Aileen Jeffries

I am by no means a model parent. I lack patience. I refuse to wear mom jeans, I swear profusely and I exposed my baby to the music of 50 Cent while she was still in the womb.

However, I have learned a thing or two in the last ten months. Mostly, that modern technology is a perfectly acceptable alternative to hard or unpleasant work.

Without further introduction, my Top Five Mother’s Little Helpers.

The Diaper Genie II

To the uninitiated, a Diaper Genie is a bin for soiled diapers. The killer feature is (and I apologize for the choice of words here) a sphincter, through which the diaper is pushed. The sphincter snaps shut, sealing in the odor. I suppose the scat of all omnivores offends the nose but the smell of baby poop is especially appalling because it emanates from a being so lovable and innocent. How could someone so angelic unleash such great evil? I salute you, oh Diaper Genie, tamer of the fetid.

Video Monitor

We started off with the camera attached to the railing of the crib. Then Kea started pulling herself up, plucking the camera off its hook and munching on it as a pre-nap snack. This would all be very amusing to watch but the monitor system was expensive and certainly not saliva-proof so I moved the camera up, way up, above the window. It now looks over the crib, panoptic and inaccessible. Rightly so, Kea stares up at the steady green light as though it were a god.

Clothing with Ears

Every hood is an opportunity for ears. Rounded, bear-like ears. Kea is at least twice as fetching when she’s all bundled up in her fuzzy pink bear suit. What’s that you say? Annoyed I haven’t managed to select a pastry in the five minutes I’ve been waiting in line directly in front of the pastry case? But look, ears! On my baby! Impossibly cute.

Head Rest Mirror

Being under one year of age, Kea’s car seat faces backwards so I can’t check her expression in the rear-view mirror. Is she sleeping or restless? Spitting up? Contracting malaria? Molting??? These concerns are distracting. But now, thanks to a flimsy and marginally reflective disc of safety plastic affixed to the head rest in front of her car seat, I can now catch a reassuring glimpse of her chubby visage and go back to the business of driving. Peace of mind for less than $20.

Disposable Diapers

I consider myself a friend to Mother Nature. And we tried, valiantly. A few weeks into the parenting adventure, we picked up a set of G Diapers – reusable diaper covers with flushable, biodegradable inserts. There was leakage. When I tried to flush the insert there was – and I shudder involuntarily at this memory – splash back.

Now it’s all disposables, all the time. They do not leak, they wick. They’re light-weight and self-adhesive. The used ones wrap up into neat little packages of doom.

I was raised by wolves in the forest (this is true except for the wolf part). My mother had no monitor, no disposable diapers, not even a washing machine. I am in awe. Of course, she once almost allowed an eagle to eat me as I dozed under a tree, so perhaps I should not be too impressed.

I have a friend who likes to go on 12-mile hikes on Mt. Hood in the middle of winter. He summits such colorfully-named locales as Misery Ridge, Starvation Creek and Resort-to-Cannibalism Cliff. He recounts with glee sinking thigh-high into the snow with each arduous step.

To me, this sounds like insanity. Not how I’d like to spend my weekends. But we all must have our masochistic fun, and mine comes in the form of Plane Travel With Small Child.

Over the weekend, Kea and I flew down to Nashville to surprise a friend from my Clemson days at her baby shower. The trip was a big success – my friend was duly floored by my appearance and Kea was her usual charming self for most of the weekend.

The flight home wasn’t ideal, however. Apparently, freezing temperatures came as a surprise to Frontier Airlines. In January. In Denver. So, our last flight from Denver to Portland was delayed by 1.5 hours. All seats were occupied, the overhead bins and underseat storage overflowing with the belongings of passengers trying to avoid the $15 fee for checked luggage. Being a budget airline, even nuts and berries were exorbitantly expensive, adding hunger to the list of scourges afflicting my fellow travelers. Kea, who seemed to intuitively understand that commercial aircraft are powered by the screams and tears of babies, did her best to get us home as quickly as possible. She cried, she squirmed, she refused to be pacified. No number of Kix could quiet her. At times, she would close her eyes, raising my hopes that she might pass out (at midnight, this did not seem like an unreasonable wish) only to rise again with renewed vigor and vitriol. College students glared at me, parents cast me sympathetic glances. Three hours crept by at the pace of an elderly snail.

But in the end, of course we made it home. In the morning, Kea arose with her usual sunny smile as if to say, what plane ride, Mom?

For six innocent months, our baby, Kea, was unaware of her feline housemates. Saks would curl up next to her on the sofa and Kea would treat him like any other furry warm blanket.

Unfortunately for our cats, Kea is starting to take more notice of her surroundings, just as she has begun her quest for mobility. She explores her world largely through her mouth – if she can grab it, it goes in the mouth. Whole catalogs are reduced to paper mush in mere minutes.

The greatest prize would be a cat – to grab, to ride, to fit as much as possible into her gaping maw. Our cats are not social creatures. They do not bear gladly the clumsy and the loud. When Kea smacks her fists against the floor, shrieks her primal cat-hunting call and lunges for one of them, they take off. This only spurs her desire to dominate them further.

Until this morning, I assumed the cats realized they had the upper hand, with their competency at walking and jumping to high, protected places. This was before we discovered what Nieman had done to Kea’s favorite pacifier. Evidently, he has some suppressed feelings about being stalked daily by our baby.

Our cat, Saks, spends most of the day outside, but come nightfall, we lock him inside to keep him safe from the zombies coyotes. Around 5:00am, he gets a little antsy and starts lobbying to be let out. If I’m lucky enough to be sleeping at this hour (which happens less often than I’d like) I’m surely not getting up to open the door for him.

So, naturally, Saks spends the pre-dawn hours roaming the house looking for items to destroy as some sort of petty revenge for his imprisonment.

This morning he found the beginnings of a mobile I was making for Kea. Of course, Kea’s nearly four months old now, so the time when her mind could actually be expanded by watching objects float about in the breezes above her crib has probably come and gone. My vision was grandiose: a flock of Western Tanagers made from colorful scraps of cloth and batting, suspended by filaments from a well-chosen branch. I made exactly one tanager before abandoning the project, which really, when I think of it, is an apt metaphor for the gap between my parental aspirations (I will sew her adorable yet comfortable baby clothes! I will teach her sign language! I will learn lullabies and sing her to sleep!) and reality (Hey look! She stops screaming when I turn on the TV!).

So, Saks found the lone cloth tanager this morning and rendered it asunder. Wings on the stairway, the body in the foyer, tail hanging on by a thread. Which is exactly what he does to actual birds when he finds one dumb enough to be caught by a cat as impatient and loud as he. I have to wonder if he was disappointed this one didn’t have nice crunchy bones.

Kea celebrated her 2-month birthday yesterday (with a round of vaccine shots, poor girl). Many aspects of my life have returned to normal. I’m back at work, my body no longer resembles an egg with legs and I can enjoy the occasional glass of wine or stinky raw cheese without worrying how my dietary indulgences will effect Kea’s future algebra aptitude.

Some things, though, will never be the same. I learned this a few weeks ago at my 30th birthday party. My actual birthday was one day after the birth of our daughter, making it both the least significant and most memorable birthday I’ve ever had. So, Kes threw me a party six weeks later on the 5th of July. The other reason to celebrate was the completion* of our house remodel. The party was great – a house full of music, good friends and plenty of alcohol. Yet even with Kea safely in the arms of my friend Michelle (mother extraordinaire) and a fridge stockpiled with milk, I found I couldn’t truly let go and get nice and drunk, freshman-year-in-college style. Part of me knew I needed to maintain a firm enough grasp on my faculties to properly care for my baby. In retrospect, this is probably for the best – wasted thirty-year-olds are considerably less appealing than drunken co-eds. Still, I felt wistful, knowing a stage of my life had definitively come to an end.

I mentioned this to Michelle the next morning and she retorted, “Oh, I didn’t tell you? Things will never be the same again!” So, like my new foot size, I’m going to have to adapt to a portion of my brain forever devoted to my child. I love being back in the office, but as I work, my thoughts tend to drift a little, wondering what Kea is up to. This morning, Kes reported that our baby has finally developed the motor skills necessary to stick just her thumb in her mouth but was furious to discover that sucking it did not produce milk. Little anecdotes like this are enough to make my throat tighten with love and longing and many other emotions the hormones have no doubt programmed me to feel.

The addition of an offspring has enriched my life more than I expected. But it is no longer just my life.