Holden ushered in Memorial Day weekend as an 11-month old baby.  It’s hard to believe we’ll be celebrating his first birthday in a few short weeks.  Holden still loves people (especially other babies), animals, chasing the kitty around the house, tormenting the rabbit, dancing, “reading” to himself, going to the park, and getting into everything he can get his not-so-little hands on.  His vocalizations are sounding increasingly speech-like, and he has developed some rudimentary sounds that he associates with specific objects.  “Dig-dig” is his word for dog.  “Itty” is his word for “kitty” (he has yet to master the “k” sound).  This past weekend he started being able to stand unassisted from a sitting position.  It was pretty wild to watch him rise up to a standing position without using any support or relying on anyone else’s reassuring grasp.  As I watched him stand, I saw the little self-corrective movements in his feet, legs, and trunk that prevented him from crashing to the ground.  It’s amazing how quickly we are able to acquire these sorts of motor skills.  Holden is indeed a little machine, optimally designed for learning.  

Holden is still working on some more teeth.  The pain seems to come and go without any rhyme or reason.  On days where his teeth are obviously bothering him, his sleep suffers.  He’s asleep by 7:30PM every night—he wakes up every couple of hours thereafter, and finally wakes up for the day between 5AM and 6AM.  I don’t think I’d mind the early waking time if he slept more soundly throughout the night.  I could even tolerate a couple of night wakenings without much of a problem.  The constant interruption of my sleep is really starting to take its toll, though.  That said, during our Memorial Day getaway to Maine, Holden slept through the night two nights in a row.  This hasn’t happened since January.  When we returned home from Maine, he reverted back to his crappy sleeping habits.  I do wonder about the noise in our condo and whether that contributes to Holden’s poor sleeping.  We live on a busy street and there are people up and down our driveway at all hours of the night, smoking cigarettes/drinking beer just below his bedroom window, etc.  It will be interesting to see if Holden sleeps better after we move.  I do have to add though, that Holden and I have perfected our little bedtime routine.  It used to be that we’d do our bedtime stories, brushing teeth, nursing, followed quickly by being tucked into bed.  I’ve found that Holden is so much more relaxed if I cuddle with him for a while after he is done nursing before I tuck him into bed.  It does end up taking me 45-60 minutes to get him to go to sleep, but the process is so so sweet and special that I really don’t care how damn long it takes.  After he’s done nursing, I position him so his head is resting on my shoulder.  I usually pat his hair and rub his back.  He blinks slowly and his eyes lose their focus.  But he will occasionally smile as if he feels like the most loved baby on the planet.  It’s so sweet.  When I finally do lay him in his crib, he rolls immediately to his tummy and smiles as I rub his back and pat his hair.  He just loves going to sleep this way.  This isn’t to say that he is always this placid and tranquil at bedtime, but nine times out of ten, he really is.  I just love this time with him and I will be sad when he outgrows it and wants to go to sleep on his own.

And speaking of growing up quickly—we’ve begun the slow process of parting with Holden’s baby items.  His jumper, which he absolutely LOVED as a younger baby but hasn’t used since he was 5 months old, was given to a family with a little baby.  We’re selling his co-sleeper and a bunch of other things that Holden has outgrown.  It’s nice in some respects to know that we are past the babyhood period of our lives but of course it’s also incredibly difficult to accept that Holden really is on the verge of leaving babyhood forever.  I wonder sometimes if I cherished the time with him enough; I was so consumed with job searching this past year and wallowing in my own self-pity and being angry with our neighbors, that I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t present enough with Holden.  It’s kind of irrelevant, these thought exercises in self-loathing.  I can’t do it over—all I can do is commit to being more present for him in the days to come.  Looking back, I really do think I did the best I could.

To wrap up this rambling and incoherent post, I will leave you with some of my favorite images from the past several weeks:

At Fort Williams.  I was worried about H’s feet being cold.  You will see that I am holding his feet with my hands in every shot.

Cookout at Uncle Joe’s.  Holden enjoyed crawling, ice cream, and unassisted standing.  He looks so big!

I love this photo.  It looks like an advertisement for something.  Of what, I do not know.

Fort Williams.  Holden spies Papa trying to covertly capture this moment.  I am  probably oblivious because I am too wrapped up in keeping H’s feet warm, again.

Someone is a drama queen.  Holden has established several different ways of telling us “No,” including shaking his head, arching his back and crying, struggling and crying, screaming, and now this:

Holden with his pal Mallory.  They share a nanny together two days a week.  Mallory accidentally bit Holden last week.  But it doesn’t matter.  Holden is loyal and loves her anyway:

So happy to be outside!

Holden is still in love with Mallory:

Holden loves spending time with his Papa:

We saw 6 houses on Monday.  We made an offer on one of them.  We negotiated back and forth with the sellers and today we sealed the deal.  The house is a BARGAIN (woot, for buyer’s market!) and will end up costing us about the same as our condo.  The house is an ugly duckling from the outside.  The inside has a lot of potential.  It mostly needs updating.  It has an awesome bi-level deck off the dining room, it has a kitchen with a breakfast bar, a woodburning fireplace in the living room, and gas stove with exposed brick in the family room.  It has FOUR bedrooms and two baths, a mudroom, and a 2-car garage.  It’s on a quarter acre.  We will have 1200 more square feet of living space than we currently have.  And the best part is that we will have nice neighbors!!!!!

We’ll post pictures after our property inspection…..w00t!

This past week was another cortisol-filled adventure.  After the whole incident with our downstairs neighbor, our car was vandalized in our parking space.  We don’t believe our downstairs neighbor is to be blamed for this, although we do suspect a friend of one of the tenants in the multi-unit next door.  We have no solid proof though, so filing the police report was more for our own sense of closure than anything else.  The car is pretty much OK, so we are trying to move on and forget about the incident.  

We got an offer on our condo towards the end of last week and after many, many rounds of counter-offers, we finally came to an agreement and got our condo under contract.  This relieves much stress as we no longer have to prepare for showings that could happen pretty much at any moment, AND we can expect (if things go according to plan) to be moved by July 1st.  Today we attended several open houses around town and found a house that we could be happy in, although we plan on seeing 5 more houses tomorrow just to be sure.  The house needs some work, mostly cosmetic stuff, and a new roof.  We saw some of the neighbors outside gardening with their kids, and they waved and smiled at us.  I wanted to pinch myself, not believing that we weren’t being asked to apologize for Holden’s existence for once.  Our lives are going to improve so significantly once we are out of our current housing situation.  Enduring these final weeks in our condo will be tough, so we plan on packing the coming weeks with trips, bike rides, mini-hikes, grilling, and strawberry picking.  Our downstairs neighbors have made it clear that they don’t intend to be courteous with the volume of their music, so unfortunately, it looks like we must grin and bear it for a while longer.   And don’t even get me started about the passive-aggressive door-slamming…

So where does karmic retribution factor into all of this??  Clearly, someone who is as awful as our neighbor has got to have it coming to her at some point, right?  Well, I have a prediction that I would like to share.  The individual who is buying our house came in with a low-ball offer and continually countered our counteroffers, even after we very clearly stated that our counteroffer was FINAL and we weren’t willing to accept anything that she would offer beneath our last offer.  Did she take no for an answer??  Nope.  She kept at us.  What does this mean about her as a person??  Might she be obstinate?  Might she be unwilling to give up until she gets her way??  Might she fight our downstairs neighbor tooth and nail over every little thing??  I am willing to bet the money we lost on our condo that she will.  Believe me when I say I DELIGHT in the idea of this.  Paybacks are a bitch, what can I say.

While I am relieved and happy that we will be moving on, part of me feels sort of sad and nostalgic about leaving the home to which we first brought Holden.  As I cuddled him to sleep this evening, I was looking around his bedroom and thinking about all of the hours I have spent in there nursing him, reading him stories, tickling him, trying to pin him down for diaper changes.  I have a vivid memory of one of the first nights we had him home.  I remember sitting up with him and nursing him for several hours in the middle of the night.  I remember that he finished nursing and I laid him in my lap (yes, he actually used to fit in my lap), and I remember that he had his eyes open and he looked up at me with so much love and he smiled at me and made a noise that sounded like “A-goooooo.”  And when he did that I remember feeling like he was a conduit for everything in this world that is unconditionally loving, gentle, and pure.  I felt such immense love for him in that moment, and such an intense connection with him, and moreover, I felt so lucky and grateful that such a good person came from me and Rob into this world.  In that moment, I felt like I really had a sense of Holden as a person.  I felt overwhelmingly that Holden was a good person….a gentle soul.  Moments like this one are moments I want to remember from living here.  I will pack these moments lovingly in bubblewrap, place them in a box, and secure them for the ride.

Gosh, I don’t even know where to begin with this one.  I got a call today from our neighbor’s mother.  She began the conversation by saying that they feel we haven’t shown her daughter the proper respect.  I took this moment to bask in my speechlessness, while she continued on to say that 1) we cannot control our baby, 2) Rob slammed the door in her daughter’s face the other day when she came up to complain about said “out-of-control” baby, 3) we constantly move our furniture around at night and play loud music, 4) we neglect our son and let him cry for hours without attending to him.  Let’s just allow these accusations to sink in a moment.  The last one especially.  She is accusing us of neglecting our son.  These are dangerous allegations to make, and if you think I resented hearing them, and felt sick at the stomach that someone would even say such a thing, you are right.

I finally caught my breath and asked this woman calmly what she suggest we do about the “crying,” “laughing,” “squealing,” and “loud crawling.”  She said that she wasn’t sure because it wasn’t her child.  I replied “Exactly, he’s not your child.  He’s ours.  And we are doing the best that we possibly can with him.  I understand that it is inconvenient to wake up to a crying baby, but we are doing the best we can.  We have our house on the market.  We will be moving soon.  We are doing everything we can.”  On the inside I wanted to tell her she was a horrible pushover who was allowing her spoiled 34-year-old daughter to lie to her and be a complete pain in the ass to everyone around her.  But I restrained myself.  It was very, very hard.  Her end of the conversation started out very defensively, but I was able to slowly disarm her by saying I understood the disadvantages of living beneath a baby, and from there, I was slowly able to introduce her to the idea that living above her daughter hasn’t been a pleasant experience either.  When I conceded that leaving beneath a baby could be disruptive, I told her I knew this because I could hear them mocking Holden through the floor.  She laughed nervously at this.  When she brought up the fact that her daughter felt like we were “tattling” on her to her parents instead of directly addressing these issues with her, I raised the point that going directly to her with a problem is pointless when the music is so loud that she doesn’t hear us knocking at the door.  Again, nervous laughter.  

I said to her mother, “Let me illustrate a scenario for you.  This morning Holden woke up at 5:45 AM.  Your daughter was angry and frustrated at also being woken up at this hour, and understandably so.  She retaliated by blasting music for an hour.”  Her mother responds “That’s exactly what happened.  She needs to handle this situation with more maturity.”  Aha.  So what started out as a defensive tone where Rob and I are these horrible furniture-moving, baby-neglecting monsters, has somehow morphed into a more reasonable stance where her daughter needs to accept some responsibility and start acting like a grown-up.  Now we’re getting somewhere.  I told her I would go downstairs to speak with her daughter, because I don’t want stress or bad blood.  But I also said that I cannot control my baby.  It’s not possible, and it’s not fair.  It’s already not fair that I wince whenever he vocalizes because I am afraid of what repercussions we may face as a result.  At any rate, I asked her mother whether she thought her daughter would be receptive to a sit-down.  She said, “I don’t know, she’s pretty angry….”  Sheesh.  

One of the questions that her mother asked me was whether we would treat her daughter with more respect if she was the owner of that unit, rather than a renter.  I told her that was irrelevant, but what I really wanted to ask her in response was whether her daughter  would exhibit less of a sense of entitlement if her parents weren’t the owners.  

In the end, the conversation concluded amicably, although it accomplished nothing.  It made me realize that our downstairs neighbor is who she is, in large part, because her parents have supported her emotionally and financially through all of her bullshit.  Her mother seemed to be half supporting her daughter and half embarrassed at even having the conversation in the first place; she kept saying, “I do know and remember what it was like to have babies…”  almost as a disclaimer for the outrageous things she was asking of us.  I keep thinking to myself that she is a woman in her 50s, whose legacy is a daughter who cannot interface reasonably with the world around her.  Her legacy is a daughter who concocts hurtful things about those around her solely so she can get her way.  I think about this legacy and I am glad I kept my cool, because this woman deserves my pity more than my hate.

I hate to be so negative, but there it is.  This weekend we had EIGHT parties come through our condo.  On Saturday we had three private showings, and on Sunday we had our second Open House.  Needless to say, I do quite a bit of cleaning to have the house ready for our showings.  This task has been complicated by H’s messy eating habits as he drops about a third of his food on the floor at any given meal.  In addition to the relentless cleaning, H is back to hardcore teething and is not sleeping well at all.  Because of the crying, our neighbors are retaliating by slamming doors and absolutely BLASTING music through the walls.  It’s to the point where you can hear it outside in the parking lot with all of the windows closed.  You can hear it in every room of our condo.  And if you videotape H, the music can be heard on the video as if it were actually being played in our unit.  I’ve been stewing pretty much all day today about this, and it’s taking a good deal of self-control to not a) go downstairs and verbally bitch slap them, b) call the cops, and/or 3) call her parents and tell them they’ve raised a spoiled, insolent brat.  

Let’s see if I can end this post positively.  I started back to work this week.  I felt very welcomed back to work and I am excited to have some other things to concentrate on.  I have a lot of enthusiasm for the projects I will be working on and I am eager for them to really get under way.  At the moment I don’t have an office at work, so my reading and writing has to be done from home, which has been challenging given reasons cited in the previous paragraph, in addition to the fact that I don’t have a dedicated work space and have to work on the couch.  

OK…..Holden still can’t sleep b/c of the noise.  And I am about to lose my shit.  So I think I need to contact this girl’s folks….enough is enough….