finslippy

Ho paura del ragno.

This is the one sentence I remember from the two years of Italian I took in college. And I probably got it wrong.

Yes! So! I am here! This computer at this Internet place, it does not function as I am liked it to! I am having the unhappy!

When I go to other countries I can't do their language, so I just speak the broken Englishes. They love it. No, really.

I must make this short, as the proprietor here, she is liking the incense, and my husband, he is having of the sickness regarding this. So! Our trip so far: pretty! We are surrounded by, um, what do you call it--nature. There are lizards in our beds. And snails in our shoes. There are many pretty sights. The pasta! What can I say! Hospitaliano! On the minus side, there has been some vomiting, and some not pooping, and some fever, and some refusing to eat a single foodstuff except for gelato. Guess who I'm referring to! C'mon!

Okay, Scott is reenacting Henry's regurgitation in the car on the way to San Gimignano, so I must leave you. More there will be at a later times! Me are hoping they will have the happy, the times in the next days! 

Hello, we must be going.

So we’re going to Italy tomorrow, and did I brush up on my Italian? I did not. Zut alors! Wait, that’s wrong.

We are going to a farmhouse in Tuscany with my mother-in-law and brother-in-law and brother-in-law’s new wife whom I now get to call my sister-in-law. For two weeks, we’re going! We’re going to be in the country! With, um, donkeys? I think there might be donkeys. Really I have no idea. I have done very little thinking about this trip. Does it show?

My mother-in-law wishes to celebrate her birthday by taking us on this trip, and who am I to argue? I’m a little nervous about the flight with Henry (read: I’m picturing Henry flinging vomit and feces all about the cabin as he skitters across the ceiling and screeches the Nicene Creed backward) but I’m sure it will be fine! Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaa! Hurgh!

Anyway, then we’ll be in Italy, so even if the ride is as awful as I can imagine, we’ll still end up in Italy. The last time we were in Italy it was our honeymoon, and it was fantastical and wonderamic, except we flew Air France and therefore we had to deal with the French. On the way there I sat next to an aging, bitter old crone who wore too much makeup and applied smelly salves to her hairy cheeks and then berated me when I suggested that maybe using nail polish remover in a plane wasn’t the most considerate way to go. She actually called me a “spoiled American” and repeatedly sneered, “You want your own plane,maybe?” And oh, how I loathed the French, on that trip.

But not as much as on our way back, when we missed our connecting flight and ended up being put up in a hotel in a town called Bagnolet. Bagnolet, Where the Hookers Are! Actually, maybe it was a nice town, I don’t know—we were too busy hiding in our room from the hookers down in the lobby. They looked mean, those hookers, like they wanted to cut up some Americans. As for the room we were in, there were brown streaks running down the walls out of the vents and the sheets made us itch and the only channel that worked on the television was airing “Men in Black” in French.

But the Italy part, that was nice.

This time we’re taking Lufthansa, so I expect we’ll return with tales of Germanic cruelty. Along with many, many pictures of Henry eating gelato.

Phone transcript: Henry after his date with Thomas.

Henry: I [incoherent] THOMAS’S WORLD.
Me: Did you have fun?
Henry: YEAH AND I [incoherent] TOO.
[hands phone back to grandmother]
[whispering in background: Tell her how you shook hands with Sir Topham Hatt.]
[shuffling]
Henry: I SHOOK SIR TOP HAT.
Me: Wow! Did you ride on Thomas?
Henry [obviously losing interest]: Hmm.
[hands phone back to grandmother]
[more whispering and shuffling]
Henry: OKAY GOODBYE.
Me [trying to hide the desperation in my voice]: I'll see you soon! I love you so much!
Henry [whispering]: Yeah.
[click]

He's coming back this afternoon. Upon his return, I may eat him.

This post is entirely the Pope's fault.

First of all, my turning-off of comments was an experiment. I was feeling comment-averse, and I wanted to see what it would feel like to not have comments. It turns out that if you’ve lived with comments and then you turn comments off, you feel like no one likes you anymore. And then you get too many emails to respond to, and you feel like a bad person. So the comments are back.

I want to be funny and brighten your day with some humor, but I am feeling like the lowliest of people today. I have not been good to my son today, O Internets. I am a bad person.

An hour ago my husband took Henry to the in-laws to spend the weekend. Tomorrow there is some kind of Thomas The Tank Engine event in Connecticut. Henry and his grandparents will ride a life-size Thomas, and Sir Topham Hatt will be there, and then they will gorge themselves upon the cotton-candy brains of Claribel and Annie, the Dim-Witted Coach Cars. Whatever will happen, Henry has been sick with excitement. He has educated everyone we’ve met about his plans for the weekend. The cashier at Met Foods now knows all about it. As does Crazy Shuffling Guy by the Q train, and Eye-Patch Man outside Natural Foods. “I’m going to Thomas’s World!” he told them, and then invited them to come along.

So this morning I woke up at 9:30, quickly realized that my kind husband had woken up with Henry two hours earlier and had let me sleep in, and was just as quickly plunged into shame and guilt. (Thanks, Catholic upbringing!) My baby is going to be away all weekend, and I should have been awake to spend these last moments with him, I told myself, and hurried to the living room. Where Henry got one look at me and screamed, “GO AWAY.” And then said it again, as if I hadn’t gotten the idea the first time.

And like the sulky adolescent I am and will always be, I stormed back to the bedroom and slammed the door and threw myself on the bed. That sure showed him! He’s going to feel bad now, I bet! And I’m being an excellent role model, with my stomping and slamming!

Thirty seconds later, it occurred to me that I was an ass, and so I returned to the living room, where my husband and I proceeded to yell at each other—over what, I can’t even remember. All I remember is saying I JUST WOKE UP COULD YOU LEAVE ME ALONE. I might have said it a few times. And then noticed Henry was weeping. So I went to him, I apologized to them both, I tried to make things right. “I want breakfast,” Henry wept, and I tried not to ask my husband why the fuck he hadn’t fed him yet, and I carried Henry to his high chair.

Where he proceeded to scream incoherently about some pain on his cheek. And then pain on his fingers. KISS IT, he shrieked, and I did, but then he raged some more about how the pain wasn’t going away. “Could you tell me what he’s talking about?” I asked Scott, maybe a little too loudly, as Henry screamed and screamed and stuck his fingers in my face screaming at me to KISS THEM TO MAKE THE PAIN STOP. “He has a bug bite on his cheek. I have no idea what the finger thing is.” KISS IT KISS IT KISS IT he continued. Did I mention about the screaming? The ear-piercing screaming?

I kissed. And I kissed. I had already poured his cereal, which was now soggy from soy milk and tears. Finally, Internets, I began to lose it ever so slightly. My reason deteriorated as follows:

I feel bad for you, so I shall kiss your hand.
Yes, okay, your hand hurts. I’ll kiss it more.
I’m beginning to doubt there’s anything wrong with your hand.
You are now freaking me out with the screaming, so I’ll tell you your hand isn’t really hurt.
I’ll tell you to be quiet. That will calm you down!
You’re just hungry. Hungry and out to get me.
If I tell you you’re okay in a louder voice you’re sure to understand me.
Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll rip the bib off and throw it away, then I’ll slam the cereal bowl down on the counter, and tear the high-chair tray off of you, so that your pain gives way to sheer terror!

At this my husband wheeled around and shouted something like What Are You Doing, You Monster, and I told him to shut up. Nothing enables someone to see your point of view like telling them to shut up. Didn’t you know that? Then I took the weeping boy and held him until he calmed down.

I have no idea what the finger-pain thing was all about, as he never mentioned it after that. I hope I didn’t terrify him into denial. He seemed completely fine after I kissed him multiple times and apologized and flogged myself and donned my Virtual Hairshirt (see above, re: Catholic), but I know that somewhere in the Future, a therapist is profiting from my failure as a parent.

I may be overreacting a tiny little bit. But one of my worst memories from childhood was being subjected to screaming by adults who believed that their anger or upset entitled them to scream whatever they felt like screaming, as loudly as they felt like screaming it. And now, experiencing that same loss of control with my own kid… well. It does fuck with one’s head, a little bit. It does make one feel like something lower than dirt. Whenever I was screamed at, it felt like there was a hole opening up inside me, like anything happy I had experienced before was false and I was stupid to believe it, and if I looked into the hole I would fall and fall and keep falling. I know it makes no sense but it’s the best way I can describe it, and God help me if I make Henry feel like that. The last thing I ever, ever want to do is make him feel like that.

I think what he meant was DON'T GROW IT OUT.

We don’t give Henry candy, as a rule; I believe in these things in moderation but Henry DOES NOT BELIEVE IN MODERATION, so I always think, why make trouble for myself? Why give him candy and then have to listen to him beg for candy every day?

Because, that’s why! Because apparently I didn’t have enough of a headache before!

After his last haircut I granted him the post-haircut lollipop. He had one lick, and then it was all over. He couldn’t walk, so all-consuming was the lollipop experience. He stopped in his tracks and announced, “But this is too delicious.” Then he took a few more licks and stopped again. “I can eat this?” Afterward, when he told his father about the haircut, he had to whisper the Story of the Delicious Lollipop. Lest the gods hear and take away lollipops forever, I guess.

It was very sweet. It made me happy that I gave him the lollipop. And then came the next 60 days of ceaseless and ear-splitting demands for lollipops.

I tried to convince him that lollipops were magical foodstuffs created only after one’s hair has been successfully shorn, but he didn’t buy it.

After MY last haircut I bought him one, knowing he’d demand it upon my return, and I do enjoy occasionally giving him what his little heart desires. Except this lollipop was not the child-sized version the savvy barber doles out; no, it was a regular-sized one, and as such he never managed to finish it. He took these soft little licks, and after a few hours of watching him do nothing but lick lick lick lick I was shouting such unwittingly filthy phrases as, “Don’t just dab it with your tongue, SUCK IT.” Really! How inappropriate! Periodically he set it down while he ran off to kiss the dog’s lips or something and I would find a fuzz-covered lollipop oozing red dye #6 on my rug. Then I rinsed it for several minutes and sucked it (!) myself in the hopes that I could get the damn thing to go away. But it wouldn’t go away. And then Henry returned to his carpet-pop to find it not there! And then some screaming! Where is his LOLLIPOP! GIVE IT!

After I found it on the rug for the sixth time I threw it out. I tried to convince him that he had finished it. Of course he didn’t believe me. Oh, why did I make him so smart? Why did I take those prenatal vitamins?

He keeps demanding them. He will never forget. Just yesterday, as I pushed Henry home from the playground, the child announced, “I feel like something to lick. Get me a lollipop.”

Me: We only have lollipops after haircuts, remember?

H: Then go get a haircut. And bring me a lollipop.

M: Nope. No haircuts today.

H: Don’t say those words! I don’t like those words!

M: I know. You wish you could have a lollipop.

H: Don’t say that either. I need something to lick. I need it!

M: Wow.

H: GET A HAIRCUT!

p.s.: For various reasons I am closing comments for a while. I will explain later.

Because kids love furniture, and parents love putting them on it.

Attention!

I have contributed to the blog for Design Public, a company that sells hip furniture that mostly I can't afford. But I still like to look at the furniture, and drool all over the keyboard and short out my computer.

I was given the task of writing about babies and design, and here's what I came up with. Other bloggers, including someone named Mrs. Kennedy, will be offering up their thoughts in the coming days.

BlogHer, BlogMe

Last Friday, I was on a JetBlue flight, surrounded by the Greenwich, Connecticut Boys’ Water Polo team who are headed to the Junior Olympics in San Jose. This was announced by the pilot, whose voice I was too busy scrutinizing for slurring or tipsy joie de vivre to appreciate what I was in for: five hours of good-natured, sun-bleached young boys wearing flip-flops and torn jean shorts and stepping over my lap every two minutes. It was physically impossible for these kids to sit still. I could hear them straining against their seat belts during takeoff. They were sweet, but I quickly had had enough of being knocked to one side while I attempted to sleep. And sometime during the flight, my lower back began to protest sitting for so long. I was in agony. I was sweating and trying to knead my lower back with my knuckles, while I considered asking one of these boys for a massage. Could you imagine? “Excuse me, young man—perhaps you wouldn’t mind palpating my lumbar region?” As I begin to unbutton my shirt. And one of their many guardians pushes me down to the aisle and locks me in a half-nelson.

I am too old to drink that much tequila.

I'm back from BlogHer, and I want to post all about how I slept with Melissa, among other things, but I'm too tired. And weak. And my head hurts too much. It's been almost 48 hours since I had a drink and I still want to die.

Meanwhile, here are my pictures..