Thoughts on a Sunday morning

Well, Biffle got up early this morning and laid the dog-poop newspaper trap for our Sunday paper thief, but alas, the thief didn't come by. The poop-filled paper still sits on our porch, unmolested. At least we got the real Sunday paper and got to hang out drinking coffee and reading it together. As Biffle mentioned, it's not a great paper, but it's usually entertaining. This morning's edition featured a glowing letter to the editor about the Bob Hope tribute a woman took her mother to see ("The ending of the show was magical. While the cast sang 'God Bless America,' one by one the audience stood and joined in singing. There wasn't a dry eye in the place.") and an article about the International Clown Ministry, which the Post & Courier apparently loves because they've featured them before.

We've also helped Maybelle with her morning workout, which we documented in a video.

Sunday Papers

Well, our paper is being stolen again. Alison--and me, too, to some degree--has hung in there with the actual paper paper. Although it's a really, really bad newspaper, we continue to get The Post and Courier seven days a week.

The deal is, though, we've long had the tradition of sitting in the morning drinking our coffee, and--even in these post-Maybellian days--we play editor for each other, reading stories we think the other might find of interest. This morning, for instance, i read Leonard Pitts. We both like Leonard Pitts.

We don't want to give this tradition up.

A paper that's particularly important to us is the Sunday edition: nothin' goin' on on a Sunday, you just sit and enjoy. Only problem is, for the past two weeks we've woken up and found our beloved Sunday paper gone missing. Now, while the Post and Courier may be a lousy paper, Charleston is still a tiny town. This is the kind of town where you know your mail carrier's address. The personal delivery service of the paper is exceptional. On mornings when there has been rain our delivery person even knows to throw the paper a little left of the front door--a small puddle collects in the usual spot. So I know it isn't their fault. No, there's mischief afoot and i know it because our squeaky iron gate, which i close behind me without fail whenever i come in or out, has been slightly ajar for the past two Sundays. And besides, we've been through this before...

This same thing happened when Alison and i lived on Lischey back in Nashville. We let it go on for about six Sundays. We suspected some local sexton--on their way to turn on the church's heat or a.c. as the case may be--was dropping by and casually saving themselves a couple of dollars. After all, who else is up that early every Sunday?

Fed up, Alison and i decided to lay a trap. We figured the paper showed up somewhere between 4 and 5 in the morning, and we set the alarm clock accordingly.


The alarm went off at the appointed hour...and we promptly turned it off and went right back to sleep. Somehow, however, old eagle-ears Piepmeier heard the tell-tale thump of the paper in the yard a little after 5. Alison shoved me awake and we jumped out of bed, ran out into the yard and grabbed it. We shook it out of its little blue plastic bag and laid that morning's paper on the kitchen table. We then took a big pile of recycled newspapers and made a convincing maquette of the real thing. We even put some shiny circulars from Circuit City in there. The last step was to go into the backyard and find the previous night's best gooey pile of Baxter shit. This we plopped right into the center and topped that with a couple of litter-encrusted cat turds. We then folded the paper up, slid it into its bag, and put it back in the bush where the less-than-personal Nashville delivery person perpetually threw it.

And our paper never went missing again.

Happy Halloween from Maybelle

How Sweet It Is

I don't know if you've ever looked into it, but just google something like "Rumsfeld" and "Aspartame" and start following the links for a while. You should find stories of how, in 1977, Donald Rumsfeld was made CEO of the company that owned the rights to this chemical compound. You'll learn how a long-time head of the FDA was unceremoniously replaced within the first few days of Ronald Reagan's presidency--and, surprise surprise--how the new head, hand-picked by Rumsfeld, immediately approved the substance the FDA had been rejecting since 1971.

I've got aspartame on the brain here lately, no pun intended (since one of the FDA's findings was holes in the brains of test animals). No, I've got aspartame on the brain right now because i'm the result of another government-assisted screw job: cigarette addiction. No, I haven't smoked in a while, but that does not in the slightest mean that i don't drool at the thought of a cigarette every once in a while. One of my favorite things, even, is to be in a smoker's car when they turn on the air conditioner and all that stale smoke-stink blows out.

Now the way all this is tied together for me is the method i used to quit smoking: chewing gum. Now: Go to the store and find me a pack of gum that does not contain aspartame. Except for the freaking Cracker Barrel, which carries old, weird gums like Blackjack, you're just not gonna find a pack of gum that simply contains simple sugar anymore. The last bastion of sugared gum, and the chew of my choice, Big Red, has, as of a few weeks ago, gone the aspartame route.

This is bad--terrible even--not just because i use gum as an anti-cigarette aid, or because i don't want holes in my brain, but because i am wildly allergic to aspartame. I can't chew gum with aspartame in it. My eyes start wiggling back and forth, i break into cold sweats, i get a headache, my energy levels plummet and i'm no longer able to think clearly. You might as well stick me on the top of Everest without an oxygen bottle.

Me and Heidi Klum and Seal are movin' to Sweden, man.

Hey there, Maybelle!

If Maybelle...

...grows up to become incredibly strong...she'll be called Barbelle.

...ever becomes the strawboss...she'll be called Haybelle.

...becomes a famous composer, her name will be Maybelius.

When she turns 13, im sure she'll become Rebellious.

If she has a very high voice, people will call her Trebelle.

Breast milk

There are lots of things you learn about only after you have a child. One of those things for me has been the insane value of breast milk. We all know that breast milk is good for babies. I learned a number of academic facts about breast milk in my few days in the hospital, like the fact that colostrum is so loaded with antibodies and nutritional value that even a few drops rubbed on the lips of a child in the NICU is useful. But this isn't what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is how highly, almost irrationally, significant breast milk becomes to moms who pump.

I've been pumping since Maybelle was born, first to boost my milk supply so that she'd gain more weight, and now because I'm stockpiling milk in the freezer for when I go back to work in January. I've developed a kind of neurotic anxiety about the milk, only wanting to heat up an ounce at a time to feed Maybelle if she's hungry and I'm gone. Anything you heat up that she doesn't eat within an hour has to be thrown away, and I can't stand to pour the milk down the drain. Biffle calls me a breast milk fascist.

What I've learned is that this is a common phenomenon. A mild-mannered colleague shared the experience of her husband heating up way too much of her frozen milk to feed their son, and she described herself getting uncharacteristically angry. A friend told me about being painfully engorged when her child was young and having to express milk into a public toilet. "I cried," she said, "because I couldn't stand to waste it!" At a La Leche League meeting a woman shared the trauma of her deep freezer breaking and hundreds of ounces of frozen milk going bad, and every woman in the room gasped as though she'd described a death. This afternoon I talked with a woman in Texas who's going to sell me her breast pump, and unprompted she made mention of the tensions surrounding breast milk: "I always got so upset if too much of it got heated up and it had to be thrown away!"

The good news is, it's not just me being neurotic. It's a pretty wild thing to be able to create food out of your body--a wonderful thing and a potentially scary one, too. While I find the experience of breastfeeding to be mostly sweet and convenient, it's not pleasant to pump. And while I'm proud of how well Maybelle is growing, it can be somewhat anxiety-provoking to realize that another being's health and well-being depends on this stuff that my body is producing. Given all this, I find that it's comforting to look into the refrigerator and freezer and see plenty of milk there. So comforting that I'd almost rather just keep it there than use it.

maybelle and alison, oct. 25