An attitude of gratitude

Sometimes I catch myself being too critical. OK, often I’m too critical.

I hunt out typographical errors on signs, in advertisements, on children’s clothing manufactured in Taiwan. I snicker.

I snipe at my husband for not doing something the way I would have done it. His way is almost always faster. Mine tends to be more thorough.

For instance, I give him hints about how to tell if our child’s pajamas are on backward. “Usually,” I say, “the manufacturer puts the size marking in the back. Usually there’s an embellishment — piping, applique, screen print — on the front. Usually it snaps in the back, but sometimes the snaps or buttons are on the shoulders.”

Scott doesn’t take kindly to my pajama policing. I get it.

Really, what does it matter? Will Desi’s stuffed sheep, standing sentry at cribside, complain if her jammies are facing east instead of west?

My husband often can’t be bothered with bibs, but the child gets fed.

Painting her room, he rolled a few strokes of the lavender hue on sideways, if you can believe it. At least it got covered, and once dry, it didn’t show.

He also watches entirely too much Discovery Health channel on cable — although I hear it’s leaving to make room for Oprah’s network — and is riveted by programs about children with horrible diseases or birth defects and the surgeries undertaken to help them.

“Why are you watching that?” I exclaim. It gives me the willies.

Sometimes, I conclude, I’m a shrew. So this week, as we approach Thanksgiving, I’m trying to cultivate an attitude of gratitude.

I’m grateful that I have a husband who not only loves me, but who loves our little “science experiment” more than he ever thought possible.

As I approach Desi’s first birthday, I am in awe of the whole pregnancy, birth and breast-feeding process. I’m grateful that my body cooperated with a minimum of rebellion. Liver spots on my formerly clear complexion, 15 still slowly retreating pounds of baby weight and two suspicious moles shaved off were a small price to pay for a glowing, healthy child.

I’m grateful that Desi loves me. That was one of my big fears going into all of this: What if I didn’t love her, and she didn’t love me? That was silly.

I’m grateful for my family, which somehow managed to keep me alive despite my adventures with canoes, bicycles, poisonous snakes, bee stings, snapping turtles and catfish.

It was nice of my folks to cultivate my sense of humor, too. I don’t think I could have made it through my first 11 months of motherhood without laughing at myself, and at my child.

I’m grateful to still have a job. Doing what I love. In journalism, no less, a field that is shrinking. If you like reading this column, having people act as watchdogs to keep government open and transparent, or if you’ve bought anything from the classified ads, help us out. Buy a newspaper.

But I digress.

In a culture where 16 percent of adults are uninsured, I’m thankful to have good health insurance, and people in our local Blue Cross office who go to bat for me when corporate unjustly rejects a claim.

I’m grateful for my reliable, safe vehicle, and for the understanding of my insurance company and my coworker, Dava, after I backed into her truck in the parking lot on an already stressful day.

Desi and I are both grateful for Lisa Schulte and Ginny Mahood, who care for Desi as if she were one of their own. And Grammy Sandy Edwards, who steps in whenever needed.

We’re grateful for those who gave us baby gifts this year, and those who gifted or sold us hand-me-downs. Margaret Gordon, 2-year-old Celia Ward and Ward-in-the-oven “Elko” were invaluable as friends and equipment loaners. I tried to return the favor by passing on our own surplus.

I’m thankful for the grace and goodness of friends and strangers as I lug around what sometimes seems like two tons of baby and gear. People open doors, literally and figuratively, for us. To name a few: Stroller-hauling Catherine Gwilliam, compassionate vaccine-giving nurse Mary Ness, tireless listener and special-order queen Brigid Rossolo of Teton Kids, baby-shower-hosting Ruth Ann Petroff.

Those of you who read these humble words on a regular basis make my day by stopping me in the coffee shop to tell me about your own experiences.

In short, I’m grateful to be a part of this community.

And I hope my attitude will last a little longer than Thursday.

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Features editor Johanna Love is grateful to be able to pontificate about parenthood every other week in this space.

Keeping keepsakes

A few generations ago, people weren’t as mobile. They were “from” a place, and for the most part they stayed. Their stuff stayed. If they gave away treasured items, the recipient kept them.

Of course, those things were generally of high quality or homemade, and there weren’t a lot of them.

These days, many of us are involved in the Jackson Shuffle: moving once per year, or more, when housing situations dictate. So paring down possessions becomes important in a town where space is at a premium.

But what to save, what to toss, when it comes to baby’s things?

I’m a saver, married to a tosser. So although Scott isn’t physically getting rid of baby items himself, he encourages the practice.

Perhaps just one baby scrapbook would do the trick, I thought. That would be great, if I had time to scrapbook. So instead, I bought a hand-painted wooden box and am stashing memorabilia inside.

The box contains the predictable: baby shower invitation, photographs, birth announcement, newspaper announcement, ultrasound images, hospital bracelets.
It’s also a convenient place to file her immunization record, Social Security card and savings account register.

I bought photo stamps with Desi’s picture on them, so there’s a whole sheet of stamps in the box. To add to the nostalgia, postage has increased from the 42-cent rate I used to mail her birth announcements.

I also kept a “Name that Baby” poster-size sheet of paper from a poll taken at my baby shower. Desi can see that she could just as easily have been named Ruby, Myrtle, Twanda, Wookie or Lucille.

Former Teton Valley, Idaho, resident Jen Harrison Solis said she “can’t tolerate” having lots of clutter in her house.

“I don’t think Sully will regret not having every little thing he touched or used,” Solis said. “Unless something is really special, it’s just not worth the hassle to me.”

I’ve given away, donated or sold hundreds of baby items in Desi’s first year. Even gifts from family and friends that are no longer useful get passed on.

I find baby clothing more difficult to let go of. I’m not planning another child at this point, but some of her outfits are so adorable, and filled with memories of the days she wore them, I haven’t been able to give them away. So I fling them to the top of her closet. Soon I’ll need to dig through and properly store them.

Quilter Mary Lou Weidman gave me a great idea: Sew four or five items down to a background, strung along a piece of jute like they’re hanging on a clothesline. Make it into a quilt. That way you’ve saved the clothes and created a utilitarian object so they can be on display, not boxed in an attic. Other jumpers I’m also saving to use as quilt pieces.

My parents, bless their hearts – insert Southern joke about that phrase – did a fairly lousy job of documenting my childhood, and that of my sisters. There are no bronzed booties in their attics. When people ask me if Desi looks like my baby pictures, I have to say I don’t know.

I have only one set of photos of me and my sister, Edie. We were about 3 and 4, posing in dresses in front of some Olan Mills backdrops. There are no refrigerator-quality drawings socked away, but Edie has saved an oil painting from that same era. I brushed a vaguely SpongeBob SquarePants-looking dog, and Edie painted a taller, rectangular creature with huge yellow clawlike feet. It’s titled Bananatoes, and it brightens her hallway.

Bella’s mom, Trish Henning, says she’s already running out of space in the keepsake boxes she bought for her daughter.

“By the time Bella is grown and ready to move out on her own, I fear she may need a small U-Haul for everything I’ll collect over the years.”

Erika Wells Edmiston is keeping a baby book for Jack, largely because that’s what her parents did, although she isn’t sure he’ll want to keep it.

“I sort of feel like maybe a boy won’t really care, the way a girl might, later in life,” Edmiston said. “Who knows! Let him throw stuff out when he decides later on.”

I think that’s the best strategy. Keep as many things as you want to store. When your child is old enough to appreciate her keepsakes, and your hormones have cooled, then some things can be thrown away or donated.

My friend Elizabeth Mangum still has cute smocked dresses she wore as a baby. She dressed her baby doll in them as a child, then put them away and saved them for later.

Now, three decades hence, she’s using the clothes on a baby doll for her niece.

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Features editor Johanna Love hopes that she will find time to follow through on her quilting plans. Perhaps after life stops resembling a crazy quilt.

Desi's first Halloween

OK, baby dressup fans... photo post. Desi was a Jackalope Fairy for her first Halloween.

Dressing up baby

As I write this, I’m snuggled up in my happy place – in front of Desi’s closet.

My ingenious friend Elizabeth came to visit in July with the best baby present: a second clothes rod, suspended on starry purple ribbon, to hang below the top one in Desi’s closet. Now we can see more clothing selections at once. Cubbies – packed with bloomers, tights, bibs, hats, pajamas – line each side of the clothes rod, and tubs of too-big togs await on the floor.

You scoff. I say these things are vital for a well-dressed child.

Consider layering for 50-degree temperature swings, the volume of puffiness required for below-zero weather, pajamas, outerwear, hedging for growth spurts and outfitting for swim lessons, all within the constraints of a 2-by-5-foot closet.

Clinton and Stacy of “What Not To Wear” couldn’t work in these conditions.

At my baby shower a year ago, friends, family and coworkers started me on the path to baby adornment. We scored a polka-dot coming-home outfit, purple flowered dress, owl-toed Robeez soft leather shoes and a pair of petal-pink Moon Boots, among other things.

We’ve been gifted dozens of hand-me-downs that we’ve loved, worn a few times and re-gifted.

An aunt and great-aunt each sent an outfit in three sizes: newborn, 6 months and 12 months. Brilliant, since the girl pretty much wore “sleep sacks” for her first three months, and she stayed ensconced in a car seat sleeping bag whenever she was out of the house.

However, gifts of clothing, as much as they are appreciated, can be – ahem – taste-specific.

At Dina’s annual Oscar party, 2-month-old Desi wore the fanciest dress anyone had given her, a navy-and-green plaid number with velvet footed tights. Everyone else at the party was dressed to the nines, and my child resembled a Catholic schoolgirl.

Other outfits have been just as questionable. How do you explain to a beloved relative that a crocheted ecru lace tam and the creeper with faux-furry unicorn mane and butt ruffle aren’t your child’s style?

Because, really, baby’s style gets to be your style for the first year or more, and I’ve never worn a lace tam or a butt ruffle.
It’s a small window, though. I’ve been told that the child will not always succumb to your wardrobe wishes, so I’m getting my kicks while I can.

My photographer friend Katy, who polled her friends about Milo’s first shoes – Chuck Taylors or Vans? – just bought a neon-striped crocheted cap for her son. I’m sure he’s secure enough in his boyhood to rock the pink stripe. It’s funky, offbeat.

“I don’t even care that he doesn’t like hats and takes them off right away,” she said. “He will learn to love them, dammit.”

All summer, I scoured yard sales for stylish child clothing. Some of our favorites: orange Patagonia vest to wear for the Bronc homecoming, apple-green Puma tracksuit for lounging and airplanes, tiny Converse high-tops with a pink-and-orange Pokemon print, ladybug gardening clogs that likely won’t fit until late next summer.

I should confess, I never played much with Barbies. Boring. Only in the past decade have I embraced the color pink and developed some sense of style. And having a living, giggling dress-up doll is too good an opportunity to pass up.

While visiting family last week, I hit Target and the outlet malls to fill in the gaps in Desi’s winter wardrobe. She needed tights in several colors, cardigans in brown and black, a lime-green bolero, a couple of corduroy dresses and a handful of long-sleeved T-shirts from the clearance rack.

Although she’s 10 months old, the smallest thing I bought her was to fit 18 months. It seems like throwing your money away to buy something that will only fit for a month or two.

Desi has six pairs of shoes that fit her right now. Cowgirl boots, hiking boots, fleecy slipper boots, sneakers, mary janes and Robeez. One was a hand-me-down, two were gifts, two pair I bought new and one came from a yard sale. Guess how many of them stay on her feet. Just the Robeez. The rest are cute, but she can Houdini out of them in two minutes flat if you don’t cinch them down.

Sure, Desi has days she doesn’t get out of her pajamas, when I’m too harried and under deadline to bother. But any excuse to go out warrants a full wardrobe change.

My husband surprised me on Friday by asking if we could go out to dinner after work. Sure, I said. But you and I have to bathe and change, and we’ve got to get the baby dressed.

“Why can’t she just wear that?” he asked, pointing to Desi’s grubby blue “Whoo’s the Cutest?” owl T-shirt and the dog-hair-accented fleece pants she had been mopping the floor with for hours.

“Because she can’t.”

“Why not?”

Enough already. I threw out the totalitarianism. “Because I said so.”

I did resist buying her an event-specific Halloween costume this year. We’ve got plenty of creative outfit elements to choose from.
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Features editor Johanna Love is going through her own wardrobe this week, tossing some items, hanging onto others. But it’s not nearly as much fun as going through baby clothes.

Sugar sugar

Ugh.

While moping about the World Wide Web because of a self-imposed sugar moratorium, I came upon this.

We eat 200 POUNDS of sugar a year? That's hard to fathom. That's more than a half-pound a day. That can't be right. But I did eat about half a pound of sugar, it seemed like, on Monday. That was the day that Edie and I drove down to see our dad. Family angst and drama compounded my sweet tooth, and over a 12-hour period I had a blueberry muffin, TWO squares of chess pie and most of a bottle of red wine.

No wonder I busted out with a skin condition that Scott terms "jungle rot."

No sugar, no flour.

For the foreseeable future.

Baby, what are you thinking?

Dear baby,

As you approach 10 months old, I think it’s time to discuss communication. I’m trying really hard to be clear with you. It’s only fair that you hurry up and tell me what’s going on in that head of yours.

I realize that some people learn and teach their babies sign language. Are these folks unemployed? I can’t possibly find the time and energy to learn a whole new language for your convenience just because you won’t be chatting for another year.

Anybody can look at you and tell that you’re usually a happy girl. It’s why you’re so popular. That smile of yours can light up a room, and your squeal draws baby-gazers like flies to a teething biscuit.

I can pretty easily discern when you’re hungry, sleepy, bored, pooping or in a cranky mood.

You’re delighted by music. You bop and jig to the beat, dancing better than that Baby Cory kid, except that you can’t quite stand up to do the stanky leg shake.

It’s obvious that you’re fascinated by sensory experiences of all kinds. You like splashing in the tub, chewing on a spoon, petting Buster Mahood (who likes babies way more than our dog Mojo), tasting a new food, looking at architecture on your 497th stroller lap around the neighborhood.

Your listening skills are excellent. If somebody talks while you’re trying to eat, you pop off the boobie and pay attention. So I have to be a little bit of a Shushing Nursing Nazi.

The crawling thing frustrates you, I can tell. Your daddy says you’ve only got one gear at this point: reverse.

As Patrick Swayze said in Dirty Dancing, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” Well, except for baby. I turn around and there you are with nowhere to go, backed into the cabinets, body straining into a plank, pushing backward against the wall.

You growl and complain and grunt and cry because crawling is so hard and you just can’t figure out how to use your knees. I comfort you verbally and restrain myself from coming to scoop you up and cover you with kisses.

I try to just let you figure it out, because that’s what life’s about. I can’t always be rescuing you and fixing your problems for you. I don’t want you calling me at 2 a.m. from your college dorm room and asking what to do about your roommate’s boyfriend’s snoring problem. You’ve gotta develop some coping skills.

Crawling is tough. That’s just the way it is. But once you get the hang of it, I’m sure you’re going to be great, and it’ll be so much fun. It’ll probably be even sweeter because you taught yourself, with no fancypants crawling instructor or older babies to show you how.

I know other babies your age are crawling, even cruising around on furniture, probably holding their own sippy cup and pointing to Uzbekistan on the globe. Forget about them. You can’t compare yourself to other babies all the time. That’s a recipe for crazymaking.

Sometimes you surprise us with your vocalizations, funny faces or actions, and we laugh at you. This encourages you to repeat the behavior, like the fake cough that Grammy taught you. You’re such a ham.

I guess it’s getting better than it was when you were a baby and I couldn’t tell one cry from another. Still, sometimes I just don’t what you’re trying to say. It’s hard to reason with someone who doesn’t hold up her end of the debate.

You did convey your dissatisfaction with me when you pitched your first fit last week. That was one for the books. Except that I’ve had zero time to write in your baby book, and that’s one more thing I feel bad about, thank you very much.

Anyway, about the fit. You remember. I let you be the Shopping Assistant and carry the list, but you couldn’t just hold it and read it, you had to eat it. So when I saw a chunk missing from the Post-It note, I fished the spitball out of your mouth and took the list away.

You freaked out. You gulped in air and screamed. Huge crocodile tears flooded your face. People stared.

Your vigor impressed me. Your daddy says he would have given you the paper back to shut you up and avoid a public meltdown. As family therapist Laura Santomauro says, your daddy and I are going to have to work on meshing our parenting styles.

If I were Perfect Mommy, I’d have had a suitable toy in my pocket to substitute for the list, possibly preempting the fit. “I need this list back, but here, have a silicone spatula to chew!”

I’m not Perfect Mommy at all, but I’m the only Mommy you have, and I’m trying really hard to be good at it.

So if you could just help me out by working on your communication skills, that would be great. Sometimes I feel like Jay, exhausted by Silent Bob’s charades in Kevin Smith’s movies. “Just say it already!”

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This column originally appeared in the Jackson Hole News&Guide. Don't delay, subscribe today, so Jo keeps a job!

Knit an iHoodie. You know you want to.

Five years ago, I designed a knitting pattern for a wee hoodie sweater to knit for your iPod. These days, the iPod is miniscule, but the iPhone is the same size, roughly, as the old iPod.
What is old, made new. Buy a pattern today! ((My first foray onto Etsy, too.)) Baby needs new shoes!