✄

Do you think Ambien transmits through breastmilk? I’m joking. But really. The day after I dropped the line ‘my baby sleeps through the night, waking only to eat’, Julian decided to drop-kick my life in the face by not sleeping through the night at all and instead, staying awake for hours on end screaming, wailing, and gnashing his teeth. Not really the latter, but the phrase kind of flows when you’ve been Sunday Schooling.

I think that parents play loose and easy with the phrase ’sleep through the night’. Sure, some parents do actually have little bundles of joy who very literally sleep through the night, but since reading one or two things, I’ve learned that ‘through the night’ generally means 12am-5am and not overnight. Parents seem eager to claim their kids sleep through the night and I can’t tell why. Maybe because they think it’s a reflection on them (‘That’s right, I’m polishing my fingernails. I have both the time and coordination to do so because I got my kid to sleep through the night’). Or maybe it’s an evolutionary scam to fool non-parents into thinking parenthood isn’t as sleep-deprived as they hear, so as to populate the planet and sucker non-parents into joining the ranks of catatonic zombies veiling themselves in caffeine in order to pass for people. Actually, scratch that. If you’re nursing, caffeine is usually out of the window so you can just stop at zombies. Anyway, even I started spewing the ‘baby slept through the night’ rubbish. Maybe parents like to state this because they believe in positive energies and if they say something is so, it might become so. Either way. My jump on the all-nighter bandwagon was premature and in truth I landed face first in some sort of quagmire that frankly, I might stay in because I’m too tired to remember what Bear Grylls said about climbing out of quagmires.

It’s like Julian suddenly realised that his ramblin’ days are over and he’s ticked. No more international moves, cross-state travails, or cross-country trips means his cot is for real and not a two week napping-novelty like every other sleeping arena in his life so far. Apparently the homebird life doesn’t suit him and he’s so mad that he has to stay up all night telling me about it because there just aren’t enough hours in the day. He’s gone from sleeping 8pm-7am waking only to eat, to sleeping 8pm-11pm and then staying awake until 6am when he takes a one hour victory nap (magic, it coincides with when I have to get up and do stuff).

So what do I do. It’s not like I can schedule a progress review with the little guy, threaten him with a pay cut if he doesn’t start pulling his weight because there’s no ‘I’ in ‘Team’. Getting no sleep isn’t working. For one, Andy can’t understand my text messages when I text this tired (’see he settles, he’ll awakes cycle!’, ‘let’s get your school purples!’). I have trouble trusting my instincts unless I’ve looked at the tried and tested options first, so I turned to the world wide web to confirm that the West has managed to over-complicate everything baby-related from their barfing patterns to their sleep schedules: there are parent-led schedules, baby-led schedules, combination schedules, cry-it-out methods, no-cry methods, let-your-baby-cry-until-social-services-are-called methods. It’s nuts. I had to stop reading stuff on the internet when I hit the blogs and comments saying ‘What’s The Big Deal? Just Put Your Baby Down and Walk Away, They Always Fall Asleep’ and started feeling vaguely violent. Even more so when people claimed they ‘forced’ their newborn onto a schedule without any tears. How exactly do you force a baby onto a schedule without tears. Baby wants to eat at 3am, you want baby to eat at 6am and you’re going to solve that conflict quickly and without tears or a peace treaty how?

Oh. Three days later (I just found this post in a drafts box and I only half remember composing it. Fatigue, what is it good for?) and I think I found the solution of Julian’s sleep issues. Caffeinated soda. What? Yes. I’m not a soda person but I got excited about Root Beer since coming back to the states. The past few nights we’d eaten dinner later than usual and I’d cracked open some Barq’s with the meal and turns out Barq’s is caffeinated. And delicious. What was I saying? Oh yeah. Caffeinated. And like I said earlier, maternal caffeine consumption before feeding a baby makes for zombies. So maybe that’s the cause of the no sleeping issue for Julian. I’ve quit the rooty good stuff so we’ll see. On topic though, I just saw an ad on a local bus stop for a 12oz can of diet coke. The ad called it a ‘no-cal fashion accessory’. It’s pretty gross that even Coke have tapped onto the fact that girls who think drinking diet coke will make them skinny consume multiple cans for breakfast (so why not put them all in a handy 12oz). Anyway. I need to go because Julian’s taken to removing his pacifier from is mouth, staring at the fist holding it, and then crying because he can’t get it back in.

Andy and I got a $128.00 bill for eleven days of electricity use last month. We we panicked but we realised that given the Philadelphia heat wave, we’d had the A/C on most days and that must have been the culprit. We made sure our fridge and freezer were set to the highest temperatures that they could still function at. We turned everything off when we weren’t using it. Once we came home and started melting. I asked: “Is the air on?” and Andy replied: “It’s set for 80 degrees; that’s a pretty affordable temperature.” Energy saving to the max. I anticipated our electric bill for the last 24 days with less trepidation than I had the first. I figured that for twenty four days of conscientious use, it couldn’t be too high. I just received the electricity bill:

$291.66 for a 24 day period.

Seems a little high for a mini-house, no? I called the electric company and told them my bill seemed astronomical. The only advice they could offer me was to “make sure my swimming pool pump was turned off when not in use”. Thanks. Since the $300 electric bill broke my heart, I’m obviously someone who can afford a swimming pool. If you know where to find Smash Brother’s Pikachu, let me know. I need free electricity and fast. Or else Julian will end up with bush-baby sized eyes from growing up in a black hole.

I don’t usually have regrets. That’s not to say I don’t have a catalogue of misdeeds, I just don’t usually regret anything because I know I probably made the decision that seemed best at the time and who can regret doing that. I experienced some regret today and I didn’t like it. First time in a while I’ve wanted to start a conversation with ‘If only’. Obviously, to have known I should have done things differently would have required me to time travel into the future, get retrospective, then go back in time again and make different decisions. Complicated, but I still wish I’d done it. I am aware that my 20/15 laser-vision doesn’t apply to hindsight but I wish it did. I’m considering inventing HindSight Lasik. Don’t steal my idea, okay.

Fashion is so much more forward in the UK blah blah blah, oh hey Topshop. What’s that? A Turban, you say? And you do student discounts? Sold, to the loony with the crystal ball.

You seen this?

Not to bag on the cute mother-son thing those two have going on but blahhhhhh. Mothers really need Kelloggs to leave space on a sack-lunch treat because they don’t know how to write notes? And does a twelve year old really want a note from his mum splayed over his lunch? Any kid attending my school with ‘I Love You, Son’ on his Rice Krispie Treat would have gotten a beat down for being a bleeper and for eating something with such a cute name. Maybe I totally have the wrong end of the stick here. Maybe American kids in the 21st century don’t sit around saying things like ‘My Dads Stronger Than Your Dad’, rather ‘My Mom Loves Me More Than Your Mom Loves You’. Maybe I’m just uncomfortable with love-tokens taking the form of sticky puffed rice, but I’d rather have dads ripping up phone books in school yards than have kids subconsciously thinking that Kelloggs sponsors Their Mom’s Love (thus when they get to college and get dumped for the first time, become bulimic, and seek comfort food, they’ll start buying Rice Krispie treats in bulk – single-handedly keeping Kelloggs in the black). I’m on to you, Kellogg’s.

I retrieved an English Muffin from it’s packaging this morning in order to have a snack and I noticed that packaging said ‘NO HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP’ as if, relative to other brands, this muffin manufacturer was doing me a favour. That annoyed me, America.

When I was pregnant, I’d look at babycenter.com on a weekly basis because it gave me an idea of what Julian was doing in there. I continued to look at it every fortnight or so after Julian was born because it continued telling me things about my developing human. I’ve been feeling bad lately because since being born, Julian’s been carted down to London, over to Pittsburgh, over to Philadelphia twice, flown to Utah, driven back to Philadelphia etc etc. He’s had little routine and no toys and little floor time because we couldn’t commit to spending $ on a rug to cover our very hard floors. I realised while in Utah that Julian was bored sometimes. He liked toys, so I started trying to think of what three month old babies were entertained by. Rattles? Mobiles? Sudoku? I went to babycenter.com the other day and clicked on something that said ‘Games to Play with Three Month Olds’. It took me to a new page with this picture and an opening sentence telling me to put a phone to Julian’s ear and pretend we were on the phone to each other.

I can’t decide whether that baby is crazy from gossip, or from having cell-phone signals beaming through it’s brain. Either way I’m not smashing a cell phone into Julian’s face no matter how much I’m dying to ask him if he could recommend a good hairdresser/catch up on the latest.

I witnessed a giganta-flock of cool kids on fixed gears (some sporting boomboxes – dead serious) swarming Center City the other night. A little baffling since Center City is already bike-friendly. Irony’s in right now though I guess.

It’s easy to forget I’m in South Philly when I’m inside my house. It’s not as if there are gangsters dealing crack out of my bathroom or anything. This morning, however, I got on Netflix to add a documentary to the queue and noticed this:

Netflix thinks I’d give Krush Groove 3.5 stars though, so maybe I’ll give it a shot. Might give me something bonding to talk over with the neighbors.

The other day on the news, the anchor started his report by saying ‘THE LAST TIME WE SAW FLOODING LIKE THIS WAS NEVER’. I was duly impressed.