I Love You, Sippy Cup!

The parenting books say that at some point Baby may form an attachment to an object that will henceforth be known as a security item. Parent will then spend many hours ransacking the house looking for said security item, screaming, "I need the buzzy bee!" or whatever, as Baby wails and remains inconsolable.

Until last week, Milo had not developed any sort of attachment to any inanimate object. He likes his brooms, sure, but he didn't need to sleep with them or anything.

We had actually been trying to interest him in all sorts of items that could be considered traditional security items, filling his crib with at least fifteen soft blankets with stuffed animals attached (called, I am sad to report that I know this, loveys). But Milo hadn't really taken an interest in any of them, nor in any of the stuffed animals that sometimes threaten to crowd him out of his own crib. (We frequently check on him in the night only to find him face down in a pile of animals.) Sometimes he gets up in the morning and talks to his tiger or his monkey or his monster, but he hadn't formed any intense lovey-worth attachments to anything.

Last week that changed when I gave him a special sippy cup with a straw attached to it. At first we thought he'd just become a milk addict, but no. It turns out that what he's really addicted to is the cup. And the other night, he insisted that he sleep with it. Just to point out the totally obvious -- this is a cup. A hard, plastic cup. And Milo loves it with all his little heart.

When the New Baby Smell Wears Off

"Hey, babe, can you come here and smell something?"

I could hear Steven turning the sink off in the kitchen and thinking over my request.

"No," he yelled back.

"Come on," I said. "Just smell your son for a second."

"Why?"

"He doesn't smell good."

I heard Steven shuffle down the hall. He stuck his head in Milo's room, where Milo was happily exploring his nether regions, stark naked, on the changing table.

"I took the diaper off," I explained. "And he still smells bad. Will you smell him?"

Steven rolled his eyes, then leaned into the table and inhaled. Yucky-ick noises quickly followed.

Milo giggled and began clapping his feet together.

"Is something wrong with him?" I asked.

"No," said Steven. "He just stinks. He needs a bath."

"I thought babies were supposed to smell good," I said. "How come we got a stinky baby?"

Housekeeping at Twelve Months

Dear Milo:
You're changing so fast, it's hard to keep up. This month has had it's ups and downs, but I still wake up every morning excited to see what new thing you'll do today, so that's probably as good as you can hope for in the parent department.

The first thing that needs mentioning this month, without a doubt, is your passionate love affair with brooms. I thoughtlessly swept up some dust near you one day, and told you I was sweeping with the broom, and then let you sweep a little bit, and from then on you were head over heels. You began asking for the broom ("bee", you call it) first thing in the morning, at lunch, at dinner, and generally every twelve seconds. We'd all grown pretty tired of having to lug the broom around the house for you, until thankfully your ever-attentive babysitter bought you your own Milo-sized broom.

You now carry your broom everywhere, and when you see it for the first time in a few hours you always give it a huge smile and coo: "Bee!".

But the oddest thing about your broom obsession is that it's not limited to brooms in the apartment. Like the best of utterly obsessed humans, you see brooms everywhere. We were standing in the bagel store when you started shouting "Bee! Bee!". I turned and saw that sure enough, a woman standing across the store had purchased a mop, and the handle was sticking out of her plastic shopping bag. Your babysitter took you to a sing-a-long the other day, and despite the dozens of singing babies, the general hubub in the place, you managed to locate a broom in the far corner of the room.

And then there was the leaf brigade. We were at the Tot Lot last week when a van pulled up and out came at least ten park service employees weilding rakes and brooms. As they began to sweep up the leaves littering the ground, you stood dumfounded, as though your brain circuits were overloading from TOO MANY BROOMS. You tried to follow one, then the other, and then, finally, you started to cry because it was all too much.

In other news, you took your first steps on Halloween. You're able to walk short distances on your own, though you prefer to have someone's hand there to hold on to. And you've become an amazing mimic. You like to sing intonations like "Goodnight Moon", or answer the cat's cry with your own "meow". You know what a pig says and what a cow says and what a horse says, and very occaisonally when you want more Cheerios you remember to say "mo!" instead of just whining and acting pissy.

You continue to follow in your parents' footsteps by eating everything under the sun. You still love Chinese food, and you think bagels are the bomb. Berries of all sorts - also a favorite. And riccotta cheese too. You've managed to feed yourself once or twice with a spoon, and once (possibly by accident) with a fork, although mostly you just like smashing the fork on your tray.

And as always, still smiling, still outgoing, still a bundle of energy.

You are my little chicken.
Love,
Mommy

Milo Turns One

For those who were worried about my lacking of posting, know that Milo successfully turned one-year-old on November 2nd. Here's the photographic proof:



That would be Milo eating not the cupcakes that I lovingly prepared, nor the ginger cream cheese frosting that I whipped by hand, but the candle that I put, as an afterthought, on top of one of the cupcakes. Milo update coming shortly - please stay tuned.

Go Democracy!

A long time ago I thought I wanted to be in politics. I thought I wanted to write speeches and make political campaign ads and crunch poll numbers and change the fate of nations. That was before I knew that most of politics involves stuffing envelopes, calling strangers on the phone, or standing at the I95 overpass next to Arthur Treacher's holding a "Laurie Frost for Delegate" sign at 7a.m.

For people in politics, election night is like New Year's Eve and the SuperBowl all rolled up into one. It's the night you've worked for, and yet, if you're a true campaign hack, it's also the night you stand back in the shadows, refusing to hold campaign signs, and, most likely, having not voted. And last night, at the election night party for the Democrats in New York, I spied a few true campaign hacks slinking towards the edges of the room. They were the ones who hadn't slept in days, who were wearing t-shirts rather than suits, who were sporting slightly befuddled expressions on their faces as though they weren't quite sure what all their hard work had been about, when you really got down to it.

This was also the first election night party I'd been to since 1992 that was a victory party. And here is the difference between a victory party and a loser party: at the victory party people show up. At the loser party people stop by to offer condolences, and then everyone decamps to the nearest Irish pub.

And yet, nothing will ever be as exciting for me as that party in 1992. It was the party hosted by the Chicago branch of the Clinton campaign, and it really felt like the times they were a changing. Maybe because I was a college student. Maybe because I'd been bitten by the campaign bug. Maybe because it really, truly felt like the times they were a changing. Whatever the reason, I still totally have a crush on my boy Bill.


Hillary, not so much. I'm not in favor of women gaining elected office because they married well. I'm in favor of women gaining political office because they deserve it.

Of course, this is not the sort of thing one says at Hillary's victory party. Plus, she'd provided free booze and snacks, which is how you know for sure that you're at a victory party hosted by an incumbent, as opposed to a loser party hosted by the next ex-state senator from the 39th Ward.

The party made me miss politics and it didn't. In politics all of the levels of heirarchy are displayed like Nazi arm bands. At the party the plebians (like me) wore blue badges. More important people wore red or yellow badges. We heard tell of another, better, smaller room for even more important people. Wherever you are in politics, you are always jokeying for position. There is some of that in the corporate world, but it's not so explicit. Someone has a corner office and someone has a Blackberry and that's about the extent of it. But in politics it's all about the badge color. I don't miss that one bit.

But I do miss the sense of higher purpose that working in politics gives you, even if it's a completely fabricated sense of purpose, given that politics tends to do very little to change the ways of the world. Yay, the Democrats are in power -- now what? Will the war end? Will people stop dying? Will we suddenly have universal health care? Will someone create affordable middle class housing in Manhattan?

But you don't ask yourself those questions when you're a politico. You believe in your candidate like you believe in your god. You just believe. And sometimes you are rewarded for that belief. Sometimes you get to wear the red badge.

Thoreau or How To Make Me Queasy

Back in high school I had a range of complicated, frequently bitter, relationships with my English teachers. There was Mr. Blanchard, who I loved, but to whom I nonetheless felt compelled to remind that "those who can't do teach," which I'm sure forever endeared me to him. There was the unfortunately named Mr. Rodd, who was so pleased with the obituary I wrote for Willy Loman that he agreed to overlook the fact that I hadn't really gotten around to reading Bartleby the Scrivner. And then there was Mrs. Hart, who hated me from the minute I turned in my first Heart of Darkness critique. She was also the assistant softball coach, and when she wasn't hating me in the English classroom she was hating me on the softball field.

We read a lot of books in Mrs. Hart's class that I should probably go back and read again, now that I would no longer be using every essay in English class to write long disguised missives on how I hated everything Mrs. Hart had assigned, and, by extension, hated her. Mrs. Hart attempted to fail me for writing an essay about how I hated Faulkner. I contested the grade on the basis that it was a well-constructed essay, just not on a topic that Mrs. Hart agreed with, (certainly making her love me all the more) and got it changed to a passing grade.

We also read Walden Pond in that class. I've sometimes thought about trying to go back and read Walden Pond, because after all I now write memoir, and Thoreau was one of the original American memoirists. But even though it has been nearly 20 years since Mrs. Hart's English class, I still can't think about the word "Walden" without the bile rising in my throat. And then, the other day, I discovered that Thoreau has a blog.

So I've been reading the blog. And while sometimes DHT has some beautiful turns of phrase, a lot of the time he's just writing down long boring dream sequences. Also he uses too many commas. But most of all, he's kind of a pussy. I mean, the guy uses a stone to get chestnuts off of a tree, and then writes sentence after sentence about how he feels sorry for the tree. "I trust that I shall never do it again," he writes. Yes, Henry David. Much better to go to the store and BUY your chestnuts, so you don't have to think about how someone hurt a tree in the chestnut procuring process. Because what's his plan? To never eat chestnuts again? What about the starving people in Africa? I'll bet you they are eating their chestnuts.

But even more annoying than the fact that Thoreau is a pussy is that this journal would never, in a million years, be published today. Editors would read it and say something like:

"I love Henry's voice -I found it very relatable - but in the end I am going to have to pass. While I enjoy his musings, Henry comes across a little bit like a trustafarian with way to much time on his hands. I don't really see much of an audience for this, and of course the memoir genre is already so crowded that without a strong differentiating factor (i.e. if Henry decided to become a cannibal, or was a victim of child abuse) it would be a hard sell. Thanks for sending it my way and I hope we can work together in the future!"

And eventually HDT would be forced to sell his manuscript to a tiny all-recycled-paper press, and the return to his life as a management consultant.