Posts from — February 2009

In an effort to shake things up yesterday after Saturday’s jaunt into the delightful wonderland called 30-Day Shred Level Two: DEATH, I decided to take advantage of the beautiful day and go on a walk with Rosie and the iPod.

And holy bananas: the weather was fantastic, the tunes were awesome (thanks to you guys and this really nice dude who lives in my house who compiled them for me) and the whole way Rosie grinned up at me through a river of shiny drool.

It was glorious.

And I felt…well…I felt great.  Strong, even.  It’s amazing what a good song can do for a push up a steep hill.  For one thing, it masks my horrifying gaspy breath sounds, (which I like to pretend no one else can hear either) and for another, it never fails to make me feel like I am in a sweeping epic about a down-on-her-luck girl who overcame all the staggering odds to compete in the National Stroller Pushlympics, and as I crest that incline with the music swelling, I look around to see if anyone else saw how awesome I was.  Um, walking up that hill.

But WHATEVER.  It pumps me up, and I LIKE IT.

So I’m just going to come out and say it, even though it kind of makes me want to puke just thinking about it: I’m going to try a 5K at the end of March.

I cannot BELIEVE I just wrote that.  Because now I have to do it.  And really, that’s kind of the point: I need some accountability, right?  So hey!  How about being accountable to the whole Internet?  What can I say, I like to do things 100%.  Unless I feel like half-assing, which occurs pretty frequently as well.

SO.  Support is needed, encouragement welcome, and you can bet your sweet jellybeans that by the time I cross the finish line of that sucker I will have already picked out the soundtrack that will accompany the video montage of my athletic achievement in all its glory.

Unless my hair looks like crap.  Then we’ll see.

Dudes, I need the following questions answered, STAT:

1.  If we are in trouble and need help, how do we call Batman? (Note: yes, we KNOW the commissioner uses a Bat signal.  However, information needed is: how do we joe schmoes call him since we do not have a giant bat-shaped million-watt spotlight in our backyard?)

2.  Where does Batman live? (Again, note: “Gotham City” does not suffice, need to know “Where is Gotham City?”)

If you could get back to me on these, L will stop being so exasperated with me for always answering, “Daddy will tell you when he gets home.”

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Right, so I wrote a whole post about this already, but SERIOUSLY THE SLEEPING THING WHAT GIVES.  I am this very minute listening to Rosie do her little squinch and rustle for the eighth or maybe ninth time since we put her down at 7.  I know I always make fun of The Secret, but whatever: THIS BABY WILL SLEEP.  I AM PUTTING IT OUT INTO THE UNIVERSE.  P.S. UNIVERSE ALSO MAYBE I WILL COME INTO LOTS OF MONEY.

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Do you perhaps watch Mad Men?  If so, please enjoy this stinky penguin butt.

Last night we had our first taste of the next kabillion nights, i.e. our nightly quest known as Operation Act Like We Know How to Put Two Kids to Bed.  We’ve already been putting Rosie in her crib in Noah’s room at night, and it’s gone ok, but last night she woke up right before Noah crawled into his bed, and L and I looked at each other like “Um, did you read this part of the parenting book?”  Because it has been a long time since the days of Every Night is a Toss Up and I have really sort of forgotten (kind of like you “forget” the pain of childbirth) how totally and utterly maddening it is to try to put a child to bed who is developing at warp speed and therefore requires vastly different routines almost daily.  One evening they go to bed at six and sleep most of the night without a peep and you think, “Awesome. Bedtime routine memorized and filed into brain. Done and done.” And then the next night you go to put them down at six but LO:  Six o’ clock bedtimes are so fifteen minutes ago, and they wake up a mere 10 minutes later stretching and smacking their lips like “Why that nap was quite refreshing!  What’s on the tube?”  And then the method you used to put them to sleep earlier (read: boobs) is null and void and a whole new game plan has to go into effect on the fly.  Only you don’t have a game plan and babies can sense this with their tiny ESP abilities and they lay wide eyed and grinning at you in the dark as you rock and rock and rock until the left side of your body is paralyzed and you’ve begun drooling out of the corners of your mouth.

So, yeah.  That’s what we’re on the cusp of.

It’s like Rosie was this sort of lump of a thing that you could just lay down and pat on the back and she slept, because she didn’t have a whole lot else going on.  But now all of a sudden, now that she’s three months old, she’s like a person and stuff.  A person who is aware of things now like “Hey! I have hands!” and “Hey! That smallish dude gets in my face a lot!”  And Aware Babies like this newfound awareness, and sleep, well, sleep is what newborns do, dudes.  Three month olds are so beyond that, duh.

And besides the giant hurdle of Getting Them to Sleep there’s the whole other realm of Getting Them To Stay Asleep that involves bolting off the sofa at first gritch on the monitor to reinsert the pacifier as quickly as possible because it has been scientifically (i.e. made up by me right this minute) proven that the odds of continued sleep go drastically down with each second that ticks by.  And if that effort fails you go to Plan B, which usually involves curse words.

Rosie has yet to sleep in her crib all night long, but geez, she’s only three months.  Noah NEH-VERRR did that.  Not even once.  The first night he ever woke up right where we left him with no interaction with us through the night was sometime right after we put him in his big boy bed.  That’s two full years of interrupted sleep. But almost worse than that is that since then we’ve had about two years of UNinterrupted sleep (minus the time of the pregnancy when I woke up 15 times to relieve my dime-sized bladder).  So the old noggin’s feeling a little mushified these days.

I would say that we’re just a little rusty at the whole waking up at night to parent thing except that I really don’t think I ever got good at it. It was always hard.  And I expect it will always be hard.

But of course, obviously, clearly, a million DUHS…worth it.

Yesterday Rosie and I went to one of those giant craft stores that is filled with impossibly small objects for you to glue or otherwise affix onto the decorative project of your choice.  Frankly, the thought of doing crafts gives me hives.  I mean, if someone held a gun to my head and said “Make a springtime wreath out of this ribbon, pipe cleaners and fake pinecones OR SLEEP WITH THE FISHES” I would happily employ my creative side to fancy up a front door, but otherwise?  Meh.  But craft stores, while hyperventilation-inducing, are also cheap.  And I had my mind set on hanging letters spelling out Rosie’s name over her bed – letters I thought I could easily purchase on Etsy, or as I like to call it, whymakehomemadestuffwhenotherpeoplecandoitforyou.com.  Only, holy hell, painted wooden letters were going for anywhere from $10 to $20 a pop there. So after briefly considering renaming Rosie “Xi” or “Ed”, I decided that for $1.99 each I could make my own damn letters, thankyouverymuch.

I was perusing the paint aisle picking out colors when I heard a familiar PHBBBBBBBBTTTTTT…TUT…TUT………..TUT and before I could get the words “ALERT CRAFTY SHOPPERS, DEFCON 1″ out of my mouth, Rosie’s huge grin confirmed that the deed was already done.  I am not normally one to react in any kind of big way to Code Browns, but being in this specific location was bringing back a particularly unforgettable event involving a tiny chubby Noah, a baby carrier, and a white shirt of L’s that was never white ever again.  With that memory fresh in my mind I dropped the acrylics and beelined it to the bathroom.

The bathroom in this place is way back in the bowels (HAR DEE HAR) of the store in a room with no heat or air and requires a code to enter.  In other words it’s probably the very last place you would ever want to take your three month old baby to change her diaper, right up there next to a prison bathroom or maybe a boy’s dorm bathroom.  It gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it.  But Rosie has made it clear since she was straight out of the chute that she has a Daily Diaper Blowout Quota, and she does not intend to come up short, nosiree.  So I gingerly laid her down on the changing station, having piled every removable garment from my body under her as protection against the V. Questionable Stains upon it and began the disrobing procedure.

Of course, there was poop, and more poop and even more poop, and so I cleaned her the best I could while balancing dirty wipes on the edge of the changing station that clearly had four times as many germs on it as the wipes did and I kept dropping things on the floor and cursing the fact that I’d have to then take a blowtorch to them and I was struggling with the shmillion snaps that had to be resnapped and was trying not to gag from the fumes of the stall next door and finally, dear God, finally she was clothed and dry and (relatively) untainted and I had repacked the gear back into the bag and dumped out the entire bottle of Purell on my hands and onto her head and then I picked her up…

and she laughed.

That girl laughed right out loud right there in that cesspool of a bathroom with the cockroaches and the flies and the stink and the filth.  She looked at me straight in the face and without any tickling or nuzzling or belly prodding she opened up to a huge toothless grin and she laughed.

And I stood there for a full five minutes longer in the dank smelly recesses of that craft store restroom and I held my girl high above the markered stall walls and I gazed up at her in the glow of the buzzing fluorescent lights above and I laughed.

And together we laughed and we laughed and we laughed and we laughed.

BREAKING NEWS IMPORTANT ENOUGH THAT I AM WILLING TO LOOK LIKE AN ASS IN ORDER TO BRING TO YOU:

Two words:

Rosie laughed.

(Captured only briefly on the following clip.  Please enjoy the remaining 20 seconds of L and I acting like bumbling fools trying to get her to do it again as our gift to you.):

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DON’T TRY THIS ON A FULL STOMACH:

As a reward for being incredibly well mannered and patient during the Semi-Annual New Work Duds Shop-a-thon we executed for L on Sunday, Noah was rewarded by being launched into outer space with a giant slingshot:

Ok, maybe not actual outer space, more like the second floor of the mall.  Still, I was pretty stoked he would even think about doing something like this, when just a few weeks ago he ran in horror from the tiny mall train that rolls along in front of the stores at 3 MPH.  Sometimes I don’t get that kid.

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OPERATION DEFLABBIFY UPDATE:

All right, Day 10 of the 30-Day Shred, people.  I told myself I would do ten days of Level One: Seriously I Wasn’t Kidding About Shredding You and if after then I was able to do all the moves unmodified, it would be time to Pony Up and move on to Level Two: Your Ass Is Mine.  The good news is that I am indeed going all out unmodified. (DOODS, I can do PUSH UPS. Like A LOT OF THEM.  Well, by a lot, I mean maybe 10 or 15. But STILL.) The bad news is that this means I will be back to whimpering my way through the twenty minutes while Jillian says things like “If you’re looking for modified jumping jacks, WELL YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GET THEM.  I know 400 pound people who can do jumping jacks, and YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THEM, TOO.”  And then she’ll glower at me with her laser beam stare of doom.  But see, this is why The Shred is working.  I am fearfully trembling myself towards leaner thighs and toned shoulders.

Hey, whatever works.