Our household has been wracked by illness pretty much for a month straight. It got so bad that last week, Cooper was only able to go to school one day. He’s been losing weight, sleeping all the time, and producing some amazing colors of snot. Finally, I had enough and I said, “hey sickness. You’re a jerk, and you’re not going to beat us.”

We just moved into a place with a fenced in backyard, so I’ve been determined to take advantage of this as much as humanly possible. One of the first things I did, was buy my water-loving baby a pool, which he is obsessed with. The second is to garden. Luke is container-gardening some tomatos, we’ve topsy-turvied some peppers, and I’ve planted seeds for an herb garden. This works out for Cooper in many ways– the best of which is the use of the hose, aka his new best friend.

Sure, you can go spend 30 bucks on an inflatable blowfish pool at Target, but all a kid really needs is the hose.

Summertime!

I’m a terrible singer, and I’m sure if I took voice lessons, I would improve, but let’s be honest: I’m just this side of tone deaf, and I’m never going to make it on American Idol (also, because I am old. To wit: As I was writing this sentence, I pulled a six-inch-long grey hair off of my cardigan. I may as well be sipping Metamucil as I punch this into my typewriter).

I’m also a terrible runner, for many reasons. I have no pace, I’m pretty sure I put all of my weight on the left side of  my body, and my sports bra does things to me that the picture above illustrates. I took that photo after I got back from the gym, to document my abuse at the cold hands of the treadmill. The sore was just forming then, and as the days went on it started to ooze. The whole thing was awful and hurt like hell.

The worst part, actually, wasn’t the pain; it was that most of my shirts don’t cover it up. So I was walking around with this odd sore on my collarbone that people kept on asking me about. My favorite responses? “I let the baby watch Twilight, and he keeps on trying to ‘change’ me,” and “Luke burns me with cigarettes when I displease him.” I really should probably just tell people the truth the first time they ask, but why not make a weird situation even more awkward?

Like most women, I felt like I was pregnant forever. It was just a never-ending process in which I got so used to my giant stomach, that by the time I started my ninth month, I literally could not imagine a time in which I would ever be not pregnant. I couldn’t imagine a time in which I would wear pants without an elastic panel, or be able to see my belly button without looking in a mirror. I was going to be giant FOREVER.

Going hand in hand with this belief was the fact that as I got closer and closer to my due date, the more theoretical my baby actually seemed. Even though I knew I could have him any day; that he was full term, and even though I could feel the outline of his little butt as it pressed against the right side of my stomach, I became less able to actually believe that one day very soon, the thing that had been crawling around inside of me for the better part of the past year was going to be a living, breathing being.

So buying those pajama bottoms and the matching robe helped make this very unreal situation real for me. Those clothes were tangible objects I could hold in my hand and say, “My baby will come, and I will wear this.” It was the best time of my life.

Cooper was 6 days late, and in the last two or three weeks of my pregnancy, the belief that I would stay pregnant forever was mixed with my hormones and made me into a crazy mess. But when I dragged myself off of the couch and prepared; when I made Luke drive me to the Chipotle in Secaucus for a burrito bowl (a drive that took at least three times longer than it was supposed to, due to the fact that Secaucus is an unwieldy maze of business hotels and chain restaurants); when I thought I might be going into labor, but I didn’t want to jinx it, so I cleaned the bathroom; when the doctor’s answering service told me to go to the hospital; when Luke and I parked in the garage and I walked the two blocks to the hospital, in labor, dressed in the pajamas I had bought for just this occasion; when I had my baby and discovered, that yes, he was real; I had never been happier in my entire life.

Of course, after that, things got much, much harder. The baby was real, and he needed me– all the time. I went home and walked into terrible family drama, my inability to not spread myself too thin with work (I stayed home for a month or so, but never took an actual maternity leave), and stressor piled on top of stressors. There was fighting, there was crying, there was feeling overwhelmed, there was a lot of travel, and then there was a move, and the whole process started over in a new locale.

Every day of the past 10 months has been a non-stop struggle. Like my ninth month of pregnancy, it feels as though it will be this way forever. I know it won’t though; I know that eventually it will get easier; things will get better. In fact, they already have. I still have those pajamas, and I still have my baby, sleeping soundly in his crib upstairs.

I could write a very “insightful” post about leaving the NY area after moving her three-and-a-half years ago with a duffel bag and $300, but I just don’t have it in me at the moment. It is weird though, that I came to Manhattan with my dog and said duffel bag, and now I’m leaving with Luke and a baby. Buckley is already waiting for us in VA, and I still even have the duffel bag packed away in one of Luke’s millions of boxes.

If I was already a little burned out on the NYC area, with it’s unbelievable inability to make any task (like leaving town or grocery shopping) simple, spending a year in Jersey City convinced me that maybe genocide wasn’t completely unjustified in all situations.

So we packed up the baby and left. I don’t know exactly what I had planned to have accomplished when I left New York, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t involve working a random office job for three years and getting knocked up. That’s not to say I’m unhappy with the way things turned out–quite the contrary. I always said I never wanted to raise kids in New York, and now I’m not.

I also said I never wanted to move back to Northern Virginia, but it’s kind of nice to be able to pawn the kid off on family members who I (somewhat) trust. I have a new car and a Harris Teeter right across the street, so I can easily get the hell out of town and grocery shop, respectively. While the new place doesn’t have a working stove and the mass of boxes makes it look like a hobo camp, I like it.

It’s a new time in my life, and quite honestly, I’m as excited to embark on it as I was when I moved to New York. In fact, I may be even more excited since this change won’t involve selling comedy tickets to tourists in Times Square. And that’s always a plus.