Jenna Glatzer, Ghostwriter

So, I went to a thrift store yesterday and bought a couple of outfits for Sarina and some foam alphabet tiles-- the kind you put on the floor. I was very excited about this purchase: costs $25 new, but I got it for just $3! Yay, me!, I'm thinking. Sure, they were a bit dirty, but nothing a sponge and soap won't fix. An hour and 11 minutes into the scrubbing, I thought perhaps there might have been a better use of my time. That's when I began calculating. The gas money it took to drive BACK to the thrift store today when I realized I left these fabulous alphabet tiles on their counter. The sponge I used up while washing my brains out. The soap. The hot water for an hour and 17 minutes (which eventually went cold and turned my pruny hands to ice). The fact that I could have written something during that hour and 17 minutes that would have earned more than the $22 difference in prices. The fact that there are still pen marks I couldn't remove. And then. Then, there was thi...

I think Sarina's been holding out on me. There's this book, Your Baby Can Read! My First Words , a "slide & learn" book-- you slide the windows to see pictures of the words. Anyway, she's really into that book. She slides the windows across herself, and lately, she's been acting out the actions in the photos. For example, the word "hi," or "clapping," or "book." She waves at the girl who says hi, she claps along with the babies, and she does the sign for "book" when she sees the picture of the girl reading. It's been amazing, and again, all at once. She reacts to about 8 of the 30 photos so far. So, we were looking through at some of the words she hadn't yet reacted to (like "eyes" and "ears"), and I said, "Where are Sarina's eyes?" And she pointed to them. I almost fell over. "Where are Sarina's ears?" Duh, right here, Mommy. Head? Check. Mouth? Got it. She di...

Well, I've pumped my last pump. It took me three sessions just to get one bottle (and not even a full bottle, at that... five ounces), so I had some time to think about how I wanted that last bottle to go. That's right-- we had "dinner by candlelight." Lullabies in the background, snuggled up on the glider. It was a fitting ending. I had a very big sense of pride that I was able to provide for her for this long, and the truth is that I feel a strange sort of loss that it's over. I sure won't miss the pump, but there's been a loving feeling that goes along with feedings-- "Hey, I made that for you. Hope you like it!" My original goal was to make it to 6 months; my later goal was to make it to 12. I made it to 10 and a week.

I bit her! By accident! See, remember a few posts ago, I told you she loves to share stuff now? Well, she reached out to offer me a bite of her delectable wheat teething biscuit. What I failed to detect was that, apparently, moments before my mouth made it over to accept said biscuit, she dropped it. So instead of sinking my teeth into a biscuit, I bit her fingers. And what's worse is that I didn't realize it right away. I bit harder because-- "darn, this biscuit is hard to bite through." And that's when she looked at me like, WHY, MOMMY, WHY? And cried. And I realized I had just nearly taken a chunk out of my wonderful child's tiny fingers. I bit the hand that fed me. She forgave me quickly and even offered me another bite, but I can't help but think she's going to have a messed up psyche now, thinking that people who love you might turn on you at any second and attempt to bite your fingers off. I fear she will join a baby gang and get caught stealin...

I forgot to mention this yesterday: I'm quite pleased to announce that Sarina is in love with board books. Whereas earlier, she mostly just tried to eat them (I even had a much-repeated motto for her: "Books are for reading, not for eating!"), now she flips the pages, looks at the pictures, touches the touchy spots, and listens while I read. It's the coolest. Every day, several times a day, she goes over to her bookshelf and takes all the books down (yes, cleaning up after her is a bit tiresome). She finds one or two to focus on, then we read them. Her favorites are Don't Be So Nosy , Posy and Rainbow Rob . I'm glad, because honestly, I don't "get" some of the more popular ones-- like I Love You, Little One : "I love you as the river loves you," it says, and I want to scream, "No! The river is an inanimate object! It has no capacity for love. I love you waaay more than the river loves you!" And each "I love you as the ___...

and I'm stalled again. Here I am, over word count, at the end of the Marilyn Monroe book, and I've been stuck for two days trying to think of an ending. I've already written about her death. Now how to close it? Everything I can think of seems too obvious and anticlimactic. "Lookit, all these years later, she's still such a legend... her legacy lives on... blah blah." Other biographers have wound it up with a really good quote or anecdote, which is what I'd like to do, but I don't have one that seems fitting as an ending. She's been in my dreams nearly every night. It's interesting... I don't remember ever dreaming so much about a book subject before. I think it's because I keep going to bed with my own little conversation with her in my head-- I ask her how she'd want me to write this book, what the truth is, how she'd want to be remembered. I guess it's sort of a prayer. Anyway. Here is the shot I caught of Sarina walking ...

There are certain things in life that, once you've had the "good stuff," you can't go back to the regular stuff. I have just discovered that this is true of smooshy mattresses. Toward the end of my pregnancy, when I couldn't get comfortable, my mom gave me one of those squishy memory foam mattress toppers. The other day, I pulled it off the bed with the intention of cleaning it (before I was stymied by the actual process-- how exactly do you wash queen-sized memory foam? With soap and a hose in the backyard in the summer, maybe, but in the winter? I'm stumped). Anyway, it's still off the bed, and I'm miserable. How did I not know that I was sleeping on a pile of bricks before? For roughly 7 years? Oh, and I did finally buy Sarina that tutu, after all. It arrived on Christmas Eve! I even wrote to the post office to thank them for such amazing delivery-- it arrived overnight, even though it was sent Priority Mail. I had no hope of receiving it before Chr...

Mmm! This is the best teething biscuit I've ever had. I got my hair bow from Mama's Girls Bows over here . I got my flower clip from Bow Baby Bow over here . Today, Santa Claus was in my very own house. I wasn't quite sure what to make of him, but he turned out to be pretty cool. He gave me peach puffs. I love standing. I thought sitting was cool, but man, standing is so awesome. You should try it.

Sarina is learning things at an astonishing rate right now-- I feel like she's in the middle of another of these "milestone madness" weeks. Among other things, she is now calling the cat "ca." She doesn't yet know that I'm "mama" (she uses the word "mama" all the time, but doesn't associate it particularly with me), but she knows the cat. You know what's funny? I totally predicted that. She's so in love with my cat. I guessed a while back that her first real word would be "cat," (or "kitty," which is what I usually call her). The beautiful thing, though, is that she's learned to share. She will feed her mommy one of her peach puffs, or share her gummed-up biscuit with me. I never would have thought that I would have accepted a half-eaten teething biscuit from another human being, but you know? When it's your baby, it's just not gross. It's beautiful. Last night, we took turns. She fed me...

I'm hoping and hoping to finish the Marilyn Monroe first draft before Christmas. I'm not sure if it's possible yet, but I'm going to try. I've interviewed a number of people for it, but am still trying hard for several others. Did you know Gina Lollobrigida and Marilyn were good friends? I'm trying to reach her, and Eli Wallach, and her singing coach, and... well, about 50 others who haven't yet answered me. Time is getting tight. I have enough material already, but it would add a lot to the book if I could speak to people who don't ordinarily speak about Marilyn. I'm aiming to get interesting little anecdotes from people who met her along the way somewhere, even in very limited capacities. (Psst, know anyone who knew Marilyn Monroe? I'll be your BFF.) I'm so distractable about the actual writing, though. Every night, I tell myself I'll do nothing but write, but I have irresistible impulses to do stupid things online. Like, does eBay have...

Thank you to Chesapeake Ribbons for the lovely hair bow!

We've discovered the best game ever. It goes like this: 1. Mommy sticks a pail on her head. 2. Mommy says, "Hey, Sarina, what do you think of my new hat? Isn't it a lovely hat? I sure hope nobody steals my hat." 3. Sarina steals the hat. 4. Mommy hollers, "Ohh! How did you do it? How did you steal Mommy's hat?" 5. Sarina screams laughing. 6. Repeat, endlessly. We can do this for hours. It just never gets old.

She sure did. Her first word was "mama" during month 6. Last night, she started saying "baba." The adorableness of it is almost too much to bear. I awoke to the sounds of her practicing. "Ba... bama... maba... mbababababa!"

Please, visit here: http://www.xanga.com/no_Im_not_a_nurse That's Licia's blog. She runs a rescue center in Haiti. Before I had Sarina, I felt sympathy for suffering children. Now it's a physical pain that I can barely stand. I see Henrius, the five-year-old in the video, crying... and I think of my daughter and how much it kills me to hear her cry for five minutes because she has teething pain. That boy's skin is peeling off because of malnutrition. This is a center with 50-60 children in it at a time, not a giant company with corrupt executives. This is a place where you can actually help people save children's lives. Licia's sister, Lori, also has a blog. She runs the medical clinic next to the rescue center, where they see about 700 patients a week. There's a PayPal link and an address to send donations here: http://xanga.com/haitinurse4life They're doing the heavy lifting. Let's do the easy part. Please, spread the word. Let's make sure th...

Sarina's two front teeth are spaced widely apart so far, which makes me think back to my own youth, in which-- I am not kidding-- my parents had our Christmas card pictures retouched to erase some of my hideously gapped buck teeth. And this was before Photoshop, when you actually had to pay a photo lab to fix things with colored pencils or somesuch. Ahhh, braces. I would have been such a freak without you. Other people save for college when their kids are born. We're saving up for the orthodontist.

Michelle tagged me to write a post about what I would write if I had an extra hour every day to write . Hmm. Now, the real answer is that I'd just use that hour to get my assignments done, but I have to assume that the spirit of this meme is to find out what our "heart projects" are. Someone else asked me about that by e-mail recently. Well, technically, I asked myself. It went sort of like this: He asked me if there was anything no one ever asked me about my writing before that I wanted to be asked. I said I had never been asked if there was anything I wanted to write but wouldn't. So... he asked. Anyway, what I explained then was that I had several ideas for books that I'd love to write, but wouldn't be commercial enough to justify the time I'd spend on them. Some Absolute Write readers might remember the time I went searching for a book that would be appropriate to teach my brother (who has Down syndrome) about dating. He had asked me for a book that w...

Yes, she did have (ahem) more than one costume. What can I say? Babies 'R' Us had a clearance sale, and her dad got excited.

So where was I? (Read the previous post first if you haven't already. I'm writing about how I became a writer. I'll wait here.) Right, so I was now an advertising major, and as such, had to take writing courses. That was cool by me because I had always enjoyed writing and had taken elective writing courses as an art major. I had even tried to take an advanced workshop in poetry, but I was turned down. What a disappointment that was! I remember waiting outside the class when the list was posted, and searching and searching for my name. I remember, too, the poem I used as an "audition," and how stupid I felt afterwards. Dumb poem! Why did I write you? Why did I think you were any good? I had a slightly weird writing history in school. Very early on-- I'm talking first grade, I think-- my teacher wrote on my report card that she expected to see my name on the New York Times Bestseller List. My mom, who was an English teacher and thrilled! thrilled! thrilled! by t...

Don't think I've ever told the whole real story of how I came to be a writer. I'll start today. This could take a while. I entered Furman University in South Carolina as an art major. After just a semester, though, I realized that the school was not the right fit for me. (The cafeteria was segregated, for a start.) I transfered to a community college for the remainder of the year because I had missed the deadlines to transfer to any of the other schools I was interested in. My big hope was to go to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), but I applied to several other schools "just in case." The acceptances came in quickly-- Pratt, Parsons, I don't even remember where else. I took a trip into the city by myself one day to see how it felt, though, and a man followed me from the subway to Parsons. I ended up hiding in a bathroom for at least an hour until he left. Decided the city was not the place for me. So I eagerly awaited the response from RISD. I watched...