what's new in cosmo's world?

so much.

cosmo has turned into a pretty good traveler this summer. he and i drove to san antonio to visit with his relatives a few weeks ago and he did great in the car, with no one to entertain him. after he napped for a couple of hours, we pulled into a rest stop and had a little picnic. he adjusted well to hotel living, and especially loved using the elevator several times a day. we stuck as closely as possible to his schedule for naps and meals and bedtime, and that seemed to really help him feel secure. he's not used so sleeping on a high bed (his futon is on the floor at home) and he flops around a lot in his sleep. after one fall of the bed, i ended up improvising the bedding arrangement in the hotel room. the beds themselves wouldn't move, but the top mattresses did, so i bridged the gap between the beds by pushing one over the edge of the box spring a little, and then dragging the other mattress over to make one giant bed. i had to be careful not to get on the part that was bridging, it would have sank under my weight, but it worked great for cosmo, and he did not fall out of bed again.



i think he enjoyed sea world (not my idea) and had some fun chasing pigeons in downtown san antonio.






less than a week later, the three of us flew to bloomington. carl has been hired to teach at IU in the history and philosophy of science department, so we are moving there in about a week (!) we went to find a place to live. we love the town and think we'll have a lot of fun there. we look forward to cleaner air to breathe and four seasons of distinct weather to enjoy. it is a small crunchy college town surrounded by state parks, national forest and nature preserves. cosmo was a real trooper throughout all the running around getting in and out of the car, looking at crappy student housing, and gorgeous historic homes we ended up not renting for one reason or another. we ended up with a very practical (if not terribly charming) house with a big yard on a quiet street close to the university, but more importantly, 3 blocks from the best park in town. there is even a heated/insulated workshop/studio in the back for all my projects, and a great place for cosmo to get messy. the best thing about the house (besides the washer and dryer in the kitchen) is that the floor plan includes an open loop of doors through the rooms, facilitating endless games of chase indoors. we had a chance to drive out to a nature preserve about 5 minutes from town with a lake and hiking trails in the woods. cosmo had a great time throwing stones in the water, picking wild blackberries and running along the wooded paths.



i hope his recent travel experiences prepared him for our three day road trip. we decided on a u-pack moving system, where we pack the trailer and someone else drives the truck to our destination. that way we'll all be in the same car for the drive. as excited as i am about moving to a new place, it breaks my heart to leave our beautiful community of loved ones...there's going to be plenty of tears.



ok. in other news, cosmo had his first haircut, which looks pretty smart, if i do say so myself. he's mastered the summersault, and has a scary-good throwing arm. carl and i worry that we won't be able to keep up with his athleticism. that's what coaches are for, right? he can't quite jump yet, but he tries so hard every day, he's bound to get it soon.

he's had a verbal explosion lately, and seems ready to try almost any new word we ask him to. at night, when he's trying to fall asleep, he practices all the sounds he can make. i guess it's babble, but it seems to me more like a singer doing scales. he still signs a lot, learns new signs instantly, and he even made up a sign for fiddle, which he makes when he hears fiddle music. we got some ASL books so that we can continue to teach him sign language, even when he no longer needs it. i figure it is one way for him to become somewhat bilingual, since he's not regularly hearing a foreign language in our house.

one of the things that most amazes me about cosmo at this age is the amount of empathy he expresses. if he hears another baby crying, he will stop what he's doing, make the sign for hurt, with a worried expression on his face, and kind of moan. he got so upset one night when he saw some injured pets being cared for on TV that carl had to turn it off. he reacts to the picture in our mother goose book, of jack (of jack and jill) falling down and hurting his head. he is terribly worried about humpty dumpty and even seems to be concerned about a spot of flaking paint on a doorway in our house. he is convinced it is a boo-boo, and that the wood is somehow suffering and needs to be acknowledged. of course, he fusses over his own minor scrapes, and bug bites, and ours too. he has only recently become aware of mosquitoes as they bite him, and wants to scratch them afterwards. good timing for moving to a place where mosquitoes are few and far between.

he still shares pretty well and is generally gentle with other kids. i am sure that possessive stage is coming soon enough, but for now i appreciate his kindness. he throws minor fits now and then, if he's tired, or when he's taken away from something he likes (such as the full drum kit we saw at the salvation army the other day) but they are not outrageous (yet) and are very short lived. i treasure this rare and precious time, savor every moment.

petroleum products are cozy

this picture will probably make my friends at green parenting cringe. cosmo has recently learned to fall asleep on his own...meaning he no longer requires nursing or motion in order to drift off into dreamland. however, he now requires cuddling up to a sippy-cup (or two, or three). he doesn't always drink from them, he just needs to have one near, and protests if i try to take it away. he has also taken an interest in michael's reiki bear, the firsts plush toy he has ever bonded with. sometimes he will toss the bear, but the water bottle is always in hand. his favorite bedtime reading at the moment is a book of classic mother goose nursery rhymes. i've been enjoying trying to uncover some of the history behind them. song of sixpence apparently has something to do with pirates. who knew? cosmo just likes the part where the blackbird "snaps off her nose."

comic junky

carl gave me persepolis 2 for my birthday (i turned 40 on tuesday). whenever i get my hands on a comic i haven't read before, whether it's a gift, borrowed or bought, i devour it from cover to cover, can't stand to put it down until i'm done, and i tend to tune out everything else around me. then i want more. it doesn't matter how good the book is, or how long, comics always leave me longing. it's like a good drug. an addictive drug. i almost cringe when i am handed one...because i know what's about to happen. i don't want to taste the chocolate truffle because i know i am going to want an entire box of them, and there's only one. my appetite for good, quality comics is insatiable. so, in a sense, as pleasurable as reading comics is for me, it comes at a price.

it makes me wonder if there isn't something about the medium itself which produces this lingering hunger. i guess that doesn't make much sense really. i'm sure some people feel this way about a great record, or book of poems. it just so happens that for me, it's comics.

lucky for me, chuck and hank gave me a gift certificate to domy. i can go get one more fix before i head into withdrawals again. thank you thank you my dear friends. thank you.

in the round

cosmo's fascination with flowers has given way to an obsession with circles, balls, all things round. on walks in the stroller, he spots every single manhole cover, or water meter access point, and he wants us to push the stroller over the circle. he laughs and groans with delight. when he is walking himself, he steps on every circle he can find, and the plastic rectangle ones in the grass too. at home he has two favorite new toys, a bag of marbles and a tin full of buttons. he wants to play with them ALWAYS and cries when we put them away. "ball" is his favorite word to say, and he will point out any object in any landscape that resembles a ball.

i often catch myself trying to recreate the better parts of my own childhood. when i was a kid, my mom had a little old-fashioned marshmellow tin filled with buttons of all kinds. i used to love to spread them all out on the floor and organize them into categories, or make various kinds of arrangements. i remember really enjoying them, and i wanted cosmo to have some too. i only had a half dozen or so myself, so melanie and kate suggested that i ask friends to contribute to cosmo's button collection. i like that idea a lot, but in kentucky i found a jar of assorted buttons at a junk store, so it seems strange to ask for more since we are now button rich. however, i like the idea of buttons coming from people he loves. in any case, i was thrilled to find that he loves the buttons as much as i did (and still do) and i imagine his enjoyment of them will change over time. right now he likes to pull individual ones out of the tin, marvel and coo over them, and he also likes them in quantity...he will pour them out, and run his hands through them.

he recently discovered a grate circling a tree outside of a restaurant, and proceeded to run around it, over and over, round and round, laughing and making himself so dizzy he'd stumble. he really loves a circle, that one.

what cosmo learned on vacation

we had a relaxing time out in the country. it was such a relief to just let cosmo run around without fear of traffic, mosquitoes or fire ants. we spent most of our time outside and cosmo had a blast. he learned how to climb a ladder, swing on a big kid's swing and run down a tiny hill. he also got to see a catfish being caught and released, ate some violets in his salad and saw fire flies for the first time. i've heard other parents report that travel often brings leaps in development, and that seems to be the case with cosmo. here are a few pictures and a video.

belated father's day post

Dearest Carl,

On this father’s day, I wanted to try to express to you how much it means to me to have you in our lives, sharing this incredible parenting experience. Your ever growing love for Cosmo is such a joy to witness. I love listening from the other room as you bathe Cosmo each night after our walk--- to hear your patient and proud voice as you ask him to trust you when it comes time to lean back into the water to rinse his hair, or ask him if he can wash his toes with the sponge…then his knees. You are a wonderful teacher a perfect playmate and a careful guardian. I love you, and I love you being Cosmo’s dad.

Happy father’s day.

travelcraft

we are going on a little trip to kentucky. we will be visiting carl's brother out in the country. we love to travel together and i'm looking forward to it. i won't have a chance to blog about some things i have been planning to, but i wanted to share some photos of a couple of bags i felted. one is a gift for dominica, who just turned one. cosmo liked hers, so i decided to make one for him too. he enjoys putting things inside, peering into it, taking them out, and he likes to grab the handle and whip the bag around wildly. hopefully the photos will give you a sense of what i am talking about. happy summer!

in the meme time

i got tagged by the other mother to do a post that lists 7 things about me that you might not know. ok, i'll bite:

1. i have moved 28 times in my life. no, i am not an army brat. only 8 of those were during childhood.

2. i like to put semi-sweet chocolate chips in my cheerios. with the milk, the texture contrast is fantastic.

3. in my early twenties, i lived on a women-only land trust for 2.5 years. we had no electricity, and only a trickle of running water. i learned how to chop wood, grow vegetables, identify wild plants, preserve food, read by candlelight and many other things. i learned how difficult it can be to live by consensus decision making.

4. i worked as a plumber's helper for a few years, mostly on large scale, industrial construction sites. during the summer, the hours were 6am to 3pm.

5. i once got hired 10 different times in one year. i never got fired.

6. if i were stranded on a desert island and allowed to choose one food to eat for the rest of my life, i would choose avocado sushi cut rolls-- complete with soy sauce, pickled ginger and lots of wasabi. i am certain i could live on that. happily.

7. though i live with my share of clutter, i am a fiend for organizing. i love to sort things into containers, i love containers. i collect old suitcases and store things in them like photos, letters, videos, maps. my art supplies are logically divided and stored in labeled bins on a shelf in cosmo's room. it helps me to manage my pack-ratism.



ok. there you have it. that's my 7. now i tag chuck, magreen and greendaddy.

whistle while you work

most parents i know bemoan the fact that stupid, repetitive children's jingles get stuck in their heads, haunting them throughout the day and into the night. my friend sarah calls them earworms. i have experienced this, and yes, it can be annoying. however, lately i have been finding it quite comforting. it gives a rhythm and an upbeat mood to my thoughts. the lyrics, or rhymes are usually quite simple, so they don't really interfere with my thinking, but the steady cadence of, say, "the wheels on the bus go round and round" is kind of meditative, and keeps me moving. carl's brother recently sent us a tape of some american folk songs from a record they had as kids. it includes a bunch of railroad songs, a version of "yankee doodle dandy," and "the bluetail fly." we find ourselves listening to it even after cosmo has gone to sleep.

sleepy bear

it happened quickly, overnight you might say. i'd been fearing and dreading the time when i would finally find the courage to try night-weaning cosmo. you see, he's been nursing throughout the night for many months now. it hasn't been a real hardship on me. i always felt like i got plenty of sleep. but i knew, for his sake, that he needed to begin to learn the skill of getting himself back to sleep when he wakes up in the middle of the night. i also suspected that if he learned this skill, he would probably wake up a lot less. i meant to start this process a couple of months ago, but i got the feeling he wasn't quite ready (or maybe it was me who wasn't ready?) and decided to wait. one of my friends was having great success with her daughter at the time, and she's a few months older than cosmo. it made sense to me that if i could explain to him what was going on, it might be easier...he might not feel so confused and betrayed. i wanted to wait until he would be able to understand my words more fully.

so, i guess it was over week ago now, one night he woke up and was nursing, but he wasn't falling back to sleep. he was in fact, thrashing about, climbing all over me, switching breasts etc. it was keeping me up, and it wasn't working as the quick sleep aide that it used to be. so, i stopped the nursing and told him to lie down and go to sleep. he fussed for a bit, then did exactly that. he fell asleep. i was astonished. from that point on, there was no turning back. i still put him to sleep at night by nursing him, but when he wakes up, i go to him, and tell him to lie back down and go to sleep. sometimes i pat his back. a few times he cried and made the sign for nursing, once he even made the sign for "hurt" which just about broke my heart, but i felt so certain that i was doing the right thing for him. each time he cried, it was for less than a minute (often more like 10 seconds), and i just stayed with him and tried to soothe him, and he fell asleep so fast i couldn't really believe it--MUCH faster than if he had been nursing. then, after a few nights of this. he stopped waking in the night. he sleeps for 8-9 hour stretches now, undisturbed! once in a while he will cry out, but when i go to him, he is already sound asleep. i no longer need to assist him in getting back to sleep. he knows how to do it, and does it. once morning comes (any time after 6:30am) i'll nurse him when he wakes up, but night nursing is now officially in the past.

it is tempting to think that i should have tried this much sooner, but i honestly believe that the timing was just right. i don't think it would have gone so smoothly with cosmo had i tried any sooner. i knew i couldn't handle a "cry it out" approach, and i actually have done a lot of research on this topic. i know i had some fear which was preventing me from trying it, but i was also listening to my intuition, and i listened to cosmo. he changed. the previous methods weren't working anymore, so we moved on to something else.

in any case, i am so proud of him, and proud of us.

others people's lives (and mine)

today i found myself searching google maps for satellite views of places i lived growing up. it was a strange and surreal experience to see photographs from the sky of backyards we built forts in, and the empty fields where we played now covered in housing developments. this search eventually led me to pursue names of people i've known from the distant past. i finally landed on a blog hosted by a couple i knew long ago, who i am no longer in touch with. their lives are vastly different from mine, and different from when i knew them, yet there was some kind of common thread. i am really enjoying reading it, sifting through the archives. i've focussed on the posts by the woman i knew the most, and what strikes me is how happy she is about her life. she has lots of love around her, and she feels like she is right where she needs to be.

it occurred to me that this is how i feel about my own life. how lucky. tonight, the stifling heat has lifted. there is a cool breeze blowing, and the sky is a peachy pink, dotted with shades of amethyst. i feel good. i love my life, and i love the beautiful people in it.

in other news, last friday i took myself out on a date. carl was finished with classes and had some time to spend with cosmo during the day, so i walked up to the river oaks theater and saw the lives of others it was the perfect title for what i needed right then. i wanted to be alone, but i didn't want to be at home, where i would inevitably feel compelled to sweep the floors. i also didn't feel like sitting in a cafe and thinking about the cover letters that need to be written, or why i didn't spend my summers during grad school interning at sexy architecture firms (presumably, if i had, i would now have a flourishing career?). i just wanted to get away. simple escape into someone else's story. what better way to accomplish this than sitting alone in an aging movie theater, with a huge screen in front of my face playing a heart wrenching film set in east germany-just before the wall came down? it was perfect. afterwards i shopped at an upscale consignment shop next door, and found some summer pants (which i tried on, at my leisure, no impatient toddler rushing me to get out of the store). they were half off, which is still considerably more than i'm used to paying for used clothes, but still, a bargain. i walked home thoroughly rejuvenated. when i arrived, cosmo and carl were still out. i was at a loss.

so, i swept the floors.

sweetpea

narration: freshly picked sweet peas from the community garden! i think i'll try one. yumm! those are delicious! more. please. ahhh...this is the life.

stoop sittin'

cosmo thinks he lives in brooklyn or something. when we take little walks in our neighborhood, he likes to stop and sit on the steps of other people's porches. he has also taken to insisting that we also sit down next to him, at which point he gets up and moves on to the next stoop.

curious new habit.

little kitchen

i knew those 3 years of cabinet making would come in handy at some point. that, and my life long propensity for scavenging. i got the idea to make cosmo a play stove when i saw a homemade one that pearl and carrie had at their place. it was made by a friend from an old cabinet, and the kids seemed to love it. i've wanted to get a stove for cosmo, but the ones i've seen that i like cost over 80 dollars, and i didn't like them that much. i knew i could make him something, but i wondered if i'd ever get around to it. i ended up using an ikea box/shelf that a friend gave us as the base. i found an old wooden drawer on the street last week, which became the shelving on top. we salvaged some scrap tongue and groove pine panels from the construction site across the street and i used that to make the door, which has a little plexi-glass window. the only thing i spent money on was the hardware, and that came to about 10 bucks. i saved an enormous amount of time by choosing not to paint any of it. i realized it would look much nicer if i just left the natural wood colors, and painted some stenciled burners. i have to admit, i am quite proud of how it turned out, and most of all, that i actually got it done --so that cosmo has a chance to play with it before he out-grows that sort of thing. so far he seems to think it's pretty cool.

rant

we just finished watching the last of the four part series when the levees broke—a documentary by spike lee about hurricane katrina, the aftermath, and the affects on the community, the black community of new orleans, in particular.

even though i already knew a lot about what happened, and how horrible it was, and how fucked up the government response was, and still is—and even though i already knew that the crisis is far from over, that it has only just begun…i was still shocked by the film. each of the four sections seemed to highlight a further injustice. different from the last, not worse exactly, but no better.

i thought about what it would be like to live there when the mandatory evacuation orders came. would i get out? what if i didn’t? what would i have done? where would i have ended up? who would i have been with? in many of the shots of people making their way on foot, through flooded streets, or being rescued by boats or helicopters, or huddling together in the superdome, or waiting [and waiting and waiting…]to board a bus out of town—in many of those shots of people, children are present. you see mothers with babies, toddlers, older kids. i try to imagine myself in any less-than-ideal situation with cosmo, and i just crumple up and sob. caring for an infant or small child in the best of circumstances can be so incredibly challenging. any of us who have kids knows this. when you consider that these families, these young mothers with several children, or older couples with grandchildren, anyone with small children in their charge, dealing with appalling, dangerous, life threatening, hopeless and confusing situations…for days on end, weeks, months—trapped and at the mercy of incompetent, racist, stressed and stretched authorities---who have no ability to care for all of them, and no plan to even start—it is enough to make you go insane vicariously, or in sympathy.

then you realize that the trauma of the hurricane, the immediate disaster, of the storm, levees breaking, massive, unprecedented flooding, and the horrendous “survival” conditions of the so-called shelters…this short term trauma, which actually went on for weeks, even longer for some…you realize this was just the beginning. life after katrina for these people, not just the ones who were there when it happened, but even for those who left—life after katrina is, in many ways, worse than surviving it.

injustice piled upon injustice. insult to injury, salt rubbed into every open wound. motherfuckers not giving people any compensation, any way to rebuild some fragment of their lives after they paid every month their insurance premium outta their measly pay check just to try to protect what little they had…for 50 years, believing somebody would look out for them if something happened. believing people would do what they said they would do in exchange for your monthly payment for 50 years and nothing. “here. $600. that’s all you are entitled to.”

and what you hear about on the nightly news all around the country is the fraud from all those free loading welfare queens spending all their FEMA money on crack or whatever the fuck…middle class white america is so offended by fraud. by theft. by looting. but only when it’s done by poor desperate black folks. the good hands of allstate can fuck everybody inside and out while the good neighbors of state farm rob pillage and plunder the working poor who did what they thought was right all along only to be left. with nothing.
no thing.

tip of the iceberg folks. i could keep going. but i better not. you get the picture. i urge you to see the film. though it doesn’t do anyone any good…the least we can do is look. this is what carl says about the iraq war, and why he refuses to turn away, day after day, as it just gets worse and worse, more and more hopeless, more and more tragic and devastating for the people of iraq, and the families of all who are dying. seeing does nothing. but there is nothing that can be done. we cannot stop it. the least we can do is witness this senseless catastrophe. we owe it to our fellow human beings not to look away.