on IMDB.

I try not to let this sort of thing happen — I have a VERY STRICT rule about no daytime television (no soaps, no talk shows, no Showcase Showdown, alas) for myself, my work generally gets priority over everything (except my kids, of course — I do everything during naps and independent play time and preschool and I will only turn on the TV if I’m truly well behind the eight-ball on something), and I’m very careful about the aimless web surfing that can kill an entire precious naptime — but sometimes it just doesn’t work. I lose direction or focus or can’t think of an idea or I’m tired or OH LOOK SOMETHING SHINY!

At one of our many recent jaunts to the pediatrician’s office, I shared the waiting room with a couple and their brand-new, fresh-from-the-hospital newborn. The husband was puttering around, pausing to thoughtfully take in the cartoons playing on the TV, giving the wooden bead mazes a try — while his wife sat with the carseat and…I don’t know. HOVERED. She was staring at her baby with a kind of scary intensity. Like the force of her gaze alone was what kept his heart beating and his lungs functioning.

She gave off a fairly tightly-wound vibe, is what I am saying.

I had my new baby in a sling and my three-year-old running wild, probably smearing germs onto every available surface. I attempted to smile at her, all “oh! these kids! whattaya gonna do, right?” but noticed her gaze had shifted and she was full-on GLARING at my toddler, who dared to — you know — COUGH. At the DOCTOR’S OFFICE.

Her husband walked back over. He’d found a brochure on new baby care. “It says here we shouldn’t use the nail clippers. We should only use a file.”

My mom thinks this is something I should tell the Internet. She felt quite strongly about it, and my sister agreed. Both of them, over Christmas, responded with a forceful “YOU NEED TO TELL THE INTERNET” when I told them about my ingenious idea. My ingenious, totally weird, totally gross idea.

So. Nursing pads. I never used them with my first baby, except maybe once or twice early on — in those dark, toe-curling days of improper latchings and round-the-clock comfort nursing — to get a little padding for my poor chafed hamburger meat nipples. I had terrible supply issues and never ever leaked milk, so the box of 100-count nursing pads sat on my nightstand unused, occasionally mocking me and my pathetic boobs.

I refused to be mocked again, so this time I bought the smallest box possible, just in case. I figured I could repurpose them as doilies or pee-pee teepees, if I had to.

And of course, I blew through those suckers in record time. OVERSUPPLY. CRAZY ABUNDANT MILK. I hear a baby cry from two states over and my bra is soaked. It’s…totally insane. Awesome, really, and totally unexpected. But it’s forced me to get creative with nursing pads.

After being inspired by some other bloggers’ creative home displays of their children’s preshus weshus artwork, I recently decided that yes! I can totally do that! I shall build my own preschooler art museum and it will be ADORABLE and CLEVER and my house shall be transformed into the Pottery Barn catalog’s version of a house with kids instead of the real version, which is more like “deathtrap obstacle course of primary-colored clutter.”

(You know where this is going, right? I mean, even I’m yelling GIRLPLEASE at myself already.)

So I went out and bought some square cork tiles and self-adhesive safe-for-painted-walls double-sided sticky things. I dutifully applied the sticky things by the dozen to six of the cork tiles, carefully and painstakingly pressed them to the wall with a level and a measuring tape and then selected the best of my son’s artwork to proudly display with some super-cute thumbtacks.

So a few weeks ago I read the lovely Asha’s entry about free alternatives to traditional gift wrap. And I loved it. So much that I even bookmarked it, for future wrapping reference.

I was especially charmed with the idea of recycling my preschooler’s art projects, although I was annoyed to find that a good 80% of MY preschooler’s art projects involved non-wrapping friendly materials. (Seriously, preschool, enough with the popsicle sticks.) But I managed to find enough to wrap the grandparents’ gifts at least, and if there’s anyone else who will be especially charmed by a few crayon marks and glitter glue on a piece of construction paper, it’s the grandparents.

(Speaking of toddler masterpieces, next week’s edition of How Not To Do Things will cover my recent attempt at creating a clever little crafty “art museum” display in our kitchen.)

(SPOILER ALERT: Disastrous. I am Martha Stewart’s worst nightmare.)

But this morning, with 15 minute to spare before a preschool classmate’s birthday party, I realized I needed to wrap a present. And…well, if you could use another reason to eschew wrapping paper in favor of Asha’s ideas (and the many additional tips from the comment section), LOOK NO FURTHER THAN MEEE.

Confession: coupons make me nervous.

Not AS A CONCEPT or anything. I’m not scared of barcodes, like this one kid I knew in high school whose mother was convinced that stuff like credit cards and supermarket scanners were predictions from the Book of Revelations about the End Times. He seriously was scared of barcodes. And his mother, frankly. I think we all were.

No, coupons make me nervous because of all the fine print. All the expiration dates and exclusions and limitations. I read and reread them, convinced that I’ve missed something.  THEY FREAK ME OUT, PEOPLE.

My current anxiety about coupons most certainly does NOT come from my childhood. My mother was the best coupon-clipper I have ever known. She dutifully went through the paper and the circulars every week and clipped clipped clipped and filed them neatly into her wallet-like coupon organizer. I used to beg to help her, and I’d sit at the kitchen table scanning the pages for grocery items I recognized, proudly announcing each relevant coupon I found as I neatly cut it out and filed it into the appropriate category in the organizer. At the store, it was my job to go through it and find any coupons we could use, and double-check the expiration dates. I would hand them to the cashier with confidence. Coupons were easier, back then, somehow.

Who doesn’t love hand-me-downs, right? I love hand-me-downs. I spent my first pregnancy almost exclusively in a friend’s maternity clothing, accepted all of my sister’s maternity clothing before we were even officially thinking of trying for a second baby, and then when those clothes turned out to be off-season for my second summer pregnancy (gah and argh and damn), I was still exceedingly happy to lovingly hand them off to other pregnant friends.

So when the wife of one of my husband’s coworkers asked if I would want any of her son’s baby clothes, I immediately said yes! yes! How kind, how lovely!

She smiled (POSSIBLY EVILY. I SHOULD HAVE PAID ATTENTION.) and said she would send the clothing to the office with her husband. I imagined a few sleepers. Probably some onesies and a lot of unworn hats, since we all end up with about four frillion of those. And I sometimes wonder if any infant outside of Alaska has ever actually worn a newborn-sized snowsuit, or if we’ve all just been handing the same four or five snowsuits around to fellow parents for the last few decades.

So I was watching some home improvement show the other day — or maybe it was more of an informercial, or perhaps I dreamed the entire thing up — that had a little segment about these fancy baby-safe electrical outlets. Not the little plastic outlet covers we all know and use and despise and regularly snap our thumbnails off with, though. No, those are for parents who clearly DO NOT LOVE THEIR CHILDREN VERY MUCH, because now you can get your house wired with actual baby-safe outlets that somehow sense when fork prongs or knife blades are being stuck into them and slide shut, saving your curious child from electrocution. So hooray! You are now free to leave sharp metal objects lying around the house with confidence!

(This same show also had a bit about a table saw that can sense when your finger gets too close to the blade and shut itself off. The inventor was there demonstrating the mechanism by sticking a hotdog against the blade, and frankly, I was disappointed that he wouldn’t use his finger. Way to stand behind your product! Come on! I want some violence mixed in with my do-it-yourselfing.)

Anyway! The show reminded me of how seriously we took baby-proofing, and of how much money we’ve spent on fancy retractable gates and outlet covers and window-blind cord covers and drawer locks that snapped in two every time we forgot about them and opened the drawer with the tiniest bit of force. And obviously we DO NOT LOVE OUR CHILDREN VERY MUCH, because we never even bothered with the corner guards and door blockers and toilet locks and coating every vaguely hard surface with bubble wrap. Not that I didn’t stand in the baby-proofing aisle of the store fretting over each and every expensive plastic doohickey of safety. What if our baby DID fall into the toilet? What if he DID knock himself senseless on the corner of the dining room table? What if he DID somehow push a chair across the kitchen to the sink, climb onto the countertop, flip the garbage disposal switch and shove his hand down in there?

And yet, we’ve managed to bring one child through infancy and toddlerhood relatively unscathed, save for one tumble down the (carpeted) basement steps, but that was not for a lack of a working gate. That was more for the lack of me remembering to close the gate.

Admit it, we’ve all shelled out perfectly wonderful dollars on completely useless junk. Much of it baby- and child-related. Most of the useless stuff we’ve ended up with was bought in a fit of paranoia, (i.e. the baby won’t ever sleep a single MINUTE unless we buy a white noise machine, a top-of-the-line rocking chair AND at least three or four battery-operated baby containment devices with both rocking AND vibrating functionality), while the rest of it was bought in a fit of OMG LOOK AT THE CUTE.

At the top of that particular list? The pee-pee teepee.

There’s no denying that pee-pee teepees are cute. They’re adorable! Tiny little teepees for the tiny pee-pees and the little wee-wees and oh, it’s all so precious I could die or puke or both. And they (and all the other assorted pee-blocking devices out on the market) SEEM like a good idea, as anyone who has ever changed a baby boy’s diaper knows, baby boys are packing a loaded weapon in their pants. A weapon that tends to go off every time it’s exposed to air or sunlight or look! Mama’s mouth is hanging open in a sleep-deprived stupor! ReadyAimFIRE!

And so, the pee-pee teepee has become a HUGELY popular shower gift as well as a knee-jerk purchase by first-time parents who have just confirmed the presence of a penis on the ultrasound screen.