On Waking A Sleeping Infant

In the words of TS Eliot:

"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

(From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Lines 45-49)

Welcome Ramlet!

We did it!*

Sylvia Plath, in "Morning Song," sums it up:

"Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements."

* Back in August.

13 Ways to Induce Labor

It's been awhile, no?  And, a lot's happened.  While there's almost too much to write about, I'll bring you the highlights from the last (gasp) two months in the next few posts.  Then I'll get back to the adventure found in each new day.

Nine months pregnant: when waddling replaces walking.

This list, originally meant to be a parody of Wallace Stevens "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,"* sums up the last week of my pregnancy.  (*Except when I reread this poem, I realized I remembered liking it more than I actually like it.  Hence, not spending the time giving it a shout out via parody.)

1.  Host an open house party.  (Ours involved ice cream.)

2.  Eat take-out Indian food based on the rumor spicy food kicks off contractions.

3.  Go to Babies R Us and casually park in the expectant mother parking.  Who knows how much longer you'll be able to take advantage of this perk.

4.  Take an extra nap just because you're worried you'll never sleep again after your baby's born.

5.  Make a tray of chicken enchiladas for the freezer and eat the other one.  Mexican food qualifies as spicy, right?

6.  Run an errand to the local baby boutique to exchange one item for the same item in another color.  You must coordinate the baby's dirty diaper bags after all.

7.  At the last minute, host overnight a couple who are friends of friends.  Bonus if one guest is also nine months pregnant.

8.  Spend some, um, quality time with Husband.

9.  Walk to the farm truck and carry all of the produce you purchase home.  Extra points if the bags weigh more than the average combined weight of a newborn and a car seat.

10.  Get up in the middle of the night because you feel "weird" and haven't finished recopying your "Books to Check Out" list.  Nursing will be a one-handed activity, right?

11.  Date night with Husband at a fancy Turkish restaurant.  Come on spicy food!

12.  Go to the grocery store so you can waddle around somewhere with air-conditioning.  Park in the "Customers with Infants" parking spaces because you figure you're close enough to meeting the criteria.

13.  Browse a bookstore looking for the perfect notebook to kick off your next project for all of the free time in your life.

Vacation: Documenting v. Experiencing

Unaware of Husband's documentation.

                    "But it was more than that,

More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing."

Wallace Stevens, from "The Idea of Order at Key West"

  

A handful of sea shells, some from the Atlantic and some from the Pacific.

Husband's shrewd eye for pictures, my selective pocketing of sea shells and ticket stubs--innocuous documentation of time well-lived.  A certain amount of capturing and collecting optimizes memory keeping, but I'm skeptical of the frenzied photographer and, especially, the fanatical videographer.  Too much time behind the lens shifts the focus from reveling in the moment into an abstract editorial mode.  If extreme, this disconnect blushes inauthenticity over everyone else's experience.  Still, a little proactive documenting makes for scrapbook pages to savor when vacations are distant, for a pocket full of sea shells to discover while running errands.  

How do you balance experiencing your travels with documenting them?