Wack Attack

Lyra is sleeping more and it makes everything So much better. She and I have been keeping busy this past week. We’ve rocked out with rattles and laughed at mobiles and gone for long walks (she likes trees better than anything inside). We’ve been to new parent groups, seen both The Namesake and Sicko at baby-friendly movie showings, attended her second wedding, and examined the jewelry exhibit among others at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Also this week while feeding her I have read The Ha Ha by Dave King and half of The Zen of Fish by Trevor Corson, watched several episodes of Man Vs. Wild (I so love that show) and watched and fast-forwarded through 22 hours of Live Earth concert footage and related short films. I’ve had a leisurely lunch out by myself one day, and then of course there was the one dud day, today.

This day started off stupidly, though I did find it pretty amusing. It went like this:

I decide to skip the new parent coffee down the street from my house and go on a walking tour of former factories in the ‘hood that was leaving from the main library branch. It was the first time I’d been to this branch with Lyra.

The tour started at 10AM and we get there at 10:02 and rush up to the door. It’s situated atop two steep stairways, and I have Lyra in the stroller. I know there are a lot of parent activities at this library and assume there is an easier way inside. I follow the handicapped accessibility sign around the entire large building and finally get to the open door in the back. Two signs on it say NO STROLLER ACCESS, which confuses me.

So I walk all the way back around the other side of the building, seeing no other entrances and I then haul the stroller with Lyra up the stairs and inside past a group of teenagers leaving as part of some group. I wait for what seems like an eternity while the one person ahead of me in line talks about computer programming with the guy behind the counter. I ask if the tour left and where they went first. He points me up Broadway toward Harvard Square.

I leave the library and aim the stroller for the Square. I see ahead of me the group of teens I had huffed past and realize that maybe they are my group – I’d been expecting more of a senior set at this and perhaps I had made a stupid generalization. So I rush and catch up. “This the walking tour?” I ask a kid lagging at the back. “Yeah,” he nods.

The group stops and everyone oohs and ahhs over the baby for some time. The kids are super friendly for a tough looking bunch. The sound like they might be Haitian. I tell them not to stop on account of me, “I was just trying to catch up.” The leader is a young white woman with a bag with folders and I quell the urge to ask if I missed anything and just tag along with her hoping she tell me. I chat and try to make eye contact with everyone as we are all on this trip together and I don't want to monopolize the leader just because I'm older and have a cute baby. The leader talks about when she was a nanny for her sister and asks me various questions about Lyra, and I stop and go, staying purposefully in the middle of them for at least five blocks.

I am wondering what the first stop will be as I thought all the factory buildings were concentrated the other direction when they all peel off to the right suddenly…to go into the high school. “Bye!” they all yell. “It was very nice walking with you,” says the leader, “Enjoy your day.”

D’oh!

So yes, wrong group. And yes, I just spent twenty minutes being a friendly neighborhood total friggin’ wack job.

After I got some coffee and recovered a little, I headed back to my neighborhood and attended the New Parent group after all. A mom there told me people routinely leave their strollers on the sidewalk at that library. She doesn’t like that much. I looked at her stroller and realized it’s one that cost at least $700.

From there Lyra and I headed to the movies in Brookline and Lyra would not eat and started getting Very Fussy. Everything I tried failed, but we made it through the movie. At home the fussiness continued and the hunger strike went on and on. Twelve hours after her last good meal she ate again finally and is now asleep. My nerves are shot and I will now do the same.

Today's moral: Be nice to your neighborhood wack jobs. They could be me.