Rebecca Cuneo Keenan is a writer who lives in Toronto with her husband and three children.
DAILY SNACK
They had the craft paper all spread out.
Body parts had been traced and duly decorated.
Polka dotted arms and legs,
Zebra-striped hands and feet.
Young C insisted on tracing his elbows and head.
“How about you, Mom?
Wanna trace your eyeballs?”
Product Review
I’m a few weeks into the not-so-solid feeding phase and still trying to catch my rhythm. The eternal and unsolvable problem when it comes to infant care is that you need to do things right away if you ever want to keep on top of it all. But infants are such babies and they really have no patience at all. So more often than not I finish spooning the pureed goop from bowl to baby and barely have time to walk the bowl to the dishwasher before L’il I is screeching and kicking and looking for an escape hatch. And Young C will usually pick this time to yell “Poo!” and starting running around in circles. I yank L’il I out of her highchair, toss her bib on the counter, kick the stepstool over to the toilet and chant “Run, run, run!” I’ll wind up wiping her face in the bathroom and then putting her down for a nap and trying to sneak in a little laptop-time while C (hopefully) amuses himself.
The next meal-time, then, starts off with a lot of cursing under my breath while I try to wipe/scrape dried up baby goop off all surfaces. That is why this was the best bib I ever owned:
DAILY SNACK
I was running back and forth,
Trying to make sure everything was packed.
Diapers, wipes, change of clothes.
Blankets, snacks, bibs and spoons.
Rattles and books and chew toys, too.
“I have just the thing, Mom! Just in case we need it.”
Young C ran over with a Connect Four travel-sized game.
And later, at dinner, it was just the thing.
DAILY SNACK
Her big blue baby eyes light right up.
Mouth stretches wide open and she laughs so hard.
She’s rocking back and forth now,
Arms and legs going a million miles a minute.
I take a couple pictures and put the camera away.
Cries of protest and resentment.
I really hadn’t been paying much attention to the whole Jon and Kate hullabaloo. I’m not a celebrity gossip rag reader and I’ve been pretty much forced to give up t.v. until the earth just slows the hell down and gives me a couple more hours each day. (And Jon and Kate isn’t even close to making my t.v. short list.) But there I was on Saturday night, standing in line at the drugstore with a box of diapers on my hip, and realizing that they were still all over the weekly covers. (And ZOMG it looks like Brad and Angie might be breaking up.)
It got me thinking, though, about our facination with the reality couple. Sure, it was their sextuplets that originally landed them their own show, but the kids are really peripheral now, aren’t they? This marital scandel has catapulted Jon and Kate into the realm of real celebrity. They are even better than celebrities insofar as we feel entitled to sift through the sordid details of their misery. I mean, sure, we’ll gobble up every iota of rumour and innuendo about regular celebs, too, but there is a sense that we are snooping and that just maybe these stars do have a claim to some amount of privacy. But Jon and Kate are asking for it, aren’t they? They sold out their children’s right to a private life by signing up for this t.v. show and are money-hungry, limelight-loving egomanics. It seems, is the general idea, that they deserve it.
DAILY SNACK
He was crying so hard.
His Dad had picked him up off the concrete,
And held him tight.
The tears ran down his cheeks and kept right on going.
I took him in my arms and we walked toward the lake.
We stood there and looked out.
And I talked.
“See that goose way out by itself? Silly goose.”
“Look, C, you can’t see the other side of this lake, can you?”
“On the other side is the United States. That’s another country.”
And finally, the crying stopped and he will be alright.
That goose egg, though,
Will be hanging around for another couple days.
How we almost lost Young C up a mountain because I was too busy video-ing.
Here’s another page from the lack-of-daycares-keep-women-down book. A woman moves to Canada from Slovakia and works as a live-in nanny. She meets her husband-to-be, another Slovak emigré, and becomes pregnant. She takes her year-long maternity leave and doesn’t know what to do next. She knows that she won’t be able to land a job that pays enough to cover the cost of full-time infant care, and the wait-list for subsidized spots is eons long.
So she stays home and her young family makes do with a small (but quite lovely!) basement apartment. She puts her hopes of gaining experience in the Canadian job market on hold. Then her daughter turns 18 months, making daycare rates are a bit more affordable and the prospect of increased socialization more appealing. She gets on the list at a local daycare and waits and waits. Finally, last week, mere days before her daughter’s third birthday, she gets the call. Now she just needs to land a job before July 15th or forfeit her spot.
DAILY SNACK
I stop writing to scoop the baby up.
And I lie beside her,
Nursing her back to sleep.
Suddenly it’s two in the morning,
And I’m awoken with a THUMP! AAAAH!
Ed rushes in to help C back into bed.
I put L’il I back in her crib and get undressed.
Another hour and she’s crying again.
I know she shouldn’t need to fed at night,
But still I scoop, lie down, nurse, fall asleep.
Repeat as needed until morning.
DAILY SNACK
They sat facing each other in the bath.
He played intricate games with his boats and ducks and frog.
She splashed and kicked and chewed on a rubber toy.
Bald baby head dripping with suds,
I tipped her back to rinse off.
“Be brave, L’il I,” her big brother said.
And she was.
Daddy took her away to towel off and now it was C’s turn.
He tried to be brave, too, but he cried.