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My stupid job. My soon to be old job is screwing me out of my last two days of pay because they only pay holidays if you work the day before and after. The fuh? I WOULD be there, if they were OPEN. Yes, I would work on Thanksgiving if I had to, to get paid. But that’s not an option. Oh well! Happy *^$$*& Thanksgiving!

Of course this bit of news was delivered by the same assish young miss in HR who “misplaced” my paycheck info, making me have to call God and everyone at the head office (she was “too busy”) to get my first check–two days late. She also failed to get my healthcare info sent to headquarters by the deadline, either–but by then I was forewarned and had called them myself. I am not sure exactly what the fuh she does all day, but it ain’t workin’.

She is the daughter of one of the VP’s. Guess she has W. syndrome; we can’t seem to fire his ass either. Won’t miss her a-tall.

This comes on top of an already-long week of wheezing and coughing and sick babies and sick husbands and I ain’t feeling too snappy myself, and we haven’t got our new money in yet to start making up for the bills we couldn’t pay with our old money…and I’m tired. And he’s tired, and the baby’s tired, and our parents want to help but THEY’RE tired, and they’ve helped enough already, and we could all frankly use a week in Hawaii which we’re not going to get.

All my normal props are worn out, and it’s just me, and I’m still walking forward because it’s that or sit down and wait for the guys in white coats. And if they offered me a massage and a margarita, I’d probably hop into their van without a protest.

Phleghm-a-thon continues, though I am less affected than Matt and Nathan. Nathan acts cheery but occasionally coughs and snots up a few cupfuls of goo. Matt has raging sinus headaches. I’m tired and a bit achy, but not as bad…for now. Which puts me In Charge. I helped round us all up for a trip to Half Price today, because we were all stir crazy and bitchy. And because we love to spread our lethal cold germs around.

It was all going pretty well, we came home, fed Nathan, and let him play. He wanted up on my lap, and laid his head on my shoulder. “Aw, how cute,” I thought.

And then the little monster BIT me on my shoulder. HARD. Left a little broken skin and some brusing, dammit. Still hurts. I put him down and yelled “Ow!” which he of course thought was hilarious.

Little so and so. I may sell him to the gypsies after all.

baby getting better. Me not so much. More tomorrow maybe.

Sick baby. Sick hubby. Tickle in the back of my throat. Probably be up all night. This is all the blog I can spare.

Finally!

I have SO got to get my own camera. It’s scary how much I am already spending the money I’ve not yet earned.

Here he be, in his one year old glory.

But first, the Dora cake. My MIL is so talented. She did our wedding cakes too.

They did not have Dora on them.

Next, we lit the candles and sang. Nathan was dubious. And if you’d never seen a flaming cake or heard someone warbling the Birthday Song before, you would be too.

Finally we gave him some cake. He thought it odd and sticky.

But then I stuck some chocolate frosting on my finger and put it in his mouth. It was a whole new world. Of sugar highs!

And then he pooped his pants.

(no image available. Aren’t you glad?)

Nathan has a cold, one of those hot-mucous-down-the-back-of-your-throat-making-you-cough colds. No fever yet. He had his flu shot the other day. I have always gotten sick when I get flu shots. But every night the news warns against not getting one for your baby.

Of course, anecdote is not data. He is in a germ factory all day with other toddlers and strange adults, plenty of whom could be carrying some random virus for which there is no shot. Maybe he’d be worse without having had it. Trouble is, I can’t know.

Where is our Star Trek medicine, dammit, with tri-corders and magic hypo-sprays? Somebody needs to get on that.

Meanwhile, we dose him with kiddie decongestant and suction out his nose when it gets too bad. Which he hates. He’s not too good with sleeping propped up to help his drainage either, because his preferred sleep mode is face down, butt in the air.

Poor thing. He may need to stay home tomorrow.

Which is ok with his dad, who is not all that pleased with the daycare. It’s only been 3 days, so I’m withholding judgement for a bit. Apparently the teachers have noticed that noise makes Nathan cry a lot, which just seems to indicate to me that our home is somehow preternaturally quiet and we’re giving him a complex. Should we start playing marimba records at high volume every day? That really would be making a sacrifice for my child. We like quiet. We just never thought that would put Nathan at some sort of disadvantage.

Hello baby.

Except, you’re not such a baby anymore.

I hardly know where to start with this entry, because it means so much, and yet, our life together is so calm most of the time. Wake and nap and drink some milk; try some new foods, reject the rest. Get your diaper changed. Laugh when Mama balances toys on her head, or holds you upside down. Laugh when Daddy billows a sheet over you both and plays hide and seek. Sing wordlessly, or in a “bblbblbbbl” that sounds like motorboat. Cry when you’re tired, or mad, or bump your head, or for some reason that no one knows but you. Hold your board books in your lap and turn the pages, serious and frowning as if Snuggle Puppy were the subject of your upcoming thesis. Struggle with sippy cups and shoes and standing unsupported. Refuse to give up your bottle. Splash in the bathtub as if you were a slippery shiny naked fish. Sleep with your foot propped up on the crib rails, toes curled like a monkey on a tree branch.

Such little things. Not enough to build an epic blog post around, a poetic entry capturing the essence of your first year.

A year ago today, I began two journeys; one with you, and one completely alone. One happy and one dark. So I didn’t know if writing this post would be a hard thing for me, if I’d be able to talk about you without seeing everything through my own memory of pain. But you don’t know anything about that, and that helps me to see you only as yourself, however you arrived in this world. And I have healed much of that pain by letting it change me where I needed to be changed (and by resisting everywhere else), and that helps too.

Your Grandew has promised to send me your birthday pictures, the ones with the cake-smeared smile that every baby has to have on record. As soon as I get them I’ll put them up here. I’m sorry your parents were too poor to have a camera and record as much of your life as they could have been, but we’ve managed pretty well. And when you’re tall and grown, your happy baby face will always be there, just under the surface, for me to see, whether I managed to get enough pictures of it or not.

Hello, little boy. Hello, hello. I’m so glad we’re here together.

First: The NaBloPoMo Randomizer. Randomly takes you to NaBloPoMo-participating blogs. An awesome and beautiful thing.

Our day started out bad. Bad bad bad. Overdrawn on your bank account bad. Daycare don’t take credit cards bad. Have to borrow money from your inlaws till Friday bad. Bad bad bad.

Then it leveled off a little into merely annoying. Had to clean up a co-worker’s messy-ass Quark layout. He has a DEGREE in graphics, is getting PAID to be a graphic artist, undoubtedly more than I am being paid to be an assistant. I have never gone to school for design. Yet unlike me, he doesn’t seem to understand the basic principles of layout. Such as: Don’t make your margins vary wildly from page to page. Don’t let graphics overlap and block your text. Don’t kern your text in to -13, fer cryin’ out loud. OR IT WILL LOOK LIKE CRAP. I mean, he doesn’t seem to know how to insert tabs in a bulleted list, or use guides, or basically, do anything at all other than put Nintendo gaming rings on his cell phone. I wanted to call up his college and get his degree revoked.

So what should have been a 10 minute revision became a 45 minute cleanup job. Idiot! I muttered under my breath. After the morning I’d had, I was full of hate for the world. Hate hate hate.

Finally I had a few free minutes and left a voicemail with Potential Job’s HR Guy, to say “Um…hi? Still needing job? Have we, you know, made a decision?” I was fairly convinced I would either be required to come in at 1pm on a Wednesday to take the Schtuckerman-Porridger Personality and Editing Test in their special underground facility, or be told “sorry, we found this other guy over here who wears great shirts.”

Instead, HR guy calls back and says “We’ll be emailing you an offer with details about benefits, or we can Fedex it to you tomorrow, and you can decide if it’s acceptable.”

Whu? I know not these sophisticated ways of getting jobs! At best, I expected a surly, “Yeah, Bob said it’s good. Show up at 8 on Monday, bring your Social Security card, don’t ask me about benefits, because I only work in HR and they outsourced all those last year. Do you want the job or not?”

So still not daring to be hopeful, I assured them that email would be fine! Because if I had to wait till tomorrow, I would go insane! Thank you very much! All had to be said in the most oblique of ways, because my boss was SITTING RIGHT THERE. Not that distance matters; in that building, you are frequently startled by the richochet of the secretary’s sneeze downstairs, or the endless trilling of everyone’s cell phones, or the heavy breathing of the guy in Section D-12. It is not a private-conversation kinda place.

So after emailing Matt, and frantically, secretly, checking my email all day, I finally get the offer. And it’s very close to what I asked. AND my benefits do NOT have to wait 90 days to kick in, they start the week after I begin. And OH MY GOD I WILL BE MANAGING OTHER PEOPLE. And there we are. I give all the credit to the 80-dollar suit I bought at Lane Bryant, and to my ability to not sweat profusely until my interviews are over.

The cruel thing of course is that although we will SOON have money, we have none now. Not a farthing till payday. And not a lot more till my new Mad Cash kicks in. So after dinner we celebrated the way only poor unsophisticated types can; a cheap bottle of leftover wine and Blue Bell ice cream.

But, you say, I don’t care about your stupid job. What about Nathan’s first day of school??

Well, I can’t rightly say. He apparently did cry a lot. And his little right shoe (but not the left one?) doesn’t seem to stay on properly. I can’t be sure he ate very much; the menu said “spaghetti and meat balls”, and considering that he has so far rejected all meats and pasta, seems like it wouldn’t have been much of a lunch. He was, in fact, crying when we got there, though apparently because the little girl he was playing with had started crying. It was all very bewildering for all of us. I really wish there was a webcam there, so I could at least see what he was doing all day. But it’s not that fancy a daycare.

He’s only there half a day tomorrow, but that’s because he’s going to the dr, and may get a shot. So basically this is his Suckiest Week Ever, and I have to deal with the guilt. It won’t scar him for life, but it will probably make me feel guilty on my deathbed.

Still, once he got home, ate dinner, had a bath, and some hugs, he wasn’t holding any grudges, and didn’t seem scared or traumatized. He even added “Mamamamama” to the “Dadadadada”s he says, and melted me right down to the ground.

I still think it’s for the best, and that he’ll adjust. I just hope I survive that long.

Matt and I have had mixed feelings about starting Nathan in daycare, and I thought it might be a good idea to discuss them in a way that’s useful to any new(er than us) parents out there.

1. It is perfectly normal to want to drop your baby off with someone, anyone, and run off to Wyoming, change your name to Darleena, and become a waitress.
2. It is also perfectly normal to, at the same time, feel unable to turn your child over to any other person to care for, because you are convinced that they will do it all wrong, scarring your child for life and insuring they will turn into a heroin-using mugger who steals your Social Security checks when you’re in the home. This includes your mother-in-law who successfully raised six lovely children, including your spouse. Track record counts for nothing; YOUR baby will be forever traumatized unless it stays within five feet of you.
3. At precisely the time you’re considering daycare, your local news will start advertising its new series about horrific accidents at local daycares; babies driving vans into buildings, children being robbed of their shoes and forced to play barefoot in the snow, etc.

So basically, accept that parenting makes you a teeny bit insane, and don’t watch the news.

Speaking of mental deficiencies, Matt and I were horrified to realize that we were sending our child to school tomorrow, but had given no thought to the fact that he had no shoes. None. Not even booties. He never has had any, because there’s never been a need–he didn’t walk, after all, and had many warm socks. And so at the last minute, we had to dash off to Target to try and find him something to wear to school. All the other babies in his class were wearing shoes when we visited, and I just didn’t want him to be Little Shoeless Nate. Like most toddlers his foot is fat and square, and I think the size 5s I got him are a bit too big. But we couldn’t wedge him into 4s. Lord knows, he’ll grow soon enough. But since he’s never worn shoes, I wonder how he’ll do in them all day. Maybe that will be the least of his worries.

I’m happy we’re taking this step, but apprehensive. He went to sleep so sweetly tonight, flinging his empty bottle out of his crib and then talking to his toys, saying “Da da da da da!” for about 15 minutes before he keeled over. Not a single cry. As far as he knows, it’s a normal night, and tomorrow’s a normal day. But instead he’ll get woken up early, hauled to a strange place with strange people, and forced to find a whole new routine. Will he eat? Sleep? Cry a lot? I worry.

I hope it’ll be a party all day. I’m afraid it will freak him out completely. I comfort myself that at least his dad will be off and have the car, so he can be picked up in an emergency. Still, it’s going to be a long day tomorrow for all of us. Fingers crossed.

Ugh, missed my deadline AGAIN. I passed out from exhaustion last night, then got up to do Nathan birthday things with family all day today.

So since that should be my actual Sunday post, here’s a makeup Saturday post, consisting of a link to pictures of toothpick sculptures.

I like this one, personally: