Blog: A work in progress.
Bebe: Anti-sleep as usual, but also outputting cuteness at such intense levels as to nearly counter my sleep deprivation.
Life: Alhamdulillah, Good. 🙂
Work: Yes! I actually have enough projects coming my way that I can choose which ones I want to do; SubhanAllah, what a luxury!
HF: MIA: Spending more time in traffic for work than at home, I miss HF. 🙁
That’s all folks! Real update coming soon to a blog near you.
Alhadulillah, Alhamdulillah, Khalid is asleep.
He’s been asleep since 10:15 (it’s 1 am now) and he’s woken up about five times since then (don’t ask, God knows why) and this is the point where you scream at me and ask WHY THE HECK AREN’T YOU SLEEPING TOO!?
Umm. Well. I can’t sleep.
I’ve been having this problem for the past week or so- even after putting long and odd hours into the Khalid Sleep Battle, when Khalid finally drops off to sleep I lay in bed next to him, wide awake, sometimes until his next feeding, which is generally 40 minutes later. I’m exhausted, I’m sleep-starved, I’m shaky and wobbly and worn out, but my brain is feverishly churning out thoughts related to Bloom’s Taxonomy and other pedagogical nonsense with zero significance at this hour.
This is Bloom’s Taxonomy. It’s a pyramid. Yep. Why is my brain thinking about it? Because the six words here represent six significant intellectual processes regarding learning behavior. The simplest is Knowledge, simply ‘knowing’ and being able to recall facts. After that is Understanding of the knowledge. After that is Application, where you can take that understanding and use it. So on and so on.
(I teach too, remember? American Accent Training? I’m an American, Dammit!)
So I was writing out my syllabus for an upcoming Accent Training class that I’m supposed to teach and I stumbled upon a copy of Bloom’s Taxonomy on the desktop. HF had put it there, because HF is an education-flavored guy too, and I thought it was cool. But now it has embedded itself in my brain and I’d rather be sleeping but here I am blogging about it at 1 am.
And I can’t sleep. I try to- when Khalid takes his afternoon nap I try to join him, but I mostly lay there are stare at the patterns on the pillowcases.
Ehow.com says I should:
And I’ve managed steps 1, 2, and 6, but hey, I’m still up. And now I’m blogging quantity over quality. And I’m out of warm milk. And I already ate all the dates, which are supposed to be high in tryptophan to make me sleepy.
Right Brain: Go to sleep you moron.Left Brain: Make me!
RB:I’m trying!
LB: Trying what?
RB: To make you go to sleep.
LB: I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m sleepy.
RB: Oh hey, have you heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy?
Well, actually, she didn’t, but that’s ok. Momma equipped me with resourcefulness as well as coping skills, so the fact that Khalid is wide awake and drumming his heels against his high chair doesn’t phase me much. Because I’m eating icecream. Five minutes ago though, it was getting to me quite alot, as I was well into hour number two of trying to put Khalid to sleep.
A note on bebeface- he bites, he kicks, he rages, and worst of all- he pinches.
Last night we went to bed at 4 am, and today had a very, very long day. Khalid was grouchy and had multiple small naps to fuel his angry little engine. I’ve been nauseated with exhaustion as well as insanely busy. And we drove to Abu Dhabi and back, too, which from where we live is nearly a 3 hour road trip. So I’m tired. Bebeface is tired. I don’t know about his logical processes, but mine are bordering on irrational. Well, they were until I had icecream. I was ready to put Khalid on the carpeted floor and walk away when I remembered that HF, who can sleep through alot, but not a full-on Khalid tantrum- has to wake up in three hours and go to work. So Khalid and I are here in the kitchen, he’s waving a rice-cracker around. I’m eating icecream. We both seem happy for the break.
His sleep schedule is nuts as usual. I’m on break from trying anything new. I’m just trying to catch whatever ZZZ’s I can, in whatever increments Khalid will let me. Speaking of whom, he is out of cracker and needs refill…
So things have been a little frustrating lately, and I find myself joining Khalid for his afternoon nap- lying in bed with him to feed him every 40 minutes as well as get some sleep myself.
ah, now he’s rubbing cracker crumbs into his eyebrows, which generally means he’s tired. time to go try again.
Last night was another interesting night, rather than nurse Khalid to sleep I tried the ‘crying it out in arms’ approach, which basically involved him screaming his little self tired- in my arms. Someone posted a link to this in the comments of one of the crying it out posts, and I’m not sure who it was, but they should also have posted a link to body building and developing muscle for high-stress baby-rocking. :p Khalid is, MashaAllah, over the 95% percentile for his weight and height, which means me bouncing almost 12 kilos (26 pounds) of angry, screaming, WWF-Wrestling baby in my arms for 20 minutes before he winds down and falls whining to sleep.
Alhamdulillah, he slept, and last night wasn’t too bad, although there were no long sleep stretches over an hour and a half. I think by now I’m so frazzled by the every-forty-minutes schedule that an hour and a half seems good. The other night I put Khalid to sleep and even though I was exhausted, I wandered in to the kitchen and got on to the laptop to do some work. Why not? I thought, he’s just going to wake up in forty minutes, why bother going to sleep?
But going back to the title of this post- Last night, about fifteen minutes into rocking and screaming and wrestling- my arms were burning (you know burning? it’s five minutes past aching and two minutes before dying) and my back was aching and I was getting frustrated and suddenly Khalid stops crying, looks up at me and says, “bap bap bap?” Then he smiles at me and launches into a few minutes of impossibly cute baby-babble, “pibpibpib, bap bap bap, nanagagagaGAK!” He lays relaxed in my arms, just making cute little sounds and smiling at me, and manages to undo all of the anger and frustration that had been piling up onto my shoulders just minutes ago.
SubhanAllah. Standing there in the dark, at 1:30 am, with aching body, aching feet, and 12 kilos of sleep-resistant babyfat in my arms- I laughed out loud. I kissed his soft little cheeks. I remembered that bed time is an ordeal for him too, and he’s not deliberately being difficult, he’s just being what he is- a baby.
We went to the pediatrician last week for his cough, and HF asked the doctor about Khalid’s atrocious sleep habits- waking every forty minutes, not sleeping at night, etc. The doctor patiently listened and then shrugged apologetically. “That’s normal, all children are like this.” We asked her if she was sure. She was. And she had her own kids too.
SubhanAllah, I sometimes forget how much I am blessed. Allah has blessed me with a beautiful, beautiful child, free from disabilities or conditions or any visible defects- ten perfectly chubby, perfectly formed fingers, same number of wiggly little toes, enormous gorgeous eyes, the sweetest, softest cheeks- Khalid is a perfect baby, and it’s my fault for forgetting- he’s a perfect baby. He’s sitting in his high-chair right now, banging a clothes pin against a set of teething keys and periodically chewing on a baby biscuit that he’s also managed to rub into his eyebrows. He’s a baby.
My beautiful little son. 🙂 It was time for his nap about an hour ago now, and he managed to sleep for ten minutes before waking up again with a happy -bapbapbap- He’s starting to rub his eyes and pull his ears (which also have cookie crumbs on them) so I guess it’s time for me to try to put him to sleep again. Please remember us in your duas- I need patience and he needs an off button. :p
Peace & Chikken Grease
Abez & Bebeface
Well, the past three days have been hectic. Picking up where we left off-
Night Before HF gets here- Bebeface cries it out for an hour and forty minutes, only to wake up two hours later and then be up and down all night as usual. That is very discouraging.
Night HF gets home- Bebeface cries for an hour and a half before I go in to rescue him from him own stubborness- it’s midnight, HF and I are both tired and he’s just gotten back from a business trip. I nurse him to sleep, hoping that crying for so long has at least drained his batteries a bit. He sleeps for an hour as usual, and wakes up about six times during the night.
Yesterday Night- I am swamped with two separated freelancing tasks with seriously short deadlines- I put Bebeface down to cry it out for the night, and after an hour of listening to him scream and get not quieter, but louder, I am not able to concentrate at all on my work. I go in to nurse him to sleep. He nurses, and then is up and ready for action until 1:30 am.
Yesterday Night- I do nothing related to crying- I happen to be in the shower when I notice that Bebeface, who HF had been rocking and singing to (I love you HF!) had gone quiet and fallen asleep. And there is much rejoicing. (He wakes up ever hour or so all night. This is usual.)
This evening- Hoping for similar success, I feed, pajama, and soothe Khalid before passing him to HF for a rocking to sleep. Bebeface stubbornly resists. HF passes him back to me after about half an hour, and I nurse Khalid to sleep.
He’s asleep now, my little bundle of impossibility. I must clarify- the bedtime routine of a nice bath and a feed and a kiss and a song- I’ve been doing that for about a week and a half now, and if the purpose of it is to make Khalid rub his eyes with sleep, then it accomplishes its goal. But then, since Khalid wakes up every morning at 9:30 by the latest, regardless of what time he’s gone to sleep, getting him to rub his eyes and yank his ears and pull his hair from tiredness has never been a problem. It’s getting him to close his little eyes that we seem to be doing so badly with.
So now what?
Well, last night was a mixture of both failure and success- Khalid cried for over an hour, and when I went to check on him (as I had been doing every fifteen minutes or so) I found him lying on the floor again- hands cold, feet cold, face cold, shuddering and whimpering. So I threw in the towel, wrapped him up and nursed him to sleep.
Then I emailed HF (who is on a business trip, for those of you who asked in last entry’s comments) and told him I was giving up and I feel miserable. Then I went to bed. And Khalid slept for 7 hours. Again, I woke up before he did, and was so surprised at the time- 6:30 am, that I had to go check on him. My sleepy brain was terrified and sure that he was dead. I know that sounds horrible and morbid, but I was on the verge of crying when I knelt down to see if he was still breathing. Which, Alhamdulillah, he still was, and I think my sleeping brain is nuts.
I don’t know what I’m doing tonight. These past four nights, Khalid has slept for long and longer stretches, Alhamdulillah, but I’ve only managed to stick the crying out twice. Twice I’ve caved, twice I’ve stayed firm. One of the times I caved he only slept for two hours, the second time (last night) he slept for seven. I’m not sure what it is about crying it out that makes him sleep better- is it the exhaustion of bawling for an hour? If so, then how come on night two, when I let him bawl for an hour before rescuing him, he only slept for two hours? And then on night three, he only cried for 45 minutes but he slept for five hours.
I’m not sure what to make of things, and tonight will be night five, InshaAllah. Tonight may also be back at home, where I can put Khalid in his crib and not have to worry about him ending up on the floor. He does wiggle about and get his feet stuck in the bars, but that’s pretty minor. I think if I put some rolled blankets on the side it’ll minimize his wiggling and protect him from getting stuck as well InshaAllah.
HF will be back tomorrow InshaAllah, and that’s such a relief for me. Him being on a business trip is always lonely, but this time has been especially hard w/the tension of the nightly crying game. It’s amazing how love takes two perfectly sane, perfectly independent people and then fuses them into one entity that spends time apart yearning for the other half. Next time HF goes on a business trip, Bebeface and I are crawling into his suitcase.
I’m confused.
JazakAllah to everyone for the encouragement. Last night’s missing post was due to technical probs, and a guy from Etisalat had to come over today to fix a wire inside the wall so now we’re up and running again.
Yesterday, before putting Khalid down for his nightly crying session, I set out to build the ultimate baby-contaning fortress so that he couldn’t wiggle out on to the floor again. I’ve ended up with a mattress on the floor, wedged against the side of my mom’s waterbed (I’m staying at the chateau while HF is on a business trip) and bordered on three sides with bolsters which are in turn, reinforced with three chairs.
And yet, even with all that work, Khalid ended up on the floor again last night. I went to check on him after ten min and found him wiggled into a corner of the room. I put him back on the bed and walked out, and I was surprised at how me coming in and soothing him a bit didn’t make him go ballistic again. I thought seeing me would give him typhoon-powered second winds that would prolong the cry-it-to-sleep process, but I think it may actually have made things better.
Either that or Khalid’s learning, but last night only took 45 minutes, Alhamdulillah. It also wasn’t as stressful for me, because, I must shamefully admit- I found a distraction. I have rediscovered XCOM- UFO Defense. I used to be quite a game junkie- I would stay up all night playing things like Command and Conquer, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Civilization, Ages of Empires… Strategy games mostly. And I would play so long my eyeballs would burn because I would forget to blink.
I wasn’t that bad last night, but 45 minutes passed quickly and before I even realized, Khalid had fallen asleep. I’m pretty sure he slept for a long ole time. I’m not sure how long because this time I didn’t wake up repeatedly to see why he hadn’t woken up yet. Alhamdulillah.
Yesterday he missed his afternoon nap though, so I’m wondering if maybe that contributed to him passing out earlier. Today, his afternoon nap got moved down to maghrib- he woke up around 6:20- about half an hour ago. (There’s construction going on across the street and the bang bang bang makes getting Khalid to nap very difficult) So let’s see what happens tonight InshaAllah.
Yesterday, after Khalid’s hour and five minute crying jag, he once again slept for five hours. Five lovely, uninterrupted hours, Alhamdulillah. It’s 10:40 right now, and he’s been crying since ten o’clock. He’s definitely winding down, and I peeked in on him a second ago- he’s laying face down on the bed, he raises his head to cry, gets tired and rests it for a few seconds. Then he raises it to cry again. I don’t know if he’ll beat yesterday’s time, and I don’t know if any progress is being made. This is only the second night anyway, so looking for progress right now is a little early I think.
If anything though, I at least don’t feel like I’m dying of guilt pangs. Yesterday was hard, and I felt horrible, but it yielded very real and very encouraging results. Oh wait, he’s gone quiet…
No, he started again. But the pauses between crying spurts are getting longer and the cries are getting softer and more tired-sounding.
But like I was saying, having done this once yesterday and seen really encouraging results, I don’t feel so bad and it’s not as hard for me today as it was yesterday. My child is sobbing his little eyes pink, and I’m ok. Does this make me a bad mother? I hope not, I would like to believe not. He’s not in pain. He laying in a bed, he’s fussing himself to sleep. He’s fine.
I’ve already gone and spent a long time in the shower (with Owlie listening out for me) but I ran out of hot water after ten minutes so I’m back out again. Khalid’s been crying for 45 minutes and I suppose we’ve got another fifteen to go.
10:50- I tell you, this kid could do commercials for energizer.
11:20- The good news is that Khalid is asleep- the bad news is- I caved. At eleven I went to check on him, and found that he had wiggled past the fortress of pillows and bolsters I had surrounded him with and was lying face-down on the cold, hard, floor- crying. (his mattress is on the floor anyway, so it’s only a two-inch roll down, not a fall, Alhamdulillah) But I couldn’t help it. I picked him up and he sighed and shuddered and clung to me. I nursed him to sleep.
I’m sorry and did, and yet I’m not. I feel torn between wanting to do things right and wanting to do right by my son. Why isn’t there a way of putting him to sleep that doesn’t involve making both of us miserable for upwards of an hour? I keep wanting to apologize to him, I feel like this is somehow my fault.
Well, 11:20 is his sleep time, let’s see how many hours he sleeps. I know he’s utterly exhausted, chances are he’ll sleep five hours any.
I feel selfish for putting Khalid through this, and I feel discouraged. 🙁
So once upon a time there was an impossibly cute (MashaAllah) but horribly scheduled son of mine, whose unruly sleep habits have been the only (but rather large) down side to motherhood. He wakes every 40 minutes, night or day, to feed, and drives me rather batty with sleep deprivation.
Everyone and their mother tells me I need to let him cry it out. I know. I know, but it hurts my heart to hear him cry. Really, physically- I can’t explain how it feels to hear him sobbing away. Like how he is now. Sobbing. In the next room.
Last week, after many frustrating and futile attempts to put Khalid to sleep (punctuated by being hit in the face with his flailing arms and being savagely bitten with his pointy little teeth) I put him down and walked out the bedroom. I hadn’t been intending to let him cry it out, but ten minutes into it, I decided what the heck. Let’s go for it.
It took an hour, and I’m sure it was rougher on him than it was on me, but I’m not sure it was by much. In the end, it finally happened. Bebeface cried himself to sleep, and he slept for five hours straight.
Five hours.
Straight.
Five hours, from a kid who’s never slept longer than 2 hours in his entire life.
Fastforward to this evening- HF left for a five-day business trip, and since he won’t be disturbed by Khalid’s ear-shattering (and heart-breaking) wails, I’ve decided that this is the week we’re gonna cry it out.
It’s 11:24 right now, and Khalid has been crying since 11:15. I know he’s exhausted, I left him in the bed with a full stomach, rubbing his eyes and pulling his ears out of exhaustion, but the second I closed the door, the BebeSiren sounded and he’s been wailing away ever since.
I learned from the last time that after half an hour he’ll start to wind down. Everyone I’ve talked to has told me that kids learn fast- let him cry it out two or three times and they’ll learn to soothe themselves to sleep. One woman I know did it over the weekend- she went away for two nights in a row, and the husband volunteered to keep an eye on the baby- and it was a hard weekend but the baby learned in two days, and now she sleeps straight through.
Admittedly, I feel horrible right now. Khalid is now hiccuping as well as wailing- and I can hear the little gasps and shudders between cries, but he is winding down.
I wish it didn’t have to be like this. I wish he came with a ‘sleep’ button. I can’t really sit and listen to him cry, I need to find something else to do- like take a shower or something. I didn’t turn the water heater on though, so the water’s too cold to be any sort of pleasant distraction.
11:31- Still wailing. Oh wait, there was a pause. Ok, now he’s gotten a second wind and seems to have hit a higher pitch. I’m going to go wash dishes or something.
11:53- Well, there are longer and longer pauses between the crying fits now- I know that these silent moments are spent in rubbing his eyes or pulling his hair, and I know he must be exhausted. The crying is getting tireder, the pauses longer- I think the water might be warm enough. I wonder- if I take a ten minute shower- will he be asleep by the time I come out? Let’s see. I need to relax, I feel wound up and tense.
12:21- Asleep. All quiet. Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah. It took Khalid an hour and five minutes- which is five minutes longer than his previous time, but maybe tomorrow will be better InshaAllah. And let’s see how long he sleeps now InshaAllah. I spent the last fifteen min taking the longest, hottest shower I’ve had in months, and I’m ready to pray and hit the sack. I’m really looking forward to five beautiful hours of gorgeous lovely sleep.
(Many thanks to everyone who’s kept pushing me to just do this- to retrain Khalid no matter how hard it is. Taubah, my Momma, and especially HF– who’s been nagging me to do this- even volunteered to take Khalid for a weekend, and has been so patient with my foolish refusal to do so until this point. It could only last so long. You can only run so long on sleep deprivation, and not letting Khalid learn how to fall asleep on his own doesn’t do him any favors. Also, much love to Owlie– who’s been the Abez Distraction Committee these past two times I’ve let Khalid cry it out. >>>hugs<<< )
JazakAllah
Bebeface is sleeping, shh! type quietly!
My lil Brother emailed me about a month ago, and since he’s not the communicative type, it was one of only a handful of emails he’s sent me in the last six months. I would love to reply, but so far I haven’t been able to. I’ve sat down several times and stared blankly at a gmail draft. The delay isn’t Khalid’s fault, it’s actually my Brother’s. He had to go and ask me a hard question- he had to ask me what my goals were.
I’m sure I used to have goals. I vaguely remember wanting to finish a book of poetry by the age of 25. I’ve moved it up to 30, and am hoping that the next three years are extra-inspirational.
I wanted to weigh 125 pounds once upon a time. Har. Dee. Har. My mother’s family is primarily composed of hard working, hard farming people of big bones and German descent, so when we say we’s big-boneded, we mean it. We’s big boneded. I’ve moved my goals from numerical weight to physical fitness instead, but even those have slipped so far that if I manage to work out three times a week I’m going to buy myself a trophy.
I wanted to learn Arabic, but I find that here, living in the Middle East, I can’t afford classes. Once upon a time in Pakiland, we could afford Arabic lessons from a nice teacher who came to the house five times a week to suffer through grammar with Owlie and I. Things in the UAE are much more expensive than they are in Pakistan, especially education, so the idea of getting a private tutor is no longer feasible, and the possibility of attending classes with Bebeface is impractical. (Alif, Ba, Bababababbbbbbbpppprttt Waaaannnh!)
I do have some goals left, but they’ve mellowed out lately, are instead of being clearly-defined targets set to be achieved within a given time frame, they’re more like ‘things I wanna do, InshaAllah.’ I want to pray with concentration, and this is an ongoing battle. I’ll probably be fighting it for the rest of my life, but it’s one worth fighting, so bring it on, baybee.
I want to read the Tafsir of Ibn Kathir, InshaAllah. HF bought me the entire set for Eid (yay! I *heart* HF!) and I started, Alhamdulillah, and I will continue, InshaAllah.
I want to get back to my pre-baby weight, InshaAllah, and be able to do 20 push-ups. Lately I’ve started being more of a Captain and less of a wicked monkey, so I’ve lost another two pounds and the morale boost feels fantastic.
Sadly, above all things- I want to sleep at night. Bebeface is, MashaAllah, exceptional in many ways, not excluding his exceptionally bad sleeping habits. By his age, most children have been sleeping through the night for a few months already. He’s ten months old, MashaAllah, but if he wakes up four times in the night I consider it a Very Good Night. Other not-so-good nights involve waking up every forty minutes to rock Khalid back to sleep, slump miserably back into bed, and then get up in another forty minutes to do it again, my back aching, my eyes burning, my head spinning from sleep deprivation and the in-again, out-again, up and down of popping in and out of bed all night long without anything more restful than a series of cat naps. I just want to sleep. It feels like months since I’ve dreamed.
So yeah, I do have goals, it’s just that I don’t think they’re the sort my Lil Brother was asking about.
Once, I wanted to be a doctor.
Now, I just want to be myself again.
As I sit at this computer desk with all the wires taped securely to the legs and all the peripherals moved away from the edge of table, I wonder where the time has gone. Bebeface, whose misbehavior was once limited to wiggling alot and peeing on me, has morphed into something else entirely. He has become- Cap’n DangerIsMyMiddleName. Two days ago he unplugged the laptop. The day before that he pulled the wireless signal repeater out of the wall. Last week he reached up to this desk and got hold of the electric drill and very narrowly avoided dropping it onto his head. Yesterday, he woke me up by falling off the bed.
It was a different sort of alarm. Instead of beep beep beep the noise went waanh waanh wannh. I woke up in a panic- I could hear Khalid crying but couldn’t find him in the bed. He was on the floor in an untidy heap of baby, his head down and his legs propped against the leg of the crib, looking very offended and somewhat more compact than usual. I scooped him up and went to the kitchen, where immediately, I turned on the microwave. Khalid likes the microwave. In a few seconds, the wails turned to whimpers. Then the whimpers were replaced with the silent hyper-vigilance of Khalid watching the plate in the microwave go around in circles. Then he giggled. All was well and the mighty fall from the bed was forgotten.
(Oh, and the other day he pitched himself off the sofa head-first and was caught in mid-air by Knicq. Many thanks Knicq Bhai.)
Khalid is now a little human. Officially. He used to be a little blob, and before that he was a jellybean of some sort. Now he’s a little person who likes chicken, doesn’t want his nose cleaned, laughs at the pictures in his baby books, follows you around with upheld arms, pulls my pant legs when I’m doing dishes, tastes absolutely everything, and plays peekaboo. Really, he plays peekaboo. He will hold things in front of his eyes, wait, and then peek out and smile. Then he’ll do it again. And again and again. Alhamdulillah, SubhanAllah. He’s growing, he’s learning, he’s developing sneakiness. Combine a desire to pull the phone cord with the knowledge that he shouldn’t be, and you get a baby who drops the phone and runs smiling up to me when he’s caught, as if he’s never pulled a phone cord to within an inch of its life before. Oh no. Not me momma, would this face lie?
Right now Khalid is laying in my bed (surrounded by a wall of pillows) and drumming his heels on the mattress, growling, and playing with a rubberband simultaneously. In a minute we’ll head to the kitchen for lunch, maybe scoot around the house in the walker later, and then we’re off to Ikea for yet more adventures, so I guess I’ll just finish this blog later.
Bebeface & I, over and out!
I am reading
Methods of Learning and Evidential Deduction between Sunnites and Heterodixtsts
(Which is far more interesting than the title would lead you to believe)
I am listening to
Blink
(Which is a fantastic book, even in audio format.)
I am looking at
My hovercraft is full of eels.
(Because HF found it and HF rules)
I am taking
Bromelain-POS
(To reduce swelling in the ligament in my knee that hasn’t healed since the accident)
I am eating
Weetabix
(Low-sugar, low-taste, low-thought breakfast option of champions)
I am wearing
Blue Jeans
(because they were clean)
So, what are you up to today? Blurkers, I’m asking you too!
There are good days and there are bad days. Some days you may come home from work and the dishes will be dirty and the laundry unfolded. Your wife will grumble a greeting at you as she walks by, still in her pajamas. There will be no dinner cooked and you will have to walk on tiptoes because the bebe, who was a grouchy little teething monster all day, has finally fallen asleep.
Also, no one will be able to find the external hard-drive, which you need for work.
Also, the curtains will fall off the wall, rod and all.
And you, tired from work and tired from sitting in traffic, and hungry from forgetting to take a lunch and sleep deprived from the odd hours the baby has been keeping lately- you will smile and take your wife in your arms and hold her, and tell her it’s alright to have a lousy day, and you will tell her to get dressed because it’s been a while since we went out for dinner.
And you will joke and make your wife laugh, and tell her to hurry up and NOT iron her clothes, and you will pile everyone into the car, wrinkles and all, and drive to a posh Irani buffet and have a fantastic time putting a massive dent in the barbeque and dessert tables.
And you will drive home and do the dishes as your wife hangs laundry, and you will pray and go to bed. And that will have been a very good day.
I love you HF.
Every now and then I decide I’ve been a wicked sloth monkey. This is a phrase my mother coined that I believe combines all the worst elements of the evil flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz and the deadly sin of Sloth. As far as eating according to the Sunnah, as far as working out, as far as reading Qur’an and praying Fajr and giving an overall damn about my personal and spiritual maintenance- I’ve been a very bad sloth monkey indeed.
I’m still holding on the ten more post-baby pounds, I can’t remember the last time I did a push-up, there’s a layer of dust on my Qur’an so thick that opening The Book may require an archaeological dig… It’s sad, but the good news is, I’m still Captain of the LazyShip Abez, and I say we’re going to change course!
I know, I know, I do this often, and the reassuring this is, it works. Considering how often (hu)man slips up, one should be willing to change course however many times necessary to keep the ship from going into the part of the map that says Thar Be Monsters. One should be willing to take correction, to admit mistakes, and if necessary- to make charts.
I have a tendency to make charts. I have charts from 1996 until 2000 that count the number of prayers missed a day, every day. They are all titled, “Abez Is An Idiot,” but they mean that in a good way, in a gentle way that means that if I miss prayer for anything less than a coma, I’m an idiot. No water? I can do tayummum. No masjid? All of the earth is a place of worship. No time? Generally, honestly, there’s no such thing as no time. How many minutes does it take to say just the Fard- just the basics of prayer? Five? And how long do I spend surfing the net, taste-testing cereal and installing crooked bookshelves in my bedroom? Too Long. If I can just pray first, just pray before I spend an hour and a half realizing I have the wrong drill bit for cement, then I won’t have to suddenly realize (with dust on my hands and an oddly shaped hole in the wall) that I only have ten minutes left until Asr time begins.
I digress. I made a chart. Because I do better with achievable, short-term goals, it is divided into two one-week sections. Each day has a field for Working Out, Reading Quran, and Drinking A litre of Water a Day. The more water you drink, the less hungry you feel, and the easier it is to eat according to what your body needs as compared to what your stomach wants.
Starting today, Monday January 8, as soon as I finish this blog, I have to do 30 min of reading/Qur’an, 30 min of working out, and fill a big water bottle and carry it around with me so I drink from it all day.
Life is an ongoing process, and Self should always be a work in progress. None of us are perfect, but all of us could be better, InshaAllah.
BigBro: I am rubber you’re glue, bounces off me and sticks to you.
Me: Yeah well, there’s a force field around the glue! (or it is then scraped off, concentrated, and sprayed on you in a mist form that settles on the rubber with no danger of bouncing back)
BigBro: impossible, that’s like a fish saying he is protected by the sky
Me: and is the sky not doing a good job? I mean, when’s the last time you saw a fish get hit with a meteor anyway?
BigBro: but the fish ends up in my plate, so the sky failed
Me: yeah, but then you could choke on a fishbone
BigBro: i always de-bone the fish
Me: alright alright, so there are no bones.
BigBro: and fish stick are not just yummy, but make good play swords and projectiles
That they do sir, that they do.
Or at the very least, werkin.
There are four more days until HF returns, and I’ve found that the best way to make time go faster is to attach it to a deadline. See, if I focus on HF’s return alone for the 29th, then time drags its feet and twiddles it thumbs and dawdles all over the dang place. However, if I, say… take a copywriting job on ridiculously short notice that must be completed the 28th, then suddenly time picks its feet up and starts hurdle-jumping over the little lines that divide days in my monthly planner. Because time is annoying like that.
So I’ve picked up the job for the >>Large Hoity-Toity Food Conference Name Here<< that right now involves rewriting their brochures, then their posters, and then their banners, etc. Alhamdulillah for the work. Now if only I could get Bebeface to agree with the schedule. See, if I could get him to change his own diaper, then I could finish this paragraph and be done with the page. However, according to the Babycenter.com calendar of developmental milestones, Khalid is a long way off from that, so far off, in fact, that it's not even mentioned on the Year One page. Maybe it's on Year Two? Developmental milestones are annoying like that. Off we go, Bebeface Beckons.
HF has been internationally away for the last 11 days, and top of that, Khalid choked on a carrot today. Yes, these two are related.
Today Bebeface swallowed a huge piece of carrot at dinner and started gasping for breath. I picked him up, turned him over and slapped him on the back repeatedly before he finally coughed the piece up, vomited, and started crying. The whole episode took twenty seconds at the most, and we had guests over for dinner who, I am sure, probably did not notice anything beyond a baby coughing up a carrot bit and then being carried out of the room. Truth is that I took him out of the room so that I wouldn’t be seen holding him tightly and trying not to cry.
There was a friend of mine, a woman my mother’s age, who I always knew as being very flamboyant, very loud, very sparkly in the way she spoke and the way she acted and the way she dressed. She was the 50-year old with the perfectly blonde hair and the short skirt. I remember once commenting to a mutual friend about how cheerful she always was, and the mutual friend said, “Yes, it’s nice to see her like this now. After her son and husband died she went into depression for a few years.”
I’d had no idea. Her husband and only son had died only a few years ago in a car accident, and not only had she never brought it up, she seemed alright. She was colorful. She was alive.
(I later learned, she was lonely)
When I knew her, I was single and her story seemed like a tragedy. Now that I am a wife and a momma, her story seems like an apocalypse, an ending of life as we know it, a implosion of the universe itself. How does one recover from that? HF has been gone only 11 days, and I think about him constantly. Khalid gave me a momentary scare, and the tiny glimpse of worry, of fear for my child’s life that it caused has had me rattled this entire evening. What if I couldn’t get the carrot out? What if he stopped breathing. God, I don’t want to think of the what-if’s.
(I’ve been staying at the Chateau these past 11 days and last night I shared a room with Hemmie. “It was an interesting night,” she said to me this morning. “You woke up and asked me where Khalid was.” Actually, I’d had a bad dream, and when I woke up, I couldn’t find Khalid and started to panic. He was in bed next to me, right where I left him, but my sleep-heavy eyes missed his warm little bump under the blanket. )
As I read this over I realize it seems strange, maybe even pathetic to be so attached, or so afraid. The truth is that no one but a mother will know how this feels. Erma Bombeck once said that to have a children was “…to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”
She was right, and when you factor in the husband you adore, then your heart is neatly halved before it is removed from your chest and sent on its merry way. There’s no way of ever getting it back. You will never stop checking on your child when you know he is asleep. You will pull the covers over your husband if you think he’s cold. You will fret when your husband is late, you will lose sleep when your child is sick. You will dance continually between worry and relief, but being worn at by concern for the ones you love is more sweet than bitter. It is part of life, and it is proof that you love them deeply, and thank God, you have someone to love. SubhanAllah for the pain, because it means you have someone to give your heart away to.
Better the ache of love fulfilled than the emptiness of lonely regret.
Abez Presents: How to Mortally Wound Yourself with Lunch
Step1: Make Tuna Corn Chowder yesterday(recipe will follow at bottom of post)
Step2: Reheat bowl of Tuna Corn Chowder in microwave, set on one minute.
Step3: After one minute, take the chowder out to stir it, so that it heats evenly.
Step4: Put spoon into chowder
Step5: Be attacked by superheated flying potato from chowder.
Step6: Catch superheated flying potato- in the eye.
Yes, I burned my eye with a potato. This may be a world’s first, and remember, you read it here. Alhamdulillah, I managed to wince in time, and my eyelid caught most of the damage. It hurts though, subhanAllah, and the area around my right eye is quite red.
Facing the pain of betrayal from my own lunch, I decided to take solace in dessert, hence, the second recipe of this post- Conciliatory Icecream Cone.
Mix One scoop Vanilla Icecream with 1 tbs pancake syrup
Add 1 tsp peanutbutter (it rolled away!)
Plop onto an icecream cone.
Nurse your burned eye and enjoy.
Recipe2: Treacherous Tuna Corn Chowder
In roughly two cups water, add:
Can of Mushrooms
Frozen, mixed veggies (greenbeans, peas, carrots, corn)
1 diced potatoAnd boil until the potatoes are soft and seem broken of their will to retaliate with flying attacks.
Add 3 cups milk, 2 cans of tuna, black pepper, salt, and 4 cloves of garlic that have been finely minced. Or grated. Or mashed into paste. Just destroy them, ok?Mix 1/3 cup white flour into abt 1/2 cup cold water on the side, add to soup BEFORE it boils. (if you boil milk that has no thickening agent in it, it will split) Allow soup to thicken, add salt and more pepper if you wish.
Allow soup to cool. Reheat a single bowl. Microwave on medium heat. Beware of flying potatoes.
I came across an article the other day that made reference to “citizen journalism,” a phenomenon so powerful that news conglomerates and spin doctors could no longer cover up unsavory events. Try as they may to keep things hidden, news gets out because somewhere, someone blogs about it. I find that both a little reassuring and a lotta scary- reassuring because however small, and however obscured by blogs about the dog and why I hate the girl at my office, the public still has a voice.
What’s a little scary though, is that the media is so unreliable and hopelessly twisted by political and private slants that we only know what they want us to know, and even when we find out, they distract us with pretty pictures and colored lights and we forget our indignation and buy iPods and move on. (Oooh, shiny!)
HF and I own a second-hand iPod btw, it’s fantastic for listening to ibooks in the car. Living in the UAE means living in traffic alot. Moving on-
So in the spirit of (hemhem) Citizen Journalism, I would like to pretend like my blog is a news forum and throw out a question- Would you carpool? I’ve started freelancing for papers here, and in the spirit of the recent focus on how very badly the traffic in Dubai stinks, I’m supposed to be writing up on how to fix the problem instead of just whining about it.
So, would you carpool?
Would you, could you, carpool?
Would you carpool from your house?
Would you carpool with a louse?
I would not carpool from my house.
I would not carpool with a louse.
I would not carpool from the docks.
I would not carpool in my socks.
I would not carpool here or there.
I would not carpool anywhere.
I would not carpool, Sam-I-Am
Not even in your new Grand Am.
-ahem-
Back in the eighties, when leg warmers were hot and orange lipstick was cool, Abez was a wee little Muslim kid with a weird name that no one else had and dietary rules that none of her friends followed. She wished, above all things, that her name had been Diana, and that she could eat Skittles.
Skittles, you see, used to be made with that devious evil- Pork Gelatin, and no one but Infidels ate them. 😉
(Shout out to my favorite infidel- Hi Mom! :D)
It’s interesting to note that most Muslims, regardless of their level of practice, will not break the no-pork rule. I’ve met Muslims who drank at meals, danced till they dropped and ran amok on beaches in bikinis, but they still wouldn’t eat pork. But I digress. Skittles were forbidden fruit, and in my 9-year old eyes, they epitomized everything that being a Muslim unfairly held back from me. Couldn’t eat Oreos, couldn’t have McNuggets, Twinkies are still haraam… Life was unfair and I can very distinctly remember sitting in the park outside of our apartment in Chicago and staring dejectedly at an empty Skittles wrapper that some other, luckier kid left on the ground.
Then we moved to Pakistan for a few years and I had other things to worry about. Skittles were forgotten, for a while at least. Fast forward to 1994, and a 14 year old Abez in MCC, the Muslim Community Center, staring in shock at another kid eating Skittles. In the masjid. Man, it’s one thing to eat pork, but to eat it in the masjid? That was a double whammy. I asked what the heck was up. Didn’t you know Skittles have pork in them? No they don’t said another 14 year old. We read the wrapper. I was blown away. The ingredients in Skittles had been changed while we were out of the country. I tasted Skittles, finally.
Fast forward to this post, and a 26 year old Abez with feet up in the computer chair and a pack of Skittles on the desk. Believe it or not, I have only eaten Skittles a handful of times in my life. As I finish this bag I remember why- they taste fake and they get stuck in your teeth.
Not that that stops me from finishing the bag. Oh no. The mental association that I have of Skittles with All Things Wonderful That Muslims Can’t Have from when I was a child pushes me to finish the bag, to make up for past, lost opportunities. It’s bizarre, really, and sad that being raised as a dietarily practicing Muslim (if little else) in the US left me with emotional baggage that I wasn’t able to understand until I was much, much older.
As an adult I can say things like, “Of course I wouldn’t let my child go around eating pork. As Muslims, we should do our best to live by the rules that Allah has given us, and children may not understand why, but until they’re older, they can at least understand that they must.”
Yep, that’s the kind of thing that adult Abez sez. And then the kid inside (who insists that the Skittles were wonderful) says that no one should have to live in a world where they’re wrongly denied simple pleasures. And the adult in me rolls her eyes and sez see, this is why kids are not in charge.
Life is not about pleasures, simple or complex, and to say that no one should be denied their pleasure is the basis for a completely amoral society. As uptight as it sounds, this is the truth. As a child, it was Skittles. As a teenager, it was boyfriends. As a young adult, it was the sex and drugs that everyone else seemed to be having a great time with. There are pleasures, unfortunately, that have more detriment than benefit for society, and they are haraam for that reason- not because Islam has something against fun or enjoyment. You’re allowed to eat sweets, but pork isn’t clean. You’re allowed to have friends, but never let the people you hang out with push you towards wrong. You’re allowed to love, but do so cleanly, and with commitment, and within a marital contract that protects both parties and helps to ensure their rights.
This is what grown-up Abez sez, but the little kid in Abez nods, pretends to understand and then whispers thank God they made Oreos halal.
I wonder whether I will be able to explain this concept to Bebeface when he is older. Will he understand why, if he goes to a non-Muslim friend’s house, he won’t be able to eat the pork pies? The bacon bits? The ham sammiches? Will he be ok with that, or will he too resent his parents for imposing rules he doesn’t understand in the name of a religion that he is too young to make sense of yet? Every child must be taught that they can’t have everything they want. That’s life, that’s restraint, that’s normal. But will my children negatively connect that to Islam? Will Khalid wish his name was Diana too?
I hope not. I suppose that’s one reason why I always want to live in a Muslim country. Note: I don’t say Islamic country for a very big reason;
No community is “Islamic,” per se. People are people, human beings are all a mix of good and bad practices, and no one is completely virtuous or completely evil. A man who prays five times a day may still be a jerk to his friends and a complete jerk may pray five times a day, you know what I’m saying? (Think about it) If you go into a Muslim community expecting it to be completely moral and perfect, you will become disappointed and bitter. Boys will still sneak girly mags to school and smoke in the bathroom. Girls will still sneak out and maybe take their hijabs off when they get to the mall.
So now you say, “If there’s no difference between an “Islamic” community and everywhere else, then why bother? Well, the difference between a Muslim community (a community that is predominantly Muslim) and everywhere else is that morality is, a least, the expected norm. Of course, there will be people who drink and people who have sex but they will be people who do so in secret or do so to the disappointment of the community. Compare this to 16 year olds who do this with their parents’ consent and make a big huge deal of it, so much so that the Muslim kids get jealous and wonder why they couldn’t go to Prom, too.
I lost my train of thought. Believe it or not, I was thinking about Oreos. Then I was wondering whether it would be proper to make a reference to pedophilia or homosexuality or drug abuse or any other ‘pleasures’ that certain pedophiles, homosexuals, or drug abusers feel they are wrongly denied by society. I’m not sure yet. I was going to draw a parallel, but it seemed wrong to taint Skittles with an association to marijuana.
New Paragraph: Bebeface is still young, and fortunately, still asleep. Without his dedicated snoozing, this blog would not be possible. I suppose I will have to cross the bridge of forbidden fruit when we get there, and I pray I can do so without making my son feel deprived and resentful of the religion that sets him apart and the funny name that prevents him from being just like everyone else.
May it set him apart as a good man.
May he never, ever be just like everyone else.
Ameen.
Alhamdulillah, Bebeface is seven and a half months old now, and the rate at which he’s developing dangerous and cunning new skills is amazing. This week alone has seen several developmental firsts- several key skills he has obtained and now uses to threaten all of humanity with.
So Eye See… Glasses are not part of a person’s face, and can be removed with one quick yank of the gooey, wet fingers and then dropped on the floor. Khalid now knows that glasses are both removable and edible, and there seems to be no turning back, regardless of how we threaten to withdraw damages from his college fund.
Take that, HA! Khalid now has the ability to, but not necessarily the proper licensing to, drive his walker all over the kitchen, into my ankles, against the dining chairs, etc. Up until just two days ago, he just sat in the walker and if he moved his feet it was out of excitement or frustration, but not with any direction or purpose. At some point though, he seems to have had an epiphany, and one morning surprised me by very purposefully steering himself towards the garbage can and then proceeding to worry said garbage can from one of the kitchen to the other, and then back. This kid can drive.
Take That, CHOMP! Teef. Alhamdulillah, Bebeface has two little bottom-teeth about half-way out now and the two on either side of them are just starting to appear beneath his gums. So now what used to be a cute little gnaw on peoples’ fingers is now a life-threatening, needle-sharp brush with dismemberment. Khalid likes to chew, and he likes to chew HARD.
Hello there, Handsome. Khalid has long, meaningful conversations with the handsome baby in our bedroom mirror, and spends tens of minutes (which is hours in baby-time) cooing, squealing, and wiggling his eyebrows at the baby on the other side. And, he does this all sitting up. Khalid started sitting up about a month ago, but only now is he getting really stable enough to stay upright for long periods of time, and without toppling over.
Mine, all mine! Khalid is no longer my computer buddy. It used to be that I could sit him in my lap and operate the lappy easily. Now, I sit Khalid in my lap, turn towards the computer and then frantically push everything away that he’s trying to grab and cram in his mouth- mouse, headphone wire, tea cup, hair clips, pen, cell phone, digicam… anything on the table is fair game and very likely to be scooped towards Khalid with both of his outstretched little arms and then slobbered on. Even when I have moved everything out of his reach, he still cranes forward to slap at the power-indicator and wireless modem switch (those pretty blue and yellow lights) on the front of the laptop and gives them a good beating.
You gonna eat that? Cuz if not, Khalid will try. It doesn’t matter that Khalid has never had soup before in his entire like, he still wants it, and yesterday he managed to grab a spoonful of it as it was headed towards my mouth, splattering chikken noodle in my lap and down his arm. On top of that, he wouldn’t let go of the spoon. He saw me drinking a cup of tea earlier today, and zoomed towards me in his walker, came to a crashing halt against my knees and then started smacking his lips and looking deprived. I’m sorry kid, you are years away from caffeine.
Hey, whose feet are these? Khalid has discovered his feet, and day by day he is learning that they can go closer and closer to his mouth. He holds one foot in each hand, and in a gesture that would be rude if it weren’t so impossibly cute, he grins at you over the full-moon he’s pointing in your direction. (When he does that without a diaper on, I get scared.)
So yeah, MashaAllah. SubhanAllah. Bebeface gets more and more beautiful and unpredictable and alive every day. He has wants and needs and even a sense of humor, and has a beautiful little laugh that lights up everything- his face, the room, the people around him. I laugh at him sometimes and he looks at me and just laughs back, my crazy beautiful little kid.
Me: Waleed, – (mumble mumble mumble) –
HF: What? I can’t hear what you said so I’m just going to make something up. No Abez, I don‘t believe you can talk to dolphins.
Me: Oh boy…
😀
Cuts and bruises, bruises and scars
That we got from toying with other cars
When the road was more than enough to share
And really, they could have gone anywhere
Rather than both try to fill the same spot
On a Tuesday so tired when the road was so hot
And the glass was all glittery there on the street
And the witnesses helpful and caring a sweet
And the sky sunny blue and your cheeks teary pink
And the spots on my skirt rather fetching, I think
And the wail of the sirens not louder than yours
That rang from the hospital’s ceilings and floors
Bruises and cuts and thank God nothing bad
(Not like the man in the other room had)
Cuts and bruises, bruises and scars
Can you keep a secret about other cars?
I can see as they speed up to pass from the side
That they’ve hit us again and someone has died
The emergency room is now miles away
And the scream on your face will not go away
Cuts and bruises, bruises and more
The hot on my hands is smeared on the door
Cuts and bruises, bruises and God-
Cuts and bruises, bones and blood
The screech and the crash and the pain and then
The car finally stops and we’re home safe again
And I, for the hundredth time, happen to find
That we’ve died just a little, just in my mind.
There are some hills over there…
Excuse me while I build my ark,
I haven’t got much time.
Fast the flooding waters rise,
Go find a hill to climb.
Do you mind not standing in my light?
Hey, give me back my tools!
Must you insist on sabotage?
Keep away, you fools!
The hand you lend, it hardly helps.
I need no Three-Piece Messiah
All I need is One Good Lord
For when the waves get higher.
Don’t preach vicarious atonement
For when this day is through
I highly doubt you will have found
Someone else to drown for you.
We interrupt this Ramadan introspection with a late-breaking Husbandfile.
Me: We need to do something about the front gate, there’s no way to see behind it when somone rings the bell. I could be opening the door for anyone. We need to put one of those little peep-hole thingies in.
HF: No, all we need is some electrical wiring and a switch.
Me: Oh? (For a security camera? she wonders)
HF: We could run the wire under the gate and plug one end into a socket and leave one end on the ground outside.
Me: Ok.
HF: And when someone rings the bell, you go outside and turn the power on.
Me: Then what?
HF: Then when they get electrocuted you identify them by the sound of their screaming.
Once upon a time, Ramadan was really, really sacred. Owlie and I read Qur’an aloud each night, broke our fast on as little food possible, had reasonably small dinners and felt light and alive and grateful. This Ramadan is hugely disappointing, I feel like a Ramadan Failure.
I’m not fasting because I need to nurse bebeface. That in itself does not at all make me a failure. Alhamdulillah, Allah knows His creations well, and allows certain exceptions to the fast, nursing mothers included. I will make the entire month of fasts up when I can, but as the days pass one after the other, I feel more and more as if I’m missing something that I can never get back. I feel, well… almost sore about it. I feel left out at Iftar time; me munching on dates then is not what it used to be. The first date at Iftar, the first bit of sweet, soft fruit that you put in your mouth is better than a hundred dates in any other month. That warm little cup of tea used to make up for hours of self-denial in its first sip. Iftar was quiet and contemplative and, for lack of a better word, magical.
It used to be that Ramadan passed slowly. The first few days were agonizing, of course, but after a week or so, they had a certain, gradual sweetness to them. You counted the days of Ramadan not as being closer to the end of deprivation, but as being nearer to the happiness of Eid. I remember an Eid spent in Islamabad when it was just Owlie and me praying Eid Salah at Faisal Masjid. Now, we come from a very ‘Suck it in, Walk it off, If you lose you leg, don’t come crying to me’ kind of family, but we let all the force fields down after Eid prayer and give each other happy, sincere hugs. I remember that hug, I miss it.
I used to read Qur’an. I used to open its pages and read and re-read the lines until I registered them, understood them, thought about them. It was slow going, but speed was not the issue, comprehension was.
I used to pray Fajr. Now, a combination of odd baby-related sleep habits plus laziness and growing spiritual apathy on my part mean I pray a handful of Fajrs a month. It’s embarrassing to say, but what purpose would it be to hide it? Everything I do, and don’t do, will come out before every human ever born on the Day of Judgment. Blogistan, compared to All of Humanity, is peanuts, and compared to God, Humanity is dust.
-to be continued-
Hey hey! I’m here! And I’m donut powered! Props to Owlie and blueberry cake donuts!
I’m feeling much better than I have in a long ole while- the move was chaotically busy as well as physically taxing. Bebeface of course realized that we were moving, so he decided to work harder- at being demanding. I have never tried to move while also minding a bebe. It’s Difficult. I capitalized that D on purpose.
And then the day before yesterday I gave myself minor food poisoning. I call it Chicken Fingers. It’s what happens when you cut and prepare chicken and the germs get on your fingers and somehow your fingers transfer the germs to your stomach, which then goes into a state of violent political upheaval and nationwide strike to protest the incursion of foreign elements.
I was in bed all day except for when I was in the bathroom. I woke up the next morning feeling miserable and desperate and worse, so I reached into my bedside table drawer, found a blister pack of amoxicillin left over from my wisdom tooth removal and popped one in my mouth. Yes, all of my doctor friends will scold me for dosing myself with antibiotics, and HF pulled my ear and glared at me, and yes, amoxicillin is typically for ENT and uncomplicated skin infections, but it’s also sometimes used to treat stomach ulcers caused by the baceria H. Pylori, so I figured that its presence in my politically unstable stomach couldn’t go completely unnoticed. Then I went back to sleep for another six hours.
And woke up feeling like a newer, less toxic man. And today I moved some boxes around, finished up a design project, found out I have another one lined up (Alhamdulillah!) and met Owlie for donuts at the City Center. And now I have thawts! As well as the ability to keep food down! SubhanAllah, health is such a blessing!
Bebeface is six months old now, and I don’t know where the time went. Honestly. One day he’s this little pink blob, the next he’s a big, chubby, heavy, cooing, impossibly cute bundle of giggles and spitbubbles and cramming of slobbery fingers into my mouth. His mouth too, but he’s realized that I have a mouth and it’s a great place to hold on. He calls for attention and then revels in it, he bounces himself u and down in laps, and even bestows slobbery bebe-kisses on me. Only one other person has been honored with a bebe-kiss, and that’s Lil Grey. Khalid’s version of a kiss is to smile and then grab you by the face with both hands, and then press his mouth into your cheek. And it makes him exceedingly happy. It’s not a ‘Hi mom, lemme suck on your cheek,’ it’s definitely a kiss, and it’s definitely reserved for when he’s happy and content.
And then when he’s not happy there’s the ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma of ‘momma, help!’ or the bbbbbb of the self-defense raspberry. A good indicator of whether Khalid’s nose is being cleaned is whether he’s blowing raspberries- when I poke a q-tip up there he frowns and goes BBBBBBB with such force that if the q-tip were in his mouth it would have been shot across the room.
And then there’s the singing- Khalid sings. He does opera, mostly. He fills the new halls with aaaaaahs and oooohs and waaa waaa waaaas that he enjoys immensely. He experiments with volume, he smiles, and out of his gummy, wet mouth comes an ear-shattering EEEEEEE that might be B-minor, or more likely, EEEEE-major. hehe. My son could shatter glass.
Also, he could probably eat whole chickens. Well, he would if he knew what they were. MashaAllah, Khalid is in the 95th percentile for his height and weight, which means that’s he’s bigger than 95 percent of other kids his age. Which, for me, means an aching back, but muscle definition on my arms comparable to when I used to lift weights, and for Khalid, it means comments from guests like, “Whoa, Olympic sized!” and Hbiddy‘s hysterical “Oh my God, that baby is huge!”
(Also, “What an adorable one year old!”)
You know, it’s interesting seeing how people who haven’t been around babies react to Bebeface. I’ve heard questions that immediately mark the questioner as complete baby-amateur, like “Wow, he’s 3/4th Pakistani and 1/4th white, so what does he call you?”
(Well, he’s four months old, so he mostly just calls me waaaanh.)
“Cute kid, so what language does he speak?”
(He’s a baby, he speaks all languages and they all sound like crying.)
And then there are the exciting babysitting tactics from people who have never babysat before. A group of family friends (we shall call them ‘The Four A’s) consisting of three very cool dudes and one very cool chick were left to their own devices with Khalid for all of ten minutes. I returned to find the baby strangely quiet. The dudes were sticking small balls of tape onto Khalid’s hands, feet and clothing. Khalid thought the crinkly sounds were fantastic. I give that new game a nine out of ten, and it loses one point only for not taping Khalid’s arms and legs to each other.
So yeah, Bebeface rocks, but I currently stink. I am a Ramadan nothing this year. But I’ll blog about that next time. It’s 11:50 right now and Bebeface has just gone to sleep. I’m going to run and do grown-up things like wash my face and maybe reply to my email.
Peace & Chikken Grease! And Ramadan Kareem!
But now I’m going there. House is abt 60% unpacked. Bizzy. Off to Chateau for some R&R. peace & chikken grease.
Wireless, and wirelessless. No wires and no wireless. The wireless internet router is being packed in a few min, and I have awoken at 7:30 in the morning to check my email before that happens. Junkie Me.
It’s mostly Khalid’s fault. He’s lying on the one remaining carpet behind me and cooing at the same blue dog that, ahem, attacked him yesterday, so I guess he’s forgiven both of us. 😉
See y’all on the other side!
Internet over & out!
There’s nothing funny about pain, but the look on Bebe’s face (brow wrinkled, lower lip protruding) followed by the offended little ‘meep!’ noise that he made when I accidentally beaned him in the face with Blue- that was funny. That was very, very funny.
I must be a horrible mother, because once when the cell phone I had been trying to hold between my ear and my shoulder slipped and bounced off of Bebe’s forehead, I couldn’t help but notice how his wide-open eyes and perfectly o-shaped mouth made him look like a surprised little coconut- and I laughed.
On a separate note: the moving and packing is about 80% complete, and we are now left with one mattress, a fridge, a washer, a stove, a kitchen and two bathrooms. There will be one last installment of work and then we should be shifted into the new house completely, InshaAllah. So if updates are few and far between these days, it’s because I’m currently busy reigning over the Kingdom of Dustbunnies in Cardboardland.
I’m in the process of customizing this template, which of course means accidentally making the text in the ‘About Me’ section blue so that no one can read it. Oh yeah, I meant to do that…yessss…
And I would finish customizing it, but reality calls. It sez, “FOLD THE LAUNDRY!” and “WE WANT TEA!” and “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER!”
Reality is a strange place. Oh and last night, I did something I never ever thought I could, and according to Momma, HF, and LilGrey, never ever should. I removed my own stitches. I had two stitches inside of my mouth from last week’s removal of a wisdom tooth (Abez: Now with 50% less wisdom!) and thanks to a pair of tweezers and a pair of scissors, I now have none. Admittedly, the idea gave me the heebie-jeebies for about ten minutes before I gave the stitches an experimental tug. That was relatively painless, so I gave them a snip and they practically fell out.
What was painful though, was the way HF grabbed me by the ear after he caught me. You know how your mom does that when she’s scolding you? Hehe.
Yeah, that may be one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done.
Also, this may be one of the most random blogs I’ve ever written. Owlie is back! Hooray! And she brought me a DDR pad! And I was up until 2 am last night stomping away! And I am w00t! w00t I say, w00t!
By Abez, The End.
Last night HF popped his head into the kitchen with a box of mithai in his hand. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘Did you say to put the mithai in the fridge?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, soaping up another glass.
‘Good, because that makes more sense than putting my ties into the fridge.’
HF was relieved. I was happy for him.
SubhanAllah, things these days are good. Well, things these days specifically are good, though you never know how those other days will be, and whether you’ll contemplate flinging boxes over the side of the balcony as compared to taping them shut and sending them to the new place. We’re in the process of moving, InshaAllah. The exact move date is uncertain, but the non-essential items of the house are slowly but surely being sorted, arranged, and taped shut. As of yet, none of them have been flung over the balcony.
Did I mention that it’s 6:20 am?
Bebeface is getting a head start on religion by waking up for Fajr at the age of 5 months. Alhamdulillah, he’s grown a lot since I last blogged about his age specifically. (3 months) He’s learning how to sit up, he plays with his fingers and has learned how to smile with two from one hand and three from another crammed excitedly in his mouth. Up until one sentence ago, he had been sitting in his stroller and chewing his Yellow Tiger and contemplating his socked feet. As of this sentence, he is in my lap, holding firmly to the edge of the computer table and staring at the monitor. (Psst, Momma there’s a typo in p2, l5.)
We’ve been up since 5:30, and having prayed, we’ve also had Weetabix, a shower, and a diaper change. Right now we’re sucking our fingers and rubbing our face sleepily into Momma’s t-shirt. Bebeface does wake up several times a night, but usually not for longer than the time it takes to nurse and fall back asleep. He’ll be running out of steam soon, and then we can go back to bed InshaAllah.
*rubs eyes sleepily onto own shirt*
AssalamuAlaikum alls of ya’ll
JazakAllahu Kheiran for all the duas and well-wishes and the ‘what the heck happened?’s I’ve gotten. So here’s what happened. Basically, as we were passing through an intersection on a yellow light, a car coming from our right slammed into us from the side, knocking us into the turn lane on oncoming traffic and into the front end of a truck. It looked like this:
The other car, a BMW, had been waiting for the light to change, but for whatever reason, decided to accelerate before it turned green. It shot out of the red light fast enough to knock us askew, and as the car spun the rear-end of our vehicle hit the bmw again, knocking the bumper off. Then we crashed into the front of the truck. The car is quite simply totalled. It took three consecutive impacts, the first from the bmw on the side, another from the bmw at the back, and the third from driving head-on into a truck.
SubhanAllah for good people, the man who had been in the car to the left of the bmw had also been waiting for the light to change, and he testified to the police that he had been waiting at the same signal and saw the bmw accelerate when the light was still red. He’s also the man who brought Bebe’s car seat and stroller to me, first to the shop, and then again to the hospital. We were all driven away by police/ambulance reapectively, so he packed our stuff into his car and followed us there after talking to the police.
And imagine my surprise when Knicq appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. I was waiting for my turn in x-ray when he showed up, even before HF did, bringing his usual supply of cheer and comfort. JazakAllah Knicq. You are a good bhai.
And my lovely HF called when he was enroute, and when I answered the phone he said, “You know, Abez, if you want me to spend more time with you there are better ways of letting me know.” And then he bought me chocolate and took me for an adventurous spin in the wheel chair, and we went zipping through the halls of the hospital with Khalid riding asleep in my lap.
It’s been two or three days I think, but I have yet to let myself even think of what might have happened. I am very well aware that any one of us could have died should Allah have decided so, but I refuse to imagine anything having happened to Khalid. Even writing this right now is difficult- my throat gets tight and my eyes fill and I get this horrified, panicky feeling. I can’t imagine my life without Bebeface. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose him. I don’t want ever to be lost to him, either. Chalk it up to Momma hormones, but to think of my baby crying and me not being able to be there for him- to think of my child growing up without his mother-
Alhamdulillah.
May Allah bless and reward and shower with mercy and kindness everyone who brought nercy and comfort and kindness to us. Allah, please give us life so long as life is good for us and death when death is good for us, and reunite us with those we love in the hereafter. Ameen
A beautiful thing happened two days ago. After the bounce and the jolt and the crash- after the smell of the hot asphalt and the exhaust cleared, I took Khalid from his car seat and got out of the car. To get out of the car – that was a beautiful thing.
We walked through stopped traffic to a shop on the other side of the road, where I took Khalid’s clothes off and looked for injuries, and I could see, from where I sat, the back bumper of the car lying in the road and the front end of the car crumpled and pushed into the nose of an 18 wheel truck, but I could see both of my husband’s parents had gotten out and were standing near it. To still be standing – that was a beautiful thing.
And the men from the street brought in Khalid’s car seat, and brought his stroller, and brought water and tried to comfort and soothe Khalid. Khalid’s little face was flushed pink from the heat and the fear and the pain, but the men held him and kissed him and told him he was ok, and that too was a beautiful thing.
And my right knee was bloody, and my right calf was cut, and my right ankle was swollen, and my left leg was rapidly turning purple, and my right eye was swollen, and I had hit my head, but the x-rays said that nothing was broken, and that was a beautiful thing.
And Khalid was scared and in pain, and he spent 45 minutes screaming and crying until he passed out from the effort. Even in his sleep, he shuddered and whimpered, but after two hours he woke up smiling and that, Alhamdulillah, SubhanAllah, AllahuAkbar, was the most beautiful thing of all.
Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah.
Always wear your seat belt.
Always keep your baby in a car seat.
Life is a beautiful thing.
I should have known what was coming when I saw how close the box of q-tips was to the edge. I should have moved them when I placed Khalid on the bed to change his diaper. I should have known that a kid who has mastered spitting up not on my shirt, but in my shirt, would be able to take advantage of the q-tips’ precarious position.
Bebe’s Plan for Revenge for Putting Bebe to sleep last night at the wee hour of 11.
Step 1: Pre-place box of 200 q-tips on the edge of bed.
Step 2: Soil diaper.
Step 3: Allow self to be placed on bed and freed of diaper, thus exposing lethal weaponry.
Step 4: Kick Q-tips off of bed, scattering them precisely within range of lethal weaponry.
Step 5: Allow mother to stoop to pick up q-tips, foolishly leaving lethal weaponry exposed.
Step 6: Ready.
Step 7: Aim.
Step 8: FIRE!
Step 9: Beam joyously as you soak momma’s back in a fresh, steady stream of revenge.
Somewhere when I wasn’t looking, Bebeface turned 3 1/2 months. I hadn’t noticed really. There were other things to look at- like spit bubbles. My son has become quite proficient at them, pursing his lips together to produce a nice, long cascade of wet, frothy silliness. Then he beams. He doesn’t smile anymore, he beams, his whole bebe face lighting up in the biggest, gummiest expression of joy.
A few weeks ago he noticed his own hands for the first time and then spent a few days staring at them intently. Soon afterwards, he began playing with his toys for the first time, MashaAllah. Lying underneath an assortment of hanging toys, Khalid now has mighty battles with the jingly yellow tiger. Khalid crams the tiger in his mouth, and the tiger retaliates by craming its stuffed legs into Khalid’s eyebrows. Khalid growls. The tiger jingles. The battle continues.
It’s hard to believe that this is the same baby I brought home with me in March. That baby was a tiny, non-interactive bundle of newbornness. This baby is a wiggly, cooing, squealing, arm-waving, judo-chopping, bicycle-kicking handful of chub and happiness. The Bebeface I brought home only cried, but this one holds conversations with you.
“coo! bbbbb! aaaa?” he asks, raising his eyebrows at the end of the sentence. He expects you to answer. So you coo and laugh and squeal back. And he beams.
Bebeface noticed his reflection the other day, and spent a vain long time engaging it in conversation. “bbbBbbb?” (translation: “Who is that handsome devil?”)
I wasn’t looking when it happened, but my son developed a personality. MashaAllah.
You know those plain, brown plastic Bata sandals? The ones outside of the men’s section in any Pakistani masjid? The ones that everyone has a pair of to do wudu in, the ones that everone’s father has owned at least once and everyone’s mother has ‘borrowed’ around the kitchen a few times? I saw one yesterday.
It was lying on its side in the fast lane on Emirates Road, ten feet from a white sheet with a growing red stain on it. Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ileihi Rajioon. Verily wa are God’s and to Him we return.
