mommy moments

I had my first real taste of Mommy Power this past weekend. We were visiting with family, and my MIL was holding Delma. D was getting fussy and fidgety so my MIL passed her to me. The second she got into my arms she instantly quieted. Whoosh. Calm. She just stood on my lap facing me and gnawed on my necklace and was happy as a clam. How amazing that I can have that effect on another person, that I can be all she needs to just feel safe and centered. What a blessing.

D has a good bedtime routine, we feed her dinner at 6, give her bathy at 6:30, and at 7 she gets a bottle and goes to bed. She likes her routine, and goes right to bed with no fuss and puts herself to sleep. When she gets her bottle, we shut her bedroom door so no kitties wander in and distract her, we turn the light down low so she knows it's nighttime, and we turn her white noise machine on. We really try not to mess with the routine, because we're pretty much obsessed with her sleep schedule and we don't want to do anything that will screw it up.

Josh usually puts D to bed, but he's out of town this week. Last night as I was giving her a bottle and singing to her, she got all squooshy and cuddly. She just wanted to watch my face while I sang to her. I realized we've been robbing ourselves of a really special time with her, right before bed when she's all sweet and sleepy. When she was tiny, at night we made sure to keep feedings to "just business," no playing or anything that would stimulate her, to get the idea of night vs. day really cemented in her mind. We've kept that up, but I think now her bedtime routine is well established enough that we don't need to be so hyper-vigilant. I think now we can give up a bit of that control and follow her lead. If she's really exhausted, put her right to bed. If she wants to squirm around and have some cuddles and kisses, then by God that kid should absolutely get cuddles and kisses.

making friends with the earth again

Before D was born, I ordered the gdiapers starter kit and refills. I was so excited. Then she was born and we got home and I had no room in my head for anything other than putting one foot in front of the other every day and just surviving. We never opened the gdiapers. I did make sure to buy all natural household cleaners, but other than that my head was not in a very earth-friendly space. I totally succumbed to convenience.

After almost 9 months of mommyhood, I finally feel like we're in a groove, at long last. We have a schedule for Delma, our days and nights are pretty predictable, and with that new level of comfort is coming the freeing up of some mental space and energy. I went back to the gdiapers site and re-read all the alarming statistics regarding disposable diapers. D is too big for the newborn-sized stuff I bought last year, so I stocked up on all the goods for her current size. They arrived last week, and so far so good. We even have the people at daycare using them during the day too, which I am so pleased about. They aren't flushing, they're throwing the diaper inserts out. But that's fine with me, at least it's all biodegradable! It definitely requires a bit more planning and work than just using disposables, but both Josh and I are happy to put in the extra work since it means being kinder to the planet. I wish we'd done this from Day 1 -- I think the key is to be completely committed to it, and prepared and ready to go before the baby is born, so that when you get home you can just start using them and don't have to feel like you're figuring out some new project. We just weren't prepared and we obviously were not 100% committed. We took a sort of wait and see approach, and if you do that you will never just decide to start doing something that requires more effort. You need to acknowledge the extra effort and accept it and commit to it.

I also ordered BioBags from drugstore.com... Our local natural foods market carries Seventh Generation, which is better than regular trash bags since it's mostly post-consumer plastic, but I really want to try the biodegradable ones. Far more expensive than getting a big ol' box from Target or Walmart, but since we won't be using a diaper pail anymore we'll hopefully be using less garbage bags. We'll see how they work.

AND I ordered these super-cute shopping bags. I even got a discount using a code from Cool Mom Picks. I have forgotten them in the car every single time I've gone shopping since I got them, so they're not working out too great yet, but I'm sure they will once I get myself into the habit!

All of this more earth-conscious living is making Josh think about going back to veganism. We're vegetarian and are raising D vegetarian. When it comes to dairy products, especially for D, I'm trying to be more conscientious about organics etc. I appreciate and respect veganism, but I just don't think it's a committment I'm willing to make right now, and it seems to me like that's something we would need to do together as a family. If one person is vegan, we'd have to cook vegan for the whole family. Our restaurant options would be severely restricted. I know these are all manageable issues, people make it work all the time, I just don't think that's where my head is right now. Right now I need to get used to flushing Delma's poo and to using garbage bags made from corn. Baby steps!

Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to me. Technically I was a mother last year since I had a bebe in my belly, but this year it's really really real. I told Josh a while ago that for Mother's Day, I wanted to go away by myself for a night in a hotel, to get a good night's sleep. He's a bit of an over-doer, and though a night at a Best Western watching cable and reading a book in the bathtub would have been just fine with me, he instead sent me to a spa. Huzzah! It was great, I got a facial and a manicure and a seaweed mud wrap thing. I took a line dancing class and a toning/stretching class. I got an astrological birth chart done for Delma, and a tarot card reading done for me. I had room service dinner while I lazed about watching Beauty and the Geek. I finished a book I've been reading. It was over the top, and Josh is not allowed to by me any gifts again for a long time, but it was wonderful.

8 Months

Delma is 8 months old. Actually, since I am so late in posting as usual, she is about 8 and a half months. Crazy. She had been really healthy, then caught some little tummy bug last weekend and was running a fever for a day or 2. It was very weird, even when she's been sick before she rarely really seems sick. But this time, all day on Monday she was totally mopey, lethargic, a bump on a log. So not like her usual peppy kooky self. It sort of freaked me out, she would let me cuddle and hug her, whereas normally she's too interested inpulling and pushing me and grabbing and squirming to ever let me just have some nice quiet cuddle time with her. I had just been complaining days before that she never lets me mush and cuddle, and then she got sick and did let me, but I would have traded her back for her annoyingly squirmy healthy self in a second.

She's all better now, though, and is donning fun little summer clothes now that we're having some warm days. LOVE the summer baby, with the exposed flesh and the sweaty little head.

Del still isn't crawling, but she sometimes seems like she almost might be making some progress. She does on occasion get on her knees and rock, but it seems more accidental than anything. She's happy to push herself around backwards on her belly, though, and she scooted herself right into the kitchen the other day and found the cat food. Oops. Time to baby-proof. She mostly likes holding someones hands and pulling herself up, but now she likes plopping back down on her tush too. She used to cry any time she plopped down, but now she does it on purpose. She'll do it over and over and over and over. We call it "Up and Oop!" Good times.

A few weeks ago we went to a birthday party for our niece Aria, who turned 5. My sister-in-law is one of 4 kids, and they each have kids around the same age and all live near each other and the little cousins all spend tons of time together. With the exception of the youngest, my nephew Elijah, they're all girls, and they're all tight. They were so excited to see Baby Delma, they practically descended on her like lions on prey, though in a very loving way instead of an I'm-gonna-chew-you sort of way. Alexandria put a little tiara on her. Del was overwhelmed but fascinated. We just kept our distance and let her get sucked into their world, my SIL's mother was holding her most of the time. It was very cute to sit back and see it all play out, see our baby trying to make sense of this completely foreign world. Josh and I have problems with my SIL, and her family is rather overbearing and they're definitely a tight pack, but I want Delma to know her cousins and have the experience of extended family. It's hard, it means that we have to make a real effort to see them and spend time with them, but it will be worth it for Delma's sake.

Up until recently, Del had this strange thing where she'd get very upset when we'd play with blocks and a tower of them would crash down. I would make little towers and she'd watch me, and then I'd knock them down or she'd try to grab the top one and accidentally knock them all down, and it would really freak her out. I don't know why. But now all of a sudden, she's fine with it and has also started doing this cute thing sometimes where every block that I put down she'll grab and put in a little hoarded stash in front of her. Very cute. I put it down, she grabs it. If I want to make a tower I have to do it very fast because she'll grab as fast as I can stack. Of course she won't do it if there are witnesses... I wanted to show Josh how cute it is, and she doesn't do it if he's there. She's like that singing frog from the cartoon.

black plague strikes again

I can not catch a break this year! Oh my god, I keep getting so horribly sick, this has been the grossest winter/spring ever. I am so ready for less rain, more sunshine and fresh air. I feel like I need to put on some sunglasses, dress all in black, and go lay down on some black-top somewhere and just bake myself til I've essentially pasteurized my system and killed off all the hideous crap that's been coursing through me. Antibiotics have kicked in and the codeine has done a good job of helping me sleep at night, but it's all left me feeling completely whomped.

Very pleased that all the new fashions have floppy shirts that make everyone look pregnant and hide sad bloated tummies.

Delma wants to stand so badly... She's figured out that if she grabs our hands when she's sitting, she can pop herself up to a standing position. And she gets really pissed when you plop he back down on her butt. The woman who spends the most time with D and the other babies under 1yr (aka The Littles) at daycare said that D will stare at the woman's hands to see when she can find her in, and grab them to stand up. Yesterday she tried pulling herself up on an activity center toy like another Little there does. The girl doesn't even crawl! I really don't think she will, either -- I think she's going to go straight to her feet.

I ordered a couple of these cute necklaces, one in pink and one in blue. They're specifically made out of the same rubbery plastic that teething toys are made of, for ladies who have babies who chew their necklaces. D is obsessed. The second you pick her up she reaches right out for your necklace. If you aren't wearing one she rests her little hand where your necklace should be. She really likes these, and I know they're safe for her to gnaw on. It's a win-win!

7 Months

Delma is 7 months old. Wow. She is a little person now, sometimes I look at her and I wonder just who she is and what she's doing in my house. She's completely weened now, so I don't have that physical connection with her anymore... When she was hungry she used to grab me and smother her face in my chest -- now instead when she sees her bottle she starts getting all impatient and cries and it makes me really sad. She's completely separate from me, if I dropped off the face of the earth she probably wouldn't notice. Josh, on the other hand, she would notice. She is such a daddy's girl already -- if he's in the room she can't keep her eyes off him. When he leaves the room she just stares at the doorway he left through. The only thing that's maybe as interesting to her as Josh are the cats. She beams the biggest smiles when she sees them, her head whips around to check them out when she hears a meow, when they come near her she screams with delight (and then looks completely confused when they get scared and run away).

I'm glad she won't remember this part of her childhood. I fear that this is how she'd remember it:

Sitting on the bathroom floor every morning when we get ready for work. Babies shouldn't have to play on the bathroom floor! It's clean, but it's weird. She gets to look up at our naked butts as we get in and out of the shower and get ready for work. I think we're going to end up being "that weird naked family."

Her hair is so long now that we have to put a barrette in it every day. We love her crazy unruly hair, but one day when Josh picked her up from daycare there was a piece of yarn tied in it on the top of her head, Pebbles-style, and they made a comment about how it always in her eyes... OK, OK, point taken. Now we put a barrette in front, but we let the rest just stay all crazy.

A couple weeks ago she developed Thrush, the poor thing. She's such a good sport about being sick that we didn't even notice it for quite a few days, until the daycare people pointed it out. All we noticed was that she wasn't eating as much as usual, and then we relized it was because she was uncomfortable. :( It's her own fault, though, she should have just told us instead of withholding information! Seriously, when will she learn??

This little girl has such a personality now, and is really asserting herself. She babbles A LOT. She has developed that adorable baby habit of screaming when you take things away from her. Throughout the day, just for the hell of it, she'll tense up her whole body, clench her right fist, and yell this weird gutteral yell. We're finally starting to realize that we shouldn't laugh every time she does something crazy like that, since we're just encouraging her and she knows it. When did she grow a brain??

One really great development is her love for music. We sing and dance all the time in our house, and she's always really responded to it. So we signed her up for a Kindermusik class and it's been a blast. We bought her some little instruments to play with at home, and it's a great way to calm her down. She can amuse herself for quite a while with her little drum, tamborine and her little shake boxes while we listen to music. I think she's going to grow up thinking that life really is like a musical, where randomly in the middle of a conversation people break into song. Because that's what we really do. And she's going to think that's normal. Ha!

$$ and the Easter Bunny

Money and the Easter Bunny are on my mind, though not necessarily in that order. Actually, yes, in that order.

We got a Discover card recently. We always used our Mobil card for all gas purchases, and then paid it in full each month, so we never carried a balance or paid interest and we never had to use cash for gas. That worked great for years, and also gave us very clear visibility into what we paid on gas each month. But the Mobil card had no benefits, points, etc, so was sort of a waste in the world of cashback and miles and points and all that... Enter, the Discover Card. 5% cash back on all gas purchases, plus cash back for all other purchases too... So now I'm trying to use it for everything that we'd normally pay for with cash, like groceries, etc, and we'll just pay it off in full each month. I'm really excited about it, and after only one month we already have a nicely growing little cashback balance!

I also signed us up -- finally! -- for upromise, so we're earning money for Delma's $800kajillion college tuition every time we use any of our credit or bank cards, or when we use our little savings cards at the grocery store or CVS. We still don't even have a savings account ourselves, or a 529 for Del, but at least we're taking baby steps in the right direction (we have 401k's, but those don't really count since we can't touch them). I feel like we're finally learning to be a little bit proactive financially, and it's very motivating.

OK, so the Easter Bunny... Josh and Delma are Jewish. I'm converting. This past Christmas was really weird for us, we got a tree and decorated it -- out of habit more than anything else, really -- and then felt really uncomfortable having it in the house since we're not Christian and we had no clue how to justify having it, other than the fact that we like shiny things and we have all sorts of my family's ornaments and decorations going back to before I was born. Though we both grew up with Christmas and we have wonderful magical memories associated with it, we just don't know how to raise a Jewish daughter and celebrate Christmas. So we likely won't be doing the Christmas thing anymore at our house, but we'll happily enjoy the sparkly shiny twinkling lights and decorations and trees in public places and in the homes of friends and family.

So, on to the Easter Bunny. While Christmas is extremely secular, it still is very much a Christian holiday. But Easter? It is so secularized that there's almost no religious association with it out in the public forum. And it's really cute, with all the chicks and the bunnies and what-not. And it's got really great candy. And egg hunts with all those waddling, greedy little kids are really cute. Would it be so awful for us to give Del an Easter basket every year? I'm conflicted. I have a meeting with my rabbi today, I'll have to pick his brain on this one.

Happy Thursday

I love Thursdays for a few reasons:
1. I have no meetings. My Outlook calendar is completely empty on Thursdays (for now), and it makes me so happy.
2. Bagels at work. On Thursdays we have free bagels and cream cheese in our office. My love for bagels is boundless, and absurd. And then when they're FREE? Look out.
3. Free lunch. On Thursdays we have a free sort of buffet lunch thing here in the office. I love food a lot. I love free a lot. Put the 2 together... heaven.

In other random thoughts:
Bravo has been playing Six Feet Under. I don't get HBO, so I've been watching the series on Bravo -- I caught it right from the beginning, and they play 3 new episodes every Monday night which I record and then somehow find time to watch during the week. Oh my god, what an amazing show. It's up to maybe the 4th season now and still after just about every episode I am so sad that it's over. Last night I watched the episode when Ruth's sister takes her friend Fiona hiking, Fiona trips and falls down the mountain and dies, and then Ruth and several women end up getting drunk and high and go down to the basement to look at the body, and all start singing "Calling all Angels." I cried, and all morning today I keep picturing that scene and getting teary. It makes me miss being surrounded by girlfriends.

3 is the magic number

When we bought our house a year and a half ago, the inspector told us we had some mold in the attic. He said all attics have some mold, it wasn't super-serious, but we should call someone and get it cleaned at some point. He also told us our bathroom fan is vented *into* the attic, not out of the house, and that should get fixed at some point too.

Fast-forward to a few weeks ago when we sloth-esque first-time home-owners finally get around to dealing with some of these little issues. The mold dude looks in the attic and says the amount of mold is so extensive that remediation isn't even worth it, it would be cheaper to replace the entire roof, all the way down to the plywood. *Gulp.* Then the roofer comes out, takes one look up there and almost shits a brick. That's never good. When the roof was replaced 7 years ago, they pushed the insulation all the way down into the soffit vents. There is no ridge vent. Even though we don't turn the fan in the bathroom on, the vents are there and all that moisture has to go somewhere... So we have an attic full of moisture from our nice long steamy showers and baths, and absolutely no ventilation up there to get the moisture back out. Recipe for toxic air. Toxic air that we and our infant daughter are breathing. Next week we will be the proud (and financially strapped) owners of a shiny new roof. Then after that's done, the mold dude comes back and kicks us out of the house for a couple days so they can do some crazy enzyme fog that will eat all the kajillion evil little mold spores that live in our house.

But that's not enough. No no no. The weekend before last, the whole downstairs of our raised ranch flooded. The first time there's been even a drop of water down there since we moved in. It was some freak situation with the frozen ground and flash-flood rains... It sucked. We spent a Friday night shop-vac'ing water from the utility room floor, throwing out LOTS of (thankfully not valuable) wet belongings, and trying to sop up as much water as possible from the carpet in the family room. The next day we had guys out there ripping up the carpet, taking out any padding that was damaged, putting in fans and a massive dehumidifier... A few days later they put down new padding, relaid the carpet and cleaned it.

Then a few days later the dryer went on the fritz.

These things happen in threes, right? So nothing else in our house is going to blow anytime soon, RIGHT??? Knock on wood...

Happy 6 Months!

Delma turned 6 months last week. And what a month it was... We flew to Florida for our first little vacation, Delma had back-to-back health issues, she started eating food, I stopped pumping (and I promptly got my period!), she started sitting on her own, she outgrew her infant carrier and graduated to a big-girl car seat, and she has a fabulous new repertoire of vocal noises.





Health: Poor Del had a crazy ear infection, and a week into her second round of antibiotics she developed an allergic reaction to the Augmentin she was on. She broke out in a rash all over her face and body, then her fat little hands and feet swelled up to even fatter little hands and feet. She really handled it like a champ, though, and now she's all better (knock on wood!).

Aunt Flo: I didn't miss that bitch! After over a year with (blissfully) no period, she just had to go and show up. Damn. I'm still nursing D once or twice every day, but I don't pump anymore so during the day when I'm at work she gets formula. And seriously, after only 4 days of not pumping my body just immediately responded to the lower milk demand and decided to menstruate. I never cease to be amazed at the things my body does, the way it responds to different dynamics with the baby. Just incredible.

Food: We have been blessed with a little piggy baby who will eat anything you put in her mouth. I hope it stays that way, and she doesn't turn into some picky eater. She's liked every food we've given her, and though it's messy and a bit of a time committment, feeding her is so fun.



Talking: It only took her a couple feedings to get the hang of the chewing motion. And as soon as she started doing it, the babbling started. She loves the feel of flapping her dumb little gummy mouth like she's chewing, saying "lalalalalalalala," "mamamamamamamama," "blablablablabla," etc. She still licks and chews everything that gets near her face, but there are no signs of teeth yet. Her gut seems to have matured, too, and she barely spits up anymore. She used to constantly spit up, we had to always wear "baby armor" -- burp cloths -- over our shoulder when we held her or else we'd get schmutzed.

People at daycare are constantly commenting on what a sweet, happy, cute baby Delma is -- the people who work there, parents of other kids... She has quite a fan club. She really is a very pleasant little muffin, and it brings us such joy to feel like we're creating a home and a life for her where she feels safe and happy, where there's always laughter and singing and kisses and love.