Down The Rabbit Hole

We just got back from spending a week in Seattle with friends.  Given, it was the middle of July and Seattle is currently experiencing a particularly long stretch without rain, but people, it was glorious.  GLORIOUS.  I would move there in a heartbeat, but the hubs has an aversion to rain.  And I don’t blame him.  He grew up in L.A., so I’m surprised that he even knows what rain looks like.  But me, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, so I need some gloomy grey skies and rain every so often.  But maybe not nine months out of the year.  That does seem a bit excessive.

It was our first time traveling with Áine where we weren’t staying with family, just friends, so I was a little nervous subjecting them to the idiosyncrasies of our barely-six-month-old.  But I needn’t have worried, Áine was perfect.  A couple minor meltdowns, but that is to be expected.  She had a growth spurt while we were there which meant that she slept for inordinate amounts of time for several days in a row.  This gave Mama and Papa plenty of time for wine drinking with friends.  We bought her this little tent to sleep in and it worked out great.  We’d prepared her for it beforehand by having her take some naps in it at home, and she took to it immediately.  Tent + baby monitor = happy relaxed parents.

We stayed the first few nights with friends on Bainbridge Island and also took an overnight trip with those same friends to Hood Canal.  There we ate fresh clams and crabs and swam in the ocean (until someone got stung by an evil red jellyfish).  The last three nights were in Seattle with other friends.  I also got to meet up with an old friend from high school and her two little boys.  Seattle is such a beautiful city.  It’s so clean and there’s lots of cool stuff to see:  Pike’s Place Market, Pioneer Square, the Experience Music Project, the Seattle Aquarium.  Loved it.

Here are a few pictures from the trip:

Áine ate her first solid food over the weekend.  She is six months old today (WHERE does the time GO?), so we decided on Saturday that she would have a real dinner.  She had rice cereal mixed with Mama’s milk and a couple small tastes of green peas. We even used the special silver spoon that Papa’s friends Luke and Liz gave Áine when she was born.  She was crazy about the rice cereal, grabbing for the spoon and shoving it in her mouth, happily sucking off every drop.  She wasn’t so sure about the peas though.  She went from big smile to furrowed brow in a snap.  She still ate some, she was just concerned about it!

As I was feeding her, I had one of those moments where I got so excited for her future.  Just think – this watery rice cereal that she was happily gobbling down is just the first taste in a long life enjoying food, and we get to be there with her to introduce her to it.  Both of our families are big foodies – our absolute favorite thing to do together is sit down over a table filled with amazing food and drink.  If the reaction to rice cereal is any indication, Áine will be right there with us, savoring every bite.

Today I am thirty two years old.

Back when I was a kid, thirty two seemed unquestionably grown-up.  By the time I was thirty two, I would, obviously, be married with a kid or three, a career, house, cat, dog, all of the accoutrements that come with being an adult.  And to my surprise, I actually have all that stuff.  Except the career.  And the cat  (allergic husband).

Anyway, back then it was easy to picture what being “grown up” might look like.  I looked at my parents and figured that I would have what they did.  As a kid and a teenager it looked like they had it all figured out, balancing work and family so (seemingly to my young eyes) seamlessly.  Throughout my twenties, as I started to accomplish or accumulate these milestones (married at twenty two, house at twenty five, trying for a baby at twenty seven) I began to worry a little bit because I didn’t FEEL like a grown up yet.  And even now that I am a parent, to me the singular biggest indicator of adulthood there is, I still don’t feel grown up.  Does anyone ever, really?  Hawk’s grandmother once told me that inside she still felt like the sixteen year old girl she once was, she just happened to be stuck in the body of an eighty year old woman.

I think that rather than using external indicators like homeownership or parenthood, for me it’s more about the feeling of being comfortable in my own skin that makes me feel like an adult.  Not a “grown up”.  An adult.  Because I’m not a kid anymore, and happy not to be, thank you very much.  Anyone who tells you that “the best years of your life” are in high school is full of shit.  In my teens and twenties I had NO CLUE who I was, and I was miserable a lot of the time – so insecure, so full of self doubt, hating myself for every stupid thing I ever said or did.  I was so unkind to myself back then.

It’s only the last four years or so, the catalyst being my journey to get pregnant, that I really began to learn about what makes me “me”, what makes me special.  I did a lot of soul searching, a lot of introspection and ultimately came out the other side with a much clearer picture of Miranda.

The birth of my daughter this year is just the icing on the cake.  With the gift of Áine, that facet of my life that I was yearning for is complete.  It’s a piece of my heart that was broken with my two miscarriages and is now healed.  Now I am finally able to move on, with my daughter and my husband at my side, to see what challenges life brings next.

This summer we’ve created a little ritual for ourselves in the evening.  When Hawk gets home from work, we pour a cocktail and go sit on our front porch.  We watch cars pass by, we watch people walking their dogs.  We have neighbors with three little kids who play soccer in the street, so we help Áine cheer them on.  It’s a lovely way to unwind, talking about our day, spending time together as a family before Áine goes to bed.  She can be cranky all afternoon, but when Papa gets home and we have our family time on the porch, she’s happy as can be.

My hair has never really been one of my best features.  It’s pretty thin, it has never held a curl well, always just kind of laid there, limp and boring. I’ve never really been able to do anything with it, it’s either down or back in a ponytail.  It’s been the same length and the same color for years and years.  There was an ill-advised pixie cut back in my early twenties, but let us never speak of that again.

But when I was pregnant I grew a gorgeous head of hair – thick, shiny, luxurious.  I could go days without washing it and it just looked fabulous all the time.  Every day was a good hair day.

See?  Great hair.

Until…

Yeah, one of the (many) things “they” don’t tell you about what to expect after you give birth is that all that gorgeous, thick hair?  It falls out.  Like all at once, all of a sudden.  About four months after Áine was born, I started shedding like a balding dog.  After I shower, it comes out in clumps.  I’m cleaning my hairbrush every day.  It’s all over my pillow when I get up in the morning.  I’m constantly fishing hair out of Áine’s little fists (could be worse, I read online if you have a little boy to watch out that a loose strand doesn’t wrap around his little boy parts – owie) and feeling a tickle on my shoulder because a stray strand has fallen there.  I have enough extra hair to make a small furry animal.

It’s just one example of one of the (not so) joyous little surprises that you discover after giving birth that no one really bothers to talk about, and your doctor doesn’t really bother to give you an “oh hey, by the way, now that you’ve actually had the baby, here are some things to look out for…”.  None of those pregnancy books I read while I was expecting said anything about this.  A friend of mine who had her daughter a couple months before Áine was born was experiencing the same thing and had actually made an appointment to go see her doctor, because she was worried that something was wrong with her.  Luckily, I had just looked googled “postpartum hair loss” a day or two earlier so I could tell her not to worry about it (I thought about googling: “DEAR GOD I’M GOING BALD WHAT THE FUCK?!?” but managed to calm down a bit).  It’s totally normal after-birth hormonal bullshit and should stop in a couple months.  Hopefully I’ll still have some hair left when it’s over!  If not, I guess I’ll be investing in a number of lovely hats for fall.

As if I don’t have enough to do what with the child rearing and house maintaining and such, I went and bought a fish tank for Áine’s room a few months ago.  I had read that the sound of a bubbling fish tank could help soothe her and help her sleep, so I thought why not.  We started out with four minnows and a very handsome bright red betta, who we named Fishes 1-4 and Mr. Fish, respectively.  Thinking I was being a responsible fish mom, I cleaned their little tank every week.

The first fish tragedy occurred when one of the minnows committed fishy suicide while I was cleaning his tank.  Mid-clean, I looked into the bowl where I was keeping them in the meantime – one fish, two fish, three fish…WHERE THE FUCK IS FISH #4??  Well fish #4 was on the fucking floor.  He had jumped out of the bowl and plunged to his doom.  RIP Fish #4.

A week or so later, Mr. Fish started looking not so hot.  His color dulled and his fins started to look kind of shredded.  I kept an eye on him, kind of concerned, and then one day I looked in on him and he was covered head to tail in white fuzz.  ”Well that,” I told myself, “CAN’T be good”.

I poked around online and was bombarded with a dizzying amount of information on fish diseases.  I thought, screw this, and went back to the store where we bought him and asked what was up.  I told the guy how I’d been religiously cleaning the tank and he told me that was exactly the wrong thing to do.  Apparently when you’re first setting up a tank, you have to let it get good and dirty (to an acceptable degree) to let good bacteria build up that will process fishy waste.  If you clean the tank too often, you don’t let the bacteria build up and basically your fish are eaten alive by toxins that would normally have been digested by bacteria.  By the time I learned this, it was too late for Mr. Fish and he died a horrible HORRIBLE fishy death.

I was wracked with guilt.  I’m usually not one to feel too badly for fish, but he was my pet and by trying to do what I thought was the right thing, I caused him to die and die painfully.  I think Mr. Fish will haunt me the rest of my days.

But that didn’t stop me from going out and buying another fish.  This time I did it right and waited for a month – didn’t clean the tank (the three remaining minnows didn’t seem to mind) to make sure all the good bacteria were built up – and I bought a lovely fantail goldfish, named Fatty Bo-Batty:

I brought him home and put him in the little one and a half gallon tank with the three minnows and all seemed happy as can be.

Then I started poking around online to find information on caring for fantail goldfish and everywhere I read that at a minimum fantail goldfish need to be in a ten gallon tank in order to be healthy and happy.  Usually I would have been like, whatever, it’s a fucking fish.  But I was still suffering from Mr. Fish Guilt and was convinced that if I left Fatty in the little tank that he would be miserable.  So I went out and bought a goddamn ten gallon tank.  I put the minnows in it for three weeks to get it “ready” for Fatty while he stayed in the little tank by himself.

Today was the day and Fatty moved into his new home.  Áine and I also took a trip back to the fish store and bought him a little calico girlfriend (or maybe a boyfriend?  It’s hard to tell with fish).  Turns out Fatty is kind of a douchebag and has been relentlessly chasing his new buddy all over the tank.  I figure they’ll work it out.  Here’s a photo of Fatty in pursuit of Gato (named in honor of the cat that Pepe Le Peu was always chasing):

We also got a little freshwater eel (named Pinky) to hang out on the bottom.  He’s camera shy though, so no pics of him.

The overall moral to this story?  I am a sucker.  I guess it’s worth it though: