Squidbits

I'm afraid this month I've got (almost) nothin'. The Squid had a cold and an ear infection and was red-eyed and swampy and in need of extra attention, I was drowning in workstuff, the only pictures we've taken in weeks are documentation of the rash on his cheeks for the pediatrician (eczema, joy)...things have occurred to me, but then I haven't had the time to write them down (every moment seems filled with paperwork or Squid or chores or something) and so my usual long Squidbits post will probably be sorely abbreviated.

(One week later...okay, so maybe not. And I snapped a few of my trademark blurrycrappy photos in the last week, so we even have pictures! \o/ I will take pride in what achievements I can, okay?)



On developmental whatever: 18.3 pounds. 26.5 inches long. And by December he will be 18 inches around in his head, so I had better start knitting his Santa hat soon. He rolls over finally, though not regularly yet, and can push himself up on his arms, brava brava. Himself is in a race against the Squid's developmental curve to see if he can get the woodshop finished and the entertainment center redesigned before crawling (and the attendant button-pushing and cable-chewing) begins. Just as we've more-or-less adjusted to babyhood (immobile version), everything will change, of course. No rest for the wicked, &etc.

The Squid has figured out how to hold his own bottle for real now, and how to shake rattles, and is interested in helping to feed himself solids, if not even close to capable yet. I think he's teething, if the increased drool and fuss is anything to go by, but I can't feel any teeth poking up. Everything in sight disappears into his gaping maw, though, and to hold him is inevitably to feel that warm, wet, slimy feeling ambush some bit of you when you are not paying attention. The Era Of Hideous Plastic Toys has begun - he has this exersaucer thing that lets him stand up with support and rotate among several toy stations, and he really loves it, even though it's garish as all get out...or perhaps because of that, who knows. He likes some tasteful European wooden toys, too, and he likes to play in the laundry hamper, but I'm not one to let my aesthetic sense trump the variety of his enjoyment; we have the jungle mat and the godawful exersaucer and this plastic fish arch that plays music as well and I'm okay with that.



Snippet: Himself to me, after putting down a howling (and obviously exhausted) babe: "Why do babies hate sleep?"

On mamalife: I had to take a break from my beloved online mamas group this month, and I'm not sure if I'll return. They're a very knowledgeable and supportive group of women, and they were really helpful to me during my pregnancy and the early days of Squid. But...I don't know. I think of myself as a relatively negative person, but something about the negativity on the board was getting to me. We'll see how it goes; maybe a rest is all I need.

Not that it's all happy happy joy joy around here, of course. Parenting pushes the dominoes a little closer together in the rest of life. This work crunch was ugly, and it highlighted some division-of-labor issues that usually don't bother me, and the house got cluttered and I felt harried and cranky all the time and nothing and nobody got anyone's full attention. I lost my keys (we had to get the whole house re-keyed, >$600 in stupid tax), lost my paycheck (found it again, thank God), neglected my dog, forgot a dose of the baby's antibiotics, scheduled appointments on top of one another, missed a deadline (I haven't done that in...years) and bought a teal cardigan, thereby becoming a sartorial someone I had hoped never to be. (It had cables! And an awesome hood! And...never mind, I can't justify it.) September was just sort of grim in a variety of small ways. I lost my shit at one point entirely and spent a few days in tears.

October will be better: work will be quieter, I will go to LA to visit Grammy and two of my best friends, there is Hawaii for our friends R & K's wedding and to see my Uncle J, there is Halloween, and then the long winding ramp-up from there through Thanksgiving to Christmas, which is my favorite holiday in the history of ever. This was just a dip in life's rollercoaster (may it never go upside-down).



On the flip side: And of course there were still the sort of inexpressible moments when everything coalesces into a sharp burst of sweetness; one morning at 2:30 a.m., when I was drowning in work and had not yet been to bed, the poor poppet woke himself up coughing and we had a sleepy quiet snack with the lights on low. He flailed one paw up to pat at my face while he ate, and I caught it in my hand; he wrapped his tiny fingers around my thumb and we just sat and rocked and nursed and held hands until his eyes drooped closed. It's times like that my heart could just burst with how much I love this small person, who is slowly but surely becoming his own unique self.

I wrote all that, and then my deadlines passed, and then I finished my projects (sadly, in that order) and the Squid's Lola came to visit for a few days and I took off work and we hung out with the baby and ate awesome food and Himself and I had an honest-to-god date with a movie and dinner and everything. I'm finishing September out with a much better feeling than I had going in; tomorrow is my college alumni picnic for the local chapter, and my best friend from junior high/high school's bachelorette night at AsiaSF, and then next week I can start lining up my ducks again. It will be duck, duck, duck, goose, and then it's off and running for the next bout of chaos.

Crazy wonderful emotional exhausting

I have more work to do in the next week than I usually manage in a month, and every time I really start to think about it the high mosquito whine of panic starts to rise in the back of my mind. I just ran a massive statewide meeting for fifty-odd people today, which is always nervewracking, and I wanted a cigarette this afternoon like I haven't craved one in ages.

But this is not a post about that. This is a post about the two amazing things that happened to me today that made my eyes well up with the sheer goodness of them (full disclosure: my eyes are always fairly welling-prone and then I started bleeding, but whatever, these things were touching, I'm serious).

(1) Today before the meeting started, The Curmudgeon came up to me. You know the Curmudgeon - every politically charged project has one. They're the person who has a deep and passionate commitment to making the project something other than what it has the funding, time, and political will to become, and who crusades for their hobbyhorse at any and all points along the way up until the project's last gasp and often after. I have some respect for that kind of passion, but it's hard to manage a project with a really good and vocal one involved sometimes. And my project's Curmudgeon is good. When the first iteration of the latest product came out, it was pretty wide of the mark, which happens sometimes. He was so upset he called me personally to air his views, fairly vehemently. He's not a bad guy; he wasn't crazy-talking or abusive, just upset and expressing it strongly. But it was enough to make me cry. I think that might have been the day that I started looking for a new job, come to think of it. A low point, certainly.

Anyway, so the Curmudgeon came up to me, and he said, "Can I talk to you alone for a minute?"

"Oh, I'm in trouble!" I joked to him and the people I'd been talking to. Everybody knows he is our Curmudgeon, and it's handled with good grace most of the time.

"No," he said, "Just the opposite."

And he drew me off to the side a little and proceeded to give me the most heartfelt goddamn apology it has been my privilege to hear in a month of Sundays. He told me that he would never like the product that we had come up with, but that he appreciated my professionalism and conduct in managing the development process and my efforts at listening to and accommodating different points of view. He said he understood the project's constraints and thought I did the best job I possibly could have done within them. He said if he ever had a job like this himself, and he needed to get it done and get it done right, he would want to hire me. And then he mentioned the telephone conversation, and said he was sorry, that he shouldn't have come down so hard on me, and that it had kept him up nights feeling bad thinking about it ever since.

I almost lost my cred completely right there by bursting into tears. It was a near thing. I of course told him not to worry about it, and thanked him, and told him it meant a lot to me. But I don't think I can adequately express how much it really did mean. It shored up some of my always-rickety faith in both my professional abilities and the essential goodness of my fellow man. A good apology for something is never too little and never too late.

(2) I called my brother on the way home to see if he wanted to get a cup of coffee or something (he lives on the way). He was out of town, so we didn't get together, but we had a nice conversation. For the first time in a few weeks, he didn't sound depressed. In fact, he sounded glad to hear from me. And when he hung up the phone, he said, "Love you." I said, "Love you too," and hung up, and promptly had a little leaky sob to myself right there in the car. You're thinking, what's the big deal, right, that's a normal phone call - and it should be. But I can't remember the last time my brother told me he loved me. I'm pretty sure it's been years. I've said it in all my letters, all my phone calls, and not once that I can remember did he say it back. And then today it just came, out of the blue, natural like it had always been there.

I'm welling up again just thinking about it. What a crazy wonderful emotional exhausting day. What a crazy wonderful emotional exhausting life.