Snips and snails

Here is a partial list of items that my not-quite-two-year old son has hugged of his own accord in the last two days:

• His daddy
• Mommy!
• Cute but grumpy little girl at the coffee shop who definitely wasn't having it
• A booger
• His french fries
• A peach, moments before announcing, "Eat!"
• My kombucha
• A fire hydrant

He is so affectionate that I had to ask our nanny if it was normal. "Yes, it's normal," she said. "He's a boy."

From the morning I found out I was pregnant, until the morning that I woke up for the ultrasound appointment in which we were going to find out the sex of our baby, I thought I was having a girl. Despite the results of Chinese gender predictor I found on the Internet, and the absence of morning sickness, which, according to an old wives tale, suggested a boy, I only imagined tiny embroidered Peter Pan-collared frocks and bobby socks with baby Mary Janes. I had a dream when I was about eight weeks pregnant of a young girl probably four years old, her head thrown back in laughter. I could see her face so clearly I thought she must be mine. Ryan would ask me what I thought we were having. Girl, I said.

The morning of the ultrasound I woke up and the first thought that popped into my head was, "I'm having a boy." We drove to our appointment. A technician moved the wand around and told us that she could see what we were having but that she wanted to bring the doctor in to confirm. The radiologist, an older man with a kind face, delivered the news: you're having a boy.

Ryan has many talents, but filtering his words in these kind of situations isn't one of them. "Oh babe, I'm so sorry," he said to me. He turned to the doctor and ultrasound technician and explained, "She wanted a girl." At that moment the only thing I really wanted was to throatpunch him, but when you're pregnant and in the company of medical professionals who could probably report you, you smile nervously and feign decorum. Instead, I subtly shot him a look that I prayed he understood as a threat. They offered to leave us alone for a minute.

It wasn't entirely true. It wasn't so much that I wanted a girl, as much as I just couldn't picture having a boy. I knew nothing about boys. They wreck stuff and don't quite grasp the concept of volume control and find poop jokes funny, right? From what little I did know, the options for cute clothes looked bleak.

But the moment you find out what you're having, what you thought you were having or maybe might have preferred is immediately irrelevant. As soon as I found out, I didn't want to spend even one more second thinking about something that wasn't. And on the really off chance that somehow my avocado-sized fetus could read minds, I wanted him to know I chose him back.

There is a tenderness to Jonah, a sensitivity for others, that I naively and foolishly assumed lie in the domain of little girls. I'm so lucky to be wrong.

Sleeping beauty

I'm only half kidding when I say that we have two savings funds set up for Jonah: college and therapy. We really felt it was important to start putting money away, just in case he doesn't get that academic scholarship. Last night was the first time that Jonah slept in his own bed by himself. He's been sleeping in that bed since he was born (in it), but until twenty-four hours ago, Ryan and I slept alongside him. We were co-sleepers.

When we decided to co-sleep, we didn't even realize that there was a term for a thing so intuitive to us we didn't know to question it, or that that thing was actually a hotly-debated, controversial topic in the parenting world. It's right up there with circumcision and breastmilk v. formula. We had a bassinet when he was born, but he was really cute and little and in the immediate months following his birth, it seemed natural to hold him near. Months turned into almost two years.

I found out that there was a name for what we did during a three a.m. nursing in one of the topic rooms on a "mommy blog." (That's what Ryan calls apps like What to Expect where strangers simultaneously bond over their child's birth month and tear each other apart for being on the wrong side of the food-stamps-used-for-steak issue.)

I really loathe debating controversial issues, especially online. I have yet to meet the person who has been swayed by an impassioned rando on the Internet. Mostly though, these kinds of arguments tend to swell around the poles, both sides characterized by emotional appeals to fear that I don’t relate to. On the granola side of the coin, placing your baby in a crib causes deep-seated abandonment issues, resulting in a child who grows up either a sex addict or Republican. On the other, WHAT ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY YOU WILL ROLL OVER YOUR BABY'S HEAD! SIDS!

For the last nearly twenty-two months, the three of us have shared what Asian cultures apparently describe as a family bed, which sounds emotionally scarring. In actuality it is sweet, nurturing and most of all, practical. But I had had enough.

Actually, our couples therapist had had enough.

She urged Ryan and me to make the break. It’s time, she said. Do not let it go another night.

When nine o'clock rolled around, I got Jonah ready for bed by telling him that now that he’s old enough, he gets to have slumber parties with his animals all by himself. Whenever he needs us, we’ll be right in the other room. I asked him if he was excited. He squealed an exuberant, “Yes!”

We picked out his lucky companions, a robotic talking puppy that I hate so I removed its ability to utter anything ever, and a monkey Jonah stole from the car of one of my besties. We climbed into his bed. I started with a couple of books, and then I launched into daydreaming, and nothing. Motherscratcher was onto me.  It took over an hour to get him to sleep.

In all of the time that we’ve slept next to him, I never worried about his safety. When you co-sleep, you are acutely aware of the presence of your child’s breath and his tiny body. We didn’t consider him in danger of suffocation or being crushed. Unintentionally, we also became light sleepers, which is why I’ve been longing for the day when I could count on a full eight-hour rest.

Until I got into bed last night. The distance between our rooms felt enormous. What if he woke up scared? What if he broke his head? I checked on him throughout the night five separate times, making sure his neck was intact and I could hear his breath.

He woke this morning calling for me, refreshed and bright. Meanwhile, I slept two hours. TWO. I didn’t realize that the co-sleeping was actually for me.

Travel bug

Today I am less plaguey than yesterday.  It is still the plague and plagues suck. But I digress. A few years ago, my job sent me to the East Coast for work every week. I had a corporate apartment in Hoboken, which I euphemized  as The City to anyone not from New York.

As a consultant, travel rules generally go like this: you can expense airfare to and from your client site (in this case, LAX to JFK and back) or you can expense a ticket of equal amount to fly elsewhere on a return trip. This meant that I spent probably a total of ten weekends in my apartment in LA over an eighteen-month period. It's the reason my roommate and I broke up. Sadface. But, I was able to do one of the things makes my Sagittarian heart leap: travel.

My coworkers, BA and BS and I, decided that we would fly to Iceland for a weekend. Reykjavik is only a four and a half hour flight from New York, making it faster than flying home. Coincidentally, my roommate was working in London for two weeks, and she agreed to meet us there. After work on Thursday, we headed straight to the airport. We stopped at the bar on our way to the gate. By the time they announced boarding, we were two celebratory scotches deep.

We got on the plane and BA immediately popped a sleeping aid. Normally I'd have too, but I didn't want to overshoot on a short flight. We waited on the tarmac for about twenty minutes. Finally we taxied from the gate. We didn't get far. The pilot--utterly charming in his honesty--announced that there was a "critical failure" and we'd have to return to the gate to look for a part. Like, a part? Just one? By critical, how critical? So we returned. They deplaned us as they looked for the part. We got another drink. I highly recommend having a conversation with a friend who's on Ambien and scotch.

Eventually we learned that they cancelled the flight until the following day. We didn't want to wait, so the three of us tried to book another city. BS and I tried to sell BA on the Bahamas instead. But BA found the freezing cold of DC more inviting, so BS and I headed to London to hangout with my roommate.

An ill-fated Reykjavik trip turned into an even greater ill-fated London trip for reasons that are another story altogether. More importantly, three and a half years later, I have finally booked a trip back to Iceland. This time I'll be foregoing the bars and instead yelping parks. It's marginally less glamorous. My son is turning two in August, and we wanted to take advantage of seat-sharing before we have to start paying out the nose for his own ticket. By the time we return from this trip, in his two years he will have visited six countries outside of the US, eleven states, plus the capital.

As a parent, I try to be conscious about letting my little guy develop his own interests. But I can't help but hope that he, too, gains a sense of wanderlust and appreciation for foreign soil, be it city, state or country. And if he ends up finding joy shopping in a place where he'll be able to buy clothes not found at home? Well that's a bonus.

Sweet dreams

Tonight I was putting my almost two-year old, Jonah, to bed. I have this trick where I tell him to pretend like he's sleeping. Actually, I learned it from our nanny because she's about a million times smarter than I am. Anyway, I say, "Close your eyes and pretend like you're sleeping." Typically he puts his head down and then will pop back up in about five seconds. At night I secretly hope that he'll just close his eyes, forget that he's playing a game and then accidentally fall asleep. It's sort of similar to the other game we play where I keep reading him books hoping that he'll just, you know, nod off. He doesn't. I'm not that good at this parenting thing. It's probably why I waited so long. Sometimes I surprise myself. When we laid down tonight I told him that if he looks up towards the sky and closes his eyes really hard he can see the stars and the moon. If you want to go the moon, all you have to do is reach up for a star with one hand, and then pull yourself to another star with your other hand, and you just keep doing this--you keep climbing the stars back and forth--until you reach the moon! And once you've reached the moon you can go anywhere you like. You can see friends you miss--there's Wy wy and Havey, remember Granny?--you can climb on forklifts and diggers... In his sweet little drifting voice he whispered, "dig-guh."

I found myself describing a world of delight and wonder. We defied physics and time. As we lay in the dark, we flew over the countries we have visited together, and then moved on to the ones that we're about to visit. We glided over Iceland's tundra and then swooped down through Amsterdam's canals. We looked at the bicycles on the cobbled streets and we put on our sweaters at night for a brisk ride along the waterfront. A ladybug landed on his arm and told us that we should go see Paris so we did.

He nuzzled softly into me as I pulled the covers over our shoulders. Our little universe continued to unfold. When you close your eyes and look up at the sky, it turns out that butterflies and dinosaurs and kitty cats are all the same size and you can climb a tree to float on the clouds. Clouds are like bubbles that don't pop; they just gently change their mind.

Somewhere between swimming with dolphins and riding on the backs of orca whales, Jonah fell asleep. In the near dark I listened to the rise and fall of his breath and looked for the outline of his tiny mouth. I want to hold onto time. Of the countless nights I have spent trying to bribe, cajole and trick my way into bedtime, I had no idea that we only had to close our eyes.

Mom of the year

I have just spent the last thirty minutes googling, My two-year old ate a tube of lip balm. I suppose I should have been watching him. He is a toddler, after all. In my own defense, he's a really good toddler, I'm playing single mom tonight, I'm really tired and I can't find the pacifier he should be over by now, so when he's sprinting around the house well past his bed time refusing to be tamed and suddenly gets quiet in the other room, I consider myself lucky and use the opportunity to Amazon shop on my phone.

Until, of course, he comes in, his doe eyes widened, holding the remains of minty sweet lip balm and looks up at me and says, "Num num." I glance at what's left in his hand. His tiny palms contain what was literally the first time in probably a decade that I'd bought a brand whose ingredients could likely be substituted  for auto fuel. I got suckered in by the cute packaging and the fact that I saw a girl at work whose makeup is always Kim Kardashian-on point using it. Christ. There are better times to fall prey to marketing and one's own insecurities.

"This information is applicable for small, unintentional ingestions. If your child becomes unresponsive, please call Poison Control immediately." Small? Unintentional? I need something more quantifiable than just "small," but also I'm not sure that "unintentional" is relevant when it comes to poison. One cannot be a little bit pregnant. Even in the throes of crisis I still find time to be critical of web copy.

"Toxicity level: Minimally toxic in small amounts such as a taste or a lick." Guess that answers that.

"Possible symptoms of an overdose/toxicity: An episode of vomiting, loose stool or diarrhea." He is now sitting on my lap, looking up at me while I'm asking him if his stomach hurts. "Stomach," he answers, though it's clear he's just parroting what I'm saying. "Jonah, why did you eat that?" I cry. "Num num," he logics. I take the next few minutes to hold him tightly, watching his stomach for signs of protrusion which he mildly resists. When I first became a parent I tended to call the pediatrician at every sneeze. But by the time of his first birthday I became so tired of my own baseless paranoia that I resolved to set a higher threshold. I'm not even sure what could make me call anymore. Probably blood.

So in those seconds of wrestling between fear and pragmatism, I did what makes virtually zero sense to the thinking mind: I pictured him a veritable zombie, drained of his vibrant and engaging personality by the effects of too much Soft Lips. I missed the sweet softness in the way he said, "orca. whaaaale." to any stranger who would listen. I longed for the son I once knew and hadn't yet lost. I teared up and panic-blamed my boyfriend over a series of spiral texts for leaving us at home while he went to a barbeque.

I googled again. This time I found a Facebook post in which the poster's daughter ingested Eos brand lip balm. Eos seems close enough since I almost bought that brand instead. The company responded to this woman's post stating that while they've had many questions about this, they've yet to hear of serious injury. Their post was followed by tens of other posts of parents saying, "Thank god I found this post." Irrationally, I too felt solace.

Jonah looked up at me, winced his face, and said, "Poopie." He got up and ran to the bathroom. Oh no. Here we go. I pictured diarrhea in a training potty and wondered how I'd clean it up. I closed my eyes, held his hand, and waited. He sat there for a moment, then got up and and looked at me, proud of himself. I looked down. His delivery was underwhelming.

Now, as the night has passed, it appears that his appetizer was only that. The visions of a different life--one in which I'm blamed on the Internet for being a shitty, neglectful parent--have waned. And with only 2 hours and 31 minutes remaining to receive my items on Tuesday, I finally hit purchase on that Amazon order.