savagemama

After a few nights of very little sleep, I’ve decided that my daughter should consult with the Pentagon, the CIA and Blackwater. She’s cornered the market on torture and they should know about her tactics. Cough every five minutes, rustle the covers every 30 minutes, squeeze tiny hands with sharp fingernails under mom’s back. Repeat again and again until she wakes up.

The torturers at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have nothing on her. If the GOP really wants to know how to get information out of terrorists the need not employ water boarding, they only need to put prisoners in a room with a teething toddler for a few nights in a row and they’ll get whatever information they want.

The only bone-chilling possibility in all of this I’m trying to not think about it that this innate knowledge Eliza seems to posses might just classify her as a Republican. And that is scarier (sorry Dad) than any amount of missed sleep.

It’s that time of year again, I suppose, that time of year for falling in love. Except this year my valentine walks on four legs and licks her butt. It’s true, I’m re-falling in love with Imogene, my yellow lab.

I think I’ve written here about how we met, how she picked me to be her mom seven years ago at a lab farm in Oregon. She licked me on the chin, at six weeks old, and I took her home. For months she peed in the house, chewed every pair of shoes I owned and wagged her way into my life. We went everywhere together those first few years including the grocery store.

She’s always had more personality than smarts and even as the former light of my life has, at times, been amazingly annoying. [Read More]

We met with our midwife a few weeks ago at her home. Eliza completely ignored me as she had discovered a red toy car that she could climb in and out of and open and close the doors. When the midwife checked my blood pressure Eliza was in her own little world, and when she drew my blood, Eliza was happily playing with our other midwife’s daughter.

But when our midwife checked the baby’s heartbeat, Eliza snapped out of her play-filled trance and walked over to me. She looked at me with one-part curiosity, one-part confusion. Then she climbed on my lap and reached for the instrument on my belly as though she was investigating the cause of this strange but primal and familiar sound. She rubbed her hands in the gel on my stomach and curled up beside me. It occurred to me that she will rely on me and my cues to guide her through these next few months. It seems like a big, important and, somehow tender, responsibility.

Lately I’ve noticed Eliza doesn’t really have an inside voice. I keep trying to encourage her to use it when she’s shouting one of the 10 words she knows throughout the day.

“Nilk!” she says when she wants her milk cup. “Nilk!”

“Inside voice baby,” I say trying to lower my own voice so she’ll get the picture.

“Nilk!” she shouts.

I called my mother yesterday to tell her that Eliza seems to have inherited her lack of volume control.

“She just shouts all the time,” I said. “I wonder where she gets that?” My mother just laughed. I’m pretty sure she was laughing at me. [Read More]

When I took a shower yesterday morning, Eliza cruised around the bathroom chatting to herself, playing with everything in the room besides her toys. When I got out and dried off I went through my “beauty routine” of putting lotion on my face. Then I put a little product in my hair. My hair is wavy in this dry, dry climate and requires a little something to give it some life. As I ran my hands through my hair, I looked in the mirror and could see Eliza standing behind me, running her hands through her hair, mimicking me. I almost started to cry but instead picked her up, kissed her and sat her on the bathroom counter so she would be closer to me. I’m finding I don’t want her too far from me these days.

Lately Eliza is finding her words. She calls milk “nilk,” cats “neow” and her dolls “bebe.” She calls me “me-me,” Seth “da” and Imogene, “mo mo.” When she wants a bite of whatever I’m eating, she says “bite, bite, bite” reaching her little hand into the air toward me and furrowing her brow as though I’ve not fed her in weeks. She keeps shouting “bite” (why say it once when you can say it 16 times!) until I give in or gobble up the small portion of food I’ve managed to keep for myself and say, “all gone.”

Although it may sound like it, I’m not depriving this voracious little angel of sustinence. Most of the time I’m trying to keep her from eating the crap that I’m craving these days.

I wish I were one of those pregnant women who crave oranges or nuts, that my sweet tooth could be sated with a nice fresh apple or a glass of juice. But I haven’t proven that lucky. While I try, trust me I do, my pregnant body is less of a temple and more of a shrine to the white powdered donut. [Read More]

Last week Eliza and I had a lunch of decadence. We went to a local pub because I was craving a cheeseburger. We found a quiet table and after strapping Eliza into a high chair I realized we had positioned ourselves right next to one of Missoula’s infamous writers.

I ordered bacon on my cheeseburger, vanilla ice cream for Eliza and sat back for an hour of eavesdropping about Missoula’s literati. I couldn’t have imagined a better way to spend an afternoon.