Year: 2012

A Much-Needed Vacay

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As I type this I am sitting first-class on a plane (we just happened to luck out with miles) next to my husband Jason. We’re California-bound with a stopover in Dallas. When we arrive in Cali we’re jumping in a car and driving almost two hours to Calistoga, a small town in Napa Valley. Yes, wine country! I cannot wait to have this time alone with my husband. But an even bigger reason to take this trip, and to justify leaving our kid at home with his grandparents to go taste wine, is that we are combining it with a visit to San Fransisco to meet my baby niece.

Diya Shireen Taha was born on June 6th. It is my first niece and I cannot wait to hug her, hold her and look for my sweet brother’s likeness in her eyes hair. Diya has her mom’s eyes and my brother’s dark curly hair.

Diya at two months

The last time I was in Napa with Jason was in the fall of 2009. We were visiting my brother and Sarita in San Fran. They rented a limo with some friends and took us on a day trip there.

I’ve been known to let loose and have some drinks from time to time. And my husband’s been known to be a bit of a wine-snob (although he disagrees about this). Knowing this is important because it explains why we thought Napa was a little piece of heaven on earth. We loved it. As the wineries flowed it was time to head back to the city. We reluctantly said good bye to the cloudless sky, rolling hills and buttery wines of Napa and vowed to return some day.

Ok, maybe there were a few clouds in Napa after all 🙂

Napa, Diya… here we come!

 

 

Happy 2nd Birthday Mylo, My Love

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I thought the first year of your life was the best year of my life. I thought wrong. This past year was even better. And so it will likely be that each year you get older, before you become an adventurous and defiant, testing-the-limits teenager, I will love being your mom more and more.

You amaze me with all of your developments, your likes and dislikes, and you make me smile regardless of what kind of day I am having. When you hit 14 months old I thought you were a handful. Walking, but not yet talking, you needed constant supervision. At 17 months things shifted and became more fun. You began showing signs of independence, such as feeding yourself with an adult-size fork and walking up the stairs to our first floor apartment. You were this age when you first uttered the word “Eee-dee,” your name for my dad whom we call Sidi and who is a big presence in your life. You said his name with such purpose and then broke out in a huge smile when we exploded with delight. Somewhere in your 21st month you went to bed and woke up the next morning with hair on your legs. You were 22 months when you first urinated on the potty. And even much younger when you became aware of your poop. Don’t worry, I won’t embellish on that one! You recently began chasing pigeons at the park. Not to taunt, but I’m not thrilled about it nonetheless. I love you bud, but no kid of mine will harass animals.

Your fascination with trucks and construction sites is a constant reminder that I am raising a little boy. You get a kick out of high-fiving and fist-bumping dudes whom you do not even know. You like to hide from me and get a rouse from making me look for things I need that you intentionally hide. You stop me in my tracks when you do these cute and mischievous things that show your big and emerging personality. I am in awe of you, and I love you.

Happy Birthday Budinsky!

My big boy on his 2nd birthday!

 

 

Mylostone – Choo Choo Train

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A couple of weeks ago Jason took the car and the dog out east to visit friends in Montauk and left me and Mylo home to fend for ourselves. We all met back up in my hometown on Long Island at the beginning of the weekend, which required me and Mylo having an adventure together on his first, real train ride. Subways he already has down pat, but a real choo-choo-type-train he’d yet to experience.

We walked from our apartment in Brooklyn to the Long Island Rail Road’s Atlantic Terminal to embark on a route that I had taken hundreds of times before. Prior to getting a car in 2007 the Atlantic Terminal (called simply “Flatbush Avenue” those days) to Northport, was a trip I knew all too well. I can’t say I’m a big fan of the LIRR and that I miss it one bit, but it was such a pleasure to see the joy in Mylo’s face as we rode through tunnels, sped past trucks and played peekaboo games with the commuters who sat in the seats around us.

A couple of photos from our memorable trip…

My curious kid.

Note to self: Never take a seat next to an Emergency Exit window with a toddler again. Ever.

Guck-Guck

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In the early days of Mylo’s life, when the joy of knowing he was a boy began to set in after his birth, the day dreaming began. Having grown up in a family who loves sports and played sports, and having married someone who is also very athletic, I’ve been conjuring up images of an athlete. I have visions of kicking a ball with my son. I want to teach him how to head the ball without being afraid of it and I hope he’ll grow up to see the value and joy from running. My husband wants him to play football. He wants our son to negotiate a football field with poise, power and purpose. Jason’s a HUGE Eli Manning fan. Of course I prefer he doesn’t play any sport he can hurt his brain in, so, we’ve settled on baseball.

But it seems Mylo has settled on trucks. For now.

In raising a male, it somehow slipped my mind that little boys, even grown men, love things that operate. Case in point: last week we were at Cadman Plaza park while two men in a utility truck were fixing a lamp post with a crane. Mylo was enamored by it. I held him in my arms and got as close as safely possible so he could watch. It happened that he was not the only one fascinated by the operation. An older gentleman on a bench sat with his fist under his chin, staring too.

A hard covered tot book simply called “Trucks” became Mylo’s best friend when he was 14 months old. He would let us know he wanted the truck book and that book only by motioning toward it and urgently calling out “gat-gat, gat-gat!” Last night he went to bed with his Trucks book under his arm. He is almost two years old and they are still best buds.

On Mother’s Day while strolling through Chinatown with my parents I bought him his first toy fire truck. Mylo didn’t let go of his new truck for at least one week. It was the best $4 I’ve ever spent. The fleet has since grown to include a subway car, a mail truck, a bus and a plane.

Mylo's guck-guck fleet

Mylo’s vocabulary has also grown.

The word “truck” is no longer “gat-gat,” but “guck-guck.” And before I know it, it will simply become “truck.”

I look forward to having conversations with my son. To hearing him speak in full sentences and listening as his voice deepens and matures. But right now I just want to bottle up all of these cute words and annunciations he makes and open up the jar 3, 10 and 20 years from now to remember how happy they make me.

 

 

Making Sense of a Miscarriage

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On the last Friday in February at a music class/open play session with my son Mylo came a rush of something moist between my legs. I knew almost immediately what was happening but did not go to the bathroom. When open play ended we were one of the last to leave. Afterwards, we paid a visit to a neighborhood bakery and shared an over-sized vegan chocolate chip cookie. Even the cold February rain outside did not beckon us home. I was in no rush to discover what I was certain awaited me.

Not long after we got home the cramps started. I called my midwife on the phone who sounded less than optimistic, “Shit, why does this always happen on a Friday,” she asked, rhetorically. Gulp.

Weeks after the miscarriage I had a disturbing dream. A moving boat. An accident. Someone in the dream called for women and children to get off the boat first. I was toward the front helping someone, indifferent to the fact that the order applied to me. Then someone held a baby upside down in the air, asking “who’s child is this?” She was wearing fuchsia-colored  pajama bottoms and I gathered that she was being held upside down because she did not survive the crash. The baby had blondish hair, like my son, but it was not curly. After a few moments when no one stepped forward to claim her, they lowered her down a conveyor-like pole. The older women on board looked at me knowingly, and shamefully, as I continued helping the injured.

I’ve interpreted this dream in ways that has brought some closure and helped to make some sense of the loss. For a multitude of reasons I feel confident and sure that it was just not our time to have another child. At times I still feel sad, but I have also made my peace with it.

My Big Bro

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My brother Aki is one of the most sensitive people I know. It is one of the qualities I love most about him. The other day when we video chatted via gmail with Mylo, he welled up with tears. I called him on it, but in hindsight I knew damn well why he was misty-eyed. Besides the fact that he hasn’t seen his nephew in a while, he is expecting a tyke of his own in weeks, maybe even days.

It’s almost impossible not to feel like an emotional basket case during the imminent arrival of your first child, the little person you do not yet know but who will change your life forever. I have no doubt that seeing Mylo triggered a happy place for my brother, a place he does not yet know but has spent the last nine + months dreaming about.

I am so excited to watch him become an incredible and doting dad. But I feel so many other things, too. His starting a family means less visits back East to see us. And because we’re on different coasts I don’t expect that I’ll get to know his daughter as well as I would like.

It feels like just yesterday when Aki and I were cruising in my mom’s BMW with the sunroof open, going over the Robert Moses Causeway Bridge. The sun beating down on our curly hair, the ocean’s breeze on our face, we were young, unattached and full of possibility. Now we live on different coasts, have started families of our own, and are on other ends of the spectrum career-wise.

My brother and his wife’s future is taking off. They have a baby on the way and their careers have been prosperous. I couldn’t be happier for them. I only have one sibling and yet sometimes it feels like the distance between us is growing.

Aki & Sarita sharing a weekend alone before the baby

 

Mother’s Day Deserved

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When I was seven months pregnant people were wishing me a Happy Mother’s Day – on Facebook and in passing friends and neighbors on the street. It didn’t feel right. I hadn’t the faintest idea about the huge role I was about to take on, but I thanked folks all the same.

Last year, when Mylo was nine months old it still didn’t feel like “my” day yet. Just the day in which I’ve honored my own mom for the last 30 + years.

But this year feels different for some reason. My son is almost two years old and he’s a handful and a half. He was an active baby and he’s even more active now as a toddler. I love him more each day, even if those days are challenging. There are times I don’t feel like the greatest mom, but I know I’m doing my best. I imagine I’ll carry this sentiment with me for the rest of my life and so it makes perfect sense why Mother’s Day exists. Because even if I’m not the best mom, I am honored, and thanked, for trying to be on this one day every year.

Mylo came home from daycare with this card on Thursday. Obviously, it wasn’t a solo effort. But if it was, then my son really IS a genius!

The daycare ladies really know how to tug at your heart strings 🙂

I loved my first Mother’s Day card, on what feels like my first real Mother’s Day.

A Comforting Good-Bye

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Tuesday night I attended a wake at Scotto Funeral Home in Carroll Gardens. The mother of Carmen, the woman who adopted Annie the Min-Pin from my rescue, passed away after battling Alzheimer’s Disease for the past 18 years. For the last twelve of those difficult years Carmen was her caretaker. Her mom died in hospice at home, the same home in Brooklyn where Carmen was born and raised.

At the wake Carmen told me she had eight siblings, six of which her mom buried over the years. Some of them as young as babies.

My son is 20 months old so it was difficult to swallow those words and to fathom that kind of grave loss. It was also tough to look at the coffin, which was open. Carmen’s mom was a skinny skeleton who looked nothing like the heavyset smiley woman in the photos that decorated the funeral parlor. She wore a cotton pink nightie with the word Brooklyn scrawled across it– and that’s what I will remember the most, I think: that Carmen gave the coroner her mom’s comfortable around-the-house nightie to dress her in, as opposed to her Sunday best.

It’s weird to think I walked away from a funeral feeling comfort and not sadness. And perhaps a bit of reassurance too, that one of my dogs landed herself the kind of people who will stick with her and take care of her until the very end.

Annie now called Jackie, leans on her bonded housemate Zero

Happy Re-birthday Ella

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On March 21, 2008 our dog’s fate was sealed and my life was just weeks away from changing… forever. Four years ago today was the day Ella was brought into Brooklyn Animal Care & Control, a high-kill shelter in New York City, after someone had caused her severe physical harm: both of her front legs were broken.

She was rescued by an animal welfare organization, we went to meet her, took her home and the rest was history. Actually, I lie. “The rest” was at times extremely stressful and challenging, the details of which are outlined in her blog. But adopting Ella taught me so much and opened the door to my passion for rescuing animals, specifically pit bulls.

There is so much about this breed of dog that tugs at my heart strings. For starters, they are grossly misunderstood. There is no other breed who responds to the human/dog relationship like pit bulls do. This is one insight into the fighting dynamic they suffer. But it is also the reason they are able to recover from insane cruelty. I am inspired by my dog, and by others like her. Happy Re-birthday Stinky Mama!

I'm a lover. Not a fighter.

First Post of 2012

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I am a bad blogger. I haven’t written about my son in months and it’s a shame because he’s growing and developing in leaps and bounds and I haven’t the time to document a lot of it.

I am a bad mom. With almost a moment’s notice, I ran off to Las Vegas with my best friend, crashing a trip my mom and dad had previously planned there. My brother and his pregnant wife tagged along, too. We. Had. A. Blast.

What happens in Vegas...

I have a good son. Well, sometimes. Besides calling anything with fur that moves, Ella, the name of our dog, he now clearly says Dee-Dee, the nickname of our cat. He also says momma and dadda with purpose. Much to my enjoyment and to Jason’s chagrin, he knows the word “cookie” which he pronounces “coke-a.” He does so many things that delight me, like kiss the boo-boo on my hand, and so many things that frustrate me, like constantly drag me to the fridge so that I can watch him empty its contents, only to eventually abandon all of it.

Be still my beating heart...

Mylo started daycare in November and has been healthy for all of one week since. Seriously, he spent the entire month of November sick. So much so that it required his first antibiotic, a non-Mylostone milestone. It is mid-January and he is with cold, again. His doctors tell us to look on the bright side: when he starts kindergarten he won’t be sick as much because his immunity is strengthening thanks to other snot-nosed Brooklyn babies and toddlers. Other than being sick all the time, daycare’s been great. While he’s not always so thrilled when we drop him off, it’s doing great things for him. They provide a vegetarian menu at daycare and the women there genuinely seem like they care about him. He’s learning to share, and he’s learned to nap in a pack n’ play. Yes, NAP! The most precocious boy who would only nap in a moving stroller, has finally taken to napping in a crib, with a bottle. Hallelujah.

I am working again, part-time and it’s fantastic. I am also currently waiting on big news. NO, I am not pregnant. To think we had talked about having another in 2012 makes me think someone must have spiked our drinks. Or, we were just high on life. I am not low, but I cannot even imagine bringing new life into the world right now. There is so much we are working on, and talking about… not to mention a certain little someone who stimulates and exhausts every fiber of our being. Our plates are full and our palettes are sated. For now anyway 🙂