near-death weekend ’11

Saturday, Baby and I headed to NJ to attend a two-year-old’s birthday party. All was well. He only peed on my friend once, fell asleep in the car, and napped for two hours. Post-nap, Baby was a bit overwhelmed by the people and action of the party (lots of tiny toddlers there causing a ruckus), plus was getting over being terrified from waking up in a completely foreign environment. I fed him bits of quesadilla and he clutched another in his fat, little fist, when all of a sudden, I noticed he was choking — he got really red in the face, alarmed in the eyes, and couldn’t cough. I panicked, cursed, and hit his back (which is the worst thing you can do) — but then brilliantly called my friend Nat over. Nat quickly grabbed Baby, flipped him upside down, gave a few wacks, till Baby threw up and wept. Once in my arms, he kept crying and throwing up on my chest, and the whole thing happened so fast, I’m not sure who helped wipe my body.

So yeah, turns out, I’m not so good in emergency situations, but it was good to see Nat demonstrate on Baby what I actually should have done, and since our small circle knows that Nat had performed infant CPR on his son at age two months, I figured he would have nerves of steel. Good call, at least on that account.

Sunday, Baby ran down the sidewalk, fell, and scraped his moustache area, chin, and got a fat lip. By the time he saw me ten minutes later (I was upstairs cleaning, he was downstairs doing laundry), he smiled with a mouth full of blood and saliva. Oy vey! When all was said and done, I said I cannot wait for him to act like a nerd and sit in the corner, reading. Some daycare mom said Fat chance, get ready for the accidents. Boys this age wipe out all the time.

*sigh*

And by near-death experience, I am, of course, referring to myself.

this makes me want to die, in a good way

Daycare told Husband that Baby’s becoming quite the gentleman. He is distinctly gentle with all the girl children and more rough-and-tumble with the boy children. There is one particular girl whom he has been spending time with lately. In a nook in the classroom, where there is a pillow for them to sit, Baby and this fellow girl baby go cuddle. They hug and rub each other’s bellies.

I really have no idea what to do with myself when I hear that. I mean, how much cuteness can one human be expected to handle? I told my mom that Baby might have his first girlfriend, and she’s PISSED. She immediately said “he doesn’t hug ME!”

the need to purge

Baby found a book on our shelves called The Best Restaurants in New York City for Less Than Twenty-five Dollars, 1998. I asked Husband if we could toss it, since donating it to the bookshop seems kind of obnoxious. I said he could keep it if he were doing research for a historical novel.

i really need you, mary poppins


Mary Poppins, I could use your help. Maybe not the singing, but I dig your continually pleasant demeanor and ease with childrearing and all matters related to the domestic arena. I am really trying to give it a valiant try, but weekends feel like they’re about getting Baby to nap and making food he rejects. When I clean, he follows me and undoes my work. Sometimes, Baby leaves the house with yogurt in his hair. I’m not sure what’s under my feet when I walk past his high chair. The house continually looks like someone just broke and was looking for buried treasure. And Baby ate a PowerBar… again. I was too weak to stop him. I promise I’m not always this sloppy, but lately, this feels like the norm. So if you have some merit-based financial aid for your services, I am so there, M.

9/11, zoolander

Lately, I have thinking about that day more than usual. I remember the weather — it happened to be gorgeous out that Tuesday, part of the oddity of seeing hordes of ash-covered folks in business suits quietly marching through the West Village, where I lived at the time, past hip brunchers (who did mysterious things for money that enabled them to brunch in the middle of a workday…I always wondered about that). I had been sleeping when it all happened, having just been laid off the week before. My roommate Joslyn called me to tell me the news but I couldn’t make sense of it through the fog of sleep. By the time I was finally focused, both planes had hit and one tower collapsed. I ran up to the roof with Husband, who back then was Boyfriend, to go a catastrophe with my own eyes rather than through the TV, a first for me. I saw the second tower collapse. It was hard to understand what had happened, because all we could see were people zigzagging on the street below and the tower being consumed by a black cloud. And when the cloud was gone, so was tower — THAT made no sense. It was almost like a magic trick, making more than 100 floors disappear in an instant.

As it happened, Kara, one of my high school friends was working in the towers that day and survived. She was usually in midtown, so I wasn’t worried about her, but that evening, she and her brother buzzed my door in the evening, and the two of them, me, and Boyfriend went to have dinner and she described her day. She and her brother were still on the hunt for their cousin, who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald.

The whole city was in mourning. It was in a weird state of normalcy and grief. You walked out to the hospital to give blood but you were turned away. People cried in public, but you could still shop at Barneys. The weather was weird. lots of blustery wind, which some interpreted as ghosts, and of course, that lovely earthquake the next day that made everyone panic that NYC was being attacked again. I think it was that week I went to see Zoolander with Becca and Mike, which was very silly but the whole audience found especially funny, probably just relieved to feel something other than freaked out and sad. At the end of the film, they have some aerial footage of the NYC skyline, where you can see the towers. I heard they had thought about erasing them, but decided to keep them there, and I was very glad for that.

My parents had been touring Spain at the time and were stuck without a flight home for a while. When we finally spoke, my dad wanted to make sure I was alright and said that 9/11 reminded him for the two wars he grew up through and how he never thought he would have this feeling again in his life. My mom mostly freaked out that I was unemployed. She didn’t mention the big tragedy at all. Typical of both of them.