Summer is upon us

I have sun tea in my fridge. And homemade rosemary lemonade.

I can’t believe I ever said that I never wanted children.

This is what Saturday feels like

The sun comes out and suddenly, this town is full. Packed to the edge of the street corners with spaghetti-strapped, sun-screened bodies. No day shows this off quite as boldly as Saturday, when the Farmer’s Market is in full swing, boasting sights and sounds and scents so overwhelming that a girl could just sit on a bench all morning and take in the show with all five senses.

While I recovered from Lydia’s birth, camped out in a glider with infant and secondhand magazines, I looked forward to a Saturday like this one: setting out in the summer sun with Lydia in the carrier – snuggled up against Mitch’s chest, sleeping – all of us hurtling forward toward downtown just to browse and accidentally bump into folks we know.

These are the moments that make me feel like we really are a family. Removed from the context of our home and submerged in the loud, outside world, I see us as we must briefly appear in the eyes of strangers: new parents, sunburned ourselves and fretting over our daughter’s gentle skin.

Reunion = success!

After I kicked my high heels into the back of my closet and tumbled into bed, baby in my arms – after Mitch hung up his dress shirt and brushed his teeth and kissed me goodnight – it occurred to me that this, somehow, felt so adult. Dropping the baby off with the grandparents, dressing up, going to a reunion. At a casino.

Then coming home early, because we all need our precious rest.

That evening, we clinked glasses with people we hadn’t seen in all ten of those years, with folks whose blogs we followed, whose kids we knew, whose lives we’d dropped clean out of. The playing field felt suddenly level, and it hardly mattered what elaborate ties had been made or broken or sordidly tangled over the course of those four years – after ten, they were all sorted out.

There were people I’d looked forward to seeing that I hardly spoke to, because I stumbled into conversations with people I’d forgotten about, people I hadn’t expected to see at all, and those conversations were engrossing enough to eat up entire hours.

Three more years and it will be my turn. Will that make us doubly grown-up?

In which she returns to her poor, neglected kitchen

O, how well I remember this room! The sink, a concave foundation for towers of dirty dishes, each one boasting the remnants of past meals! Once these dishes were delicious, homemade things, but these days it’s not unlikely to find knives crusted with frozen pizza sauce or seven bowls with corresponding spoons bearing evidence of granola – eaten for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Other people’s dishes have found their way into this sink, having been emptied of their tasty gifts and left at the edge of the counter, waiting mournfully to be cleaned and returned to the kindly lands from whence they came.

The oven, recently replaced, has been left to collect crumbs from cheese sandwiches, assembled in a hurry on the stovetop after the counter became cluttered beyond use. We have reheated some things in this oven, and I have made batches of granola every so often, if only to keep myself dimly familiar with this kitchen and what it does. For the most part, though, this oven remains cold, unused.

Alas!

This week, I couldn’t take it anymore. There are still stacks of dishes in the sink, but now they bear the battle scars of a “zesty” edamame salad, Orangette’s Busy Day Cake, topped with Artisan Sweets’ Balsalmic Strawberries and, due to my inability to follow a recipe combined with the bare bones state of our cupboards, a dish I like to call “lemony tuna casserole with elements of potato ham bake,” though one couldn’t help noticing that neither lemon, tuna, potato nor ham made an actual appearance in the dish.

Delicious.

Has it been ten years already?

Of course, it’s been ten years. If it had been nine years, or eleven, we wouldn’t have received an invitation by mail for Mitch’s ten-year high school reunion, right? But we did, so one can only assume that ten years has actually passed since Mitch graduated, that year of commando missions and swimming at the lake by night and band practice in the garage and drama.

Ah, the drama.

Fortunately, Mitch and I went to the same high school (his senior year was my freshman), so I won’t be at a loss for folks to socialize with. A few classmates dropped by the other night for beer and burritos, and of course the yearbook was unearthed and the pages, sodden with signatures, were turned as we looked for forgotten names and remembered faces and told the same worn stories again and again. This was, we joked, the “reunion pre-game show.” We were doing our homework.

And so, tomorrow night we will take off for our first sans-baby evening since that fateful Mothers’ Day, I in my high-heeled shoes and Mitch in his slacks and best tie. We will eat dinner, drink cocktails, do adult things! Remember those? Things that don’t involve spit up or diapers or sweet baby smiles or cooing or snuggling or…

I am understandably apprehensive about this. Excited. But apprehensive.

Tonight Mitch gave Lydia a bottle in preparation for her evening at my parents’ and she took to it vigorously, grinning at him as if it was the best thing since, well, breastmilk, that her dad was feeding her. Like, the two best things in the world! At the same time! Also, she laughed. She smiled at him and gave him the sweetest chuckle, bestowing upon him the first of what I hope will be many chuckles.

I was too smitten to bother with jealousy.

So THIS is why people bought us so many onesies

Recently, our daughter discovered the classic infant art of spitting up.

Yes, I know, those of you who have children are laughing, shuddering and nodding your heads knowingly while those of you who don’t are wondering why on earth I’m even posting about this.

I need the therapy. That’s why.

As Lydia’s most popular canvases, both Mitch and I are finding this a difficult art form to endorse. For the most part, she adorns us with wee dollops of regurgitated lunch (or second breakfast, or elevensies, or midnightsies – really, there’s a variety of meals to choose from), with the occasional foray into larger scale projects that involve soiled clothes and sponge baths and barely withheld curses.

Nothing so far has come even close to Sunday’s masterpiece, an eruption so sudden and huge and unstoppable that Mitch actually used the words “waterfalling” and “cascading” when describing what, exactly, Lydia’s work did while it ran down my belly and puddled in my lap. The kid soaked every single article of clothing I had on, and when I say “soaked,” I am not exaggerating: I had to peel them off of my grossly damp skin as I ran for the shower. And when I say “every single article,” I mean underwear and bra included (I was not wearing socks), and just for good measure, let’s throw in the cushion of the chair I was sitting on.

The event so traumatized Mitch and I that even the daintiest burp sends us running for cover. Give us a hiccup and we’re on the alert, burp cloths at the ready, just in case.

First Father’s Day

Today was somewhat less climactic than our Mother’s Day. And, sadly, it was the baby, not Mitch, who got breakfast in bed this morning. Still, Happy Father’s Day to my favorite brand-new daddy:

[I tried to embed this video, but alas! I couldn't make it happen.

I hope you enjoy it anyway, even if you have to travel a bit.]

How Lydia became Lydia (and not Clara)

Earlier, I posted about baby names, and I gave you the chance to make predictions. Then we went and did this really unfair thing: at the very last minute, we changed our minds. Until the night before she was born (we’re talking mere hours before I went into labor), our baby was to be either Thomas or Clara, but at a suggestion from my dad we changed our minds, sort of, and Lydia was the result.

It happened like this: some time around December, after a few months spent thumbing through baby name books and obsessively checking all the top-100 lists available online, we settled on Clara, simple and sweet, and Thomas – classic but, you know, nice – and then let the subject rest for five months. Periodically, we revisited the names and decided that we still liked them. We were satisfied. The middle names changed several times and by the birth, we still hadn’t settled on a boy’s name but Louise had emerged from somewhere (it was always on the tip of my tongue, it seemed) and cozied up with Clara.

So, Clara Louise.

But then my dad called a few nights before Lydia was born and announced that he had a name for us. “Fire away,” I said, maybe rolling my eyes just a little because most of the names people had offered throughout the pregnancy had been worthy of eye-rolling. However, my dad came out with Lydia and reminded me that she was the “purveyor of purple” in the Bible.

I did not roll my eyes – Lydia was a nice name. When we got off the phone, I looked her up in Acts 16 and read the story of her conversion and thought that, Goodness, I like those verses. The way that God opened Lydia’s heart, the way she “prevailed upon” Paul and Silas to stay with her – it’s a good passage. And the name is pretty. And, hey, I like purple.

Two nights later, while we were visiting with my dad and step-mom, he brought it up again and, again, I thought about it. On the way home that night, I asked Mitch, “What about Lydia?”

By the time we reached home, we’d agreed to consider Lydia as a possibility, just in case the baby was a girl and just in case she wasn’t Clara. Lydia Louise was nice, we agreed.

The next morning I went into labor. That afternoon, our daughter was born. Mitch was the first to check her gender and the first to announce, from across the operating room, that she was a girl, to which I promptly asked, “Is she Lydia or Clara?”

“I don’t know!” He cried. So the name tag on her bassinet stayed blank until [insert blurry increment of time here] later, when both she and Mitch arrived in the recovery room and the nurse gave our nameless little girl to me to hold. I studied her face; Mitch studied her face. “Lydia,” I said. And it was so.

Ice packs, Ibuprofen, back to bed.

For the last four weeks, while I recovered from my C-section, my doctor warned me not to carry anything “heavier than the baby.” (This is a relative measurement, of course, because Lydia is gaining roughly a pound a week: at birth, she weighed eight pounds even. Today she’s pushing twelve.)

Sure that the doctor advised this with good reason, I followed instructions dutifully until Wednesday, when I carried the baby out to the car and back in her car seat. Later that night, I woke us all up and kept us all up for hours because my back hurt in a very dramatic fashion that involved “upper abdominal pain” and “lateral flank pain” and nausea and lots of lolling about on the bathroom floor. Like I said: dramatic.

As a result, I spent the better part of yesterday lolling about in bed with lots of pillows and Ibuprofen and bottles of water, with a hungry, snuggly baby tucked in at my side, recuperating from what my nurse parents initially suspected was possibly a kidney stone. My parents were merciful enough to come up and change diapers and bring milkshakes and cuddle Lydia while I got some rest, and later, they took me to the doctor, who said, not “kidney stone” (thank God) but “muscle spasms.”

So, it’s more Ibuprofen, more rest and now: ice packs. And with that, I’m headed back to bed.