Hasta Luego

Just in case you notice the slacking is more than usual around here, we're off to Chicago tonight for a long weekend. I may well be able to update on the road, but you never know.

Clementine + Hudson = Tru Luv 4Ever

I haven't gotten to write like that since my hot and heavy 8th grade romance with Jeff Melzer (which sadly ended in his dumping me to ask Ann Lorden to the 8th grade dance, the jerk), who wrote me at least three notes a day and called me every night for hours and hours of nonsense on the phone. Ah, my first french kiss. Such nostalgia. We had all sorts of codes in our notes, and I think there was even some fancy folding now and then--footballs, swans, origami for the hormonal set.

And now my fast little hussy of a daughter has launched her own love life, this time falling head over heels for a boy named Hudson. He may be a little bit younger, but he's very advanced for his years; sure, he has some hang ups about not being able to roll over yet, but he keeps his very own blog and has some very sophistcated thoughts. Look how eager she is to teach him about love:
Not to mention tenderness:
And although I'm not really sure what she's doing here (maybe practicing dentistry because Hudson is the kind of guy who will certainly stand behind his woman's career) I'm certain it is done with love:
It's a good thing we adore Hudson's parents and can confirm he comes from good stock because there's no talking Clementine out of it. She's smitten.

Goodbye and goodbye and goodbye

As you might surmise from the thought-provoking title to this post, this was a weekend of goodbyes at our house, three to be exact. We said goodbye to Clementine's first car seat, to a large bicycle and to a beloved pet. It was exhausting.

The car seat is obviously not such a big deal because I never loved the whole baby-in-a-bucket thing I had going on. Sure, it was handy when she was asleep and I was mobile, but let us all recall for a moment the great car terrors of her early months. I could go nowhere, so it wasn't such a bonus to me that if I was able to make it out of the house and through the screams of terror and last long enough that she would also fall asleep I could pick the seat up and transfer it without much effort. Lately hauling that thing around was wonderful exercise and my flabby biceps will certainly miss that little bit of flexing they get these days, but Clementine was busting out of it and I had to either strap her down to the point of pain and frustration or let it be loose around one of her shoulders (thus negating the point of a car seat--why don't I just let her sit shot gun with me?). She hated both options, so we desperately searched our local Targets to find one that wouldn't cut into my ridiculous internet shopping problem or look awful in my car. Is it so wrong that I don't want anything brown in my black interior? Or anything with animals on it? We found a good evenflo one that looks like a little egg, and I was surprised at my own restraint because you know (given my expensive taste in high chairs) I wanted the $300 Britax one with the cushy cow print fabric. Am I cheap for not buying my kid the top of the line in safety? I did pause to think about that and the kind of social Darwinism that rewards those of means with increased safety and comfort but I decided that the expense was for the gullible. How much safer can a seat three times the price of most others really be? Three times as safe? I just don't buy it. It doesn't matter much anyway because despite having more room to kick around, Clementine cried the entire way to daycare and the entire way home. I just can't win.

We also said goodbye this weekend to the pregnant lady bike. The what? you ask? The pregnant lady bike, of course. The bike Nate and his friend David built for Red Bull Dragster Day, a very cool, funky race they held in downtown Detroit pretty much on my due date. When we saw the posters calling for entries last June I knew Nate had to do it--he loves to tinker with bikes and do crazy artistic stuff, so the fact that I would be in labor or about to burst had no bearing on whether or not. In fact, it gave him a theme: the bike was called "You're doing WHAT on my due date?!" As it turns out, Clementine arrived a wee bit early, so here is my least favorite picture of everyone but her. My husband in a diaper, me a few days after birth (and still lookin pregnant--thank god whoever took the picture managed to get my stomach in the shot) , my beautiful and very fresh child and the pregnant lady bike in all her glory:

It's a two person bike, and Nate and his friend Rich were dressed as babies "crowning" as they raced down the strip (click on the pic to see some of them in action...and full shots of them in diapers). Amazingly enough they didn't win--a smaller, more streamlined bike took the prize. Who would have thought? But the bike has lived on with us for the last 9 months, occasionally being dragged out and ridden around the neighborhood to secure our title as the world's oddest neighbors (a hard title to hold to here as our neighbors are always drunk and acting fools). Nate convinced some guys from Critical Mass to take her off our hands, and we will look for them as they block rush hour traffic in a large, lovely homage to childbirth.

Our final goodbye is still hard to talk about, though I know many will think it's a little disingenuous of me to say that. We put Kitty down on Saturday because she was in renal failure, living in our basement, not eating and peeing uncontrollably everywhere. Kitty has been in my family forever, but no one has ever loved her quite as much as Nate, who is taking this very hard. For my part I was struggling with Kitty since bringing a baby home. I know it makes me a horrible pet owner, but all of the sudden the tufts of cat hair, the cat shit licked off in the middle of my living room and the incessant meowing from yet another needy body were sometimes too much. Not all the time, but sometimes. Of course now I'm full of guilt and think my neglect is probably what killed her, but our vet assured us there were other forces at work. Besides, Nate loved her more than three good pet owners, so he totally balanced me out. As the old saying goes, though, you don't know what you have until it's gone. When Nate came home from the vet I had a good cry thinking of all the time with Kitty I'll miss. I'm especially sad Clementine won't have her to play with. Enough said. She was such a pretty cat that for a few minutes Nate and I joked about having her stuffed so we could still gaze upon her, but in the end we decided to have her cremated. It's morbid, but I've been surprised at how profoundly even this small brush with mortality has effected me. I'm sad about Kitty, but I can get worked up to even bigger tears when I imagine having to deal with other deaths, deaths I won't even mention. And so it is goodbye, Kitty:

Today as been a Bangles-worthy Manic Monday, cut short at work by the fact that I am a total MORON and forgot my breast pump. By 2:00 my boobs were hard as petrified grapefruits and I could literally feel flames rising off them. I had to flee. I hope to avoid further mishaps as the week progresses, as I'm angling for an early start to my long weekend--we're heading to Chicago to act like tourists, not just like people visiting family. I'm putting together a long list of things to do, not the least of which is examine Roscoe, home of the Kitchen on Roscoe (very cute little diner) and a dozen cool baby shops. Maybe I can start a life as a travel journalist--my angle, of course, will be traveling with a kid and still trying to be cool. No Disney store for me, thank you very much.

This week in pictures

I know that so far just about every age has been my favorite, but I've been feeling particularly luckly lately to have such a happy baby, exploring the world, laughing and causing all sorts of mischief. She has been so much fun that Nate and I are getting even less done at home just so we can sit around and watch her. I just uploaded some new pics to Flickr, but here are some of the highlights:

Our little circus girl loves to walk on her hands. The first time she did it she laughed harder than I've ever heard her. Now it's just a regular thing she likes to do (is it wrong that I'd so much rather see her run off and join the circus than become a republican? No, that's called parenting!):

She's been standing on her own for a few seconds at a time, but I'm never fast enough to get a picture. She's also trying her hardest to simply stand up from a seated position, which means she spends a lot of time like this:

Her dad couldn't be happier that she loves his whack-ass old VW. When she got grease all over her fingers he almost peed he was so excited.

So in lieu of any sort of real thoughts (other than it's finally Friday and I never thought I'd make it through the week), some photos.

She'll keep us company in hell

My little sister is in the throes of planning her youngest daughter’s baptism and is enjoying all the complications that come with planning an event that demands the presence of all concerned family members. She is trying to find a weekend in the summer when everyone in and out of state can be there because heaven forbid anyone miss the head dipping and sheet cake that are the main attractions of the event. I’m certainly not belittling anyone’s desire to participate (let me be clear: I’m all for the faithful having their special day), but I do pity K.C. because everyone else has an idea about when and how and where, and she doesn’t know what to do or who to prioritize. Her husband’s grandfather, for example, is up her ass to get it done SOON, before eternal damnation fall upon sweet Nora, and he doesn’t seem to understand that summer is a busy time for everyone. On top of it all, her in-laws, who have agreed to host the after party (strange to think of the after party to a baptism when usually those words signify to me partying until 4 a.m. and needing to puke in order to go to sleep—ah, nostalgia), are in the middle of a divorce. They’re going to stay in the house together until after the party, but, hey, that’s not a lot of pressure.

What gets lost in all this, I think, is the meaning of the ceremony, which doesn’t need all this witnessing in order to mean something. But I guess this is true with just about any important moment or ceremony—it is easy to lose sight of what the day is about because you have to balance family, tension, all sorts of expectations, other people’s needs, food allergies, what have you. What wins: the perfect ceremony for you at the expense of other people’s wishes and feelings, or a ceremony of compromises to keep everyone happy? I’m watching my friend Karen go through this as she plans her wedding, too, which has become a big, formal and (though she will never admit it) very traditional event when she had initially thought of it as small, informal and very personalized.

But none of this is why my little family of three is going to hell. Here it is: we have no intention of baptizing Clementine unless she wants us to, and even then we will have to look long and hard at who can take responsibility for such a huge spiritual undertaking because it certainly won’t be us (Nate can count on one hand the number of times he has set foot in a church, and I am agnostic at best). Lots of the old biddies with whom I work think this is incredibly unfair of me, this lack of regard for darling C’s eternal salvation. My office mate, for example, always asks me if maybe I shouldn’t go ahead with it “just in case.” In case of what, I’m not sure—in case there really is a God? In case something happens before C finds her way to Jesus? In case the world ends? The way I see it is that if there is a God and she cares about baptism even a little, my chances of going to hell are way higher if I get up in front of a church and promise (meaning LIE) to raise Clementine with some sort of Christian doctrine than if I wait until she is able to make decisions for herself. I’m not going to get all high and mighty here, but I think that is a much more honest approach than people who get their kids baptized and then never take them to church. I intend to take C to church when she’s old enough to understand it…and to a synagogue, some temples, a mosque. I want her to know the stories and tenets of these religions so she can choose the role one or many of them will play in her life. I see that as a much bigger responsibility than baptizing Clementine and never thinking about it again.

And while my feelings on this front a resolute, I still like the idea of a party, a ceremony that marks Clementine’s coming into our world. Yes, there is a birthday on the horizon (distant but there nonetheless), but I’m thinking of something more along the lines of a once-in-a-lifetime faux baptism to welcome her to our universe. I have some ideas about how something like this will go: friends, family, fairy godparents, a gathering, a cake and some symbolic offerings for Clementine’s future, but there are still lots of details to work out. I thought of having it on a solstice (can I be more of a heathen?), but as more and more time passes I think it may have to wait until her birthday.

The only thing I need now is a good retort to all the people I work with who are wondering what the hell is wrong with that tattooed mama who won’t baptize her baby. They think I’m doing this to be different, to be outrageous, and they can’t be convinced otherwise. I’ve started talking about how lonely we’ll be in eternity if Clementine gets to go to heaven, but most people’s senses of humor on that topic just aren’t that reliable. I fear I offend them way more than they let on. Maybe I need to consult Dear Abby—she’s always so sharp with the it’s-none-of-your-business comments.

Another oops!

OK, so I just now realized that I totally missed my 8 month letter to Clementine, and although I feel like a jerk (seriously, how can the 5^th of a month pass by me so easily now—have I somehow forgotten?), I’ve decided that it’s much more like real life to win some, lose some and move on. I don’t need to write an 8 months, 11 days letter to validate myself, do I? I didn't even start these damn things until she was 5 months old, so what's the big deal? Her perpetually unfinished baby book will not have her mother’s reminiscences from every single moment of her life, but I bet she’ll live and still manage to have a sense that I love her more than anything and have done nothing quite as wonderful with my life as watch her grow up. Besides, I’m going to write a heck of a 9 month letter, and I think it’s important to start the “I’ll do better next time” cycle of mom guilt now, so I’ll be really good at it once she’s a teenager and disappointed in my every small failure.

Just another day

Here’s what I learned yesterday: Mother’s Day is a lot like a birthday, a day that requires celebration and recognition, the level of which is largely dependent on the person being celebrated. Some people don’t care at all and are happy to get a card or a nice word. Others want fireworks, flowers, bells, whistles and all the stuff in between. The distance between expectations and reality can be the difference between a good day and one that ends in tears or an angry trip to the grocery store. I talked to a lot of moms yesterday and today, and I have yet to hear from anyone (except my own mom and stepmom, of course) who had a great day. Most of the people who had crappy days have small children who can’t really celebrate the holiday in their own right, so I think this is more a comment on husband-wife relations than anything else.

My sister, for example, “got to” host a brunch for our mom and her mother-in-law, and got a $25 gift card from Target from her husband, who purchased a new printer and a card for his own mother. Another friend of mine also had brunch responsibilities for her mom and mother-in-law but received no card or celebration of her own. She was then made to feel guilty for indulging in some junk TV (Britney and Kevin’s True Hollywood Story) and so escaped for a solo trip to the grocery store for some time by herself. My other good friend (I’m purposely withholding names here), who bought me a lovely Mother’s Day card that made me feel very special, spent her day doing laundry and cleaning the floor. What's the deal, here? Are my expectations just silly and way too high?

My day started nicely enough. We went to breakfast at the place we do most Sundays, and then we went to a flower market and bought a little something for the garden, which I haven’t even started working on this year. That was it, though, and I was a little bothered by the lack of celebration, much to both my surprise and Nate’s. He was thinking this was a holiday on par with Valentine’s Day—why celebrate love just once a year to please the Hallmark corporation? But I was disappointed and the day ended on a pretty low note. Sure, all days should involve celebrating moms, but I think the notion of one special day is kind of cute. I remember all the crafts we would make in school when I was younger: the collages and picture frames with macaroni glued on as decoration, the wall hangings and painted planters. I can’t wait until I get those things from my own daughter, and I was bummed to have not much to show for my very first Mother’s Day. In Nate’s defense, I should mention he was going to get me a tattoo to celebrate, but I realized too late that DUH! you don’t do silly things like that when you’re breastfeeding. And he always does nice things for me, even brought me flowers last week, although he was adament that they were "just because" and not for Mother's Day. I think he thus felt surprised and caught off guard that I wanted something so mundane, silly and common as a Mother’s Day celebration, so there was a lot of tension as we tried to sort things out. At one point he demanded we cancel any sort of future celebration for Father’s Day, but why would I want to miss out on an opportunity to celebrate all the important and wonderful ways his life has changed since Clementine came along, even if it is for spite?

So now I’m left thinking a lot more about what the holiday means and why I wanted it to be acknowledged. For one, I do miss all the loopy, romantic things we used to do for each other before we settled into our blissful and comfortable marriage. I agree that there are holidays that are pointless to make a big deal out of, and I do think that sometimes forces conspire to ruin big days. When you have high expectations for a day—a birthday, Thanksgiving, etc., you are almost always disappointed. But motherhood is new to me, and I’ve doubted just about every decision I’ve made since I became a mother. It is an exercise in losing control, in wondering, in taking flying leaps into a void and hoping it all turns out OK. Thus far, I’ve survived, and I think I wanted to be pampered and recognized for that. I know Nate marvels at how I’ve adapted each and every day, and he is the only person in the world I would want to do this with. He tells me all the time how great I am doing, how lucky he and Clementine are. So why did I need a bigger deal to be made of it yesterday? Am I an egomaniac or something? I feel like an ass, and he certainly felt hurt to think I don’t see his appreciation. I do, I do, but I’m weak. I wanted something more, something I didn’t articulate, something I didn’t know I would crave. I feel silly, but we were able to recover by the end of the evening and I'm fine today, if not a little embarassed for pouting so much.

Shit! More to think about, but I’m late for a meeting. Mondays really suck.

You're not alone

Oh, my sad little blog, how I neglect you. Does it comfort you to know you are not alone? These days, I neglect just about everything and everyone. I certainly feel like I neglect my daughter. I know I neglect work. Here are only some of the other things I neglect (in no particular order), just to make you feel better:

1. Laundry. There are at least 4 loads heaped in piles on my basement floor at any one time. We did two last night, and there are still 4 to be done.
2. My cat. How have I not shared this with you? I neglect my cat and now she is punishing me by peeing all over the house. She is sick, very sick, and Nate has to give her IVs every night. See, neglect can kill, and I do have funny pics of the IV thing.
3. Photos. I have hundreds I haven't edited or posted.
   
4. Dusting. We're going to start naming the dust bunnies in the house and pretend they are pets. Who needs the cat?
5. My health. It's so much easier to order out than cook healthy food, and it's so much easier to collapse from exhaustion than to actually exercise.
6. My ass. See above. It deserves its own mention, though, because I can't use the whole I-just-had-a-baby excuse much longer.
7. My thank you notes. I owe friends and family so much gratitude, and I can't find time to write out a simple card. My other mom friends have no trouble, but I am simply an ingrate. I cringe when I think of it.
8. Clementine's baby book.
9. Any sort of photo book, archive or storage system--thousands of photos of the last few months, maybe a dozen prints. If the Internet explodes, it will be as if my child never had an infancy.
   
10. General correspondence.
11. Friends, near and far.
12. Family, all of whom are far away, which is a huge pain in the ass.
13. My eyebrows. Seriously, it's bad.
14. The newspaper. I'm averaging about 2 a week on a good week. I didn't even know about Britney's second pregnancy until yesterday, not to mention the latest bad news about our country and government.
15. Dishes. How many of these are cleaning related so far?
    
16. My car. Clean? Wax? Oil change? Why do these things need so much maintenance?
17. My bills. Ask my sister--I'm a deadbeat who misses deadlines and forgets to pay things.
18. Email. I have a lot to answer but just no time.
19. Reading real books. Not parenting manuals, not magazines. Whatever happened to a good book?
20. Writing. Have I mentioned my advanced degree in poetry? My unfinished manuscript? My hundreds of pages of journals and prompts?
21. My marriage. Family bed + fatigue + insanity = neglect
22. Running. I used to run all the time. Now I'll be lucky to puff my way through next week's 5K. Last year, I had the best excuse ever (pregnant, ahem), but this year...not so much.
23. Philanthropy. Volunteering.
    
24. Movies. The last one I saw in the theater was Brokeback Mountain.
25. My vacuum. What is this strange word?
26. Yardwork. You could braid my grass and harvest the weeds.
27. Intellect. See points 19 and 24 about books and movies but include also the way my vocabulary has deteriorated and now includes calling Nate "Daddy" and talking a lot about poop.
28. Manners.

Dang! I was going to try to make it to 30, but I just realized I've been neglecting one of my most important duties of the day: PUMPING. And while I do type one handed very well and have even found ways to balance the bottles so I can have both hands free to drive or do hell knows what, I'm starting to worry about the inevitable boob sag that will come when this nursing parade is over. And so like that, I'm off to further neglect you, poor blog. But now maybe you're not feeling so lonely.

More weekend fun

What I couldn't expand upon last bight becasue I was so freakin' tired is how much fun the rest of my hungover Sunday was with my little girl and Nate. It was beautiful weather, so I put on my darkest shades and went over to my friend Laura's house to lounge around in her pretty backyard. What I learned from this experience is that it is very important, when you are hungover, to go to a house where there are no other small children. People there will likely be excited to entertain and play with your child while you lie on their lawn furniture and slurp water. Sure, you may have to change a diaper or two, but your contributions can be minimal.

Laura and Dave have a great big trampoline, and I thought it would be fun to roll around with little Miss Clementine for a while. Know what trampolines produce a lot of? Static. And giggles. Her hair instantly sprouted out in all directions, and she LOVED as I bounded her around. Other than one misjudgement that popped her well off the surface of the trampoline and which she enjoyed nonetheless (see below for photo), she stuck to the surface of the thing and crawled around picking up leaves and little bugs. Such bliss.

Static:

Giggles:

One big bounce:

A fine Derby indeed

I survived my annual Derby bash...just barely. I don't know how it was different from last year, but 2006 saw the party consume 5 bottles of varying qualities of borboun to 2005's paltry 1 and 1/2. Oh, yeah, last year I was knocked up, so there's the difference. I proudly stayed sober until most guests left and then went around like a homeless women drinking all the half mint juleps that people left behind. Have I become cheap or was this a new form of denial? I hope I don't catch anything. I later stayed up with our friends Dave and Karen, sipping the finer borboun until I realized we were having an in-depth conversation about how much we all loved each other. Yup, time for bed. Know what I haven't missed in my year and a half of pregnancy-induced sobriety? Hangovers. Sunday was desperately hard, and I spent the day queezy and being pampered (and Clementine lived on previously pumped and frozen milk as I dumped mine out until after I was done feeling dizzy. OK, it's also because I had a margarita when we went out for lunch, but it was a hair-of-the-dog gesture more than anything else.

I'm still exhausted and recovering, but there are some mighty fine photos to be seen on Flickr, including a series of Karen getting progressively more intoxicated--you can see it in the eyes. Click on one of the shots below for more.

Ho hum

So it's Friday night at 8:00 p.m. and I'm wondering how I've ended up home alone with my sleeping kid on a night that used to be pretty fun for me. I've got a party to plan and a house to clean and I'm all alone, despite plans to the contrary. A few weeks ago one of my friends was all "I'll come for Cinco de Mayo, we'll drink margaritas all night and get ready for your party," and then tonight it was, "It's 7:30, I have to get home to hang out with my boyfriend." Humph. I know my life has changed a lot since I had a kid and there are a lot of things I'm not too flexible about (bed time, for example), but I like to think I follow through and am more than willing to set aside special time to be with a friend or family member who needs it. I'm also more than willing to make my home like a disco or a club so people don't notice that I've been overrun with motherhood and toys and a whole new life. How desperate. Yuck. And how naive--here I am with a bottle of tequila, a sink full of dirty dishes (yes, in addition to a house to clean--it makes me even madder), toys everywhere and hours and hours to clean it all up by myself. Maybe I'm being deluded, but I'm starting to suspect that there is no gap wider than that between a gal with a kid and one without. Until you've been here, you can't understand the isolation and frustration (and no, I'm not forgetting about the joy and elation--I'm just going with my mood for a minute). Even when I can articulate it to people, which I did tonight, they don't seem to get it. And what kind of person leaves a mom with a sink full of dirty dishes? I mean really.

And where is Nate during all this? He's at a party, which I'm glad of because that guy hardly ever takes time to go hang out and do stuff that interests him. I'm thrilled beyond measure that he's out carousing, and I hope he comes home drunk and tattooed. He DESERVES it for so many reasons. I'm feeling like a bit of an ass, though, because I should be with him. We went briefly, but I rushed through it all sensing my friend's clock was ticking. OK, the party was a little out of my league and Clemetine needed to go to sleep, but I still should have put Nate first. I sometimes think I sacrifice my time with him too easily because he is so dependable. We've been together forever, and I'm so sure of him that I don't always put him in the prime organizational slot he deserves or blow off my friends just to hang out with him. In the end, I know I have those minutes late at night and early in the morning when we are just who we are: a family, best friends, lovers, two people who just are.

Stop reading this crap--it's just a pity party. I'm going to go wash dishes and get ready for a party I'm not all that excited about now. Tomorrow will be different, I know, but this is just one of those moments you can get lost in. Blogging is probably better than picking up the phone and bitching at someone, so here it is. I feel a little like I'm in junior high, whiny and hurt on a Friday, so I'm going to go do something no junior high student can do: a shot of tequila and an R-rated movie. While I'm doing dishes, of course.

Strawberry Clementine Alarm Clock

One of the joys of cosleeping I don't appreciate enough is that I never ever need an alarm clock (except if I have a really early meeting). Sure, the kid doesn't always sleep through the night, but she's pretty good about getting up every morning and crawling around between us, knocking her cute little head against ours in her form of a kiss. It's hard to get out of bed most days because she's so damn cute, acting all surprised to see us when we peek-a-boo out from beneath the covers, squeezing our noses, just loving on us in general. Know when it's not cute? At 5 a.m. Sure, she was cute and playful, the same loving little baby we could roll around with for hours, but it was 5 frickin' a.m., an unholy hour if you ask me. Sure, I could have gotten up and gotten a good start on my day, but who are we kidding? It would be nice to do yoga, eat an actual breakfast, maybe even blow dry (or at least brush) my mop of hair. But sleep is SO MUCH SWEETER.

To remind myself that Clementine is sweet at all hours of the day (I've been pretty grouchy on this lack of sleep), I just uploaded come pics of our recent bike ride. She loves the bike but hates the helmet, which is too big to be safe, I know. I am a terrible parent.

And maybe this is why she hasn't been sleeping so well lately:

I don't really have to tell you it's closed, do I?

Send in the troops!

My big-ass annual Derby party is this Saturday, and I haven't made much progress as far as making my home palatable for visitors. There are toys everywhere, random baby stuff like diapers, hats and carriers all over the dining room, and there are Cheerios literally under foot in every single room. Luckily, my friend Courtney came over to help last night, kicking my ass and making me grudgingly admit I might be a hoarder. The problem is I love me some garage sales and like to fill my house with funky finds. I haven't known Courtney all that long, but she sure got a crash course in my wackier side last night after trying to figure out where to put all my pens, strange card games, jewelry, art and fabulous 80s orange Betsy Johnson sweater with a huge zipper down the sleeve. After all that, she still stuck around and even donned a terrible mu mu (is that how you spell it? moo moo? mumu?) her boss gave her to wear to a weeding this weekend.

After she left, I finalized the menu and for the first time in my life see the convenience of things like Bisquick and pre-made pie shells. I usually go all out for any sort of entertaining (Thanksgiving takes me a few days in the kitchen), but this year I'm channeling that freaky Sandra Lee from the Food Network and working in some semi-homemade options so I don't totally lose my marbles. Menu will include some southern specialties like corn pudding, biscuits, tea sandwiches, ham (cooked in Coca-Cola, a little white trash tip that makes it OH SO GOOD), salad, roasted brussel sprouts and, of course, mint juleps. Guests wear their southern finery and can wager on the winner. It's a grand time, although last year was a lot more subdued because a.) I was pregnant and b.) I realized I had been making the mint juleps wrong in years past and adjusted the amount of alcohol DOWN, leading to less drunkenness. Nevertheless, someone did fall off a bike into our bushes, and my friend Karen slugged Nate because he beat her at cards.

Tonight I will have to be a white tornado in the house and may even try to sneak some grocery shopping in because tomorrow night I'll be home alone while Nate celebrates a new holiday : Syncro de Mayo. I'll try to explain that without making him sound like a total geek. He owns a Volkswagen Quantum Syncro from the 80s. They are apparently good little cars and have a cult following--there is an extremely active listserv of owners that Nate spends a good deal of time on. His friend KP lives near us and has about a dozen of these cars, no joke. Syncro de Mayo was his idea, and I swear people are coming in from out of state to attend. I know not what to say except that I LOVE how odd my husband is.

I have a ton of pictures to post of Clementine's first couple of bike rides and our trip to Iowa. Maybe somewhere in all this craziness I'll get to that because even with a helmet on she is too too cute. Which reminds me that we now have official unbiased confirmation of that fact (not like we needed it). We went to our favorite BBQ joint, Slows, earlier this week and were enjoying our meal when the manager came over to ask how the food was. "Oh, and look!" she exclaimed. "It's Clementine." We don't go that very often, so I was surprised until she told me it would be hard to forget the world's cutest baby. How true, how true. OK, so maybe she didn't say WORLD'S cutest, but she definitely implied it.

Note: This post has been edited. Apparently I spelled Syncro wrong initially (spelled it Synchro, which seems logical to me) and someone sure had something to say about that.

Was it heaven? Nope, just Iowa

So I fell off the face of the earth last week, but it wasn’t because I was drowning in work. OK, I did have a lot of work, but I also celebrated Clementine’s recent success on our trip to Washington, D.C. by taking her on yet another family pilgrimage to Des Moines. Since tickets to fly there are bizarrely expensive (seriously, who wants to go there for fun?), we decided to drive. Since Clementine still hates the car (and I think it’s cruel to put a little kid in the car for 10 daytime hours), we decided to drive through the night like old times. Since we have been blessed with the happiest baby on earth of late, it was surprisingly easy.

Nate and I are huge road trippers, and since we spent many years after college together and in love but living states apart, we are all too familiar with late nights on the open road with only the destination in mind. It did seem like a cruel slap in the face when we had a child who hated the car—kind of the ultimate test of our ability to be parents—but we’ve coped well, and I think the driving all night solution worked for the most part. I have to qualify that, however, because my normally easy-going husband is becoming increasingly type A, uptight and inflexible, and we had a little demonstration of that when we arrived at out hotel at 3:30 a.m. only to be told that they hadn’t kept a room for us. There was some big sports festival at Drake University, and there was no room at the inn. Any inn.

To me this seemed like no big deal. We have traveled all over the country and the world together, and we’ve certainly dealt with worse. We’ve slept in train stations and airports, we’ve missed planes (OK, that was all me), we’ve gotten terribly lost and had all sorts of unpredictable shit happen to us in strange places, and we’ve ALWAYS survived. If ever there was one of us who dealt with these unpredictable situations poorly, it was you-know-who (hint: not Nate). But this whole parenting thing has altered my temperament in some serious ways, and it seemed clear to me that while this SUCKED, there was an easy solution that didn’t involve waking up his grandparents who didn’t even have a couch for us to crash on anyway. Clementine was fast asleep in her car seat, so why not head back to the lovely, clean and inviting rest stop a few miles back, lean our seats back to catch some Zs and make an appearance at a more acceptable time? While this is eventually what we did, it was not before a bit of a temper tantrum and a lot of fuming. Even when we were happily snuggled in our car and I was feeling a bit of the adventurousness I thought was lost when we had a child, Nate couldn’t let it go. He was so steamed about it, I couldn't even sleep. I was going to avail myself of the free internet in the rest area (seriously, did I mention the place was LOVELY. I know it sounds odd, but the great state of Iowa has got it going on in the rest area department) to blog about what a jerk he was being, but I had let my computer battery run out and forgotten the plug like an asshole (thus none of the blogging and catching up I had planned to do from the hotel Saturday night while C. was sleeping and Nate was visiting with his family).

I mention all of this not as a passive aggressive attack on Nate. Of course it sucked that the hotel forgot about us, and he was right to feel mad. I’m getting worried, though, because he has been more and more upset about little things lately, and I miss my easy-going, calming best friend. I feel like we’ve switched roles completely: he gets ramped up about every little thing, and I am the one asking if it really matters. Last night, for example, he spent a better portion of the evening pissed because the new CD player is broken. He was hopping mad because the shit you can buy these days is just cheap and no good and he used to have a CD player that worked for 20 years because it was made when quality mattered and the whole world is against him and life sucks because the CD player should just work. Seriously, I need to find a way to help him find his way back to himself because he can’t be feeling too happy all angry and tense like this. Then again, maybe it will blow over; things are getting easier as Clementine grows up. Also, family can be very stressful, and I tend to become a bit of a freak when I go to my mom’s as well.

Other than the drama of arrival, we had a nice visit with Nate’s family. Clementine rose to the occasion and was sweet as a peach, even if she was just a little mama-hungry and clingy from time-to-time. She was teething and a little cranky (and Nate’s grandma was apparently channeling my mother the activity director for a bit and devised a grand plan to separate me from Nate and the baby for an afternoon so the baby could be schlepped all over the city to meet heaven-knows-who, which didn’t help matters), but who can resist her ready smile and cute little quirks? She’s making kissy noises, makes this funny little scheming hand gesture (I have some pics of that to post) and is trying her damndest to stand on her own. I was glad she got to meet her great-grandparents and see her grandpa again, and she loved Nate’s cousins. I got to go to a fabulous vintage clothing shop, but I didn’t get my Paul Revere’s breadsticks as I hoped. They are my nostalgia food—I practically lived on them in college.

We trekked home all night Saturday and managed to eek some pleasure out of yesterday after catching up on our sleep. We did yard work mostly while Clementine supervised from her pack-n-play. We also tried to enjoy a little picnic outside, which just about impossible due all the neighborhood dogs. I don’t know why I haven’t said much about the joy that it is living among the racist Nascar fans that make up my soon-to-be-transitioning (I hope) neighborhood because they are always good for a laugh. The dog thing is no laughing matter, though, because EVERYONE has some sort of big, scary dog that was purchased for a sense of security but ultimately relegated to bark outisde in protest (I believe) of the ill treatment they receive. No one walks the dogs or trains them—it is just a novelty that wears off quickly and leaves behind a pile of shit that no one wants to clean up.

Now I’m back to work and trying to get a whole lotta done. That’s especially hard after a weekend with my girl because I can’t help wondering what she’s up to. We have a ton to do this week in anticipation of our annual Derby party on Saturday. Last year was rough because I couldn’t have any mint juleps; this year will be a new kind of tough with a kid under foot. My my my.