Amelia eating a pear at 6 or 7 months

I’m a bad bad blogger, but I’m a mommy blogger, so it is okay. My posting has been lax because I have two kids to care for and too many “hobbies” competing for my time (Yes, this makes me very privileged compared to other moms who don’t have the luxury of any hobbies). The podcast will have to wait because one episode takes more time than I have right now, but I just can’t let this blog die a respectable death (I guess this is The Office of blogs). For this reason, I’m resorting to one note posting to combine my blogging and self-education hobbies.

What is my mommy note of the moment? I’m really into nutrition right now. Annoying I know. Self-righteous blogs about nutrition are my least favorite, whether it be vegan or vegetarian or paleo (really, paleo?) varieties. For the record, I am none of those things, but I am trying to move towards a more plant-based, less animal based diet. I’m currently taking an online course in Functional Family Nutrition just because I like knowing things and I like paying someone else to allow me the pleasure of writing papers. I also like to have a little guidance, rather than relying on blogs as sources of information (as I write this in a blog post; I’m a hypocrite by nature). I also DO NOT want my interest to veer into the smug or overly controlling or the must eat like me unless you want to be a lesser human being/mother categories. A thin food line.

Back to the point of this post. I’m reading a book by Ellyn Satter called Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family. I’ve linked to it, but I’m not wholeheartedly on board with all of its tenets, and I find it really annoying that Satter suggests anyone who is not completely with her is a food cop and therefore against her. That seems like a convenient way to try and shield yourself from any informed criticism whatsoever. However, she talks a lot about eating competence, and despite my reservations about much of the book, I like this self-check questionnaire she provides, which I will copy below.

1) Do you have mealtime structure in place?

2) Do you usually enjoy mealtime?

3) Would you say you have developed the meal habit?

4) Do you provide yourself with food you enjoy?

5) Do you generally tune in and enjoy your food?

6) Have you recovered your internal regulators of food intake, including finding your stopping place with eating?

7) Do you depend on your internal regulators of food intake to guide you in how much to eat?

8) Can you put unfamiliar, challenging, and “nutritious” food on the table without strong-arming yourself or anyone else to eat it?

9) Are you generally relaxed about eating?

10) Do you feel comfortable about enjoying food?

I copied this list of questions because I do think it is a good counterbalance to mothers or anyone else who has turned feeding themselves or their families into a power struggle, a guilt inducing occasion, or a moralizing opportunity. If you aren’t comfortable with food and with enjoying your food, any other changes you make to your diet are null and void on plate contact.

Amelia has reached the big 2 (Literally. My mom took her to Sears and made her stand in front of a giant 2 to commemorate her 2nd birthday. I think this should be done for all birthdays. I wonder if they will look at me strangely if I demand a large 31 in August). In honor of entering the terrible twos, I threw her a small birthday party at our house. Nothing fancy. Some homemade sandwiches and cupcakes, chips, veggies, and Elmo decorations. Amelia had a blast. She got cake. She got to dance. She got to play with other kiddos. Pretty much a toddler’s perfect day.

The planning and set up went surprisingly smoothly, with the exception of one night when I was cutting out flower shaped cupcake toppers and got mad at Dave for not helping. He asked “Why didn’t you just tell me to help?” I complained “But I’ve been complaining about doing this and you didn’t offer to do anything.” He answered “I thought you just wanted to vent.” No, Dave, this was not one of those woman experiencing her emotions moment (but definitely an I want you to want to help and not have to ask woman moment). I’m not much of a party planner, but I learned some valuable lessons I will share with you.

1) Just because you own Photoshop Elements and can make very rudimentary designs, do not think yourself a pro, otherwise you will end up designing cupcake toppers in the shape of a flower, rather than the easy to cut out circle. Plan to curse to yourself as you cut them out. If you must have flowers, buy a punch out, or even better, just buy them on Etsy.

2) Speaking of Etsy, buying one of those super cute tutu/shirt combos that every white middle class mom gets her kid is not worth the money if you have an opinionated two year old. She liked it enough, but spent about ten minutes in it before wanting to wear a dress.

3) Make an extra cupcake to give to your almost two year old so that the birthday tears don’t start early. Forget about the sugar. Just make the cupcake. We set up the cupcakes during her nap. When she woke up she exclaimed, “My happy birthday! I want cake!” I said no and she cried for them for the next two hours before people started to arrive. Not even the brownie I offered assuaged her disappointment.

4) Birthdays get fun at this age. Amelia really didn’t get what was going on during her first birthday, but boy does she understand birthdays now, even if it is just a Pavlovian response (you say “Happy Birthday” and she says “cake”). She can open her own gifts or at least ask for help when she needs it. I suspect the fun birthday years will last from approximately now until age 12 or 13.

5) Set the bar low now. Cake, small presents, simple decorations, and some friends are the birthdays I remember when growing up. Now that she has entered her birthday consciousness phase, I plan on keeping this same formula. No renting bouncy bounces for me or elaborate catering and thank you gifts or time consuming decorations, not that I don’t love all those things, but I’m a type A person and don’t need the added stress.

I’ve only been a mom for two years, but I’ve noticed a huge shift in my perspective about celebrations (holidays, birthdays, etc..). As a child, of course I loved them because they were all about me, in the way most celebrations are for the kids. As I approached adult-hood, the bloom was off the holiday rose, but now that I’m a mom, the prep work isn’t always fun because I have to step in for Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, but there is something lovely about acting as Oz for my kids’ memories.

Her hair is wet, not normally so stringy. Not sure why I felt the need to write that.

Like pretty much everyone everywhere, perhaps a slight exaggeration, the fam is getting over an early spring cold. Rather oddly Dave and I have gotten this thing in piecemeal. A sore throat one day, then stuffy nose, etc… without a whole lot of overlapping symptoms. Amelia, the family carrier of said cold because of her triweekly daycare (does triweekly mean every three weeks or 3x a week?) still has a slight runny nose, but manages to never act sick even as she is coughing up a lung. Henry on the other hand, wee little babe, still looks pathetic. He suffers the most because his immune system is still wee and little.

When I told my parents Henry and Amelia were sick, my mom said “still” and I had to correct “again.” They were well for like two weeks in between colds. Since Amelia seems unaffected by her snot, I haven’t minded her sicknesses all that much, but poor Henry has had three colds in his 4 1/2 months of life. Amelia didn’t get her first cold until she was like 9 months old, maybe older, I can’t remember. Henry got his first cold at weeks old.

The cause of these colds is obvious. Amelia goes to a small in home daycare, picks up a bug, and smears it around the family. I had read somewhere that getting a cold a month, although on the frequent side, isn’t unheard of for toddlers. I also know a lot of moms who have stopped going to kid heavy places because their kids will ALWAYS get sick, but for them this always can include frequent ear infections and other issues that aren’t as easily wiped off as Amelia’s runny nose. Bummer. Still, if you see a child with a bit of crusty snot at the local park, you don’t need to give his/her mother the evil eye for leaving the house, as if we should all quarantine the sniffles.

I also know of moms whose kids never get sick, the moms who credit their breastfeeding for supplying some magic elixir, or credit their healthy family habits. Hate to break the bad news, but Henry has only been breastfeed and it hasn’t stopped the colds, even though it may have lessened the severity of them, hard to tell. Also, as soon as your one child starts to interact with other kids, I’m afraid no matter how healthy you think you live, a cold is gonna happen sooner or later.

That said, I was curious. Is going to daycare really bad for a kid’s immune system? Luckily, at least one study suggests the opposite. A couple years ago, CNN and other news outlets wrote brief articles about a study in the Archives of Adolescent and Pediatric Medicine that showed Canadian kids in large day-care settings before the age of 2 1/2 getting more ear and respiratory infections than those cared for at home, but then once starting school getting fewer of these ailments than their peers. The authors of the study commented that although the increased rate of infections was much greater (61%) in the preschool years, it may put the kids at an advantage during the school years because they would miss fewer days when learning to read and write. Okay, so this study isn’t a perfect vehicle for talking about Amelia’s care. 1) She doesn’t go to a large daycare setting and 2) She isn’t getting those infections anyway, just the colds. However, what I took from this was don’t worry if your kid is getting sick. Your child isn’t some sickly creature, just doing a little prep work for school.

Now that I could stop worrying about the frequency of colds, I started to wonder, why do kids get so many. Am I doing something wrong? An article on The Children’s Physician Network explains that colds are simply caused by new viruses. Since we can get at least 200 different viruses, the younger body, i.e. the less exposed body, is more susceptible to these viruses. On average, a baby and toddler gets 8 colds a year, and that is just the average, so more or less isn’t out of the ordinary. The article also notes, “Colds are not caused by poor diet or lack of vitamins. They are not caused by bad weather, air conditioners, or wet feet.” Good to know. Of course common sense says not taking care of yourself may prolong and worsen the symptoms, but it ain’t the cause of the virus.  Colds may be annoying, especially when infections are part of the equation, but out of all the parenting worries, this is starting to fall lower and lower on my paranoia totem pole.

I’m crazy about laminating. Somebody needs to stop me. Seriously. A couple weeks ago my parents gifted me with a Costco impulse buy. They said they thought of me when they saw the Purple Cow (the laminator’s brand name). As I have mentioned, I’ve been a little organizing crazy. For example, a few months ago, I decided we absolutely needed laminated CPR/First Aid cards attached to our fridge, just in case. I spent forever looking for proper UPDATED CPR instructions and then walked to and from Staples to get them laminated. I did the same with vintage alphabet cards. Apparently, a laminator isn’t all that expensive, hence the parental impulse buy. I guess they couldn’t stand watching me do something simple the painstaking way, but I don’t think they intended to open Pandora’s laminated box.

What can one laminate? A lot. I’m having lamination brainstorms all the time. Like I said, somebody needs to stop me. I knew I had a problem when Amelia wanted my attention and I told her “One minute honey, Mommy has to finish laminating something.” Oh boy.

I took some pictures to give an idea of what can be laminated. Yes, I’m fully aware I’m starting to fall more and more on the OCD end of the mom spectrum, but it is what it is.

In no particular order, here are some of my “masterpieces.”

As if the contents weren't obvious enough.

Again, for the slightly slow.

I even took the laminator into our bathroom. Sadly, when making “his” and “her” signs, I should have remembered I was putting them on black bins.

Oops. Black on black not that great.

So I tried again.

I also decided I needed to label the miscellaneous too dangerous for Amelia kitchen items that are now too high for me to reach or see.

But my favorite lamintations (I’m starting to love that made up word) are the following…

We have been so on task, we don't actually have anything to not forget right now.

And now nobody can ask me what we are having for dinner this week (sorry for forgetting to turn the flash off).

The piece de resistance remains. I contemplated buying a no solicitation sign, yet none said what I really wanted to get across to the annoying person about to wake my children (and my neighborhood has many, oh so many, people knocking on the door at just the wrong time); I made my own. I haven’t posted it yet, so I’ll let you know if it works.

This better work! I'm not really that cranky, but I live in a neighborhood that happens to get a ridiculous number of solicitors, usually from people who fall on the roughly done end of sketchy.

Henry is almost four months old, and I already hate breastfeeding. I don’t have any latch, supply, tongue-tie, allergy problems. Henry feeds like a champ. In fact, he likes it so much he still refuses to take a bottle. Maybe he knows that if he did take a bottle we might be slowly creeping towards weaning. Crafty little fella. Refuse the bottle and I can’t sneak any formula into your tummy.

If nothing is actually wrong with our breastfeeding relationship, why do I announce my hatred? Okay, so “hate” is probably the wrong word. Sometimes, maybe even usually, I really enjoy the feedings, often the mornings and evenings when Dave is home and I can have some uninterrupted Henry cuddle time. But he eats every two hours! Every two hours from start to start! Amelia was the same, maybe more on the three hour schedule, but pretty much the same, and yet I wasn’t as eager to ditch the boob so soon. But then again she took a bottle and I wasn’t placed on boob house arrest. Oh, and she didn’t have an older version of herself competing with her attention.

I wouldn’t mind nursing Henry if I felt like I got a break during the night, but, oh no, the two hour feeding schedule continues through 10pm, midnight, 2am, 4am, 6am. Ack! At his well child checkup, our lovely pediatrician asked the million dollar question: “So, how does he sleep?” (Henry was at that moment asleep in my arms because I had nursed him to sleep to stave off the stress of going to the pediatrician). When we told her our dilemma, she agreed with us that expecting a four month old to go four hours between middle of the night feedings is reasonable. Dave and I set up a no-feed zone. Dave used the term “sleep training” when talking to his mom, but, honey, this ain’t sleep training, this is survival training. I have driven away with the car door wide open and Dave has gotten out of the car oblivious to the running engine more than once. All a no-feed zone involves is not feeding him if it is after 10pm and he ate less than four hours ago. When he awakens during this zone, Dave goes to him and soothes him back to sleep. Easy peasey, except it isn’t.

Henry really likes to nurse, like really really depends on it to get to sleep. This wouldn’t be a big deal if we were a co-sleeping family, but we aren’t, so either I’ve been schlepping myself to his room every two hours (or less, because remember it’s two hours from start to start) or Dave has been kindly bringing him to me.

The first night of the no feed zone Henry cried for two hours as Dave tried to soothe him (I’m a masochist, so I kept the monitor on the whole time to make sure I didn’t get any sleep). The next night it was more like one hour, and the night after that, a little less, so we had high hopes, but then last night happened. After letting Dave try to soothe Henry for 45 minutes at 2am I couldn’t take it anymore. I stormed into the nursery and angrily announced “I’ll just feed him.” Dave wearily asked, “Who are you mad at?” I looked at Dave’s tired face and Henry’s tear soaked face and realized, I’m mad at myself for just walking in here and violating our own no-cry zone agreement, but anyone who has listened to a baby cry for mommy, even a baby who can’t say mommy, knows that 45 minutes feels like all night.

So I’m sick of it, the breastfeeding I mean. I know breast is best and I’ll continue, not just for minor health reasons, but because I do want to keep that relationship with Henry, but I’m also really tired and I know after talking with many a parent who has a one year old or plus that babies often don’t just outgrow the two hour waking. We will stick with the no-cry zone and see how it goes. In the meantime, my lovely baby depends on my boobs to help him through anything and everything that upsets him. Amelia was upset at the world when she was 4 months old, so it was easier to try a multitude of soothing methods since they didn’t work anyway. Henry will be soothed by nursing, so I stick with it. As a result, I’m tired, unable to leave him for more than an hour and don’t sleep for more than one and a half hour stretches. Really not cool. I know this is a common story for the breastfeeding (and often the bottlefeeding) mother, which is why I’m scared to be on the road during peak stay at home mommy hours. If you see a mom in a minivan with at least two car seats, you might want to keep your distance.

This is one of the little talked about ugly secrets of breastfeeding. Yes, it is a great bonding time. Yes, it is cheaper than formula, and, frankly, easier in the moment. Yes, it is the most natural way to feed your baby. Yes, it helps you lose the baby weight without really trying. But it also demands sooo much from mommy; you can’t have a blissful isn’t motherhood grand moment with your infant every time you nurse. And just because mister man is upset, doesn’t mean mommy has to come to the rescue by popping open her shirt (even if the frantic faces around you always ask, “Maybe he’s hungry?” each time he cries) If mommy is the only one who can soothe little man, then mommy is on call ALL THE TIME. Believe me, that gets old. Motherhood is lovely and idyllic and all that jazz, but sometimes it is also a pain in the boob. That may sound like a complaint because it is. Moms are allowed to complain. It’s in our mommy bill of rights. Have you not read that? I’ll try to get you a copy.

Don't judge

I’ve gone a little project insane around here. For some reason, I fooled myself into thinking I’m crafty. I decided the best time to tackle all the little things around the house that have annoyed me for years is when I’m getting no sleep and need to take care of a toddler and 3 month old. Some of the weirdly OCD projects I have completed include organizing and labeling the laundry room, creating plastic bins (with labels) for our medicine cabinet supplies, labeling everything in Amelia’s closet, labeling everything in the master bedroom closet, labeling all the drawers of Henry’s dresser, labeling the inside of the refrigerator, and much more.

Have you noticed a labeling theme? Apparently I’m the only person in the world who laminates labels for the inside of the fridge (this according to an informal facebook survey). What’s more disturbing is that I’m actually surprised no one else labels like this. My penchant for organization is new. It started to bubble up a couple years ago and got into full swing a few months ago… around the times my kids were born. Not a surprising correlation. If my house and sleep are chaotic, why not try and organize the chaos?

In the midst of the organizing, I’ve also tried some beautifying. I’ve been reading those crafty blogs that show pictures of ridiculously cute and inexpensive makeovers of small items. You know, those blogs with a million lovely pictures that make you think for a second, just a second, that you really can emulate Martha Stewart. Why not refashion a lamp shade or make your own decorative storage box or paint everything you own in chalkboard paint (I settled for two picture frames, yet another project)?

What follows is my version of those blogs. In pictures I will show you the transformation of a clear IKEA (I think) glass bowl that had been housing our house and car keys. I was proud of myself for having said bowl, but every time I looked at the bowl it didn’t go with the fun colorful feel I wanted in my kitchen.

Hard to see because I photographed clear glass on clear plastic. Genius, I know.

I decided to get some glass paint, yes that is a thing, for a couple bucks from Joannes. I was feeling really proud of myself as I painted it. This was so easy and for a couple bucks (7) I could get a new glass bowl, a fun glass bowl! This was the result.

Notice the off center camera placement...and the drips.

Here is another angle.

With the aforementioned keys

My glass painting skills are lacking, so I got a lot of drips. I thought if I put the keys back in and moved the bowl to its real home, the drips wouldn’t be as noticeable. But instead of being annoyed by a not fun clear glass bowl I was annoyed by a fun drippy glass bowl. Luckily, I turned the bowl green.

The bowl transforms.

Wow, what a transformation. And look at the paint job! How did I do that? I threw out the one I painted and replaced it with a 2 dollar clearance bowl from Marshalls. I’m amazing. Take that Martha.

The happy threesome. Where did it go wrong?

I hate dogs. That didn’t feel loud enough. Let me say it again. I HATE DOGS! This is a fairly new aspect of my personality. You know how some people are cat people or dog people. I’ve always been a dog person. I grew up with a beloved mutt named Lucy who lived for 13 years. We got her when she was five weeks old. I was ten and so excited to finally get a puppy that I walked around our neighborhood literally holding Lucy above my head to show her off. I was in grad school when she finally had to be put down and it was a sad sad day.

This is why when I started dating my lovely husband Dave, I was excited that he had a lovable German Shepherd. Oh Kaiya, you sweet, hyperactive, crazy pup. Although I found her barking slightly annoying when we lived childless in Virginia, I considered her part of the family. On Easter we hid dog treats, rather than eggs, and had her search for them. In retrospect that might have been my desire for kids coming through and not my great love for Kaiya; either way, I didn’t mind her, dog hair and all. In fact, I surprised Dave on our wedding day with a custom made cake topper featuring Dave, myself, AND Kaiya.

When we started looking for rentals in San Diego. I discovered Kaiya was becoming a bit of a liability. No one wanted to rent to big dogs, but she was part of the family and we held firm, eventually convincing the owner of our current residence that she was the best, most well-behaved German Shepherd to ever walk the earth. She’s not by the way.

When I found out I was pregnant, all of two weeks after moving to San Diego, I turned Kaiya into my test baby, cuddling with her in bed when Dave was flying late. I did have an inkling about the difficulty of dog plus baby, so I made Dave invest in some dog training, which worked for a bit…until it didn’t. And yes we read all the Dog Whisperer books as well…also not that helpful since I never mastered the calm assertive energy stuff.

As my due date approached, I started to like Kaiya less and less. She sheds. She smells. She barks at nothing, loudly. She needs to be walked twice a day because we are without yard and I cannot walk her because she becomes psychotic on a leash (she pulled me over when I was seven or eight months pregnant and I vowed never to walk her again, but I did, and after she pulled me over while Amelia was in a front carrier, I vowed never to walk her again, and I haven’t for the most part).

Kaiya is an awesome big sister to Amelia. Never do I worry that Kaiya will hurt Amelia (or Henry). I once saw our crawling baby climb right on top of Kaiya and pretend to ride her. All Kaiya did was sit there calmly. But Kaiya still found her way lower on the totem pole. Why? Because she sheds. She smells. She barks at nothing, loudly. This barking and barking and barking woke woke woke up my fussy daughter. Ugghh. I complained, but put up with it.

Then I got pregnant again. After Henry was born Kaiya found her way to the very very bottom of the totem pole. I can’t stand her. She sheds. She smells. She barks at nothing, loudly. This barking and barking and barking and barking wakes wakes wakes wakes up my fussy daughter and my mellow son and ME. I spend my days yelling at Kaiya to SHUT UP. I lock her in our bedroom where she spends most of the day so she doesn’t wake up the babies. Then I feel bad about keeping her in the bedroom (a bedroom that always smells like dog). I self-flagellate: Why am I yelling at and locking away our dog? I’m a dog person after all! Amelia has taken to copying mommy and yelling at Kaiya to SHUT UP. What is going on? I’m a dog person! I’m a dog person! Or am I?

Dave wants me to get all Marley and Me with Kaiya. Isn’t she lovable because she is annoying? Isn’t she part of the family? Just look at her cute puppy dog eyes, how can you resist? I resist.

We tried a compromise and signed her up for doggie daycare. Not the best solution because it is expensive, and therefore temporary, and Dave must leave early for work to take her. The days she is gone, I breathe easier. My heart rate goes comfortably down. Dave wants me to miss her. I don’t. Let’s be clear. I feel bad for her. She’s a dog and can’t help her personality, but I feel bad for me too. I’m a stay at home mom. Therefore, the home is my office. How would he like an annoying, barking, trying to steal Amelia’s food, smelly, incontinent dog at his office all day?

I know I’m setting myself up for criticism by admitting the depth of my dog despair. I’m supposed to love Kaiya. And in a way I do love her. I love her enough to know being around a crazed mom who yells SHUT UP all day isn’t really living what Oprah would call your best dog life. Whoever did the research into dogs lowering blood pressure must not have been around moms with babies and manic German Shepherds. It gets worse when we go to my parents’ house where they have two Dachshunds and my brother’s Lab as barking companions for Kaiya. I HATE DOGS.

It has been suggested, I use the passive on purpose to leave the suggester nameless, that my building Kaiya annoyance is an emotional scapegoat. Perhaps the stress of having two under two is manifesting itself as dog dislike. Perhaps I yell at Kaiya because I can’t bring myself to yell at my own kids. Maybe, but this argument completely overlooks the extra stress having a dog places on the whole mothering two under two situation. As I said, when Kaiya is gone I’m calmer. I yell less. Two under two is stressful, but two under two plus dog is too stressful (a two tongue twister). We are at a hairy, smelly, barking crossroads. I’m not sure what we will do, but in the meantime I’m unapologetically seeking a dog divorce. It’s no one’s fault. The kids aren’t to be blamed. We’ve both made mistakes, but sometimes when mommy and doggy grow apart, they need to live separately…. There, that was my Dooce confessional post.

Original movie poster, taken from Wikipedia

Amelia has recently taken to wearing only dresses. To be more specific, only pretty dresses. In the morning before thinking about peeing or eating or even leaving her crib, she points to the closet, commanding that I or daddy get her the party dress, not the cute summer dress (even though it is February), not the cute play dress, but THE dress, the one with red flowers on non-machine washable fabric covering three layers of tulle petticoat.

I purposely didn’t bring THE dress to Sacramento and she has managed to survive without it, but she still insists on wearing a dress every day. She is not a fashionista because of me. If I put on jeans I consider myself dressed up. If I wear the sweatshirt with the ruffly front, I’m ready for a night on the town. If I adorn my feet with TOMS rather than with nothing, I’m living large that day. No, Amelia is not fashion forward because of her dear mother. She has gone toddlers and tiaras on me because of Ann Margret. To be more specific, Ann Margret as Kim from Bye Bye Birdie.

I wrote about Amelia’s girl crush before (you can read is HERE) and instead of dissipating, this girl crush has morphed into a dress obsession, precipitated by both the movie and a trip to the Corvette Diner in San Diego (think of a Diner on speed and you are close to imagining the Corvette).

Prepare yourself for a shocking parenting statement. Are you ready? I, Miss Overthinking Mom, let my not yet two year old daughter watch the movie Bye Bye Birdie EVERY SINGLE DAY. Most days we don’t get through the whole thing, but at least once a day she watches part of it. That’s right. EVERY SINGLE DAY. At first I thought it was a harmless love. But now Miss Only Wears Dresses dances, snaps, and even screams like the over-acting characters in this annoying musical. Fine. I can live with that. However, have you ever really listened to the lyrics of “How Lovely to be a Woman”? Well, I have. Many many times. For those of you not as intimately familiar with every second of Bye Bye Birdie, I’ll give you a snippet:

“How lovely to be a woman,
The wait was well worth while;
How lovely to wear mascara
And smile a woman’s smile.
How lovely to have a figure,
That’s round instead of flat;
Whenever you hear boys whistle,
You’re what they’re whistling at.
It’s wonderful to feel
The way a woman feels;
It gives you such a glow just to know
You’re wearing lipstick and heels!
How lovely to be a woman
And have one job to do;
To pick out a boy and train him
And then when you are through,
You’ve made him the man you want him to be!”

Okay, so let’s disregard the heels problem (cause my girlie ain’t wearing those) and the wearing mascara (I’m okay with that), how am I supposed to deconstruct the happy guys are whistling at me and pick out a boy and train them lines for a two year old? Sure, the song has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, but toddlers don’t get that. The movie has other obvious gender problems that you don’t even want to get me started on, so I could stop her from watching the movie or try and explain some stuff, but frankly the reason she watches it every day is my exhaustion. I’m tired. She likes the movie. It calms her before bed. But Ann Margret, I ask you, am I screwing up my kid? Probably.

Driving 500 miles with a two month old, a 21 month old, and a German Shepherd is about as much fun as a root canal. I think. I’ve never had a root canal (and hope not to), but I’m sticking with the cliched saying despite my dental inexperience. My parents live in Sacramento. We live in San Diego. Sacramento seems close because we used to live on the East coast, but every time we make the drive up North I’m reminded that eight to ten hours in a car is actually a really long time, and when you factor in breastfeeding, diaper changes, screaming children, and a smelly dog, the trip can seem like an eternity.

But we had a bright idea, a genius way around this nightmare. We would simply drive at night, the time when the kids usually sleep, and they would rest peacefully in their car seats. We’d stop for bathroom breaks and night-time feedings, but Henry can go 3, sometimes 4, hours at night between feedings, as opposed to the 2 hour day-time schedule. Meanwhile, Dave and I would quietly listen to podcasts and congratulate ourselves on our picture perfect all-American family.

We really were that naive. About half-way through the trip, as Amelia and Henry alternated screams, and Dave tried to keep his eyes from falling shut, we admitted that this was a failed experiment. Let me break down all the break downs. Yes, the kids were tired and did fall asleep in their car seats, but they did not go quietly. Amelia has been sleeping through the night since she was 9 months old, recently had a early morning set back, but after some sleep consulting, is now again sleeping from roughly 6:30pm to 6am most nights. Why did we mess with that!? She let out tired why are you making me sleep in this car seat screams for much of the trip. Meanwhile, Henry, wee little baby, hated being in the car seat, not a hatred we could make go away all together, but poor guy got his typical evening gas and didn’t have either one of us to help him out.

Okay, so dealing with screaming tired babies was bad, but we also overlooked one giant flaw in our experiment. Driving at night meant we would also be staying up. We = very tired parents who can use all the sleep we can get. Plus, Dave had a night flight before this and my ability to see in the dark is bad, very bad, to say the least (and I am saying the least). As we stopped for coffee at midnight, this flaw dawned on us for the first time. Why oh why were we driving at night? We should be sleeping, not sitting in a shady gas station as I nursed an upset Henry underneath a giant billboard advertising a bare elegance strip club (classy, I’m sure). Whipping out a boob in the middle of the night in a not so nice LA neighborhood is not something I recommend.

We got here safely a few days ago. The kids have caught up on their sleep (although I quickly put the kibosh on my parents’ plan to transition Amelia to a big girl bed. Did I mention I don’t want to mess with a good thing?). We are still tired parents, but tired parents who now get help and can enjoy a hot tub, so all in all, a successful trip despite our poor prior planning. Now if I could only do something about all the annoying dogs here….

I took a long long hiatus from this blog and almost stopped paying my liquid web fee because I had no time, energy, or inclination to talk about myself and motherhood. I started this blog because it was fun and it stopped being fun, what with the morning sickness, the transition to toddlerhood, the difficult delivery and birth of my luckily not as difficult as Amelia baby boy, and the NO SLEEP that comes with having a two month old. I have no illusions of blog grandeur and figured my online echo chamber could disappear forever, but the blog bug bit me at 2 in the morning (because I’m up at 2 in the morning on a regular basis. Did I mention I don’t sleep? I told Dave my only fantasy is to check into a hotel room by myself, eat cheesecake, and sleep until I can’t sleep anymore). This isn’t a viral blog, so like a good diet (ahem eating plan), I shouldn’t fall prey to the all or nothing syndrome. Just because I fell off the posting and recording wagon, doesn’t mean I’m gone forever.

The biggest, and I mean BIGGEST, event, not counting my expanding feet, since last posting was the birth of Henry, all 10 pounds 7 ounces of him. Take a moment to be amazed. He was the largest baby my midwife had ever delivered and no, I didn’t have a c-section (but was told by even the most earthy crunchy of the midwives that any future children would need to come via a section due to their “trending upward” weight. I am not a large woman and Henry had some difficulty after coming out.) All went mostly well after the initial Henry not crying and almost being taken to the NICU drama. For the record, despite my hippie tendencies, I will never ever ever speak ill of epidurals. In two cases, they prevented a c-section and I pushed for less than a half hour, so there.

I’m living in a tired cloud right now. This has been said before by I don’t know whom, probably by everyone, that having two babies is not doubly difficult, but rather exponentially more difficult. This is true and this is why Amelia frequents a lovely daycare twice a week.

I don’t know a lot about motherhood, but a second baby does teach you just how much personality is part of our God-given DNA. Nurture matters, but wow, nature is ingrained. I feel a little foolish about my past attempts to explain or qualify Amelia’s behavior based solely on what I was or was not doing as a mother. Henry has taught me that some personality traits just are. Knowing this has taken a lot of the pressure off me, yet somehow has not stalled my incessant reading about parenthood, but that is for another post.

Amelia switched rather ungracefully from two naps to one around 16 months. Her first nap was becoming really short and I knew, based on too much research, that the average child will switch to one nap around 15-18 months. I figured getting the transition out of the way before Baby Number 2 arrives was a good idea, and it has been…mostly.

The only major problem I have had with this transition is shower time, as in, mommy like needs to shower before noon and baby can’t be trusted alone in the house while I am out of commission. This is the plight of the stay at home mom, and probably the working mom as well, a plight I imagine gets more complicated the more kids you have. How does one actually shower with a toddler around?

After asking around when preparing for this inevitability, I discovered moms all have different ways of coping. Some just stick their kids in a baby-proofed room, others still put a toddler in a pack n play, others shower at night, and the truly brave shower with their babes. When Amelia was a wee thing, I’d plop her in a bouncy seat and put it in the bathroom. She’d scream, but at least she couldn’t move. Now all she does is move and I can’t leave her alone because a baby-proofed room still makes me nervous, especially because yesterday she bit her tongue after running into the wall for no particular reason. I don’t think an Amelia-proofed room actually exists. As for a pack n play, she can climb out of those.

My solution has been extensive baby-proofing of the master bath, a yoga mat, and a kiddie laptop. I now remove the toilet paper and garbage can after an impressive TPing incident (doesn’t bode well for high school). We have a see through glass door on the shower, so she spends most of the time banging on it and yelling at me for daring to do something without her. When that doesn’t work, she ignores the play computer I so diligently researched and instead tries on my bra, as a hat or necklace. Then she screams some more and climbs on the toilet. Afterwards, as I try to get dressed, she fights with me for the towel and finds great amusement in poking me where the sun doesn’t shine.

I would shower at night, but have you ever heard the kid’s song by Andy Mason called “My Hair Had a Party Last Night”? If you haven’t, listen to it and you’ll understand why it is the rare curly headed girl who can shower in the evening. So I am left with a not too peaceful but at least functional shower time. This must be the situation for many, if not most, moms. And don’t even get me started on the other bathroom activities moms cannot experience in peace.

Sure, daily showers are a fairly modern convenience and I should be grateful for my water supply, but I can’t help but complain about this little talked about mommy issue. 17 months ago I completely took for granted personal time, so at least this time around I understand what motherhood truly means. It means giving birth to the greatest loves of your life who also happen to be tumors on any private time, but what lovely tumors they are.

I’ve noticed a few differences between a first and second pregnancy. These differences undoubtedly are obvious to anyone with more than one kid, but like with all things kids and kid making related, they have to be learned anew by each not so new mom.

With my first pregnancy, I blogged the entire thing to my family (starting at 11 weeks), morning sickness and all. As anyone who still reads this outgrowth of my inaugural blog might have noticed, this isn’t happening so readily with number two. Baby number one is the obvious cause of this plummeting word count, combined with sporadic morning sickness that has lessened, but doesn’t seem to want to disappear for good.

Speaking of morning sickness, you wretched bane of my existence, my current experience started out extremely similar to the puking horrors of ’09, leading many to believe I was having another girl ( side note: extreme morning sickness with girls is actually an old wive’s tale with some merit in science, with a 56% versus 44% ratio of girl to boy births). But I’m not. I’m having a boy and although I suspected this a little– I had a 50/50 chance of being correct after all– for the first 17 weeks of the pregnancy I could not tell a single difference between my ’09 horror and the ’11 variation.

That is, until the morning sickness went away. Oh blissful week of thinking I was free a full five weeks earlier than with my baby girl. Oh week of eating Indian food and Chinese and anything else that tested my gastrointestinal tract. That week made me food cocky. One night I made a veggie lasagna and, congratulating myself on my rare culinary achievement, I had a second piece, then suggested we all walk to get frozen yogurt. A neighbor’s lawn bore the marks of my ill-guided fro-yo journey (and still might since we don’t get much rain here). Since then, luckily, I’ve been getting better, but many nights I still tell Dave to tell me never to eat lettuce again. Ever. Stupid lettuce.

My nesting is different this time around as well. With Amelia I organized and labeled everything, so much so that Dave has actually banned me from setting foot into The Container Store. The feminist in me recoils at a husband banning a wife from shopping, but the realist in me recognizes I may just have a problem, so I don’t go back.

Problem or not, plastic bins and labels were the least of Dave’s nesting woes. This pregnancy I’m all about projects, big I need it done now I’m going to attempt what I can’t do I will not rest, except when I have collapsed in exhaustion and need you to take over, projects. I just finished sanding and priming some old Target bookshelves I have always hated in the hopes of turning them into cheap white jewels. I’ve never primed anything or successfully painted laminate and my prime job looks pretty awful, so this project may mean more money spent in the long run. We are also getting a yard even though we rent, but I refuse to look at weedy mulch any longer. I refuse I say! Oh, and I want to redo the kitchen and add to Amelia’s room, not to mention the nursery and our bedroom and….. Somehow all the things that haven’t bothered me for two years are now like little needles in my brain. We don’t plan on having many, if any, more kids, but those women who have 8 or 10 probably have accomplished the most amazing feats whilst pregnant.

Ultimately, the biggest difference this time around is my energy level. Yes, morning sickness saps all energy and last time I had anemia, even collapsing at the mall around 15 weeks, but a toddler, a spirited toddler, changes the energy zapping ball game entirely. I’ve been making frequent and long trips up to Sacramento so my parents can take care of Amelia (and let’s be honest, me).

Having a kid outside the womb means no playing music to the belly babe via giant headphones, no reading What to Expect and other ridiculously long parenting diatribes, no fretting about my parenting philosophy. I played in the womb Amelia Irish lullabies for months and she never recognized them nor calmed down because of them. Reading all the pregnancy books were helpful, but a bit overwhelming and obviously not adequate preparation for the real thing, and my I need to do everything the Sears way approach I thought I would have with Amelia totally didn’t happen, and I don’t feel bad about it at all. Basically, I’m a project crazed, tired and moody, yet more mellow, months away but still scary close mom take two. Paradoxical? Yes. Paradoxes are lovely that way. They can make no sense and still be true.

Oh, and one last difference. I’m eating cheese. All kinds of cheese now. Apparently America pasteurizes everything. Good to know.

As for the podcast that I have let slip away. I have an episode soon to be released that was recorded months ago. I apologize to Amy, who I interviewed about adoption, for taking so darn long.

I’m pregnant. Yes, this is exciting news, but a messy morning sickness sieve is currently leaking all over this excitement. Marveling at the human body’s ability to grow another human body has been replaced by amazement at the human body’s ability to produce Niagara size pukes on a regular basis. To put it another way, I AM MISERABLE.

I’m past the first trimester morning sickness line of demarcation (15 weeks-ish) and my relief knight is not coming to save me. This isn’t surprising. I had severe morning sickness with my now 13 month old daughter and baby number #2 obviously doesn’t want to be outdone.

Any pregnancy condition will illicit tons of advice, and although I sincerely appreciate all the advice I’ve received, none of it has done me any good. This is why I’ve decided to compile some morning sickness myths. These myths are specific to my experience, which admittedly falls outside the morning sickness norm, but if nothing has worked for me, I’m willing to bet other women have been or are in the same puke filled boat.

Myth #1: It will go away around 12 or 13 weeks. With my last pregnancy I counted the weeks until the end of the first trimester, hoping and believing my all day vomit fest would magically end. It didn’t. Guess what? It’s not ending now either. Sure, my vomit records of a few weeks ago aren’t being matched anymore (did you know someone could puke massive amounts 8 or 9 times a day?), but even though I only regurgitate my meals 2 to 3 times a day, I still feel nauseous all the time. I don’t think my misery came through loud enough. ALL THE TIME.

Myth #2: You feel bad because you are letting yourself feel bad. I particularly dislike this myth for obvious reasons. Nausea (other than the sound and splatter of vomiting) is difficult for others to see, so when it continues for weeks and months, some well meaning people start to question if perhaps a little mind over matter action would help. Maybe if you decide to feel well, you will feel well. This is like saying, “Sure, you broke your arm and half of the bone is sticking through, but maybe if you decide your arm isn’t broken, the pain will go away.”

Myth #3: If you really don’t want to puke, you won’t. This is similar to myth #2 in that it involves the power of the mind, but unlike that myth it doesn’t relate to morning sickness as a whole, but simply to the dehydrating getting sick part. [Fitting that I had to pause writing about this myth to go say goodbye to my breakfast.] A few fellow past morning sickness sufferers expressed empathy for my plight and mentioned they had been lucky enough to never actually throw up because they had a vomit phobia and therefore wouldn’t let themselves get sick. I believe they believe this ,but I don’t believe this is why they didn’t get sick. I tested out this theory the other night. When I started to feel particularly sick, I resisted the urge to run to the bathroom. Maybe if I just refused to get sick, I wouldn’t. The result: Major grossness running down my hands as I belatedly beelined for the loo. Sure, vomit can be postponed, but it can’t be avoided completely. If you didn’t puke with your morning sickness, it’s because you didn’t have to. Consider yourself lucky, not the Queen of will power.

Myth #4: Sea Bands. Move over Charlie Sheen. Momma’s on her own Truth Tour. No cream or ointment, no matter how expensive, will prevent or repair stretch marks. Gripe water will not cure colic. Sea Bands will not relieve morning sickness. And Santa Claus doesn’t exist. You’re welcome.

Myth #5: If all else fails, medication will help. For many woman this is true. Zofran has become the gold standard of maternity anti-nausea meds. It doesn’t work for me. Didn’t with Amelia, isn’t with this one. I took it for a couple months last time, about two weeks this time. It did cut down on the vomiting a bit (think 5 or 6x a day rather than 8 during the peak, but I decided that slight decrease wasn’t worth the side effects). I’ve also tried Unisom for about a week, Reglan for a couple days (that one didn’t agree with me), and Compazine, a drug I will never ever take again due to a very strange and very horrible allergic reaction. Unfortunately, Compazine was the only drug that stopped the vomiting, but going crazy didn’t seem like a good alternative.

Myth #6: Forget medication, go all natural with vitamin B6 and B12. I really wanted this one to work. Unlike the meds, these vitamins have no side effects and some studies I found online suggest they work better than a placebo. I took a combination of the two for about three weeks straight (and yes, I took the recommended dosing for morning sickness and not just for supplementation). I thought they were helping. I really did, but then I forgot to take them for a couple days and realized I felt pretty much the same. My puke count went down while taking them, but I’ve been off the vitamins for about three weeks and now realize the vitamins probably didn’t do it for me.

Myth #7: Try ginger or peppermint or saltines or coconut water or etc… No morning sickness myth countdown would be complete without mentioning ginger. I am so sick of ginger. I have tried ginger tea (both commercial and brewed with fresh ginger), candied ginger for keeping in your mouth, pickled ginger, ginger snaps (no one suggested this one, but I thought, why not?), and ginger ale. Ditto for peppermint variations. I can see how they would help with mild morning sickness. Real ginger ale does settle the stomach and peppermint candies have provided a distraction from my nausea. Coconut water is supposed to be nature’s gatorade, but I found the taste so repulsive I can’t really comment on its effectiveness yet. All I know, none of these things will actually stop the sickness. They might provide very temporary relief, or, in my case, a strange twitch whenever someone utters the word ginger.

The last remedy I have yet to try is acupuncture. The problem with this suggestion is not only the cost but the time and energy needed to get to a practitioner. When you are dehydrated, exhausted, and nauseous, when taking a shower is an accomplishment, driving all over town doesn’t seem worth the effort, even if it could possibly provide temporary relief. People say you won’t know if it is working until you’ve had about five sessions, five sessions that insurance doesn’t cover. When I was at my worst, I couldn’t even muster the energy to have someone else take me to the ER so I could get an IV. I thought collapsing in bed was a preferable alternative and, in retrospect, I realize that was not the best decision. But I’m tired and weak and any remedy I try needs to come to me at this point.

Oh, and the last myth buster that should go without saying, but should be reiterated for anyone who hasn’t been pregnant is “morning sickness” is a cruel misnomer. Puke doesn’t wear a watch.

Technically, Amelia is not yet one, but “11 1/2 months is the cutest number” didn’t have the right ring. I’ve stumbled upon the cutest age ever, and I’m gladly committing the horrible mommy blog sin of writing about the cuteness of my own child, which is okay, because at least I’m not writing about how I love one child over another (Yes, I only have one child, but, seriously, did you hear about that Babble post? Wait, don’t read it until I’m done telling you about my oh so adorable babe).

What makes one any cuter than one month or two years or eleven years? I can’t speak to 2 or 11, but I’m pretty sure the awkward preteens don’t hold a candle to the first birthday, nor do the terrible twos. Of course, your child is still cute, but I’m talking peak cuteness here. As for one month versus one year cuteness, no match. No neck control and inability to toddle up to mommy and hug her put newborns out of the cute running.

Within a short week Amelia has learned how to walk with amazing proficiency. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is cuter than a newly walking baby. Add in the cloth diaper bubble butt and her big blue eyes and its almost too much to handle. She roams the house, toy purse hanging off her arm, just walking up and down the hall, occasionally baby mumbling to herself or laughing at what I can only imagine is her imaginary friend.

Sure, she pulls the books off the shelves and has ripped the pages from both Invisible Man and Malcolm X’s Autobiography, prompting Dave to worry about possible brewing racism, but even this literary destruction cannot dampen her cute aura. All she has to do when I say “Oh, Amelia, stop that” is slowly toddle up to me and throw her arms around my neck. Yes, Amelia is not yet one, but she can work the cute like she’s on a mini baby catwalk.

Yesterday, she spit up all over my pants and inside her play purse and continued on her merry way, unperturbed by the baby drool dripping from her onesie. Even in this state of mess, any stranger would still ooh and ahh at her cuteness. I know this is true because this is what people do. When a newborn she often got compliments because of her big eyes and baby compexion, but now she turns her charm on and off like a switch. Surrounded by possible admirers? Stare them down and then giggle when they look over. Works every time.

I’m surprised some Hollywood celebrity hasn’t capitalized on the inherent cuteness of the unsure baby walk. The faux pigeon toe stance seems to be dying down a bit, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if in an effort to recapture their youth, twenty something starlets start toddling rather than walking.

All I can say in closing is…. my baby is just so darn cute (and yes, I tried to think of adjectives other than cute, but none fit the descriptive bill). There. I said it. No deep dark secrets or mom confessions here, just a banal ode to my particular baby’s cutie-pieness.

Dave and I had a half hour debate over whether or not the term “pre-toddler” is real or just something I made up. I insisted it was a made up term to describe a very real phase, like tween or preteen. Turns out, I’m not the first to use the word. A 1995 Babywise book has the title Parenting Your Pre-Toddler Five to Fifteen Months. I haven’t read the book, but the time frame of the title isn’t really what I mean by “pre-toddler.” In my (admittedly muddled) mind, I imagine the pre-toddler as roughly a one year old, not a baby, not yet a toddler.

Dave says a “not yet a toddler” is a baby. I disagree, hence the ridiculous time wastage that was our debate. While we argued, our baby/pre-toddler/not yet a toddler happily played with some blocks, unaware that she had to fit any made up definition at all.

Why the term “pre-toddler”? For one, I like to make up terms, even if they have already been used in the title of a 16 year old book. I’m unintentionally unoriginal. I also think Amelia is so different from the baby she was 11 months ago that calling her a baby doesn’t accurately describe her state, yet most people wouldn’t call her a toddler. She just started toddling a few days ago, but not enough to give the other toddling toddlers a run for their money (or sandbox).

I still call her “my baby”; however, I imagine I’ll be doing this when she’s 2 or 22. I think some daycares use the term “pre-toddler” as a way to differentiate the nursery from the play-areas, but is that a distinction between baby and toddler or infant and pre-todder? I’m definitely overthinking this linguistic demarcation.

Whatever she’s called, Amelia has entered a new phase of mobility. Not only has she started taking steps, enough to call her walking, but her crawling has moved into warp speed. If she sees something she wants, she’s off like a baby bolt. I’ve had people come up to me in the park and express amazement at her sheer speed. This speed is awesome to watch, but has brought out her devilish personality, which is why I can see a toddler peeking through. When I call her name because she’s heading towards something dangerous or because she has grabbed a particularly menacing stick or rock, she looks back, smiles at me, and takes off! Why that little stinker. The toddler years are going to be fun and frightening.

I’m quickly crossing that imaginary, but real, line between newbie parent and old hat. When I look back at 11 month ago Meredith, the one who changed her baby’s diaper at every single night waking, who read scores of books to teach her how to do things like burp a baby, who sanitized anything and everything her daughter touched, I want to laugh at that Meredith.

In retrospect, changing a diaper every couple hours during the night just made the midnight feedings more painful. Dave and I sometimes swapped out a dry diaper for a new one. Poor rookies. Burping a baby? Not all that hard. Plus, I haven’t burped Amelia since she was a couple months old. I discovered she does a pretty good job of expelling the air (and now takes great delight in it…I blame her father). I still sanitize a bit and wash her toys once a week, but my germ phobia is drifting away.

I’ve embraced my new dirt friendly attitude and even let Amelia eat dirt today, right in front of my apathetic eyes. We were play-dating at a park and, as usual, Amelia was the only baby crawling away from the group to explore. Explore for babies is code for put anything and everything in my mouth to see what happens.

Usually, I follow her around, removing every twig, leaf, or cigarette butt she finds (Smokers, please don’t throw cigs on the ground in a playground. As if). But today I thought “oh forget it.” She’s almost 11 months old and as far as I’m concerned, if she likes the taste of dirt, more power to her. It’s official. I give up. I let my daughter dine on dirt and I don’t even feel guilty. I wonder if the dirt acceptance or the guilt riddance is the sign of my transformation from “Nervous Nelly” to “Whatever” mama.

Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Photo from http://marginalien.blogspot.com

Dave provided technical support for this Life post by spelling K-L-I-N-G-O-N and showing me a picture. I called Amelia a “Klingon” the other day, but to be fair, in my head it was spelled C-L-I-N-G-O-N and I was simply making up a word to describe her new penchant for clinging to my pants’ legs as I try to get stuff done around the house. Dave overhead this new appellation and had a geek fit.

“Don’t call my daughter a Klingon!” he protested. I tried to explain, “She’s clingy. I can’t get anything done. She keeps on pantsing me.” This is why wearing loose fitting pajama bottoms next to an open window when you have a Klingon baby is a bad idea.

Dave looked at me like I had one of those freaky Klingon heads, asking “You really don’t know what a Klingon is?” Oh Dave dear, why would I know what that is? We have many similarities, but I’m afraid a love of science fiction is not one of them (notwithstanding my odd obsession with the 90s TV show Sliders that is on Netflix‘s play instantly).

I harbored a guess. “Is that something from Star Wars, like those tiny bears.” I was wrong on two accounts. Klingons are from Star Trek and they so are not tiny bears, aka Ewoks. I insisted Star Wars or Star Trek or Star whatever, I was still going to call Amelia my made up word. But then Dave showed me a picture and those Klingons are grotesque. Fine, I’ll take the word out of my Amelia vocabulary, but now what will I call her when she pulls my pants down simply because she doesn’t want me to walk to the dishwasher without her?

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Amelia begging her daddy to keep the game going!

I’m a genius. Maybe. Probably not. But I did stumble upon a really cool and cheap play idea for Amelia. While on an unnecessary IKEA excursion I picked up a new laundry basket, which meant I had another perfectly good laundry basket marked for garage purgatory.

This basket sat in the hall for three days because I’m too lazy to get the garage key and walk the ten feet out our back door. As I walked past this hall sore once again, I had a flash of inspiration. Sturdy white unused laundry basket = immediate baby toy. I had spent ten bucks on a red thingy from IKEA the other day, a toy that both Dave and my parents couldn’t quite figure out and one I kept insisting was a “find.” I claimed the ambiguity of the red thingy was actually a purposeful attempt on my part to buy her a toy with multiple uses. In reality, I buy a lot of crap from IKEA. But what better multiple purpose toy than a basket?

My plan was to turn it into a kind of mini fort, but I first plopped Amelia inside it because I thought she’d look cute. Laundry basket + baby = adorable photo-op. To my surprise, Amelia loved it, so I started to push her around. Amelia was overcome with laundry basket joy.

I pushed her around and around our little house until my back ached and I was out of breath–roughly five minutes. As soon as the basket ride screeched to a halt, Amelia screeched her opposition. This was baby talk for “More! More!” Exasperated, I first tried to remind her of the baby sign for “more” and then gave into her demands. Five more minutes passed and I was ready to pass out. Amelia protested my physical inabilities by screaming about her stationary state. Seriously, kid. “More” isn’t a difficult sign and I’m not able to push around twenty pounds of baby and laundry basket forever.

I take back my genius assertion. The laundry basket is a great toy, but I’m starting to wonder if I’ve created a monster. Amelia now crawls over to the laundry basket, props herself up, and insists I push her (this insisting takes the form of screaming). She’s not satisfied with a little fort when she can have an on demand amusement park ride.

The blood was Amelia’s, the tears were mine (and Amelia’s). She is totally fine, but the first (and second) instance of gushing blood from your little baby is always memorable, even if the cause is a teeny tiny two times over split lip. I’m a little surprised it took Miss Amelia ten months to scare me like this, but I’m not at all surprised that my reaction (after cleaning her up and cuddling) was to fish out the first aid book I got from the Red Cross a few years ago and take notes on what to do in emergencies. My plan is to print up these notes and laminate them. So yes, a split lip made me brush up on CPR. Not an over-reaction at all.

How did she get her twice over split? The first was a result of crawling around her high chair after lunch. I was at the sink washing up remnants of banana and lasagna. She and Kaiya were trying to beat each other’s record for who can eat the most food off the floor. I heard a scream, which is pretty normal around here, so I picked up Amelia, ready to soothe her spirits. When the screaming didn’t stop, I looked down and saw blood streaming from her mouth and already smeared on both her onesie and my shirt. Yikes!

In that moment, I realized I’m so not calm under pressure. I didn’t scream other than a quiet “Oh no” and I quickly grabbed a clean rag to try and somehow put pressure on the unknown blood source, but in my mind I was thinking “This is bad! She’s going to die!”

She didn’t. After a couple of minutes of sucking on a cool rag, the blood stopped and Amelia wanted down to play (in her bloody onesie no less). I was dismayed by the blood and the screaming, but I was more dismayed by my internal over-reaction. I jumped from bloody mouth to death in ten seconds. That can’t be good.

At the end of the day, Dave home and listening to the horror of the afternoon, Amelia playing at the play kitchen in between Dave and I, I beseeched Dave to buy me some chocolate after Amelia went to bed. When I had finally calmed down from the split lip, I had had no chocolate to comfort me. Hence the tears. Dave agreed and smiled at our lovely babe and then this lovely babe tripped over Kaiya’s dog bed (next to the play kitchen), falling on her face, and wouldn’t you know it, splitting that lip all over again. More tears. More gushing blood. No chocolate.

We cleaned her up, applied a cool teether, and put her to bed with a slightly swollen but not awful looking lip. Dave went to the store and came back with three different chocolate varieties. I learned a lot about myself that day. I learned I’m an over-reacting mother, despite past assumptions that I’d be a cool cucumber, and I learned the extent of my chocolate dependence. And Amelia learned…? Not much. The next day she was back to crawling around the high chair and on Kaiya’s bed.

Image: luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Amelia had her first ever grocery store temper tantrum, and in true Amelia fashion, it was momentous. She throws plenty of dramatically nuanced tantrums at home, but in public, especially in the grocery store, a land of people and food, she usually puts on her best flirtatious smile and charms onlookers. Sometimes I take Amelia out of the house just to put her in a good mood and to hear the “What a happy baby!” exclaims from strangers. Amelia, I ask you, what happened in Ralph’s. Were you unhappy with trying out a new grocery store? Upset I wouldn’t let you eat the broccoli right away? Having some sort of baby existential crisis?

Our house was dangerously low on food and chocolate, so, at first,  I didn’t want to end the weekly shopping trip because of simmering crankiness. This was a bad game time decision. The simmer quickly turned into a full on rage boil. Strangers who usually beam and smile at my dear baby quickly looked away or made comments about her needing a nap. Since Amelia had just woken up from a nap and had eaten not too long before, I’m blaming this tantrum on the way the wind was blowing.

I took her out of the grocery cart (the cart it had taken ten minutes to select after positioning the fluffy pink cover in two others with locked wheels), propped her on my hip and attempted to push the unwieldy cart with one hand and bag the produce with the other. This soothed Amelia for about five minutes, but then I had the audacity to take out a ball point pen and not give it to her. Oh, the horror. Her screams stopped other shoppers in their tracks.

I finally conceded that this shopping trip was past its expiration date, but I didn’t want to leave without at least buying the items already in the cart. They took forever to assemble and my hard work (yes, this is what counts as hard work for a mother to a ten month old) was not to be wasted.

As soon as the items were paid for and Amelia was out of the store, she started giggling and smiling at new shoppers, two of whom commented “What a happy baby!” That’s my girl.

We came home, recharged with some lunch and playing and then walked to our usual grocery store down the street. This plan was amenable to Amelia. I got to finish the shopping and she got to bask in the compliments of strangers. But I still didn’t get my shopping trip happy ending. I forgot to buy chocolate. Of course.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Amelia with Grandpa after he spent 45 minutes rocking her to sleep.

We have come to the end of our sleep saga. If you are new to this story, check out Part I and Part II. The last time I added an installment to this saga, Amelia was six months old and waking multiple times a night. She is now 9 1/2 months old and–wait for it–sleeping on average from 6:30pm to 5:30am. I know I should be rejoicing. My pediatrician even says I can’t expect more. But 5:30am? Really Amelia? I guess she’ll have no excuse for being late to school in five years.

How did we go from three wakings every night to none? Did we attempt the dreaded cry-it-out? Sorta. After our trip back East for Christmas, Amelia’s sleeping was unmanageable. I was at my wit’s end and so so tired. I had only slept through the night a couple times her entire life. I know some mothers have gone years without sleeping through the night and I can see how. Your body eventually adjusts, but my psyche never did. Chronic sleep deprivation is like a chronic illness. You can manage, but when you finally sleep again, you realize just how sick you were.

By the way, I’ve only been sleeping through the night for a couple weeks. Amelia has been doing her 11 hour stretch for almost a month, but I experienced horrible insomnia the first few weeks of this transformation, a cruel trick my body was playing on me. I usually can sleep like a bear when given the chance.

I started this motherhood journey thinking cry-it-out is akin to child abuse. I now realize it is more like mother abuse. We tried it once or twice and I couldn’t do it, so as a result Amelia got even more cuddling and woke up every night expecting nocturnal mommy time. Even though I couldn’t stomach cry-it-out, I have little patience for the argument that you are causing permanent damage to your child if you let him/her cry, barring a real physical problem. Some people have even suggested it is akin to hitting your child or to serious physical neglect. Perhaps if you try this technique when your baby is very young, but at nine months, a baby is likely not waking from hunger, but from habit. That said, I still couldn’t imagine actual cry-it-out as an option, which is funny because you’d think with all the crying Amelia does around here, I would have developed a thick skin. I so haven’t.

What did I mean when I said we “sorta” tried that technique? At the beginning of January, I cracked. I couldn’t stop crying. I would get so angry at Amelia when she woke at night. She wanted cuddling and instead she got a bitter mamma. We decided to gradually change her milk feedings to water. Over the course of a week or so, we were able to eliminate most wakings through this technique only, but getting her to go to sleep still involved tons of crying and screaming and rocking and laying on the floor next to her and lifting a sleeping baby into her crib.

When I started to think about cry-it-out, I realized Amelia had been channeling Ferber since the day she was born. Every night she would cry herself to sleep, but in our arms. We had tried adjusting the bedtime, sticking to a routine, soothing her with nursing or a bottle or songs or white noise. It didn’t matter. She would cry through all of it. So if your baby doesn’t cry for 45 minutes to an hour every single night of her life, even as you try nursing her to sleep or cuddling, consider yourself blessed with an easy child.  With all the screaming in this house, maybe cry-it-out wouldn’t be that different from our everyday routine?

But I still couldn’t do it. Finally, Dave and I made a plan. We would sit in the nursery with her until she went to sleep, still soothe her with our voice and occasionally stroke her hair, BUT WE WOULD NOT TAKE HER OUT OF THE CRIB. We decided this would be our one form of consistency, other than the bedtime routine we had meticulously crafted.  I braced myself for the crying and told myself “Just don’t pick her up.”

The first night we gave her a bath, read her a story, fed her a bottle, sang her a song, and put her in the crib while whispering “It’s night night time.” This was the same routine we’d been doing for months, only in the past she would cry when placed in the crib and we would pick her up (she also still cries when we change her into her pajamas and diaper. She is obstinate to the end).

That first night, Amelia stood up and glared at me (I was sitting in a chair across the room). For twenty minutes, she stood up, sat down, stood up, sat down, yelled some stuff at me, let out a few frustrated screams, sucked her thumb, and finally laid down and went to sleep. Here’s the kicker: She didn’t actually cry. Sure, she yelled a couple times, but compared to the screaming we had endured from her birth day, that was nothing. We tried it again the next night and the next. Sometimes she would cry in frustration for a couple minutes because we wouldn’t pick her up, but mostly she just “talked to us” for fifteen minutes and then fell asleep. After a week, we were able to put her in the crib and leave the room completely.

Was this a joke? All the months of soothing resulted in 45 minutes of crying; one week of putting her in her crib resulted in magic. I’m not sure this would work for every baby. Amelia is the only kid I know who screams when trying to be soothed and calmly falls asleep when “crying-it-out.” I definitely don’t think it would have worked when she was younger. The whole sleeping through the night thing seemed at least partly dependent on introducing solids after 6 months and gradually weaning her off milk feedings. But I am convinced if we hadn’t taken action a month ago, we would still be dreading the bed time routine and rocking a screaming baby to sleep. Sure, I get up at the unfortunate 5:30am hour (any suggestions for that? Anyone?), but if I go to sleep at a reasonable time, I can get 8 solid hours. I’d love 9 or 10, but I’ll follow my pediatrician’s advice and try not to complain, even though complaining is in my DNA. Hmm? My DNA. This explains a lot about Amelia.

It’s January in San Diego, which means I’m in Spring cleaning mode; the lack of seasons has messed with my internal calendar. Oh, and Spring Cleaning is actually code for household project time. This is when I walk though our rental, glare at a room or wall and proclaim “We need to….” Dave hates these proclamations so much that he doesn’t even let me finish my sentence before exclaiming “No! Stop!” In fact, if I innocently look too long any place within the home he commands me to prevent an idea from even forming.

But I can’t stop myself. I am the self-proclaimed Idea Woman. During one of these glaring sessions, I came up with the great idea of redecorating our kitchen, which would involve paint and some craftiness. During another glaring session, I came up with the great idea of turning the wall in between the nursery and guest room into “The Riley Library,” complete with handmade plaque showcased above IKEA shelves housing Amelia’s books. My next project as The Idea Woman is a sandbox, completion date yet to be determined.

I am The Idea Woman because the actual project process fills me with no joy. I like brainstorming and imagining, and I like the finished project, but I’m allergic to craftiness. Did I mention Dave loathes The Idea Woman? All he hears is The Making More Work for Dave Woman. Sure, I wanted block letters that I knew I couldn’t cut in half and sand. And, sure, I knew he would hang the shelves. And, sure, I knew he would help paint. And, sure, I don’t have any intention of building a sandbox myself. But I ask, can a price be put on the original spark of an idea? Perhaps just the price of Dave’s labor.

By the way, I love the new Riley Library.  Amelia loves it too.  So far she has only removed all the books from the lower two shelves and chewed on them, but I can see the literary sparkle in her eye as she digests cardboard. I’m positive language can enter babies through their digestive systems. And when I saw Amelia glaring at the newly decorated wall, as she chewed Goodnight Moon, I knew Dave’s frustration with mommy as The Idea Woman is nothing to what he will experience when Amelia turns into The Idea Girl.

I don't share a lot of Amelia photos, but a visual really helps with this story.

Ha.  I knew it.  I knew my baby girl stood out from the pack.  I knew she was marching to the beat of her own baby drummer.  I just knew it.  Since having Amelia those nine months ago, I have struggled with her tantrums and have reveled in her eccentricities. I mean, I thought they were eccentricities.  The problem with being a stay at home mom to one baby is you have no frame of reference.  Sure, Amelia has hung around a couple other babies and her once in a blue moon sitter politely suggested she was more spirited than most, but I never had real life confirmation that Amelia is crawling laps around  her peers.

I got this confirmation at baby sign language.  A few months ago I had purchased Baby Sign Language Basics but always forgot to actually use any of the signs.  I then realized the author, Monta Briant, has a studio in San Diego.  Right now Amelia’s attempts at communication begin and end with screaming.  Loud, loud, eardrum shattering screaming (Can colic come back at 9 months?)  I figured a little signing could get us out of the house and maybe, fingers crossed, help with our communication problem.

Let me set the scene.  We arrive early, as do a couple other moms, and wait patiently for Monta to arrive.  Amelia is a little shy, quietly staring at the other babies.  When we enter the super cute colorful and carpeted studio, Amelia sits calmly in my lap, as do the other seven or eight babies who eventually show.  Monta dumps out an assortment of toys in the middle of the circle and Amelia cautiously grabs one.  I’ve noticed with Amelia that she always starts out surveying the situation, but then an internal curiosity switch turns on when she has decided all is okay.  About two minutes into the play and I see the transformation.  Uh oh, do I have the energy for Amelia curiosity?

Amelia is off!  She leaps out of my lap and barrels toward another baby, intent on stealing the toy, which she successfully does.  Meanwhile, Monta has started introducing herself and explaining the class’ format.  Amelia, tired of one toy, becomes entranced by the painted rabbits on the wall and quickly exits the circle to test them out.  Monta begins teaching us signs.  Out of the corner of her eye, Amelia notices a glint of silver in Monta’s hand, a ring holding together index cards with different signs on them.  Losing interest in the rabbit, Amelia rushes through the middle of the circle of parents and babies.  I chase after.  Playing with painted rabbits or grabbing a toy is one thing, but attacking the teacher in pursuit of a shiny object is another.  Monta laughs her off and hides her index cards.  A few parents exclaim, “Wow, she is fast.”  Did I mention every other baby is either sitting in his/her mother’s lap or playing calmly in close proximity to a parent.  Amelia screeches when I try to pick her up.  She crawls all over Monta, Frodo-like, trying to find the ring (Dave, that reference is for you).

I manage to coral her for a few seconds, but quickly decide a curious crawling Amelia is preferable to a screeching stationary one.  Monta turns on some music and starts signing to the rapt babies sitting in a circle.  Amelia, holding on to a cushioned seat, bops up and down outside the group.  A few parents start laughing, “Wow, she likes music.”  Oh, and lest you think Amelia’s love of the silver ring holding together index cards has disappeared, she catches sight of them again and leaves her perch to crawl behind Monta.  Kid, you are exhausting me.  At the end of class, one parent comments, “She’s going to be a handful.”  I respond, “She already is.”  And she’s not even walking yet.

I wasn’t surprised by Amelia’s inability to sit still.  She’s a baby after all.  However, I was shocked the other babies, ranging from 6 to 16 months, stayed by their mothers.  Shocked!  Every time I tried to get Amelia to play with me, she quickly squirmed out of my arms and set off, as if she was saying “Love ya mom, but too much to see.  Catch ya later.”  If I can harness and direct Amelia’s enthusiasm and curiosity, she’s going to accomplish anything she wants.  In the meantime, I bought her a harness, literally, one of those leash backpacks, not because she needs it soon and not because I plan on leashing her wherever we go, but I can already tell while the other kids ooh and ahh about a cliff from a distance, Amelia will charge ahead, intent on getting her shiny silver ring.  I can see it now.  “Amelia, if everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you?”  “Mom, I’m the everyone else.”

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Dave thinks I’m joking when I threaten (or entice) Kaiya with a permanent vacation at a farm, and, no, that is not a euphemism.  If we had the money, I’d love to send her away and then visit with her on the weekends and holidays.  When I mentioned my fantasy to Dave, he, aghast about my coldheartedness, asked, “So you want to send our dog to boarding school?”  Yes please.  By the way, I know Kaiya would love this set-up.

Kaiya is annoying.  This is a fact.  I don’t care about the size of her heart or her big brown puppy dog eyes.  She barks.  A lot, and always at the worst time.  I put a taped message over the doorbell, reminding the UPS guy or Jehovah’s Witnesses not to think about ringing it, lest they wake my sleeping beauty.  But more than one package carrier has pointed to the note, as Kaiya barks her head off in the background, and has asked “Can the baby sleep through this?”  The answer.  No.  No, she doesn’t.  Kaiya is annoying.

Perhaps sensing the end of my dog rope, Amelia has taken it upon herself to annoy Kaiya in return.  She gleefully crawls around the house, chasing poor Kaiya who only wants to rest her dog-tired legs.  At one point, Kaiya hid herself in the nook between our bed and the wall, even stuffing her giant German Shepherd snout underneath the bed’s corner.  I don’t know how she did it, but in less than ten seconds Amelia found this dog and was giggling while grabbing her tail.  I thought all was fair.  Kaiya barked and Amelia chased, but Kaiya’s new incontinence has revealed a whole new level of pain in my rear.

Kaiya is allergic to something.  I’m guessing the house or the rat’s nest that is our yard.  We changed her food about three times at the vet’s request, but her itching didn’t dissipate.  When we took Kaiya to Sacramento for a month, the allergies disappeared even as her food remained the same.  Great.  We successfully eliminated what would have been an easily replaceable allergen.  I knew this house was trying to poison us.  Back in San Diego, Kaiya’s body began to torture her again.  Luckily, the pharmaceutical industry has created dog allergy medicine, medicine with the only unfortunate side effect of making my dog unknowingly pee all over the house at the exact moment when I have a baby who loves to crawl around this house.  Kaiya, no offense, but you are annoying.  I would keep Kaiya in our “yard,” but I’m pretty sure the allergen must be in that mess and if we put her out there all day she barks.  Did I mention the yard is right outside Amelia’s window?  Goodbye sleep.  I did love you so.

My solution to this so far unsolvable problem is to feel sorry for myself, threaten Kaiya with the farm, and mop the kitchen floor every single day.  Tonight I’m making Dave steam clean the carpets, again.  I’m not a natural homemaker, so this solution is killing me.  Mrs. Myers and Dr. Bronners are no longer my friends.  We need to spend some time apart.  Your scent that used to make me feel so great, now makes my head ache.

I keep on telling Dave to schedule a blood test that will hopefully reveal a specific allergen.  Dave says the appointment will cost us money we don’t have right now.  Did I mention Kaiya pees on the same floor my daughter likes to lick?  We’ll be making that appointment soon.

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I’m sure you have heard the famous phrase “A family who does yoga together stays together.”  You know, the famous phrase by the famous yogi whatshisname.  Not ringing a bell?  Okay, perhaps the phrase isn’t famous or even catchy, but its our new Riley motto.

After the holidays, both Dave and I felt sluggish and generally old and doughy.  I vowed to eat less sugar, a vow I’m not keeping at the moment.  Dave vowed to get his health back and find new ways to relax, a vow that involves a lot of upward facing dogs.  I own three beginner yoga DVDs and I have owned these for 5 years.  Why haven’t I moved on to intermediate or advanced purchases?  I don’t know.  Lazy or cheap or both.  I scrounged through our DVD collection and pulled out Body Wisdom Yoga for Beginners by Barbara Benagh, my favorite of my seldom used better me DVD items.  I thought Dave would laugh at the earthy crunchy voice overs and cuts to waves splashing, but he didn’t make a snarky peep.  We did the gentle unwind for about 30 minutes and Dave struggled through most of the bends and twists, suddenly aware of yoga’s difficulty.  But he loved it so much, we are planning to incorporate evening yoga into our schedule a few times a week.

I’ll admit, I didn’t see this happening.  When I would do yoga in Virginia, Dave always made a lot of uncouth jokes.  Parenthood has acted as a health do over impetus or, perhaps, parenthood has made the de-stressing power of yoga essential to our physical sanity (physical sanity is a thing, right?).

Lest you think we have turned over a new leaf, our yoga is purely yuppie.  In fact, one of my items on today’s to-do list is buy a yoga mat for Dave at Target.  For us, yoga isn’t likely to be about some inward spiritual journey and that’s fine.  We’ll see how long this lasts, but I’m optimistic about health changes we can make together.  Unfortunately for Dave, my desire to sugar detox has been confusing.  I asked him to support me in my decision, in other words, to remind me of my sugar addiction in my moments of weakness.  Predictably, whenever Dave tries to do this, I get mad and eat the cookie anyway.  Meanwhile, Dave wanted to do a strange detox liquid type diet for a couple weeks and I told him I wouldn’t support that decision.  Based on the science, detoxes don’t actually do anything, but more importantly I didn’t want him to mess with family dinner time. We compromised and now take our probiotics together in the morning.  Our OCD dorkiness knows no bounds.

Our solution of joint incremental changes has been great, even if the other two members of our family still don’t participate.  Amelia is not included in this family yoga time because she is already asleep by 8pm and because a 9 month old is so flexible she could join the Cirque Du Soliel.  We tried to include Kaiya, but she told us downward facing dog was part of her DNA.  Would we purchase a DVD teaching us how to do standing human pose?  I think not.

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Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We did it, again.  We took Amelia thousands of feet into the air, contained her with hundreds of people, disrupted her nap schedule, had her eat baby food, dealt with a daddy migraine and a baby freak out, and barely lived to tell about it.  Truthfully, when I said flying across country wasn’t that bad, I was delusional.

The trip back from Albany wasn’t fun, not at all.  Maybe it was the result of almost two weeks of poor Amelia sleeping (or, let’s be honest, eight months).  Maybe it was the extra post Christmas/pre New Year crowd, maybe something was in the air, but Amelia was not the picture perfect traveler.  She didn’t scream the whole trip.  In fact, she wavered between maniacal giggling and shrieking.  When she would start laughing hysterically at nothing, people commented “What a happy baby!”  I looked at them and replied, “Yes, she is.  But right now, this is the razor’s edge.”  Non-parents had no idea what I meant.

We dealt with the razor’s edge with a plethora of toys and lots of holding, but ultimately buying that extra seat was still the BEST DECISION EVER.  She did sleep the entire last leg, but mostly the car seat acted as a play pen.  She was wiggly and enamored with the people sitting behind her, crawling and climbing on the car seat to look at these people (initially amusing and then exasperating our backseat neighbors).

When she finally lost energy, Amelia refused to sleep.  At one point, she started swinging her head violently back and forth, all while screeching. We knew she was tired, but she wouldn’t even take a finger.  She would pause to laugh, then scream, then laugh, before continuing the head flailing.  Dave and I looked at each other confused.  What the what?

But that was about four hours into the excursion.  The tone of the trip was set in the security line.  Dave and I are pretty amazing at getting through security lines, a result of awesome team work.  Based on our first flight, I knew they would probably double check the diaper bag because of one jar of pureed baby food.  The Albany TSA employees, although nice, were not quite as organized as in San Diego, and therefore oddly diligent about giving extra screening to all parents.  One of the women informed me that since I had exempt items in my bag (the one jar of baby food) I was required to be selected for the extra screening, the pat down that has been in the news.  I thought the policy was a little strange because by that logic every single parent traveling with any sort of exempt liquid would need the extra screening, perhaps a misguided singling out of moms.  Fine, pat me down.  I don’t care.  However, no one really knew if I had to remove my shoes, what had to be screened, what they were doing.  At one point, after receiving the pat down (in front of everyone by the way), as two women considered whether or not to scan my shoes, I said “Look, my shoes are already off, so….”  They re-scanned my shoes simply because I had put a stop to their indecision for the sake of getting this show on the road.  After five minutes of my extra security screening, I walked away feeling a bit concerned by the confusion and the time wasted.  I heard on one radio show that different airports have different standards to throw off would be terrorists.  A grand plan or organization disorganization?  You decide.

Once through security, Amelia’s energy and enthusiasm easily segwayed into a nap for the first couple hours of the first flight, but her snoozing was the calm before the storm.  Meanwhile, Dave experienced the worst headache of his life, likely the result of dehydration, but I managed to convince myself of a possible brain hemorrhage (I was also reading the new biography of Cancer and thought I had lymphoma).

Although the trip was fairly insufferable, I did realize I’m immune to negative public opinion about my baby.  None of her screaming fits were prolonged, but she did let out screeches off and on for a good part of the trip.  On the last leg, from Vegas to San Diego, Amelia started to scream because she was over tired, and a baby in front of us also let out a yell.  The girl behind us loudly announced “This is going to be the worst flight ever.”  I knew Amelia’s screams were a last ditch struggle against sleep and that as soon as we lifted off her eyes would close, which they did.  I always imagined I would be embarrassed at being “that” mom with the not easy to soothe baby, but it turns out, soothing this unsoothable baby is more important than caring what anyone else thinks.  I don’t know why I couldn’t see that before.

We survived, but I think family and friends should consider visiting San Diego in the future:)

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Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We did it. We took Amelia thousands of feet into the air, contained her with hundreds of people, disrupted her nap schedule, had her try baby food, dealt with a mommy and baby simultaneous cold, and lived to tell about it. Truthfully, flying across country with Amelia wasn’t that bad, but I’m sure I’ll be eating my words when we go back to California (but I imagine eating words is still preferable to pureed chicken).

If you listened to Podcast Episode 14: The Child Unfriendly Skies, you will know I had major anxiety about this cross country trek, anxiety amplified by the general public’s distaste for babies.  Initially, Dave and I planned to save money by plopping our wiggly baby on our laps.  However, a brief 1 1/2 hour flight on Southwest last month made Dave insist we change our plans, open our wallet, and buy that kid a seat.  BEST-DECISION-EVER.  Not only were we allowed to use the car seat, a safer alternative than our laps, but we were able to cordon off an entire row for ourselves.  We took our Snap n Go and Ergo for the airport, checked the Snap n Go at the entrance to the airplane, and comfortably set up camp at the back of the plane.

Did Amelia freak out?  Of course!  We may have purchased an extra seat, but we were still bringing along our own baby.  But her freak-outs were short lived and related to a general cabin fever, not air pressure or going up or down.  Even though she had a cold, her ears didn’t bother her at all.  I didn’t nurse her on take off or landing because I had read unless a kid has an ear infection, she usually isn’t bothered.

Although Amelia was cute and cuddly most of the ride, I was not.  At one point Dave had to stop me from making a scene.  As the day progressed, my slight sore throat of the morning turned into a very sore throat of the afternoon and a painful sore throat combined with a pounding headache of the evening.  I was in no mood for rude people.  The not so kind fellow sitting in front of Amelia decided to recline his seat as far as possible, thereby pushing up the car seat into an awkward semi-vertical position.  While Amelia was in the seat, this guy had tried to recline and had looked annoyed at the baby and her accoutrements stopping his chair.  Sure, that stinks, but get over it.  When we took Amelia out of her seat, he decided it was a perfect time to recline and snooze without a pesky baby blocking his way.  Dave and I looked at her awkwardly positioned car seat and decided to put it in the center seat so that she could nap (No one was sitting in front of that seat).  Amelia finally slipped into a deep sleep and I rested my aching head on the window.  As I closed my eyes, congratulating myself on the ease of the flight so far, a flight attendant came by and told us we had to move the car seat back to the window, otherwise it was blocking my exit.  I was livid and kept on saying “No, just no.  Let him move the sleeping baby.”  (Yes, I understand my exit can’t be blocked, but she was sleeping!) Dave calmed me down as I pushed up on the seat in front of me, hoping to jar awake the jerk in front of us.  Dave magically eased the seat back to its original location and Amelia amazingly stayed asleep.  I shot daggers at the guy who had reclined the seat in the first place.  He knew a baby was behind him and he knew reclining his seat was likely to push up on the car seat.  Who does that?

Other than this dense dude, our flight was drama free.  Puffs and cheerios magically calmed her whenever a scream tried to escape from her throat and the ever present pacifier, known as Dave’s finger, helped when she would abruptly wake up.  We packed a banana and some jars of baby food, hoping to keep her messy eating within social bounds.  Not only did the baby food smell pretty horrendous when we opened the jar (Dave was so embarrassed by the smell he forbid me from feeding her pureed chicken in public), but Amelia, used to feeding herself, kept on grabbing the spoon, making clean eating impossible.  Still, this slight mess was minuscule compared to the screaming, food throwing baby of my flying nightmares.

I’m sure having written this post, Amelia will decide to try a different, less calm approach when we fly back, but luckily I’ve realized I don’t care all that much about the reactions of the people surrounding us.  As long as we focus on making Amelia comfortable and happy, we can’t blame ourselves for anyone else’s momentary inconvenience.  And to be fair to Amelia, few people can resist her giggles, not elderly women sitting behind us or morose looking teenage boys listening to heavy metal too loudly.  When Amelia got that guy to smile towards the end of the flight, I knew we had a charmer on our hands.

Merry Christmas!

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Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Before last week, I foolishly thought extensive baby-proofing was the domain of paranoid, neat freak, posh, uber organized parents (I’m ashamed to admit the word “posh” is in my vocabulary).  I had simply been following Amelia around the house, shuffling potential dangers out of the way.  We had set up a mini play zone in the living room for when I can’t follow Amelia around, plugged up the sockets, and called it a baby-proofing day.

Kaiya has even been trained, accidentally, to move when Amelia grabs her tail or lunges towards her.  This maneuver never stops being funny.  A giggling Amelia grabs Kaiya’s nose and Kaiya jumps up on her creaky old dog legs, looks at me like I’ve ruined her life, and runs into the next room.  I know she does this because when Amelia first came home, I made Kaiya move whenever she tried to lick Amelia’s head off.  I’m both proud of Kaiya for internalizing my commands and a little sad I’ve made her afraid of the big bad baby monster known as Amelia poopy pants.  Overall, Kaiya’s new timidity and my hawk like mommy eyes had made me complacent.

But then Amelia’s crawling, amazingly, moved into baby warp speed.  Suddenly, all my misplaced preconceived notions about baby-proofing came crashing down as just another Meredith opinion based on very little actual experience.  Motherhood has been an endlessly humbling journey.

Amelia’s new favorite game is called find the most dangerous object in the room and try to eat it.  Our little house now feels like a treacherous war zone.  I had never realized how many stupid cords we use to plug in our energy sucking computers, wireless routers, television, lamps, guitar hero.  I had a plugged in shredder sitting on the ground in the guest room.  A shredder!  Am I insane?  All my podcasting equipment still calls that room home, so we keep the door closed, but the shredder had to go anyhow.

Amelia also finds Kaiya’s food and water dishes hilarious, and she has discovered the joy of taking all the books off our bookshelves, itself not as annoying as I thought it would be, yet I had a horrible dream about a crashing bookshelf and little baby legs peaking out ala the Wizard of Oz.  I finally asked Dave how we stabilize these inanimate monsters.  That is on our to do list.

I decided the crockpot, blender, and attachments to the food processor probably shouldn’t be in the lowest cupboard.  Dave has taken to keeping some of his straight razors on a low shelf in the bathroom, so that room is officially off limits.  What kind of people are we?  Straight razors and shredders.  Are we trying to make a low budget baby horror movie?  Needless to say, I’ve turned into the paranoid, wannabe neat freak, still not posh, slightly organized parent.

A friend recently asked me if Amelia has a daddy or mommy preference.  This friend has another friend whose son refuses to go to daddy, a heartbreaking phase.  For Amelia, it depends on the day and on what she wants.  Overall, she probably cries more for me than for Dave, but when Dave walks in the door after a day of work, Amelia’s face lights up like our invisible Christmas tree.  Yes, she smiles and laughs with me, but this particular brand of twinkle is reserved for daddy.  This is why I insist Amelia is a daddy’s girl.  Dave, however, views the preference differently.  He reminds me of the times she practically leaps out of his arms to reach me or of how I am often the only person who stops her crying.

Let’s see?  Twinkle smile for daddy and insistent cry for mommy.  I’m not sure that means I’m winning the preference war.  Yesterday, Dave, Amelia, and I were splayed on the floor, toys surrounding us, lullabies playing in the background.  Amelia had refused to sleep at her normal early bedtime, so rather than force the issue, we had opted for some quiet play time until she tired.  Dave can get that girl to giggle like no other, but when she bumped her head, I was needed to dry her tears (and snot).  In that moment of giggle to cry, I realized I may make it all better, but Dave makes it fun.

I feed into the making it all better part of the bargain.  When Amelia started crying because she didn’t want to sleep, Dave picked her up and brought her to a cordoned off play part of the living room.  I wanted to write a blog post and Dave offered to watch her.  Dave was sitting next to her, but Amelia sat on her knees and bawled, looking straight at me.  Seeing her cute face scrunched up and covered with tears made me start crying.  Amelia sat on her knees, arms stretched out, tears streaming down her face and I stood before her, arms stretched out, tears streaming down my face.  Dave sat between us, confused.  I didn’t write the blog post.

On a slightly related note, Amelia has learned how to pull herself up, which necessitated adopting the lowest crib setting.  This new found ability is tragicomic around bedtime.  Sometimes Amelia goes right to sleep, but sometimes, with sleepy red eyes and a cranky I’m tired cry, she resists.  If we know she is really tired but resisting, we sit next to her until she falls asleep, or, that is what we did until the skillful standing made that impossible.  She simply pulls herself up and grabs our noses.  That night, Dave decided to sit in the rocker across from her.  He said she pulled herself up, wrapped one arm around the crib for support, and used the other to suck her thumb, all the while staring at Dave and crying at him.

She did something comparable last night after the night-time play session.  I sat in the glider and sang her lullabies.  She stood up, put both arms on the crib rail and yelled at me.  I burst out laughing.  A colicky scream used to make me weep, but an eight month old rebel yell is kinda hilarious, even if it does mean I usually cave and take her out of the crib.  Oh Amelia Bedelia, you have us wrapped around your pretty pudgy baby finger.

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I’m sitting in our house in San Diego, feeling the urge to shhh myself, even though I am quiet except for the sound of typing.  Amelia is FINALLY asleep, no thanks to the soothing powers of her momma.   This nap was all Ann Margret’s doing.  What magic power does Anne Margret have over my daughter and how I can ever thank her for this power?  I’m also eating chocolate right now.  My mom in her infinite wisdom put a chocolate turkey, a Thanksgiving gift for my daughter, in my travel bag, even after I told her I didn’t want to eat it.  My mom said it was in case of a “chocolate emergency.”  Today is a chocolate emergency kind of day.

I spent all of last month in Sacramento with my parents, and although I could see Amelia’s sleeping habits getting worse and worse due to all the attention she was commanding, I enjoyed the babysitting help and the extra hour I could sleep in the morning.  Amelia enjoyed, well, everything about Sacramento.  Now, back in San Diego, she is trying to rediscover her colicky three month old self.  She spent the last two hours crying.  She hasn’t done that in months (the crying for hours, not the crying in general.  She is a crier).  I nursed her, rocked her, let her cry as I put laundry away, played with her, took her into public, basically tried everything that once helped calm her.  NOTHING WORKED.  I knew she wasn’t sick.  It was a general “mom you are boring me” or “mom don’t leave me while you pee” type of cry.

While in Sacramento, my dad stumbled upon an unlikely crying cure.  He was showing her the musical Bye Bye Birdie and Amelia’s screams turned to giggles when she saw Ann Margret in front of a blue screen, singing the title song.  We played that clip hundreds of times up in Sacramento, but Dave and I don’t own the musical here (I actually still have no idea what is happening in the movie because I’ve only seen the musical numbers.).  I bought the song off iTunes, hoping it would calm her on the car ride, but the rendition isn’t the same as in the movie.

During Amelia’s screaming fit today, I started to wonder how fast I could find the movie.  Would Target or Best Buy have it?  What to do?  I went to You Tube and typed in Bye Bye Birdie (with one hand because Amelia was on my lap).  An image of Ann Marget in a gold dress appeared.  Jackpot.  I hit play and Amelia immediately starting smiling.  Most of the other musical numbers from the movie are also on You Tube.  A half hour of hitting repeat and my little angel is napping, probably dreaming of Ann Margret.  Perhaps I should be jealous of Miss Margret from the 1960s, but truth be told, I’m wondering where I can find a gold dress and red wig and how long it would take to paint one wall bright blue.  Maybe Amelia needs a little Ann Margret in her momma.  If you are curious about the exact amazing clip, I embedded the You Tube video below.

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This is the Margret magic:

Amelia had her first taste of solids at age 6 months, 2 days.  I read Gill Rapley’s book on introducing solids to babies by skipping purees and rice cereal and in it she mentions that babies may at first be reluctant when confronted with solid food, that they will first play with the food before eating it, and that we as parents should watch the process and not freak out about consumption quotas.

The first day of solids, I put Amelia in her high chair, a mat placed beneath it, as the book recommends, and braced for a lot of confused baby looks.  I put the banana on the tray.  Amelia picked it up and began eating, without a pause, a glance at the food, or anything.  She ate the entire banana.  Huh?

The next day I gave her a whole very ripe pear.  I took a bite out of it to get her started and then placed the pear on her tray.  She ate the whole thing (except for the bits and pieces falling out of her mouth).  Dave was gone that evening so I walked to a pizza place specializing in healthy pizza options (think whole wheat and eggplant).  I held Amelia with one hand and tried to eat with the other.  She did an Amelia freak out, screaming, crying, fidgeting.  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.  She had been fine a minute before.  I let her taste the pizza and she started to smile.  Uh oh, I thought.  I’ve created an eating monster.

The Baby Led Weaning book advises limiting your baby’s intake of sugar and salt.  I’ve been pretty good about watching out for salt, but sugar has been another story.  Mind you, I don’t give her pumpkin pie or ice cream for a meal, but when out at a restaurant, I have quickly learned the sight of sugar combined with a “harmless little taste” brings out Amelia’s sugar demons.  While out to dinner with my parents, she started to scream with delight when the ice cream that came with our meals arrived.  I let her have a taste.  Bad idea.  She started to screech when the ice cream stopped being offered, causing everyone in the restaurant to turn their heads, and causing me to make a choice between giving Amelia more sugar or ruining my own dessert bliss as I ushered a screaming kid out of the restaurant.  I chose the former.  I know I should feel bad.  This can’t be a good precedent.  But I love ice cream.

Not all BLW days are perfect.  We are discovering which foods upset her stomach (surprisingly few) and some days she doesn’t eat much.  She hasn’t refused anything offered to her and she is an EXTREMELY MESSY eater.  Cleaning up is a pain, but not buying baby food or pureeing my own makes up for the five extra minutes of wiping down a high chair.  We do give her quite a few soft foods with a spoon.  I preload the spoon but do not place it on the high chair tray.  Instead I hold it in front of her and let her grab it.  This has helped with the mess, kinda.

A little over a month of solids and I’d say Baby Led Weaning has been a success.  Despite some of the claims about BLW, I’m not sure I’m convinced Amelia is destined to be a better eater or have better hand eye coordination than the baby eating purees, but meal times are enjoyable, something I credit to this solid food approach.  I like eating my sandwich as Amelia munches on a carrot or eggplant.  We have lunch time conversations that feel very European, in the sense we are each having a lovely time,  slowly eating our meals, and speaking a different language the other can’t understand.  I try not to help her when she has trouble picking up a piece of food.  I used to hand it to her, but I now realize she is much more capable than even I imagined.

Although I usually love our leisurely lunches, the only downside of BLW may be the time it takes to finish a meal (other than the mess).  I don’t control how fast she consumes her food and some nights I’m just not in the mood to watch her struggle with a piece of broccoli.  That said, I love that lunch is our meal time, not hers or mine alone.  She’s my little babbling messy eating secret sharing girlfriend.  Please pass the broccoli–and the ice cream.

Motherhood has turned me into the cranky old woman in the neighborhood, the one who wants to post No Soliciting, No Trespassing, Leave Me Alone! signs, the one who shuffles around in her bathrobe with a constant scowl on her face.  Perhaps that is an exaggeration, but only a little.  I’ve become so anti-social that I sicked Kaiya on two unsuspecting women canvassing my parents’ neighborhood.  I did this accidentally and at first felt bad about the image of a barking Kaiya sprinting to the gate as two slight women jumped back in horror, but I quickly decided they got what they deserved.   Mind you, these women were coming to the yard in the middle of a bright sunny day; they were not strange intruders standing in the driveway at night (and I do find it funny that Kaiya happily greeted the intruder from last week and barked ferociously at the probably pleasant women).

I don’t consider myself a perpetually unhappy person.  Despite previous complaining about Amelia’s spirited temperament, I find great joy in playing with her, feeding her, watching her discover the world, but one part of her day is sacred–her nap.  If you mess with her sleep, you will experience the tired mother’s wrath.  She doesn’t have a consistent sleep schedule, although I have tried.  When I do get her to nap, forty minutes later on the dot she announces her slumber’s end.  Kaiya is bad enough at home, always barking at the worst time, but here she has three other dogs with which to conspire, and many a nap has been interrupted by their yapping.  Ughh.

Usually squeaky Mae will start the commotion.  She’s blind and neurotic, howling at everything.  Coughing Simone follows suit and deafening Kaiya picks up the rear.  On this particular day, I had just gotten Amelia to sleep after almost an hour of rocking and cuddling and intermittent fussing.  I was so proud of myself that we had avoided full out crying.  Not five minutes after I shut the door to her room, Kaiya abruptly began barking.  With my cat like mother’s reflexes, I quickly grabbed Kaiya’s collar, whipped open the front door, and pushed her out.  I wanted to get her outside before the barking reached Amelia’s ears.  I was too late.  Amelia started screaming as I was ushering Kaiya outside.  I looked up as I slammed the door to see these two women jump back in fright.  Kaiya couldn’t reach them, likely the reason she kept up the barking and didn’t revert to her usual “won’t you love me” tail wagging and licking.  I made eye contact with these women, so it looked like I purposely sent my guard dog to scare them.  I was too busy attending to Amelia to find the humor in the misunderstanding.  When Amelia refused to reenter sleep, I became even more annoyed with the almost visitors.

Non-mothers and mothers with babies who easily sleep probably think I need to lighten up, but this is not the lesson I learned from this experience.  As soon as I get back to San Diego, I’m buying a No Soliciting sign and/or putting up a Baby Sleeping placard.  In the past, when I have walked our neighborhood with Kaiya and Amelia, I often saw No Soliciting or Do Not Disturb signs and thought the owners needed to stop being so grumpy and un-neighborly.  But now I understand.  Sometimes you need to be unapologetically anti-social.

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Image: Boaz Yiftach / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In 1947 my grandmother bought land in Sacramento to build a modest house for her soon to be family.  In 1947, this house was in the middle of nowhere.  In 2010, this house, itself still nice, sits on a type of border land.  In one direction is a lovely neighborhood.  Only a few blocks down is a park for children.  However, a few blocks in the other direction is a busy road leading to a highway and strip malls.  Half a decade ago my parents moved into my mother’s childhood home and took over the care of my grandmother.  I have always associated this house and the surrounding fenced off property with my idyllic childhood visits to California, but we all have had to admit that over time, as the neighborhood has changed, some unsavory elements have encroached on this oasis, and when I say unsavory, I mean criminal.  A few years back, my mother had the tires stolen off her car while it sat in the driveway.  The image of my dad attempting to chase after those guys was more comical than scary.  A few nights ago, we had another disturbance (I’m visiting my parents for the month), one that started out scary and ended as all Bartron stories seem to end, with the absurd.

On this momentous evening, I had decided to soothe myself in my parents’ small hot tub.  I was soothed, until I rested my arms on the sides and found hundreds of ants crawling all over me.  If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you will know I have a hate hate relationship with ants.  I marched into the house and told my parents of the ant attack.  My mom sprayed the sides with ant spray, but my dad was unsatisfied with her efforts.  A few hours later, he went to finish the job properly, but as he walked to the hot tub he noticed someone standing in the pitch black in the middle of the driveway, a driveway that is blocked off by a gate.  In other words, this dude had jumped a fence to get into the yard. Meanwhile, a police helicopter was circling the neighborhood.

Startled, my dad asked him what he was doing there.  The guy said he was being chased, probably not the best way to begin explaining your whereabouts in a stranger’s yard as a police helicopter searches for someone.  The man elaborated:  He was being chased because someone in the Home Depot parking lot about a half mile away had wanted his medical marijuana (I appreciate that this dealer felt the need to justify his possession by inserting the word “medical,” obviously aware of Prop. 19′s defeat a few days before).  Not wanting in his yard a strange man who claimed to be chased for possession of “medical” marijuana, my dad told him it would be best to leave.  Since the intruder had obviously hopped a gate to get into the yard, he had to be shown how to exit respectably.

As this conversation was taking place outside in the dark, the menagerie of dogs inside were going crazy (waking the baby by the way, much to my displeasure).  Molly, our old outdoor dog, didn’t let out a peep when this guy entered the yard.  Mae and Simone, the partially debarked indoor miniature dachshunds, were barking safely from the couch, while Kaiya, our loud German Shepherd, was ferociously barking at the door.  Hearing this commotion, my dad told the man he was lucky our German Shepherd had not been in the yard.  The man agreed, thankful he had encountered an old mutt rather than Kaiya.

My mother, concerned about who was in the yard, decided to unleash Kaiya by opening the front door.  Kaiya sprung outside, taking off toward the intruder.  And what did my big bad ferocious German Shepherd guard dog do when getting to the medical marijuana dealing intruder?  She wagged her tail and tried to lick him, a pretty standard greeting for Kaiya by the way.  She loves people.  Oh Kaiya.

The man was about to exit the yard, safely out of reach of Kaiya’s slobbery kisses and Molly’s indifference, but then exclaimed “Your dog bit me!”  My dad responded “Yeah, she does that,” she, as in Simone, the miniature dachshund.  When my mom had opened the door for Kaiya, Mae and Simone had scurried into the dark as well.  Kaiya may not be a tough guard dog, but watch out for the teeth on the twelve pound lap dog.

After the man left the yard, my parents immediately called the police.  I still don’t know the identity of the intruder, but I do know anyone coming into my parent’s yard should beware of amiable Kaiya and angry Simone.

The Dangerous Dachshunds

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A couple weeks ago my grandmother broke her collarbone while trying to climb over a fence after she locked herself out of the yard when my dad was at Home Depot (she lived in the house on the same lot, across the pool).  My dad found her with a bruised face and a dazed look, broken flower pots and a missing collarbone the only evidence of the accident; my grandmother had no idea what happened and still has no idea.  She is demented.  Literally.

Because the combination of dementia and her naturally stubborn (German) personality made twenty four hour care a necessity, my parents finally made the decision to put her in a home, an expensive lovely homey home, but a “home” nonetheless.  It was time.  Visiting my grandmother at this center for the elderly with memory loss has helped put her descent into perspective and context.  Most of the residents are women, which makes sense because we women keep on ticking, and most of the residents look dazed and confused, which also makes sense because their present always floats awkwardly in between a forgotten past and a soon to be forgotten future.

I’ve been to quite a few nursing homes, always finding them incredibly depressing.  In college I briefly volunteered at one, but didn’t know what to say to the women who wanted to know why they were living so long.  Immortality, the quest of many fairy tales, seemed so foolish as one woman, at 101, kept on asking to die.  She had no one left and she felt left behind.  Although my grandmother asks the same questions over and over, always wanting a recap of what happened to her and why she is at Primrose, our brief daily visits aren’t that depressing.  Living in a confusing present must be disorienting and awful, but so is keeping your mind while your own and everyone else’s bodies disappear around you.  They are two different kinds of over-thinking; for the demented, lost details consume their lives; for the old yet sane, the loss of their lives consumes them.  Not all the women at Primrose are as unhappy as my grandmother.  As my dad reminds me, “Memory loss doesn’t change your personality.  If you were happy before, you’ll still be happy, even if you can’t remember why.”

I especially enjoy the reactions to Amelia.  Most of the women ooh and aah, repeating over and over “Isn’t she cute.”  One woman kept on asking “Is that a real baby?”  Some of the residents with a particular preoccupation with babies are given bassinets and dolls with which to play.  Is play the right word?  Amelia’s real laughs and giggles make many of their days, or, rather make many of their moments since they can’t remember what happened minutes before.

The same woman who marveled at Amelia’s existence asked if I was her mother.  I nodded.  She then earnestly questioned, “Do you want to give her away?  I know someone who wants a baby.”  I laughed and told her I planned to keep her.  The woman did not return my laugh.  She wasn’t joking.  I wonder what it is about babies that gets at the core of some women.  Young girls often play with baby dolls and apparently old women do the same.  Maybe in a world made fuzzy and confusing, the joy of seeing a baby smile doesn’t need to be explained or put in a temporal context.  When Amelia starts to get on my nerves, I try to remind myself I am lucky to have my own real baby (who hopefully will take care of me when I am old and demented).

Los Angeles traffic makes my husband’s head explode, especially LA traffic at 3pm on a Friday when 400 highway miles still remain of the journey.  I don’t share Dave’s sentiment.  I’m surprisingly zen about stop and go two hours to travel twenty miles situations if, and this is a big IF, I am alone, listening to music or podcasts, safely cocooned in my Honda hideaway.  However, LA traffic while dealing with a screaming baby, an incontinent and cramped German Shepherd, and a head exploding husband, do not a zen experience make.

Dave exclaimed in frustration that we should move to Montana, the assumption being, since neither one of us have even been there, that they don’t have a lot of cars or people.  As he rhapsodized about our hypothetical retirement plans, I fantasized about sitting in the driver’s seat, listening to the Slate podcasts or BackStory (or if you are really wild, listening to my podcast).  Suddenly I understood that new motherhood had taken over my fantasies, turning them into lame escapes.  Right after Amelia was born, my mother’s day gift was the chance to leave the house all by myself and go see a movie.  I saw Date Night with Steve Carell and Tina Fey, who play a complacent married couple.  At one point, they reveal their fantasies, and Tina Fey’s character admits she dreams of sitting alone sipping a Sprite in a hotel room.  Any chance to be completely alone, even if in rush hour traffic (yes, 3pm starts rush hour in LA), is a welcome break for a mom.  At least, I believe this to be true.  Perhaps I am the only new mom who fantasizes about such things.

After we left the land of plastic people, our trip didn’t get too much better.  Amelia screamed most of the way and when we made a pit stop at Popeye‘s for some greasy artificial food, she let out a scream so screeching that all the other patrons glared at us; Dave whisked her out of the fast food chain, and I literally stood above our table stuffing food into my mouth before I rushed after them.  None of our finest moments.  Why did Amelia let out this scream?  She does not tolerate any food consumption in her presence unless she can participate.  We let her eat our food at other restaurants, but I had to draw the line at Popeyes, her scream a high pitched sign we shouldn’t have been eating there in the first place.

I’m making an addendum to my fantasy.  I am alone in my car, sitting in traffic, listening to podcasts, and eating heart attack inducing chicken in peace.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Amelia is six months old and not sleeping through the night.  A month ago I thought Part II of our Sleep Saga was going to be one of celebration (Check out Part I here).  Amelia had gone three or four nights sleeping from 6pm to 5am, and I was about to shout our success from our Craftsman rooftop, but then I told myself to put off the post for a few more days, to make sure this freakishly early bed time and nocturnal sleep stretch would stick.

It didn’t stick.

She started waking up three times a night.

Since then she has averaged about two night wakings.  We tried letting Dave go to the nursery and had disastrous results.  I got less sleep with this set-up, so returned to my role as on call milk provider.  Amelia’s 6pm bedtime has been pushed back (or pushed forward?) to around 7pm.  She sleeps until 11.  I feed her and then hope and pray she will make it until the morning.  She doesn’t, most of the time, except for that one time.  Should I tell you?  Okay, I have a confession to make.

A few nights ago, Amelia did sleep from 11pm to 7am.  I woke up before Dave, a smile on my face.  She did it!  All we had needed to do was give her time to figure out this self-soothing thing.  I got up to quickly use the restroom while Dave went to check on Amelia.  He came back with a smiling baby.  As he handed her to me, he paused and said “The monitor had been off all night.”  My eyes shot up to the white plastic magic egg on our bed.  The light was red, indicating it was on and working.  Confused, I looked back at Dave.  He mumbled, “I turned the monitor back on when you went to the bathroom and I debated whether I should tell you.”  I looked down at my nursing darling and immediately started to moan “Poor baby.”  Dave kept on insisting she was fine, she was smiling after all, but I felt like a horrible person.  Cry it out is one thing, but accidental cry it out?  The next night, I double checked the monitor.  She woke up twice and I stopped moaning “Poor baby.”

I wonder how long sleep deprivation can actually last.  I wonder if we will try sleep training at some point.  I wonder why my guilt of leaving the monitor off has now transformed into nostalgia for that one night of uninterrupted sleep.  The Saga continues….

This is the scene:  3am in Yosemite National Park.  A car alarm pierces the cool night air, waking everyone in their respective RVs and tents.  After a couple minutes, the alarm goes quiet.  What happened?  Did someone forget to stash all food and makeup in the bear locker?  The alarm goes off again.  Something must be wrong, but no one stirs from their sleeping bags.  I, snuggled with Amelia next to me, glance out the window and hope for the best.

The next morning my father opens the RV door, announcing that the car alarm was his doing.  He had had to go to the bathroom and had tried opening the car door from inside, setting off the camp awakening boom.  Not understanding how he had made the alarm sound, he did it again.  And no one came to check out the problem.  Why was my dad sleeping in my Honda fit while the rest of us were tucked away in RVs and tents?  He snores, like really loud, and his sleep apnea machine wouldn’t work, so he was banished to the bright blue sub-compact car.  Did I mention he was financing the trip?

My dad’s faux bear attack was emblematic of the Bartron attack on Yosemite.  We were that family, the annoying too loud and proud of it with three RVs and three tents and three screaming babies family.  In one RV was my family-Dave and I, Amelia, my parents, and older brother Micah.  While my parents bickered about who was sleeping where, Micah took all the romance out of camping by asking why we would do this for fun when he had been forced to carry around heavy equipment and sleep on a cot in Iraq.  Across the lane were the Hessers who dramatically announced their arrival with 30 feet of RV, wine glasses, tri tip, and an Englishman who had never tasted smores (despite his distaste for marshmallows, graham crackers, and Hershey, he ate two).  In the middle were the Zorns and Goodyears, who, the camping pros of the group, tried to keep little Kira from wobbling into the fire or chasing the freakishly big crows.

Dave wasn’t super pumped about driving nine hours one way to spend less than two days reliving the glory days of my extended family’s Yosemite camping past, but once we got there he realized the comedy gold he’d get to observe–from a tent.  Dave was quick to accept my dad’s offer of sleeping by himself in a tent next to the RV.  In fact, less than two hours after arriving, I looked for Dave and saw him eagerly pounding tent stakes into the ground.  He knew the Bartrons would be funny, but only from a safe distance.

Me sulking on our honeymoon because we forgot to bring enough cash to tip our wine tour driver. I really am that difficult to live with. I wish I still had that figure and not that scowl. Napa Valley, June 2009

In my most recent The Joys of Parenting post I complained about my husband Dave’s inability to register the existence of his child at 2 in the morning.  Having a blog is akin to being the victor of war (go with me on this); I get to write the history, but it’s not always accurate.

What I left out of that post were my tantrums a couple days later.  After a rough night of little sleep I got enraged when Dave, preparing for this little thing called his job, got in the shower just as Amelia started her first nap.  That is my shower time.  My shower time I tell you!  Then, that evening, after Dave already went to bed to rest for this little thing called his job, I decided to mess around with my new website (as in the one you are reading right now).  I thought my extremely limited knowledge of code meant I could alter the custom_functions.php file.  Not exactly knowing what a custom_functions.php file is should have been my first hint to step away from the computer.  I ended up deleting something crucial, screwing up the website, and convincing myself all my work was lost.  Dave, who also doesn’t know how to write code, stayed up with me until midnight as I just made things worse.  Luckily, Krystyn of Krizzy Designs saved me from myself and got the site back up and running.

What did I get as a reward for my temper tantrums and naivete?  A lovely brand new Kindle arrived in the mail today, a gift from my husband.  Last week, I told him I was saving up my discretionary money for one (check out the podcast Who’s The Boss to learn about our money management system), but it would probably take a couple months to cobble the money together.  He bought me this completely random gift before I threw my tantrums and never even hinted at it.  When I thanked him today, all he said was “I love you Meredith.”  There you have it: A more honest and accurate version of my husband and a more honest and embarrassing version of myself.

Also on our honeymoon. He really is lovely. Napa Valley, June 2009

Before I had Amelia, if the power went out from 2am-7am, the only way I would have known about this dimming of the lights would have been the annoying flashing twelve on the alarm clock in the morning (for the life of me, I still can’t program that thing). A baby makes this once barely noticeable and not even inconvenient circumstance a middle of the night cause for marital strife.

At 2am, a confusing beeping woke me from a very bizarre dream involving adult bum genius diapers, my high school, and a camel. After a few moments I realized this beeping was the baby monitor, on Dave’s side of the bed, informing us that it wasn’t working. I shook Dave and he didn’t move. Finally, after much whispering and hitting, Dave roused and looked even more confused than I. I said “Dave, the power’s out,” thinking this information would help explain the beeping and prompt him to help me find the cause of the outage. Dave’s response: “What??” I again repeated, and I thought more clearly, “Dave, the power is out.” Suddenly, Dave seemed to understand. I started to get out of bed and assumed he was following. I assumed wrong. He turned off the monitor, his head plopping back onto his down pillow. My response: “YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.” He was not kidding me.

Realizing he was useless at 2 in the morning, I stumbled through the kitchen, took some sheets out of the linen closet, and tried to get back to sleep on the guest bed, which is in hearing distance of Amelia’s baby sanctuary. For some reason we had left the window open in the guest room, and as I tried to warm myself and reenter the bizarre land of camels, Dave stumbled into the bedroom, sighing “Oh.” He had eventually come to realize that, yes, we have a baby and we can’t hear said baby without a monitor, or, for that matter, see anything when she cries for us at 3 in the morning (about twenty minutes after I had gotten back to sleep).

The next morning, after the power came on, waking Amelia, Dave and I tried to parse our dark induced spat. He said in the future I need to be more specific than “the power is out.” I said the only way to be more specific was to explain “Dave dear the power is out. This is why the monitor is beeping. We need to move closer to our baby, you know the baby we had back in April, and find a flashlight, maybe even check the circuit breaker.” Although I was being sarcastic, Dave exclaimed “That’s exactly what you needed to say.” Dave is lovely, but he takes a long time to enter the land of the living after wakening, which hasn’t made Amelia’s night crying any easier for me. I laughed and applauded Dave for at least realizing why I had left and coming to the guest room to follow me. Dave paused and admitted the only reason he had gone into the guest room was because he had thought he was in trouble and should probably sleep there. He saw me in the bed and only then did he understand the beeping noise from twenty minutes earlier. Oh Dave.

I kinda hate being a single mom. Amelia is cute, but she’s not low maintenance. Before I had Amelia, I never understood what people meant when they said they had an easy baby. I understand now. I don’t have one.

To her credit, five month Amelia is much more laid back than five-week Amelia. At five weeks she spent ninety percent of her waking time crying; now, around forty or fifty percent. According to that math, by the time she reaches ten months she should cross the threshold between fussy and easy baby. Just let me think it works that way.

With Dave gone, the girls have thrown off all pretence of civility. I’ve stopped cooking, not that I did much before anyway. One day last week two out of my three meals were ice cream, and this was a result of my laziness, not my sugar addiction. I didn’t even want the second ice cream meal, but when I looked in the fridge, saw ingredients and not meals, I opted for the freezer selection. I went to Von‘s to buy frozen entrees, realizing that if this is my mentality, I might as well work with it and not pretend like I am actually going to eat the two pounds of green beans from last week’s CSA.

Kaiya has become unmanageable. I finally caved and took her to doggie daycare twice. I didn’t glance at the doggie cam once because I’m way past the “oh, look she’s playing with other dogs, isn’t that cute” stage. Out of sight, out of mind. Today, on her evening walk, Kaiya started eating her own poop. She hasn’t done that in a long time, so I think Dave’s extended absence is either causing some sort of doggie psychic crisis, or I’m just more attuned to her senility.

Kaiya eating her own poop is a little gross, but not all that weird. On the other hand, Amelia eating her own poop makes me question my mothering abilities. But, wait, let me explain before you judge. Kaiya approached her droppings with clear poop eating intention. Amelia approached hers with foot eating intentions. The poop on her foot didn’t entice, but obviously didn’t deter her either. She has become super wiggly during diaper changes. I used to dispose of the dirty cloth diaper before putting on the clean one, but now I have to practice deft diapering manuevers to keep her from falling off the table, which means quickly putting the dirty diaper to the side as I grab the clean one. The other day, Amelia kicked the dirty diaper before I could shuffle it away and then stuck her newly soiled foot in her mouth.

There you have it. A mom eating ice cream, and dog and baby eating poop. Dave needs to come home soon and rescue us from our culinary missteps.