Well, Blake is now officially "getting into everything." 10 minutes ago I put him down to the right of that pink bunny. Can you see his wiggly little legs behind the couch? For the past 5 minutes or so, he's been amusing himself with

1. a helium balloon attached to a long ribbon
2. an old wash cloth that his father keeps around the computer for reasons we probably don't want to discover
3. and the bottom of the bookshelf.

Upstairs he's forever crawling onto the brick hearth to get at the gas fireplace's reflective glass surface (this morning he ate some crumbs of loose masonry. That'll be a pleasant diaper.). In the bathroom he wiggles behind the toilet & sucks on the flow knob. This morning I taped his journey behind the toilet (and his subsequent extraction by the Boy). Halfway through you can hear me screech, "are you sucking on that knob?! Oh Christ! I gotta stop this tape!" There's something to show his first date.

I know that I should be more like those moms you see at the drugstore, the ones who have a total flaming freak-out if their child dares to touch a fingertip to a shelf. I know I should be keeping him in totally controlled environments or else making it my business to periodically shriek "dirty!!" "dangerous!!" and "NNNOOOOO!!!!" as I swoop down and separate him from the offending item of real world paraphernalia. Unfortunately for Blake, I'm just too fascinated by his determined exploration of the floor-level world. He's Alexander Cabot in a froggie onesie.

Our first day of the BBESP was chaotic as all get out. I once again failed to get up at 6:30 a.m., feeling sincerely that if I were to get out of bed at that moment, my eyeballs would break open and leak into my mouth. I handed Mr. Squirmy to a passing stranger and was not woken again until 8:30, when Mr. Squirmy returned to feed. Somehow I convinced Mr. S. to sleep until 10:45 (I believe that constant breastfeeding may have turned the tide). So my one victory was that he had a long morning nap. But he was too angry to eat solids for lunch, he had a scant 20-minute nap in the afternoon, and he fell asleep at 5 p.m. (thus missing dinner, goopy cereal & the start of his brand new bedtime routine). We did the routine when he woke up at 6, and he's been waking up every hour since then.

My problem, as I've said before, is expectations. I can never let anything just be what it is. On the rare occasions when Blake goes to sleep exactly when I want him to, I get immediately swept up in a flurry of chicken counting: he'll take a long nap! Or: tonight he'll sleep through the night!

He inevitably wakes up just as the giddiness subsides.

Well, we'll just see where we are in 9 days time, shall we? Sue wrote me yesterday to remind me to have ten tonnes of patience & a steel-reinforced spine; her husband Brent calls the book "The No Sleep Cry Solution" because there's so damn much crying on everyone's part. Maybe I'll become superstitious and attribute Blake's sleep patterns to planetary alignments & the use of a certain spoon with a certain cereal. Maybe I'll start looking for patterns in the spitup.

Or maybe I'll just check into a motel. For a really really long time, or at least until they stop looking for me.

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 6/30/2004 08:29:00 p.m.