Ten Months and Counting...

I cannot believe how time flies and to all my loyal readers (all five of you!) I apologize for my lack of posts. May proved to be busier than we had expected, but now that we are finally well into summer vacation things are slowing to a more enjoyable pace.

We began the month with my graduation, a slightly anti-climatic, yet worthwhile-all-the-same, 4 ½ hour drive to Iowa City. Mom, Dad, Chris, and Felicity all attended.

We rented a minivan for the trip and, having experienced the wealth of space, I have to admit Chris and I are sold on the whole minivan thing. Felicity had the backseat to herself and chatted away and slept the whole way there. No crankiness. No crying. It was amazing.

The hooding ceremony itself was boring and the auditorium was hot hot hot. Wearing the thick polyester robes didn’t help either. (Below is me and my advisor, David Depew)What made it all worth it, though, was looking up into the bleachers to see my little girl, donned head to toe in pink. She stood the nearly two-hour event on her daddy’s lap clapping and screeching and being genuinely excited for her momma. I don’t think anyone acted quite as proud of me as Felicity. Seeing her cheer me on made the entire dissertation experience worth every second. And, as I sat down on the floor amidst my fellow graduates, I had a wave of nostalgia. I graduated with many of the people I came in with, which is a rarity in the land of the Ph.D. Most of us are now married. Some of us have children. And all of us have new jobs. I felt proud and relieved. This summer will be the first summer in eight years that I do not have to do any of the following: get married, move, work on a dissertation, have a baby, or find a job. Needless to say, it feels somewhat more low key.

I was supposed to be teaching summer school beginning the Monday following graduation. But, despite my boldest efforts to design a sexy summer school course on the Intelligent Design controversy, my course did not meet the enrollment requirements. On one hand I am upset about the lack of $4500. We really could have used that money. But, I am finding a silver lining in the whole thing and have made it my mission to spend every second with Felicity as Chris finishes his dissertation.

So, beginning on May 15, I have been full-time mommy and neglected my duties as professor. It is soooo nice! Since Felicity was born on July 20 and I had to begin school on August 16, I hardly had any time with her, just the two of us, all day long. But now we are making up for lost time.

Our days are filled with various activities all designed to tire her out for a nice long nap. We are up at 6:30 and play downstairs for about two hours. Then, she naps for two hours and wakes smiling and standing in her crib ready for another installment of momma. Her longest period of wakefulness is from 11-2:30 or 3. During this time we go for walks, crawl in the grass, play of the floor, run errands, swing, or play in the sandbox. She loves to be outside and fortunately it climbed back down to the 70s after giving us a scare of 92 degrees a few days ago. Having no air-conditioning makes those days tough and I imagine that we’ll clock a lot of hours at indoor malls and libraries during July.

Developmentally Felicity is amazing us! She has a lot of words. She says tree, lizard, ducky, teeth, fish, Dada, Momma, juice, and kiss. However, if you ask her to bring you any of her toys, she’ll retrieve the ladybug, horse, cow, sheep, balloon, ball, phone, Eeyore, Elmo, Big Bird, and, her favorite, my graduation tassel. It’s amazing how quickly she can learn the name of a new object or concept. If you say, “Felicity, do you want some food?” She looks to the kitchen and starts crawling toward her high chair. Although I am biased, I think I have a rather smart little cookie.

She finally has a tooth coming in!! It started to break through yesterday and it looks like more are on their way. It appears that they are arriving just in time, as she has begun to lose interest in baby food and would much rather feed herself. She is very much into Organic Morning-Os and these Organic Wheat-free, Dairy-free, Soy-free teething biscuits that I think taste like wood, although she really likes them. They get everywhere, though, and usually necessitate a bath.

Although at the end of every evening I am tired beyond belief and eager for her to go to bed, it takes about thirty minutes for me to recover and I begin looking forward to the next day. It just doesn’t get old. Her smiling face in the morning and the smell of her sweet little head as we spend the first half hour of the day nursing in her rocker has to be my favorite part of every day. And while I am excited for her to learn more words and begin walking I am a bit sad that she’s not going to be my little baby for very much longer. Perhaps this is why the middle-of-the-night nursing sessions have never bothered me and I continue to endure the awful nursing bras. Because someday soon I’ll actually miss all of it.

Storytime

Every Monday morning Felicity and I trek to the Lake Forest Public Library for Storytime. We walk with fellow dual-career Mommy/Poet Nicola and her little boy Brook. The little babies ride side by side in their strollers talking nonsense and enjoying being pushed while Nicola and I attempt adult conversation. I say attempt because it usually devolves into Mommy-talk. For instance, rather than intellectually-stimulating conversation about global politics and the fate of the universe, we discussed how Brook hates carrots, how Felicity is enthralled with balloons, and how neither one of us feels like our bodies are entirely our own.

Storytime at the library is equally for the mothers as it is for the kids. Although, Lake Forest moms are quite an interesting breed. For those who do have time to take the kids to the library (as opposed to the nannies who are very diligent in their attendance), they are not like any moms I have ever seen. For one they have perfectly done make-up, perfectly manicured nails, and are dressed like they just walked out of the J.Crew catalog. Scratch that. They are dressed like they just walked out of one of those ritzy boutiques in downtown Lake Forest where t-shirts are $75. Because they probably did. But for every Lake Forest mom who writes me off as some nanny (I have to admit that Nicola and I are lucky to have had coffee let alone a shower before we arrive at what I have dubbed "Fashion Storytime"), there are the few down-to-earth moms. And for them we are thankful.

Felicity likes the library (she is, after all, her father's daughter.) But storytime? Well, she could take it or leave it. While most of the kids are listening intently to the story about ladybugs, Felicity is crawling all over investigating everyone's shoes. She faces away from the librarian reading and bawks and makes her high pitched dolphin noise at nothing in particular. She marches to her own beat. She does her own thing. (She is, after all, her mother's daughter.)

Having taken in our fair share of storytime and played with the toys afterward (today's favorite: the xylophone--mainly to eat the mallet rather than make music), we headed home. I think that she enjoyed the ride home more than the library itself because we got to look at the trees. Alas, she is destined to be a botanist and talked to the trees and flowers from her stroller throne (wearing, coincidentally, her princess robeez.) She actually says the word "tree." And I think that makes it her first real word. She does say "Mama" and "Dada," but doesn't seem to associate them with anything. With tree, though, she looks at them and says "tee" or "eee." I have to take credit for this one, as for the past week every plant, bush, and tree that we have seen I have said "tree" over and over and over again. I assume that if she does become a botanist that she'll learn to differentiate the classes of plants, but until then, jades and hostas are trees in our house. If you didn't know that, though, and heard me talking to Felicity about all the "trees" in my house, you'd probably think I lived in the forest. Oh wait, I do: Lake Forest. Perhaps Felicity is on to something after all.

Venturing Outside

Today we ventured outside of our little family room play area to investigate the outdoors. Felicity is very interested in plants, flowers, and trees. They make her laugh. It's the strangest thing, but she'll crawl over to a plant we have in the house and get up on her knees and talk to it and laugh. If it's true what they say about talking to plants, then this one ought to be ten feet tall soon at the rate she's going. So, as predicted, she likes the ones outside even more. Especially dandelions!

She touches them...

Sne studies them...

And, of course, eats them...

We also experimented with some "big girl" activities. Both of which she seemed to like a lot! She liked the sandbox, although she was more interested in pounding on the box itself and putting the shovels in her mouth. She did not, surprisingly, try to eat the sand!

We finished off the day with some swinging on the swingset. Needless to say, she was quite tired! I think you can tell based on the photo. She managed to wake up, though, for her favorite activity: the bath. She splashed from the moment she got in. And now, as I type this, she is peacefully sleeping, resting up to do it all over again tomorrow.

A Break From My Dual-Identity

Today markes the last day of classes for the Spring 2006 semester and with it comes a break from my dual-identity of Prof./Mom (well, except for the first session of summer school.) I've always been one to have dual-identities, I suppose. One thing that strikes me as ironic, though, is that I remember complaining to anyone who would listen when I was a grad student about how difficult it was to make the transition from student-during-the-day to waitress-at-night. My mind had such a difficult time moving between those two worlds. I'd like to give myself at 22 a slap across the face. Poor, silly, naive girl. If you only knew how different two worlds REALLY could be.

Now I get a sort of sick twisted thrill about my dual-identity and imagine myself more of a Diana Prince/Wonder Woman character (I confess I had to look up what Wonder Woman's "real name" was. Thank you, Google.) I pump milk while answering student emails. I write test questions in my head during middle of the night nursing sessions. And appear in the classroom as a put-together professional woman. If they only knew that moments before I give a lecture on the finer points of Plato's Phaedrus I was changing a poopy diaper.

I am fortunate, though, to be a part of a community of fellow women professors who truly "get it," who have done it all before, and knew better than to object to my determination when I said that I would defend my dissertation two weeks after Felicity was born. They kindly waited until she was 9 months old to let me know that they didn't want to burst my over-achieving bubble, but that there was "no way in hell" I knew what I would be in for.

And they're right. I had no idea. None. Zero. Zilch. There just is no preparation. You have to get thrown into it, and, amazingly you survive. Because you have no choice but to. So here it is, the last day of classes and I am mildly nostalgic. I did it. A year ago I got a visiting professorship here. Then we moved, had Felicity, and started new jobs. I defended a dissertation, I got a tenure-track job, and we lived to tell about it. It makes me need a nap just thinking about it.