Trial by fire.

I’m sure I’m not telling any parent something he or she doesn’t already know, but having a baby is the very best and the very worst that life experience has to offer. Well, maybe not very worst, but really, really bad – particularly for parents who had conducted long, selfish love affairs with themselves until the magic moment of birth. A prime example is my own, sweet-natured Eeyore, who turned 4 months old on Saturday. That 4 months represents not only all the milestones that make a baby so adorable, such as cooing, smiling, babbling, interest in toys and even pictures in books, but it is also the amount of time it has been since I have slept through the night. FOUR MONTHS; also known as about 120 days. Really think about what that means for a minute. Sure, it’s bad when you sleep poorly for a couple of nights; you feel kind of crappy but know you can catch up on the weekend and maybe even spend your entire Saturday lying in bed watching movies and dozing. Now imagine that not only have you slept poorly, but you have in fact been up and out of bed, tending to somebody else’s well-being, for anywhere from an hour to three hours those nights. For a third of a year. With no apparent end in sight. Yes, that’s right; it’s hell.

R. and I are almost at the end of our ropes right now. Eeyore has been sick with a bad cold, so he has regressed from waking up once in a night to perhaps 10 times. Even if that means only one feeding, it still means getting up to replace the pacifier or simply to try to soothe his pitiful little cries. This would be bad enough, but we are both sick with the same cold. Waking up 10 times a night is not the way to get better, and so each of us has watched with dismay as our colds have descended farther and deeper into our chests even as Eeyore recuperates. When I feel this bad, it’s hard to be cheerful or focus on the good parts of being a mother.

Oh, look – I see on the monitor he has just woken up from his 10 minute nap. What fun. I guess I’ll have to save my analysis of the current state of the world for another time.

Shoot, y'all.

There are a lot of things going on in the world right now, and one of them is that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant. At the ripe old age of 16. I guess that based on the precedent set by big sister Britney we shouldn’t really be too surprised, but for some reason I think the part of America that cares thought that Little Sis somehow had it a little more together than the freak show Older Sis. Apparently she plans to raise the little critter down in Louisiana, where “it can have a normal family life.” Uh huh. Here’s a question: if she is 16 and her baby daddy is 19, doesn’t that make him guilty of statutory rape? Last I checked it wasn’t a matter of pressing charges to determine a person’s guiltiness of that crime; after all, the girl in Georgia who had supposedly consensual oral sex with a teenaged Genarlow Wilson declined to press charges and yet he spent 2 years in jail for his “crime.” Oh wait, what’s that you say? Are you insinuating there might have been racial factors at play in that case? No, it couldn’t be, not in America!! No way!

Anyway, not that I truly give a crap, but it’s still pretty icky that this girl got knocked up at 16 and is having the baby. I suppose if you’re really wealthy and likely don’t have plans to try to attend college and make something out of your life, because you already have some popular show on Nickelodeon that will keep you in residuals and a tacky McMansion in BFE Louisiana for a few years, then why not just keep the baby and maybe even carry it around your hick town in a little bag like your sister does with her mini-dogs? It might even be fun to have someone who loves you even when everything else is getting you down, like your boyfriend telling you to stop stuffing your face with corn dogs or you’ll never lose the baby fat, or your tutor ragging on you to finish your geometry homework! And hey, in a way it will be more like having a little sister or brother, because not only will he be so close to your age, but you’re just going to leave him with your mom while you go out and party anyway, right!? Cool!

What else is going on? Christmas, of course. I tell you what; trying to deal with Christmas with a new baby in the house doesn’t work that well. Decorating the house, planning the menus, buying all the food, making goodies to have when our families get here and buying all the presents, all with a baby in tow, is HARD. Really hard. Especially when said baby is developing a nasty habit of waking up 5 or 6 times a night just to say hi, thus turning me into a zombie during the days. I can’t really recommend it, if you are thinking about it, unless having some ridiculously cute pictures of that baby is enough to make it all worthwhile for you. Or, you know, burying your nose in his fuzzy, No-More-Tears little head as often as you can.

Now I am here.

I felt quite out of sorts all day, knowing that tonight I would pull the plug on two years of my blog. I’m not quite sure why; it’s not as if my past is actually gone. Rather, it has moved back from the realm of exaggerated confidences to the ether into the confines of my mind, which is where most people’s memories remain in the first place. Still, I think the time was right. In some ways I don’t even feel like the same person who started that bitter diary two years ago: that person was all sharp edges and peevish observations, and today’s Kate is generally a nicer, and probably more boring, person. I’m not sure if that’s because I am clearly more settled in life, and happier, or if it’s simply because I am so constantly befuddled these days from a lack of sleep that I no longer have the mental acuity to be mean.

Christ, who do I think I am fooling with my butter-wouldn’t-melt routine? It’s not like I was recently born again or something (although then I’d have an excuse to attend my local “mega-church,” and wouldn’t that be fun). I’m still the same anti-religion, conservative-bashing, anyone-in-my-general-vicinity-loathing gal I’ve always been; I’m just so tired and busy with baby drool these days that I have less time to write about it. With that in mind, I probably didn’t need to start this other blog, but I really wanted to have somewhere to keep writing if the mood struck – it just needed to be somewhere that the floral part of my persona wasn’t attached. In fact, if anyone comments on this blog, or links to it, it would be fab if you, too, could skip references to my old persona and just call me Kate. Not that you intended to read this site, or comment on it, or link to it, or anything like that, but, you know, if you did.

There. I feel much better. It wasn’t like cutting off a limb, after all.