Merry

Merry Christmas to all! And a happy, hopeful 2009!

Last Christmas, as I mentioned in my earlier post, Sam and I traveled to his parents' for the days preceding Christmas, and then returned home to meet my parents on Christmas day.  It was hectic, but privately we talked tough about how it was all okay because starting in Christmas of '08, when we had this baby, everybody could come see us.  After all, we would have grandbaby leverage, which any physicist can tell you is a force not to be reckoned with in the universe.

And yet, somehow, in spite of all of our silly talk, we've ended up with even more hectic travelin' plans this year, due to a number of circumstances: Sam's mother's health prevents her from traveling; Sam, Allison Clare, and I all got the flu, which combined with bad ice storms kept us from getting to Ohio before Christmas as planned; and my sister is coming to New Jersey with my as-yet-unseen (by me) nephew in tow.  My parents kindly offered to drive out to our house for Christmas, so Sam and I hosted Christmas, and then the next day, all of us departed--Sam and I for his parents' in Ohio, and my parents for their house in NJ where my sister and her family were due to arrive. We drove out to Ohio yesterday, returned today, and we are now home for 11 hours before getting back in the car tomorrow morning to drive to my parents' house, where there will be a big party tomorrow night. 

Complicating our travel plans, Allison Clare has learned to loathe her carseat. I can't blame her; she's her mild and happy self for a while, and then she starts straining against the straps that have her pinned down like a little racecar driver in an uncomfortable position (facing backward and reclining).  I sit in the backseat with her and hand her toys, but our trip out to Ohio got really difficult.  The 4-hour trip took 6 hours, between stopping to feed her, then stopping to change her diaper, etc.  While we were out there, we even considered having her and me fly out to NJ instead of driving, and ended up, instead, making a purchase that represents everything I have learned to accept about parenthood that I theoretically would like to reject: a car DVD player. 

Although (or maybe because) in my adult life I have become a lover of television, I really didn't want Allison Clare to have a relationship with television.  In fact, I wanted to postpone her awareness of the television even as an object until she was older. But a friend--ironically, probably the person in my life who hates television the most--gave her a Baby Mozart DVD as a gift, and she really does love it.  But who loves it even more than Allison Clare?  Sam, of course.  He especially loves the time it buys him, and he's also very interested the visual imagery and adaptation of new media to stimulate her development (insert me wincing here).  Really, since the images are pretty gentle and it's classical music, I don't mind her watching it sometimes, though on principle I haven't used it for babysitting purposes except for the day I had the flu. 

However, six hours of watching your baby writhe and twist against straps you know are uncomfortable, and having to extricate yourself when she reaches desperately with her tiny baby hands and grabs your sweater and tries to pull you toward her, beseeching you with piteous eyes to set her free, will do wonders for jettisoning a principled approach in favor of hard realism.  And actually, I'm not opposed to television in extreme times, such as when a kid is home from school sick, etc. . . . I would have preferred to have believed that simply traveling with my baby was not an extreme situation, but given that reasoning with her doesn't appear to work very well yet, we'll try television, the real opiate of the masses!