Tuesday, Sept. 14: Patience to the Maxx

Yesterday I did not get to see Gavin except for a brief time in the morning when I helped get him ready for day care. That's how Mondays and Wednesdays are going to be for the next couple of months because I can't get home from work in time. And I can definitively say I do not like it. Stacy called me around 6 when I was getting ready to leave work and he was getting ready to go to bed. She put me on speaker phone so I could say goodnight to Gavin and he beeped random buttons in my ear. Probably using Morse Code for "I love you Mama D," except I don't know Morse Code and neither does he. Stacy said he was rampaging naked around his room after a bath. So sad to miss naked rampaging time. So sad to miss any Gavin time, really. He does so many cute and amazing things in day.

Like yesterday, for example, he apparently had quite the party on Emma's dog bed (Emma is my sister Laura's dog, a 14-year-old greyhound. They are staying with us for the time being). It's a big round pet bed from Orvis (highly recommended by Laura, in case you're looking for a dog bed. She never shuts up about how much she loves it). What Laura, who witnessed the event, said when I asked her to describe what Gavin was doing: "Writhing around doesn't sound like something a baby does." I tell her to try again: "He seemed to be, like, hamming it up. Kind of rolling around and smiling with a knowing look on his face like he knew what he was doing was adorable. And he did a head stand more than once. It's the first thing he did when he came home from daycare. He ran over to the bed and flopped down like, 'Ahhh, long day.' That's the best I can do, really." By "head stand" Laura means Gavin's downward dog-esque pose where he plants his head on the ground and then grins at you from between his feet. It's pretty much the cutest thing ever. Laura also told me yesterday and he was just cracking himself up being on the dog bed and rolling around.

So the dog bed is his new thing now, much to poor Emma's dismay. He displaced her several times today, in fact. I wish he would take a liking to something with less dog hair on it. No offense to Emma. But I had to lint roll his entire body (clothed, of course) more than once today. He laughed very hard when I lint rolled his armpits. He's very ticklish.

Gavin and I went to T.J. Maxx today, a store I absolutely hated before I had a kid. I used to have a very firm policy about refusing to shop places where you had to pick merchandise up off of the floor and where every shelf looks like it's been arranged by a blind person with a seizure disorder. I was actually at a T.J. Maxx store once when an employee lightly chastised me for putting something back on the hanger that it had fallen off of while I was looking at it. "Oh, you don't have to do that," she said. "We don't even do that." Very encouraging.

But now that I'm a mom I have more patience for literal bargain hunting. After all, being a parent teaches you patience, right? Actually, I'm not sure if that's true. Maybe it's just that parenting fries so many of your nerves that it takes longer for former negative emotional triggers to register. Take waiting in line, for example. A long line. And it's kind of hot and only one register is open and that clerk is handling some kind of complicated transaction for a customer that can't make up her mind and it's taking forever and all you want is to buy some Advil because you have a headache and you can't even take it until you get to the car because that's where your bottle of water is and you can't justify buying another one because that's wasteful and you think about just throwing a couple down the hatch without water but your mouth is kind of dry and you're worried they'd get lodged and you'd end up horking them back up, which would be really embarrassing. Anyway, pre-Gavin that kind of situation would make me a little crabby and impatient, to say the least. Today, however, it's all, "I've cleaned baby poo off my hallway walls and scrubbed it out of infant sweat socks. This ain't no thing."

So, yeah. T.J. Maxx. I managed to find him three Paul Frank shirts on clearance, some little cars that go with his race ramp on clearance, and really cute socks with airplanes on them, also on clearance. It was a very satisfying trip even if I did completely forget to look for a sunglasses case since mine is broken, a casualty of Gavin's propensity to drop things he's holding out of his stroller (I then ran over it).

Stacy and I had an argument after I gave Gavin a tiny piece of my organic pop-tart crust. She got really, really angry. Over reacted is a good way to put it (and is how she later put it herself). He wanted a piece of it and he started to cry and get upset so I didn't give him any. But once he calmed down I did. Stacy said I am teaching him to throw fits to get what he wants. I think that I am rewarding the behavior I want to see. Like training a dog. I mean, I know kids aren't dogs and dogs aren't kids (though some people seem to think otherwise). But in the grand scheme of things I don't think this alleged infraction on my part soldered any of his brain pathways together or anything. Something tells me that we're all going to pull through this. As a family.