But these guys seem to be getting more use out of it. Every time I turn around, one or both of them i stretched out or curled up or cleaning himself on the bed. And blog pseudonym aside, Gatito is not exactly the cats’ biggest fan.
Side note: Have you ever noticed how hard it is to photograph a black cat? He has no definition!
Eleven years ago today, my plans for the evening fell through. Coincidentally, so did the plans of a cute guy who worked an aisle or two away at my first job and who had been saying, “Hi Cat!” every time he passed me (which was often, since my desk was in the middle of the hallway) since I had started two weeks before.
What are you doing tonight? he asked.
I don’t know. What are you doing? I asked back.
I don’t know. What are you doing? he asked again.
So I took a deep breath and said, Do you want to get a drink?
We stopped off at his apartment on the way and he went into his closet to change his shirt. Peeking through the crack, I was astounded to see how white his chest was. Taking another deep breath, I decided I could get used to it.
Drinks at the Time Cafe on 7th Ave. (which is no longer there) turned merged into dinner at a sushi restaurant on Hudson Street (also no longer there) and then a movie. The next day, we both had pre-arranged dates with other people, but by evening, we were back together. The rest, as they say, is history.
One third of my life and counting.
Gatito’s bed is arriving on Thursday. I always swore that I would not move him out of his crib unless he was climbing out or I needed it for another child, but I didn’t count on being woken up in the middle of the night by a child who needs to use the toilet. Not that I am counting on his getting up to pee independently and going back to bed without waking us up (although he is capable of it), but it could happen! I guess this is really the end of babyhood.
One thing that amazes me about Gatito is how consistent his personality has been from the age of two months. In infancy, he had an unusually long attention span and ability to entertain himself. These days, he requires long periods of daily independent car playing to be truly happy. Last week, when we arrived an hour too early for his tots music class, he sat entranced through an entire Suzuki violin class first. They let him interact with real instruments during and after the tots class, and he loves it. Tata sent a great picture of him holding a violin under his chin a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been looking forward excitedly to learning Suzuki violin (or other instrument of his choice) together when he turns four (only if he still wants to, of course).
While his personality has been consistent, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t evolved. He has always been extremely sensitive to loud noises. He still doesn’t like them, but he’s learned to deal with them, in part by talking about them often. When my mom showed him an apple corer/slicer, he asked, “Is it loud?” He pretends to vacuum and makes me hold Cowie and cover his* ears and have Cowie cry because of the noise. (*Although all cows are female, Gatito insists that his is a boy, just to be contrary.)
He remains tall (around 40 inches– the average height of a four-year-old) and skinny, and he’s always hungry. He consumes whole pints of berries in a sitting. Often when we put a plate of food in front of him, he immediately asks, “Are you going to give me more?” as though he’d lived through a famine or something! He’s excellent at co-opting whatever we’re eating, which is a pain on the days I am bothering to count WW points. When he is at other people’s houses, he says, “I have a kitchen.” And then, “Do you have a kitchen?” This generally has the desired outcome of being offered a snack.
He woke up in the middle of the night last week and started crying hysterically, “Daddy! YOU ATE MY PASTA!” (No pasta had recently been served, just for the record.) After a few minutes of that, we went in there and he accused daddy again and added, “And you were fading away. And you need to be blue.” It was so wacky I thought for a second he may have had a brain injury, but I guess he was just still mostly asleep.
He’s totally potty trained and has been for months, but he still delays going and does an elaborate pee dance. It hasn’t resulted in an accident so far, but I worry about bladder infections! Ever since we had to stop on the side of the road in the Bronx to let him pee, he’s loved peeing outside. It sure is easy being a boy, but that doesn’t mean I want him peeing on my lawn all the time! (Or worse, he often wants to go by the side of the pool at our new club. Uh, no!)
While he’s often in non-stop motion in the typical manner of a two-year-old, he’s not aggressively physical. He only recently got comfortable with climbing up ladders and going down slides. The dad next door showed him how to throw a baseball overhand. He did it and we all cheered, and when the dad asked if he would like to do it again, he said, “No, thank you.”
If he one day ends up as a film or theater director, we will tell stories of how he used to sit on the potty and direct A and me in elaborate plays involving Cow and Monkey (or, if I am too lazy to get them, Toothpaste and Hairbrush, or Flat Iron and Hair Dryer). Mostly I have to make them bake cakes and serve them, or else look for and purchase a book for Gatito. The required accompanying dialog is elaborate and specific and woe betide the stuffed animal or hair styling tool that messes up a line.
He’s still nervous around other little kids (interestingly, in particular younger kids and babies), but Tata has been taking him to playgroups with a few kids that will be in his preschool class in the fall and I have been getting him together with the little girl down the street who will also be in his class, so he won’t walk in to a room of 17 total strangers. I think the timing for school is going to be perfect for him. His personality was so much more suited to the one-on-one, calm attention of a nanny, and we’re lucky to have had that option, and lucky to have the option to continue that in the fall, with preschool three mornings/week.
He’s amazing around grown-ups, always at his most charming. He’s incredibly articulate in both English and Spanish and impresses everyone he meets. We took him to a barbecue with people from A’s job and he charmed the pants off all of them, from his greetings and hand shaking to his unprompted pleases, thank you’s and general conversation, to his general obedience. (He has his share of melt-downs and obstinacy but he generally saves these for when no one else is around.) Quickly catching on to the rules of Simon Says, he wanted to be Simon and directed everyone to look at the sky, look at the grass, look over there, in a sort of existential version of the game.
We had to go to a daytime wedding on Saturday to which he was not invited and I was grumpy about losing a whole day with him. Even though I am sure it is healthy for me to spend some time away, I almost never spend more than an hour away from him other than when I am at work, and I felt like a piece of me was missing. I was so excited to see that my office is having a kids event in a couple of weeks because I cannot wait to show him where I go every day and to show him off to my colleagues.
Tata is on vacation this week and we split up the days between A, my mom, and me. My time starts tomorrow, and I couldn’t be more excited to have two full days of him all to myself. We spend a lot of time laughing around here, and asking how he manages to be so cute and so funny, and how we managed to get so lucky.
And not a surprise, either, given the wonkiness of this month’s cycle. Onwards!
No period, no positive pregnancy test.
Sometimes ectopics have betas too low to show up on a pregnancy test. But since First Response can detect a beta of only 6.3, that seems unlikely, even to a worry wort like me. I know that progesterone can delay a period, but in my experience (n=2) it does not delay at least spotting. I’ll stop taking it and see what happens, I guess.
Did you see Sex and the City? There is a part where Charlotte says that she has everything she’s ever wanted, and she’s terrified that something bad is going to happen. That’s a pretty good description of how I feel. It’s no way to live, really.
But I wonder if another part of my ambivalence about a second child is an unwillingness to really open myself up to the possibility of massive disappointment if it doesn’t work out.
I think this may be taking its toll on my subconscious. For the past two months, I’ve been lightheaded in the way that I am when I’m pregnant, and over the past week I’ve even thrown up several times. The fact that this all started at the same time I started trying to conceive again cannot be a coincidence. Nor can the fact that it only happens when I have time on my hands, but if I’m busy and distracted, I feel fine.
I’m hoping that by explicitly acknowledging to myself that this is all psychosomatic will help me kick it, because I just do not have the time for therapy right now.
Sometimes I’m not sure whether I want to get pregnant because I’m desperate for another baby or because I’m desperate for the trying/being pregnant phase of my life to be over. A quick conception/healthy pregnancy seems somehow a faster route to the end of this phase than either a drawn-out attempt or coming to terms in my head, without medical imperative, that Gatito will be my one and only.
The superstitious side of me cannot decide whether my ambivalence is a jinx that will ensure I conceive immediately and wind up feeling unhappy about it or never conceive/carry to term and wind up unhappy about that.
There’s a lot of talk about how to create a family-friendly workplace, and I’ve been mulling over one of the concepts in The Feminine Mistake for a while. Some of this is hers and some of it I think is mine.
We often talk about women getting to the top and then changing things, but the problem is that most women who’ve gotten to the top have had to act like men to do it. And once there, they’re not really that interested in helping other women to get to the top without paying the dues/making the same personal sacrifices that they have had to make.
Consider, on the other hand, men who have wives who work full-time, serious jobs. Two things happen (theoretically, at least): One, they have an intimate understanding of the challenges faced by a working mother. And two, without a wife taking care of everything on the home front, they themselves have more responsibility and thereby require a more flexible, humane work environment.
By this theory, the answer to developing a more family friendly work environment is not so much to have more women at the top as to have more men at the top with wives who work. (At least for the first generation. Once a generation of women who didn’t have to sacrifice everything gets to the top, they’d theoretically be more flexible for the next generation, too.)
Looking back on the senior men and women with whom I’ve worked, I’d say there’s a rough (by no means 100% consistent) alignment with this idea that men with working wives are more sensitive to the need for balance whereas the women think other women need to either sacrifice like they did or slow down their career development, at least for a while. What are your thoughts and experiences?
Finally got the positive on CD 19. By this point, who even knows if the follicle on the “wrong” side that was largest at the ultrasound eight whole days ago is still dominant. My body is laughing at me for trying to understand it.
A friend of mine used to say that nieces and nephews were the best birth control. Unfortunately, later she discovered that infertility was actually the best birth control, but that’s neither here nor there for tonight’s topic. (For the record, she did get her happy ending– two kids via IVF.)
Today, I ended an information session on saving for college and let me tell you: THAT is the (second) best birth control ever: Assuming an after-tax rate of return of 5%, an annual college inflation rate of 6%, and payments made from now until a 2-year-old child is 22, you would have to put away over $1,500/month to fund an ivy league college (and there are many non-ivy’s that cost similar amounts), $1,100 for a private college, and $535 for a public one (including all expenses).
How’s that for staggering?
Now multiply that times two kids and you could see how someone in the middle of a cycle could start to feel a little ambivalent.
Gulp.
(FWIW, I think I am either about to ovulate or I have a yeast infection that doesn’t itch. Not sure if either of those things are even possible. Sigh.)
