Merry F*€#ing Christmas

Traveling by air during the holidays is one of life's greatest annoyances. Traveling with a spirited toddler, anytime, is one of life's greatest challenges. Yesterday, for us, combining the two has led to my vow of never going anywhere ever again, until Katherine is old enough to sit and read Harry Potter for 3 hours straight. 

I am so traumatized by yesterday's flight from LaGuardia to Charlotte and I can't seem to get past it. Time heals all wounds, blah blah blah, but our flight back to NYC is 4 days away, and that is simply not enough time for these wounds. Yeah, I know I just said I wasn't going anywhere ever again, but I say lots of things I don't mean. 

I have flown with Katherine so many times that I have a pretty decent routine and a few tricks up my sleeve to keep her occupied and happy. Try to schedule the flight to be during a nap time. Fresh diaper right before boarding. Wait until everyone else has boarded so you can be the last people to get on, thus minimizing the amount of time actually spent on the plane. iPad apps. iPhone home videos. Snacks, snacks, and more snacks. 

Unfortunately, trying to beat the holiday rush meant waking Katherine up at 5 AM to make an 8 AM flight, and this proved to be detrimental. (Should we have scheduled a later flight and risked the delays? We will never know!). She was squirmy and happy and normal, and we walked up and down the aisles a few times when she lost interest in staying in our seats. When we started to descend, it was time to sit back down, and Katherine decided she was going to completely fucking lose her shit. She was exhausted, and I couldn't console her. (I know you're thinking her ears were bothering her, and maybe they were, but they never have before. The loss of sleep was the real issue). I'm talking out-of-control, throw-herself-on-the-ground, screaming-at-the-top-of-her-lungs, flailing-like-a-feral-cat tantrum.

Enter the passenger seated behind us: a drunk 60-something hag in a peacock cardigan. The guy sitting next to her later told us she had pounded 5 drinks in the first 30 minutes of our 8 AM flight. She rattled her almost-empty glass of her vodka martini on the rocks and offered it to us to give our toddler. "Haha, no thanks!" We get it, haha, alcohol for the baby will help! Let's all laugh about it.

It turns out she wasn't joking. She kept shoving her drink through the crack between the seats, begging us to take the vodka as Katherine continued to scream. "Please take the vodka! I need to you to take it! For me! It's for ME!" Because the happiness of the woman trying to give alcohol to my toddler was a real priority for me. "STOP SCREAMING!!!! STOP SCREAMING!!! She kept yelling as Katherine kept screaming. It was mayhem.

Derrick finally turned around and yelled, "Ma'am, we're doing the best that we FUCKING CAN!" I thought this was the most polite thing he could've said. I wanted to tell her to eat shit or go fuck herself, or that Santa was still watching her in spite of her being a drunk old hag, etc.

 

Shortly before landing, Katherine collapsed in a heap on my shoulder and didn't wake up again until we left baggage claim.

Look, I get it. It serves me right, yeah? There is no greater annoyance on this earth than being stuck on an airplane with a toddler having a tantrum. It's too bad we were packed like sardines in a metal tube instead of a restaurant or a mall or somewhere where we could just leave and not have to annoy others with emotional development. But children exist. There's another one born every second! Sometimes they have to go places. Sometimes by airplane. Sometimes kids have tantrums, and sometimes they don't. All of those kids have parents that are, to paraphrase my husband, trying their fucking best. It's life, and life doesn't last forever. Just like a flight from NYC to Charlotte.

I also got my lip busted by a baby with an iPad:

Navigating Playground Politics

Completely ignoring my desperate pleas, Katherine is currently transitioning from two naps per day to just one, causing me to scramble trying to figure out how to entertain her for HOURS AND HOURS with no nap.

Today I Pinterested "Halloween crafts for toddlers," and eliminated anything with choking hazards, paint, glue, or the use of intermediate motor skills. This only left making spiders out of pipe cleaners. I created them with great enthusiasm, and they amused Katherine for approximately 30 seconds accompanied by a loud "Itsy Bitsy Spider" rendition with lots of gesticulation, but that would have been exactly the same amount of A.T. (Amusement Time) with or without the pipe cleaner spiders. So.

We now visit the local playgrounds more than ever. In New York City, if it is remotely temperate, they are jam-packed with jerks, and I don't necessarily mean the parents. 

Overheard being said to/about my curious baby: "She can't have this!" "She can't come up here!" "I hate babies!" "Go away!" She has also been purposefully pushed to the ground - a one-year old! - and had sand thrown in her face.

Children are so adorable. 

YOU CAN'T SIT WITH US.

Yesterday Katherine was intrigued by an older girl and her sandbox toys - which in all likelihood belonged to the sandbox and not to her personally - and the girl could not have been more rude about Katherine's proximity to her precious plastic treasures. I am troubled by how to properly respond when a caretaker is not intervening (or even paying much attention) when rude behavior arises. I tried to see how things played out but it was pretty clear they wouldn't improve on their own, so I tried several times to distract Katherine and had no success. One last ugly look from the Sand Queen and I grabbed Katherine, who screamed like she was being axe-murdered (and why not?  She had no idea what she had done wrong).  And we left in a huff. 

This same scenario has played out multiple times lately. It's too bad common decency prevents me from telling strangers' kids that they really should share with other strangers' kids.

I am fascinated by the fact that sharing seems to be the most unnatural concept on earth, as "everything I touch is mine" manifests as early as a few months old. Children are truly like animals, and I honestly wonder whose idea it was to share shit to begin wth. Jesus', probably. 

I hope Katherine is nice to babies when she's a little older, unless it's this particular girl's younger siblings. Jesus would have had the same wishful thoughts, right?

Ghost Mom

Lately all of my Manhattan mom friends have been moving out of the city.  I am shamelessly and openly jealous of them for making a break for it, yet I must press on here without them, and I'm trying to pick up new women left and right.

I sometimes go to mom meet-ups, but Katherine is interested neither in sitting in her stroller while I chat, nor in sitting really anywhere while I chat.  So I spend most of the time chasing her around, which I can do on my own, anywhere.

We go to baby classes and I am acquainted with and chat with a few other moms, but I often think of a recent groundbreaking study, probably something I saw on the Today Show, that revealed that social media has made us less social in reality.  They say it's because you always have your nose in your smartphone and don't interact with strangers and neighbors, which I'm sure is a huge part, but no one mentions another reason: that since it is so easy to keep up with old friends, there is no real need to make new ones.

"You want to hang out IRL?  You must be a loser with not enough Facebook friends."

A couple of weeks ago I got overly excited to discover a new mom in my building with a 9-month-old son.  I saw them a few times and once bumped into them at the grocery store across the street and walked back to the building with them, enjoying a friendly chat.  She said they were only in temporary housing for a couple of weeks and then moving away (of course), but I decided to try to get in touch with her anyway if she wanted to kill some time together in Central Park before they moved away.  Look at me, being friendly!

I wrote a note and asked one of our doormen to help me since I didn't know her last name or her apartment number, only her first name and the floor she lived on.  He showed me a list of everyone who was moving in / out over the past few months and neither her nor her husband's name was on it.

The only logical explanation is that she and her son are ghosts.  I haven't seen them since and can only assume they have moved away at this point or have vanished into thin air, as ghosts tend to do.  If we looked back at surveillance footage of the day we walked back together from the store, it would probably show me walking alone with Katherine.

You couldn't have spoken with her ... She died ... 50 years ago ... TONIGHT.

Boozy Baby

I reached two new mom milestones last week:

1. I bought frozen chicken nuggets and tater tots for the first time.  Although the nuggets are actually called "chik'n" so I should probably check to see if there is any real food in them.  If not, I'll just eat them myself, obviously.

Katherine's solid food feedings aren't going very well.  She screams like a banshee when I try to offer her anything in any form.  Except Puffs.  She will cut you for some Gerber Puffs.  Put some Puffs in front of her and all is right with the world.  But any kind of fruit, vegetable, meat, bread, squeeze pouch, jar, finger food, processed food, organic food, homemade food, store-made food, etc., and she will scream, cry, and throw the food at you (which Violet loves, if it lands near her).  It is terribly stressful and makes me want wine.  Mmmm, wine.  Wine wine wine.

2. I called the poison control center after Katherine discovered some pina colada-scented hand sanitizer from Bath & Body Works in a cute turtle holder attached to our diaper bag.

It turns out the only real toxin in hand sanitizer is alcohol.  Shockingly, not even those little beady things are really toxic.  When the nice lady told me to look out for general drunkenness in my baby's behavior (stumbling around more than usual, slur-shouting to her sorority sisters, "NO, I love YOU!"), I thought, "Pshhh."  Katherine is already a champion drinker.  When she reached 9 months old, I finally bought those alcohol testing strips for breast milk and as it turns out, my milk has a much lower tolerance than I realized.  Oops!  I reassured myself that any of Katherine's previous microscopic alcohol consumption couldn't have affected her development that deeply as she began walking on her own at 8.5 months.  A friend said, "Imagine how much earlier she would have started if she had been sober."

So now I wait until after my late-night pump to imbibe, but by then, what's the point?  I'm exhausted, full, and the stress of Katherine's 6 PM solid food dinner time is long gone.  Maybe she will really like tater tots and chik'n this week and her feedings won't be so stressful anymore?  I can only hope.

Stroller Anxiety

Occasionally, I have to leave my neighborhood.  Why?  I'm not sure.  There are at least 5 wine stores within 2 blocks of my apartment, so why would I ever need to go farther than that?

But sometimes when I simply must go beyond my 20-block limit, I spend hours, sometimes days, worrying about how I'm going to get there, becoming filled with stroller anxiety.

For a while, I could just stick Katherine in the baby carrier and clomp around the city wherever I wanted to go.  Union Square?  Chelsea?  Upper West Side?  No problem!  I laughed in the face of the city's narrow aisles and heavy doors and steep stairs.  Now Katherine has passed the 17-lb mark and the last time I carried her on the subway and around the city for four hours I almost passed out.  The 14th Street freaks became even freakier when I started hallucinating by the Whole Foods.  Plus with no car seat, you remove the option for the luxurious relief of a cab.

Segue to the cab option: cabs are expensive if you can even find one, pending weather and time of day.  Moving on.

The stroller on the subway is economical, and the likelihood of passing out is low, so it is now the best option. Having done this several times now on my own, I have made two discoveries:

1. Manhattanites are content to watch you struggle up 3 flights of stairs with your heavy baby, diaper bag, car seat and stroller base and not offer to help you.  While shuffling upstairs once carrying all these things, one helpful fellow told me I needed to be carrying even weight on both sides.  Thanks, that's very helpful.  Next time I'll bring a suitcase full of rocks - or just leave the baby behind!  You are more likely to get help from the Brooklynites, but even that is no guarantee.

2. New York City is disgracefully, completely inaccessible to folks who need wheels, and I don't just mean the stroller set.  Most subway stations don't have elevators and if they do, even the most meticulous minder of gaps will still get those wheels caught between the platform and the train, and get them out before the doors slam shut on you - although sometimes not.

So now I take the stroller and wear the baby carrier, and stick Katherine in the carrier to get up or down the steps while carrying the stroller and wearing the backpack.  While visiting a childhood friend and her newborn in Brooklyn, we stood outside the stairs for the F train for at least 20 minutes while the two of us tried to readjust my carrier that had just been mangled by my stroller on the sidewalk.  We laughed about the state of our lives - that this is what it now takes to walk down one goddamn flight of stairs.  For me, I'll still take it over Mississippi.

My friend Anna lives in North Carolina and says she gets stroller anxiety just going into Target.  I told her that sounded like a vacation.

Any other moms out there get stroller anxiety?