widdershins to wednesdays

A Long Line of Mommies

2011-05-24T10:13:00.004-04:00

Yes, we're still co-sleeping. There is some "crib time" every night and at least an attempt for most naps but, we all seem to get the most sleep at the moment, with Noah joining me in bed. Every night that I nurse him and see him settle in next to me with a little sigh, I can't help but reflect on how we are connected to a long, long line of mommies. While a little space in our togetherness is a wonderful thing allowing me to take the occasional bubble bath and manage a shower when my husband is out of town, I can't argue with the baby logic of wanting to be close to the person who makes the food and keeps you safe and warm. Babies have cuddled through the night with their mommies for eons. It's the same sort of feeling I get when hanging up the laundry or kneading bread. Women have done this for generation after generation. I always wonder what they thought and hoped and dreamed for when they were doing the same things. Were the enjoying the sun on their face; the smell of the yeast? Were they worried about when they might get flour again; if the baby would fuss before they were done? Did they hope their daughters might not have to ever do such a chore? Would they be surprised at the pleasure I feel in the rise of the bread; the magical drying of the clothes? It's likely the closest to time travel I'll ever get and the most connected I can be to my great grandmothers as well as my great granddaughters- all of us part of a long line of mommies.

Chatting with Charlie

2011-04-21T09:17:00.003-04:00

Me: What do you think Noah is talking about?

Charlie: I think he's talking about fire breathing dragons and kimodo dragons. Although, kimodo dragons are actually really huge lizards.

****

Charlie: Daddy I think you have an ear infection. I need to check your ears.

Daddy: Ok, do you want to come and look in them?

Charlie: I could. Or, I could use my pretend otoscope. (picking up a toy lizard)

****

Daddy: Charlie, I'm so glad you're wearing that shirt. It has a rocket and a "C" on it.

Megan: And it has a planet!

Charlie: But I don't like Saturn. It's not my favorite planet!

Daddy: What is your favorite planet?

long pause

Charlie: Mars.

Raising a Prince

2011-04-13T17:09:00.002-04:00

So, Noah is going through this teething, motor milestone, language milestone developmental trifecta that is leaving me with a lot more time than I might like to contemplate all manner of things between midnight and 4 am. On night 2 ish my thoughts turned to the fact that Kate Middleton will likely never find herself patting the heiny of a cantankerous baby in the wee hours of the morning, night after night. Whether this is a good or bad thing can be debated by mothers better than I, at the moment, I have to confess to nothing but envy. Kate, of course, is Prince William's very soon to be wife and current co-habitator (gasp!). In addition to envying her future filled with night nurses, happy to competently pick up the slack when Kate has reached the point which every mother finds herself- at a complete loss as to anything else that she might offer said baby and longing for nothing more than an hour of quality time with a horizontal surface. I also began to wonder just what it was that made Will such a catch. Of course, there is a undeniable cachet to fact that he is a Prince, a real one, with castles and stamps and a crown hanging about. But, I think it's more than that.

After all, beyond the royal lineage, which, when you consider it, isn't exactly full of the absolute most upstanding characters, you have things that are somewhat easier to come by. Will has family money, good looks (although he is going to have to come up with a better strategy for his remaining hair), an athletic build, and at least a modicum of intelligence although I have gotten the impression he isn't quite setting the world afire in that regard, and (according to Piers Morgan) impeccable manners.

I want my boys to have as many opportunities to have rich and fulfilling lives as possible. So, I'll make the presumption that they will someday be interested in dating and, perhaps, marrying someone (male or female isn't really a paramount concern). On night 3-ish of patting the fussy, fussy, baby, I started wondering what I could learn from the wonder which is Prince William's allure. While I can't do much about family money, their looks, interest in athletics or intelligence I can raise some well mannered boys. After all, as I started contemplating the manners thing, I began remembering how much I liked boys from Texas and it's near neighbors when I was in college. While the boys differed radically in many regards, they all had courtly manners and I think that was what pushed them into such desirability. Even if I didn't want to date them, I wanted to hang around them. I didn't so much care about the specific manners, I think it really came down to the idea that my comfort mattered more than theirs. So, it wasn't that the door was opened, a chair pulled out, someone stood until I was seated, it was that feeling that I mattered. It was also just so easy to be around them and interact through those awkward first bits of meeting. Small talk is a skill and if you have some social rules to fall back on and practice implementing them, it makes all the difference. Hell, just navigating coat removal, perusing the menu and parsing out the dinner rolls could carry you through the first 15 minutes of a date and somehow, everything seems a little better once you have a dinner roll.

And, so, I have decided that come what may, I am somehow going to impart some lovely manners on my boys. How that will be done, I have no idea. I suspect the first step will be getting Charlie to stop picking his nose or at least to stop eating it...

Just a couple of minutes...

2011-04-10T08:11:00.002-04:00

1. I started using Chrome as a browser. It is faster but the autofill is slowly driving me insane and for some reason it's always taking me to facebook.

2. Noah may have his first "word." It started just shy of 8 months. He tends to say "mmm" to indicate hunger. It seems to be multipurpose as most early language is, indicating wanting to nurse, wanting another bite (he finally came around to solids), asking for a cracker to nibble, and, most enchantingly, speculating that something would be ideal for teething on.

3. I drew smiley faces on the insteps of Megan's outer soles. She can now put her shoes on the correct feet by making them smile at one another. She is very proud of this achievement.

4. Charlie is completely astounded at the idea that kindergarten involves going to school on Mondays. He's never been to school on a Monday and, prior to this week, the thought of going never entered his head. It reminded me of last year when I told him he would go to school on Fridays. His response: "But, Mommy, when will we go to Target?"

The Highly Active Infant at age 4

2011-03-30T17:02:00.002-04:00

So, I still get lots and lots of hits for my "highly active infant" post. I thought it might be heartening to hear how things turned out once we got past the infant stage. Also, I will note that while Charlie was very, very busy so was his sister (although she was somewhat better at self soothing). When Charlie was a baby, I was really worried that he might have ADHD. I worried he would never learn to sleep for any length of time. I worried I was doing it all wrong. I worried that I would never manage to babyproof well enough that he would see age 2. None of these things were true either for Charlie or Megan. Although, I will say my house has some impressive baby proofing at this point. :-) While Charlie never met a drawer he wouldn't open, Megan never met something she didn't consider appropriate for climbing. To round out the group, Noah doesn't seem nearly as much on the always in motion side but he is OMG fussy, fussy, fussy but, that is another type of baby entirely.

Anyway, for those staring at the infant that won't sleep, can't be put down, and seems to be in perpetual motion, let there be light...

There does seem to be something to the whole assertion that these types of children are gifted. Now, I'm not really prepared to go down the whole "gifted" path at this point but I will say that both Charlie and Megan tended to run ahead of the curve on most skills. Megan was speaking in 2 word sentences by 12 months and making 8 block towers by 13 months. Charlie got a speech evaluation at age 2.5 and was about 6-8 months above where you would expect. He's been able to read a clock to the 1/2 hour since he was a late 3. In short, they do seem to be busy, in part, because they are learning at a very rapid pace.

Charlie, especially, is a very empathetic little boy. For the longest time, he would befuddle his preschool teacher by crying every time another child cried. She would always be trying to figure out what had happened to him, assuming she had missed something while attending the other child.

Charlie does still need a lot of help to wind down and is still easily overstimulated. We bought headphones to use in the car so he can block out Noah's crying. He will often wear them, turned off, even when Noah isn't crying just to enjoy the quiet. He will go up to his bed for a break when things are too busy and we have never had a large birthday party for him. I hosted a playgroup for Megan's 2nd birthday with around 8 children and that was too much for him. He retreated to his room with my mother for most of the gathering. We are very careful to not overschedule him- skipping children's choir, pee-wee soccer and any number of other activities. But, it's a careful balance as he does get bored at home. The priority for us is to make sure we are home in the evenings as we still stick very closely to a bedtime and bedtime routine. He finally started sleeping through the night at 3 years, 2 months. So, it does happen eventually. :-) He now sleeps through all manner of disturbances with our remaining big challenge being trying to figure out how to night train him- a project for this summer.

Charlie shows no signs of ADHD and got a glowing report from his preschool teacher about his academic readiness for preschool. It gets better. It really does.

Contentment

2011-03-30T09:47:00.003-04:00

I have been thinking a lot about contentment over the last couple of weeks. The defining moment was when I had a home party. I had an idea in mind of what I wanted to "earn." I was discouraged when I managed to pick a date that wound up being unworkable for many people. But, in the end, I had a small but fun group over and we had a wonderful time. No one ordered much but I wasn't terribly concerned. I had an amount budgeted to spend and the month's specials allowed me to get what I wanted, within my budget, without any hostess benefits at all. I was content with my items and happy to have had such a fun time.

Then, when I did wind up with some hostess benefits, I struggled to figure out how to use them as I have been making a concerted effort to avoid "stuff." After that, I started hearing about other people's parties. How much they had "earned," all the neat stuff they had acquired, and their free shipping. It took me a couple of days to regain my contentment.

I continually reflect on what I would like my children to learn and what I would most like to teach them. One of the things I have been struggling with is teaching them contentment. There are constant small battles over whatever the other one has and demands to set the timer or enforce turns. While there is a time and a place for that, there are also times that I simply say, "The only reason you want that is because your sister has it. Find something else to play with." I was thinking about the way that I often utterly fail to follow that instruction myself. I am perpetually noticing things to yearn for instead of simply being content with what I have.

I struggle a lot with the whole "keeping perspective" advice. I often find myself stressed out and frustrated with a fussy baby, whining toddler, and pouty four year old and try to remind myself of how lucky I am to have them, to have food for them to refuse to eat, a house for them to wreck and toys for them to bicker over. I think of the homeless families all over, the mother's struggling in war zone, refugees, Darfur and how very fortunate I am. Unfortunately, I tend to wind up still frustrated and stressed but with a sprinkle of guilt on top. The "keep perspective" advice just pulls you back into that trap of comparison and coveting but in reverse.

I have decided to take my own advice and focus on "contentment" for the remainder of Lent as a second Lenten sacrifice (we also went with a paperless kitchen). I am going to try to give up comparing and coveting and instead be content. Notice, I didn't say "happy." I think"happy" is a trap. To be happy all the time is exhausting and ignores other feelings you might have. I can be stressed and frustrated in the moment. I can have plans and hopes and goals and aspirations. But, I can be content with the jeans that do the job if they might need to be hiked up fairly frequently while also aspiring to buy a couple pairs that actually fit next fall. I can be content with the baby I cuddle through the night if also having a plan to cuddle slightly less and sleep slightly more. I can be content with a body that is reasonably healthy and has brought 3 children into the world while also having a goal to manage a couch to 5k this summer. "Content" allows space for real feelings while also allowing freedom from the constant comparisons that come so naturally to us. "Content" leads to "enough" and I find no other feeling quite so comfortable as "enough." Now, to see if I can pull of a reasonable approximation of "content" while driving 3 screaming children to school through a never ending road construction project...

Overreacting

2011-03-11T04:43:00.002-05:00

Generally speaking I find my husband to be a compassionate, caring, sympathetic husband. There have been 2 notable occasions during our parenting career.

The first was when Megan was only a few weeks old. She was sleeping in the c0-sleeper and, as new mothers do, I put my hand on her back to check that she was still breathing. My hand didn't move. I turned on the light, shook her (gently), called her name and generally tried to rouse her. I had just announced (rather hysterically) to my husband that Megan was dead and was reaching for the phone to call 911 when she finally came out of her deep sleep. In the morning, my husband said that I have given him quite the scare and to please be sure our children really weren't breathing before telling him that they were dead and/or not breathing. I, with great restraint, didn't punch him.

The second time happened yesterday. I set the children up at the table with their afternoon snack, stepped into the next room to retrieve a forgotten yogurt container, stepped back and had Charlie ask me who that strange man on the deck was. I asked a few brief questions hoping I had misunderstood and that it was a pretend man, an animal, his father, anything other than a strange man on the deck. As we live on an acre lot, there is really no reason anyone would ever wander so close to the house as our back deck, not that I can really think of any reason anyone would ever wander onto the back deck of anyone's house. My thoughts raced. We live in a very low crime area but we tend towards random, absolutely horrible occasional crimes. Last week there had been a man wandering around outside the high school with a shotgun that led to a lock down. I wasn't sure if he had been caught.

While it probably would have been a better choice to hole up in the bathroom and call 911, all I could focus on was getting the children away from the man. I shoved shoes and coats on the older two, picked up Noah and ran us all out to the van- just outside the kitchen door. I never knew I could latch 3 children in so very quickly. As I drove down our road, that never has any random traffic, being a gravel, dead end road, I looked around for any reason a man would be in our yard- meter readers, cable guys, anything. I saw a white pickup turning out of the street but for reasons known only to my subconscious, I felt confident that it wasn't a workman's truck. I'm pretty sure it was the man who lives at the end of the road. We drove to the police station where Charlie gave a description and then hung out at Chik-fil-a until my husband would be home.

I've been up off and on most of the night and that's saying something with the level of sleep deprivation I'm fielding. I've been trying to come up with what we will do today since I'm not comfortable being in the house alone with the children. I once had a psychology teacher tell my class that once you had children, your nightmare changed. Prior to children, your worst nightmares generally involved you being in danger or your death. After children, your worst nightmares generally involved danger to them. While I was only steps away and in sight of them for most of their encounter, I keep thinking of them being in danger without their first and most ardent protector, their mother. What if the man had waved a gun, broke through the glass, or done any number of other horrible things and I hadn't been right there to do whatever had to be done to protect them. What if they had been scared, or worse, and alone for however brief a time. How will I bring myself to leave them alone in a room again to do something as basic as changing Noah's diaper or go to the bathroom? I told my husband that I thought I would get over those feelings fairly soon. Probably by Monday, I would be ok in the house with the kids alone during the day. After all, it only took me an hour to get past the strong desire to own a gun which I would carry in a holster all day; prior to this I took the long way around WalMart to get from diapers to home goods so I could skip seeing the hunting rifle display.

My husband thinks he saw the strange man with a couple other people at our sort of neighbor's house. They are selling and their house is vacant. Our hope is that they were looking at buying the house but we still have no idea why they would come into our yard much less wander onto our deck. I'm hoping to call the realtor today.

The capping point is that my husband has to go out of town on Sunday. Things haven't gone well with trip plans this time. I really need help during the dinner, bath, bed sprint. It can be done alone but it's very challenging and if you're coming off a solo parenting day (and more so, a solo parenting night), it's just that much harder. The isn't a babysitter to be found on Sunday or Monday night. Megan has been having frequent night wakings for unknown reasons the last few days. Noah is still a handful and a half at night and isn't terribly happy with anyone but me at any time of the day or night. Charlie is learning how to read which is fabulous but whenever he is learning a new skill, his behavior and sleep fall apart- happily, he no longer loses all potty skills, too. Penny has yet another ear infection and requires drops twice a day. In short, I really wasn't looking forward to my husband's absence even though this was a short trip with a Tuesday night return. Add in "strange man on the deck" and it's become my own personal little vision of horrible.

I'm pushing for us to go on the trip as a family. It's within a 5 hour drive and near my parent's house. The children and I can stay with them while he does his thing. There are several snags. Noah continues to hate the car and car seat with the heat of 10,000 flaming suns. I generally find my mother to be roughly as stressful to interact with as any stress she's relieving and double that when we're at her house. My husband has to get home Tuesday night since he has a morning class on Wednesday so our driving home timeline has little flexibility to accommodate child bedtimes, etc. At the same time, no babysitter, no sleeping, and strange man... My husband is opining that I'm overreacting. I'm showing great restraint and not punching him.

Triggers

2011-02-26T15:54:00.002-05:00

Charlie seems to be entering the time of life that leads to lots of triggers for horrors long past for me. (FYI-horrors might be a tad strong but scans nicely.) I've been working hard to make sure to keep my baggage separate from my parenting but it's a tough thing.

Charlie's getting ready to start kindergarten in the fall. At least I hope he is. We have a conference with his preschool teacher in a couple of weeks in which she will give her learned opinion. I'm fairly confident he's more than ready academically but I worry about his social skills. At the same time, as I told my husband, I'm not sure the social skills he needs learning will be acquired any more smoothly in another round of preschool than they would be in kindergarten. His main downfall is assertiveness and I actually think his best tutor there is his sister, anyway. However, the lack of assertiveness brings us to the first issue...

Charlie likes to run in large circles. I occasionally worry just a tad that it indicates some sort of psychological something but I think it's actually a little boy version of pacing which his father does all the time and while my husband can be quirky, he's psychologically sound. Anyway. Charlie was running around and has his mittens attached to his coat with the little elastic clip things. This makes the mittens flap in the wind in a manner quite alluring to other little people feeling a hankering to play "chase." The upshot was that the mitten holder got ripped off and mommy did a bit of sewing over the weekend. There was rather more to the issue involving a game about good and bay guys and a jail but what it came down to was that Charlie was a victim of bullying. It was bullying in the most innocent sense. I don't think the other children had any concept of intimidation. It wasn't a terribly targeted thing. But, Charlie was also completely unable to stick up for himself. His concept of yelling consists of that fake sort of yell they do on the very genteel cartoons I allow him to watch where it's really just someone pitching their voice a bit higher. We've been practicing talking like Mommy does when she's being very stern but it still worries me about kindergarten. Charlie tends to play by himself, isn't terribly aggressive (I think he's hit Megan once in his entire life and that was when she was 3 weeks old and I think was actually a misguided attempt to play) and isn't all that assertive. He's also not terribly socially aware when it comes to pecking order and so on. The social awareness is actually a nice protective factor at the moment. He is relatively immune to teasing and verbal sorts of bullying and taunting. He tends to not even register those sorts of things. But, all of these things make him a more likely target for physical bullying.

Of course, this brings back all the bullying I experienced at various times. I'm much better at dealing with those sorts of issues now. I have a lot more confidence in myself and that helps a lot. But, it still makes it a squirmy sort of thing and I still worry a lot that I have no real idea of how to model how to not get bullied.

And So It Goes

2011-02-26T15:33:00.003-05:00

A friend called me a couple of months ago, horribly frustrated that her daughter still wouldn't accept milk from a bottle. I was puzzled, knowing that her daughter was starting solids and the difficulties of feeding a breastfed, bottle refusing infant were soon to be a distant memory. After a day or so, I remembered what it was to be a stay at home mom with your first 5 month old. There is a feeling that you will never again leave the house again for any significant length of time without a baby attached to you, that you will never again see a movie in a theatre, sleep through the night, go on a date with your husband, take a long bubble bath or a nice dose of badly needed nyquil again.

I am now in a similar spot myself. Although, the lucky part is that this is my 3rd time around. While doing this several times in quick succession has it's own downfalls, an upside is that you haven't forgotten all that much and what you did, returns quickly. Of course, knowing you have been lost in this location before is only the barest help when trying to remember how, exactly, you managed to find your way home the last time. I have joked with friends that God must have known this would be my last baby and so sent one that would give me plenty of baby-ness so I could really get my fill. Noah continues to only sleep for any length of time while being held. So, his naps are in the rocking chair (when we are home for them, which is somewhat hit or miss and probably part of the problem) and night sleep is next to me. This periodically causes me a complete and total panic as we are solidly in the aforementioned stage. Part of me thinks that he will never leave my side, my bed, or my breast. I question why in the world I have let this go on so long and What Sort Of Mother lets herself be pushed around by a 6 month old and I must Take Steps. At the same time, I have to say that mothering a 4, 2, and 0 year old kind of takes it out of you and I sort of like sitting in the rocking chair for an hour or so in the afternoon and I'm not completely sure I wouldn't be wanting to go to bed at 8:30 anyway. I also keep remembering that I have never had a good experience with any permutation of cry it out and Noah, in particular, seems like a child who will do things when he decides to do them come what may. I think the day is fast approaching when I will start making a go of crib sleeping again for naps- the poor child never manages to get a full nap in and I suspect that's a large part of the reason he is known as "Angry Baby" but I'm willing to let it ride a while longer.

In summation...experience is a lovely thing but apparently every baby is different. Curses!

You're Doing It Wong

2011-02-12T15:13:00.002-05:00

Does anyone else remember that line or even the movie? It's from Mr. Mom, made in 1983 when the whole stay at home dad thing was considered Teh Wacky and Ripe Comedy Fodder.

Anyway, I spend a lot of nights, just before falling asleep reflecting on the fact that I'm pretty sure I'm doing it wrong most of the time. I came to the conclusion that was why I'm so dedicated to breast feeding. It's one of the very few (singular?) times in parenting that you can feel quite confident you are doing it the one best way. There are lots of valid reasons to not breast feed but breastmilk, from a primary caregiver, exposed to the same pathogens the baby is, is really the way the whole baby eating thing is set up to work. Also, at this point, I'm pretty good at pulling it off. I can manage breastfeeding Noah come what may. I have breastfed in bars, in Church, wearing all manner of clothing in all manner of positions in front of pretty much the entirety of humanity. But, after the whole infant nutrition thing, I'm at a complete loss.

First, there is no cut and dry. Sleep-how much, when, where, and how achieved is veritable land mine. Vaccinations, organic vs local vs what's on sale vs homemade, diapering and the whole pthalate thing are industries unto themselves. And these are only the controversies that have arisen in the last few years. Add on the long term parenting ebbs and flow and I'm a complete basket case.

Then there come the many things I am pretty sure I should do but can't figure out how to pull off. For instance, I feel pretty strongly that kids should play outside as often as possible but weather appropriate for a 6 month old is often radically different from what is appropriate for a 4 year old. Also, it gets a little boring to do the monitoring... And, I should be hugging and cuddling Charlie more. I feel perpetually guilty about is since he is a bottomless pit of cuddle need. At the same time, I am touched All The Time by Noah. He still doesn't so much tolerate sleeping alone (a whole area of angst in itself) and doesn't much like being put down in general and then factor in the whole issue of Megan not being so great at the baby on the floor awareness. So, when I say all the time, I mean roughly 20 hours a day in close contact with a small human. The idea of cuddling with another small human sounds great in theory but in actuality, I am soooo touched out. I have to say, I think Erica Jong makes a point with this article, I do feel slightly oppressed by the whole attachment parenting thing. At the same time, I'm not really willing to put up with the hysterical sobbing that has occurred with attempts to not do the attachment parenting method either. I don't think it's the way all kids are but it does seem to be the way mine are wired. And then, I worry that my insecurity about my parenting will lead to my children being less confident. My mind at 2 am is a wonderful place to be...

I try to remind myself that children are actually really resilient. I try to remember that there are lots of ways to be a great mom. I spend a lot of time reminding myself of Babies. I found it to be less than representative of the US style of doing things, if accurate in the broad strokes so I took the other cultures' footage with a grain of salt. But, I also remind myself that if it was at all accurate, kids in Mongolia and Namibia are raised in radically different ways and those cultures haven't collapsed. Once the children become adults, they don't seem to need massive levels of psychotherapy. Although, I will say that I was totally ok with the Namibian style but had a number of qualms about the Mongolian style of parenting. This also makes me wonder what's wrong with me because the general gist of the reviews is that this is simply my overly attentive western thinking but I just can't see to it being ok to leave a baby to by himself for an hour or so while I run errands no matter what the culture- are there no Grandmas in Mongolia? Anyway, I remind myself of all of this; that there are lots of ways to be a fantastic mother. But, I also wind up wondering if other moms feel this way. I wonder if other moms have always felt this way.

Sweetness at 5:18 am

2011-01-15T09:40:00.003-05:00

So, Noah is my fussy baby. Charlie was still probably the hardest baby with the whole not sleeping even when held thing and Megan is currently still the winner for ugliest, ugly cry but Noah, he is a fusser! He's happiest when being held by Mommy (which isn't really all that surprising) and won't sleep anywhere for any length of time except when within smelling distance of me so I am generally just able to pull off keeping the household limping along. I do pretty well with facebook, though, and am hoping to branch out to twitter again so, if you're dying for news, drop me a line with your social media info and we can be "friends" or "followers." (Why do none of them make it possible to have "minions?" That would be social media I could get attached to!)

While Noah is fussy, it makes the sweet moments even sweeter. Noah has moved on from only sleeping in the crook of my arm to sleeping NEXT to me (it was a big deal) and I had moved him a little further away from me in an attempt to gradually get him to make it into the co-sleeper sometime in the next year. It had only been about 45 minutes since he last nursed when I heard stirring next to me. Picking Noah up, I realized that he felt a little cool and then he wasn't interested in nursing. Apparently, he was just cold. So, I nestled him back into the crook of my arm to get him warmed up and he made the most adorable little croon. It sounded almost like a kitten purr. And then he patted my face and promptly went back to sleep. It was the sweetest thing I've ever experienced at 5:18 am. I suspect that if he keep this sort of psychological warfare up, he'll make it to the co-sleeper in 2018.

I Just Want To Cry

2010-12-19T19:58:00.002-05:00

I would really just like to sit and cry for about 20 minutes. I'm being slowly pecked to death by ducks; killed by a 1000 paper cuts; herding marauding turtles. Every time I think I am about to get it back together, the stomach flu hits, my husband leaves on a business trip, school is delayed for weather, Noah needs yet another well-baby check up or my dog needs me to place a warm compress on her anus for 10-15 minutes nightly (don't ask).

I have been at a baby weight plateau for a good 3 months now (baby is 4.5 months). While I know that I know the extra donut is helping no one, it doesn't seem possible that I can wake every morning famished yet somehow see the scale fluctuate between the same 3 numbers. Surely, by now, it should be coming off. I keep reminding myself that it came off with the other 2 with no obsessing on my part and I actually don't think it's coming off any more slowly this time. I suspect it's due to the fact that I gained so much less this time that there was just less that my body felt comfortable with shedding easily. I still keep having a nagging in my head that I am 33 this time and perhaps my metabolism just isn't what it was.

The dishes are a source of endless bafflement as well. If I skip running the dishwasher one night because there is so little in there we somehow make a bumper crop of dishes the next day and it takes me another 2-3 days before I'm properly caught up.

I keep having to remind myself that I am a grown up now regarding my social life. I keep telling myself that not everyone has to like me just like I don't actually like everyone else. But I still find myself wondering why that woman doesn't like me or that group doesn't invite me to their get togethers. I have my own friends, my own groups, my own groove but part of me is still that 14 year old who has no sense of self.

I am pretty sure my mom is going senile at a gradually increasing rate. On a purely selfish level, it puts me in a mild panic because I had counted on being able to turn to her for help with the children when my husband has to travel, etc, but she's starting to be at a point where that just isn't the best plan. She's not a danger to anyone but the stress she invokes in me is almost equal to the stress she takes off of me at this point.

I can't get my laundry put away in less than 3 days. This drives me nuts.

Noah has this massive scream-fest/fussithon every evening as well as being a bit on the touchy side all day. I think the main issue is that he's ready to go to sleep for the night around 6. However, he only sleeps while being held and only really hits the night time sort of sleep, laying next to me. So, in Noah's world, I should be going to be at 6 as well. Since that's less than practical, he cries while being rocked in a variety of venues. But, I'm still winding up trying to be in bed by 8:30 because that's still about 3 hours of screaming and it's about all we can take anyway. This has a lot to do with things like why I can't get the laundry done.

Noah is also still getting up every 1.5-3 hours to nurse. I'm sure it has to do with sleeping with me but as the alternative seems to be listening to hours of crying every night, it seems to be a wash. I'm sure the lack of consistent sleep isn't helping my mood or my weight.

Insanely, even with all this, I'm still mourning that this will be my last baby. I'm such a mess.

If it makes you feel better...

2010-09-29T21:03:00.004-04:00

Sometimes I look at a woman who seems to have it all together and wonder if she ever has a bad moment. I have been told on a couple of occasions in the last few weeks that I am this wonderfully organized person who has it all together. Au contraire...

1- Yes, I got out of maternity clothes by 3 weeks post partum but I only fit 2 pairs of pants- one pair is far too long and the other had to have the crotch sewn up. I am SYLISH! I only fit 2 church outfits and both require me to wear heels and hose, sigh. I am hoping that I will be closer to my regular size by the time Noah is 12 weeks old and that I can hold out shopping until then. I have now personally witnessed 3 women who were back to their regular jeans, etc, by 6 weeks post partum. I am currently in talks with Jesus about how to temper my feelings towards them, thus far, the Holy Spirit has been unable to burn the un-Christian feelings from my heart.

2- Noah is 8 weeks old and has had 4 or perhaps 5 baths in his life. He's also pulled off getting not one, but two, colds.

3- I watched Sister Wives the other day and came to the conclusion that I think I would presently be ok with polygamy if it meant I would get a daily nap while my sister wives tended my children.

4- I do menu plan and write a grocery list but this is mostly to mask the fact that if left to my own devices at the grocery store our entire week's meals would consist of fage yogurt, s'mores, and whichever cheese Kroger was offering samples of when I went through. Even with menu planning, etc, my children eat, on average, 1 dinner I prepared per week. Once upon a time I was a spontaneous cook...

5- There has been more than one occasion in Noah's 2 short months with us when I honestly could not tell you when he had a- last nursed or b- had his diaper changed. As I tend to nurse him when he cries and cloth diapers leak after not a ridiculously long time, he is doing fine by default but with Charlie, I knew to within the 30 second when those had last happened.

6- We went to the library last Friday afternoon and stayed 20 minutes. We will not be forgotten soon. Megan had to poop not once, but TWICE, both times managing to interrupt just as I had gotten Noah latched so he cried at ear splitting volume, not once, but TWICE. Charlie toppled this rocking toy over on his head and required rescue (of course, just after I got Noah latched). When I cried "uncle" and took us home, Megan began running and jumping through the stacks (shouting "tada" every time she jumped), while waving her DVD over her head until I could explain that we couldn't take the DVD home if we didn't take it to the librarian. On our way out, Megan dropped all her books and threw a tantrum when I said I would carry them. Charlie wasn't paying attention and almost wandered out the main door until I hollered at a level less than conducive for reading and, of course, Noah was crying. The little old people were totally glaring at me.

7- I have been trying to write a "Works for Me Wednesday" post for 4 weeks and have yet to pull it off. Generally those posts are 1 paragraph or less...

Link

2010-09-18T15:58:00.002-04:00

Sorry! I meant to link to Jo's blog and forgot. Here it is- also corrected in original post.

Never Look Back

2010-09-18T08:41:00.005-04:00

Jo wrote this really fantastic post about wrestling with the decision of having more children. In addition to all the logistical and emotional wrangling there was also a really interesting twist involving how changing the punctuation of "No more, kids" several times can easily sum up the entire thought process.

I have had a lot of similar thoughts over the last month or two. My pregnancies are miserable. They are not dangerous or high risk to anyone, I don't find it especially challenging to become pregnant, the birth process is fairly straightforward and I recover as well and as quickly as could be expected but the pregnancy itself is a long, forced march through just about every really annoying pregnancy symptom What To Expect might put on offer. In short, if I really wanted to, I could easily pull a Dugger and pop out a healthy baby every 18 months or so but I wouldn't be all that pleasant to live with. By my 3rd month of pregnancy this last time, I vowed I would never do this again. But now, the fuzzy haze is descending and I keep wondering if we shouldn't have just one more baby (friends have assured me this is the best way to conceive far sooner than you planned and with twins to boot). I feel a twinge every time I know I will be seeing a first for the last time- Noah started smiling about a week ago. It's mostly at lights and fans but every once in a while I get a gummy grin as well. There is also the existential crisis of facing your mortality via leaving a stage of life behind if I close the door on childbearing.

I can see that things really do get a little easier once you get over the hump of 2 children. The learning curve with Charlie was hella steep. While Megan was a slightly easier baby, we didn't do ourselves any favors by spacing the children 20 months apart (a spacing I now adore but the first year is a humdinger). Noah shares a number of the characteristics of both children that made them challenging but we know a lot more strategies for coping with them now. Noah is generally happy only when being held. Since we've been doing this for a while, we now have 4 baby carriers and are well versed in their use. We gotten the hang of the evening baby handoff and I've learned how to do the essentials to keep the household running in the 1.5 hours I have to cram it all in (as well as anything I might need to do for myself).

We've hit the point in parenting where we simply do what works. Noah will only sleep at night if he is nestled into the crook of my neck so we co-sleep. There is no parenting philosophy or theory behind the decision beyond the fact that we have to be rested enough to care for two other children in the morning. Noah's eating habits are erratic. Sometimes he goes several hours and sometimes barely hits the hour mark. Happily, after nursing 2 other children my milk is plentiful, my let down fast, and my apprehension at nursing in public non-existent. I can adapt to what he needs much more easily than I could with Charlie, when I was chained to the couch for hours at a time and I'm inclined to simply feed him instead of worrying about hind milk and fore milk, which side we did last, etc. The important elements of breastfeeding are pretty automatic at this point and I know what needn't be worried about. In short, I can see how families with 5 and 6 children can add another child with minimal fuss. At the same time, I'm not sure I want to have 5 children simply because it will make the 6th so much easier!

I have this twisted logic that says that if I enjoy my children and motherhood in general so much; if I really loved children, I should just keep having them. After all, if I liked them so much and enjoyed things so much, why wouldn't I want MORE? I know that it doesn't actually work that way. I know that simply having more siblings doesn't make an automatic big, happy, Weasley family. I know that I have gotten to a point where, for me, with my particular quirks and foibles and my tendency to have the rather high maintenance (come by honestly!) children, 3 is probably my upper limit. I know that I do love them beyond reason, smile daily at the many wonderful little things that happen everyday and adore listening to their interactions. I know that I show my children that I do love them and motherhood and wiping tiny heinies by doing it, every day, every night, every week. I know that having another child would prove nothing other than that I apparently never want to sleep for 6 hours in a row again. I know that having another child would likely do the opposite of showing my current children how much I love them- I would be stretched slightly thinner, wound slightly tighter, have sightly less in my already slightly anemic store of patience. With another child, there would be yet another 6 months of no mommy cooking, another round of "not while I nurse/rock/bounce/soothe/cry with the baby," another round of maybe once I've managed to get a little sleep. I know that I can love my children and being their mother without always enjoying the nitty gritty. But, there is always a nagging in the back of my mind saying that "if I really loved them..."

I keep reminding myself that I never tend to like to look back. I had no significant wish to go to my high school or college reunions other than to fulfill passing curiosity. I look back on the passing of Charlie's infancy with nothing but relief. I seldom re-visit my home town. I'm one of those people who mostly likes to look ahead. I have various mementos and reminders but I appalled my mother in law by not saving baby teeth or first curls and I am a disaster at scrapbooking. I am making a conscious effort to spend more time experiencing the present and letting the future sort itself out. Having another baby would be many things but a big one would be clinging to a present that is quickly becoming a past and that just isn't the way I tend to operate. Once I've said "good bye," I prefer to quickly turn to the next thing. I hope I can remember that I can have an identity beyond my fertility. If I can just remember that there are no motherhood merit badges. I hope I can simply remind myself that I don't need to prove to anyone that I love my children. I hope I can simply remember all this the next time I think "No more kids?"

Babies Are Well Designed

2010-09-14T09:39:00.002-04:00

Noah arrived August 1st at 6:34 am. He weighed 7 pounds, 9.5 ounces and was 20 inches long.

It's a good thing babies are so squishy. It makes holding them for 23 hours a day much more pleasant.

It's a good thing I got used to carrying around a bunch of extra weight when I was pregnant, it makes the extra 10 pounds I carry most of the day that much easier and this 10 pounds is way cuter.

It's a good thing babies heads are so downy and their cheeks so soft. It makes having them sleep tucked in under your chin feel pleasant even when your shoulder goes numb.

It's a good thing babies don't know what a lullabye is so I can sign "Dream On" ala Glee when I get tired of the standard stuff.

It's a good thing I held on to a little baby weight. I can think about all the calories I'm burning when up for the 4th nursing session of the night.

It's a good thing babies have such sweet breath. It makes the 45 minute crying sessions that much easier to manage.

It's a good thing baby heinies are so cute. I sure get to see it an awful lot- this child is a pooping machine!

It's a good thing pregnancy left me so squishy. My tummy is now an excellent place to lie on while "off gassing."

It's a good thing the only move Noah has is to work his way upward while searching for something to latch on to. If you only get one move, the one that gets you to the mama milk is a good one to have.

It's a good thing babies cry so loudly. It's helpful to have my milk let down before Daddy has even made it up the stairs with Noah for our next nursing session.

A Difference in Perspective

2010-06-20T07:33:00.003-04:00

I had to go on a bunch of errands yesterday morning. I had glorious free morning and each was the sort of thing that was fairly quick to do without children in tow but take ages when also trying to wrangle. Or, at least I thought. I had the absolute worst luck at every store- photo kiosks were broken, delivery trucks delayed, stores short staffed, and on and on. This gave me a lot of time in which I stood around waiting with other customers, for whatever reason they all tended to be women of a certain age who all wanted to know about when I was due. To each I gave my standard answer of "August," occasionally qualifying it with an "early." The answers varied but all were permutations of "You must be so hot," "I bet it can't come soon enough," and "You still have a ways to go, then, huh?" To each I wanted to answer "Are you out of your mind?"

I have been hot since March. Dressing the children in weather appropriate clothing was a constant struggle this spring as I had to keep reminding myself that 55' is not actually short sleeve weather for the rest of the world. The fact that summer is hotter than spring means little to me and, as I keep pointing out, we do live in an age of air conditioning and freely available cool water.

In regards to the baby's impeding arrival, I have been solidly fixed in the mental state of vague impending doom for the last month, at the least. I have 6 weeks or so left and I need every bit of that time to have any hope of being ready for his arrival. The nursery is in the middle of being remodeled. While a good hunk of it is done, it is still far from habitable and I know from experience that if it's not done by the time the baby gets here, it will next be worked on when the baby is 16 months old. Take out is not a terribly viable option with my gestational diabetes so I've been doing a vast amount of cooking for our day to day life. Since I'm still experimenting with just how many carbs I can eat, cooking ahead is not really an option. Add in that the heavy emphasis on meat, dairy and nuts and the grocery budget has little wiggle room. This means the freezer stocking that I tend to start by now, hasn't happened. I have yet to go through fall clothing for the children to see what needs to be bought, hitting the August back to school sales will be a challenge this year. Nor have I gone through our newborn clothes to see if Noah will have anything clean to wear. As far as I'm concerned, this baby is coming any minute and I'm woefully ill prepared.

I have developed a powerful nesting instinct this go around that I'm trying to take advantage of. I have a theory that while there is something to the idea of the nesting thing, it's also the end result of your body slowly going completely out of your control. While there are definite evolutionary advantages to women wanting to get things in order shortly before a baby arrives, it seems like there is also a very real element of control as well. Not only is your body doing things that it never does otherwise, you know that you have the impending arrival of this unknown permanent house guest whom you will be expected to care for and keep alive and LIKE for the next indeterminate number of years. You generally don't know quite when he will arrive, what sort of things he likes to do, how he will sleep, etc, etc. And so, if I can't get a handle on anything else, I can at least corral my baking supplies. So far, I have rearranged kitchen cabinets, bathroom closets, the Y has received a steady stream of donations, pictures are being hung, and lists are being made. If I just keep finding new projects to do, I can ignore the fact that I have a body in rebellion, that I have desperate desire to eat the completely out of the question french toast with syrup, and that I have this mild sense of panic about just what I decided to get myself into 33 weeks ago.

So...

2010-05-24T20:19:00.002-04:00

a- baby is a boy and seems to be growing nicely

b- we pretty sure he'll be named Noah

c- for 5 minutes one morning, I was in domestic bliss. Charlie and Megan were "working together" on a floor puzzle while I packed us a picnic lunch for later in the day. Working together mostly consisted of Megan helpfully saying "here you go" while handing Charlie random puzzle pieces only to follow it up with "that don't go there." But, they were happy and I got to experience one of those lovely mommy moments with wiped counter tops and a clean sink to boot!

d- I got some of this whipped sugar scrub and it's a little slice of heaven for your skin. I use it on my face once a day and it does a wonderful job exfoliating and cleansing without irritating although I have found I have to follow up with moisturizer no matter what as the slow march of time carries on. Her products are are paraben and pthalate free- I emailed to check.

e- I am very pleased to report that both children seem to be mostly sleeping through the night or at least getting within spitting distance. While there are periodic cries for re-tucking or reassurance or comfort for the pain of teething, we seem to be past the worst of the extended night wakings- of course, we're about to start it all over again, sigh... But, it's been coupled with Megan taking up to 2 hours to wind down for the night- not crying, just having a party in her crib. While she was welcome to sing, dance, tuck her bear in, re-tell various nursery rhymes, etc when she was in her own room, we moved her in with Charlie a few weeks back to do some light remodeling that really Must Be Done before baby 3, in the 2nd nursery where she was sleeping. Namely, we would like the 2nd nursery to actually look like a nursery rather than a guest room with a crib shoved in it. So, either my husband or I have been stuck in the 1st nursery shushing and rocking and patting and slowly losing our minds each evening. I'm hoping this will pass soon but am not holding my breath. But, it sure beats a 2 hour cryfest at 3 am.

f- Megan only wants to wear big girl underwear to bed. This present a bevy of problems and helps not at all with potty training. I was assured it was easier with a girl but I am beginning to have my doubt. First, we had some basic plumbing confusion. For a while, Megan was fond of telling us her "penis was empty" when she didn't have to use the bathroom. We finally got her to switch over to telling us the state of her bladder instead but now one of her favorite jokes is to announce the barren nature of her penis only to follow with "I don't have a penis" accompanied by much laughter. While I, of course, find this charming beyond measure, it took a bit of explaining to Miss Judy when she tried it at Mother's Day Out.

g- I am pretty sure this is our last baby. I had been a bit on the fence even though my husband was sure. My pregnancies are far from perilous but I'm not exactly glowing throughout. I tend to actively manage morning sickness from week 6-18 or so and then still feel quite iffy through week 24. In addition, I always have some sort of one-off difficulty- dislocating my hips, throwing out my back, a lovely week or two with Megan's pregnancy when my immune system completely gave up and I had some sort of weird fever blister things all over my mouth, pink eye AND a nasty cold. With this pregnancy, I acquired a rescue inhaler because apparently my lungs had just had enough with the very long, very dry winter abruptly followed by April, May and June all occurring in 1 week resulting in a pollen season like no other. Finally, last week I failed my gestational diabetes screening test.

We pulled out all the stops with this pregnancy. My husband cut back on his travel so he would be around to support me. I cooked like a fiend in the month before the pregnancy so we would have a stocked fridge. Both children are in care 2 mornings a week to give me a break (mostly used for napping in the first hunk of pregnancy). I went on morning sickness medication as soon as practical, etc, etc, etc. But this has still been a slog with the gestational diabetes simply the icing on the cake. Plus, my children don't tend to sleep at all well until they are are least 2 and I don't really count on much until 3. So, I feel like Charlie's main experiences with me thus far revolve mostly around me falling in an exhausted, queasy heap on the couch. I think we've limped through well enough that he still seems to be a happy child with adequate stimulation and whatnot but I would like to be able to do more than an adequate job. I want to bake cookies, run around, or simply stay awake now that he's old enough to really appreciate that sort of thing.

I think a lot of the driving force behind me wanting to have several children (I had been thinking 4) was that I wanted to provide my children with what I didn't have- a sense of home family. I want them to have that soft place to land, a tribe to call upon in time of need, back-up when you're over your head or just want to go to the movies, somewhere you actually want to be when Thanksgiving rolls around. But, I finally came to the conclusion that I could have 10 children who all dislike one another or I could have 2 that adore one another. Adding more children to the equation doesn't actually equal a family. I am glad we decided to have a 3rd baby and I think if my pregnancies had been a touch easier, I would have liked to have had more but, for now, I want to focus on helping nurture and grow the family I have and I think I can do that a lot better if I don't spend quite so much time in an exhausted stupor.

Totally Shallow

2010-02-02T07:40:00.003-05:00

1- The other day I noticed that Megan has tell tale cottage cheesy-ness on her upper thighs. I decided that my perfect little 20 month old could not possibly be suffering from any beauty ailments as of yet. Hence, I've decided that cellulite is simply a part of life and to waste no further time worrying about eliminating it.

2- Over the last 4 years I have spent roughly a year puking or variations on that theme. Add an additional 3-6 months of nausea and general ill will towards most foods. I do have 2 and a third beautiful children as a result. However, it seems like I should really have abs of steel and nary a smidge of extra weight. This is really not the case.

3- I am at the annoying pudgy stage of pregnancy.

4- I discovered during my celebratory past-the-first-trimester hair dying that I now posses "resistant gray." (The general consensus seems to be that hair dye doesn't pose any significant risk to developing babies. Preferably, you should get highlights since they have less contact with the scalp but I had to settle for Natural Instincts with the thought that a complete lack of permanence, ammonia, or bleach had to be worth something.)

5- The cold weather combined with pregnancy induced dry skin, has my hands looking less than lovely.

6- I can't tell you how beautiful I feel with the combined effects of 2, 3, 4, 5. Glowing, I tell you, I am glowing!

7- In other third pregnancy news...
7a- I totally ate some brie when another pregnant lady pointed out to me that it was made from pasteurized milk

7b- I have eaten eggs with somewhat runny yolks twice now on the basic assumption that if one's morning sickness is as overenthusiastic as mine, if it was really all that bad for me, I wouldn't be able to even look at it.

8- I do have a theory concerning my morning sickness which makes me feel slightly more philosophical about it. I am apparently ill designed for actually getting babies out although reasonably good at growing them. Frankly, had I been born then or there instead of here and now, I likely would have died in childbirth or, at the very least, lost my babies, had all else been equal. However, somehow these genes managed to make it to me so somehow a woman managed to give birth with my structural quirks. I think extended morning sickness (as well as releasing enough relaxin to inadvertently dislocate your hips) is the answer. Had I not had the advantage of abundant nutrition pre-pregnancy and then the advantages of gatorade, modern medicine and Ben and Jerry's milkshakes, I would likely have gained rather significantly less during pregnancy and, hence, never managed to grow a 9 pound baby. At the same time, I was never sick enough to seriously endanger the child or myself- miserable, yes, hospitalized, no. Between this natural weight limitation and the excessive mobility of my joints, had I been born then or there rather than here and now, there is a good change I would, in fact, have managed to survive childbirth and pass along my somewhat questionable genetic viability.

9- We live far enough south that sweet tea is generally offered and magnolias are a part of the scenery. But, we live at a high enough elevation that snow boots are not an uncommon acquisition and Target stocks snow pants. We have some plows and the school districts build in some snow days. HOWEVER, we are on our 3rd (or maybe 4th?) major winter weather event of the season. Our snowfall for the year will soon be measured in yards rather than inches. I am about to go nucking futz! The children and I are seriously starting to not enjoy one another. We all have colds to varying degrees. I worry the couch will never recover from the amount of snow Penny has allowed to melt on it and that the children will develop rickets from the extended lack of sun. Of course, on deck for today is "light icing" and they are calling for more snow on Friday. I am considering if I would rather we move to South Carolina or South Texas. Thoughts?

My Biggest Parenting Challenge

2010-01-28T10:23:00.003-05:00

So, I read this blog and they posted asking what the readers biggest parenting challenges are in an effort to address reader needs. It started me thinking and the thing is that my biggest parenting challenge has very little to do with the mechanics and logistics of parenting and a lot to do simply with how I interact with the world in general. While Megan's fledgling violent streak and Charlie's penchant for drama are cause for some extra parenting cognition, the thing that challenges me most as a parent is me. Specifically, I tend to get overstimulated somewhat easily. While I am completely fine in an office setting and even cope reasonably well in a classroom setting, being a SAHM is challenging for me when you consider my children and their ages. Both are talkers. Both were EARLY talkers. Both are high needs in their own way. Both are cuddlers and touchers. Both are going to be in fairly high physical need stages of life for at least a few more years and there is another on the way. My life is filled with a constant background of chatter, singing, Charlie's many, many sound effects (he recently perfected his helicopter noise- the joy!), questions, requests, demands, and other joyful noises. Thankfully, neither child is in a particularly whiny stage at the moment.

Before the added demands of pregnancy, I would say that I reached my saturation limit around 3 pm assuming Megan could be coaxed into taking a decent nap and Charlie agreed to sit quietly and watch a couple of shows during rest time. But, I still tended to eat dinner by myself, upstairs. The added cacophony of "Where's my cup?" "I dropped my spoon," and "More!!!" that comes with meal time being simply beyond me. When I would eat with the family, I would often be snappish and my husband would often suggest that I might prefer to eat upstairs anyway. With the added demands of pregnancy, I peter out at about 11, Megan's nap is slowly fading away and Charlie is on some sort of restfulness strike filling rest time with chatter and fidgets. So, I am left with an even more urgent need to figure out how to balance the very legitimate if exuberant needs of two young children with my very real need to have a few moments of peace. Right now, I have been known to put on a show, give the children snacks and drinks and then steal out into the hall for a few minutes of silence. Both children are in care two mornings a week which was quite helpful until we ran into the Christmas break, quickly followed by snow, ice, and a mysterious 3 day long "winter break" which was less than 3 weeks after the end of Christmas break. My husband modified his schedule so he goes in early but is also home by about 4 which is when I need him most. But, of course, none of these are perfect. At this point, I am mostly hoping that the occasions when I do start to crack are outweighed by the many occasions on which I don't.

The Good Parts

2010-01-16T09:34:00.002-05:00

Suzannah is having a rough time so I thought I would write a post just for her. Head over and give her some encouragement if you can.

A months or so after Megan was born, Charlie, who had never slept well, hit a massive sleep hiccup for the next several months. It involved at least a couple of epic sleep battles every night. He often would cleverly time them to coincide with the point that Megan finally consented to sleep for a stretch. Megan didn't quite have a colic but was quite vocal most of the day and then would cry, with short breaks for nursing and napping, from about 5:30-9:30 every night until she was around 4 months old. For the first 2 months or so, we were blessed with 4-6 hour stretch from her but as she developed more social awareness and more awareness in general, sleep became less desirable and wakings became more frequent. Charlie also started this moaning thing where he would just make this low level, whiny moan for 45 minutes to an hour when subjected to such indignities such as needing to put on shoes before going outside or having his nose wiped. It would make you want to chop off your ears. Charlie started trying to drop his nap at birth but really put a push behind it a couple of months before Megan was born. After she was born, I generally managed to get him down around the time Megan woke from her nap. When she was around 4 months old, I gave up and he dropped it entirely with the expected behavioral "changes." I cried a lot those first 3 months. It wasn't really PPD so much as the overwhelming knowledge that you did this to yourself. You CHOSE it. I was tired, I looked awful, the house was falling apart. And then, it got a touch worse when Megan started sleeping for shorter stretches and the academic year really got in gear for my husband who could no longer offer the level of support he had been. There was no rhythm to my life, I was struggling through every day and then it started to ease.

Megan started going longer between nursings. I stopped fighting the sleep battles with Charlie. I was ok with just winning the war instead- if he would sleep through the night, I would muddle through the day. Megan stopped crying ALL THE TIME. Megan discovered the wonderful world of carbohydrates. Charlie started going to Mother's Day Out. I discovered the wonder that is the Sprout TV network. The endless summer ended and our activities started up again (spring is a beautiful time to have a baby but perhaps it's not great if all your social supports are getting ready to go on hiatus just as you need them most). It all started to get a little better and then the good parts started happening.

When Megan would cry in the car, Charlie would make "shhh" noises for her and tell her it was ok.

Charlie and Megan would reach out between the car seats and hold hands.

When Megan got baptised at around 9 months, Charlie reached out and stroked her wet head.

About 3 or 4 months ago, the really great stuff started.

Megan learned how to spell "Charlie" because she adores repeating everything he says.

Charlie and Megan climbed in a box and had a picnic. When I tried to ask Charlie what he was doing, I was told that he was "busy talking to Megan."

When Megan drops her placemat (which totally doesn't fit on her high chair tray), Charlie picks it up for her and tells her it's ok.

Charlie "reads" Megan books.

Megan insists on wearing all of Charlie's old pajamas instead of the ones I made just for her just because they used to be Charlie's.

They have tea parties together in their play house.

They hug.

They kiss.

They tickle.

They chase.

They tuck one another in and pat each other's backs at "rest time."

They play a very energetic version of ring around the rosie.

They make meals for one another in their kitchen and occasionally mange to build "big, huge towers" together.

Charlie watches out for Megan and tries to keep her from hurting herself.

And, really, there's a lot less fighting than I ever expected.

Give it 12 months and it really will get great. You really didn't make a horrible mistake.

Helpful Household Hints with Counter-Cultural Flair!

2010-01-14T10:10:00.003-05:00

If you want your laundry to just smell clean, try using Charlie's Soap with a cup of vinegar in the rinse cycle instead of fabric softener.
Liquid Dr Bronner's is often available in bulk from natural food's stores. It's fair trade and not really all that expensive to use as a hand soap since you have to cut it with water- it's too thick otherwise. Tea tree oil helps fight germs without all the ick of triclosan and the scent is actually quite light. Between the laundry just smelling like laundry and the soap smelling mostly like soap, I now find more standard scented items to be overwhelming and I'm pretty sure that's not a bad thing.
Cut your plastic consumption by using re-fillable containers for your liquid soap and consider only using liquid soaps in the kitchen. Keep bar soaps well drained and wash for a good 30 seconds and you honestly won't die of a combination of super bugs and contamination- I promise!
Have you been a bit distressed by how much waste your monthly girly needs create? Consider the re-usable possibilities!
Create a paperless kitchen! This is something I'm working on but have currently been felled by the logistical difficulties of tiny children and pregnancy inertia.
Do you want to feel mildly paranoid at all times? If so, subscribe to thesmartmama twitter feed. She will keep you completely on top of lead and pthalates and all manner of other OMG!Fudgesicle! children's issues. I find it helpful to feel in the know but it can be a bit much at times so be sure to self filter as you need to.
For a decidedly non-counterculture nod... If you just want to know if the damn milk has expired, consider printing out these mini calendar pages, mount them on pretty sheets of scrapbook paper, punch 2 holes at the top and tie with a pretty ribbon to make your own customized, small calendar that's just perfect for hanging on your always spotless fridge!
If you were hoping to go both counter culture AND Jesus freak with your nutrition this year, Kitchen Stewardship has you covered! While I can totally get behind any number of her goals such as cutting out processed foods, dyes, HFCS, etc, I did blink a bit when I got to the argument that saturated fat is good for you. This mom is very sincere and earnest and is always up for some well reasoned debate. It's like visiting with that mom that always brings the sort of *different* snacks to preschool. She has some great information and the rest offers some interesting food for thought.

Apropos of nothing... I can't wait for some moss to peek up it's head so I can make one of these.

My Resolution

2010-01-09T14:23:00.002-05:00

For the past couple of years, I have been holding off on resolutions until Lent and then combined the two. I've been trying to look at reducing my carbon footprint. I know that one year I decided to try to do without disposable cups, especially plastic, and another year I decided to only use durable shopping bags. There may have been another that I can't remember. This year, I decided to go back to a New Year's resolution and this year, I resolve to smile more.

I used to smile all the time. Long ago, I looked in the mirror and discovered I couldn't pull of a "serious expression" in the middle of July or any other time, really. I was much more attractive when I smiled. And then I read an article about how the wrinkles in your face settle after a while to make you always look vaguely frowny if you frown too much. Smiling also sends some sort of message to your brain that you are happy, even if you're not which can make a bad situation at least mildly more bearable. I decided to make a smile my default expression.

I didn't realize how much energy it took to smile until after I had Charlie. I was so completely shell shocked by the experience of 4 hours of sleep a day in 45 minute intervals that the idea of a coherent thought, let alone a smile was just an insurmountable feat. As time went on, things got a bit better but sleep was always hanging over us. Then there was this 2 week interval where we thought it was getting better and... here comes Megan. It makes me rather sad, looking back on it. Charlie really started coming into his own in toddler-hood. I think if I hadn't been struggling my way through pregnancy, I would have enjoyed him a lot more. He had these wonderful language skills and was so cuddly but he also had 1-2 hour waking period 1, 2, or even 3 times night and nothing worked to get him back to sleep and we were all just frustrated and exhausted. Then Megan came and I was juggling all the time. For the first 3 or 4 months, it felt like we were only just hanging on. I considered it a triumph if I made it through the day without becoming completely demoralized. Smiling was infrequent.

People told me that things got better after the first year and they were right. There came a day when the floors were mopped again, laundry got done in a timely manner, I considered actually buying new craft supplies. I could enjoy and appreciate my children and all their adorable moments (the other day Megan put on her cape and said "I super hero. I come. I save you!" something about the fact that she couldn't even get the cape on or off by herself nor pronounce all the letters in her announcement made it even more adorable than you can imagine). Charlie sleeps through the night (with the introduction of light bribery) and Megan doesn't but generally has brief, manageable wakings rather than hour long sagas leaving both Charlie and I hiccuping messes. Life is becoming less battle and more enjoyment. These moments are fleeting and, damn it, I'm going to smile at them.

Little Ado About Much

2009-12-31T20:11:00.003-05:00

I am deep in the first trimester haze so a collection of small thoughts about any number of things it is...

a- The pregnancy looks good. I'm sick but I think I might be somewhat less sick than my previous pregnancies. If I stop puking before the 6th month, we'll call it a win! I saw the OB the Tuesday before Christmas and all parts were there and the heartbeat was a good 170 bpm. Plus, I'm outgrowing my clothing. I am guessing that this one is a boy but we won't know for a while. Signs are good that we'll be welcoming a new friend in August!

b- I've slowly been worrying about what sort of care this poor third child can expect. We were so very on top of things with Charlie. His diapers were changed every 90 minutes, his every bodily function recorded, photo sessions happened monthly, if not more often. He got new clothing- even some stuff from Gymboree! There has been at least one instance where I honestly couldn't remember when Megan had last been changed. She gets clothes from the children's re-sale shop. We have to hunt a bit for photos and then can't remember if they were of Charlie or Megan. This third child better be both hearty and loud or at least patient.

c- I am beginning to really wonder how much of gender identity is genetic. Megan and Charlie have had access to basically the same toys. Megan carries around her baby and spends ages feeding it and rocking it and demanding that I tuck it in. Charlie uses the baby as a discus.

d- I am flirting with homeschooling as part of my long, slow march to being an accidental conservative. A full day of kindergarten seems like so much to expect of very small people. There are standardized test in KINDERGARTEN. Charlie is such a very sweet little soul (We have taken to having rest time in my room. I try to nap while Charlie watches on-demand shows from netflix on my computer. The other day he pulled the blanket up over my shoulder, patted me and said "sleep tight, I love you," and then kissed me. It was almost more than my hormonal self could take.) Some of the other little souls he meets will be decidedly less sweet. Also, I suspect he will be telling time and reading by the time he's 4. That poor kindergarten teacher will be trying to make sure no one wets themselves and no one gets decapitated with a block. Listening to Charlie read from Frog and Toad will be low on her list.

e- Why did my mother think it was a good idea to give the children finger paint for Christmas?

f- Why is it considered so out of the norm to now have 3 children but it's totally normal to have a minivan with seating for 8?

g- Charlie is hoping he will get a little brother and is really hoping we'll bring home the baby Jesus.

h- In one of the crowning ironies of life, I have developed a deep pregnancy aversion to saltines.

The Other Shoe

2009-11-27T08:18:00.002-05:00

My life has been going really nicely lately. My husband is well on his way to tenure and his job is secure. My children are ridiculously cute. Megan wear "all overs" (overalls) and asks us to "Hold you me!" Charlie is developing magical reading powers. He was a bear for a month and then woke up one morning, perfectly amiable and able to identify most, if not all, of his letters and numbers and is making swift strides to writing his name. He spends most of his play time pretending to be a fire truck and a helicopter and it's all just too adorable. I have the supplies to make this ornament wreath and I think I might actually get it made sometime before Christmas THIS YEAR. I keep waiting for the other shoe, the fly in the ointment, the accidental use of salt rather than sugar...

As you know, we decided that we wanted to have another baby in July. There had been some debate. I liked some of the logistics of having them very close together so there was discussion of aiming for a February baby but then Megan didn't sleep and I just couldn't face another sleep deprived pregnancy (note: Megan still doesn't sleep through the night but is significantly more on the ball than she was 6 months ago). There was then the April discussion. I adore the concept of a new baby in April. April just seems like such a very fresh and new month full of warm spring rains, hazy green mists in the trees, bulbs popping from the ground, and the wonderful possibility of it all. However, April and early May is also the time of exams, thesis defenses, and graduation and April in the mountains can mean lovely weather but can also mean high winds and snow flurries. Babysitters are scarce on the ground in this college town and preschool is winding down. And, our dog died in July so, and August "start date" it was.

And then the other shoe dropped. While Megan and Charlie both happened far faster than expected, this pregnancy was much more of a challenge. Every month I would experience the fatigue, hunger, and passing nausea for a week or so only to be feeling suspiciously better a couple of days before my period. I decided to start tracking my basal body temperature. I discovered that the time between when I ovulated was rather later than I thought and that the time between ovulation and completion of my cycle (to put it delicately) was not terribly compatible with implantation. I decided that I was ready to put things on hold until I could see my OB. I couldn't take another month of symptoms and temperature rises only to see it all go awry. Luteal phase defects are among the easiest of fertility problems to fix, especially in my case. I was fairly certain the problem was simply that my thyroid levels needed tweaking. And then my temperature began to rise and I missed my period.

I'm due in early August!

It is still quite early and I'm still worried that my thyroid medication needs tweaking but I was assured by the nurse that once you cross the initial threshold of pulling off the implantation in time to thwart your cycle, the LPD shouldn't be a major concern and my thyroid levels, while off, are not currently incompatible with life. The line has been getting darker and my temperature has stayed higher and mornings are starting to get dicey. Fingers crossed and prayers please but for now, I'm calling myself pregnant!

Super Mommy

2009-09-27T15:48:00.002-04:00

So, since the end of July...

Megan and Charlie both started "school." Charlie is in preschool twice a week and Megan is in Mother's Day Out. Both are reasonably content with Charlie hitting the milestone of crying one morning when I had to break it to him that it wasn't actually a school day. I've been having to try to remember that they will be doing this twice a week for quite some time so I don't actually have to try to cram every single project I've been putting off since Megan's birth into one Tuesday morning. Working yourself into a productive frenzy has fabulous effects on piles of clutter and ridiculously messy floors but is sadly less than restorative.

I'm the membership co-ordinator for my MOPS group which resulted in quite the flurry of activity for the last couple of months but that seems to finally be settling down by virtue of the fact that we are at membership capacity.

We are currently trying for baby 3. If you are struggling with infertility skip the rest of this paragraph as it will make you mildly homicidal. Hem... Anyway, with both Megan and Charlie we went with the assumption that it would surely take more than one round to pull off the miracle which is conception resulting in a living, breathing, bouncing baby. We were wrong both times hence Charlie was NOT a Halloween baby (early September, in fact) and Megan had a very high likelyhood of being born during finals week (happily Megan decided to bake a bit longer than Charlie and missed both finals and graduation). This time we decided that it was really time to just go with the assumption that it will probably happen the first round and to plan accordingly. Did you just hear Fate guffaw? We've had a swing and a miss. Hopefully, good news will come my way soon because I have an irrational determination to not have a baby in August. In fact the experience is really beginning to make me think that there is something to the idea that God opens and closes the womb. By rights, there is no way Megan should have been procured when she was and Charlie was statistically rather improbable. This baby should have been a slam dunk but wasn't. Life is an odd alchemy, isn't it?

On to the point...

The part about motherhood that I find to be a complete trip is the way that I developed superhuman powers simply by making it through the 3rd grade. I can cut with scissors, read Dr Suess, and zip jackets. I know all the words to Row, Row, Your Boat and can count to 20 with 1:1 correspondence. I can reach the paper towel dispenser in all the bathrooms and am not afraid of the hand dryer- even the really loud, ridiculously powerful one at Target. I keep my underwear dry all the time and always go in the potty! I can find the missing baby and build towers 10 blocks high. I am incredible! I'm just hoping this last for a few more years because I love being able to fix it all with a hug and tape and a kiss.

Ponderings

2009-07-30T10:33:00.002-04:00

Becky;

a- wonders if Mr. Obama is aware of how much energy my children expend resisting sleep and wonders if he is looking into a way to harness it as a renewable resource

b- wishes Megan had taken her morning nap

c- emphatically decides that there will be NO MORE CHILDREN and then Charlie begins discussing the caterpickles and Megan starts dancing using the only move she knows- the wiper motion from the Wheels on the Bus- to Mary Had Little Lamb and both give kisses and I wonder how we will ever manage to cut ourselves off

d- hopes Doctor #11 is as hot and adorable as Doctor #10

e- wonders where Megan picked up the Maine accent- "Oh, Dea-ah," indeed

f- is convinced that people's clothing must have been perpetually damp and the towels perpetually questionable in the summer in Virginia before dryers and is beginning to seriously question if the Earth might not want saving and is in fact having a go at Hiri Kiri

g- still really wishes Megan had taken her morning nap

h- wishes her house was cleaning itself- she suspects that those who have had this particular FlyLady experience don't have 2 young children

The Clothes Line

2009-06-28T20:40:00.002-04:00

I've been trying to line dry our clothing since it started getting warm. Of course, I was quite frustrated by the long string of cool, cloudy and rainy days which were interspersed with extreme humidity- apparently, it doesn't matter how sunny it looks, nothing gets dry with 80% humidity. I am at a complete loss as to how a vast majority of the world ever managed to wear anything both dry and clean throughout history as one or the other is apparently quite elusive a great bit of the time.

I'm hoping for some tangible benefits such as the children's clothing making it longer without stains since they will be in the sun and the stains won't be set by the dryer but I don't have high hopes. I will have to satisfy myself with the mild sense of superiority I get or at least the hope that this evens out some of my vast car related carbon footprint- having a little boy who asks each and every day, "Mama, what we can go today?" sets the bar a bit high for those hoping to consolidate errands...

It is rather nice to have 10 minutes or so to simply enjoy being outside and the luxury of knowing something will be done for you (evaporation of water) while you work on other important tasks (such as getting yet another bagel out for my littlest carb fiend). I tend to hang the laundry during rest time while Megan naps and Charlie watches a show (it just got to be too much to try to get him to stay in his bed so we go with a very early bed time and some tv downtime during the day- while tv is not ideal, it does get us both through the day). So, it's often a bit of time to reflect on the day and think random thoughts. The thing that keeps occurring to me is just how much you can divine from the clothes line.

You can see exactly how Charlie's potty training is going; how Megan is sleeping (when it gets bad, things mostly go in the dryer); how Megan is napping (did I get out 1 load or 2?); that I never manage to wash Megan's sheets since the only time I get to strip beds is when she's sleeping on said sheets; that I, apparently, have no racy clothing- in fact, I apparently never wear underthings (actually, I just dry all undies inside); and when my husband is out of town. In fact, I can only imagine what a blow the dryer was to the community gossips.

The Power of Polish

2009-05-31T20:30:00.003-04:00

I had thought that liking to have polished toenails was a personal quirk but after a discussion at a book club, I began to see the power of polish. We were talking about make-up. Some of us, like me, have a vague desire to wear a little something. Just enough to indicate that we are still worth it, damn it. We may be wearing the capris we dug out of the clothes bin, have sippy cups leaking in our purses and been slowly crossing the line from, hmmm, I need to shave to perhaps I'll just wear pants this summer. But, we're still worth the 5 seconds it takes to swipe the lipstick across our mouths or use a touch of eye liner. There is a particle, somewhere, that is still woman, not Mommy, and belongs to us. Somehow, eeking out those extra 5 seconds of "me" time just doesn't happen. For my part, a great deal of it is habit. The last time I regularly applied make-up was high school and it' just not part of my routine anymore. Those extra 30 second in the shower are just too luscious to pass up (not to mention the extra 2 minutes I spent trying to get OUT of the warm, comfy, non-whining bed and motivated to get IN said shower). However, there seems to be one last bastion of beauty- your toe nails.

Most notably, the hard-line feminists would be so proud. A great deal of the time we paint our toes just for us. In the fall and winter and a good chunk of the rainy spring, our toes are safely enshrined in sensible shoes and warm socks. No one will see the shocking magenta, trendy brown, or sex-on-a-stick red. The plus, of course, is that not only are our toes chilblain free, the socks make it so they only need real attention every few weeks. Even the most hassled mother can manage 20 minutes every 3 weeks or so, especially since waiting for your nails to dry is The Perfect excuse to sit and whatever- read, watch tv, write a blog post...

Of course, the summer brings open toes and more frequent maintenance but is there anything quite as luscious as sitting outside, listening to birds, watching the grass grow and waiting for paint to dry as your husband corrals the children? Why not do it once every week or so?

One of the things I was happiest about with my pregnancies was that I was always able to manage to paint my toes. It required some odd contortions- near the end, I would sit in the glider, prop my foot on the footrest and rock myself forward to manage each swipe of the brush.

My toes are pink and are pink just for me. I am worth 20 minutes every 2 weeks.

Becky's Helpful Houshold Hints

2009-05-02T10:21:00.002-04:00

1- 1/2 cup vinegar, 10 drops of tea tree oil and 15 drops of grapefruit seed extract will kill the stuff in your shower (but not bleach the mildew stains- sorry!)

2- 1 cup of vinegar in your rinse cycle will keep your clothes static free- nope they won't smell like vinegar when they dry. Added bonus- it won't effect the flame retardants in your children's clothing and has antifungal and antibacterial properties so, good-bye thrush!

3- Always have a snackbox in your purse. Charlie's has cheerios, goldfish, some sort of cracker and a box of raisins. Megan's has puffs and cheerios. I also keep 2 extra boxes of raisins, a lollipop, a battery operated toy phone, and a vibrating teether stashed in my purse- this can see us through just about anything.

4- If at all possible, get to stores by 9 am (or when they open, if later) and plan to leave by 11:30. There will be plenty of help available, short lines, and you'll get the best pick of the mark-downs. You'll get in and out in no time. Your children's behavior will also, magically, be about 300% better than if you tried to do the same errands at 4.

5- Use your used dryer sheets to dust baseboards and windowsills. The residual anti-static stuff will help them stay dust-free longer.

6- A Roomba is the best Mother's Day gift evah!

7- Always bring along a (re-useable) bottle of water for yourself and cups for the kids. Being thirsty just makes everything worse.

8- Rice/Corn cakes make the perfect car snack for little ones. They are big enough to a- keep them happy for a while and to b- easy for little hands to grab when you are trying to pass them back while driving. They also keep fairly indefinitely, aren't sticky and are reasonably food allergy safe.

9- Always keep trail mix in the car for you- The tex-mex one from Target that comes in the tub is my favorite.

Books- a cuteness vignette!

2009-04-20T19:27:00.003-04:00

Megan has had a slightly more than passing interest in books for a while now. Of note was the Feely Bugs book we got from the library a month or so back. It was a big hit and I can't recommend it enough for the tactile set. Although, a good bit of monitoring is needed since the feathers will come off (as we discovered).

Megan has also (to our shock) started talking in the last couple of weeks. "Apple" is her most intelligible word with a "ma" constellation that can me more, mama (maybe), or banana depending on slight variances in inflection. "Hold you," "uh-oh," "kisses," and "woof woof" also make appearances. We also now have a "ba" constellation. She had been pretty solid on "ball" but today she added "book" to what we have to figure out based on gesture and inflection. It was the first instance that I really got to see the "aha" moment for her.

This afternoon I threw caution to the winds and decided to try to read a bit of Multiple Blessings while the children played. Megan, of course, wanted to see the book so I gave her a touch and feel book to look at. As we explored the pages, I repeatedly said "book." She enjoyed it and started saying "bo" so I pulled another touch and feel off the shelf and said "book" as we explored again.

This evening, Charlie was a hair shy of narcolepsy so bath was early. When Megan and I went downstairs to nurse she was not as sleepy as usual and noticed the books on the endtable saying "bo." So, we looked at the books. Being the neglected second child, we haven't done well with a book at bedtime but this seemed a fine time to start. After a thrilling few minutes with the fuzzy duckling and soft calf Megan started to squirm saying "bo." I let her down and she promptly went over to the bookshelf and started excited pulling books down saying "bo" inquiringly. After being assured that these were, in fact books, even the softcover one and the one made of cloth, she proudly carried one after another to me, climbing into my lap and examining them, occasionally kissing the book just for good measure.

If there was ever a doubt, Megan is definitely her mother's daughter. I can't wait to introduce her to all my favorites!

Seasons

2009-04-19T12:44:00.002-04:00

My house is not quite as much a mess as it was but still very much a work in progress. My cardmaking supplies haven't been touched in months. My blog is neglected. My book reading rate is surprisingly robust. My husband has been waiting for me to hem a curtain for the better part of a year. Penny desperately needs to be brushed.

My children are intensely needy right now. Neither can handle any bodily function unaided. Charlie can generally get unclothed well enough to pee-pee in the potty but re-dressing can be challenging. They need me to feed them, help them fall asleep, keep them clean, keep them rested, and provide balance to their lives. Their father and I are their Alpha and Omega. This is my current season. This season is about learning to serve others, most always. This is a humble season. This is an uncertain season. This season is fleeting, so I am told, but feels quite long.

The idea of seasons in life is sustaining me. I am not biblical enough to repeat the pertinent passages to myself (Ecclesiastes 3. 1-8), instead I take the secular route, humming the Simon and Garfunkle song periodically. Remembering that just as summer lounging follows the vigorous activity of a spring joyfully met, so will a slightly less intense period follow this one. There will come a day of no more diapers, sleeping through the night, quiet mornings when all the little people are at school, and a lunch eaten, sitting, the whole way through. There will come a season when I can devote more thoughtful attention to my children, when I will have slept well enough to form a coherent sentence and contrive clever projects for them. There will come a season when I can introduce them to Anne Shirley, Harry Potter, and Nick and Nora. There will come a time when I don't thank God that they are so cute and have so much biological drive behind their care because, Good Heavens, Megan was up for 2 hours last night and I just don't know how much longer I can do this. There will come a day when, instead of experiencing them, I will be remembering the firsts and the sweetness and the cuddles and the giggles. It will be a season for new firsts, new uncertainties, new causes for sleepless nights.

Talkin' 'bout my generation...

2009-04-04T15:39:00.003-04:00

Has anyone else noticed that there is much discussion about going back to the values/traditions/whatnot of "our grandparent's?" I don't think our parent's generation has been referenced at all as a standard which should be hearkened back to. Interestingly, these references seem to uniformly looking towards people who came of age in the Great Depression which is not really accurate, at all, for most of the boomers. Is it just further resistance on their part of being able to say that you should have listened to your parents? It seems it would be the height of annoyance for those who spent most of their lives looking at their parent's values with scorn, to suddenly have to admit their wisdom. When it comes down to it, my generation is much luckier in that respect. It seems we can say with some confidence that the monetary values we were taught based on a lending economy aren't quite all they are cracked up to be- our parents really weren't always right. While we may not reap the same rewards of an implicit confidence that we will see ever increasing incomes and standards of living we may also have the benefit of at least knowing that what we have is ours and not actually the property of Visa.

This zeitgeist of "our grandparents" rather than "our parents" has been circling in my head a great deal as of late. My husband travels for work rather frequently. We have wound up calling on my mother for back-up and the experience has wound up being quite hard on me. She has tended to be astonishingly unreliable. Perpetually, she will agree to various dates only to then change her mind, need to leave a day or two early, arrive a day or two late, etc, etc. Her attitude is in constant flux as well. There are times that there will be tearful farewells and others when she will storm out in a huff. Sometimes she will anxiously ask if she should come down for the weekend to allow us to get a much needed break when my husband isn't traveling while other times she will need to stay at home for events that seem less than pressing when our need is much greater. While I wish there was another option- a friend to call upon, a sister, anyone- there isn't. (this is actually part of what drives my desire to have a larger family for my children) And, I get just enough intermittent reinforcement to continue to call her.

There have been several tearful discussions with my husband about the issue. We are thinking of another child and I just don't know how I will do solo parenting 2 young children, pregnant and sick with a third. A reliable back-up is becoming a more pressing need and will be for at least the next couple of years. I think that by the time everyone is at least 2 or so, things will ease a bit but right now, the physical demands are intense. However, I know that other mother's manage similar situations with calm and even panache. I am forever wondering if I'm just expecting too much from my mother or if I am just less than competent.

Last night, he suggested that my mother might be the least bit selfish. I'm not sure I would go that far. It seems not to be selfishness as much as self-centeredness. Another woman of my mother's age made the comment the other day that the students graduating into this very uncertain job market will be taught the value of "not having things handed to them" and that "sometimes you have to make do." This was so very lacking in self-awareness. While I do not know a great deal about this woman's background, I know enough to be reasonably certain that when she graduated college it was to a market that had jobs available and, more to the point, credit readily available. In addition, her parents were graciously making way in the job market to allow those younger worker the opportunity to work. To pretend that you could lump her experience in with those who came of age in the '30's is the height of ridiculousness. I find the continued experience with both self-centeredness and a lack of awareness to be particularly confounding when contrasted with the high level of social activism of the generation.

I started hunting for information about generational psychology and boomer psychology in specific as of late. I am one of those uber-reflective types that likes to know exactly why I find my parents' generation so annoying- is it simply the naturally occurring desire to develop my own sense of self or does it go deeper? Am I being self-centered in my own demands of my parents? Will my children look back in 30 years and wonder how my generation went so wrong? To the point... as I was searching I found several references to how the boomers refuse to acknowledge their own mortality. This aspect was the catalyst of my decision that my parents are stuck in a generation that seems to be slightly frozen in the teenage stage of development- once they were idealistic, now they are struggling with the superman complex seen most often in teens, with the narcissism, self-centerness and lack of awareness that they were complaining about seeing in us just 10 years ago. I would like to think I outgrew that but I guess I will have to wait to see if I did for another 25 years or so when my children call on me for help when I would rather be at book group.

The Case for Conversion

2009-03-13T20:36:00.003-04:00

I was once a practicing member of the Church of Latter Day Saints. The reason for my conversion was simple. They were the only group I could find that readily embraced and validated my goals. I wanted to be a stay at home mom. I wanted to make a house a home. I wanted to cook dinner and pack nutritious lunches. I wanted to have babies. The problem I ran into is that girls in the church are strongly pushed in this direction. I feel strongly that while this is what I wanted to do, it's not what I wanted to tell my daughters they should do. If Megan wants to stay at home and raise babies, I will fully support her but if she decides that she would like to go to work while her partner stays home or that she wants no part of babies, I will fully support that goal as well. This, along with their position of homosexuality, led to me re-joining the Methodist church.

While we were at the library today, I ran into a woman with a gaggle of children who had kind words for me when I discovered Charlie had managed to wet his pants and underwear AGAIN (how could one sippy cup possibly lead to so much pee!) I sorely wished I could talk with her more but off we went. The characteristic western accent as well as the lifestyle decisions she had made strongly suggested that she was Mormon (if I can make some sweeping assumptions... Through the day, I reflected on how much I miss being Mormon at this stage in my life. Methodists don't really have much in the way of large families. The norm is generally to stick with 2, 3 at the outside. Even then, it seems that, more often than not, those with 3 got there without intending to. When I speak of wanting 4, I'm look at askance. I'm an aberration. To make things worse, I sometimes speak about how difficult it is to be home with young children. I occasionally share my frustrations. I have been known to respond to someone telling me that these years are fleeting with a heartfelt, "Thank God!"

I don't know precisely why I want a larger family. I'm sure it is a convoluted mish-mash of experiences with larger families while growing up, a desire that my children have a happier upbringing than I did (and therefor a different family size), a manifestation of the loneliness I have and do feel at time and a desire to give them a built in social structure. I knew I wanted more than 2 and there seems to be a bit of common wisdom that says that 3 is the hardest hump to get over. So, if we're going to slog through that, we might as well go with 4 to even things up. I'm not sure any of this is a real reason to decide to have more children but it seems as sensible a set of reasons as any. After all, when it comes to it, I have no sensible reason for having had 1 child and certainly nothing of any weight to advocate for a second- Charlie having been anything but an easy baby. I do know that I feel strongly that I would like to have 4. It is the same sort of certainty that came with my feeling that Charlie would be a boy and Megan a girl and that if I am ever due in October, it will be a boy. It's just one of those things in the cosmos that sets itself in your head. If I don't have at least 3, I am quite certain I will always feel something is missing and I may feel someone is missing until we hit 4.

At the same time, I love having 2 children. I love discovering how different they are and marveling that they both came from the same pool of genetic material. I love the way they hold hands in the car. I love watching Megan catch Charlie's eye to exchange smiles.

I also feel like I'm finally getting the hang of things. My second pregnancy was hard in it's own way but so much more manageable. I knew which pants would fit, which tea to drink, which morning sickness medicine that would work. I know even more now. I'm starting to figure out how to make the house at least marginally picked up, how to keep up with laundry, how to juggle 2 children in the grocery store. It seems like such a waste to have finally started getting things figured out, only to leave this stage behind.

Although, that brings me to the other reason I would find having some Mormon mom friends so helpful... These are women who have often come from larger families and are having larger families. I need some mentors. I need some women who can tell me which stores have carts that will hold 3 children. I need some women who can support my assumption that it is hard but it's also worth it; that you don't stop having babies just because the days are very challenging.

I need some women who support the idea that you can choose to have a larger family, not because you are having as many babies as God will give you but that you are actively choosing to have more children. I find the idea of simply "opening yourself to the will of God" to be disingenuous. Having unprotected sex multiple times a month has rather predictable consequences. I don't find this to be an expression of God's intentions so much as a biology experiment. To me, it seems just as spiritual, if not more so, to give a great deal of conscious and unconscious attention to the issue of children and follow a course of action commensurate to how you feel led.

My days of late have been long. I am fighting against a strong tide. My peers say that 2 is more than enough. My husband and I haven't adequately slept in years. My husband's work is pressing hard and isn't the most family friendly. It can get tense. I don't like uncertainty and there are no clear answers in this situation. Maybe my gut is wrong and I should quit while I'm ahead.

The Whole "Gifted" Thing

2009-01-31T09:29:00.003-05:00

So, I have been hanging out at Facebook quite a bit- to the detriment of my blog I'm afraid. It's so easy to splash up a sentence and skip over the whole paragraph thing...

Anyway, something that keeps hitting me in the face is that I'm just not all that special. Of course, I already knew that but what is also being driven home to me is that those other kids, the other ones that were in the special class with me... they're not all that special either. At least, not the ones on facebook. My mother always said that IQ was only part of the equation. The important thing was what you did with all that brain power. In fact, she claims that my brother has a higher IQ than I do. While I got a graduate degree and a job more white than blue collar, he did manage to finally get his degree from a less prestigious institution than I and then work a series of sales and blue collar jobs. However, of note is that he does love his current job and has acquired a number of skills associated with it and has climbed his way up to a supervisory sort of position. In fact, I would like to pause at this point to say...

Blue Collar Is Just Fine! No Degree Is Just Fine! I Am Not Better Than My Brother!

Well, I am better than my brother but for other reasons...

In contrasts, my husband has a very slightly lower IQ than I do (very slight, in fact, well within the standard variation and meaningless but I like to point it out anyway) but he has a Doctorate and is a Professor (with Doctoral candidates). I am more nimble linguistically but he has it all over me in math.

As for my classmates, they may skew slightly higher in the areas traditionally associated with higher intelligence- things like being doctors. But, on the whole, they seem to settle out roughly on par with the rest of my high school class. This is, of course, a skewed sample set, especially since the gifted class only went through 5th grade, and, not everyone is on Facebook. We have a healthy smattering of teachers and engineers across the board as well as a few outliers like a wedding planner.

It makes me wonder what exactly is going on... If we had a school system that targeted highest achievement rather than adequate, would more of these "gifted" minds be doing more? Why is it that some children probably never were spotted as "gifted" but go on to such high achievement? Should we really bother to test at all but instead just look at the kids who stand out to the teacher for whatever reason? This is certainly done in special ed. I had several students that were in my purview simply because of behavioral anomalies- intelligence-wise, they were completely typical. There was no terribly scientific way of quantifying that something was wrong but, when you begin to actually froth at the mouth and talk with your mother through the spine of your math book (and get answers) the general feeling is that, perhaps you could use a little "extra attention."

At the same time, I look at my children and see that they are likely quite bright. I say this as a person with a Master's in this sort of thing, not as a mother. As a mother, I would like them to be happy and pee pee in the potty- I don't care so much about their phonemic awareness, startling linguistic developments and whatnot. But, as one who had memorize many a chart with expected times of milestones, I can say my kids are ahead. I suspect, that when raising them, it will be good to have this sense of perspective. It is helpful to know that no matter how bright, or not bright, they may turn out to be, that the numbers really won't ever mean anything much.

I'm Flying!

2009-01-05T19:31:00.004-05:00

I decided to start the FlyLady system a couple of weeks ago. As I like to say... "We are well on our way to Ramseying out of debt and now will be flying out of clutter."

In one of those stupid sorts of things, I am getting a little worried that I'm turning into my parents and should have just listened to them all along- after all, you are always warned against repeating the sins of your fathers and learning from your elders. Have I spent the last 10 years of my life (my years as an independent adult) getting into all manner of difficulty that I could have skipped if I had just swallowed my stubborn and listened. After considered thought and discussion with my husband, I was heartened to decide that this was probably not the case.

As with money, my mother also took a very hard line, somewhat extreme view towards cleaning. She did advocate some of the flylady basics of picking up after yourself regularly and wiping up the kitchen every night. However, these sensible steps were tempered by some less than manageable expectations- my mother scrubs the kitchen floor on hands and knees once a week. This is apparently a hold-over from when my brother and I were crawling about and putting everything in our mouths. While I freely admit that when my children are crawling, I see merit in the hands and knees periodic wipedown or even when your children aren't- I draw the line at continuing mouthing, crawling children standards when said children are well over driving age. In another instance, I remember her telling me about how exhausted she was but that she wouldn't be able to sleep until she had vacuumed her bedroom. Might I say that it is a rare moment that the dustbunnies who are currently hoping to be numerous enough to finally organize that fantasy football league cross my mind at bedtime, let alone prevent me from sleeping. On the other end, my mother gave up on the bathroom shower curtains sometime when I was in middle school. The get a wink and a nod every few months and then are replaced when they begin petitioning for civil liberties. You might see how this left me with little practical knowledge (hee, spell check wanted to make that piratical knowledge!) of how to manage a household.

So far, I'm in the decluttering stage. I have completed the living room and am currently working on the kitchen. I'm hoping to to get to really start cleaning next month when we rotate through the zones again. For now, I'm trying to do a consistent 15 minutes a day and hope to add a 2 minute hotspot drill in the next week or so. Ultimately, I'm hoping to manage with 10-15 minutes a day in home blessing work and 15 minutes or so of zone chores as well as a couple of fire drills morning and night. I like structure and organization which makes the flylady a good fit for me. Plus, by the end of a day more than 30 minutes seems wildly beyond my reach. I'm also hoping to be able to take weekends off, by and large, and I would really like to be able to avoid the great Saturday morning clean which had seemed inevitable. As an added bonus, I seem to be at least a touch ahead of where many people are when they start, based on her writings, so I get to fit just a tad smug at how well I've already been doing. This would be the first time I've ever gotten to feel ahead of the clean house curve.

For those wondering, neither of my previous posts had to do with my New Year's resolution which is to avoid using single-use cups- especially plastic ones.

Fighting the Frump

2009-01-04T19:59:00.002-05:00

So, Megan's little self is doing something that results in her not sleeping as in we have now crossed the line between limping along in a half-assed fashion, generally squeaking by with enough collective sleep to not be a danger to self or others while driving to having come to Jesus meetings with a 7 month old at 4 am (which, for the record, doesn't work) and odd, swimmy head moments that leave you fairly certain you shouldn't be trying to chop that onion just now.

In other news, we are back to potty training. We took a break when Charlie started crying hysterically at the mention of the potty on the second day of the last go. This time we were armed with car underwear and lollipops. We've been working on it for just over 2 weeks now and he's reasonably good with keeping his underwear dry (we went with a 2 pronged approach- rewarding both for dry underwear AND potty action) but pooping is a whole other matter. To gloss over the finer points, he doesn't seem to be in touch with his body enough to really be able to pull the needed steps off. I'm sure we'll get there but this wasn't the best time for Megan to go on a no-sleep, all mommy cuddles, all the time, bender.

On to the actual point of the post... I have never been particularly concerned with my appearance. I liked to look reasonably put together but never did much in the way of accessories, blow drying, or make-up. After 2 children, I'm starting to want to do a little something for myself. I want to feel like I count. I want to feel "worth it" to steal a phrase. So, I have decided I will start to fight the creeping frump. I have manged to consistently moisturize for a while now and am ready to add the step of using a touch of powder. I really want to try mineral make-up but I haven't decided which kind yet- drugstore, Arbonne, or Mary Kay. I tried eye shadow the other day but, even though I have worn it fairly regularly before, it just makes me want to rub my eyelids these days. I have hit a slight snag with hair cuts as well. I've gone through all manner of hair dresser drama over the last 3 cuts and am hoping to land on a hair dresser that is fairly cheap and also doesn't take her cues from Mrs. Brady sometime soon- really, I just want a fairly short shag and/or bob. It seems like it shouldn't be all that hard. The local Gap Outlet has helped me make admirable in-roads on my wardrobe but we're in the easy season. It's somewhat easy to look put-together in winter- you have cords and pants which go nicely with chunky loafers and then you can throw on a stylishly snug sweater. Summer is always so much more complicated for me- even more so since I have been pregnant, newly done with pregnancy, and/or nursing for 3 summers now and my clothes are the weird sizes that go with that. I used to be able to fall back on sundresses but nursing has thrown a wrench in that. Not to mention the loss of B. Moss which was the sundress source of choice. Oh, well... that's a problem for another day. For now, I just need to get a non-mullet and pick some powder- suggestions welcome.

Sleep Is For The Weak

2008-12-03T13:05:00.002-05:00

Has anyone read the book by that title, yet? It's a book of mommy bloggers and is reportedly quite good. Unfortunately, none of the bookstores nor libraries in my area are carrying it. I was able to read a rather alarmingly (from the publisher's viewpoint) excerpt of it and enjoyed that much of it. Anyway, it inspired me to start using that response when people ask how my children sleep. My children, as you know, are not sleepers. Megan does somewhat better than Charlie with periodic 4-5 hour stretches but those are interspersed with days or weeks of bi-hourly waking (if not more frequent). I have a near encyclopedic knowledge of the many facets of sleep training, sleep development, co-sleeping, bed sharing, and, in a related field, the psychotropic drugs parents may skip because they get the same effects after not getting a REM cycle for 6 months or so. "Sleep is for the weak," is really an ideal response since it manages to make light of what is actually an issue capable of driving me to the pits of despair. However, hysterical weeping isn't really something I want to do in the produce aisle. It also gives the clear indication that you are aware that the rest of the world thinks sleep is important but you have transcended the issue. Therefore, you don't require helpful tips. Finally, it gives a mild amount of healthy sarcasm to deal with those slightly smug parents, or worse, grandparents. My second favorite response is to say "Oh no, they're gifted." This also puts people enough off balance that the subject is quickly changed. You'll get some odd looks but you usually don't get told any of the more irritating tidbits of advice.

Sleep is the area where I think I am growing the most as a mother. I want to be the type of mom who can maintain a positive relationship with her children throughout their adulthoods. A lot of this seems to hinge on being able to accept your children as they are rather than who you want them to be. While I am not about to let my children decree that they only need 7 hours of sleep a day. I am learning to accept that my children aren't sleepers- there is still wailing and gnashing of teeth and gentle but firm guidance about when sleeping times are. I'm also learning to appreciate the reasons they aren't sleepers- the high social drive, the incessant desire to explore, the desire to be 100% there all the time. And now, if you'll excuse me, Megan only knows how to crawl backwards and seems to have lodged herself between the playhouse and table which is highly distressing for all involved.

Gender Equity

2008-12-02T20:08:00.003-05:00

I'm sorry. I haven't slept in about 2 weeks- last night was a banner night with 6 hours. We were traveling last week. By car. Through either 4 or 5 states (I lost track). With an infant and a toddler. The infant was teething. The toddler hadn't had a decent night's sleep in a month nor a good nap. The infant had just finished a round of vaccinations. The toddler (and I) had just had our flu shots. Nope, he didn't sleep in the car either. I am now eating large quantities of chocolate ice cream (I can't speak highly enough of Dove's Unconditional Chocolate). I will return when I can form a coherent thought.

However, this struck my fancy. An interesting take on how to explain the whole penis vagina thing when changing diapers.

The Two Income Trap

2008-11-22T20:36:00.002-05:00

I recently read The Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. It was published in 2004 but is quite pertinent to the current financial situation and, in fact, predicted it to an extent. Elizabeth is a professor at Harvard. I must confess I'm not sure what her daughter does. The book's main premise is that the cause of increasing bankruptcy and disappearing middle class (and remember this was in 2004) is not due to the middle class spending frivolously but instead due to a convergence of risk factors that come together to spell disaster when families are faced with a fairly common array of moderate disasters.

They first make a compelling argument about school funding reform. The current system is mainly based on property taxes which means that the children in the more affluent districts wind up with better funded schools which leads to more people wanting into that school district which causes the housing prices to go up even more. So, parents have a compelling motivator (their children's wellbeing) to buy houses which they can just barely afford. Secondly, since mothers began entering the workplace, it is now the norm to be competing against families with both adults contributing income which has cause housing prices, in proportion to overall income, to raise even higher. This means that not only can the parents only barely afford the house they feel vital to their children's future happiness and prosperity but, both parents MUST be working to have any hope of making the payments.

The authors then go into great detail about the horrible practices of the banking and credit industries which led to their collapse a few short months ago (as the authors predicted). Basically, the more difficulty you have paying back a loan, the more these companies would like to lend to you. The authors make a very astute argument refuting the common assertion that people are simply less honorable than they once were. In fact, it was much more that once people began having difficulty paying bill their credit was cut off, greatly decreasing the amount of debt people could accrue and greatly decreasing the risk factor for the lender. At this point, it seems the creditors are getting exactly what they deserve for lending to people in such a predatory manner.

I found the arguments FOR remaining a one income family rather validating. The authors pointed out the value of having one person not in the job market. First, because of the non-monetary contributions I make to both my immediate and extended family. In addition to providing child care, cooking, cleaning, etc, I am also available to help fill in the gaps should my husband ever loose his job. While I won't make as much as he does, when combined with unemployment we will still be doing considerably better than if our income was abruptly halved with no means to make up for the loss.

A Jury of Her Peers

2008-11-20T20:12:00.002-05:00

When I was in college I took a class in Women's Literature. One of the works we read was A Jury of Her Peers, as short work by Susan Glaspell. The full text is available here and it's an excellent and quick read. At any rate, I've been thinking about that story a lot lately and the idea of a jury of my peers and what they might excuse. Once upon a time, it never crossed my mind that I might be tempted to thwap a dog but then Penny started barking just as I got Megan down the other day. I never thought I would grow tired of holding a sweet faced baby, especially one that was smiling and loving until earlier this week when Megan had needed to be held constantly for several days- teething and lack of sleep having gotten the best of her. I never understood the motivations of shaken baby syndrome until an epic round of nap battles with Charlie while I pregnant with Megan. Giving into the impulses is still unforgivable but these unfathomable thoughts can be understood by a jury of ones peers.

Mommy blogging gives such an interesting change in perspective to what was once secret. I often think about my mother and her generation as well as those that came before. They seem to have lived up to so much more than I, at least, manage. They had dinner on the table at 5, a clean house, and children that slept without black-out shades and sound machines. I have to remind myself that they also had valium, evening cocktails, and all manner of "help." I'm sure that all manner of things were shared over coffee cake and tea but they were never publicly recorded as they are now. It seems to me that those poor women of our mother's generation were determined to do it all and appear to make it all effortless. I sometimes feel looked down upon by women of a certain age when I point out that I won't be attending x,y, and z because I don't have childcare or that it will be from a box because that's all I have time for. At the same time, it seems that the mothers of our time have a certain level of confidence our predecessors lacked. We can admit to things falling down about our heads, the crazy thoughts you have 45 minutes into a nap that isn't happening, and the dreadful pain of post partum depression. We no longer have to prove that we can earn the bacon and cook it up as well. We have moved past that (to an extent) and can let it all hang out in cyber-space. At the same time, the secret camaraderie that created the jury that secretly acquitted Mrs. Wright no longer seems to exist. We constantly divide over breastfeeding, sleep training, where we will work and what we will label ourselves. While we are all there for a mother struggling through some difficulties there are other times that unproductive criticism seems to come from the woodwork. The public sharing of the many burdens and frustrations of mother hood is so very welcome but where did the sympathetic jury go?

A Walk to Beautiful

2008-11-19T20:33:00.002-05:00

Today was not one of my favorite parenting days. Charlie didn't sleep well last night and his behavior today showed it and then he didn't go down for a nap this afternoon. Megan is teething and just broke her 1st tooth. She's well into the 6 month growth spurt which is generally alleviated with the addition of solids but Megan isn't wild about solids so there has been lots and lots of nursing at all hours as of late. I was cross and cranky and ready to run for the hills by the time my husband came home today and then I watched NOVA while I nursed Megan.

The NOVA episode tonight was A Walk to Beautiful and was about women suffering from obstetrical fistulas. WARNING: We are now wandering into a girl bit heavy post. I don't think it's too terribly graphic but if you flinch when passing the feminine hygiene aisle give a nice donation to the WHO and be on your way...

I was in labor with Megan for 18 hours. It was mostly back labor and was somewhat unproductive. My contractions were significant to wake me up by 7 am and I was fully effaced by the time I got to the hospital at 3 ish. But, I was only dilated to 3 cm. My contractions didn't form a good pattern and I dilated only 1 more centimeter over the next 3 hours or so (my memories are fuzzy). I hung out in the shower for a while but didn't want to get into a tub, which would have relieved my discomfort, because it could slow my labor even more. I finally got an epidural when we decided I should start pitocin around 7. The epidural was only somewhat effective. The doctor discovered that Megan was turned and got her to turn properly which helped rather more than the epidural. Unfortunately, she turned back (most unusual) so I spent the last hunk of labor, aided by pitocin and largely unaided by an epidural with a baby in a very wrong spot. It really, really hurt. Happily, I am a champion at dissociation and can therefore only rememeber that it hurt in the most abstract way. I remember simply focusing on not panicking and reminding myself that I really wasn't in danger or about to die. I went beyond breathing, relaxing, focusing, or coconut visualizations and simply tried to not try and fling myself out of the bed to run away from the torture and torment I was going through. I remember my husband pointing out that I was not relaxing and wanting to Do Something to him because "Duh!!!" but not being able to focus beyond the pain to do whatever it was.

I pushed for an hour. I know they were good pushes. My forehead began to hurt from the pressure of my pushing. I spun on the bed. I felt my muscles move in co-ordinated and strong movements. After an hour, Megan's foot remained in the same spot in my ribs as it had been for the last 2 months of my pregnancy. I was exhausted. I was very ready for a c-section.

After Megan was delivered (the epidural never did work so I was anesthetized), I was told that she was 2 pounds heavier than Charlie even though my measurements and weight gain had been the same. I was told that the opening she would have had to pass through was too small. I was told that she had never actually engaged in my pelvis and that was why she was able to rotate back after being rotated to a correct position. Finally, I was told that she had a 3 inch cone. I had pushed and pushed well but she wasn't going to come out without help. I am very proud of those 3 inches and also so glad I had ready access to high quality, obstetrical care.

The women in "A Walk to Beautiful" didn't have that sort of access. They were in labor for days, sometimes up to 10. Their babies died. They labored and labored and never got to meet a little person at the end of it. Worse, some part of the baby had pressed against the birth canal over and over with every contraction, compressing the tissue and slowly killing it. Eventually, a hole between the urethra and vagina and/or the urethra and rectum opened. These women were then shunned. A hut would be built to keep them "from being eaten by hyenas" where these women would hope for death living a half-life of despondency.

Over time, the women suffering from fistulas in Ethopia can go to one of a precious few hospitals devoted to treating fistulas to get surgical treatment. They can cure 93% of the women and at least help the rest. This is a story worth learning about. The interview with the founder of Thee Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia is an excellent introduction.

There is nothing quite like a bit of perspective at the end of what formerly seemed a very long day.

Motrin Follow-Up

2008-11-18T21:48:00.002-05:00

So, tons of mommy bloggers (among others) told Motrin what we thought of the ad- some in considerably more vehement terms than I. And, Motrin has responded with a public apology and withdrawal of the ad. I have to give Motrin kuddos for a swift and respectful response. I have told my husband on a number of occasions that the best apology is a full assumption of being in the wrong. Once you have told someone that they were right about everything and you were completely mistaken they have very little room to quibble or argue. The matter can generally be put behind you both. In fact, it even raises you a bit, even if you were a complete ass previously since it conveys a subtle message of power to be confident enough to admit that the other person was completely the better at you at that moment. Way to give an apology Motrin.

The Day In Cuteness

2008-11-17T20:59:00.002-05:00

So, today was actually full of moaning, misery, and no naps but there are other days with lots of cute and I thought I would share some of it here...

Charlie tried to nurse his babydoll yesterday. Unfortunately, he used his bellybutton but, as everyone knows, breastfeeding can be difficult and confusing in the beginning and sometimes you need the help of a good lactation consultant. Today he changed his baby's diaper while I changed Megan's and then whipped me up a nice meal of brown sandwich, black plum, and brown chicken cookie. He is going to make some girl (or boy) so happy one day...

Charlie now calls his magazines "Megan-zines."

Last night, I nursed Megan in the dim light of Dr. Who but she wasn't quite ready to drift off. She was determined to get the giraffe on her foot (don't you just love Carter's, except for the whole tagless causing chemical burns, of course) into her mouth. So, she would work on that for a minute and then nestle into my chest with her thumb only to pop back to the foot issue again. She did that a few times and then gave the cutest little baby yawn, popped her thumb in her mouth and stayed asleep until almost 11. I realize other people would consider that a "bad sleeper" but any baby that goes to sleep without full-on hysterics (on both our parts) is a blessing in my book.

One of Charlie's favorite phrases is "Let's count them." Interestingly, there are 16 of a surprisingly large number of things in our house. The thing I find most interesting about this is that it was clearly learned while he was at "school" (mother's day out). It's so odd to realize he now has a life beyond his experiences with me.

Another phrase he must have heard at school was "I love..." While we say "I love you" with regularity it was only recently that he started using it in the more colloquial context. Of note, Charlie loves the following: fans, trashcans, and smoke detectors. This will make for an interesting Christmas.

Baby Wearing Scandal!

2008-11-16T16:00:00.003-05:00

You may have noticed that I'm a wee bit crunchy. I wouldn't say I'm quite granola yet but I could definitely be cheerios with a splash of (locally produced and/or organic) milk.

One of the ways in which I manage to be both crunchy and practical is with baby wearing. We got both a sling and Ergo with Charlie. He hated both with a passion for quite a while, particularly with me. And then, one day, when he was about 8 months old he decided he liked the Ergo and my arms finally stopped aching at the end of the day and we could make it through a whole grocery trip without tears from either of us.

When Megan was born, she was popped in the sling until she was developmentally ready for the Ergo without the infant insert whether she liked it or not. It's the only practical way to manage a shopping trip with a toddler and an infant.

Baby wearing has a bit of a learning curve. You have to have things adjusted correctly and you may have to experiment with different "carries." You also have to be a bit picky about your carrier. Some aren't terribly ergonomic- the baby Bjiorn is notorious. But, within a week, with a well designed carrier you can carry your baby around with no more strain than you would have with a bookbag and less than if you were trying to simply carry the baby in your arms or on your hip. The Ergo is a godsend while Megan is in her all mommy, all the time phase. I can strap her on and do what needs to be done and she's happy and/or napping and I'm not loosing my mind from a crying baby. There are some sticky spots. I don't like to cook with her in the carrier and I haven't been able to change Charlie's diaper with her in the carrier. Although, if she were on my back, these wouldn't be problems. Overall, I'm just not sure what the lady in this commercial is talking about but it does sound like she needs to get in touch with peppermint and get some help. Motrin, shame on you...

Thanks for bringing this little bit of nonsense to my attention Barb!

Eeek!

2008-11-13T19:34:00.002-05:00

I signed up to do daily updates on a breast feeding blog and forgot! I will try to do better. I had been able to update while Charlie napped and Megan bounced (heaven knows I don't want the naps to overlap- Megan falling asleep just as Charlie gets up is some much more restful and refreshing) but Megan has been clingy and the time change killed Charlie's naps and there we are...

Anyway, I have a new project. I think I would like to be a lactation consultant when I get to be something in addition to Mommy again. I have been looking into being a La Leache League Leader but I'm not sure it's for me which is unfortunate since that would have probably been one of the most efficient ways of doing it. So, for now, I thought I would focus on doing something about getting some sort of nursing degree. It's much easier to be employed as an LC if you are also a nurse although, I have to find out some more information since I would rather not take a side trip as an L and D nurse for 3 years while trying to get the requisite breast feeding education experience. I was thinking about an LPN but it appears I can get my RN with about 1 semester more of work so I think I will probably try for that. Of course, not much will start for a bit yet. I would like to be getting a consistent 5-6 hours of sleep a night before stabbing people with sharp instruments for fun and profit. I'm also a bit nervous about if I will do well in my practica. I am sure I can handle the medical aspects of being an LC and I think I could probably swing doctor's office nursing and that sort of thing but I have visions of not handling the OR terribly well but it seems like motherhood is wonderful desensitizer to all manner of bodily fluids so at least I have that going for me. To wander to my point...

I am always hearing about various mothers going back to get their teaching licence when times are rough because then they will have the same schedule as their children. I have to admit that I once thought they had a point but, now that I look into it, it seems nursing has it all over teaching. I am reasonably certain that you can make twice as much as a nurse (easily) as a teacher, have a much more flexible schedule, shorter lead time, an easier time finding a job, and have to bring a lot less work home with you. Per Diem work seems ideal for a mother, if nothing else works out. After all, you will probably need to put your child in some sort of care some of the time as a teacher. Even if you have to put your child in care for half the summer as a nurse, you will most likely still come out ahead. It seems to me that should my DH leave us tomorrow I think I would want an RN after my name way more than my current MEd.

It Gets Easier

2008-10-28T18:06:00.002-04:00

I've noticed that get fairly frequent hits for "highly active infant" and I wanted to let those souls know that it does get easier, at least in my house.

As Charlie has gotten older we've learned more tricks to nip melt-downs in the bud and the lead-up to them is getting longer. Charlie's 2 big things are food and sleep. If he's having a hard time, first offer him a snack and then try to figure out how to get him to a quiet activity or, even better, to sleep.

On the issue of sleep, we now take a nice ride in the car everyday around 1:00. The big thing with the highly active infant as a toddler is getting him to hold still long enough to actually fall asleep. Since he is too large to swaddle and rocking for 30-45 minutes is out of the question with an infant in tow, strapping him into his car seat is the best solution we've found. At night, we've discovered that he needs wind-down time and he's finally old enough and has been consistently responded to long enough, that he will bounce around, sing, kick, and otherwise amuse himself in his crib. Periodically he'll give a holler and one of us will go up to fix his blanket and pat his back for a minute. After anywhere from 2 minutes to 1.5 hours, he will drift off. From what I can tell, there seems to be a trend among those tots that agree with Charlie on his views that sleep is a communist plot to be thwarted at every turn. The trend being that around 2, things start to fall in place and your child will suddenly start to sleep, if not through the night, then, at least, significantly more than they ever have before. Until then, when people say, "But you're getting some 6 hour stretches, right?" you can simply respond, "Sleep is for the weak." This isn't to say that 2 years of 2-8 wakings a night doesn't completely suck, it does, it REALLY does but, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Charlie is sleeping more now, than I think he's ever slept before.

The real treat is that that highly active infant, who couldn't turn off to save his life, took it all in. Charlie is a delightful toddler. He is inquisitive and highly verbal. The same drive that made him want to socialize at 2am also drives him to learn to talk. Charlie is easily 6 months ahead in his language development. That high socialization drive also means that he is sweet and relatively socially advanced- he has the rudiments of sharing and comments about how other feel. That incredible will that drove refusals to be molded into acceptance of naps and being put in the bouncy so I can pee for God's sake! is now focused on learning how the world works. The beginning was hellish but now I get to reap the rewards.

It gets better. It really does. Stick it out and there will come a day with sleep and speech and a smiling face.

Ooh, la, la!

2008-10-26T20:47:00.002-04:00

Amy stopped by my blog a week or so ago and am I glad she did! I just got a chance to check out her blog in turn and found that she has a fabulous Etsy shop that makes lovely wooden and handmade toys. I haven't ordered one (yet) so I can't vouch for the quality but they sure look quite well made. I had been stumped for Megan's Christmas gift (the trouble of being a 2nd child) but I think my problem may have been solved. She would love this rattle/teether. The roller elephant is adorable as well but we would have to pry it out of Charlie's hands first. Give Little Alouette a look for some wooden lovelies.

Baby Weight

2008-10-26T20:37:00.002-04:00

So, my children may be less than ideal sleepers but I do manage to drop that baby weight! I am now 2 pounds less than I was when I got pregnant with Charlie and am hoping to nurse my way down another 5-10 pounds. Of course, things are still in rather different spots than they used to be but at least I can be happy when I step on the scale.

How To Go to the store in 39 simple steps

2008-10-22T14:40:00.003-04:00

Decide you are going to make felted dryer balls.
Plan to go to craft store, leaving at 10.
Begin preparing at 9:15.
Start to change Charlie's diaper.
Discover you are out of diapers downstairs and have to run up to get more.
Start to change Charlie's diaper.
Realize you forgot to wash your hands first and you have a cold sore.
Wash hands.
Wrestle toothpaste, hairbrush, sunblock, and fish food out of Charlie's hands as he helpfully cheers on your handwashing.
Finally change Charlie's diaper.
Charlie poops.
Change Charlie's diaper.
Change Megan's diaper.
Run upstairs for Charlie's socks and shoes.
Upon return smell something...change Megan's diaper only to discover a false alarm.
Begin to wonder what the hell these children are eating.
Put on Charlie's socks and shoes.
Start to carry Charlie out to the car.
DEFCON 1 is reached due to the girl not being on bus with friends and dog.
Find girl hidden in corner, place in bus, sing round of Wheels on the Bus for good measure.
Stop to put on my socks and shoes.
Discover than none of my cute shoes go with outfit.
Sigh over yet another frumpy day.
Carry Charlie out to the car.
Remind self to get Charlie's sacred red sippy cup.
Get Megan.
Put Megan in car.
Give treats to dogs- watch Penny (45 pound, healthy dog) accidentally drop treat and Shirley (partially blind, deaf, arthritic, 25 pound dog) steal it from under Penny's nose.
Sigh.
Wonder what propensity for adopting neurotic dogs indicates.
Give Penny new treat.
Back out of driveway.
Realize you forgot something and remember baby carrier.
Back in, re-treat, drop, sigh, and away we go at a still respectable 10:05.
Get half-way to craft store and realize forgot sacred red sippy cup.
Careen over 2 lanes to catch exit to go back home at last second.
Wonder if you will make it to craft store during this geological epoch.

By the Numbers

2008-10-15T10:08:00.003-04:00

2- number of dogs of dogs in the house barking at falling leaves, squirrels, and other such threatening things with deafening results
4- number of plants being neglected in my house
4- number of months Charlie has been working on his 2 year molars
0- number of molars that have broken through (Dear, God! Let them break through soon!)
1.5- number of bottles of children's motrin we have used in the last month (we are apparently raising a drug addict)
7- number of times Charlie was up between 3:30 and 4:30 last night (rough estimate- it may have been more)
1- number of stair gates trying to drive me to tears with their infernal latches
4 (am)- time my husband is leaving tomorrow for a business trip
3-6 (am)- roughest time of the night with children
4-6 (am)- time I would rather be dead than awake
2- episodes of Play With Me, Sesame we have watched so far this morning (thank you, Tivo)
1- number of feet I wish I lived from Starbucks
45- number of minutes Megan can sleep on her own if I'm lucky
30- length of Megan's morning nap
14- minimum number of hours of sleep a 4 month old needs
12ish- number of hours of sleep Megan gets
3- the number of times the "bad sleepers" of Megan's birth group are waking- Megan is such an overachiever
15- number of pieces of Bliss chocolate I forsee myself eating today
20- number of pieces of Bliss chocolate I forsee myself eating tomorrow
6- number of pieces in one seving of Bliss chocolate (Thank heavens I'm breastfeeding!)
ridiculous- current price of bag of Bliss chocolate at Kroger

Single Issue Voter

2008-10-12T21:06:00.002-04:00

I have found that I am becoming a single issue voter. I always assumed that if I were to pick one issue, it would be reproductive choice (Yes, I am pro-choice but that doesn't mean I'm pro-abortion, it's so much more complex than that. See here) or at least related to women's rights. Instead, I am finding myself becoming increasingly focused on the environment.

I am noticing it most in the current election and the way I view the financial crisis. My grandparents came of age in the dust bowl...in Missouri and southern Illinois...in small farming communities. Really, it couldn't have gotten any worse. They came out of it ok. There were some years that weren't fun. My grandmother uses some odd recipe substitutions she learned during the hard times. Parts of it sucked. But, they're fine. At this point, they're actually quite well off. My dad was a carpenter and was our sole source of income through the recession in the early 80s and was a good hunk of it in the recession of the early 90s. I still get twitchy when I hear "recession." As with my grandparent's lives, sometimes it wasn't fun. Some parts of the recessions sucked. I have some strong feelings about financial security and how often you should go shopping for clothes (once in August for all your school needs and once in the late-spring to get your warm weather duds and all formal dresses should be bought at 80% off the season prior). At the same time, it was ok. We survived. With a reasonably amount of forethought and decent budgeting skills you can ride out a nasty financial time. It's not fun and some of it will suck but you will survive it. Further, our species will survive it.

I worry that we won't make it out of the current environmental crisis. There isn't the option to "ride out" hurricane after hurricane, followed by floods, extreme temperatures, droughts, and tornadoes. Nature is bigger than us and we've been trying it's patience for a while. In a way, I'm very glad for the financial problems. It seems to be spurring the idea that things MUST change. We can't be so dependent on energy we can't make ourselves. We need to start curbing our love of "stuff." We need to pay attention to what our resources are and how to harness them in a way that won't crash upon our heads. I am beginning to feel that time is running short. I keep being reminded (as I take a bubble bath) of seeing the question, "If you think it's bad when we're fighting over oil, imagine what it will be like when we're fighting over water."

Cloth Diapering A Newborn (rocks!)

2008-10-06T20:12:00.002-04:00

Wee, bitty babies produce an incredible amount of extraneous matter, if you know what I mean. Their poop, it is explosive and runny. Their pee, it is constant. The trips to the store for diapers, they are many. One doesn't contain adequately. Several cause a rash. One doesn't fit right. And that one, the one that FINALLY works, is just so expensive! And, that expensive one, you went through 3 in 15 minutes because your daughter decided that only virgin landscapes are appropriate for her needs... twice.

Allow me to introduce you to the wonder of the wonder of the kissaluv/thirsties wonder duo. We used kissaluvs size 0 and a thirsties XS and experienced nary a leak or rash for a blissful 2.5 months. They fit Megan beautifully until she hit about 13 pounds. The only leaks I ever had were on the rare occasion that we used a disposable and, yes, they were the expensive kind. Should you have a wee, bitty one on the way get thee to diaperswappers for some fabo deals on used (but still quite nice) kissalus (I wasn't able to find much in the way of thirsties covers) or wander on over to Jillian's- she has them new and used- and get you some wonderous cloth. They are totally worth adding a little extra laundry to your life.

Things I've Learned Since Breakfast

2008-09-29T13:49:00.002-04:00

1. I will not be able to figure out how to resolve the mysterious wet-spot on Megan's sleeper- diaper changes haven't helped. Perhaps it's a new spot for drooling?

2. The Wheels On The Bus has verses. This means you will feel much more charitable towards it when on your 5th repetion of Twinkle, Twinkle.

3. Don't worry about that spit-up puddle you forgot to clean up. Your foot will helpfully remind you of it later.

4. Toddlers find it very helpful to pair a word with an action when mastering new vocabulary. In the case of the word "break," you will be glad you only paid a dollar for those toys.

5. The moment at which you simply can not hold it any longer will co-incide with the moment your infant is this close to asleep but will need to be rocked for an additional 15 minutes if you stop to attend to your potty emergency.

6. We need more chocolate.

4 is the loveliest number that you ever knew...

2008-09-17T12:33:00.002-04:00

So, I have discovered that my magic number is 4. 4 hours of consecutive sleep is how much I need to stave off the horrid sub-cycling which causes me to have PMS-y cramps for days, iffy skin, mood swings and completely unpredictable hormone related supply dips. 4 hours of sleep is also how much I need to remain on an even emotional keel. Megan stopped doing her consistent 4 hour stretch a bit ago (3 weeks maybe?) and I have felt the effects. Some nights, I get to cobble together some decent sleep with my husband taking her on after about 4 or he might take her for shorter stretches at about 2. But, Charlie is working on his 2 year molars (will the teething ever end?!?) and has a nasty cold to boot so my husband is busy fielding cries from him. Megan sleeps with us reasonably well but can't settle even in the co-sleeper set-up next to our bed. I continue to have strong hopes that as soon as she gets the hang of rolling over, things will improve precipitously but, who knows when she will manage the rolling. She gets precious little practice time during the day as the floor isn't the safest place to be with a toddler for an older brother; even one who is gentle and careful to the utmost of his 2 year old abilities. While I haven't sunk into a full depression, everything is just a little bit harder. I am having trouble finding the creative sparks needed to make dinner, let along write posts or do my favorite crafts. Weathering the toddler tempests and baby related frustrations tests me more than I would like, culminating yesterday when I found myself with my butt in the rain, changing my hysterical toddler's diaper in the tiny space between his seat and the door, listening to my baby wind up to full hungry cry, and singing "Jesus Loves Me," to myself as my last bastion against curling in a ball and swearing. I am confident I will make it through. I made it through 8 dreamless months with Charlie, I can make it through this. I have the full support of my husband and a comprehensive knowledge of danger signs to watch for. I am unafraid of taking medication if I need it. But, what I need most are those 4 damn hours of sleep.

Yummy Fake-A-Dillas (among other things)

2008-08-29T18:08:00.003-04:00

I seem to be having a hard time writing posts with regularity with the addition of a second child in my life- who would have thought! Anyway, we seem to have wandered nicely out of peak fussiness, through 2 weeks of "I think she might be close to sleeping through the night," only to wander into the quagmire of teething and motor milestones. Apparently my children believe in teething early and often. I keep telling myself that the fact that Megan naps at all is still better than Charlie did at this age but the dashing of the "My baby slept through the night at 3 months of age" hopes is rather sad. I do keep reminding myself that at no point during Megan's life have I wondered if I was actually alert enough to drive safely while I frequently had the thought during the first 8 months of Charlie's tenure.

Anyway, Megan is cute! We have coos and grins. She has recently started to figure out how to get things into her mouth and is currently working on trying to grab on to her tongue- we have decided to wait to break the fact that is actually in her mouth already for another day. She adores her brother and her brother generally likes her. Thus far, we have had almost nothing in the sibling rivalry department except for occasional anger that I sometimes have to pick up the baby too soon after giving cuddles for a bumped head.

Charlie continues to progress nicely. He will start a Mother's Day Out program 2 days a week next week and I think he'll really enjoy it. We got him this book bag which was both surprisingly affordable, considering the source, and looks quite sturdy. He will be two next weekend and I think the festivities may be even more low key than last year. It looks like it may be family only and grandparents only at that. At the same time, I was thinking about what would make for a really good day for Charlie and playing with other kids still isn't really on his radar. I think a day with construction truck plates, lot of bubble blowing, and an extended park visit will really do it for him. In other news, Charlie has started trying to jump, sings the ABC song with a reasonable level of accuracy, and enjoys yelling "Hey, Becky (my given name), come back!" up the stairs just as I have managed to lay his sister down in her cradle.

Finally, the Fake-a-Dilla recipe. This makes sort of quesidillas that are fantastic make ahead fare.

First, get chicken breasts when they are on sale. Put them in your crockpot on low with a few cans of Rotel (or salsa if that's what you have on hand) and cook them until you can shred them with a fork. Shred and place in small freezer bags in portions that you think look about right for your family. We use about 1/2 a pint size bag for 2 generous servings and a little leftover for the 2 of us.

Second, Kroger sells a handy pre-chopped, flash frozen bag of green and red peppers and onions (a fajita blend thing). Get a bunch of those, or something similar when they are on sale.

Third, buy shredded cheese when it's on sale and the same for tortilla.

Finally, pick up a few extra cans of Rotel or whatnot when it's on sale.

Stick all this stuff in your freezer (except the canned stuff).

When you are tired and hungry and need a quick dinner. Pull the veggies and meat out and dump them in a pan, saute on medium high, covered, until it's all mostly thawed and then throw in a can of Rotel. Heat up a second skillet and put in a tortilla. Cover the tortilla with a good handful of cheese and then put in a few spoonfuls of the meat/veggie mixture and fold in half. As soon as the cheese is melted you have a Fake-a-Dilla. I serve it with the Birdseye Steamfresh Mexican Rice. Yummy!

Potty Training

2008-08-04T13:38:00.002-04:00

Charlie has a hunk of diaper rash that is a completely raw patch. We've been battling diaper rash with varying success since his birth. So, I decided to bit the bullet and start us today. I may lose my mind by the end of the week.

To add to the fun, both Megan (I think) and Charlie are teething this week and their sleep shows it.

Apples and Oranges

2008-08-02T21:34:00.002-04:00

I am constantly amazed by how different my children are. I wasn't expecting them to be clones or anything but I thought that the similarities would extend to something beyond that neither of them is fond of going to sleep and hating their car seat.

Megan isn't wild about any pacifier but consents to find a nuk acceptable in a pinch. Charlie was surgically attached to his avent.

When in the car, Megan finds the dulcet tones of The Police to be her happy sound where Charlie was only soothed by Baby Einstein.

Megan likes a nice meal followed by some energetic kicking, a session of flirt with Mommy, and then some "me time" in the swing. Charlie was all holding, all the time.

Charlie was a Buffet fan whereas Megan likes a nice Billy Joel ballad to soothe her soul.

Charlie felt that my boobs would go home in an insulted huff if he didn't visit with them for a good 45 minutes every hour or 2. Megan is happy to neglect them for a good 2-3 hours and then only gives them a passing 5-15 minute nod.

Charlie's butt has a level of sensitivity matched only by the Bronte girls. Megan's butt seems to be as hardy as winter wheat.

Megan is currently a better sleeper than Charlie which is just beyond sad.

Of Vampires and Werewolves

2008-07-30T21:07:00.002-04:00

I started reading Twilight at Anne's suggestion. She was right, it is the ideal book to read while in the throes of early motherhood. It's absorbing enough to keep you awake during various feedings even while on codine! And, it's light enough that you can follow the basic plot points in your sleep deprived, codine happy state. However, it is so much more. It's actually literary crack...

The basic premise is that Bella falls in love with a vampire (Edward) who has a strong desire to devour her but by the power of twu love, he can resist. Over the next 2 books (the last one comes out this Saturday), they suffer separation of epic angst and Edward is forced to manfully defend his virginity. There aren't a ton of books that have managed to suck me in quite so wonderfully. Harry Potter, of course, managed quite nicely but before that there was the Outlander series. It lost some of it's hold when I found myself thinking "Damn, abducted by pirates again!" However, Outlander is ideal if you find yourself moving, without children, to a place you know no one, have no transportation and need to supervise movers, wait for cable guys, etc. It's now one of those series' that I will always read the next book but I can wait to get it from the library until it gets marked down at Books-a-Million.

Anyway, on to the point of the post. So, in the second book (New Moon), it comes out that Bella's soul mate- not true love, but soul mate- is a werewolf. Now, there are a good hunk of fans that hate Jacob (aforementioned soulmate). But, I found myself thinking that I would much rather a werewolf than a vampire. I found this to be the case in the Sookie Stackhouse books as well (another fabulous read- they are great bathtub books). I couldn't figure out why for some time until I realized that my preferences in supernatural partners seems to come down entirely to the issue of body temperature. I hate to be cold and the idea of cuddling up to a cold guy apparently goes against the grain for me. I would much rather have my own personal space heater. Unfortunately, in the third book (Eclipse) Jacob gets a little too Alpha Male stupid for me and I'm stuck realizing that my self-insertion is apparently screwed as I'm not out of male protagonists to long for but there we are.

In Brief...

2008-07-24T20:16:00.003-04:00

I apparently only birth children who don't like to fall asleep although Megan is willing to remain asleep once she achieves the state- hooray!

I hate dealing with pink eye more than I do thrush but only just barely.

Charlie has been watching ridiculous amounts of tv as of late but does seem to be picking up a bit of language. Sure to come in useful is "1, 2 cha, cha, cha," care of Bob the Builder.

Charlie now says "shhh," to his sister when she is fussing. Dr. Karp would be so proud.

Win free Bum Genius 3.0 diapers here.

While the death of naps doesn't actually equal the death of my blog it's taking a bit of time to figure out how to work it in. More to come soon about why I prefer werewolves to vampires.

Divorce

2008-07-01T20:02:00.002-04:00

An alarming number of mommy bloggers in my very small sphere are in the throes of divorce. It's freaked me out a tad. I told my husband that we couldn't get a divorce until everyone is sleeping through the night. Until then, he can keep a woman on the side, sleep in a separate room and develop a bizarre iPhone fixation as long as he still takes on some night duty. I seriously can't fathom how any of these women are managing. I nearly loose my mind when my husband leaves for a few days on a business trip. The thought of having to juggle all the household chores I do as well as his is mindboggling. Kudos to the strong mommies that are making it work.

Naps and the Women Who Love Them

2008-06-26T19:41:00.003-04:00

We decided to drop Charlie's nap last week. It was, by far, the most stressful part of the day for all involved. Charlie clearly still needed the sleep but getting him to admit that was a feat beyond imagining. So, we now pile in the stroller at 1ish every day instead. Charlie generally sleeps for at least a little while. Megan is a crap shoot. Today she actually fell asleep in the car and then slept through the walk. Other days haven't gone so smoothly. While it's nice to get in some exercise for me, I'm really missing that nap. I really think divine intervention occurred near the end of my pregnancy. For the last month of my pregnancy and the first week or so that Megan was home, Charlie napped like a champ. He went down with little fuss and would sleep for 2 hours, sometimes even more, and then he would still sleep at night. It was nothing short of miraculous. We are putting him down an hour earlier and the extra time will be nice once Megan gets past the peak fussiness stage and starts developing some organized sleep. But, nap time was when I re-charged, wrote blog posts, checked e-mail, and otherwise got the down-time you desperately need when facing a day with Charlie. I loved my naps.

4 Things

2008-06-18T14:46:00.002-04:00

1. Sometimes motherhood sucks

2. Some days, my biggest parenting achievement will be not spanking my toddler

3. Never go to the grocery store with a newborn (cranky) and toddler (cheerful but energetic) who need you to go as efficiently as possible on senior discount day

4. Always be sure to keep 2 chocolate sources in the house at all costs

New Motherhood

2008-06-05T09:09:00.002-04:00

So far, things are continuing to progress in a reasonable fashion. Last night was rocky. There is at least some possibility that Megan has colic which is a pain but if there is one thing I got good at during Charlie's early months, it was waiting out a crying baby. I can sing, pat, and bounce with the best of them and colic has the saving grace of generally ending by about 4 months. I'm still hopeful that it's a gas issue due to a rather overabundant supply and way too much lentil soup on my part but we'll see what happens over the next week. I know that by this time with Charlie, I had called my mother in hysterical tears to beg for help. A week of nights like last night might have that effect but I think we can struggle through for now. I suspect a large part of the problem was that she was too gassy to do her usual cluster feed before her long stretch so the cluster feed got moved to between midnight and 4 am- less than desirable for all involved. If she's anything like Charlie we'll be looking at least a day or so to get back on track, unless it's colic and then we're looking at another 3-4 months at which point we'll get to embark on teething!

I had forgotten how much of new motherhood involved being smelly. Between the hot flashes, spit up, and projectile poo, I'm not sure 2 showers a day is really adequate.

Charlie is becoming happier as his routine is coming back into play. The c-section took me out of commission for 2 weeks for all but the most sedentary of Charlie activities and the parade of relatives who came to help, threw him as well. Yesterday was our first solo morning and you could see his little body relax as we went about our usual morning routine of errands, lunch, and play time. The tantrums that had been at least an hourly occurrence eased back and I can only hope that the trend continues. He did get very distressed in the car when Megan was crying (she needed to go to sleep but hadn't quite managed yet) but calmed down as Megan did. I was heartened to see compassion on the part of my young toddler. Although, I do hope that we won't have many tandem crying sessions- that is the road to madness.

Nursing Drama

2008-05-25T11:44:00.003-04:00

So far, it seems that Megan really is a bit of a sleeper. I'm not willing to totally buy it until I'm completely off codine but she is currently about a million times easier to care for than I remember Charlie being.

She tends to nurse fairly quickly and efficiently during the day for 15 minutes or so and then goes to sleep for another 3 hours. In the late evening she will cluster feed for a good hour or hour and a half but then sleeps for 4-5 hours, nurses in a highly focused manner for 10-15 minutes and then goes back down for another 3-4 hours. This might be slightly less than accurate (re:codine) but is what my muzzy brain remembers. Last night and today have been a bit different but I think we may have hit the 7 day growth spurt. This nursing pattern is a bit on the unusual side for a newborn (and is vastly different from Charlie's clockwork 45 minute session starting every hour and a half around the clock) and caused a bit of drama at the hospital where they really don't like them to go much more than 2-3 hours at the outside. Megan has strong feelings about when she would like to sleep and when she would like to eat and does not appreciate attempts to mold her to your will. But, since she was making plenty of wet and poopies and appeared quite healthy and happy the nurses didn't really push it on the whole. I also got a lot of ground from having nursed Charlie for 14 months- including through my 1st trimester. The nurses seemed to feel that this was plenty sufficient to ensure my nursing competence. The pediatricians were a different story.

We had to use the on-call practice because our family physician doesn't do hospital rounds for newborns. We also did this with Charlie and liked the doctors reasonably well and since it's only for a few days it didn't seem like a big deal. This time was different. Starting with the 1st visit, less than 12 hours after Megan was born, I started getting told to consider supplementing because Megan was such a big baby. The first pediatrician made the argument that I wouldn't ever be able to get any rest because it would be such a struggle to feed her. Instead, we should make liberal use of the night nursery and allow for supplements from the start. There were so many things wrong with this argument, I was stunned. How did she ever expect my supply to catch up if I was supplementing from the start? In addition, there were simply no indicators that there even was a problem and, while 9 2, is on the larger size, considering that one woman can nurse multiples or tandem nurse siblings, the assumption that one newborn is beyond the capacity of a woman who never even fully lost her milk from her previous nursing stint, was just dumb. I was of the impression that most new parents understood that sleep deprivation is part and parcel of new parenthood.

Things continued to go downhill as she dropped weight every day. The hospital flagged 8 6 as being the point of concern (although it isn't actually the 10% mark) and she hit 8 5 on Tuesday morning. Since this was also the day of discharge, the pediatrician (a different one) decided that he needed to be as dour as possible, telling tales of readmission and droopy, dehydrated babies needing IVs. The dreaded supplements were brought up again (for the 3rd time). The thing is that while 8 5 was a fairly steep drop, it didn't appear that the pediatrician actually looked at any other health indicators. Megan routinely nursed to the point of falling off the nipple, falling asleep contentedly or having a brief and happy awake period. She showed no signs of the fussy or listless behavior that come with an infant who isn't getting enough milk. I showed signs that my milk was coming in that morning. Her poop was rapidly shifting from merconium. There were plenty of wet diapers. She showed no signs of jaundice and her blood sugar (checked several times of the first 36 hours as a matter of course for babies over 9 pounds) was wonderfully stable. The daily visits from the lactation consultants were brief and positive. As far as I can tell, the only thing the pedi looked at was weight. He didn't even bother to ask me about how nursing was going, my milk coming in, etc. He said he would send in the lactation consultant to talk to me about supplementing, helpfully adding that she didn't need to go directly to the bottle, instead we could look at finger feeding and cups. This still didn't really fix the issue of the best way to increase supply being to nurse more and, as she was apparently starving before my eyes, she should be more than happy to nurse, right? Of course, every time I had tried to increase her nursing frequency, I was met by hours of frustration and tears on both our parts but I figured we could work around that somehow.

After he left I just started sobbing (no mean feat for a woman who just had abdominal surgery). As far as I could tell my baby was happy and healthy with just my milk and supplementing was the last thing I wanted. I was already quite disappointed about not being able to deliver vaginally (more to come later but I'm not ready to "talk" about it yet). The idea that my body would fail again was quite upsetting. Particularly as I just didn't see it. Luckily, the lactation consultant was able to observe a nursing session right after she came in and agreed with me that Megan seemed completely fine and that my milk was already starting to come in. I was encourage to simply continue on the current course, go to our doctor for a weight check the next day and was told to write plenty on the evaluation form I was given that would go to the nursing supervisor. We took Megan to our doctor on Wednesday and she was actually down a few more ounces but our regular doctor wasn't at all concerned. Megan continued to look healthy and happy and her weight was far from being at a concerning level. She said we could bring Megan back early this week for another weight check if we wanted but she felt the 2 week appointment would be plenty soon enough for her.

I don't know why she wound up dropping so much weight. I have a few theories. She got rid of almost all of her merconium on the first day which had to account for a least a couple of ounces. I had a good hunk of water weight gain in the last week or so of my pregnancy and she may have gained with that as well. On a less logical note, I wonder if there was a reason that she did wind up so very unexpectedly big so that I would need a c-section. God does work in mysterious ways and all indicators flatly contradicted my growing a 9 pound baby. I am so beyond thankful that I somehow managed to have a relatively easy recovery that allowed me the option to go home on Tuesday. I shudder to think what would have happened if Megan had stayed in the care of those pediatricians another day, knowing she went down a few more ounces. I am also so thankful that I had a strong confidence in my ability to breastfeed as well as plenty of factual knowledge to back up my instincts. I really worry about the poor, first time mother who would be in a similar situation. The advice I was given would set her up for failure and oodles of unnecessary stress. I'm somewhat hopeful that the lactation consultants are now aware of an unfortunate tendency by this practice and will act to alleviate it's effects.

Megan!

2008-05-21T13:32:00.003-04:00

Megan Mac... arrived at 2:51 am on Sunday, May 18th. She weighed 9 pounds 2 ounces and was 20.5 inches long. Labor was very, very long with many unexpected difficulties. I finally wound up with a c-section under full anesthesia (courtesy of my epidural's hot spots). More to come later. Mommy and baby are both doing well but are both very, very tired.

So Sweet

2008-05-08T07:55:00.002-04:00

We have a Roomba. It is a shining point of light in my life and a wonderful Mother's Day gift. Ask for one now.

Anyway, Charlie calls it the "uh-oh" because it bumps into things as it wanders about. I ran it in the kitchen last night and it finished up as he was taking a bath. He had been very concerned about it getting put away and had to be repeatedly reassured by his father that Mama would put the uh-oh away (which I did, right before his stories). My husband reported that the last thing Charlie said before drifting off to sleep was "Mama, oh-oh away," followed by a very content "Ya." It's good to know that I can bring some comforting order to his life even if I am the less favored (boring) parent at the moment.

Laughing

2008-05-06T08:29:00.002-04:00

I am reasonably certain that my hospital bag started laughing at me this morning. It has sat, faithfully in the corner, for the last 2 weeks and is apparently getting bored...

In other news, Charlie is proving the world correct in their assertions that bad sleepers are gifted. His special gift lies in the world of teething. He seems to have already started like gangbusters on his 2 year molars 4 months early. I feel so blessed.

Charlie is also showing some really nice language development which is beyond cute. As of late, he will make various statements (such as "bye-bye pee-pee") for a good 10 minutes or so and the appropriate conversational response (obviously!) is to repeat his statement back to him so he can be sure you've properly deciphered it. If you get it right, you are rewarded by an emphatic "Ya." Apparently, my long buried Nordic ancestry is surfacing in my 19 month old. We've also started being treated with 4 word phrases, although the syntax is always an adventure- "Woo Woo don't touch eyes" ("don't touch the puppies eyes"). And, he's started to recount events that happened earlier in the day without me around. The other day he told me about how they blew bubbles in the nursery- mind, there is a lot of linguistic interpretation to figure out that "Ducksi, pop boo, boat" means Lexi blew bubbles that I could pop and I played with the boat but it does make my child development heart proud. And finally, Charlie's new favorite game with his father (who seems to focus a lot more on adverbs and counting than I do) is to claim he has 2 noses just to get his father to say "No, you have 1 nose." This is greeted with the ubiquitous emphatic "ya" and a big grin.

My husband and I think we may have figured out what the future holds for Charlie. We are reasonably sure he has a place waiting for him in the Mob. His favorite activities persist in being moving large objects and throwing things away. He's also a very social fellow so, of course, the obvious choice for someone with interests in moving services and refuse collection is the Mob. Now we just have to work on his actually liking pasta.

Ok, now that my 2 readers are bored beyond relief, I'm off to gestate.

Watched Pot

2008-05-02T16:58:00.003-04:00

I am officially in the watched pot stage of pregnancy. There was a run to Labor and Delivery in which we found out that my cervix is still totally closed but is at least thinning and they even managed to register 1 contraction before it all came to a crashing halt with the internal exam. Apparently, your flight or fight response tends to kick in and you body feels that anywhere that involves people with cold hands and cold gel is really not the spot to have a baby. I felt fabulous yesterday and there was some activity of interest very early this morning and things looked somewhat hopeful but it all stopped by nap time. The thing that is really making it all much more difficult is the Charlie factor. I don't have the luxury of just puttering around waiting for something definitive to happen. By the time definitive things are happening, I'm in no shape to chase after a toddler. So, instead, every time my cervix hiccups, there is anxious analysis which really isn't conducive to either the relaxation the Sears family would like me to practice nor the acquisition of the "excited" stage Dr Bradley would like me to attain. I am growing so tired of having my husband (and others) inquire. I told my husband today that I would let him know, really I would. At which point, he told me he just liked to stay abreast of things. While I sympathise, I have to say that I think I am the one who would most like to know the when and where and I don't have a clue.

While I find it rather frustrating that Charlie came so unexpectedly early and this baby, while by no means late, is later than I would like, it really is working out fairly well. She apparently settled in the other day (I'm assuming this was why I had all those contractions and what not that send me to L and D) and I'm much more comfortable that I had been. The OB assured me that negative progress was usually not seen as my 1st assumption was that she had discovered how difficult getting out would be and decided to just un-drop and hang out for a while. It sort of nice to actually have time to finish up the projects that I had given up on. My husband is in the final sprint to the end of the semester and, while he's having to be home a bit more than optimal (there is only so much toddler wrangling you can do at 37 weeks), he's certainly getting more time at work than he would be getting otherwise. And, if she holds out for about another week, most of his major responsibilities will be over- not say he doesn't do any work over the summer but the really time sensitive stuff will be done. Also nice is all the cuddling with Charlie. The quality of my parenting has taken a steep dive over the last few weeks. Teletubbies and Sesame Street figure heavily into our routine now but this does lead to lots of snuggling on the couch, which is so sweet. Of course, there is the semi-constant dark cloud of "Good Lord, she's just getting bigger!" at this point but, eh, perhaps all this means she'll be a sleeper!

Jealousy...

2008-04-29T18:46:00.003-04:00

First, yes, I am still gestating. I didn't get "checked" at my last appointment because I just didn't want to know- if he had said no change, I would have started sobbing and if he had said there was progress it would just get my hopes up. I have come to the conclusion that while this pregnancy was much easier overall, late pregnancy with a toddler is just bound to be unpleasant. My husband keeps being very concerned about me as he comes in and I'm in tears or moaning and groaning my way (not in a good way) through the night but I've told him that the general consensus seems to think this is par for the course. She's dropped (I'm pretty sure- the OB could feel her head at the exit so I'm thinking that's solid evidence) but I think she's started to stretch out some so the heartburn and what not is back. I asked if they ever changed their minds and went back up but the OB assured me that didn't generally happen. The plug has been wandering out in dribs and drabs for a couple of weeks now. There have been many twinges but they apparently aren't doing much productive. And, as far as I can tell (the pelvic pressure sort of makes it tricky) there has been very little in the way of contractions. It's actually better, in terms of logistics if she stays put for a bit longer but it's getting harder and harder for me to remember that.

Anyway, this brings me to my jealousy. I am so jealous of working moms right now. Admittedly, it's a select segment of working moms. I'm specifically jealous of those with office jobs involving cushioned chairs and peeing whenever they need to. I'm also jealous of those that are going ahead and starting their maternity leave a week or so early but keeping their children that were considerate enough to leave the womb in a timely manner in daycare. My husband has been wonderful. He is staying home later in the mornings and coming home early in the evenings. He is giving me more hands on support than some fathers do by a long shot but still... Today I really thought that I would throw up from the pelvic pressure if I didn't sit for just a few minutes but it was the middle of lunch and bringing in the groceries and Charlie was screaming for applesauce and the milk was out and I really had to shovel something in my mouth and I couldn't help but think of how nice it would be to let someone else have him for 6 hours a day. I very much sympathize with the plight of the working mother and it's not really something I would want to do but right this moment, nothing sounds better.

In addition, it recently occurred to me that the longest my "maternity leave" would last is 2 weeks. I spend a great deal of time being appalled at the US concept of appropriate maternity leave, especially when you pair it with the health initiative to dramatically increase breast feeding rates by 2010 but even the meanest leave is 6 weeks. I actually feel quite lucky that I will likely have my husband's help for 2 weeks and I am so glad I won't have to watch my newborn being cared for by others but there is a part of me that fervently wishes I had Charlie in day care and a maternity leave of 6 weeks coming up.

Of Corks and Coconuts

2008-04-13T11:11:00.003-04:00

I am beginning to suspect that this baby will be here sooner rather than later and, at any rate, she is sure to be here in a little over a month. So, I've been reviewing my childbirth books. I'm hoping to go unmedicated. It's not for any particularly "crunchy" reason, I don't think I will be birthing myself as a woman or anything like that. I'm not looking for a feeling of empowerment. But, it does seem to be that you have 3 options about the pain of childbirth. You can frontload it with an unmedicated birth and while the labor and delivery process itself will be more intense you are also less likely to tear, more likely to use your muscles efficiently, and the whole thing is likely to be done faster- including the recovery afterwards. You can spread things out a bit with an epidural but you are likely to have a longer labor and may have more tearing and hemorrhoids and that sort of thing and that may cause the recovery to be somewhat longer. Finally, you can go the c-section route and the actual delivery is a breeze but, for me at least, it took a couple of weeks to really be up and about and much longer than that for my abdominal and back muscles to get back up to functional snuff. Of course, there are those poor souls with back labor, stalled labor, unmedicated for 30 hours and then a c-section labor and for you I offer up a toast and my deepest sympathies. Since I have Charlie to consider, I would really like to make this recovery as quick as possible so, I'm hoping for the unmedicated birth with the quick recovery. But, I also know I'm a bit of a wimp so, if an epidural or c-section are called for, so be it. At the end of the day, I would really like a baby. The rest is mere semantics as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, the popular way of dealing with contractions or, as some books called them, "expansions" (I refuse to even entertain the whole "life surges" terminology) is to visualize being a cork on a wave. While I appreciate the imagery in theory, every time I read it, I wince. It makes me think of rotting corks, corks mangled by corkscrews, cork floors with strong warnings about exposure to wetness, and an ancient pair of cork sole shoes I found that were scuffed and disintegrating. In addition, corks are little and ocean waves are huge. Corks can get lost, pummeled, buffeted, and broken. Charlie could easily break a cork into bits for heavens sake! I have come to the conclusion that I would much rather be a coconut. Coconuts want to wander around on the water. They look at the intense waves and say "Bring it on! I would like to go forth and multiply! I have an entire ocean of island to colonize!" Coconuts are strong and hardy- how many of us have stared at the whole coconut at the store and been tempted to buy but didn't because, for pete's sake, how will you get the thing open? I have no wish to be a wimpy, rotting, bobbing cork, I am much more the firm, stubborn coconut, waiting for the perfect beach.

Staying the Course

2008-04-07T21:18:00.003-04:00

I had my first internal today. All is well although it looked a little dicey for a bit. I've been having quite a bit of contraction action today- just the sort of reassuring activity you want the day before your husband crosses the Atlantic. But, the OB did a fetal fibronectin test, which I had thought about requesting but was under the impression it wasn't a useful tool after 34 weeks, and it came back negative. Apparently, it can still give you the basic information about the likelihood of labor but there isn't a ton they do differently if it indicates that labor is likely so it's generally a moot point. However, in my case it was useful since we just really needed to know if my husband should get on a plane or not. The negative result means that while my uterus can contract away and my cervix can twinge to it's heart's content, there is almost no chance that there will be a delivery any time in the next one-two weeks. Plus, I'm only about 1 cm dilated so it looks like a frantic round of pack and clean won't be needed for a bit yet.

The OB also suspects that the baby might be breach but there's still a little wiggle room left so she could swing around. He also wasn't totally sure if he was feeling head or tail so, she might not even need to flip. I actually think he might be mistaken based on the movements I've been feeling but, eh, we'll see what comes of it.

In other news, I have managed to produce a sarcastic toddler. Charlie delights in saying "No!" and then grinning and doing whatever it was you just asked him about. For instance, you might ask him if he would like to turn out the light (a favorite of his) and he'll say "no" and then give you a big grin and start reaching for the switch. While part of me suspects this advanced humor combined with the fact that he still doesn't sleep through the night is sure to indicate that he must be gifted beyond belief (bad sleepers are gifted, you know) there is also a large part of me that wonders what sort of behavioral nightmare I have inadvertently incubated. Luckily, he still gives really good hugs.

First Internal

2008-04-06T21:01:00.002-04:00

I have my 1st internal exam tomorrow. It's a little earlier than usual (36 weeks) because of my husband's trip. I'm really of two minds about the whole thing. I've definitely reached the stage of pregnancy where I'm mostly ready to just be done. The stretches and kicks are starting to be quite painful and having a little head burrow itself into my bladder on a semi-regular basis is starting to be less than thrilling. I feel a bit adrift compared to the other "experienced" mommies since I'm carrying so differently this time. It's impossible for me to compare the experiences and get any real clue beyond the most basic observations. I know my weight stabilized for about 2 weeks before I had Charlie but it had several stabilization prior to that as well. My babies seem to grow in fits and starts which is rather alarming until you get used to your weight suddenly going up by 2-4 pounds after no gaining at all for a couple of weeks. Penny started stealing my underwear shortly before I gave birth but I don't really want to use that as the definitive measure either. Other than that, there's really not much to go on. I know I feel like I'm just about stretched to capacity. I don't know what I would have done with a twin pregnancy! I haven't had the sensation of walking with a bowling ball between my legs but I have often felt that I needed to walk cautiously because my lower abdomen felt it was about to burst. It reminded me a lot of the walk you do once you are past the pee pee dance, past the shifting of the weight, when you desperately need to get to the bathroom but you know if there is ANY jostling at all, it will all be over.

At the same time that I am rather ready for the doctor to say that I am at 2-3 centimeters and it may be sometime in the next week or so (I highly doubt), this would be a most inconvenient time. My husband is still in the middle of teaching, our college student babysitters are gearing up for finals and all that the end of the semester brings and, while the vital tasks are mostly done there is still plenty left for me to finish up- not to mention the trip my husband plans to leave for on Tuesday...

It will be interesting no matter what the OB finds, though and I'll be sure to report back here. My mother keeps asking when the baby will be here. One would think that she of the 3 week late baby (my brother- I was delivered promptly on my due date) would understand better than most that babies come when they will come. I am tempted to give her my OB's number, sign a consent and let him hash it out with her the next time she asks.

Still Gestating...

2008-04-03T18:43:00.003-04:00

So, I know posts have been scarce on the ground. The reasons numerous. My arms are getting too short to easily reach the keyboard when I hold my laptop on my lap which makes posting anything significant a bit of a pain. I'm spending a lot of my evening time in the tub and I have yet to actually try to use my computer while bathing. While this pregnancy feels significantly better in general due to all my physical therapy there is still a lot of discomfort involved as I near the end. This baby likes to hang out on my pelvic floor so floating her off is nice. And, my body seems to be objecting to the whole 20 pounds of pregnancy and 25 pounds of toddler I often am lugging around. I have high hopes for the wonders of my abs when all is said and done though. I also have the memory of our very dim dog Shirley at the moment. The other day, I went to the store with a grocery list and forgot that I had it half way through the trip- as in, I had been referencing it and everything for the first 15 minutes and then it just slipped my mind. I think at one point I even started to wish I had a list... I seem to remember this happened with Charlie as well. I can only hope that some day my memory will bounce back. So, anyway, I'll sit down to type and entry and then "oh, shiny!" and all hope is lost.

Charlie is starting to show some movement towards getting within spitting distance of sleeping through the night and taking a semi-reliable nap. I had rather assumed we would be father along the sleep journey by the time this new one got here but, alas.

Charlie does continue to be adorable if exceedingly inquisitive and busy. We went to toddler story time and as the rest of the babies sat hesitantly on their mother's laps, Charlie stole the hand puppet off the librarian's chair and then danced around the back of the room.

I'm rather nervous. My husband is traveling to Ireland next week for 5 days. He will return just as I turn to 35 weeks. We have babysitters lined up from 4-7 so I can get a break from toddler care. I am debating if we should see if we could get some coverage in the mornings as well. I think we'll be fine with the evenings if Charlie sleeps well and I can avoid carrying him too terribly much. He can walk (and run) quite well, the issue is getting him to go where you want him to. I have an OB appointment scheduled for the day before he leaves and he will cancel his trip if anything "exciting" is happening. I don't really expect the baby to be making an appearance in the next 2 weeks but the idea that there is any possibility that she will and my husband will be in Ireland at the time is terrifying. There is also just general concern about the variable which is Charlie. If he gets sick, clingy, his sleep routine gets thrown out of wack, ugh...

I have my baby announcements designed and supplies to do what can be done before the baby is born as well as supplies to make candy favors for the nursing staff at the hospital and staff at the OB's office (always be nice to those who make the appointments and hand out the drugs...) and hope to work on those during my Charlie free time next week. I'll post pictures when I've managed to accomplish anything of significance.

Let the Nesting Begin!

2008-03-18T19:44:00.002-04:00

So, I have begun nesting in earnest. This last weekend I cooked a rather vast quantity of chicken with the intent of stocking the deep freeze with ready made meals for after the baby comes. We now have 5-6 meals worth of chicken nuggets, pre-seasoned and shredded chicken for quesadilas, and enough chicken soup to make me wonder if I will every actually feel like looking at a chicken again. The roomba is seeing plenty of action. I have 3 to-do lists wandering around the refrigerator and need to write at least 1 more. Baby announcement supplies have been bought (I make my own) and the ceiling fans still don't know what hit them.

I think my experience with Charlie is really shaping my behavior with the pregnancy. With Charlie, we had the whole tainted well/no water saga for the whole last 6 weeks of my pregnancy and then we didn't get water back until 36 hours before he was born. There were so many tasks that I didn't get to do that my hormonal self was aching for- food couldn't be cooked, dogs couldn't be washed, bathrooms couldn't get scrubbed. In addition, the whole element of Charlie coming right at week 37 threw everything off. While I was still thinking I had plenty of time, I soooo didn't. Who ever heard of a first baby being EARLY?

At the same time, I could be completely wrong, but I really think that there may be a purpose behind the frenzy. I struggle a lot with trusting myself when it comes to pregnancy. I knew in my heart the sex of my babies long before the ultrasounds. I strongly suspected I was pregnant with both babies long before a positive test ever appeared. In addition to "feelings," I think there is also a lot to intuition simply being your subconscious paying attention to and putting things together that your conscious mind doesn't for whatever reason. In my case, I began to suspect that I would go early with Charlie by the 33rd week. I remember suddenly realizing that my pregnancy symptoms were no longer lining up with the week I was in sometime in the 3rd trimester but instead a couple of weeks later. The clincher was when I figured out Charlie had dropped and it was only week 33. Much frantic reading confirmed that the longest that puts you away from labor is generally 4 weeks which would be... 37 weeks but I thought I simply must be mistaken. Over several days before Charlie was born, I noticed all manner of subtle changes- my joints seemed looser, I was far more irritable than previously, I kept getting these "twinges," and I had this driving urge to do tasks around the house- most notably cleaning the baseboards at 3 am with baby wipes since we still didn't have water. I continued to ignore the idea that labor was imminent up until my water actually broke.

In the same sort of vein, I feel somewhere deep down that this pregnancy is quickly moving along. Things just feel more scrunched than I would expect them to feel at this point, granted, I'm carrying this baby completely differently but still... The baby's movements feel much more cramped than I would expect and this baby is very low. I don't have the bowling ball between the legs feeling some women describe but I have been feeling pokes far below where I even though my uterus extended. My nesting urge is so very strong. I keep having to really make an effort to reign myself in. You just can't do a full deep cleaning of the kitchen if you are also expected to care for a very active toddler the next day. I haven't started to go after the baseboards yet but they are starting to call to me as are the obscure cleanings tasks that one generally doesn't think of. The air intake registers have begun to irritate me greatly and I have this insane urge to take 4 showers a day just so I can use up all the random bath products that are wandering about under my sink. Also, my underwear drawer is suddenly striking me as being ridiculously disorganized. It will be interesting to see when I actually deliver. My due date is May 17th, my early prediction was delivery on May 12th (Mother's Day) and my current goal is to have everything done by May 1st with all bets off starting then. Adding to my stress, my DH is traveling to Ireland in my 34th week. While we have an OB visit scheduled the day before he leaves to check nothing "exciting" is occurring and even I don't think I will deliver that early, there is a part of me that is very worried about the matter. Of course, with all this trepidation, preparation, and prediction, the baby will likely wind up coming sometime in early June...

Someday My Pants Will Fit

2008-03-10T19:46:00.002-04:00

The intersection of nesting, staving off the panic of adding another person to my life, and the whole rid you life of what you don't need-ness that seems to go with the current zeitgeist has led me to my closet. I would desperately like to weed through my closet, pitching items willy-nilly. One would think it would be easy with the overflowing nature of it. However, I am stymied.

Shortly after we moved to Virginia (4 years or so ago) I noticed that I was rapidly gaining weight. I finally convinced my doctor that even a lifestyle change and move couldn't explain 20 pounds in less than 6 months. We established that I had a thyroid problem and, once properly medicated, the 20 pounds melted off. However, there was this whole period of time that I was suddenly 2 sizes larger than I had been.

As I was settling back into my normal weight, we took a trip to Hawaii. While I can understand why Hawaii is generally considered a paradise, we managed to go during a fluke hot spell in August. They don't have a/c in a lot of Hawaii because it's usually temperate and lovely but we spent most of the time being really hot. One might wonder why we didn't just hang out by the pool or go snorkeling. These foolish souls have not been properly indoctrinated to travel according to my husband. Guidebooks are poured over. Map are analyzed. Lists are made. Every point of interest will be seen and pictures taken or it just hasn't been a vacation, damn it! This meant that I spent 2 weeks mildly dehydrated and too hot to eat. 3 weeks after our return from Hawaii we left for Egypt. This caused stress and even less eating. We spent 2 months living in a dorm in Egypt and learned that cafeteria food the world over is cafeteria food. All of this led to more weight loss. In addition, since we were traveling a Muslim country, I needed to acquire clothing that allowed me to not offend the locals. My biggest goal during our visit to Egypt was to not get arrested.

Over the last 2 years I have been pregnant and/or lactating, necessitating all manner of additional clothing as well as blending in clothing from previous weight incarnations. Amazingly, at no point do any of my pants seem to properly fit. Maternity pants manage to go from a little loose/ please stay up to a bit snug/ please don't ride down in the blink of an eye. The post-partum belly is apparently not designed to actually fit anything for at least 3 months except, maybe, those maternity pants that never actually fit while you were pregnant. Your body finally wanders back to pre-baby weight but none of the weight is where it used to be so where you used to be snug you are now loose and where previously loose, you now resemble a woman of questionable virtue. I spend vast portions of my day hitching up, adjusting, and rolling cuffs (because, of course, petite women don't get pregnant).

Someday I will be done gestating, lactating, going on inadvertent deprivation diets, or having my body just go into a complete rebellion and my pants will actually fit and my closet will comfortably hold all of my clothing.

I can't wait.

Theme Songs

2008-02-28T20:33:00.002-05:00

I am one of those people that seems to always have a song running through their head. I've been putting some thought into what songs I might like to have with me during labor with this new little person and it's got me thinking about personal theme songs.

I often think of "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate. The part that I focus on is the "I believe in miracles" line. I find it difficult to remain despondent in the face of this song and it's one that I often, often hummed to myself while teaching. Occasionally, I would even put it on and have my students dance around with me to it. It was excellent at snapping them out of particularly awful moods.

When I was pregnant with Charlie, I often thought of "Hello, Goodbye" by the Beatles. It was so appropriate for the whole situation. When he was born, I was saying hello to a whole new experience and goodbye to a former version of me. He was saying goodbye to the comfort of my womb and hello to all the many experiences of humanity. Once he was born and we really got to know him, the song fit even better. He is a very sweet natured boy but has a mind very much his own. He is quite willing to say "yes," when I say "no." And, the "hay laa" ending makes for a lovely lullaby.

With this pregnancy, it is "New Soul" by Yael Naim that runs through my head. I'm sure it has to do with the apple commercial but it also just seems so appropriate for her somehow. Whenever I hear it (in reality or just because it's running through my head), the closing scene of a movie runs through my head. It's one of those montage, clippy things where you see the baby born, a clip of the cake eating from the 1st birthday, learning to ride a bike, reading a book, and ending with her wedding scene. It makes me hope that should she be homosexual (unlikely but it would be foolish for me to ignore the possibility) that she will be a lipstick lesbian. I don't think I'll feel complete as a mother until I have wrestled with tulle rounds and jordan almonds far into the night. I keep wondering if her personality will wind up reflecting the wonderfully quirky cheerful quality of the song.

Finally, just because I like it, "In the Jungle" which makes a surprisingly good lullaby if sung a slightly slower tempo.

Ung...

2008-02-17T13:46:00.000-05:00

Overall, I have found this pregnancy easier than the last. The physical therapy I diligently pursued seems to have done the trick in regards to keeping my pelvic bones where they belong. I've needed some periodic maintenance and there is still some pain but it is of a manageable variety rather than the agony of my last pregnancy. My morning sickness has generally subsided although there are occasional dicey moments. I didn't have so much in the way of contractions with Charlie but they are manageable and there has been much less insomnia with this pregnancy. So, had expected to cruise nicely into my 3rd trimester and feel reasonably human for the next month or so at least but I was wrong...

While I had heard that you tended to be more tired during a second pregnancy than the first, I had not realized the extent to which they meant. This is starting to be that rather soul sucking fatigue that I really thought would confine itself to weeks 8-12. It's when you want to take a nice relaxing bath but are worried about the likelyhood of accidental drowning. It's the sort of fatigue where you can have a 2 pound fetus sitting directly on your bladder and you begin to contemplate how much it would cost to replace the foam mattress pad because you are just soooo tired. Luckily for me, I have a very caring husband who finds his wife in hysterical tears more difficult to handle than getting up with Charlie in the middle of the night and so, I at least am only awakened by 1 child and really, there's no way he could field her needs anyway. Making the fatigue more frustrating is that I am also entering some hard core nesting urges- although, I still contend that it isn't so much nesting as a frantic attempt to fend off the mounting feeling of impeding doom. I'm finding the idea of 2 under 2 rather more terrifying as the day gets closer. I keep remembering the projects that I didn't quite manage to finish before Charlie's unexpectedly prompt arrival and how they then sat for the better part of a year. We have childproofing that is yet to be done and I have an unquenchable desire to dust the shoe cubbies in the closet- really, at 2 am, when I have insomnia, it takes actual effort to prevent myself from pulling out a duster and going to town.

And, my husband is in Finland for business. When we were discussing the trip in the fall, it didn't seem that it would be all that awful. I would only just be starting my 3rd trimester and I felt pretty good up until somewhere in the 8th month with Charlie. Now, it's causing nothing but anxiety. I just wasn't expecting to be quite this tired, quite this soon. I keep reminding myself that Charlie doesn't actually expect intelligence after 5 pm but I do have to try to read those pesky books at bedtime...

Due to some scheduling difficulties at other times, I am now to 2 week appointments. It gives you such a ridiculous feeling of accomplishment- sort of like when you finish a tube of toothpaste or a bottle of shampoo. So far, all looks well but I have the gestational diabetes test on Thursday and I failed the one hour last time for inexplicable reasons since I then passed the 3 hour with no difficulty. I'm hoping for the best but we'll see.

Am I the Only One...

2008-02-10T08:43:00.000-05:00

Who has been half asleep, forgotten that she was pregnant, felt the baby moving around and wondered what in the world she ate to give her such odd gas?

Drive By...

2008-02-01T12:26:00.000-05:00

So, we're traveling and that's really throwing off my mojo but I did LOVE this post by Julie because I have to say I thought the same thing but without nearly the witty graphics. Be sure to click the link to see what she wants them to branch out to.

I wish I were making this up by Julie

The Accidental Conservative

2008-01-19T18:03:00.001-05:00

So, I consider myself to be very, very moderate with a healthy sprinkle of crunchy. We cloth diaper (well, my husband does and I do when I don't have an overactive gag reflex), we buy local and organic at least part of the time, we drive a hybrid car but we also vaccinate, I use an OB and have no interest in a home birth, I'm pretty sure Charlie will attend public school, etc. Yet, somehow over the last year I have managed to wander into any number of activities that are affiliated with the religious right.

I joined MOPs last year when I reached the point where I just had to get out of the house. It's somehow linked with Focus on the Family. It's an oblique link and I have had trouble finding anything on it's web site that spells it out but it's very much there. While a good portion of the programs are focused on things like discussions of quilting, ways to pamper yourself, etc, there are usually one or two talks that veer pretty heavily into realms that aren't so much on the neutral side. It's still a good way for me to meet other mommies, get a break from Charlie, and, for what you get, it's very reasonably priced but there are a few meetings that I am learning to skip.

Now, my husband and I have decided to attend Financial Peace University with a curriculum by Dave Ramsey. He doesn't spend huge amounts of time discussing faith but I think I can safely say that Jame Dobson would approve and they might even be buddies.

As a side note: No, we aren't drowning in debt or anything like that but we were raised with 2 very different philosophies of money management and this fell in our laps as a way that we can perhaps come to some middle ground about how best to go about things like budgeting. After 7.5 years of marriage, it doesn't appear that we've really gotten all that far on the issue on our own.

I joined diaper swappers the other week in hopes of finding some good deals on new itty, bitty diapers for our new itty, bitty person with an itty, bitty heinie! We generally use BumGenius, which are great. They are a one size diaper that technically fits from birth through when your child will probably be potty trained. But, I've heard that they can be a little bulky for newborns so we're looking into getting kissaluvs for the new little person to use at first. We've really liked our cloth experience. They save quite a bit of money, have helped a lot with Charlie's never ending diaper rash, and are much more environmentally friendly. They aren't nearly as much of a pain as I thought they would be in terms of washing and are as easy to use as disposables. Should you ever want to try them, we did the Try Cloth program through Jillian's Drawer's. It's fully refundable except for $10 and is a great way to get your feet wet. Anyway, so diaper swappers has a pretty large contingent of women who would probably self-identify as religious conservatives. It's one of those weird places where the really liberal, off the grid because they want to be one with nature collide with the really conservative, off the grid, make your own food, be ready for The End groups. I always find those intersections interesting if a bit bewildering since I really just wanted to get a good deal on kissaluvs.

Finally, broomhuggers, which I find to be a great resource for green cleaning tips posted a big anti-abortion post. I could see where they were coming from but it was still jarring to see abortion positions nestled between tips about how to use oregeno oil as a disinfectant and the controversy of if one should use dryer balls made from PVC that are reusable or dryer sheets that are disposable.

I am worried that soon I will manage to wander into a Huckabee rally and wind up with a picture of me shaking his hand.

Ultrasound Results!

2008-01-13T08:30:00.000-05:00

We had the big ultrasound on Thursday and we're having a GIRL! We're so very excited (especially my husband). I have already ordered 2 tiny pink onsies- crazy8 was having a clearance sale with free shipping and I had to get something for Charlie anyway... :-)

She was shy and kept her arm over her face but we got some really lovely spinal shots. The tech was also able to see that everything looked good and we have every reason to expect a perfectly healthy little person in about 4 months.

Her head is very low though and this is causing my uterus to speak up occasionally. It apparently doesn't like getting jabbed quite where she likes to stretch so, we made a quick trip to L and D on Friday but she had finally shifted by the time got there (don't they always!) and things quieted down nicely. I took it very easy yesterday and am trying to be careful today but I'll have to jump back in tomorrow. Apparently there was a big growth spurt this week (explaining my monster appetite and need for 15 hours of sleep a day) which may be irritating things as well. But that will be done soon. I'll breathe a nice sigh once we finally make it to 30 weeks though.

It really does seem to be true that each pregnancy is very different. Charlie tended to move around more. He loved to spin and swish and I never believed the books when I read that they spend 85-95% of the time asleep. He also tended to always keep me up for about 2 hours between 2 and 6 am which has carried over to his early childhood as well. This little girl moves plenty enough to keep me reassured but seems to sleep a bit more and her active time seems to be more in the evening, after dinner. She's also much more responsive to food. As soon as I have a snack (especially a sweet one), she kicks up a storm. But, she also tends to sit on things that I once considered rather important to not interfere with- like arteries and major nerves. And, since she isn't quite the acrobat that Charlie was, this means that once she finds a spot she likes, it takes a while for her to move on. As I told her on Friday, her brother never made me go to L and D in a bit of an anxious cloud. At the same time, I'm hoping this means she might be a sleeper- keep your fingers crossed! Of course, she's only just now really getting into her movement groove so, she might become twice the acrobat her brother was in the next few weeks. And, while the contractions are nerve-raking, in some ways, it's preferable to never getting to sleep through the night even before you've had the baby.

I See a Bad Moon Risin'

2008-01-06T16:11:00.000-05:00

Charlie is right on the cusp of really starting to talk. We are seeing a real leap in his receptive language skills. And, he's now getting to the point of being able to almost tell you what he wants. Unfortunately, he often considers the problem to solely be that you just don't understand that he wants to play with the sharpie. The idea of that the sharpie is off limits is far beyond his ken and receptive abilities. "No," is still hit or miss. Thus, we are starting to get tantrums. So far they haven't been too bad but you have to remember that I've seen some real humdingers in my previous life as a special ed teacher. We have had a couple of public melt-downs that have resulted in a swift whisking away home. People have been surprisingly nice about the whole thing, carefully stepping around us as I wrestle him into his coat at PetSmart or ignoring us as I pack up his bag at the hamburger place.

We're also getting to the point that he really wants to walk while I am getting to the point where chasing a highly active toddler through a store isn't so feasible. Also, see previous discussion of "no" and add in "come here" as another phrase we really need to work on. We've actually gotten him one of those back pack baby leash things but I haven't had the where-with-all to actually use it yet. I've seen more parents with them though and they look much less like something I would put on my dog than previous versions. I suspect he won't object to wearing the backpack so much as being frustrated that I have found yet a new way to thwart his quest to obtain all the shirts at B Moss.

I sense that our little Drama King has far bigger tantrums inside him though and what parent doesn't want their child to live up to their full potential so we will soldier on and help foster his talents in full contact drama because he's gifted, you know.

Of course, all this doesn't come without the oh, so, cute as well. We have many, many discussions every day focusing on balls. I had not realized how much could be conveyed with the phrase "Uh, oh! Ball." It's a conversation starter, color commentary, and request to play (as he rolls it under the entertainment center). "Ball, mmm" is a request of an asian pear (now labeled as an apple-pair- I'm not sure if that is for cultural sensitivity or a brand thing). It only took me a few minutes to figure this out when I had a snack the other day and I was attacked by a very small, apparently very hungry marauder. Happily, he will now hold the pear himself while sitting in his highchair and gnaw on it for 10-20 minutes. On a particularly trying day last week I was able to keep him quiet and happy for a good 35 minutes in his high chair (it was one of those days where he was so sleepy he kept running into things and falling down but we really needed to make it just a little longer before nap) between a pear, watching the roomba, and watching Mommy mop. I've been amazed at how many balls Charlie can find in life. It really has made me stop and smell the roses in a fashion. But, cutest of all, is "tickle, tickle, tickle." He can't really manage 2 syllables or the "t" sound yet so it comes out as this garbled lickle, lickle, lickle involving lots of sticking out your tounge. If I wasn't already pregnant "tickle, tickle, tickle" would have us trying for another.

For the Love of Pete!

2008-01-01T07:52:00.000-05:00

I woke up at about 5 to make my trek to the potty and discovered that the baby had found some choice nerves to sit on over the night. My right thigh, butt, and, most oddly, labia (!) were all numb. You have not really experienced life until you have had a numb labia. I'm starting to get feeling back in all key parts but have tried to drink a bit of extra ginger ale this morning (yes, still with the morning sickness) to get her to wiggle to more comfy climes. She must be really far back today though because even when she's kicking strongly, I can't feel them from the outside.

Emerging...

2007-12-29T18:34:00.001-05:00

So, the last month has been rather hellish. I obviously really pissed someone off. Charlie came down with that nasty, nasty cold that's been going around sometime shortly after Thanksgiving. This coincided with some teething so it took us awhile to figure out what was going on. We went to the doctor for his 15 month check-up and discovered that he had a little ear infection. As that cleared with some antibiotics, up he entered the OMG how much snot can one little nose produce section of the cold which wasn't that bad except for sleeping because he wouldn't be able to breathe so there was a lot of rocking.

In the midst of all this, I got The Cold. The 2nd week we were sneezing and coughing together. Luckily, Charlie had decided he enjoyed Teletubbies a few weeks earlier so we spent one notable afternoon on the couch after yet another disastrous nap. Charlie actually sat and watched 2 full episodes as well as a random cooking program while I contemplated why anyone needs sinuses anyway. This is the child who generally sits for 10 minutes tops, God was obviously feeling just a little guilty about the previous weeks. Happily, I discovered that a great deal of my difficulty was from a lack of humidity so, as long as I sat in the shower 3 times a day, my sinuses were no longer burning tubes of misery. Apparently, no matter how exhausted you are, it is unwise to deprive your over-enthusiastic mucus membranes (thanks pregnancy!) of a daily dose of humidity via the shower. Lesson learned.

Charlie and I then battled it out to see who needed the humidifier more as we entered (for the love of God!) week 3! Week 3 greeted us with my husband coming down with The Cold although he got to take all the lovely medicine so it didn't make him quite the tower of misery Charlie and I were. That week the congestion migrated down into our chests so that Charlie and I had adorable matching smokers coughs. Happily, I learned from one of my pregnancy books, the baby had already started squishing my lungs to a notable degree which explained my propensity to see black spots and wonder at what point you go to the emergency room for oxygen deprivation.

Charlie and my husband both came out of the worst of The Fucking Cold (as it was now known) by the end of the week. However, I am blessed with an immune system that doesn't attack the small being growing within me which I am so grateful for. The corollary to this seems to be that my immune system doesn't want to take any chances and is apparently debating if it should just perhaps send a strongly worded note to any other invaders. This meant that on the Friday that everyone else started to feel better, I started the day by apparently trying to cough up my toes which also triggered my morning sickness and led to my back strenuously objecting to puking and coughing at the same time. According to my back, It Simply Isn't Done! This, of course, was the day neither of my OBs were in the office and a brief chat with the nurse revealed that all I could really do was try heat and tylenol unless it got "really bad" and then I could go to the ER or call the doctor on call. While I was miserable, I doubted if 4 hours in a waiting room chair was really the way to go so, my husband stayed home from work and I lay in a stupor. Of course, the best position is flat on your back for the first day or so but when you're pregnant you can't do that because of the whole vena cava, black spots issue so I instead had to manage to lay on my side with an artful arrangement of pillows. Mind, I was also continuing to cough in a highly enthusiastic manner throughout the whole experience which just helped things so very much. My husband spent the next several nights in the guest room. Oh, did I mention that the violent 20 minute coughing fits would wake Charlie so we had to cough into pillows?

I was finally able to really rejoin the land of the living Tuesday which was just in time to frantically finish all the Christmas prep that had been going at a good clip but had, at least, seemed manageable until a few days previous. Just as our families were set to descend, my husband got a stomach bug and was completely out of commission for a full 24 hours and on limited duty the day after that. Oh, and my brother who was staying with us had a cold but a different one that we had been battling and my father was sick with an unknown illness but my mom thought it could be the flu (it turned out to be a UTI). Clorox became my new best friend. But, aside from a lingering cough on my part, we seem to be finally wandering out of illness land. I am hoping for 1 solid week in which all 3 of us are actually healthy before we start the next round. Wish us luck.

pitiful...

2007-12-17T09:55:00.000-05:00

There is something particularly pitiful about throwing out your back while throwing up. Pregnancy is such a beautiful time...

Bitty Bumps and Bounces

2007-12-11T19:37:00.000-05:00

So, I've been feeling this little bit for about a month now. I first noticed her (I really think it's a her this time) after my last OB appointment. I woke up in the middle of the night trying to figure out if I had to pee or puke until it finally dawned on me that the funky feeling was coming from right about where the OB had found the heartbeat. (speaking of which... can you say "low." It was into the forest time for that doppler mic. Although, it was also nice because I finally figured out that was probably why it takes me so long to really show.)

I have come to the conclusion that noticing the really early, shivery, flippy in the middle feelings is a lot like your first kiss. It's exciting and wonderful while at the same time being a little odd and leaving you with slightly mixed feelings. In the form of the kiss there is all that wondering of where your noses go and if people really use their tongues because "Ewww!" In the form of the baby movement, since I noticed it so much earlier than with Charlie, there was the fact that it wasn't so much those fun pokes as it was a feeling that left you with the nagging suspicion that something was happening with your gastro-intestinal tract that you couldn't identfy- unsettling at all times and particularly so when you are totally in the middle of morning sickness. At this point though, things have settled into the more comforting bitty bumps and bounces; little hellos from the newest member of the family. It's not consistent by any means yet but often enough to be reassuring and make all the puking seem worth it. Charlie has taken to lifting up my shirt to poke at my belly button and I can't help but think that soon it will poke back. Whatever will he make of that?

I had another appointment today and things look good. The heart rate was in the 150s and the baby was sitting slightly higher so I am no longer worried that all those kegels were a complete waste and that my uterus was about to fall out or something. The big ultrasound won't be until January 10th which is way later than any of the other May Mommies somehow the doctor was more concerned about good images that gave really solid information about the baby's health than my desire to include the sex in the Christmas letter. Humph!

In other news, Charlie is battling a cold/ear thing/cough that he kindly shared with me and he is having a terrible time with naps because of the whole not able to breathe thing. I also decided that it would be nice to knock out 6 Christmas presents at one go and make a photo book of Charlie for various family members which is causing my computer great consternation. And there's all that other Christmas stuff to do. So, my evenings and weekends and coherent thoughts are being eaten up at a startling clip. Someday I will be coherent enough in the evenings again to post on something like a regular basis.

Morning Sickness the Second Time Around

2007-12-01T20:36:00.000-05:00

So, I'm still struggling with morning sickness. I had rather hoped that for this pregnancy I would magically wind up with a nice, well-behaved case that would wrap up no later than week 13 and that I would enjoy the wonder that is the second trimester that I heard so much about during my last pregnancy. It doesn't seem meant to be.

However, this time it doesn't seem as awful as last. I think the big thing is that I didn't really expect it to end this time. Last time, I kept thinking that it would surely only be a few more days, a week at the most and then all would be smooth sailing. This time, if it ends before the 7th month or so, I'll be pretty happy. Zofran has made all the difference as well. I know that I will only allow myself to throw up twice and then I can stop. I still might feel a little iffy for the rest of the day but I can leave the house without wondering when I will be making a sprint to the restrooms (even more exciting with Charlie in tow). I also have plenty of strategies this time. There are days that the refrigerator is just too much so there are bottles of ginger ale out on the counter for me. It means that some days Charlie gets to carbo-load for lunch but there are worse things and even on the worst of days I can usually manage to cut up his banana. I have a near encyclopedic knowledge of what foods are most likely to stay down or at least not be so bad to re-visit.

I also know the up-sides to months of morning sickness. At no point do I really have to worry about my weight gain. I know enough tricks to sneak calories in to keep myself from loosing weight and when I start being able to eat more normally, I can cut those strategies out. For instance, while I'm still getting sick regularly, I only drink things with calories. This means that I am beyond sick of gingerale but I also haven't had to be hospitalized or get stern lectures from the OB. And, I can look at all food with the attitude that if I think I can keep it down, I can eat it. If that means I have a day of french fries (only Wendy's please) and chocolate milk shakes (Ben and Jerry's, of course!) so be it. After all, even the most conservative pregnancy books encourage you to follow your cravings during the more difficult days. I also seem to get to skip over some of the aspects of pregnancy that plague other women since I seem to basically just hang out in the first trimester for the better part of 6 months. Heartburn was a total non-issue until at least the 7th month. I could give myself at least a rudimentary pedicure until the very end. The lower weight gain also meant that I shed the baby weight with little effort. I hung on to the last 5 pounds or so until Charlie started solids and then, off it slid. I am one of those rare women who gets to look at pregnancy and breastfeeding as this odd sort of delayed weight-loss plan where you eat way more than usual and then at the end of 15 months or so you're 2 pounds less than when you started with bigger boobs to boot. And, I know that I apparently come into the pleasant part of pregnancy just as everyone else is gearing up to be miserable. I found the 7th month to be quite nice really and even a hunk of the 8th wasn't that bad. Finally, puking just isn't nearly as objectionable an activity as it once was. Apparently, familiarity does breed contempt, or at least neutrality. At this point, the biggest issue for me is that the receptacle be clean. There is perhaps nothing quite as miserable as being in the middle of an unfortunate event and being completely without ability to escape your failings as a housewife. So, should anyone ever want to inspect my bathrooms for cleanliness, the time is now.

Now, this isn't to say that extended morning sickness doesn't suck. It does. There are definitely mornings that I simply delete that damn perky e-mail telling me how wonderful I feel now that I'm in my second trimester. I still wish a violent death to any woman who dares tell me how she simply didn't allow herself to throw up or asks me why I don't just make sure I keep food in my stomach and God help anyone who suggests I try some nice crackers. Really, at this point I have had morning sickness for at least 9 months. I have tried it all. If you have a baby yak I could sacrifice to the Goddess of whatever and happen to know of a nice chant I could try, please share, otherwise, trust me, I have sooo tried it. But, at least this time I have some perspective and realistic expectations.

I May Go To Hell for This...

2007-11-20T07:49:00.000-05:00

but I absolutely LOVE these cards.

Torture

2007-11-19T14:32:00.000-05:00

It really seems like about once every 2-3 months Charlie completely forgets how to sleep and we spend several days in sleep hell. Is it too late to decide that instead of being a Mommy, I'd rather be the cool Aunt?

Me Time

2007-11-18T09:18:00.000-05:00

We are encouraging Charlie to stop worrying so much about the impeding tasks of the day and to instead indulge himself. We would like him to take some time out for Charlie where he can just please himself. Naturally, the best time to do this would be from 5:30-6:30 am. We feel he needs to take a step back from the bustle of the start of the day rush and just breathe. I have offered to take on his chores for him so he can really just relax. I told him that I would handle spreading the puzzle pieces around for maximum distribution, taking all the dirty laundry out of the basket and replacing it with clean burp rags and pulling all the books from his shelves. We have assured him that we understand that it's important to get in touch with your morning Charkra and to become one with the sun. So far, we have met with little success. Charlie seems to just give and give and just can't take a step back. He feels such a strong drive to visit with us and ensure our happiness and access to animal crackers and o's. He needs to give cuddles and hugs and remind us where our belly buttons are. He doesn't want us to miss a moment of each precious sunrise. What treasure!

Day Dreaming

2007-11-11T09:19:00.000-05:00

Charlie has a cold which means more time in the rocker and more time to just sit and think. It's sort of nice to do occasionally and I've started to be able to see why people talk about the wonders of rocking a sleeping baby. I have to say that when I was rocking a sleeping baby for hours on end every day while desperately needing to sleep, eat, and pee, the romance was rather lost. Anyway, I started think about where I would like to live and as always, my thoughts turned to Maine. I have this idealized vision of it from trips taken throughout my childhood. In the summer it was this delightfully cool oasis where you could run around outside even in August. I could walk to the beach and sit on the dock or walk to the corner store and get a coke and pretzel rod all by myself. The air smelled exotic and comforting at the same time. A wonderful blend of evergreens and a sweet grass and meadow smell. We could go to LL Bean and examine the stream, sit in the tent, and find a small treasure to take home. Sometimes we would drive the rest of the way 'up' and go visit Canada or visit relatives who lived in areas so remote, it was rather unfathomable.

When we talk about where my husband should look for a job next, I always bring up Maine or Vermont or New Hampshire but there is little there to draw him professionally however much he might like it personally. I think some of my longing is also a means of putting my head in the sand regarding climate change. While the seasons are also 'off' in the North East, coming from warmer climes, it probably won't seem quite as jarring as wearing short sleeves well into October did here. I worry rather frequently these days about what sort of world Charlie will find as he grows up and never really feel I am doing enough. I struggle with how many children we should really have if we are being ecologically responsible. We have really slacked on the reusable bags since I have been in the quagmire of early pregnancy. We are switching our bulbs to florescent as the incandescents burn out, drive a hybrid car, and try to vote for the green candidate. At the same time, I know that all of this is such a minor drop in the bucket. I still use my dryer regularly. We also drive a minivan. We don't live in a walking friendly community and as such, drive more than I would like. We use air conditioning and turned the heater back up to 71' after Charlie was born. I feel like we, as a society, may be on the cusp of change and I am hoping that it happens soon enough that we won't have to move to Maine just so Charlie can see what snow is.

Give Rice A Chance

2007-11-07T17:50:00.000-05:00

You're pretty SMRT! Go prove it and get rice to people who need it here: http://www.freerice.com/index.php

I hit level 43. Can you beat the sleepy pregnant woman?

I think I might be a bitch...

2007-11-06T09:31:00.000-05:00

or, at least quite assertive. I belong to a pregnancy message board where I keep reading about these women who have husbands that want to go off for ages doing all sorts of things- watch football games, go hunting, skateboarding, etc, etc. While that by itself isn't a huge deal, I'm always taken aback by the rest of the story. The dad's are also working long hours, often nights and weekends, the wife is pregnant with a tiny one already, this is the 3rd time this month, this was the 1st time they were to see their child awake in a week, and so on. I'm of the opinion that I don't really care what my husband wants to do outside of family obligations, he helped make this family so he can help care for it. This doesn't mean that he doesn't do things he enjoys or that I don't, for that matter, although we could both use a little more time to devote to them. I very much understand the importance of taking time for yourself. But, when you go into parenthood it should be with the implicit understanding that sometimes it will suck. You will have to miss sleep and outings with friends and hobbies may take a beating. It also comes with the understanding that just because I'm The Mommy, I'm not the default caregiver and I'm certainly not the default caregiver of my husband. These men are demanding special meals at special times while the mom is trying to juggle a crying baby's needs and morning sickness. My husband has been offered anything he would like to eat over the last month or two, as long as he fixed it. When he travels a lot, if I don't get to the laundry and he needs a clean shirt or whatever for his next trip, he knows he can do a load himself. When he started getting very martyred about the extra work he's being taking on while I was in the 'must sleep now' stage of pregnancy, I told him to grow up and get some perspective. I was quite effusive with my appreciative praise but I also wasn't going to cry him a river over 6 loads of laundry and 4 grocery runs over a 4 week period. I just lost some of my ability to pity when I reached my 3rd really nasty diaper of the day, requiring me to have a puke bag out and ready to go before even taking off Charlie's onsie. My husband does help more than some but less than others. I find it hard to not feel guilty about the whole thing though when I hear about these women slogging through motherhood, in effect, on their own and I can't decide if I'm just a demanding bitch or they're push-overs or if it's all some fuzzy thing in the middle. I'm so glad that Mommy-guilt can manage to creep into every aspect of your life...

Cute but Yucky

2007-11-04T20:04:00.001-05:00

Charlie has started trying to give me kisses, at least, I think that's what he's doing. They involve pulling my face down and putting his open mouth on various parts of my face. The thought is very cute but I always have a burning desire to wash my face right after- particularly when he has just finished eating his snack.

Yum!

2007-11-04T19:38:00.000-05:00

So, in one of the abrupt turns typical of pregnancy I have gone from shunning all food 20 minutes ago to being willing to commit a felony for some shrimp cocktail. Oh, if only I had a kitchen staff or cabana boy to do my bidding...

Cravings...

2007-10-28T19:29:00.001-04:00

I haven't had any really crazy cravings with this pregnancy but I don't remember really having them at all with Charlie. This baby has some definate food opinions though. Over the last weekend I have simply OMG MUST HAVE NOW had to have:

1 pear
dark chocolate
sprees
smoked gouda
southwestern eggrolls from Arby's
tangerines
chocolate chips on a waffle

I have also craved but haven't manage to aquire:

cheesecake bites from Arby's
Riesling white wine (I don't even really drink wine)
yeast based homemade waffles
instant coffee with non-dairy creamer (I just don't know...)
clementines

Getting Sucked In

2007-10-28T13:21:00.000-04:00

I have degrees in several flavors of Early Childhood Education. I am completely aware of the many variations of typical development and have a strong bias towards play based education. I don't believe in flash cards for the under 6 set. I don't believe in tutors for pre-school. I don't believe you really need to do much in the way of direct instruction to see a young child flourish. My developmental mantra is that "You don't teach teething, why would you teach the other stuff?" After all, teething and teeth are the only real bastions of sensible thought on early childhood development. You will occasionally hear a parent questioning if they should be concerned if their child has reached their 1st birthday without cutting a tooth but I have yet to see a toy aimed at teaching your child how to cut teeth faster. There are no vitamins or drops advertised to speed the process along. The acceptable range for cutting teeth allows for a comfortable margin of acceptability. Charlie started teething at 3.5 months and other children we know didn't even show a hint of teething until after 7 months and no one considered either child odd.

At the same time, I keep feeling myself getting sucked into the doubt that is seemingly integral to modern parenthood. Charlie has yet to really have a first word. He has a mighty clap at this point. We taught him to do that rather than crying for "more" and this may have slowed down his speech a touch. I know that it won't have any detrimental effect in the long run but I do worry that I "messed him up" in some way. He will say "woo woo" for anything with 4 legs. He can identify his head and mouth. He is perfectly within range of typical development and shows no sign of any communication delay but I worry. He has wonderful pre-verbal skills and is fabulously outgoing but I worry. I read about other children who walked sooner, are talking, are running, etc, etc and I worry. At baby gym, when the rest of the children can sit for the songs and Charlie simply can't/won't I worry even though I know it's not really a developmentally appropriate expectation.

I so want to just be able to let Charlie blossom in his own way and his own time. There is a time and a place for concern over development. I am well aware of those signposts and markers he really shouldn't miss and when to ask for help. So far, he hasn't shown a hint of delay. He changes so fast, it seems like as soon as I begin to wonder if he will manage to make the marker in a reasonable time or when I feel like he has been almost there for so very long, it happens. Charlie is very much a child who wakes up one morning and turns a corner. He will be soooo close for ages and then, boom, there it is, suddenly with accuracy and precision. Some of it is also that I spend so much time with him that I miss things. I become so entrenched in the day-to-day that I miss that he is passing objects back and forth or is crouching or making more distinct babbles. He has become simply who he is and I couldn't tell you exactly where he is in skill development any more than I notice the lengthening of the day. One day you simply wake up and realize it is light when it was dark and you know the days are longer. One day I looked at Charlie and realized that he no longer crawled at all, instead he walks. It all goes too fast to spend your time worrying but that seems to be all the world wants you to do.

Pregnancy Book Reviews

2007-10-20T20:38:00.000-04:00

One of my husband's friends has just found out that she's pregnant (remember, couples are expecting but only the mommy is pregnant!) and I thought that I would put together a book review in her honor. I will offer the reviews based on what I remember but in some cases, it's been a bit since I've read it and I'm just too sleepy to go and re-read. So, take the information with a grain of salt and feel free to offer up your own suggestions...

Don't Panic! Pregnancy Book by Judy Morris In my opinion, this is the absolute best book for dealing with the practicalities of pregnancy and new motherhood. You won't find weekly updates on what your uterus and baby are doing but you will find concise information about things like how warm your bath should be, if you should dye your hair, and how to get all those thank you notes written. It's a small book that will fit in your purse so you can whip it out when you need to figure out which fish are safe, which type of sushi you can eat, or if you should think twice about that 2nd cup of coffee. It's all presented in a calm, clear manner that explains enough that you feel informed but not so much that you're bogged down. Every pregnant woman should have this book.

What to Expect When You're Expecting I didn't find reading this the terror that other women seem to. I keep hearing about how scared they were after looking something up in it. I did find it rather "meh" in the information department though. It seemed like it gave you adequate information but finding it could be a pain and it was written in a slightly condescending manner. That said, my husband said that it's the book he always looks things up in. They also seem a bit hung up on weight and nutrition. While I think it's important to be aware of, if you already have any weight anxiety or body issues, this book really won't help you out in that regard. On the plus side, it does point out that episiotomies aren't routine and offers some different
laboring positions.

Your Pregnancy Week-by-Week by Curtis and Schuler I liked this book on the whole. It nicely met my need of wanting to know what was going on with the baby with more detail and frequency than the monthly format of What to Expect. You can tell that there are some fairly slow spots where not much is happening beyond the baby getting nice and plump. There is definite "filler" material in those weeks. I wasn't wild about the way that it presented the labor process though. I got the distinct impression that the authors would like you to lie back and simply listen to the nice doctor rather than being a thinking (and opinionated) participant in the delivery. They also present episiotomies as routine.

The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy by Vicky Iovine This is one to get from the library rather than buy. It's a nice overview of what is to come and is a quick read. It's ideal for when you just got the 2 lines and are both panicked and euphoric and want a basic idea of the road ahead without needing detailed information about the pros and cons of various screening test and the like. I found some of the information a bit dated (particularly about clothing) and she focuses a lot on sex and body image (neither of them astoundingly positively) as well as making some fairly negative assumptions about how the men in your life. But, it does give a frank discussion of all the stuff about pregnancy that you hadn't even thought to ask your friends about or, you thought about it but couldn't bring yourself to ask.

Sheer Frivolity

2007-10-17T17:40:00.000-04:00

So, it has come to my attention that Harlequin has released their Christmas themed titles. There are few things quite a yummy as chocolate chip cookies, a bubble bath, and the pure cheese romance that Harlequin serves up. Christmas titles are just one step closer to mindless heaven. Can you really beat Christmas in his Royal Bed and A Town Called Christmas or, for true old school delight...The Boss' Christmas Baby. And for those of you who simply MUST have a sheik there is The Sheik and the Christmas Bride. I know what I want in my stocking this year!