BabyHead wasn’t sleeping well today (meaning: at all), so at 5 I finally sat down with her and she fell asleep. “Okay”, I thought, ” I’ll just sit here and watch tv until she wakes up. Poor thing needs her sleep.”

Yeah. Well.

2 HOURS later, my butt was numb, my back hurt, and I was *starving*, not to mention several IQ points stupider (that’s right, stupider). So I put her gently, so very gently, down on the couch, and, you guessed it, she woke up immediately. Which made making dinner Happy Fun Time Yay!

They don’t tell you this stuff, so I will take up the slack. This little stuff adds up to make you clinically insane. This is why your mom is the way she is. You have damaged her irrepairably. And she’d do it all again (I know I would).

It’s graduation time here in the 5 College Area. The big white fancy tents have been up for days in preparation for the festivies; soirees for the students and the parents, mostly to show that they have not tossed away their money on some low-rent school for the past 4 years. The town is full to bursting with Parents and Family in their nice yet casual dress, eminating Tourist Vibes everywhere they go. Lots of 20 year olds walking around with 50 year olds, lots of trash in the Dumpsters.

side note: There were 3 mattresses in the one by the dorm nearest us. It seems a shame to toss a mattress- they’re expensive!- yet I’m not about to drag a frat house mattress out of the trash. The compound amount of cooties is too frightening to contemplate. I can’t blame them for not wanting to keep them. Bothers my consumer culture guilt, I guess.

It’s nice, though, and not just because our local businesses are booming for the weekend (nice perk, I admit). It’s good to see children’s accomplishments applauded and supported. The whole area is awash in Familial Pride Vibes. It’s like we are in the midst of a thousand Old Home Weeks, with parents visiting offspring they haven’t seen since Christmas and kids packing up and going home again, this time for good. Even the annoying hippie band playing in the Common wasn’t enough to wash away the Happy.

So, from all of us at Tracitalynne.com: Congratulations, Class of 2005. Go out and make us proud.

Well, I’ve done it. May as well feed her McShakes and fried cheese and never teach her to read. May as well buy all her things at WalMart and not encourage her dreams.

I’ve let her watch tv.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s seen tv before. God knows we watch enough of it. But I swore I wouldn’t put her in front of the televison so I could “get stuff done” until she was well nigh ruined anyway. But today. Today I had to finish stuff for work, and I have no babysitter. I had to make phone calls, business calls, so I couldn’t have baby crying noises in the background, and she was not in a “I’ll just play here quietly” kind of mood. So I did it. I put the DVD on.

It has really cute songs. She dug it in a big way.

We are screwed.

I just took a freelancing job, so: Yay Money! I am freaking out a bit because, well, because that’s what I do, really. I haven’t been able to get much done today, unfortunately. BabyMuffin is the Queen of Tiny, Tiny Naps and Much Fussing.
The babysitter is coming tomorrow, which is great, because she’s great, and Audrey thinks she’s the bee’s knees. She is a person, though, not bee’s knees or any other body part.

Okay, fussing has begun again. Off to the races!

I haven’t posted lately, mostly because BabyMuffin has decided that 4am is a delightful time to be awake, especially after waking at 2am for a binky. It makes me sleepy. So very sleepy. The Moms and I sit around and say insane, bizzare things to each other like, “She only woke up twice last night, and we actually got to sleep until 6:30 this morning!” and the rest all coo in jealous admiration for such a good, good baby.

Not my inner child, but my inner 20 year old is absolutely horrified by this situation. Sleep has always been my dear, dear friend. I haven’t slept 8 full hours in a row since I was about 7 or 8 months pregnant (by that time my esophagus was jammed up next to the roof of my mouth, so sleeping was an issue, what with digestive fluid coating my throat and all). Thankfully the sleep deprivation has so addled my brain that I don’t really notice it at all anymore.

This is how it happens. This is how parents get crazy. I’ll bet that people who have live-in nannies don’t get nearly as crazy-parent-y as the rest of us.

And the baby is up again, now. I can hear her through the monitor, talking to herself. This is why she is not at an orphanage; she is the cutest fucking thing in the world.

BabyHead is rolling over. Not the cute, “rolling over in place” thing that she had been doing, but the amazing and horrifying “I was right here but now I have, while you are not looking, rolled my tiny body over near the heavy and precariously placed electronics equipment” kind of rolling. Now we have to actually pay attention and do the whole “safety” thing. We will resist it, but soon our ultra-hip home will be covered in baby safe white plastic, and it will be impossible to open any door or retrieve silverware or go pee without solving an elaborate wooden puzzle and entering a security passcode.

They say it goes so fast, but dammit if “they” aren’t right. I find myself saying things about my 6 month old like, “Well, when she was a baby…” as if she has just graduated from Stanford. But she is so remarkably different from the tiny bundle of non-movingness that we had just a few short months ago, it is hard to even remember that it is the same person. The only time she seems the same is when she cries. That is the only time she is still this unfathomable, unreachable, helpless, needy little creature that I am somehow in charge of. I now have an idea why moms are so insane. Each day is a rollercoaster of mourning the sweet tiny muffin that you could just snuggle and sit with and love, and immense pride and overpowering unconditional love towards this incredible little person that is blooming and growing right before your eyes. This mom thing is not for everyone, but I am so grateful that it’s for me.

“I went to the Burlington Mall with your mother. I don’t walk much anymore, so I was lagging behind, I would look up and there she was, two feet in front of me. I called to her, said, ‘Jill! Slow down!’ Ha ha. She says, ‘Oh, Ginny, I forget. You should walk more.’ I should walk more, but I don’t. Ha ha. Your mother likes to look in the cooking stores, you know, like that, so she was zipping around the store, and I said, ‘Jill, I have to sit. You go on, I have to sit.’ And the lady from the cooking store showed me where there was a place to sit, ha ha, so I sat while your mother looked around at the cooking store. Then we were so hungry, and we wanted to go to Jimmy’s, but Jimmy’s is closed at the mall, did you know that? So then where were we supposed to go? Your mother took me to the Food Court, which is all the way over by Sears. They are putting a Cheesecake Factory where Jimmy’s used to be, but it’s not there yet. Your mother says that the Cheesecake Factory is supposed to be good, they have everything there, but that doesn’t help me now because I have to walk all the way back towards Sears and we were by Filenes, you know. So we went to the Food Court, and your mother wants a pizza, she knows what to get right away. But she had to walk me all around the Food Court, I didn’t know what to get. I should have just got pizza, sometimes I can eat pizza it’s not so bad. But I didn’t know what to get, and I just got a turkey wrap. Have you ever heard of the wraps? Your mother went off to get her pizza and I sat there watching the man just wrap and wrap that sandwich, I thought he would never stop, he just kept wrapping! Ha ha. I didn’t know what to do with a wrap, I never had a wrap before. Well, I didn’t know how to eat it, and your mother was still getting her pizza, so you know what I did? I just unwrapped the sandwich, and pulled all the turkey out with my fingers. Ha ha. I didn’t know what to do, so I unwrapped it and I didn’t have a fork so I ate it with my fingers.”