Thanksgiving was so long ago by now that people have probably forgotten it happened, but this story bears telling, I think.  Better late than never and all that.

I love Thanksgiving- a holiday devoted to eating, and no gift stress! Seventeen kinds of carbs! A socially acceptable time to eat Cool Whip and jellied cranberry sauce shaped like a can!

But in recent years, it’s gotten a little stressful in my house. My wonderful mother, who usually hosts and cooks, wants so badly for everyone to be happy, wants everything to be perfect, that she gets anxious, and stressed, and doesn’t seem to enjoy herself, and we in turn don’t enjoy OURSELVES, such is our stress at observing her stress, and…well, ours can’t be the only family like this, right?

Anyway, so this year, I had a few days off around Thanksgiving, because I changed jobs. (Yes, again. Changing jobs is, apparently, my job. This one is for good! Or at least for longer than  a year! Swearsies!)  With that extra time, I volunteered to cook the entire meal. I like cooking, it doesn’t stress me out, I figured it’d be good for everyone.  We’d eat on time! There would be no tears! We would finally have enough stuffing!

Foolish, foolish me.

It almost came off without a hitch, until the cranberry sauce gave my mother a black eye. Yes, really. Something about the fridge door hitting her elbow and bonking the dish into her eye on its way to the floor? I’m still a little unclear on details.

Yeah, we didn’t eat on time.

Still, all was not lost. This Thanksgiving will live forever in our memories as the year that my family embraced Flo Rida.

You know, Flo Rida? Or, as I call him, Flo, for short? The rapper?

This guy:

It was all my grandmother’s fault, obviously.

My grandmother came for Thanksgiving from California. She’s 93, and doesn’t get around too much, so her shopping options are limited. However, she loves Poppy more than anything on earth, I think, and would not stand for coming to Thanksgiving without a gift. So she hired a taxi to drive her to the Hallmark store to buy something. There, she found a little reindeer that sang and danced, and thought Poppy would get a kick out of it.

She didn’t look too closely, and didn’t recognize the song, but no big! It was catchy!

Damn if she wasn’t right.

Yes, inexplicably the dancing reindeer rocks out to the musical stylings of Flo, and my kid’s favorite song is now “club can’t handle me.” And my dad knows the words. My mom, too. Thanksgiving win.

So. Baby’s first Halloween. Lots of pressure to choose the right costume.  We went crustacean: I think it was a good choice.

Poppy was less certain:

But she rallied:

I submit that there is nothing cuter than baby claw arms.

I had grand plans to make costumes for John and myself that matched with our little lobster- I was going to be a chef, he the Gorton’s fisherman. A whole sea-to-table thing. The slow foods movement in Halloween costumes, if you will.

But yeah, I ran out of steam, so no costumes for us.  Or so I thought.

“Nice costume!” said my boss on Monday morning.

I looked at him blankly.

“Farmer! Farmer Pseudo!” he continued. “I like it.”

Huh. I was… well, I was not wearing a costume.

And yet, twice more during the course of the day, I got further compliments.

“Farmer! Nice!” said the coffee girl.

“Are you going out to till the land?” asked our UPS guy.

TILL THE LAND, people.

So, lesson learned: do not wear your plaid shirt on Halloween, lest people assume that it’s your really half-assed attempt at a costume.

Does this shirt, plus skinny jeans tucked into boots, read “farmer” to you? Don’t you think if I was a farmer I would have, like, done my hair in pigtails or something? Or maybe worn overalls? WHAT KIND OF FARMER WEARS SKINNY JEANS? ANSWER ME THAT.

In summary:

Costume for offspring: success!

Costume for self: fail!

General sartorial choices for self: need some work, apparently!

Purchasing of far too much candy, thus guaranteeing that we will have leftovers to last us well into the new year: unqualified success!

On the whole, I’d call it a win.

I am missing the lullaby gene.

I realized this when we were up at my parents’ house a few weeks ago. My sister was there, too, and she and my mom were trying to comfort the baby, who was wailing. (It was 8pm. Wailing is what Poppy digs most at 8pm.)

I walked into the kitchen and saw my mother and sister standing with the baby, my mom holding her, my sister leaning over to her ear, the two of them singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in a sweet, slightly off-key serenade.

“Huh,” I thought. “It would never have in a million years occurred to me to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

Not that I don’t sing to my daughter. In the middle of the night in Poppy’s first few weeks, when she would cry inconsolably when we tried to put her down, I would sing to her every night. In those dark, lonely hours, though, the only songs I could reliably remember the words to? “Cecilia” by Simon and Garfunkel (nice kid-appropriate lyrics, self!)  and “Iowa” by Dar Williams. (Oh, and one night, an ill-fated attempt to remember the words to “Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls, which taught me that (a) I don’t actually remember all those words and (b) that song sounds a LOT better with 2-part harmony.)

But mostly just “Cecilia,” over and over and over again.

I do not offer this as a fake-self-deprecating but actually-self-congratulatory suggestion that my kid is above kids’ music, or that we are somehow cultivating in her Excellent Music Taste from day 1. On the contrary, Poppy listens to a wide variety of deeply unhip music.  But we don’t own any kids’ music yet, and since one of the only reliable ways to calm her down is dancing to upbeat tunes, we have to make do with what we’ve got. To date, her favorites include:

• “Raise Your Glass” by Pink
• “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel (“Don’t listen to him, Poppy,” John whispers at her while party boy Billy tries to persuade the young Virginia to drop her pants.)
• “Little Pink Houses” by John “Cougar” Mellencamp
• “Toxic” by Britney Spears
• “Hard Core Troubadour” by Steve Earle
• “Love the Way You Lie” by Rhianna and Eminem (another for the “Please, God, let her never remember these lyrics, even subliminally” list)
• “Low” by Flo Rida (featuring T-Pain) (particularly good for dancing/quad exercises while holding baby)
• “Excursion Around the Bay” by Great Big Sea
• “Hooked on a feeling,” “ooga chakka” version  (please do yourself a favor and watch the video featuring David Hasselhoff, if you haven’t before.)
• “Party In the USA” by Miley Cyrus

So, as you can see, Poppy’s music taste is not particularly discriminating. Drop a beat and girl is good to go. Now please share with me those songs that you find useful for baby dancing. Our short playlist is getting a little tired.

Well jeez, that was fast:

Timmmberrrr!

At one month old, Poppy likes:

• lights, staring at
• narwhals
• pooping in a newly-changed diaper
• the new Paul Simon album

And dislikes:

• The one cute outfit I allowed myself to buy, on which she poops every time I try to put her in it
• Delayed mealtimes
• Sleeping longer than 3 hours in a row
• Bouncy seats of all sorts

At one month of motherhood, I officially dislike:

• This effing April weather that is so freaking cold and rainy that we’ve been kept inside many, many days.
• 4am wakeups
• The guy who lives next door and insists on parking his junker car in front of our house. No, that doesn’t have anything to do with Poppy, but I’d like my dislike noted for the record.

The rest is pretty good. I just got a wrap thing that I can strap the kid in that allows me the use of two hands. As a result, I’m preparing for an increase in meals consumed at roughly the time they were intended, bathroom breaks, and (hopefully) updates in this space.

Poppy says peace out.

Well then! As you have likely deduced, I went and had a baby. And then proceeded to sit on the couch in my sweatpants for two weeks, feeding said baby every 45 minutes and worrying that we will never sleep again. Folks who have done this before: that hormone cocktail of the first few days postpartum is NO JOKE, huh? I was ill-prepared for the magnitude of the “hormonal mood swings and accompanying sudden unexplained tears” phase.

Worth it, though:

Internet, meet Poppy. (Not her real name. Just like my real name is not pseudo. I know, you’re shocked.) As you can see from the furrowed brow, she has some concerns. She’d like to know where to register a complaint.

When we were decorating Poppy’s room, our organizing theme was “hippos.” Stop looking at me like that, hippos are a totally reasonable theme. It was inspired by this bedding, which I found and fell in love with early in my pregnancy. I liked its gender neutral color scheme and cute use of large ferocious water-dwelling mammals. Total winner.

What I didn’t realize was how prescient our theme would be. What do you think of when you hear the word “hippo”? If you are anything like me, one of the first associations you’ll make is the obvious “hungry hungry” of board game fame. Funnily enough, if I had to choose one word to describe our daughter so far, it would be hungry. Perhaps she is inspired by her bedding? All I know is that my dud boobs haven’t been doing it for this kid, and so I have spent the past two weeks chained to the couch, feeding every ninety minutes, pumping for 20 minutes after every feeding, pounding fenugreek and mother’s milk tea and the occasional Guinness, all in an effort to get dud boobs up to snuff.

It didn’t work. I’m okay with that. No, I’d rather not hear other suggestions of things I should try. We’re good. I just though I’d explain why it’s taken a little while to get back here for an update.

What’s that? You’re interested in seeing more pictures showcasing her impressive assortment of fancy jammies? Oh IF YOU INSIST:

Yeah, we’re good. Very, very good.

There are many advantages, I’ve found, to being at the biggest part of my pregnancy in the winter. It’s a time when many people tend to sort of hibernate, after all. It’s dark early, sitting on the couch is normal, napping encouraged. There are no festive lawn parties taunting me with beer. No heat and humidity related swelling. Less unattractive boob sweat.

But one thing that kind of blows about later-stage pregnancy in the dead of winter is clothing. If it were spring, or summer, or even fall, I could just pop on a dress and call it good. But it’s ass cold here, people. A coat is necessary.

For months, I have strained my poor winter coat beyond all reasonable boundaries, zipping it up over my ever-increasing girth. But I knew there would come a time when regular coat would no longer fit, and “no coat” was not an option.

So I looked at maternity coats. Holy nuts. Those things are EXPENSIVE, and many of them seem to be “winter coats” in name only. Unlined, no down, not warm looking at all. Pass.

I figured I’d just buy a regular basic down puffy coat in a few sizes larger than my regular size. Clever, yes? I looked at several options, and when I found a 40% off coupon for Lands End, I decided it was time to pull the trigger and buy their basic warm not attractive but highly functional down parka.

Then, because I was feeling EXTRA smart, I decided to order it in a color other than black, so it didn’t get mixed up with my regular coat in the closet. Genius, yes? I selected a nice gray color and pressed “order.”

A few days later, a package arrived. I took the coat out, tried it on, and showed it to John, who promptly burst out laughing. Not quite the reaction I was hoping for.

“What?” I said.

“ahahahahahahahaha” he said.

“WHAT?” I said.

“You” – gasp choke laugh “you look exactly like….a manatee!”

“HEY ASSHOLE,” I said. “I’m PREGNANT. Comparing my girth to that of the noble sea cow is NOT NICE.”

“No,” he said, catching his breath, “You look fine. It’s nothing to do with you. I mean the jacket itself actually looks like a manatee- it’s the color plus the hood. The resemblance is uncanny, really.”

I regret to report that he is not wrong:

This week, after delaying it as long as possible, I’ve been forced to bring out The Manatee. I must say, I kind of wonder why I didn’t make the switch sooner- it’s so roomy! And warm! But I could live without John making motorboat propeller noises at me as I’m preparing to leave the house.