My Baby Alien

Unaccountably down today. May have somehow caught a cold. Throat hurts. Tired.

Duckie's fine. We're going to the doctor today after I get off work to have him take a look at her hiney which is still red and sore. Also I'll ask him to check her ears as a matter of course.

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I mentioned last week that our system auditor would be looking for evidence that our corrective action and audit systems are working. Apparently he just wanted to know that they existed - and was not terribly concerned to know many of the details once he had found an opportunity for improvement in another area.


I will be surprised if I am ever able to get along with this man but to tell you the truth I couldn't care less right now - I see him twice a year and whether we get along or not has very little to do with how I feel right now.

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Husband and I put the tree up yesterday. I finally decided on a little 3-foot artificial tree from Wally World. It's decorated more like a New Year's Tree. (Even now I can hear the tree hollering drunkenly in the background, waving a party hat, with a cigar hanging out of his mouth. Not exactly your typical Christmas decor.)

The trip to WalMart was hard. I kept running into cardboard cutout families and missing my own special threesome. I also saw plenty of examples of alternative family arrangements - three generations of daughters together, a dad and his son without mom, etc. And just because everyone wasn't at WalMart doesn't mean they didn't exist - it just meant they were somewhere else.

Today is one of those days that I don't feel like I exist. Like my anchors are gone, somehow, and I'm just drifting. Am looking forward to going home and turning on the Christmas tree.

A friend told me last night that I looked happier and more relaxed than he had seen me in a long time. I thought that was interesting and kind of scary given that I was pretty stressed last night and pretty sad. How can I appear happy when I am spending so much time and energy trying to duct-tape my heart together enough to make it from day to day? I suppose I'm still a pretty good actress after all.

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I think little kids are like aliens in lots of ways. Mine is, anyway. She stumbles around the house as if trying to get used to a different gravity field. Everything new that she sees, she stores in her mind and tries to figure it out at the same time - you can see it happening - it's like her little brain goes on overload for a few seconds. She experiences her body the way the rest of us admire a cool new outfit that we just can't stop wearing - constantly touching and testing the fabric, idiotic with delight when the fabric doesn't melt or go away, the ability to touch and feel new things utterly absorbing. She was hypnotized by the Christmas tree lights last night - it looked like she was having a transcendental religious experience.

And she speaks an lovely exotic new language that I wish I could speak and understand - some gorgeous cross between Hindi and Italian that sounds completely adult and absolutely comprehensible - if you could only figure it out. "Dleeba naga say," she says solemnly, and points to her belly button. "Ay-za aka dan." "Of course," I agree. "That's your belly button."

But I like the way she says it better.