Opposite of the Beverly Hillbillies

It occurred to me today that our family is the OPPOSITE of the Beverly Hillbillies. The premise of that show is that "Pa" has found a gusher of oil on his remote Appalachian land, becomes a millionaire, and suddenly, "Californee is the place ya oughta be, so they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly... Hills that is... Swimming pools, movie stars..."

Well, I bet Jed was pretty pissed once he noticed his outrageous TAX BILL in California, whereby he could have kept at least 10% of that money had he stayed in "Hillbilly" country.

Our family has made some money, and so now we're running like the dickens straight into the arms of... Hillbilly country! We can go back there and buy Jed's old estate for a pittance compared to California prices, spruce it up, and raise our daughter among polite hillbilly people.

Next week we visit Tennessee to look at houses together. Pass the moonshine.

Judge not, lest ye be judged

If you look closely at this picture, you can see that Britney Spears' son, Sean, is lurching forward in his carseat, trying to sleep.

When most people see this (non-moms, most likely), they think: "HORRORS!" The curlers in Britney's hair do nothing to add to the non-horror-ness of the photo, and it seems cruel with his little body all hunched over like that.

But Babycakes has TOTALLY done that in a carseat. It is not IDEAL, and it's best when she naps in her crib, for certain, but sometimes they're in a carseat that's a little too upright, a baby will just kind of lean over for a nap.

YES, the previous "driving with the baby on her lap" thing was pretty dumb, but in general, I have to give some surprising props out to Britney for spending time with her child, when she can afford not to. And there is no mom out there that would seriously judge her for most of her mothering "transgressions," because we have all been there ourselves.

I have to keep this in mind when I have big judgy thoughts about other moms. When I see a four-year-old with a pacifier, or a big fat kid riding in a stroller, or some mom disciplining her child in a notable manner... Judge not, lest ye be judged.

If the paparazzi followed ME around, I would be in big trouble. For example, last week, to my utmost horror, Babycakes flew off of the changing table. She hiked up her leg and pushed down suddenly, just at the moment I was leaning down to get some pants from her drawer, and she launched herself right off the top of her changing table, landing two feet away and four feet down, unscathed. Suffice to say that we're changing diapers on the floor from this moment on, but I felt like the world's shittiest mother at that moment.

Hub-D's quote, when I confessed the situation to him, was, "How would you have felt if she'd become a quadriplegic?"...uh... bad?

Plus I've fed her all manner of foods. The paparazzi would have a field day filming me feeding her champagne, Coke, cake, french fries, not to mention the spicy vegetable samosa I fed her when she was FOUR months old.

And while we're on the subject, I am not good at dressing my child, so the outfits they would capture -- the floods and the stripes and the general DORKINESS of her clothing -- would be enough for a warrant from child protective services, I'm sure.

So I'm trying to be less judgy, and I think that people should give Britney Spears a BREAK because she seems to be working as hard as she can to be a good mom, and probably outscores the majority of celebrity moms in her attentiveness to her son.

And I bet HE never flew off his changing table.

Babies need dogs

Because our life is not complicated enough, with an eight-month-old baby and a big interstate move and a three-legged tabby and twin cats hauling a possum carcass up to the porch for my consideration, we're thinking of getting a dog.

Babycakes LOVES dogs, just really loves them with unabashed glee. It was her first "sentence" -- "Dog! I see, I see!"

She jumps around in the backpack carrier like a maniac whenever a dog comes into sight, and has taken to smooshing her face into the cats' fur. Otto finally had enough of her pretending that he was a dog and lightly bit her head a few days ago.

So after the head-biting incident, I opened up Petfinder.org and started searching for a dog. I could see Babycakes' position: she wants to snuggle on a furry dog. And I could see Otto's position: he doesn't want an abnormally large baby head jamming into his tender gut.

The best thing for everyone concerned is to acquire a dog with all due haste.

Whereas my daughter acts just like my dad

Who knows what traits will develop in Babycakes as she grows up, but right now she acts just like my dad.

This is most noticeable in two ways:

(1) Her propensity to go right up to strangers and insinuate herself in their lives. Both she and my father do this, cheerfully and in a way that people don't seem to mind because both my baby AND my dad are exceedingly cute, but to those of us who are more GUARDED in nature it's kind of a shock to find one's father and/or one's daughter merrily chatting up some person of possibly criminal nature lurking around outside a 7-11.

(2) Her love of mechanical engineering. OK, I grew up with a father who, on road trips, would stop at bridges and make my sister get out of the car. Why? Because of the view below? NO. Because it was some kind of unusual suspension system or it was completely constructed of some kind of German concrete or WHAT HAVE YOU. Once I moved out of my father's house and stopped going on road trips with him, I looked back on this trait with sentimentality: how he is always finding a hinge that isn't set right or some other structurally intriguing feature.

My kid is the SAME WAY. She just wants to see how everything fits together. For example, when we were at Gymboree last week, all of the kids were climbing up on this wooden slide and "weee"-ing their way down the other side. Where was my child? Underneath the slide feeling the bolts and surveying the structural supports of the slide.

There is nothing that Babycakes likes better than, for example, meeting a bunch of seedy strangers and examining a lock.

So yeah, it's like I'm living with my dad again. But again, it's OK because, well, they're cute.

A strange game, the only way to win is not to play

My friend J. said something really wise and I didn't get it at first.

We were talking about our baby daughters and about some aspect of weaning, and she said, "That's a battle I chose not to lose."

Because she had *given up* the battle, I corrected her, "You mean, you chose not to win?"

"No, I chose not to lose."

And at the time, I didn't understand. I mean, if you walk away from a game or a battle or whatever, you have FORFEITED, and therefore you totally lose, right?

Well, I was thinking further about my rationale to move to Tennessee. Basically, it had been that if I allow Hub-D to move Babycakes and me to Tennessee and if anything goes wrong, I can blame him for all of our problems! It seemed simple, and so much better than taking all the heat for any and all of California's problems.

I was on my bed staring at the ceiling and that rationale was weighing on me. Then I realized I was completely full of shit.

I mean, if two people in a relationship are so competitive as to blame any mishap on the others' not taking their advice or doing what they said, that couple will in time become the most cautious two people on the planet! I mean, all it would take is for one of them to say, "Let's not get out of bed, just in case anything bad should happen to us," and if the other person, daringly, leaves the bed and say, stubs his/her toe, then the "cautious" person who had advised staying in bed can take full credit for having been RIGHT and basically WINNING the relationship.

I thought, I don't want to WIN this relationship. I know that sounds simple to anyone who isn't as blindingly competitive as I am, but it was a huge epiphany for me: Hub-D is on MY TEAM!!! And we're a really terrific team! So if I would stop turning everything into a stupid contest, then we could go out into the world as a united family -- us against the world, instead of infighting because I had to prove how RIGHT I was about some minute detail of our existence.

It's like what "Joshua" says. He's the computer from the hit movie "Wargames" with Matthew Broderick. In referring to the game "Tic-Tac-Toe" as well as Thermonuclear War, he says, "A strange game, the only to win is not to play."

I shared this thought with Hub-D, who said, "That's what LOSERS think!"

But he was joking, and when I reiterated my commitment to quit the competitive idiocy while we ate In-N-Out Burgers today, he happily welcomed me to the team. He'd been expecting me.

Babycakes' first post

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On the move

The likelihood of our moving seems to increase by the day. Last night Hub-D put our chances of moving at 80%.

Of course it's a gorgeous day in California, and our neighborhood is filled with huge leafy trees and singing birds and a breeze. Babycakes and I just returned from a kids' festival nearby, where she got to hang out with goats and sheep, and, just as before, when we hung out with livestock, just wanted to STARE at the DUCKS.

I mean, really, they are the most interesting. What with those beaks and all.

But anyway, we're getting serious about moving, and we're thinking about September. I'm baffled by all of the inherent logistics, and Hub-D says he dreads moving with me, because I'm already getting stressed out by the minutiae, and I told him how LUCKY he is that he has such an organized, Type-A person as myself in charge of the move.

I thought about protesting the move -- saying that Babycakes and I feel settled here, with the sunshine and our friends and the great magnet school down the street. But then I realized that every time Hub-D writes a big fat check to the state of California, or the Scruffy Man delivers drugs down our street, or we see a bunch of pre-teens dressed like hookers, or there is another giant protest of illegal immigrants jams up the street of San Francisco, Hub-D is going to consider it MY FAULT that we are here in the midst of this California mess.

So if we move to Tennessee or Washington or Texas, and something goes wrong, basically, I would be rubber and he would be glue and whatever crappy thing happens would bounce of to me and stick to him. See?

Feline parade

Our twin cats have begun to follow me on my walks around the neighborhood. At first they only went 100 yards from the house or so, but now they are increasingly emboldened by their adventures, and they scamper at my heels for quite some distance.

Today they followed me as I took Babycakes on a stroll to donate plastic grocery bags to the trail by our house -- there is a plastic receptacle where people leave bags for dog poo clean-up.

Otto trotted along behind me, fat as he is. He was determined to stay near me, in a casual "I just happen to be going your way" kind of manner.

Prince, who is unaccountably skinny as a rail, was a lot more dramatic in his procedure. He'd let me get a big head start, and then he'd come DASHING like a maniac, charging at Babycakes and me, his metal tag clinking in his leopard-like leaps. Once he neared us, he'd veer off to one side and instantly CLIMB A TREE. He'd just shimmy himself up 5 feet or so, then look directly at me, presumably to make sure I was watching, then drop to the ground and wait for us to get another head start.

Today they had a friend join them in their antics. After we walked past a few houses on our way to the trail, some mysterious four-legged tabby joined the parade! I think it's a girl, and she seems to enjoy kicking around with Prince and Otto. She started her own pattern, kind of darting in diagonals along our path. I've named her "Autre Tabbe," which is my "French" way of distinguishing her from Stanley, our own three-legged tabby.

As I returned from dropping off the poo-bags, both Autre and Prince were waiting for me on the street. Prince resumed his mad dashes to various trees, and threw in a "slulking in the high grass of Peter's lawn" for variation. And Autre kind of tagged along, clearly enjoying the show.

Otto has presumably been exhausted by the walk, and has taken up under a neighbor's bush, because we haven't seen him. But a big fat black and white cat can't hide long in this neighborhood, especially because I'm the one who feeds him. Oh, and the neighbors feed him too, plus he ate half a *possum* yesterday (ew), which explains why he looks particularly husky today.

Accuracy of ultrasounds

I was just amusing myself by comparing a few photos. See, when we had our 19 week ultrasound of Babycakes (left), I stared at the "4-D" photos for hours, thinking, "that's her, that's what our daughter looks like."




Little did I know how RIGHT I was!!!...

Babycakes has the sniffles

Now that we're back from our trip Back East, the weaning has begun in earnest around here. She's down to 2-3 feedings/day. But NOW Babycakes has gotten a runny nose, and I'm thinking that I am an EVIL mom, scooching her over to formula at the tender age of 8 months.

In my mind, all of the dairy in the evil formula is making my child SICK and yet I continue the weaning because I am so eager to get pregnant. Yes, I am already tossing my precious daughter aside in favor of some fictitious future sibling.

What if I go through all of the work, heartbreak and expense of weaning my child and I can't get pregnant ANYWAY? Well won't that be a kick in the pants. Because once you stop breastfeeding, it's not like you can fire it up again.

OK, I have to calm down and remind myself that this weaning is ALSO for my MENTAL HEALTH as I have been on an unusually short tether with my child since she was born. And millions and millions of babies thrive on formula around the world.

Maybe I'll just miss my big hooters.

Lonely burgers

So Hub-D is traipsing around Tennessee today, looking at various properties. Yesterday he buzzed around Nashville and today he found the town of Franklin.

He is in love with Franklin. He just called me from a five bedroom house (see photo) that is on the National Historical Register of all things. And it has a pool. And a pool HOUSE. It is big and gracious and I would have no idea IN THE WORLD how to decorate it.

Franklin has a Starbucks, a mall, public transportation and practically no illegal immigrants, which leads to my peevish question... who is going to mow our lawn? But anyway.

It makes me sad to look at the houses for sale in other parts of the country because I look at the kitchens and think "Who in the world would I be cooking for?" and I get this image of me making burgers for Hub-D and Babycakes and looking wistfully out of the 1830's windowframe, missing all of my pals.

I am The Rich

Back in my younger days, when I worked for "The Man" and hadn't yet married a Republican, I thought "Taxing The Rich" was a really good idea. I mean, c'mon, what are they going to do with all that money anyway?

I thought of "The Rich" as people like Lizzie Grubman, the PR professional who notoriously ran over a bunch of people outside a club. They were trust fund babies and cigar chomping "cronies" and people like, oh, Prince Charles. I mean, let's tax people like Prince Charles, right? Because he won't even MISS IT!

And the world is full of class-based iniquity, so we should definitely drain off money from those RICH people who are conspicuously consuming tennis courts and snifters of brandy, and we should give it to those starving beautiful children in Ethiopia! I mean, c'mon, I listen to Phil Collins telling me to "think twice" and Michael Jackson's all looking at the man in the mirror and do those poor people even KNOW IT'S CHRISTMAS TIME???

(Actually, on that last point, I think it's worthwhile to consider that much of the world's poor population doesn't celebrate Christmas in the first place, so informing them that it's Christmas when they're trying to jockey for position in the rice line seems like an especially lame thing to do.)

So here we are, several years later, and I've got a different perspective. Of COURSE I think we should all be taxed -- that's the way we build roads and reconstruct New Orleans and pay teachers and run the all-important county Vector Pest Control who help rid neighborhoods of rats and mosquitos. But raising taxes is not a good idea in every single case.

See, when I was poor, I didn't give a crap about government spending. Sure, I didn't enjoy much government money myself, other than the roads and rat-free existence I enjoyed, but I supported and trusted our government, and I was proud to help pay for our military and the upkeep of our national treasures.

Then I moved to California. Not just to California, but to the out-of-control spending hotbed of San Francisco (where, for example, the taxpayers shoulder the burden of city worker sex changes). Then I opened up a business in San Francisco. Then I started a family, and started seeing how much money was draining out of my account every month.

See, small businesses are commonly sole proprietorships, or in my case, LLC's. So my company's bottom line is MY bottom line, tax-wise. That means that if my business takes in more than $800,000 in any given year, I qualify as THE RICH, and I get the crap taxed out of me, and it's paralyzing. It really makes you NOT want to make money.

I don't plan to spend the company's money on things like a big yellow Hummer or a tennis court or even a snifter of brandy. I was thinking of getting some COPY PAPER or maybe paying bonuses to my employees, who are scratching out a living in San Francisco despite all of the taxes taken out of THEIR paychecks.

I pay payroll tax and county property tax and city tax and federal tax and licensing fees and I basically just write checks to every possible bureaucratic organization on every level until they stop bothering me. Oh, and then we pay taxes in Germany, but that's a totally different conversation.

But I understood that I'd have to pay these taxes -- the business needs to be in San Francisco, and this the price that a person pays for owning a business in that beautiful city. You help sponsor all of the police force necessary to remove the daily swarm of protesters from whereever they've settled that day. And that's cool.

But NOW California has completely lost its mind, and as a result, we are seriously thinking of LEAVING. I'm not going to relocate the company, but my family? I don't think we can take it anymore.

They are adding ANOTHER TAX to our tax burden, so instead of paying 40% to the federal government and an additional 10.3% to the state of California, we will be paying *12%* of our annual income to California if this Proposition 82 passes.

Proposition 82 is the Preschool for All initiative and it SOUNDS SO COOL. I mean, it's taking a little money from the tennis/snifter crowd and giving it to all of those cute four-year-olds so they can learn the alphabet. But it's really, really expensive, and has some notable flaws.

It's backed by Hollywood's Rob Reiner, who suddenly and randomly knows a lot about California's educational system, and it's, to all appearances, a well-intended TOTAL BOONDOGGLE.

But there are a lot of governmental boondoggles, right? We're spending oodles of money in Iraq every day, when I don't think our leaders intended to stay entrenched quite this long. And there are a LOT of lazy people on the governmental paycheck, constructing labyrinthine bureaucracies for the sole purpose of hiding their incompetence within them. So why is my family losing its mind over this particular tax?

Because we would be paying MORE to live in California than we would to live almost anywhere else in the country, and we're not sure WHY. It's turning me peevish about illegal immigrants. I mean, do I want to pay 1.7% of my company's bottom line to send the children of illegal immigrants to preschool? I'm not sure! But I am sure that it's just too painful to look at other states in this great Union of ours and see their nice houses and safe schools and their NO TAXES WHATSOEVER policies.

Is the rest of the country such a shithole that people will pay an extraordinary FEE to live in California?

OK, forget my argument about how *I* am The Rich and how I'm so PIOUS because I have a baby and I'm a business owner. What if I were a complete JERK, but still, I brought so much money into the California economy? All taxes aside, I started a business that employs a dozen people and trains new graduates from the UC school system. I bought a home here and I frequent all of the local establishments in my neighborhood. And I'm LEAVING. Because the taxes are too oppressive.

The painful lesson I am learning is that if you tax The Rich like this, The Rich are going to LEAVE. And even if they are Prince Charles or Lizzie Grubman and they run over people sometimes, you don't want to lose the moneyed people from your economy. At this rate, California will eventually be solely populated by illegal immigrants and transsexual city workers.

Hub-D is in Tennessee right now looking at houses. He's found some amazing *estates* for the price we pay for our California home, which is currently situated within spitting distance of a METHAMPHETAMINE DEALER.

In Hub-D's search, he has come across other California people who are thinking the same damn thing. One former Californian left after the "mental health tax" was levied a few years ago. He and his son bought abutting estates and they are living the high life in Nashville, contributing to THEIR local economy, so much so that they don't have any state tax whatsoever.

I'm really mad about all of this, because I don't want to move and uproot my life and leave my friends and my doula and the raccoons in my backyard and the redwoods that shimmy around in the wind every night, but I would feel like such a huge sucker if we stayed. Now that my role in my company has been reduced to "symbolic figurehead" while I raise Babycakes, this is the time to get out, and to spend our family's financial gains as we see fit, rather than on Meathead's ill-planned initiative. We give a lot of money to our former universities and to a set of well-researched charities who spend it wisely, in our opinion, in addition to the 40% we willingly turn over to our great nation's coffers. See, I'm not a TOTAL Mr. Scrooge. It's just that 12% is too damn much to pay in state taxes. It's enough to make this publicist back up her car in a drunken frenzy and get the heck out of dodge.

Not us

We met them today,
the family who lost a daughter.
And I surveyed them for signs of a curse,
Assurance this could never happen to us.

Not us,
Our baby daughter with the new freckle on her right shoulder blade,
Who yesterday said, “Dog.”

Not us,
Our baby daughter in the orange-stained sundress,
Whose hair has just begun to curl around her ears,
Who sighs little fluttering breaths in her sleep.

Tonight I am sleeping just feet from her,
This child we have just begun to know,
Around whom our happiness has congealed.

I don’t want to wake her,
As I make my way to bed,
So I stand frozen at the edge of the room,
Wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark.

Ha ha ha

http://worldoflongmire.com/features/romance_novels/

For some reason, these are making me laugh so hard. I found them because I was looking for images appropriate to "crack baby" and found this:

Whereby I am barren

Of course now I think I'm suffering from "Secondary Infertility" whereby I had no problem getting pregnant with Babycakes, but haven't yet conceived a sibling for her.

OK, nevermind she's only eight months old and I'm still nursing, I MUST have something wrong with me that I'm not yet knocked up. I worry that I can highlight Hub-D's office calendar with "ovulation pink" all I want, but that doesn't mean that I will be successful in getting pregnant again.

So all of this leads down many paths...

(1) The path whereby I heap all of this extraneous love on Babycakes, smothering her a la the mother in "Carrie" (Note: I'm not wearing make-up again today, thus am communing once again with Sissy Spacek.) I will call Babycakes a "slut" when she wants to go to the prom because all I will do all day long is obsess over my only child.

(2) The "Fertility treatments up the yin-yang" path -- cut to a scene of Hub-D and me taking in an ultrasound photo with eight embryos in it.

(3) The Adoption Path.

I have been thinking seriously about adoption for some time now. I'm defining "some time" as "Ever since I found out you could adopt a child instead of vomit for nine months."

When I was marooned on the sofa during my pregnancy, I watched every single episode of "Adoption Stories." The episodes usually centered around plump Canadian couples jetting to Haiti to pick up two or three extremely grateful orphans who would wrap their sweet skinny arms around the Canadians' necks and say "Mama" the minute they met them. They would finish these episodes with a scene in the snowy Canadian hills, with the Haitian children bundled up and sledding with their new parents. Gorgeous.

One of my favorite episodes was about a woman who simply drove to her local airport, and a fantastic Korean baby was laid in her arms. I cried and cried into my toilet about that episode. Cripes, all she did was drive to the AIRPORT!

Right after watching that, I waddled into Hub-D's office and let him know that we will be adopting the rest of our children from Korea, due to that country's (a) beautiful, well-tended children and (b) did I mention that all you have to do is go to the AIRPORT?

At the time, Hub-D told me to cool my jets, and decided to place his bets with biological children. YEAH, of course! Because Babycakes turned out to be a carbon copy of HIM. The way I see it, if my children aren't going to look like me ANYWAY, why am I going to all of the trouble of bearing them and adding to the world's population?

Since then, fatherhood has softened Hub-D, and when I asked him a few months ago what we would do if we can't have any more babies he said very sweetly, "We'll just go get us some crack babies, won't we?"

Our local hospitals are brimming with crack babies, it's true. And it's really tragic, once you are caring for your own infant, to think that any child in the WORLD isn't receiving the standard of care you are providing your baby. So, we thought about the crack babies.

Conservative Hub-D liked the idea of the crack babies because he could use it to thwart his liberal friends. When they started squawking about social injustice, he could ask, "How many crack babies did YOU adopt?" and he could pretty much win any argument from that point on.

But there are a few problems with the crack baby scenario. First, it's really hard for honkies like us to adopt children of color, of which the vast majority of crack babies are. The foster/adoption system is screwed up by racial activists in this state that way. It's not impossible, but it's just not as easy as you would think it would be.

The other problem, which sounds callous, is I don't want the biological parents coming to claim their child back after a year or two. I just couldn't abide by that, not only for my own selfish emotional reasons, but because that's a crap thing to do to a kid. I lived in Ann Arbor during the whole "Baby Jessica" nightmare there, whereby a couple who had finalized an adoption LOST the child because the bio-dad claimed custody of Baby Jessica. It was complete bullshit, and anyone who saw the pictures of that 3-year-old child with her face mashed against the back window of the social services vehicle driving her away is NOT EVER going to domestically adopt a child. EVER.

So that's when we start thinking about the planes landing, the babies arriving from other countries, and the Canadian sleds. Because international adoptions are PERMANENT, without exception.

The woman sitting next to Babycakes and me on the plane yesterday has FOUR children she adopted from Korea, China, and India. Two boys and two girls. When we landed, she called her family and they had just gotten a new puppy and all four of those kids were over the damn moon. Of COURSE they are! They aren't being raised in questionable foreign orphanages -- instead, they live in a big air conditioned house in Phoenix with this really nice, funny lady, her husband and a chocolate lab puppy. Hello! They won the orphan lottery!

I asked her if it was an arduous process to adopt her kids, and she said, "No! It took only 4-6 months, faster than pregnancy!"

"Faster than pregnancy...."
"Faster than pregnancy...."

It echoed in my mind. One could expand one's family without throwing up ONCE (unless one contracts dysintery, I suppose), and it's faster than pregnancy.

You also don't need to push that child out of your body, no doula, no nuttin. And don't think I don't look at those pictures of Angelina Jolie with her Ethiopian baby, and think, "She never has to breastfeed that child. No one expects her to. She can go to a weekend retreat and someone ELSE can care for her child for more than a 3-hour stint...."

So now that I've declared myself barren, I'm thinking about those marvelous Asian babies living in Phoenix, and the smile on that lady's face and thise handy way to vanquish my biological clock AND barfing at the same time. And it sounds good.

Highlighting madness

I'm ridiculous.

I have just gone to Hub-D's office calendar and made long slash marks with a pink highlighter over the days I may be ovulating this month.

What is he expected to do with this information? He'll check his calendar and say, aha, yes, I must file the quarterly taxes, take the cat to the vet, and hm... there was one other thing...

I feel like such a lech.

Surprise, I'm back

We're back unexpectedly early from our East Coast sojourn, and MAN are the cats happy to see me tonight.

I put Babycakes to bed as soon as we arrived home. The poor chick has so much sleep WEIRDNESS to undo, as she is still recovering from Europe and Los Angeles and all the other insults to a normal infant sleeping schedule she has endured.

Then I kind of skulked around the house excitedly. Hub-D is NOT here. He stayed back East to scout for possible no-tax/low-tax homes for us, and is currently resting his handsome head in a motel somewhere in the greater Nashville area. "Nashville has FOLK MUSIC," he said to me in a kind of sing-songy voice, working to lure me away from my irreplaceable West Coast friends, roses, jogging trails and sunshine.

I love being alone in the house, and Stanley the three-legged tabby is thrilled as well. The twin kittens Prince and Otto bolted out the door when I got here, seeking adventures far afield, and I just sat in the living room with Stanley and groomed him. I got out the jagged metal grooming loop that LOOKS like it should be painful and is intended for horses' hides, and I brushed that tabby until he gleamed.

I haven't brushed that cat since, oh, probably before I got engaged. And here I was, bleary from a day's travel across the US, pinning Stan down and brushing his neck, his cheeks, and the all-important divot at the base of his back, just before his tail starts. It was a treasure trove of fur accumulation. I mean HOW is a three-legged cat supposed to keep himself in tip-top shape when he topples OVER in his attempts to clean himself?

So I'm satisfied. He's satisfied. Babycakes is trying to sleep, and my mind is swimming from our trip.

Bizarre. We went to the Raleigh Sears Portrait Studio earlier today and my friend K. snapped dozens of photos of our Babycakes and us. Then we went to the airport, Hub-D dropped us off, kissing me twice because it made Babycakes laugh the first time, and the baby and I sped across the US, back to our quiet, high-tax California home, and Stanley, who sits here like a striped loaf of satisfaction at my feet.

Brief missive from the field

I have only as much time to write as it takes Babycakes to become bored with my car keys and/or to remember how much her Teethies HURT.

I'm using her backpack carrier to block her into the hotel business center.

Hub-D is off in the wilds of North Carolina, looking at homes in the area. We like this area a great deal, and we're wondering if this might be the place to escape CA taxes -- although NC isn't much better, so it's kind of idle thinking at this point.

We're contemplating a wild and spontaneous trip to Tennessee while we're here. It's one of the magical ZERO tax states, and it's not too far from many of our family members, so perhaps that will be the right place? We have no idea.

Time's up with Babycakes, although so many other things are stewing out here. Hub-D and are having a marvelous time with each other but sleep is scarce.

Over and out from beeeeautiful Chapel Hill, CA.

And we're off

On what I *think* is our last long trip for awhile, Hub-D, Babycakes and I are leaving for North Carolina and Virginia tomorrow. I have only packed about 2 things, and nothing of Babycakes'. I think my psyche is in denial that, on the heels of two other major trips, we're doing it AGAIN.

But I know once we're underway we'll have fun. Babycakes is a good traveler, and we're visiting a lot of really fun people. It's just that... man. We JUST got back on a normal sleep schedule.

And on top of all of this, Hub-D is raising the idea once again of moving to a lower tax state. California taxes are really killing us, and we could be saving a bundle by relocating. But the idea of relocating, to a woman who has only mustered the energy to pack 2 things for a trip leaving tomorrow early AM, is too mind-blowing to even contemplate. So I'm kind of hiding from him, lest he broach the subject again.

He's saying he'd want to move by mid-June, so you can imagine what this has done to my wee brain, which, I may add, is still semi-pickled in postpartum juices, I believe. Poof! There it went, my last rational thought...

The house made me do it

You know how in "The Shining," Jack Nicholson's character shows up a completely normal guy, and then the hotel makes him slowly go insane? The premise being that all of the caretakers become possessed by homicidal urges once they step foot in the hotel?

Well, in a very different way, my house is making me do stuff. See, when we first looked at this house, I got a flash of it being full of people, people drinking wine at the bar in the kitchen, and the backyard teeming with fun. As we walked through the main rooms, I felt this overwhelming spirit, that this house is the sort that possesses you to invite people over. This is not a show-offy kind of invitation, such as, "you must come over and see our new deck," but a desire to entertain. There is an underlying spirit in this house that wants for people to get together and be happy.

So yeah, we bought it, and moved in, and it's been "Heeere's Johnny" ever since, as the house has taken over my mind and filled itself with warm and wonderful people.

The house's "entertaining spirit" didn't make much sense to me when I learned about the previous owner. A fairly angry man had lived here with his family for 17 years. They had kept the blinds shut and installed a blaring alarm system which disturbed our quiet neighborhood with false alarms many times over the years. He had an obsessive need to keep building on the house -- he built a new family room and a new garage, then converted that garage into an office, then constructed a giant master bedroom and the CHEESIEST master bathroom you can imagine (if you're thinking "pine-green toilet" you're on the right path). None of the neighbors liked this guy, and he pissed off so many people that someone torched his truck.

His wife left him, he married his secretary, but just basically was never happy while he lived here. When he sold the house to us, one contingency of our purchase was that he install subfloor ventilation -- something he had neglected to do in his manic urge to build additions on the house. We discovered a few months later that he had installed FAKE VENTS around the periphery of the house, and as a result, the subfloor of our home was collecting MOLD. He was apparently very angry that we paid lower than his asking price, and took it out on the house in various ways. Oh, and just before we closed on the house, he actually hauled away the NICE dishwasher and replaced it with a shitty one.

So he was an unhappy gent. But WHY did the house feel so "entertainy" and HAPPY at its core? It had housed this angry man and his bad marriage and his manic building frenzies for 17 years! He had chopped down the beautiful gum trees in the front yards, yet the house still harbored no resentments, no ghosts, just a kind of spiritual "welcome mat," which I sensed the minute I walked in the door.

Maybe he and the house were uncompatible at some level, thus exacerbating his unhappiness? Perhaps he kept building new portions of the house so its insistent call to "invite people over! open the windows! have a party!" would quiet down. But it didn't. So he sold it to us ever-so-begrudgingly, and moved the heck out.

Enter us. Just after we moved in, I traipsed up and down the street and popped invitations into everyone's mailbox (even the meth dealer!) (I didn't know he was a meth dealer then) for our housewarming party. And people came! And they filled the house with spirit and community, and I know it sounds psycho, but the house smiled. Neighbors who had never met finally connected there in our backyard. People stayed into the evening, swapping funny stories about their run-ins with the former owner of our house, and thanking us for moving in.

Shortly after that, I learned from our next-door neighbors that PARTIES are the heritage of this house! The original owner (before the mean tree-cutting dude) had turned this house into an entertaining paradise, and everyone in the neighborhood would meet here for various celebrations. It had been the social hub of the neighborhood in its original incarnation.

And so I think the house was glad when I walked through the door, and it guides me, I feel, to have people over as often as possible. When my friend L. had her babysitter cancel last night, thus trashing our original plan to go out to dinner, I invited her over for dinner, and then invited more friends! And we filled the house with our spirits, and we drank WINE and cooked (how did I learn how to cook? It's the HOUSE, I tell you...).

And whlie we live here, Hub-D and I enjoy the last moments of the day together, in the spaces that our friends have recently vacated, having a drink together while Babycakes sleeps, played out and contented, and the house... the house is happy again.

Would a second child be a mistake?

Babycakes has become ridiculously charming in the last few days. When Nanny D walked into the house this morning, Babycakes crawled over to her (employing her unique leg-draggin' style) and climbed up Nanny D's jeans, looking up at her with a nice ole grim.

I was just thinking tonight as I washed my face, what a CELEBRATION that Babycakes has been right from the beginning. My pregnancy with her capped off a stellar year for Hub-D and me -- we had gotten engaged, married, went to Germany together, bought a house, went to Hawaii (twice!?) and then spent the holiday season hovering around toilets as our infant-to-be took root in my belly.

And she's brilliantly healthy, alert and beautiful -- now with this new sweetness on top of it.

Not to be a weird superstitious pessimist, but it makes me worry -- I mean, should I even try to have a second child? What if there is something ever-so-slightly wrong with the second child, and we will forever compare him/her unfavorably to Babycakes. Plus a second child would mean that we couldn't pay attention 24/7 to our sweet firstborn -- she may have a great accomplishment, and look around to celebrate with us, but we would be too busy dicking around with baby #2! That would be tragic!

Babycakes has just started enjoying reading with me, after spending eight months Hay-Hay-HATING it. Today she even kind of snuggled into the crook of my arm with her thumb in her mouth as I read and turned the pages. I felt like a REAL MOM of a real child, like we had this reading thing DOWN and we were so literate I just couldn't even stand us.

There is no room on my lap for another person! I mean, even a pregnant belly would inhibit these sweet snuggly scenes. Maybe we ought to call it a day and know that we basically achieved perfection with this child.

But then again, perhaps it's somehow our moral obligation to bring more offspring into the collective human gene pool, now that we know that we make "good 'uns?"

And also, if anything (GOD FORBID) should ever happen to Babycakes, a second child would probably keep Hub-D and me from pulling a grief-stricken "Thelma and Louise"-type maneuver.

An heir and a spare, isn't that the saying? Yeah, I guess we better get to work.

Babycakes Resemblance Addendum

I know she can see and hear, but when I'm talking, sometimes she reaches out and feels my lips. Today, when I was feeding her water, I kept saying "Water....Water..." really slowly, and then I thought, "What's that from?"

Damn if it's not from "The Miracle Worker" and, in my mind, Babycakes was Patty Duke as Helen Keller and I, totally Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan. Totally.

The Project X Moment

Babycakes has gotten a lot more self-entertaining. She is no longer marooned in the spot where we stick her -- she can go wherever she wants, and explore most surfaces of the house.

It's become clear that she likes me, which is nice. When I come into the room, or stand near her, she climbs up my legs, using my knobby knees as a grip like a mountain climber.

But today something kind of magical happened.

I was unpacking a gargantuan suitcase, hanging up my wrinkled suits. Babycakes played around me while I sorted laundry and uncovered stashes of business cards. At some point she uncovered a bunch of gifts I had bought for her little baby friends when we were in Italy, so I went and sat with her, wrapping the gifts at long last and chatting.

She lunged at my water bottle, so I unpopped the top and let her drink some, which she loves. She feels so grown-up drinking out of OUR containers, plus it was so hot, we both needed some refreshment. Finally, it was almost 8pm, and she needed to eat and head to bed without further delay.

I had left her highchair outside at breakfast (at which, I might proudly add, she ate three pieces of watermelon, a bowl of oatmeal, 1/3 of a banana and a piece of wheat bread). I went to the back patio to move the high chair inside.

She was inside, looking out the glass door. I didn't want her to start crying, as she sometimes does when I leave the room, so I tapped on the glass and said, "Chebbles!" and she smiled wide and squinched up her eyes, staring back at me.

After I started to clean up the patio, I noticed she was still looking at me, so I returned to the glass door and knocked again, waving to her. That's when she smiled again, raised her arm, looked me square in the eye, and waved back, fingers waggling in my direction, filled with delight.

She was so small, and the act so charming, I just leaned my forehead against the glass door and wept. When I realized I might alarm Babycakes, I waved gleefully once more, burst open the door, and retrieved her for her dinner.

It reminded me of that upsetting scene from "Project X," when Matthew Broderick offers the dying chimp a cigarette through the glass of his enclosure, except I think I'm the smoking chimp in this comparison, and it wasn't SAD, it was one of the very happiest moments of my life.

She's not a boy

The best day to go shopping at Target is Mother's Day! The place was inhabited only by dads and grandmas, with children, untethered from their mothers, getting whatever they wanted.

I bought Babycakes a slew of 2T clothing because, let's face it, she doesn't fit in any of that cute infant gear anymore. I searched all over for "footie" pajamas for her, but she has graduated to the 2T club, where she'll be wearing little T-shirts and wee boxers to bed from this point forward.

When she was first born, I stocked up on gender neutral baby clothes, so that I would have hand-me-downs appropriate for any gender. It sucks, that whole theory, because people don't say, "Oh, what a nice looking gender-neutral baby!" No. They take one look at her totally awesome Hanna Andersson corduroy overalls, which happen to be blue, and say, "HEY LITTLE FELLOW! Aren't you a sweet little boy?"

I thought that wouldn't bug me, but after everyone in Italy says, "Ciao Bambino" a thousand times, and then you realize that Bambino means "little DUDE," you start to understand the object of dressing kids in gender-appropriate colors. She doesn't have boobs or make-up or little high heels or anything that would indicate to people that she is a girl, so the only thing we can do for our wee girls is slather them in PINK from head to toe.

Still, even when she's wearing a blatant floral print, people will call Babycakes a boy. Hub-D is traumatized by this perpetual BOY identification, as the popular opinion is that she resembles him. He laments, "What if I don't make a cute girl!" As he studies her face for signs of stubble.

But she is SUCH a girl, even Dr. M, when he saw her on her second day of life, when she looked up at him with her woozy blue eyes, said, "What a GIRL!" He said that some kids just look like their gender from the get-go, and she, with her rosy cheeks and gummy grin, certainly was a little lady.

Gee, I wish Dr. M. would tell the rest of the world, who have conspired to drive us bananas by asking "How old is he?" and "He's a strong little fellow, isn't he?"

So, when I saw in today's Target flyer that they had the Circo brand toddler T's on sale, damn if I didn't squeal out of the driveway and go get me some. In HOT PINK thank you very much.

Video monitor freak-out

I have a video monitor for Babycakes that gives me the basic picture of what is going on in the nursery. This has been a nice accoutrement, as I can see when she's (a) crying but falling asleep, OR (b) crying and rattling the sides of the crib in outrage, starting a letter-writing campaign to Amnesty International and penning a future bestseller detailing the HELL of being trapped in one's crib.

So tonight I scared the CRAP out of myself by imagining something super-spooky. See, I like to watch her sleeping on the monitor. It's a fuzzy image, but I can usually make out the curl of her back, and see her little hands move in her sleep, plus I can make sure that a Panda (currently the giant Panda is on duty) is cuddling her in her dreams.

WHAT IF one day I turned on the video monitor, and just as the picture came into view, I saw an old woman leaning in over the crib and, ever-so-gently running her hand along my baby's back as she slept. She might be an old woman in the clothing of yesteryear, a spirit of this house who loves babies. OR she could be a gypsy DEMON! And she could turn toward the camera, intuiting the intrusion, and her eyes would GLOW and she would hiss, with FANGS!!!

Aaaaahhh!

Happy Mother's Day.

Back again, leaving shortly

We're leaving again for another long trip next Thursday, headed out to the East Coast to see a slew of pals and relatives. Great. GREAT. More things to panic about, such as how much "Stewardess Stink-Eye" we get when we fly without a carseat for Babycakes. I mean REALLY, has there ever in the history of aviation, been a baby who was seriously injured because they weren't strapped into a carseat? I don't mean to be morbid here, but usually, with airplanes you either make it or you don't.

A carseat isn't going to help us if the plane plummets from the sky, and, my friends, a carseat will just piss everyone off. It pisses off Babycakes, who in turn will piss off her fellow passengers. It will also piss off Hub-D and me because we'll have to tote that monster through myriad airports.

Nevertheless, I may take one, just to avoid the stink-eye. We can experiment with it. Maybe she'll like it. Yes, and maybe then she'll like it when I change her diaper, and like it when I put her to bed for her naps, and THEN she'll like sucking down formula so that I can get on with my life and not be a wetnurse for another eight months for the love of pete.

Yes, I'm in a bad mood, due to the first onset of PMS I have had, in, well, four years. I met Hub-D in 2002, and because we liked each other so very much, I went on the birth control pill. The BCP is great because it really evens out all of that wicked PMS, provided one is on the right prescription. (I take Loestrin because when I was on Ortho-Tricyclin, I turned into Emily Dickenson, refusing to leave the house, wearing black and writing volumes of poetry.)

So after I got off of BCP, I was knocked up in short order. And then once Babycakes was born, I was still sportin' all of those preggers hormones. So it is only very recently that things have kicked back into gear, and the unfamiliar and much-reviled PMS has started its merry march through my emotional well-being.

So the poor flight attendants, simply suggesting a safety measure to me as I cradle Babycakes awkwardly in my arms. Hissssssssssssss, back off, ladies.

You know that scene in "The Sound of Music" when the captain is berating Maria? He says something like, "Have my children been running around Salzburg wearing clothes made from curtains?" and Julie Andrews says in her terrific British accent, "And having a MAhhh-VELOUS time!"

That's how I feel a lot of the time. The things that we're doing, Babycakes and I, aren't necessarily the best, safest, most normal courses of action, but we're having a marvelous time.

I allow her to gnaw on my cell phone, and remote controls, and metal railings for pete's sake, that are doubtlessly coated in lead paint. Her favorite toy is the PS2 controller, which she mauls with glee, then takes the cord and spins it 'round her neck like a deadly electronic boa. See, it's not the safest thing, and we don't let her do it alone, so she's not going to choke, but she's having a marvelous time.

And last night, I was the one who was marvelous. I wore these REALLY high heels and went out to dinner with a client here in Los Angeles.

I had arrived early to the dinner, so I popped down the road to the Fossil store, which a gay friend of mine had recommended (thereby anointing all of the merchandise) and I bought up the store. I was clacking around in my high heels, trying on a watch and then BUYING it, which was just so naughty -- I was ALONE (no Babycakes, no Hub-D) and I was buying a watch that had crystals on the face of it -- not a dowdy digital mama-watch but a fancy lady in Los Angeles in high heels kind of watch.

Then I found a T-shirt, one of these fancy T-shirts with something "retro" printed on it. This one says "Rise and Shine" in faded gold lettering, and damn if I didn't buy that too, teetering over the cash register while the exasperated saleslady wondered when she was ever going to stop ringing me up. I threw in a purse and a pair of sunglasses. At FULL retail. Not at Target or TJ Maxx or secondhand or on sale, but there in a retail establishment. I was stopped in my purchasing frenzy by Hub-D, who, following a base male instinct that something was going terribly wrong, phoned me.

So I bought the goods and strolled down the avenue talking to Hub-D, dress swinging, heels wobbling, and felt completely NOT like someone's mother.

THEN I proceeded to drink several glasses of wine with my clients and eat pretty much everything set before me. Almost all of it was "not when you're pregnant" food, so it's a good thing I'm not. I mean, mercury-laden shellfish and soft cheeses and gallons of wine and beer for goodness' sake. And I hollered and hooted and so did everyone else at the table, plus I'm sure I had a certain amount of cleavage going on.

YEE-HAW!

"Hey, is that Babycakes' mother sitting there in those impractical shoes, eating squid with her hands, sucking down glasses of merlot and cracking dirty jokes?"

"...And having a mahhhvelous time."

Managed expectations

When we were about to have Babycakes, I signed Hub-D and me up for a series of classes about childbirth, caring for a newborn, and infant CPR, all of which were a waste of time.

Yes, I'm happy to know how to dislodge something from Babycakes' throat, but we pretty much needed a 15 minute download of information, rather than hours and HOURS of our lives jammed into a small conference room with other cranky mothers-to-be and their beaten-down husbands.

One thing that Hub-D and I found particularly terrifying was the slideshow they showed us in the "Care Of The Newborn" class. It was entitled something like, "Weird Crap that Might Be On Your Baby" and it featured extreme birthmarks and super-smooshed faces and big pointy heads, distended genitalia and was generally a "Rogue's Gallery" of really ugly children. They kept each slide up for an extended period of time, pointing to the deformities, and saying things like, "You can expect your child's nipples to issue milk like this in the first week."

Aaaaah!

So we were duly warned.

And after I pushed and pushed that baby out of my hoo-ha that September morning, Hub-D and I watched her emerge with no small amount of trepidation. We were basically expecting a gnarled up, bright red, heinous gnome to emerge.

Instead, we got... Babycakes. She was weirdly perfect, as though she'd been born by C-section. She was barely squished, and her head was ever-so-slightly pointed, but her big blue eyes were open and looking directly at us as if to say, "Who did you expect? Yoda?"

She had beautiful rosy cheeks and a contented look on her face as she nuzzled in to nurse for the first time. Her hair was already in kind of a nice style and, other than her ooey-gooey umbilical cord, she was ready for a newborn beauty pageant.

Hub-D surveyed the other babies in the hospital nursery and considered them "fat blobs" next to our gorgeous, perfectly formed baby.

I was just thinking of this as I walked with Babycakes through our hotel lobby today, and one of the hotel staff said that she was the cutest baby she'd ever seen. I had to stop myself from saying, "I know, can you BELIEVE she came out of MY vagina?"

Our blue-eyed blondie, charming us from the get-go.

Babycakes in Lala Land

I'm in Los Angeles and it is a beautiful day! I always feel more attractive in Southern California, partially because I can wear warm-weather clothing and I can exercise and eat whole grains and fresh vegetables.

See, in Northern California, there is always a need for sweaters and clogs and various unattractive accoutrements, but down here, you can basically strut around in your prettiest bra and it's A-OK.

I'm also ovulating like a big dog, but let's not get into that. I do spend a few moments wondering about this wasted egg (as Hub-D is still up in Northern California, while his fertile wife is rockin' her bra in LA). Like, who would it have been, had that egg been fertilized?