January 07, 2006 - 6:49 PM.

Punie walks & walks, w/blog complaints

The child is a walking machine. Back and forth, in and out of every room we'll let him into, round and round and round. The only place off-limits is the bathroom due to water & bonking risks (he likes to bend over the edge of the tub until the worst happens), so both doors to that are closed most of the day, making peeing a frigid and infrequent occurrence.

I did go through the toys, putting many away for later or to rotate, separating the "outs" into Punim's Room and Living Room, and taking one large Pier One shopping-bagful to consignment. So in each room there are plastic boxes (or storage ottomans) full of books, puppets, stuffies, and smallish plastic toys; then there are stackers and musical toys and bead runs and a puzzle book and one whole stash of balls. There is a bookshelf full in his room (still just a playroom) and a cupboard plus the coffee-table-cum-technology-barrier surface in the living room. Oh and the valet parking area for his two walk-behinds -- with regret, I did end up putting his Klamath away late last week. Plus I did end up assembling the yuppie-tent portion of his Ryan's Room Mambo Combo in his room 2 days ago, so now he is constantly running in there with squeals of delight, longing to be chased, looking up at us through the clear mesh part of the roof, eyes wide & demented with joy. He has no idea how to squat and his crawl still entails one foot flat on the floor, so getting in involves yanking the opening up over his head, getting excited means a fall, and trying to get out the round openings is -- well, it's ruining them, is what it is. But he LOVES it and I'm so happy to see effective, happy-making play that I don't care.

He says "i-huue" for "shoes" now, and brings them when he wants to go out. We took him to a new park today (he is totally clumsy but completely digs the toddler climbing structure at the one closest to home), where he re-freaked about how much he loves parks. This one has baby swings (how those things are considered safe I couldn't guess but he loved them), a gazebo, THREE slides, and a clutch of old men waving metal detectors slowly over the ground in search of green pennies they'd planted for themselves to find (?!). Two of the old men had tiny dogs accompanying them, and as is the child's habit, he leapt and shrieked upon seeing them; as he has also done before, he corrected us when we told them they were dogs by meowing at us. Apparently dogs are a certain size, and these were the size of cats, so instead of "Ba-bahk" these animals are "Mao?"

Shift gears:

I've grown weary of reading the infertility blogs. I don't read many, just The Big Famous Ones (which I didn't know were Big or Famous when I found them, but I see now why etc). I loved them when I first found them; I learned so much about fertility and about how various smart funny women were approaching achieving the reasonable but almost insurmountable goal of becoming mothers. And interestingly, most of the women on this short list have since in fact become mothers; they all have children under the age of two, on my list, except for Karen over at The Naked Ovary who is still expecting, awaiting the placement of her daughter from China. I know the usual reasons fertile people usually get turned off these blogs -- can't take the "negativity," can't or won't relate, etc. But for me . . .

Well, I just don't get any sense of who they are as mothers, and even less sense of who their kids are. Before the infertility blogs, I didn't even really get it that people started blogs to cover just one aspect of their lives anyway; over here at Diaryland things are pretty rough and allsorts for the most part. And they all did GREAT through infertility and somewhat even through pregnancy, writing with wit and self-knowledge, getting us all to pull for them. But then they had their babies, and continued to blog, and . . .

Well, it's hard to put a finger on it, isn't it? I still enjoy the writing style of Tertia at So Close, and learn a lot about S. Africa and rather a bit about her babes. Christine at The Rabbit Lived posts only sporadically, but she *is* a full-time vet and Max doesn't sleep more than 2 hours at a time. And I don't think Charlie, son of Julie at A Little Pregnant, has been well for more than 3 weeks at a time since spring, so . . . (Although I can totally put my finger on it with Jo at The Leery Polyp -- just that self-conscious, change-the-world, Hip Mama style that I want so much to love because I agree w/the ideals but can't because the ink is just laid on too thick. Like the "writerly" description of a bookstore clerk, "The one in the bagged-out khakis with the faded period stain on the ass," and then calls her befuddled when Jo is buying that Best of Blogs book in which Jo herself appears. Too MUCH.)

Well, I do go on, unclear even to myself, and I know that part of the reason some of them hold back about motherhood is that mysterious land they live in, the infertile who has become a mother, that asks respect for their sisters who aren't there yet. But I haven't found a one of them yet (except Tertia and maybe Christine) whose disclosure hasn't weakened, who -- well, I guess it doesn't matter since nobody on that list reads *this*, but I don't know if I can read them anymore. I don't think I'm the audience any more.

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