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I’ve chosen a hard path with this parenting thing, but you know what? It’s fascinating, too. And sometimes it’s just plain wonderful.
Today I’m thirty-five. I’ve already gotten well over half a dozen well wishes on Twitter, in email, via SMS, and in person. Soon my mom and her partner will come over, and tonight other friends and loved ones will drop in for snacks and company. I am rich beyond compare.
Nico is in his crib—we’re experimenting with putting him to sleep there. I won’t be giving up co-sleeping for a long while yet, but it’ll be nice if there’s another place he can snooze without being rocked (as he is in the awesome hand-me-down swing we have, where he can sleep for hours). Exploring, exploring.
He was all smiles today. All in all, worries and hurdles aside, I lead a pretty charmed life. If you’re part of it and reading this: thank you.
You turn one month old today. I’ve always loved reading dooce‘s used-to-be-monthly newsletters to her children, so I’m kidnapping the idea (get it? kid… never mind) for my own.
A month and a day ago, I went on a road trip to Portland. I was restless at 41++ weeks, impatient for labor to start, so why not dinner in Maine with Molly, one of my favorite road trip companions? As you have discovered in this first month, road trips make me happy. So you won’t be surprised to hear that my water broke while driving up to Portland. We went right on to have dinner at Duckfat.
Tomato-fennel-basil, cream of onion, PS Vika's water broke
Then we came back to Boston, and twenty-two hours after my water broke, after some additional drama, you were here. You came out all skinny. 7lbs 10oz and 21.5 inches, or as Mark put it, a tall drink of water. You had long, looong skinny fingers and toes. Now, they’re looong and fat. You’ve filled out, babe, gaining somewhere in the vicinity of three pounds in your first month (we’ll find out exactly how much tomorrow, at the doctor’s). You have the round baby-fat cheeks and the double chin, and the insane number of dirty diapers to support my rapid-growth observation.
hello world: eleven days in
Not only is all that baby fat adorable, it’s also a good idea. You’ll be needing these reserves and then some, as you become more mobile. As it stands, you’re already holding up your head and getting your back to go all rigid for seconds at a time. Your kicking is pretty strong, too, but the head and back mobility means that you can look at more of OMG EVERYTHING—to the extent, anyway, that you can make out the shape of anything further than ten inches away. Some of the things that keep your attention for minutes at a time are lit lamps, the television screen when it’s off (large, dark object against the wall’s light background), the dark curtains at home, and the dried roses hanging upside down off the bookshelf near the chest freezer, where your bouncy seat often gets planted.
You’re pretty copacetic about the bouncy seat, most of the time. You even let me take showers, and sometimes make breakfast and/or wash dishes. There’s a limit to your patience, of course, but given your extreme n00b status, the time you do spend in the bouncy seat is impressive, and I’m thankful for that. Single mamahood has been a big adjustment, and so far you’ve been astonishingly cooperative.
Not that you don’t prefer to be held. You do, sometimes emphatically so. Good thing there’s the Moby wrap. You like that thing, even if sometimes you get mad when I put you in it. You settle down and burrow a bit, and often fall asleep. I’ve done laundry, dishes, cooking, therapy sessions, and walking to the doctor’s, all with you in the wrap.
I do wish I could nurse you in it. You’re voracious, and growing accordingly. You’ve started to recognize the breasts: yesterday morning, you reflexively but repeatedly grinned when you saw me offering you one.
That grin, oh. Your entire face lights up. I can hardly wait until it’s conscious. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the myriad expressions that can appear on your face one after another in the span of a minute. One of them in particular I haven’t been able to capture, because both my hands tend to be busy with your floppy little body. When I help you to get rid of the air you gulp in your eager nursing, you lift your eyebrows and half of your head scrunches up, and you look for all the world like Wallace Shawn. Mark calls this your “what fresh hell is this?” face.
one face among many
Other things about your first month:
You’re liking the music I play, and sing along with sometimes, for you. I love it too. Lately I’ve been grooving on Barenaked Ladies’ “Pollywog in a Bog,” which is totally a song about life, the universe and everything, and in my new-mama haze sometimes makes me choke up.
You’ve found faces—first mine, then others’. You are starting to track objects… sorta.
You make mammal sounds when you nurse, and also as you fall asleep and wake. You snort, you snuffle, you grunt. In particularly cold weather and/or wind, you make these little gasping sounds. Naturally, I think it’s all adorable.
My favorite pair of your pants has me calling you Monkeybutt.
You’re totally going to be a road warrior. Our trip to see family in New York was a total success, complete with epic poops in the car but only at rest stops. Further, like 98% of all babies, you fall asleep almost instantly in a moving car seat. I can only hope for that to continue as you grow.
You survived my first screw-up! The very first time we went out with the wheeled frame that turns your car seat into a stroller, you were only a few days old, and I couldn’t get the car seat to snap in. No idea what I was doing wrong, since after that time it’s always worked. Maybe I was trying to put it in backwards? In any case, I ended up just sort of resting it on top of the frame. SO VERY UNSAFE. And you know what? We both survived.
You’re excellent at snoozing.
You don’t know this yet, but you have the best, most supportive community of friends that a little human and his mama could hope for.
You seem to be a morning person. Hey, neat! Me too!
I love sleeping with you, and nursing you in the night. I love cuddling you for hours and watching (feeling!) you gain strength and coordination in your legs, back, neck. I love watching you watching the cats watching you. I love hurtling headlong into the unknown with you.
It’s not that I haven’t been blogging, it’s that I haven’t been doing it here. I feel ok about this, but thought I’d let you know about one project I’ve been working on.
Nico Alexander Zafrin. January 26, 2012. 7lb 9.9oz. 21.5 inches. A tall, skinny newborn who has been gaining weight like nobody’s business. But more about that in the first-month summary that I’m almost done writing. In the meantime: been busy.
What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.
Three years ago, then-five-year-old Eleanor asked Mark if she could please please PLEASE go to Burning Man. He said something to the effect of, not until you can take care of yourself in the desert; not now, for sure. And she said, we should have Burning Man right here, in our backyard! Thus, BackYard Burning Man was born.
This past summer was BYBM’s third year, and it was soul-warming, all day. Mark and Eleanor, graciously hosting out-of-towners, worked at their place all day. In the afternoon, Rosa and I joined them to do what we do best: help with food (and, secondarily, the rest of the prep). Colorful streamers everywhere; a couple of open tents with gorgeous brightly-colored curtains; crafts for kids and grownups. Beer and big-girl drinks in the coolers; a pot luck of tasty foods; the grill going. My funky food contribution this year were little chocolate cakes made in scooped-out orange shells, wrapped in foil, “baked” on the grill. Campfire cakes, they’re called. Wicked fun! Try it—but do use decent ingredients. We had gluten free chocolate cake mixes and quail eggs, to accommodate some friends who don’t do gluten or chicken eggs, and it came out phenomenal.
A brief aside for Bostonians north of the river: Seabra supermarket in Somerville reliably has good, cheap quail eggs. And a bunch of Latin American foods that make it one of my favorite groceries around here.
Yeah, this isn’t really Burning Man. It’s not even Firefly. There’s a gas grill and modern plumbing. At the last two, there’s been a bouncy castle. (I had no idea how easy it was to rent one!) Really, it’s a mid-summer party. But it’s not just that. For one thing, it was conceived and executed (with help from her dad and friends) by a kid who gets pretty creative with it, I’ll tell ya. There must’ve been two dozen or more children there over the course of the day, and activities involving making things. There was hooping and juggling and belly dancing. In the evening, when most everyone had left, MartinH brought out his guitar and we sang and sang, The Beatles and Paul Simon and I don’t even remember what else. Fairy lights everywhere.
One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?
Grounding.
I feel solid, personally—about time, I tell ya. It’s been a long three years since my separation from my life partner, and that’s ceasing to define me.
I’ve sunk my roots into Boston even further. Home feels like home. People feel like my people. Everything is always in transition, but many days this year I’ve been struck by how living feels. It feels like it did when I was a kid: sometimes, I’m not distracted by whatever’s in my head. Time goes more slowly. My filters aren’t filtering out quite so much of the world. I notice more little things—not beautiful little things, but ordinary ones. The sounds of street traffic, out there, all the time. The shuffle of the old lady passing by my window. People’s movement through Davis Square, in aggregate.
A ton of new knowledge acquired. This grounds me in my profession. Speaking of which: I have a new job. It’s still at BU, and starts in a couple of weeks, at which point I’ll write more about it. The job is also grounding: it will draw much more fully on my skillset, and further solidifies my geographic position.
I keep wanting to write something about Mark, and how our relationship relates to Word of the Year for me—it does in a cardinal, astounding way. But I haven’t yet figured out (again, post-divorce) how much I want to write about my personal life involving other people. So, redacted.
Taking up weight lifting again has helped my body feel more sound. Pun intended!
So: compared to this time last year, much better grounded.
Next year could have so many defining words that would thrill me. One possibility I wouldn’t mind: joy.
Some friends of mine are using today as an occasion for making lists of 77 things that… well, you get the idea.
I’m in Sleepy Hollow again, visiting my brother and family (cast of characters, again: Zhenya = brother; Jo Ann = sister-in-law; Tesher = nephew; right now also Jo’s mom Linda, who lives in Maine). Tesher and I stayed up super extra late to make this list.
I gotta say: the things below are stuff external to us. But he’s definitely one of MY 77 things.
I came into work early today, and am taking some time to watch Martha Nell Smith‘s Distinguished Scholar-Teacher lecture titled “The Humanities Are Not a Luxury: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” given this month at UMD. I love listening to Martha Nell talk: her perceptiveness and her wicked sense of humor are a good in the world. So, as much as I wish there were a transcription of the lecture, I think the video is worth watching, and recommend it. (The lecture proper starts around minute 11-12.)
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
I’m in New York this weekend, visiting with family. Tesher is ten this year, lanky and giggly and energetic and sometimes a little… loud. You know, a ten year old. He loves BB guns, and also loves making art — painting and drawing are his favorites — and he’s getting to be pretty good at it.
Tonight we watched the first Matrix movie. He’d never seen any of them. His mind: blown, of course.
Got to the scene wherein Trinity asks Tank to load her up with the knowledge she needs to fly a particular model of helicopter. Tesher, by this point, is bouncing up and down and cheering. He’s agape at the implications of this one, though. An the first thing he says, imagining himself in the midst of the action, is: “‘I want to paint like Matisse!’ — boom!!!”
I’m on a plane from Seattle to Minneapolis and then to Boston, finishing up ten days of travel. When we were taking off, Rainier Mountain just out my window was rising above the lower clouds, its head just touching the upper layer. Gorgeous and apt: the past week has given me new knowledge and a wider perspective.
I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria! This was made possible by the DHSI and by my dean, and I’m grateful to both. The Institute’s ninth year was my first time attending, and it was an intense experience. Something like 35 hours of instruction over five days; evening plenary talks and early-morning graduate student presentations for four of those. I took the large project planning and management course with Lynne Siemens. It was even more exciting and useful than I’d expected it to be. Who would’ve thought I’d be into project management? But bring industry-born ideas about cat herding resource wrangling into academe, and I’m there. We talked about juggling (often too-little) money and time and people, getting folks to be as excited about your ideas as you are, getting your head around a project in the first place. We had guest speakers in almost every class and got to plan our own projects. All of this delightfully low-tech: I’m bringing back large sheets of flip-chart paper with wild scribbles and post-it notes. Now to get grant funding for this thing. (Grant application is in, but we don’t find out for a couple more months. If we don’t get funded, I imagine we’ll apply again. In any case, the training will be applicable in other contexts, not least of them the everyday juggling of activities at work.)
The best part, of course, were the people. I saw some old friends and acquaintances, and finally got to spend a bunch of time around Julie Meloni, who is moving to Victoria to work as a postdoc at UVic’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. (ETCL folks put on the Institute every summer—and let’s pause for a second to appreciate the work they do, and their success at it.)
Talking to Julie, and to Jentery Sayers, and Jon Bath, and Susan Brown, and the many other folk I met at UVic, one thing is clear: networked technologies are finally at a stage where they can be reliably and cheaply used for long-distance collaboration in the digital humanities. There’s no substitute for in-person interaction, but it’s also increasingly easy to work together over arbitrary distances, meeting in the same place every once in a while. This is changing our work process. It’s no longer just that we can email Word documents back and forth. We can use combinations of text/audio/video chat, collaborative editing environments, remote file upload and syncing venues, online project management systems, even bibliography and research sharing systems to work on projects either synchronously or asynchronously, as circumstances permit, at times across many timezones. All of these tools have been available for some time, but have been clunky or expensive or not easily interoperable. The recent explosion of networked tools and services (some of them created by and for academics) is a perfect storm for academic collaboration.
At the beginning of the DHSI week I got pretty discouraged about my self-imposed geographic restriction to Boston. All this activity swirling around me, watching people who have found inspiration in working with one another, felt like being on the outside looking in. Which is pretty ridiculous, all things considered: nobody can do everything, and I have a job in Boston that’s at least nominally a digital humanities/digital libraries job. But it does get lonely at BU sometimes. There isn’t much DH activity either at the university or generally in New England. (Sure, Brown University is just an hour away, and THATCamp New England has just opened for applications. But given that we’re in CollegeTownUSA land, there’s still woefully little DH work going on around here. It’s ramping up, but slowly.)
Well, seems like there’s nothing like a little live interaction to get things going. Seems I’m about to get involved in a couple of projects that will feed me in ways that will supplement the satisfaction I draw from current in-person work. This is good both for me and for my workplace. Information will flow through more channels, inspiration can be distributed. Perspective allows serendipity to do its unpredictable future thing.
I love Boston, and have good reasons to live where I live. This has meant passing on multiple opportunities to apply for jobs I’d no doubt enjoy. But I’ve placed a high priority on being near my people. It was a hard decision to make when I made it, but the rewards are constant and significant. And now, the trade-off doesn’t seem as big as it did even only three years ago.
Being a free agent in the age of networked communication is pretty exciting.
Life’s been chugging along, and the best I can do sometimes is keep up. In the now-venerable tradition of good-thing, bad-thing, here’s my week and a half, give or take.
++ Birthday! I had one. I went out to dinner with mom and Vlad, and later had a party. It was well attended by lovely people; Mark supplied lights and gorgeous swathes of cloth to drape around things; the food was appreciated; much merriment was had.
– Then last Monday I started feeling sick.
– Then last Tuesday I came in sick to cover library supervision in the evening (until 9pm), and proceeded to lie on the table floor for most of the time I was in, unable even to watch stupid TV online, much less work.
— Then Wednesday I discovered that what I had was strep throat! I don’t remember whether I’d ever had it before; certainly not since I got to the States almost twenty (!!) years ago.
+ Yet I recognized it for what it must be, went to get myself checked out (thanks for the encouragement, mom), and got
+++ penicillin, which is a wonder of (semi-)modern medicine, even though it’s kicking my butt by greatly diminishing my baseline energy level. But hey, it’s only for ten days.
– Meanwhile, I missed my weekly playdate/kid-sitting night with four year old Natalie. SO looking forward to seeing her today.
++ On Saturday, I had fantastic dinner with my family, all of them—even brother Zhenya, sisinlaw Jo Ann and nephew Tesher came up for this—as a first, early celebration of my mom’s 70th birthday (coming up in May). I do so like hanging out with them, particularly when it involves food and then sleeping in my own bed.
+ The last two nights, I had excellent dates, with conversations and food and laughing that left me feeling hale and whole.
+ Yesterday, I finally finished up the saga of having had to have a tooth extracted a year and a half ago, then get an implant, then get a crown for the implant. Dentistry has been the bain of my didn’t-grow-up-with-fluoride-in-my-water body, and I’m glad this one’s over.
++ Also yesterday, I acquired a physical therapist and a therapy schedule to finally fix a year-and-a-half-old shoulder injury. I like the therapist, and I like that he’s two T stops away from the building where I work. Major win.
+ I’ve been productive and happy at work (except for that miserable evening with the strep throat). We submitted an NEH grant proposal; I’ve been talking to faculty about teaching with technology; we have several IT and digital library projects going; and as terrifying as it is to essentially be my own boss most days, I’m also learning new stuff at a pace I can feel. Mostly learning about managing time and expectations. Valuable stuff.
– Work is also exhausting and often frustrating. Yesterday I shut down my computer after reviewing and commenting on four long library policy documents, and literally couldn’t think for a while, just let myself be on autopilot going home.
+ Good thing cooking perks me right up.
– I’ve also been chronically under-sleeping again, mostly by making bad time-management choices in favor of being with good people.
+ Good thing I got plenty of sleep while sick with strep throat!
+ On a different note, I’m participating in a Tufts study on how people manage their personal finances (or at least that’s what they claim the study is about). This got me thinking more deeply about my own personal finances, and once again coming to a conclusion that I can manage them well even if the jam-tomorrow enticements that just keep coming from my ex never materialize, and I have to pay his share of our mutual debts too. I wouldn’t be happy doing it, but not having any choice, find it more pleasant to be sanguine about it. Of course I have a rant about that, but that’s not the point: the point is, this isn’t driving me crazy anymore.
+This past weekend, I saw a bunch of old friends and acquaintances from my days of hanging out on the interactive fiction MUD. I also got to see a screening of the excellent documentary Get Lamp, by Jason Scott of textfiles fame, which (both Get Lamp and textfiles) I’m highly recommending if you’re into that sort of thing.
++ My house and my life are full of people so good in so many ways, it makes me dizzy sometimes.
And these are just the highlights. Life’s full, and mostly good.
