Ned is smiling in this picture because he has a hot dog. What you can’t see is that I’m having a nervous breakdown on the other side of the lense. So. Much. Rage.

I don’t care how freaking cheap their furniture is, I’d rather poke my eyes out with an allen key then hit up another IKEA in the next sixth months. \

We keep on going there and trying to buy things like beds, and couches, and we come out with a serious hate-on and a blue bag full of some crap we decided to buy so the trip wouldn’t be fruitless. Oh, awesome. A shower curtain. THAT WAS SO WORTH 6 HOURS OF MY LIFE.

And what about the low, low, low prices? Is a MALM really worth $199 if it makes you want to shoot your partner and yourself whilst selecting it, buying it and assembling it? Maybe it’s actually better to shell out twice that so I don’t end up having a stroke in the parking lot.

Remind me not to treat the big blue box as an appropriate stand-in for date night – something I’ve admittedly been doing. Actually,remind me not to go there with Ned at all. The man asked to line up and get a hot dog before we even set foot in the display area. Guys, he didn’t deserve that hot dog yet. That’s why it’s at the END OF THE STORE.

The store has its own logic and if you shrug it off, you fail yourself and you fail humanity.

Anyhoo. We went on Sunday, and suffice it to say, we’ll be making do with what little crappy furniture we have already. If our relationship hasn’t been permanently crippled that is. Then we’ll be splitting stuff and I’ll be heading to IKEA solo.

Which sounds like a hot pile of paradise, if you ask me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really proud of Ned. I think it’s great that he finally confronted his 17-year-old fear of taking the G1 driving test. (They failed him twice when he was 16.) It is SO. AWESOME that I won’t be the sole driver on all of our future road trips. Also, I think it’s kind of sexy when Ned drives… Seriously. Maybe it’s just that I feel like less of a mom-carting-the-kids-around when he’s behind the wheel. I don’t know, but it is heavily imbued with awesome.

But here’s the rub. We don’t own a car. And for the longest time we were dead set against owning a car. We’re lefties. We like our bikes. We like the TTC. Oh, and we’re cheap.

But it is so freaking convenient to just shove everything and everyone into a four-wheel living room and razz around town. Adelaide even sleeps in the car. Which is more than can be said for the stroller. Or her own bed.

Ned’s fallen in love with driving. He doesn’t even have his G2 yet, but he’s already scouring the dealership websites to find good deals on fancy-pants Jettas and Audis. And now that we have a house and a mortgage and all that, sometimes it feels like we should probably just throw ourselves head-first into absolute adulthood, right?

I’m already resolved to hold out for as long as I can. I’m like a personal walking billboard for Zipcar. It makes so much sense in the city. And for longer trips, we’ve had no trouble getting a rental or using my parent’s car like the amazing teenagers-in-adult’s-clothing that we are.

Christ, my parents picked us up from the hospital and drove us home when Adelaide was born. Seriously, folks, we had – and have – no shame.

But can the car-free family survive? Even in a city that’s pretty walkable and accessible? I’d like to think so. But I’m not betting my bike on it.

That leak is the incredibly high cost it takes to cover the medical care involved with carrying and delivering a child in the States. With a normal vaginal birth hitting the ceiling at $5,000, and C-Sections approaching 10 grand, there’s not too much for a couple of insurance-less kids in Ohio to do when it comes to family planning. Well, except for sticking to the Ortho-Tri and double checking the expiration dates on those condoms.

We are so lucky in Canada to have the medical system we have, even if it pains me to admit it. This past week has been an absolute horror show for me, and definitely tried every single facet of my beliefs in socialized medicine.

It all started when Adelaide got sick last Thursday. After a short patient period of letting her rest and feeding her fluids, we realized it was more serious when her temperature hit 40 C. We’ve been shuttling between hospitals and drop-ins and our family doctor (with the occasional call to Telehealth, just for good measure) ever since.

We waited five hours in ER on Tuesday night with Ada’s pulse racing and her oxygen levels floundering. A woman in the adjacent room was cuffed and pressed her chest to the window as I walked by, mouthing “Help Me” behind the paned glass. Two cops perched outside the door cooed at Ada in her hospital gown as she toddled down the laminate halls, passing gurneys and nurses and other awkward ur words without pause.

It’s been uncomfortable, and not entirely efficient. That ER doctor sent us home with a click of his tongue, saying Ada was suffering  nothing more than a cold. Two days of bleary fever later, and we hauled her to another drop-in that was packed to the gills with maladies and their owners.

We ultimately decided to be patient and wait it out for the family doctor, whose schedule was wildly over-taxed. She finally gave us a prescription for Amoxycillin, a puffer, and a caveat to come back if Ada’s symptoms hadn’t improved.

A week after Ada first fell ill, and, finally, the golden ticket of a prescription.

The truth is that this medical system doesn’t come to you. It’s coy and annoying. I cursed about it every single time I had a chance to over the course of the last week. It made me feel powerless and inept when I knew everything was closed except the ER at 11PM on a stat holiday. I wanted the Little House on the Prairie doctor that bundled up his black bag and rode on horseback to see you.

But, if you manage to swallow your sense of urgency – which is admittedly damn near impossible to do -  it’s a good system, and it means that after a round of insane sojourns and doctors and false diagnoses, we had a toddler en route to good health and no bills to show for it.

How much this would have cost us south of the border is a mystery to me, and I prefer it remain that way. I had my baby in a hospital with no worry that if things went wrong, I might end up in debt. When she was diagnosed with hip dysplasia, I didn’t shy away from treating her because the cost was too high. When she’s sick, I don’t keep her home worrying about the bills a doctor might send me.

It makes me sad to think of people spurning health for money, and people eclipsed by a system that seeks profit rather than aid.  A stream of cuss words and a few days of headache is worth it if people can get better for less.

Or have babies for free.

His new job requires him to be able to drop everything and sweat over his laptop on celebratory Friday nights and balmy Saturday afternoons. My job is a little more lax, but with picking up the slack and taking care of Adelaide and the occasional late nights playing catch-up with deadlines, we’re both pooping ourselves out. I think the technical adult word is called “burn out,” and we’ve had it happen to friends of ours semi-regularly. But we’re both calm, chill, relaxed people, who don’t drool over dollars. So it’s kind of a surprise that we’re running the labyrinth of Toronto’s rat-race so readily.

The problem isn’t that we know what we’re doing is wrong for us. We both talk about how to make more time for ourselves, our house, Adelaide, pretty frequently. We know that we’re on the downward spiral to burn out (or, you know, early heart attack or divorce or something). The last date night we went on was almost two months ago. I have a hard time making doctor’s appointments. I get sick all the time and sometimes my head swims and my eyes don’t focus at work. It’s crazy, what we’re doing to ourselves.

But the problem is we have no idea how to stop. Even now, on a quiet Sunday night, I feel compelled to check my work emails and start a draft of a story that’s due on Tuesday. I can’t tear myself away from tabs full of shared calendars and work-backs. And N. is usually enveloped by the soft-blue glow of his phone, checking his emails and his to-dos.

There’s no rope or trail of bread crumbs leading us out of this. Neither of us can figure out how to stop it. N. could quit his job, but that doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. I could be a stay-at-home mom, but I don’t think I’d be happy doing that either.

Our dream right now is to move away. To Portland or Montreal or somewhere pretty but not so cutthroat, where house prices are more on par with what people make and we might not have to feel like we’re drowning under all the work, all the debt and all the stress.

But then I think about Toronto and how lucky we are to be living here. I love the city. i grew up here and I really feel like it’s my home. I love the art galleries, the museums, the culture, the food, the people. I love that both N.’s and my parents are here and can be an active part of Adelaide’s life. (And really, where would we be without them to pick her up from daycare?) I love that we can choose not to own a car and be totally fine without one. I like our health care and our hospitals. I like our green spaces and the movement to create more of them and beautify the ones we have. I even like the goddamned streetcars, and that says a lot. (Part of it’s that they used to get me slowly and gently home after a night at the bars. It was like being rocked to sleep as an adult.)

Moving is just a fantasy. It just takes me out of the head space where I feel like I’m drowning under everything that happens in a day. I imagine working part time, spending lots of time in a big ass garden with herbs and vegetables growing. Being able to cook those herbs and vegetables into wicked healthy meals. And to have the time to enjoy those meals as a family. Right now, the hustling and bustling and stress that leeches into your down time, I don’t know if it feels right for me. Or for us. For my idea of what’s best for our family.

I’m sure we’ll stick it out. Portland and Montreal is where our head goes when Toronto gets too ragged. And the funny thing is, instead of thinking about how to manage our own life here better, we’re dreaming of running away. It’s weird where the mind goes when it’s taxed. Especially when, when you get right down to it, fight and flight are equally hard.

Most people would just assume that the couple were crazy and keep their kids iron-clad in diapers until they could at least toddle to a potty. But not me. I was instantly intrigued. Could it be real? It had to be! What did other cultures do in all those places that don’t have plastic products up the ying-yang?

So I started putting Adelaide on the potty. And at first, it kind of worked. She could barely crawl, but there she was, urinating in the toilet as I held her there, chanting “shh-sha-shh-sha-YAY!” as she went. We spent mornings and afternoons without diapers (and some vinegar-spray and a rag). There was one particularly insane outing to the library where I took her in the carrier, diaperless, and sat her on one of the children’s seats in the public washroom in between book readings.

Everything was going well. There were accidents. There were clean-ups. There were beautiful moments where I “caught” pees and the occasional poops in the potty. I thought were were headed in the right direction — my goal of having Ada potty-trained by her first birthday.

And then something happened. Adelaide started hating the potty. I would hold her above the toilet and she would howl. I’d put her on her potty and she’d squirm and scream. I’d try to coerce her with books and toys, sitting with her, singing. Nothing worked. So, given the ECers advice that ECing is a journey, not a destination, I gave up with the intention of trying it again a couple of weeks later. A couple of weeks later, it was the same deal.

I keep on coming back to this idea of potty-training Adelaide. She’s now 16-months-old, can recognize when she is going pee, when her diaper is wet. She’s whip-smart, she speaks in whole sentences already, knows her colours and can count to seven. She understands what the potty is for, understands the process. But since that magical time when she was 5 months old, she hasn’t used the damn thing again.

Today I tried bringing it up again. Armed with a jar full of jelly beans (potty beans, as I call them, but they might as well be called bribery beans), I had her sit on the potty until I doled out a meagre brightly coloured bean into her little hand. She didn’t sit still for long enough to “go”, but she liked the beans so much that she ended up having an out-and-out fit when I refused to give her one when she hadn’t sat on the potty. The point of the exercise was completely missed.

I’m now four months past my goal of having her potty trained and nowhere near as close as I had been at five months. (She whizzed in eight different spots today! And wiped out in her own pee and was rolling around in it on the floor!) And now I’m worried that our monthly potty dance will only wind up making her scared of the potty, or make her hate it even more. And I really, really don’t want to do that.

So, I’m giving it up. At least for the next few months. My end of the elimination-communication needs to take a back seat, and I’ll definitely be ready to lend a helping hand to Adelaide when she comes to me and wants to use the potty. But until then, I’m keeping my potty-bean jar shut, and my high-hopes vaulted somewhere in realty.

Maybe it works for some kids, but I couldn’t help but notice that our birth-class friends had a long runner covering most of their carpet at our last meetup, and lots of splotchy looking places peeking out from the edges. As for their daughter? She kept her diaper on for the whole time. And probably afterward, too.

I have a part of me stuck somewhere and I can’t get it free. And I either have to cut it off entirely, or I have to live with it atrophying and petrfiying, stuck in some miserable cranny in some god-forsaken hole in the middle of some insane mountain range. Either way it’s basically gone. Or going.

It’s like this blog. It’s no coincidence that I went back to work and then stopped writing for three months. (OK, four. But who’s counting?) I don’t have energy to pluck my eyebrows at the end of the day, let alone sit down and do some intense navel-gazing at my now-somewhat-misshapen-navel about motherhood and my swiftly growing toddler.

This part of me, the one that want to hole up and write and think and disappear into my own head, is just another sacrifice on the pyre that fuels this family. The part of me that I’m pushing as far out of my mind as I can, is the part of me that’s shriveling up, caught somewhere that I can’t wrest free from. The trap of things to do and fatigue and chores and all the little things that creep up on you every day, the things you never think will knock the wind out of you but always do.

I have a little book that I keep on my nightstand, and a pen. I try to write a sentence at the end of the day, or a paragraph if I’m feeling up to it. I’m trying to keep on top of everything, not just work and chores and motherhood, but an outside eye on what’s going on in my life. It’s a little thing, and most of the time I’m phoning it in, but it’s the only lifeline I have for now.

Hopefully I’ll get back into this arena again soon, but craziness has a way of begetting craziness, so barring lottery winning or a real mental breakdown, I’m guessing this blog is going to remain on the back-burner for a little while.  Let’s just hope I don’t cut it off.

When I look back on that day, lingering feelings about how surreal it was well up. And looking over the last year, and all the changes that Adelaide has gone through, all the things we’ve done together through her many stages, it seems impossibly miraculous that it all began here, on this day, with her sleeping as we all took turns holding her. I am in such awe at how much fierce, fierce love I had — and have — for her.

Adelaide, my saucy redhead with the funny, serious scowl, you are the most wonderful thing. Your energy and fearlessness inspire me and fill me with so much love and adoration. Since I first held you in my arms and looked at your scrunchy, brand-new face, I’ve been on the best adventure of my whole life and I’m totally indebted to you for that. You’re fiery and hilarious and amazingly dexterous and smart, and it’s been the most wonderful pleasure getting to know you day-by-day, watching you unfurl and grow like a tiny seed into a beautiful little sapling.

My daredevil, my chatterbox, my tiny powerhouse; you’re a year-old today. You’re sleeping upstairs as I write this, tucked in to your crib and dreaming of running around and boobs, no doubt. I sort of want to run in there and wake you up just to hug you, but I won’t (I may be emotional, but I’m not stupid). Tomorrow, we will play and party and dance and eat some good foods and we’ll begin year #2 in style.

It’s been a magical year, and I’m so excited for all the years to come. I love you , Adelaide Eleanor Schwartz. Thank you so much for being the awesome little baby that you are.

We have everything set up the way you’re supposed to. You know, the routine, the bath, the story time, the gentle rocking with some soothing music. (N. has outfitted the iPad with a bevy of amazing tunes… tonight we listened to Bon Iver and it was awesome.) And she’s tired. My god, she’s tired. She doesn’t nap during the day anymore and she burns more calories than Courtney Love does dancing on tables. And yet, still, she’s got enough left over for a bedtime fight. (Seriously, some scientist should come up with a way to osmote–is that a word?–energy from babies directly to their parents, who really, really need it to do things like work and be social and maintain relationships and stuff.)

So, here’s how it goes. I hold her, and rock her. She cries and squirms. I hold her a bit more loosely and let her do her thing, keeping steady with the rocking. She cries and yells at me. I tell her that I love her and that I’ll see her in the morning, and that all living things sleep; and gosh, as a little living thing that’s new at this whole life stuff, she should probably sleep too. She yells some more. She sticks her fingers down her throat and gags herself, as if the idea of sleep has made her suddenly bulimic (trust: that part of the bedtime routine freaks me out too, but I feel it’s my duty to record it). I don’t give in and keep on rocking,  until finally she gives up and I’ve got her down for the count, snuggled into my chest and snoring.

Oh, but it doesn’t end there. Because I still have to do the transfer to the crib. And that’s like a death drop into the abyss. I creep softly over to her bed and try to slowly, slowly, slowly lower her onto the mattress. So slowly that she might not be able to perceive the effects of gravity on her tiny little self. But then — boom — as soon as she touches the sheet, it’s all over. She howls. I pick her up and we start from point A.

Part of me dreams about the time when she’ll crawl into bed, pull the covers over herself and close her eyes and drift off to sleep. That happens, right? That’s a real part of childhood? Kids do actually sleep on their own without rocking and cajoling and a big bruhaha about bedtime, yes? Because if it doesn’t, take my name off the Mom list. I don’t know if I can handle 7pm for the next 5 years.

OK, and then there’s this part of me that secretly gets a kick out of getting her to sleep. It’s nice to be so close to her at the end of the day, and even if she is really fight-y and belligerent (and freakishly into gagging herself) it’s still sweet to have a slumbering baby in my arms. And even though she’s so, so big now and it kind of hurts my back and arms, it’s really a nice thing once she’s actually asleep.

So what do I do? How do I make that really rough transition from awake to asleep easier for the little bug? I’ve searched the ‘Nets high and low for answers and so far, I’m doing everything right, but she’s still not so into the whole sleeping thing. Why, oh why, doesn’t parental success fit into the many equations that are suggested to me?

Anyway, if you have any answers, do tell. And until then, tomorrow will be Battle of the Bedtime, part 363.