Monthly Archives: January 2008

Otter

The NSBBM movement…

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Otter is a big baby activist. He has spoken out on behalf of the No Down Babies movement, the No More Bottles movement, the Hell No Mom Can’t Go movement, and the Anti-Baby Containment Devices movement. Frankly it has gotten challenging to keep up with all his political activities. (We do like to encourage a healthy interest in activism in this house, so we try.)

His latest cause is the No Separation Between Baby and Mommy movement (NSBBM). He is no longer contented with mere co-sleeping and night nursing. Now he has moved on to night snuggling. While I am more than pleased to snuggle the young man, I am a little upset that he will not stay asleep, unless he is snuggling me.

It starts about 4 or 5 a.m. (A time of night I prefer not acknowledge the existence of, but sadly am getting to know very intimately.)

Otter will stick his arms and legs straight out in front of him and roll toward me, making “eh eh eh” sounds while he searches for “the boob”. He will not deign to open his eyes. Once his hungry mouth has found it’s target, he will nurse contentedly until he falls back asleep.

At this point I will carefully remove him from my breast by pulling slightly away from him. This is when I used to be able to go back to sleep. Now however, this activity is met with opposition and strident protest.
“Eh eh eh” goes the baby, as he wiggles closer in an attempt to find “the boob” again. If it is not found soon, the “eh eh eh” will increase in volume until he is awake and crying, so I will capitulate, and offer it again, in the hopes of being able to go back to sleep sometime before 6 a.m. He will nurse for a few seconds and fall back asleep. That is, of course, until I try to extricate him from “the boob” once again.

Rinse, repeat.

If I am successful in removing him from the breast, he will snuggle up right next to me to sleep. This is nice, it is wonderful, except if I move at all, he will wake up. Also, I am usually right on the edge of the bed at this point, clinging for all I am worth to the mattress, having scooted over slightly each time I have removed him from my breast. (He also takes up a surprisingly large amount of bed real estate for such a tiny person.)

If I scoot him over, he will wake up.

If I move over to the other side of the bed, he will wake up.

If I get up, he will wake up.

It is too early to be up!! I want to sleep!

Argh!! I never thought I would be complaining about my children’s desire to snuggle, but I really want to jump up and down, stomp my feet, and scream “STOP TOUCHING ME!!”

I love co-sleeping, but I have to be able to sleep. It’s not called co-snuggling, or co-waking.

Any ideas of how I can continue to co-sleep, and yet still curb his increasing need to be my own personal fungus?

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Perfect blue buildings….

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When I was young, I once drove to Wyoming in a snow storm with a boyfriend on a whim. We got caught in the mountain overpasses by a whiteout, and we were getting scared for our safety because my headlights were aimed oddly and I had no fog lights in my ancient Toyota. We were eventually led out of the passes by some truckers, and continued on our way. Even though we had been frightened, the entire experience was exactly that, an Experience. It was one of those moments of youth that you look back on a thrill over.

The true tragedy in life isn’t that the world gets mundane and loses it’s thrill as we age. There are as many fantastic and terrifying experiences that come with thirty as there were with 19. In fact, the stakes are higher now than they have ever been, I should be over the rooftops with thrill. I am daily surrounded by everything I ever dreamed of when I was young.

No, the real tragedy is that we never realize the thrill, until years have passed. When we are young, we long for our adulthood and minimize our youth. As adults, we long for our youth and stress over our adulthood.

The real tragedy is never being thrilled with where you are.

Oh, there are some moments of perfect realization, a few of those experiences that break through life like the sun breaks through the clouds. Radiating their heat, their thrill, into our very souls, and screaming “This. This is what I live for.”

Those moments are rare. They can be a trip to Wyoming, or the first time your child really laughs at something you do, or when your partner looks at you in just the right way. The first time you do what you trained so long to do, or the first promotion, the first word, the first step.

Why can’t they be found in the laundry? Or the dishes? Or the TPS reports? Those are the places where we build the foundation for those moments. No one lives to starve, or go broke, or wear filthy clothes all the time. You need the mundane in order to create stage for your life to play across. Without the sweat and repetition of life, there is nowhere for the magic to happen.

We should be thrilled to have the mundane. We should look around our lives, and we should say, I am thrilled to be here, knee deep in dirty dishes, surrounded by cleaning products, buried in paperwork, stuck in traffic.

Why do we wait for the tiny moments, the rare moments, the movie moments, to thrill?