For nine months I grew a human being inside my belly and then I pushed it out my vagina and now I’m feeding it with my boob. Biology is so fucking weird.
I just really needed to point that out.
I think it’s official that Leta does not like sushi as evidenced by her very bad mood all day Saturday, the day after Jon and I consumed large quantities of raw fish. This means that I won’t be eating sushi again anytime soon because when Leta is in a bad mood the whole family suffers including the dog who responded to the shrieking yelps of bad moodness by jumping on and off the bed over and over again. This on/off bed jumping routine has become his reaction to everything Leta does and to someone who isn’t chronically sleep deprived it might be kinda cute. But in the middle of the night, here in week five of Project Leta Doesn’t Sleep, his compulsive bed jumping makes me feel like I’m being pecked to death by a duck.
The list of things that Leta does not like is relatively small consisting of things such as having the light turned on suddenly in the middle of the night and having cold baby-scented lotion rubbed on her naked belly (DOES NOT LIKE COLD LOTION, NO!) Every night after her bath Jon and I wince right before we stick her left arm into her night gown because there is nothing so upsetting in this world as having to put one’s left arm into one’s night gown, obviously, and we spend the next half hour dodging the wailing screams as they bounce off the walls and melt the hair off our heads. When Leta is in the middle of an encounter with something she doesn’t like the last thing you want to do is stick her pacifier in her mouth because she is fully capable of spitting it four feet across the room.
I’ve learned quickly not to sing her lullabies when she’s upset because it seems that my singing voice is at the top of the list of Things That Annoy an Otherwise Pleasant Baby. I’ve tried loud singing and soft singing and somewhere in between singing, but Leta’s reaction to all of the singing is to get a pained about-to-pass-gas expression from her chin to her wrinkled forehead that seems to say Why are you trying to kill me?
So instead I’ll turn on the new Norah Jones CD which she absolutely loves, not surprisingly considering that we almost named her Norah Jones Armstrong. And the pained about-to-pass-gas expression will immediately turn into a serene I-totally-just-shit-my-pants grin, and in this household we’re all about encouraging the free flow of poop.