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.

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 first found myself in the press-on nail aisle. I know what you’re thinking: an entire aisle of press on nails? Impossible! Back when I was a pre-teen who coveted Lee press-on nails, you could get pink, or slightly darker pink, or French. That was pretty much it.

Those were the olden days, when people had to walk to school barefoot uphill both ways, and had to grow their own fingernails.  They were dark times.  We shall not speak of them.  Now, apparently, press-on nails come in hundreds of styles.

For example, if you want to demonstrate your “Harajuku Style,” you can buy a mismatched plaid manicure.

I apologize for the poor photo quality, but a Walgreens employee walked by at around this point and gave me a very strange look for photographing the press on nail aisle.

That didn’t stop me from capturing this shot, though. Because I wanted you all to know that the late 80s/early 90s? They aren’t dead. Hypercolor lives on!

Without nails that changed color in the sun, how would we ever know when it was sunny out?

At this point the Walgreens employee was really starting to look at me suspiciously, so I was unable to photograph all the other truly fantastic styles, including one with peace signs (because what better place to advertise your pacifist beliefs than your fingernails!) and airbrushed tiger-stripe with sparkles.

I sidled over to the cosmetics section. Where I found this:

What is that, you ask? That, my friends, is makeup for your legs.

Airbrush makeup.

For your legs.

I have concerns. Could one wear clothing? Because it seems like makeup FOR YOUR LEGS would get on your pants. Or your skirt. Particularly if you’re wearing white or light-colored pants/skirts/what have you, which is when it seems like one would most care about having ones legs appear nicely tanned. This product seems wildly impractical, is what I’m saying.

Finally, I decided to head back toward the pharmacy in the hope that if I started hovering around, they might one day have my prescription ready.  As I was standing there, doing my best to look wild-eyed and desperate, my eyes fell upon this:

Interesting. A little card with a place for pills at the top that you can slide into your wallet. Because I’ve always wanted to keep pills in… my wallet? I guess? I mean maybe it could be useful for, like, vitamins? Birth control? That medicine you have to take with your morning coffee for which you need a daily reminder?

Then I looked closer, and realized the true purposes of this product:

In case you cannot read that from my crappy, crappy iphone photo, that little red medallion says “discreet dispenser for aspirin, ED meds, and allergy pills.”

AHA.  They try to sneak it in there all innocuous-like, but this is a product for men. Men with a particular kind of problem. Men who are potentially picking up women in bars, and need a way to subtly engage in necessary pre-game warmup activities without scaring off their opponent.  Men whose dates end with side-by-side bathtubs.  I’m glad to know that these products have reached such a level of popularity that they have spawned a market for related storage products. Way to go, big pharma!

At this point, the pharmacist called me over and gave me a prescription for 492 days worth of antibiotics for Poppy, so I had to stop photographing odd products.  And I hadn’t even gotten to the 5 Hour Energy aisle yet! Next time, my friends.  Next time.

We’ve been a little busy.

The good news is, she’s totally on pace to beat me in visiting all 50 states. My goal was to do it by 25, I didn’t make it until I was 27. Stupid West Virginia.

(West Virginia is not actually stupid.  Please don’t hate me, West Virginians, your state seems lovely.)

(Except did you hear that thing on NPR a few weeks ago with the guy from West Virginia who is holding out and refuses to sell the oil company his house in the Hollow? Pronounced Holler?  Like, for real? And how you had to listen incredibly carefully to understand him because he appeared to be speaking a different dialect, so different were the vowel sounds? HOLY ACCENTS, West Virginia!)

Where was I?

Oh yeah, seven states in five months. Plus a slew of houseguests, two basement floods, partridge, pear tree, etc etc.

TIRED. I AM TIRED.

Man, though, my kid is in a cute stage. She has discovered her feet, and can roll over in both directions, and sometimes, if you catch her in just the right mood, she will belly laugh for minutes on end while you pump her legs and sing “peanut butter jelly time.”

(So I guess our taste in kids’ music hasn’t improved.)

She also has decided that sleep is for suckers, and she is not interested in being comforted, no thank you -  but woe to you if you fail to come in and try to comfort her, for she will scream like she is being nibbled by tiny cannibalistic fish.

If she could outgrow that part of this stage ASAP, I’d be really grateful.

What, you want me to sleep? Weirdo.

The last few days we’ve had several evenings where there’s almost a coolness in the air, a hint of fall coming. While I have loved having family visit, and am so grateful we’ve been able to introduce Poppy to so many of her extended family members, I’m ready for fall. Things will slow down, we’ll spend some weekends at home, the houseguests will taper off. Football will start. Chili will be weather-appropriate food. We can visit a pumpkin patch. I’m ready.

This made me nervous, as you can imagine, since 3 month olds are not universally known to be road trip fans. But Poppy did great, slept most of the trip, and both there and back managed to poop immediately after we arrived at a rest stop, making changing easy and totally sparing the car seat from any accidents. I think we probably owe her a pony.

As we were driving through Iowa, we passed several Kum & Go gas stations, also known as “the most unfortunately-named business known to man, and also the source of many, many junior high jokes.”

Not being from the midwest, John had never seen one of these before, and was astounded that the company had not chosen to rebrand somewhere along the line. (Hey, it worked for Beaver Arcadia College…)

But Kum & Go is not alone. Deliberately misspelling business names seems to be something of a standard practice in Iowa. We also saw:

• QuikTrip
• Joocy Froot (a roadside fruit stand)
• Kwik Kleen Car Wash
• Maid Rite (mmmm, loose meat…)

Good times, Midwest business establishments.

Aside from the long drive and questionable spelling, it was such a great way to spend the weekend. I hate it when great friends move away, and these guys are some of the best. But I’m so, so grateful that even though we go months at a time without seeing each other, we can still pick right back up where we left off.

Except when we left off we didn’t have babies, and now we do.

Whoa.

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.

Look, a lot of people on the internet are fond of noting how nerdy they were in the old days. I want to believe these people, I do. Except I think many of these self-proclaimed nerds were in fact cool and alternative and into neat-o things that were just not appreciated by their peers, like underground punk music, or philosophy. Such was not the case with me. I had no interests that, in retrospect, would give me hipster street cred. I was just painfully dorky. For example:

Bad: I was on the math team. For all four years.

Worse: I was an alternate on the math team- as in, I didn’t always even compete, because truth be told I was not that good at math. But I stuck with it for the social scene. Oh god.

Even worse: When we were juniors, my math team buddies and I wrote a song to celebrate the graduating seniors at the annual banquet. (Side note: MATH TEAM BANQUET.) It was called “the Circle of Math,” and was sung to the tune of “The Circle of Life.”

Worse yet: There were accompanying hand gestures, and a brief dance interlude.

(Related: for some godforsaken reason, “The Circle of Math” has been stuck in my head all day. I still remember all the words. Because that’s a good use of brain cells.)

So yes, I was really, really dorky. But you know what? I was okay. My high school class had 1000 people in it. The whole school had close to 4000. It was not small. And while popular high school mythology suggests that large schools crowded with jocks and queen bees and so forth are absolute torture for the young nerd, I benefited tremendously from that size. When your school is that large, there is a whole crowd of painfully dorky kids, ready to befriend each other and write lyrics to a song about mathletes. There are many alternative artsy types, ready to band together to start a literary magazine. There is critical mass of sullen Goths, there to hang out on the street corner together, smoking, looking disaffected.

So while I definitely also experienced the rougher parts of serious dorkdom (mocking, rejection by crushes, a really mean-spirited series of messages scribbled in textbooks suggesting I was fellating our driver’s ed. teacher) (I wasn’t), I also had friends with whom I was happy to spend Saturday nights gathered in someone’s basement, playing Scattergories.

(The rowdiest we got was playing “ten fingers” a game that is supposed to be a drinking game (“I never”). We played without drinks, which was just as well, because based on the combined sexual experience of the group we would have remained sober forever.)

Is it wrong that I half wish for the same sort of dorkiness for my daughter? I mean, if she ends up being a prodigious talent at basketball, or becomes a popular cheerleader type, I certainly won’t love her any less. But I won’t mind a bit if she ends up being a dork- never in the coolest crowd, not invited to all the big parties, spending her high school Saturday nights thinking she’s naughty for saying the word “fucking” instead of actually doing it. Would that be so terrible?

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.

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.

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.