I celebrated Rocketbride Day by getting sick again: sore throat and headache and runny nose. You’d think that the reduced stress of being at home would preserve me, but no. Blake is sick too, and we’re wondering about Margaret: she’s either fussy because she’s still adjusting to her new cognitive level and her continued excellence in the field of night-sleeping, or she’s sick. Giving her a bit of baby Tylenol last night helped, as did an intense eucalyptus oil-infused shower. Blake just lay on the couch all night, looking flushed and listless. He’s developed an antipathy towards medications of all kinds, and has to be strongly persuaded to take his Tylenol despite his sore throat and headache. I’m starting to wonder if I should bribe him with smoothies.

Anyway, he was feeling better this morning, and he took his medicine so I let him go to school. Maggie is in a great mood and doing a lot of napping, so she’s either feeling better physically or she’s adjusting to her new sleeping schedule. As for me, I’m drippy and spacey and really should be off the computer before I start buying shiny things online. I did manage to upload about two weeks worth of pictures to Maggie’s 365 project, so there’s new stuff there. And I worked out yesterday with my brother, so that should somewhat offset the fact that I ate a whole bag of chips in the last 24 hours.

(I’m not really working out to lose weight, although that would be awesome. I’m working out for the strength and the energy, not to mention the endorphins and feeling of satisfaction that lasts the rest of the day.)

Off to conserve strength.

As I wrote the date, I thought, February 8th…that sounds like something. Birthday? Aleta Day? Anniversary of something? Five minutes of trolling through the archives to find it: Fireball 1997, the bender that begat That Tuesday, a.k.a. the worst I had ever behaved while drunk. So there’s that.

If there’s any legacy from that monument to stupidity, it may be this: every day I rock my baby to sleep while staring at a quilt from Poet’s wife. It’s a gorgeous alphabet bestiary, sent to us for Blake right before he stopped communicating with me altogether. I’m not sure if she made it or bought it, but it’s wonderful and it hung in Blake’s room right until the minute we made a nursery for Maggie.

(Maggie has her own quilt, a rainbow of fruit patterns from Amèlie. When we pulled it out of the bag at our work shower, I melted. I mean, I’ll knit a blanket for someone I really like, but a quilt? That’s crafty alchemy to my mind.)

Maggie herself, the quiet centre of all of this quilt-talk, is finally sleeping. She was a ragged, howling, snotty mess yesterday, kept from her naps by Baby Time and skating trips. Today we have our Intense! Exercise! Class! which I love, but will skip if that means a calm day. Not just because it makes her nights better, but because I hate hearing that overtired cry all day long. I may be vindicated by the sight of Blake on the ice and I may need the cardio endorphins from a class, but she sure as hell doesn’t need any of that nonsense.

All of this is complicated by some new cognitive developments. When she sleeps through the night, she doesn’t want to sleep in the morning, but is willing to fool me by lying quietly in her crib after I put her down at what was her usual time. If I listen at the door, I can hear her giggling at the ceiling, which is just too adorable to be left alone. Also, she’s grabbing stuff and studying it intently. Yesterday morning it was the appliqués on the front of my old, unearthed nursing pj’s. Today it was the rim of my cereal bowl as I scooped up the last bit. And her swipes at my hair have become purposeful, rather than the random flexings I was used to. (A month ago while in a rage, she grabbed my hair and pulled my head to her mouth as she screamed directly into my ear. It was pretty awesome.)

I’m not sure if she’s learning new things when she grabs them, or if she’s just stunned that she got anything at all. Her expression is ludicrously serious, and a bit drooly.

Yesterday Maggie slept through the night. Not just technically, as she’s been doing for over a week, but from 8 to 5. She’s been sleeping so well at night that I’ve been waking up with the pain of engorgement, my shirt completely soaked. Sleeping was my only “problem” with Blake: he was a great baby who didn’t sleep well until he was more than eighteen months old. Ironically, this momentous occasion happened on the second night she wore Blake’s baby clothes.

I paid for it today, though. She missed her first nap, and our entire day after was a rocketsled of overtired unhappiness. She was so upset this afternoon that I nursed her at a hockey arena in full view of four elementary classes, after which we watched the skaters together, snuggled in Mason’s giant sweater.

Today I accompanied Blake’s class and three others to a local rink for an afternoon of recreational skating. It’s something his school does every year, but of course this was the first year I was available to witness it. For many of the students, this is their first experience on skates. More than one spent the hour with their ankles bowed to the ice, clutching an orange pylon for dear life. One of these newbies was a friend of Blake who competes and brags constantly. I’ll admit to some schadenfreude watching him skate like a newborn calf, but I was very impressed with how many times he returned to the ice after a rest. He may have sucked, but he wasn’t allowing himself to be sidelined, and I don’t see that very often in my older students.

I was also hugely satisfied watching Blake skate so easily around the ice. Four winters of interrupting the week and driving him to lessons, all the time in the stands watching him flop around the ice, seeing teenaged instructors give up on him for good halfway through the session when he refused to try anything new, registering him in the same level again and again: it was all redeemed in one afternoon. My son is a proficient skater. Of all the ways I may have failed him, I haven’t failed him in passing on this most Canadian of outdoor skills.

My writing may be sporadic, but I’m still trying to keep up with my photography projects. I took all the pictures on my original 365 project, and I’m now getting around to uploading the missing pics. August 9, 2010 to June 8 is complete; there are a few more for June & July, and then the set is done from July 24th to August 9, 2011. Definitely some fun ones in there.

Also, I’m a little more than a month behind posting pictures of Maggie in her 365 set, but I’m still taking them. There was one sad day when we were out of the house almost all day and no picture was taken, but so far my success rate with her has been amazing. I’m really going to enjoy being able to put all of these pictures together and have this wonderful visual document of her first year. And my dad has started using the stream, so my parents can print as many pictures as they like. Sweet.

Finally, there are other people in my family, as they often like to remind me.

Yesterday I found the storage tote with all the infant stuff. I’ve been looking for it for months, and there are things in it that Maggie is already too big to wear. Still, as much as it pains me to put the “ducks talking on the telephone” sleeper into the rummage pile, I’m glad I found it. There’s enough sleepers and underwear to get us through the next few months, now that she’s too big for most of the clothes she got at the baby shower. (The season needs to turn before she’ll be able to wear most of the next size, as it was bought with warmer thoughts in mind.) There’s also some pretty dumb boy stuff in there that’s going directly out the door, dinosaurs playing baseball and so forth, every bit as ridiculous as the pretty kitties and frills that adorn her “girl” clothes.

It’s hard to get rid of those wee sleepers, even though I have no practical use for them. I’m still grappling with the finality of this baby, wondering if I need to hoard even the tiny clothes that Maggie can’t use just in case there’s another one down the line. Ridiculous: I still have all of her tiny clothes and can’t even think of putting them into the box to go out, so another baby would do just fine. This isn’t a rational feeling, though. It never was.

There’s also a few pieces of maternity clothing in there, all of my old nursing bras, cloth nursing pads and a smaller size of cloth diaper cover that may also be outgrown already. I put all of this stuff away, neatly labelled, thinking that I would be pulling it out in a few years at most. It was everything I would have needed, a total preparedness kit. Undershirts from Once Upon a Child, sleepers from my cousins, tiny socks balled together, boy clothes. Now what do I do with it all?

I think I thought that having another baby would even the score. Like I could stack up one failed marriage and one shared child against one working marriage and one full-time baby and it would cancel out. Turns out that having a kid around all the time doesn’t make me forget the other one when he’s gone. Turns out that having a working relationship doesn’t make me feel less of a failure with my first marriage. And the baby clothes, so carefully stored against the continuation of that first life, are stirring up an awful lot of sadness. Probably not what the makers of the baseball dinosaur design would have expected.

Another sleepy weekend. Lately my challenge has been giving myself permission to leave the house solo for an hour every few days. It’s really hard, especially when I come back and discover that Maggie started screaming the minute I left and fell asleep the second before my key went into the lock (fine sense of irony, that baby). And while I want to fold her into just about every minute of my day, I also need to be good to myself and that means leaving her with her dad so that I can exercise. Yes, I would rather have my unbelievably intense Baby Zumba class three times a week rather than one, but I don’t have it so I have to be brave and deal with the guilt of leaving her. Leaving her with people who love her. The horror.

I’ve been wondering if I’d ever want to have another baby. I’m pretty lucky: I have healthy pregnancies and awesome babies, so it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to imagine another one in a few years. It wouldn’t even be that hard; Blake’s in school so most of the time we would have two kids, with a third on mornings and evenings and an occasional fourth coming in like a best friend who has his own bed. Still, four crosses that line. Four means giving up any pretence of avoiding a minivan. Four means that our mornings at church, which are already a circus, become an official disaster zone. Four means someone has to share a bedroom.

Still, I can’t quite give up the idea of one more. Having Maggie in my own house, in the first year of a marriage, has been fantastic. It’s been a non-stop celebration since spring. And Maggie, as befits the queen of the party, just might be the best baby ever. Saying no to another feels awfully ungrateful.

One thing about me is that I get very enthusiastic about things. (Understatement!) This is a family trait that I share with my brother, my son, the uncle for whom my son is named, etc. Blake gets fixated on video games. Nic gets fixated on food. I get fixated on music and books. So it should come as no surprise that last month’s intense reading of Street Gang has kindled an intense desire to reconnect with Sesame Street. Youtube helps fan the flames, as many sketches are archived there (including my all-time favourite, “Baby Loves Cookie“). Yesterday I went to the library to return some books (including Kevin Clash’s book My Life as a Furry Red Monster) and I came home with two Sesame Street videos. One is the 1978 Christmas special (which is extensively analysed in the book) and the other is a special created for the 20th anniversary of the show, hosted by Jim Henson. It was the year before he died.

The more we learn about this topic, the more Mason & I turn to each other and wonder why he couldn’t have just gone to the damn doctor. It was such a colossal waste.

I’ve been feeling pretty dopey the past few days, and I’d like to chalk up my writing difficulties to that. You see, I’m fine for most of the day, but by 7 or so I get so sleepy that I can’t take advantage of Blake being in bed…so I just put on my pajamas and go to sleep with the baby. The exciting development this week is that on Tuesday she started sleeping through the night (five hours). I’m sure it’s some combination of maturity, calm days, Mason rocking her in the evenings and the fan we put in her room to take the chill out of the air. It’s absolutely brilliant. At 2 am or so I’m summoned downstairs by the wails of someone convinced she’s been abandoned, but it’s a small price to pay for the most consecutive hours of sleep since mid-pregnancy. I’m sure that eventually it will mean less dopeyness and more writing.

Two Sundays ago, Maggie was baptized. It was a rush job, put together in a week and a half, because Mason’s parents are involved in a kidney round-robin swap and they expected to be done that and in Florida by February. (Note: this is very unlikely, but who’s going to argue with people having major surgery?) They were planning to be gone until Easter, and our minister was going on a four month sabbatical after Easter, which would have delayed the baptism until August. Personally, I wasn’t in a rush. We don’t believe she’s going to limbo without it, and we go to church every week anyway. Plus, there is a lace christening gown in one of my books, and I’d already bought the yarn for it. But the prevailing consensus seemed to be to get it over with, so we allowed ourselves to be swept along.

The gown we used was once worn by myself and my brother, and before that it was my mother’s wedding dress. It’s awesome, nice enough to make me give up my knit gown dream without a pang. I knit her little socks, baby versions of my only published pattern, and we wrapped her in the shawl I knit for the wedding. My parents bought her a gold cross and chain. And seeing her clean and fluffy haired, dressed in that big white pouff and looking around avidly in a white bonnet, made my heart melt. My parents were there, and my grandpa and my last great-aunt. Mason’s parents, too. And most importantly, both brothers were there, looking their best in sweater vests and the bowties we bought them as wedding presents.

Beneath the bowtie, Blake had a rocky morning. He’s been in the choir for years, but hasn’t ever been enthusiastic about participating. When I was running it, he was adamant about being a part of choir, but still rarely sang. This year he finally admitted that he wanted to take a break. Unfortunately, this was the first morning he had made this decision, and it meant giving up a cookie after practice, which was clearly a consequence he hadn’t anticipated. I had to take him into a stairwell to stop him from punching the wall in agitation. Once I had him talking, he told me he was jealous of all the attention Maggie was getting. I tried to convince him that his own baptism had been a bigger deal, with many relatives and a pool party, and that seemed to calm him down. Eventually he was ready to come along, and he spent his time in the pew stroking Maggie’s head as we waited for our part of the service.

And Maggie? My beautiful angel was calm right up until the rite started, and then she started wailing directly into the microphone. Well, she wouldn’t be my daughter if she wasn’t causing a ruckus.

I’m sick, so in the time-honoured tradition of this journal, I’m writing a sick day entry. If you just went by the written evidence, I seem a lot sicker than I actually am. Let the record show that I’m not normally a dopey mouth-breather.

Maggie is sick too, a perfect amount that matches mine and doesn’t require a trip to the doctor. She’s just a little snuffley in the night and wants to take many naps. I can relate.

Yesterday we had Sarah & Leo & their kids over for the afternoon. We love hanging out with them, and yet it took a ridiculous amount of scheduling and re-scheduling to make it work for both families. Blake was at his dad’s for the afternoon, so the girls busied themselves with his stuff while the adults sat & chatted. Maggie was much admired, especially by Demi, who didn’t get to hold her as much as she would have liked. When Blake got home the play got more rambunctious, and I sent the two oldest outside after dinner to yell and chase each other in the last light.

The best part is that, when we see them next, there will be a brand new baby. Maggie will be old news and I can get my newborn fix.

Speaking of the rapidly-aging Miss Maggie, she is three months old today. There’s a line Big Bird says in the episode dealing with the death of Mr. Hooper: “the thing about babies is, one day they’re not here; the next they are!” Whenever I think about Maggie’s age, it reminds me that she wasn’t always here, which is weird. She seems so permanent that when I look at toddler pictures of Blake, I think about how she would fit in.

She’s sleeping in her crib while I write this, a major surprise that I’ve written about before. When she’s not having a sleepy day like today, she’s blessing me with periods of alert calm (most welcome during meals!) and extreme happiness, in which she laughs and hoots at songs, faces or the ceiling. She’s already outgrowing her second set of clothes and when she gets really mad, she’ll stiffen her whole body and seem to stand.

People ask if she’s a good baby. The truth is that she’s the best baby.

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.