June 5, 2014
A Year of Iris
This whole week has been rife with “one year ago” nostalgia, the disbelief that so much time has passed, that it’s all gone so fast, and that there ever was a time when we didn’t have an Iris. And it is astounding to have a record of my first glimpse of her, a baby who looked nothing like anyone I’d ever seen, certainly not like her sister, who I’d sort of assumed was a baby template. But no, because here was someone else, someone entirely different, utterly herself. I was able to love her immediately, even as I understood that I didn’t know her at all.
While I feel as though I’ve always had an understanding of Harriet, that if I could have dreamed up a daughter she would have been just the one, Iris has been a mystery to me. She’s kept us guessing–she was born with a tooth, and then another by 3 months, and has yet to have any more. She’s had weird ailments that made us regular visitors at the Emergency Room this winter, and none of them have been either serious or straightforward. She’s very small, her weight in the low percentiles since 3 months of age, and while her weight went up at her 9 month visit, her height was down and she was in the third percentile. “Third?” I asked for clarification, thinking this put her in the bottom 30%, but no, it was the bottom 3. We track our girls’ heights on a doorframe in our house, and Iris is so much smaller than Harriet was at this age. And it’s all so different from my first baby, who was big and bruising and never got sick. And yet…
Iris can walk! Only single steps for now, but she has pretty much mastered pulling herself up to standing without support. She has been crawling for months, speeding across the floor, up flights of stairs, and across the sandbox, and the playground, and Harriet’s classroom, and pretty much anywhere. Iris is at home in the world. She can be jolly and happy, and she laughs and laughs, but has a scream that’s the definition of bloodcurdling. She will rarely consent to have anyone hold her, except her parents, but if you give her time and space, she’ll warm to you. She likes to play with balls and flips through books and if you put on music, she will do the shaky bum bum dance. She has learned to safely get down from furniture and the step in our hallway, and has never fallen. Somewhat recklessly, she has the ability to turn anything into a potential noose. Her favourite joke is blowing raspberries on people’s bare skin. She is an expert at blowing kissing too, and waving, and clapping, and in the last day or so, we’ve begun to suspect that Iris can talk. She can say, “Bye bye”, and “dog” and “Daddy” and sing, “Happy Birthday” (which sounds a bit like, “Apa buh”). She is absolutely in love with her sister, and the two of them now get up to all kinds of tricks, and they make one and other laugh and laugh, and their relationship makes me happy. I am also fascinated by the fact that it has nothing to do with me.
Iris has been up to all kinds of adventures this year. She’s taken two journeys on a plane, another on a train, and plenty of road trips. She has loved our co-op shifts at playschool and has been so welcomed there that she thinks it’s her school too. She’s had afternoon tea at the Windsor Arms, and been out for all kinds of brunches, lunches and dinners. Last Friday, she tried sushi for the first time, and discovered an affinity for edamame. On Sunday, we had our first experience of going out for ice cream and ordering four cones. She likes to hang out at the park and eat sand, and if you try to take her out of the swing, she will scream at you. She likes the slide. She likes looking out the window. She likes to open cupboard doors, get her fingers stuck in drawers, and often won’t eat her dinner until you take her out of her high chair and then she’ll eat what she’s just thrown on the floor. She’s big into eating paper and I once found a googly eye in her diaper. She is still really enthusiastic about pushing the button to change the traffic signals before we cross the street. And once we’ve crossed the street too. And if we just happen to be walking by one. And she loves climbing, her latest trick involving standing up on her rocking chair and then rocking it perilously. Her favourite book is Little You by Richard Van Camp and her Wonder Woman Board Book. She likes turning pages more than she likes listening to stories. She likes it when I play guitar, but mostly because she wants to put things in the hole. She is always game for a round of “Row Row Row Your Boat.”
She’s terrible at sleeping, and only naps on people, which has its benefits and drawbacks. Ever since I met her, I’ve been ridiculously tired, but I’ve also been ridiculously happy, so pleased and grateful to have the family I want to have. (To be finished having babies too.) I am grateful too for the gift of having learned to appreciate babies, an ability that was lost on me when Harriet was small. I am grateful that this really has been something of a do-over and that I had a chance to appreciate what they mean when they all tell us to enjoy every minute. I would never have believed it, but for the most part, enjoy it I really really did.
Happy Birthday to our beautiful girl! How wonderful life is now you’re in the world.
April 30, 2014
Things About Iris at Nearly 11 Months
1) Very interested in dogs and squirrels. Points to them as we walk down the street, and says, “eeggh”.
2) When you ask her where something is, she answers by pointing to a photo on the wall. Doesn’t seem to understand that reality is out in the room in all three dimensions.
3) Perhaps related to above, but obsessed with baby photos of her and her sister which hang in the hall.
4) Obsessed with traffic signal buttons at intersection. Must press the button every time we cross the street. Also wants to push the button on the other side, and sometimes cries when I don’t let her.
5) Likes to throw my Mitford books (conveniently situated at Iris height) onto the floor. Debo seems to be her favourite.
6) She eats pom-poms, toilet paper, and things we bring into the house on our shoes.
7) She has just started fake-laughing when she heard others laughing. It is terribly funny.
8) Probably should have been taught baby sign language because she just screams to get what she wants, and it’s so so terrible.
9) Is very soon going to have to be bought her own ice cream cone, as she is very crap at sharing.
10) Thinks she is 4.
March 31, 2014
The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
Over and over again lately, the first line (which is also the title) of Dylan Thomas’s poem has been running through my mind: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…” though not the rest of the poem, obviously. When spring finally arrives, one is allowed not to think things totally through to their logical conclusions. Though I sort of do, feeling a slight dread at the green creeping up through the soil–because first it’s crocuses and then forsythia, and irises (!), then full summer green, then the summer green that all gets to be a bit too much as weeds appear through the cracks in the pavement, and then and then and then. See, the crocuses aren’t even properly here, and I’m killing them already. The force, indeed. Isn’t it curious how winter always seems eternal while summer is a moment in time? Though apart from its joys, winter is mainly trudging about in heavy boots, the force itself remaining dormant.
But no, let’s start again. The force has driven the green fuse up from the ground. It is spring! It is spring! And while last spring felt full of the force, as we waited for our baby to arrive, it’s got nothing on this spring. Speaking of force. Speaking of Irises. I set her on the ground and she charges: go! go! go! And: grow! grow! grow! As if the rhyming words were interchangeable, which, if one is a 10-month-old baby, they sort of are. So she goes, driven. To crawl, to stand, to climb. After a tumble from the second step, our baby gates went up Saturday night. How can this be happening already? My incredulity partly because a second child’s first year goes by in the span of a few weeks, but also because, with Harriet, the gates were never entirely necessary. She was one of those babies of whom parents say, “I think she’s going to skip crawling,” in order to excuse the baby’s sluggishness. She had a force of course, oh yes she did, but it wasn’t physical propulsion. Whereas Iris is a blur.
Tomorrow is April. On Saturday, I went out and got my hair cut after nearly a year, and got my eyebrows waxed, and then went to Futures Bakery and drank a chai latte BY MYSELF whilst reading Jane Gardam’s Last Friends, which was so so wonderful, and so was the moment. There was no force. I’ve never been so much in the now, and it was such a commemoration of that day exactly a year ago when I took myself out for lunch just one last time, knowing that would be ages before I could afford such luxury of time and aloneness again. But we’re here! We made it. The journey so much smoother than I’d ever dared to suppose.
But it’s not the end, of course, oh no. The force keeps forcing onward, going and growing. The former the given and the latter the point.
March 13, 2014
Little You
Little You by Richard Van Camp and Julie Flett is the first book whose content interests Iris just as much as its flavour. This makes me happy because I love it too, and so delight in reading it over and over. The line, “You are mighty/ you are small” describes our littlest girl so perfectly. And then then next line, “You are ours after all,” and I love that too, because ours is what she’s always been, belonging to our whole family, and I’ve loved her even more for that.
At first glance, Julie Flett’s illustrations are simple, though they’re made interesting with different prints and patterns throughout, and I notice new details all the time. Like the Mother’s bright red tights in this in image as she dances with her baby.
And then I looked even closer upon my 180th read to see a hole in her big toe, which is pretty much the story of my life.
Just when I thought I couldn’t like this book any more…
It’s so absolutely perfect.
- Learn more about this book here, how it was inspired by Eddie Vedder, and how it was distributed across the Northwest Territories and published also in Cree, Chipewyan and South Slavey.
February 19, 2014
On Milestones
Iris is 8.5 months old, which is really the age at which one turns into a human. She moves, she sits, she eats our french fries when we go out for lunch. Finally, it feels like we’re discovering who she is, and it’s no less miraculous to see it unfold having seen it all before. In fact, it is more miraculous than it was the first time around.
Partly, this is because we were so focussed and anxious the first time around, not having a great deal of faith in a baby’s ability to bloom into a human all by her very self. We were anticipating all the milestones, checking them off like these were our accomplishments, not really understanding how long the story of parenthood would turn out to be (and how we are actually incidental to so much of it). We were also always watching for these milestones to happen, which meant that very often nothing happened, and that was a little boring. And when they did happen, the milestones felt so singular, monumental. Our baby learned to roll over, and it was the most extraordinary thing in the world.
This time, the milestones have caught us off-guard. Our focus is so broad that we forget about Iris a lot of the time, and then suddenly, there she is pulling herself up to standing. On Sunday morning I lost her altogether, totally confused by how she’d completely disappeared, until I realized that she’d crawled under her crib and was playing there. She slithers around on the floor like a snake, and gets to wherever she wants to go (which is usually in the direction of paper she can eat. Somebody needs to invent edible paper for babies. They would make a fortune).
What makes Iris’s milestones most miraculous this time is that I have the scope to see them as part of a continuum. First, of Iris herself growing into her own body and mind, but also that every single human being has to undertake this journey in his own way. These incredible discoveries–of how our bodies work, that we can stand and walk, how strong we are, how fast we go–must be made over and over again. And each discovery doesn’t mean, as they did the first time, “Now we’re getting somewhere,” with the prospect of some kind of arrival, but instead the journey itself being the entire point.
January 11, 2014
On Seven Months
As it was when Harriet was a baby, seven months has been a turning point. The baby has become vertical. She sits and eats her dinner with us in her chair. She has a sense of humour. I can put her down and she can play by herself, thereby ensuring that dinner gets made. She and Harriet are beginning to play together. We have found equilibrium as a family of four. And yet seven months is turning point in another sense, such as we’ve turned a corner and smashed into a wall. It would be more troubling if we hadn’t been precisely here before, but it’s still exhausting and frustrating. Six nights out of seven, she won’t be put down to sleep in the evenings, and then we take turns sitting on the sofa drinking wine by ourselves while the other is upstairs trying to get her to settle. Because we’ve been here before, we know enough not to turn it into a power struggle, we know that baby needs what she needs, and that “sleep habits” are indeed something a child of 18 months can indeed acquire out of the blue. I always expected that we’d end up here again, but oh, it’s not a fun place, even if you’re only visiting. (She is upstairs, screaming right now, and just spat out her soother and it sailed down the stairs.) We know we know we know, and it could be a million things–she is teething (or just evil?), and on antibiotics since this morning for cellulitis. I spent 4 hours last night at the emergency room having that cellulitis diagnosed, so you can see why I had hopes for having earned a more enjoyable way to spend my time tonight than the screamy baby relay. When I am refreshed enough to be philosophical about the whole thing, I know she is little, in need, that I love her, and these days are fleeting (and it’s the nights that are the trouble; the days themselves are fine, and I’m not even really tired because once I come to bed, she is happy enough to sleep beside me), but more often on these nights, I’m just impatient and angry. There is nothing like a baby to take one to the limits of herself. My own limits, as I learned very early in my mothering days, are closer than I’d like to admit.
December 5, 2013
Iris is Six Months-Old Today!
That Iris has reached her half-year milestone means that everybody lied when they told me that feeling would return to my abdomen within six months. I mean, I know that nobody really needs feeling in their abdomen, but it’s the principle of the thing, you know?Anyway, I’ve got a lot of feeling in most other parts of my body, perhaps too much, so perhaps it all just evens out. And Iris is absolutely adored, this obscenely bald person who was born with a tooth. I like her less in the evenings when she refuses to be put to bed, but the odd time she actually makes it there, I start reminiscing about her goodness in about 45 minutes. And then last night she slept from 10:30 to 2:15, which was a monumental occasion. Also, she has finally dropped for 5:30 pm nap, which makes getting dinner on a whole lot easier.
Who is Iris at six months? Truth be told, we don’t wholly know, because she’s still unfolding. In the last few days, she’s started prattling on incessantly in baby mumbo-jumbo and we love it. She’s been eating solids for a week, and pureed peas and zucchini is her favourite so far. She likes to smear egg yolk in her eyes and then cry (as you do). She delights in her older sister, and while Harriet’s ego is a bit too big, it’s true when she says that she is Iris’s favourite person in the world. Her favourite book is Mr. Brown Can Moo, but she also listens to all kinds of stories and is really quite patient about the whole thing, even though sometimes she spends story time screaming. Her favourite way to engage with books is by eating them. Her favourite toys are the rice paddle, a pie plate, and Harriet’s stuffed giraffe. She thinks it’s funny when you blow on her tummy, she is happiest when being dangled upside down by her feet. She is never, ever wearing socks because I can never ever find a pair, and if you have a problem with that, then you can go and look for them yourself. She has become an upright person, eating dinner with us in her high chair and nearly sitting up by herself. It makes her so human-seeming! She is always being schlepped about in her Baby Trekker and she’s happy there, so everyone thinks that she is a well-contented baby, which isn’t technically true. She can scream unrelentingly like nobody we have ever met.
Six months is so much harder than the newborn days, when we bounced along in a blissful bubble of summertime, but then at six months we can (pretty much) handle it whereas we were all quite fragile then. These days, we are very, very tired, plus people who are 4.5 years old also come with their own very specific and complex needs. It’s a tricky business, and sometimes it all goes very wrong, but then there are these other moments when it’s oh so very right, and we know that a family of four was who we were always meant to be.
October 9, 2013
Sadness and Rainbows
It’s hard to believe that it’s been only a year since Malala Yousafzai was shot, propelling her into the public consciousness, because I feel like I’ve always known her name. It was a name that solved a small problem of mine, the problem of why we no longer name our babies for heroes. I think we no longer name our babies for heroes because there are so few heroes, and heroes are so fallible that their names could become a burden. But it was different with Malala, whose miraculous recovery made her story a triumph. Now there’s a hero, I thought–somebody brave, smart, articulate, young and inspiring. I love that she is living proof that nonviolence is more powerful than a gun is. I was early in my pregnancy when Malala’s story landed on newspaper front pages around the world, and we decided that if our baby was a girl, we would name her after her.
Malala is a big name for a little baby to live up to, particularly our little baby, who is small, bald and funny-faced. It is Iris’s middle name, and we call her both names sometimes because the name is so melodic, but it doesn’t entirely suit her yet. I wonder what her connection to the name will come to be, though already it means something to Iris’s big sister. She knows the story of Malala, how bad men tried to hurt her because they didn’t believe that girls should go to school. She knows about Malala’s bravery, the force of her nonviolence, and, most importantly, she knows that life isn’t the same for girls everywhere as it is for her. Perhaps even that freedoms are not to be taken for granted.
The name “Malala” means “sadness” in Urdu, and even Malala Yousafzai herself has confessed that it is a hard name to carry for that reason. The meaning had me considering whether this was a suitable name to give my baby–particularly as her sister’s second name is “Joy”. But we decided to name her Malala anyway, because three remarkable women have had this name even with the sadness entailed: the 19th century poet warrior whom the modern-day Malalas were named after, Malala Yousafzai, and also former Afghan MP Malala Joya who Malala Yousafzai claims is an inspiration.
We gave her the name because sadness is part of the story, as an acknowledgement that there is still much to be overcome. But the sadness doesn’t negate the light, the hope. The world is big enough to contain all of this.
But we did call her Iris too, which means rainbow. It’s a fascinating name–a flower, a part of human anatomy, a song by not only the Goo Goo Dolls but also Split Enz (which I listened to over and over again while we waited for her to be born), Dylan McKay’s mother, and a Greek Goddess. A good counter and complement to the sadness, I think, and she suits it (though has been perhaps unfortunately nicknamed Aye Aye, while she does not possess a special middle finger to fulfil the same ecological niche as a woodpecker).
October 6, 2013
The Things I Want to Keep
In our house, there is now a big plastic bin full of clothing that will never fit anyone in our family ever again. “Should we keep any of it?” I wondered yesterday, only because I thought I had an obligation to wonder. In actuality, we don’t have the room to keep anything and I’m so happy about that because it makes answering such questions much easier. But I wonder too if I will always feel this way, feel the urge to discard pieces of our history, like jetsam.
I haven’t always felt this way. Twenty years ago, I saved everything, any flower I’d ever received hung and dried on a line strung across my dusty, cluttered bedroom. Like most teenagers, I took great care to completely paper my room walls with ticket stubs, magazine cuttings, and photos. When the Blue Jays won the World Series, I saved that day’s newspaper in a cardboard box. I was born afflicted with nostalgia. (I imagine that I am quite human-seeming in this regard.) I remember listening to Meat Loaf’s “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad” when I was six, and telling my dad how it reminded of me of the old days (when I was three). Everything I ever did from age 16-23 was carefully mucilaged into scrapbooks. But enough time passed and so much was accumulated that eventually I could see the futility of my attempts to save everything that mattered, and also that the consequence of it all was stuff stuff stuff and necessarily room enough to put it in.
So we don’t keep much anymore. I only kept a few of the scrapbooks. I am aided in all this by living in an apartment and not having a basement, and also in that so much stuff now exists online, thereby not requiring room enough at all. My blog is perhaps my most precious repository. But I become overwhelmed even by a large number photos on my phone, deleting all those but the essential because I fear being carried away by too muchness. I hate that there are 18,000 messages in my inbox. Books aside, I feel so much lighter living my life without freight. I have decided to retrieve from that plastic bin the stripy sleeper that both my girls wore home from the hospital when they were born, and the rest will go to charity.
“In fact I no longer value this kind of memento./ I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted./ There was a period… when I thought I did./ A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep things with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things”, their totems… In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment./ In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.” –Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Nostalgia, I have learned with time, is an affliction that can’t be cured, or fixed with a totem. I will keep that sleeper with me, but it won’t bring the past any less faraway. Already, I cannot believe that anybody that I love was ever small enough to wear it.
We went out for posh sushi for dinner last night, our first time having it since our post-partum sashimi party when Iris was 5 days old. I’ve been awash lately in nostalgia for June, as Iris turns 4 months old and leaves her newborn self behind. June, not so long ago, of course, but forever irretrievable, a time like no other before or since for our family. Such a gentle time indeed, just like I knew it was while it was happening. I have no need to keep anything from that bin full of clothes, but oh, how I want to preserve those memories, those moments. That week I spent lying in bed recovering my c-section, when Stuart brought me all my meals and there were only four people in the world. I can no longer remember what it was like to not be able to get out of bed unassisted, or not to be able to turn over without a great deal of pain. All those memories gone, and I just remember the sashimi party in our room, that posh sushi. That was the night Harriet hung up the laundry, and played with her sticker book we’d just received from my friend Kate. How summer always is, the way you want to bottle it.
I remember Stuart taking Harriet to school in the morning, and then coming home to collapse into bed with Iris and I. I remember this one evening when Iris and Harriet were both asleep, and I sat down and wrote a review of a picture book. I remember reading The Flamethrowers, and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? I remember Harriet scampering up the stairs to crawl into bed with us every morning, and there would be all of us there, everyone I love best on a single mattress, an island in the universe. Stuart ensuring I was stocked with snacks, reading Harriet stories while I breastfed, how I was annoyed to once again be mobile because then I couldn’t read so much any more.
In June, Harriet watched the Winnie the Pooh movie with Zooey Deschanel over and over again, and we floated around our house like sleep-deprived lunatics, singing the “honey honey honey” song and “It’s Pooh! It’s Pooh! Pooh wins the honeypot,” whenever we changed Iris’s diaper and the situation called for it. How we’d be up at 4am laughing hysterically about Vladimir Putin’s relationship with rhythmic gymnast, and saying, “His virile persona….” which was alway hilarious. The afternoons when Stuart would strap on the baby and take the children away, and I’d be blessed with an hour or so of precious aloneness. I remembering leaving the house even–hobbling to the farmer’s market clutching my incision, going out for ice cream, walking to the playground to fetch Harriet from school. Her class’s end of the year picnic and glorious sunshine. The first time we took the baby out for a meal, for lunch on Father’s Day and she didn’t explode. Tremendous kindness from everyone: cards and presents in the post, meals dropped off, baked goods and visits. All this proof that we were connected to the world and that the world is good.
None of this particularly monumental, of significance to no one but me, though I suspect that it might remind you of your own precious memories, you own very best times. These are those memories that don’t dissolve into the blur of every day, though dissolve they someday will, all the same. And so to counter that, I write them down here, preserve them in my way. These are the things that I want to keep.
September 24, 2013
The Hang of It
My new office.
Now that we’re nearly three weeks into our brand new life, I’m going to take the risk of saying out loud that we might be getting the hang of it. After a very bumpy first week, Harriet is very happy to be in Junior Kindergarten, and has already acquired some brand new skills, such as being able to sit down and focus on a project for more than two minutes, and also the ability to draw something that actually resembles a thing. She is also enjoying being back at her play school in the afternoons. Stuart is back to work, and quite happily now that we’ve learned he’s got a promotion and begins a new position next month. He’s also taking a college course he’s finding very inspiring, which means I am home alone on Wednesday nights.
The first Wednesday night was surprisingly good–I had two crabby kids and a heat wave, so we all jumped in the bath and had a pool party in the tub. Somehow, I managed to drown no one, we had dinner, *and* I mopped the floor, so I got to feel like Mommy Awesome. There was to be no repeat the following Wednesday, however, as the baby proceeded to cry unceasingly and the house looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. We’ll see how I do tomorrow.
Regarding Iris, who is 3.5 months old: we thought we’d been doing so well tolerating her poor sleeping habits, and then she went and showed us that we’d not seen nothing yet as poor sleeping goes, and so now I’m kind of the walking dead. This time, however, we know it’s a problem to be endured instead of something that we can fix, and so we just tolerate the tireds without feeling badly about the whole thing, and that makes a huge difference. She has a cold and has just got her second tooth in, which isn’t helping matters, plus she is a *baby* and we know what they’re like.
What they’re like though is pretty easy compared to 4 year-olds, which I didn’t appreciate at all the first time. I also think that when I was home with Baby Harriet, I was terrifically bored, but now I’ve got commitments and deadlines, and things to get done with Baby lying on my chest. There is no time for boredom, and so Iris rolls around on the floor while I do my work, and I really am accomplishing so much, though I am having to also train myself to type with one hand while the baby screams in my other arm. In the mornings, she falls asleep soon after I drop off Harriet at school, and so I can’t go home because our apartment is up a flight of stairs and I’ve got her in the stroller, so I go to RedFish BlueFish instead and work for the 30 minutes she manages to stay asleep for. (Iris has about six naps a day, 20-40 minutes. This would bother me, except I had another baby like that once before, and everything worked out fine.)
And the very best thing we’re up to these days is that we started reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which Harriet and I are both encountering for the very first time. And we love it. I’m reading it aloud and once in a while get a sense of where possible criticism comes from, but these criticisms would mainly be about there being too many adverbs, or that characters “hiss” sentences which are not sufficiently sibilant, which are the kind of criticisms you really have to go looking for and be an asshole to make.
