you can take the girl out of grad school…

at our university, doctoral candidates’ dissertations must be approved by an outside reader. which approval comes after the committee has reviewed and approved the diss. this can be, as one of my students is learning, incredibly stressful and more than a little unfair.

after getting his reader’s comments my student and i embarked on a revision plan that we both believed addressed the pretty reasonable observations made by the reader. then. then. then his reader read his reviewed dissertation and wrote a second review, twice as long as the first, going into much greater detail about what needed to be changed and why. and refusing to pass the dissertation until all of these changes were made.

i had an hour-long phone conversation with this student pretty late last night. i went to bed angry on his behalf and also revved up with strategies for advocating for him. and so i dreamt of being back in some not-quite-recognizable town where i’d lived before, on a crowded and not-quite-recognizable sidewalk of a street i’d been on countless times before. in front of me were all my graduate school comrades — people i was close to, people i barely knew, people i might not even recognize IRL on an actual street, people i still talk to almost every day. the sidewalk was crowded, and people were jostling each other but also meandering, stopping to exclaim in front of changed store-fronts, to reminisce about hours spent in dark bars, or to catch sight of an old friend and stop/hinder/divert traffic to get to the person for conversation. it was quite sociable and everybody was happy.

except me. i was pedaling furiously on my tricycle, trying to wend my way through the crowd: get out of my way! you’re in my way! you’re slowing me down! but i was so low to the ground — below everybody’s knees, more or less — that nobody really saw me or paid much attention.

teacher/scholar/administrator or toddler? you decide.

the (eerie) ties that bind

a chronology of freakiness:

item 1: in one of the 45-minute naps that passed for a good-night’s sleep, courtesy of  eamon and The Fever That Ate 2009, i dreamt that i was taking care of a young mairin when a skeevy creepoid tried to wrest her from my loving arms. KIDNAPPER! i yelled and hugged her to my chest, trying to run but finding my dream-legs leaden and unmoving. skeevy creepoid dude made another move for her. RAPE! i screamed, and tried even harder to get away. i woke from the dream just as mairin herself, sleeping in the next room, started crying out “mommy, mommy, MOMEEE!” heart pounding, i stumbled out of bed and went to her. she was sitting up in her bed and when i sat down next to her she threw her arms around my neck and would not let go. i reassured her that everything was OK and i would see her in the morning. she kissed my cheek, whispered okay, mom, snuggled back under her covers and drifted back to sleep.

item 2: mairin and leo were playing at their new game in our adjoining front yards: each holds one end of leo’s jump rope and then, keeping the rope stretched to its full length between them, they run around squealing with delight. they have done this a lot over the last few weeks, and they both love it. i have never thought anything of it, except to think that they are too cute when they play together. so i’m holding eamon, watching them play at their game, and suddenly think oh my god mairin is going to hurt herself. and that instant — THAT INSTANT — she tripped and fell. since her hands were busy she didn’t really break her fall with them very well, and so she smacked face-almost-first into the concrete. she lifted her face to me and she was covered in blood from the nose down. i passed off eamon to leo’s mom, grabbed mairin and dashed into the house to rinse her mouth, test her teeth, reassure her she was fine, try to convince her to let me put ice against her rapidly swelling lip, and miss the piece of gravel ground into her gum (never fear, shannon found it as soon as i would let anybody else touch her).

item 3: mairin is walking around the house. i think to myself wow, she’s doing so well with the potty training. WAIT! maybe she needs to go to the bathroom! at which exact moment in time she turns to me, crotch in hand, and says mom, i need to go potty. please give me some privacy.

so there it is. eamon may be the one who refuses to literally detach from me, but apparently some spooky part of me isn’t letting go of mairin. either that, or massive sleep deprivation has launched us into a new astral plane.

invasion of the princesses

saturday morning i heard mairin making her veeeerrry careful way down the stairs (she likes to run and jump down them, which rarely ends well), when i heard her stop and gasp.

“mommy! look at that!” and there, on our front porch, was christmas in february.

our neighbor’s girlfriend is moving in and his kids’ old playroom will become her office. so our neighbor was making the trek from his attic to our porch, and apparently had been doing so all morning.

to bring us an easel.

and a play table.

and a little nursery-type doctor’s cart, complete with stethoscope, thermometer, knee-reflex-bangy-thing, and miniature x-ray machine. (it only does skulls. go figure.)

and a purple stroller.

and a my little pony head. (now don’t go all godfather on me. it’s the kind of head with a lovely long (and brightly purple) mane that besotted young girls are supposed to spend hours combing and braiding.)

and an ariel head. (ditto.)

and 9 cushy puzzly mat pieces, 8 of which have a disneyfied princess likeness on them: cinderella; snow white; briar rose; etc.

well.

mairin and i sat outside in our coats and mittens and put the princess mat-puzzle together, and have left it out on the front porch as a warning to all tonka trucks or boy superheroes welcome mat. i was not thrilled about this plethora of princesses, and so contemplated taking a small measure of revenge against the culture machine by calling the princesses just plain “girls” (which in fact i have done) and letting mairin name them (which we will have to do, in part, because i don’t know all of their names anyway). 

now lest you think i am a thoroughly ungrateful wretch of a neighbor, i will confess to be pleased by the notion of toy recycling and i am, in the abstract, quite happy to be given a ton of stuff that will entertain the kiddos and not require any outlay of cash on our part. but as much as i have defined my mothering by being anti-pink, i am rabidly anti-princess. you all know me, so i’m sure it is no stretch of anyone’s imagination to guess how i feel about having a princess welcome mat, let alone a disembodied princess/mermaid head, floating around my house.

so imagine my pleasure when mairin put ariel’s head in the purple stroller and pushed her away, hollering over her shoulder “be back soon, mom. we’re going to target. she needs some thomas panties.”

no, hang on a sec, i’ve almost got it….

you know those hateful, “hey, cute-mama-to-be, here’s how marvelous you should be feeling now in week ‘x’ of your pregnancy?” bits that i ranted about months ago? turns out they don’t end just because i’m no longer pregnant. seems some poor sap has figured out that new mothers are desperate for information (okay, so what if we are?) and that we’ll turn anywhere for it (i’m taking umbrage at that one) and will believe anything (don’t even get me started).

today, as welcome to week 9 of my baby’s life (okay, i remember enough to know that that’s wrong by a week) i received an email giving me advice about how to remember things.

seems the first thing you have to do is figure out whether the memory you are seeking is procedural or declarative. if it’s procedural, well then, accessing the memory is easy: just start doing the thing that you’re trying to remember. but if it’s declarative, then you have to determine whether it is episodic-declarative or semantic-declarative. if the former, then just remember a bit and the whole memory will come flooding back; if the latter, well, wait! there is no answer for how to get at your semantic memories. just your procedural ones, or your episodic ones, or your declarative ones. is that a typo? should the article say “semantic” where it says “declarative”? or, wait, did i even understand that right in the first place? or are all my semantic memories gone forever down the operating-room drain?

next time i’m stressed because i can’t remember something, i could take this advice:

Don’t worry too much if you can’t remember something because, ironically, stress can cause you to forget! Stay calm and logically work out what kind memory you are seeking.

instead, i’m going to be grateful that i have at least promptly forgotten how it is i’m supposed to remember.

mommy’s not walking! mommy’s running! yeah!

it has become clear to me that i am not going to magically find my waistline anytime soon if i don’t make some sort of effort. i mean, i’ve been limiting myself to no more than two desserts a day, but apparently that is not enough. so i’ve decided to re-enter, at long last, the sweaty world of the exercising.

no mean feat, though, given that two weeks after eamon was born i realized that my feet hurt. badly. all the time. and that the culprit(s) were my shoes. it seems that birthing a boy has finally done me in: my feet, troupers through years of teaching aerobics, running, and having babies, have at last expanded. after realizing why i was in pain, and then complaining to shannon about the continued pain, i finally wised up and bought a pair of kick-around pumas that fit. they’re the same size i’ve always been wearing, but they’re nice and wide from the arch up, and boy-oh-boy do they feel good.

not so my old running shoes. and since they are hardly worn out from sitting alone in my closet for so long (lonely, perhaps, but not worn out) i can only attribute the pain to their smallness. so off i went in search of a pair of running shoes that fit.

i landed at bob roncker’s running spot, the “it” shop for all things running in cincy. there i was schooled first by ashley (who just that day was expecting her loot to arrive from nike, her new sponsor for the heptathlon — turns out ashley placed 7th in last summer’s olympic trials) and then by none other than bob himself on the fine art of shoe fit. i tried on a variety of lengths and widths until i found the pair that made my feet so happy that i could actually envision myself running.

later, once at home, i loaded mairin in the jogging stroller. it was a crisp autumn evening and i was geared up in my new shoes! yeah! as well as my favorite brooks running jersey — the one with sleeves that unfold to cover my hands, mitten-style, so very important for those cold north-midwestern runs of yore — and we headed out. it was glorious from the beginning. it felt good to move my legs. it felt good to feel my heart pumping, my lungs stretching to pull in enough cool air. my feet were cushioned but hugged, making them feel a bit like they were seatbelted to the world’s best feet-pillows. after breaking a gentle, just-starting-out sweat i picked up the pace. and that’s when mairin started with the squealing: mommy’s not walking! mommy’s running! yeah! and so i ran, and ran, my  heart starting to really pound, blood moving hard in my ears, my lungs hot and bursting. and still i ran, and mairin squealed, and the orange and red leaves blew in the breeze, and the jack-o-lanterns stared back at us from the neighborhood porches. it was  heaven, i tell you. heaven. and when my calves started to ball up and my chest started to burn, deep and tight, i called it a good run, and warned mairin, and slowed down to walk.

not bad for four blocks, huh?

in a boring continuation of this pregnancy’s theme

we are all worked up with no place to go.

i occasionally have signs of labor. (crabbiness is a sure sign of pending labor, i’m assured over and over again.)  our hospital bag is more or less packed. i finished gus’s handknitted blanket, the one i was certain i wouldn’t finish before his fifth birthday.  shannon hung the porch swing i decided i wouldn’t be able to live without once gus is home and nursing and my late-summer days yawn endlessly in front of me. (little miss optimism, that’s me.)

but for now, gus stays put, my sac stays in tact, and we remain simply the parents of a toddler and the hopeful parents-to-be of a newborn.

i am tempted to call nurse cheryl and yell and scream at her about her damned statistics. i was supposed to go into labor on saturday! and then i remember not what my doctor would have me remember (every day inside is good for the baby) but rather that nurse cheryl is a dear with the platitudes and then i’d just be doubly pissed off.

instead, i’ll try just to calm down for the biophysical tomorrow at 3, and assume i’m going to make my 9:15 a.m. appt on friday with dr lum, and prepare not to go into labor before i have to show up to the hospital at 5:45 am next tuesday. harumph.

thomas shannon smith

last night i dreamt that three days after gus was born shannon took me to meet him. all grown up at 3 days old he was already in day care, in the “binky room” where the 0-6 month set hangs. shannon got waylaid by some guy selling used books from his time in graduate school (enough! we have enough of those already!), so i headed into the binky room by myself. as soon as i opened the door i realized i was in over my head: some babies were squalling, others were getting their diapers changed, still others were hanging off of their caregivers like miniature howler monkeys. here were all these babies, all demanding attention, and i was supposed to find mine among them? i hadn’t even seen my baby yet. how in the world would i recognize him? how would i be able to even see him through this miasma of baby sounds and smells?

but there he was, in a crib at the back of the room, laying on his tummy (agggh! SIDS alert!) with his face turned outward. he was wearing the dr. seuss “thing one/thing two” outfit that is, in my non-dream-world, waiting for him at home. but it wasn’t the outfit that gave him away as mine: it was his complete and utter perfection.

cliché as it is, all parents think their children are gorgeous. truth be told, though i was thoroughly charmed by mairin’s arrival and her looks, her appearance was, well, funny. she looked like an old man. except for when she looked like a frog. she was as adorable as could be, but she was funny looking as an itty-bit, and i wasn’t too doped-up on love-hormones to see that. but this baby? this baby was gorgeous. perfect. dark hair, olive skin, a fine little nose, not a blotch or a squish or an odd genetic gift to be found. i have never in my life seen such a beautiful baby. i stared and stared and stared at this dream-child, unable to believe that he was mine. really, truly, mine.

but since he was, i picked him up, changed his nappie, and began that mommy-cuddling that so many women seem to do instinctively with their kids. i could not believe my good luck. i could not believe he was real, so perfect, so whole and complete. i spent hours in the binky room with this gorgeous little guy.

when it was time to go i realized that it was time for us to go, not time for me to go. i was taking him with me. are you kidding? leave him here in this chaos? unh-hunh. so i packed up his gear and got ready to leave. at that point i realized i had no idea what his name was, so i walked back to his crib to see. by that time shannon was with me. he looked over at me and said “well, i had to name him.” i read the sign: thomas shannon smith. “but,” i said, “that name wasn’t on our list.” “i know” he answered. but i looked at the baby and it was right — a perfect fit. he looked exactly like a little thomas shannon.

which didn’t really matter, because at that moment the baby looked up at me and said “call me lolo.”

bad mama!

i’ve been berating myself for weeks now about not posting new photos of mairin to flickr. we’ve had this nice thing going with monthly sets for mairin (sure, sometimes i only post 7 pictures for the month, but other months i post 49!) and i’ve liked keeping it going. the only monthly set we sort of blew it on was her 13th month, but i’ve given us special dispensation since ruby was delivered on the day mairin turned 13 months, and i wasn’t too, um, with it for a while.

anyway, so last night was the night. mairin was in bed, shannon was at a team meeting (or so he says), and i actually had a few hours to myself. it was the perfect time to catch up on my backlog of photoblogging, right? wrong. a careful perusal of both our “shared pictures” folder on the computer and the massive databank that is our adobe photoshop, revealed that we got nothin’. NOTHING. sure, we managed to snap a few shots here and there, but they are mostly useless and desultory.

and so it goes: prep for newbie picks up speed, attention to older child starts to slide. no wonder mairin has been a nervous wreck. just wait, though, ’til she gets to open all the gifts i’ve purchased for her to distract her from the attention gus will get when he gets here. (whoever said money can’t buy love had obviously not parented a toddler.)

in other bad mama news, i actually asked nurse cheryl yesterday evening if i could forego my final 17P shot just, you know, to get things going. she said no. and while i was warming up to a good old-fashioned huff about my right to make my own decisions about my medical care, she was describing to us her years as a NICU nurse and her experience that caucasian male babies have the lowest survival rates among preemies. “wimpy white boys” she called them. shannon told her not to call his son names. she told me to keep the baby in place for a while longer so she wouldn’t have to.

extra toys for mairin, a few million more brain cells and some extra lung tissue for gus. should be a good few weeks.

on the charts

sometime this month dear ol’ dr lum will be joined by his new partner, an apparently sweet, young, female newly-graduated ob-gyn. it seems, however, that some of ted’s current patients are not so happy about this: apparently one about-to-deliver patient left his office in tears recently when she learned that the new dr. heidi might deliver her baby.

i learned about this new development — not dr l’s own pending new arrival, but the possibility that she could actually TAKE HIS PLACE as my doctor – at our last visit. dr l had left the room briefly and, bored stiff by all the redundant pregnancy magazines (do everything perfectly! don’t worry — you don’t have to do everything perfectly! in fact, that’s the only way to do everything perfectly!) i picked up and started to browse my medical chart. at the bottom of page one, highlighted in lemon-yellow, is this note: 2nd c-section UNLESS BABY FALLING OUT! i was still laughing when he came back in the office. i pointed to this note and he laughed, too — “wow, did i actually write that? well, with another doctor joining the office, i figure i should have some pretty clear notes on the patients’ charts.”

by the time he was finished with this explanation he was busily engaged in the exam familiar to all late-term pregnant women — the one where the doctor wears your torso like a giant foam finger while shoving the baby’s head around between your hip bones (and for you male readers, yes, it is about as painful as it sounds). still, from my disadvantaged position i looked him squarely in the eye and said, with as much authority as i could muster, “yes, well, YOU’re delivering this baby. right?” he looked up and over my knees at me and smiled. “what if i’m out of town?” “we have a scheduled c-section. how can you be out of town?” “what if i’m not available?” i just glared.  he cracked a toothy grin and said “don’t worry. this baby is one of the only ones i’m going to make certain to deliver myself.”

unless, of course, the baby falls out. which is exactly what happened — feet first, no less – in my dream last night, prompting me, today, to grab my crotch every few minutes to make sure there are no baby toes making their daring escape.

at least i happen to know the doctor is in town.

no, really, stop. you’re killing me.

with earl & mairin i subscribed to babycenter.com’s weekly pregnancy newsletters. see how your baby is developing!  what to expect from your body this week! it all seemed so, you know, helpful and stuff.

by the time i got pregnant with ruby i had those damned weekly announcements memorized, so i didn’t bother to susbscribe. but then with gus i somehow felt like i was shortchanging him, not being totally current with whatever miniscule changes might be going on with him, or me. (please, no size jokes here, else i shall roll myself over on top of you.) so i found a new e-newsletter, which sends me similar, but different, worthless information. like these tips to keep me going through my 35th week of pregnancy, when apparently i have lost not only my ability to bend over and tie my own shoes but any sense of personal hygiene in the still-easy-to-reach regions above my neck:

TIME SAVING HAIR TIPS!

Use a dry shampoo or hair powder on roots in between washings

Look for two-in-one styling aids, such as shampoo-conditioner combos

Braid wet hair in the morning and by the time you take it out in the evening you’ll have sexy waves

Get a great short hair cut – a new look for a new baby!

 

i’m not sure which i like better: the idea of a newly post-partumed woman styling her hot new ‘do between hourly feedings and nappie changes, or the idea of a 35-week pre-partum chippie out in her stilettos and bump-hugging strapless number, sipping a virgin cosmo while sporting her sexy evening waves.

if only i weren’t so old, i would do this whole pregnancy thing one more time … just to get it fashionably right.