My RSS reader has been painfully empty the last week or so. If you, too, are hitting refresh every few minutes, perhaps you’d like to go visit my brick-and-mortar friend Astarte, who started up a blog after I wore her down with my incessant nagging. Astarte and I have been friends since high school, and she is my go-to girl when I’m FREAKING OUT about something.

And you could go visit Katie and see her exciting news.

You could go tell me what kind of expensive face stuff I should buy before Paul has time to regret his offer (I don’t think he knows how much face stuff can run to).

You could go give an opinion on a baby name. Nobody likes Lawson? I knew such a cute boy in high school named Lawson (hi, Jonathan!).

You could go fill out Sarah’s funny Would You Rather? survey.

You could go tell another of my brick-and-mortar friends, Mairzy, what mental image you get when you think of someone nice. (Dark blonde hair and green eyes, right?)

You could go see this tea and tell me if you think it’s worth risking. It looks kind of yummy, but I’m not sure I want to buy 100 teabags without trying it first.

There. That’ll keep us busy for a few minutes while other people compose their posts to entertain us.

One of my friends and I have been emailing about something, and we’re stuck, and we’re hoping other people can help us figure out what is going on. I’m going to cut a big chunk out of one of her emails, because I think she does a good job explaining what we’re wondering:

Why is it that when you are young and married, and you are out with other young married couples who have children (and you don’t have children), and they spend the whole evening complaining about their children (which, okay, whatever, some of it is funny, some of it is sobering when they get serious about how. bad. their. lives. have. turned. out. because of offspring–this conversational tone is awkward, yes?), do they have to follow every paragraph with a question like, “Oh, I bet you guys have changed your minds, right? You’re never gonna have kids, you didn’t know what it was like!” or “We’re really opening your eyes, aren’t we?” or “I bet we’ve ruined any chance you’ll ever have kids!” Why do they say these things so smugly? Why do they seem so horrified at their lives, and yet act superior because we don’t have children? What is this smugness?

And I know I haven’t had a child, so I haven’t experienced it and don’t know from experience all of the stuff. Obviously. But why do people have to complain and complain and complain, and tell you how awful it is, and how hard it is, and THEN freak out if you even consider NOT having children? And why do people call that selfish?

Maybe, my main question is, why do so many parents complain so much, when, duh! You are responsible for the complete well being of a tiny human! These conversations make my skin crawl.

I have been thinking and thinking on this topic: Why DO Parents Say Things Like That? Because I am totally familiar with what she is describing, and I can’t quite pin down what happens. Here is what I THINK happens:

1) New parents think that they are the only ones to ever have negative feelings about parenting, or about their children. (I don’t know how this happens, since we hear it all around us, but it does seem to happen.)

2) In a group of new parents, where everyone wants to talk about parenting the way a group of engaged people want to talk about wedding plans, someone finally tentatively broaches their negative feelings. Everyone else is so relieved, they’re practically high from it.

3) Searching for more of that high, parents bring up negative things more often. When that high becomes insufficient, they get more and more negative, saying bolder and bolder things. People who actually dislike the entire parenting experience (as opposed to the people who enjoy parenting but also enjoy complaining) start getting more confident and vocal.

4) And when parents realize they’ve been talking that way in front of non-members, as it were, they suddenly get self-conscious. They’re torn: on one hand, they kind of WANT to tell you the sucky stuff, because they’ve been working the whole “Nobody tells you it’ll be like this” angle (true or not), and because they want credit for dealing with something so diffcult. On the other hand, they know it sounds awful when they describe it this way, and they don’t literally mean all of it, and they think you’ll think they’re bad parents, and they wonder if they’ve gone too far and will talk you out of having kids. Also, when they look at non-parents, they remember their own non-parent selves and feel embarrassed about whatever opinions they might have had back then. CONFLICTED!

5) So then they get even stupider, and talk more when they should be talking less.

I think the SMUGNESS she describes is basic “We know something you don’t know” smugness. Like when someone has been to another country and keeps bringing up how they do things there. Or when someone has been on a missions trip. Or when someone has worked in a job you’ve never worked in. Or when someone has had something awful happen to them. Or when someone has done ANYTHING where (1) they now know more than you, and (2) they want you to know that there is NO WAY you can know the same thing unless you go through the same thing. Man, you can’t even BEGIN to understand. And so now we’re going to explain it to you AT LENGTH, even though we JUST SAID that there’s NO WAY you could understand, because there is NO REASON you shouldn’t be able to do this too.

Married people do this to non-married people. Graduates do it to students. War veterans do it to civilians. Exercisers/dieters do it to non-exercisers/non-dieters. And, as we’ve noticed, parents do it to non-parents. Parents also do it to other, less-experienced parents: parents of two children do it to parents of one child, parents of toddlers do it to parents of babies, and parents of teenagers do it to parents of toddlers. Kind of makes the human species look bad, doesn’t it? We want credit for being more awesome than you, and we also want you to know that you have no excuse for not being this awesome too.

Anyway, that’s my theory: we do it because of one of our strengths as a species (our eagerness to bond with each other and to empathize with each other) combined with one of our failings as a species (our eagerness to one-up each other and be superior to each other).

That’s not quite as . . . useful a theory as I’d like to have, though, so please add your voice to the discussion and maybe we can hammer this out a little better.

When Valentine’s Day candy was 75% off, I reminded myself that the COST of the candy is IRRELEVANT: the CALORIES are not 75% off.

But today it was NINETY percent off.

Last night, Henry woke up twice to nurse. I like to think of myself some sort of Natural at getting up in the night, but it’s actually that I adjust well: if he wakes me up when he hasn’t been waking regularly, I’m a sleepwalker. I woke up in the recliner an hour or so later, with a sleeping baby sprawled across me. I tried to put him in his crib, but no: now he wanted to nurse. So I nursed him, fell back to sleep, woke again with the baby sleeping on me. He again explained that he’d been robbed of his opportunity. Some nights, I write myself an I.O.U.

In other news which MAY OR MAY NOT be about Henry, I called the doctor to ask what constipation remedies were safe for an 8-month-old someone who may or may not be 8 months old. This is my first baby to have this problem, so this is all new territory for me.

I talked with the nurse, and she said they don’t recommend things like milk of magnesia until the child has been seen by the doctor. She said that I should try changing the child’s diet first, starting by taking out applesauce, bananas, rice, and carrots, and adding prune juice, white grape juice, more fruits and vegetables, more fluids, and more grains.

So, fine. But how to get the juice into him? He just spits when I give him a sippee cup. I’ve never even offered him a bottle, because lengthy and frustrating experiments with his siblings showed me it was easier not to bother with it.

On the other hand, Henry is the easy-goingest, laid-backest baby I have ever had. His life philosophy is “Sure! Whatevs!” So I got an Avent bottle (those are the ones the breastfed babies used in the daycare where I worked), and I put some prune juice into it, and Henry fumbled for a minute and then latched on like a champ and drank it right down.

Conclusion: slightly-warmed prune juice is A GREAT IDEA. I’ll say no more.

As long as we’ve all lost our appetites anyway, this seems like good timing for a diet update. I am having a teetery couple of days, almost forgetting I’m ON a diet. Like, this morning I was all, “Hey, this would be a good day to bake cookies!” Then I had a very grim remembering, and it was SO grim, I felt like the only compensation was to go ahead and make the cookies. (I haven’t.) (Yet.) (But I AM eating an enormous bowl of sugar-free fat-free pudding at 10:00 in the morning.)

But I am still on it, and my weight is still going down—more slowly, of course, but ever downward. I notice I’ve been feeling perkier and more energetic and like I’m better able to cope with things. I even washed the kitchen floor, and if that doesn’t smack of losing weight directly from the brain, I don’t know what does.

Swistle: Baby Names

The crappiest Valentine’s Day present of all is the single, perfect, long-stemmed red rose: it’s cheap and it’s painfully trite, but you have to pretend it’s BETTER and more MEANINGFUL than something more expensive or more thoughtfully chosen.

One of my best Valentine’s Day gifts ever was THIS, from Paul:<

We only had four kids then, and he got each of them dressed in a coordinating outfits (white shirts for everyone, blue pants for boys, pink pants for girl), and took their photos holding letters (L O V E) he’d cut out and painted. Then he got prints made of the photos and went out shopping for a frame, and he chose the frame I would have chosen over any other.

So, awesome: lots of work, lots of thought, and also showing he knows me (the frame style, and also knowing I am the kind of person who would want the children to be in order of age).

But the REAL best part was later that day, when he said, “OH DAMMIT! I meant to give you that for MOTHER’S DAY!”

Our Kelsey is in the hospital for pre-term pregnancy complications. Our Samantha is just home from the hospital and on bed rest for the same thing. Would you be darlings and go leave them a bolstering comment or two?

Whoops.

You want to know about my CATS? Oh, they’ll LOVE that. It’s very little attention and love they’ve seen since we brought home the first of our five unusually large, loud, furless kittens. …Sorry, I hate cats’ eye view, too. What’s next? Talking about “their humans”? Referring to the cats as our “furry children”? It’s a slippery slope, my friends: one day it’s “furless kittens” and the next day it’s “My cat walks all over me!” sweatshirts.

We have three cats, all acquired in ignorance of our creature-saturated future. The first one was Ge0rge. (You are going to think I am a PARANOID FREAK for disguising my CATS’ names, and listen, I agree. But on the other hand, I feel like my mother-in-law is EVERYWHERE. The walls! They have eyes and ears! And horns!)

So, this is Ge0rge, who in actual life has an o and not a zero in his name:

We adopted him from a shelter when he was a kitten. Ge0rge is not my preferred kitten style: he was frisky and sunshiney and hypering up and down the walls of his cage. He would run right up our bodies and sit on our shoulders.

The kitten I picked out more my style: sniveling, clinging, cowering. That was OIiver, who normally has a lowercase L instead of a capital I, and who normally does not have a mysterious red scuff on his nose:

OIiver is also a shelter cat, chosen painfully from a litter of four very similar kittens. His mother was also in the shelter, and I still wish I’d taken her, too. She was a very nice cat. And then maybe OIiver wouldn’t spend so much time sucking his own paw. Plus, it turns out I don’t like kittens, even if they’re in my preferred style.

And so the third cat we adopted was a grown cat. She was a stray in our apartment complex, a knocked-up teenager. Someone else took her in (technically, she took herself in: she walked right into their apartment without asking) when she needed a place to have her kittens, and then we took her when her kittens were old enough to be given away. I thought it would be sad to separate her from the kittens, but you should have seen her shaking off the shackles.

We named her Amelia, but called her that about three times before we nicknamed her M0use, and we’ve never called her anything else since then. You wouldn’t know it to look at her now, but when she was younger she was thin and almost all white, with huge ears. So the nickname seemed less silly back then.