TO: Milo RE: Wednesdays

I love how people are always saying, it's okay if you need to take a break from the baby. Don't feel guilty if you put him in the swing and go have a minute to yourself. What if you need, like, 4 hours to yourself? Are you supposed to feel guilty then? I mean, he's great and all, but he's not much of a conversationalist right now.

On Wednesdays Steven has a late class and doesn't get home until nine p.m., so I have Milo to myself for 9 straight hours. Luckily, he is always asleep for at least the last two hours, and sometimes he sleeps for two or three hours in the middle. So technically it's only four or five hours with the baby. But the problem is that I have a life that doesn't stop for me on Wednesdays. So I am constantly hoping he'll entertain himself on the activity mat for just another five minutes while I check my email and take a look at how my book is doing on Amazon and just respond to that other email and by the way I need to practice for my reading next week and I just want to jot down this one sentence so I don't forget it and oh wait, you know what would make a really good essay, let me just write that down too...

I have blocked off Wednesday afternoons on my calendar in Outlook with a big note saying "Mama and Milo" and I have set it to repeat indefinitely, although technically I could have set it to end in five years when he goes to kindergarten. Yes, this is what it has come down to: I need to schedule the baby in Outlook. In any event, having him in Outlook is partially so I won't forget and schedule something on Wednesday afternoons, but mostly it's a mental note to myself that on Wednesday afternoons I am a SAHM (stay at home mom, for those not familiar with the Urban Baby vernacular) and that we will all be a lot happier the minute I stop trying to also have a life on Wednesdays.

So we usually do all right for the first few hours, but around 5 or 6pm, when we have sung songs and read books and played on the activity mat and swung in the swing and danced around to Bob Marley and had a fight about whether or not Milo would have his nails cut and taken a walk around Prospect Park (the long route) and had multiple "conversations", there is another hour or two before I can legitimately feed him again and then begin the process of putting him to bed, I start to find Milo boring. And I'm not sure, but I think he starts to find me boring too. Basically, after an afternoon together we are sick of each other and if he could read we'd probably just sit together on the couch and read a book, and if he could talk we would sit and have a conversation that involved actual words, but right now I am totally out of ideas.

So usually he goes to bed early.