January 24th

This morning, Meri and I danced around downstairs to the sounds of Tupelo Honey. Like the good girl that she is, she was drawn to the music, looking over at the computer speakers with fascination and jumping up and down in an excited, if uncoordinated way.


In general, she enjoys most of the songs on my Dire Straits Pandora radio station. It is my fond hope that by exposing her to such good music so early, I am inoculating her against any Justin Bieber-esce nonsense that in her future pop culture might hold.


Only time will tell if I am successful in this endeavor.


This morning, I am eating breakfast while it is still warm and the bed is already made and on the fridge, a message of love is spelled out in alphabet magnets: love u kitns.


This message is laid out above the chart for a weekend juice cleanse, which for some reason still hangs on there, despite the fact that I pretty much have abandoned the discipline, and must now figure out what to do with a pound of spinach leaves and other assorted vegetables.


Keith came home from work early yesterday, just in time to catch a cooking show where they were demonstrating the art of the cheese steak sandwich. This particular version was made with three kinds of cheeses, including mozzarella and cream cheese. We were in awe.


"Your mom used to cook like that for me," Keith told Meri sadly.


Those were the days. I suspect they will be returning shortly.


Meri has grown so much; each morning, she looks cuter. She is growing out of all her sleepers and onesies.


When she wakes, she sings to herself softly for a long while, before deciding that enough is enough and she has better turn up the volume and so announce herself to the waiting world, and also to wake Mom.


When she sees me, her entire body is filled with joy and her face is filled with laughter. It's the most marvelous thing. When I carry her down the stairs, I swing her around so I'm holding her wrapped close in my arms, because lately she loves to fling herself one way or the other, heedless of gravity or any other consequence.


"Safety latch!" I declare to her, smiling down at her and she breaks into a delighted grin. She thinks this is a game. But when we reach the foot of the stairs, she likes to stay there, curled up close to me, just looking up at me, and we end up dancing slowly around the kitchen, even when there is no music.


Per her doctor, we have started her on rice cereal. She was not impressed with this foreign substance and could not figure out why it was being put in her mouth. She promptly spit it all out again, as if that were her job. When I persisted, she pouted and looked around her for reprieve, any reprieve.


It broke Daddy's heart, who happened to be filming this event. It is not for nothing that we have dubbed her sad expression "the pouty face of infinite cuteness." It rarely appears, but when it does, to a man we are undone, we are slain. This does not bode well for future discipline, but we will do the best we can in the face of unstoppable adorableness.


Keith had to try the rice cereal himself, as he doubted that my bright expressions of "It's delicious! Delicious num nums! Delicious num nums for you!" held any truth.


Indeed, they did not. "That is not delicious," declared Keith, bitterly.


I tried to explain to Keith the Theory of Parenting When Trying New Things, but that was not the moment for it. Keith was filled only with commiseration, so we ceased Operation Num Nums, knowing that the battle might be lost, but the war was not over.


Two weeks later, she is willing to eat half the bowl- which amounts to a tablespoon, and even manages to swallow most of one spoonful at one go. The rest of it goes everywhere else.


She sits on my lap during this process, because, as her highchair was being assembled, a strap got caught in the place where the instructions strictly warned and forbade it from getting caught- we will not say whose fault that was- and now it seems to be permanent part of the structure, unless we can figure out how to undo the hinges and each time I look at it, I am filled with despair, so my lap it is.


Which reminds me of her last doctor's appointment. It was set for three in the afternoon and coming up on this event, that hour seemed to provide ample time for preparation. In fact, in order to prepare, I had given the baby a bath in the morning, so that she would be all sweetly clean and smelling of lotion for the doctor, who would then be doubtless impressed with my mothering skills.


After her bath, I decided it would be a great idea to give her downy, clean smelling hair its first comb with a tiny baby comb, so that she would be especially adorable. As soon as I did this, all of her cradle cap decided to come loose at once. This was horrifying.


"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, you're beautiful, this is mommy's fault! What was mommy thinking? Don't worry this is fine, this is going to be okay," I was wailing, while attempting to get her hair free of the stuff, but there was no end of it. Baby herself was unaware that tragedy was occurring right then and there, on top of her head and continued contentedly chewing on her fingers.


(I called my mom later, and my mother said the exact thing had happened to her, with me.


"All the baby books said to leave it be, that it was fine, and not mess with it, so I did, until now!" I wailed. "I just wanted to comb her hair! Surely I must comb her hair sometime!"


"No, that is right," my mom assured me. "It's perfectly natural. It'll go away on it's own."


But I digress.)


I did the best I could with it, but I didn't want to annoy the innocent child, so I had to leave it be. By two thirty, I suddenly found myself with a baby with a head full of dandruff to wake and change and insert into car seat, car seat to insert into car, diaper bag to sling in with, purse to be located and directions to be found, just in case.


In order not to lose my phone, I had jammed it into the back pocket of my jeans. Before beginning preparations for baby, I had decided I had better use the bathroom myself, because heaven forbid this need should arrive at the doctor's office, where all and sundry must enter the restroom with me and how on earth? Best not even to allow for this.


However- the best laid plans and all that. Somehow, the phone fell with a terrible plunk into the toilet. This was a shocking on many levels.


Fortunately, the water was still as clean as toilet water can ever be said to be, and so, after a horrified moment of wrestling all my best instincts down, I reached right in and grabbed the phone and then held it, dripping in my hand, and wondered what the next step might be in this unfortunate and unforeseen event.


I tossed it into the sink, realized I needed to wash my hand, realized I couldn't with the phone in the sink and realized I needed to get the phone dry if I were ever to use it again. So I used toilet paper and then remembered the small bit of brown rice still in the pantry, and how that is useful when a phone is wet.


So into the bag of rice the phone was tossed, I was able to wash my hands and then I realized I had yet to even wake the baby up. Somehow I remained calm while waking and dressing a sleepy but mild mannered baby and got her all set in the car seat.


Now I was really running late, so I fished the phone out of the rice and jammed it again into my back pocket- a habit is a habit- and rushed out the door, though rushing is not exactly the right word to use when I was laden down with baby gear, looking a camel about to cross the Serengeti.


I got everything situated in the car and then sat in the driver's seat, only to realize that my butt was cold and, worst still, wet. The phone had leaked its excess water out into my jeans in the short time that it had rested there.


I looked up at the now locked house with a kind of patient despair. I was out of time. There was nothing to be done. I looked in the storage compartment for the GPS. It was not there. I raised my eyes to heaven, ie, the roof of the car.


"Dear sweet Lord," I prayed, fervently. "Please don't let me get lost, ending up somewhere in the bowels of the city amid a confusing tangle of menacing highways and byways, now that my phone might not be working."


And so that is how I arrived at the doctor's office with two minutes to spare, sporting a butt wet with toilet water, a rice gummed phone and carrying a baby with a head full of dandruff. This is also why I will never, ever have an iphone.


At least I found the place. Maybe I should have been praying for the phone as well.

November 28th

It's unseasonably cold down here in Georgia. I could hear the heater kicking on all night long and this morning the lawn was pale with frost. The sunlight moves around the house differently this time of year. It creeps into corners and slides down the wall, deep and golden and then gone.

The oval window at the foot of the stairs lets in a perfect circle of light early in the morning. For the light loving person that I am, this is a gift and I thank Him each time I see it, for the way it lifts my heart even when my body is exhausted and my eyes bleary.

It's Thanksgiving and there are cars parked along the side of the road and piled up in driveways, as families up and down the street congregate in heated houses, steaming with spices and cooking, overflowing with the television sounds and conversation and children.

Or they are quiet and shuttered, getting through the day one hour at a time, feeling out of place, feeling slightly foolish, the way Keith and I did, when we first arrived in Georgia. We were fresh from the wounding of infertility and that year spent hidden down the winding roads and woods of Kentucky.

I remembered that year recently, when Keith and I were outside earlier this month. He was grilling chicken and I was holding the baby and we were both completely exhausted, drawn way out past what we would have thought we could handle.

It was late afternoon and the light was caught on the tips of the pines and slanting down onto the dry yard. There was the scent of barbecue and smoke, and as I rocked in that mindless, almost effortless dance that one learns with a baby, I remembered that spring in Kentucky.

That back porch was green smeared from moisture- that winter, there has been months of cloud cover. The woods were black and bare, the leaves moldering on the forest floor. The sunlight sparkled on rivulets of water that ran down our quiet street. The sun was lowering and I caught the light in my eyes as it shot through the tangled branches.

We were exhausted then too, from the move and the winter and adjusting to married life. Our entire first year was spent in the emotional roller coaster of his deployment to Iraq; when he returned and before he left, we were drunk on that awful, exhilarating rush of feeling that is impossible to sustain.

After he came home safe, we had to figure out who we were all over again, in a new state, in a new house and a new job, and with the growing knowledge, month after month, something must be wrong very wrong, that we were not getting pregnant.

I was so angry at God. I didn't know Him very well and I was carrying so much heavy religious baggage. Sometimes I still bump up against the broken shards of it inside me; sometimes it feels like I'm living inside the ruins of an abandoned factory, made to make me into the person I thought I had to be- to press me and scald me and force me into perfection, no matter what part of me withered away in the shadows of those awful, unyielding beliefs.

That day in Kentucky, the spring so early it was nothing more than the hint of something fresh and chill in the air, I leaned against Keith as he stood on the back porch. He was warm, solid and smelled of smoke and barbecue sauce and this familiar scent lit up memories of our life before he deployed and that giddy autumn before we moved.

I knew we would be okay. It didn't matter where we found ourselves or how many deep places in life we had to make our way through- we would find our way back to ourselves again. And that has been true- we went through infertility and two moves and two years of working on the adoption before we held our daughter in our arms.

We thought we were prepared, but there was no way that we could have grasped how parenthood breaks apart you apart and then puts you back together, piece by piece, in ways that would have seemed impossible, before.

It's raw and exhausting; the work is slow, slow, slow and unending, hour by hour, day by day, with sudden, shining breakthroughs, like the first time she laughs and this delights even her and the first time she realizes that her hands can make something move. It's the hardest work I've ever done and most meaningful and even knowing everything I know so far- and I have so much more to learn, about being a parent- I would accept it all over again.

This year, I have been thankful for the most life changing things. There was the phone call to tell us that two complete strangers had insisted that Keith and I be the parents of their unborn girl, despite the fact that they should never have seen our profile, and the moment that I saw my daughter for the first time, attached to tubes and machines and nearly swallowed up by the tiniest diaper the hospital had on hand, and putting this tiny person into the car seat and actually driving away with her, because she was healthy, putting on weight, breathing on her own, and ours- our own daughter, a member of our newly expanded family.

This fall, I have been thankful for the most elementary things- for the ability to crouch down before the refrigerator and then to rise up effortlessly, turn easily on my hips and walk to the counter, for Meri falling asleep on only the second time I put her down, and for the light at the foot of the stairs.

October 31st

Holy crap, I think I have time to write, and I must seize the moment.

I have a crockpot meal going, the smoky scent of the pork carnitas drifts in the air, along with the tinny, electronic notes of Meri's swing. I tried lulling her into the swing with the soothing notes of ocean waves or jungle birds, but she will have none of it.

She clearly prefers one themed jingles repeated endlessly; something like a particularly annoying ice cream truck circling the house again and again and again and again. That's okay though, she has lots of time for her musical appreciation to develop. I'm sure by the age of two that she will prefer Bach's cantatas and Mumford and Sons.

I am in the throes of sleep training. Sleep training is when you realize that you have done everything all wrong and that everything is coming back to bite you in the ass at two o'clock in the morning, when you would, naturally, prefer to be sleeping, and so one temporarily does things that worsens the situation in the hopes that, in the end, everything will improve. You will sleep, Baby will sleep and husband will sleep. It will be Goodnight Moon, everybody.

That's the dream, the goal, the illusion that taunts at the end of a long night of putting Meri down drowsy but not asleep, which she does not appreciate and protests most vehemently, over and over and over and over again.

This is, by the way, the exact opposite of the advice that I had started out with, advice that my first baby book gave so convincingly- to hold baby until she had fallen completely asleep- in deep, solid sleep. I mean, who's going to argue with that? Who wouldn't want to hold their adorable, cherished, little tiny baby girl in their arms while she peacefully drifts off into happy slumber?

Apparently, no one who wrote it heard anything about "sleep associations" and that once Meri ceased to sleep like a newborn and began instead to have short, light sleep cycles which would cause her naturally to wake several times in the night, she would need those sleep associations to get back to sleep, and if those sleep associations are my limp, aching arms twitching in exhausted sleep, she will make very sure to inform me of her need for said sleep associations.

As an aside, I have the most toned, shapely arms in the history of my having arms. I'd be down right slim if I wasn't addicted to chocolate and other forms of fatty foods. I guess if my body can't get sleep, it will demand chocolate.

My back is better, that is something that I am grateful for, every single day. There was a time when I couldn't sit, stand or walk without aching, stabbing, debilitating back pain that spread down my leg all the way to my foot and out from my hip into my stomach.. I had to kneel on the floor to change Meri's diaper instead of bending over the crib- I couldn't bend at all- and couldn't use the Moby wrap, obviously, or sit in the computer chair, even if I'd had the time to write. Hell, I couldn't get to the lower cabinets to put away the 12" sauce pan. I couldn't even lift it off the counter.

I was miserable. I ended up crying on the couch because I couldn't even hold Meri on my lap to feed her without waves of pain rolling down my back and leg. Soon after that, I made a trip to the clinic, where they reminded me that I still had a herniated disk- from that first year of my marriage, when Keith was deployed and I was working in an assisted living home. The pain had gone away, but the injury never does. It's always there, lurking, looking for an opportunity to strike again.

They gave me a shot of something or other and some medication and some back stretches, which I now do, religiously, whenever I can get Meri to fall asleep in her bassinet, and I did a lot of walking, and now I am almost back to normal and can wear Meri in the wrap, which was an elevated manner of living to which she was very accustomed and which she was not happy to give up.

The neighbors around here go all out with their decorations- there are ghosts across the doors and skeletons half buried in the landscaping, decals on windows and gravestones on front yards. We had a pumpkin for a while and then, after a week or so, caved in to the unspoken peer pressure of the houses across the street, and bought some cheap foil decorations which are now hung, somewhat haphazardly, on the wisteria tree.

If this is what they do for Halloween, I am in big trouble for Christmas. It's not that I wouldn't love to decorate everything to the nines, it's just that it costs so very much and right around the holidays is when I have the least amount of money for it and even though, each year, I tell myself I will be all housewife-ly and clever and coupon clip-y and buy the decorations after the holiday, when they are half price, I never actually remember to do it.

We are heading toward that Indiana ideal of three attached garages- one double, one single, with an even larger pole barn in the back with space and height for snowplow, and one shed. This is my husband's heritage and our eventual car housing/storage goal in life- we built this house specifically to create a custom, larger garage and now we have purchased a storage shed.

I think this is as far as we can go in this house, but you can bet in our next house we will have all the car storage that my Indiana farm raised tank commander could possibly imagine, and that is going to be a lot. He's already been talking about getting a golf cart and "just a little bulldozer." Purchasing the John Deer ride-on lawn mower is just a given, of course.

I would end with a cute little picture of Meri in her adorable Halloween costume, but I couldn't find any adorable costumes in her size- two and a half months. The only thing I could find was a little kitty outfit in neon pink with black tights, and she is currently not wearing the tights, because putting them on and taking them off again at every diaper change drives us both a little nutty. Also, I bought the outfit two weeks ago and though the tights are still many inches too long, the top only fits now with the back buttons undone.

I assure you, however, that she is still very cute.