confessions of a reformed tourist
One night when Bean was about eight months old, we took the subway from my dad’s house in The Bronx to my friend’s apartment on the Upper East Side. He was still Snugli-bound back then, so it was an easy trip. Pleasant. Fun. We had a good night. He found her stash of cat food [...]
My brother has one of those video cameras with a little screen that you can flip around. I guess so that you can use it to tape yourself? Yeah. He brought it out on Tuesday to record Bean blowing out his birthday candles and opening his presents. At first he kept the monitor where he [...]
I’ve been analog for four whole days. Four. Whole. Days. Weird at first, but then I got over myself and it actually felt pretty good. And it’s going to be the norm for the next couple of months or so. Some big things are in the works. I’m taking a class, self-publishing a little book [...]
He loves brooms, mops, the dishwasher, all varieties of soap, buckets and sponges. Mommy, I want to wash. Mommy, I want to sweep. Mommy, why don’t you use the dishwasher? These are some of the first sentences he ever spoke. He was about eight months old when I went back to work. Carol, whose primary [...]
It started when he was newborn. It’s funny, you know? Because you’re pregnant for nine months, waiting for the baby. Anticipating the baby. Imagining the baby. Et cetera. And then! Labor and delivery, which is basically like military basic training, except condensed and in your vagina. And then you bring home the baby! And what [...]
You’re too big to climb on my back but too little to monkey up the tree. You’re too big to be carried everywhere but too little to make any of your own decisions. (Except for maybe sometimes you get to choose between chicken nuggets and sunflower butter.) I never said life was fair. Or that [...]
I used to take lots of videos. Short things, nothing too special. The idea was to capture a minute’s worth of what my life in Grenada was like. What Bean was like as a baby. For a while I forgot about the videos. I was busy with other things. Primarily, being miserable. But recently I’ve [...]
Because someone expressed concerned regarding the girliness of Bean’s curls in the video I posted the other day. That video is over a year old. At the time the child was a few months shy of his third birthday and had never, not even once, had a haircut. That plus the moisture and warmth of [...]
It started about two years ago when Bean first figured out that neither his grandmother nor I have a penis. He was AMAZED. For a while afterward, he’d randomly point at one of us and say, “No penis?” He’d ask me. Then his grandmother. And his babysitter if she happened to be there. Once we [...]
A few weeks ago Bean was really into Batman. George Clooney-Batman, believe it or not. He saw the movie and he thought Poison Ivy was “so pretty, especially her hair”. He also informed me on more than one occasion, in a very SRSBSNS tone of voice, that “this is why Superman works alone.” So I asked [...]
