Week 16 Day 2: A mown lawn

Gavin is 9 months old today. To celebrate, he decided that sleeping is for babies. Big boys refuse to take naps and are whiny and high maintenance all day. (Actually, from what I've heard from a lot of my lady friends involved in the heterosexual lifestyle, this isn't necessarily that far from the truth.)

Considering Gavin skipped his morning nap entirely (and by "skipped" I don't mean, "Gee, he was never tired and didn't even need it." I mean, "He was tired but fought sleep with every fiber of his being, spending the majority of what would have been nap time standing up and hollering from his crib") the afternoon wasn't all that bad. He was a little bit cranky, but not much. I even managed to drag him to Target where we had a fine time.

Speaking of Target, it has been brought to my attention that I seem to shop an awful lot. That hadn't really occurred to me, but I realize that is, indeed, true. And while I don't really think of myself as someone who loves to shop (when I picture someone saying, "I love to shop!" it's a woman with a maxed out Macy's charge card and hundreds of pointy shoes in her closet), I guess I kind of do. But I don't spend lots of money really. I love myself a good bargain, that's for sure. It's also fun to take Gavin shopping because he really digs it. Though he gets grabbier and grabbier each time wanting to touch and hold whatever is on the shelf nearest him. And in my defense, one of the reasons I go to the store so often is that with Gavin in tow, my time to get any shopping done is limited and I can only get so much at one time. Before he was born I could go to Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Target and CVS all in one day. Now I can pick one of those and am lucky if I get everything on my list.

Sadly Gavin also skipped his afternoon nap, which is usually "the big one" that allows me to get things done like eat or write or do laundry. Not today. He fell asleep super fast and yet only slept for about a half an hour, an hour shy of what would be considered a good afternoon nap (2 hours is ideal). Alas and alack.

So now I had a sleep-deprived but very much awake baby on my hands and a big chunk of time to kill before Stacy came home. When Gavin is tired he is very clingy, unable to entertain himself for any good period of time. Which means non-stop mama action from me. Which is exhausting. So I decided that he and I, with trusty poodle in tow, would go for a walk. It would do us both some good to get out of the house into the sunshine. We took a much longer walk than any of us wanted, but we needed it, especially me since I had that whole bag of chocolate Chex mix for lunch. By the time Stacy came home I was all, "He's all yours. Have a nice life." I'm kidding. Kind of.

In all seriousness, he was actually pretty adorable today and we had a lot of fun. In fact, I made him laugh harder than I've ever made him laugh before. I took his little crab rattle in my teeth and made growling sounds and he totally lost his mind. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but we played this game - me taking the rattle, him taking it back, me trying to grab it again - for a good long while, both of us laughing super hard. It was one of the best times of stay-at-homedom so far. And yet, by 4:15 today, I needed a break. Not from him so much, but from being a mom.

And so I handed him off to Stacy and went outside to pull dandelions from the yard. I've been pulling the dandelions by hand for a couple of years now and I have to say, our yard has the fewest of any of our non-weed killer using neighbors despite the fact that everyone said I was insane to bother. I refuse to use weed killer or fertilizer on our lawn because it makes no sense to me to put poison into your lawn so that you can eventually drink it from your groundwater. Nor does it make sense to put poison on the lawn my son plays on. Not to mention the fact that my lawn is basically various weeds to begin with. If I sprayed that sucker with Round-Up all I'd have is a dirt patch. Plus I find pulling weeds to be a very calming activity. Especially dandelions. Getting one of those sons-a-bitches out with the entire root intact is terribly satisfying.

Eventually Stacy and Gavin came outside to join me and he was a super happy Bear with a belly full of milk. They hung out on a blanket spread out on the lawn -- the very lawn, by the way, that Uncle Jamie cut for us today. Not only that, she did all of the edging. My yard has never looked so nice and neat. And all because Jamie answered my request for someone to wrangle Gavin so I could mow the lawn today saying she would be happy to mow my lawn while I wrangle Gavin. Because she hates my son.** But she clearly loves my yard. And that's what really counts.

(*Uncle Jamie is my sister Laura's girlfriend. Laura jokingly referred to them as "Aunt Laura and Uncle Jamie" and that kind of stuck.)

(**She doesn't.)