Wide awake baby and a pot to piss in

Sometimes life seems to pass by like one of those timelapse shots - where a whole day passes by in a minute, flowers opening and closing in the blink of an eye, and cloud formations passing wildly overhead like an antique cartoon of handdrawn billowy shapes, jumping every second to new coordinates in the sky. And all the while some majestic landscape of desert bluffs or a panaromic view of snowcapped mountains remains unmoving and static in the shot, eternally planted in silence, its change so slow and minute as to be invisible to the modern invention of timelapse photography. I seem to have this new obsession with time - maybe it's because I have a baby now, and they really do grow quickly, and you both want them to stay little forever and want to see what development they'll hit next, like I can't wait till he walks, till he talks. I guess the obsession with time also stems from feeling like I have none. As soon as the baby hits the hay for a nap, I run around doing all of the things I haven't had time for - mostly household duties, and that leaves me with no time for myself, to do those things of which I spend the rest of the time dreaming - painting, reading, writing, sipping a cup of tea in peace and quiet.

I have this new problem with the baby at night - he used to go to bed at about 9 p.m., which is already late by American standards, but perfectly normal for Mexico, where there is no structure whatsoever for childrearing. Kids go to sleep when they fall asleep. So here's the new problem - because we've been doing a fair amount of summertime celebrating, with a series of events like Pancho's grade school graduation, my birthday, my mother-in-law's birthday, and generally just hanging out with the family since its vacation time, we've been out and about fairly late every evening. So the baby is out and about as well. And he gets totally amped up because his Tio Pancho is making funny faces at him and making him guffaw and cackle and chuckle and laugh like I've never heard a baby do, and so 11 rolls around and the baby is wide eyed and grinning. Even if we're home trying be mellow now, after he's had his lavender bath and sips of chamomile tea, he's still grinning and bouncing around in his crib, hanging from the railing, till as late as midnight. I lay down with him to get him to calm down, I nurse him, and he's still clambering around on me like I'm his own personal jungle gym. I think, oh my god, do I have a hyperactive baby? I don't know how to move his schedule up, because we're all so tired in the morning we sleep till 10 and we start the whole bad cycle again. And all the while, I have no time to do anything, since the evenings after he'd go to bed used to be my free time.

I don't even get to take my shower at night like I used to do. I've had to do it during the day when the baby finally conks out into a long nap. But that's just as well, because in the day I'm less likely to want to linger in the shower, which is impossible anyway. When I want to linger, the hot water just taunts me. We don't have on-demand hot water. We have a little propane gas tank outside, which we replace every few weeks for about $18, and that is connected to my stove and to the hotwater heater. So everytime we want hot water, we go outside and crank open the gas tank, light the pilot light in the "boiler", as it's called, and wait about 25 minutes for the water to heat up. We could leave it lit all the time, but it wastes gas and it makes the kitchen stink because there is some sort of a leak in the hose that pipes the gas in for the stove, so with that seeming a bit dangerous, we just turn it off after our showers. The pain in the ass about that, is that the boiler isn't very efficient, and the hot water always runs out right about the time I'm rinsing the conditioner from my hair. Nikis says I take too long in the shower and that's why it runs out. But I don't think so -I'm jamming in there to soap, shave, scrub, rinse. I guess it's just another way in which "time" rubs my nose in the fact that I'm so attached to time that I never have enough of it. I don't even have enough time to take a decent shower.

Everytime I get whiny about my shower situation, though, I have to stop myself and count my blessings. As Nikis always says, "vivimos en la gloria," as in, we live in glory. We have an indoor bathroom, we have hot water, we a nice tiled bathroom, we have a shower. Our bathroom didn't have a toilet seat or a window when we moved in a couple years ago - the previous tenants never bothered to install a seat, go figure. But we bought one for 5 bucks, and we had a guy come over and remove the cardboard from the window frame and install glass, and now its a great bathroom. I'll never forget some neighbors over at the Dreaming House, whom I could see before they built the wall around the land there - these folks had an outhouse made of stacked cinderblock - not even mortared together, and when they wanted to take a bath, they had to heat up their water in a big pot over a wood fire. In general, most bathrooms are really minimalist in this village - probably 70 percent of the bathrooms are separate from the house - kind of like they just kept the outhouse location even though they got plumbing hooked up at some point in time. (That would suck for me who likes to go pee a million times during the night). Lots of bathrooms aren't tiled, just raw cement. Lots of bathrooms don't have a toilet seat. And there are even still plenty of bathrooms that don't have running water - just scoop a bucket full of water from an outside bin to flush the toilet. So I can piss and moan all I want about my shower, but I still have to look at the bright side and thank the heavens that I've got running water. Or according to the old saying, at least I have a pot to piss in!