Barely promoted

Risking avalanche

Each morning, my first step in preparing for class is mounting a search for my notes from last lecture.

Two days ago, two days ago, people, and I know they're on my desk, and still it takes a good 10 minutes to find them.

Suspected misunderstandings

There's another baby, named Emma (no really!) at Miss T's daycare who's just three days younger. She started about a month later, and for her first three weeks or so her mother Linda came in to nurse at lunchtime, like I've done all along. Emma is a charming smiley baby; shorter than Miss T., but a little ahead on gross motor milestones, and with a lot more hair.

Linda and I picked up our babies at the same time a few days ago, and she asked casually, as we walked out to the parking lot, "So, how are you doing with this day care thing?"

"Hanging in there, I guess."

"It's so hard. I still cry after dropping her off some mornings."

"Yeah, I've noticed that on the days she cries when I leave at lunchtime, I'm a lot more likely to get chocolate on my way back to work."

WHAT I'M AFRAID SHE HEARD: Hey, you know that I'm still coming in to nurse every day, right? And I've so totally noticed that Emma's been getting formula in her bottles for weeks now. Looooooo-ser!

WHAT I CAN'T EVEN ARTICULATE EXCEPT MAYBE HERE: I've never cried after dropping the baby off in the morning. But I don't drop the baby off in the morning. Beaker does. It's easier for everyone: sets up some apparent his/hers duty fairness and protects me from confronting my guilt.

'Cause there's a lot of guilt here. I know, oh yes I know, that Tabby would probably be drinking bottles a lot more readily if she were ever separated from the boobie for more than four hours. I go in at lunch for me, too, to assuage my own fears about attachment (and about laws of supply and demand).

That chocolate thing? I don't know if I've ever comfort eaten before. It took me a while to notice the cravings, and to correlate them with my own frustration at handing a crying baby to someone else. It's a new kind of hurt, much more physical, much more in the gut, than most emotional pain is for me. Working when my daughter is this small, this helpless, is one of the big compromises, the kind that day by day, changes who I am. I honestly believe that Miss T. is doing, and will do, just fine. But there are little pieces of me that get burned up by each day of this and I don't know if they're replaceable.

A couple of weeks ago I gave up and just ordered a lot of extreme cocoa. I have a cup when I get back to my office, every day.

They came for our mailbox

We saw the truck that came to take it away. A smallish flatbed, which already had five or six blue mailboxes piled up in back. Only one guy, who seemed a little small and a little old for the task.

We were driving Miss T. to daycare, and me to work, so we couldn't stop to watch.

They gave us two weeks' notice, where "notice" was a big sticker over the pick-up schedule. I used to do bills twice a month, but that's dropped to just once in the post-baby era—as long as that's around the 18th of the month, it works well enough, at least if we pay credit cards online—and I only saw the notice because of one day, a week ago, when we were strong enough to walk the baby over, instead of driving her.

They do usage surveys, they say, and only take out the boxes that aren't being used. When Beaker called the post office, they told him that his was the only complaint about the removal of that particular box they'd received.

Our neighborhood is an old neighborhood. We have sidewalks and the houses are close together. In almost every household, at least one adult, and often two, works within walking distance—at the college, of course. Downtown is also walking distance—although it has no grocery or drugstore.

But even here, there's too little pedestrian traffic, and too few letters being sent, for the postal service to think it's worth their while to send a truck around once a day. Shame on us.

Seven months

She's sitting up. For 10 or 12 minutes at a time. When she falls, it's always backwards.

She shakes her right arm back and forth on purpose. When there's a rattly toy in her hand, it rattles. This baby is so right-handed. But sometimes now she holds two toys at the same time, one in each hand.

She sits in high chairs. She lunges for anything she can reach. Silverware is better than plates are better than menus are better than napkins. She bangs on the table.

Each day there's a new favorite syllable. For the last several days it's been orangutang-like grunts of happpiness. But there have been days of UH-DDUH, and of BLUUUAAH. Occasional THAH, THAH, THAH's, too.

This week she's suddenly become the hungriest baby in the world. It's a little scary. Drinking both bottles at day care, and nursing hard when I go over at lunch time, and waking up at night to nurse. Twice, actually, on Tuesday, at midnight and at 3:00 a.m. Mostly I've been pumping an extra 12 ounces a day. But that day she drank it all.

Her pudge is back. She lost it for a while, when she had the two long long colds, and when she decided she didn't like bottles after all. But her little thighs have plumped up again, her cheeks are full, there's a little roll and crease at each wrist. She's mostly a tall baby, but it's so good to see her round again.

Teeth! Two, the center two on the bottom. Just barely. Sharp. Hard to see; she only reveals them when she's really happy. Or really sad.

We've barely started solids. A few spoonfuls at a time. She likes chewing on spoons much more than she likes eating. It's fine. She's still so tiny.

Hair and eye color still uncertain. Well, the hair's probably a direct average of mama's and dada's. There are few strands long enough to get in her eyes. The eyes are hanging on at dark grey, just a little lighter than when she was born, with hints of brown around the iris.

Oh, does she have object permanence. People permanence. Distractibility. She lunges after dropped toys, or bigger brighter toys than the ones she has. When dada walks into the room, she'll unlatch to smile up at him: look where I am! Look!

And she cries when I leave. After I nursed her at day care today, she grabbed onto my shoulder fiercely as I walked her over to her favorite teacher. For the first time.

My zeitgeist lag has been validated!

By this little piece in Slate.

Falling behind isn't a minority position anymore, it's a legitimate first-time viewing strategy. Thanks to TVD (along with newer technologies like DVR and on-demand cable), the first broadcast of a show has lost its old magic—around 60 percent of The Sopranos' DVD audience, for instance, doesn't subscribe to HBO. Most of my friends are still scattered, with little sense of cultural loss, throughout Six Feet's first four seasons.

This fall I re-watched the first two and half seasons of the Sopranos, then watched for the first time the other two and a half seasons, all while nursing on the couch. The (poor in so many ways) joke was that Miss T.'s bedtime routine consisted of watching fat Italian men kill each other.

Then I started in on Six Feet Under. That's been going more slowly, what with work and all; just finished disk 2 of season 4 (that's when David gets the crap beaten out of him for no real reason at all, in case you care). And I can already see that when the library gets the Season 5 disks in, I'll be right where this guy was:

But (to adapt Six Feet's ad copy), everything everyone everywhere ends—at least eventually. After eight months, my Six Feet gap finally closed: Last week, the final season reached its second-wave DVD audience. I took full advantage of the medium shift, tearing through the entire season in three days—15 times faster than its original viewers. I watched with frenzied, immersive, isolation-tank intensity, breaking free only to feed my daughter and my dog and (prompted by the show) to check that my marriage wasn't flaming out into some kind of loveless soul-draining screaming match.