Apres le deluge, the vultures descend.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye: Little "Gigi" has passed the nine-pound mark.

Here's how my day started out yesterday: After breakfast, my daughter let loose a weapon of mass destruction. I was going to just clean and change her, but the mess was just everywhere. The best solution was a mommy-and-me bath, where I get in the tub with her baby bathtub in front of me and we both get a good soaping. So afterwards, I had the baby on my lap, nice and clean and cooing contendedly as I dried her hair, when that familiar warm feeling spread across my belly. Yep, she peed on me, the towels, my bathrobe, the works. I stood over the changing table, collecting wet stuff and hoping to get the diaper in place before she could strike again, and I thought, "Yeah, this is still better than most days I had at work last year."

Male readers might want to skip this one: Yep, it's breastfeeding rant time. Now that baby "Gigi" has discovered what her hands are capable of, she is not content to just sit back and suckle, oh no. Every other feeding is just a feather boa and a folding chair upside the head short of a Wrestling Smackfest. What's a mother to do? Carter's doesn't make straightjackets; I've checked. There is such a thing as "nursing beads" that moms can wear to keep babies' hands occupied benignly at mealtimes: just one more way that we can turn a perfectly natural biological function into a huge academic and commercial exercise.
Gigi hits her three-month mark this weekend. I had hoped to feed her Mommy Juice for at least six months. I really don't want to give it up; I like it (when she's not turning my anatomy into hamburger), and it's good for both of us. I just want to get through this phase without either one of us suffering permanent damage.
I wonder if I could qualify for a small business startup loan. I'll bet there's a huge market for custom homemade straightjackets.

I may not know how to be a good parent, but I can give you some pretty good hints about how NOT to.

I hoped I would eventually overcome the urge to watch my daughter sleep. I no longer do so out of fear that she can't really breathe on her own; I have accustomed myself to the idea that she no longer relies on me for oxygen. Now I watch her sleep for the sheer joy and tacky-poetry-inspiring pleasure of it. I spent a long time curled up with her on my bed today. Now that's the way to sleep in on a snowy day.
I'm not in any hurry to overcome the urge after all.

I am in mourning. My brother and blogging mentor has decided to retire his on-line magnum opus after many years. Ave atque vale, as the Romans used to say. It was Enormous Fun while it lasted. Respect.

Yesterday I wore all black. Today I drank no coffee. Tomorrow, life will go on.

Corollary to The Heisenberg Principle as applied to infants: Sitting down to blog about a sleeping infant is almost certain to wake her up.

I swear I am not making this up: I know, I always say "I don't usually put political commentary in the blog." However, the U.S. inaugural seems to bring it out of us all. To wit: as we lay in bed this morning, listening to the proceedings in Washington DC, my ingenue daughter screwed up her face and cooked up a steaming batch of amazingly potent diaper chili.
I do not wish to imply that this is a predictor of her political leanings. But I am hard-pressed to find a more subtle editorial comment on the day's events.

The Heisenberg Principle, as applied to infants: I am ridiculously enamored of the coos and burbles that emerge from my daughter's mouth. Sadly, she will not make these sounds forever. So I dusted off an ancient camcorder to record my little girl's "cute noises" for posterity. Armed with my device, I stalked our subject in her common habitat (a playmat with lots of colorful dangling toys), where she frequently vocalizes while batting at Monkey or Giraffe. I switched on the camera and --
Silence.
I circled the mat, finger poised above the "record" switch, until the battery light started its countdown to shutoff. No luck. I shut off the camera and put the battery back in the charger. As it clicked into place, a different sound came from over my shoulder: "Goooo...ga! Ahoo..."

The local schools opened two hours late this morning, as they do when there is extreme weather. The definition of "extreme" has broadened to include temperatures in the teens (Fahrenheit). Where I lived for the last two years, temperatures in the teens constituted a heat wave. Seriously, people.

This is what I get for marrying a New England Yank and moving to Baltic Europe for two years. Now I figure it's not really winter unless you're up to your hips in snow and "daytime" consists of a maximum five hours of grey sky.
Want to cure your Seasonal Affective Disorder? Spend October through April in subarctic Finland; you will never whine again. You will also never understand why anyone would delay or cancel school, barring Yeti attacks.

Every time I wonder about my competence as a mother, I remind myself that wee Gigi really lucked out, on the grand scale of things.

I'm not saying the woman doesn't love her child. I'm just saying that fame and riches mean jack squat if your kid has to visit you in rehab and daddy in the boneyard.

For someone who is on leave, I spend a lot of time at the office. I went to HQ Thursday for the second time in as many months. Sounds crazy, but there is a reason: they want to know what to do with me when my maternity leave is up, and this takes some planning ahead. There were a few proposals out there to send me to Western Europe in the fall, but all of them would have brought me back to work sooner than I wanted, in order to get language training.
The goofy thing is that my mother is relieved that I'm not going to Western Europe. Mind you, an earthquake and tsunami just wiped out hundreds of thousands of people in Asia. But no, modern Europe would be a dangerous place. What doom awaits us there? Terrorism? Volcanic eruptions? White slavers carrying off my cherubic infant daughter? No, none of that. Mom was anxious about us going back to Europe because of an earthquake that happened over 200 years ago.
Good thing my company doesn't have an office in Atlantis.
The only thing that keeps me from being more sarky about this - aside from the fact that Mom is a regular reader - is the knowledge that as a mother, I could turn out to be just as much of a worrywart. But hey, I look forward to being anxious about the first time my daughter pilots a space shuttle beyond Mars.

I'm still not sure whether to thank my brother on the other coast for sending me this picture.

HANDS! Genius! Woo HOO!
Sorry, I'm just a little excited. Today "Gigi" picked up a toy all by herself for the first time. She's figured out what her hands are capable of. I'm feeling sort of like Anne Sullivan with Helen Keller at the pump shouting "wa-wa!"
Don't tell me about the dread I must now live with, that everything she picks up for the next twelve months will go straight for her mouth. She's still working on that level of coordination. I'm just going to sit back and enjoy my girl genius.

The DSL guy came on Thursday to see what was wrong with our connection. I mention this because I have been accused of blogslacking. So now there's supposedly no problem with me getting on line - except for the whole bit about finding the time. Note to self: as much as my husband enjoys it, it is not a good idea to get him a Sid Meier computer game for Christmas if I want to read my e-mail anytime this century.

Happy New Year!!! Yeah, I know, I see the date too. Don't get me started about the reliability of our DSL and the fact that Internet Explorer seems to exist for the sole purpose of cheesing me off.
The big development of the week is that I am officially off the payroll now. Yep, for the first time in over thirteen years, I am not earning a paycheck. During the months between my return to this side of the Atlantic and now, I was burning up paid leave. I went into HQ two weeks ago to do the paperwork, and here I am, sabbatical commencing. I wanted this more than anything in the world a year ago. Now I'm scared to death. No income? We're paying this mortgage on my husband's salary alone? And oh yeah, there's a baby to feed?
At the same time, it's very exciting. Beholden to no one, no performance reviews, no micromanagement, no bureaucracy, no alarm clocks. (But then, who needs alarm clocks when you have a hungry infant at 4 a.m.?)
Okay, I have one boss. She is unpredictable, demanding, can not be reasoned with, and I am constantly cleaning up after her messes. And I love her more than life itself.
Happy New Year, indeed.