Art As Perceived By A Nine Month Old

This weekend it was satisfyingly cold and rainy - always nice after a long hot summer - and we took the opportunity to pay a visit to the MOMA. Milo had been there in-utero, in a visit that lasted about twelve seconds, and Steven hadn't been at all since they re-opened, so we happily bundled the whole family up, packed Milo a thousand toys, and off we went into the wilds of Manhattan.

Milo was noisy, but luckily so were the tourists, so no one seemed to mind much. Particularly not when every few minutes one of the security guards would run over to some hapless tourist and yell, "No flash!". This happened at fairly regular intervals, the tourist always looking surprised and embarassed, the security guard always rolling his or her eyes. I was waiting for a security guard to rush over, grab someone's digital camera and throw it against the wall, screaming, "I SAID NO FLASH!".

I'm not entirely sure I understand why someone would take a picture of a painting anyway. Frequently the would-be photographers were carefully lining up pictures of famous Monets or Picassos, perhaps not understanding that the museum shop downstairs sells thousands of these images, all framed and lit far better than one could possibly capture on a camera phone. Every now and then we'd see someone posing next to a painting (Look! Here's me and a Campbell's Soup can!), which I guess at least makes some sense, but still seemed inexplicably strange.

We ended up the day at the Stage deli, where Milo devoured an entire matzoh ball, and eagerly pointed out that they, too, have ceiling fans. He's obsessed with ceiling fans -- actually with fans in general, as he's always trying to crawl his way over to the fan in his room and touch it, watching me or Steven all the while to learn at exactly which point in his long crawl we will say, "Don't touch the fan," for the umpteenth time. Sometimes he looks over at us like, "What? Don't touch this fan? Are you insane? This fan NEEDS to be touched."

We have a ceiling fan in our bedroom, and whenever he's in the room he makes all sorts of happy noises and gestures toward the ceiling as if to say, "Holy crap -- are you guys seeing what's going on on the ceiling?" So when he discovered that the Stage Deli, too, had this miracle of modern engineering, he just about flew out of his seat.

"Yes," we repeated throughout the meal. "They have ceiling fans too."

A Warhol or a Picasso -- so last Tuesday. Give me a good ceiling fan anyday.

Drama at the Tot Lot

Since nearly every afternoon of the last month has been ridiculously beautiful, I've gotten into the habit of taking Milo to the Tot Lot, a playground for toddlers that is a few blocks away. Over the weeks I've come to not only recognize some of the babies and their parents, but I've begun to understand the politics of the playground. And as with any playground, there has been drama.

A few weeks ago a cute little Asian girl arrived with a new push toy - the sort of thing that looks like a baby lawnmower. The baby pushes it and it makes noise and helps said baby to walk faster and steadier and, most importantly, noisier, than the baby would without the push toy. Apparently there is a rule on the playground that if you bring something you must share it (stupid Park Slope hippy parents), and this rule has not been good to the little Asian girl. Unfortunately for her, there is an older, bigger Italian boy (for some reason half the people at the playground are European) who likes to grab her push toy and run off with it. So every few minutes screaming will come from one end of the playground, and everyone knows that yet again the Italian boy has stolen the little girl's toy.

The best part is that you can tell that the Asian girl's mother has grown to loathe the Italian boy's mother, probably because she does nothing to stop him from running away with her daughter's toy. There are actually two Italian mothers at the Tot Lot, and I'm not quite sure which mother belongs to the pushy toy-stealer, but one of them also has a smaller baby, and the other one is very pregnant, so both of them usually stand around ignoring the toy-stealer until long after he has absconded with the Asian girl's toy.

So this afternoon the Italian boy arrived with his own push toy, which looked exactly like the Asian girl's toy. And a few moments later the Asian girl arrived, without her push toy, probably because her mother had simply given up and didn't want to subject her daughter to any further torture at the hands of the Italian boy. And although I really wanted her to, the little Asian girl made no attempt to steal the Italian boy's push toy. She just sat quietly and played by herself.

On Writing

Yesterday I watched an interview with Lewis Black in which he described the process of writing a book as being like Sunday evening when you're a kid, watching the sun set slowly and all the other kids are outside playing and you're inside because you have to do your homework. Except that it's like that every day. I would say that's about right. But I would add that the alternative is worse. When you're in the middle of a writing project you've always got it hanging over your head, but when you're in between projects you've got a big black emptiness hanging over your head, just waiting for the Sunday evening feeling to come back.

Busy Boy

 

You Had To Make It Complicated

Things have been working out pretty well with the new schedule, wherein I have Milo after 4pm three days a week, and after 1PM the other two days a week, except for one slight problem. Milo has suddenly decided to develop a tiny case of seperation anxiety. The nerve!

When he sees either Steven or me in the morning, or catches a glimpse of us in the hallway for the first time that day, he starts doing a little happy dance. He kicks his legs and bounces his whole tiny body up and down while simultaneously making little shrieks of glee. And then, after we have said hello or good morning or good afternoon and squeezed him a bit and gone to hand him back to the babysitter so we can do a bit more work, he starts to cry. Has there even in the history of time been something as heartbreaking as having a tiny little person crying because he just wants to spend time with you?

Luckily the anxiety passes quickly once we are out of sight and Milo goes easily back to being his old happy self, but my heart falls to pieces every time.

There is no way to win the motherhood war.

Is Nine Months Too Young for Military School?

Dear Milo:

It has come to our attention that we have a slight problem with your behavior. Specifically, your desire to not only make eye contact but also wave at every single person you see on the street. If said person hangs around long enough or makes the mistake of smiling at you, you are instantly transfixed, and begin doing what can only be described as flirting. Which is all well and good, except for the fact that this means that whomever is pushing you in your stroller (usually one parent or both) is obliged to then make conversation with the object of your affection.

Milo, your parents have worked long and hard to create lives for themselves that do not under any circumstances involve making eye contact with strangers on the street, let alone making polite conversation with them, which inevitably leads to awkward pauses and the general feeling that it was a bad idea to leave the house today. As a result, we demand that you immeditealy cease and desist your obscenely friendly behavior. Failure to do so may result in the abrupt termination of any further stroller-related activity.

Consider yourself warned.

Sincerely,

The Management

Guilt

Sometimes Steven and I communicate via instant messenger while I am at home and he is two blocks away at his satellite office (aka the coffee shop). Yesterday I instant-messengered him in the mid-afternoon to see what he was up to. I'd finished all the work I was going to do for the day (except of course the afterword I am working on for the paperback, which for some reason I have decided I can only work on in the mornings or alternate Tuesdays because it requires so much brain power) so I thought maybe we could take advantage of our few remaining babysitter hours and take a jaunt to visit the new love of our lives.

"Are you busy?" I asked Steven.

"No," he said. "I'm just fucking around."

"Don't you feel guilty?" I asked before I could stop my fingers.

"I feel tired," he replied.

And then we went on to make plans for a trip to the supermarket, whereupon I spent the entire time mulling over why it is that I feel amazingly guilty if I am not working every second that the babysitter is here, while Steven just goes about his day guilt-free. And then, to try to cheer myself up, I bought some organic seaweed and tamari flavored rice cakes. Shockingly, they tasted awful. Who could have guessed?

Then we came home, got Milo and took a field trip to see the really freaky corpse flower at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Milo was unimpressed and spent most of the time playing with his feet and making his new noise: lodle lodle lodle lodle. Guilt-free.

The Descent of Woman

Is it bad that when I read this article my first thought was: I win!? I had a longer labor than even the longest labor in giant panda history. Take THAT Ling Ling, or whichever one of those was the female. (They're dead now, right? Are they dead? I'm not up on my giant panda history.)

Baby or Deadly Disease?

This weekend we had our third and final wedding of the summer wedding season, where it was noted that there are similarities between having a baby and having cancer, in that both occupy an awful lot of mental energy. Upon determining this, both the person I was talking to (whose wife is currently undergoing chemo) and I stood and nodded sagely for a bit, as though we had hit upon some strange coincidence in the universe. Then we excused ourselves and ordered more drinks, because that's pretty much a conversation killer.


MORE READINGS
If you are in the New York area, please come hear me read with Jami Attenberg at Book Court (on Court Street in Cobble Hill) tomorrow night, 8PM.

Oh, Puh-leeze...

More breaking news: women like to make each other feel bad about shit.

I particularly like the woman who said the magazine cover made her husband feel uncomfortable. Why, because he's never seen her breasts? Or because he thought the baby was creepy looking? And if that makes him uncomfortable, how on earth does he manage to get through an episode of Baywatch? Or, like, leave the house? Ten bucks says her husband is off visiting hookers while she's home nursing.

Fifty seven percent of the American public thinks it's disgusting to breastfeed in public, But guess what? The other forty-three percent think you should be nailed to a cross of formula if you don't.

Baby Power!

For reasons I don't entirely understand, Milo has begun doing the Black Power salute. Although I think what he's really saying is, "Power to the babies!"

In other news: Jews No Longer Short. Milo grew like a weed over the past three months (which explains why we suddenly had to double his food intake) and is now, gulp, big for his age. 85th percentile, baby. (And 30th percentile in weight - tall and skinny? Where did that come from?)

Enjoy it now, because it's probably never going to happen again.

Housekeeping at Nine Months

My beautiful boy,

I fear that we are in the waning days of what has been a pretty blissful few months. Every day you're closer and closer to crawling, and as you gain mobility you also have the audacity to want things -- sometimes things that you can't have, like the wires behind the stereo. And so I imagine the battles will begin.



But for the moment, you're freakin' awesome, and do not take my regression into the language of my teen years lightly. You are genuinely delighted to be alive nearly every moment of every day. Sometimes you wake up groggy from a nap and you spend a few moments staring into space and rubbing your eyes, and then as you slowly take in your room and your parents or whomever has collected you from your crib a smile creeps across your face as you realize that, yes, the world is in fact as wonderful as you remembered.



In all honesty, you were a little boring a few weeks ago, but it seems likely almost every day you now have some new surprise in store for us. Today you entertained yourself for a good half an hour with a rice cake. That rice cake was the greatest thing you'd ever encountered. You talked to it, you broke it into little pieces and then, best of all, you ate it. Then a few hours later, as I was feeding you banana, you decided you wanted to try to feed yourself with the spoon. A couple of times you actually managed to put the right part of the spoon in your mouth, and once or twice you also ate the banana off the spoon. You were very pleased with yourself.



Not surprisingly, your love affair with standing continues, except that now it's getting a little annoying because you have also learned how to stiffen your legs when we want you to sit, when we are tired of holding you up and just want you to put the tushie on the floor already, ensuring that you will remain standing. If we try to bend your legs for you you get genuinely pissed off. Who would want to sit when there is standing to be done?



You are currently able to sort of drag yourself around the floor, and sometimes you like to roll over and over in order to move yourself from one place to another. Full-fledged crawling is clearly only days away.



No words yet, and no teeth either, which is definitely something I am going to discuss with the pediatrician on Thursday. The only word-like thing you do so far is, when we say "cock-a-doodle-do" you reply "eee-eee-eee", which, as best we can guess, is your version of "cock-a-doodle-do", and perhaps something you picked up from the real live roosters who lived outside our house in Vermont last month. Which brings me to something that has been bothering me for a bit -- what's with the animal obsession? You must own about thirty toys that feature barnyard animals. Do the toymakers of America think that we all still live on farms?



Yesterday I was walking around the neighborhood, running errands, and I kept passing a woman who had clearly given birth within the last week or so, and her mother, who was pushing this woman's new baby in a stroller. The woman was all post-partum-lumpy and she looked miserable and exhausted. I had to restrain myself from putting my hand on her arm and saying what I wish someone had said to me: "it's going to be okay". I wanted to tell her that in nine months she would have some semblance of her figure back, she would have some semblance of a good night's sleep back, and she would be mother to an amazing baby instead of a screeching, demanding, semi-human pile of flesh. But I resisted the urge. I didn't want her to think I was a lunatic.

But it's true - life with you, Milo, is lovely. Now, on to the next phase, when you will probably regress into a screeching, demanding pile of overly mobile flesh. Yay!

How To Ruin My Lunch

So after yesterday's paean to New York, I thought I should follow it up with a story about the downside of the city.

Yesterday Steven and I decided to take advantage of our day-long adventure in babysitting by having lunch together. We picked a cute little restaurant with outdoor sidewalk seating that we'd been wanting to try for some time. We were sitting there on the sidewalk enoying our cold drinks and mulling over the menu when some guy crossed the street and strode purposefuly toward us.

"First time eating here?" said the guy.

I thought maybe he was affiliated with the restaurant, so I gave him a cheery "Yes!", as though I were expecting a lovely lunch and was just pleased to be alive.

"Last time I ate here I got food poisoning," he said, then promptly turned around and walked down the street.

Steven and I sat in stunned silence for a minute, watching him disappear around a corner. And let me just say, possibly the best way to kill someone's appetite is to announce you have gotten food poisoning from someplace and then not provide any further details.

"Was it the fish?" I wanted to yell down the street after him. The more I thought about it, the more it became clear that the possibilities were endless. Not only the menu possibilities, but, this being New York, there was also the possibility that the guy was in some sort of fight with the restaurant and just wanted to drive away customers. Maybe his ex-girlfriend was a waitress there. Maybe he'd been a former owner. Or, maybe it was the fish.