Things I’d like to write about are:
being tongue-tied
an adventure or two in raising a boy
an adventure or two in raising a baby who appears to be an eater, glory be
and other stuff and junk
anything you’d like to hear about

Meanwhile, email me if you want to friend me on Facebook. I spend a lot more time there than here because I can do it while I nurse.

brand new:
buttered toast
marshmallows
open-faced peanut butter cracker sandwiches on graham crackers
my little pony fruit snacks
drinking out of an open top cup

with brand new fervor:
muffins
peanut butter cracker sandwiches (homemade)
frozen gogurt

what’s up with the sudden change? those of you who know me in real life may already know the answer to this. for the rest of you, care to make a guess?

ETA: OMFG!!1! Applesauce!

It is, however, a side effect of Tater. You see, Tater is always ALWAYS eating, thereby rendering me incapable of typing on my keyboard, so I’m left using this:

It’s called the on-screen keyboard. This entire post was created with it. I “typed” it with no interruptions, and it took 15 minutes. No, I don’t have carpal tunnel yet. Yet.

Please HURRY if you play Pet Society. I need more Pet Society friends.

I intend to continue this blog. In fact, I have a couple of Very Important Posts brewing that I’ll try to get up here shortly. I’m just still adjusting to working, having a small baby and a big girl, and juggling all the other crap life dishes out.

Combine one cat with standard desire to consume cereal bowl milk. Add to cat an insatiable hunger for all things granola, graham, cookie, and cracker.

In a small bowl, pour Golden Grahams and milk. Add spoon. Sit down and begin to enjoy.

In cereal bowl, find cat’s tail, nose, or whiskers. (Paw would also work.)

Fight off cat for thirty seconds.

After fighting, stand up and walk to center of room or to any part of room with open floor space and at least three feet between furniture tall enough for cat to access bowl from. (Kitchen may be substituted, but is not recommended.)

Finish cereal. Discover cats have no kibble and realize that was probably the problem.

Serves one. Discard leftovers.

When you are old enough to wonder about these days, I want to be able to tell you about them.

Today, America changed. Today, America saw its first African American President Inaugurated. This is an important moment in our history because it is a first, a door opening for future Americans.

When you ask me where you were when it happened, I will tell you this. We were in our living room, watching it on tv. I had been walking Tater around to get him to settle into a nap while I listened to the coverage on the kitchen radio. Tot, you stayed home from preschool with a cold, so you were kneeling at the ottoman in your rainbow-striped jammies. When I asked you if you wanted to see it, you said yes.

“Barack Obama will become President today. Do you want to watch?”
“Yes.” So I turned off the kid shows and put on a news channel.

We watched a poet and a prayer and a performance and a President, and that was that.

While it was a momentous occasion, I didn’t make a big deal over it, my little ones, because I don’t want it to ever be a big deal that America can elect someone who isn’t white or male or a member of a major political party. I am glad that for the whole of your lives, a President who also happens to be a minority will simply be within normal limits. I am hopeful that by the time you are both voting age, what a person is will not matter as much as what she or he stands for, as it has so often in our past.

It is a good dream to have, for all of us.

Love,
Mama

Our house is filled with products that have been recalled due to the salmonella scare. Sure, many homes have Austin and Keebler peanut butter crackers in the cupboard as snacks, but in this house, pb crackers are on the tot’s plate every single lunch and dinner. They are in my purse for when we’re out and she needs to eat. They are in her lunch bag at the babysitter’s house. Peanut butter and peanut butter products are her main source of protein.

Has anyone in this house gotten sick from them? No. The tot and I have a cold, but that is the extent of any illness here. Still, it feels like every time I turn around I see a packet of crackers in the snack drawer here and a half-packet of crackers leftover on the table there and I snatch them up, feeling relieved that she didn’t see them and open them for herself in a fit of independence. (It does happen from time to time.) I have told her that we aren’t eating peanut butter crackers from packages right now, only homemade ones (which she resists), but she’s 4.5 and really it’s my job to be in charge of shielding her from potentially dangerous things.

I am left with a weird feeling as this story develops. Of all the food contamination scares we’ve had in the last few years, I never really worried about them. They were all detached and distant from my life because I didn’t eat those things. I mean, seriously? Spinach? C’mon. Who the hell eats spinach? But here, this feels a little too close.

The up side to this is that the tot is forced to eat more cheese crackers (which should help desensitize her to cheese flavors) and is being offered more chicken nuggets (though she hasn’t been eating them), but even consumption of those is down right now due to her cold. For now, it’s lots of fluids for us and a big dose of relief that at least jarred peanut butter is considered safe for the time being, if she decides she feels like eating.

And then Santa came to my house and brought me a Christmas Eve present of one 4.5 hour stretch of sleep by Tater, followed by a 3 hour stretch. Heaven. And then there was the unexpected Christmas night gift of the longest night of sleep we’ve had since Tater joined us. He slept 7 hours, and I got about 6.5 hours of that.

Holy crap, I heart Santa.

That probably doesn’t sound all that bad, but when contrasted with the sleep we’ve been getting, it truly is a small miracle.

A typical night has been looking like this:
*Tater nurses to sleep for the night around 10:30 p.m.
*He wakes between 1 and 1:45 a.m.
*He nurses and is back to sleep within a half an hour
*He wakes again between 4 and 5 a.m. and is up for about a half an hour
*and is up again between 6:15 and 7. (This last stretch can be lengthened if I sit up holding him instead of putting him in his crib.)

On the good end of that spectrum, that works out to a 3 hour stretch, a 3 hour stretch, and a 2 hour stretch, but that never happens. It’s usually more like, 3, 2, and 1.5, and then I just stay up because I have to take the tot to preschool and the coffee is already made*. If I’m not lucky (and believe me, this is all about luck – he’s not deliberately trying to kill me by sleep deprivation.) (Shut up and let me believe that), his night is 30 minutes, 2.5 hours, 2 hours, and 4 more if I hold him.

When I was pregnant with the tot, I used to hate all the people who told me that having to get up to pee two or three times a night was preparing me for getting up with a baby. I hated this for two reasons. First, I don’t know about you, but I can get up, pee, and get back in bed in under 5 minutes and without having to fully wake up. Getting up with a baby? Not so easy to do while sleepwalking. Second, (I heard this somewhere, loved it, and adopted it) it’s the equivalent of preparing for a famine by dieting. Um, no thanks.

With Tater, I started waking up to pee much earlier in the pregnancy than with the tot, and the chronic sleep disruption was compounded this time by insomnia that would hit me after my 3-4 a.m. pit stop. While lying awake in the wee hours, I began to see the kernel of truth in what all those well-meaning people were saying. The truth is this: the getting up to pee at all hours of the night doesn’t so much prepare you for taking care of an infant in the night as it breaks your spirit. In those late nights and early mornings of my pregnancy, I had to hand myself over to the sandman. I had to accept that I had no control over when I’d need to wake up or when I’d get to go back to sleep. I could use all my best tricks, but when it came down to it, it was no longer my choice.

The postpartum sleep deprivation is easier this time around for this very reason. I know and accept that I’m at this little person’s mercy, at least for a while yet. And the fact that I know it won’t last forever helps. (The tot did eventually sleep in stretches longer than 4 hours, though I don’t care to think about how old she was when that finally happened or what it took to get there [anemia].)

So that’s that. I’m tired, so very, very tired. But on the whole, we’re doing well. Tater is an adorable baby and a happy boy who seems bent on learning to talk already. The Tot is a doting big sister, even when she’s infected with every god-forsaken cold virus her preschool pals insist on sharing with her. (Preschool. Ugh.)

Stay tuned for more. I think now that Tater is starting to sit up a bit on his own I won’t have to hold him quite so much, which will free my hands for teh typing.

*HG programs it the night before, and I love him for it.

2. We are home and as well as can be. My recovery is not all rose petals and champagne, like I remembered it (or, like I mis-remembered it), but all the pieces-parts seem to be in the right place and I’m not hemorrhaging, so that’s good.

3. The tot is an amazing child, and we couldn’t be more impressed with how she’s handling the interloper.

4. The cats are not impressed by anything.

5. I think we’re going to try Tater as the boy’s blogonym to see how it fits. If it doesn’t, we might just stick with The Boy. Not sure yet.

6. It was very important to me to be able to breastfeed this child, and so far it’s going okay. Not awesome, but okay. Tater was tongue-tied, which we got clipped, but nursing is still hurty. But still! Nursing! I never got to say that with the tot.

Now, why would I tell you that I’ve chosen to feed the boy with my boobs? Because it’s connected to my three favorite times with this baby so far, and I’d like to share those.

Story A:
I hadn’t been home from the hospital long, so HG was still helping me get situated when Tater would need to nurse. Tater was squawking and HG was soothing. I got seated and popped my top, at which point HG lowered the baby so as to hand him to me. Tater was still squawking, until he saw my boob. He saw it, did a double-take, and his expression went from “I! AM! SO! PISST!” to “Oh! Hello, friend!” in a microsecond.

Awesome.

Story B:
I was holding Tater in the football hold while nursing him the other day. The football hold means the baby is lying next to me with his feet pointed back and his head is at my breast. My arm is wrapped around him like I ought to be posing for the next Heisman trophy carving session. In this position, he was able to look across the breast in his maw to see the other one, and I’m certain he was making eyes at it. I’m not kidding. Like, “Hey, maybe we can get together some time” + bats eyelashes.

I have never been quite so popular in my life as I am right now.

Story C:
This is, when I’m lucky, a repeating episode. In the morning, after he fills his gigantic stomach and falls into a milk coma, I put him on my shoulder and listen to him sigh. Only newborns make this sound, and I’m trying to enjoy every moment of it since this will be the last baby in this house. It’s a sort of rhythmic hanh hanh hanh that comes through his nose but sounds like he’s forming it with an open mouth. It is the same sound the tot made and it is just about the best sound in the world.

So today, I offer you all a prize for waiting so long for me to tell you we’re having a yob. I mean, a boy.

Chuck Jones was a genius.

If I had been able to find it, the video I’d have provided would not have been Rocket Bye Baby. It would have been an old commercial, which basically went like this:

A man is at a payphone in a hospital. He tells the operator he’d like to make a collect call.
The operator asks who is calling.
He replies, “Bob Wehadababyitsaboy.”
She says, “One moment, sir.”
The phone rings in the family room of an older couple. The husband is reading a newspaper and the wife is knitting. The husband picks up.
The operator asks, “Would you like to accept a call from Bob Wehadababyitsaboy?”
He says, “No, thanks” and hangs up.
As he returns to his newspaper, the wife stops knitting and asks, “Who was that, dear?”
He rattles his newspaper back into reading shape and nonchalantly says, “It’s Bob. They had a baby. It’s a boy.”
With a simple “Ah,” she returns to knitting.

And that, my friends, is exactly how you can expect to find out the baby’s been born because I’m totally not spending my daytime cell minutes calling all y’all.

I kid, I kid.

C-section scheduled for Friday morning. OB agrees with me that I’ll make it that far because the baby is still floating high, high, high, and my cervix is locked down tighter than a, well, a something that is locked down really, really tightly.

That’s all, folks!