5 3/4 months?

Look, we're not sticking to a regular timeline here. It's an update. I'll take the time when I can find it. (Right now I'm procrastinating on folding laundry!)

So, the baby is just a dream, a doll, the very model of a infant individual. He smiles, he laughs, he sleeps (mostly, pretty well), he nurses mostly without trying out those new teeth (but if he does, and I say "no" or "ow" or "gentle" he eases up). He got pinkeye this week, and he was just a little less happy than usual. We got it treated, and the medicine worked fast, but of course we have to take it for another 5 days.

He is nowhere near talking that I can tell. He makes almost no consonant sounds when he babbles, and what he does make are the sort of soft Y-H-W sounds. No "baba gaga mama" stuff yet. He is, however, VERY LOUD, and he is pleased as punch with himself when he can get people's attention. The other day he was doing his Chewbacca noise (sort of a gurgle) in a restaurant, first at soft volume, then a little louder, then pretty loud indeed, so that people at other tables were turning to look at him. Lucky for us, he's cute as hell and smiles at anyone who smiles at him, so most people are charmed rather than annoyed.

He is getting a ton of hair suddenly (well, a ton relatively speaking -- still nothing like those babies that are born with full heads of hair). It's still a sort of strawberry blond, very shiny, and perfectly willing to be combed into a mohawk (tee hee!). He's a handsome devil. At the moment, his eyes are still blue. Not ice blue -- a bit of green is creeping in, but still largely blue. I forget, I guess, that my dad's, grandma's, grandpa's, and mother-in-law's eyes are all varying degrees of blue. It's not out of the realm of genetic possibility for them to stay blue, is what I'm saying.

Just like his sister, his first crawling is backwards! I put him on the floor, socks off for traction, just 6 inches from a bear toy he likes, and then I went to wash Z's hair (he was in Sweetie's office, so he was supervised). When I came back, he had turned 180 degrees in what looked like a perfect clockwise half-circle. I'm not surprised -- he is still stronger on one side than the other due to his torticollis, but it's getting better all the time. He was, sad to say, quite far from the bear.

He gets really excited about reaching for things. He reaches for me, for his toys, for Boompah's hats (he was very proud to have finally removed one the other day). In fact, there's a small group of toys that we put on his high chair tray but rarely give him otherwise. And when I put him in the high chair, he knows what's coming and gets so excited! He starts reaching for the tray before I can even get it close enough to lock on. His favorite, I think, is the little car that's easy to grip and that makes sort of rumbly sounds when he wheels it back and forth. He also likes dropping things so that we pick them up again. He gets more satisfaction from Grandma on that front than from us.

Speaking of Grandma, I rarely mention her here in much detail (mainly because her stories aren't mine to tell, you know?), but she broke her hip! We heard something (which she later revealed was her, cussing) one day as she left with the kids for school, and I went outside and she'd fallen in the driveway. At first she thought it was a pulled muscle and was icing it and taking anti-inflammatory pain relievers, but when it didn't get better, she went to the doctor. She has to mostly stay off it for about 6 weeks. If you know me well you know Mom does, like EVERYTHING for me. So I've had to pick up a bunch of my own slack -- picking the kids up instead of meeting her at my house, mainly, although this week my dad is doing it as Z's school is on early release days. I feel awful for her, because if there's one thing my mother is not, it's a couch potato. She is always on the move. She irons while she watches TV (I could probably locate my iron). So being stuck on the couch can't be much fun, but she's taking it in stride because she knows she has to heal.

Z is her inimitable self. She can be so amazing, drawing a picture for you, creating a pretend world, coming up with profound questions, doing double form-check kicks in karate, and entertaining her brother. And she can be difficult as all get-out, too, using these mean, shouty tones for no reason. Or getting in trouble at school. Or lying. Or even just being her happy self when that self goes on ten-minute monologues, during the course of which she moves things around (it is very difficult to keep this place clean because she just puts shit in weird places all the time) and dances, nearly knocking things over and dropping the new and fragile X-box remote on the floor (like, every day) and shouting when the baby is going to sleep and... sigh. I hate to list the difficult parts. I prefer to talk about how smart and creative and funny she can be. But it would be painting a false picture to say that she doesn't just make us all lose our shit sometimes. I'm not ready to talk about it, but we are investigating the idea that maybe there is something more going on than ADHD. It's not a bad thing, just one of those things that explains a lot and would maybe actually give us more options for treatment and perhaps therapy. But it does sort of mean that her odd behaviors are probably not just a phase, and that she may well have a rough go of it all her life. More later, I promise. But we've got a couple doctor visits to make, and I don't want to jump the gun.

Wishing you all well!
CM

Middle ground

A friend of mine is very... sincere. He wants to change the world all the time. I like that about him, although it can be a bit wearing, too. His current project is taking the posts shared by his conservative friends and asking his liberal ones to look them over in an open-minded fashion and try to find some points of commonality, and vice versa.

This has gone about as well as you might expect. On the "liberals react" side, the comments went:

• Actually seeking common ground
• Off topic response
• A question for the conservatives about an issue at hand. 
• Off topic response
• Disagreement
• On-topic response that neither agrees nor disagrees
• Kind of unclear response that sounds Libertarian-ish

On the "conservatives react" side, the comments were:

• sarcasm and criticism of Obama
• Disagreement and bringing up new topics
• ad hominem attack
• several from me, my intention being to both find common ground and refute the Obama criticism
• complaint that what I'd said was a personal attack (I know I'm biased, but I REALLY didn't see it that way)
• expression of frustration (from a liberal)

So, you know, not a lot of that is the finding of common ground. And my feeling is that common ground is going to be a lot more difficult to find than my friend hopes, because we've become so polarized. One problem is that even on the things the two sides can sort of, maybe, marginally come to agreement on, we would come to fisticuffs over the way to address the issue. Like with abortion: both sides more or less agree that fewer abortions would be better. Liberals, in general, would like to do that through access to sex education and birth control. And conservatives would like to legislate it out of existence. And even I, open-minded as I try to be, can see NO good in the other side's plan. Like, at all. I think my way is right and theirs is wrong and I don't even see a little bit of wiggle room where I could be like "well, what if we do birth control, but then you also get to ban abortion after 20 weeks even if the mother's life is in danger?" There's no commonality there.

Or income inequality: to the extent that conservatives say they want to fix it, they trot out economic ideas that have failed, hard, for decades. Why would I want to let them try out their shitty ideas? 

And there are issues that I really and truly believe that, even if we can't come to terms about a solution together, at least we ought to agree that they are issues. Like poverty. How can we not agree that kids going hungry is a bad thing? But conservatives seem to be all "BOOTSTRAPS!" and "If they can't feed their kids, don't have 'em! (But no birth control for you.)" and "The churches will take care of them." I mean, perhaps there is some thin line between "that is not a problem" and "that is a problem about which I don't give a shit" that I'm failing to appreciate, but still. 

How about the environment? Even if you pick and choose your one scientist out of 100 that can be paid to say that climate change isn't happening, you can't deny that there's a big fucking island of plastic trash in the ocean and that every time there's an oil spill tar balls wash up on the beaches. Fracking has caused earthquakes and water that catches fire to come out of people's taps. But conservatives won't pass a bill for clean air, clean water, nothing. Not a problem, they seem to say! But, like.. these people have children and grandchildren. Why isn't it a problem for them? 

I find it frustrating, because I know that underneath it all, those folks (and not just the friends of my friend, but my conservative uncle, my friend the woodshop teacher, etc.) are loving people with families, but I can't believe our underlying values are so incredibly different. I'd love to find some common ground. But there's a 40 mile wide demilitarized zone between us studded with land mines. I think there's a lot of work to do, and at the moment, I don't have a lot of hope for that work getting done. 

Brian Williams and the time I met Ray Bradbury

Every time the question "who's the most famous person you've ever met" comes up, the first name that pops into my mind is Ray Bradbury. He came to my school in my junior year of high school. I was so excited! I had read several of his short stories, and I had read Dandelion Wine multiple times. I still remember the feel of that library copy of the book -- the plastic dust cover crinkling and the gummy residue of the clear tape. I had probably memorized his author photo from the back cover. Before the event, I imagined him sitting on a chair in the auditorium, the spotlight shining on him. Would I ask a question? What would I ask?

When someone asks which celebrity I met, I think of that image: Bradbury in the auditorium of Hiram Johnson High, spotlight shining down on him.

It didn't happen. Or it did, but I wasn't there for it. I had pneumonia, and although I tried to tough out the previous day at school, I was too sick. I went home early, and then I had to stay home the next day as well. I missed Bradbury.

So I have some empathy for Brian Williams. In case you missed it, 12 years ago when Williams was embedded in Afghanistan as a reporter, he was on a helicopter. A chopper an hour ahead of his was hit with RPG fire and went down in the sand. Shortly thereafter, Williams' own chopper was targeted by small arms fire and went down in a sandstorm, where they came upon the other chopper. His crew and the crew on the other chopper were evacuated together. The day he first reported the story, he told it as it occurred. But in the intervening years, he has re-told the story such that he was the one on the chopper that was hit with an RPG. Many people are accusing him of being a big lying liar who is trying to steal the troops' glory. I think he got Bradburied, just a little harder than I did.

Brains are weird. Have you ever experienced deja vu? Ever said something and then realized it hadn't happened that way and had to correct yourself? Ever convinced yourself you had a memory when it was really a story someone told you or a dream you had?

When Z was born, it was after a long and difficult labor, and then she was in distress. One day, I was telling someone the story of her birth, and I said that after they'd stitched me up, they wheeled me in to visit her in her isolette, but I had only stayed for a few minutes. "No," my mom interrupted, "you stayed for an hour or more." I was tired, I was stressed, and my memory had just straight-up failed me.




I feel bad that this happened to Brian Williams so publicly, and particularly given that his chosen profession is that of a credible reporter. But he's a human and he has a human, fallible brain, and I think it failed him. It happens. Let's give a guy a break.

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