Blah blah work blah blah baby's naps blah blah blah

I've become boring.

I'm obsessed with getting Bonaventure to nap more and for longer periods. Unfortunately, barring some magic spell, it's virtually impossible to "make" a baby sleep longer (unless I can stay in bed with him and let him nurse at will, anyway), so this is largely a fruitless and uninteresting topic.

But at the end of every day, I could tell you exactly when and for how long Bonaventure has slept--even if it's only through the reports of babysitters. I memorize this information effortlessly and think about it all the time. So the "largely fruitless and uninteresting" thing doesn't stop me from talking about it with anyone and everyone who asks me how I'm doing.

So! Yes, boring!

Work is the only other thing really going on (unless you count laundry, and let's not count laundry), and it's not wildly interesting, either. It's all right, though. I've found that having a baby has had the salutary effect of getting me to not worry too much about my classes, or put an excessive amount of energy in them. And they're going perfectly fine (even if I was a little boring last week--but that often happens around week 4 or 5). The fact that I've been at it for 5 years now probably helps; I don't need to prep obsessively and run through all of my notes in minute detail right before class. So I'm viewing this mellowing-out and getting-by as a good thing, in the balance.

There are a few grand things going on at work, actually. But because I want that post to have a different title, I'll hold off and write about them later. (This is what comes of not posting often enough: I now want to write multiple posts at once!)

Screw you, William Blake

So we're working on "nap training" this morning, which is horrible procedure far worse than night-sleep training was (at least for our little guy) and which involves just putting the baby in his crib when he's tired and letting him go to sleep. Or, in our case, letting him cry for half an hour (with a couple of quick check-ins), then picking him up to resume (sleepy, cranky) playing.

It's heartbreaking, and Bonaventure's crying, and I feel terrible. So I start reading for next week's Brit Lit, trying to get a little work done and take my mind off of our collective woes. The Norton has added a new poem to the Songs of Innocence section, "On Anothers Sorrow," and as I'm holding back my own tears and B is wailing away, I read:

"Can a father see his child,
Weep, nor be with sorrow fill'd.

"Can a mother sit and hear,
An infant groan an infant fear--
No no never can it be.
Never never can it be."

That did it. I cried. We picked B up at 27 minutes instead of the mandated 30. It was just plain rotten all around.



(This afternoon is going better--he fell asleep quickly and has been down for 25 minutes. I guess just wearing him out to the absolute limit is the key? Sigh. This all just makes me feel like a terrible, terrible person.)

You have no idea what this means to me

Bonaventure is currently napping in his crib.




You know, I've done a lot of difficult things. I wrote a dissertation. I got a tenure-track job. I published a book. I biked 330 miles in 4 days and, in the same year, walked 600 miles across a country whose language I don't speak. I've survived passport theft in southern France teaching three 20-student comp sections in a single semester. I can handle shit.

But getting a baby to sleep when and where he's not used to sleeping? That's just about beyond my capabilities.

Bonaventure had developed the sweet (but unsustainable, now that I'm going back to work) habit of napping on my lap, or in bed with me, after a nice long nurse. Breaking that habit is not easy. But today we've made a little bit of progress.

Now, if he'd only take a bottle....

And now for something less fuzzy

OK, I was totally sincere in my last post. But I do actually have some more tangible, ordinary things that I'd like to work on this year. They're not interesting, but I like account-a-blogging, and for some reason I like reading other people's to-do lists and whatnot, so here goes: I'm sharing my boring bourgie goals for 2013. Brace yourselves!

1. Get Bonaventure sleeping on his own, in his crib, and--eventually--through the night. This needs to start happening immediately. In fact, it has started happening! We initiated Phase One of the Ferber method (please refrain from freaking out over sleep training in the comments, please) tonight. I've been worried and anxious about it for days. Would I be able to withstand the crying? Well, I don't want to jinx it, but so far, so good. He was asleep in 15 minutes. Now to start working on the 4+ night feedings....
1. Subnote: If you're considering sleep training, do not cruise the interwebs for advice. You'll just find people telling you that letting your baby cry at all is torture and teaches him that he's unlovable. To which I say, if that's true, I've already done it, because the dude cries about half the time that he's in the car, when we really can't stop to pick him up and reassure him. I can't see that there's any difference between that and crying in the crib. And he's a very happy, sweet, secure little guy. So that's all just hooey. (Not saying that sleep training is an unqualified good--just that the critics are in some cases a little low in credibility.)
2. Revise Stupid Article into something potentially publishable. Step One: Come up with a better nickname for it than "Stupid Article."
3. Apply for a research course release for next year--which will mean more clearly articulating my research plans.
4. Write Kalamzoo paper--for I am planning to skip graduation this year and take my family to Kalamazoo! Hooray!
5. Do some mothertrucking yoga again, good God. I've lost all my pregnancy weight and then some, but I'm not in any kind of shape, and my back is getting wacky from all the baby-tending. I'd also like to swim again sometimes, if the pool's opening hours are at all convenient. 

That's all I can think of. At least two of these things absolutely have to happen, and two are very concrete, so I don't really know that they count as "resolutions." But the secret, buried resolution lurking beneath 2-4 is really to recommit to my scholarship. That's the key thing. Wish me luck!

And happy new year (slightly belatedly) to all!

De retour

Well! It's the new year, and we're back from Christmas Visits 2012--which I'm calling Bonaventure's Great Train Adventure. In the course of 12 days, we took a total of 7 trains, including 2 overnights (we got sleeper cars, but the very smallest sleeper cars, and it turns out that these are very small indeed. They certainly put the "ette" in "roomette").

 Bonaventure is now a seasoned traveler; he even brings his own reading material. See:

On train no. 5 

 

 

Our trip out (to my folks' state) was pretty good, even though we left our house at 8:30 am and arrived at my mom's at about 4:30 the following afternoon--a long trip, but with only one (9-hour) layover and a relatively comfortable sleeper car. The intermediate journey (from my folks' to TM's) was fine, too, although we had to push our departure back 6 hours because of snow. (The good news was that this meant not have to wake Bonaventure up at 5 am.) The 29-hour return journey (from TM's home) was a bit more agonizing: three trains, one of which had a midnight departure time. We got home at about 5:00 pm on New Year's Eve, unpacked a bit, ate, put B to bed, showered, and collapsed.

Oh, and the visits themselves? Yeah, they were good. Bonaventure got loads of toys, but he's not really old enough to appreciate a lot of them, so they'll last us for a while. And it was such fun to share him with our families. One thing that I didn't anticipate enjoying so much about having a baby was how pleasurable it is to entertain other people with him. Okay, most likely I overestimate how entertained these other people really are--I am unabashedly and unashamedly in love with my little pudding--but honestly, we have a surprisingly sociable guy on our hands. He loves smiling at people. Both TM and I have noticed recently how, when we're out in public with him, he'll look at every single person who walks by with this hopeful little smile, and if they smile back at him, he just beams--a full-on Muppet smile, his mouth as wide open as it can get. It astonishes me that anyone can resist him.

(Here he is grinning at my dad, who is, in his opinion, the funniest--or funniest-looking?--person on the planet:)

Today has been one of those relaxed, easy, post-holiday days. Bonaventure napped more than usual; I did a load of laundry, washed out an apron that's been dirty for too long, and baked cookies; TM fixed some good meals, played with B, and worked on his manuscript. I feel so happy to be home. As, it turns out, I usually do. Lately I keep thinking about how lucky I am: I have a snug little house that I love, am married to a wonderful partner whose conversation I adore, get to snuggle the sweetest baby in the world whenever I want, and make enough money to pretty much buy what I want (our incomes actually aren't very good, certainly well below average for our disciplines and status, but our needs are modest and we have no big, looming expenses at the moment); everyone in my family is apparently in quite good health; I have a job that I find sufficiently interesting and meaningful (no job is always interesting and meaningful, right?); and my own habits are largely healthy and orderly.

That last one sounds a little weird, yes, but I'm thinking about new year's resolutions here, and there aren't many habitual actions that I think I need to worry about too much--I mean, I'm sure I could refine things here and there, but I eat well (with enough treats thrown in to keep me happy), floss daily, and certainly do not need to resolve to be more organized or neater or anything like that. In fact, lightening up could be a good idea.

But, seeing as it's new year's day and all, I'm thinking about what I'd like to have more of in my life, and it's this: enjoyment, or presence; actually living through all of the beautiful moments in each day. It's a habit of mind, not a habit of body, that I'd like to change. While I have concrete things that I'd like to accomplish this year (including dramatically revising Stupid Article, applying for a research-related course release, getting Bonaventure to sleep in his damned crib, and maybe trying again to find an agent for my novel), my resolution for the year is to ease up on the need to be productive and accomplish stuff all the time.

Maternity leave has been good practice. Certainly one doesn't need to have a baby to realize this, but one of the things that caring for Bonaventure has taught me is the importance of letting go of the need to Get Things Done every moment of the day. There have been times, especially early in my leave, when I was worn out and frustrated by my inability to Accomplish; but by the end of the semester, I was much more comfortable with the idea of lying in bed for two hours with Bonaventure sleeping against my side, idly reading a few pages of a book now and again, dozing or letting my mind wander the rest of the time, and occasionally bending down to kiss his fuzzy head. Or sometimes when I'm playing with him and I start to get bored, I remember that he won't even be a baby anymore by this time next year, and suddenly my attention is drawn right back into the moment and the pleasure of watching him grow.

That's what I want to keep with me. And not just when it comes to Bonaventure, but in my moments with TM, with friends, even with myself--the other night I wrote in my diary for just a little while longer than usual, letting myself not be in a hurry, but taking the time to describe things at greater length, even moving the pen a little more slowly than usual across the page. It felt good. I spend too much time straining for what's next; I want to bring myself back to what's now.

Oh, and I should work out or whatever more often, too, of course.

Enough with the ratings already! -- a rant

It just dawned on me that it is preposterous to rate the "helpfulness" of other (unknown, probably inexpert) people's ratings of products. How do I know if a rating is "helpful" or not? I won't know if they're right until I read the book/watch the movie/whatever; and, having no idea who wrote the comments, of the value of their opinions, or whether their views are likely to line up with mine, I'm really unqualified to assess their merit. And I was noticing (on Netflix) that each comment was rated helpful by all users who bothered to rate it--e.g., "2 out of 2 members found this comment helpful"; "4 out of 4 members," etc. So, clearly, no one is rating comments "unhelpful"--or almost no one--because why would you? And probably you just say one is "helpful" if it confirms what you wanted to do anyway; on what other basis would you judge it?

Oh, and why do I care how many other members found a comment "helpful," by whatever standard of "helpfulness" they happened to be using?

Where will it all end, anyway? Will we start rating the helpfulness of the helpfulness ratings?

I do believe that we're approaching the ad absurdum limit of the Feedback Era.

The kind of person I am

Do you sometimes have realizations about your own absurdity, which then seem to cast an illuminating light (or something less redundant) upon a whole dimension of your personality?

I can't say that I have, because I just thought of that question as I was typing it and trying to tack some significance onto the little bit of trivia I'm about to give you. But, in the true spirit of Writing to Learn, perhaps I can find something out about myself through the relating of this detail.

Here it is. I am a person who will try to "eat more healthfully" by cutting out orange juice in the mornings, on the grounds that it contains a lot of sugar. (Let's note that my eating habits are, if not exemplary [desserts are frequent], pretty damn good--lots of vegetables, no meat, and nearly every meal is homecooked and balanced.)

TM tried to talk me out of this. For one thing, I like having orange juice in the mornings, so why deny myself? It's full of vitamins. And there are much more effective ways of cutting out sugar (like, for instance, NOT EATING ICE CREAM), but I wasn't interested in any of those.

So I tried to pin it on the expense. Because, you know, a $4 thing of orange juice every few days (TM likes his juice, too) is really killing our budget.

Eventually, I gave in. I drink the juice (a small glass, in deference to my bizarro asceticism) and like it.

But really, what is my deal? Why this arbitrary obstinacy? Is this some kind of purity thing? Virtuous People Deny Themselves Juice? But Not Ice Cream? Is it asceticism for the weak and self-indulgent? That's probably closest, actually. I make little rules to make things just so, but only in ways that either please me (e.g. all of my organizing and straightening foibles) or only inconvenience me just a little.

Sometimes, when I'm hanging Bonaventure's diapers out on the line, I'm tempted to organize them by color. It takes an effort of will to resist this time-wasting, but aesthetically pleasing, measure.

So: there. That's what we learn about me today. I invent arbitrary rules for myself and, if they're not too onerous, enforce them until someone convinces me that they're stupid.*

*Ooh, another example! I used to keep meticulous track of every cent that I spent, color-coding it by category. This was years ago. Finally, after many and valiant efforts, an ex convinced me to try not doing it. I gave it up one month and it was so liberating. Now I limit myself to a balanced checkbook, which I only balance like twice a month. Go me!