In the last two weeks, the baby has learned:

1. Pulling up to standing

2. Clapping

3. Waving

4. Cruising

5. Sitting up from lying down

6. Making a downward doggish sort of thing that seems to be a failed attempt to crawl but nonetheless allows her to move about with startling efficiency given its mostly upward movement

Things the baby thinks are hysterical and/or awesome

1. Her sister

2. Her father

3. When I pretend to bite her index finger when she points it at me

4. Being tossed and caught

5. Peek-a-boo

6. Taking a bath (but not always; see also: Things that make the baby angry)

7. Whacking spoons on her high chair tray

8. Whacking drinks coasters on the coffee table

9. Whacking her toothbrushes on the coffee table (make that: whacking anything on anything)

10. Her toothbrushes

Unorthodox greetings adopted by the baby

1. Acknowledges her father at all possible opportunities with a pointy-finger-gun sort of gesture

1a: has said “dada” but not consistently enough to convince us that this is as yet anything other than coincidence

Teeth of the baby:

2 incisors, 1 fang, all of them surprisingly difficult to capture on film

Exciting poops:

1. The day she ate half an avocado

2. That time she had the freeze-dried banana-apple snacks

Things that make the baby angry:

1. Ear infections

2. Fevers

3. Getting medicine for either of the above

4. Taking a bath, sometimes

5. Getting out of the bath, sometimes

6. Having her diaper changed, sometimes; no correlation to the contents of said diaper

7. Waiting for us to catch on that she wants her diaper changed, sometimes; no correlation to the contents of said diaper

8. Getting a bottle

9. Not getting a bottle

The baby on film:

Lucy tips over:

Lucy stands up:

I was going to do a big “Wooo, I’m 40! My wisdoms, let me show you them” post yesterday, but then the baby was even more furnace-like than usual Sunday-Monday night, which turned out to be a double ear infection.

We put her on meds right away but they took a while to take effect and last night her fever spiked to 104.2, which is officially pants-wetting-panic-inducing as far as I’m concerned, and I spent 2 hours wiping her down with cool washcloths to get her out of the danger zone.

I gave her more meds in the morning for fever and the infections, a process about which she was so angry and resistant that I had to wrap her in a towel like you do a cat when you have to dose them. She retaliated by throwing up on me (and my nice pajamas that Jim got me for my birthday, thanks kid!). Also now she has trust issues with me and will only nurse because she’s suspicious of all other foodstuff turning out to be camouflaged medicine. I think. I don’t know, but that seemed to be the general intention behind the screaming and pushing-away and spitting.

Then I got in the shower with her figuring that a luke-warm one would help with the fever as well as the puke, but then while we were standing around airdrying she peed on me, which may have been revenge for all the temperature-monitoring. When your baby is that hot they want you to take her temperature every 30 to 60 minutes and it turns out that babies are not into frequent rectal probing any more than the rest of us are.

I stayed home and I was going to clean the house because I’m a girl and competitive and a martyr and if I’m home I should be doing something helpful only then I remembered I was up half the night wiping down a dangerously feverish baby and then the vomit and the peeing and I started to wonder what the hell my problem is, because if any situation justifies mindless TV-watching, this is pretty much it.

I watched a movie in which Fassbender is a Nazi who keeps a family as his blood-providing slaves so that he can complete a Nordic occult ritual to create his third eye and then the family members capture this dude and he escapes and then he and his brother come back for payback which is so not a good idea when you’re dealing with blood-slave-keeping-occult Nazis, but whatever, because at some point, the house where they were holed up was attacked by a vampire zombie horse on fire.

A vampire zombie horse ON FIRE, you guys.

At this point, I realized that the movie was terrible, but in that way that is also FANTASTIC.

The end.

I walked up to my former teacher expecting to have to re-introduce myself and remind her who I was.

“Anna-Maria!” she said. “I feel like we should have U2 playing right now!”

So, uh, OK, I guess she remembered me better than I thought she would. (From sophomore to senior year, I was obsessed with the band and wrote about them, or at least made reference to them, in every. single. paper. I wrote, including a 5-pager about what it’s like to hear the first note in a U2 concert. I can perseverate with the best of them. Also, in retrospect: OMG. My poor professors.)

We caught up on the basics (she says Hi, Mom!); she congratulated me on having two girls, made sure I had a partner who was supportive, and made sympathetic noises when I bemoaned the fact that I hadn’t been able to get into the oversold Q&A with Werner Herzog a few weeks back. She clued me into him 20 years ago — although back then he was still the insane filmmaker who thought nothing of attempting to drag a boat over a mountain in a near-futile quest that paralleled the plot of the film he was making — and we agreed that he was equally awesome now that he was less nuts.

“He is such a nice, nice man,” she said. “Which was reassuring. It’s awful when you meet your idol and he’s shit.”

And that five-minute encounter, right there, encapsulates why I took 60 percent of the classes required for my major with her.

The end.

This morning, Eliza asked me if it was true that 7-year-old girls could become pregnant.

After the screaming inside my brain stopped, I asked her where she’d heard that and she said one of her friends had read it on the internet.

I told her as neutrally as I could that her friend was mistaken and that even though people are born with all of their parts, some of them don’t start working until they get older.

This seemed to relieve her.

“Okay, good, because I read that you can’t make babies until you’re 14 or 15,” she said, nodding with satisfaction that I had confirmed her understanding of the facts.

“Where did you read that, honey?” I asked.

“In a book at the Children’s Museum,” was her response, before going on to tell me that she had also read up on duck development and dairy-farming recently, the latter research including a bit on calving which included the information that mommy cows lick the mucus off their newborns. I told her that I did not lick the mucus off Lucy, but that babies are indeed also covered in goo when they are born. That amused and horrified her in equal measure, so we had a good laugh about it.

This exchange answered for me, finally, the question I’ve been pondering for the better part of a year: Why has my super-inquisitive science-nerd of a daughter never asked about the particulars of baby-making? Of course she would’ve looked it up on her own.

I am torn between ‘OMG we’re here ALREADY’, ‘thank god that she feels comfortable and trusting enough to ask me about information that troubled her’, ‘dammit, I should’ve been there to help her more’, and ‘I love the totally-Eliza way she acquired and synthesized the information she was after’.

I guess I’m stopping off at the bookstore tonight on my way home to pick up some new reading material.

Also: Children’s Museum? What? (but, thanks.)

ETA HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS:

Eliza: Hey Mommy I’m making a farm. There’s a cow, and she wants to have babies only the bull won’t give her his liquid to make her pregnant because he’s afraid because it’s his first time!

AM: *blink*blink*

much later, after I have collected the bits of my brain that are lying on the floor and stuffed them back in my head…

AM: So, where did you learn about the bull and his liquid?

Eliza: In my book about the dairy farm (NB: She has been going on and on all week about this library book and how she wants to be a dairy farmer because “It sounds like so much fun, Mommy!” which is, in retrospect, officially the most disturbing thing I have heard all week.)

AM, dancing with the devil: So, did they say anything about the bull and how he gets the liquid to the cow?

Eliza, with a soupcon of scientific disgust: No! They weren’t very specific at all.

I can’t decide whether to get her a book on puberty or animal husbandry.

***

In other developmental milestones, the baby has learned to clap, and everyone here is dead from cute, the end.

***

I thank you all for your nice comments about my essay. I was really nervous about it, but I’m feeling much better. I am going to go to the goodbye reception for my teacher (if only so I can apologize for all the typos in it) and I am hopeful now that she won’t be all, “YOU! You have single-handedly blighted my teaching career with your drivel!”

However, I am once again the only person who finds me funny. I have been laughing for a week at this Sarah-Silverman-levels-of-inappropriate sentence that I wrote:

I feel a little guilty about watching A Dangerous Method the same way, because I’m against spanking, …

This (with some identifying details changed for repost here) is what I wrote for the English professor I mentioned in the previous post. I decided I like it, so I’m reposting here:

For a while, you could watch Sans Soleil on Netflix.

I found it one day last year as I idly flicked through the offerings. In our household corollary to possession being 9 tenths of the law, she who has the remote control remote and a black belt, and is gestating a massive baby, picks the non-linear French documentary essay over her baffled husband’s objections.

When my older daughter (not the one being gestated at the time) is ready, I’m going to show her this movie, and she’s finally going to understand why she has been surrounded by maneki neko figurines all her life.

When she’s even older, I’m going to watch Aguirre, Wrath of God with her, and she’s finally going to realize why monkeys freak me the fuck out.

The little one, meanwhile, is going to wonder why German-accented voices soothe her until she figures out about the time she spent sprawled on my lap, napping, while I watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams and a handful of Herzog’s other films.

I feel a little guilty about watching A Dangerous Method the same way, because I’m against spanking, but at least it wasn’t Dead Ringers.

All of this is to say, the things I learned and experienced in your classes, Professor ____, are things I carry with me to this day. Those classes influenced my tastes, especially in film and in non-fiction writing. There are other, more ephemeral connections — I had to look up the name of the it just now, but moments from Joyce at 34 have bubbled to the fore of my memory recently as I’ve struggled again to figure out a way to be a working mother to a newborn all over again with my youngest. Changing a baby on a computer table in my office is fraught with personal/political resonance and I find myself thinking about my thesis on mother-daughter relationships in film and how I really didn’t have a clue. Part of me wants to read it again and see what I’ve learned. The other part of me cringes and thinks I should probably thank you for your patience with my clueless, belligerent, daughter-less self.

You know that I wrote for the newspaper, locally, for years after I graduated, and it was a job I loved. Now, I work at ______, doing public relations for the _________, and I moonlight as an editor for a  magazine.

My job is less about writing than I might’ve hoped, but I haven’t abandoned writing. I can’t remember the name of it, but the course I took with you and _______ on autobiography, both reading and writing, in my junior year, first set me on the path to the kind of writing I do almost daily on my blog. It brings me tremendous satisfaction to know that my girls will have this record of their life and how much I love them.

My writing there has provided a point of connection with my mother that continually delights me — our written conversations in English about our lives and our experiences as mothers and daughters has made our relationship a profoundly different one than it was when we were talking, in person, in Dutch. Who knew, and thank you, however indirectly, for setting us on that path. I had no idea.

In some ways, I guess, I haven’t gone very far at all since I walked out of my last class with you — down the road a stretch, still thinking about my place in the mother-daughter continuum, still falling in love with some filmmaker or writer or band and figuring out why they mean that much to me. But it feels like a right, and good place to be, and I am grateful to you for being one of the handful of teachers who have helped me figure out a way to make it all meaningful.