On Mother's Day, I reflected on what six months of motherhood has meant for me.  All of the beautiful things that come along with being a mama are here - the warmth of holding a baby, the heart's expansion while watching my son sleep, the joy of seeing him smile.  We all know these things are nice, they're the best things in our lives, and all that good stuff.  I could write a recyling bin full of florid, rhyming greeting cards about these things, and, since I'm betting you're on the giving or receiving end of some of those cards, I'm not going to go in to all that loveliness.   I love being a mother, and I love my son.  It's the collateral damage of motherhood I don't like.

Something seems to have happened to my ability to recall the correct word.  I handed Axel a purple stuffed toy yesterday and said, "Look, baby, it's your hippo!  Isn't that a fun hippo?"  The toy isn't even a mammal.  It's a crustacean.  It's a little stuffed crab.  This happens all the time - when I'm talking to Axel, in meetings at work when I've asked questions the answers of which are written in paragrap three of the written materials in front of me and aren't the question that I really meant to ask, while on the phone with friends when I stutter or say "See you soon" to people who live halfway across the country who I won't see anytime soon.  I pull up the wrong word and don't even realize how wrong it is until someone gives me a look that says, "Ummm, are you okay?"  Yes, I'm okay.  I'm just a mother.  I'm teaching someone all about language, and I can't talk myself.  Axel's going to go in to kindergarten calling elephants donkeys and cats giraffes. 

Mixed in with my new weaknesses when it comes to the spoken English language is an inability to focus.  Halfway through a conversation with my husband, I realize I have no idea what he's talking about - and I've been responding in a coherent manner for ten minutes. Top Chef will be on and I'll be alone, sitting on the couch, and I couldn't tell you why they're hacking at a fish that looks like it's a mutated creature  from a nuclear waste-infested lake.  All this while Axel's not even awake.  When he is and I'm with him, it's even worse.  It's not that my mind can no longer shift gears between things.  It's that my mind is trying to run in five different gears at once and failing at all of them.  There's no quiet space left inside my head.  Every inch is full of reminders to call the preschool down the street about waiting lists, set up a meeting at work, finally get the dog in to the groomer, hook myself up to the breast pump in twenty minutes, pay the phone bill, send an overdue reply to a friend's email. 

And, of course, there are the permanent spit-up stains on my clothes, mashed yam in not just my son's hair but my own, the body that's a mushy version of itself pre-baby, the dried boogers that are on my sleeve and perched on the tip of Axel's nose like those of a rare, especially snotty unicorn.   Oh, motherhood.  It changes you.  It shakes up your life and stains your wardrobe.  It makes you confuse  hulking land animals and small, clawed sea creatures.   And it gives you the chance to get to to know your baby, and fall more deeply in love with him each day. 

Happy Mother's Day to you and yours!

I thought I had about thirteen years before Axel started having make out sessions.  Well, Axel's done wooing much older women and has turned his affections to a younger crowd.   When I picked him up from daycare yesterday, his favorite teacher reported that he'd learned to kiss.  He wasn't kissing her - he was kissing another baby.  I'll call her Miss C.  Miss C is about six weeks younger than Axel, with a tiny snub nose, an extensive wardrobe of footed sleepers, and a soft little mew in times of distress.  Compared to the agressive older woman (she's one) who takes Axel's pacifier out of his mouth and tries to escape whenever she hears that the door hasn't been shut all the way, and the three month old who's still in the newborns slug phase, Miss C is the most eligible bachelorette on Axel's side of the infant room.  Apparently, Axel peppered her with wet, slobbery kisses, rolling toward her again and again across the soft mat.  I think he has designs on the two ladies in the other room, too, since he flashed a sly grin at a brunette as we went out the door.  He's the wee playboy of daycare. 

When he's not sitting in a tree with little Miss C, he loves to grab a fistful of cheek and plant an open mouthed slobber on the adults nearest and dearest to him.  Luckily, his classmate kisses were of the less aggressive and grabby sort.  He's planted his baby kisses on his mama, and isn't just betstowing his love on his classmates, though he has requested a velvet smoking jacket and some Barry White tunes. 

When he isn't kissing, Axel's trying to crawl.  I guess I could say he's crawling, since he moves himself with intention while on all fours.  He digs his face in to the floor, wiggles his butt in the air, and propels himself forward a few inches.  He'd be moving a lot faster if he stopped using his oversized head as a front brake. 

Kissing and crawling?  We're in trouble. 

A report from our adventures on (and getting to and from) the Cape:  we survived, though we crawled in to bed late Monday night feeling like we'd gone ten rounds in a very small boxing ring with a pack of hungry, ferocious badgers. 

We left our house at 6:15 am on Thursday, and traveled to the airport.  Though we arrived 100 minutes before our flight and had checked-in online, the three of us got to the gate at the end of the boarding rush, and were almost the last people - except for those who actually sprinted to the gate - to board.  Lesson learned: things take longer with babies.  Lots longer.  Axel nursed during take off, discretely underneath the nursing cover, and we spread out in our the row we happened to have to ourselves, though we only paid for two seats.   After playing dance on Mama's lap, there was minimal fussing, and Axel quickly settled in for a nap.  Sean decided that was a good idea.

Upon landing and almost losing a bag that then mysteriously appeared in the dark back hallways of Logan airport, we picked up the rental car and rental car seat, and used a combination of Google Maps directions (accurate) and the Hertz GPS device (inaccurate - it seemed to think we had an amphibious vehicle floating through Boston Harbor when in fact we were in the not really all that new tunnels) to make our way to my dear friend Marbree's apartment in Somerville.  We went to a pizza place where a handful of other groups with children were eating.  Some couple gave Axel dirty looks because he was exercising his vocal chords.  He's figured out he can do high-pitched screeches, and sputter his lips together in a motorboat imitation.  This couple was the second of the anti-baby crowd we encountered, after a cranky male flight attendant - traveling forces them in to close contact with babies.   There were many in the pro-baby crowd, too, far more than the anti-crowd.  I just don't get the anti-baby folks.  They were babies once.  I'm sure they made loud noises at inappropriate times and pooped all over someone and had tantrums.  If Axel were in the middle of the Russian Tea Room, rolling around on a knit blanket with a pile of rattles and teddy bears blocking the dessert tray, or flinging expensive and irreplaceable vases around the Louvre, I would understand the disapproval, but we're talking about a pizza place. 

It's not like I tried to make them touch my baby, chasing them around the tables with a six-month-old in hand the way I remember boys chasing girls in the cafeteria wielding the guts from the worms disected in 6th grade science class.  I get that not everyone wants to hold and gush over babies, but why be negative about their very existence?  Marbree, luckily, is firmly pro-baby, though she does not have any babies herself.  She was the perfect hostess for Axel's first night outside of Colorado. 

The next day, we drove to the Cape, met up with another friend and her lovely daughter for brunch, and swooped on down to Provincetown.  On the way, Sean pulled over in to one of those former rest stops that's now nothing but a chained-off parking area so I could nurse Axel.  By this point, he'd realized that flapping at the nursing cover offered mealtime entertainment, and, by the end of the trip, half of Mass had ample opportunities to see my boob.  Though I told myself that all the women have breasts themselves, and everyone else has seen them on cable TV, I still felt really, really uncomfortable being half-topless in public.  I'm much happier with my flesh covered up.   

While in Provincetown, we hung out with Axel's east coast grandparents, and spent half the time exploring the area, the other half encouraging naps and playtime back at our (dry, warm) hotel room. The weather when we arrived was a slightly overcast mid-50s, and it was the best we got all weekend.  Axel stared at the ocean and toured town nestled in the Baby Bjorn, his fuzzy bear hoodie pulled up around his ears.  Hoodies are apparently the garment of choice for everyone in early May on the Cape.  At a local coffee shop that we hit five times (hot drinks being right up their with hoodies on the list of damp, cool weather necessities) and a delicous breakfast spot we visited twice, Axel became known as baby bear.   During the trip, we were caught in a few windy, torrential downpours of the sort in which your umbrella is pulled inside out as you rush back to your hotel room after a leisurely half-eaten lunch to nurse your baby.  Axel seemed to find all the rain and wind to be interesting or, if not interesting, then simply something perplexing that must be endured.

After all the relative smoothness of the trip, we had high hopes for the flight back home.  The flight out went so smoothly.  Alas, it was a full-on explosion.  There was a barrelfull of baby triggers: a long car ride in from Provincetown, constepation (no poop for the last 24 hours), bedtime interference (not in Denver, time, but with the slowly moved up by Axel East Coast bedtime), and teething.  Well, I think he's teething, but I've thought that he was teething on and off for three drooled-filled months now and yet no pearly whites have appeared.  This time, his grandparents brought up teething with no suggestion from me, so maybe it's really true.  Regardless of the causes, the flight back was three and a half hours of baby rage, interrupted by one brief 15 minute nap and a few grins at other passengers - never at his parents, only at those in the row behind him.  Rocking and toys and airplane and multiple attempts to nurse, all to no avail.  I got dangerously close to weeping myself and wished that rather than the five extra diapers and sunscreen, I'd brought along a carton of earplugs for 150 fellow passengers.  Finally, thirty minutes before we landed, Axel fell asleep.  My back and my legs had been tensed up between the slightly frantic rocking, bouncing, and wishing that the child would just give in to sleep with every muscle.  Once back home after somehow getting through the baggage claim and long walk to the parking lot, I had the lovely sensation that I'd been beaten with a lead pipe.  A not-quite-fourteen-pounder beat the crap out of his father and me in a space the size of a port-a-potty. 

We'll travel again.  But next time, we'll be sure to pack the ear plugs and the whiskey. 

Feeding a baby is a messy, smelly, fluid-filled adventure all its own.  Axel has moved from the isle of breast milk to the land of semi-solids - pasty rice cereal, and, in the past two and a half weeks, yams, carrots, and mushed ripe bananas.  I'm starting to wonder about the child's tastebuds.  He adores the bland glueyness of rice cereal, but seems to suspect that the other three foods he's tried are thinly veiled attempts to poison him.  Here's mealtime with Axel, in pictures:

"Hmmmm, what's that?  That's....interesting."  The first bite of yams triggers a few investigative lip smacks.  The second bit oozes out over his lip.

After the third bite, he gives me his coldest baby drop-dead glare, wondering how someone who claims to love him could ever try to put something so foul into his mouth, then spits a mouthful of yam in my direction.  Hey, kid, I've seen you put a clump of dog hair in your mouth followed by a slurp on your big toe - your palate is not that discerning.

By bite four or five of yams or carrots (see above), his cautious exploration turns to rage.  "Carrots?  I loathe carrots.  I have no use for root vegetables of any kind.  Who cooked this crap anyway?"  I cooked it - and all that effort wrapping up the yam with foil, leaving it in the oven for an hour, and mashing up the part of it I didn't eat myself was unappreciated.   

Then, we move on to the rice cereal, which gets a better response....

Axel then insists on extensive rice cereal exploration by hand.

Then, as quickly as it started, it's all over.  Axel is done eating, and being in the highchair becomes intolerable.  He thrashes about and bites at the high chair straps like an angry badger trapped in a cage.  Jabbing himself in the cheek with the wrong end of the spoon occupies him just long enough for me to put the dishes in the sink and wipe my hands of gunk.   Sometime - when the weather's warmer and I'm feeling like we both need some excitement - I'll dab bits of various brightly colored foods, like avocado and carrots and beets, on his high chair and just let him mash the stuff all over himself and his chair and me so that we become a swirl of bright edible color, before hosing us all off in the shower. 

We're about to take this eating show on the road - on Thursday, we're flying east to meet up with my in-laws in Cape Cod for four days of a cold, early season seaside vacation.  I'm in frenzied packing mode, trying to figure out how to cram everything we could possibly need in case of various emegencies (say, bandaids and neosporin in case of attack by rabid hamsters on the plane, or three large packs of wipes in case Axel develops the pooping habits of triplets) in a bag that won't get hit by the heavyweight bag fee.    Early next week, I'll let you know how well we survive the likely misadventures that come with babies and travel (airplane nursing, nap disruptions) and, of course, if any unlikely calamities involving pet rodents let loose on a plane occur. 

Preschools are in high demand around here.  There's one preschool/daycare that had a waitlist so long for infants that, by the time a child's name came up, he or she would be two years old.  Since you can't put toddlers in the infant slots, the school went to a once-per-year lottery instead.  It's basically baby heaven, with blue-hued gauzy tents draped over the nap futons and a lunch menu that includes curry chicken and yam fries - on second thought, that sounds more like my kind of heaven.  The toddlers are probably just as happy chowing down on GMO chicken nuggets and transfat-laden french fries, even if their parents aren't. 

I got on the list for Axel's daycare when I was five months pregnant, and he didn't get a slot until he was four months old - eight and a half months later.  At the same time I put my name down on that list, I also put it down on a waitlist at a daycare that's closer to our house, and that has part-time slots.  Around here, it's hard to find infant slots, and twice as hard to find part-time infant slots.  We're still on the waitlist for the closer center, and it's not likely that Axel's name will come up until he's about fourteen months old.  So, to get a spot, I would have had to put my name on the list before getting a postive pregnancy test.  And I consider myself to be someone who planned ahead - what do people do who don't start thinking about childcare until their child is six weeks old?  Bring boxes of bagels to the daycare everyday?  Sell their child's soul to the devilish waiting list queen?   

Given the demand for infant slots, I figured I should start researching preschool options now.  The choices expand the closer Axel gets to two years.  Figuring out how the wait lists work, though, is it's own kind of science.  It seems like the waitlists should just be first come, first served - you know, take a number, sit on a hard plastic chair, and read your magazine, like the DMV.  But, no, that's not how it works.  Some of the waitlists operate by month - put your name on the list of the month for which you want a spot and, if a spot opens up that month, you might get it.  But if a spot opens up the next month and you didn't also put your name on the list for the next month, you're bumped to the bottom.  At another place, you put your name on the interest list.  Then, a few months before a spot or two might open up, the center director calls the interest list families, and there's a mad rush down to the place to put down the deposit and secure the highest spot on the waitlist - and even then, you might not get a spot.  I'm not even going to start on the interview and applications for some of the Montessori schools.  Just thinking about prepping a two year old for an interview freaks me out.  I mean, what do you do?  Remind him not to pick his nose before he shakes the prospective teacher's hand?   I don't even know what sort of preschool will be a fit for Axel but, with the length of waitlists, I feel like I've got to get him on at least a few, so that the balance of power is switched once he's ready to go to preschool, and we will get to choose from several options, instead of going with the only place that has an opening for us.

The main thing I've learned in all this calling around to the preschools is that I am not important.  I am not desireable.  The preschools - at least before you get in - are the pretty popular girls, and I'm the drooling math genius desperate to tutor them just to get my foot in the door.  Half of them don't call me back.  I've yet to receive an email reply from any that I've sent - makes me wonder why the preschools even have email addresses listed on their websites.  They're all playing hard to get, and I haven't even figured out the rules.   There's a secret password I don't know.   Maybe I should start bringing fresh baked cookies on the information tours with me.

When I started on this preschool quest, I heard something that frightened me even more: a coworker's wife told me that they'd put their daughter's name on the waitlist for her charter school before her first birthday.  She's just now five, and will be entering kindergarten at the school in the fall.  Oh. My. God.    Maybe I should just homeschool Axel and avoid all of the school craziness.  Then I'd be able to avoid being driven insane by the waitlist waiting game, and I'd never have to make cupcakes for 60 2nd graders or worry that I'd break 25 little hearts when the class hamster eate its young while staying at our house over winter break.  

Really, though, I'm sure that it will all work out.  I went to neighborhood public schools, and I turned out OK.  As long as Axel's in a daycare or preschool that is safe, with loving and caring staff,that returns my calls and access to some finger paints and construction paper and a playground, I figure it will be fine.   But if you know the secret preschool password, please share it with me...

The sleep solution - at least the current solution - is stomach sleeping.  Sleeping face down, with his arms splayed out and face smushed against the mattress, is apparently Axel's preferred sleep position.  Maybe for months he's been longing to be belly-down at night, and was thwarted by our committment to the anti-SIDS back to sleep approach.  I don't blame him - I like to sleep on my stomach, too, especially now that I'm not carrying six pounds of baby and twenty plus pounds of amniotic fluid and pudge in my belly.  Because I'm the sort to follow the doctor's recommendations precisely, especially when they have anything to do with death, we still put him to sleep on his back - it's just that he's figured out that he can immediately roll over, wiggle around for five minutes, and burrow down into his red crib sheet before passing out.  Though I've twisted his chin to the side when his nose is smashed down, I'm not so paranoid that I roll Axel back over to his back again and again.  If I started that, I'd be doing nothing but baby rolling all night long.  If he's able to do his rolly-poly nightly settling routine, he's also able to roll back, should he need to.   

Let me back up and explain our other sleep-promoting steps over the past few weeks.  First, we moved Axel in to his own room.  I thought he would have moved from his spot in the Pack N Play next to our bed to his bedroom sooner, but his room wasn't quite finished.  See, we were insane enough to decide to renovate our kitchen, add on another bedroom and bathroom, and reconfigure the office (now nursery) starting when I was just over five months pregnant with Axel.  Things didn't go as planned, as they tend to when construction or children are involved, and, after the delays of our pokey, half-competent contractor, Sean's just now finishing up the trim on the doors, windows, and baseboards.   The move in to Axel's room went pretty smoothly and didn't, as I worried that it would, backfire and cause even more night wakings and restlessness.  He settled right in, happily grabbing at the yellow wall during diaper changes and spitting up on the red and gray carpet tiles. 

Axel's also been partaking of the sticky pasty deliciousness known as rice cereal mixed with breast milk.  Except when he's sick, he loves it - grabbing for the spoon with two hands and making his monkey face of excitement at it.  It reminds me making an elaborate paper mache earth for my 6th grade geography class.  Get out some newspaper strips and a balloon and we could make our own solar system with the leftovers.  I don't think this has had much of an affect on his sleep, but he seems to like it, and so we're going to keep on offering him bland mush.

We're also fiercely protective of the bedtime routine.  We rushed home from a slow restaurant, changing our dine-in order to to-go, to get home in time to start the rice cereal, bath, baby massage, books, then bed routine.  With all of this, and allowing a bit of nighttime fussing - never more than ten minutes, because I am thin-skinned and weak - Axel's down to waking up just once per night.  

Now, with his cold still in such force that he coughed so hard he made himself throw up, our sleeping through the night plan of attack is on hold.  We've withdrawn the sleep battling troops for some R & R, since we've all been hit by the same late season cold, cough, and aches.  Waking up once per night isn't really so bad, though, especially when compared to the four plus wakings we had before.  The most annoying sleep situation right now is that he's woken up at 5 am the past few mornings, and only been willing to fall asleep and stay asleep until 6 in my husband's arms.  The kid's sick, so I can see how sleeping cuddled up against a warm body would be comforting in the early morning.  I'm hoping the early morning waking when not yet ready to wake will pass when the cold does.   

I'm obsessed with sleep - who's sleeping, how long, why, why not.  I'm a sleep-information addict, but all that information's just filling in for the real thing: my sleep craving will only be satisfied by the elusive, blissful full night's rest.

After six weeks at daycare, Axel's caught his first cold.  His nose is in snot-production overdrive.  The under-arm temperature taking technique revealed a fever of 100 - 101.  I've subjected him to temperature taking a few times a week since his birth - his forehead always feels hot to me - but this time, his belly radiated heat as well.  I've been hit by the same cold, but my aching head and sore throat doesn't bother me nearly as much as my poor boy's loud, boogery breathing. 

A sad, not so little cough rolls out of him, his cheeks are flushed, and he's doubled up on his naps.  Apparently, viruses are the true daytime sleep solution, not blackout shades or white noise or putting him down still a little awake or moving him into his own room. At night, he wakes up with his nose chock-full of snot, gasping and shrieking.  I'd yell, too, if I woke up unable to breathe and didn't understand why.

He hates having his nose wiped, and the only thing worse than not being able to breathe while sleeping or nursing is having his nose sprayed with saline and suctioned.  I didn't realize how deviously wiggly he'd become until having to break out the bulb syringe again a few times a day.  All babies hate the bulb syringe - it's like they tell one another at the hospital to watch out for a little blue plastic device designed to suck out baby souls.

All in all, though, he's relatively cheerful.  I've been able to distract him with toys, our pets, or sitting in the shade on the back porch, feeling the breeze and looking at the birds that fly past.  He'll get caught up watching something for about fifteen minutes and then he'll yell and fuss, as though he suddenly remembers he's not feeling well and wants to make sure I know:  "Look, a bird!  How does it make those things flap like that?  Oh, hey!  Did I tell you I feel like crap?  I just remembered.  I'm achy and sick!  Listen!"

Yes, I know, I want to tell him - you're dripping snot on my breast while you nurse.  I remember the part of the La Leche League book that mentions of the super-charged antibody germ-fighting action of breastmilk, but I missed the part where it warns that you'll become a human Kleenex.

Axel's a loudmouth.  He lets out loud ah-gaas in the middle of restaurants, talks to himself through car rides, and squawks at his toys when they're delighting or aggravating him.  His stream of chatter has gotten me thinking about first words.  The early talker's vocab is filled with words about his or her world, like mamma and sleepy and kitty and poopy and bye bye and no.  There's a good chance Axel will start off with these words, too, since a typical day goes something like this:

"Hey, Axel.  Good morning Mr. Peanut Butter Cup.  Let's change your diaper!  Do you want me to change your diaper?  It's poopy.  That is a lot of poop.  How can someone so little make so much poop?  Are you hungry?  Do you want to eat?  Let's eat!  I'm hungry.  No, you can't have mamma's necklace.  Sorry, Mr. Crazy Head.  No, you can't have mamma's cellphone.  Cameras are shiny and pretty but they don't go in mouths.  Look!  Look at the kitty!  Are you watching the kitty?  Do you like little Miss Kitty?  Say bye bye to the kitty!" 

I'm going to stop now, before your brain turns to mush.   It's interesting to a five and a half month old, but it's certainly not scintillating conversation about new restaurants or world affairs.  Why did everything gain a title once I had a child?  It's Mr. this and Miss that.  I also throw "head" and "pants" on the end of things, so Axel becomes Mr. Baby Head, or Mr. Cranky Pants, as though he was just a floating head of glee or a pair of fussy, body-less pants. 

It makes sense that first words are the words that babies hear the most, the ones that are connected to their world.  I know there's research about the sounds that develop first, and I think I've read that "d"s come sooner than "m"s.  But can we get Axel to have a few SAT words, or moderately high Scrabble-value words, in the first round of language?  Can we throw something other than rudimentary commands, food-related words, or animals in the mix? 

One or two syllables - especially two syllable words that end in "y" or have repeat consentents, like doggy or daddy - seem to be the first words that come.  Axel's loving the letter g right now, especially when preceeded by a vowel.  So, for less traditional baby words, that could mean agate, agape, or gaggle, or googly.  I'm partial to flapjack myself, though it doesn't fit any of those rules - and Axel seems to be, too, since he gets giddy and giggles (ooh!  more g words) when I say it to him.  That might be because of my enthusiasm, not the particular combination of sounds.  Maybe we can get flapjack to be in there among the first half-dozen words, if we repeat it often enough, frequent diners, and break out the griddle to make pancakes a couple times a week. 

Hey, Mr. Baby Head, do you want some blueberry flapjacks?

Each time I see a mother, especially one with a child or two under four, I want to run over and give her a cookie.  Not her (always adorable) child a cookie, but her.  The child's strong, capable, beautiful mama.  I feel like I have an unspoken bond with all mothers of young children.  We should all get together for the world's biggest cocktail party and toss back a few martinis, on the house. 

You haven't slept more than five hours straight since the constant nightly bathroom trips brought on by the third trimester, I want to say, and you still look fabulous.  Sure, all of your dry-clean-only sweaters have been baptized with spit-up, but that's just a part of the rocky induction into the sisterhood of mamas.  Maybe you haven't had your hair cut in six months, or your belly's oozing over the top of your jeans like mine is, or you forgot to brush your teeth yet again, but you're still on top of things.  Hey, you got out of the house on time, and everyone's wearing a matching pair of socks!  Oh, and here's a piece of cinammon gum to cover that sour breath until you get a chance to brush your teeth.  

Because I'm afraid that my fellow mothers will think I'm crazy, I rarely go up to them in the mall or the grocery store and offer over-the-top compliments or stealth hugs.  I am not a person who likes hugs that much, other than those from my baby or my man or my own mother, yet I kind of want to have a group hug with all the mothers I see at Target, despite the deep invasion of personal space that would bring on.  I understand that such unsolicited contact could really freak some people out - it would freak me out if a random woman ran up to me, wrapped me in her arms, and told me I'm doing an impressive job raising my child.   While I have kept my hands to myself, it's been surprising how often I do end up talking to fellow parents on the street.  I'm more on the shy side, and really took that whole don't talk to strangers thing they repeated in preschool to heart, yet I find myself engaged in conversations about baby socks or dirty diapers with fellow parents I've never seen before all the time. 

The world seems friendly to me now that I have a baby.  We're all sleep deprived.  We're all just trying to take care of our children in the best way we know how, in a way that keeps our families safe and healthy.  We all have moments in which we wonder how we're going to be able to do this, to get through the newest challenge, and then we figure out a way and we make it through.  We're trying our best to be loving and resourceful and keep our sanity, all while remembering to feed the dog and buy the diapers and balance the checkbook and fight off diaper rash and read a story and make something relatively healthy and delicious for dinner.  I feel like all of us parents are in it together, like we are the world, and we have the children, and we can make it a better place. 

I'm sorry I had to bring up a song co-written by Lionel Ritchie.  Please don't smack me.  I'm so cheery about mothers that I kind of want to smack myself.  And fathers!  I love all you dads, too, especially the one I saw juggling a baby on one hip and a coffee cup in the other, or the one I ran into while walking the dog with Axel who talked to me for a good fifteen minutes about the merits of various front and back carriers and the one he and his wife picked out.   I confess that I feel a bit more of a bond with mothers who I don't know and really have no reason to feel deeply connected to than I do with fathers, perhaps since we see one another juggling children and diaper bags in the ladies' room, but I still recognize that you fathers are pretty fantastic yourselves.  And don't even get me started on my adoration of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers, or I might have to be locked up in a rainbow-painted room with a dozen caffeinated candy stripers, all the jelly beans we can eat, and "What the World Needs Now" playing as The Care Bears Movie shows on a flat-screen TV.

I have romantic notions of inviting all the parents in a two mile radius from my house - who I'd ID by the strollers on their porches - over for a playdate/brownie and margarita fest, but then I'll remember that I've got to fold a load of laundry or clean up the cat's vomit or play airplane with Axel and let him drool all over my face, so I haven't gotten around to setting a date yet.  It would be great, though - we'd have a big bouncy castle in the backyard, which I would test out myself before any of the other families arrived, and a huge vat of my sister-in-law's delicious gazpacho, along with mountains of guacamole.  The babies would crawl around on the grass (meticulously cleared of dog poop for the occasion), and the rose bushes would be in bloom.  Unfortunately, we don't have any rose bushes, and I've got a feeling that I exceeded the bouncy castle weight limit at age twelve.      

Maybe it's all that bond-promoting oxytocin that's floating around in my bloodstream that makes me turn into a walking early Mother's Day greeting card.  Maybe it's because it's springtime, and Axel's been drawn to the blooming daffodils we pass on our walks, and the weather's flip-flopping between sunny 75 degree perfection and overcast and snowy.  I know there are parents out there who I wouldn't really want to invite over for a playdate, and there are parents who feel the same way about me.  My sunny view of all parents of young children probably won't last long enough for me to get it together to host a neighborhood-wide baby party.  I figure by the time Axel's five I'll have scaled back my plans and hosted a barbecue, catered by my husband and Whole Foods, for the fellow parents living on my block.  But while I've still got the sunshine spirit, I just wanted all you parents out there to know that I love you, I admire you, and, anytime you want a cookie and I have one, I'll split it with you.  I'd even give you the bigger half.     

When do we become who we are?  Are we ourselves from the time we're thrown out our mothers' wombs?  I know when I feel like myself - whatever that means.  When Axel grabs at my face, and then slips his thumb into his mouth, it seems like he knows that I'm separate from him - and if he knows other things and people aren't him, then does he, on some level, know that he is himself?   Oh, I think I'm giving myself a headache.   

I'm watching Axel become a little person, and his emerging personality makes me wonder where all this person-ness comes from.  At just five and a half months old, he's got strong opinions - and he's not at all shy about expressing them.  No one in the same room - or house - as he is wonders where Axel stands on just one more bite of rice cereal (Horrible!) or silver cellphones (Genius!) or rattles (Fantastic!  Unless they hit you in the eye - then very, very bad!).  He's generally a pretty happy fellow, and he spends long chunks of time merrily chatting with track lights and the bushes we pass on walks.  Axel wants to be wherever the action's at - if we move into the kitchen and he's still in the living room on his mat, he lets us know he doesn't appreciate being left out.  His favorite form of punctuation is the exclamation point.  He's never still, unless he's just noticed something interesting - like our dog walking by, or a cute blonde in the grocery store.   Axel's a hundred pounds of excitement and energy in a thirteen pound package. 

On Saturday, we went to brunch with friends who have a baby almost two months younger than Axel.  While Axel sat up in a high chair, contorting himself to stare up at the ceiling, then flapping his arms wildly, our friends' son was a calm, chubby angelic baby, just relaxing in his car seat, taking it all in.  You could imagine them in a few years - Axel as the crash test dummy of the pair, riding his trike at full speed off of a porch, while his friend hangs out and takes a more relaxed (and slightly less likely to cause scars) approach. 

About halfway through the meal, Axel moaned and squawked loudly, demanding a change in the suddenly intolerable situation of being strapped in a chair, forced to stare at four adults eating omelets and pancakes.  Sean turned the high chair to the side, so that Axel faced the movement of the restaurant, and, feeding off of the energy of the mid-morning brunch crowd, he was again content.  Our friends' baby let out a few sweet grunts when he wanted to get out of the car seat - the baby equivalent of, "Hey, guys,  I'm a little sick of the car seat.  If you wouldn't mind, can you take me out for awhile?"  Anyone want to guess which boy is sleeping thorugh the night?  Yeah, that's right, not our hyper (yet adorable) babe.  My brother asked me why Axel's not sleeping more, since he's so active during the day.  Because the child runs on sunlight and milk, and doesn't need rest.  Really, I think the answer is that Axel gets so excited about the world - he can move his arms, together, on purpose!  There are daffodils sprouting in the neighbor's yard!  When he pushes a yellow button on his exersaucer, it talks to him! - that it's challenging to slow down.

It's the never-ending nature versus nurture question.  How much of Axel is wrapped up in his DNA?  I don't think we could have taught him to be cheerful, though I'm sure that our happy responses to his smiles reinforce that part of his nature.   And, while I bounce my legs if I'm sitting for too long and feel really cranky if I don't get to exercise or walk around enough, I don't think I could have already taught Axel to be on the energetic-verging-to-hyper side.  Maybe we're all built with tendencies - like a leaning toward tea versus coffee, or emotional moderation on one end versus being more tempestuous on the other.  Perhaps environment can slide us a bit up and down various scales, but can it rewire us?  I'm not sure.   Axel's so much more of a person now than he was as a three-day-old warm lump of baby smells, but is that because he knows how to control his facial muscles and communicate his moods in ways I understand now, or has his character somehow become fleshed out by the act of living?  Probably both.  It feels like I've always known him, and known Axel as himself, with the personality he's showing now, though that can't be true, because, when he was a newborn, I couldn't see beyond the mewing, sleeping, swaddled baby to any nuances.  He will change more, as he grows, and my sense of him will, too, as I watch him develop. 

1.  Sleep cannot be commanded. 

It is futile to attempt to command a baby to sleep.  That's why sleep deprivation, rather than forcing someone to sleep for days, is an instrument of torture.  Perhaps we can all be wooed a bit into sleep and happiness by the right environments, but there's only so much a warm bath and a off-tune Otis Redding tune can do for my baby.  Once I've wooed Axel to the edge of sleep, only he can jump into- and stay in - that state.  I keep forgetting this rule and having to re-learn it because, in the bleary-eyed exhaustion of the night, telling a baby that he has to go to sleep and not sleeping is not an option is pretty easy to fall back on.   

2.  Never turn on the television while attempting to sleep train your baby.  Especially not the news.

One night, while home alone with Axel, he woke up about 15 minutes after falling asleep.  I decided to let him fuss for about five minutes, as he'd cried for a few minutes, then fallen asleep, the last time I tried it (see rule nine).  This time, though, he didn't wind down (see 10).  So, I went in, rocked him for a bit, and we tried again.  I went into the living room and flipped on the TV.  At that moment, the sparkly-eyed newscaster - who looked like she got at least six hours of sleep in a row every night and a luxurious nap on top - chattered on about a tiny baby who'd just died, and was then left on the doorstep of a local hospital.  The baby wore a pink sleeper and white socks.   I heard one of Axel's forlorn sobs over the news, and I couldn't let him cry after hearing that story.  The next night, Sean went to the hospital, so I'm sure it will take me awhile to work back up to even a five-minute fuss tolerance. 

3.  Rice cereal does not lead to longer stretches of sleep. 

I said I wasn't going to try it.  Well, I did.  My totally unscientific study of a handful of parents I know found that some thought it worked and some didn't.  Our pediatrician said it doesn't usually, but every once in awhile it seems to help.  I latched on to the sliver of possibility that it would help, and mixed up a batch of it with breast milk and fed it to Axel.  After almost a week of rice cereal, we have only found that Axel thinks red spoons belong inside of his mouth at all times, and, even if babies chow it down, rice cereal tastes like crap.  I made the mistake of licking it off my finger and almost threw up on the spot.

4.  A baby's ability to fall asleep on his/her own, to fall asleep easily, or to fall asleep under various conditions, does not necessarily mean he/she will stay asleep for any longer 

In the last six weeks, Axel's become much better at falling asleep at night.  Sean no longer has to bounce on the exercise ball with him for a half an hour, begging him to drop off.  I don't waltz around the bedroom singing Petula Clark tunes over and over again for almost an hour.  Axel has his bath, gets lotioned-up, punches the pages of a few board books, and then nurses or is rocked a little by his father.  Then, the kid is out.  The ease with which he now falls asleep, though, seems to have no relationship with the length of time he stays asleep.  There was a time when Axel fell asleep at 7:30 or 8 pm and only woke up once before getting up for the day at 6:30 or 7.  That blessed period seems to have been no more than a cruel joke he played on us to show what a relatively good night's sleep feels like.  While he's gotten a little better from the sleep trainwreck of three weeks ago - meaning that I now count the number of times he wakes up, whereas for a bit there I just stopped writing it all down in his journal because that made the horror of it all too concrete - he's still up an average of three times a night. 

5.  Babies who do not sleep are not always cranky.  Their parents, on the other hand, can be snarky bastards.

Axel's a happy kid, whether he's napped that day for two thirty-minute bouts or for a total of three hours.  He can be easily convinced to smile at anyone.  He even smiles at inanimate objects - like his stuffed giraffe - from time to time.  I, however, have been reduced to flipping off people who drive in the bike lane while I'm running, pushing Axel in his stroller.  Yes, I know that flipping drivers off is juvenile and not such a great habit to display in front of my infant son.  But I'm tired and sometimes that makes me mean.  Actually, there's a good chance I might have done that even on eight hours of sleep.  It's a bike lane, not a special car lane with thick white lines painted on either side of it. 

6.  The phrase, "Let sleeping dogs lie," is stupid.

Dogs?  Really?  Are there lots of dogs with insomnia out there?  Should we start wrapping little Ambien pills in bacon and feeding it to them?  Who even thought that phrase up?  Where's the baby Ambien? 

7.  Rescue Remedy may work for someone, somewhere, but not Axel.

Rescue Remedy is an herbal flower thing recommended by our doctor.  You can put it in the bath or take it orally.  Axel twists up his mouth in disgust when I try to put a few drops underneath his toungue.  Drops of it in the bath seem to help me calm down, but Axel is impervious to its powers. 

8.  I am really, really irrational at 3 am.  And 4:30 am.  And 5.  And, now, at any time after 8 pm and before 8 am. 

That's when the people who are trying to raise money for that police-related league for which donations are not tax deductible should call me, because I'll probably say anything to get them off the phone.  Actually, if those people can come over and make my baby sleep for ten hours straight, I might just sign over my retirement fund to them.   

9.  What worked before may not work again.  But it might.  Then again, it might not.

One night, I decided to let Axel fuss for a few minutes and see what happened.  After about five minutes, he started quieting down.  His cries turned to sporadic, calm squeaks, and then silence.  That worked again another night.  And then, it stopped working.  Maybe it's because he's going through early teething, or he has a cold, or he's lonely or he had a baby nightmare about whatever horrible things it is that haunt babies - you know, like a world in which they try to put things in their mouth and everything bounces off the edge of their lips as though their mouths are shielded by a forcefield, maybe.  I'm sure there's some reason that the things that work stop working, it's just I'm too damn tired to figure it out. 

10. Most importantly, there are no rules. 

Everyone's got a sleep strategy or a sleep theory.  There's no guarantee that what worked for your kid is going to work for any other kid.  Regular naps during the day supposedly help sleep at night, as do regular bedtimes.  Rice cereal, stress, weather changes, cosleeping, not cosleeping, being too hot or too cold, a full moon, no moon, Big Foot....Maybe some of those have helped Axel, and his sleep would be even more crappy without those things, but they haven't helped to the extent that I'd like them to. 

My newest theory: sleep at night makes babies sleep at night.  So, the more rest a baby has on one night, the more likely he'll rest the next night.  Lack of sleep at night leads to more lack of sleep at night.  How to break the cycle?  I don't know.  My other theory: Axel needs to get tanked up more during the day.  He's a very particular eater and, often, doesn't take more than 2 - 3 ounces from a bottle feeding at daycare or from his father or grandparents.  Sometimes he just nurses for a few minutes with me, and other times he does a big marathon session.  Eating, however, is like sleep - you can create opportunities for eating, but you can't force a baby to gulp more milk down.   

Axel's the anti-sleep Superman and we've yet to find the Kryptonite that will break him.  But we will.  Oh yes, we will.  And then we'll capture El Chupacabra and go on the road, showing off our goat-eating vampire and selling our sleep solutions to the masses. 

I'm still not sleeping.  Axel, at five months, is sleeping in slightly longer stretches, but not long enough that the people have stopped saying, "You look exhausted," to me.  And now, this: my husband went in to the emergency room at 4 a.m on Saturday.  He's fine, he's fine.  That's what I kept telling myself, even before we found out that he truly was. 

Sean woke up with pain in his chest and his right shoulder.  Husbands should never wake up with chest pain.  Wives shouldn't, either, or parents or significant others or children or grandparents.  The world moves more smoothly when the words chest and pain are kept at a reasonable distance from one another.  Sean spent about forty five minutes waiting it out in our bedroom, before driving himself about a mile to the hospital.  We didn't want to expose Axel to anything that might have been floating around in the ER, so I stayed home with him until it seemed like an acceptable hour to call my mother and ask her to come over.  I ran the mile to the hospital at 6:30 am, clutching my purse underneath my arm like a football, pausing to walk the last block so that Sean wouldn't think I'd been panicking. 

They ran tests.  A lot of tests.  Sean is the opposite of a heart attack waiting to happen.  He's a slender 5'10", works out like mad, hasn't eaten fast food in at least five years, has high good cholesterol and low bad cholesterol, and on and on.  He was not supposed to wake up with chest pain at 33.  Some of the tests were normal, but his blood work was not.  Apparently some sort of enzyme (I still haven't figured out exactly what it was) becomes elevated whenever the heart's under duress - meaning when it's having an attack, or when it's under attack.  A heart attack.  Again, words that I would like to keep separated by full sentences, if not paragraphs.  The enzyme kept going up.  And up.  And up.  This was not the good sort of up as in interest accruing in your 401(k) but the bad sort of up as in this hot air balloon is going way too high and no one on board knows quite how to control the thing.  Sean's chest pain went away later that morning (though it came back again early this morning).  As for the ER - why are they so thrilling on television and so dull in person?  Sitting in a chair next to someone wearing a hospital gown, trying to think of non-heart-attack-related topics of conversation would be a lot easier if there really were two nurses in the hallway yanking one another's hair over the on-call physician.  All you doctors and nurses out there, you owe it to your patients to offer a little soap opera-style distraction. 

*

I went to the grocery store to pick up a few things.  I bought Sean flowers, but I put them in a vase at home.  Bringing them to the hospital would mean he was staying at the hospital.  A cheery yellow bunch on the table meant welcome back, everything is A-OK.  I looked for a card, but there aren't any cards that say, "I'm sure everything is fine.  I know you're fine.  This is just a fluke.  Oh, and it would really, really suck if you weren't fine."  I guess I can see how that one might not be a best-seller, but weren't greeting cards created for hospital-related situations and funerals?  Where are they when you really need them?   

People do amazing things everyday.  The energy Axel puts into the herculean task of learning to roll over to grab a rattle just out of his reach is amazing.  We all did that.  We all have gone from not being able to keep our fingernails from digging gouges in our cheeks to being able to put together compound sentences, balance a checkbook, and drive a car, even if some of us don't totally know how to drive a stick shift.  Isn't that amazing?  Aren't we all amazing?  Given the capacity of our species, shouldn't I, then, be able to teach Axel how to ride a bike, if my husband weren't around to do it?  It had only been one day.  It's silly that I've even thought such things, but, awake at one am, with my husband trying to sleep at the hospital and me alone with our son, I couldn't seem to stop.

*

The doctors thought it was probably pericarditis, which can occur when a virus, like the one that Sean had earlier in the week, crosses over into the sack that surrounds the heart and tries to beat the crap out of it.  I avoided checking into it on the medical websites; I've got hazy recollections of hearing about a young woman dying from after such a viral infection, and so I decided much rather just stay in the determinedly happy place of telling myself that, maybe people do die from this but it's about as rare as someone dying from Botox injections.  It's just a virus.  Like the flu!  People fight off the flu all the time!  People also die from the flu, and there've been wide-spread flu epidemics, so that may not be the best rationalization.  On Saturday night, I wallowed in my medical ignorance and took everything as a positive sign.  He had to have another test in the morning. 

*

I managed my anxiety with cleaning products and baking.  Our toilet bowls have never looked so sparkling.  A plate of brownies sat next to the flowers, waiting for Sean to come back.  I cleaned the cranny between the back of the faucet and the sink with a Q-tip.  I walked around the house with my cell phone in one pocket and the house cordless phone in the other, like six shooters slung in a belt, on the ready for an emergency.  If this continues, all my worry-fueled energy will turn me into a younger, more jittery Martha Stewart. 

*

Axel has Sean's gray-blue eyes.  He's just started being a baby flirt - grinning out at Sean from my arms, then turning to hide his head in my shoulder while he gnaws on my shirt.  When we went to visit Sean on the cardiac floor, Sean swooped Axel up over his head, and Axel tried to grab the dark grey checkmarks on the fabric of the hospital gown, before bathing the gown in a warm puddle of spit-up.  In the elevator, a sickly thin man in a wheelchair showed Axel his chocolate pudding cup and said, "Bet you can't wait till you get one of these!"  Axel grinned and cooed.  The nurses on the cardiac floor, on which Sean was the youngest patient and where babies are infrequent visitors, exclaimed over him, and one said, "Oh, babies.  They just renew your faith in the world, don't they?"        

* 

Our best conversation at the hospital came after the nurse, going through her list of questions, asked Sean if anyone depended on him for care alone.  "Not really," he answered.  "He relies more on you."  He nodded in my direction.  "I mean, you're his food source."

Later, I said, "He thinks my boobs are his."

"Yeah.  It's like you're just holding them for him for awhile.  Like a wallet.  Here, take care of this for me until I need it."

"I do that to you."

"Whenever we're on vacation, my pockets get filled up with the camera and your wallet."

"He'll eventually learn that they're mine." 

*

The cardiac catheter showed that Sean's heart is pretty healthy.  Upon seeing the shiny gray pictures of Sean's heart, Axel made his excited monkey in close proximity to a banana face, grabbing at the print-out and trying to pull it into his mouth.  After spending hours flat on his back, Sean came home with us. 

Many of those oft-repeated, simple statements are true.  Sunsets are beautiful.  Babies are the best things that happen to many of us.  You don't know what it's like to be a parent until you've got a kid.  Heart attack scares make you remember what's truly important to you.  My man and our baby.  Our family and friends.  Everything is fine.  We're fine.  We have each other - and our shiny toilets and a pan now half-full of brownies.    

Before the light of our lives and apple of our eyes, our firstborn male child, came roaring into the world, Sean and I got a dog.  A sweet, humble, local Humane Society mutt we named Angus.  Angus was an only child  before Axel came along to push him out of the number one spot, except for our pudgy cat, Muldoon, but cats let you live with them, not the other way around, and Muldoon can't fathom that he could ever be less than the center of the everyone's universe.  He's the sort of cat who aggressively forces his love via headbutts on any mammal around.  He's above being anyone's sibling, especially anyone not of his species.

Gus has something of a weight problem; he came home from the shelter a bit chubby, and this was after he'd been a stray for untold weeks.  I think he camped out behind a McDonalds during his vagabond days.  He likes short, slow walks, cuddling on the couch, commandering a lovely red blanket crocheted by my cousin for me and Sean as a wedding gift, and eating.  He's adorably dim-witted, having never quite figured out fetch, or even how to catch a treat that's tossed toward him - my husband once clocked him upside the head with a rawhide chew.  Gus's dislikes include thunder storms, the evil noise of a pop-top can opening, vacuum cleaners, and, apparently, babies. 

I thought he was okay with Axel.  Gus basically avoided the baby for a few months, but recently started coming around - sniffing the wee boy's head from time to time and sitting behind the rocking chair while I nursed Axel.  Apparently, I was tricked by his fabulous dog acting skills.  Tuesday night, a nasty fit of jealousy overtook Angus.  First, he amputated the hand and foot of Axel's soft green hippo.  Axel loved to try to shove the entire stuffed hippo into his mouth.  He will not be doing that any longer, now that the hippo has been baptized with doggy drool.  Then, he tore up the soft and lovely green and brown blanket bestowed upon us at Axel's baby shower.  It was soft and cuddly, the sort of blanket that I wished came in an adult-sized version so I could cuddle up with it and read Little Women for the twentieth time while eating oatmeal raisin cookies.  Now, instead of an accessory for gloomy day comfort book reading, it's a dog-shredded dusting rag. 

All this happened while Axel was happily splashing about in the tub and we were wrapping up our bedtime routine.  Pre-bedtime, I'd pulled together Axel's lotion, a fresh diaper, and a onesie that says "I Eat Dirt."  Sean gave me the onesie last Mother's Day, while Axel was still a fetus.  So, even though it was sort of a pro-pica onesie and I generally think eating non-food substances is a bad idea, it had sentimental value.  When I finished up Axel's baby massage, I couldn't find the onesie.  I figured that I'd misplaced it - not such a stretch since I've been lucky to sleep two hours in a row recently.  I was wrong.  The dog snatched it, took it out to the living room, and tore it to bits.  Fitting, since he's the only member of the family who intentionally eats dirt.

Yesterday, after Axel came home from daycare, we were sitting on the floor and playing, and Angus came up and gave both of us dog kisses on the cheek.  Even though I'm pretty sure his memory's not any longer lasting than the flavor of a piece of Bazooka Joe, I told myself this was his way of apologizing for the previous day's destruction.  Clearly Gus was a bit more miffed about being displaced by a baby than I thought.  He's going to get a few more walks alone, more treats (he's pushing for straight bacon), and more belly rubs.  Hopefully this will prevent any further onesie or blanket destruction. 

Most baby socks suck.  They don't stay up.  They don't stay on.   They get sucked into the vortex of the washing machine and the netherworld behind the dresser.  Even the cheapest socks cost far too much for something the size of a larg