momtourage

Newborn Chronicles: Part 1

I wanted to give the baby a bath.

It seemed like a simple enough task.  A small goal, if you will. 

My house was clean (thanks to the cleaning lady, not my personal efforts.) The apartment felt so functional. But the kitchen?  There were plates in the sink.  The sink where I hoped to wash the baby.  A normal person could just wash up the plates and get on with the baby washing. But I couldn't clear the food off the plates.  The trash bag was full.  The baby was in one-hand mode, as in, sorry-mom-you-can't-put-me-down-so-do-what-you-can-with-one-hand. 

Here are some things I can't do with one hand:

• Pull trash bag out of can
• Put new trash bag in can
• Put trash down the apartment building trash chute
• Fill the dishwasher
• Get the baby bath thingee down from the top of the kitchen cabinets

Sure, I guess I could have put him down and let him scream while I did that stuff.  But he's so little and new. And the house was so peaceful.

So.  You know.  That's why my baby's neck smelled a little funky this morning. 

The good news? I did bathe him today.  I did it right after his nap, during which I completed all two-handed tasks in preparation for the bath.  Live and learn.

Ten Reasons I'm Glad I'm Not Pregnant Anymore

10. I can pick stuff up off of the floor.  My three-year-old started picking things off the floor with his toes.  I realized he got that from watching me.
9. Advil.  Oh, sweet headache ambrosia!  How I missed you!  I couldn't even take it while I was trying to conceive.  Does anybody need a huge bottle of warehouse store generic acetaminophen?  I'm never using it again.  Perhaps I'll make a mosaic jewelry box with the left-over caplets.
8. Runny eggs, medium rare hamburgers, lunch meat, sushi, the occasional guilt-free glass of wine, unpasturized cheese (Who am I kidding? I totally ignored this rule.  Every time I thought of avoiding the raw cheeses, a gaggle of pregnant French women in my head laughed at me as they enjoyed their raw gruyere.  The baby seems to have survived this indiscretion unscathed, BTW.)
7. I can sleep on my belly!  (At least until my b00bs start to hurt too much from the dairy farm action going on in there.)
6. I lost around 15 lbs.  In one day!  Magical...
5. The triumphant return of my bladder.  You don't miss your water until you need to relieve it every time you drink more than a teaspoon.
4. I can carry my baby when I want to.  I can put my baby down when I want to.
3. My back no longer aches.
2. That week of 90+ degree weather we had just after I gave birth.

1. I can finally carry my older son! Nope.  Not so much.  Even though I had an uncomplicated vaginal birth, I still have six weeks of recovery from it, according to my midwife.  So swinging Cakie around and helping him do flips and playing horsey is still verboten.  At least for the next three weeks.  So I need a new #1 reason...

1.  Ok, my sweet baby.  That's reason #1.  I finally know what he looks like.  I know the date of his birthday and how exactly he came into the world.  And I love it.  I love it.

Ten Things To Do Besides Wanting to Induce Labor

Here's a post from my other blog.  If you, or anyone you know, is about to give birth any day now and getting a little impatient about it, please share.

Having been recently freaked out by the number of women who spend the last few weeks of their pregnancy wishing someone would induce them, I have decided to offer up a list of alternative things to think about and do. I have had a newborn in my life before. Perhaps for this reason, I am able to see and appreciate the things that those of you who have not, might be missing. Don’t worry, you’ll get to meet your baby soon enough if you are this far along. I’ll spare you the induction-is-bad-for-you-and-the-baby-and-more-painful-than-birth-should-be-

and-likely-to-end-in-a-c-section speech. You already know my views on that. And that sometimes the doctors won’t let us avoid it. But that’s different from wishing they’d do it to you.

1. Enjoy the use of both of your hands. Do things everyone else who’s not holding a baby can do. Rip paper towels off the roll with ease. Put your trash down the chute. Eat a meal. Even the use of your pesky un-dominant hand will be sorely missed once it is gone.

2. Take a long shower.  If you shave, enjoy the opportunity to have enough time and energy to shave both of your legs without feeling guilty about the helpless creature who is not in the shower with you. Your baby’s right there under your ribs and not even crying!

3. Walk somewhere.  By yourself.  Without a stroller or sling or burp cloth.

4. Go in to a fancy store without worrying about any screaming erupting from anywhere near you, for which you might be stared at and psychically urged to leave. Linger in the fancy store. Look at the pretty things.

5. Go to a movie.  Even if you are uncomfortable in the chair and you have to pee seven times.  You’ll thank me later.

6. Enjoy your pain-free nipp1es. Right now they are just sitting there like lots of other parts of your body…a knee or an elbow. Enjoy not being aware of them every waking moment.

7. Sleep. I know you’re excited. I know you keep obsessing over what to pack for the hospital and which stroller to get and if you got enough nursing bras. Sleep, I tell you. Sleep like a drunken college student who just turned in her thesis upon which she worked for three days and nights straight, then went to a bar and drank too much. Sleep hard. Sleep long. Sleep. And not like a baby. Because guess what? Babies wake up every two hours and cry.

8. Enjoy your partner (if you have one.) Eat meals together… like in the same moment. Look into each other’s eyes. Have uninterrupted conversations. Talk about books and plays. Talk about anything but poop and milk. Give and get lots of attention from each other because you are both going to be pouring it all into a third party soon.

9. See your friends who don’t have babies. See them a lot. Try to talk about things other than the baby when you see them. A lot of people slip away from their friends after the baby comes, so enjoy them now and try to envision how you’ll fit into each other’s lives a few weeks from now when the baby poop hits the fan.

10. Enjoy the special pregnant-lady treatment you’ve been getting for so long that you probably take it for granted, or even let it bother you. Because guess what? Once that adorable little babe comes out of your body, you will be almost invisible to most folks. Especially the strangers, who will switch from holding doors for you and giving up seats for you, to telling you that you dressed the baby wrong, or you’re holding it wrong, or could you get out of here with all of that racket?

Ok?  Enjoy.

Do it for me.

All the Swedish Meatballs I Can Eat!

New York City, for some like myself, feels like the center of the universe.  It has everything a person could want or need.  Except an Ikea.  For the Swedish affordable-furniture delight, New Yorkers need to take a car or a bus to either Long Island or New Jersey.  So when you go, you need to buy everything you think you might want.  You need to go through the whole store in case you miss anything.  You need to eat the Swedish meatballs while they are available.  You shop until neither you, nor anyone in your family can even have the energy to stand unassisted in the usually-long checkout line. It takes a whole day.  It takes a whole lot of energy.

That was the way it was.  That is, until... June 18, 2008.  On June 18, Brooklyn got its own Ikea.  It was craziness, I tell you.  People slept out on the street in Red Hook for four days for the prospect of getting a free sofa or a gift card.  My wise friends and I stayed away.  But yesterday, after going swimming at the Red Hook pool with a teacher-friend and eating lunch at the local fancy grocery store, on their deck overlooking the New York Bay and the Statue of Liberty, we couldn't resist.  So we went.

It was a lot like all the other Ikeas we know.  It was actually less crowded.  And it featured lots of model rooms which showed how you can fit many Ikea products into very small New York apartment-sized spaces.

As we sauntered through the store without any focus (if you drive for an hour to get to an Ikea, you usually have something specific you're looking for...)  I started having wonderful realizations.  This is five minutes from my house!  I can come here just to eat Swedish meatballs!  If I'm not sure about that $3 bathmat today, I can come back and buy it tomorrow!  In fact, I went through much of the store saying "This is nice!  Maybe I'll get it next time!"  And I ended up spending only $13.  My lowest Ikea bill to date.  If it is terrible weather, I can come here and let my kids play with the toys or go the Smaland and jump in the ball room.  Look at the waterfront!  They turned it into a lovely park with benches and tables.  We can picnic here.  It went on and on. 

Of course, every time they build  something new in Brooklyn, there is controversy.  This time it was about the traffic this huge store will cause in a residential neighborhood.  But that long crime-ridden, but I always thought pretty cute due to its isolation, neighborhood is already being hit with traffic for the fancy grocery store.  And the pool.  And the new restaurants and furniture stores that have started popping up.  And the yummy and slightly illegal food that is cooked in homes and slyly sold out of coolers on the soccer fields.  Frankly, there didn't seem to be much more traffic than usual.  I think this store is a good thing.  It seemed to have a lot of neighborhood folks employed there, too.  Maybe I'm just a sucker for a store who's ad campaigns feature a family with gay parents.  Maybe I'm a Lingonberry fiend.  Perhaps I just like the names of things like Urgle and Huk.  But I'm one happy camper to have a local Ikea.  Happy, indeed.

And wherever there is an Ikea... A Trader Joe's is sure to follow in a nearby neighborhood.  And it is!  Opening soon in Carroll Gardens.  Now I'm never leaving Brooklyn.  No reason.

Nesting Part 2

Here's a list of things I felt impelled to do at 38 weeks, one day:

- finish writing thank you cards from my shower
- go through most of my non-maternity clothes and give half of them away
- pick up the co-sleeper from Kris's husband.  it is still in the trunk of our car.
- go back to the co-op because we really need food (we don't need any food.  we have too much food.)
- finish two drafts of the sample chapter of my book. send it to my writing group friends begging them for feedback in the middle of gay pride weekend.
- post to both of my blogs

- write a letter to my daycare provider with photos and contact numbers of all of the people who might be    watching cakie while we're in the hospital.
- dust the walls.  I freaking dusted the walls.  I am not a normal wall duster.  I have to say, I am happy with the dusted walls.  so very clean!
- get the return labels for an item i got two of from my registry
- order 274 diapers and 420 wipes
- feel guilt about not using cloth diapers.  get over it.
- cook dinner
- clean kitchen
- watch my belly do the mambo while my partner watched 'house'

whew.

Nesting -- Part 1

Some women, when they are as pregnant as I am (nine months,)  get what is known as the nesting instinct.  They want to clean their whole house from top to bottom.  OK.  I'm not a big cleaner.  Mr. Clean and I never went on a single date, although Fantastik and I have had some shining moments together. 

I do want to organize.  I have so much stuff from my first son that needs to be organized for the arrival of my second son.  AND we just have so much stuff, period.  Stuff we don't use, stuff taking up space.  Broken stuff.  Stuff still packed in boxes from when we moved here three years ago.  I can't take the stuff!  Arrrrggh.

My first nesting project was my son's closet.  In my last few weeks of work, I probably thought about tackling the closet on a daily basis.  Of course, I was too consumed with all of the undertakings of my last few weeks of work. 

What a relief!  Here are my before and after shots:
The cat is there to show scale.

Now that I can see them together, the after shot doesn't look much more organized than the before shot.  But it feels amazing.  Now, on to the linen closet...

The Apprentice

Some people at the end of their pregnancies do what they call "nesting."  That's when they go a little over-the-top cleaning their homes in preparation for the coming child.  That might happen to me.  I am planning a major purge of all the things in my home that never get used.  But this week I've been obsessed with grooming myself.  Let me tell you, people, I rarely get obsessed with grooming myself.  Yes, I shower.  I shave the legs when they get embarrassing.  About four times a year I wax the eyebrows.  Maybe one mani-pedi a year.  Not obsessed.

Today is my baby shower.  I've never had a  shower for anything.  I've never had a wedding.  My partner's shower was really for her, organized in great part by yours truly.  So I'm very excited to sit back and let my friends throw me a little party.

This week I got a mani-pedi and an eyebrow wax.  Then I became obsessed with getting my hair cut.  I want to look cute. I've been bouncing around between different hairdressers for the past year-and-a-half, ever since I broke up with my hairdresser of ten years, Gina.  I don't even know where Gina is now, but if I could have found her this week, I would have walked back over that burning bridge, let me tell you.  What I did end up doing was pretty fun.  Apparently, lots of salons in New York -- fancy pants ones -- have apprentice training programs.  Two friends from my building just got very cute cuts for only 20 bucks at fancy salons.  So I took out the list printed from the web and went to work on it.  Most of the places only did cuts on specific evenings.  By the time I got around to seriously scheduling this hair business, it was already Thursday.  After many fruitless phone calls, I ended up walking into a salon with a higher price ($45) but more flexible hours.  This place was far fancier a salon than I had ever deigned to enter in NY, aside from when I was working on a documentary on hair and we went into one on 5th Avenue.  This place had the fanciest bathrooms I've ever seen in a salon, with black river rocks in the shallow white sinks and fresh  white flower arrangement against the black subway tiles.  I was able to make an appointment for the next day, two days before the shower.

My hairdresser, a cute skinny little punky girl who just broke up with her boyfriend, was very chatty and entertaining.  Her ex got to keep the pit bull.  She got the chihuahua.  I told her she had complete control.  If she wanted to give me a crew cut, go for it! As long as I didn't have to blow dry it, I would be happy.  Oh, and I had to look cute.  She  decided to keep it long, suggesting I even let it grow two or three more inches.  Then she consulted the stylist.  They did a lot of holding up my hair and planning.  Then she chopped away for quite some time.  At the end, the stylist came back and did a "check."  Mind you, I thought my hair looked fabulous.  Then he said all these little things she needed to tweak, and she tweaked them.  It struck me that probably every time I've had my hair cut there have been a thousand little things to tweak, but nobody ever did a "check" before.

At the end, she showed me how to style it so I don't need to blow it dry.  Then she blew it dry and hot ironed it.  I looked like a freakin' movie star.  No wonder, apparently the likes of Marisa Tomei and Amanda Peet are regulars at this place.  I looked like a movie star on Friday.  I looked pretty good yesterday.  Today...I look a little like Kristy McNichols in the 1970's.  That is cute in a 1970's teenaged lesbian crush kind of way.  But not the cute I was hoping for.

So I'm going to wash it.  Wish me luck.  And, the next time you're in the big city, shell out the 20-45 bucks for an apprentice haircut.

Wrangler

A neighbor walked our son to daycare this morning.

Upon dropping him off, she called us.

"Cakie almost caught a squirrel." 

"He what?"

"And as he was chasing it, he was yelling 'MY CHINCHILLA!'"

2 Reasons Why My Honey is Very Very Smart

#1 When my son developed a neurosis about bubbles in his drinks... and let me tell you, when one drinks from a sippy cup, one always has bubbles in one's drink.  We struggled with it for a while.  We tried to use cups through which he could not see, for example.  Then the other day, she simply said, "Taste it and see if it tastes the same."  He looked at the cup and said, "Ok."  Then he proceeded to chug the entire cup of milk mixed with yogurt smoothie.  He exclaimed in a very excited two-year-old way, "It tastes the same!"  Problem solved.

#2 As I was poised to throw away all of our plastic sippy cups, especially the beloved and cheap disposable ones, my honey took a look at the bottom of our one over-priced Born Free sippy and declared, "Uh, this is number five plastic and so are the disposable ones."  Hmmm.  Oh look, the Platex ones that don't leak are also number five.   I wikied it online and it turns out that only #7 and #3 are troublesome. Money saved.

Smart and clever.  That's my honey.

There Is Superstition...

I just want to alert you to what is quite possibly the best superstition EVER.

I learned of it from a guy who works in my school cafeteria.  I had followed my nose down there.  The smell of garlic and general yum had wafted up to my room on the fourth floor.

He explained, as he set down in front of me a heaping plate of ravioli with spinach, peppers, cream and lots of garlic, about a Puerto Rican superstition.  If you deny a pregnant woman's request, you will get a sty in your eye.

All I have to say is, Que bonita bandera! That will not be my last visit to the school cafeteria.