Is This the Greatest Blog Ever? Is it? Is It? Oh, yes it is!

I've never been a fan of baby talk, not even to babies. When adults incorporate baby talk into their regular everyday conversation it's like nails on a chalkboard to me. Baby talk, even when directed at babies, seems to assume the listener is a complete moron. And when you hear a grown woman talking to her grown husband/boyfriend/significant other in baby talk it's just downright creepy. Like women who call their significant others "daddy" and then follow it up with a partially-gibberish request for jewelry. Gross.

(However, although I've never baby-talked to my dog, an ongoing discourse of complete nonsense is not, for some odd reason, an irregular occurrence: "Who's the best dog ever in the whole wide world? Is THEO the best dog ever? Ever in the whole world? Yes she is! Oh yes she is! I'm going to fold the laundry now! Do you want to help fold the laundry? Nooooo Theo can't fold the laundry! Theo doesn't have opposible thumbs! No she doesn't!" etc. As long as I pronounce each word maturely I for some reason consider this acceptable.)

While up until now I've managed to keep baby talk out of my speech completely, even when whispering sweet nothings to romantic interests at the peak of my teenage hormonal years, the somehow inherent necessity of repeating everything to anybody who is not an adult human being has not escaped me. Why do we do this? Is it because we feel the need to immediately fill any possible silence after a silly declaration to indicate we understand the joke is on us? Is it because we think somehow that even though the listener is certain not to understand us the first time, they will somehow gain whatever knowledge is necessary to decipher our meaning a millisecond later?

And now that I have an actual baby I do find myself doing the real baby talk thing, not just the repetition of inane but adult-word commentary - although not to an obnoxious degree (I must tell myself this, so I can live with myself). I've given myself a pass with the minor baby-talk that seems to just slip out - a phenomenon that seems to kick in whether you like it or not as a side-effect of giving birth - but only, obviously, when directed at my baby. Therefore you can imagine my shame and embarrassment when I asked a coworker the other day if her lunch was "lummers in her tummers."

Even I don't know what this means, although like Jabberwocky the context does at least provide a fairly reliable definition to infer. My coworker either didn't notice or has a brilliant baby-talk filter mechanism because she didn't react at all, just answered the nonsense question as if it were perfectly ordinary. But this did not alleviate my mortification. What if I've completely lost all baby-talk self control? What if she reacted so smoothly because I do this ALL THE TIME and don't even realize it?!

For those of you who do not have or interact with kids and, therefore, have no reason to know this, babies have a tough time with pronouns so it is recommended you refer to her and yourself in the third person or by name. But Tom and I now refer to ourselves completely in the third person at home, even when not addressing the baby. "Mamma's going night-night" has replaced "I'm going to bed." We do it when the entire rest of the sentence is completely inappropriate for a baby's ears: "Daddy is so FUCKing exhausted." We may say "fuck" around our kid but at least we remembered to refer to ourselves in the third person.

I think the barriers between home and work are slowly erroding, as evidenced by the lummers question. Now I'm living in a constant state of paranoia. What if in my next staff meeting I burst forth with, "Who wants to hear Mamma's reporty-worty? Who wants to hear? Who wants to hear Mamma's reporty-worty-torty-lorty?" I really feel sometimes like this might not be too far off.

Is Mamma going a little nutsy-wutsy? Is she? Is she? Is Mamma going to have to go away to the hospital wospital? Oh, yes she is! Oh yes she is!

Summer Lovin'

So Tom, Annora and I were hanging out in our sub-basement bedroom in our underwear, with three fans pointed at us, wondering how we were going to get through this summer's heat. Because not only do Tom and I have to worry about my very vocal discomfort but for the first time we now have another person in the family who is - and who ever imagined this were possible - more vocal about her displeasure than I am.

"It's hot," I whined.

"Aheh-aheh," A agreed, which is baby-speak for "I am upset about something. I do not have the vocabulary to say what, exactly. But you have 30 seconds to figure it out before I reach Full Baby Meltdown and I don't think I need to remind you what happened last time."

"We should get a baby pool," I suggested. "That would keep her cool, and she loves the water. We'll just get one of those small ones, fill it up and plop her in. She'll love it!"

"AHEH-AHEH," insisted A.

The next day we were out bright and early shopping for a baby pool. It turns out inflatable pools are quite cheap so we decided, why should A have all the fun? We should get one big enough for the whole family! We (as in, Tom) even had the presence of mind to measure the one flat space in our backyard to make sure the biggest one within our budget would fit.

We dragged our purchase home and ripped open the box. It was a matter of hours before the heat of the day would be on us and the aheh-aheh warning siren would begin. While A had her lunch and nap, Tom would inflate and fill up the pool and joila! Instant happy family splashy time.

But after about an hour of playing with A, and rapidly running out of amusing tricks, I wandered into the backyard to see what the hold-up was. The pool lay limply on the deck where we'd left it; Tom was in the yard sweating profusely over a plastic bag.

"What are you DOING?" I asked impatiently.

"We can't put the pool on top of dog poop," he pointed out. Well, I couldn't argue with that; nor was I about to volunteer to help. So A and I skeedaddled back into the house.

A was in the middle of a tasty lunch of squash and peas (her favorite - don't ask me where she got that) when Tom came inside, soaked with sweat, and announced, "Blowing this thing up is going to take a year and a half. I'm going to the store to buy a pump."

I suppressed my sigh, glancing at the clock, but figured there was still time to get the pool inflated and filled before A woke up from her after-lunch nap.

While she snoozed I headed outside once again to check Tom's progress. The pool was still limp, and Tom, barely recognizable he was so covered in sweat and grime, was futily pumping away with a hand pump. "I've shortened the amount of time to maybe 6 months," he said grimly.

"Don't we have an electric pump?" I asked. It seemed to me that at some point in our past Tom declared the necessity of an electric pump for reasons I no longer remember and didn't bother to argue at the time.

Tom looked vague, then sheepish. "Oh yeah." He went down to the garage and brought the pump up, and I went back into the house to attend to A who had awakened from her nap and was in a very sociable mood.

After I'd gotten A changed and we'd played a rousing game of peek-a-boo we once more went to check on the progress of the pool, only to discover - guess - that it still lay limp on the deck exactly where we'd dropped it that morning.

"I forgot this pump only works by plugging it into the car," Tom said.

"So why don't you bring it down to the street and inflate it there?"

Tom looked a bit dubious but also recognized no real alternative other than going to the store and buying yet another pump. So he hefted the heavy hunk of plastic over one shoulder and tottered down the steep driveway to the car, where he laid the pool out on the grass and hooked up the pump. After watching this ordeal and subsequently hearing the satisfying hum of the pump's motor, insuring that soon, soon, we would be sitting in a cool pool of water, I headed back inside once more to dig deep into my creative soul for more ways to entertain a six-month-old.

After another hour or so, A decided, for lack of anything better to do, to take another nap. I put her down and glanced out the window to see how far along Tom had gotten with the electric pump. The pool was still completely limp. I watched him fiddle around, turn the pump off and on and off and on, and crouch beside the pool rubbing his face in consternation. Then a lightbulb must've gone off in his head because he suddenly lept up, did something in the car, came back out, and started up the pump again. This time I could see a barely perceptible ripple run through the length of the pool. At last! When A woke up she would get to experience her very first pool!

A had been up for another two hours by the time the pool was done inflating. She had run through absolutely every single toy and activity we had in the house and was clearly expecting an afternoon soujorn, as we did most afternoons to alleviate her predictable late-day boredom. But we couldn't go anywhere with the pool ALMOST ready, and in any case we were fast approaching dinner time. While there was certainly plenty of time to have a nice splash in the pool, we'd be pushing it if we tried to go out anywhere, and we learned the hard way one day when we delayed at a friend's party for an hour that you do NOT mess with the nighttime schedule. On penalty of insanity. But after another few minutes had gone by, still with no pool present in the backyard, I once again stuck my head out the front window to witness Tom attempting to maneuver the not-heavy but incredibly unwieldy pool - which was significantly larger than I envisioned it would be - up the front steps and into the house. I plopped A in her bouncer and ran out to help him.

"We may have been a bit overly ambitious," Tom admitted.

"We can do it," I said. "We'll just get it up the stairs and heave it over the couch and around the dining table and out the patio door just as soon as I move all the patio furniture over to the side."

So that is what we did, and finally the pool was inflated AND in the backyard. Now all we had to do was fill it and instant family play time!

"It's getting dark," I observed. The previously sunny patch of lawn which was the one place the pool would fit was now in shadow. "Do you think it'll be too cold?" When the sun goes down in Seattle, the temperature plummets pretty quickly.

"Oh, it'll be fine," Tom said with a certainty that I had learned over the years not to argue with. "I'm not worried about that." Which begged the question - what WAS he worried about? But I decided to leave it alone, particurlarly since A was starting to wonder aloud if, after fifteen minutes, she had been left completely alone on the planet. We played roller coaster baby for awhile, a game that would have made me, personally, sick to my stomach but which caused A to shriek with delight. When I started to feel light-headed and as if my arms were going to fall off, I brought A outside once again to check on this fabulous pool I had been promising her all day. And lo! There was water in it! In the inflated pool, in our backyard, there was water!

Tom grinned with pride, his dirty, sweat-soaked t-shirt sticking to him, and gestured at the pool he had assembled for his little family. "Go ahead and try it out! No need to wait till it's completely full!"

"Okay!" I cried excitedly and whirled back into the house to get our bathing suits. I debated for a brief moment just leaving A in her diaper. What does one do in this situation for a person who still pees in her pants? If I leave the diaper on her, it will soak up half the pool water and I won't be able to lift her out. But if I take the diaper off, the carefree feeling of a breeze on her tushy will inevitably cause her to add a little of her own warm water to the pool's. I decided a little pee was no big deal - it's sterile after all - and a loaded-down diaper full of pool water was less desirable. So, dressed in our bathing suits (A's too big, mine too small) we gleefully headed out to our pool.

"Look sweetheart, it's like a big bath!" I told my daughter, who squinted at it and looked unimpressed. Nevermind, I'd show her soon! She was going to love it! I clambered over the side of the pool with one leg and gasped. "Holy shit, it's FREEZING."

Tom rolled his eyes. "Well give it a second, you have to get used to it."

"No, Tom, it's FREEZING. Check if you don't believe me."

He stuck a hand in. "It's freezing," he said flatly.

We looked at each other in the waning light and Tom pursed his lips with determination. "We've gotten this far," he grumbled and marched into the house. I watched as he filled bucket after bucket with hot water from the sink and dumped it into the pool. After about six trips he said, "Okay, that's enough. This is getting ridiculous." I couldn't have agreed more. But at that moment A considered the delay an excellent opportunity to have a nice long pee, and it was currently running down my arms and legs, her bathing suit providing no road block whatsoever.

After I got us both cleaned up and decided to resort to the diaper-full-of-pool method we trudged downstairs into the twilit evening and I once again dunked in a toe. "It's freezing," I muttered glumly. "I'm done. No pool. It's A's dinner time anyway."

Tom looked crestfallen. "But what do I do now? If I leave the pool out it'll get full of bugs. I am NOT going to empty it and go through this again tomorrow."

I just stared at him, too weary to offer suggestions.

Tom heaved a sigh. "I'll go to the store and get a tarp to cover it," he said, and off he went again looking like a homeless person in his crusty, dirty shorts and t-shirt. Or like a dad who is trying to give his kid a fun time in the yard. It's a fine line.

A was finished with her dinner and we were moving on to bath time - the regular kind, in the tub, which she frankly never found anything wrong with in the first place - when we went once more to check on Tom. What we saw was the inflated pool sitting on top of a tarp, covered with another too-small tarp, and held together with a complicated series of bungee cords which Tom keeps in his car for things like this and securing Christmas trees to the roof once a year. Our yard was gone and had been replaced with a webbing of bungee cords which the dog would have to somehow maneuver through and around in order to relieve herself.

Tom looked up at me from his crouched position, looking like a very tired, very disheveled, and very dispirited spider in the middle of a web, and said without emotion, "I got the wrong size."

At that point I think you'll agree there was nothing to do but burst into hysterical laughter, so that's what we did, until Annora gently reminded us that it was getting very close to bedtime, and woe to the parent who did not heed the warning:

"Aheh-aheh."