Learning #17 : Time is money.

In an effort to reduce clutter and try to keep myself organized, I recently decided to convert all my photos to digital by sending off 2 extremely large boxes to sunny Red Bluff, CA, home of the magical photo scanning elves at GoPhoto.

This rad picture, at left, is me on a pair of homemade stilts that my Uncle Bob gave to me one Christmas.  There is also a picture of my sister with a yellow pair of stilts, wearing the exact same powder blue Levi cords and fly OP shirt with the wood buttons, but I'll spare her by leaving that to the family archives.  I actually remember taking this picture, so it was fun to find it again.

It took me about 20 minutes to find all my old albums, find 2 boxes big enough to fit everything, print 2 labels, pack them in a semi-orderly fashion (emphasis on "semi" – good thing GoPhoto does negative scanning, because there were a fair amount of random envelopes full of mystery memories), find the packing tape, and tape them up. Then I drove them over to the UPS store, and off they went.

All told, I spent under an hour on my photo scanning project, and I had around 3500 photos and negatives that I needed to convert to digital. (While slide scanning is a pretty popular service 'round GoPhoto, I'm just slightly too young to have any of those.)

As I drove home from UPS, I did the math:

3500 images x $.37 = $1300 - 20% off (hey, I have a coupon) = $1040 if I keep all the scans, which is unlikely. Since you only pay for the scans you keep, I figure I can probably delete at least 500, so now we're at

3000 images x $.37 – 20% off = $888

Which seems like sort of a lot, except that I've literally just digitized and preserved my entire life's history. Which is, seriously, very cool once you're looking at it all on screen. Plus, if I want to spend less, I can delete more scans. Do I really need 4 different versions of essentially the same picture of me and my freshman year roommate wearing our sweet '90's sweaters and hats, looking vaguely Punky-Brewster-like, drinking some light beer swill?  Not really.

But I digress.  After doing the $$ math, I did this math:

3000 images x 3 minutes = 10,500 minutes = 175 hours

Now, keep in mind that 3 minutes each is a low estimate, because realistically I’m going to get distracted looking at photos and I’m going to have to take them out of albums and put them back and color correction/dust and scratch removal takes time, and I’m also probably going to get bored and space out and take even longer due to being generally annoyed with the project. But even at 3 minutes each…

That’s twenty-one 8-hour days of non-stop scanning. Which is 2.5 months of weekends.

And I have to buy the scanner anyway, so now we have to factor in $250 for a good scanner (which still isn’t as good a scanner as GoPhoto has), and suddenly I’m actually only paying myself $3.64 and hour (or $4.90 without a coupon). Do I want to pay myself less than $4/hour to miss 3 full weeks of weekends wherein I’m spending 8 full hours a day doing nothing but scanning photos?

Um, no. No, I really don’t.

And that’s the thing about photo scanning that people don’t realize: you think you can do it (and technically, you can), but you’re probably not going to. Because it’s a bigger project than you think it is, and you most likely have much better ways to spend your time.

So: although I’m a serial DIYer, when it comes to converting my own photos to digital, I’m really glad that I outsourced to a team in not-so-far-off Northern-Central-ish California. Because I only have so many weekends, and spending 10 of them curled up with a scanner isn’t the best or most enjoyable use of my time.

(This is, incidentally, the same reason that I’m not going to dig up the freaking oleander stumps in my back yard myself. Anyone who’s tried to dig in clay soil knows what I’m talking about.)

Learning #16 : Don't judge a book by its Berkeley

When I was pregnant, I immediately started reading books loaned to me by other mom friends.  In reading these books, it was painfully clear that I had some immediate homework to do - namely, to come up with a "birth plan."

This seemed like a lot of work.  I mean, I was really not aware that we would need a plan beyond "I'll go into labor, we'll head to the hospital, the baby will come out," but Ricki Lake definitely felt otherwise.

And so, somewhere toward the middle of my first trimester, I started interviewing doulas.

Now, at this point I was not hugely attuned to the difference between a doula and a midwife.  (In a nutshell, for those who haven't used either: a doula is a labor coach there to help you through labor.   This includes giving your partner a break, etc.  The midwife, like a doctor, is there to get the baby out.)

Living in the Bay Area means that you can pretty much swing a cat and hit a doula (though doing that around here might get both the animal rights and the doula rights people after you).  But I wanted to make sure that the person getting on-board to shepherd me through labor was a good personality fit, because, being my first pregnancy and all, we weren't exactly sure how things were going to shake out on The Big Day.

And so we ended up in Berkeley one sunny morning with Betsy Appell, who seemed to know what she was doing, had trained with midwives, had a toddler herself courtesy a homebirth with one of the midwives I'd interviewed, had a super mellow and nurturing energy, and - as an extra bonus - taught a Zen birthing class as part of her services.

Knowing even less about the Zen tradition that I did about birth ("The Art of Zen" having sat, untouched, on my bookshelf for years - right next to "The Art of War," actually, which I have read), I felt like I'd be in good hands with Berkeley Betsy, who was also a prenatal yoga teacher and probably a vegetarian or something and, therefore, we assumed (correctly) that she would be a nice calming influence when The Big Day arrived.

What I hadn't counted upon was the homework.  Betsy immediately sent us a CD that we were supposed to start listening to, like, immediately.  So, always one to do my homework on time, I uploaded the CD into my iTunes and set about this hypnobirthing prep business.

It should be noted here that I am frightfully nearsighted.  Without my contacts in or my glasses on I really can't see anything but suggestive shapes and blurs.  It's sort of like living in a Monet painting, with less color and far less water lilies - the last of which is a good thing, I suppose, because if I'm without my contacts next to a body of water, well... it just sounds like a bad idea.

It should also be noted here that we did not have an iPod docking station in the bedroom at the time.  And so, since we were supposed to listen to the CD before bed, we just used my laptop.

The Zen lesson started out normally enough: "Get into a comfortable position, and either close your eyes, or open your eyes, looking downward with a soft gaze..."

Details after that are fuzzy, because my partner generally fell asleep practically at the end of this sentence, and I was usually out by the time we were laying on my magical beach.

But then, there was the song.

Having usually drifted off to sleep before the talking ended, I started being awakened by this weird song at the end of the exercise.  It started out somewhat normally enough, with a sort of hippie-ish guitar that could definitely be the choice of a yoga teacher who lived in Berkeley.  But then the guy started singing, and the first lines of the song seemed just like a really odd choice for a Zen hypnobirthing practice CD:

She left her father, been 30 years

She drew some water to dry his tears

She said I'm sorry, I've been lonely.  I need another

Um... what?  What was Betsy trying to tell us with this song?  That we shouldn't cling to our child and make her look after us for 30 years?  That the baby was lucky to have 2 moms?  I wasn't sure, but the song went on:

She crossed through deserts and rivers wide

She walked through valleys and mountains high

She crossed the seas through storm and night

To find a lover

???????

Was Betsy trying to tell us that we need to nurture our child and teach her about love early, so that she doesn't have to circumnavigate the globe to find it?

Now, bear in mind that I'm half asleep here.  Not for long, though, because suddenly the song picks up tempo and the singer starts bellowing pretty loudly:

LOOOOOOOOOVE Bet-SAAAAAY

Somebody is going to love you someday

It was at this point that I figured that Betsy either hadn't really listened to the words of this song, or that she was in dire need of a hug.

The first explanation seemed more probable.  I figured that this song was her signoff.  Like, "Thanks for doing your Zen birthing homework!  Love, Betsy."  I mean, that seemed like a nice thing to do, something that maybe a Berkeley yogi might do.

And so, seeing as how she was a tea-drinking probable vegetarian Zen student prenatal yoga teacher from Berkeley, this explanation made sense to me.  And so we continued to listen to the lesson, every night, with my partner continuing to fall asleep within 5 minutes and me generally falling asleep at some point, only to be awakened by that freaking song.  And then I started dreading the song, so sometimes I didn't manage to fall asleep at all, and I started waiting for the perfect time to turn off the computer so that I could avoid that Stupid Freaking Song which made No Freaking Sense and was seriously putting a dent into My Freaking Zen.

I thought about talking to Betsy about this.  Maybe giving her a helpful tip, like,"You know... I like the lesson, but the song is just a wee bit disruptive..."  But I figured that Zenmaster Betsy knew what she was doing, so I let it be.

Her husband actually called us to reschedule our first birth class (Berkeley Betsy being at a Berkeley Birth), and I asked him about it.  I said, "We fall asleep before the CD is over - my partner falls asleep like 5 minutes in, and I usually fall asleep before the song," and he told me a funny story about how he fell asleep while she was making the CD.

No mention of the song.  And so I didn't mention it again.

And then, one day, I talked to my partner about this annoying, annoying song, and asked her if it bothered her at all.  Being the world's soundest sleeper and having never actually made it to the song, she had no idea what I was talking about.

So I pulled out my laptop and, having the benefit of my contact lenses in my eyes at this point, I realized something important:

The Freaking Song, as it turned out, wasn't actually part of the hypnobirthing lesson.  It was a Big Head Todd and the Monsters nong, called "Love Betsy."  And the reason that it played at the end of our hypnobirthing lesson is because, without the benefit of my contacts in or my glasses on (which is generally how I go to sleep), I was just squinting horribly at iTunes and typing "Betsy" into the search box primarily by muscle memory, assuming that the only thing that would come up would be Betsy Appell's Greatest Zen Birthing hits.  And I could sort of see that the search result was quite short, so it never occurred to me that some random, terrible Big Head Todd song had surfaced.  Hell, I didn't even know I had a Big Head Todd album, let alone a Big Head Todd album with the world's cheesiest song about a lonely Betsy who apparently lived with her father for 30 years before traveling the globe to find... well, to find another.

It was at this point that my partner began to laugh.  Reeeeeeally hard.  Once she listened to the song we were both just howling.

I then sent the song to Betsy, with an explanation of what had happened.  Apparently the Zen tradition allows for uncontrollable laughter, which is nice.

Namaste.

Learning #15 : Time ages everything

This photo, like me, aging over time...

Sometimes it's easy to forget that I was cute once.

Photo scanning being all the rage these days, my Dad was nice enough to scan this picture of me when I was around 3 months old, to compare with my then 3-month-old daughter. Here is a list of things we learned in this experience, in no particular order:

1) The hardest part about finding a matching yellow lion toy is that the sheer volume of plush lion toys is enough to make one wonder whether or not their numbers exceed real-life lions. So if you were worried about the status of the lion on the endangered plush-species list, don't be. Population: stable.

2) A single old photo scan takes kind of a long time, and it still looks about as comparatively good as the person in it after all that time. By the time my Dad scanned it, touched it up and emailed it to me, he'd spent 20 minutes on this. (And if he's saying 20, I'm saying 30...)

3) I was cute once. See? And I was way, way ahead of the fauxhawk trend.

4) Sending your child a decades-old baby photo that depicts her at the same age her first baby is makes it far too tempting to spend far too much time planning to take an identical-as-possible photo of her own baby.

And thus we arrive at the series of photos taken of my somewhat unwilling offspring after I spent an embarrassing chunk of a Saturday morning finding Just The Right Yellow Lion Toy for the occasion.


Now, I'm not exactly proud of myself for fancying up my child and subjecting her to the apparently unruly Mr. Yellow Lionface, but fancy her up I did.  She's in a frilly dress and everything.  Hey, we're making memories here, people.

After the ordeal, it then occurred to me that it might be nice to scan my whole baby book so that I might compare the 200-ish photos commemorating my entire childhood with the 2000-ish photos I managed to accrue in the first few months of my child's life.  Not to mention that, given the condition of my baby pic, it's probably a good idea to get these things scanned before they fade any more.

But man - the time it would take.  Do I want to spend an entire weekend scanning and touching up old photos?  Um... no way.  It was bad enough spending 2 hours looking for that lion.

And so, as I write this, I am waiting on my baby book to come back from Red Bluff, CA, home to the magical scanning elves at GoPhoto.  I sent 2 boxes, literally crammed with every piece of photography I could find: photo albums, random envelopes full of miscellaneous negatives, loose pictures - they all made the journey up North, along with my baby book.  I didn't bother sorting through anything; since you can delete any of the scans you don't keep and don't have to pay for them, I figured it's easier to sort through them online once everything's digitized.

(So once I decide that, perhaps, my Freshman 15 doesn't need to be immortalized quite so thoroughly, well, there's a handy delete button.)

As for the lion toy, he regrettably met a swift end at the paws (er, teeth...) of my dogs.  I'm just glad we got to commemorate his short, baby-slobbered life with a series of somewhat amateurish photographs.  Sleep well, Yellow Lion Toy.  And don't worry: Mr. Giraffe is still around to play with the baby.

Learning #14: read the safety instructions...

(...if you can see)

When an eye care company who makes a product for contact lenses knows that this product might, like, burn your cornea off your freaking eyeball if your eyeball comes into contact with it, you'd think that they'd:

1) Not make their bottle look like a saline bottle, and
2) Not pretend that they aren't making their bottle look like a saline bottle by putting a tiny red stripe on the label -

- since, after all, people using their product have contact lenses.  Which means that, in the course of using said product, it's very possible that some extremely nearsighted people will be in frightfully close proximity to a white-ish saline-shaped bottle that's next to the saline, because they were of course using this product when they took their contact lenses out and so the bottle is still sitting there, because who's cleaning the bathroom before bedtime when they can't even see?  And it's entirely possible, too, you know, that these people might then the next morning remove their lenses from their overnight sterile de-funking bubble bath, and then accidentally wash their lenses with this product and then actually insert a contact lens, thus relegating her their eyes to hostile, burning, stormy tornadoes of searing pain, and of course now these folks are going to have to go to the freaking optometrist and explain what happened while the desk staff sort of snickers behind their hands and everyone pretends that you these poor, poor, misled consumers aren't complete eejits -

And all this could be avoided with better packaging.  Make the entire freaking bottle red, people!  Don't try to invoke some fuzzy "this is good for your eyes" feeling by trying to make your bottle look like a Bausch & Lomb saline bottle.  Because this product isn't actually for the eyes, it's some crazed Lysol-like sterilizer for the actual lenses, and as such the packaging would be more appropriate if the bottle were shaped like a cleansing solution bottle.  Or a branding iron.

I mean, I'm just saying.

Learning #13 : Actually...

...Keeping track of these numbers isn't that difficult, since my dashboard lists them all for me.  I think I was just being lazy.  Or cranky.  Or both.

Learning #12 : Keeping track of these numbers is...

...a huge pain in the arse.  And, thusly, they shall therefore cease to be numbered.

Learning #11 : seriously, don't forget your towel

It turns out that "Hitchikers' Guide to the Galaxy" wasn't wrong about this.

Today I decided to bathe the offspring via a Bumbo chair and a hose, as the weather has recently gone from "Where the hell is Spring? (It's cloudy and freezing!)" to "What the hell happened to Spring? (It's infernally hot!)"

She enjoys sitting in her foam chair while I magically make it rain via the hose nozzle pointed up in the air. It's a good thing, too, because it turns out that the Bumbo chair is most assuredly not for use in a bathtub, which I found out the hard way once the water level started rising and it freed itself from the bottom of the bathtub and became an extremely unstable raft, baby and all.

And this is learning #11a : read the instructions on baby products. Especially the ones made out of magical foam.

Anyway, once I took the child from her foam roost, I realized that I'd forgotten a towel for her. And just as I was thinking "Dammit, I forgot a towel," she added a bio-exclamation point to the sentiment by peeing on me. Now, perhaps the learning here is actually "don't forget a diaper," (we'll call it learning #11b), but for the purposes of drying her off and saving me somewhat from being christened in baby pee, I think a towel would have done the trick.

This reminded me, of course, of the original incident that made me realize that you should just always have a towel. And no, it wasn't the duck incident. It was the "I need a new gym" incident.

As this incident has been immortalized in an open W2W personal ad entitled "I was wet and naked; you were dry and in uniform," I'll simply note it here:

An open letter to the Bally's housekeeper who may or may not be telling this story at parties:

I suppose you might have wondered why you were being approached by a naked, dripping girl in flip flops in the Bally's locker room. Indeed, you may have wondered, "Why doesn't this girl have a towel?"

Or, more appropriately, "Por que ella no tiene una toalla?"

This is a good question, in both languages. Allow me to explain.

I did have a towel. Unfortunately, that towel was locked in my locker along with any other form of clothing or other woven item that might have covered my private parts.

You see, I'd been in the pool. I was appropriately attired in the pool, as I must express that I am not an exhibitionist of any kind. Quite the opposite, in fact: I often wonder why women feel the need to be gratuitously naked in the locker room. Do you really need to be naked to apply makeup? To dry your hair? To ask me an inane question about the weather as I struggle to look sideways so as not to catch a glimpse of your nether regions?

You must understand, I was raised in Catholic schools and have earned myself a healthy fear of my own genitals. Not wanting to think about my own paraphernalia, I really don't want to be forced to confront that of a stranger.

In any case, my point is that I don't make a habit of parading my bare ass around public locker rooms. So when I chose to swim laps yesterday, rest assured that I was in fact wearing a very modest, granny-like one-piece bathing suit.

Upon exiting the pool and going to the sauna, I wrapped my towel around myself. I don't like parading around in a bathing suit much either, as the nuns taught me well that tight clothing leaves little to the imagination, and the Bally's clientele is not particularly one I want imagining anything about me. Good God, these are are strangers, after all.

Upon exiting the sauna, I had to cross through the pool room again. Woozy from the unrelenting sauna heat, I apparently did not fasten my towel well enough around my waist. It deserted me as I was crossing by the pool, and fell into a puddle of other-people's-after-pool-footwater. Yuk.

The good sisters also taught me that cleanliness is next to Godliness. I would just as soon wipe my own bare ass (or someone else's) with my hand than infest myself with funky foot germs from Lord knows who and how many. Children swim in that pool, for Chrissakes - which is something I don't like to think about when I'm in there, but it's the gospel truth. Those little petri dishes and their hair-trigger bladders are allowed in the pool on weekends.

That being the case, I was left in a conundrum. I had no other towel, you see. I was also in a hurry. So, I decided that a quick, nekkid dash from my locker to the shower and back wouldn't be a big deal. Moving quickly enough, I might even dry myself off. And at least I had my flip-flops.

Sister Jeanne Marie and Co. having instilled in me a deeply ingrained appreciation for being neat and tidy, I of course opened my locker and put my soiled towel and wet bathing suit in it. I then locked it*, since I have no idea as to whether the Bally's clientele was privy to the same Catholic upbringing as I was - which is to say that some Godless folks might be prone to breaking Commandments, most notably the ones about coveting and stealing. Call me paranoid; I call myself a good old-fashioned Christian.

As it turned out, my naked dash to the shower wasn't so bad. Nobody saw me. I had a nice, soapy shower with Bally's crap-ass cheap foamy skin-drying soap, and made the trip back to my locker unscathed. Planning to dry myself quickly with a clean, extra T-shirt, I immediately fiddled with my lock in order to end my public nudity as expeditiously as possible. Unfortunately for me, the fates turned at that point. My trusty Master Lock simply

would
not
open

This had to be a mistake. Damnation, I just opened the godforsaken lock 10 minutes previously. I tried again. And again. And again.

No dice.

Now, I know what you're thinking (in addition to "Eres es una Catolica loca!"), but you're wrong. I did not forget my locker combination. For whatever reason, the combination simply didn't work. Perhaps my Master Lock had been possessed by the devil. I'll never know.**

I tried various combinations for a good 10 minutes, as well as the one I knew it was. Keep in mind (and as you noticed all too quickly), I'm naked here. The only good thing about standing there like an idiot in a public locker room while you're naked and dripping and trying to open a lock is that you have a little time to drip dry.

I will tell you that I did look around the locker room to see whether anyone had recognized my godawful plight. Everyone seemed studiously unaware of my dilemma, and since all the women in there were clothed I didn't really feel a burning motivation to prance up to any one of them in my birthday suit and explain the situation. And my cellphone was in my locker. With my underpants. And my damn towel, which at that point was seeming less and less infested with other people's germs.

But then, as I was really about to panic and was considering removing a shower curtain to use as an impromptu plastic toga in order to find some help...

You!

Like a winged angel sent straight from the Heavens, glowing resplendently in the coveted gray Bally's employee polo shirt, mop bucket gliding happily beside you, you entered.

You seemed a bit confused as I approached. I understand. I'm sure I looked a little frazzled (and a lot naked), and of course I explained everything in English the first time.

I might add that I have rarely been so happy I studied Spanish as I was yesterday, explaining my plight for the second time in your native tongue.

Now, I would first and foremost like to thank you for not laughing. I'm certain that you had yourself a good chuckle as you left the locker room, but you do get a heartfelt prayer from me tonight for sparing my feelings so bravely.

When you returned with the bolt cutters, I must say - and I'm not trying to be ungrateful here, truly - but I must say that I was a wee bit disappointed that you didn't bring me a towel. I also noticed that you looked a little dubious as you handed a sharp metal cutting tool to the crazy white naked girl, and I agree that your doubt was well-founded. I might suggest that you do the honors of the lock cutting next time, should the other party be dripping and naked. It's really just a safety issue, isn't it? Those handles can be slippery when wet, and given that being nude inherently entails a lack of proper protective gear, I can only imagine that naked bolt-cutting is an activity on which your Loss Control and Legal departments would frown.

I'd like you to understand, incidentally, that I was not trying to stick any naked part of myself so close to your head, but since my locker was on the top I needed to stand on the dressing bench in order to get the appropriate leverage for naked bolt-cutting. I hope you forgive me, and that you're able to erase the memory from your mind.

In any case, I think we can both agree that my lat flies have paid off, as I'm certain I heard an audible sigh of appreciation from you as I snapped that lock like a priest snaps a Communion wafer. Hallelujah.

And may God bless you, Locker Room Savior.

Signed,

The Wet Naked Blushing Dripping Bolt-cutting Bilingual Catholic Schoolgirl


*Did I lock it? See below.

**Today I bravely revisited the gym and found my lock in my gym bag. Not the lock that was cut, mind you, but my actual lock. How, in span of stowing a soiled towel and bathing suit and taking a shower, a stranger's identical lock ended up on my locker and mine ended up in my gym bag is up for debate.

And to the woman whose lock I've unwittingly vandalized and stolen, I either apologize or I put a pox on you and your misplaced lock.

Signed,

The Formerly Naked Lock-vandalizing Bolt-cutting Gym Member

--

I told this story recently to someone who asked me a very good question, which was: "Why didn't you wear your bathing suit into the shower?"

And the answer is: I just didn't think of that.

Learning #11c: if you find yourself in a situation where you need to abandon your towel and will therefore be naked in public, keep any available clothes with you.

Learning #10 : you don't need a p

It's been aaaaaages since I wrote anything non-work-related that's more complicated than an emailed diaper order cancellation. When I went on maternity leave in September of 2010, I rather confidently announced to myself, in an internal monologue accompanied by a John-Williams-esque-overly-orchestrated-trumpeting-to-crescendo tune, that I would now have time to write! Write all day long, uninterrupted by the soon-to-be squealing bundle of potential that would almost certainly ensure that I would no longer have time to do even the most basic of self-grooming tasks, let alone ever have a spare second to sit down, collect my thoughts (the best I ever do, which is to say strung together with too many commas and dashes and apostrophes and parenthetical digressions), and write... something.

What I was going to write was unclear to me, but it had better be fantastic. I mean, if I was going to sit down and write, it had better be good because this was time I was spending, after all, and I we were about to get into a dwindling resource situation as far as time was concerned. So maybe I'd write a children's book, or a collection of essays, or just a kick-ass novel about... something. No, that might take too long to write. But the time I would have! I could at least write something.

It probably took a week of maternity leave before I was feeling reeeeeally pregnant and overwhelmed with choices like "Will a baby in flannel pajamas stick to flannel sheets, thus creating a velcro-like effect that may harm her due to some sort of limb dislocation, or will they create any sort of sparking effect that might cause a crib fire that we won't catch despite the fancypants 'I will sound a blood-curdling alarm if the child stops moving for 20 seconds or more' (which might, you will find, mean that the child has pinned herself sideways up against her crib bars despite being swaddled, as though an Oreo cookie standing up on its side. And not because she's in distress, but because you've spawned a creature who for whatever reason just likes to sleep that way, thus intermittently setting off the monitor alarm and scaring everyone half to death), or will she be hot in flannel sheets, or is bamboo better - wait, do they even make bamboo sheets for newborns, and - crap, do they have them in any gender-neutral colors so as not to convince our child that girl = pink even though, secretly, I think little girls in pink are hugely adorable, but somebody's got to take a stand, and anyway she'll probably get my regrettable lack of melanin, and I look like utter shit in pink, and... wait, what was I about to do?"

And, feeling justly overwhelmed, I reasoned that my baby would obviously come out well-behaved and docile enough to allow me the time to write.

To be fair, she actually was a really easy baby (I like to think this is because I called her "Lil' Sleepy" in utero, in order to suggest a basic behavior pattern), but she was, after all, a baby. A really new and wobbly baby who slept like 22 hours a day, but not exactly right in a row. Well, um, OK, she actually slept like 8-10 hours a night starting at about 2 weeks old, but ... I was busy. There were the diapers to change, and one day I clocked the number of hours spent in my nursing chair in a 24-hour period, and it was 8 hours. Eight! And that didn't even count dancing around to Hall 'n Oates because rocking around while seated was not producing the all-important newborn fhbreeeeeeeeeeeeeerphhh (which is what a newborn burp sounds like). I mean, feeding this bundle of wonderful was amazingly awesome, truly. Which was a pretty darn good thing, too, because I was doing it 40 hours a week.

And, feeling, justly time-challenged, I decided I'd wait until she was about 6 months old, or eating via something that wasn't inexorably attached to me, and then I'd write. Something. Seriously, like maybe a children's book, but maybe a children's book for adults or something. Wait, that sounds kind of hard, actually, so maybe I'm being overly ambitious about this children's book... (And why is my computer underlining "children's" in red? Is this a mistake? Childrens' doesn't seem right, unless childrens' is the new extra plural or something... does that even make sense? What is an extra plural and what in the hell am I talking about?)

Anyway: 6 months passed. I was, medically speaking, recovered from the rather unexpected C-section that had dramatically announced our daughter to the world. But now I'd gone and done it: we were in escrow.

Moving the contents of a house you've lived in for 5 years is bad. Doing a sprint of a remodel in your new house - one that you're actually doing hands-on, which is to say that your handy partner is doing all the physical work while you do the very hard work of choosing paint colors and asking when it might be done and whether you'll be on time to move in and otherwise worrywarting around, which has to be someone's job, after all - anyway, having all of that DIY drama while simultaneously getting ready to dislocate the contents of a house you've lived in for 5 years with someone else that also contains all the stuff you got at 2 baby showers for your first baby and everything you need to manage 4 dogs plus there's a basement full of forgotten stuff... argh. Now I see why people stay in the same house for 20 years. Moving stinks!

And then there was the packing, the unpacking, the 6 and then 7 and then almost 8 month old... I'd definitely have time to write when we unpacked, though. (Which, incidentally, seems as though it may be sometime next spring, and that - given the weather lately - would seem to indicate that it will be sometime next... June? July? What is this climate change of which you speak?)

With all of these challenges, it seemed almost cosmic that the computer was, tragically and arguably forebodingly, missing its p key. Which is to say that the computer is now a comuter or a com[find a p somewhere on the screen, ctrl+c and ctrl+v]uter or a comhttp://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=wearing+sweatants+in+ublic&aq=f&aqi=g-l1&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=951dc7972bfd90fb&biw=1280&bih=553uter*, that last since I use that ctrl+c / ctrl+v a lot in general.

Surely, I can't write a serious work of ... something ... with a missing p key, people. Which is to say: surely, I can't write a serious work of ... something ... with a missing (925) 376-4040 key, oele.

But the thing is, I can. I mean, I can at least sit down at the desk between feedings (just had one) and between baby-staring and marveling over how well she can roll over and laughing at her wanting to feed herself almost immediately after trying solid foods and using the camera semi-obsessively to document as many fleeting moments as I can so that I can always remember her wee progression through babyhood. And I can do this because not only am I the one in charge of making the time (I'm the Mom, after all), and not only am I tired of my own excuses to dilly-dally and whatnot (which is to say procrastinate, which really doesn't have very many quality p-free synonyms), but I can definitely do this because it turns out that I can actually often avoid the letter p due to a mild childhood obsession with a thesaurus, and so I'm somewhat out of excuses.

And so I did. Because it doesn't have to be erfect, it just has to be.

The child is still alive and everything. Um... and chewing on a Thank-You note.

*(I would here like to that Google for allowing me to enter most my search terms containing the missing letter without bothering to include it and still give me the correct result as well as"did you mean?" header, thus allowing me the chance to [ctrl+c] + [ctrl+v] and get that p back.)