rivka

Back from a long weekend in Memphis with Michael's father and stepmother.

The good:

Michael got to spend a great deal of quiet one-on-one time with his father, who is dying. I didn't even know that Michael could bond over football and grilling, so it was fun to see a rarely-exposed side of him. I felt good about being able to provide the baby-wrangling that made their time together possible.

Michael's father loves Alex to pieces. He just drank her up, all weekend long. She was much more responsive to him than she was during our last visit, which was a joy and a relief. She wasn't into sitting in his lap, which he would have loved dearly, but she played with him some, and gave him a lot of her best smiles. Watching him watch her made the hassle of the trip so worth it.

They had scheduled Alex a session with a portrait photographer. I was dubious in advance, because it was hard to imagine Alex sitting still for a formal portrait. But (and this is obvious, in retrospect) the photographer was highly skilled at capturing pictures of toddlers, and didn't need Alex to sit still. She got some gorgeous shots. I still think of us as "not the formal portrait type," but I'll be glad to have the pictures anyway.
They bought Alex a metric ton of clothes, some of which we like so much that we won't be returning them even though she already has too many clothes. And some of which filled empty niches in her wardrobe, like the warm, lined, hooded raincoat that will carry her right up until snowsuit weather.

Michael's father paid for our plane tickets, so I didn't have financial anxiety to cancel out the family loveliness.

Alex is a great traveler. She handled the flights and airports and disrupted routines incredibly well.

The bad:

We discovered from a chance remark, after Alex had been trotting in and out of Poppy and Nana's room all weekend, that Michael's father keeps a loaded gun at floor level, just under his side of the bed. Oh. My. God. I mean, we were mostly following her everywhere, because the damn house is cluttered with breakable tchotchkes and they don't babyproof for our visits. But still.

Michael's father is just so sick. He had a good day on Friday, when he was excited about our arrival, but for half the next day he could barely walk or speak.

The ugly, a.k.a. the Michael's Stepmother Rant Report:

She expected to be able to hold Alex right out of the car, and sulked because instead Alex needed time to warm up. She called her "Mama's baby" in a sneering tone of voice, as if that's a bad thing for a toddler to be.

I told her that I'd moved some breakables off the coffee table because Alex went right to them. She said, again in a nasty tone of voice, "What, she doesn't understand the word 'no'?" (She does. But we we try to give her a break by keeping temptations out of her way, so that she doesn't have to hear 'no' all. Day. Long.)

A couple of hours after we arrived, Alex went down for her nap. She still hadn't wanted to be held by anyone but me or Michael. We crashed too. When Alex woke up, instead of coming to get us, Betty took her out of the crib herself. Fortunately, I woke up thinking I'd heard Alex, and went looking for her. I found them in the kitchen. Alex was crying and frantically trying to get away, while Betty tried to shove an artificially-sweetened Weight Watchers-brand popsicle into her mouth. It took ages for me to calm her down, while Betty made more snide comments about "Mama's baby."

She explained that our choice of portrait studios was based on which shopping center "you can't hardly walk in anymore, with all the blacks and Mexicans."

At the portrait studio, when I made a comment about "Well, I'd be satisfied with...", she interrupted me to say, "I'm the one who needs to be satisfied." (She was paying, because the portrait shoot was their idea.) She hit me on the shoulder, hard, when I ordered extra pictures for myself. (Yes, I had made it clear that I intended to pay for them myself.)She kept up running instructions to Alex about how she hoped Alex would be "good," where "good" was defined as sitting still and smiling for the camera. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure Alex is too young to understand a guilt trip.

At one point, I went looking for some kind of vegetable to feed my child. Other than a sad-looking head of iceberg lettuce, there were no fresh vegetables in the fridge. There were no frozen vegetables in the freezer compartment of the fridge. Even in the massive chest freezer in the pantry, I couldn't find a single bag of peas or broccoli or corn or anything. Just a bunch of meat and processed stuff - french fries, Lean Cuisine meals, sugar-and-fat-free "ice cream." The only veggie-like substances we had all weekend were tomato sauce, baked potatoes, and "salads" consisting of iceberg lettuce and one slice of tomato.

Not a Betty thing, but still ugly like whoa: see the top center doll on this page? Alex was given one that is almost its twin. A hard, stiff, unposable, unhuggable doll that sings snippets of nursery rhymes when you press on the little animal heads sewn on its body. It can only be played with one way - you poke it and listen to what it says. Seriously; she has other talking toys that are still lots of fun when you take the batteries out, because they lend themselves to general imaginative play, but this thing has almost nothing in common with a real doll. Amusingly enough, a banner on the box announced that it had won a "creative toy award" for 2003 from "Creative Child magazine." Looking at the other winners, I strongly suspect that awards can be had for a reasonable price.

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