James

I just spent the past few days in Seattle, getting to know the perfection that is my 7-week-old nephew, James.

I have also been asked about a dozen times whether being around said perfection has set off some sort of uterine alarm in which I think, “I want another baby.”

As I have said repeatedly, leaving Seattle has left a James-sized hole in my auntie heart. But there is no way that I’m going to fill it with another baby.

I’m muuuuch better off just buying lots of cross-country flights, don’t you think?

I absolutely treasured the time I got to spend with James, taking the 4:00 a.m.-forward feeding shift. He’s SUCH a love, chubby and blue-eyed, grunting, snorting, and whimpering in an adorably frenetic way. He smiles at me when I cry out at the poop I discover during a diaper change, grabs on to my fingers with that infant death-grip we all secretly want to believe is a expression of sheer love for us (and not just a reflex), and sleeps with his mouth wide open. I adore him.

Lots of things shot me back in time to my girls’ infancies: the smell of Pampers swaddlers, the rhythmic sound of the Medela pump, toothless baby gums that make me cringe as I recall how much nursing HURTS, the sound of a baby wipe warmer lid closing, life with one ear always on the baby monitor, the snarls I’d receive as I coaxed a Gumby-like arm down a tiny sleeve. Even the constant sway came back after only a couple hours with James. Sometimes with a bounce mixed in.

I also remembered how life revolved around nursing schedules and, just as soul-possessing, SLEEP schedules. I remembered the helpless feeling when the witching hour has struck and nothing will stop the crying.

In short, I remembered the amount of WORK these little creatures are. And sure, I pitched in as much as I could, but  . . . I had the peace-generating knowledge (relief?) that Chris and I were past this stage.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how my reproducing instinct would react to James. I was actually a tad nervous that he would indeed launch a desire to have another baby. Before I left Maryland, the often-repeated joke was that Chris might want to get a vasectomy before I returned with grand ideas about how we should be a family of FIVE.

I’ve always kept the door slightly ajar on the whole third baby thing. Sure, my desire dwindled year after year, but I was never ENTIRELY convinced that we were done.

But coming home to my two awesome, beautiful girls---my Charlotte and my Lorelei—I really do feel reproductively complete and very much at peace with the decision to stick with two. Ashley’s uterus is closed for business.

Which should, I assume, leave a smidge more time for books.

(Was that a weak transition, do you think?)

In the land of the bookish, Charlotte is in a nonfiction ocean life phase. Several days watching Shark Week with her cousins in Reno MIGHT have contributed to this, but hey, I'm happy. She's obsessed with random facts about sea creatures. The weirder or the more dangerous, the better. Dolphins are, however, cute and still worth reading about. She knows where the kids nonfiction ocean life shelf is at the local library. And now that my girl has her own library card, there's no stopping her.

I recently finished four (four!!) books. (We can thank my cross-country flights sans children.) The first, Naptime is the New Happy Hour, was your typical blog-esque read aimed at mommies of toddlers. Many parts were funny. A lot was outdated (it was published in 2008). A whole stinkin' lot was trying-a-tad-too-hard-to-be-funny filler. Whatever. It was entertaining enough, but there are better "bad mom" books out there, I'm sure. If not, I should write one . . . .

I finally finished the almost 600-page tome of Libba Bray's The Diviners. I liked so much about this book and will read the sequel. Eventually.

This next book is a weird one---Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife, published in 1910. Apparently it's a classic? I dunno, but I found it charming. It has the tone of a know-it-all mother. Interestingly, the first chapters focus on single, working women, what sorts of wages they might earn for certain work, and why they must advocate for pay equal to men's, assuming their work is of equal quality.

People---this is in 1910. In a book focused on mommies and housewives. Let's take a moment to be impressed.

Admonitions abound, sure, but the important role of wife and mother as society emerged from a more agricultural basis--in which women literally produced goods and income--is centralized here, without all that saccharine ass-kissing and pandering of "the most important job in the world" rhetoric. I liked it.

The section on decorating was a hoot. Although I think we can all reasonably disagree with the author's assertion that "red is the only appropriate carpet color" for stairs, I did agree that a piano need not match a room, as the quality of its sound is what is important. Also, because a dining room is where the children learn appropriate manners, it should be more formal than the other rooms. Um, PREACH! I was also amused by the author's insistence that beautifully bound books on display ought to have contents worthy of such pretty binding.

Finally, I just finished a great book by Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me. I enjoyed one of her other books, Seating Arrangements, so I had high expectations. This novel follows the relationship of a two ballet dancers, one who gets pregnant and the other who defects from Russia. Clearly, Mr. K, the great choreographer, is based on Balanchine (Mr. B), down to him choosing different perfumes for female dancers. And the Russian defected star is clearly based on Baryshnikov.

I loved the book, partly because I loved the topic (ballet--duh) but mostly because it was extremely well-written. At times, the leaping (pun intended) between time periods was too much, interrupting the flow of story, but overall I really enjoyed it.