Maxin' and Relaxin'

Everyone likes to take a load off in different ways.  Olivia and Hermes, in a rare moment of solidarity, enjoy watching backyard t.v.  Squirrel is currently the top-rated show on the network.  Milo, on the other hand, totally digs napping in the crook of Ben's arm.  Not gonna lie: so do I.  

In other news, which is really not news at all, but I got out of the house, so it feels like news to me, is that Milo and I spent a lovely afternoon with his GG (Great Grandpa Morris) dining at Frenchtown's marvelous "Lovin' Oven" and hanging out at Casa Wachtel.  There's virtually nothing I like better in the world than watching a 6-week old spend time with a 4992-week old, and I'm not being at all facetious.  Morris is quite smitten with Milo, and is as gentle and loving as you could possibly imagine, and it intrigues me to think about how Milo (who is just beginning to follow an object like a rattle with his eyes) will someday, God willing, have an accumulation of knowledge, memories and images like Morris does.  Someday, hopefully, Milo will be talking to (or near, anyway) his own great-grandson, and musing on what life was like before we all had pentium chips implanted in our crania and ate homemade food rather than FutureShakes.  

Also, I love hanging out with Morris, because I like hearing about the number of worlds he's inhabited, getting his perspective on family and parenting and being the recipient of his compassionate advice.  And to get a little bit sentimental, being with him allows me to feel like I can still enter a portal to see my own grandmother.  Boy, she would've gotten a kick out of Milo (and of meeting Ben, of course) and would've had her share of belly laughs watching me try to mother someone!  Really, there probably isn't too much out there more wonderful and bizarre than having kids, watching your kids have kids, and then watching those kids have kids.        !לדור ודור

The Mantra of Tiny Elvis

My Lovin' Teddy Bear

There is an old SNL skit that Ben alludes to fairly often, The Adventures of Tiny Elvis, in which Nicolas Cage plays the eponymous leather-bedecked character who is so small he can fit in someone's palm.  The premise is simple: he's Elvis, but tiny.  The dialogue, which is not nearly as amusing as that of some other vintage sketches, looks something like this:

Tiny Elvis: Hey, man...look at that salt shaker, man. That is huge! Man, I'll never be able to use all that salt, man. That is way too much!


Red: Yeah, that's a big salt shaker, Elvis!


Tiny Elvis: Sure is huge, man.


Sonny: That's hilarious, Elvis!


Red: Score another one for the Tiny E!


Sonny: Man, we can't keep up with you!


Tiny Elvis: Well, I'm just saying it's a big salt shaker, that's all.

On the surface, nothing special, right?  Barely even funny, although Ben and I have always enjoyed using it in reference to really odd things, like disproportionately big road signs that tell you there's a curve ahead or the enormous American flags outside of car dealerships.

I have, however, found a new role for Tiny Elvis in my life.  He is my new guru, and "It's just big, that's all," is my new Jesus Prayer, a la Franny and Zooey, when things seem too overwhelming.  When Milo is screaming, and the dog is outside on the porch whining and the phone is ringing and I'm late for something or other, I plan on using the Tiny E mantra to get me through.  At the absolute minimum, Nicolas Cage can be a force for good in the world for the first time in a very long time.

Deep Thoughts

Since Milo's birth, I've been having not flashbacks, exactly, but very vivid images of places or experiences from various stages of my growing up: sitting under the cherry trees at lunch in springtime on the front lawn of my high school and closing my eyes so that the cars zooming by on East West Highway sounded like waves; the basement room in which I reluctantly took part in the Brownies; annual yearly photographs with my brother at Sears; bag lunches that my mother packed, always with a note in them.  And the varying significance of these memories or senses of things notwithstanding, it seems to me as though my brain is having some sort of reaction to having a child of my own, that my neurons are responding to having become a mom and are showing me this flipbook of my own childhood as if to say, "Guess what?  You're going to do it again, but from another point of view."  This is both frightening and intriguing.  People always have that fantasy of re-living their lives with all of the knowledge they possess at their wisest moments, but doing so is, of course, impossible.  Impossible, as well, I suspect, to impart whatever it is I perceive as the wisdom I've gained over the course of thirty-four years -- of screwing up, accidentally succeeding, making truly wonderful decisions and flopping head-first into moments of grace -- to Milo.  He's got to do it for himself, and every day now he is creating his own montage of images and understanding, and how grateful I am to be able to help him, and ultimately just watch him, make the trip.

Let Sleeping Babies Squeak

What do these two guys have in common, you might ask?  Well, something that we've noticed, after living with Milo for almost five weeks now, is that he has an entire repertoire of cute and bizarre noises.  Some of them we've named, like the "screeching brake" effect and the ominous "door creaking" noise.  There is the adorable "nom nom" of the hungrily swallowing Milo and a sound that I noted sounded like something important happening on the deck of a battleship.  After the kid made a new one the other night, I don't remember which, I said to Ben how creepy it would be if we peeked over the side of his bassinet and up looked Michael Winslow, from Police Academy fame.  And no, not because he's black.

A Few Thoughts on the Breast Pump

Count Rugen from The Princess Bride said it best: "As you know, the concept of the suction pump is centuries old. Really that's all this is, except that instead of sucking water, I'm sucking life. I've just sucked one year of your life away. I might one day go as high as five, but I really don't know what that would do to you. So, let's just start with what we have. What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity so be honest. How do you feel?" [Wesley cries and moans in pain].

That's obviously a hyperbolic choice of quotes, but there's something to it on a couple of levels. First of all, the act of pumping is not particularly comfortable (especially at four o'clock in the morning), and the hospital-grade pump that I've rented, while a lovely, buttery shade of yellow, has a knob on it that is deceptively cheerful.  The knob controls the level of suction, which is represented on the digital screen as a row of peppy little droplets, to suggest that the higher you turn the knob, the more delicious, life-sustaining milk you will produce.  This is sort of true, but not necessarily, because there's no baseline for the knob.  It's just at the level that the user left it on the last time, and so it might be set high, but then you turn it on, gasp in surprise, and you're only looking at two or three digital drops, and then you feel like a pansy.   I'm certainly not as big of a bad-ass as Wesley, which I totally recognize.

But secondly, the pump takes time.  Lots of time.  Maybe not years-off-my-life time, but definitely hours-out-of-my day time.  I like to surround myself with magazines or the computer.  If I did Sodoku or the New York Times crossword puzzle, this would also be a pretty good time for it.  And I suppose if I were creating gushing rivers of milk, I'd feel like an earth goddess and mistress of frugality, but it's a pretty measly turn-out, frankly.  But, as my grandmother used to say, them's the breaks. 

What Baby Sleeps During Cosmetic Surgery? Wait, What Baby Gets Cosmetic Surgery?

Don't worry, we didn't claim that Milo had a deviated septum and then get him the Jennifer Grey treatment (or the Joel Grey treatment, for that matter).  He was born with two skin tags, little lumps of epithelial cells, one on his ear and one on his cheek; the one on his cheek, in particular, was the sort of thing that made children ask, "What is that thing?" and made adults want to ask but refrain from asking.  Ben and I named them Cheech and Chong.  We had our appointment with the pediatric plastic surgeon today, who wore "Mad Men" style 1960's glasses into which he awesomely inserted microscopic goggles during the procedure.  First, the doctor had me hold Milo still while he stuck a sort of obscenely long needle into the skin around both tags to numb them.  This was the worst part of the whole thing, and the kid cried for about a minute.  Then, he was swaddled and they shone a bright light on him.  The nurse held his head to the side, and Ben held his torso still like he was some sort of insane meth addict instead of a four-plus week old, and the doctor did his cutty-snippy-stitchy thing, during which Milo promptly fell asleep, feeling cozy and warm as though he were on some sort of weird baby tanning bed.  After putting a couple of dissolvable stitches in each spot, the doctor put superglue on our baby's face.  That's right.  The glue ostensibly not only holds the bandages in place, but helps the skin heal over more smoothly.  It makes me think of the Krazy Glue commercial from 1980's, and I imagine a construction worker attaching his hard hat to Milo's face. God forbid.  Anyhow, now Milo's shana punim is silky smooth, and I think we're done cutting things off of the poor kid for now, IYKWIMAITYD.

P.S. Two sights of interest this week, and you judge whether or not they're related: 1) a young, blind albino woman with a cane walking confidently in a rainstorm and 2) a sighted teenage girl, walking while texting, who tripped and pitched straight into a telephone pole.

The Future Robert Christgau?

Milo has been enjoying the Afro-pop sounds of Vampire Weekend's first album this morning, and appeared to give a smile to the poppy grooves and concurrent jiggling he was experiencing that seemed unrelated to gas. He expressed some concern that the group's sensibility was too derivative of singers like Paul Simon or groups like The Talking Heads that embraced a world music sound in the late 70's and 80's, but he thought most of the buzz surrounding them was pretty well-deserved.

Although unrelated, I thought it was worth mentioning a comment that Ben made with no apparent irony the other evening while reading an article in The Week:  "I was just thinking about Emilio Estevez."  His acting in Men at Work was truly underrated.

And for my next trick...

This is the pose I like to call Jesus Christ, Superbaby, which is a fun one. It usually ends with him having some sort of involuntary muscle spaz and then crying before falling back to sleep.  WWMD, right?

Also of note, Ben and I took Milo to the Doylestown Pumpkin Festival on Sunday afternoon, a beautiful day, and the little ingrate slept right through it.  Actually, it's a dumb idea to take a newborn to a Pumpkin Festival, because, really, what's he going to do there?  Vote on whether he prefers the enormous gourd carved into a tableau of Edgar Allen Poe and the Raven or the meta-pumpkin carved all over with pumpkins?  Plus, it cost twenty-five cents to vote, and Milo didn't bring any money.  Whatever, we're not going to coddle him. Ben and I certainly enjoyed the funnel cake, and Milo didn't seem to mind that I sprinkled his infant carrier and him all over with confectioner's sugar.

Finally worth sharing today, Milo makes the most excellent little noise when he gets burped, and I was thrilled to see that it was much like Troy without a larynx in the most recent episode of Community.  Feel free to watch this clip to see what I mean: http://shirtoid.com/50698/evil-troy-and-evil-abed/ 

OK, thanks for tuning in...more posts to follow...