the world is your acorn

Lady #1: And I have this friend, and he’s gay, and he sent me this list of all the businesses I should be boycotting. And some of them I don’t ever go to anyway, you know, like

Both ladies together: chick-o-fil

Lady #1: right, like chick-o-fil, whatever that is.

Well, on Monday I woke up with the same Ick that The Little Red Haired Girl had last week. I don’t think I’ve ever had a stomach virus before. I had all the soreness of flu (achy muscles, sensitive skin) but the only other symptom was that my stomach was all a mess. All kinds of perceptual stimulation made me feel sick, so I didn’t want to read, watch tv, or even listen to music. So I just lay in bed and dozed and stared. Basically I think I experienced the kind of the day the dog must have. I have much more sympathy for him now when he wants to go on that walk SO BADLY every day.

Tuesday I was still feeling not quite right, so I tried to work from home, and made myself comfort food lunch:

Egg noodles, beef balls, yu choy, napa cabbage, onions, mushrooms, Chinese pickles, scallions, cilantro, and a squirt each of sriracha and hoisin.

Dinner was a little more normal, except we haven’t gone grocery shopping for weeks, so it was a “what’s left in the kitchen” kind of dinner.

Pea shoots, beets, Mexican zucchini, mushrooms, with a balsamic dressing. Rice and broiled flat iron steak on top, with blue cheese and fried shallots. I know now that the blue cheese was a terrible idea. Other than that though, not a bad go.

Well, it’s Sunday. Spring break is over, daylight savings time has begun, and my proposal is still in the same state it was a week ago. Oh well. Next week’s the week.

Meanwhile, it’s been a good weekend. It was gorgeous yesterday, and I spent the day getting the garden together. Planting in our backyard is a little ridiculous, since for some reason this house does not have a hose spigot. Nor does it have gutters, so we can’t set up a rain barrel. So either we fill up the watering can over and over, or rely on mother nature. Guess which we do? Still, the weather here (at least last summer) seems to be pretty sympathetic to the kinds of things we want to plant: herbs, cucumbers, beans. We rely on our CSA for everything else.

The baby also spent some time outside while I worked.

Today The Little Red Haired Girl has to work in the afternoon, so I’m on baby duty. I’m all fueled up with some oatmeal and Tivoed women’s basketball.

Now I’m all ready to finish this weekend up with some baby-time, house-cleaning, bill-paying, and some sort of interesting dinner-making. Doesn’t sound as appealing as it actually is.

It’s spring break this week, which means very little if you’re a doc student done with coursework and no regular teaching responsibilities. For me, I think it means I have fewer meetings and if I want to go work at the office it’ll be much quieter. I’m not sure yet though, since I haven’t tried. I took yesterday off for a mental health day, which might mean that I binged on being sad and useless, ran some errands, had some pho, napped, and did some chores. I figured I’d let myself have yesterday, then pull it together today, and finish my proposal this week.

So far, I’m half successful. I think I’ve pulled it together for the most part, although I’m still not eating properly. My stomach is hungry, but my throat won’t stand for it, and then if I manage to eat (like yesterday), my stomach becomes a mess. However, The Little Red Haired Girl is SICK, so I’m trying to take care of the baby and do whatever I can for her too. No time to wallow about in any me-muck, which is a good thing. So far that’s mainly what I’ve been doing, but I’m hopeful that this afternoon will be productive in terms of writing. Fingers crossed.

I should have known when I didn’t feel like eating breakfast. By lunchtime, when I couldn’t even force down the cheese sandwich I’d made myself, it was becoming clear. On the ride home, it hit me full on. I’m officially in the blahs. I won’t say depressed, because then that’d really be Trouble, and I’m not there yet. I’m still in a place where I’m thinking about how to pull myself out of it. The problem with the pre-depression blahs (and depression in general, I guess), is that it’s not because something happened. You search and you search for something that must be going wrong, that you must be unhappy about, but it’s not there. You can’t change that thing. You do, however, start to overanalyze every aspect of your life, and start to imagine things might be wrong, creating trouble where there is none. Danger.

So, what now? Catalogue the positives, find activities that get you going, remind yourself that you’re ok, get some perspective. Fight the urges to feel shitty about yourself and about the world around you. Fight the urges to shut yourself in and down and wallow and implode.

I found myself feeling sort of bummed yesterday, as I tried to get some work done from home.  Could be the anxiety surrounding preparing for the conference and the baby’s cast and not getting my proposal done, could be tiredness, could be February, could be stagnation.  Who knows.  It was a feeling that I associate distinctly with much of high school, although I’ve had it since.  A feeling like I wanted to crawl out of my skin or punch something hard or explode screaming into a million pieces.  Back in the day, I responded with self destructive behaviors.  Now, I’m looking for better solutions.  I feel much better today, so that’s encouraging.

For yesterday,

A beautiful moment: It was a grey, rainy, thunderstormy day yesterday. In the morning I went up to go get the baby when she’d just woken up from her nap. She was lying in her crib quietly, looking at the curtained window. I watched her for a little, while flashes of lightning reflected off her face, before she noticed me.

A funny moment:  Before the cast, the baby loved her jumperoo, and even when she wasn’t in it she bounced up and down all the time.  We were really worried that being immobilized from the waist down would be upsetting for her.  Yesterday we found that, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

A delicious moment: Fancy cheese, sent as a gift from my brother, eaten with The Little Red Haired Girl, while the baby sat in her bean bag and devoured her dinner of turkey and veggies, including her first leeks.

A challenging moment: In the moment that I started to recognize that antsy crazy feeling, I started to try and figure out what to do about it. Once, soon after college, I took a bunch of old, crappy tennis balls and a baseball bat, drove to the ocean, and hit balls as far as I could. Bad for the environment, but felt amazing. Yesterday I decided to take the dog on a run. Not quite the same, but helped.

In this month’s (March 2011) Food and Wine magazine Sandra Tsing Loh has an article about a Yoga for Foodies retreat led by David Romanelli, who “believes that each day, humans should experience three things: a beautiful moment, a funny moment and a delicious moment.”  There’s something about that list that strikes me as a really nice way to approach a day.  Except I’d add something more, something that would push me to learn something, or become a better person.  I couldn’t quite figure out the right way to put it though, so I decided to call it a challenging moment.

So here’s my moments for today.

Beautiful:  On the plane ride home today, there was just enough cloud cover so that I watched us ascend through it, then suddenly break through into bright, blue sky with fluffy white below, and a just fuzzy shadow of the city beyond that in places the clouds thinned some.  There’s something so breathtaking and bright and amazing and calming all at once about that moment.

Funny:  The baby never fails to make me laugh.  Today I got the chance to feed her for the first time in a week, partially because I was away at a conference, and partially because of the craziness of getting the cast on (her) and preparing for the conference (me).  Lately, she’s developed the habit of going “pbbbt” while eating, which of course sprays food everywhere.  Won’t be funny long, but right now, still adorable.  Today it was quinoa, and I still have some in my hair.

Delicious:  This is maybe unexpected for me, but my delicious today was a Southwest Tuna wrap from Au Bon Pain with a Nantucket Nectar Half and Half (half lemonade, half iced tea) and a bag of Cape Cod chips.  I grabbed it from the airport on the way home to Nashville, but it tasted like Home, like Boston and New Haven and all of that.  I only ate half the sandwich, and The Little Red Haired Girl enjoyed the rest of it later this afternoon.

Challenging:  Flying is always sucky for me, and makes me feel shitty the rest of the day.  I don’t know why.  But my challenge today was to make something of my day once I got home around 2 in the afternoon.  I wasn’t terribly successful, but I did manage to unpack my bag, get my receipts together for reimbursement, and make dinner.  Better than laying on the couch, I guess.

Well, Baby is more than 6 months old now. It’s still crazy amazing and fun and hard and tiring all at the same time, but it also feels normal now. She’s eating some “solids” now, she’s wearing clothes that are bigger than her age bracket, and she’s going to start daycare soon. We’ve balanced our budget and lifestyle so that Baby gets what she needs and so do we. We’ve even made some new little buddies with babies our age. It’s all progressing swimmingly.

The one hiccup in our parental bliss is all the legal bullshit we have to deal with because we live in this state. On some level, in general, I am grateful that, given our biological limitations as a couple, we get to have a baby. Fine, I’ve said that. But that does not mean I have to be grateful to the ass-backward social and political institutions that make us jump through fiery barbed hoops that are inconvenient, expensive, and time consuming for everyone involved.

Here’s a summary of the ridiculous, up to this point:
* Before The Little Red Haired Girl was inseminated, the fertility clinic made me pay a fee and get a full panel of blood work done, just to sit next to her and hold her hand during IUIs. (Maybe I should be grateful for this, since they were treating us like a straight couple?)
* When the Baby was born, we discovered that in this state, The Little Red Haired Girl is considered an unwed mother, and that Baby’s father is unknown. This is how she was required to fill out the Birth Certificate form, and the only last name that Baby could be given is The Little Red Haired Girl’s. So, over the course of the next few months, we paid a lawyer, the courts, the registrar, and the social security administration to have Baby’s last name legally changed to include mine.
* Now that Baby is 6 months old, we have begun the adoption process. (You can’t adopt a child until he or she is a legal resident of the state, and that takes 6 months of living there). This requires more lawyer fees, caseworker fees, court fees, and a pile of paperwork and meetings that is more intensive than my graduate degree. BOTH The Little Red Haired Girl and I have to answer 5 page-long questionnaires about all our personal business, get reference letters from friends and family, have our employers write letters, get fingerprinted, have our finances scrutinized, have long personal interviews, have MORE blood tests (because they have to be within 6 months), have home visits, etc. All just so I can be legally recognized as the parent of my child.

So yes, I am crazy pissy about all of this. It will be a happy day when we get to move on out of here. Some folks might be brave and generous enough to stay somewhere difficult and fight the fight, but that’s not me. Coastal urban liberal elites, save some space for us!

This is my 5th day of being away from home, the Little Red Haired Girl, and the baby. There are fun parts of traveling, but I’d much rather be at home. Even with no crying baby, I don’t think I’ve slept better here than I do at home. I have had some delicious food, but it’s not as enjoyable without the Little Red Haired Girl. So, I guess this means I’ve turned into a boring old lady. I don’t really mind.

Well, the Baby is almost a month old. Since no official announcement was made here, I’ll do it now: Baby was born on Monday, July 5, 2010, at 7:45am. She was 8lbs even, and 20in long. Labor was short, just 6.5 hours. She seemed perfectly healthy at the time, but things have come up since. She has hip dysplasia in her left hip, which means that the socket of the joint isn’t quite formed yet, and it slips in and out, depending on the position of her legs. She wears a little harness that keeps her legs “passively” in the right position which should help the joint develop.

Also, she was born with a little jaundice, which is pretty normal for babies. However, last week we went in to get it checked out again, because it wasn’t gone yet. The blood test revealed that she had a billirubin level significantly higher than at birth, and higher than the pediatrician (not ours, another in the practice) was comfortable with. So we switched to formula feeding for a few days and went in for more blood tests. We now know that all the tests came in fine, and we are back to breastfeeding. However, there is still the fear of the possible effects of this high billirubin level. Going back to our pediatrician to get her looked at in about half an hour.

Those are the things that haven’t gone right. Lots of really good things, though. She eats really well and mostly sleeps really well. When she is awake she is really alert and curious, looking around and grabbing at things. She changes so much every day, that she doesn’t even seem like a newborn anymore. The Little Red Haired Girl mostly deals with her at night, so I get decent amounts of sleep, and mostly I try to get up early and take her so The Little Red Haired Girl can get some extra hours in the morning. Even though there’s no routine, I feel like we’re getting some patterns and strategies established.

We take a million pictures, and don’t get tired of them. Baby makes so many facial expressions that I want to catch them all, because she might stop making them any day. Some people say that they’ve never loved anyone so much when they have their first baby, but I think, for me it’s that I’ve never been more obsessed with anyone/anything. We stare at her and talk to her and read to her and sing to her and talk about her and point out the stupidest things about her to each other and take pictures and videos all freaking day long.

As for school, I have been slowly easing back into it. Baby came a week early, so my plans for finishing my qualifying paper have been put off quite a bit. It’s hard to get my head there, but I’m committing to having a full draft in the next week. Oy. It’s hard to concentrate on something this cognitively demanding when you have an active obsession.