Q&A

Q: What do you get when a baby vomits up spit-up mixed with phlegm?


A: I don't know but it's all over my pajama top and pooling in my bra.


Happy Holidays and a Merry New Year!!

Oatmeal!

Hey, Belle, aren't you excited? We're going to have oatmeal this morning! Yes, that's right! Oatmeal! It's something new; you've only had rice cereal until now, but now we're going to try this oatmeal cereal. Isn't that exciting? Yeah? Look at that smile, I can tell you're excited! Hooray for oatmeal! Hooray! here we go! Stirring it up in the bowl with the spoon! Mmmmm, doesn't this look good? It looks good to Mommy, yes it does. Hooray! Oatmeal! Oatmeal for Bella-boo! Yum yum, are you ready? Mmmm, that's so yummy. Ooops, got a little on your chin, that's okay, that's why we have a bib on. Yum yum yum you eat it right up. ...Mommy got distracted for a moment there, but I can see from how you're flapping your arms and hitting the tray that you're impatient for more food. More food! So yummy! You love this oatmeal! Oop - don't spit it out, it goes in, not out. Yeah, just like that, you've got it! Yummy oatmeal for breakfast! Numnumnum! Ooooh, you want to hold the spoon? You want to feed yourself? Oh, you want to play with the spoon? That's nice! Nice spoon. Yes, it goes right in your mouth, just like that. Yum! Oh, no, that end is the end for holding. That end is not for the mouth. Not that end! Here, let Mommy help you turn it around. You want it back? No? You want more oatmeal? Yeah? Yummy! Yum yum eating oatmeal! Oh, look, all done! All done with our oatmeal now! You did such a good job eating your oatmeal, Mommy is very impressed. Hooray! Hooray for baby! Okay, let's get you out of your bib and wipe off your face and hands.
That was fun!

I don't know which Spock I need

Belle has two little points on her ear. I first noticed them in the hospital when she was first born, and I thought maybe it was the kind of thing that would go away over time, but it hasn't. Sometimes I try to feel my own ears to see if she got it from me, or what. I think it's the kind of thing only a mom would notice; nobody's ever said anything about them to me.
Eventually, though, Belle will notice them, and I have these terrible flash-forwards to an eleven-year-old screaming at me:
I hate my ears, Mom, and I hate YOU!

Holidaysholidaysholidaysohgodholidays

I'm a little freaked out that the holidays are coming up so soon. There aren't a lot of weekends between now and then, and there isn't a lot of time to figure out gifts for people. I don't get gifts for that many people, just family members, but still - it's the figuring out that can be fun but looms a bit stressful this year. I think I might just shortcut by buying things from stores people like and then including a gift receipt. That way they can go when things are on sale anyway.
And then there's the Christmas Card Question. Now that we have a baby, people are going to expect cards, right? I figure folks expect cards as soon as a couple gets married, but we got a break the first year for being newlyweds, and the second year for being pregnant, but this year the baby excuse is trumped by the need for baby pictures! Send photos! So I think we have to do the photo card, and really there's no excuse not to, except that I'm not sure when to take the photo. I'd like to as soon as possible, but then she might be too young in the photo? I dont know; I think we'll take it asap so we can get everything ordered.

Another self-explanatory website

I just ordered labels for all of Belle's stuff. All stuff must be labeled!!! How do you do that? You go to labelyourstuff.com of course.

We had a note from day care last week to label Belle's bottle lids. I put the three flower stickers on them that I've been using to mark her bottles but NO THAT'S NOT ENOUGH ANYMORE apparently, because when D brought Belle home, all the bottle lids had Belle's name written on them. This must be some new initiative, because Belle's been in day care since the end of August, and labeling bottle lids never came up before. So I decided it was finally time to buy some of those stupid labels to slap onto everything. Hers are red with the butterfly logo. (The ladybug is ugly.)

Bleb-B-Gone

Bleb bleb bleb!
Much like plutonium, it is fun to say. But I believe I have successfully resolved the bleb situation, so no more bleb blogging. "Bleb-B-Gone", by the way, would be a terrible name for a band.

October is a busy month 'round here

Where September was a month dedicated to getting in the swing of our new work and day care schedules, October is the month of, now that we've got a schedule, visiting with friends. Lots of travel, and a little bit of hosting, but we have let the apartment get messy. I still have a full suitcase from 2 weeks ago, and D and I both wondered where two of the dryer balls disappeared to for weeks now. I found them yesterday in a forgotten laundry basket full of to-be-ironed table linens hidden behind said suitcase.

Belle is doing great; she's between colds right now, which is how I'll be thinking of "not sick" until June. A few weeks ago, she proved herself too adept a roller to be allowed free reign on her playmat in the middle of the apartment, so she is now confined to the Pack-and-Play. This seems to be OK with her. Her current project is figuring out depth perception, also known as Is That Close Enough To Touch, a game that goes hand in hand with Can I Fit It In My Mouth?

Breastfeeding is going fine, as is the pumping, except that I have some weird thing that I think is a milk bleb. "Milk bleb" is fun to say, even just said silently in my mind. Milk bleb milk bleb milk bleb.
It also would be a funny insult to call someone. "You milk bleb!" I think it might catch on.

In these busy weeks, D and I have found a little time to zone out and watch some of the new fall tv season. Between returning shows and all the Exciting New Programs, the first two weeks of the fall tv season meant we watched more than usual, and definitely more than we should.
I cut Bionic Woman from my slate after the pilot - blech. I don't see how they can promote the show as girl power when the entire premise is based on a guy using his girlfriend's body without her permission.
Pushing Daisies is the next for the chopping block. I feel like I should like it, but they're doing it all wrong somehow. I do like Jim Dale's voiceover work, and the character Olivia, but the two main characters are just yuck.
New Show Keepers: Chuck and Reaper. Despite the articles comparing them to one another, these shows are definitely distinct. And cute.

Oh right, I have a blog...

Belle's down for a nap, so I thought I'd check in on you poor neglected readers.

It's been very busy for us the past few weeks: I started work again and Belle's begun day care, so we're adjusting to new rhythms and schedules. Also, we bought a car!!!!
We are the proud owners of a 2006 Subaru Outback in dual-tone Atlantic Blue (w/silver). It's an automatic transmission, and it's a basic model; the only option-thingy it has is heated seats which, if you could choose one, that's a good one to choose. Now, I said we're 'owners', but I didn't say 'drivers', because we haven't yet had the car seat base installed and checked out at the local police station. It's a sticky situation, because they only do inspections on Tuesdays, which is one of the days when I go to work and D takes care of Belle. But D is confident he can install the base properly on his own (since he did it for the other two cars before getting a thumbs-up from the police), enough to drive over there with Belle this Tuesday.

I've also had to go shopping for some work clothing for my post-partum figure. You may recall that I had a HUGE pregnancy belly - well, that doesn't go away all at once. A deflated belly creates a new figure, one that requires differently-cut clothing. And I have to be careful about it, because I still have numbness on my lower abdomen. This should wear off in another 6 months or so, but in the meantime, I have to take that lack of feeling into consideration. For example, if a normal person's belly is hanging out of their clothes, the tiny hairs and nerve endings on the skin will alert them to the exposure, because you feel drafts, etc. Not so for the numb! I could walk around all day with a saggy gut hanging out and never realize it. This is why I am still enamoured of my pregnancy camisoles - they cover everything. But I'm too small now for my preggers pants, so I must shop a bit.

Speaking of shopping, have you SEEN the adorableness available at Gymboree?? OMG, SQUIRRELS! And hedgehogs and bunnies and tiny gnomes! I have $17 in store credit and a 20% off coupon that expires in two weeks, and I'm trying to decide how to wield them to Belle's best advantage.

Day care is going ok for Belle, but not great. I call to check in one her twice a day, while I'm pumping at work, and one day she spent the whole morning fussing, and another day she had loose stools (which they'd send her home for if she wasn't fully breastfed) and a minor fever (99.3). But she's had some okay days too, so I think it's going to work out. Yesterday, she cried when Daddy left, both times. (He stopped by in the afternoon because they called me at 2pm to tell me that she'd been refusing to eat all day since her 9am feeding.)

She's still sleeping like a champ, which is so very very lucky for us, and totally undeserved for me, because I was a terrible sleeper as a baby. She has mastered rolling over from her back to her belly, as long as she rolls to the left. I wonder if this means she'll be right-handed. Handedness is interesting to me because I'm a lefty and D's a righty and I'm so curious which way Belle will go. She also has figured out the leg movements for crawling, but she hasn't figured out that her arms need to help out, or that it would be easier if she lifted her belly off the floor. The result of her legs-only pushing is that she kind of pushes over onto her head. It's cute. It's also only a matter of time before she figures it out and starts crawling. Yikes!

She still isn't very interested in toys at all. Hands are for observing and sticking in her mouth, not for reaching or grabbing. If a toy gets in her hand's way, then it might be contemplated with a bit of interest, but as a minor obstacle only.

Unremarkable = Perfection

Yesterday was the kind of Saturday I'd been looking forward to for ages. Beautiful weather, no plans, just us. Before Belle, this kind of day generally went somewhat wasted: we might get out on some kind of trip, but ultimately it felt to me like we just weren't fulfilling the potential of the day.

Now, with a baby, the potential of a day is very different. Instead of feeling like there's so much I should get done, I felt like everything we do accomplish is a victory, and everything we do is layered with a kind of significance, because we're doing it with Belle as well. Mostly, we had a quiet day at home. Our big outing was to take Belle on a little 1-mile hike in the Baby Bjorn, and once we had gotten her to sleep at night, we tried cooking a new recipe for dinner.

Sure, we didn't hike Mt. Monadnock or camp out overnight or throw a party, but it was perfect to me the way it was. This is precisely the kind of day I was looking forward to having once we became parents, and I have not been disappointed.

Losing my cool about spit-up

(Reprinted from an email to my new-mom group)

I have a question that I never thought to ask in class, but after yet another debacle this morning, I would love some advice about what to do to contain/control Belle's spit-ups after a feeding. It seems like no matter how clever I think I'm being, or how big a cloth I use to cover her, me, and the area in-between, she always ends up getting spit-up on my back, in my bra, in my lap, down my side, down her front and past her bib, or on the chair. Sometimes she'll spit up while leaning on my shoulder, sometimes when she's held sitting or standing facing me. I hate the idea of having to run to the kitchen after every breast just so the spit-up can land on the linoleum; does anyone have any suggestions? I had a particularly bad time of it this morning, with spit-up so copious my husband had to take her so I could strip and shower. It's not that there's so much volume, it's just that it ends up covering so much surface area!

Mixed Feelings

I'm torn between wishing this page had an RSS feed I could subscribe to,
and a sense of relief that it doesn't.
It's a list of all the non-toy children's products that are being recalled, including furniture and clothing. It's funny that the clothing people keep forgetting that drawstrings are always a strangulation hazard. I suppose it's sad that parents keep forgetting, too.
Caveat emptor, dumbasses, it's clothing with a built-in rope.

Anyway, the list can be kind of upsetting, especially if you have a Baby Bjorn Active or a Fisher-Price Rainforest Swing.

I'll call her Belle

The name "Baby" has an expiration date on it, so I'm going to call her Belle.

I still don't know what her different cries are, but I think the reason for that is partly because I so rarely hear her cry when she's hungry. I feed her every 3-4 hours during the day, and it's only about once a week that she realizes she's hungry before I feed her. When she wakes up hungry at night, I'm just not that with-it to notice the nature of her cry. After all, I know exactly what she wants.

In addition to not getting particularly hungry during the day, Belle has taken to getting a good chunk of sleep at night, falling asleep by 8:30 at the latest and waking at 2am at the earliest. This leaves me with a dilemma many new moms face: do I try to get a full 6+ hours of uninterrupted sleep by going to bed at 7:30pm, or do I enjoy a quiet evening and continue getting 4ish hours at a time? So far, it's been the latter, and I'm trying to be in bed by 10:15, which mostly translates to "before 11". I usually get another 2-3 hours after that feeding before the next.

The only frustration we have with Belle's latest schedule and otherwise-delightful personality is that she has to have a good cry before sleeping most of the time. When she gets tired in the afternoon, she gets so sad and cranky. And in the evening when we're getting her ready for bed, there's always crying. Sometimes her evening crankytime lasts only 15 minutes, but sometimes it can go for 90 before she tuckers herself out. It's so very sad when she cries, and I feel so sad to not be able to help her.
I think that's one of the most important lessons of parenthood - that sometimes, we just can't help our children, we can only be there to hold them and love them. I've seen my mother go through the same thing when I've had hard times, so I might as well just learn how to deal with it now.

Athlete's Foot in the Mouth

At Baby's 2-week check-up, I was dismayed to learn that she has a mild case of thrush on her tongue. All I'm supposed to do is dip a q-tip in the medicine, swab it on her tongue after feedings 4x a day, and I'm done. I was worried we were in for a long haul of fighting over whether Baby would allow me to do so, mostly because Kathy's ordeal sounded like a total pain.

When Baby seemed to have no problem with the medicine, and would start to actually suck at the q-tip, I was amazed, and decided that she was truly a perfect match for fellow-gourmand Spliggle. But her affection for the medication was more practically explained when my mother read the packaging and discovered that Nystatin is 50% sugar.

The thrush seems to be clearing up, albeit slowly, and it doesn't seem to be bothering Baby at all. She enjoys getting dessert after four of her feedings a day, too.