The Great Rolling Over Experience

We just arrived in Rehoboth Beach after a wonderful weekend in DC (much to be said on DC later, but tonight's post is on a different topic). Over the weekend, X got to play (ie. stare at other babies and toddlers while they played, he was the second youngest) with many children and had a wonderful time.

Perhaps inspired by the antics of all the other children, he did the most amazing thing at 8pm this evening. He rolled over for the first time! It was so cool. We were giving him naked tummy in the middle of a diaper change and we were talking about what soft skin he still has and we weren't even paying that much attention to what he was up to, and boom, he rolled over! We put his diaper on and then he rolled over two more times! For the sake of posterity, I will note that he is fifteen weeks old now.

Many thanks to the many children who inspired him over the weekend to go where he had not before!

Florida from Brooklyn

I find it a bit sad, but I'm declaring an amnesty again, so that I don't stop writing because I missed a few days. I tend to miss one day and then feel guilty and keep skipping and that's how I didn't blog for months and months the last time. So...

Florida was actually pretty awesome. Seeing my dad happy was really pretty cool. He held X a total of three times, all of them instigated by J or me, but he talked about how cool a kid he was and what a good baby all the time and mentioned several times that he thought I was a wonderful mother. I've had a difficult relationship with my father over my teenage years and beyond and it is nice to be slowly digging out and starting over.

We spent two days in Jacksonville during the trip visiting my college friend and our former commune member I, who was so excited about X. It was really sweet to see her interact with X. She really is the perfect Auntie. Every kid needs someone who thinks they are miraculous and special (who isn't Mom!) On the way to Jacksonville, we recreated part of our honeymoon trip up the east coast of Florida. We stopped in Meibourne and Daytona Beach.

X coped very well, all things considered. We were on the road from 10am to 8pm, and although we stopped frequently, that was really asking a lot of him. At the end of the trip at 7pm, we ran out of bottle (on car trips, we bring bottles of expressed breast milk, so he can eat while I drive) in the middle of his snack and he started screaming so loudly that we couldn't hear each other talk. I had to pull off the highway, park at the gas station and nurse him in the back seat of the car in order to calm him down and get him to stop screaming. But he did stop screaming and fall asleep for the night, so it ended well.

X also got to meet his Great Uncle A, my father's brother, who was in Florida at the same time we were. He lives in Michigan, on one of the great lakes, so this is his yearly retreat from the cold weather. He was enchanted with X and held him many times and wanted to take infinite pictures.

We flew back to Brooklyn tonight and got in a few hours ago. I don't like flying and we had to circle JFK for 45 minutes before landing, which I was not thrilled with, but now I don't have to fly again until August when we do our west coast trip. I need to work on the flying thing before X notices my anxiety. Ah, more things to work on.

Second Day in Florida

Today was a good day, mostly. I got up early with X (7am, sigh) and we read and sang and visited with Pops and then Em got up and did a dissertation interview over the phone and then we ate lunch on the back porch. We split up for the afternoon and Em and X went with J (Pop's girlfriend) to the Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg and Pops and I went to the marina, rented a boat and took it out to the Gulf of Mexico.

It was a gorgeous day and a lovely boat, which I got to drive once we were out of the difficult bits and in the open Gulf. According to my father, I did quite well driving the boat. Being out on the boat with my dad was interesting. I had wondered when he suggested earlier today that we split up and do this for the day if he wanted to talk to me by myself, and in fact, that may have been why he suggested it, but being my father, he is remarkably incapable of speaking about emotional or difficult things. Sad considering the man is a psychologist. My mother always spoke about this problem as the shoe makers children having no shoes. He's good with other people's emotions, just not his or ours.

According to Em, the museum was nice, although X was largely unimpresssed and needed a lot of attention in order not to have a small meltdown on the guided tour. We attempted to have dinner around 6:30pm, but X was totally done for the day and cried whenever we tried to sit him or ourselves down. He screamed and fought when I tried to nurse him, so I made the radically assumption that he wasn't hungry and was annoyed that I'd tried to silence him with food. Em walked him while I ate and then half way through dinner, he went insane and I left the table to try nursing again, and this time it worked and Em sat down for dinner and I fed him and we reheated my meal after he was done. He continued to be sad and whiny until we finally got him down after another nurse at 9pm. I think that this trip has been hard on him with all of the new things. Although he almost rolled over today, which was awesome. Another day, I'll tell you about how my child doesn't like sunshine.

First Day in Florida

First full day in Florida went okay. We ate lunch on the patio, Emily went kayaking in the backyard. I'm not actually kidding, my dad's place has a dock facing the intercoastal waterway and a kayak. She had a good time. We had dinner at one of our favorite places to eat in Florida, Sweet Tomatoes, a vegetarian buffet place. We ate with Dad and Jen and her daughter, who I have met once before about two years ago at the beginning of the whole divorce mess. Yes, my parents have been in the process of divorcing for over two years. It's been fun. Spending this much time with my father is interesting. It's the first time I've spent more than five or six hours with him since I lived at home the summer before my senior year in college and the times spent home for the holidays before October 2006. It's very weird to see him be happy and affectionate with someone not my mother, but to be honest he never was happy or affectionate with my mother that I remember, so maybe that's why it's weird.

More to come later. Night.

Flying and Florida

I may not have mentioned this before, but I really don't like flying. I avoid it. For our honeymoon we went to Florida, and to honor my dislike of flying, we took the train from NYC to Miami. Lovely and romantic, but a little insane to take a 27 hour long train ride when the flight is 3 hours. Now, my solution used to be valium. Sleeping on Em's lap for the entire take-off and early flight (the part that makes me craziest) works well. During pregnancy that didn't work, so I suffered through.

Flying with X is an entirely different challenge, because I have to be strong for him and not freak out all that visibly. I nursed him while we waited for the plane to take-off and, get this, he slept through the entire take-off. Strike that, the entire flight. He was amazing. And I coped decently well, only holding him very tight against me and clinging to his little hand as he slept through it all. And once we were up in the air, I listened to my ipod and held him sleeping on my lap and it wasn't so bad. And I don't have to do it again until next Saturday, so that's good.

Florida is nice so far. We are staying outside Tampa with my dad and his girlfriend, which is interesting. Their house is nice, but appears to have no heat and although it is Florida, it is also January and I wish they had more blankets. We have so far had dinner, gone to the CVS for diapers and snacks (they have no food in their house, I swear, but that is a comment for another day) and watched a British mystery on the TV, with my father falling asleep 20 minutes in and snoring, which actually was kinda nice, as it reminded me so strongly of my childhood, where that happened pretty much every night.

A Trip to the Beach

This weekend, X went to the beach.




His family can be pretty boring at the beach. Especially when they have the new issue of Buffy Season 8. (Best. Comic. EVAR.)



Mama got a new bikini for the occasion. (Mommy thinks she married a hottie.)


X got to swim in a pool for the first time! He really liked it.




Then he went to his first funeral: his moms and uncle buried their kitty, Vodka, who died a year ago.



Then he came home. He likes the beach. He's going back next weekend.

Notes on California

• I've never in my life lived anywhere but the northeastern US. Frankly, I doubt the rest of the country exists most of the time. So it says something Deep and Significant that, within 24 hours of getting off the plane, I was picking out real estate. I really freakin' love the Bay Area. North Bay more than South Bay, but, really, the whole thing. I'd move here in a hot second.
  
• We spent a subtle chunk of our time here checking out potential places for me to teach eventually, in a sneaky way. Today's trip to Palo Alto to wander around Stanford got canceled once we saw how long it would take on the train, but we did get to see both UC Santa Cruz and San José State. The Verdicts: Santa Cruz looks a little bit like if you went to college in a summer camp. I would be worried about possible bear attacks as I walked between classes. That much nature intimidates my urban self. San José is cute, and there is a decent used book store that is apparently run by people who like to make a ruckus--they got arrested trying to pass out fliers at the main campus bookstore.
  
• I've always said I want to raise my kids in a city, mainly to protect against the white-middle-class hegemony of the suburbs, as I experienced them, in addition to my deep loathing of sprawl. But what we've been seeing out here aren't the suburban-sprawl monstrosities of my youth, precisely; they're nice small towns, with walkable centers and functional public transportation systems, located along the outer edges of cities. None of the towns I've seen out here have been entirely car-unnecessary, but they are more car-optional than the town we grew up in; while one might want a car, it wouldn't be necessary for trips to the weekend farmer's market, or the book store, or going out to dinner, if one picked where to live with an eye towards walkability. In addition, Santa Clara County (where we are staying) is roughly 30% Asian and a quarter Latina/o; the suburban town where our friends live is 14% Asian and 13% Latina/o. By comparison, the county where we grew up (which includes one majority-black small city that is geographically and socially isolated from the upper-middle-class suburbs) is 18% black, 4% Asian, and 2% Latina/o. So, is living in ethnically diverse suburbs that are not patterned around sprawl ethically distinct from living in other sorts of suburbs? Is what I want urbanity, or do I just want not to need a car and to raise my kids away from monolithic whiteness?
• It's spring out here. It's tortuous how beautiful it is. And both strawberries AND asparagus are in season already. Seriously, have I mentioned I would move here in a heartbeat yet?
  

Willa By The Bay

Escape From New York Pizza,
at the intersection of Castro and 18th, San Francisco, CA

We decided to celebrate Willa graduating from embryo to fetus by taking her to California for the week.

OK, so it's my spring break, and it was our turn to visit some friends who live in Silicon Valley. Kate survived her first pregnant flight quite well--and without her usual Valium fix to conquer her fear of take off and landing, or even a Benedryl to put her to sleep. Turns out Continental serves palatable gluten-free meals, although their vegan meal left something to be desired (a truly uninspiring veggie burger).

Willa and her mothers are faring well in the lovely Bay Area sunshine, enjoying time with our friends, the brilliance that is the Ferry Terminal Market, and three hours of time change. I'd say blogging might be spotty...but we're staying in the most techno-dense house I've ever been in, so we're probably going to be blogging just as much, because why not?

Also I have a post mostly written about the X-Files. So that'll be coming soon.