Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

parenting

extra sleep sunday

by

Last night I slept the sleep of the dead. This morning, too. Really, all day.

I was already nodding off in my chair after dinner. I barely made it through supervising kid bedtime activities. Then I was out again for fifteen hours of pure unconscious bliss until late in the morning, when I woke up, ate breakfast, and then promptly took a nap.

I’m not sick. I hadn’t worked out extra hard. I slept perfectly fine the night before. I just needed extra sleep.

No, not just needed. Wanted. Desired. Craved.

It was glorious. Pure luxury. 5 stars out of 5, would sleep that much again.

Something not enough parents explain to you as a non-parent or an expecting parent is how rare extra sleep will be for at least the next decade of your life.

Or, if they do tell you about it, they make it sound like it will be purely out of spite. The spite of a tiny rage-bomb of an infant who will never sleep. Also, the spite of your partner, who will never again be willing to cover for you for the morning so you can catch up on sleep.

And then you’re like, “of course they will, we both love to sleep in, they’ll never do me like that.”

Here’s the actual secret I’ve discovered, as someone with a kid who has always slept through the night and who has an amazing parenting tag team partner:

Parenting programs your brain to believe that sleeping extra means danger.

I’m not sure if it’s evolution at work or a result of our modern lives, but I find this is true even when my kid is many miles away on a camping trip with said parenting tag team partner, leaving me alone in the house to sleep to my heart’s content.

As a parent, oversleeping is always a scary prospect. It equals not checking on a diaper in time. Or a hungry kid trying to forage for their own breakfast. Or missing school dropoff. Or simply getting your kid up so late that their sleep schedule is ruined for days to come.

They’re all dangers external to your own well-being, so they’re an impossible alarm clock of anxiety to turn off. It’s not the same as hitting the snooze button as you tell yourself you don’t mind having to take the late bus to work. At some point, you stop being asleep because your brain is trained to spring into action.

Over the years we adapt. We affirm ourselves with statements like, “I’m a morning person now” and “I cannot imagine wasting that much of the day.” But the truth of the matter is if we want to sleep the sleep of the dead, usually it involves feeling like death rather than doing it just for the lazy weekend joy of it.

That’s why last night was so delightful. It was a random act of drowsiness. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I slept that long in a single sprint of unconsciousness apart from being ill. I didn’t have a single damn reason I needed all of that sleep and I got it anyway.

And I’d do it again. If my brain would let me.

Captain Crunch and the Butterfinger Cowboy

by

The tastes of many American snack foods have become a distant memory after five years spent living in New Zealand.

A few familiar American snack brands make it to our remote shores and supermarket shelves, usually via companies with an Australian outpost. We can buy Cheerios and the occasional Fruit Loops, and there are $13 pints of Ben & Jerry’s to be had for the big spenders, but the vast amount of familiar expat snacks are absent from most Kiwi grocery stores

Mostly I don’t mind. My solution has largely been to cook a lot more meals and to eschew snack foods like cookies, chips, and crackers entirely. Why start a fresh snacking habit when I can instead scan down an aisle of unfamiliar cookie packages and not know what a single one of them taste like?

Being oblivious to local brands is a terrific diet.

The one kink in this flawless snack free life is that I sometimes catch myself regaling the kid with one of my distant snack food memories. As she has grown older I’ve realized how many of my stories tie to specific foods, like the routine of buying Twizzlers every time I went to the movies (and how it’s essential to enjoy them when they are fresh) or the excitement of discovering I had a Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpet in my lunch (and the process of rubbing them against your shirt to make sure the frosting wouldn’t get stuck to the plastic).

While I don’t necessarily miss the indulgences I describe to her, I do sometimes regret that I can’t give her the same experiences. I don’t need her to like all of the same snacks as me, but being unable to give her the opportunity to turn her nose up at them makes me feel like I’m missing some essential aspect of the parenting experience.

One snack in particular, has come up again and again in these conversations: Captain Crunch cereal. Yes, I know the actual name is “Cap’n Crunch,” but I’m not typing that repeatedly. It’s undignified for a man of the Captain’s position and tenure.

I explained the mouth-shredding experience of eating Captain Crunch to the kid at least a dozen times over. I’m uncertain why Fruit Loops were able to make the ocean-spanning journey to our shores and stores while the good Captain – himself a seafarer of some renown – could not. New Zealand loves peanut butter!

(E’s theory is that Captain Crunch (actually, a Commander) is obviously modeled on historical colonizers, who aren’t as welcomed as junk food mascots here as they are in the states. My theory is that because Kiwis don’t dip cookies in milk, they simply aren’t interested in more cookie-esque cereals since there’s no built-in allure to eating a bowl full of them.)

(Seriously, they don’t dip cookies in milk here. It’s a whole ‘nother post entirely.)

Occasionally I’ll fall down the internet rabbit hole of looking into buying Captain Crunch by the case. Even in bulk, the cost of having it shipped to New Zealand is prohibitive. Plus, I’d be crushed to find out that customs had incinerated a case of contraband cereal for violating some form of border integrity (which has happened to E before while trying to import spices).

It was these memories (and cravings) for the Captain that found the kid and I staring into the tantalizing maw of US import store in our local shopping center a few weeks ago. It is tucked into an odd corner of the parking lot such that I don’t usually need to walk past it, but a rainy day of household errands had us scurrying from from awning to awning to avoid getting soaked.

There we were, slightly damp and slightly breathless, peering through the window. There was the Captain, his smiling face splayed across a row of familiar red boxes, smiling back at me. It was the first time I had seen him in person in almost five years. [Read more…] about Captain Crunch and the Butterfinger Cowboy

pushy little George

by

I thought I’d have more than a two weeks of EV6 being in school before I had to deal with explaining bullies to her.

I also didn’t expect that bully would be a very pushy two-year old, but at this point nothing about our experiences in New Zealand surprises me.

On one of the first days I picked EV6 up from her new school, I saw a toddler built like a fireplug who was really enthusiastic about grabbing and pushing. He tried to grab a book from EV repeatedly, and when she eventually managed to dismiss him  he redirected his attentions to a tiny, reedy toddler in the the corner of the room.

He gave the tinier toddle one push. Two pushes. A third push. At first I thought the two kids were playing, but then I saw tears welling up in the eyes of the reedy little one and before I could move one of the teachers sprung into action and scooped him out of the corner while gentle admonishing the pushy sparkplug.

This pushy little spark plug was George*, and to hear her tell it EV6’s days are chiefly concerned with avoiding his pushes.

*His name isn’t actually George, but I now asked EV6 no less than four times if that was his name only to have her correct me, so we’re just going with it since that’s what my brain is convinced to be true.

I asked about EV6 about her day as we were driving home the next day, and she replied, “Oh, I spent a lot of it sitting in a tree.”

“Oh,” I replied, “were you having fun climbing trees with your friends?”

“No, it was that George kept pushing me and I climbed the tree because he wouldn’t stop.”

Let me tell you: I was seeing way more red in that moment than I was seeing the road. I was seething with parental rage. [Read more…] about pushy little George

35-for-35: 2016 – “Mountains” by Dirty Holiday

by

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]This is actually a post about the 36th song from 35 years of my life.

I’ve never understood how “Best of the Year” lists can come out in December. There’s a whole extra month of things that might be the best! There’s more year – more context – that hasn’t happened yet!

The lists should come out in January. I blame Christmas. Some might say I have declared a war on it.

I think “Best of Year” lists should come out in the following January, or maybe even March or April. Who can even know the shape of the year without a little time and hindsight? How many of these 35 songs would I have chosen right at the end their years rather than after? In many cases, I hadn’t even heard them year.

I don’t know what hindsight will tell me about 2016. It was tempting to pick “Blackstar” or “Lazarus” as a reminder of those brief first 10 days of 2016 when it seemed everything was possible before the sad, awful mess of this year set in. Maybe in hindsight one of those will be my song of 2016.

For now, my pick is a song from just two weeks later. Actually, it was the first thing I heard other than David Bowie after his death. The song is “Mountains” by Dirty Holiday, a moniker for one of the many projects of Philly singer-songwriter Katie Barbato.

It also happens to be EV’s favorite song of the year.

This will forever go down as the first song I discovered and loved at exactly the same time as EV. She was sitting at our dining room table the first time I played it from my laptop, and as she requested Dirty Holiday’s Nobody’s Sober EP again and again it grew to be our favorite song amongst a strong crop.

There’s something about how the song picks up from a bluesy, acoustic strum to something larger .The arrangement and production is a perfect fit for this tune. In particular, I’d describe those organ parts as “lurid” – so swirling and colorful that there is almost something prickly and sinister about them, lending a different meaning to Barbato’s tossed off “da dut da” above them.

One Wednesday over the summer I brought EV to the Academy of Natural Sciences to see the dinosaurs for the first time. However, in documenting the story on the blog this summer, I skipped my favorite part.

EV and I reached the intersection of 19th street and Walnut, where 19th is interrupted by Rittenhouse Square. As we crossed from the west side to the east, we very literally bumped into Katie Barbato and her husband Matt. We hugged hello, and then I leaned down to introduce EV.

“EV, this is Miss Katie.” Then, it dawned on me that EV knew exactly who Miss Katie was. “EV, it’s Katie Barbato.”

Here is an artist’s rendering of EV’s face in that moment:

steven-universe-star-eyes

Katie, Matt, and I chatted about Katie’s record and my purple hair for a few minutes while EV hid behind my legs in awe. There we were in the middle of Center City, and her papa was talking to A ROCK STAR FROM THE IPOD. She did not say a single word to Katie or Matt, but as soon as we said our goodbyes the only thing she could talk about for the rest of the day was, “Did you know that I met Katie Barbato?”

Requests for “Mountains” saw an uptick after that, which I didn’t even think was possible.

You can buy the entire Nobody’s Sober EP at BandCamp for $4. It is five songs long and each song is way better than a dollar, so that is a steal.

35-for-35: 2012 – “Madness” by Muse

by

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]EV is a very musical child.

I know, shocking.

muse-the-2nd-lawShe not only pretends that she fronts a band, but actually writes songs for that band, rehearses them, and then sings them to us. She’s also got pretty solid pitch, can memorize most lyrics after two practice runs, and has started singing harmony to my originals when I play them for her.

She has a pair of musical parents, and has already sat in on dozens of rehearsals, but I like to think all of her musical interest and acumen is down to one song: “Madness” by Muse.

I’ve enjoyed Muse ever since I first heard an a cappella group sing “Time Is Running Out” back in college. There’s something about Matthew Bellamy’s rangy voice and the Queen-like bombast of their biggest songs that draws me in.

As with Kings of Leon, I continued to follow Muse’s releases oblivious to the fact that they were turning into the most popular band in the land. Their sixth studio album, The 2nd Law, came out on September 28th and I was already sure that I liked it when I heard “Madness” on the radio for the first time on Sunday, November 18th, on its way to being the longest-running Alternative Rock number one song of all time.

I remember the day, because that was the day we learned we were pregnant with EV. We were driving back home from seeing our friend Gina (not that one, the other one) in a play and the song came on the radio. We both sang along and traded the vocal percussion back and forth, smiled giddily at the “some kind of madness” that was about to take control of our lives.

After that car ride, Muse’s omnipresent “Madness” became the secret anthem of our pregnancy.

When we arrived at the hospital to deliver EV nine months later, we were met by one of the older midwives from the group of six we had been seeing. She was an authoritarian hippy, easy-going and new age-y but able and ready to command us at a moment’s notice. I know I wasn’t the pregnant one, but that’s pretty much everything I was looking for in a midwife.

Unfortunately, her hours of coverage were up midway through E’s labor. Just as we were getting comfortable with her, she was replaced with a young midwife who we’d only met once before. We were a bit bummed. How had we spent all these months forging relationships with a group of women who would deliver our child and missed getting to know the one who’d actually do the delivering.

The bummedness didn’t last long.

The midwife’s name was Erin, another E-name in a room with E and an nurse named Elizabeth and, potentially, a little E-named baby, if our baby turned out to be a girl.

Erin shared E’s birthday – not just the day, but the year as well.

Finally – and to this day, I find this last coincidental detail utterly insane – like E, Erin sang in a semi-professional a capella group.

Erin was meant to delivery EV. It was all part of the madness.

The first image of her I recorded somewhere other than in my gray matter. She is about 15 minutes old.

The first image of her I recorded somewhere other than in my gray matter. She is about 15 minutes old.

E and I had joked for a long time that she wanted the rocking soundtrack to Supernatural Season One playing throughout the entirety of her labor, but as the evening progressed I noticed she simply wasn’t getting into a good zone listening to all that classic rock.

The first time “Madness” came on she went into a sort of trance. I played it again and reflexively began singing the “mm-mm-mm-ma madness” part under my breath. Then, Erin began to sing along in harmony. Then, to our surprise, E began to sing too, quietly, between her contractions.

Almost every other moment of the labor process is a blur of details to me until EV emerged, but that moment remains frozen in time in that way all of my most significant memories are – where I can see it happen as an omniscient 3rd-person narrator looking in on the scene over my own shoulder.

Music. “Madness.” EV incubated in it for nine months, us singing along to it in the kitchen, trading the vocal percussion back and forth, and it summoned her into this world.