Mother of the Year

For the third night running, Piper is doing her best imitation of a college sophomore. A couple 30-75 minute naps during the day, and then not going to bed until 3:00 am (or possibly later, I don't know, because I stop checking the clock at some point, it just makes me crazy). I wanted to work on knitting projects (I have about, oh, I don't know, 15 things going right now), but she shrieks every time I try, so I am on the Internet and she is in the living room chewing on a ribbon and waving things around and taking big drinks of water which she then spits on the carpet. I am also letting her watch TV. I'm pretending not to notice when she is looking directly at the TV screen, because hey Black Beauty is on and at least it's not Elmo, right? That little red asshole creeps me out. I am not about to do anything to disrupt her current state of being, because she is entertaining herself and she is quiet. She is not scooting around the living room screeching when she gets stuck behind the couch. She is not overturning a box of crochet hooks and sticking them in her mouth. She is not pulling papers off the end-table and taking bites out of them.

I feel like a bad mother for letting her watch TV. This does not compare, however to several Fridays ago, which was a banner mothering day for me. That day, in the space of three hours, I did the following:

1. Mistakenly thought she would be okay standing up and holding onto the couch without assistance. So I let go. She stood alone for a few seconds, then fell over backward and conked her head on the carpet with a very audible thump. There was some crying, and tears, and soothing by Ryan. Oh, and Piper cried some, too. I'm only half-joking here. I felt horrible, and Piper spent thirty minutes getting loved up and cuddled by Daddy while I bit my nails and wondered if I'd just given her brain damage.

2. Twenty minutes later, I was eating some blueberry muffin graham snacks and gave her one, because I thought they were too thick for her to bite through and she'd just gum it into messy oblivion the way she does with biter biscuits* and zwieback toasts.* What happened was she liked the blueberry graham snack a lot and promptly bit off a large, extremely choke-sized piece, which Ryan and I had to take turns using our fingers to dig out of her mouth. She gave us a confused look and then cried as though we'd broken her tiny heart. Not angry sobs, miserable ones, directed at us for stealing her tasty snack. So then I felt even more horrible.

3. Thirty minutes after that, as we were getting ready to go out to dinner, I paid too much attention to the television and not enough to my child, who wriggle-rolled off the couch onto a pile of shoes, scaring the shit out of me and startling her. It's possible she even found it fun, but by this point in the evening I expected Child Services to show up on my doorstep.

Ah, yes, and as I look over now I notice that the ribbon she is chewing on is red, and has turned her fingers, the front of her pajamas, and very probably the inside of her mouth, bright pink. Faaaaabulous.

I can't believe they let me take her home from the hospital without supervision.



*Totally useless, by the way. Especially for a beaver-toothed baby like mine. She just gums them for a while and smears the resulting brown goo everywhere, then bites off unchewable chokeable-sized pieces, which I then have to dig out of her mouth. And let me tell you, digging slimy pieces of biscuit out of her mouth is guranteed to piss her off. So then I have an angry baby, shrieking and covered in sticky brown goo. Not fun. Not fun at all.

*Not much better, actually, but at least the goo is less sticky and the pieces slightly less chokeable.