Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dyeing
I realize plenty of nursing mothers get by just fine without ever buying a single piece of “nursing” clothing. Others, I know, find the look of nursing shirts awkward and embarrassing.
My god though, it’s SO much easier. Ok, so these days, nursing is pretty easy. Ender and I both more or less have the routine down, and if I wanted to, wearing “normal” clothing would absolutely be doable. But in the early days weeks months of nursing, it was just one more thing to deal with, and I fell in love with the easy openings of nursing tops. I got in the habit. Plus, if I need to nurse Ender while I’m out and about, it’s way easier with a nursing top to not flash every passerby a glimpse of my crepe paper belly, never mind my boobs.
Unfortunately, (affordable) nursing tops are pretty slim pickings. I have exactly four long sleeved tops I’m comfortable wearing. And as of this morning, one of them looked terrible on me.
I like brown, and some browns like me, but this pilgrim turkey brown was not one of them (I meant to take a photo of myself wearing it, but didn’t remember until it was too late). So I thought I didn’t have anything to lose by trying my first experiment with RIT dye. Well, first since a tie-dye activity in the 2nd grade.
I didn’t bother trying to get the original color out, mainly because I didn’t realize it was possible until recently. Plus adding one more step to a project just makes it a little less likely that I’ll get it finished. I thought a bright red would combine nicely with the original brown, and even if it stayed more brown than red, it would be warmer color, and hopefully look nicer with my skin.
Stirring, for over an HOUR was a pain, and it looked like evil Jello. It turned out beautifully though. The color was even nicer than I’d hoped for, I can’t think of the name of the red, but it’s a color that makes me feel nostalgic, it’s the color I imagine Little Red’s riding hood should be.
To be totally honest, my craft whims don’t usually turn out this well, so I’m pretty psyched to not just have one more shirt I can wear without feeling ugly, but to have completed a project in less than a day. I have plans to buy and dye two more shirts, and next time, I think I may play with masking using some wax resist. I can’t wait to see how they turn out.
Freedom of Thought
Ender is… well I won’t call it Crawling, but by the time you finish reading this post it might be. He’s got the legs mostly worked out, but his arms stick out stiff in front of him, effectively providing breaks to his forward momentum. Sometimes he topples forward and manages to scramble a few inches, sometimes he sort of hops, frog style, and his whole body slides forward a bit. Sometimes he tips to the side and ends up in a roll which takes him somewhere unless he gets distracted by looking at the ceiling.
Whatever I want to call it though, Ender is starting to be mobile. It might take him a while to get there, but he moves from point A to point B. Or at least to point A and 1/2. So far he rarely travels further than a few feet at a time, and by the time he makes it that far he’s probably ready for a nap, or at least a different point of view. Nonetheless, my baby is moving (or rather crawling) slowly into a significant new phase of independence.
I think the reason I’ve been so excited about crawling (despite many many suggestions from more experienced parents to enjoy the lack of mobility while I could) is because it is the first time a baby is able to inflict his will on the world. Up until this point, Ender has been subject to my choices and my whims. Obviously he still is, but before the only protest he could make was to cry or to hold on to the toy a bit tighter. Now he can run away. He can go places I’d rather he not.
Obviously it’s not just about baby vs. parent. Ender suddenly has the ability to make real choices.
I mean, sure, before, while he was playing under his baby gym, he could choose to bat at the owl, or yank on the blue bird, or kick the padded bar, but this is the illusion of choice we give to toddlers to appease them (would you like the blue socks or the red socks today?) not a real decision.
Soon, Ender will be able to survey the room and decide: do I want to go play with the ball, or do I want to hide under a blanket, or do I want to try to pull up on that chair? Or maybe shake the security gate or bang on the door?
We think of crawling as a big milestone, but we lump it in line with sitting up and rolling over, we see it as a halfway point to walking. It’s more than any of those, because it is such a significant shift in how the baby’s world operates.
I realize this will sound absurd, but it makes me think of the video game the Sims. Sims 2 to be specific. (And this isn’t even the first time I’ve talked about life mirroring the Sims.) In the Sims 2, when your sim has a baby, it functions as an object in the game for three days. You have to feed it and change it and bathe it, and you can play with it or sing to it, and you put it to bed. After three days, it morphs to a “toddler” a slightly larger crawling sim. Only then can you see the intent of the sim, the moods, the metered needs and wants and fears. Only then does the sim have selectable actions, and begin to learn skills. Only then does the sim become a playable character.
From the time Ender was born, he was learning of course. They do that. Up until now, he was not a participant in his learning, he was a passive receiver, truly the sponge we say babies are (a really CUTE sponge though). Now he is on the same continuum as a toddler or even a preschooler. Of course there is a world of difference between a crawling baby and a three year old, but it is only one of time and experience, not one of being.
Yesterday he was an object. Today he is a player.
Chyna
I wonder why they say “It’s for the best.”
Rather, I know why they say it. If you’re a vet, you probably see mostly sick animals, and when they’re really sick, death is a saving grace to the pain which is your vision of that animal’s normal. If someone’s cat was hit by a car, of course you wouldn’t say “It was for the best.” When your cat gets a sudden illness, or even a less sudden illness, it is one long car accident, culminating in death. When it’s over, and you’re stroking the fur of what used to be your cat, you are still reeling from coming home to find her wheezing and lethargic, barely able to move and not interested in tuna. When the vet says “It’s for the best,” you are still thinking of uneaten tuna.
“It’s for the best” is like a slap, but a slow slap, that you can see coming.
It brings up those secret worries about snowballing vet bills. Googling “hepatitis” and the dismay at complicated and expensive long term treatment on top of the twice a day insulin injections and hepatitis has a different special diet than diabetes and there will probably be more urine and vomit and blood and probably diarrhea to clean up now. In the end you conclude she’s worth it, but when the vet says, “It’s for the best,” that little part of you that was tallying up the logistics of animal illness slinks lower down inside you, hunched with guilt.
Chyna (pronounced Chee-nuh) was probably about 8.
Back when Matt was still living in his own apartment, I had a project using a little piece poster board. The rest of the poster board I folded in half, into a rough Teepee shape and wrote “cat house” on the side. To my delight, Chyna ran right over it and proceeded to camp out. She played in that paper Teepee for weeks as it lost it’s shape sliding wider and lower, and she had to crawl on her belly to get underneath.
A pair of freshly ironed pants once attacked her, and she was afraid of pants for the next several months.
She liked to attack dust, or towels or toes under doors.
If you made the mistake of scratching your leg beneath a blanket, Chyna was there to help you SCRATCH harder. Then when you jerked your hand out from under the blanket she perked up and said, “pet me?” with her eyes.
Her meow sounded surprisingly like the word “hello” and I’d always meant to record it, but never got around to it.
She liked to carry toys in her mouth and meow around them, and often meowed in the darker corners of the house, as though she was exploring. If we called out to her, she we glance at us, then continue her expedition. Hello? Hello?
A few years ago we adopted Tricky, and Chyna, though she was eventually happier for the company, started binge eating to keep the new cat from getting her food. She slowly gained weight and started slowing down, acting old. About a year and a half ago, we found out she had diabetes, and almost as soon as we started treatment, she started acting like a kitten again, and was more loving and social than ever. The new house was likewise good for her, with more spaces, more places to climb, more perches, and spaces to crouch beneath.
With some cats it seems like the only time they come near you is when they want to be fed or they want to be pet, but Chyna would follow you around to see what you were up to. If your lap was full, she would curl up by your leg, or if it was too hot, she’d curl up a few inches away, purring and clearly just happy to be near you. Her favorite place in the world was the bathroom, and the first time she tried to jump on Matt’s lap he was in the bathroom and he was, shall we say, unprepared for a lap cat.
When Ender came into the picture, Chyna was the first cat to sniff him (though she’s also been the smarter cat in terms of keeping out of reach as he starts to grab for furry things) and when he cried she would meow at us in evident concern that we weren’t taking care of him fast enough. One of our friends brought a toddler to the house, and when we weren’t watching closely enough, she picked up Chyna around the middle, and carried her into the room, arms and legs sticking awkwardly out in front. Chyna didn’t try to scratch or bite the little girl, she just looked at us and meowed pitifully as if to say, “can you do something about this please?” I really hoped we would get a few years of trying to stop Ender chasing her around before we would have to say goodbye.
Whenever we got home from a trip, or even a long day of errands, Chyna would be sitting at the french doors, looking out for us. As we got out of the car, she would stand up expectantly, and we could see her mouth opening to meow at us.
Hello?
Hello?