Thursday, July 31, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
Potty Time
This morning, for the first time, I heard those three little words that every mother of a toddler yearns to hear: Mommy, go potty!
That’s right. It’s official. We’ve entered the Potty Training Era.
I figured it was coming. Over the last year, we’ve had a few false starts into the PTE as Fletcher flirted with the idea of potty use without fully embracing it. Of course, the second he showed the slightest flicker of interest in bathroom goings on, we jumped all over it. After crawling, walking and uttering a few choice words, PT is the Next Big Thing in toddler milestones, and I was amped up and ready to go, so to speak. I did some basic potty prep and bought the oh-so-grating Once Upon A Potty book, which came with a teeny plastic potty and an anatomically correct boy doll -- which we promptly christened Potty Pete -- to put upon it. And whenever I’d have to go, which is quite often, since I have a teacup of a bladder, I’d sing out, “Come watch Mommy go potty!” The idea (the fervent hope really) was that Fletcher would get the hang of the bathroom thing by watching me and then be ready to pee solo in no time. You can stop laughing now. Really. Stop. Right. So, back on earth... that was never going to happen. What has happened, though is that Fletcher seems to be picking up PT piecemeal. He quickly grasped the process of unrolling all the toilet paper and stuffing it into the bowl. And flushing. He loves flushing. That boy could stand in the bathroom, pushing the handle down and watching the water swirl round the bowl all day long. Which, come to think of it, may explain our enormous water bill. Though, I actually counted my blessings over that one, since the flushing noise scares lots of kids, and then you have to let things sit there and remember to go back later and flush when they’re not around. And believe me, with everything else you have to keep track of, and with the very real condition of “mom brain” in which anything really important that you try to remember, like Did I snap the baby carrier into the car seat base before I left ... or just leave it and the baby in the driveway?, just leaks out of your brain like store-brand sauce through a colander and ... what was I saying? Right, with everything else going on, it’s unlikely you’ll remember any time soon. And when that shit just sits around, it gets really gross.
But back to PT. My multiple potty training books and the numerous magazine articles I read on the subject suggested Fletcher would be more invested in the PT process if he had a hand in picking a potty of his very own. So one afternoon, Stewart took Fletcher on a daddy-son potty bonding shopping trip to Target.
That was our first mistake.
Fletcher’s clearly inherited his father’s gadgetphilia. In our house, we’ve got more redundant time-saving, snazzy-looking gizmos than I know what to do with -- the motorized grill scrubbing brush, the battery powered milk frother for cappuccino, the auto-softening ice cream scooper, the iPod nano that sits unused at the bottom of one of my dresser drawers, the radar detector languishing in my glove box. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised when they came home with the Mac Daddy of baby potties, fully loaded with everything a toilet-training tot would need ... except maybe a built-in plasma screen and iPod docking station.
“He picked it out,” Stewart shrugged when I raised an eyebrows at the thing when he started assembling it.
At first I thought the gimmicks -- a faux paper roll that sings when you spin it; a seat that issues congratulations when sat upon, the lid that announced “up,” “down” as you moved it -- would encourage Fletcher to hunker down and take care of business. But we soon discovered, a talking, singing, whistling, whooping potty doesn’t help at all. In fact, it’s a major distraction from the task at hand. Why pish when you can play? Fletcher would amuse himself lifting the seat and putting it down, unfurling yards and yards of real toilet paper, stuffing it inside the play potty, which would then chime You used the potty! Yea!
It wasn’t exactly on message.
Obviously, we were putting the cart waaaaay before the horse. Fletcher was more interested in the potty for its entertainment value ... and as a place to display stickers, since we rewarded Fletcher with them if his tush so much as brushed the potty seat for more than two seconds. But he never expressed any desire to use the potty for what it was originally designed for.
In the hopes of rekindling his interest, I even relaxed our limits on TV time to let Fletcher watch Elmo’s Potty Time DVD over and over and over and over. Fletcher loves Elmo. In fact, we credit this fuzzy red puppet with getting Fletcher talking. Around the time that Fletcher (again) stubbornly refused to say anything other than Mama, Dada and duck (at least we hoped it was duck), and our pediatrician was expressing some mild concern about his reticence, we’d taken him to see Sesame Street Live! and gotten him a helium-filled Elmo balloon. Coming down the stairs the next morning, Fletcher pointed right at it and said, unprompted: “Elmo!” After that, the words flowed like a Midwestern river. Best eight bucks we’ve ever spent. So, I figured, if Elmo couldn’t influence Fletcher to use the potty, well, he very well might be going off to college still in pull-ups. We watched that thing so many times, I woke in the night with Gordon’s voice crooning “Grownups do it/Oh yeah, we do it/Folks all around the world do it/You’ll do it/You’ll use the potty” ringing in my ears. After the umpteenth viewing, it was making me a little crazed.
Still, every morning, I’d ask, “Do you want to sit on the potty?”
“No,” he’d respond with the irritating stubbornness typical of toddlers everywhere.
I decided to chill for a while. Just as a watched pot won’t boil, a heckled todder will refuse all entreaties to do as you ask. Meanwhile, I checked with my girlfriend Lara, who we share a nanny with, to see how she was progressing with her two-year-old’s training. She and her husband had decided to take the Evelyn Wood approach. In anticipation of an extended trip home to the Middle East, they were taking a week off from work to give their son a crash course in correct toilet use. “I. Am. Not. Packing. Diapers,” Lara told me with firm conviction. With the extra costs for baggage these days, who could blame her? But, see, I don’t have that kind of determined focus ... and wasn’t facing hundreds of dollars in baggage fees to motivate me. I could barely keep track of Fletcher’s diaper output when he was an newborn and I needed to make sure he was getting enough breastmilk. I couldn’t see myself sticking long to a plan that required me to poise him on the potty every 30 minutes. Besides, if I ever do get a few days off, I don’t want to spend them chasing my toddler with a mop and carpet cleaner when I could be doing something meaningful like watching Jungle Book 2.
So lacking the discipline for potty training boot camp, I figured the path of least resistance (certainly for me) was to wait it out. Though our pediatrician seemed surprised that we hadn’t started PT by 18 months, everything I’d read told me that little boys in the U.S. typically get the hang of the whole potty thing around 3 to 4 years old. So I figured we had at least six months before I had to panic. In the meantime, I told myself -- a common practice among moms concerned their wee ones aren’t hitting those milestones according to our timetable -- that, Elmo notwithstanding, it really was unlikely Fletcher would go off to college in pull-ups. (I plan to use, or rather cling to, that same logic when we get ready to kick the binky habit, but more on that later.)
Sure enough, backing off paid off. A few weeks ago, Fletcher started asking to sit -- just sit -- on the potty at nursery school. Other kids (older kids) were down with the potty thing. He wanted to do it too. Finally, an upside to peer pressure. While I hoped that this desire to enthusiastically follow the pack wouldn’t lead him into crystal meth later one, potty-wise, I glommed onto any motivating factor I could.
Hoping to capitalize on this new found PT interest, we headed to Target the next day where Fletcher picked out his first big boy underwear -- Elmo (natch) and Thomas The Tank Engine. We also grabbed a Go, Diego! Go! potty seat. It had none of the bells and whistles of his first potty, but we hoped Diego’s exhortations would at least encourage Fletcher to “go” as well. And a day or so later, it did ... which brings us back to those three little cherished words. It was just Alicia, our nanny, and me at home then when Fletcher announced he wanted to go. Quick as we could yank his diaper off, we hoisted him onto his Go, Diego! Go seat, turned on the faucet for encouragement and after several very long minutes. Then ...Eureka! He did it! There were cheers and hugs and high-fives all around. Alicia quickly drew up a “potty chart” to track his progress. I phoned everyone I could tell without embarrassment that Fletcher!!!! Used!!! The!!! Potty!!! The next morning, Fletcher got to tell his preschool teacher all about it, earning yet another sticker and another high-five for his stellar efforts. Yessiree ... we were on our way.
Then, faster than you can say Flushed away!, the whole mission sputtered to a standstill. Sure, since his initial triumph, Fletcher’s spent lots of time on the potty -- his nursery school teachers tell me he loves to sit on the potty at school. But we’ve yet to experience a repeat performance at home. And no matter how many times I ask Do you want to go potty?, I’m met with a flat Uh, No. The other day, his nanny sat with him for 20 minutes while he played and sang, stuffed paper in the toilet, flushed ... basically did everything except what he was there for till she finally threw in the towel herself. Again, I thought we were close a few nights later at a family dinner. Toward the end of the meal, Fletcher bolted from his seat and loudly proclaimed, “Go potty!” so that everyone within earshot, which is to say, everyone in the restaurant, was instantly privy to his intentions. I dutifully took him to the bathroom, put him on the seat and actually sat down on a public restroom floor to await the Second Coming. Ah, I’m sure Beckett must have been potty training his two-year-old when he wrote Waiting For Godot. I feel like one of the characters, waiting by that lonely tree for pee that never arrives.
Because that’s the thing about PT. It’s a series of false starts; one pish forward, three poops back ... and we haven’t even gotten to overnights yet. At the moment, we’re back to regarding the potty as a toy and going to the potty -- and shouting it out -- as an amusing game. So, I expect that, unlike my pal Lara, we’ll be plateaued here for a while. But I will say this, with all the playing around he’s doing, he has mastered one more piece of the potty puzzle that undoubtedly will be appreciated by future girlfriends and eventually his wife: He’s had a ton of practice putting the seat down.
That’s right. It’s official. We’ve entered the Potty Training Era.
I figured it was coming. Over the last year, we’ve had a few false starts into the PTE as Fletcher flirted with the idea of potty use without fully embracing it. Of course, the second he showed the slightest flicker of interest in bathroom goings on, we jumped all over it. After crawling, walking and uttering a few choice words, PT is the Next Big Thing in toddler milestones, and I was amped up and ready to go, so to speak. I did some basic potty prep and bought the oh-so-grating Once Upon A Potty book, which came with a teeny plastic potty and an anatomically correct boy doll -- which we promptly christened Potty Pete -- to put upon it. And whenever I’d have to go, which is quite often, since I have a teacup of a bladder, I’d sing out, “Come watch Mommy go potty!” The idea (the fervent hope really) was that Fletcher would get the hang of the bathroom thing by watching me and then be ready to pee solo in no time. You can stop laughing now. Really. Stop. Right. So, back on earth... that was never going to happen. What has happened, though is that Fletcher seems to be picking up PT piecemeal. He quickly grasped the process of unrolling all the toilet paper and stuffing it into the bowl. And flushing. He loves flushing. That boy could stand in the bathroom, pushing the handle down and watching the water swirl round the bowl all day long. Which, come to think of it, may explain our enormous water bill. Though, I actually counted my blessings over that one, since the flushing noise scares lots of kids, and then you have to let things sit there and remember to go back later and flush when they’re not around. And believe me, with everything else you have to keep track of, and with the very real condition of “mom brain” in which anything really important that you try to remember, like Did I snap the baby carrier into the car seat base before I left ... or just leave it and the baby in the driveway?, just leaks out of your brain like store-brand sauce through a colander and ... what was I saying? Right, with everything else going on, it’s unlikely you’ll remember any time soon. And when that shit just sits around, it gets really gross.
But back to PT. My multiple potty training books and the numerous magazine articles I read on the subject suggested Fletcher would be more invested in the PT process if he had a hand in picking a potty of his very own. So one afternoon, Stewart took Fletcher on a daddy-son potty bonding shopping trip to Target.
That was our first mistake.
Fletcher’s clearly inherited his father’s gadgetphilia. In our house, we’ve got more redundant time-saving, snazzy-looking gizmos than I know what to do with -- the motorized grill scrubbing brush, the battery powered milk frother for cappuccino, the auto-softening ice cream scooper, the iPod nano that sits unused at the bottom of one of my dresser drawers, the radar detector languishing in my glove box. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised when they came home with the Mac Daddy of baby potties, fully loaded with everything a toilet-training tot would need ... except maybe a built-in plasma screen and iPod docking station.
“He picked it out,” Stewart shrugged when I raised an eyebrows at the thing when he started assembling it.
At first I thought the gimmicks -- a faux paper roll that sings when you spin it; a seat that issues congratulations when sat upon, the lid that announced “up,” “down” as you moved it -- would encourage Fletcher to hunker down and take care of business. But we soon discovered, a talking, singing, whistling, whooping potty doesn’t help at all. In fact, it’s a major distraction from the task at hand. Why pish when you can play? Fletcher would amuse himself lifting the seat and putting it down, unfurling yards and yards of real toilet paper, stuffing it inside the play potty, which would then chime You used the potty! Yea!
It wasn’t exactly on message.
Obviously, we were putting the cart waaaaay before the horse. Fletcher was more interested in the potty for its entertainment value ... and as a place to display stickers, since we rewarded Fletcher with them if his tush so much as brushed the potty seat for more than two seconds. But he never expressed any desire to use the potty for what it was originally designed for.
In the hopes of rekindling his interest, I even relaxed our limits on TV time to let Fletcher watch Elmo’s Potty Time DVD over and over and over and over. Fletcher loves Elmo. In fact, we credit this fuzzy red puppet with getting Fletcher talking. Around the time that Fletcher (again) stubbornly refused to say anything other than Mama, Dada and duck (at least we hoped it was duck), and our pediatrician was expressing some mild concern about his reticence, we’d taken him to see Sesame Street Live! and gotten him a helium-filled Elmo balloon. Coming down the stairs the next morning, Fletcher pointed right at it and said, unprompted: “Elmo!” After that, the words flowed like a Midwestern river. Best eight bucks we’ve ever spent. So, I figured, if Elmo couldn’t influence Fletcher to use the potty, well, he very well might be going off to college still in pull-ups. We watched that thing so many times, I woke in the night with Gordon’s voice crooning “Grownups do it/Oh yeah, we do it/Folks all around the world do it/You’ll do it/You’ll use the potty” ringing in my ears. After the umpteenth viewing, it was making me a little crazed.
Still, every morning, I’d ask, “Do you want to sit on the potty?”
“No,” he’d respond with the irritating stubbornness typical of toddlers everywhere.
I decided to chill for a while. Just as a watched pot won’t boil, a heckled todder will refuse all entreaties to do as you ask. Meanwhile, I checked with my girlfriend Lara, who we share a nanny with, to see how she was progressing with her two-year-old’s training. She and her husband had decided to take the Evelyn Wood approach. In anticipation of an extended trip home to the Middle East, they were taking a week off from work to give their son a crash course in correct toilet use. “I. Am. Not. Packing. Diapers,” Lara told me with firm conviction. With the extra costs for baggage these days, who could blame her? But, see, I don’t have that kind of determined focus ... and wasn’t facing hundreds of dollars in baggage fees to motivate me. I could barely keep track of Fletcher’s diaper output when he was an newborn and I needed to make sure he was getting enough breastmilk. I couldn’t see myself sticking long to a plan that required me to poise him on the potty every 30 minutes. Besides, if I ever do get a few days off, I don’t want to spend them chasing my toddler with a mop and carpet cleaner when I could be doing something meaningful like watching Jungle Book 2.
So lacking the discipline for potty training boot camp, I figured the path of least resistance (certainly for me) was to wait it out. Though our pediatrician seemed surprised that we hadn’t started PT by 18 months, everything I’d read told me that little boys in the U.S. typically get the hang of the whole potty thing around 3 to 4 years old. So I figured we had at least six months before I had to panic. In the meantime, I told myself -- a common practice among moms concerned their wee ones aren’t hitting those milestones according to our timetable -- that, Elmo notwithstanding, it really was unlikely Fletcher would go off to college in pull-ups. (I plan to use, or rather cling to, that same logic when we get ready to kick the binky habit, but more on that later.)
Sure enough, backing off paid off. A few weeks ago, Fletcher started asking to sit -- just sit -- on the potty at nursery school. Other kids (older kids) were down with the potty thing. He wanted to do it too. Finally, an upside to peer pressure. While I hoped that this desire to enthusiastically follow the pack wouldn’t lead him into crystal meth later one, potty-wise, I glommed onto any motivating factor I could.
Hoping to capitalize on this new found PT interest, we headed to Target the next day where Fletcher picked out his first big boy underwear -- Elmo (natch) and Thomas The Tank Engine. We also grabbed a Go, Diego! Go! potty seat. It had none of the bells and whistles of his first potty, but we hoped Diego’s exhortations would at least encourage Fletcher to “go” as well. And a day or so later, it did ... which brings us back to those three little cherished words. It was just Alicia, our nanny, and me at home then when Fletcher announced he wanted to go. Quick as we could yank his diaper off, we hoisted him onto his Go, Diego! Go seat, turned on the faucet for encouragement and after several very long minutes. Then ...Eureka! He did it! There were cheers and hugs and high-fives all around. Alicia quickly drew up a “potty chart” to track his progress. I phoned everyone I could tell without embarrassment that Fletcher!!!! Used!!! The!!! Potty!!! The next morning, Fletcher got to tell his preschool teacher all about it, earning yet another sticker and another high-five for his stellar efforts. Yessiree ... we were on our way.
Then, faster than you can say Flushed away!, the whole mission sputtered to a standstill. Sure, since his initial triumph, Fletcher’s spent lots of time on the potty -- his nursery school teachers tell me he loves to sit on the potty at school. But we’ve yet to experience a repeat performance at home. And no matter how many times I ask Do you want to go potty?, I’m met with a flat Uh, No. The other day, his nanny sat with him for 20 minutes while he played and sang, stuffed paper in the toilet, flushed ... basically did everything except what he was there for till she finally threw in the towel herself. Again, I thought we were close a few nights later at a family dinner. Toward the end of the meal, Fletcher bolted from his seat and loudly proclaimed, “Go potty!” so that everyone within earshot, which is to say, everyone in the restaurant, was instantly privy to his intentions. I dutifully took him to the bathroom, put him on the seat and actually sat down on a public restroom floor to await the Second Coming. Ah, I’m sure Beckett must have been potty training his two-year-old when he wrote Waiting For Godot. I feel like one of the characters, waiting by that lonely tree for pee that never arrives.
Because that’s the thing about PT. It’s a series of false starts; one pish forward, three poops back ... and we haven’t even gotten to overnights yet. At the moment, we’re back to regarding the potty as a toy and going to the potty -- and shouting it out -- as an amusing game. So, I expect that, unlike my pal Lara, we’ll be plateaued here for a while. But I will say this, with all the playing around he’s doing, he has mastered one more piece of the potty puzzle that undoubtedly will be appreciated by future girlfriends and eventually his wife: He’s had a ton of practice putting the seat down.
Monday, June 30, 2008
One
When I married my first husband, I don’t think the wedding band was on my finger 15 minutes before my father asked, “So when am I going to have a grandchild?” Well, 12 years, one divorce and another wedding later, he finally got a grandson. And barely a year later, I started getting from all quarters, “So, when are you going to have another one?”
Huh? Are you kidding me?!?! I’m still adjusting to this one.
My standard reply alternates between “We don’t want to have more kids than we can afford to send through graduate school” and “Well … maybe if we’d started earlier …” Yes, I’m aware that women in their late 50s are having babies, thank you Aleta St. James. Hey, if you wanna be pushing 80 at your kid’s college graduation, go for it … and I hope that in the excitement of watching your progeny receive a diploma, you don’t trip over your walker and break a hip. But, as far as I’m concerned, this factory produced a single model and is hereby closed to business.
Still, every few weeks someone -- someone who’s usually 10 years younger than me -- asks, “Are you ready for number two?” Or “Don’t you want to have another baby?” Or “Wouldn’t it be nice if Fletcher had a sister?”
This last wistful thought came from my nanny as she was reorganizing my cup cabinet. We’re transitioning from sippy cups to cups with straws -- part of our proactive plan to avoid putting a Mercedes worth of orthodontics in Fletcher’s mouth later on. I wanted to ditch the sippy cups altogether or at least pass them on to someone else who could use them.
“No, save them,” my nanny objected. “You could have another baby.” She looked at me slyly. “Maybe a little girl. Think of the pigtails. The freckles.”
Trust me, I have thought of the pigtails and the ribbons and the dresses and the dollies. [See Boy Toys ] Though it would be nice to play dress up with a little girl, I’m still not having another one. Period. This is because --
A) We’ve rolled the genetic dice and were immensely relieved to come up with a healthy kid, and it’s doubtful that as our eggs and sperm age, the fates will smile on us again.
B) I’m basically selfish. Having resigned myself to the fact that I will sleep the rest of my nights with one ear cocked to the sniffled cries of Mommy? Mommy! and abandoned the luxury of ever being able to pee alone, not to mention ceding precious DVR space to Sesame Street and Word World episodes, I’d like half a shot of getting some of my grownup, pre-mommy life back in the form of a work day that isn’t interrupted by changing diapers and picking up children from nursery school and a social life that doesn’t revolve around playgroups …unless said group involves attractive consenting adults, condoms and lube.
Hmm, maybe that sounds a tad defensive. But when did one’s kid count become anyone else’s affair, anyway? I never ask -- in fact make a point of not asking -- other couples with one child if they’re planning more or childless couples for that matter if they’re planning any for the simple reason that you never know if your innocent question will pop open a whole big can of hurt. One of my girlfriends was nearly brought to tears when a casual acquaintance thoughtlessly (callously in my opinion) asked “Is one really enough for you?” The jab was especially sharp because at the time my friend was knocking herself out trying to get knocked up with Number Two... and failing miserably. No, one child wasn’t enough for her …though she didn’t need to be reminded of it by a near-stranger.
You'd think with twin preschool girls, my friend Sonia would be safe from these kinds of nosy inquiries from relative strangers. But nope. She still gets them. Yes, she would like more, but she can't and she's made her peace with that. She's casually considering adoption ... maybe ... sometime in the future ... maybe. Still she shames the askers of inappropriate questions like this by letting tears well up in her beautiful brown eyes and sputtering out, "I'd love to ... but I had had to have an emergency hysterectomy after the girls were born." Most people don't say much after that since they're trying to extricate their feet from their mouths.
So, maybe we could dial down the “Are you going to have another baby? Are you? Are you? ARE YOU? When?” Or at least not challenge our curt “No, we’re done” with “Are you sure? Really sure? You might change your mind later.” George W. might be remembered as a thoughtful, effective president, but I highly doubt it.
This is why I really do know that even though reproductive technology might allow me to have babies well into my fifth decade, we won’t be doing an encore: It took me decades -- decades! -- to come around to the idea of having even one child. I vacillated more than Hamlet on the Have A Baby/Don’t Have A Baby question -- and twice took the bail-out option guaranteed by Roe v Wade … and suspenders-and-belted it on more than one occasion with the “morning after pill.”
Back in my younger years, whenever a friend told me she was pregnant, my hearty Mazel Tov! barely concealed bewilderment that anyone would want to get off the career track just as they were gaining traction. But a decade later -- about the time when Stewart’s best friend and old college roommate called to let us know that he and his wife were having a baby girl -- I was surprised to find my hardcore stance softening. My unguarded heart lurched at our friends’ news. A baby! I want one! suddenly flashed in my brain.
Of course, I wanted a lot of things -- a brownstone in Brooklyn, a collection of Manolo Blahniks, a National Magazine Award, the ability to eat a fudge brownie sundae without it immediately showing up on my butt and thighs. But since babies pretty much come with a no-return policy, I also wanted to tread carefully to be sure I wouldn’t later suffer buyer’s (parent’s?) remorse. So I waited and pondered as Stewart and I tried to figure out whether our relationship would go the distance. Meanwhile, friends continued to pop up periodically with announcements that -- Mazel Tov! -- they were expecting. And though happy for them, my hearty Mazel Tovs barely concealed a tiny quiver of sadness and regret that I didn’t have similar news to report.
Fast forward past that divorce and second wedding, and now it’s nearly two and a half years since Stewart and I finally had our One. I know he is our Only because I recently heard from a girlfriend, who’d similarly been straddling the baby fence. She called to tell me that she was expecting Number Two. And in my hearty Mazel Tov there was no longing … only joy …for her.
Huh? Are you kidding me?!?! I’m still adjusting to this one.
My standard reply alternates between “We don’t want to have more kids than we can afford to send through graduate school” and “Well … maybe if we’d started earlier …” Yes, I’m aware that women in their late 50s are having babies, thank you Aleta St. James. Hey, if you wanna be pushing 80 at your kid’s college graduation, go for it … and I hope that in the excitement of watching your progeny receive a diploma, you don’t trip over your walker and break a hip. But, as far as I’m concerned, this factory produced a single model and is hereby closed to business.
Still, every few weeks someone -- someone who’s usually 10 years younger than me -- asks, “Are you ready for number two?” Or “Don’t you want to have another baby?” Or “Wouldn’t it be nice if Fletcher had a sister?”
This last wistful thought came from my nanny as she was reorganizing my cup cabinet. We’re transitioning from sippy cups to cups with straws -- part of our proactive plan to avoid putting a Mercedes worth of orthodontics in Fletcher’s mouth later on. I wanted to ditch the sippy cups altogether or at least pass them on to someone else who could use them.
“No, save them,” my nanny objected. “You could have another baby.” She looked at me slyly. “Maybe a little girl. Think of the pigtails. The freckles.”
Trust me, I have thought of the pigtails and the ribbons and the dresses and the dollies. [See Boy Toys ] Though it would be nice to play dress up with a little girl, I’m still not having another one. Period. This is because --
A) We’ve rolled the genetic dice and were immensely relieved to come up with a healthy kid, and it’s doubtful that as our eggs and sperm age, the fates will smile on us again.
B) I’m basically selfish. Having resigned myself to the fact that I will sleep the rest of my nights with one ear cocked to the sniffled cries of Mommy? Mommy! and abandoned the luxury of ever being able to pee alone, not to mention ceding precious DVR space to Sesame Street and Word World episodes, I’d like half a shot of getting some of my grownup, pre-mommy life back in the form of a work day that isn’t interrupted by changing diapers and picking up children from nursery school and a social life that doesn’t revolve around playgroups …unless said group involves attractive consenting adults, condoms and lube.
Hmm, maybe that sounds a tad defensive. But when did one’s kid count become anyone else’s affair, anyway? I never ask -- in fact make a point of not asking -- other couples with one child if they’re planning more or childless couples for that matter if they’re planning any for the simple reason that you never know if your innocent question will pop open a whole big can of hurt. One of my girlfriends was nearly brought to tears when a casual acquaintance thoughtlessly (callously in my opinion) asked “Is one really enough for you?” The jab was especially sharp because at the time my friend was knocking herself out trying to get knocked up with Number Two... and failing miserably. No, one child wasn’t enough for her …though she didn’t need to be reminded of it by a near-stranger.
You'd think with twin preschool girls, my friend Sonia would be safe from these kinds of nosy inquiries from relative strangers. But nope. She still gets them. Yes, she would like more, but she can't and she's made her peace with that. She's casually considering adoption ... maybe ... sometime in the future ... maybe. Still she shames the askers of inappropriate questions like this by letting tears well up in her beautiful brown eyes and sputtering out, "I'd love to ... but I had had to have an emergency hysterectomy after the girls were born." Most people don't say much after that since they're trying to extricate their feet from their mouths.
So, maybe we could dial down the “Are you going to have another baby? Are you? Are you? ARE YOU? When?” Or at least not challenge our curt “No, we’re done” with “Are you sure? Really sure? You might change your mind later.” George W. might be remembered as a thoughtful, effective president, but I highly doubt it.
This is why I really do know that even though reproductive technology might allow me to have babies well into my fifth decade, we won’t be doing an encore: It took me decades -- decades! -- to come around to the idea of having even one child. I vacillated more than Hamlet on the Have A Baby/Don’t Have A Baby question -- and twice took the bail-out option guaranteed by Roe v Wade … and suspenders-and-belted it on more than one occasion with the “morning after pill.”
Back in my younger years, whenever a friend told me she was pregnant, my hearty Mazel Tov! barely concealed bewilderment that anyone would want to get off the career track just as they were gaining traction. But a decade later -- about the time when Stewart’s best friend and old college roommate called to let us know that he and his wife were having a baby girl -- I was surprised to find my hardcore stance softening. My unguarded heart lurched at our friends’ news. A baby! I want one! suddenly flashed in my brain.
Of course, I wanted a lot of things -- a brownstone in Brooklyn, a collection of Manolo Blahniks, a National Magazine Award, the ability to eat a fudge brownie sundae without it immediately showing up on my butt and thighs. But since babies pretty much come with a no-return policy, I also wanted to tread carefully to be sure I wouldn’t later suffer buyer’s (parent’s?) remorse. So I waited and pondered as Stewart and I tried to figure out whether our relationship would go the distance. Meanwhile, friends continued to pop up periodically with announcements that -- Mazel Tov! -- they were expecting. And though happy for them, my hearty Mazel Tovs barely concealed a tiny quiver of sadness and regret that I didn’t have similar news to report.
Fast forward past that divorce and second wedding, and now it’s nearly two and a half years since Stewart and I finally had our One. I know he is our Only because I recently heard from a girlfriend, who’d similarly been straddling the baby fence. She called to tell me that she was expecting Number Two. And in my hearty Mazel Tov there was no longing … only joy …for her.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Boy Toys
When I was pregnant, I was convinced -- 1000 percent positive, actually -- that we were having a girl. My husband Stewart would refer to my growing belly as “he” … and I’d routinely correct him. “No -- She.” These back-and-forths usually played out when we were in a department store’s baby section, and I was mooning over some ridiculously frilly powder pink dress that no baby could conceivably be comfortable in -- or able to keep clean -- for long. But those baby wear designers know exactly how to hook into a hormonal pregnant woman’s fantasies -- before they’re shattered by the reality that your bundle of joy will really live in the onesies you buy by the dozen because a) they’re comfortable and b) can be tossed without regret once they’re stained beyond repair.
Not that there was any rationale to my insistence that there was a girl baby cradled in there. My thinking ran along the lines that my sister already had two boys, and I figured, with the kind of twisted logic that makes Lotto addicts play the same combinations day after day, convinced their numberswill come up … someday, that it was simply time for our collective family to have a girl. And thus I was carrying her. So certain was I, we’d already picked out her name -- Quinn. I wasn’t even thinking about boy names, because … well, why bother? Obviously, we were having a girl.
And then around about 14 weeks, I had my amniocentesis.
“Do you want to know the sex?” the ultrasound tech asked as she slid the wand over my belly, before the maternal-fetal medicine specialist came in to play pincushion with my expanding waistline.
Now some people swear they don’t want to know their baby’s gender until the doctor joyfully announces “It’s a boy/girl!” in the delivery room. “There are so few surprises left in life,” they sigh wistfully, as if Christmas will never come again, and even if it does, they’re sure to get nothing more exciting than socks. “We want to be surprised when he/she arrives.”
Whatever.
I promise, if you’re newbie parents, there are still plenty of surprises in store for you. Just wait till your toddler is covered in sky-blue paint because you left a paint tray on the floor when you went to answer the phone and he decided to “help” paint while you were gone -- as my oldest nephew Eli did. (“He looked like a Smurf!” my sister still shrieks, now with laughter, but at the time, given that she’d just had her carpets cleaned … well … that’s another story.) Or when your daughter learns how to get her diaper off, discovers that poop is her true medium and finger paints her crib with it -- as my friend Gail’s daughter did. I’d bet hard money they were … surprised to say the least. So trust me on this: whether you find out at 14 weeks or 40 weeks when you give that final push your baby’s gender will still be a surprise. But knowing ahead of time, at least gives you a jump on nursery décor.
“Sure, what is it?” I agreed, confident my girl hunch would at last be confirmed.
“It’s a boy!” the tech said jubilantly, as if she’d somehow had a hand in his creation.
Wait … a boy? I looked at her dumbly. A boy? (What did I tell you about surprises, right?)
“Check again,” I directed, thinking she must have somehow been mistaken.
“Oh, it’s a boy all right,” she said, turning the monitor toward me and pointing to the fuzzy gray image onscreen. “See? That’s his penis, right there.”
It all just looked like a fuzzy gray blur to me. But Stewart, who knows his way around an ultrasound and had spotted the evidence well before the tech’s announcement, confirmed it. We were having a boy.
Later on, my mom called, all concerned. “Are you okay? Are you disappointed? You can tell me,” she said conspiratorially.
Well, on the one hand, I was delighted that the ultrasound showed everything was as it should be, and that I wouldn’t be giving birth to some eight-legged octopus alien out of Men In Black. Girl or boy, a healthy baby was ultimately all that mattered. But, yeah, my heart of hearts sank just a bit. And not just because I’d miss out on the parade of little girl baby fashions. But because the terrifying truth was, I had absolutely no idea how to play with a boy.
Growing up, I was the girliest of girly girls, from the ribbons in my hair to my lace-trimmed ankle socks and black patent leather Mary Janes. I disliked sports, loathed getting dirty, hated to rough-house. I played dolls, I played dress up, wearing so much of my mom’s tacky costume jewelry, I looked like a retirement home granny dolled up to receive visitors. For weeks after seeing my first Nutcracker ballet at age 5, I danced around the house in a pink tutu and cardboard tiara, pretending I was the Sugar Plum Fairy. In other words, I knew what to do with a girl. I could play tea party and house and Barbies all day long. (Sure, I knew how Barbie’s unrealistic dimensions could torpedo a girl’s self-esteem, but I was already prepping a feminist self-actualization speech to deal with that dilemma.)
But a boy? Utterly clueless. I felt like I’d been dropped into unfamiliar territory without interpreter or GPS. How’d the nursery rhyme go? Snips and snails and puppy dog tails? Having a boy meant there’d be no Barbies or princesses. Instead, I’d have trucks and bulldozers, trains, cars, and let’s not forget: -- assorted weaponry. (As I’d long ago learned from observing my nephews, any toy, no matter how innocuous, can instantly be transformed into a sword or a gun.)
My fears were only compounded when I dropped by my sister’s one night and found her hunkered down on her patio with a new Hot Wheels track, racing cars with her boys. I didn’t know how to play cars. Nor did I know how to play Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Rescue Heroes, Avatars or Transformers -- or any of the other things that seemed to captivate my nephews. The closest I’d come to playing with “action figures” was having Barbie make out with G.I. Joe because even as a kid I knew Ken batted for the other team. Even after my sister promised her boys would “bring me up to speed,” my anxiety that I wasn’t up to this task wasn’t entirely allayed.
After the baby formerly known as Quinn now formally called Fletcher was born, I held out as long as I could, studiously avoiding the obviously gender specific toys to see if we could find some middle ground I could relate to. Now there’s an uphill battle against evolutionary hard-wiring that’ll give you glutes of steel. Sure, Fletcher loves playing in the toy kitchen. But then, again, in our household, kitchen duty is hardly “girl” stuff: It’s my husband who mans the stovetop since I’ve been known to burn water, ruin box brownies, and once did actually set a kitchen on fire.
When I visited college friends and watched their daughter deck herself out in plastic beaded necklaces, rings, bracelets and tiaras, I knew I was swimming hard against the gender currents. Fletcher would endure a wicked case of diaper rash before he’d ever reach for that stuff. And as soon as he could make his preferences known and was mobile enough to get to what he wanted, Fletcher headed straight for the toy cars, spy gadgetry and play guns he found in his older cousins’ toy bins. Last Christmas, he instantly commandeered the new spiral racetrack that had been a gift to my nephew Dylan. While the rest of us ate, first, Christmas breakfast and then later moved on to Christmas dinner, Fletcher refused all attempts to engage him in anything else. He stuck with that toy the way a determined slots player sticks with a progressive jackpot.
I knew when I was beaten. I gave up and gave in.
Now our living room looks like a construction site imagined by Toys R Us, and I can actually articulate the difference between a back hoe and a front-end loader. But nothing gets my boy more jazzed than seeing a real-life, honest-to-goodness truck on the road while we’re driving. “Big truck! Big truck!” he shrieks excitedly from the back seat. And these days, a major source of entertainment involves standing in the driveway, watching the sanitation guys roll through the neighborhood picking up recyclables. “Hi, Truck!” Fletcher waves enthusiastically when the garbage truck stops at the end of our drive. He is in awe. To him, the guys who drive and ride these trucks are way cooler than Justin Timberlake will ever be. It’s my tough luck if we’re running late for school on pickup days because I’ve learned it’s futile to even try to wrestle him into the car while the truck’s still on our block. “Bye, bye, Truck!” he shouts as it disappears from view. Though I don’t get the allure, it must warm these guys’ hearts to know they have such a devoted fan base.
One night, when it was just the two of us at home, we played on the floor in his room. Fletcher spilled out his bin of cars and trucks and lined them up, a long snake of bumper to bumper toy traffic. “Vroom, vroom,” I said, making some circles with a yellow cement mixer, in what I hoped sounded like a convincing I know how to play this game tone. “Vroom, vroom,” Fletcher parroted back, happily. Gradually, it began to dawn on me that this wasn’t such an enormous stretch from playing tea party. Pushing toy cars around on the floor, pushing toy cups and teapots around on a table. It was the same game of pretend, really, just with different props. The point was, the two of us were having fun playing. Together.
Not that there was any rationale to my insistence that there was a girl baby cradled in there. My thinking ran along the lines that my sister already had two boys, and I figured, with the kind of twisted logic that makes Lotto addicts play the same combinations day after day, convinced their numberswill come up … someday, that it was simply time for our collective family to have a girl. And thus I was carrying her. So certain was I, we’d already picked out her name -- Quinn. I wasn’t even thinking about boy names, because … well, why bother? Obviously, we were having a girl.
And then around about 14 weeks, I had my amniocentesis.
“Do you want to know the sex?” the ultrasound tech asked as she slid the wand over my belly, before the maternal-fetal medicine specialist came in to play pincushion with my expanding waistline.
Now some people swear they don’t want to know their baby’s gender until the doctor joyfully announces “It’s a boy/girl!” in the delivery room. “There are so few surprises left in life,” they sigh wistfully, as if Christmas will never come again, and even if it does, they’re sure to get nothing more exciting than socks. “We want to be surprised when he/she arrives.”
Whatever.
I promise, if you’re newbie parents, there are still plenty of surprises in store for you. Just wait till your toddler is covered in sky-blue paint because you left a paint tray on the floor when you went to answer the phone and he decided to “help” paint while you were gone -- as my oldest nephew Eli did. (“He looked like a Smurf!” my sister still shrieks, now with laughter, but at the time, given that she’d just had her carpets cleaned … well … that’s another story.) Or when your daughter learns how to get her diaper off, discovers that poop is her true medium and finger paints her crib with it -- as my friend Gail’s daughter did. I’d bet hard money they were … surprised to say the least. So trust me on this: whether you find out at 14 weeks or 40 weeks when you give that final push your baby’s gender will still be a surprise. But knowing ahead of time, at least gives you a jump on nursery décor.
“Sure, what is it?” I agreed, confident my girl hunch would at last be confirmed.
“It’s a boy!” the tech said jubilantly, as if she’d somehow had a hand in his creation.
Wait … a boy? I looked at her dumbly. A boy? (What did I tell you about surprises, right?)
“Check again,” I directed, thinking she must have somehow been mistaken.
“Oh, it’s a boy all right,” she said, turning the monitor toward me and pointing to the fuzzy gray image onscreen. “See? That’s his penis, right there.”
It all just looked like a fuzzy gray blur to me. But Stewart, who knows his way around an ultrasound and had spotted the evidence well before the tech’s announcement, confirmed it. We were having a boy.
Later on, my mom called, all concerned. “Are you okay? Are you disappointed? You can tell me,” she said conspiratorially.
Well, on the one hand, I was delighted that the ultrasound showed everything was as it should be, and that I wouldn’t be giving birth to some eight-legged octopus alien out of Men In Black. Girl or boy, a healthy baby was ultimately all that mattered. But, yeah, my heart of hearts sank just a bit. And not just because I’d miss out on the parade of little girl baby fashions. But because the terrifying truth was, I had absolutely no idea how to play with a boy.
Growing up, I was the girliest of girly girls, from the ribbons in my hair to my lace-trimmed ankle socks and black patent leather Mary Janes. I disliked sports, loathed getting dirty, hated to rough-house. I played dolls, I played dress up, wearing so much of my mom’s tacky costume jewelry, I looked like a retirement home granny dolled up to receive visitors. For weeks after seeing my first Nutcracker ballet at age 5, I danced around the house in a pink tutu and cardboard tiara, pretending I was the Sugar Plum Fairy. In other words, I knew what to do with a girl. I could play tea party and house and Barbies all day long. (Sure, I knew how Barbie’s unrealistic dimensions could torpedo a girl’s self-esteem, but I was already prepping a feminist self-actualization speech to deal with that dilemma.)
But a boy? Utterly clueless. I felt like I’d been dropped into unfamiliar territory without interpreter or GPS. How’d the nursery rhyme go? Snips and snails and puppy dog tails? Having a boy meant there’d be no Barbies or princesses. Instead, I’d have trucks and bulldozers, trains, cars, and let’s not forget: -- assorted weaponry. (As I’d long ago learned from observing my nephews, any toy, no matter how innocuous, can instantly be transformed into a sword or a gun.)
My fears were only compounded when I dropped by my sister’s one night and found her hunkered down on her patio with a new Hot Wheels track, racing cars with her boys. I didn’t know how to play cars. Nor did I know how to play Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Rescue Heroes, Avatars or Transformers -- or any of the other things that seemed to captivate my nephews. The closest I’d come to playing with “action figures” was having Barbie make out with G.I. Joe because even as a kid I knew Ken batted for the other team. Even after my sister promised her boys would “bring me up to speed,” my anxiety that I wasn’t up to this task wasn’t entirely allayed.
After the baby formerly known as Quinn now formally called Fletcher was born, I held out as long as I could, studiously avoiding the obviously gender specific toys to see if we could find some middle ground I could relate to. Now there’s an uphill battle against evolutionary hard-wiring that’ll give you glutes of steel. Sure, Fletcher loves playing in the toy kitchen. But then, again, in our household, kitchen duty is hardly “girl” stuff: It’s my husband who mans the stovetop since I’ve been known to burn water, ruin box brownies, and once did actually set a kitchen on fire.
When I visited college friends and watched their daughter deck herself out in plastic beaded necklaces, rings, bracelets and tiaras, I knew I was swimming hard against the gender currents. Fletcher would endure a wicked case of diaper rash before he’d ever reach for that stuff. And as soon as he could make his preferences known and was mobile enough to get to what he wanted, Fletcher headed straight for the toy cars, spy gadgetry and play guns he found in his older cousins’ toy bins. Last Christmas, he instantly commandeered the new spiral racetrack that had been a gift to my nephew Dylan. While the rest of us ate, first, Christmas breakfast and then later moved on to Christmas dinner, Fletcher refused all attempts to engage him in anything else. He stuck with that toy the way a determined slots player sticks with a progressive jackpot.
I knew when I was beaten. I gave up and gave in.
Now our living room looks like a construction site imagined by Toys R Us, and I can actually articulate the difference between a back hoe and a front-end loader. But nothing gets my boy more jazzed than seeing a real-life, honest-to-goodness truck on the road while we’re driving. “Big truck! Big truck!” he shrieks excitedly from the back seat. And these days, a major source of entertainment involves standing in the driveway, watching the sanitation guys roll through the neighborhood picking up recyclables. “Hi, Truck!” Fletcher waves enthusiastically when the garbage truck stops at the end of our drive. He is in awe. To him, the guys who drive and ride these trucks are way cooler than Justin Timberlake will ever be. It’s my tough luck if we’re running late for school on pickup days because I’ve learned it’s futile to even try to wrestle him into the car while the truck’s still on our block. “Bye, bye, Truck!” he shouts as it disappears from view. Though I don’t get the allure, it must warm these guys’ hearts to know they have such a devoted fan base.
One night, when it was just the two of us at home, we played on the floor in his room. Fletcher spilled out his bin of cars and trucks and lined them up, a long snake of bumper to bumper toy traffic. “Vroom, vroom,” I said, making some circles with a yellow cement mixer, in what I hoped sounded like a convincing I know how to play this game tone. “Vroom, vroom,” Fletcher parroted back, happily. Gradually, it began to dawn on me that this wasn’t such an enormous stretch from playing tea party. Pushing toy cars around on the floor, pushing toy cups and teapots around on a table. It was the same game of pretend, really, just with different props. The point was, the two of us were having fun playing. Together.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
My (Brief) Life As Chowzilla
My mother was horrified. Horr-i-fied. She’d just watched me chew through a Carnegie Deli-size sandwich like it was a canapé and then dig into a pile of supersized potato pancakes.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’ve eating like you’ve never seen food before. Look how much weight you’ve gained!”
Now, my mother measures calories with the precision of a diamond cutter, and tracks weight gains and losses the way day traders track the mercurial ups and downs of the stock market. Only in an Alice in Wonderland sort of way -- down is good; up is bad; very very bad.
See, weight has always been an issue -- the issue -- in my family. Not that I was ever heavy. But my mom was . . . well, let’s say she wasn’t a thin child. Some moms fear their kids will end up on milk cartons. Mine worried I’d be so fat I’d never get a date. I was 12 when I went on my first diet to lose 5 pounds. The Just In Case Diet. Of course, to truly get how utterly ridiculous that was, you have to understand that except for the time when I was 16 when I became addicted to Cadbury-style chocolate bars -- I ate two a day for a whole summer -- for the vast majority of my adult life, I have rarely ever weighed more than 100 pounds. Now you’d hardly call that a candidate for Corti-Slim.
My secret? Being vegetarian. And a pretty strict one at that. For years, I not only eschewed all meat, fish and fowl, but eggs and dairy too. Going out to dinner was an exercise in what I couldn’t/wouldn’t eat.
And then I got pregnant.
For my husband Stewart, a diehard carnivore who still talks wistfully about the $25 cheeseburger stuffed with foie gras that he devoured on one of our trips to New York, that was like Christmas, his birthday and our wedding night/honeymoon all rolled into one. He gleefully soaked up tales about friends’ vegetarian wives who’d turned into insatiable meat-eaters once they got knocked up. He immediately made reservations at his favorite steak joint. Just in case I had a sudden urge for Kobe beef.
Initially, I’d meant to stay the vegetarian course. After all, I’d been eating vegetarian for nearly 10 years. And old habits die hard. But the baby clearly had other gastronomic plans. And apparently they involved a smorgasboard. Lots of pregnant women complain that they miss their sushi and brie, they want their coffee and martinis. Not I. Sure I was off those things too, but a whole new world of gustatory delights beckoned. Suddenly it wasn’t what couldn’t I eat, but what wouldn’t I eat?
Turns out, not a whole helluva lot. First there were the buttermilk pancakes that I absolutely had to have at 2 AM. Days later at a diner it was a tuna sandwich, which got woofed down in three bites and was promptly followed by another. I polished off Buca di Beppo’s “small” spaghetti marinara, which normally can feed several hungry frat boys, as a single serving. I dove into eggplant parmagiana, bagels with cream cheese or whitefish salad, French toast, shrimp cocktail, turkey clubs and cheesy omelets. Even junk food like Big Macs and Egg McMuffins, which disgusted me even before Morgan Spurlock, became must-have menu items. I rediscoverd the joys of full-fat mayonnaise. And thousand island dressing. But when I cut across four lanes of traffic to pull into Tony Roma’s, ordered a full rack of ribs, then picked every last bone clean and sucked out the marrow, I knew I was definitely off the wagon. When they asked me what I wanted for dessert, only decorum kept me from ordering a whole other slab.
I’ve never been so food obsessed. I was eating like a had a Delta force division in my belly -- not a baby, barely 2 centimeters long. Halfway through my blueberry pancakes, I’d be thinking ahead to what I’d want for lunch and dinner. It seemed our unborn child had pumped my appetite full of steroids. But I was getting a little self-conscious about my piggy appetite even before my mother pulled me aside to warn me about the 80 pounds she gained when pregnant. “Don’t let it happen to you,” she cautioned as I stuffed my face with reheated Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Yeah, I knew the more I put on, the harder it would be to take off later. And that excessive weight gain could bring on all kinds of pregnancy complications, like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, a very dangerous condition, involving high blood pressure and excess protein in the urine, that could endanger me and my baby. Yet, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
An old college pal Rich, who works as a producer at Comedy Central, gently helped me off the hook. “The first trimester,” he explained with the authority of someone who watched his own wife morph into Chowzilla when she was expecting, “is so critical to the baby’s development you need to consume about as many calories as climbers require to get to Mount Everest’s base camp one.” That did make me feel like scarfing down Reubens slathered in Russian dressing ultimately served some higher purpose beyond giving me some extra cushion in the seat.
Strangely, though, once I hit my second trimester, those weird-ass cravings vanished like freeloaders when the check comes. I lost my taste for BBQ ribs. And that double quarter-pounder with cheese once again went from seeming incredibly appetizing to incredibly disgusting. It was like I suddenly got sober after a meat-eating bender.
But for one brief shining moment I ate whatever I wanted.
And I loved every bite.
(A version of this essay was originally published in Las Vegas Life)
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’ve eating like you’ve never seen food before. Look how much weight you’ve gained!”
Now, my mother measures calories with the precision of a diamond cutter, and tracks weight gains and losses the way day traders track the mercurial ups and downs of the stock market. Only in an Alice in Wonderland sort of way -- down is good; up is bad; very very bad.
See, weight has always been an issue -- the issue -- in my family. Not that I was ever heavy. But my mom was . . . well, let’s say she wasn’t a thin child. Some moms fear their kids will end up on milk cartons. Mine worried I’d be so fat I’d never get a date. I was 12 when I went on my first diet to lose 5 pounds. The Just In Case Diet. Of course, to truly get how utterly ridiculous that was, you have to understand that except for the time when I was 16 when I became addicted to Cadbury-style chocolate bars -- I ate two a day for a whole summer -- for the vast majority of my adult life, I have rarely ever weighed more than 100 pounds. Now you’d hardly call that a candidate for Corti-Slim.
My secret? Being vegetarian. And a pretty strict one at that. For years, I not only eschewed all meat, fish and fowl, but eggs and dairy too. Going out to dinner was an exercise in what I couldn’t/wouldn’t eat.
And then I got pregnant.
For my husband Stewart, a diehard carnivore who still talks wistfully about the $25 cheeseburger stuffed with foie gras that he devoured on one of our trips to New York, that was like Christmas, his birthday and our wedding night/honeymoon all rolled into one. He gleefully soaked up tales about friends’ vegetarian wives who’d turned into insatiable meat-eaters once they got knocked up. He immediately made reservations at his favorite steak joint. Just in case I had a sudden urge for Kobe beef.
Initially, I’d meant to stay the vegetarian course. After all, I’d been eating vegetarian for nearly 10 years. And old habits die hard. But the baby clearly had other gastronomic plans. And apparently they involved a smorgasboard. Lots of pregnant women complain that they miss their sushi and brie, they want their coffee and martinis. Not I. Sure I was off those things too, but a whole new world of gustatory delights beckoned. Suddenly it wasn’t what couldn’t I eat, but what wouldn’t I eat?
Turns out, not a whole helluva lot. First there were the buttermilk pancakes that I absolutely had to have at 2 AM. Days later at a diner it was a tuna sandwich, which got woofed down in three bites and was promptly followed by another. I polished off Buca di Beppo’s “small” spaghetti marinara, which normally can feed several hungry frat boys, as a single serving. I dove into eggplant parmagiana, bagels with cream cheese or whitefish salad, French toast, shrimp cocktail, turkey clubs and cheesy omelets. Even junk food like Big Macs and Egg McMuffins, which disgusted me even before Morgan Spurlock, became must-have menu items. I rediscoverd the joys of full-fat mayonnaise. And thousand island dressing. But when I cut across four lanes of traffic to pull into Tony Roma’s, ordered a full rack of ribs, then picked every last bone clean and sucked out the marrow, I knew I was definitely off the wagon. When they asked me what I wanted for dessert, only decorum kept me from ordering a whole other slab.
I’ve never been so food obsessed. I was eating like a had a Delta force division in my belly -- not a baby, barely 2 centimeters long. Halfway through my blueberry pancakes, I’d be thinking ahead to what I’d want for lunch and dinner. It seemed our unborn child had pumped my appetite full of steroids. But I was getting a little self-conscious about my piggy appetite even before my mother pulled me aside to warn me about the 80 pounds she gained when pregnant. “Don’t let it happen to you,” she cautioned as I stuffed my face with reheated Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Yeah, I knew the more I put on, the harder it would be to take off later. And that excessive weight gain could bring on all kinds of pregnancy complications, like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, a very dangerous condition, involving high blood pressure and excess protein in the urine, that could endanger me and my baby. Yet, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
An old college pal Rich, who works as a producer at Comedy Central, gently helped me off the hook. “The first trimester,” he explained with the authority of someone who watched his own wife morph into Chowzilla when she was expecting, “is so critical to the baby’s development you need to consume about as many calories as climbers require to get to Mount Everest’s base camp one.” That did make me feel like scarfing down Reubens slathered in Russian dressing ultimately served some higher purpose beyond giving me some extra cushion in the seat.
Strangely, though, once I hit my second trimester, those weird-ass cravings vanished like freeloaders when the check comes. I lost my taste for BBQ ribs. And that double quarter-pounder with cheese once again went from seeming incredibly appetizing to incredibly disgusting. It was like I suddenly got sober after a meat-eating bender.
But for one brief shining moment I ate whatever I wanted.
And I loved every bite.
(A version of this essay was originally published in Las Vegas Life)
Thursday, May 29, 2008
My Misadventures in Breastfeeding or How I Learned To Love Baby Formula
“So, are you breastfeeding?”
When I was a new mom, I got asked that a lot. It’s the kind of question -- along with How much weight did you gain during your pregnancy? and Are your nipples chapped? -- that even complete strangers feel is well within their rights to ask if you’re toting around a baby. And given everything we know about the health benefits of breastfeeding -- the higher IQs, the lower risk for infections, allergies, and a host of other problems including obesity and diabetes -- the expectation was that I’d say Yes. Because of course I’d be foolish . . . make that down-right selfish, to deny my baby the precious elixir of breast milk.
Funny, though, how some things are so much more black and white before you actually have the baby. Before I gave birth, I was firmly, completely (some in my family might say ridiculously) on the breastfeeding bandwagon. Formula? For my baby? Never!
“You and your sister were formula-fed, and you turned out fine,” my mother would remind me whenever I’d start going on about my plans to breastfeed till my son was at least . . . well, I figured I’d wean him sometime before preschool.
“The World Health Organization recommends a year of breastfeeding,” I’d respond. “And two years is preferable.”
“By all means try,” she’d say. “But if you can’t do it, that’s fine too.”
If I couldn’t do it? That thought never crossed my mind. What was to do? It wasn’t calculus (or balancing my checkbook for that matter). Wasn’t this what breasts were designed for -- I mean apart from attracting the fathers of our children in the first place? And really how hard could it be if at one point the survival of our species hinged on cave moms doing it? Besides, with all that expectant moms are told about how much better off physically, emotionally and mentally breastfed children are compared to formula-fed kids, not doing it seemed akin to handing the little tyke a book of matches and telling him to go play in traffic.
So I was surprised when a friend who was due a few weeks after me mentioned she was stocking up on formula. She’d given up breastfeeding her first child after a month, she told me over decafs. With her second, she wasn’t even going to bother. “That stuff’s expensive,” she griped, digging into her fat-free pound cake.
“Breastfeeding’s free,” I tried wooing her back. “You burn 500 calories a day.” Feeling like I was dangling bait, I ticked off a few more mom benefits I’d heard about -- a lower risk for diabetes, some cancers and fractures, not to mention the emotional connection with the newest member of your family. And then the kicker: “And you know, it’s just so much better for the baby.”
“I wasn’t into it,” she shrugged, and moved on to debating the relative merits of Bugaboos versus Peg Peregos. The subject was closed. But as far as I was concerned, she might as well have been talking about whether it was better to let the baby play with electrical outlets or razor wire. I thought about giving her the freebie can of formula that had shown up in my mailbox. After all, I wasn’t going to need it. Sipping my venti decaf, I felt . . . yes . . . superior. Women who claimed they couldn’t breastfeed, I thought smugly, just weren’t trying hard enough. Or they were looking for an excuse not to. Meanwhile, I’d taken the breastfeeding class. I’d read the breastfeeding books. I knew all the benefits my darling boy would reap. I was prepared -- no, make that determined -- to breastfeed my baby for at least a full year.
Until . . . I couldn’t do it.
Things had started out so well. My newborn son, Fletcher, latched on within hours of making his debut. There was no hassle, no pain. When the lactation consultant dropped by to check on us, I proudly showed off how we’d gotten the hang of nursing so quickly. I hadn’t felt so triumphant since I’d been accepted early decision to college.
In the hospital and when we got home, I nursed constantly. But after a few days, I realized something wasn’t quite right. During baby care class it had been drilled into us that we were to see about six wet and three to four soiled diapers daily. I tracked Fletcher’s output more vigilantly than the ups and downs of our stock portfolio. With all that was supposedly going in, there should have been more diapers to deal with. A lot more.
Panicked, I went to the pediatrician. “Maybe your milk just hasn’t come in yet,” was her take on the situation. “But you might have to supplement with formula,” she warned. “You know, some women just don’t make enough milk.”
Not enough milk?
Now that ran contrary to every thing I’d read or heard in breastfeeding class. Our teacher had assured us that every woman produced enough milk to feed her child, and if we ran into problems, well, it was just a matter of trying hard enough to get past them. Whatever might be going on, I was pretty sure I could overcome it.
Later that day, I was relieved to see that while I was napping my breasts had grown to the size of a Vegas stripper’s. My milk had finally come in. Okay, now we were on the right track. But a day or so later at Fletcher’s next well-baby visit, the pediatrician had gone from mildly concerned to mildly alarmed. “He’s lost 12 ounces,” she said. Now I was alarmed. Losing eight ounces or so after birth wasn’t unusual. But 12 ounces was way too much.
We raced to see the lactation consultant, who promptly diagnosed a weak suck reflex for Fletcher and poor production on my part. A double whammy. “You’re going to have to give him formula,” the consultant said, popping a nipple on a premixed bottle. When the lactation consultant breaks out the formula, you know you’re out of other options. And as Fletcher gulped it down like a ravenous man at an all-you-can-eat buffet, my heart broke for my hungry baby.
Driving home, my diaper bag filled with formula, I burst into tears. “He . . . was. . . . hungry!” I sobbed to my husband, Stewart. In my zeal to feed him the perfect baby food, I’d practically starved him.
Still, I held onto the slim hope that Fletcher would get some breast milk. The consultant had sent me home with a high-tech, hospital-grade breast pump and instructions for taking two herbs -- fenugreek and milk thistle -- that she said might, if I was diligent, restart my milk production.
So I redoubled my efforts. The thought was that if I pumped as often as I fed the baby, my milk would come back. So I took my herbs, hooked myself up like a Guernsey cow to the electric pump and willed my milk production to increase. The day I got two full ounces out of my breasts, I did the happy dance. At last, I thought. It’s working!
But, unfortunately, ‘twas not to be. No matter how long I pumped, those two ounces were the most I ever got. And the teaspoon or so my efforts were usually rewarded with was just … depressing. A constant reminder that I wasn’t up to the most important responsibility a mother has to her child -- giving him the best food possible.
But though I felt like I was spinning my wheels, I still vacillated about stopping. The thought lingered: Maybe if I just keep trying! But finally, even I had to admit that it was like squeezing blood from the proverbial stone. And with so much else to do with a newborn, it hardly seemed worth the time. And I confess, I was so bone-tired, I couldn’t face getting up at night to pump every time Fletcher ate, especially when it was far easier for Stewart to make up a bottle and feed him while I slumbered. So, gradually, lured by the promise of full bottles in the fridge and the security of knowing exactly how much Fletcher was eating, I succumbed to formula’s seductive ease.
For a while I felt guilty about stopping. Especially when I’d been so arrogantly gung-ho. And because I often found myself giving long-winded explanations -- to total strangers in the supermarket checkout line who inquired -- about why I couldn’t breastfeed. Assuring them that I had tried my hardest. Honest.
But as I watched Fletcher regain and then surpass his birth weight on formula, my guilt and disappointment eventually gave way to relief that at last he was getting enough to eat and as far as I could tell, was thriving. And I was thankful that I hadn’t given away that freebie can of formula. After all, that stuff’s expensive.
This essay originally appeared in American Baby (October 2007).
When I was a new mom, I got asked that a lot. It’s the kind of question -- along with How much weight did you gain during your pregnancy? and Are your nipples chapped? -- that even complete strangers feel is well within their rights to ask if you’re toting around a baby. And given everything we know about the health benefits of breastfeeding -- the higher IQs, the lower risk for infections, allergies, and a host of other problems including obesity and diabetes -- the expectation was that I’d say Yes. Because of course I’d be foolish . . . make that down-right selfish, to deny my baby the precious elixir of breast milk.
Funny, though, how some things are so much more black and white before you actually have the baby. Before I gave birth, I was firmly, completely (some in my family might say ridiculously) on the breastfeeding bandwagon. Formula? For my baby? Never!
“You and your sister were formula-fed, and you turned out fine,” my mother would remind me whenever I’d start going on about my plans to breastfeed till my son was at least . . . well, I figured I’d wean him sometime before preschool.
“The World Health Organization recommends a year of breastfeeding,” I’d respond. “And two years is preferable.”
“By all means try,” she’d say. “But if you can’t do it, that’s fine too.”
If I couldn’t do it? That thought never crossed my mind. What was to do? It wasn’t calculus (or balancing my checkbook for that matter). Wasn’t this what breasts were designed for -- I mean apart from attracting the fathers of our children in the first place? And really how hard could it be if at one point the survival of our species hinged on cave moms doing it? Besides, with all that expectant moms are told about how much better off physically, emotionally and mentally breastfed children are compared to formula-fed kids, not doing it seemed akin to handing the little tyke a book of matches and telling him to go play in traffic.
So I was surprised when a friend who was due a few weeks after me mentioned she was stocking up on formula. She’d given up breastfeeding her first child after a month, she told me over decafs. With her second, she wasn’t even going to bother. “That stuff’s expensive,” she griped, digging into her fat-free pound cake.
“Breastfeeding’s free,” I tried wooing her back. “You burn 500 calories a day.” Feeling like I was dangling bait, I ticked off a few more mom benefits I’d heard about -- a lower risk for diabetes, some cancers and fractures, not to mention the emotional connection with the newest member of your family. And then the kicker: “And you know, it’s just so much better for the baby.”
“I wasn’t into it,” she shrugged, and moved on to debating the relative merits of Bugaboos versus Peg Peregos. The subject was closed. But as far as I was concerned, she might as well have been talking about whether it was better to let the baby play with electrical outlets or razor wire. I thought about giving her the freebie can of formula that had shown up in my mailbox. After all, I wasn’t going to need it. Sipping my venti decaf, I felt . . . yes . . . superior. Women who claimed they couldn’t breastfeed, I thought smugly, just weren’t trying hard enough. Or they were looking for an excuse not to. Meanwhile, I’d taken the breastfeeding class. I’d read the breastfeeding books. I knew all the benefits my darling boy would reap. I was prepared -- no, make that determined -- to breastfeed my baby for at least a full year.
Until . . . I couldn’t do it.
Things had started out so well. My newborn son, Fletcher, latched on within hours of making his debut. There was no hassle, no pain. When the lactation consultant dropped by to check on us, I proudly showed off how we’d gotten the hang of nursing so quickly. I hadn’t felt so triumphant since I’d been accepted early decision to college.
In the hospital and when we got home, I nursed constantly. But after a few days, I realized something wasn’t quite right. During baby care class it had been drilled into us that we were to see about six wet and three to four soiled diapers daily. I tracked Fletcher’s output more vigilantly than the ups and downs of our stock portfolio. With all that was supposedly going in, there should have been more diapers to deal with. A lot more.
Panicked, I went to the pediatrician. “Maybe your milk just hasn’t come in yet,” was her take on the situation. “But you might have to supplement with formula,” she warned. “You know, some women just don’t make enough milk.”
Not enough milk?
Now that ran contrary to every thing I’d read or heard in breastfeeding class. Our teacher had assured us that every woman produced enough milk to feed her child, and if we ran into problems, well, it was just a matter of trying hard enough to get past them. Whatever might be going on, I was pretty sure I could overcome it.
Later that day, I was relieved to see that while I was napping my breasts had grown to the size of a Vegas stripper’s. My milk had finally come in. Okay, now we were on the right track. But a day or so later at Fletcher’s next well-baby visit, the pediatrician had gone from mildly concerned to mildly alarmed. “He’s lost 12 ounces,” she said. Now I was alarmed. Losing eight ounces or so after birth wasn’t unusual. But 12 ounces was way too much.
We raced to see the lactation consultant, who promptly diagnosed a weak suck reflex for Fletcher and poor production on my part. A double whammy. “You’re going to have to give him formula,” the consultant said, popping a nipple on a premixed bottle. When the lactation consultant breaks out the formula, you know you’re out of other options. And as Fletcher gulped it down like a ravenous man at an all-you-can-eat buffet, my heart broke for my hungry baby.
Driving home, my diaper bag filled with formula, I burst into tears. “He . . . was. . . . hungry!” I sobbed to my husband, Stewart. In my zeal to feed him the perfect baby food, I’d practically starved him.
Still, I held onto the slim hope that Fletcher would get some breast milk. The consultant had sent me home with a high-tech, hospital-grade breast pump and instructions for taking two herbs -- fenugreek and milk thistle -- that she said might, if I was diligent, restart my milk production.
So I redoubled my efforts. The thought was that if I pumped as often as I fed the baby, my milk would come back. So I took my herbs, hooked myself up like a Guernsey cow to the electric pump and willed my milk production to increase. The day I got two full ounces out of my breasts, I did the happy dance. At last, I thought. It’s working!
But, unfortunately, ‘twas not to be. No matter how long I pumped, those two ounces were the most I ever got. And the teaspoon or so my efforts were usually rewarded with was just … depressing. A constant reminder that I wasn’t up to the most important responsibility a mother has to her child -- giving him the best food possible.
But though I felt like I was spinning my wheels, I still vacillated about stopping. The thought lingered: Maybe if I just keep trying! But finally, even I had to admit that it was like squeezing blood from the proverbial stone. And with so much else to do with a newborn, it hardly seemed worth the time. And I confess, I was so bone-tired, I couldn’t face getting up at night to pump every time Fletcher ate, especially when it was far easier for Stewart to make up a bottle and feed him while I slumbered. So, gradually, lured by the promise of full bottles in the fridge and the security of knowing exactly how much Fletcher was eating, I succumbed to formula’s seductive ease.
For a while I felt guilty about stopping. Especially when I’d been so arrogantly gung-ho. And because I often found myself giving long-winded explanations -- to total strangers in the supermarket checkout line who inquired -- about why I couldn’t breastfeed. Assuring them that I had tried my hardest. Honest.
But as I watched Fletcher regain and then surpass his birth weight on formula, my guilt and disappointment eventually gave way to relief that at last he was getting enough to eat and as far as I could tell, was thriving. And I was thankful that I hadn’t given away that freebie can of formula. After all, that stuff’s expensive.
This essay originally appeared in American Baby (October 2007).
Friday, April 25, 2008
What's with that blog name?
Don’t put lizards in your ears.
Who would, right? I mean, that’s a pretty weird thing to say. Good advice, but a bit incongruous. And really, how often do those words actually come together in conversation? In my experience ... uh, never. But I’m finding that as a new mom -- and a late-in-life mom at that -- I say a whole lot of things to my 2-year-old son, Fletcher, that I never -- not in all my wildest college-era hallucinogenic-fueled dreams -- thought would tumble out of my mouth.
There are things I remembered my own mom saying that I pinky swore to myself that I’d never, ever say to my child. And then you find yourself in a Mexican standoff in the Publix checkout line with a defiant yowling toddler who’s rolling on the floor screaming, NOOOOOO! because you won’t let him have a goddam bag of Skittles. Once you've exhausted all your diplomatic negotiating skills, your only choice is to launch your final grenade: BECAUSE I’M THE MOM, THAT’S WHY!
Of course, you can add to that gem, such chestnuts as: Stop whining. Use your words. Don’t make me come in there. I won’t tell you again. Don’t ask me again. And my personal favorite: Because … I … said …so!
My point is that now that my child is no longer an abstract concept, but an actual living sentient being with opinions, not to mention, demands, of his own, I’m sounding a whole lot more like my mom than I ever thought I would. Still, some things will surprise you. So, there I was, on a Saturday afternoon, folding laundry, when I looked up to see Fletcher rather determinedly jabbing something into his ear. Terrified that he could at that very moment be puncturing his ear drum, I flew across the living room, pried open his pudgy little fist and found -- yes, you guessed it! A lizard! We live in Central Florida and our cat, Squeak, frequently catches too-slow chameleons on our patio, then brings them in to play with in the dining room. All I could think was that in a goodwill-gesture, she’d offered to share her toy with the baby.
“Don’t put lizards in your ears!!” I scolded Fletcher as I rescued the reptile.
Out of the mouths of moms.
So, welcome to my now understandably named blog. Here I’ll be reporting from the front lines of what I call the Mommy ‘Hood. Because you know what … it doesn’t matter how many girlfriend guides you read, kids don’t come with operating instructions and the world of moms can be like being thrown back into the high school cafeteria. And you remember how much fun that was, right? Parenthood is purely on the job training, requiring the diversity of da Vinci, the patience of the Dali Lama, the reflexes of a fighter pilot, and the thick skin of a rhino.
Coming to this “second career” after years of editing magazines and writing freelance, I can tell you that there is no job, no project that’s tougher, weirder, messier, with longer hours, lower pay and that comes with a more demanding “boss” and more cliquish comrades. It’s Devil Wears Prada -- with strollers.
It’s a good thing kids are so damn adorable. Otherwise, everyone would give their two weeks and make for the Bahamas.
Who would, right? I mean, that’s a pretty weird thing to say. Good advice, but a bit incongruous. And really, how often do those words actually come together in conversation? In my experience ... uh, never. But I’m finding that as a new mom -- and a late-in-life mom at that -- I say a whole lot of things to my 2-year-old son, Fletcher, that I never -- not in all my wildest college-era hallucinogenic-fueled dreams -- thought would tumble out of my mouth.
There are things I remembered my own mom saying that I pinky swore to myself that I’d never, ever say to my child. And then you find yourself in a Mexican standoff in the Publix checkout line with a defiant yowling toddler who’s rolling on the floor screaming, NOOOOOO! because you won’t let him have a goddam bag of Skittles. Once you've exhausted all your diplomatic negotiating skills, your only choice is to launch your final grenade: BECAUSE I’M THE MOM, THAT’S WHY!
Of course, you can add to that gem, such chestnuts as: Stop whining. Use your words. Don’t make me come in there. I won’t tell you again. Don’t ask me again. And my personal favorite: Because … I … said …so!
My point is that now that my child is no longer an abstract concept, but an actual living sentient being with opinions, not to mention, demands, of his own, I’m sounding a whole lot more like my mom than I ever thought I would. Still, some things will surprise you. So, there I was, on a Saturday afternoon, folding laundry, when I looked up to see Fletcher rather determinedly jabbing something into his ear. Terrified that he could at that very moment be puncturing his ear drum, I flew across the living room, pried open his pudgy little fist and found -- yes, you guessed it! A lizard! We live in Central Florida and our cat, Squeak, frequently catches too-slow chameleons on our patio, then brings them in to play with in the dining room. All I could think was that in a goodwill-gesture, she’d offered to share her toy with the baby.
“Don’t put lizards in your ears!!” I scolded Fletcher as I rescued the reptile.
Out of the mouths of moms.
So, welcome to my now understandably named blog. Here I’ll be reporting from the front lines of what I call the Mommy ‘Hood. Because you know what … it doesn’t matter how many girlfriend guides you read, kids don’t come with operating instructions and the world of moms can be like being thrown back into the high school cafeteria. And you remember how much fun that was, right? Parenthood is purely on the job training, requiring the diversity of da Vinci, the patience of the Dali Lama, the reflexes of a fighter pilot, and the thick skin of a rhino.
Coming to this “second career” after years of editing magazines and writing freelance, I can tell you that there is no job, no project that’s tougher, weirder, messier, with longer hours, lower pay and that comes with a more demanding “boss” and more cliquish comrades. It’s Devil Wears Prada -- with strollers.
It’s a good thing kids are so damn adorable. Otherwise, everyone would give their two weeks and make for the Bahamas.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
