I settled a sleeping Tristan into his bouncy seat so he could continue his nap while I washed up and prepped dinner, but within five minutes he’s awake and screaming. I do my checking-in routine, which quells the screaming, but he continues to cry as I rush through 75% of my tasks, narrating and checking in.

Inky walks in, sees Tristan crying, and bites me on the leg*

Me: Good grief, cat. What gives?

Inky: Don’t “what gives” me, human. Whay aren’t you snuggling that kitten?

Me: We’ve been snuggling since 4:30, and I have to wash dishes. He’s fed and dry, and safe in his seat. He can see me and hear my voice.

Inky: Clearly he wants to be back in the nest. Jesus, are his eyes even open yet?

Me: If I spend all day in the nest, who’s gonna keep things clean around here? Who’s gonna make dinner?

Inky: I can lick dishes… wait, you bi-peds don’t eat kibble like the rest of us? Fuckers. Stomps off.

End scene.

You know, no one ever told me I’d have to scoop poop for my peanut gallery. I left her the pots and silverware.

*She’s done this several times, and I can’t tell if she’s trying to urge me to calm him down, or if she’s challenging me for his tastiest bits.

All-righty, then.

Oh hell, I have to rotate things. Stupid phone camera.

Those will have to hold you. Oh fine, here.

There’s a lot of different this time around. Tristan sleeps in general quite a bit more, but has some more colic-based lunacy in the evenings. He caught a cold from Seamus and was sick over the weekend, and for the last two days and nights appeared to be reverse-cycling. Today I worked on stopping that (and I’ll do it again tomorrow), which involved him crying while I talked to him and scrubbed the bathroom. I needed him to stop drifting off after nursing half of his usual time, which increases his chance for an upset stomach and decreases my milk supply, and I couldn’t wear him while I scrubbed the truck-stop level of filth off of the toilet. Stopping to take off my gloves, wash my hands and comfort him made the whole process take FOREVER, and I decided I was eating the rest of the chocolate chip cookies today while we went through this. So I’m willing to do the awful but necessary stuff much sooner this time around. He nursed much better during that awake period, and he’s now napping. I’m not trying to put him on a schedule, but having lots of screamy wakefulness late into the night is not sustainable for our family. 

Seamus is doing well, but I struggle to give him enough attention - and enough positive attention at that. He still wants to push buttons constantly, and it usually takes a time-out to get him to stop. I’m also wondering exactly how much of our efforts to raise him with consistent expectations and consequences was undermined by preschool. I know that play-based preschool was to his benefit, but there have been set-backs in his knowledge set, his interest in learning, and a few other things, and I don’t know if they would have cropped up if we had chosen differently. On the other hand he has made wonderful friends (and now I know a lot of boy-moms, which makes a world of difference) and engages in imaginary play. We’ll see what we regain in the next year, and what new things develop.

Time to buckle down on the dishes, Tristan and I need a walk this afternoon.

“So anyway, I had a baby last week.” Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

On March 31st, I did some chores, went to a kid’s birthday party at Chabot Space and Science Center, and picked my mother-in-law up at the airport. My mucus plug had fallen out the day before, and I was feeling pretty good after a few weeks of feeling increasingly pre-menstrual. I took these things as good signs. Also good signs were contractions that were a better organized than what I usually had, plus some fluid leakage. We went through the day with me writing down my contractions in a little notebook. After we got back from the airport and I gave Seamus a bath (the poor kiddo got carsick from cake and the winding road from the museum to OAK), I called Kaiser. The Labor and Delivery nurse said hey, come on down and we’ll check you out. We had dinner and packed Seamus up to stay the night at Grandma’s hotel, then packed ourselves up just in case they admitted me. We left at ten and got to the L&D desk  in San Francisco at eleven. 

They got me into a room and started checking my fluid to make sure it was amniotic and not an uptick in leukorrhea or anything boring like that. I knew I was a fingertip dilated as of my prenatal on Wednesday, but alas, no further progress had been made, and my contractions were petering out from seven minutes apart to ten, plus they were getting weaker. But my water had apparently broken - it was most likely a small break, high up. Unfortunately, it had likely broken nineteen hours before, which was putting me awfully close to that twenty-four hour limit that OBs seem to like for delivering after the sac breaks. So we decided to start a low dose of pitocin to ramp up my contractions (“right now you’re too comfortable, we want them to make you uncomfortable”) and get T/M moving. They started the drip around 1:00 AM, and I napped till 4:30 when my water REALLY broke. I labored walking and on a yoga ball for about an hour while our wonderful L&D nurse L, helped Patrick brace me and encourage me. T/M had been head-butting my pubic bone for at least a month, and the nerves around it lit up with every contraction. The muscle pain is a distant memory now, but the memory of pain around my pubic bone lingers. I asked for a light epidural to help blunt that, Patrick called our friend Lo who had offered to be our doula, and the anesthesiologist came in. My epidural went in at 5:30 AM, Lo arrived at 5:40 AM. And by 6:30 I had gon from 3cm dilated, no effacement, -3 station to 10cm, fully effaced, +1 station and ready to push. I started pushing around seven (my legs had fallen asleep, d’oh), and by 7:12 AM we had a little boy on my chest, getting dried off.

Meet Tristan:

Tristan at a few hours old. Photo by Lorraine Mulvihill.He was 20 inches long and 7lbs, 14oz. Smaller than Seamus, which means I had to do some emergency shopping for 0-3 sizes, of which I had three outfits. I now have six, and he’s outgrowing them fast. He weighed 9lbs, 2oz at his last weigh-in, and measure 21.25 inches, which makes me think they didn’t get a good measurement after his birth, because who grows over an inch in two weeks? He had a tied tongue that we decided to clip, and now he’s nursing like a champ. I left the hospital 12 hours after delivery to sleep in my own bed, and am itching to get cleared to exercise.

Seamus is very sweet and gentle with Tristan, mixed with a good chunk of acting out toward Patrick and I, which is to be expected, but does make for rough nights. It’ll get better. We’re trying to give him a lot of good experiences right now in the form of adventures and playdates and classes. He graduates from preschool next month, so the summer will be all about being in the world with Mama and Tristan, with some adventures on his own (science camp! whoo!) before he starts Kindergarten. But for the most part we’re doing pretty well. Tired, but well.

Yeah, I get my haircut with the guys.

He wakes up every morning and asks if the baby’s here yet. Not yet, kiddo, not yet. I do wonder if one day he’ll wake up after a long night of wake-ups and ask if the baby’s left yet. Not yet kiddo (yawn), not yet.

As for the rest of us…well, it’s a big cast. Have fun.

One of the best-selling children’s books of all time is Laura Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. The story is basically a set formula. If you give that mouse a cookie (Who gives a mouse a cookie? You know what you should give mice? GLUE TRAPS.), he’ll do X, which make him do Y, which will cause him to do Z, which will make him want a cookie all over again. Very cute.

But then Numeroff wrote a shitload more books, all of them deploying this exact same formula. There’s If You Give a Cat a Cupcake, If You Give a Dog a Donut, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, and even—I shit you not—If You Give a Moose a Muffin. You think I can’t see what you’re doing, Numeroff? You think I can’t see the creative rut you’re in? Maurice Sendak was right to trash you. THE ANIMAL ALWAYS ENDS UP EATING TREATS.

Via Bluemilk.

• I finished unpacking the kitchen and rearranged our pantry spaces and it is MUCH BETTER. Easier for me to maintain, easier for me to cook out of. T/M started dropping that night, so I’ll be doing much nesting in a peasant squat. I’m feeling the time crunch quite acutely, but damned if I could have gotten it done as sick as I was.
• I realized we didn’t have time to get the bedrooms painted like I hoped, so I started putting stuff up in Seamus’ room. Between the stuff hanging from the ceiling and the Charley Harper posters, it’s starting to resemble the “Put a Bird on It!” sketch from Portlandia. But he loves it. We still need a bigger dresser to stick in the closet that the kids can share, and to move the baby furniture into the spaces I claimed for T/M when we first moved in, and hopefully we can do all of that this weekend.
• Seamus apparently got both a chunk of the Norton social engineering genes and the scattershot family luck, and was accepted into the local charter school. Given that we managed to buy a house in a good public school zone and he got into our preferred Montessori option, he has had more luck getting into a choice of kindergartens than I did getting into colleges. We’re sticking with Montessori Option #1, as it still feels like the best fit.
• Perhaps driven by bribes (the only bribes he gets are marshmallows for making an effort during his home lessons), Seamus FINALLY put in a good effort at his reading lesson yesterday and we were done in record time. Actually, the whole day was kind of like that. He worked in one of his math workbooks, he walked with me to the barbershop and then the coffeeshop and a baby gear store on the way home. He was polite to every single adult he encountered, and when we needed to grab a couple of items for dinner, he was helpful and stuck to our bargain that if he wanted a particular snack food, he could pay for it himself from his allowance. We suggested this as a way to let him explore the whole spending money thing, to curb the whining for things that occurs in stores, and to let him explore the whole arena of random snack foods for kids without feeling like we capitulated to his demands and are now stuck with 3-7 servings of something he won’t eat. And I think there are some good lessons for all of us in the exercise regarding budgets and marketing and nutrition. Based on how it goes, I plan to use it in other retail environments.
  Anyway, yesterday was like a sneak peek into watching him figure out how to manuver in the outside world, and it was a very, very hopeful thing.
• My sister and two friends threw us a shower last weekend, which was really sweet. It was definitely good to see people (and after nine weeks of coughing and involuntary peeing into pads, it was good to be seen), and despite our not really needing much, people were creative and generous. 
• We’ve decided to let Inky outside for a few hours everyday. Since we lack cat doors, I let her out and then call her home a few hours later. She doesn’t like the lack of agency, but getting outside makes her more affectionate with the rest of us, and definitely more relaxed. She has also begun roaming less and defining a little fiefdom for herself, which makes us more comfortable with letting her out. Aggie shows no interest yet, so I’m happy to wait and hope we can keep her contained in the backyard when the time comes.
• I have discovered that I do not want to talk about politics during this election cycle. I’m know what matters to me and I do my best to do my research and vote that way. I assume you do too. The rest is noise, and I find it ugly and vicious. You wanna engage in the culture wars, fine. Not in my house please. (Brought to you by AFDC, WIC, SNAP, SFUSD, CalGrants, PellGrants, and Federally Subsidized Stafford Loans. Supported by Medi-Cal, Planned Parenthood, and Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. Just so we’re clear.)
• Operation WASH ALL THE THINGS! Is going well. Every gift and hand-me-down in the house is clean, and Inky is currently napping on a stack of pocket diapers. See above re: dresser hunt 2012.

Off to clean bathroom, keep sewing, and perhaps explore the potential of DIY pizza for dinner. Or not.

1. It is entirely possible for your runty stray cat to eat enough to almost double in size and outgrow the shared catbox.
2. Newly giant cat may respond to her discomfort with said box with multi-day pissing spree.
3. Said spree may take place entirely on your bed.
4. You may blame the wrong cat until you catch giant cat red-pawed on your bed, making her own little toxic lake. Attempts to punish cat may involve wrapping her in puddled bedding while saying “no!” repeatedly. Pee will splash all over you.
5. Twice-daily scooping did not stop the peeing (see #4), and tonight you may find a large wet pile of poop just outside the box. Said poop will smear all over box exterior, scooping tools, and stupid expensive litter mat while you try to clean it up.
6. Post clean-up, you have tossed three rags, your litter-scooping gloves, and the mat into the trash, scooped the mostly empty box, and driven to PetCo. 
7. The biggest catbox sold at PetCo is called the “Mega-size”, and is bigger that the car you rented to drive around Maui back in 2000. Remember that trip, with the SCUBA diving and the unfortunate sunburns gotten at the nude beach and reading Ben Franklin’s autobiography while drinking rum? And that guy you really, really liked?
   
   You need to get out more.
   
   You buy the mega box and a 17-pound bag of litter, and new scooping tools.
8. You come home and toss the old box and the tools because if you think you’re washing and recycling any of that while you’re 36 weeks pregnant, you’re out of your goddamn tree. You set up your new stupid expensive litter mat. You’ll find that the new box is too big to face away from the bathroom sink like the old one did. You will add 15 pounds of litter to get three inches of coverage. You put away the litter and new tools and wash your hands for the ninth time in 45 minutes.
9. You add the tags you bought and engraved at PetCo to the cats’ collars, in case you decide tomorrow morning that all the house quadripeds can go potty OUTSIDE.