the trenches

[photo credit: dan foley]

when i think about it, i think we are in the parenting trenches. or maybe it's just all trenches from here on out? basic things like eating in peace and having enough rest are systematically routinely denied. but, strangers smile at you. a couple in their eighties smiled so dearly at us today it made me want to cry at the secretary of state. these are the best days, i thought, even though they're so hard. then sho bit a kid shortly thereafter. god she's fierce, sweet too but really fierce. i wonder who she will become.

if she was a dog, we'd be seriously considering putting her down by now.

we got a car! a black buick regal, very fine. a car after nine months of carlessness feels illicitly delicious. it really does feel like it's too good to be true. everything is so easy! i want to buy a car for every single mother carrying a baby and groceries i ever saw on the bus.  some parts of living without a car were lovely--so many adventures from walking to get there--but some parts were grindingly hard.

i'm off to fashion shoshanna the biter a necklace for her to unleash her biting impulses upon, which the internet recommended. i'm thinking some sort of knotted leather. sort of boho-chic with a splash of savage uncontrollable biting tendencies thrown in.

[photo credit: kelsey newnum]

moments in bad parenting

  

every parent has those moments (i hope).  when you're desperate to finish the final thirty seconds of dinner preparation, and hand your infant a tightly fastened bottle of vitamins (while you're standing right there, of course) to shake, shake, shake.  when your kid is coughing hard, and you ask your partner, "should we do the heimlich?  or is she just coughing?" and decide she's fine, before she finally coughs up a shiny, deadly penny, somehow alive in spite of her parents' ineptitude.  or when, during the second hour of trying to get your dear sweet eighteen pound infant to sleep, using an exhausting combination of singing, jiggling, pacing and begging, you say gently, "please, please go to sleep, you little motherfucker!" 

why do i tell you these things?  the truth, it is irresistable.  and i do believe: the kids are all right.

ok here we go

man when you haven't written in awhile, it is like dragging yo ass to the secretary of state.

ok, here we go. well today shoshanna mary bit a kid for the second time at playgroup (pictured above), she is now the BITER. there is really nothing like parenthood to take you down a peg or two. if i ever for a second start feeling like awwshit i got this parenting DOWN dog!--BAM! your kid starts taking two hours to get to sleep at night and is the BITER. the worst part (how to pick just one) was probably when another mother said, "not to make anybody feel bad, but i have some parenting books you can borrow if you like." or no, probably the worst part was seeing the gnarly bite on this kid's arm, right across from the still-healing bite on his other arm from last week! she was wearing tiny pigtails and a dear little red pinafore, and all the other kids went scattering in her wake.