I want to dive into a chocolate cake.
On which topic, I found myself weirdly furious with the ladies at my wife's office who insisted on saying I was losing weight. Blah blah, never argue with a compliment, but you have to understand how I live.
Evie sleeps about three times a day, on average: overnight, from about 9pm to 9am; a morning nap, from about 10:30am to 12pm; and an afternoon nap, from something like 4pm to 6pm. It is in those gaps that I devote myself to eating the feelings I had from the prior hour or so, when I was trying to put her to bed.
I've always been a determined eater, but it's like there's a fire lit under me when the baby is napping, as though wholesale calorie-consumption will save me from the parenting demons chasing behind. "Get thee behind me, Satan! I've got pie!"
The point being that a random ex-co-worker saying I'm losing weight is not just a little bit goofy at 9-months postpartum, but also feels like a denial of my lifestyle. Even if Evie's ferocious breast-feeding is doing enough to distract my metabolism from the ice cream I'm gorging on, the ice cream is the truth.
I want to be clear: Evie is a sweet little girl. She's remarkably even-tempered, she's been doing great on sleeping long hours overnight, she's affectionate and funny, and usually she only cries for 10 minutes on her way to sleep. But those 10 minutes... Sometimes I shrug them off-- "She's tired. She's just fussing herself to sleep for a few minutes"-- and it's fine, but sometimes they rattle me and I just want to shout to the heavens.
But I don't, because I can't shout when the baby's sleeping. So I wad my shouts into bagels or sandwiches and I swallow them back down.
Then, a little while later, the baby wakes and she is perfect. She has dreamy eyes and curly little tendrils around her ears, and her cheeks are pink and warm. She sees her moms and smiles shyly, and it's all good again.
This post is awesome, man. Chapter one of the memoir, eh?
ReplyDelete(I...can't tell if this comment already went through once. Hey, I have a thought: maybe you should start a tumblr. I feel like you'd get a wider readership there and that's kind of the hip place to blog these days. Also, you could reblog things and not have to write posts but still keep an active blog.)
I spent the last couple days reading your entire blog from the beginning and I have to say thank you for this. It has helped in so many ways.
ReplyDeleteAww. I'm so glad to hear that!
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