We have turned the corner...

...on the daycare drop-off crying jags. (Hold on while I furiously knock on wooden desk. Hell, it's laminate! Does that count?) She doesn't really cry when I drop her off in the morning, and so I don't leave feeling like her jailor.

And yes, I said when "I" drop her off, because the task is now mine. More on this later.

Snot central

It's now been a week since we stopped nursing, and it hasn't been so bad. She's asked a few times but is easily distracted, so we have really stopped. I haven't had much pain at all, but now a week later it seems I have one last plugged duct for old times' sake.

And hey, I'm not saying there's a direct correlation, but she just developed a nasty, wet, bark of a cough. We nursed for nineteen months and she never had more than a cold, and now one week after I cut her off, she's sicker than she's ever been.

The poor tot is a drippy, congested mess, and is a tantrum powder keg. If hokey-pokey Elmo looks at her the wrong way, she's ready to blow.

The girls are retired

As of yesterday, I think I'm done nursing. We had a false alarm last week, but I kept at it (if just barely) in anticipation of stopping for good this coming Thursday. But last night my daughter didn't ask to nurse, and I didn't offer. And that, it seems, was that. Tonight was very huggy, but the story was the same. I'm sad because...

...it was lovely.

The difference between mom and dad

This morning, the tot's 2nd day of daycare, her dad was late getting home. Now this was a problem because:

• The plan was for him to take her in until she's adjusted to the place, at which point I'll take over, and
• We're trying to establish a routine to facilitate the adjustment mentioned in bullet point #1, and
• It drives me nuts when he's late and doesn't think about how it messes things up such as bullet points #1 and 2.

Also, this meant that after I failed to reach him by phone, I decided to take her in myself and stop being such a weenie. Because the whole reason he was driving her in the first place was because I didn't want to see her cry. Because it doesn't bother his been-there-done-that-dad self one bit, and it totally undoes me. I'm having enough trouble with the notion that my little chicken of a newborn was already old enough for school; I just didn't want to have the image of walking out on my crying toddler seared into my brain all morning.

Even though I knew she'd stop crying and be OK. Unless, of course, she didn't, and I got the call to come pick up my sodden puddle of a baby. So I'm working up a full head of righteous indignation in the car, when he calls. Can't you wait two minutes? I'll be home and take her. Nope, nope I can't. Because:

• Just like during the fourth quarter of the Giants' game, two minutes is never two minutes. If you had a decent internal time clock, you wouldn't have been late in the first place, and

• I'm martyring myself here, so I've got to go ahead and do it myself. After all, I wanted you to do it, but its not like I NEED you to do it. I can take care of it myself, thank you very much. For nothing! (If I let you take her, then I can't be pissed, and I'm now of a mind to be pissed, it seems.) And...
• I always over-worry things that, once I do them, aren't so very bad. So what the hell, I'll take my own damn kid to daycare. If I was a single mom I'd be doing it without a thought. (Well, I'm sure I'd have a thought, but I always use the single-mom I almost was to shame myself into doing things.)
  

So I take her. And she bawls. I walk out fast like I'm supposed to, but I feel like crap all morning.

So I kicked her out of the house...

It was high time too. The little slacker was perfectly content to sleep in, watch videos, eat take-out thai (without ever even reaching for a wallet, much less contributing the ocasional twenty), but she showed no sign of looking into school or a job. So once she hit 18, I signed her up myself.

She's eighteen months old and we just started her at a daycare place 3 mornings a week. Today was the first day and she seemed pretty OK about it, but I'm a dishrag.

The showdown

She likes it when I look mad. I mean, I don’t think we’re going to end up a New York Post headline or anything, like “Mom keeps demon baby in closet,” but she definitely smiles and claps at me when I try to get stern with her. Take this morning, for instance. I was watching an episode of Supernanny on TiVo, and she kept shutting the TV off. Now, I’ve got the remote; I could just turn it back on, but then it becomes a game to her. So I tell her in a firm, low voice to turn it back on.

I picked that one up from the Supernanny, who says “get down to their level, and speak in a low tone….” She says it in a plummy British accent and it sounds so perfectly reasonable, but when I try it on the baby, she laughs at me. I mean, I grasp the irony here. I’m watching this show to pick up pointers, because, god forbid, I end up raising one of the hell spawn they have on that show, but I can’t control my child well enough to get through an episode. And she’s one! What’s going to happen in a few years? So I think maybe I’ve already screwed up and I’m doomed to be on the show, with her at four calling me a “giant poopy butt” and biting me when I try to give her a kiss.

That’s my nightmare, that I become one of those moms on the show who asks her child permission to do everything and has to drag her kid through the supermarket by her ankle because she's throwing a massive arms-flailing, legs pumping temper tantrum on the floor of the Stop and Shop.

But the low tone doesn’t work, so the two of us are locked in a standoff. It’s like High Noon, only Gary Cooper’s two feet tall and wearing footy pajamas. And I’m trying to channel Jo Frost, my beloved Supernanny, by telling the baby that her behavior is unacceptable and threatening to place her on the naughty spot. I mean, I’m really working it; I even add in the British accent and mispronounce it like Jo does: “Your behavior is totally ‘unasseptable,’ young lady!” (Strange, this pronunciation. You’d think the producers would pull her aside or something. She says it like ten times on every show. )

But back here on the rug in front of the TV, I take her little finger and press the on button. Supernanny springs back into action, helping the TV mom whip two sets of twins into shape. My baby looks from the screen to my tense face and begins to laugh, her finger pointed at the off button like a six-shooter.

Great. I’ve been a mom for eleven point five months and I’ve raised Dillinger with an itchy trigger finger. Just think what havoc I can wreak in a decade.

Could use a nannycam right about now

I'm auditioning a babysitter as I type. She is upstairs entertaining the baby and I'm listening for cries between keystrikes. Man, this is odd.

Ah, arghh. It lasted ten minutes, but she's now crying. The baby, not the sitter. Better go rescue them...

I'm Ron Popiel in a nursing bra

As I'm going about my day with the baby, because I am a smart, talented person with no current means of expression except this blog and the perverse little twists I give nursery rhymes when the correct words escape me, I am always coming up with ideas for inventions.

If I had any business sense, I'd be contracting folks to build prototypes, do patent research, raise venture capital and whatever else one has to do to cultivate a tiny germ of a brilliant idea into a giant, fecund, fruit-bearing tree. And by fruit I mean money. And by germ I guess I meant seed.

So much for crafting metaphors, I need to be building a lucrative business empire. Or at least come up with one more cheaply produced piece of crap that people are foolish enough to believe they can't live without. And it just so happens that I think of things all the time. Here are two examples and the circumstances which inspired them:

Beeping Baby Shoes
My daughter is a veritable Houdini when it comes to removing her shoes. (Socks too, but those are cheap enough that I don't care so much.) Even when she is wearing this brand of elastic-topped leather bootie-like shoe that, besides being festooned with unbelievably cute apliques of ice cream cones, or puppy faces, or spouting whales and being crafted of butter-soft leather, is supposed to be IMPOSSIBLE for the kid to remove. But of course my daughter flicks them off her feet with abandon. And then strangers tap me on the shoulder and hand them back to me, making me feel both grateful and guilty for being such an unobservant mom.

So, I figured, how hard would it be to attach some sort of beeping device to each shoe that would activate when it hit the ground? You can buy greeting cards that sing Happy Birthday when you open them and magazine insert ads sometimes beep or play tinny little tunes, so how expensive would it be to produce a kids' shoe that alerted a parent when little Katie or Connor's shoe hit the mall floor in front of the Cinnibun stand? I figure I'll be a millionaire by the time my baby hits preschool.


Bubble machine
This one is another sure winner. You know how babies all love bubbles? How about a cry-activated bubble machine that attaches to the crib? Baby wakes up crying at 5:47 and you want to sleep until the sun comes up? Bubbles ON! Baby happily watches them and drifts back to sleep...

Breast milk filter
Decent ideas, no? They come to me all the time. I had another one since I started this post and it involves a Brita-like filtration system for breast milk. Since the stuff is worth more than gold to those of us who get performance anxiety when faced with the pump, how bad do you feel when you (and by you I mean me) have to dump a bottle after having a second glass of wine or puckeringly tasty margarita? I mean, I could stop drinking entirely, but motherhood's stressful.

So I made a few sketches, but they were on a cocktail napkin and I think I used it to wipe up a macerated cheerio on the bartop. (And yes, the baby has been to a bar. She sat in her infant seat and was rocked and fed and cooed over by our friendly neighborhood bartenders. We have anti-smoking laws, so it's not as tragic as it sounds.)

Anyway, the filters would attach to the breastpump. But now that I think of it, maybe we could also manufacture portable ones that would stick onto the nipple itself, like a pasty on a showgirl. But instead of a tassel, there would be a charcoal filtration system to remove impurities before they reached baby's little lips.

So what do you think? Anyone with a line on some venture capital?