carl in casimirland.

If I suddenly became famous, after I started my own perfume, make up, and sweat shop clothing line, I'd set my sights on maternity wear. Because why does everything have to fit like a tent over the belly? And why, with swimsuits, does the tent part have to hit right at your thighs, while the bikini bottom barely covers your ass, which I dare say is often not at its fittest during pregnancy. Unless that's just me.

Sometimes I wish kids didn't need this routine thing so much. Sometimes I feel like shaking it up, staying up late, sleeping in, and eating leftover dinner for breakfast and serving cereal for dinner. But our morning routine is the best. We used to get up and sing about how the Bright Sun comes up, and the Dew falls away, and how Good Morning Good Morning, the little birds say. Now, as soon as he wakes, we bring Casimir into bed with us in a vain attempt to cuddle and fall back asleep. After about twenty seconds, he shouts "Play cars!" and wiggles out of bed. He says, "Up daddy! Up mommy!" as he pulls us out of bed by our limbs, and gets me my socks and my sweatshirt, which he knows I like when I get up. So basically my two year-old gets me up and dressed. I only hope that twenty years down the road, this won't devolve into that scene in Pretty in Pink, where Molly Ringwald had to basically drag her dad's ass out of bed and remind him of his job interview and what he had to do that day. At least I can assure you that our nighttime routine is entirely proper and grown up-directed.

How to count to ten. When you're not quite two: One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine. Nine, Nine. More Nine. Nine! More Nine.

Tomorrow I go to the midwife again and since we have a sitter, Paul is coming along, though I know he's mostly in it for the pancake breakfast afterwards. For the first pregnancy, he came eagerly to pretty much every visit. And I expected him to. I used to see women sitting alone in the waiting room and think, poor women. All alone. Now I usually have to go alone while he watches Casimir and I see all these couples in the waiting room and think, "What, does he hold her hand while she gets her blood pressure taken?" Funny how that works, after you've done it once.

I'm going through that usual pre-second kid thing where you wonder how you can possibly love the second as much as you love the first. Intellectually it sounds like a stupid thing to ponder. But emotionally, until it happens, it's hard to imagine. Lord knows Casimir siphoned off some of the love the cat got around here. Even though the cat came first, there was only room for one of them on top, and the feline lost. But the next one will be human, too. So how will I love them both equally? I find myself suspecting that all the parents out there who have more than one child secretly favor their first child and just don't tell anyone. And I'm the fourth, so that's not terribly comforting. It's just that the love part kind of hits you like a Mack truck once you've got the bonding thing down, be it instantly or over a few days or weeks. I can't imagine being hit by two Mack trucks.

And in conclusion, I miss alcohol.

I'm trying to figure out why any company would decide to add "splat-shaped" crackers to perfectly flawless goldfish. And why I bought them. That's almost worse than blue ketchup.

I'm also realizing that the child of the house is not really the lunatic, even though he occasionally acts like a cute one (if lunatics can be cute). It's ME. Ta-da! No one would probably want to go on a road trip with me right now, or room with me if not legally bound by marriage. Partly because I would eat all the food, but also because I'm a little moody these days. But if you read the tabloids in the supermarket lines, you'd know that Celebrity A filed for divorce from Celebrity B while 6 months pregnant, and all because of hormones. So at least I'm not that bad. (I'm sure it's entirely true, and I know you read the big Hollywood headlines. Even my dad wanted to know why Brad and Jen broke up.) I hate to depict hormonal pregnant women as hysterical and illogical. But sometimes lately I am. So?

And while I'm acting rather mercurial, Casimir is shaping up to be a polite young gentleman. He not only suddenly picked up "Thank you," but he says it all.day.long. He thanks the cat after petting him. He thanks the man who sticks flyers in our mailbox. He thanks me for wiping his butt after a big poop. Usually the repetition (like hearing "Where go??!" and the invented construction "More this!" or "No this!") 454 times a day gets to me, but I'm not sure Tank you Mommy! will ever wear thin. Let's hope it's not a phase.

I stumbled across that quote the other day, which is from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Not me. I would never say that! I find all children to be sweet-natured angel creatures.

Well, so much for Violet.
I conceded to finding out the gender at the ultrasound, primarily for my mom, or at least that's what I tell myself. She was dying to know, like wetting-her-pants dying to know, and she sits so much lately for him, that I figured I could use an act of generosity as a front and an excuse to ditch my principles and give in to curiosity and find out. I asked the technician how certain she was, because I thought she indicated that she wasn't sure. But she said somewhat irritably, "Boy parts are boy parts. 100% certain." Subtext: duh! It's kind of hard to mistake a penis for a vagina! They kept saying "boy parts" and "girl parts" though, which I found amusing and strangely incongruent with all their obvious training in identifying heart chambers and brains and livers in the blurry rohrschach-like images on the screen.

I had sort of thought it would be a girl, but then I sometimes I thought boy, and then I thought "I'm only thinking 'boy' because I have one and that's all I can imagine " and back and forth. And whichever I pictured, I mourned a little that I wouldn't have the other. Basically it depended on the day as to what I thought it was. And I was still surprised! Part of me was a bit sad to take away that "surprise" at the birth, but then I remembered that I didn't wait the first time just so I could be "surprised," and, more importantly, after going through labor and being exhausted and seeing a Real Live Baby emerge from me, I recall the whole final "surprise" of gender thing being rather irrelevant. The midwife didn't really announce it with drama, and she could have said "Hermaphrodite!" gleefully and I wouldn't have been very surprised. I'm happy about having a boy, primarily I think because that's what Casimir is. It's what I'm used to and since I like him so darn much, I would clone him if I could, boy parts and all.

Now though, when everyone asks what we're having, I find I really resent feeling like I know and therefore should provide them with an answer, and then with the name, and so on. I know they're normal questions, but I think in the future I'll just keep saying that I don't know. Unless I'm in a bad mood, in which case I'll say "None of your business," or, that we're naming it Rupert no matter what gender it is. Or unless I'm blogging, in which case I'll blather all about it.

So I guess I'll have to get another cat if I want to use my grandmother's name. We're tossing around the ideas of Henry or Carl, which we had already agreed on two years ago in the highly likely case that Casimir was an all male set of triplets. After Paul nixed about 20 of my other names, that is. Coincidentally though, my dad's new fascinating hobby is geneology, and I'm finding out that about 45% of my male ancestors were named Carl (only slightly exaggerating) and about 50% of them were named Henry or Heinrich (not really exaggerating at all.) So there's that fun connection. And there's always my great-grandfather, the adulterous Swedish mortician Carl Carlson. We can always say we're honoring him, which would be a real treat. Sometimes the name Carl reminds me of that janitor in the Breakfast Club, and I picture Judd Nelson saying his name really dorky to make fun of him. But then I also remember Carl Anderson, the hottie pothead in my high school Spanish class. Nothing like a cute Swede to turn a name's image around in your head, be it Casimir or Carl.

That was quite a self-indulgent rant about naming. My god, the NYT was right about mommy blogs!

Casimir keeps playing hide and seek, and manages to go into the hall closet to hide and close the door behind him. The weird thing is that he'll stay hidden there for a few long seconds without even making a peep, unlike his usual method of shouting Boo! before he's even finished hiding. I keep hoping someone will call and ask how Casimir is, so I can say, "Oh just fine. He's locked in the closet at the moment. It's terribly quiet in there, too."