My Baby in Boston

I love my husband.  I really do.  We have this way of being with each other where we go back and forth on a subject, usually something one of us does, and how idiotic, inappropriate or genius (not) it was.  This time, it was Joe’s turn to be the genius.

It is one thing to be driving to a white Christmas in Vermont.  It is a whole ‘nother story when I am the one doing the driving with a three month old baby in the back seat sitting next to a perfectly capable husband.

Now, to put in perspective there are a couple of important details here I must let you know.   We are from Miami, so we don’t have snow.  Although I lived in the northeast for about 8 years, I did not drive a car.  And, most importantly, I was not a typical first time mom.  I took neuroticism to whole new level. 

During my pregnancy I did not have coffee, I did not have soda, I ate organic, I slept on my left side, I did prenatal yoga, and spent a fortune on both supplies and books about the supplies I just bought.  And then some more books.  I feel like I got a PhD in my 40 (well, 38) weeks of pregnancy and eventually went into early childhood education because of it.  So once my son Diego was born, my neuroticism became exponentially worse as it was combined with even more hormones and the fact that I was now RESPONSIBLE for someone.  Diego was flesh and blood … not some theoretical child I was reading about.

I realized there was no way of getting out of going to Vermont for Christmas when Diego was 3 months old so I took every precaution I could think of.  We flew to Boston instead of our usual New Jersey so the drive would be shorter.  We got in while it was light, I purchased every winter clothing item that was available and carried most of them by hand (just in case the suitcases and the baby were separated and I did not have enough warm clothes for him).  We checked and double-checked that the car rental company had car seats, which car seats, did they install it, where the installers trained or certified, did they have backward facing seats not just convertible ones.  Newborns need to be facing backwards.  I drove myself and pretty much everyone around me insane.

The plan was that my dear husband Joe would go out of the terminal in Boston, rent the car and drive back to get Diego and I so that Diego would not spend anytime in the cold.  Not only was he a newborn, he was from Miami and MY son. (Note the caps and italics to denote the extra emphasis here).

Not only that but I had seen, and I am not sure why, one episode of “I Should Not Be Alive”.   In this one of course, a family sets out to a Christmas gathering, takes a side road, a blizzard comes (did they not get the warning?), gets stuck in the snow, and no one can find them.  And, get this, the mom’s breast milk FROZE and the baby starved to death.  Awful.  Mom and dad eventually made it out alive.  This was NOT a good idea to see before our trip to Vermont. And it amped my determination that this scenario was not going to happen to my little family.

Prepared?  Definitely.  At least I was.  My dear husband …. well … not so much.

We arrive in daylight.  We get the bags from which we were not separated.  Joe leaves to get the car and I dutifully breastfeed.  And I wait. And wait.  And wait some more.  Joe was supposed to call me when he was coming back so I wait.  It gets cold every time the sliding door opens, so I put a jacket on the baby.  I move seats away from the door.  That gets too hot so I take off the jacket.  I had a lot of time to wait.  And I figure something is wrong but dismiss it.  It begins to get a little darker.  Joe does not answer the phone and so I breastfeed.  Again.

He finally appears, walking.  Not a good sign.  He preempts his next sentence with something like “remember, these things could happen to you too”.  Short story … he forgot his drivers license expired in October, and if you were paying attention we are in Christmas and it December.  He couldn’t rent a car.  Which meant I had to rent the car which meant I had to drive, in the snow, with Diego in the back and that was the equivalent of asking me to enter into a dark cave and touch a bears nose.  I could have killed him.  The mama bear in me shouts out but the clever me stays quiet.  Because a) this is a very “milkable” moment as in, you did THAT so now you need to do THIS without complaining and b) I had to keep my final goal in mind: to get baby safely to Vermont for Christmas. Right now in my neurotic mind, things weren’t looking too good.

We leave the terminal and take the bus to the car rental place.  GASP.  Diego’s face will feel a breath of freezing Boston air AND he will ride in a bus without a car seat (DOUBLE GASP).  Try to imagine how hard I was holding the poor child.  Now exaggerate it a little more and you are close to what I was doing.  Poor kids’ eyes could’ve popped out of their sockets from all that squeezing.  Alas, we arrive at the rental agency and it is still light outside but getting darker.  It gets dark early in winter.  That alone made the urgency of renting a car and getting out of there a priority. 

I, contrary to Joe, do have a valid drivers license … lucky me … and they rent us a car.  While we wait for the paperwork, changing of the reservation, putting in my information, etc… it got hot in there so I took off the 10+ layers the baby had on.  And I breastfeed.  When we receive the car, I bundle him up again with 10+ layers to get to the car only to find that it had indeed a car seat but it was facing forward and my baby was NOT going to be facing forward.  Back to the agency, back to unbundling, and back to waiting another while until someone comes to reinstall it (because, at this point, the only one that installed a baby seat worthy of my child’s tushy was the local fireman as I didn’t trust anyone else to do it).  I check and double-check the installation.  It looks dubious.  Anything concerning my son at this point is dubious.  I am neurotic remember?  But I took a deep breath and prayed that God would spear him some awful fate if I crashed the car, and spared me the associated guilt.

And just in case, because it was a three hour drive or so, I breastfeed so we wouldn’t have to stop on the side of the road and a mass murderer would attack us and hurt my precious child.  We place baby in the now backward facing seat, I tell Joe to sit next to him in the back (because somehow that would provide an extra layer of protection for Diego), and as soon as we are about to pull out we hear a massive explosion coming out of our child.

This was not an ordinary poop.  I fed him so much that his poop was everywhere.  One of those poops (and if you are a parent you know what I am talking about) that reach from the neck to the toes and all you can do is undress baby completely. GASP.  The cold!  My child was going to be exposed as I cleaned the seemingly thousands of folds on his legs to make sure no rash would ensue.

When that ordeal is done it is night.  And dark.  We had arrived in Boston at least 4 hours prior and still had not managed to get out of the parking lot.  I would be driving, Diego probably had caught pneumonia, and my husband was smart enough to dutifully respond “yes dear” because in my mind this was all HIS fault!  Well, actually, in my mind and in reality … this was all his fault.

As soon as we are driving out of the parking lot, after checking and double-checking seatbelts, bottles, seat adjustments, mirrors everything …. before we are out of the gate of the rental car agency … I kid you not (no pun intended) … the check engine light goes on in the car.  We need to get another one, we need to take all the bags out, reinstall the rear facing car seat, and change the paperwork.

I look to the back, I see Joe with his hand on Diego and tell him the good news.  And I laugh, because I realize I could not make this story up even if I wanted to.  Because family history is made of stories like these; and I can see myself as a grandma telling my grandchild “did I ever tell you the story when your grandfather forgot his license was expired?”  I laugh because I love Joe.  Because stuff like this happens and we can both take it in stride. And for the next 4 hours, as I drive like an old lady from Boston to Brattleboro, there is a familiar banter between us.  He teases me because I am indeed driving below the speed limit, I tease him because if he were “all that” he would be the one driving.

Two Minutes on Cristina & Kony 2012

SIDENOTE:  I put "two minutes" because I have spent very little time thinking about this.  I thought that writing how I felt about the whole Kony 2012 thing would help me understand how I FEEL about it.  So this is not a well thought out, articulate opinion piece.  They are just my thoughts, and truthfully, I would rather stick to storytelling ... but I am happy that I am putting another post on my blog!

Two Minutes on Cristina & Kony 2012

I was one of the millions of people who watched the Kony 2012 video on Facebook, cried, and shared it on my profile.  If you have no idea of what I am talking about, you can see the video here.

I was not going to buy the kit, I didn’t quite understand or believe that by a specific date in April Kony will somehow be brought to justice, nor did it activate me into action.  But I related to it at several levels.  The first and most obvious was as a mom of two boys ages 4 and 6.  Having them taken away from me at night and the things they would have to go through is truly heart-wrenching.  That was enough to press click on the share button.

On a second level, as a “gringa” who lived abroad for 22 years and began a nonprofit (more on that later, I guess) I could relate to seeing things that you think “how can this be?” and feeling moved to do something about it.  And finally, I stayed in-country long enough to be highly annoyed by world bank Harvard types (sorry guys) who made funding conditional to their solutions even if local people didn't think they were solving the real problem.   Gross generalization … I know.

I half read the critiques about how the organization that did the video, Invisible Children, was shady on their finances.  Of how the guy who did the video ended up on drugs and half naked on the street.  Of how sharing a video and buying a wrist band does not solve a problem but that there are people who have dedicated years of theirs lives to solving them.  Yes, I get it.  But I felt differently.

My reaction was “so instead of focusing on what the movie is saying, we are focusing on its production”.  We are calling into question those who at least did what they thought was the right thing to do. 

Like I said, I was not moved to action.  In part, because I think I am at a point in my life that my action-capacity is limited and I am a “go big or go home” kind of girl.  But if I am truly honest with myself, I was a little envious.  When I was working in Chile, starting a nonprofit from my savings and working day and night to get funding … I would have loved to have a movie like this.  I would drool over the opportunity of making my cause so well known.  Because whether you believe in my solution to the problem or not, now you know there is a problem.  I cannot be so arrogant as to think there is only one possible solution to fix this and that solution is my own.  So it might make things more difficult for a little bit, the field may get cloudier for a while, my position as “expert” on my issue may be threatened by some young kids in the US who think they can save the world.  But eventually everyone who is serious about the issue will be talking and organizing and with a lot more support because millions of people now know the problem.  In this case who Joseph Kony is.

And I am sorry.  I just can’t see how that is a bad thing.

Here I Am In A Blog

I can't believe I am doing this.  As if I had the time or the energy.  When my new years resolution was to read more of what other people wrote, not to write.  But yet here I am, in a blog and unsure of what to write next.

My parameters are: better late than never - better done than perfect - better "on paper" than in my head.  So here I am in a blog.

I was inspired by my new years resolution of being more "literate".  I began listening to podcasts as I cooked dinner or as I drove to and from my morning triathlon practice.  One of my favorites is The Moth, where storytellers tell a story.  My second favorite is, oddly enough, The Story with Dick Gordon. And finally TedTalks.  So here I am in a blog trying to figure out which story to tell first.

I sit on "my" computer (in quotations because my husband takes it over at times only for me to find his facebook logged in *sigh*) in my bedroom, surrounded by both literature and clutter as I hear the appalling sound of Lego Batman Wii coming from the living room.  Its been years since I even  made a new years resolution and I should have known better.  The idea was to listen to a podcast, or read a page of something, at least once a day, and by the end of January I had already failed.  So the chances of me keeping up with this blog are stacked against me.  But you know what? Stranger things have happened.  I have surprised even myself a thousand times in hundreds of ways so why not? So here I am in a blog and kind of looking forward to discover what comes next.