Chapter 9: Everything Everywhere All at One!

She’s one-year-old now and she’s picking up steam, she’s picking up steam fast.

She wakes up every morning with more hair, stronger cheekbones and an agenda. She’s “cruising” and crawling, standing and falling, squeaking and squawking. She’s determined to open every drawer and cabinet in our home. She wants to take inventory, she wants our stuff, she wants our attention, and for good measure she wants our phones, too.

Once she gets our things, she wants to give us back our things, as well as her stuff. She opens our hands and places the thing in our palms, then looks at us expectantly…. Until we give it back—

Which tees her up beautifully to then return that item to us. It’s a self-sustaining economy, a socialist utopia where we all have stuff and we all have NOT stuff but most importantly, we have shared purpose and each other.

She wants to go where we do not want her to go. We pen off most of our living room for her, we place pillows around our plush baby-friendly ottoman, we set up soft blocks for her to climb on and fall from. I call it Tumble Town, she calls it Escape from Alcatraz.

She wedges herself between the baby gate and the TV stand and then, compressed in this non-space, fights her way down to the floor before crawling beneath the TV stand ‘til she reaches salvation.

(Salvation is a tower fan that stands beside the entryway to our dining room.)

For Christmas, she received a walker from Aunt Alyssa and Uncle Aaron that’s also an “ice cream cart,” but she has no designs on selling scoops, no, she’s in the business of bustin’ out and that walker is her stepladder on wheels. She pushes it over to the TV stand, puts down the side-flap (the one that’s meant to say, we’re open for business!) uses it as a foothold, hoists herself to the top of the cart, and then manages a leg up on the stand before I thwart whatever next move she had in store.

She features a three-hundred and sixty degree threat radius. I have her in one arm while I lean over to inspect a surge protector that could pose a danger and when I lean back up, she’s grabbed a pair of scissors off a shelf. She waves it around and says, “rarrrr.”

We’re baby proofing as fast as we can, often a step too slow but sometimes even too fast, like IF you needed a new roll of toilet paper, but first you had to figure out how to open the cabinet lock while crouched in a compromising position. I said IF!

I’m feeling it in my body.

I love holding her, tossing her, catching her (critical), kneeling for bath time, walking with her mounted on my back or my shoulders or hanging from my belly, but my lower left back hurts, my cement hips are tugging on everything above and below, my good ankle is now my bad ankle, my bad ankle is both unchanged but also now my good ankle, my right middle finger hasn’t been the same since I tried to move lawn furniture while on vacation in Cape Cod, and the back of my right knee is doing something new and I don’t like it, no not one bit.

I go to an infrared sauna-gym up the block to wring it all out, more so in this past week since Los Angeles has been on fire. Though thirty five miles away from the conflagration and far from danger, our air is dry and carries flurries of ash, so for now I’m avoiding my favorite stress release, the tennis court, in favor of an indoor shake-it-all-out.

While relaxing in pigeon pose, I can’t help but wonder (relaxedly!) is this $60/month infrared sauna situation really something we can afford?

Just this week we reviewed our budget, and when I saw how much we’d spent in our first year as parents, I felt The Panic. Now I’m in child’s pose, healing my body, picturing it all falling apart financially. I’m at a tribunal, where I’ll have to answer for this expense. I’ll tell them the infrared sauna sounds ridiculous but really, it was necessary. It allowed me to get a deep stretch and important sweat in just twenty minutes, flat! I sound insane and rightfully, I will be convicted.

I feel like I never have enough time.

We cut our nanny’s hours down by half to give our bank account a chance to catch its breath while we wait for our spot in daycare, while we’re both still operating from home, while Eleanor networks and interviews her way out of the Land of the Laid-Off Post-Merger.

Some work days feel strung together by Scotch tape and threads, which our baby puts in her mouth and moistens to a pulp before giving them back. The “giving back” part is Big Progress, we’re so proud.

Once upon a time she slept on my lap while I worked for two hours straight. (Literally, just once. It hasn’t happened since.) Today when I open my laptop within her threat radius, she has a say in my emails. She makes quick and emphatic points. The border of my screen is caked in tiny fingerprints. It looks like a little ghost is trying to escape from my Macbook.

This past week, Eleanor took her out for a long walk to break up the day, to give me space while I worked, but then came right back because the air’s still too dry, she could feel it in her eyes, and ash was falling on our baby. My friend Kalen reminds me that Parable of the Sower begins with a fire in Altadena. That’s incredible. I spare her our drama, that our nanny is going through a breakup with her partner of twenty years and also we have ants.

I install an air quality monitor and air purifiers, which dazzle her with their blue lights. She positions herself above the purifier and is about to swan dive off the sofa into that deep, deep blue before I grab her. I put the purifier out of her reach and now she just looks at it lovingly from afar.

I clean out the upstairs storage space and the garage en route to putting together Go-Bags; it’s me versus the Stuff again, I want to be lighter, able to focus on the essentials in the event of an evacuation, or just a move-of-house, which is entirely possible given Eleanor’s job hunt.

An evacuation alert sounds across all of our devices. It’s Friday, four days after the fires began, and I swear we’re not in harm’s way, we’re the lucky ones, but that blaring alarm tells us maybe not.

I don’t believe the evacuation warning, but I go through the motions, and by the time I make it to our Go-Shelf with all of our Go-Things, another ALERT comes through: Alert #1 was made in error, but nothing wrong with a swift kick in the ass to remind us that everything we take for granted is held together by frayed threads and Scotch tape.

I try to slow down. After a day of go-go-go I tackle a new recipe for a slow roasted tomato pasta, it looks delicious and simple enough. Fifteen minutes in and there’s more halving mincing and measuring than I expected. It feels like I’ve clocked out of one job and in at another. The only way out is through.

I mix, I toss, I build flavor, I make sure to save the pasta water and then some. The recipe stresses that I must scrape up every last burnt bit from the baking sheet, that in French culinary school you’ll lose all respect if you leave any of the flavor behind—

I deglaze and scrape, deglaze and scrape. I lean the pan on the pot to get that last little bit and the pot comes tumbling down. Thirty percent of the tomatoes fall on the floor along with, I estimate, sixty percent of the flavor. I react, scraping sabor-de-floor back into the pot. I’ve gone full Kevin Malone with the chili. When Eleanor arrives, I tell her what I’ve done and she informs me we’ll be having something else for dinner.

Every day ends the same. We have dinner together, all three of us. She eats what we eat along with a few flourishes, such as putting lentil stew down her shirt or chicken between her toes, and then we head up to her room to roll around.

We put her in Jiggle Jail, a beanbag where she’s shaken and tossed in the air. We race from wall to wall, she wins, and we all clap. We go through the motions of brushing her five-and-a-half teeth, she screams and fights, then we all clap again. She has bath time, bottle time, story time, and then bedtime. She sleeps soundly from 7 PM until 6:30 AM, and we’re not far behind. Before the lights go out, I’m not stressed, I swear it, I’m happy and I’m so, so ready for bed.

Should I have a kid? I don’t know, let’s find out!