Shannon Phillips

From Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices:

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn’t it what all the great wars and battles are fought for—so that at day’s end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?…This is part of what I meant about housework. If it isn’t important, what is? If it isn’t done honorably, where is honor?

I’ve been very happy lately, and wondering if the reason for my happiness lies in the lengthening days, or in Robin’s developmental stages; right now he’s more delightful than ever, sweet and cuddly and “talkative.” When we go to park he’ll toddle off and explore, and bring me back whatever he finds: leaves, or flowers, or sticks; he’s delighted to place them all in my lap, and grin up at me, and be kissed as a reward. He’s become so easy that Sam and I are talking about having another one. I know! It’s crazy!

I think another reason for my happiness is that I’ve settled into my new role. No, I haven’t gotten much done on my own creative projects. I’ve become more comfortable with just being a housewife. It’s a big job. It’s an important job. It’s an honorable job. I feel proud of the work I do. I want to do more, there’s other things I’ve left unfinished, but right now I’m proud of this. It’s real work. If it isn’t important, what is? If it isn’t done honorably, where is honor?

Tonight, during his nightly walk with Robin, Sam bought a packet of Pepperidge Farm cookies from our corner grocery store. He set them on a countertop when he came in, but Robin wasn’t fooled. My son knew exactly what was in that package, and he knew he wanted it, nevermind that he hadn’t had his dinner yet. He stood there underneath the cookies, pointing and saying “dee da? ba ba ba!”

“All right,” I said cruelly, “if you can tell me what you want, I’ll let you have one. Say ‘cookie.’ If you can say ‘cookie,’ I’ll give you one.”

“Ehn!” said Robin, pushing up on his tiptoes and stretching out his hands.

“‘Cookie,'” I repeated, heartlessly.

“Ehn!” said Robin. “Ehn!” And then he managed it! He grabbed the cookies! He pulled them off the counter and hugged them to his chest!

Then what did he do? He brought them to me, and laid them deliberately in my lap. “Dja!” he exclaimed.

I gave in. I opened them up and I gave him a cookie. It wasn’t English, but I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what he was saying.

In the box: collard greens, pea shoots, chard, kale, arugula, radicchio, spinach, bok choy, carrots, leeks, fennel.

Tonight I’m making a beef barley soup with the last remnants of our leftover corned beef brisket. I threw in the pea shoots because, you know, why not.

Tomorrow’s lunch: leftover soup. Dinner: pork chops and collard greens, maybe along with a French potato salad I’ve been wanting to try.

Friday lunch: spinach salad with bacon. Dinner: farfalle pasta with winter pesto (using the spinach and kale); roasted carrots and fennel.

Saturday lunch: leftovers, or something from the pantry. Dinner: baked polenta with cheese, leeks, and chard.

Sunday brunch: crepes at the crepe place! Dinner: roasted beet salad with arugula, radicchio, and blue cheese; steaks.

Monday lunch: PB&J. Dinner: Hot and sour soup with bok choy.

Tuesday lunch: leftovers. Dinner: I think I’ll try this arctic char recipe from Whole Foods (probably with the tomatoes and artichoke hearts rather than the broccoli). I usually avoid cooked fish because I’ve just never been a fan (although I love sushi), but lately I’ve been thinking I should give it another try.

There’s not much really new going on in our house. Oh, except Sam has started a new tradition of going for an evening walk with Robin when he gets home (usually while I’m finishing up dinner). The boy loves it and I think it’s really good for him to work off some energy at the end of the day.

Last week’s Sam-friendly menu seemed to go over well. Sam has been making a conscious effort to give me more positive feedback when dinner is good, and that’s been really nice for me to hear. I definitely appreciate the effort on his part. I snapped this picture of our Valentine’s Day calzones, don’t they look cozy all cuddled up together?

Well, it turns out I had no reason to be stressed about Robin’s eighteen month checkup. He’s gained weight and height, enough that he’s back on a normal growth curve: he’s 31 and a half inches, 22 and a half pounds. And Dr. Simons pronounced himself fully satisfied with Robin’s communication skills. He recommended a book if we wanted to work on his language (It Takes Two to Talk) but stressed that he does not consider Robin to have any sort of language delay, and that the book was really just in case we were freaking out and needed to do something to reassure ourselves. Which we are not, and do not.

Poor Dr. Simons. I think he must deal with a lot of pretty intense type-A parents.

Valentine’s Day has been really nice so far. I got flowers! And I’m wearing a pretty new dress.

Robin’s just about a year and half old now, and we’re kicking it up a notch on the weaning. We were already down to three nursing sessions a day—morning, noon and night. That happened fairly organically. There wasn’t much conscious scheduling on my part other than a vague notion that I didn’t want to be nursing every hour and a half anymore. I guess I just started pushing it a little, not offering the breast first thing when he got fussy (but continuing to nurse him when he really demanded it) and that’s what the schedule settled into.

The real breakthrough was giving up our midnight nursing sessions. Boy, am I happy about that. The baby book advised me to refuse middle-of-the-night feedings long, long ago, but Robin had different ideas. And when it’s two A.M. and you just want to go back to sleep and the baby is screaming his head off and you know that simply nursing him will send him right back into slumberland…well, anything the books may say suddenly becomes a lot less compelling. So Robin got his way on that for a long time.

But it’s been a couple of months now without any midnight feedings. Again, all I did was keep pushing just a little: offering pats and soothing words instead of putting him to the breast right away. For a long time Robin pushed right back, insisting on a feeding, and then something changed; suddenly he was willing to be soothed. He would go back to sleep without the nursing. It was totally a change in him, not a change in anything I did. And boy, does it make my life easier.

So yeah, that was the biggest step as far as I was concerned. But lately I’ve been feeling that we should continue the weaning process. So as of today we’re dropping the morning session. I gave him a cup of milk instead, which he drank, and that seemed to go over okay although he definitely noticed the change in routine. He has a signal he gives when he wants to nurse: we have a nursing pillow on the couch, and he’ll walk up to it and start patting it. He’s been doing that off and on throughout the morning, like, “hey Mommy, I think you forgot something.” But I when I give him his milk cup instead, he accepts it.

The other two nursing sessions are going to be harder to give up. The noon feeding puts him down for his nap, and the evening feeding puts him to sleep for the night. “Milk coma,” we call it, and it’s by far the easiest way to get him to drop off. If for whatever reason he doesn’t nod off while nursing, we know we’re in for a long evening of increasingly-crabby baby, until finally either Sam gets him to sleep by walking and bouncing him, or I lie in bed with him singing lullabies while he squirms all around and kicks me in the face. So yeah, I’m not particularly eager to give up one of the most potent tools in my mothering utility belt. We’ll keep going with two nursing sessions a day for a while longer yet.

I am resolutely not worried about Robin’s speech development. I am not worried about it even though the baby book engages in base scare tactics, warning us to “alert our pediatrician to possible signs of developmental delay” if our toddler is not speaking at least fifteen words by eighteen months. I am not worried about it because Robin is happily babbling away and I have talked to many other mothers of little boys who tell me that their boy, or another boy they know, wasn’t really talking until two years or even later. (It’s a boy thing. The girls are little chatterboxes, all of them.)

I am not worried about it even though Robin’s eighteen-month checkup is coming up, and the doc told us that if Robin wasn’t talking by this point he’d want to check his hearing. Robin’s hearing is fine. He turns his head when we call his name and he imitates sounds that we make. He is interactive and very conversational, it’s just that the sounds he makes to indicate how he’s feeling or whether he wants something aren’t English.

In fact, as I was fretting on a low level about that upcoming checkup, it occurred to me that I may be drawing an arbitrary distinction around what counts as a “word” and what doesn’t. We’ve been focusing on the English, trying to tell ourselves that when Robin points at a dog and says “da-gi!” he’s saying doggie, ignoring all the times he points at his juice cup and says da-gi, or points at a dog and says guh! or buh! We tell ourselves that when he runs to Sam calling da-da-da! he’s saying daddy, ignoring the long hours when Sam’s at work and Robin shouts da-da-da all day anyway.

But there are things that Robin only says in certain contexts, never randomly. He says “awwww” when he lays his head on my shoulder, or when he pets the cat. He says “mmmm!” when he sees food that he wants to eat. He doesn’t make these sounds at any other time. They are meaningful. He clearly understands that awwww is an expression of tenderness, while mmmm! is an expression of yummyness. Are these words? I think they must be something very close.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much easier it’s gotten, being Robin’s primary caretaker. It was astoundingly, asskickingly hard at the beginning but it got steadily easier, and now as he’s learning new ways to communicate his desires it’s easier still. I mean, we have our days—especially when he was recovering from being sick, and wouldn’t eat much, and as a consequence was hungry and cranky—but his appetite is completely recovered now and so are his spirits. Oh, except that he still won’t eat bananas, which is a sad thing.

But a well-fed, well-rested Robin is a happy Robin, and a happy Robin is good company. Which is a lucky thing, because he is quite literally my constant companion. He sleeps snuggled up against me. He wakes me in the morning with kisses, pats, and gentle coos. Yesterday and this morning he gravely offered me first one foot, and then the other, expecting kisses on his toes which I obligingly provided. (“Oh look at those delicious toesies nom nom nom nom mmm oh it’s a very fine crop of toes today, thank you my dear.”) I suppose someday he will have to become accustomed to a world wherein his feet are not kissed first thing upon awakening, but that day has not yet dawned.

From morning to bedtime we are never far from each other. Even as he races around the park he keeps me in his sights, and toddles back to my side every now and then for a quick hug before pelting off again. He generally even joins me in the shower. He is my little buddy, my good friend, always wanting to help no matter what it is I’m doing. He is so funny and so sweet, and most of the time it’s easy, now, to be with him.

Of course this total intimacy won’t continue much longer. I’d like to establish some bathroom privacy at some point in the near future; and when we move into a larger space we can start getting him used to sleeping in his own bed. But I know that most of the separation will be at Robin’s own initiative. He’ll hit the normal developmental stages that lead him to seek greater and greater independence. He’ll be growing and changing, and he’ll reach a point where he doesn’t want to be always at mommy’s side.

But I, ungrown and unchanged, will be a little sorry when it happens.

Our visit to Reno last weekend was marred by illness: Robin caught the stomach bug I mentioned in my last post. We’d given him a couple bananas in the car, and we first became aware that he was sick when he vomited banana all over himself and his carseat. We pulled over and cleaned him up.

About ten miles later, the second banana came up.

We were in the middle of a mountain pass and we decided the best thing we could do for him was continue on to his grandparents’ house. So I sat in the backseat as he continued to vomit every ten minutes, doing my best to comfort him and to contain the mess. By the time we arrived he was only bringing up stomach acid, but he continued to be shaken by retching spells.

At his Pappy and Nonna’s house Robin actually seemed pretty happy: there were doggies to pat, Christmas presents to discover, and of course his grandparents and his auntie to play with. We followed him around with a towel and the vomiting seemed to ease up a bit, going from every ten minutes to maybe every twenty. In the meantime he was perfectly happy to explore and to play, but it became obvious that he was pretty worn out. The grandparents wanted to take us out to dinner and to do some more visiting, but I was worried about him and insisted on taking him back to our hotel room so he could rest. When I set him down on the bed, he dropped over like a felled tree and went immediately to sleep.

Unfortunately, he woke up twenty minutes later to puke. He went straight back to sleep afterwards, but the pattern continued throughout the night. Sam is slow to wake so I was the one who tended to him during these episodes, and it was awful. I was so worried about him and I felt so helpless; and of course I was exhausted too since I’d just recovered from the same sickness. The brief periods of sleep and the many episodes of waking to hold a towel under his chin blurred together into one nightmarish moment that seemed like it would never end. I remember glancing over the at the clock woozily at one point and seeing that it was only 12:30; it felt like ten hours had already passed, and I distinctly thought to myself, “This is exactly what Hell would be like.”

The very worst part of the night came at 3 AM when Robin started getting dehydrated and asking for water (not with words; he just points in the direction of things he wants and adopts an insistive tone with his usual syllables: “buh! guh!”). We gave him water, he drank it thirstily, but it came right back up. Here is another thing that everybody already knows: it is incredibly hard to watch your child suffering when there is nothing you can do to help.

I was resolved to take Robin to the hospital as soon as the sun came up, but around 5 AM something remarkable happened: Robin woke up, vomited, had a drink, went back to sleep…and then didn’t wake up again for an hour and a half. And even then he didn’t throw up, he just wanted to nurse.

And as morning finally came I was filled with an immense gratitude: I turned blissfully to Sam and I said, “The sun’s up, my baby’s not vomiting, and Obama’s going to be president.”

Robin’s stomach was still a little touchy for the rest of the weekend; he wouldn’t eat much solid food, but we kept him hydrated and he was at least willing to nurse. He’s been resting more than usual, and his appetite seems to be recovering. Last night we got him to eat some french fries, and this morning he took in a little bit of oatmeal. Right now he’s pulling a bunch of Saltines out from their box, taking a single bite from each, and placing them each on the seat of Sam’s chair. I feel pretty okay about this. At least the sun’s up, my baby’s not vomiting, and Obama is president.

We just received a lovely red amaryllis plant via Fed Ex, in a silver pot, and it’s very beautiful in every way except that I don’t know where to send a thank-you note! I scoured the packaging and I can’t find any indication of who sent the gift! It seems to be sent from within California but I can’t find a note or name attached.

I’m worried now because we actually sent similar gifts to a couple of our loved ones. Is this a “return address” sort of thing? Is there somebody out there who didn’t get their amaryllis? Or is this our amaryllis to be watered and cherished and placed in indirect sunlight? Please do say!

At least, hard to watch without crying.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/couragecampaign/sets/72157611501972510/show/