Keeping up with Sarah

True Bus Love

Moishe's new favorite bus movie:

A photo album of English buses in Ipswich set to the song "Time in a Bottle."

"You're the one I want to go through time with..."

A bus? You want to go through time with a bus?

Do these still exist? Anyone been to London recently?

hours of entertainment

for a 17 month old boy....The St. Louis Fire Engine Rally

And perhaps the best reason ever to visit St. Louis.

Hurrah for Time Magazine

Here is Po Bronson's new column in Time Magazine. I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly. It shows The New York Times* for what it is, out of touch with the masses. It's ashame that the best newspaper in the country chooses to depict families as either broke and beyond help, or wealthy with extreme problems (okay slightly hyperbolic, but not that much).

*also the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

Babysitting for Moishe

A dear friend babysat for me in San Francisco this past week. Here is her story of babysitting the boy who has just hit the developmental clinging to mommy phase:

So I babysat little Moishe yesterday morning, and he was decidedly *not* a happy camper after Mom split. Nothing we didn't see coming, but aw -- it's sad when a baby is sad. Sad and loud. The allegedly magic blankie didn't seem to interest him at all. Soy milk, bread stick - no thanks. Can't you see I'm busy having a meltdown right now? Did you not *see* my mother leave?

Any one of a number of suggested baby games failed to distract Moishe from his mounting despair -- even "Baby Ouija" where you hold his hands and let him walk wherever he wants or "Baby Flickr" where you look up pictures of other babies online and say "Ooh! Look at the cute baby Moishe! Isn't that a cute baby? Look how *happy* that baby looks Moishe! Hm. You don't appear to care at all about that baby, *do* you Moishe. Something about the way you are clawing at my sternum and writhing your entire body like some kind of runaway fire hose gives me the impression that you don't give half a crap about that baby." So you try the soy milk again, which gets another big ol' baby-nose-in-the-air while the separation anxiety grows ever more dire.

Then I realized I had a stack of CDs to listen to for work, so I popped one in to see if maybe it'd help calm little one down a bit. It was some lovely, techinically perfect swing guitar a la Django Reinhardt. Moishe thought it sucked though and showed his disapproval by drowning out the music with the much more poignant song of his emotional torment. Who *are* you anyway, he seemed to ask me with his
eyes. What do you think you're doing? *You* are not my mother, so don't think that any of this play-the-baby-some music shit is going to work with me, aiiight? I have bigger fish to fry right now. I have *Freudian* fish to fry.

Ok, screw this jazz guy. I pop in some piano chick. *Mom* is a piano chick Moishe, remember? Hear the pretty piano chick music Moishe? Doesn't that remind you of Mom? Yes it does, as a matter of fact you stupid whore, and it also reminds me how much I miss her right now. Methinks I will step up the crying jag.

Right, *fuck* piano chick. Clearly a bad move on my part. What was I thinking? Well, I wasn't really, because I can't really hear myself do that so well at the moment. Bygones. Alright, next CD in the stack -- it doesn't really matter what. It turns out to be some super bratty rock and roll, borderline punk. Moishe suddenly stops crying. I check to see if this is just some sort of eye-of-the-storm situation, but no
- he seems genuinely calm. We dance around the kitchen a little together. He puts his head down on my chest as if to say, thank God this woman finally put on some decent music. In a minute, he seems....wait, yes....he seems sleepy! I squish some pillows together on the couch and put him down next to me, punk rock band still blasting in the background. He goes to sleep. 25 minutes or so later, punk rock demo album ends, so I play it again. Moishe sleeps a bit more, then wakes up and sits there on the couch with me, cooing and playing with a toy. Punk rock album ends again, and he starts crying. I start punk rock album over again. Moishe stops crying. It's baby magic! We do a little more kitchen dancing. He's annoyed with me now though, because he knows I am capable of the ultimate DJ foul -- dead air -- so he cries a little between punk rock tracks to remind me of What Can Happen if I screw up again. During punk rock songs, he is fine. He gives me his thoughts on the particuarly strong tracks and we listen to those about, oh I dunno -- like, 37 times or so?

Hm. I wonder if he's going to be anything like Sarah?

Stop that Brawling, the Baby's Asleep!

We're pretty laid back parents. Moishe tried Chinese food when he showed interest at three months, which for those of you lucky childless-ones reading this was counter to all the parent education prescription that we "introduce one food at a time over the course of several months." Yeah - his first bites of solid food were spicy La Mien, a slice of orange and some chocolate ice cream. He really liked them all. So laid back.

We had kudos from friends about being laid back about noise because we expected he would fall asleep when we went out and he slept through all sorts of noises. But those kudos for being laid back had a lot to do with our baby's age. Under six months, he really didn't care where he was and he was too busy processing simple stuff, "Is that mom? Will she nurse me again? Am I tired? Boy I AM tired! I'm going to sleep. Snore." Now, he's seven months old and he doesn't just fall asleep when he's tired. He gets it that there is stuff going on around and that it's interesting, most things are more interesting than sleeping when you're seven months old. He just hasn't seen or heard that particular type of mufflerless car go up our street and he's got to know are those white walls or wide rims? And so he doesn't fall asleep and stay asleep through say, theoretically, bar brawls or police sirens. Now we tiptoe while he naps, and we keep things quiet when its time for him to sleep because he wakes easily and then he's cranky and unhappy, much the way I am when I've been woken before I'm ready. That doesn't mean he's not going out with us, it just means that you know, sometimes, we're those parents who hush people around baby.

Useful and appropriate baby shoes

So far I've found these two types of baby shoes available.
The first, though cool when painted with flames, are supposedly bad for the development of baby feet, and more importantly, are very painful when said baby kicks them in glee while being held in his sling. These are shoes for special occasions, and fashion dates.
The second don't hurt, but they are difficult to put on, and stay on only with difficulty, and aren't particularly warm. A friend described them as the device that keeps her son's socks on.

It's wintertime, my kids toes are cold, so what do I do? I make him shoes. Below are the pictures of the prototype shoe. The shoe is felted, and I put stitch markers in so I'd have stitch holes to pick up for later, but that didn't really work. I ended up using the pointy end of a needle to poke holes around the felted edge and then picked up a row of stitches with a crochet hook to start my knitted sock portion. The sock is done in actual sock yarn, some acrylic/cotton/lycra blend, so it's stretchy. I don't like the way the sock looks inside the shoe. I'm thinking about knitting the sock on the outside of the shoe for fashion.

Either way, this Dr. Seuss inspired footwear is way warmer and more practical than either of the other options. If anyone needs a pattern, let me know and I'll figure it out. It's just not that hard to wing.

Mommy Knows All About Math!

Can I say that I'm just so proud that my son's first interest in a calculator was at MY desk. Girls are good at math!

Baby Medicine

Moishe's been going to the doctor a lot. Here's how he handles it. That's special medical paper his wrapped himself in. It's serious business, ripping paper.

Urban Mom? Not!

I am forever in love with The New York Times. Today it's because of this article in the Fashion Section, Supersize Strollers Ignite Sidewalk Drama . Shabbir and I are personally appalled at the SUVs on sidewalks masquerading as child protection devices. This article is wrong that the opponents of Stupid Useless Vehicles are all childless adults. We were given a gigantic SUV for our tot at birth, a super nice and generous present, that we returned for a rocking chair. Much more practical. Instead we carry our child in a sling. We have two that we use for different occasions. Shabbir prefers this one because it fits his size best and its got a lot of extra fabric. I prefer this one because it has a pocket for diapers and a wallet, so I can go grocery shopping and not bring anything else along. Don't get me wrong, when he gets too heavy for a sling we'll submit to a stroller, but by then he'll be able to sit up, and therefore won't need as much padding as the SUV strollers have.

The worst incident of SUV abuse that we've seen was at the Mommy Movie in Georgetown. We don't live within walking distance of Georgetown, and as everyone in DC knows, there's no Metro there, though now there is a Circulator bus. So for the Mommy Movie we drove to Georgetown in our stationwagon with our tot in the car seat, pulled him out, into the sling and walked all of 20 steps through the parking lot to the elevator and the another 20 steps from the elevator to the movie theater. The room was occupied with about 25 women and babies under the age of three months, and a good three-quarters of them had brought gigantic SUVs to the movie theater and parked them in the handicapped space. We watched at least one of these new mothers pull up in their SUV to park next to ours, pull out the next SUV and put the baby in it to do the same 40 steps with us. There is only one person I know who really needs such an SUV for her kid and that's because she doesn't own a car. Her only choice for doing her grocery shopping, going out and insuring that her kid has some place to rest because she's likely to be gone for hours at a time, is a pram. And so that's what she's got. As for me, I put Moishe in the sling, walk down to get coffee, and then the dry cleaning and bags of groceries. I've carried him and all that back up the hill. I figure if I keep this up, I'll be strong enough to carry him and my groceries for a while more.

People are continually surprised by his presence in the sling, especially if Shabbir is carrying him. He's quiet, and he sleeps very well against our bodies. I have yet to be bumped by an SUV while carrying him, mostly because I can go places that the SUVs can't. You don't see them on the escalators in the Metro, nor often on the buses or the curvy narrow streets of our neighborhood. I didn't see them on the streets of The Mission, in San Francisco, and our foray into Noe Valley was brief.

I think the author's viewpoint is incorrect, not only in that it's childless vs. parents, but also that it's an issue of safety or "child as status." I believe that it is clearly an issue of "status as status." Bigger is richer is better in this revision of the 1950s. Cars, homes, and furniture are now scaled so outrageously large that normal sized homes built in the early part of the twentieth century can no longer hold newly made bedroom sets or sofas, let alone have garage heights tall enough for the pickup trucks masquerading as stationwagons. Why shouldn't this be the case in strollers and other needless baby equipment? I wonder if those same people who rage against the SUV stroller version rage against the actual SUV? The new ostentation is acceptable now in a way that throwing money around in the Reagan era wasn't. The upcoming recession and inflation is our punishment for wanton excess. Unfortunately it will be those who don't have the money to spend now who will pay once the economy crashes.

Compliments from prominent people

Moishe was complimented on his cuteness yesterday by Sandra Day O'Connor. He responded politely with "Gooh."