A Lie Recast

I'm sitting on a leather loveseat in the window alcove of a first floor of a Chicago 3-flat. Last November, monad got word from one of the companies he interviewed at during the summer after the layoff. They hadn't had anything for him at the time, but he was on their 'We Like You And Have Not Yet Hired You' list; would he like a job? He spoke with me, then said yes. More money, lower expenses, closer to family. (The lower expenses thing didn't actually wind up being true, but whatever. More on that in a second.)

His yes was conditional on starting after our son was born. So we planned to move around the end of April, six-ish weeks after he was due to be born.

Our son's due date came and went - he was born a week late. We still had him at home, still entirely unmedicated, but I had some bleeding and the kid had pneumonia; we were in the hospital (two days for me, ten total for him, which means ten total for the two of us). That was a really hellish week - it felt like our son's health was a moving target and we were constantly told he couldn't go home that day, the next, that week. But the infection cleared and we got to take him home, and then we got to move, just a bit more quickly than planned.

So now we've been in Chicago for about eight months. We have a lovely two-bedroom apartment in a delightful (and delightfully queer) neighborhood; it's the sort of place you can settle in and nest for the winter, which is good, because I fail at winter. We've made some friends; we joined a nerdy parenting group, which happened to have about 80% overlap with a local poly group, and so now almost all of our (local) friends are poly. Bizarrely, they all seem to be doing poly in a way that doesn't skeeve us out ("Oh, you're poly? I'm free this weekend if you wanna fuck."). I'm used to having mega-bifurcated identity stuff going on because I'm poly in one circle of friends and whatever occupation (currently: mom) in another and a crafter or a scientist or whatever in another, and never the twixt shall meet.

Our son is nine and a half months old; he is the Biggest Ever (99.9th percentile since birth), over eleven pounds at birth, thirty at six months, and thirty-three now. He went from what my dear friend kadrin called a "bag of needs" once to smiling at things that pleased him, to napping and sleeping relatively predictably, from exclusively breastfed to eating damn near anything we'll give him (exception: turnips), from a baby paperweight to sitting to scooching to pulling up and now, cruising from my knee around furniture and on again. His favorites include mommy, mommy's boobs, Apple devices and/or daddy, grandma, strawberries, baths, people who make dopey faces at him, things that are not toys and that we would not like to have slobber on, toys we don't mind having slobber on, in approximately that order. His unfavorites include the booger-sucker, putting shirts on, laying on his back, turnips, playing by himself, car seats, also approximately in that order.

Yesterday I turned thirty and had an amazing party; I had someone cook for it, and we set up my iPad to stream karaoke to our TV, and the kid slept straight through the ruckus. A dozen friends paraded through our place with warmth and well-wishes. I don't think I could ask for more. Tonight we are babysitting some friends' kids, two awesomely well-behaved and friendly girls, eleven and six. They're in bed. Looking at them, I feel comforted. Parenting is fucking hard, yo, but they feel like our future, and it's a good one.

And that's our year.