Once again, I have resolved to start blogging again. You know, once every 6 months or so, ha ha. And once again, I had an idea of what to write about this morning and now that I’m sitting here with the laptop open, I don’t have a clue what that idea was. I think I get flakier every day.
I’m sitting here watching my over-tired child (who is supposed to be napping) in the video monitor as he allegedly attempts to nap, but really is playing with his pacis and his glow-worm (which is really a seahorse, but I call it a glow-worm). GO TO SLEEP, Baby Bear! And I am exhausted. EXHAUSTED. I slept a good 8 hours last night (woohoo!) and yet I’m still just totally and completely pooped. As much as I would love for my Bear to have a sibling, I fear I may be too tired for that. I should have had kids when I was younger.
Enough whining, though. Is anyone out there reading? If so, I am sorry for this incredibly lame post. Let’s talk about fun things, okay? Like: PINTEREST!! It’s my new obsession! I lurve it!! Except! I get all these awesome ideas for projects to do and things to make, and I go out and buy all the stuff to do them, and then that stuff clutters my house and I don’t actually get anything done.
For instance: The Enormous Heart Wreath! Here’s what it’s supposed to look like:
Looks awesome, yes? I started this little project a few weeks before Valentine’s Day, except I couldn’t find a heart-shaped foam wreath anywhere. There was a national shortage, it seemed: no Michael’s or Jo-Ann had them, even online. I finally found this place and ordered a few, thinking (loftily) that I would make them for a couple of friends, too. When the wreaths arrived, though, they were all broken. Every last one of them. I finally ended up on this site (I think…it looks like the one I used, at least), and by that time, I decided if I was going to be paying for shipping, I may as well go big. Very big. I bought a 3-foot heart in addition to two smaller ones. When the small ones arrived, they looked more like teardrops than hearts, so I decided to go whole hog and commit to the giant one.
Except here we are, well into March, and I’m only half-committed to this thing. Or, really, 1/3-committed.
Sorry it is sideways. I’m too lazy to go back and rotate it. Anyway, I think when I finally finish this thing it is going to have to be a permanent fixture in our house, even though it’s really kind of a giant cat-hair catcher. I shall call it the Enormous Wreath/Gargantuan Cat-Hair Catcher. That’s a nice, catchy name, no?
SO anyway, PINTEREST! Isn’t it amazing? I can waste hours on that site. What has inspired you lately, or what ridiculous crafts have you only partially completed?
Here I am on a Saturday night, with an assignment looming before me (it’s a big one, and it’s due by midnight tomorrow night) and a very very tired feeling and NO MORE WINE IN THE HOUSE, and I miss blogging. So hi!
I think I’m having a blog identity crisis. I miss my old blog and want to kick the person who snagged the address when I was sleep deprived and mothering a newborn and not realizing my card that was automatically paying for it had expired. I’m fearful about having an address that has my name in it, not because I write anything particularly private, but because I’m in school to become a teacher, which means one day I will have students, and those students will have computers, and it seems in this day and age one cannot be too careful about what she says on the internet in that situation. And I feel conflicted because if I were to write regularly, I would definitely become one of those bloggers. You know, the ones who have kids and suddenly all they can talk about is their kids and diapers and baby food and parenting and sleep and the people who read their blogs before the kids came along want to just punch themselves in the face to make the parenting talk stop, for the love of all things holy, because they started reading the blogs for other reasons.
And I can’t come up with another blog name that hasn’t already been taken to save my life.
So here I am, a future English teacher with a blog full of run-on sentences and probably more than a few swear words and it says my NAME in the address and how many Laras are there in the world? Not many, I tell you.
I am in a pickle, indeed.
So, if anyone is out there and actually reading this drivel, I beg you to participate in my poll. Except I’m not sure it will actually paste here because I’ve forgotten how to do it.
And now for a thrilling chat about diapers!
*Before I begin this fascinating discussion, I should first say that yes, I considered cloth diapers…for about 3 seconds until I realized that I have an entire walk-in-closet piled high with dirty laundry. And I do not like gross things, such as poop, for instance. I know there are products on the market like diaper liners, so that you can remove the liner (and any poop in it) and flush it down your toilet, leaving you a lot less grossness to launder and whatnot. And I know there are a billion and a half really good reasons why cloth diapers are superior to disposables, and I could get on a soapbox with you cloth diaperers and talk about the environmental reasons, which I realize go far beyond the billions and trillions of disposable dipes that are sitting in landfills (things like how unsafe it is for poop to be in those landfills and trickling into ground water and how if you flush the poop, it gets treated in water sanitation systems. And the wood pulp that goes into disposable diapers and how it contributes to the deforestation problem. And all the scary chemicals (AGM included, which I’ll discuss below) that go into disposables. And I feel terrible for knowing all of this but still feeling like cloth diapering is probably not a feasible thing for me to do. So please, please, please do not make me feel even worse about this. Thank you!
AHEM. ANYWAY. If my baby has a super-power, that super-power is peeing in the middle of the night. He pees a TON. So much that his diapers literally explode. And this is driving me crazy.
If you don’t have a kid, you probably don’t know that most disposable diapers (and by “most” I mean every single brand except ONE – even most of the “natural” brands) are filled with what many diaper companies (like Shmampers and Shmuggies and Shluvs, for instance) refer to as “Absorbant Gel Material”, or AGM. Wikipedia calls it “Super-Absorbant Polymer”, or SAP. I know more about AGM than I ever wanted to know, and less about it than I want to know.
In the “more” department: AGM is a polymer that is inside the diaper innards, if you will, for its extra-super-duper absorbance powers. When it becomes wet, it becomes a gross little gel ball. When a diaper becomes fully saturated and can take no more liquid, it bursts at the seams, spilling these gross little gel balls all over the place (or the body upon which the diaper is velcroed). They are ridiculous to clean up, and in my experience, the only way to really do so is dunk the baby in the bathtub.
In the “less” department: WHAT EXACTLY IS AGM/SAP DOING TO MAH BEHBEH??? Also, why do these stupid diapers keep exploding??
Lest you think I’m a neglectful mama who doesn’t change her baby’s diaper often enough, this only happens at night. By the time a kidlet is as old as mine is, nobody expects a mom to wake her kid up and change his diaper. I’ve tried the various “night time” or “extra protection” diapers on the market, and those still explode. I’ve tried putting the Bear in a bigger size than he’s supposed to be in (which is a little silly, since he’s nowhere near the weight limit for his current size) and they still explode. I’ve tried not letting him drink much milk before bedtime, and then he wakes up hungry/thirsty in the middle of the night (and I’ve never been able to make him cry through a middle-of-the-night wake-up before. He sleeps through the night sometimes, and he settles himself to sleep every single night, but if he wakes up, I go to him and comfort him).
I have to say, too, that Shmuvs diapers are the absolute worst. I tried them two nights ago on the advice of another mom, and that sucker exploded gel beads by 3:30 a.m. It didn’t even make it until a decent morning hour! That was a really fun night, let me tell you, because I first tried to just wipe the kidlet down, give him a fresh dipe and new PJs, settle him with a bottle of milk (in hopes of him sleeping later), and put him back to bed, but he screamed his head off until I gave up and plopped him in the bathtub. At 4 a.m. After that, of course, he thought it was morning and time to play. Whee, good times! (I refused to let him be up for the day, and woo boy was that fun.)
Tonight, we are trying a product that looks like a giant maxi pad without the adhesive backing. Allegedly, this will soak up pee and then allow more pee to be absorbed by the diaper. I have high hopes for it, but will not be surprised if it doesn’t work.
Wow, wasn’t that the most interesting thing you’ve ever read? I bet you want to go back and change your poll answer now and tell me to stop blogging altogether.
Well, May has come and gone, and my resolution to be a more frequent blogger has too. Whoops. We have been in the throes of “sleep training” around here, and let me tell you – it sucks.
I started this journey into parenthood vehemently opposed to sleep training. For you non-parents out there, sleep training usually involves leaving your kid in his or her crib and letting him or her cry for some period of time. There are a bunch of different books out there on this topic, and I’ve read a handful of them (Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child; The Baby Whisperer; Twelve Hours’ Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old; Sleeping Through the Night), as well as one called The No-Cry Sleep Solution (which I’ve also read, and which doesn’t advocate for leaving your kid in his crib to cry). I tried the Twelve Hours’ Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old one for about 13 minutes one night when the Bear was a lot older than twelve weeks old, and ended up in his room, crying along with him as I nursed and rocked him to sleep and promised him that he would never cry alone in his crib again.
Ha. Haaaaahahahaha.
Little did I know that there would come a day when there would be no such thing as nursing and/or rocking to sleep because my tot would be so busy squealing and trying to climb up my body that such things were futile. All those other books told me to create a calming pre-bedtime routine that would signal to my little Bear that bedtime was coming and thereby allow him to drift calmly off into Dreamland when the time came. Oh, books! You are so silly!
There is nothing more frustrating than spending a couple hours creating a calm atmosphere and pre-bedtime routine for your child, only to have him giggling and squealing and climbing all over you, flicking your nipple like it’s a toy when you’re trying to nurse him to sleep (hi, creepy!) and then sobbing as if his heart were breaking when you lovingly place him in his crib to usher him off to Snoozeville.
And so, we have been “sleep training.” And now he sleeps more than he has since he was about 4 months old. He still doesn’t sleep through the night (I don’t have the heart to leave him in there to cry at 2 a.m. Either that, or I don’t have the energy), but we’re making progress. I’m seriously considering going to bed as soon as I hit “Publish” on this thing so I can get a solid block of sleep before the 2 a.m. wake-up, too.
It’s amazing what sleep-deprivation will do to you. Did you know that, in order to function even remotely normally, most adults need a bare minimum of five hours of uninterrupted night-time sleep? Do you know how long it’s been since I got that, except for the night last week when I went to bed at 7 p.m.? Yeah, a long time. It’s no wonder I feel like I’m on the verge of batshit crazy a lot of the time, and it’s no wonder that I’ve opted to sit here and ramble away on my computer instead of making my house semi-presentable.
Just recently, I ordered a bunch of baby food from Diapers.com – which I love, because if you order more than $50, they give you free shipping and it usually arrives overnight. Oh yeah, that’s another thing – I used to make all of the Bear’s food. I would buy boxes of fruit and vegetables from Costco or Sam’s and spend hours cooking and pureeing them., then tell Wilbur we were going to have to order pizza for dinner because I had no energy left to cook us anything. Well, in my maternal guilt over quitting making the Bear’s food, and in my current state of extreme sleep deprivation, and in my quest to give him some variety in his diet while also buying more than one packet of food at a time, I ended up with the baby food equivalent of a Mormon’s “year’s worth.”
Seriously. I just spent half the evening trying to cram it all into the cabinet in the hopes that Wilbur won’t see how very ridiculous this is and have a sit-down “Lara, you are crazy,” type of chat with me.
And now that I have fascinated you all with that riveting discussion of sleep, my lack of it, and mass quantities of baby food, I think I really will go take a shower and go to bed. Peace out.
Well, I don’t know how things are where you live right now, but it is bee-yoo-ti-ful outside here today. I’m very much looking forward to getting outside for a walk with the Bear and another of our mama/baby friends.
It has been suggested that I refer to my husband as Wilbur, and I can only think that this request harkens back to my pre-Lara-Bee, pre-Red Red Whine days at ye old Mental Buffet, when I referred to him as Wilman. Wilman was a pretty stupid alias, chosen because the Dude and I used to talk about future baby names, and his favorite boy name was Will. I refused Will as a name because our last name, if spelled slightly differently, could be a verb, so the poor future kid’s name would sound like he was someone who “will [insert verb here]“. Like, Run. Will Run. Will Walk. Will Dance. Will Dojazzhands. You get the point, I suspect. Anyway, Wilbur is a much better alias. Whee! I am married to Wilbur!
In other news, you know how there are a bunch of food blogs out there? If you don’t, you might want to crawl out of that cave you’re living in and check them out. As an example of the many ways that I am not cut out for food blogging, I can say from first-hand experience that if you brown some ground beef with some onions, dump a jar of pre-made gravy on top of it, and serve over cooked egg noodles, you will NOT end up with a delicious Beef Stroganoff.
In addition to today’s What Not to Cook segment, I shall add a What Not to Wear one…except that I just tried to copy and paste a picture of the shirt in here, and I can’t do it. Bummer. Anyway, I wore what I thought was a fun, fluttery top the other day and someone asked me how far along I am. Whee! Good times! I love when people think I’m pregnant and I’m not! The good news is that the Bear and I have been going for long walks every day for two weeks, and as a result, I’ve lost 7 pounds. Woot! I must persevere.
In anticipation of the Bear’s first Easter, we’ve been reading all sorts of Easter-themed books, such as Spot’s Easter Surprise, Where Are Baby’s Easter Eggs?, and, the topic of today’s discussion here, Baby Touch & Feel Easter Bunny Book. This book cracks me up. Each page has a different animal with a small textured patch, and an accompanying rhyme. With a name like “Easter Bunny Book”, you’d presume it would be about Easter, right? Um, no. Yes, there’s a bunny. There are also two little ducklings and a lamb. Those are somewhat Easter-y, right? One could also argue that a fawn is a bit Easter-ish. But…what the hell are a hedgehog and a raccoon doing in this book?
Hrm. Yeah, I don’t know either.
In other news, it’s ridiculously difficult to find an iPad2 that works with AT&T in this town. Do you know there are people out there who will stand in line at the Apple store starting at 7:30 a.m.? I am not one of those people.
Also, I wasn’t all that impressed with Eat Pray Love. Maybe because I watched it over the course of two days, and part of that time was when I was also playing with my kid, but also maybe because it was dull. What did y’all think of it? Also, the Dude is making me watch The Ten Commandments, and have you noticed how these people have modern furniture and drapes? Really?
Alright. I am not very interesting today, so I will close with a cute baby picture.
I am drinking a glass of Valpolicella (does the V get capitalized here? Hrm.) and watching the movie Eat Pray Love and thinking two things: (1) I love Julia Roberts. Seriously. I think she’s fantastic and beautiful and I love that she hasn’t done anything smutty enough to show up in the news, at least that I’ve heard. Which isn’t saying much. For all I know, she has flashed her hoo-hah to the paparazzi whilst OD-ing on crystal meth and making out with her sister. But it hasn’t been on the Today Show lately, at least, so that’s saying something. And (2) I am really excited for our upcoming trip to Italy.
Oh yeah! I haven’t told y’all. (you know, all 9 of you. Why did I install a statcounter on this thing when I know you have to read blogs and comment on them to get readers and I also know I have failed to do either of those things?). Anyway, we are going to Italy! And bringing our kidlet with us! We may be insane! But his passport arrived in the mail today (thank you, government, for not shutting down when you idiots couldn’t come to an agreement on budget and other stuff, so you could instead focus on Very Important Matters like my kid’s passport application) and I must say, it is quite possibly the country’s cutest passport. Will we regret this? Perhaps! But I am excited enough to over-pepper this blog with exclamation points! Dear God, let us not regret the decision to travel with a 10-month-old. Or to stay in the hotel we chose. Or to think we can get by with public transportation so we don’t have to lug and install carseats all over Rome and Portofino. I’ve never been to Rome. Have you? Do you have any restaurant recommendations?
In other news, my kid sucks at sleeping lately. I’m currently trying to keep in his crib all night instead of succumbing to his desire to cuddle ALL. NIGHT. LONG. This kidlet was a great independent sleeper until a few weeks ago when everything went to hell in a handbasket and suddenly he became unable to sleep for more than a few hours in his own room, acting like his heart was going to break into a billion pieces unless I brought him to bed with me. I refuse to let him just sit there and cry in his crib, so tonight I am dedicating myself to not giving in (but also not make him just lie there in a lonely dark crib and cry). Laugh at me if you will, but for now, the cry-it-out thing isn’t my bag, baby.
So, you may be wondering why I labeled today’s post like I’d had a rough day. In parts, it was lovely. The housekeeper came (although you’d never know, because all straightening-up-for-Eugenia-the-housekeeper has been undone by now), The Bear and I had a lovely time at the mall, I got to eat my beloved Chick-Fil-A, and I’m watching a movie as I write here. However, did y’all see my haiku about my hypochondriac husband? He would kill me if he knew I was blogging about this, but hey, he doesn’t know about this blog, and I am an idiot for writing this honestly when I haven’t bothered to hide anyone’s names or locations and I may come back and delete this section one day, but for now, I must vent. MUST.
People, he went to a random emergency room in Miami last night for his heart attack symptoms. Oh yes, yes he did. They did a barrage of tests (and really, is there a greater word than barrage? Perhaps. And perhaps is one of them. As is sparkle. And canoodle. But I digress). So far, nothing is wrong with his heart. But I had to stay up until 1 a.m. to find this out (as did he), and then they recommended that he stay overnight for additional tests and monitoring, so then we had to discuss (in whispers on my part, because Baby Bear had shunned his crib and was sleeping in my bed and even though I lined all sides of it with pillows I was worried he was going to thrash himself over the edge of the bed and conk his head on the floor) whether or not he should stay overnight or not. I advised to follow doctor’s recommendation, and he did. Eventually, we decided it was okay for me to go to sleep and that he wasn’t going to die while I was snoozing.
I woke up to 15 text messages from him. FIFTEEN. He was left on a gurney until 5 a.m. in the middle of the brightly lit emergency room and none of the caregivers spoke English. (Go figure. You’re in Miami, dude. Of course nobody speaks English.) He wanted to make sure “if [he] didn’t make it home” that I’d make sure the Bear knew how much he loved him. (Seriously. Why are men so dramatic????) He worked himself into an incredible panic, all while I was off in snoozeland, enjoying a lovely dream involving Colin Firth and a snowy London street, which, now that I think of it, was precisely a scene from Bridget Jones’s Diary. They did additional tests, and he was finally discharged tonight around 8:30 p.m., but not before I we had a billion more conversations that led to me calling Patient Services to get his room’s phone working (his cell phone was dying) and try to get someone to explain what was taking so long for a doctor to see him (it was maybe 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. before he did, and then the guy didn’t even give a diagnosis) or explain why someone wanted him to provide menu requests for the next 3 days (meep!). He is now back in his hotel, ready to get on a plane and come home tomorrow for his (sorry, I’m a jerk) annoyingly-prescribed “rest, at least until Monday”. I told him he has probably never been happier to see a hotel bedroom in his life. (He agreed.)
Wow, I am a fan of the parentheses today.
Anyway, apparently, although they didn’t find anything wrong with his heart, they found some unusually high levels of enzymes in his pancreas.
I tend to be the sort of person who assumes everything is going to be okay when it comes to health stuff. At least with other people, har har. Did that stop me from consulting Dr. Google? Nope. I should be panicking right now, right? But I’m not. I think we’re all invincible in our own way. He needs to eat more fiber and less red meat is all, right? Honestly, that’s what I think. Am I a jerk for not thinking he has pancreatic cancer or pancreatitis or something else horrendous that is life-threatening and awful? I don’t know.
He’ll come home tomorrow, and he’ll see his primary care physician (toting his records from Godawful Miami Hospital with him) and we’ll figure out what to do after that. And, even though a part of me will think this is nothing, I will dote on him. I will set him up on the couch and refuse to let him lift a finger for anything, except to hold our sweet baby boy whose first thing he does upon awakening (in my bed) every morning is to look over where The Dude usually sleeps and then look at me in confusion before succumbing to the Morning Surprise Tickle Attack (God bless the 8-month-old’s short attention span). And I will continue to assume that we can resolve whatever pancreatic enzyme issues he has with simple changes like avoidance of beef and the ever-so-beloved Doritos.
PS, I am so not going to make it through the Bali part of this movie. This lady is TIRED.
I’ve said before that motherhood provides infinite opportunities to wonder whether you are doing things right. Well, there are also plenty of opportunities when you don’t have to wonder: you know without a doubt that you’ve done them wrong. In most of these cases, I’ve been able to laugh at myself. Here’s my list of things I’ve done since The Bear was born that were definitely NOT the right thing to do:
(1) When he was teeny, it was near impossible to get the Bear to burp after he ate. My mom told me it could help just to jiggle him a little bit, to help the air bubble work its way up from the belly and out of the mouth. Well, brilliant me took that to mean “play this-is-the-way-the-Bear-rides-the-horsie” after a meal. We bounced and bounced and bounced until the poor kid puked up everything he ate. It was like I stuck him on a roller coaster after a meal. Whoops.
(2) In a similar vein, I learned the hard way not to play “flying baby” shortly after a meal.
(3) Two days ago, I was at this awesome restaurant with my parents when they were in town. As we enjoyed our meat and cheese platters, I remembered reading that the Bear is old enough to start trying soft, pasteurized cheeses. Ooh! I thought. What better place to try some? After checking with the waitress to find out which cheeses were made from pasteurized milk, I stuck a little piece of a delicious goat cheese into his mouth and watched as he gagged, coughed, acted like I’d poisoned him, and then puked all over me. It was only then that I remembered the word that came before “soft” and “pasteurized” in the baby-feeding guidelines: MILD. I’m not sure stinky, sharp, fancy goat cheese fits into that category.
(4) Until recently, the Bear still got swaddled when he slept. I’d wrap him up like a little papoose with his arms down at his sides and he’d be all snug as a bug in a rug. Well, once when he had a cold, I rolled up a towel and stuck it under one end of his mattress, thinking it would elevate his little head and keep his nose from being too stuffy at night. What I forgot was that he liked to wiggle himself so he was sleeping sideways in the crib…which meant that when he did that, he rolled down the “hill” of his bed and stopped at the end. He woke up crying and i went in to find him with a look on his face like, “What is my mama doing to me???” I still laugh thinking about this one.
And the two worst ones that I still can’t laugh at:
(5) the Bear went through a period of time when he hated his car seat. He would start crying as soon as I started to strap him in. During this time, we drove up to Vermont to visit his grandma and he cried for almost the entire 7 hour drive and then cried the whole 7 hours home. It was horrible. After about a month of this – a MONTH! – I realized I was supposed to adjust his harness straps so they were at the same level of his shoulders or just below them, instead of being WAY below them. Ohhhhh. He was trying to tell me he was uncomfortable. Or worse, in pain. Awesome.
(6) I have dropped my baby on his head. I was walking with him in his Ergo carrier and I tripped, fell forward, and the Bear’s head hit the concrete. Oh, how he cried. He ended up being totally okay, but man, did that suck.
Motherhood is definitely a learn-as-you-go experience!
I am catching up on episodes of Modern Family this morning and thinking about that wondrous invention, the doohickey that allows me to connect to Netflix instantly…which is a little weird, considering I’m watching Modern Family on DVR, not on Netflix, but whatever.
We got the doohickey (very technological term, yes?) and accompanying Blu-Ray/DVD player shortly after the Bear was born, when it became apparent that TV was going to play a considerably more important role in my life as I struggled to breastfeed my late-preterm infant (more on that at some later date, perhaps). Since then, I have been working my way through every episode of a variety of TV shows. Here is my list, as I can remember it:
Damages (suspensful!)
Better Off Ted (hilarious!)
Rescue Me (oh, how I love those firemen!)
Dead Like Me (surly!)
Nip/Tuck (delightfully smutty!)
And now I need a new show. Suggestions?
I was all geared up to head to the grocery store and make my very pregnant friend a batch of Scalini’s Labor-Inducing Eggplant Parmigiana today and then was reminded that we have some window guys coming to the house to give an estimate in an hour. Am somewhat of a horrible person, because I was starting to have second thoughts about this promise anyway since I can’t seem to manage to cook myself any sort of dinner – what makes me think I can go all out for someone else? Still, I hate when I promise something and then fail to deliver, so maybe I’ll get my act together after the window dude leaves.
With that, I need to go put the bebe in his crib to play (safe place and all that) so I can take a shower and be semi-presentable. I never promised y’all a ton of excitement on this here blog. Oh wait, yes I did. Whoops.
(You can find instructions for making this here.)
Sorry it is sideways. I’m too lazy to go back and rotate it. Anyway, I think when I finally finish this thing it is going to have to be a permanent fixture in our house, even though it’s really kind of a giant cat-hair catcher. I shall call it the Enormous Wreath/Gargantuan Cat-Hair Catcher. That’s a nice, catchy name, no?
