Accommodatingly

It’s our last day in Connecticut for a bit, and we are sad to leave but it is time to go home, as the events of the past hour have reminded us…

(1) Nathan has recently developed real circadian rhythms: he’d like to start the multi-stage going-to-bed process between about 8:30 and 9:30pm Eastern (we expect that this will become 8:30 to 9:30 Central in about a week, and move slowly in one or another direction as the weeks and months go by). If he’s not on his way to bed by 9pm or 9:30pm, he expresses his displeasure with increasing force.

(2) Nathan now eats lots of things– avocado, green beans, oatmeal, yams. They go in at one end, and they come out the other. This will not be news to readers who are parents themselves, but the speed and volume with which the process takes place can surprise us.

Tonight we celebrated Chris’ graduation with an enormous family restaurant dinner meant to start at 6:30pm. Due to car trouble, the dinner ended up beginning at 7pm, which meant that the entrees began to arrive around 8:30, perilously close to Nathan Collapse Time. He fussed, and then he fussed, and then he fussed some more, and then he spit up. Time to go home, we thought– for reason (1).

In fact, it was (2). It was, so to speak, a number (2). Or maybe a (2 x 4). We are now washing the clothes, and the car seat. Baby diapers are simply not made to handle the mass and the velocity of material which comes out of the back of a big baby who has just started with solid food. Anyone who invented and marketed a diaper that began at the waist in the front, but extended almost all the way up to the shoulderblades on the back, would meet with our immediate praise.

As of last night I’ve finished up a taxing, wonderful, variegated, friend-filled and small-scale-action-packed week of reading and promoting Parallel Play in Boston and New York. My pleasure in seeing The City again is equaled only by my sense of how hard it would be to live our lives here with a baby– though people do it!– and by my anxiety at staying away from Jessie and Nathan for this long. I understand that he eats avocados now. I hope I can see him eat one (well, not a whole one) tonight.

Recent urban discoveries: the McSweeney’s store in Brooklyn is set up as a Superhero Supply Store, with products like grappling hooks, invisibility spray, and canned darkness. (Somebody saw Mystery Men. Besides us, I mean.) Reading with Joanna, and/or with Mike Scharf, and/or with Dan, means much more fun than reading alone. Cate Marvin is a dynamic and tireless teacher. There is at least one brilliant, brilliant breakfast place on 57th St, though it’s designed for expense-account types. There is a superb and surprisingly affordable Indonesian-and-Vietnamese place on– is it West 4th?– called Cafe ASEAN, and you,too, should eat there. West Chelsea looks great in a rainstorm– all those leaves! West Midtown, the part with the skyscrapers and businessfolks, looks wonderful in sunlight, but only in sunlight– all those shiny planar surfaces! it’s like the buildings have mirrorshades.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is very worth reading, even if the science-fiction parts are (too) close to Crowley’s Engine Summer (one of my favorite books) and the non-sf parts are a bit too close to Nabokov. Reading WNBA-connected poems to an audience with several WNBA fans is waaaay more gratifying than reading WNBA-connected poems to an audience with only one fan who gets the jokes. Coliseum Books has reopened on 42nd St between 5th and 6th Ave and folks should go shop there. The new Chicago Review has cool things in it. And finally: there’s no place like New York, but there’s also no place like home.

Well, virtual exile, anyway. I picked up a wireless router for my mom’s house and set it up today. I’m so lousy at remembering passwords that I really need to use my own computer with all its stored account info to log on and do things like post.

Nathan had three meals of rice cereal today. This did not, however, keep him from wanting to nurse every hour or so. The only thing that seemed to distract him was the trip to Target this afternoon. The familiar bullseye must have been soothing.

The massive road trip has begun! We’re watching NBA playoffs—Cleveland vs Washington in OT—in a hotel room in Madison. Nathan is sleeping in the middle of one of the beds, not in his Close and Secure Sleeper, which, it turns out, is now too small for him, but rather just on a waterproof pad so that any accidental leakage won’t ruin the hotel’s sheets. We’ll probably do a lot of co-sleeping on this trip. The thing that kind of bugs me about the now-too-small sleeping device is that we never actually used it. I bought it specifically for this trip, and he’s too long to use it now. It will take up precious space in the cargo area of the Forester and for nothing. If I pass a children’s consignment shop, I may just stop in and see if I can get rid of the damned thing. He is also too large for the bassinet attachment in the Pack ‘N Play.

Nathan did well in the car today. He slept all the way to Osseo, waking up while we ate lunch at the Norske Nook. I ended up going out to the car to breastfeed while Steve finished lunch (both for privacy and because it’s awkward to breastfeed in a restaurant booth). The stretch between Osseo and Madison went pretty well, too. He only required one stop to eat and get a diaper change.

Tomorrow we’ll breakfast at the farmer’s market, look for a Bucky Badger doll, and hit the road for West Lafayette, IN. It’s weird that we won’t be back in our house for almost a month, but I trust that the kitties are in good hands with Steve’s reliable former student.

Three quickies– (1) Sign the net neutrality petition. (2) Read the new National Book Critics Circle blog. (3) If we know you and might want to see you and you live in New York. Boston or Connecticut… and we haven’t been in touch.. get in touch.

Steve is reading on the East Coast. A lot:

Thursday May 11 in Cambridge Mass., at the Harvard Advocate, 21 South St, 7pm, with Dan Chiasson.

Monday May 15 at the College of Staten Island, 2800 Victory Blvd, at 2:30pm.

Wednesday May 17 at the Poetry Project, St Mark’s Church in the Bowery, 131 E 10th St in Manhattan, 8pm, with Michael Scharf.

Thursday May 18 at the Brooklyn Park Slope Barnes & Noble, 267 7th Ave, 7pm, with Tom Sleigh and Joanna Fuhrman.

Thursday May 25 at the UConn Co-op in Storrs, Conn., 81 Fairfield Rd., at 7pm. Go Huskies! Go Sun! Go Wallace Stevens!

Sunday June 25 at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, at 5pm.

And for those of you who live in Minnesota, we’ll be doing some fun events over the summer– with luck, two of them will involve the Lynx.

Entirely unrelated but cool things which deserve to be linked somewhere around here: (1) Jenny Boully has a cool blog. (2) Paul Hoover has a cool blog. (3) From Germany, for some reason, an extremely useful bibliography of works about sex and gender.

See you soon?

hmm-what is this?

Originally uploaded by Jessie and Steve.

Nathan just had his 4 month checkup yesterday (a little early since we’re leaving town Friday), and Dr. S gave us the go-ahead for solid foods (again, a little early, but he’s in the 95th percentile for height and weight). This is very exciting for me, as there are days when I feel like I am breastfeeding him constantly, and it will be messy but, I hope, fun to introduce him to grownup food.

As to the height and weight, he’s 15lbs, 14 oz. and 25 3/4 inches. That’s awfully large for his age. He’s also quite healthy, if a little sore from his vaccinations yesterday.