Literature or Psycho, the movie? (HoL 6)

I tried to write last night, but Isaac had other plans. He was clean, fed, and half asleep. I would put him in the crib, walk across the house, sit down, start to type, and he would start crying. Initially, I’d let him cry for a few minutes, but then he would start the “goat boy cry” (Yes it really sounds like a goat.), and follow it up with a round of coughing for extra guilt. I would go back in, check all the essentials, calm him down, and walk back to the computer. Usually before I could sit down, he would be crying again.

Sometimes I’d walk in, and he would be mad because he spit his pacifier out. I would explain that his pacifier is one and a half inches from his face tethered to his jammies. He couldn’t seem to grasp this concept at all. In this regard, babies are complete idiots.

So for most of the night, I’d sit down and try to write something funny or sweet, and this little dictator would yell from the next room for the sheer joy of watching me lose my mind trying to calm him down. Nothing sweet or funny came from last night.

Even as I write this, he is fussing and crying from his bouncy seat. I finally had to take him outside to Nancy, so I wouldn’t write anymore bad stuff about him. I have two baby calming techniques that work temporarily. The first one is, I put the pacifier in his mouth and then gently blow on his face. I don’t know if it’s the sensation of the breeze, or the beer on my breath, but generally he will settle. When I really am about to lose my mind though and ready to scream, I do just that. I’ll hold the baby face to face with me, and making crying sounds right back at him, only louder. This will usually startle him, and as long as I’m “Wah Wah”ing at him, he will quietly stare at me with a puzzled look on his face.

The boy can push me to the edge of sanity when he is in a bad mood, but at the same time, I am absolutely crazy for him. (The same can be said about Nancy, but that’s another story all together.)

I can be completely exhausted at work, and I just pine to come home and hold him. Every morning, I wake up and think, “I could just call in sick and stay home with him today.” It’s the closest thing I’ve had to a “Crush” since I was in middle school, but it’s much more intense.

If he is around, I love holding him and cuddling him. I’m not much of a touchy person. I have three rules for hugging. 1) I hug immediate family. 2) I hug people who I’ve known over ten years 3) I will hug a woman if she is crying and if I think hugging her will make her stop crying. I was raised Southern Baptist and the problem with touching other people is that you might enjoy it, and that could lead to dancing.

I love feeling Isaac’s weight ( eleven pounds, five ounces) on my chest when he is sleeping. I love to feel his head rooting around on my shoulder. I love to feel his soft hair under my chin. I love feeling him make a fist around my pinkies. I love to feel the strength in his legs when he kicks. I love to zrbrt his belly. (Up north they call it blowing a raspberry. Since I saw it called “Zrbrt” on the Cosby show, it just stuck.).

He’ll look at me and smile, and make funny noises. He has been trying out new sounds, and I think he enjoys experimenting to see what kinds of sounds he can actually make.

He is also eating a lot more. Sometimes he’ll only eat two ounces of formula, other times, he’ll take four, and then chase it with some milk. I’m thinking of installing a giant hamster bottle in his crib, and filling it with breast milk. It just seems easier.

We have started praying together at night. I’ll read three books and then I’ll say a prayer with him. We started out with “Now I lay me down to sleep”, but after saying that one, it seemed fairly violent and scary for the last thought before drifting off to sleep.

For those of you who don’t know, the prayer goes like this “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE, I PRAY THE LORD MY SOUL TO TAKE.” This is a Metallica lyric, not for baby.

We switched over to the Lord’s prayer and close it out with the “God Bless” section. This is where we mention family, friends, and complete strangers, that we care about. It’s strange praying out loud in a private setting, but it’s a very holy time for the two of us.

We’ve left him alone with someone we don’t know for the first time last week. Our church hires college kids to man the nursery on Wednesday nights. Nancy did really well, but when that class was over, she was ready to get her baby.

So Isaac is almost two months old. How do my pre and post birth expectations about having a baby differ? First having a baby is not impossible, but at the same time I have a huge new respect for single parents. You just need to be a little clever, and anal retentive about planning. Secondly, I seriously underestimated how crazy in love, and how crazy frustrated I am capable of being (sometimes both in the span of five minutes).

Lastly, Nancy read the book, “I’ll Love You Forever” to Isaac today. She couldn’t help but cry every time the mother sang to her son, “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be”. It wasn’t until afterwards, that she realized what a creepy ass book this is, and what sort of messed up family they are.

If you haven’t read the book, the Mom drives across town in the middle of the night, and breaks into her adult son’s room while he’s sleeping and cradles him. Later on, little Oedipus sneaks into mom’s retirement home and cradles her while she’s sleeping.

I prefer nice wholesome children’s books like Beatrix Potter’s “The Fierce Bad Rabbit”.

Big Matt

Little Treasures (HoL 5)

Well life just keeps on zipping by here. The nurse came out and weighed Isaac a couple of days ago and he is up to eleven pounds five ounces. We are hoping to instill an early sense of shame on him for gaining weight, but it doesn’t seem to be taking.

I do have a funny story from a few weeks ago, that I kept forgetting to tell. I have a friend named Matt Williams who lives In Auburn, Alabama. Matt and I have known each other for most of our lives. My birthday is October 6, his is October 7. Both of our parents have the same anniversary date. Oddly enough, we are both named “Matt” as well. Anyway, Little Matt and I have a peculiar habit of giving each other odd birthday gifts. It started many years ago, when little Matt gave me five dollars for my birthday, and on the next day, I gave him five dollars back.

The next year, a carrot was given in addition to the five dollars, and the next year a potato, and so on. Let me just say, never get in a weird present contest with someone who’s dad is a scientist. You are going to lose. A few years ago, I got the original carrot back for my birthday. For years, Matt and I have been passing back and forth a large wooden statue named Shaheera that I pulled out of a garbage pile. She is probably four feet tall and weighs 30 lbs. The idea is to get it to the other person’s house without them knowing or having a chance to refuse it.

Little Matt had arranged an anonymous “Drive by” dumping of the statue one time while he was three states away. I was out innocently mowing the yard, when a car drove up to my house, someone yelled “Hey!”, and I saw Shaheera dumped in my front yard. The card sped away with me yelling and cussing in it’s exhaust.

The last time he got her, she managed to find her way into his lab about a month after I visited. I managed to hide her at one of his friend’s houses in Alabama. One day, an undergrad grabbed Little Matt and told him that some woman had found a bird that she couldn’t identify, and she needed his help. This “woman” was waiting at his workstation in the lab. She is still at his house today.

So anyway……..Isaac’s umbilical cord fell off a couple of weeks ago…………

I wanted to put it in the shadow box my mother-in-law had made, but Nancy pretty much ruled that out. I hid it in a box of baby pictures, and she told me that she was going to throw away the gnarled stump of dried black flesh, unless I did something with it. Then it hit me.

I wrapped it up tissue paper and sent it to Little Matt in the mail. This is probably a federal crime.

It took Little Matt a few minutes to figure out what it was, but he laughed heartily. When he called, I asked how the stem cell research was going.

Who came up with the simile, “I’m going to sleep like a baby”? I always thought that meant that you were going to sleep soundly and peacefully. It evidently means you are going to sleep for a maximum of four hours and then wake up screaming at the top of your lungs and covered in human waste.

I’ve had many folks tell me that to get the baby to sleep better at night, you have to keep them up during the day. This of course is total bullshit. People say this assuming that a baby is a rational creature. I explain to Isaac that at this stage in his life, he is supposed to sleep “X” number of hours, and since he has been up for “X minus 24” hours, that he should sleep for “X” hours.

Not so much.

His newest trick is that he can find his pacifier if you let it touch his cheek. It’s not exactly sawing a woman in half, but dammit man he’s working on it.

Nancy has grown concerned that we aren’t doing enough to stimulate his mind. I assured her that he is one month old, and there is not a whole lot we can do. We both read to him regularly, play music for him (They Might Be Giants mostly, because I want him to be a huge geek like his old man.), dance with him, and he listens to National Public Radio for about eight damned hours a day. What else can we do for him?

We tried to get him into some online classes at F.S.U., but they said he was over qualified.

Oh, by the way, Little Matt says that Isaac will be getting his umbilical cord back. Probably on his eighteenth birthday.

One final note. We are probably going to do Isaac’s dedication at the church on Martin Luther King weekend in January (That’s Robert E. Lee’s birthday to all you North Carolina folks). Everyone is welcome to the celebration at the church.

Big Matt

Presentation of Isaac Ryan Cravey, September 11, 2005

Holy God,

Thank you for this tiny bundle, this miracle, Isaac Ryan Cravey…Isaac means “laughter”, Ryan…his father’s name.

Thank you for his safe arrival and for his and Mommy’s good health.

Thank you for placing Isaac into this family where he will be overwhelmed with love, intellect, compassion, wit, life lived wide open and out loud. May Matt and Nancy drink deeply of the deliciousness of Isaac’s life.

Thank you for the laughter you will provide him, for you are the source of laughter…at times irrepressible, at times contagious, at times his safety net, at times a safety net for those who love him.

Thank you for his larger family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Thank you for his Sunday School teachers, choir teachers, extended worship leaders, tone chimes teachers, youth leaders, his entire church family who fell in love with him even before first sight.

I pray that we, as Isaac’s church, will grow with him, re-experience life with him, teach him what Jesus’ love looks like on Earth, hold his hand on his exciting journey, cry and, yes, laugh with him.

This prayer we offer in the name of Jesus who wants us to be trusting, just as Isaac trusts his mommy and daddy,

Amen


By Janice Kirkman

Connections (HoL 4)

Nancy, Isaac, Max, and I went on a walk around the neighborhood this evening. While walking through the far side of the neighborhood, I noticed something that most folks probably didn’t pay much attention to. One of the trees in our neighbor’s yard had turned almost entirely yellow, and had dropped half of it’s leaves to the ground. I pointed it out to Nancy and she said “Gosh they are falling really early.” It’s not that they are falling early, it’s that time is moving quickly.

Isaac has already sort of outgrown one outfit. He has a “hand-me-down” set of red footie pajamas from some friends of ours. I put them on him last night, and found that I couldn’t fasten the top snap without a great deal of effort. The outfit was so tight he looked like a sausage stuffed into a skin, or perhaps he was wearing a spandex biking outfit.

He has also learned to smile somewhat regularly this weekend. This is a very cool trick and he has already got a few girls’ phone numbers in the nursery.

We presented him to the church today. At our church, we do a baby presentation on the child’s first Sunday with the congregation. This is sort of a formal introduction to the rest of the gang. One of the deacons, Janice Kirkman, holds the baby, introduces him, says an open eyed prayer, and then hoists the baby up like in the Lion King. It was a very special time for us, and Janice said a beautiful and kind prayer. In a few months from now, we will have a slightly longer “Baby Dedication” service. It’s a small service in the middle of a normal Sunday morning. It’s similar to a christening in that folks usually come in from out of town to go to it, and the family usually provides a small lunch afterwards. It’s different in the service is more about making a covenant between the church and the parents that they will help to raise the child, and support each other. Out pastor, Michael Usey, will walk around the congregation, with the child, and talk about the family, and where the child gets his name from. It’s sort of like a eulogy in reverse. The church then gives Isaac a Bible.

I really like the idea of these ceremonies. There isn’t anything “magic” about them. God doesn’t all of a sudden love him more just because a certain prayer is said. It I love the idea of connecting ourselves to the history of the church. I think it is possible to experience God through the love of other people, and my family definitely feels loved at our church.

I also found out that Isaac really likes to dance. I will hold him in my arms and dance to one of the Schoolhouse Rock CDs in his room, and he seems to enjoy it. Most people enjoy watching me dance though.

Nancy and I still do things together, but we have slightly lower expectations for our free time. Today the whole family drifted in and out of sleep watching the Panthers football game together. It was pretty terrific.

Life is sweet, and I am savoring the marrow of it


Big Matt

Decision Tree (HoL 3)

Isaac is one month old today. It has gone by quickly, and at the same time, it also seems that our pre-child lives were long ago. He’s carved out a nice little niche for himself in our organization, and I think he’s an asset to the household. As my sister predicted, the cats do not realize they have been demoted. If the cats are crying for breakfast and Isaac is crying for breakfast, Isaac wins hands down.

Not every aspect of parenthood has been great. Our normal routine goes something like this, around ten, Nancy feeds him and goes to bed. It’s my job to keep him quiet as long as possible. Usually I can go until midnight then he either cries, or I go to sleep.

I had a breakthrough the other day. There are basically four reasons he cries.

1) He’s soiled himself. (His X-men name is going to be Shitstorm.) This is fairly obvious how to fix, and I’ve gotten pretty good at telling from the feel of the diaper if he is wet or not. I had always assumed that diapers were just filled with cotton of some poly-foam material. I think they are actually filled with some absorbent gel material. It probably never biodegrades and is quite possibly made from baby seal flippers or something. We also use the diaper genie, a device which produces what could only be described as a life sized model of an albino anaconda which has just eaten a dozen kittens in a row. My ecologically minded friends, the Williams’s, in Auburn, Alabama can sense the amount of garbage produced every time my child urinates and cry like that Indian in the commercial.

2) He’s bored. Entertainment for a one month old consists of picking the child up and moving him around, or putting something in his mouth. This is pretty straight forward, although he seems to enjoy watching me play “Advance Wars”, and “Age of Empires” on the computer. I’m glad he enjoys war strategy games as long he doesn’t pick up any of that goofy Dungeons and Dragons crap from his “ungodlyfather”.

3) He’s cold. We had a mini breakthrough when we realized he sleeps like….well a baby if we put him in footie pajamas.

4) He’s hungry. This is where the real breakthrough happened. We were so worried that “La Leche League” was going to bust through our windows if we gave him any formula that we held off. One night, it had been about an hour since his last feeding, Nancy was in bed, he was wailing like a banshee, and I was considering which house in the neighborhood would be the best doorstep to leave him on.

Finally I broke down. I didn’t care if he grew a third arm, or developed mad cow disease, I was going to feed him. I made a small amount of formula, and he sucked it down, and then popped the nipple off and licked the sides of the bottle. Then a miraculous thing happened. He turned into the Gerber baby. He fell asleep and didn’t wake up for a few hours. It was a very good thing.

Nancy has been feeling a little confined by the whole breast feeding thing as well. She has to time every trip so we can be home to feed. She occasionally pumps, but it takes forever, and you don’t really get that much. Now that we have loosened the restrictions a little on formula, she’s once again free to leave the house for more than 30 minutes at a time. Breastfeeding in a remote corner of the zoo is one thing, in the middle of Costco is something entirely different.

I spend a lot of time looking at Isaac. In the mornings this weekend, Nancy brings him into the bedroom and he and I look at each other. It’s a great way to start the day. I can’t tell yet what color his eyes are. In different light, they look brown, blue, or even gray. His other neat new trick is his smile. I know it’s not a real smile yet. (He hardly laughed at the movie “The Aristocrats” at all.), but when you do catch a glimpse of a smile, you feel like King Kong on cocaine. It’s a super concentration of all the good feelings about having a child in the first place. It’s good that it only lasts for a fleeting moment at a time, because it’s powerful stuff.

Finally (I know this is a cliché at this point), please find some way to donate to the folks down in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama. I can’t imagine having a small baby and not having food or water or diapers. I can’t imagine not having a cool, quiet place to let them sleep. We all hurt for when our fellow countrymen suffer, but Nancy and I have shed tears whenever we see the anger, frustration, and desperation in the eyes of a parent with small children in the middle of the chaos.

Big Matt