Here I am. Slightly ashamed by failure, but willing to try again.

I went to a Baby Time gathering today at the local Early Years Centre. There’s two per week, and this is the third week I’ve been able to get there. At first I was just getting out for Maggie’s sake: I needed to be out of the house, where I couldn’t find some way of keeping myself busy and away from her smiles. Going out forces me to concentrate on her, which makes everything else easier. I’m starting to be so in-tune with her that it’s almost scary. This is paying off in longer periods of independent sleep and less crying in general. (Especially now that I’ve mostly given up trying to take her out into the evening.) It’s a pretty awesome superpower, but sometimes I catch myself wondering how I can know what she wants. The flip side is that if, God forbid, I have my hands full with cooking or Blake, I know exactly how disappointed she is in my lack of timely response.

Anyway, Baby Time. I stay pretty quiet there, since I seem to have one of the youngest babies and generally seem to be parenting differently than the moms with burning questions. After the first time I thought that it was nice, but the most benefit was for Maggie. Then the next week rolled around and I realized I was counting down the days until I got to sit in a circle on the floor, listening to everyone talk about solid foods and sleep. Even if I’m not doing the same things as these moms, I’m not terribly bothered by it. For one thing, I’ve already done this, so I don’t lack for confidence. For another thing, it lets me hear other points of view, so I can be sure I’m doing the right thing.

Today I noticed how often I hear of the baby’s growth expressed as a series of projects, as in, “we’re working on vegetables/sleeping through the night/taking a sippy cup instead of a bottle.” Maybe it’s just because Margaret is still so young, maybe it’s because she might be my last baby, maybe it’s a matter of personal style or maybe it’s because I have fairly low expectations of her other than be delightful (which she fulfills daily); but we have no projects. I’m thrilled that she takes long regular naps in the day time, naps that I can look forward to and which make the both of us happy. But if she didn’t, the way Blake didn’t, I’d be content with it. Blake resisted scheduling so I don’t bother with her, and it amuses me that she’s found her own rhythm despite my indifference. She also enjoys brief periods of independence, which Blake never did. I hesitate to say that she’s a better baby, but she’s certainly easier in some ways.

While I’m not using my leave to work through a series of baby goals, I do seem to be working through a series of domestic goals. Last month I noticed that Mason wasn’t using his dresser at all: clothes cycled between the hamper and clothes baskets with no down time. He moved in piecemeal, which meant many temporary solutions for his stuff and not a lot of thought spent by either of us as to where everything should ultimately go. (It was only 4 months ago that I cleaned out half my closet for his use.) So this week I’ve been straightening out the chest of drawers a drawer at a time. It’s strangely fun working on someone else’s wardrobe because there are no decisions to be made, just classifications. Next project: the overflowing bookshelves of the basement, or possibly the howling mess that is Sage’s room/the second office/my yarn closet/where everything went before Christmas.

Blake’s out with his dad for the night and Mason is out visiting Sage. This is the time on a Tuesday when being home alone with the baby starts seeming like a life sentence rather than a blessing. To be fair, I was taken to the mall this morning so that I could buy Blake a collared shirt, so I haven’t been housebound and isolated all day. It’s just that it’s hard to stay excited about eating leftovers and finding ways to fill the time while the sun goes down and the temperature drops.

I’ve been reading Street Gang, which bills itself as “a complete history of Sesame Street” but should be amended to read “a complete history of the performers and the first five years of development, after which the author obviously got tired and decided to skim over the intervening thirty years until everyone started to die.” I bought the book for Mason this Christmas, and got interested when he started telling me about the bits he was reading. As much as I love fiction, there’s just something about social history that totally grabs me. Unfortunately, we’re not very good at sharing books, as we tend to want to read at the same times. Also, Mason will often not finish a book if he knows I already did, so I’ve been trying to downplay my interest in Street Gang. I’m very nonchalant.

I also spent much of December reading and re-reading three of Dan Savage‘s books: the Kid (which I read for the first time shortly after Blake was born), Skipping Toward Gomorrah (which I picked up while waiting for the Kid to be returned to the library), and The Commitment (which was the last to come in, and which I read something like three times before it was due, partly because it was fascinating and partly because I was trying to keep my hands off Street Gang). I end up doing a lot of reading while I breastfeed, so I need a steady stream of original material or it gets real ugly around here.

I hear the baby, so it’s time to stop writing and get reading.

I’m really not sure how it got to be 9:23 already, but being that it did, I should write as fast as I can. Today was a return to the routine for everyone. Mason is teaching night school classes again, and he started tonight. This meant that my aggressively bourgeois cooking got another roll out tonight in a pasta bake straight from the pages of the ChickaDEE cookbook. It was delicious, though. It’s nice to be able to make something delicious, rather than throw together something from the freezer. And the abundant leftovers will help tomorrow morning. Score.

Today was also the date set for Maggie’s first immunizations. We had a doctor’s visit last month, but were too soon for the needle. Today she earned a little round band-aid on each of her chubby thighs, poor thing. She was very brave, enduring the first with a curious look but bursting into howls of outrage when the second needle established a pattern. I nursed her throughout, as I did for Blake, which made the both of us feel better.

Mason and I have been marvelling over her growth, feeling intuitively that she’s getting significantly bigger every day (which is confirmed when all of her three month size sleepers became ¾ length sleeves over the break). Today she weighed in at 12 lbs, 2 oz, which seems a staggering amount of growth considering how worried we were in the first few weeks. She’s charging out of the middle percentile; not something I experienced with Blake.

She’s also been extraordinarily lively and alert today, initiating conversations of “ahh”s and “oohhh”s with me several times (including during storytime with Blake, when she was so loud she drowned out my reading). When she stares at me, grins and starts talking, she is mermerizing. She always wins the staring contests. The idea of lying down with her this morning after everyone else was gone was sublime. I think I’m in love.

Blake came home yesterday, and passionately reunited with his Nintendo 3DS. I’m glad to have him back, although I was also glad to get in one late morning sleep on the day he returned. I’ve been sleeping really poorly lately (not enough exercise, most likely), and every night I’ll wake up in the dead darkness with a dull ache running through my hips and a squirmy baby who doesn’t want to let me move to relieve it. Last night every move in the bed woke me up, and I was fairly convinced that I would never sleep again. Fortunately, the alarm clock is on the other side of the bed, so I’m never able to keep track (and therefore obsess) over time spent staring at the insides of my eyelids. And the other fortunate bit is that no matter how bad it gets, I sleep eventually. Even if it’s only for a few minutes.

It was a slow day today, a day for laundry and library. Maggie slept the whole morning, but it appears she wants to cry all night to make up for it. Tomorrow we’re going to take the oldest and youngest to dim sum, and then maybe a return showing of LaserQuest to use up the enticing BOGO coupons we got at the birthday party. The tree is coming down, which should clear up some of the chaos that’s reigned in my living room since Christmas Day. And if I’m lucky, I’ll find my engagement ring, which was lost some time last week.

Okay, so that resolution didn’t work. Boo. But just as I decided to go to the gym yesterday even though I would only be able to work out for a half hour, I’m pushing forward with this resolution. I’m rebuilding.

Sometimes I feel guilty not writing because this project is one of the only constants in my adult life, and if I stop feeding it, I’ll have failed at something huge. Sometimes I feel guilty not writing because I know how weird and patchy my memory is, and I want to remember my kids when they were tiny and precious or older and precocious.

(Last night I was lying in bed, trying to find the words for the deep sense of satisfaction I get at night when we’re all in the bed. Three of us lying in the dark, slowly warming up under the covers, Maggie’s fingers flexing on my bare stomach as she transitions from feeding to sleeping. Later on when she gets big and kicky I’ll want her out of the bed, but for now? Heaven.)

Those two reasons kind of suck, though. Keeping some institution afloat is no reason to do anything, and reading about my babies is definitely not the same as holding them. Ultimately, the reason I want to write, and the reason I want to put organization and structures in place to make it easier for me to do so, is because I still love it. I still love putting it all into words and filing it away, deciding how it all went down and snatching at ephemera. I still love it.

Now that it’s taken days to write about New Year’s Eve, I hope expectations have not been raised as to the spiciness of the content. You’ll be disappointed.

Ever since the Boy left, I’ve had New Years Eves on my own: even the first one, when Blake had a sleepover at my parents. This has opened the door to a muted kind of partying, one that befits someone who lives in a different town from the one where the party’s at. I’ve been stranded at home, I’ve been dancing with my favourite band, I’ve done late-night runs to parties and returns before midnight, and last year we went to two proper parties. This year we had two babies, Sage and Maggie, and Maggie is a terrible, inconsolable night passenger. What with the prospect of Sage falling asleep and having to be loaded into the car (that kid is heavy), and Maggie crying all the way home, we decided to bow out of our invitations. It was a hard decision, as we’d had so much fun last year, but we’ve had a very long run of childfree NYE’s, so we couldn’t get too upset.

During the day we tooled around Toronto. We picked up Sage in the morning, and then drove around in the strangely warm day, looking at the Boxing Day sales and enjoying ourselves. We had brunch at Caplansky’s, where Mags was able to visit with the waitress who spent decades in Brampton and is also a doula. We bought some great books at She Said Boom, which I promptly gave away. We bought Mason a good overcoat and some nice suit elements at a fabulous store in Kensington, a place where the sales staff know your neck measurements just by looking at you and the prices are not so much fixed as starting points for the owner to use as a high watermark. The weather was so nice by this point that we were in the mood for a short walk to Lettuce Knit, where I dropped off a few birth announcements, then went across the street for screenprinted cards and boxes destined to package up the books.

The day before I had put out a call for a top hat, figuring that among the ranks of my stylish friends there would be one easily-accessible hat and then I could do my New Year’s baby photo shoot. We ended up borrowing two, one each from the households that had invited us out that night. There’s a beautiful symmetry in that.

The first was a fancy black fascinator from Stacy. We dropped by so that I could give her birthday and Christmas gifts, and then leave quickly (who wants to see people on the day they’re getting ready for a party?). Much to our surprise, she and Jim invited us in, and we all hung out in the kitchen while Stacy made appetizers for the lucky people who would be arriving later. I greatly admire the calmness they exuded, even as they worked to get everything together. It’s a calmness I can only aspire to, and it was beautiful. I was so glad they let us in.

We also dropped by Souzan’s for her grey top hat, which provided Mason a key accessory later that night. After we had come home and fed Sage, we tried to figure out if we were up for anything else. The city runs a family New Year’s program every year, and I have fond memories of it from when Blake was a few years old. Besides, there would be fireworks at 9, an entirely civilized hour for fireworks if you have small children. So we loaded up the car and went. Mason wore the baby, the grey tophat, his new coat and the leather gloves my mom got him for Christmas; I kept telling him that he looked like a Sensitive Millionaire Dad and random passerby were thrilled to catch a glimpse of Maggie’s little head poking through his coat. Unfortunately, he’d overestimated how much stretch was in the coat, so he became convinced that he had wrecked his new coat on its first day. This followed a long period in which he was anxious about how much money we had spent on clothes, which I suppose makes the stretching worry a logical follow-up.

But when we weren’t talking about the restorative effects of dry cleaning, we had a good time. Sage liked everything, from watching the skaters in the outdoor rink to dancing with me in the square to some techno teen queen. (I agree. It was hugely enjoyable, one of those no-expectations moments of sheer happiness.) He also liked getting to climb inside a fire truck, and we spent a fair amount of time watching the boots in the boot drive get pulled up to the roof of City Hall. We were killing time with a hotdog in a local coffee shop when the fireworks started, so we rushed out the door to watch. For some reason, I tend to bow out of any activity before the fireworks, so it’d been a long time since I stood in a crowd, oohing and wowing at the sky.

And then we went home, put Sage to bed, and experimented with some of Mason’s very special beers. It was a very good New Year’s Eve; exactly the kind of family night I picture when I imagine what it would be like if the Boy didn’t have Blake every year since the split. It’s good to know that we can find a middle ground between cocooning and mad rush back to the days before kids. That said, I think we’ll want to go to a party next year. Who will sneakily monopolize the karaoke at Zing Haus if not me?

My parents and I took Maggie to visit my aunt today. She’s my dad’s eldest sister, and we haven’t seen much of her for a few years. There’s some obscure feud going on between her husband and us, I think, the kind of thing that exists in one person’s mind but not the other. She’s been getting sicker as the years roll on, and although I was a little put out when she didn’t come to the wedding, when I did the mental math I realized that she’s in her 70′s now and can be excused a great deal.

She loves babies, though, and I thought I should go out of my way to visit, so that she’d be able to see mine. (My mom always remembers her running into the house to see me for the first time, her slip askew in her rush to pick up the new niece.) The five of us spent hours in her still basement, gossiping about relatives, looking at pictures and talking about Maggie. I got to hear all kinds of little stories from her and my mother, all the bits and pieces of motherhood that you only get access to when you become one. And there’s something wonderful about being able to make people happy with your baby, because it’s easy to forget in the midst of a crying fit how miraculous they are. I was glad to be able to do such a simple, miraculous thing for her. I only wish I had brought a camera, so that later I could show Maggie the pictures of her wearing a ruffly pink onesie that says “my auntie loves me” while she is being held by the one who bought it for her. Because it’s true.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that 2012 will be as fantastic as 2011. I still can’t believe that, one year ago today, we didn’t know Maggie was coming, or all of the wonderful changes she would bring in our lives. Perhaps she’ll be just as much of a blessing in 2012?

Yeah, probably.

More on our family New Year’s Eve in the coming days. My resolution is to get better at focussing my time to write, without sacrificing something crucial like laundry or snuggle time with Mason. Maggie is planning to help me with her resolution: to sleep in her crib. She made this resolution without consulting me, she is currently living it and to be honest, it sort of freaks me out. I never got this sort of co-operation from Blake. There must be a hidden cost.

(Grey top hat lent by Souzan; black fascinator lent by Stacy. Thanks, stylish ladies!)

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,800 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Today was Blake’s last day with me before spending a week with his dad – in Tampa – so we tried to make the most of it. We had a hot oatmeal breakfast, we played boardgames (a Christmas Heroica and a healthy choices game that came in the cereal box), and we went tobogganing at a hill next to my junior high. We haven’t had any snow accumulation this year, and we might lose it all before he gets back, therefore: tobogganing. I think I may have had more fun than he did. It was a perfect, just below freezing day and the only thing that made me agree to stop was that my tailbone was getting sore from the bumps. Pro tip: if you holler at the top of your lungs, you go faster.

As soon as he was gone, the house seemed funereal in its silence. We’ve spent the days since Christmas in a cloud of Nintendo DS noise, and although I was counting down to the end of it, I started humming the music internally after a few hours of its absence.

We get Sage back tomorrow, so that should clear up a bit of the lonely spaces.

As for the latest Rocketbaby, we finished setting up her room today. As explained in the last post, her bedroom was little more than a green changing station until yesterday, when my dad came over to disassemble Sage’s toddler bed and reassemble the crib. This was not without its stresses: most of the hardware was gone and it took a mid-afternoon call to the Boy to determine that the missing pieces had been forgotten when the Boy returned the bed to us a few years ago. It was a discovery that saved me from having to buy a new crib, although I ended up springing for a new mattress anyway. Once the crib was wiped down, I moved the furniture into a new configuration to suit it. Today I put a flannel sheet on the new mattress, plunked down the enormous monkey from my brother, and suddenly Maggie’s room was a bedroom. It’s a very nice bedroom, actually, even though I need to put a few more pieces up on the wall (and hide the big dent in the plaster). It’s pretty much exactly the nursery I always dreamed of having. Maybe one day she’ll spend the night there.

Sage is dressed. Margaret is asleep. Blake is at soccer camp. Mason is in the shower. I think I may have five minutes.

This month has been beyond insane. Christmas itself was a bit more busy because we hosted everyone, and because I didn’t have to compress my gift buying into weekends and after-school, it spread across weeks with little more achieved. But the biggest time-taker this year was Maggie, of course. She’s fussy in the evenings and won’t settle for anyone but me, so after a few hours of trying to get her to sleep, I usually just throw in the towel and go to bed with her. It’s cutting two hours out of my day, the exact two hours I used to use to write and think and try to keep up with my silly photography projects. Lately I’ve been feeling incredibly guilty about letting December sail by undocumented, and this may just be an attempt to beat back the anxiety that free-floats around me this time of year. Nevertheless.

Later.

I have ten minutes before I have to get a travel form notarized for the Boy, so let’s see what I can spill out.

Christmas was pretty exciting, what with my foolish, late-pregnancy decision to invite everyone in the world. We had 19, topping our previous record of 14 from Easter 2009, and necessitating a third (children’s) table in the middle of Maggie’s nursery. (Her nursery is the emptiest room in the house right now, as she sleeps with us and we use that room primarily for storing her clothes, diapers, books & toys. This is the room that was Blake’s bedroom when we moved into the house, and it’s remained a vibrant cheerful green ever since. Maggie loves her diaper changes on the table there.)

We thought that it would be easier to have everyone over than travel everywhere, or maybe we just felt guilty about not hosting a holiday since Thanksgiving 2010. We probably couldn’t have done it if both of us had been working, and we definitely couldn’t have done it if my parents hadn’t paid their cleaning lady to clean our house on the 21st, and if they hadn’t brought a tonne of plates and cutlery to accommodate everyone. But I was off, and they did those things, and we did it.

Still later.

Probably the worst part of it (barring the mild breakdown I had on Christmas Eve, when I started weeping, convinced that no one loved me and I had made a huge neurotic mistake inviting so many relatives) was the late morning, when we had to quickly put away all the presents we had unwrapped so that we would have room for everybody and everything. As Blake attempted to spread out his gifts, my mantra became “19 people,” as in, “19 people are coming over, and your things will be sat on, stepped on and ruined”. He was very good about getting everything away, I must say. It helped that he was entirely besotted with his gift from Santa.

He had asked Santa for an iPad 2, but Santa decided to go the less expensive and more child-friendly route with a Nintendo DS 3D. This was a very very big deal, as my house has always been a video-game free zone. I was very torn about the idea of introducing a system to the house, but I suppose I feel guilty about all the upheaval of the past year: Blake’s troubles in school, my remarriage, a new baby. I suppose I thought that bending on the video games would be some sort of compensation. Mason didn’t seem to think it was a big deal, as Blake’s free time tends to be fairly short during the school week and there wouldn’t be a lot of opportunities to lose himself in it. I talked to the Butchers before Christmas, and they were evenly split on the issue of introducing video games. We’ll see how it pans out: we’ve already had a few ugly scenes and some earnest follow-up conversations about personal responsibility. I don’t want to use it as a carrot/stick. Like I said, we’ll see how that pans out.

My own presents ranged from a gorgeous camera bag (hopefully the last I’ll ever need) to a woodcut print of knitting. I got Mason a record player so that he can play music in Maggie’s room when he rocks her, two records, and a book on the genesis of Sesame Street. Blake got three pieces framed, and each was matched with another gift: his Salt Water Taffy prints went with the newest book, his Lucy Knisley Harry Potter print went with the fourth Dragonbreath book and a Sick on Sin shirt, and his yellow belt certificate went with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. On top was a crocheted Black Bomb Bird. Maggie got knit mittens, a little devil t-shirt and a collection of pages from a broken Dick Bruna book in a big frame. It was a good haul for all of us.

The dinner went really well, I thought, although I probably had too many people in the house. Maggie was snuggled and appreciated by her family, and she even slept in her bassinet for short periods of time. Mason cooked a massive, beautiful turkey that just fed all of us with a bit left over, along with decadent brussel sprouts, gorgeous stuffing from St. John bakery bread, roasted squash with maple syrup, and mountains of mashed potatoes. All of my guests brought dessert, not that anyone needed it, and even the kids put down their individual devices for one blessed blackout hour. (They didn’t want to. We made them. It was the only time the noise they made seemed normal to me.)

I think my favourite part of the day was that my mom went out of her way – twice – to tell me how well she thought we were doing. I really appreciated that affirmation.

The other exciting thing this month was Blake’s Laser Quest birthday party. My agreement to this idea probably came from the same guilt that fuelled the acceptance of the DS, but it was a pretty good time and I didn’t have to clean and re-clean the house, so there’s that. It was so normal that it made my teeth ache: we had a bunch of local kids, the whole Brownbill family and my brother in the games, then we had pizza and a pacman cake from my mother. (It looked like one of Nic’s past birthday cakes. Everything old is new again.) One of the moms stayed and held Maggie the whole time, so I was free to deal out plates and make sure everything ran smoothly. The whole thing was over in two and a half hours, and the teenaged staff cleaned up. Despite the constant clamour, Maggie was perfectly behaved. No one threw up or got mad at each other. It was awesome.

On Tuesday night, Mason & I went to see the Basement Revue. This has become a holiday tradition, and although we didn’t stay very late, nearly every act was awesome so we left happy. The highlight for me was the fake country band, the “hardest band to work with in show business,” who interspersed original songs like “Honkytonk Modulation” (“15 cords and the truth – we quadrupled the original number…and added three.”) with long, overworked reinterpretations of classics like “On the Road Again.” One of the fake cowboys was Chris Murphy; the other might have been Joel Plaskett? I couldn’t believe so few people were singing along; it was awesome. I also enjoyed seeing Rich for the third year running. I enjoy his stories, his djing, and his dancing. (This year he explained the language of Mick Jagger’s dancing.) Unfortunately, I left the pump at home, and by the time the second act hit the stage I was wet from my chest to my waist. Classy. So we didn’t say hi to anyone: when it was midnight we quietly left for home and our frantic, grateful baby, who had been making my parents miserable all night.