sueeeus

The doorbell just rang. It’s not UPS delivery time. The Jehova’s Witness ladies and the Mormon boys haven’t been around in a while. But I don’t see two forms through the blinds (they usually come in pairs). Who could it be My sweet neighbor L, bearing a plate filled with bounty from her garden. Not too long ago she appeared with a freshly baked cobbler made with more bounty from her garden. I returned her dish with a pumpkin loaf (from a mix, how lame of me, but my garden is not bountiful, and I probably wouldn’t grow pumpkins anyway, and it’s all I had on hand). It was a yummy pumpkin loaf, though! This is so wonderfully June Cleaver! In all the years I’ve lived in Suburbia, I’ve had very little to do with my neighbors. It’s a sad thing, the neighborhood dynamic in much of this area. How refreshing to be neighborly! I put the beautiful vegetables on a cobalt blue plate, and decided to break out the rattan chargers that I’d gotten years ago while dreaming of entertaining and how nice they would look with my blue plates and colorful food. Alas, most of my family members moved away, the cool one’s family doesn’t live in convenient driving range, and we have no friends. (Okay, we have a few, but none live nearby.) Pathetic. So we don’t entertain. So the chargers have been in their boxes, sealed until this moment.

Isn’t that a unique finish on my dining table I nearly sold the set this summer, while I was on a simplify-my-house rampage. I’m glad I didn’t though. I’m not ready to part with it. It is spawned from an attempted tortoise shell faux finish, and it’s quite stunning. My sister, who had much to do with its final appearance, affectionally calls the finish malignant barnacle. She, I, a niece, and a nephew wrought this masterpiece several summers ago. Same nephew has since destroyed one of the chairs, leaning back, leaning back, leaning back, Crack! Irreparable damage.

My neighoborhood consists of a handful of houses on a culdesac adjacent to a busy street. On the corner lives a registered sex offender, level 2. Yesterday I saw him. He’s a very good looking young man. A charmer. He looks harmless. He looks friendly. He might well be. He might not be. Children were riding bikes in the culdesac. He was sitting on the edge of his retaining wall, watching them. It creeped me out. I hope, I hope, I pray, that all the parents in our neighborhood have had a talk with their children about him. Stranger Danger. That’s what one of the mothers in my daycare has taught her child. She uses the phrase and her child instantly attaches close to her mother’s side. We will move before my child can play in the culdesac. And I will teach him Stranger Danger.

In another house lives an Indian family. They are very nice. Hello, hello, we exchange friendly hellos. They have nice cars. The old man, the grandfather I presume, told me he works at McDonald’s, not because he needs the job, but to improve his English and get him out of the house. It’s an interesting picture – old Indian man with a turban driving a new Lexus SUV to work at McDonald’s for minimum wage. I recently learned that the family owns a couple or a few of the local Indian restaurants. I was also recently lamenting to the cool one that we never get to have Indian food. Would you like some cheese with that whine, he says. He only wants to have Mexican food or American food if we go out. I miss Indian food! Some things I miss about being single… But since our neighbors own these restaurants, maybe we can go. It would be very neighborly of us, after all.

Next door is a Chinese family. Grandma speaks no English. Papa sometimes mows our front lawn. Once the cool one mowed his front lawn – our lawns are so small, it’s no trouble at all. Since then, the neighbor gets to his lawn more often than we get to ours, so he has mown (is that even a word ) our lawn a couple of times. I baked some banana walnut bread – from scratch! – and wrapped it up nicely with foil and ribbons, and presented it to them with a thank you card. They don’t like nuts, it turns out. Or banana bread. But it turned out delish! I made a double batch, which is how I know it turned out well. Yogurt is the trick. They appreciated the gesture, though.

L had a yard sale the other day. I took Boo over and chatted for a couple of hours. I bought him a giant floppy stuffed horse and dog. Children played in the culdesac. It was a beautiful day. L knows all the kids, and they all like her. I envy this. Prolonged neighborly interaction. It was a first. I like this neighborly stuff.

Kipe
\Kipe\, n. [Cf. OE. kipen to catch, Icel. kippa to pull, snatch. Cf. Kipper.] An osier basket used for catching fish. [Prov. Eng.]

I was just pondering what I plan to post when I show and tell what I’m wearing tomorrow, when the word kipe surfaced. I had no idea how to spell it. Or where it came from. All I knew was that I grew up with this word as a part of my family’s common vocabulary. It stands to reason that we learned this word from my eccentric anglophile dad. Kippers, are, after all, very Brit. And delish. I have a vague recollection of kippers wrapped in newspaper, piping hot and tasting very good. That was a very long time ago. I was eight. We lived in Cambridge. What a glorious place! But that’s another story.

Usage: Mo-ommmmmm, he kiped my _________. Didchu kipe my __________ Who kiped my ________

From kipper to snatch to take to steal. Mystery solved. I think.

He didn’t wake up at 4! He slept until 7. SIX HOURS! (I still had to get up at 6, but that’s beside the point.) I was alarmed to see him sleeping on his belly with his face nearly flattened into the mattress. He had a little bit of nostril exposed, through which he was breathing. He insists on sleeping on his side or his belly. This distresses me. I keep a night light on so that I can look at him during the night to see if his face is buried. His mattress is a firm foam, and it is directly on the floor next to mine. He can see me so he feels safe. If he rolls off the mattress, since he is now such a squirmer, he may startle himself, but he won’t hurt himself. Last night was his first night on this new mattress. When we tried the crib, he couldn’t see over the bumpers so I removed them. He likes to be able to see me, and I’m okay with that. Then he got his feet stuck between the rails, and could have hurt himself trying to get unstuck, so I decided I don’t want him sleeping in the crib. It’s baby jail anyway. The feng shui of those vertical bars can’t be good. We have a play pen cot that we used for a little while, but he is so long that he barely has any room to maneuver. Sometimes he feels cold when I pick him up, too, and I can’t put him into snuggly blankets for the suffocation hazard. I think the thin mattress and airspace beneath it contribute to the cold. I know that when I’ve been camping and slept on a raised cot with a thin mattress, I got too cold myself. We also tried the crib mattress on the floor, but it isn’t much surface area and he rolled off and scared himself. It’s also slippery since it’s vinyl covered, and with all his squirming, the mattress can move and open up a gap for him to get wedged in, potentially. All these sleep hazards. I gave up on the Amby hammock when he started squirming so much. He would roll nearly over and wedge his face into the hammock sides, which alarmed me. I emailed Amby about this and they assured me he would be fine and able to breathe, and they’ve never had a baby suffocate in their hammock. Even so, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea, and he is so long that he nearly pokes out the end of the hammock anyway. My Boo is a supersized baby. He is off the charts in length and weight. He’s more the size of a normal two year old; not an 8 month old. He’s spent many nights in between us, since he’s been demanding food at 1 and 4 for so long. Sometimes I’m too exhausted to put him back in his own bed-space. He likes sleeping with us. But he’s a bed hog! He kicks and pokes and seems to jab my aching boobs with such precision as to inflict the most discomfort, like an expert marksman. How he manages this, I do not know. I love snuggling with him, I admit. But I think that it will be good for him to become accustomed to sleeping on his own mattress. This new arrangement may work. Hopefully, once I’m through the paranoia of him suffocating in the night, which may be when he’s mastered rolling over and back again and sitting himself up and possibly crawling, and when I’ve gotten him to sleep consistently without needing to be fed at 1 a.m., then I will gently encourage him to learn to sleep in his own room. I want him to learn independence, but I also want him to know that he can trust me completely for all things at all times. This will be very important later in his life, when he’s a teenager or preteen and faced with making some choices that might not be in his best interest. I want him to know that I am here for him, no matter what. I would have liked to have had that trust in and with my parents.

Boo has a schedule. He wakes up around 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. every night. Give or take half an hour. Every night. I’ve read that babies will do this for attention more than for hunger, at this stage. So I’ve tried to let him cry it out. But I think he is genuinely hungry, because it’s a different cry and squirm. He squirms and writhes and twists and cries in a semi-sleep state, like he’s so uncomfortable. When I finally cave and give him the bottle, he latches right onto it, sucks it down, and settles back to sleep.

He usually falls asleep for the night around 8 p.m. Tonight he woke up around 9 because we were out and about and we disrupted him. So I decided to seize the moment and try feeding him some solid food, to fill his tummy and see if it would keep him from waking up hungry at 1 a.m. He ate all the food, which actually surprised me. I sort of expected him to purse his lips and shake his head, which he has recently learned to do when he doesn’t want to have any more. Off to bed, but he went into his writhing contorting squirm and wouldn’t settle into sleep. So I gave him the remains of a bottle, thinking he couldn’t possibly want it for anything but comfort. He drained it and wanted more. He had a couple more ounces and then settled down to sleep. It was 11 p.m. Great, I can sleep one hour before I have to get back to the milking station.

I overslept and was wakened at 1 a.m. by the sound of my baby crying. There he was, squirming, writhing, crying. I gave him the pacifier. No luck. So I snuggled him into my lap and fed him a bottle, which he proceeded to drain. He seemed genuinely hungry. Again. Already. He finished feeding and went back to sleep. When I put him down on his mattress, I realized that I was (and still am) soaking wet, as I’m way overdue at the milking station. It’s not a pleasant sensation, and my mood is sour. I stumble downstairs to gather up my milking supplies and fumble around in the dark, getting myself locked and loaded. It’s 1:38 a.m. I am so hoping that he doesn’t wake up hungry at 4. All that extra food at 9 didn’t seem to make a difference at all. So much for that bright idea.