I never post about anything really, which is fine, cause i am busy and rarely seem to have the time for self-reflection that posting requires, but this topic keeps kicking around in my head so here goes.

Alana is a remarkably good baby.   Not just cute, and sweet, and smiley, but good:   Quiet.   Sleepy.   Only cries if she has a reason.   Basically, low maintenance.   Even the daycare staff have commented on it; everyone loves her.   She has all the baby-pros and none or fewer–she still poops and barfs–of the cons. For awhile we thought, maybe she’s stupid or something, but I don’t think so…she seems to be hitting the same milestones as G, maybe even more.   Jason doesn’t agree, but I think she could be smarter than G.

Example:   I finally understand what all the baby toys are for.   When G was a baby, if you put her in the baby gym, she laid there and cried.   If you gave her a rattle, she dropped it.   We put all sorts of toys on her car seat; she ignored them.   The only thing that got her attention was Baby Einstein, which she watched obsessively.   It was like she was too busy being pissed off to enjoy anything.   Not so with Alana.   She will play for long stretches with a rattle, or those millions of links that seem to just appear when you have a baby, or in her gym, grabbing at the toys and pulling and rolling around.   Amazing.   She entertains HERSELF.   Unbelievable.

Oh yeah, and she sleeps through the night.   Like ALL the way through:   8 pm-6 am.   By herself.   Exceptional.   Genevieve STILL doesn’t do that.

I guess it’s good we had G first when we didn’t know any better.   I thought all babies were like her.   Explains the exasperated, exhausted look I saw on my mom’s face when I came home after leaving her to take care of a 3-month old G while I was at work one day.   Some babies, apparently, sleep.   Who knew.

REPEAT

She’s also managed to turn herself over, hurl herself out of a bouncy chair, and get her legs caught in the sides of her crib.   So pants-straps and bumpers have worked their way back into the rotation.   Lacking thorough documentation, I can’t tell if Alana is on pace with G in her physical development.     But it seems that this is where things suddenly started to evolve and G morphed from blob to personhood.   I feel like I have not invested as much time in Alana’s physicality as I did with G.   A constant worry is if we are preparing her for health and success as responsibly as we did with G, or if her physicality will be doomed by the curse of the youngest.     Every time I plan on increasing my efforts on her behalf, I get bored with her poditudality or distracted by G.

Beckie must have been reading my mind, since she set up the bouncer the same day I started writing this.   We have a vid of G from July 10, and she is well ahead of Alana.   But a lot can happen in 2 weeks.

Pod has gotten adorably aware of me looking at her or picking her up.   Its very very rewarding when she looks at me and breaks into a smile or launches into Happy Baby pose.   I know she doesn’t really know me from Beckie from any other person or from a stuffed animal, and her reaction is just a reaction.   But so is mine, so I get all happy for no good reason too.

Except its very time-consuming.   It distracts her from the goal at hand – inhaling a bottle so I can get back to whatever I was doing that was not staring at a smiling Pod.   Its cute to the mutual exclusion of her nutrition.

Since my staycation, its been very hard to get back onto a pod-pace.   I feel like I really need to give that to her, that she will be lacking if she does not have warmth, and it will pass by so fast I will be lacking too.

its all just a reaction.     She’s not so frail, and neither am I.   But it would be nice to have another staycation.

or as we like to call it, HiPod.

First time Pod has seemed to register me. She’s close to holding her head up too, but its funnier watching her wobble like a drunken sailor.

With my vacation balance almost maxed out, and months of non-stop pressure creating a painful need to relax, a week off doing daddy-daycare would be a welcome change.   Or so I thought.   An opportunity to spend time with my new daughter, around the house, and not drive.

Some questions:

• if you like your job, are you funemployed?
• if you are funemployed, can you take a staycation?
• can you take a staycation if you work from home?

I worked really hard to not check email too much. I could not help myself, but by Wednesday had pretty much forgotten about work.   The fact is I spend a ton of time on the internet anyway.   My days don’t feel much   different from work, except I don’t much have anything specific to accomplish, read a lot of football news, downloaded lots of music, post a bunch, and sit for hours on end with Pod in my lap.   This does lead to avoiding most chores or much of anything else if you let it.   Beckie commented during her maternity leave that she could see herself becoming an alcoholic if she was a stay-at-home mom.   Yeah I totally get that – you just keep sitting with the baby not doing much of anything but sitting with the baby and drinking half a case of light beer and sitting with the baby and then the day is done and you’ve done almost nothing.     I got to know Alana a lot better sititng with her at the keyboard.   I’d go crazy doing this everyday, but for a week its not so bad when you can go baby-pace.   I like her very much, when i have nowhere better to be.

this view went on and on and on

and finally she is becoming interesting, responding to stimuli and the like.   She cries sometimes when you put her down, cries sometimes when she gets scared being alone.   It is not much, but finally something to believe that there are wheels turning in that giant flopping brick on top of her shoulders. She hears better than she sees. Not like G, who knows and sees all. It takes Alana a long time to see me, but she hears me and reacts quickly.   “Quickly” is, however, a relative term.   The process of reacting begins, which means she works herself slowly up to a peak, builds to a full-on cry, over about 5-10 minutes.   It gives me time to get away, to plan, to respond, to get some coffee cause I’m about to be stuck feeding her for 20 minutes, to save my work cause I’m about to go dive into a swelling pants-crisis. Sometimes she is crying and i stick a bottle in her mouth, and it takes a few seconds til she realizes its there then suddenly stops crying.

She is finally aware enough for Baby Einstein to do its magic

the wheezing noise is Alana – she is the snortingest baby I’ve ever known.   We were kinda worried by the doctor said its nothing.   Some days she breathes more quietly than others.

there’s a lot of crap in there

but I’m still calling her Trucker Jr.. She is. We are. Why not?
Bill Hicks – The Sanctity of Life

I am challenging myself to have new adventures with her. Today we walked G in the stroller and Alana in the bjorn and Kila leashed 1.7 miles to G’s school. We were all kinda glad when I dropped G off in time for lunch; it is a heavy, complicated load.   And walking is very very slow.   We made it in 40 minutes, then up the road a mile to Indigo Joe’s. All the remaining riders got their drink on.

and then pod slept.   on and off.   in that way she has of just continuously eating, keeping me bound to the computer and typing 1-handed. *thunk*.   A growth spurt is coming – 4 bottles a day for 2 days.

Women develop an uncharacteristic boldness in offering unsolicited advice about a baby.   The quietest most-mousey woman loses all sense-of-place in an overflow of i-know-better-than-you.   Women are crazy, crazy about kids.   Mix that with their horrible tendency towards passive-aggression, and you get   alpha-dog bossiness prefaced with a pointless “excuse me, but…”   It might as well be a fist pushing you against a wall.

Others insist on touching the baby.   In any other situation the same woman would call similar contact sexual molestation.   They actually get offended when I ask them to keep their hands off.   My feeling is simple: you aint lettin’ me grab your tits, keep your tentacles off of Pod — you might have Swine Flu.

The loud-talkers are worse.   Someone standing next to you blathers, to no one in particular:   “oh I wish I was so comfortable\sleepy\getting a free ride.”   Then they think I’m obligated to say something stupid like “thank you for noticing my baby,” but I usually say something like “do you want to babysit for a while, I could really use the help?”

Most everyone else can’t just tune out the baby and go about their business.   I walk with the bjorn and freeweights, run with Alana in the stroller, yet some do-gooder slows down and stops and thinks they’re doing me a favor by   holding the door for me.   The thought is nice, but its not about my suffering child or weary back or the fact that I would not have her with me if I thought I needed help, its about these people and their need for feeling good about themselves or loneliness or need to go volunteer with Big Brothers.

Mostly its about how my privacy has now vanished.   If I was leering at a chick in the gym or making comments like “dayum you look hot!” I’d get arrested.   Getting into and out of anything is an endeavor with Alana, i don’t need the complications or the challenge to make conversation.   Leave me alone.

This is definitely the male way.   I don’t think its insensitive, its just efficient.   Kids are everywhere, everywhere!   They are not special, and women need men around to keep that thought in mind, and to keep them from drowning the world in maternalism.     Our neighbor the other day hugged her daughter throwing a tantrum for like 20 min straight pleading with her to stop.   WTF!?!?!   G doesn’t throw tantrums around me, at least, not for long.   Alana has been up almost nonstop for 7 hrs now, and is beginning to throw a fit.   She just refused a bottle, got her pants refreshed, and sat in my lap for the past hour – off to the crib she goes.

She will be asleep probably before I proofread this.