radish times

I never thought I would do it. I never imagined it in all the 34 years of my life: Now, not only can I multi-task, I can also multi-site. I even have a multi-announcement:

I have added to both “dontbearadish.com” and my live journal site all the e-mails I have written to my family and friends over the past five or six years. Called “updates,” these e-mails range over many topics. The most numerous e-mails were written in 2002 and are all about life in Prague.

I am posting them with love. Enjoy!

Besides reading all the Sherlock Holmes stories ever written and thinking constantly about the unhappy sagas going on at work, I have been having baby adventures. There are a number of baby adventures which do not deserve a written tribute (mostly on the order of “My Baby Shits All The Time,” “My Baby Changes Her Eating Habits Every Day,” “I Don’t Even Remember The Last Time My Baby Shit,” “The New Eating Habits of My Baby,” “The Correct Consistency of Half-Formula-Fed Half-Solid-Food-Fed Baby Shit,” “When Will My Baby Ever Do The Same Thing Two Days In A Row?,” “The exact feeling of not-to-hard-almost-adult-but-perfectly-normal baby shit,”)

There is one adventure which we recently had that has to be written – mostly because I don’t feel like I have yet been able to accurately express my (absolutely mixed) feelings about it. When you are pregnant, the books, articles and mommy-blogs tell you all the things you should and shouldn’t do when pregnant:

• Don’t drink coffee
• Only drink one cup of coffee
• Drink coffee, but not more than two cups
• Drink as much coffee as you want up to three cups
• Don’t drink alcohol
• Drink when you need to but try to keep it to one drink a week
• Don’t drink in the first trimester but after that drink responsibly and not more than one drink a day
• Excessive alcohol consumption can seriously harm your unborn baby in any trimester but especially in the first fourteen weeks after which you can consume any amount of alcohol that is not technically defined as excessive which changes depending on the weight, age and sex of your unborn child and yourself.
• Don’t eat blue cheese
• Don’t eat feta cheese
• Don’t eat unpasteurized cheeses, but pasteurized blue or feta cheese are all right
• Don’t eat unpasteurized cheese, but pasteurized feta is ok but not blue cheese because something about its blueness can harm your baby.
• Don’t eat unpasteurized cheeses in Europe and especially avoid sheep and goat cheeses of any kind regardless of their pasteurization status because sheep and goats are dangerous producers of the chemicals which harm unborn human, but not goatitious, children.
• Don’t eat raw vegetables in Italy for the same reasons mentioned above minus the comment about goatitious children.

Amazingly having got past this brief list of the most important rules of pregnancy, you figure (idealistically, and bordering on idiotically) that you have been through the worst and now things will lighten up. You have never known HOW WRONG YOU COULD BE.

When you actually have a baby, things get worse:

• Don’t feed a baby anything but breast milk for at least a year.
• Don’t feed a baby anything thing but breast milk, or the proper formula recommended by your pediatrician, for the infant period lasting for three to six months and in some places up to a year.
• Don’t feed a baby solid foods until four to six months or until your pediatrician (acting on guidelines you will never read about) tells you to start, which could be as early as two months adjusted if your baby was born before its due date.
• Don’t’ feed your baby fruit juices until later; it will just divert the baby from eating more nutritious breast milk or formula, or more virtuous water. (Do you want a fat baby??? Huh?? Do you?)
• Don’t feed a baby anything that you would not eat until it is old enough to know you would not eat it but you are forcing it to eat it anyway.
• Don’t feed your baby wheat cereal until eight months, but you can begin with barley cereal as early as four months, though you may want to hold off on the rice cereal until six months to avoid constipation unless you disregard the rule about feeding your baby juices and decide to feed your baby prune juice to loosen its bowels simultaneously with the infant formula and iron-fortified rice cereal, keeping in mind that oatmeal is also an early alternative if your baby will not spit it in your face for the first month that you try to use it.
• Corn cereal can be fed anytime (IF YOU CAN FIND IT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.) HA! HA! HA!
• Your baby should gain weight regularly every month.
• Your baby should grow longer every month.
• Your baby’s head should grow bigger every month.
• Your baby’s head should not stay the same size two months in a row; but it should also not grow larger than its percentile in any month.
• If your baby’s head does grow every month and continues to grow past the month when it reaches the 50th percentile for its age, you must consult with your doctor about big-headedness.

Big-headedness:

I stop at this rule because it was the basis of this entire update.

• If your baby’s head does grow every month and continues to grow past the month when it reaches the 50th percentile for its age, you must consult with your doctor about big-headedness.

Last Thursday I had to consult with Katya’s pediatrician about her big-headedness. For verily, she is a big-headed baby. It seems that her head is currently above the 95th percentile of head sizes for her age. This may seem alarming but in the course of events Katya’s pediatrician also took my head size which happened to be over the 98th percentile for the size of a woman’s head. She asked me to take Peter’s head size which turned out to be WAY OVER the 98th percentile for the size of a man’s head. In fact, there is no one in our family whose head (as far as I have the resources to determine) is under the 98th percentile for the size of a family person’s head. I also learned that Peter’s parents were also harrassed by doctors discussing the large size of their baby’s head.

So in the end it seems that Katya may be affected in the following ways:

• She may have to have a head sonogram, if her pediatrician doesn’t see the family trend as a genetic indicator of the potential size of her head. This means that she will have to have that sticky cold gel applied to her head in a cold almost empty room in the basement of Long Island College Hospital. This has happened to her before. OR
• She may (and most likely will) have trouble finding hats that fit. This will most likely be the case for her whole life (unless more big-headed people start buying and demanding better-sized hats), OR
• She may listen to this story over and over again while growing up and may get a big-sized-head complex which it will cost thousands in psychotherapy bills to overcome, OR
• Nothing very much may happen to her, except that she will understand someday that she is genetically related to her genetic relations.

I don’t know if you can understand from all this how exactly I feel about the adventure of the big-headed baby. But, I will say this: I really want to keep my baby safe and healthy but sometimes I feel so strongly that we have gone too far into fear and left life along the way.

I am all AMAZEMENT that such a small baby can eat SO MUCH. She just ate an overflowing tablespoon of cereal with a tablespoon of apples, a tablespoon of mixed vegetables, a third of a banana, and a teaspoon of cottage cheese. I kept expecting that she would get tired of it but I couldn’t spoon it out fast enough for her. Every time I looked up at her (from getting a spoonful of something) her mouth was open, waiting. Several times she even started to fuss because I was too slow!
Then, when she was tired of that, she drank 3 oz. of formula!

And she is not even in a food coma. She is currently yelling in the cat’s ear. The cat is inching away, trying to go through the back of the chair.:)

I don’t know if you know, but I have a zen quote a day calendar. It has been my habit to hang those quotes I really like over my desk. For quotes for 2006 were:

“All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.” — Kabir

“The real miracle is not to walk on water or thin air but to walk on the earth.” –Thich Nhat Hanh

“Only one koan matters: You.” — Ikkyu

“Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.” — Sogyal Rinpoche

“Break out from inside, and your power is strong. Break in from outside, and your power is weak.” — Zen saying

“If trecaherous talk is constantly in your ears, and unwanted thoughts are constantly in your mind, you can turn these about and use them as whetstones to enhance your practice. If every work that came to your ears was agreeable, and all things in your mind were pleasant, then your whole life would be poisoned and wasted.” — The Ts’ai-ken t’an

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add,
divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
with much allpause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
— Walt Whitman

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” –Rumi

“To take for permanent that which is only transitory is the delusion of a madman.” –Kalu Rinpoche

“Sit straight, and before you buy your shoes measure your feet.” –Zen saying

“When we look back on this life, we see that ehn people are born, no one has thoughts of joy, sadness, hatred, bitterness. Are we not born with the state of Buddha mind, given by our parents? But once intelligence develops, we learn habits from tohers, and our own personal mental habits emerge, and the Buddha mind is turned into a monster because of self-importance. We argue, lose our temper, muse over useless things, repeat the same thoughts again and again… It is darkness to darkness in an endless cycle.” –Bankei

“Buddha? Dharma? Zen? Tao? If you cling to names you will be blocked from the mystery. We use a net to catch fish. The fish are not the net.” –Ku-shan

“To set up what you like against what you dislike - this is the disease of the mind.” –The Hsin-hsin Ming

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the realy tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” –Plato

“Life the stone and you will find me; cleave the wood and I am there.” –Jesus

“The shortest answer is doing.” –George Herbert

“Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing, and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations.” –Sogyal Rinpoche

On this morn of the New Year I look back over a year that was truly spectacular for us. I can’t imagine what more a year could bring than a new child, a new home and a newly-immediate family. There were some pretty scary times for us last year and I am deeply thankful for what we have here at the end of it.

As the year started off, I was moving into my fourth month of pregnancy. We were just letting friends and acquaintances know about the coming baby. My parents, Peter and I had just agreed that we would buy a house together and were beginning the search in earnest. January, February and March were open houses, quick lunches and trips from Cobble Hill to Forte Green to Park Slope and back (for those of you unfamiliar with Brooklyn: trips in circles in Brooklyn). April found Peter and me in Italy on a long promised vacation. We visited Rome, Florence, Naples and Ischia Island. We hadn’t been back for a week when high blood pressure put me in the hospital and brought Katya into the world two months early, a tiny screaming kicking red ball of skin and bones. May was full of trips to and from the hospital for me, Peter, Peter’s mom, Peter’s sister and her family, my mom and dad and finally for Katya herself. For me, June, July and August were pumping, feeding, pumping, feeding, pumping, breast infection, feeding, pumping, another infection, and feeding. For the rest of my family these months were packing and unpacking divided by our separate moves in the same week to our new Brooklyn home. September marked one extremely important transition for me: I stopped pumping. Wow, what a difference! I could finally see the world beyond the ground where my next step would fall. October marked the other transition for us and the ascent to the peak on which we now stand: Katya started sleeping through the night. On these two transitions, hung all recovery and healing.

It is odd to have life be so intense for so much of the year. The fall for me was like a reemergence from out of deep water. Since then, everything seems to have started blossoming, especially Katya. She is now quickly approaching adulthood: she can almost sit up by herself, she eats solid food, and she yells randomly whenever enough attention is not being paid to her. She can chase the dog in her walker and grab the cats’ tails as they pass. I think we have a few more months until she hits adolensence.

Wishing you and your families the best of the new year.