8 Months Old and a Slap Upside the Head

Today our wonderful gift of a sweet angel baby is 8 months old, or two-thirds, as Mark has enjoyed saying. It’s so terribly boring to drone on about how deeply and absolutely we love and adore her. We can say it to each other of course, and tell her all the time, but I still feel the need to shout it from the proverbial rooftop.

Again, it’s a time when it rots that my mother isn’t at the other end of 401-253-8370 any more. Dialing that number is ingrained in me, and I think she was home and answered the phone 99.5% of the time I called. (One of the perks of having a hermit mom. That is something Kate will never benefit from, unless I am suddenly overcome with agoraphobia.) So yeah. I want to call my mother and tell her ad nauseum how beautiful and sweet Kate is. And not being able to makes me feel like I’m having to contain my excitement. I’m not so good at that.

So today she is 8 months old. And I think Mark and I have done a pretty good job with her thus far. From what we can tell she isn’t on drugs, and I haven’t heard a single swear come out of her mouth. And aside from occaisionally turning her nose up at her dinner, and not yet knowing how to change her own diapers, I think our challenges with her are reasonable. Someone asked me at the nursing home today how old she is and when I told him I said, “It seems like it went by fast, but also like I can’t remember the time before her.” Of course, that was just me trying to say something profound. I do remember napping whenever I wanted to and having the freedom to go out at night on a lark.

So far Kate has eaten sweet potatoes, summer squash, carrots, apples, pears, peas, avocado, bananas–and rice cereal and oatmeal. But I feel like I need to introduce some of the less-sweet and enticing foods so she doesn’t grow up only willing to eat candied yams with mini-marshmallows for every meal. So on our way home from visting Rose at Chaparral House, we stopped at Berkeley Bowl.

If you have never been to Berkeley Bowl and get aroused by produce, this place is for you. It’s like a fruit and vegetable stand on steriods with a fancy gourmet grocery store attached to it. And the variety. Oy! In the realm of eggplant alone, you could probably find 8 types. Sure, we’ve all heard of Japanese eggplant, and think that we’re pretty food-savvy because of it. But Berkeley Bowl will bust out something like Orange Siberian Eggplant, and show you who’s boss. It’s humbling.

The down side of Berkeley Bowl is that everyone else in Berkeley knows how great it is and at any given time, one-half of the city’s population is there playing bumper-cars with their shopping carts. Those erstwhile hippies get all agro over the veggies too. I’ve seen turf wars there more nasty than one I saw in NYC when two women were fighting over a pair of pants at a Donna Karan sample sale. (Maggie: I’m thinking I just may need a riot shield after all.)

So the most divine and excellent of all small people, Miss Kate, and I were wandering the aisles looking for some food to cook, puree, and freeze in ice cube trays. I was carrying her in the Ergo, which is a kind of front-pack thingy that is more fun than having the kid in a far-away stroller (i.e. I can get to her easier to smother with love in the Ergo). Here we are, two innocent produce-gawkers trying to determine what’s what, when a guy who is speed-walking frantically and weilding a yellow plastic shopping basket decides he’s in the wrong aisle, spins around, and smacks my precious sweet Katie in the forehead with his basket.

She was so shocked it took a second for her to do anything. I mean, it seemed so long that I wondered if it even really hit her, or if she was just going to shrug it off. Oh no. She let out a volume-11 wail that had Mr. I’m-in-a-Hurry practically wetting his pants. Good. Serves him right.

I was hugging the poor girl and hoping it was one of those things we could push past pretty quickly, since The Aggressor was clearly feeling terrible and I immediately went to my typical trying-to-make-him-feel-better place. Silly person that I am. When she wasn’t settling down quickly, the guy came to his senses and returned to his impatient mode. “Can’t you bounce her up and down some?” Why oh why didn’t I have the presence of mind to say, “So you’re going to clock my baby in the head with your hard shopping basket, and then tell me how to soothe her?!”

Thankfully, she doesn’t seem to have a goose egg or bruise on her forehead. The long-term psychological fall-out is, of course, TBD. Despite that, I think she’ll be wearing a helmet on all future Berkeley Bowl outings.