The Perfect Diet

So I have this great new weight loss plan. Are you ready? First, you get a ten month old. Actually, any baby will do, it just needs to be one who is old enough to be mobile and young enough to not understand when you say to him, "Please sit here for a minute so Mommy can make herself a sandwich."

Okay, got a baby? Next, spend a few hours a day running around after said baby, lifting the baby up over your head, throwing the baby around the room, and allowing the baby to use you as a walker. That's your exercise regime.

Now for the diet: never have time to eat. Simple as that! Totally overbook yourself on projects, also pitch a book while you're at it because, hey, you can never be too busy, try to pound out a few essays to keep your alleged writing career going, and then discover it is five o'clock at night and you have yet to eat anything other than a cup of coffee.

Then, when you have followed this diet long enough that you find yourself wearing the same size jeans as when you were fourteen, go shopping for new pants only to discover that everyone is now wearing SKINNY JEANS, which make your ass look even bigger than it did your freshman year of college.

Oh yes, skinny jeans are in. They are uncomfortable, they are so unflattering that a size-2 editor at Vogue was forced to write about how fat she felt in them -- what's not to love?

I think I liked my life better before I knew that the universe was so cruel as to invent a fashion item like this one. I liked it better when I was at the Tot Lot and everyone was wearing baggy cargo pants and milk-stained t-shirts. So I'm just going to go back into my hole now. Hopefully then next time I venture out into Manhattan everyone will be wearing boot cut pants again.

Sharing Sucks

The other day at the Tot Lot Milo was playing with a purple ball we'd brought when some kid came along with a red ball. The kid reached out and grabbed Milo's purple ball and, without a moment's hesitation, Milo reached out and grabbed the kid's red ball. I couldn't help but think, that's my boy.

Later on Steven and I were discussing the incident and I mentioned how proud I was of Milo that he hadn't cried or gotten pissy about the kid taking his ball, but instead had exacted swift justice.

"Yeah," said Steven. "You like when he's aggressive."

"It's not that I'm in favor of being aggressive," I said. "I just think that sharing is overrated."

It wasn't until I said it that I realized I really belived it. When you're a kid you get beaten over the head with how you're supposed to share this and share that and everyone can play with your toys and it's okay. Well you know what? It's not okay. I want to play with my toys and I don't want to let anyone else use them. So there.

I have, in fact, been awful at sharing for most of my life. As a little kid I always hated the segments on Sesame Street where they talked about how you had to share. Those sharing muppets always seemed so whiny and sniveling. As a teenager I was terrible at sharing friends, and over the years have lost many a best friend due to jealous sniping. And to this day I don't like sharing a bed -- Steven always says that if we had it my way we'd be sleeping in different wings of the house. So I don't want to share any goddamned balls at the Tot Lot either.

I realize this attitude is not going to go over big with the other mothers at the Tot Lot, let alone the battery of teachers that await Milo over the course of his life. But I don't think I can teach Milo the importance of something that I don't think is important. Which I guess is why people have two parents. One who can teach the value of sharing. And the other who can tell you to take your filthy hands off my purple ball because it is MINE.

Milo in Action (part 1)

 

Milo in Action (part 2)

 

Helpful Tips for the Insane

I have been watching far more television of late than I should be, but the up side is that it gives me the ability to comment on things like the following. There was a segment on one of the talk shows the other day entitled "Tips for Moms." One of the tips was a timesaving tip, so I listened up eagerly. I'm always game to save some time. The tip? Fill your coffee filters the night before and stack them in the freezer, so instead of measuring out the coffee every morning you can just take the filter from the freezer and pop it into the coffee maker.

Can you imagine the amount of time you can save with this idea? I've already written a three volume manuscript on the history of coffee with the time I've saved. I mean, we're talking literally two seconds a day of saved time, time you used to spend lboriously measuring out two tablespoons of coffee! Genius!

Of course, the segment also had some suggestions for what moms could do with all their saved time. First, they could use cookie cutters shaped like hearts to cut white bread to make their kid's sandwiches. Second, they could create color-themed lunches. Like: a red apple, a red juice box, red potato chips and a red sandwich (I guess?). Now, I don't know about anyone else, but I packed my own lunch for school. Maybe there were some early days there when my mother packed it, but I'm positive I made it myself by the time I was in fifth grade, because I remember eating a lunch that consisted entirely of a can of olives. And that is my plan for Milo too. Believe me, if he could pack his own lunch now I would let him. (Cheerios and the remote control for lunch? Sure!).

I'm pretty sure that these Mom Tips are at the root of all our problems in society. I just don't have the time to work out how.

Housekeeping at Ten Months

Dear Milo:
This weekend you tunred ten months old. Here's the obligatory tushie shot that will embarass all your future girlfriends:



Now that we have that out of the way, let's get on to what you've been up to. And that is primarily: standing. And complaining about not standing. And walking. And complaining about not walking. You seem to have opted to go straight from being an immobile lump to walking, without detouring into all that unnecessary crawling nonsense. Unfortunately, you have neither the balance nor the strength to walk on your own, so instead you complain until someone offers you their fingers, whereupon you promtly turn beet red while attempting to haul yourself up to a standing position. Once there, you like to grab whatever is within reach and fling it to the ground as though what you've been really itching to do these past ten months is redecorate. You fling things with such authority, like "What in hell is this magazine doing on the coffee table when it OBVIOUSLY belongs on the ground or in my mouth?"

You have begun to have fears and frustrations over the past month. When you topple to the ground from standing you cry angrily until someone helps you get upright again, as though you are just so PISSED OFF by your own limitations. When you cruise around on the furniture, moving from coffee table to sofa, you are not as reckless as you once were, sometimes hesitating or even deciding not to risk the long gap between the sofa and the end table. That said, you still don't understand that propelling yourself headfirst off the bed is a bad idea.

You love the birds in the park, and whenever you see one you yell "Buh! Buh! and then attempt to follow it until it takes flight. You also love dogs and cats, although you don't seem to discriminate between them and call everything "Dah!". (You never say anything that doesn't have an exclamation point at the end of it.)

Feeding you has started to become challenging. Sometimes you like to grab the spoon and fling food around. Sometimes halfway through your pureed carrots and beef you will decide that what you really want is banana, and you will cry until someone gives it to you. You could easily eat your weight in Cheerios if we let you. However, you seem to love Chinese food, much to Mommy's delight. Indian food, not so much. And also feeding yourself, not so much. Sometimes I worry that you've got my laziness gene -- that this is why you would rather wait until you can walk and not bother with all that crawling crap, and it is also why you would rather sit back and open your mouth and have someone shove food in it rather than actually pick something up and put it in your own mouth. I guess I can't say I blame you, but I hope you start to show at least a tiny bit of initiative in the food department soon, since I'd rather not have to follow you to college so I can spoon-feed you.

You are still smiley all the time. Everyone always comments on what a happy little guy you are. And you still love to watch people. Whenever we are in an elevator or on the subway or waiting in line you, without fail, make extended eye contact with the person closest to you. At the Tot Lot, instead of moving around, you like to just stand in one spot and take it all in. I sort of do too. I love eavesdropping ont he conversations and checking out the other mommies and babies. So does Steven. So sometimes we just sit like that, the three of us, staring at the rest of the world.

Knowing

Last night I dreamt that I had decided, along with two friends, that we would all try to get pregnant at the same time. For some reason this then involved me giving a lengthy, detailed lecture on how in vitro fertilization works. We then all bought thermometers and decided to start taking our temperatures and tracking when we ovulated so we could get pregnant at exactly the same moment (more or less). When I got home and went to take my temperature i thought to myself, what the hell am I doing? I don't want another baby. I'm so exhausted as it is and I've got an easy one! And I knew, in that minute, that I would never have another baby.

This morning I walked past the local elementary school, P.S. Upper Middle Class White Kids (P.S. 122 might be the official name). All the kids were saying goodbye to their parents as they went off for their first day of school, dressed in carefully planned outfits, carrying shiny new plastic Sponge Bob backpacks. As I watched the kids saying goodbye and skipping into school, and the newly childless mothers wandering around aimlessly in front of the entrance, I thought about how I would never, ever be able to let Milo go to school. I would never be able to be apart from him for that long, to send him into a big, impersonal space where horrible things might happen that I wouldn't be there to protect him from. Or at least, if I did, I'd have to have another baby at home to replace him. And I knew, in that minute, that I would definitely have another baby.

Goodbye To All That?

It's been three years, as of last night, that Steven and I have been married. We both always say it feels like longer, although that's probably because we've been together for seven years, it's only been legally recognized for three. Or it might be because it's been three busy years, full of book deals and babies and advanced degrees. It's been three years and two apartments, two grad school programs, six countries, seventeen states, and one cat with a trick knee.

To celebrate we had the omikase dinner at Morimoto, where they bring out an unspecified number of dishes involving oysters and sushi and caviar and fois gras and lobster, and the meal inevitably hits a turning point somewhere around dish four where you go from thinking, "this is awesome I hope they never stop bringing food out" to "please let there only be two more dishes."

The restaurant is done entirely in white and the waitstaff is clad entirely in black and the toilets have far more options on them than any toilet really should, and it was all very Manhattan and exactly the sort of anniversary dinner I might have fantasized about back in my high school years. But most of all, it made me realize how much I miss living in Manhattan, how some teenaged part of me feels betrayed by how quickly I agreed to move to Brooklyn (but the amenities! yells my adult side, the park! the home office! the trees!).

I imagined being lots of different things when I was growing up, but there were two fantasies that I kept coming back to -- I would be a writer and I would live in New York. In those dreams I didn't ever specify that I meant Manhattan, because the only people who lived in Brooklyn then were my grandparents, and clearly no one ever fantasized about living next door to their grandparents.

I think I'm missing Manhattan more and more these days because I know that our time in New York is probably drawing to a close, that in a few months we will probably pack up our belongings and move some place quieter and cheaper and more spacious, but also somewhere quieter and cheaper and even farther away from Manhattan. At first I will insist on wearing all my old New York clothing, but after a while I will start to feel ridiculous, and I'll store my black pointy-toed boots in the back of the closet and start ordering more things from the Land's End catalog. At first I will keep my cell phone number with the Manhattan area code, but after a while that will get annoying and I'll switch to a local number. At first I will continue to read the New Yorker, but after a while I will get annoyed about how those New Yorkers think they're the center of the universe, and I will read it less and less, and the issues will pile up on my desk on top of all the other things I keep meaning to get to.