June was my last post. It's October! Can you even really say you have a blog when you post so infrequently? I am one of the many who start a blog only to have it fade away. And here I have so much important stuff to say! Like:

My kid is so cute.
and
My kid is so smart.

I had a good day with her though. She napped. In her crib. For more than 2 minutes. It was amazing. I had time to rid our bedroom of many, many dust bunnies. The bunnies were breeding all over the place. It was surely hazardous.

Anyway, today at 8 months she napped an hour in her crib and this was totally amazing to me. I clearly am not a Ferberizer. I am fairly certain G would take the Ferberize challenge and poop all over it. We already know she can scream for hours, and hours, and drive us to the drink. So we have pretty much decided at this point just to look for small victories like a nap in the crib and a swept bedroom.

G was an inconsolable newborn. She cried a lot: at night, in the morning, in the swing, in the rocking chair. There was very little we could do to help her no matter what we tried: a new hold, a new room, a new toy, a new song. Nothing worked. T and I would noticed, however, that there was this spot in the corner of her room where she would look, over my shoulder, behind me, where there was nothing but a blank wall, but when she looked on this spot, she would stop crying and just look at it. Sometimes she would even smile at the spot. T and I decided that that must be God back there, her old buddy from the womb, a familiar presence comforting her in her new alien world.

These days, G doesn't cry nearly as much and for the most part we can console her. She is becoming more and more connected to us and to the earthly things around her, her block toy, her purple blanket. It is those things and us, now that she goes to for comfort.

T and I sit around a lot and just talk about how perfect G is. The word miracle used for a baby really is no stretch. T and I had little to do with her creation. Babies come from somewhere much better and bigger than us. But as she gets older, even just a few months, and she is starting to understand the world, I wonder if she also starts to lose, little by little, that connection to that bigger, better place?

She no longer looks to that spot in the corner of her room for comfort.

G fell off the counter sitting in what I thought was a totally immovable foam chair. If I hadn't been screaming when I saw it, I would have been impressed with the girl's strength. A trip to the er confirmed that G is fine and that I am officially a crazy, frazzled mother who has no idea what to do with all this love for her kid. After that horrifying experience of watching her fall off the counter far from my reach, I have no idea how I will last the rest of my life with this super sized love that makes me feel as though I may just self-combust.

I made my husband turn off Gray's Anatomy. I couldn't take the poorly acted story line about a dying kid. I cried. My cousin, another new mom, says she cries at the commercial where the kid is lost in the train station and can't find his mom. It's a "Don't Smoke" ad which she says is killing her. In my three short (or very, very long, depending on how you look at it) months that I have been a mom, my heart has grown to the size of the universe. It's achingly large. It's crippling. It's what I was warned about but had no idea about until now. I now feel what every good mom must.

I was unfriended by a "friend" on facebook. Pretty low, huh? With all the people friending everyone and their sister and their ex-boyfriends and their aunts' ex-boyfriends, and...you'd think the whole friending thing had lost any real meaning anyway. I feel pretty bad to be unfriended. Was it something I wrote? Once upon a time, in the 90s, we were real friends. It seemed only natural that today we would be facebook friends. What would make her suddenly want to unfriend me? Was she still upset that I got roses from the leading man in the musical senior year and she didn't? Or that I set her up with a horrible prom date that same year. (Totally unintensional, I promise.) What was it so many years later that made her go, "You know. She really poed me when she didn't call me back in 95 when I was really homesick." It's just weird.
And sadly, it bums me out. I am a 33 year-old mother of G, employed, with a clean bathroom and frozen homemade spaghetti sauce in the freezer, yet I can still so easily feel like that nerdy high schooler seeking solace in the library where I could eat my lunch alone without having to face the tables of girls in the lunchroom who were all so much cooler and had so many more friends than I.

Babies are work. They are funny looking, smelly, blob-like and extremely impatient. But they are also pretty magical. It's hard to know why, what with the exhaustion, the thankless giving and the full time job that comes with parenting, but many people really do love babies. Random people smile at me as I stroller G down the street. Homeless men peek under her visor to catch a glimpse. Strangers ask how old she is. Why do people care?

By the end of my pregnancy I was annoyed with people's questions about my womb. "When are you due?" "Do you have names picked out?" And my favorite, "How's it going mama?" But I realized that people love a pregnant woman because of what she represents. No matter what your beliefs, pregnancy is a crazy miracle. A woman is growing another person. And in an attempt to be close to that miracle and the innocence and purity it represents, people try to get close to you.

Now G is is an extension of that miracle. She comes from some place far away and she is connected to something much bigger. So people still want to be close to her.

My husband and I wonder when it is that she will lose her pure goodness. Will we know? Will she know? And is it then that she becomes just another person on the street? Is it then that everyone forgets the miracle that she is?

My husband wrote that initial entry. He clearly likes me. But his question is a good one, why start a blog? I don't have the answer but feel compelled to join the ranks of bloggers anyway. Although, I am sort of hoping no one reads it- except maybe my Mom and my two brothers - one a liberal leftist Californian who loves to challenge anyone to a good political discussion and the other, a writer often inclined to laugh out loud with no apparent reason- both, I figure, would be good for banter. And my husband, he is a super clever one, although his entries will most likely be more along the lines of praise than anything.

Me? I am a first time mother of a 6 week old. I feel for some reason that calls for a blog- a blog titled something like, "What were we thinking?"

A doctor friend calls childbirth a "medical disaster narrowly averted. The birth canal, he says, is not designed for the birthing process. It is most unnatural, an evolutionary error." He told me this as I sat big and round, awaiting the inevitable.

I am currently holding my very own almost medical disaster. She is loud and pink and inclined to smell funny. If you ask me though, the real potential for disaster comes not at birth but from the first months with the little person. Parenting is just damage control, at least at this point. It's as if, you're suddenly hired to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You have heard of the company but you have absolutely no experience in the field, your background being more in the wheat and barley sector. And you have never been asked to take such great responsibility so quickly. Yet now you are supposed to not only keep the company going but you are supposed to make sure it flourishes. This "career" will span the rest of your life and take up most minutes of the day and night. Go.

One friend advised us "embrace the poop." Truer words were never spoken. Who knew that two people could suddenly speak so frequently of poop- it's color, it's frequency, the act of and yes literally embracing the poop. There is really nothing else you can do when at the end of the day you find something mustard color in your fingernail.

As a parent, things like poop-talk start immediately. What does not come immediately, at least for me, is that feeling of wonder at being a mother. Really, that feeling of even feeling like a mother has evaded me. At what point does a mom really become a mom?