The Marshmallow Fluff Project

Load up the virtual U-Haul!

2007-05-21T15:29:00.001-04:00

I am moving!

Please point your internets at racheldirollzack.com for all the hilarity you have come to expect from me. I promise, we'll have good times.

This move has been a long time in coming. I've been blogging for over six years now, all of them here at Picky Eater/The Marshmallow Fluff Project. But times change, and so do people, so I think it's a good thing that I am going elsewhere. Plus, I love having my own domain with my very own name.

Links and stuff in the new pad will be updated as soon as my lazy ass gets to them, so if you'd like to be linked, head to the new place and let me know via comments.

Happy Mother's Day!

2007-05-13T09:39:00.000-04:00

Happy Mother's Day to all my Imaginary Internet Friend-Mamas! I hope you have a lovely day filled with whatever it is that makes you smile!

For me, that was new perfume (Dolce & Gabbana light blue) and cards from my husband (and cat) and from Jillian. The cat also threw up on the floor as an additional gift, but Freddie cleaned it up for me. Awwwww!

Later, we are going to brunch and then after that I have no idea what's going on.

The Best Mother Ever

2007-05-09T16:47:00.000-04:00

Most kids Jillian's age have roomfuls of toys. We have one plastic storage bin where her toys live, so I would say we have about 10% of what her contemporaries have, and thank god.

Despite the few toys she does have, what has she been playing with/chewing on/yelling at for the last hour?

My wallet. My expensive, 30th birthday present Coach wallet. I tried to take it away from her and she started in with the glass-shattering screams so I gave it back to her. I can't wait until she learns "MINE!"

Busy baby!

2007-05-08T10:17:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a total whirwind! My crazy baby woke up around 6:30, which seems to be the new 7:00. Hm. After breakfast, some playtime and a quickie nap, we headed across town for a playdate, where toys were chewed on and much fun was had by all.

Then we headed to Costco to do some price-comparisons, but we have to throw a quality variable in there, too, so I'm still not sure what's going to happen to our shopping. Those carts are so huge, they have room for two baby butts in the top and Jillian looked all lopsided in there.

We got home, had another quickie nap, then we went to the park for a birthday party. It's so nice to have a park within walking distance! We hung out with the kids and I put Jillian on the swings again and she had the best time. I think she would swing all day if I would stand there and push her.

This is actually a very very good thing because it means she probably won't be anti-roller coaster when she gets older. And at the rate she's growing, she'll be able to go on the big coasters next week, she's so tall. But she LOVES the swings and I could not be happier about that. I don't know what I would do if I had a kid who didn't like roller coasters. There's something defective about a person like that.

After the party, we wandered home and had some playtime. Our house has a step-down from the dining area to the living room area and Jillian um, rolled off of it yesterday. I was even watching her! She rolled over and as I was reaching over to grab her, she kept going and bonk! Landed on the floor.

I'm an amazing parent.

She seemed a little startled but recovered quickly. We then went outside and sat on the front porch to wait for Daddy to get home. This is a fun time of day because there are lots of cars and trucks and people and doggies going by, so we practice HI and BYE and waving.

I do a lot of HI and BYE and waving and Jillian just goes "GAAAAAAAAAAH pbbbbt!" It's progressive.

We are having so much fun these days. Now that the weather is good, we go outside a lot more than we used to. She is even tolerating the grass, a little bit. I can sit her down and she won't move an inch. It's nice to know that Mother Nature can babysit, right? Maybe I should get some sod for the living room.

Progress!

2007-05-06T11:05:00.000-04:00

The weather was so lovely yesterday! We actually sat outside and enjoyed the weather. Jillian joined us as well, and I got tired of her trying to snatch my beer away from me (bad alcoholic baby!), so I stuck her in the grass.

She wigged out a little, but not nearly as much as she has in previous attempts. She didn't have any socks on so she tried to pull her feet up into her jeans like little turtle heads. SO CUTE!

Eventually she calmed down a little bit but she still won't put her hands in the grass or touch it when I pick some up to show her. I even pretended to eat some, since she always tries to steal whatever I'm eating, but she didn't go for it.

She did get a pine cone to play with/chew on, and that didn't seem to bother her. But the grass, man - I don't know what that's all about. We're having another nice day here so we'll try it again.

Oh dear

2007-05-04T16:47:00.000-04:00

It's official - she can't/won't crawl yet, but Jillian can get from lying down to a sitting position completely unassisted. Oh no! We lowered her crib mattress the other day as a precautionary measure, and not a day too soon apparently!

Now that the weather is nice we go outside a lot. Jillian DOES NOT LIKE the grass at all. I sat her in it and she freaked out. I've been working on it with her, but she practically crawls back into my uterus when presented with the possiblity that she might have to sit in the grass. This is going to be quite a process.

Well, that's over

2007-05-03T08:26:00.000-04:00

Whew! Jillian and I have survived her first cold! I didn't know a little body like that could produce so much snot! Now the only thing we're dealing with is some kind of wacky rash that has popped up over the past few days.

Jilly had her 9-month checkup on Tuesday and everything is ship-shape. She's 19 pounds, 15 ounces and 28 1/2 inches tall. She's a big lady! Aside from the rash, she is absolutely perfectly healthy, and that's good.

The doctor said the rash could very well be one way Jillian's body deals with this virus she has or it could be a reaction to something outside or whatever. Since it's been raining we haven't really been outside all that much so I don't know. It doesn't seem to be bothering her at all, which is nice, because I don't know if I have the strength to deal with an itchy baby.

Her newest trick is blowing raspberries. She likes to do it with a mouthful of food, which makes for some very interesting mealtimes. I moved her highchair into the kitchen so when the food starts flying it doesn't stain quite so many things. I try not to laugh because I don't want her to think it's so hilarious she needs to do it all the time, but it really is funny as hell. She opens her mouth and I stick the spoon in there then BLAMMO! Food everywhere. Crazy nut!

We moved her crib down a level because she is pretty good at getting into a sitting position from laying down. The next step is pulling up to stand, and I really don't want to have to deal with a baby who has fallen out of her crib. I prefer to sleep. So down the crib went, and she seems okay with that. She can't grab the animals on her mobile anymore, but that's probably a good thing since she is really mean to them.

Now that the weather is better, we go outside every day. We were sitting outside in front of the house the other day and I sat her down on the sidewalk NEXT to the grass and she flipped out. I mean she really lost it. I don't think she's a big fan of the grass, but it's only because it's new and strange. She'll come around, I think.

Nine months already! SLOW DOWN!

Afflicted

2007-04-24T09:38:00.000-04:00

After a sleepless night of screaming and snot (and that was just me), we went to the doctor yesterday. It's a real challenge trying to deal with myself being under the weather at the same time at The Jillian. Normally, I would just pump myself full of OTC drugs and wander around in a fog until the cold or whatever passes. Nowadays, I have to be somewhat alert and able to drive, so I'm sort of miserable.

The doctor just checked her out and listened to her breathe and looked in her ears. Everything seems ship-shape and it appears as if The Jillian just has a bit of a cold. Allergies, she said, require a "second season" to show symptoms, so it's highly unlikely that what's happening now is allergy-related.

I dunno - it seems so weird that Jillian and I were struck with exactly the same symptoms at exactly the same time and it happened to be the exact same day I threw open all the windows and doors to the pollen-filled outside air. But the doctors is the one who has gone to medical school, not me (not YET, ha ha), so I am going to go with it for now.

Hilariously, the thing suggested by the doctor to deal with The Snots is Benadryl, so that's what we're working with now. I gave her some last night and she made it most of the way through. I got up with her at 11 (could have been 1 or 2, I can't tell time when I'm half-asleep), but other than that, she was fine.

This morning she was a little lethargic and cranky, probably due to the fact that I pulled gigantic boogers out of her nose. All green and crusty, they were, and she was not happy about seeing the Booger Sucker, but it was very necessary. Didn't want to have breakfast, but I eventually got the whole bottle in her and now she's sort of sleeping it off.

Poor baby, it sucks to feel yucky and not be able to blow your nose or even whine about it like I do. We shall soldier on and hope it passes quickly.

Fuck you, pollen

2007-04-23T01:38:00.000-04:00

I think The Jillian has invented my lovely allergy to pollen. Seriously - I'm so allergic that the doctor I had as a kid told me to go someplace far away whenever the grass needed mowing at our house. Turns out, I ended up RAKING IT (over an acre and a half - my parents are definitely of the "if it hurts, it must be GOOD FOR YOU" school of parenting).

Since today was just a most amazing and lovely day, I threw open all the upstairs windows to let the sun and fresh air in. Apparently, I also let it in something that is currently NOT AGREEING with The Jillian and we are both miserable.

Let me set the stage. I went to bed last night with a bit of a scratchy throat. This happens from time to time, when I am outside in the springtime or when I actually have some Swiffers and feel like dusting the house. I shot some Chloraseptic, took a Sudafed and called it a night.

I was up every two hours.

This morning, I was feeling only a wee bit better, and the hypchondriac in me decided that I might be getting mono. I can't be getting mono! I have an About-To-Be-Crawler who needs looking after!

Thankfully, Freddie took The Jillian off with him to his mother's house for the day. I should have loaded up on Alka-Seltzer Plus and lolled around on the couch, but Things Need To Get Done, so I headed out to Target and the grocery store. Ehhhhggggghhhhhhh.

I also cleaned the bathrooms and dusted one of Jillian's bookcases. This turned out to be a Very Not Good Idea, since it's now a quarter of two in the morning and I'm up and awake and posting this, goddamnit.

Jillian seemed fine most of the afternoon, but once bedtime came, BLAMMO! She woke up snorfling and crying and making all kinds of hellacious noise that comes with a stuffy nose. We went in there with the Booger Sucker to do some damage control, but once I saw the clear runny snots, I knew we were in trouble.

Freddie put her down for bed around 6:30. At 9, we were sucking out boogers and trying to get her to calm down because she was freaking out. Eventually, she chilled out enough to go back to sleep. At 10:30, she was awake and snorfling again. I went in, did some booger-wiping, and put her back in the crib. Lather, rinse, repeat.

By the time 1 AM came up, I was dying. I have massively clogged sinuses and a headache to match and all I want to do right now is SLEEP. Unfortunately, Jillian has the same thing. I checked all of my parenting books and the symptoms matched. I also called the doctor's office because I wanted to know if there was something else I could do for her aside from the booger-wiping and humidifier-refilling. I was thinking morphine or something to knock her out, but they told me maybe something a little less addictive like say, Tylenol, and then to call in the morning and have the doctor see her to rule out an ear infection.

Of course, now that I'm all prepared to go in there, Tylenol droppers blazing, she seems to have fallen asleep, the little contrarian.

I'm going to toddle back upstairs and see if I can't do the same.

Swing kid, part 2

2007-04-21T18:57:00.000-04:00

Finally, a nice, not-grey day! We went to the park and put Jillian on the swings.

Is she not the cutest thing ever?

Aw, poop!

2007-04-19T14:29:00.000-04:00

My baby is famously mellow and groovy. Jillian has few problems aside from her parentage. We dodged the colic bullet. She sleeps through the night 99.9% of the time (even if she defines 'morning' as 5 AM and I think it should more rightly start around 7). She eats, sort of. We are slowly working up to getting actual bits of food in her instead of the jarred sludge she loves so much right now. It's rough going because Jillian is a Drama Queen (NO idea where she gets THAT) and gags and retches on even the teeniest piece of anything.

That, or she doesn't like bananas, I can't tell.

Anyway, in addition to being such an easy baby, she almost NEVER has diaper rash. When I was nursing, if I ate anything dairy or involving peanuts, she would break out in the most spectacular rash I'd ever seen. But once the offending food was out of my system, the rash went away.

Now that I'm not nursing anymore, she rocks the soy formula and whatever jarred baby food we can shovel in her gaping maw. Still keeping away from the dairy and peanuts, we still have had no diaper rash.

Until this morning. I am trying to figure out EXACTLY what she ate/chewed on yesterday to determine if she got some milk or cheese that she wasn't supposed to get, and I don't think there was anything. In fact, the jarred sludge she ate was that Earth's Best organic shit, which is not only organic but vegan AND kosher. No one can object to that stuff, no matter what their allergies or religion.

So it's probably not that. Jilly did get a handful of spaghetti to chew on/fling to the floor/stick in her hair but it was plain old noodles with no sauce or anything. It probably wasn't that, because I don't think she's allergic to wheat. We give her bread and rolls to gnaw on when we go out and there has never been any kind of reaction to them so...

It could just be regular old diaper rash. It happens. In fact, my mom tells me that I had diaper rash so badly that she HAD to cloth-diaper me because my sensitive, aristocratic bottom couldn't hack the Pampers. Not like the rest of you peasants! So Jillian could have simply inherited my sensitive skin. But would it take nine months to manifest as diaper rash? Wouldn't she have had it all along?

I don't know - I do know that we liberally slather the A&D ointment on her bum at every diaper change as a preventive measure. Maybe I'll switch to powder for a couple of days and see what happens there.

Can I move the crib to a steam room?

2007-04-19T09:34:00.000-04:00

Ugh. Sleepy today. Somebody named Jillian woke up at 11:30 last night and wouldn't go back to sleep so I went in there about 34 times to see what the deal was. I changed her diaper, but that wasn't it. I rocked her, but that wasn't it. I absolutely refuse to feed her, so that was probably it.

After listening to her in the monitor, I deduced that she was having trouble breathing through her nose and it was interfering with her thumb-sucking hobby. Mighty soldier that I am, I got up AGAIN and found the blue booger-sucker thingy, and proceeded to pull the most amazing boogers out of my daughter's nose. I'm serious - I don't even see boogers like that come out of ME during allergy season, and this time of year, I am basically allergic to air (pollen, you see).

Proud of myself, I rocked her back down to neutral and put her back in bed, then headed back to bed myownself. I thought that did the trick, but ten minutes later, the "ehhhhh ehhhhh ehhhhhhhhh" started up again.

Aha, it must be TEETH! We've been expecting the top teeth to come in any time now, what with the drooling and the near-constant chewing of anything and everything she can get in her wee jaws. So those upper teeth should be making an appearance ANY TIME NOW. Thankfully, she went back to sleep eventually and so did I.

I've been keeping the boogers at bay with her humidifier, but sometimes it gets empty and I either forget or am too lazy to fill it back up, as has been the case these last two or three days. Having the humidifier seems to keep the worst of the crusties away, but I fear she has inherited my allergies. Sigh.

In recent years, my allergies haven't been so bad. In fact, I might be outgrowing them, though I'm sure the fact that I no longer live with my parents helps A LOT. Between dog hair and cigarette smoke and God only knows what else, I was almost 20 before I realized you could breathe through both nostrils at the same time! We have no dog hair or cigarette smoke in our house, so...

But we do have pollen and a whole lot of dust. Oh, and a totally insane cat who refuses to be brushed, ever. I'm thinking Jillian is reacting to one or more of these things.

She doesn't seem sick - no fever, no glassy eyes, no ick, no behavioral changes - it's only the humungous green boogers that I yank out of her that bother me. I'll ask the doctor next time we go and see what they think.

Learning about NO

2007-04-18T10:38:00.000-04:00

Every day is something new here in Jillian's World, and the last few days have been no exception. She isn't quite crawling yet, but she has certainly mastered the rolling around part, and is now therefore able to get her hands on a lot more of our stuff.

Like any baby, she has a billion toys that do not interest her in the least. What she's really interested in are the things she's not supposed to have - the vertical blinds, for instance. Jillian can now roll across the living room to the back door and get a couple slats of the blinds in her chubby fists and commence The Chewing.

Normally, I wouldn't really care, but the vertical blinds would be sorta expensive to replace and I really don't want to spend any money in this house if we're going to be leaving it in the next year or so. Which means I don't want her chewing on the blinds.

I head over to wherever she is, take the blinds out of her hands (gently) and say "No, no!"

Jillian screams and kicks her feet and it's hilarious.

I then reposition her on her play-blanket, surround her with her own toys and the whole process starts again. Only this time, she rolls over to the TV stand thingy and tries to chew on the door. If there were a way for the remote control to work through the closed door, I would keep it closed, but there isn't, so I don't. Again, I disengage her from the door, say "No, no," and put her back in Babyland, where she screams and kicks her feet.

We do this pretty much all day.

Talky talky, so much talky

2007-04-09T09:47:00.000-04:00

Jillian has discovered her voice. She's been making various noises since Day 1, but now the noise never stops. Ever. She starts around 6:30 AM and basically works her vocal cords all day long. In fact, she's supposed to be napping right now, but I am hearing her in the monitor, singing to the animals on the mobile suspended above her head.

Hmm. I should either take that mobile down or move her mattress down because whenever I go in there to get her from her nap, she's trying to yank the animals off of it.

She doesn't say anything that could be considered an actual word yet, but she is starting to imitate sounds. Our cat, who is clinically insane, meows his fool head off if his dish is ever empty and Jillian has started to imitate that. It's so hilarious - Chester will meow and Jillian will try to copy him.

Then there's the "PAY ATTENTION TO ME" screech. She likes to do this in public or when I'm on the phone. It starts with some babbling, then, out of NOWHERE, we get "AAHHHHHHH!!! AHHHHHHH!! EHH! EHH! EHH!" like she's a psycho cheerleader for some all-baby sports team. It's great!

I talk to Jillian all day. Whenever we go out, I keep up a running commentary on everything we're doing, and I converse with her as if she is answering with real words. People look at me oddly for this, but how else is a kid going to learn to talk if you don't talk to her all day? At least it doesn't look like I'm talking to myself anymore.

The Weather Channel's next big star?

2007-04-06T17:24:00.000-04:00

I try not to have the TV on too much during the day anymore, not since Jillian started watching it. I do turn it on at 5 for the news and stuff, and for the most part, she ignores it. But when the weather comes on, she stops whatever she's doing at watches it. I think it's because the maps and stuff are colorful like cartoons.

She's totally hilarious.

Conspiracy!

2007-04-05T22:34:00.000-04:00

Now that I've discovered Jillian's tolerance of the swings, I have been itching to get out to the park again with the camera. Of course, there's no possible way I will be able to do that until July, because it's going to snow every day until then.

Well, that's what it feels like, anyway. Yesterday we had ourselves a bit of a monsoon and today it was pretty and sunny but 40 degrees and windy as hell. We almost got blown away when we went to Target! Oh, then it snowed.

I had to go to Target to get the size 4 diapers. I cannot believe she needs them already, but the size 3 diapers aren't getting the job done at night. My pee bear overloads them with her gallons and gallons of pee. So it's size 3 during the day and size 4 at night, at least until I run out of the size 3 (which I just bought a jumbo box of, argh!).

My child is enormous. Few of her clothes fit anymore and I don't really have anything in her size right now except jammies and spring stuff. Can't wear the spring stuff in this weather, so I find myself washing the same five outfits over and over again. Hee.

Am I doing this right?

2007-04-05T09:59:00.000-04:00

Now that The Jillian naps occasionally (well, she hangs out in her crib and goes "ehhhhhhehhhhhh ehhhhhhhehhhhhhh" for an hour), I have some free time. I've been perusing various parenting websites and blogs and now I have to ask: AM I DOING THIS RIGHT?

See, an overwhelming amount of what I'm seeing and reading seems to be all about how HARD parenting is. It's haaaaard. And I think to myself "This is HARD?"

So far, parenting has not been terribly difficult for me. Granted - she doesn't crawl yet, nor does she talk, sneak out of the house, drive my car, drink my booze, date undesirables or smoke, but she is a child. A demanding, LOUD child. And I'm not alone - there are other first-time parents out there with babies either slightly older or slightly younger than The Jillian, and a lot of what I read is about how haaaaaaard it is to be a parent.

Some of them have got it right - Ms. Prufrock and Whoorl seem to be having a pretty decent time of it, and I'm not talking about any of my Imaginary Internet Friends anyway. I'm talking about places where I go and read and lurk because I'd like to comment but can't think of anything to say other than "you must be fucking it up if it's so hard, you whiny bitch."

But then I thought maybe I'm doing something wrong, or I'm missing something that should be making this so difficult. I know I am extremely lucky in that we dodged the colic bullet and I have a very pleasant budding comedian on my hands. So that helps.

I think it would be harder if I had to get up, shower, get dressed and go out to a job every day. In fact, doing just that WAS MUCH HARDER than parenting. That sucked. Dealing with some of the most irritating people ON EARTH is much more difficult than changing Jillian's diaper AGAIN because she has found out how to get her hands down her pants, pull the tabs off, and pee all over herself AGAIN, some more. Having to make inane small talk with people I would normally cross the street to avoid is a damn sight harder than singing the ABC song for the 56th time that hour. Biting my tongue and not bitchslapping someone who SORELY deserves it is just about the hardest thing of all. Scraping pureed squash off the wall? That's easy.

So what, then, is it that makes parenting so hard for people? Is it because you can't just go out on your own anymore? Duh - that's called making a choice. You knew what would happen when you got yourselves all knocked up so don't whine about it now. Are you losing your sense of self? Hmmm - must not have been much of a self there in the first place. I am everything I ever was only now I am ALSO Jillian's Mama. I am not getting it, people.

I suppose I could go back and edit this to make it sound a bit less harsh and nasty and mean and whatever else, but editing is for wimps, man! I am genuinely confused as to why some folks find parenting an infant so hard. This is the EASY part!

Making a choice

2007-04-04T14:33:00.000-04:00

I hate theme restaurants. I really, really hate them. Any restaurant that requires you to walk through the fucking GIFT SHOP before you see the seats is a shithole, in my opinion. The food would have to be gold-plated and come with a side of cunnilingus to make me spend money there by my own choice.

So. Today, with the mommy group, we were supposed to go to the Rainforest Cafe at the mall. I like lunching with the mommies, so despite my own dislike of such places, I agreed to go. Jillian woke up from her morning "nap," I stuck her in the car, and away we went.

Since it was pouring down rain, I parked in the covered parking on the opposite end of the mall. We took our time moseying through, looking at the people and all the stuff in the shop windows. Jillian was shouting, in that way that she has, and people were smiling at her.

We rounded the corner to the wing of the mall where the Rainforest Cafe is and I started to get really ... squirmy ... I guess you could say. It was as if my body was trying to get my brain to TURN AROUND! GO BACK! DANGER!

But I was supposed to meet the mommies! And have lunch! So I went in. I made it all the way to the hostess stand and was about to inquire as to the location of the other mommies when I just -

I turned around. And left. I could NOT make myself go in there. I just couldn't. Between all the bastard kids running around, the crazy decoration and the random screeching of the animatronic animals, I just could. not. do. it. I put Jillian back in the car and we came home.

I'm laughing at myself because there have been many times when I have done something or gone somewhere that I am fundamentally opposed to, in order to make someone else happy. And I don't think I'm going to be doing that so much anymore. I mean, when we went on that cruise a few years ago, I went to not one, but TWO Hard Rock Cafes in the course of the trip. I hated myself for it then, and I'm still kind of pissed about it now.

That is not the sort of thing I want for my daughter. I don't want her growing up thinking that Pizza Hut is pizza. I don't want her thinking that Olive Garden is Italian food (or food AT ALL, for that matter). I sure as HELL don't want her thinking that Bud Light is beer, in any way, shape or form. Hell, Bud Light doesn't even pass the "I'll drink it because we're at a party and that's what's in the keg" test.

I want her to always seek out the different, the unique, the local. And Rainforest Cafe is none of those things.

Swing kid

2007-04-04T10:50:00.000-04:00

We went to the park yesterday in our shiny new pimpmobile. That is a sweet ride, I'm telling you. I almost wish I could have one for me. While we were there, we stopped at the playground and I put Jillian in the swing, thinking she would freak out like all the other babies were doing and we could continue with our walk.

She LOVED it. I got her settled in there and she swung back and forth with a totally chilled-out expression on her face, her bare feet looking extremely white in the sun. I swung her for about 20 minutes, then we had to head out because there were other babies waiting to freak out on the swings, but Jillian would have stayed there all day, I think.

Because I am a bad mother, I didn't have the camera with me (d'oh!), but as soon as this monsoon passes and it gets warm again, we're going back out. There is nothing on earth cuter than my daughter in the swing!

Pimp My Stroller

2007-04-03T14:11:00.000-04:00

We have a perfectly useful stroller that folds up small and weighs about eleven pounds. But we got something via UPS the other day and it is this:

I haven't put the Jillian in it yet due to weather and naptimes, but we're going out this afternoon for our inaugural walk. My only question is whether or not it will fit in the trunk of my car. I think it might, since you can get at least three dead mobsters in the trunk of the Jetta.

More bulky shit to put in my teeny house

2007-04-02T15:16:00.000-04:00

Freddie and I got a sweet birthday present from my parents. It's actually for The Jillian, but I'm totally okay with that because it is the just most totally awesome thing. We got the BOB Ironman Jogging Stroller. It's beyond amazing. Actually, I think it's nicer than my car.

And my car is pretty nice.

Once I get the pictures off of the camera, I'll post one here but if you've seen one of these things, you know what I'm talking about.

Fun with breakfast cereal

2007-03-30T12:30:00.000-04:00

We are branching out with the foods here at Casa Zack. I have given her Cheerios before, but she just threw them on the floor - not interested.

Today, however, is a completely different story. I put a few on her tray for her to play with. She picked one up in her chubby fist, brought it to her mouth, and -- what's this? My thumb? Heh. She can't seem to figure out how to get it from her fist to her mouth.

Oh wait, she just did and she is NOT PLEASED. Almost every new food means a series of crazy faces, but these are really making her mad. Hmm. Cheerios are also roughly the same color as our carpet so when they hit the floor I'm not seeing them immediately. Perhaps this is why people have dogs.

I can eat cheese again!

2007-03-29T09:45:00.000-04:00

Looks like The Jillian is boob-free. We spent a couple of weeks just breastfeeding in the morning and at night, then we skipped the morning feeding, and as of this week, we are not breastfeeding at all.

I am - quite rightly - all jumbled up about it. On the one hand, I no longer have to worry about something I eat affecting her. Dairy and peanuts seemed to be the biggest problem-causers, and since ice cream and peanut butter made up a good 60% of my pre-baby diet, I was kind of wrecked without them.

On the other hand, it is no longer so very simple to feed her. I have to make sure I have formula and pre-boiled water on hand. I have to make sure the bottles are clean. Or, I have to rustle up a jar and some cereal and a bib and spoons and tiny bowls and strap Jillian into the high chair and shovel the food in. It's complicated! Plus, I miss having that warm little body attached to me, with one hand pulling her ear off of her head and the other hand reaching up to pull my chin off of my face. It's the end of an era, and I'm sad about that.

Pumpkinhead

2007-03-23T16:38:00.000-04:00

Jillian had carrots for lunch today. The feeding system is still primitive, but it is improving. However, she still gets a great deal of food on her face (and hands, and clothing, and the floor and in her hair), and with carrots... well...

Okay. I wiped her hands and face with a wet washcloth, figuring soap would just make her all dry and grumpy. Besides, she's just going to get all sticky at dinner tonight and need a bath anyway, so why waste the soap?

I'm Parent of the Year.

So I have wiped off her hands and her face and she still looks a little... orange. The carrots have STAINED MY BABY. And I think it's hilarious.

New fun Jillian stuff

2007-03-21T21:43:00.000-04:00

The food thing is progressing well. She has finally decided that I'm not going to stop trying to stick spoons of goo in her mouth, so she actually opens up her jaws and eats what I put in there. Score one for Mama, even though it took me nearly two months to get to this point.

Our next fun thing is giving her things that she can stick in her mouth her own self. We have tried bits of banana, avocado, cucumber, and the other day I gave her a big chunk of red bell pepper, but she doesn't really eat these things so much as she smooshes them in her fist and flings them to the floor. I've also tried Chex and Cheerios, but I'm not sure she understands what, precisely, I expect her to do with them.

Because the food thing is going so well, the POOP THING is going equally well. For her, anyway. For Mama, well... let's just say that I'm glad I change her first diaper of the day on an empty stomach or there would be a lot of barfing. It is seriously gross! The best days are the ones where her Daddy gets up and changes the baby first thing. Listening to him freak out is the funniest thing ever.

I have a very noisy baby. She has finally started babbling and boy, she does not stop. Ever. Only for meals and sleep! This is a bit of a relief because all of my eighteen bazillion baby books say she should have started babbling around 5 months or whatever and she was just doing a lot of EEEEE and AAAAAH then. Now we get YAAAA YAAA YAA and VVVHHHHVVVAAAA and PPPPPPPPAAAAA and WOOOHHH and BAAABAAABAAAABABABABABA!!! She says these things with varying degrees of intensity, depending upon how stupid she thinks I am at any given time.

Her mobility is increasing as well. We never really did do tummy time with her, because every time I would put her on her tummy, she would scream bloody murder and that makes Mama Crazy-With-A-Capital-C and we don't need that. So we didn't do tummy time. Now, however, Jillian reaches for things and flops onto her belly (on top of her blocks, more often than not) and stays there without screaming for quite a while! She's starting to wiggle toward her intended target, so it's just a matter of time before she figures out how to get her jellybelly up off the floor. Once that happens, I will be covering all surfaces in the house in bubble wrap.

It's so fun nowadays to see her personality developing. When I go get her in the morning, she smiles like she has been WAITING for me and she's SO GLAD to see me. I know how to make her laugh and if I'm doing something especially stupid, she scrunches up her face and looks like pure evil. She has definite likes and dislikes, and her favorite toys are my wallet, my cell phone, and the tiny remote control for the satellite radio.

I think she's going to be a music fan. During the day, I have the radio on more than I used to and she loves it. I sing to her and she kicks her feet and shakes her rattles and we have a Super Dance Party. We do watch Jack's Big Music Show on Noggin, but that's the only TV during the day (until Ellen comes on at 4). She likes the puppets and I think I'm going to get a few for us to play with.

She is super funny, and super friendly. Everywhere we go, people come up to Jillian and she will smile at whoever it is like they're her best friend. She'll probably be running for President in 2044, so be on the lookout for that.

Just checking

2007-03-15T17:36:00.000-04:00

I am sitting here on the floor with Jillian at my side. She is wiggling around, half-propped on the Boppy. Every now and again, she'll look at me and I'll blow her a kiss. She then gets the cutest half-smile on her face and goes back to doing whatever she was doing: shaking her Tic-Tacs, chewing on her toes, playing with her Baby's 1st Switchblade.

It's as if she's just checking to make sure I'm aware of her. And I am. OH how I am.

It's 2:15

2007-03-15T14:16:00.000-04:00

And it is STILL SLEEPING.

In other news, my NCAA bracket is already fucked. Why couldn't Texas Tech pull out a victory? Just the one? I don't have them going any further than that. I'm an idiot anyway, I have Stanford beating Louisville and I believe they are getting soundly spanked. I knew that was wrong when I picked it, but again, I'm an idiot.

GAWWWWD! Am I on drugs? I have Davidson beating Maryland, and it doesn't look like THAT is going to happen either. SON OF BEECH! SHEET!

Schedules are for the weak

2007-03-15T12:40:00.000-04:00

The Great Napping Project is underway. I figured this week would be a good time to start because we had just spent much of the previous week travelling and any schedule we might have had went all out the window. So why not start from scratch?

Tuesday and yesterday were pretty good. We were out of bed around 7:30, napping from about 10-11:30 and again from 3-4:30 and in bed by 8. Well, last night it was more like 7:30 because someone was all cranky and tired and shit. Yay, teeth!

She woke up last night around 10:30 and I listened to her for about 15 minutes before I decided that I needed to go intervene. She went back down around 11:15 and then got up at 7:30 this morning.

I don't know if it's the weather or what, but today has been shitty. She didn't want the bottle this morning, which is odd because she's usually starving. She spent most of the morning being cranky and fussy and not eating. I started the naptime routine at 10, like I normally do and it would be the understatement of the week to say that it did not work. She screamed bloody murder for about a half-hour before I finally gave up and brought her back down. She then decided to be fussy and cranky SOME MORE so I put her back in her bed around noon and she finally, FINALLY fell asleep, half an hour later.

I think we'll be jettisoning the afternoon nap today unless she wakes up in the next fifteen minutes. I kind of hope she stays asleep for awhile and I'm totally going to let her. Maybe that's the answer - instead of two naps, maybe one midday snoozing marathon is the key.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go huddle in the corner and cry for a bit.

Cheap toys

2007-03-14T09:27:00.000-04:00

My daughter is sitting on her play blankie, surrounded by all manner of things: blocks, stuffed things, things that light up, things that sing, etc. But there is one thing that has been keeping her busy for the past few days. She LOVES this thing. She squeaks when she drops it and if she can't reach it, she will let me know.

What is this thing?

A half-empty box of Tic-Tacs. She sits and shakes that thing for HOURS on end. I think I'm going to venture out and see if I can get her a set of baby maracas because she loves the sound so much. She has other rattles and other things that rattle, but nothing makes her so happy as those Tic-Tacs.

Why? WHY?? [bashes head on desk]

2007-03-13T16:22:00.000-04:00

The morning napping thing is going swimmingly. I put her down around 9:30 this morning and she woke up around 11. Yay!

The afternoon nap is not going so well. I put her down at 3:00, intending to leave her in there until 4:30. Normally I would have put her down around 2, but we were out spending ungodly amounts of money at Target. So. I put her down, she screamed and yelled and screamed some more. I folded laundry.

Here it is, 4:30 and Jillian? IS FAST ASLEEP. God save me from such an ornery baby. Now I have to go wake up Her Grumpiness in order to keep her on schedule and in bed by 8 PM. GAAAAAH!

Transitions

2007-03-13T10:42:00.000-04:00

We are in the process of recovering from our Road Trip Weekend, in which we drove all the way across Pennsylvania AND Ohio with Jillian in tow. It was actually pretty okay, for the most part. There were some full diapers, costume changes, and lots of screaming en route, but 80% of the time, Jilly was a real trooper.

I'm sure it didn't help that her top front teeth are coming in and she is pissed. Seriously, she is making some kind of hellacious noise pretty much all day long, and she will chew on anything - teething rings, Mama's cell phone, truck-stop restaurant tables, you name it.

She is growing up, bit by bit. I am actively trying to get her to kick her boobie habit, since I am not a big fan of having my nipples chewed on my a razor-fanged monster. I have only been breast-feeding in the morning and most nights, but now I'm cutting out the morning feeding and replacing it with the bottle. I'm a bad Mama. But it's TIME. It is SOOOOOO time. My three nursing bras started out white and now are a weird grey-beige color. The elastic in the straps is starting to pucker and I'm SICK OF WEARING A BRA TO BED. I could go out and buy a couple of new ones, and I probably should have done so in November, but I'm both cheap AND lazy so I didn't.

Although I will miss the incredible convenience of breastfeeding, I think it's time for all of us to move on.

We finally bought one of those shopping cart/highchair cover thingies, and that has been a big hit. Jilly LOVES sitting in the high chair when we go out and I don't get all skeeved out when she tries to chew on the cover instead of the actual highchair. Whew. She sits up so well and likes to look around and grab things off the table, it's amazing she wasn't lobbying for one of these cover thingies a few months ago.

Today is a big day here because I am also trying to get her to take a nap someplace other than on my lap. I won't lie: I LOVE having her sleep on my lap. I watch TV or do Sudoku or read while she snoozes away. I like to watch her eyelids flutter and wonder what she dreams about. But that means I don't get anything done, and this lack of industry is starting to suck. I mean, I can only be so lazy before I start to get annoyed with myself. So she's currently parked in the crib upstairs, staring at her mobile and making velociraptor noises.

She's not crying or screaming bloody murder, which is a nice change from our previous attempts at non-Mama napping. In fact, I haven't heard anything for about three full minutes now so she might actually be asleep. This is the time when the phone rings, or someone knocks at the door, waking the baby up and causing me serious rage. Sigh. So far so good, though. I was even able to get a load of laundry FOLDED!

I KNOW! I was even thinking about ironing! Then I got hold of myself and decided against it. I have other things that I need to work on, namely a baby blanket that seemed like a good idea until I realized I only have two months MAX until it needs to be done and it's ridiculously complicated and will take FOREVER to finish and I will be an arthritic mess by the time it's done. Eeep.

The good news is that this early Daylight Savings thing is just about the best damn thing ever. I am feeling better today than I have in about two months, what with that Seasonal Depression thing I am prone to getting and all. I actually feel like DOING SOMETHING instead of sleeping, which is a nice change indeed. The sun is out today which is also a help. Jillian and I have to go out later so we'll be able to enjoy it. Thank goodness for Spring.

Well, THAT happened

2007-03-02T18:23:00.000-05:00

I am increasingly frustrated by my baby's refusal to eat anything that comes on a spoon. I think I know what part of the problem may be, however. See, her Daddy has an extremely sensitive gag reflex. For reals - he can gag himself while he brushes his teeth. I don't know how, either. He just does. So I'm thinking that the overly dramatic gagging thing that Jillian does might be sort of related.

The thing is, I rarely get the spoon in her mouth, much less get it in there far enough to gag her. She's a nut.

Today, it was finally getting better. I was getting actual spoonfuls of actual food in her mouth, and she was even starting to open up a bit for me when the apocalypse happened.

Here I am, thinking "I am such a FANTASTIC MOM! I can get my recalcitrant infant to eat actual food!" When - BLAMMO! Barf. Lots and lots and lots and LOTS of barf. Basically, the entire contents of her stomach, which consisted of a 6-ounce bottle of formula and half a jar of corn & sweet potatoes. Sigh.

And, because she doesn't just barf, she explodes, it started coming through her nose, which I know she hates. There are a lot of commas and odd phrases in that previous sentence but I can't figure out just now what the correct grammar would be. Read it out loud to get where I'm going with that. ANYWAY - I peeled off most of the barfiest clothing and headed upstairs, where I could do nothing but sit her up and wait for her to sneeze and get all the barf out of her sinuses. Sigh. Poor munchkin.

Of course, once she was done getting all the barf out, she was refreshed and ready to party. She's up there right now, in her crib, talking to the animals that dangle from the mobile above her.

We'll try it all again tomorrow.

All right, that's enough

2007-03-01T18:11:00.000-05:00

This is something that has been bothering me for a few weeks now.

My child, my fat, happy child, hates food. Loves the boob, loves the bottle (finally!), but hate hate HATES food from any other source. WHY?

We started slowly, like they say. We did the rice cereal thing (that shit is nasty, no wonder she wouldn't eat it) and moved out to applesauce (no), bananas (sometimes), pears (no), and other fruits. Then we tried veggies. Carrots were a hit the first time and then she hated them the second time. Same with peas and green beans and sweet potatoes. She simply will not open her mouth.

It's not that she's not ready - she watches me eat and tries to grab food out of my hands if she's sitting on my lap. She will gnaw on a piece of bread, which is funny as hell. I have also given her teething biscuits, which seem to be a big hit, but they, too, turn into a gooey mush and she ends up not eating them, exactly.

So I don't get it. She absolutely HATES to be spoon-fed, but aside from putting her in the bathtub with her dinner, I really don't have another way to do it. I do give her bits of actual food (actual bananas, avocado, noodles, other chewy/soft things) but they go in the mouth, cause a Crazy Face, and come back out. What else can I do? I am patient. I am persistent. I am going crazy.

The lesson is: persistence makes you barf!

2007-03-01T16:32:00.000-05:00

Jillian isn't very mobile just now. She can roll over and stuff, but as far as crawling or something like that goes, she's just not interested. She'd rather have everything within arms' reach, or have Mama hand things to her.

I'm working on getting her to move around to get things she wants, but we're hitting some bumps. Today, for instance. She has some groovy blocks that her Daddy bought, and I like to stack them up so she can knock them down. Every so often, I stack them up just a little further away from her, thus making her have to reach.

I just made a stack that was definitely out of her reach. Rather than rolling to her side and trying to get the blocks that way, she kept leaning over forward. Now, I know her pants are a little tight because she eats like a champ and is currently growing out of EVERYTHING (even some of the 12-month-size stuff is looking less big), but I never expected her clothes to make her barf.

Which they did. She leaned over once too often and [blerrrp]! Good thing the blankies on the floor that constitute BabyLand are more than one layer. I just peel the barfy one off and keep on truckin'.

Hee. Right now, she's laying half-on and half-off of her Boppy, yelling at the blocks because they won't pick themselves up and bring themselves to her to be chewed upon. She sounds really pissed off! I'm glad I'm not one of those blocks, man.

It's sleeping

2007-03-01T12:41:00.000-05:00

We had to make a quick trip to Daddy's office this morning and The Jillian fell asleep in her car seat. Considering my new goal in life is to get her to nap somewhere other than on my lap, she is still in said car seat and we have been home for about 20 minutes now.

[knock on wood] My kid is a fantastic night-time sleeper (today, anyway). She goes down around 8PM with a minimum of fuss and wakes up anytime after 6:30. Her newest trick is rolling over onto her stomach, so from about 6:30 on, I hear "aaaaah aaaaah ehhhhh ehhhhh" through the monitor which translates roughly to "I'm on my tummy, fuckers! Come get me!" She knows full well she can roll back over to her back, but I suppose being tangled up in a sleep sack and mushed into a corner of the crib makes that difficult. She's a weirdo.

So the night-time sleeping thing is going well with almost no "training" from us. We just put her down one night and she slept all the way through. Then she did it again. And again. And some more. And even when we travel! So we thank Jeebus every day that she does this and as much as I try not to jinx it, I'm sure this will all end one day and I'll be up every two hours again.

Part of me thinks that the reason why she sleeps so well at night is because her napping habits are awful. When she does nap, it's because she fell asleep on her lunchtime boob or bottle. This is all hunky-dory until I try to actually move her. Then she wakes up, looks all outraged that I would DARE move her, and naptime is over. Shit. What's a girl to do?

The new method is to take her to her crib at naptime, stick her in there, and listen to her scream her fool head off for about 20 minutes. Then I take my head out of the oven and go pick her up because I'm a tough lady, but there is only so much screaming I can take. By now she's all sweaty and grody and so I wipe off her face and that wakes her up completely and voila! That's naptime!

I know that there are teeth coming in which throws even the most self-regulating baby into a tizzy, and that's what's going on here. But she's obviously tired! She's just stubborn. And insane!

Weaning the weenie

2007-02-23T18:12:00.000-05:00

SHE BIT ME. I'm a total idiot - I didn't think it would hurt nearly as much as the time her little gums clamped down on me in the early days when my nipples were the size of light bulbs and hurt when anyone even THOUGHT about them. Oh, no! Surely her teeny nubs of teeth couldn't be lethal, right?

E-fraking-gad. I have never felt pain quite like that. But damn. We are pretty much done nursing. As it is, we nurse in the morning and before bed (and very occasionally during the day when it is warranted by a Freak-Out), but now I think we're going to shut it down completely.

I will be very sad to see this part of our relationship go, since I really enjoy it. I was a tad apprehensive about breastfeeding and whatnot, but I quickly found that it was totally suited to my lazy lifestyle. No bottles to clean! No extra crap to tote around! YAY!

We did start bottle-feeding her a few months ago and for the most part, she switches back and forth with few problems. She doesn't mind the taste of the formula (I think it smells like potatoes) and doesn't really have a lot of the gas problems that can be associated with bottle-feeding. We're working with solids and other fun things, too, so nursing is no longer the primary baby-feeding method.

So, although I will shed a few tears so close this chapter, I will be SO DAMN HAPPY to no longer be a slave to my boobs. I will be able to buy a PRETTY BRA. I will be able to SLEEP WITHOUT A BRA. Sure, my boobs hang down to my navel nowadays, but with the right bra, no one will have to know.

Barbarian

2007-02-22T18:29:00.000-05:00

The Jillian is progressing nicely with non-liquid foods. However, she seems to be a bit of a barbarian, since she doesn't like to eat off of a spoon. She'll stick the spoon in her mouth, sure, but if there's food on it, she purses up her lips and does her Donald Trump face and nothing can get into that mouth.

But if I let her slurp her food out of the tiny bowl I put it in? She chows down.

What a weirdo.

'Sup, homey?

2007-02-22T17:09:00.000-05:00

That never fails to get a laugh out of Jillian. Besides, if I'm going to raise a bilingual baby, I may as well teach her Ebonics.

Not a whole lot going on here, to be quite honest. We survived our trip to Boston and are looking forward to Ohio in a couple of weeks. It will be the first time in nearly five months that my parents have seen The Jillian, so they are extremely excited. They have reported that they brought her back a whole bunch of stuff from the Daytona 500, so I can't wait to see what they got.

Of course, any Mark Martin stuff is going straight in the trash. LOSER!

I will get to the topics on that list I made a couple posts back. It's a weird thing - I get all these wonderful ideas for posts and things I want to say but once I get in front of the computer with more than 30 seconds to write anything, all that comes out is BLAHBLAHBLAHBALKDSHGAOEDOGIHESAIOGFH!

Sigh.

A promise

2007-02-15T14:06:00.000-05:00

I've noticed that this blog has turned into a Jillian's Poop Stinks chronicle. While that is utterly fascinating to me and to Freddie, it may not be so interesting to the world at large. I would, however, be grateful if someone could tell me how Apples 'n' Blueberries + breast milk = chartreuse poo that smells like roadkill.

So, in between posts about my daughter's poop and other bodily functions, I resolve to post about things that might actually be interesting to other people. Here's a short list:

1. I will attempt to answer the question "Am I A Hipster Parent?" Also part of that series: "Have I ever in my LIFE been hip?" and "Does it matter, and to whom?"

2. Don't judge my parenting since you're the one doing it all wrong anyway.

3. Parenthood has made me both more and less cynical: why and how.

4. Things I do that "they" all tell you not to.

5. My child dresses better than I do.

6. Two Aries people raising a Leo: a study in stubbornness.

7. "Not until you're six: teaching the baby to make vodka tonics"

And there will be others, I'm sure. I'm kind of jacked up on Coca-Cola right now so I can't think clearly. Plus, Jillian is chewing on my cell phone. Never mind the small mountain of toys she is sitting on, she wants my phone. And she needs a nap.

Not quite ready for her close-up

2007-02-12T21:23:00.000-05:00

I took The Jillian to get Actual Real Portraits done today. Well, sort of. We went to the studio thingy in Babies R Us (we practically live there) because I didn't have to make an appointment. I'm rather wary of making appointments these days for anything other than the doctor because odds are something will happen and we'll have to cancel. So walk-in stuff is just fine with me.

We went early enough that we didn't have to wait but I must have used up all my Good Baby points earlier in the morning because The Jillian started to become Le Crank and had to be cajoled into sitting up and not screaming. Between the photographer and myself, we made a bunch of damn noise and acted like fools to get The Jillian to smile. We were almost successful.

As a result, I have some totally awesome pictures of my rad little baby. She really is very cute, you know.

I had to practically beat the woman into giving me JUST THE PICTURES because she was hardcore trying to get me to pay for fancy-schmancy borders and text and perhaps a montage or whatever and I JUST WANT THE DAMN PICTURES, lady! None of this extra crap! I have Print Shop and can add that extra crap on my own, if I so choose.

So after about fifteen minutes of "Well, how about this border?" and me going "Can I just have plain photos?" I got the photos I wanted. For a crazy amount of money, but it was a Parental Mandate, so I kind of had to. I hope they know I will be expecting a check. I probably won't even ask them, even though they did offer to pay for this circus. It's just easier not to discuss money with them.

Anyway, my little baby is just the cutest thing and one of these days I'll get around to posting the photos we got. Right now I really should use this rare free time to work on the totally awesome baby blanket I'm designing. Or I could sleep. I haven't decided which one I want to do more.

How we operate (today)

2007-02-09T14:50:00.000-05:00

The Jillian has been teething for a WHILE now. By that I mean she's been drooling sort of non-stop for the past three months and her gums have been lumpy for quite some time. But today, she was chewing on my finger (again, some more), and I actually felt some little jagged thingy poking up out of those little gums. A tooth! Finally!

I will miss that little toothless grin, though. I think that's why I'm going to break down and take her to get portraits done this weekend before the teeth arrive en masse.

Right now, she is rolling around on the part of the floor we call Babyland, with her thumb half in and half out of her mouth. Every now and again she grabs a toy that's within reach and flings it across the room. I think we've got a quarterback, y'all. Or a dominatrix - her other favorite thing is getting something, anything in her hand and flinging it around in a disturbingly whip-like fashion. Hey, if being a dominatrix can help her pay for Harvard, then go for it, I say.

We're going to Boston next week, and I'm feeling faint just thinking about the sheer amount of STUFF we will be taking with us. I'm easy - a few clean pairs of undies and socks and I'm pretty much okay, but Jillian is going to require at least two outfits per day (one to wear and one to barf on), jammies, diapers wipes butt cream bath stuff washcloths burpcloths boogersucker bottles formula oh shit WATER to make said formula bottle cleaning supplies baby food jars spoons bibs toys pack-n-play blankies stroller jackets hats socks OH MY GOD.

All this for only three days. Can't wait until we go to Ohio for a week in March. At least there we'll have access to laundry and kitchens and stuff. And travelling with her is getting easier just from a feeding standpoint. Now, instead of having to stop every two hours and breastfeed, we can pull over and I can jump in the back seat and stick a bottle in her mouth. Plus, when we get to wherever we're going, I won't have to retire to another room to feed her. That will be nice.

I gave birth to a coconut

2007-02-04T11:22:00.000-05:00

Jillian doesn't have any hair to speak of. What she arrived with is pretty much what we're still dealing with, which is to say no hair. The hair she does have is translucent, and I believe this because if she turns her head, the hair you thought you saw suddenly disappears and you get to see her cute little skull again.

I know that as soon as she gets hair I will then be forced to do something about it, meaning pigtails and such, and you'd better believe that as soon as there is enough hair for a Mohawk, I will gel her up.

I wonder if there is a baby-friendly hair dye?

Six months already!

2007-02-02T22:52:00.000-05:00

Wednesday marked six whole months of Jillian-ism. Time is FLYING by, especially now that I'm more or less conscious. Those first three months were a little hazy, but now we're rocking.

We went to the doctor today for the 6-month checkup. ChunkyButt is 17 pounds, 11 ounces; 27 inches! And so cute!! The nurses all wanted to hold her. The doctor said we are doing a good job with her, and I must say, I totally agree. Parenting is a hard job, but it's one that I seem to be pretty good at.

She was perfectly pleasant until it was time for shots, then she pretty much went insane. That only lasted a couple of minutes, though - she's getting much better at dealing with it all and she had to get FOUR shots today! I think they hurt Daddy more than they hurt The Jillian.

So - six months. She is getting pretty good at sitting up unaided, although she still tends to fall over a lot. She hasn't yet developed the skill to right herself when she starts to topple over, so she lands on her face fairly frequently. She still hates tummy time, but I still plop her facedown a couple times a day. One of these days she'll figure out why.

With the sitting up, she is doing quite well in the highchair. We use a rolled-up towel on one side of her to keep her from falling over, and she loves to sit up and yell at us while we eat. Actually getting food in her mouth is quite a challenge, as she seems to have very strong preferences for some things and very strong aversions to others. We do a lot of experimenting, and will continue to do so. Eventually, she'll eat SOMETHING.

Her new thing is attempting chew on her feet. She has recently discovered these new playthings attached to her legs and will use any opportunity to get them into her mouth. This is a ticklish situation, so she spends a lot of time giggling with her toes in her mouth. SO CUTE!

When she doesn't have something in her mouth, she's making noise. No consonants yet, but she lets loose with long strings of vowels all day long. I keep telling her that if she says "Bono" before she says "Daddy," I'll buy her a pony.

Have you ever seen anything so cute?

I'm sure there will be many, many more like this

2007-02-02T16:43:00.000-05:00

We have this thing in our house. It is actually pretty interesting, in that it lights up and stuff, but it only plays 5 songs. And when Jillian kicks the green music note in the middle, it changes songs.

So, for the past half-hour or so, I have heard these five songs roughly 39 billion times, but only the first ten notes or so. Jillian is kicking the HELL out of this toy and it's driving me up the wall.

Unfortunately, I'm the one who picked it out so I really can't complain. I have a bottle of wine that I'm going to open instead.

Good thing they literally DO grow on trees

2007-02-02T14:32:00.000-05:00

I wonder if it's all babies who do this or just mine. I keep her in a peepee diaper as long as I think she can stand it, waiting for her to poop. Eventually, I start to feel like a bad mother and take her up to change.

I get her back downstairs and settled doing something and I hear [Phhhhhffffft].

My little artist apparently requires a clean canvas.

Jaws

2007-01-30T14:28:00.000-05:00

Oh, what fun we're having with food these days. Yesterday I cut up an avocado and gave some of it to Jillian to play with. She was a little confused at first by the squishy texture, but eventually she got into it and made a hell of a mess.

The books all say that we should be aiming for a full jar of baby food per feeding (the teeny ones, I'm thinking) but I'm lucky if I can get her to ingest two tablespoons or so. The rest of it goes everywhere but in her mouth. I realize it's early days yet, and I know we have a ways to go. Right now I'm more concerned with introducing the concept of sitting in the high chair at mealtime while Mama and Daddy are at the table. This is going extremely well.

Some foods are better than others, too. Carrots are a HUGE hit, along with sweet potatoes and bananas and peas. Apples and pears - not so much, but she will eat them. So far, the one thing she absolutely refuses to eat is peaches. She clamps that little mouth shut and turns her head and will do whatever it takes to keep from actually eating peaches, up to and including spitting them all over Mama.

Oddly enough, she seems to have grasped the spoon concept fairly easily. We have to give her at least two other spoons to play with while we feed her or she acts all crazy. But she manages to get the right part of the spoon in her mouth, so maybe I'm raising a prodigy after all.

Sitting on the baby

2007-01-29T12:40:00.000-05:00

How does one go about finding a babysitter? If we were in Ohio, I'd have my mom or one of my slightly mentally challenged aunts watch the baby. After all, my mom raised me to adulthood and she had no problems leaving us with the schizophrenics and the mentally subnormal for an evening or two.

However, Ma is 400 miles away and there really isn't anyone nearby here that I would want to leave The Jillian with. The majority of our friends in the immediate vicinity do not have children, so I'm hesitant to leave The Jillian with the JV team.

The mommy group I belong to might be a possible source of babysitters, and the ones who have babysitters are loath to give up the info for fear that someone will poach their sitter from them. DAMMIT. So how does one go about getting someone to sit on the baby?

I'm willing to pay CRAZY money for a good sitter, too. However, my standards are freakishly high. I can get away with this because I am a New Mom, and prone to all sorts of craziness. Here's a short list of what I require in a babysitter:

Must have a drivers' license and clean record (yes I WILL do a background check).

Must know how to do infant CPR.

Must be a kind and creative type, who will interact with The Jillian and not be distracted by our giant TV and wildly overpriced cable.

Must be free of bad habits like smoking, drinking, drugs, and talking on the telephone.

And that's just the major points. There are about eight squillion other things that I require, but most of them are intangibles that I can and will be completely nitpicky about. Sigh. As laid-back as I am about most things relating to this baby, choosing a caregiver is not one of them.

It would be nice if Grandma were a more hands-on sort, but she's not and we'll have to live with that. I wish I could have her come up to the house and watch the baby for a couple of hours, but she pretty much guaranteed that she will never, EVER get any alone time with The Jillian when she said she "doesn't like it" when the baby cries. Double sigh.

Oh, barf

2007-01-24T13:01:00.000-05:00

I'm getting to be quite the meteorologist when it comes to Jillian's barfing schedule. At first, the barf was a surprise - just one wacky face and BLAMMO! Barf everywhere. Now, I'm so good I can point her at a tiled surface roughly 80% of the time.

Today was not one of those times. I knew the barf was coming, since she refused to burp no matter how much I whacked her on the back and her belly was getting all big and bloated. So I knew we were in for a barfsplosion, I just wasn't sure when.

Turns out I can, in fact, determine when she's going to barf. I took her upstairs for a diaper change and, as I usually do, I sat her up on the changing table before I picked her up to come back downstairs. Sometimes going from a lying down position to a sitting position can make her barf and this time was no exception. She sneezed once, made her patented Horrible Retching Sound and then out it came. Eeew. All I could do was hang on to her until she was done - I didn't even get a chance to get her head around the corner into the bathroom.

Of course, we have JUST had the carpet cleaned, so it was only a matter of time before she barfed on it. But she feels better now, so all is well.

Grabby McGrabberson

2007-01-23T14:11:00.000-05:00

Jillian's newest hobby is grabbing things. Any things. Doesn't matter what it is, she thinks she needs to grab it. At first, it was cute, with the grabbing of the nose and such, but now she takes my entire bottom lip in her kung-fu grip and tries to twist it off of my face.

If I'm eating something, she'll grab for that. Drinking something? Oh, that's fair game, too. I've tried to offer her a glass of water, but she doesn't quite have the skills for that and we all end up drenched. It's fun, though. I got her a sippy cup, but I don't think she has it figured out yet. At least she can throw this one around and the potential for disaster is lessened a bit.

Mealtimes are becoming especially fun. Now that we have Hillbilly-Engineered the Inherited High Chair of Doom, she sits with us at dinnertime and eats whatever is on the menu for her. So far, apples are icky, carrots rock the house, and sweet potatoes had a slow start but ended up okay. She likes bananas and pears, and today we're going to try peas. YUM. We have to give her two spoons of her own while we feed her or she'll grab the one with the food on it and [fling!] away it goes.

We're really starting to get into a fun stage with her. She's getting better at sitting up on her own, though she does protest loudly when she falls on her face. She no longer likes to be propped up in the Boppy for long periods of time because it doesn't allow her to roll around and kick her feet, so I just plunk her down on the floor and see where she ends up. Jillian is becoming a very strong baby, as evidenced by the foot-shaped bruise on my right breast. She kicked me while she was on the changing table the other day.

Soon enough, the teeth will emerge and that toothless grin I love so much will be gone forever. Then she'll start crawling (maybe) and talking and we'll move on to the next stages, but right now, we are having a total blast.

What? No, Still Alive

2007-01-13T23:19:00.000-05:00

I have been sort of busy lately, what with having houseguests two weekends in a row and FINALLY getting our high chair upgraded so we can put The Jillian in it. Surprisingly, she doesn't hate the high chair as much as she seems to hate the various other seats we have for her. There's hope for her yet.

The solid food thing is progressing. Rather than feed her rice cereal alone, I've been mixing it with whatever fruit because otherwise? The cereal makes Mama gag. That shit is FOUL, yo. Applesauce is still causing the hilarious faces, but bananas are going over well. We're going to try pears in a couple of days and then perhaps start on veggies. That should be interesting!

Adding all of these new elements to her diet is wreaking havoc on her poop. I know I have complained occasionally about her poop being icky, but I tell you - I HAD NO IDEA IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS. Holy Moses, her poop is just foul these days.

Today, as a matter of fact, we had a slight assplosion that required a full wardrobe change. We were out having lunch and Jilly was getting fussy in her seat so I released her from her bonds and picked her up. I noticed that her pants were a bit wet, which happens these days because she pees A LOT, but then I smelled it.

I immediately sent Freddie to the car to retrieve the diaper bag and into the restroom we went. There was another lady in there and she said "Oh, what a cute - OH MY GOD!" Heh. Oh my God juuuuuuuuust about covers it. There was poop everywhere. I managed to get her clothes off of her without spreading it too much, then I scrubbed her up good, put a new diaper on her, dressed her in a totally new outfit and sent up a small prayer to the Gods of Poop that she would make it through the rest of our planned afternoon.

I'm pleased to say she did just fine. Freddie used to wonder why I would pack an entire extra outfit in the diaper bag, but now he understands. I actually pack TWO extra outfits - one set of clothes and a pair of jammies, just in case.

New Year, New Milestones

2007-01-04T19:16:00.000-05:00

Hi! Things are going well here, which means there is little to post about. The Jillian is more or less sleeping through the night, with little to no "sleep training" on our part. She just started doing it, so whatever I'm doing is working just fine.

On New Year's Day, she finally learned how to roll over from her back to her front. She still hates to be on her belly, however, and starts with the screaming once she finds herself face-down. It's hilarious to watch, but she's quite a screamer. I'm waiting for the neighbors to call DYFS on us.

Yesterday, we were playing on the floor and something must have struck her funny because she started laughing and would not stop. It was utterly hysterical and I wish I could make it happen again. These weren't just baby giggles - these were full-on belly laughs.

We have FINALLY gotten her to take a bottle. It was rough going and took quite a while, but she's drinking from a bottle and that's good because now I'm FREE sometimes! I'm still breastfeeding, but we give her a formula bottle or two during the day to mix it up a bit. Turns out she really IS sensitive to dairy, so we had to switch to soy formula, which seems to be working out quite well. I just hope that this sensitivity to dairy doesn't mean she's allergic and will be! We'll see what happens as she gets bigger.

The Jillian is also learning a lot about what her hands can do. She can suck her thumb, which is probably what's helping her sleep through the night. A lot of people see her do this and immediately freak the fuck out because it's a hard habit to break and she'll need braces, blah dee blah. Well, those people can come over and put her back to sleep when she wakes up three or four times during the night (I know she does this because I can hear her in the baby monitor but she usually puts herself right back down again hallelujah). I'm ecstatic that she can suck her thumb, because it's always there and I don't have to go find The Binky when it goes away. ROCK ON, THUMB.

She's also become very grabby. In fact, I almost lost this entire post because SOMEONE who is sitting on my lap, started pressing buttons on the laptop. OOPS! It won't be long now before we're locking everything and putting up baby gates and hiding the booze. Yikes.

Overall, my giant baby is wonderful. Every day is something new and amazing, and we have a great time. She is, for the most part, a perfectly happy and content baby, but she does have her moments. When she's hungry, she will scream until she gets to eat and eat and eat some more, and when she is tired, she'll scream for about ten minutes then it's like a switch gets flipped and she conks out. Weird.

The big thing right now is teeth, I think. My mom told me that I got my teeth four at a time (I was an overachiever) and so the discomfort was four times as great. OH GOODY! Currently, we have A LOT of drool and the occasional ear-pulling, but so far, no teeth yet. Can't wait for that one.

Fun with food

2006-12-29T11:44:00.000-05:00

We have more or less successfully introduced the bottle into The Jillian's life. She still fights it sometimes, but it's not the steel cage match it once was, so we're one step closer to being able to leave her with a babysitter for an evening. If we can only find a babysitter, that is.

Now I have started to introduce actual food into The Jillian's life. Rice cereal is okay, but smells so abominably atrocious, I totally understand why she makes those wacky faces when I try to feed it to her. So, to mix it up a bit, I've been offering her applesauce too.

You'd think the applesauce would be a big hit, but you would be WRONG. She makes the same crazy faces with the applesauce that she does with the rice cereal. Actually, the applesauce faces are even crazier. You'd think I was trying to feed her nettles or something. Still, we will work at it and try other things (I have bananas and pears in the arsenal yet) and see what happens.

I found it

2006-12-26T19:14:00.000-05:00

Whew! After a third, much more exhaustive search of the house and its environs, I found The Sucker and all is well again. Now if I only had more of my #2 parenting tool: Red Wine.

HELP ME

2006-12-26T15:56:00.000-05:00

I have misplaced my #1 parenting tool. In our house, it is simply known as "The Sucker." As in The Booger Sucker. The fancy name for it is the bulb aspirator, and it is used primarily to get boogers out of a tiny nose. It came home with us from the hospital and has been a good and loyal friend since.

And it is gone. GONE. I have two others but they don't have nearly the power of The Sucker and therefore the booger excavating situation is starting to get ugly.

I don't know where it went. The last time I definitely remember having it was Saturday afternoon and we were getting ready to head out the door. I grabbed it, intending to stuff it in the diaper bag but I'm no longer sure if I actually got the thing into the diaper bag. So it could be anywhere: the car, any one of the three diaper bags (yes, we have several), my jacket pockets, the laundry basket. Except it's not anywhere in the house. I'm sure it's not in the house because I have looked. AND LOOKED.

It might be in the car. Maybe. I doubt it. I'll have to check again when Freddie gets home, but he looked yesterday and didn't see it. Until then, I will have to make do with one of the two feeble suckers I have. And, if it's not in the car, I will have to figure out how to get another one.

Hanukkah haul

2006-12-22T11:02:00.000-05:00

Jillian did very well this holiday season. In addition to books and the Scary Light-Up Noise-Making Thing, she got a Cabbage Patch Kid Newborn from my mom. I didn't think she would go for it, but as soon as I got it out of the box, Jilly was talking to it and trying to kiss it.

SO CUTE!

DEFINITELY my child

2006-12-16T10:22:00.000-05:00

Jillian's new favorite thing to have whatever I have in MY hand in HER hand. This includes but is not limited to: my comb, whatever food I'm eating, the phone, and the remote control.

She's sitting with her Daddy in front of the stereo right now. He's teaching her about Bob Dylan and Steely Dan and so he handed her the audio remote. What did she do first?

She turned up the volume. Rock on, kid.

God help me

2006-12-14T14:33:00.000-05:00

I don't ever want to become a materialistic coveting parent, but Zutano's Autumn Check Collection is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo cute I think I'm going to go chew off my hands so I can't order anything. SOOOOOO CUTE! I'm dying over here.

I hope that link works because you simply MUST see this stuff. It's beyond cute. It's so cute I think I want to reupholster the couch in it.

How am I going to child-proof my house?

2006-12-14T14:18:00.000-05:00

Jillian is getting better at sitting up on her own. Seems like every day she sits up a millisecond longer before toppling face-first into her own lap. It won't be long now before she's mobile, and then we're fucked.

How am I going to child-proof my house? Let's start in the living room. We have a ginormous flat-screen TV that sits on a stand thingy on the TV cabinet. The TV is anchored to NOTHING and is just waiting for little hands to come pulling it down. Yikes. We have a treadmill. Granted, that thing is huge and more or less stable and difficult for me to lower the deck from its standing position, but we all know how resourceful babies can be. We have a fireplace, which is fun in and of itself, but it is surrounded in sharp brick! Oh, goody! CORNERS! It would be helpful if the fireplace brick didn't take up the WHOLE WALL, but it does, so there you go. I'm thinking bubble wrap. We also have a triathlete in the house, and his bike lives in the dining area along with the trainer that he uses in the wintertime. SO many opportunities for little hands to get stuck in chains and/or covered in grease!

The kitchen: our cabinets do not have handles on them, so we are going to have to find some kind of internal cabinet door-locking thingies. I don't know if I can convince Freddie to put handles on the doors, but I might try.

Bathrooms: we have three of them. The downstairs one is easy - just keep the door shut and put one of those doorknob slidey thingies on the knob. That's where the cleaning supplies and such will go if I can train my husband to KEEP THE DAMN DOOR SHUT. Unfortunately, Jillian has a bathroom attached to her bedroom, with all sorts of hazards like a toilet and a giant bathtub. Toilet locks I understand, but how does one keep a toddler person from exploring the bathtub?

Because Jillian's bedroom also doubles as the study, there are three gigantic, heavy bookcases in there. And, like the TV, they are anchored to nothing. I suppose we'll have to figure out some kind of anchoring system that will keep a jumbo-sized toddler from bringing the whole wall down while pulling up on the bookshelves, but I'm more worried about my actual books. Hmmmm.

Oh, stairs. Those are easy - baby gates and stuff. We'll put a gate at the bottom and one in Jillian's bedroom doorway. That way, I can leave her in her room and she can't fall down the stairs OR play in the cat's litterbox which lives at the top of the stairs because we literally do not have anywhere else to put it. GOD my house is small.

The good news is that we don't plan to be here for more than another two years, maximum. Still, that gets Jilly well into walking around and destroying the place. At least this isn't permanent.

A first attempt

2006-12-12T18:54:00.000-05:00

Today I tried to get Jillian to eat some rice cereal. She's a big fan of the spoon, because I have been letting her play with it so it wouldn't be totally unfamiliar.

The cereal, however, seemed to be a bust. She was all happy to open up her mouth and let me get some cereal in there, but then she would taste it and make this hilariously indescribable face.

And I agree with her. This stuff smells pretty grody, I can't imagine that it tastes much better. I'm going to attempt to get some breastmilk out of me and mix that with the cereal but I don't know if that's going to improve it enough for her to want to eat it. I did pick up one teeny jar of applesauce, so I'm hoping maybe that will entice her to try some food.

Why I am awesome

2006-12-11T12:26:00.000-05:00

I made my baby giggle yesterday. She already thinks I'm funny (and well she should), but I don't usually get more than a big smile and a coo. Yesterday, however, I heard her ACTUALLY GIGGLE and it was the cutest, funniest thing I have ever heard in my life.

Now, of course, I've become some kind of sideshow freak, constantly digging into my bag o'tricks to make her giggle some more.

Scar Tissue

2006-12-07T16:25:00.000-05:00

My scar is bothering me lately. The discomfort varies between an itching sensation and a burning sensation. And the area around the scar has no feeling at all, still.

Anyone know how long it takes for that area to be less irritated? I'm sure it doesn't help that my underpantses happen to rest RIGHT ON THE SCAR. I think I'm going to need to switch to granny panties or something.

Four whole months!!

2006-12-04T13:11:00.000-05:00

Last Friday was Jillian's 4-month birthday. Since not every month has a 31st day, we count from the first of every month.

Today we went to the doctor for the 4-month checkup and vaccinations and I'm happy to report that she is growing like a weed and healthy all around. She is not a big fan of the doctor's office, which is understandable, but she did really well. She's just over 25 inches long, and she weight 15 pounds and three ounces - a three-pound weight gain from her 2-month visit!

So she's growing well and hitting all of her milestones. She has recently learned how to cough, and apparently she really enjoys the sound of it because she coughs all the time for no real reason. It's mostly because she's drooling so much, and when I put her down on her back, the drool pools in the back of her mouth and she likes to cough and get it out that way. She's hilarious.

She had vaccinations today, too. These things do not make her happy, of course, but she got through it with a lot less screaming than last time. She's in her swing right now, NOT TAKING A NAP. But she's not screaming, either, so that's good. Last time, she screamed for seven hours straight and I almost ran away from home.

The doctor said we should probably start trying to get her to sleep all the way through the night, meaning that when she wakes up at 4, I should just let her go and maybe eventually she'll fall back asleep. I think she might be ready to do this. Lately, when I go get her in the middle of the night, she doesn't really seem to be hungry - she'll eat for about 20 minutes then go back to sleep. So perhaps it's time to see just how long she'll go. I'm not a big fan of the cry-it-out approach, but there are lots of other ways to go about getting her to sleep longer than six hours at a stretch.

I was trying to get a picture of her laughing, but every time the shutter clicks, it manages to capture her in a Crazy Head moment, so this is the best I could do. Don't you just want to munch those cheekies?

It's a machine, I tell you

2006-12-01T16:46:00.000-05:00

Jillian does not need to sleep. Ever. Lately, she's been going to sleep around 11 PM, waking up at 3, going back down at 5:30, waking up at 8, then not going to sleep for more than 10 minutes or so until 11 PM.

WHY? I don't mind hanging out with her all day and singing the ABC song six thousand times, but there are days when I would like to get other things done, like SHOWERING or you know, thinking about something else for ten minutes.

Okay, so maybe she's getting teeth. All the signs are there, with the drool and the cranky and the chewing on everything but this is starting to get out of hand. Crazy baby! In fact, she's awake RIGHT NOW and I only put her down twelve minutes ago. She's gnawing on her hand like she hasn't eaten in about a month when, in fact, she has been eating more or less ALL DAMN DAY.

As much as I enjoy breastfeeding (now I do, I didn't at first), I will be SO GLAD when we can get her pointed at something else for food because I am just worn out.

I'm usually sick of a job by now

2006-11-28T14:57:00.000-05:00

On Friday, Jillian will be four months old. Yikes! Four months is a long time! It's a third of a year! Usually, by four months, I have found out all of the things I hate about my job and go from being a willing worker to a slacking clock-watcher.

Not so, in this gig. Every day is something new, even if the difference is simply that we sing the ABC song five thousand times instead of four thousand times. Of the five songs I know, the ABC song seems to be the favorite. And good thing, too, since I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to rely on public school to educate my child.

I know I'm jinxing things just by writing about them, but we are doing pretty well. The Jillian tends to sleep through the night most nights, and is starting to take naps during the day. We still have days when I wonder just how much Tylenol it would take to make the baby sleep, but so far, I haven't had to resort to drugging her. I simply outlast her.

We're still struggling with the bottle, unfortunately. I am leaving that particular job up to Freddie, but she fights him and fights him. Next week, we head to the doctor and I will ask about it but for now, we just do the best we can. Even if I completely leave the house, she fights. My little gourmet only wants the best!

Jillian is also not a big fan of tummy time. She has rolled over from her tummy to her back, but not for the past few weeks. Lately, she just lays on her belly and screams, all indignant-like. What a weirdo. We'll get it figured out eventually, but for now, there is screaming.

I'm going to ask the doctor about solid foods when we go. I don't know that you'd call super-diluted rice cereal solid, but it's something new and should be an interesting adventure. I'm not sure she's ready for any alternative method of feeding since she won't take a bottle, but we'll see. She might not be ready yet.

I'm ready, though. I would LOVE to go to sleep without a bra.

El Diablo

2006-11-25T21:05:00.000-05:00

Jillian is obviously smarter than I am. I like for her to have some alone time with her Daddy, which has the added benefit of me getting my ass out of the house for a couple of hours. Last weekend, I went out BY MYSELF! Before I left, I fed the baby and since she had been fussy most of the day, I let her fall asleep on me and then I put her in her swing.

I got home two hours later and SHE WAS STILL ASLEEP. Dammit.

So we tried again today. SAME DAMN THING. She spent all morning fussing and screaming, but as soon as I decided to leave the house, she conked out so I put her in her swing with a "good luck, SUCKER!" to Freddie then I got the hell out of Dodge.

A good measure of how incredibly desperate I was to get out of the house alone is the fact that I WENT TO THE MALL.

Poo!

2006-11-21T17:33:00.000-05:00

Let's talk about poop, baby.

They say that the smell of the poo of breastfed babies is less objectionable than that of formula-fed babies. Oh, really? I shudder to think what Jillian's ass will smell like when I get her switched over to formula (even part time) because her butt makes my eyes water as it is.

Seriously, how does my baby's poo smell like eggs when I haven't been near an egg in nearly a month? Is it because I had chicken? Chicken comes from eggs so I suppose it's possible but still...

And let's talk about the Diaper Genie. I do appreciate this particular invention, only because without it, diapers would sit all unsealed in the trash and well, ew. So the Diaper Genie is good people but I'm having issues with the plastic thingamajig. See, there are supposedly 2 different kinds of plastic film for the genie - one for tiny babies who are getting breastmilk or formula ONLY, and are therefore less stinky (theoretically) than an older baby who is eating buffalo wings and burritos. Then there's the stage 2 version, which is supposed to have better odor protection from those scary diapers you get when you start feeding the baby actual food.

The Target we frequent no longer carries the stage 1 thingy, so we switched to the stage 2. What's the difference, right? WELL. This stage 2 thing is not at all good at corralling The Stank. Stage 1 rocked, kept the odor at bay and the beaches shipwreck-free. This stage 2 thingy? Eww. Open the diaper genie to make a deposit and BLAMMO! Booty stank! And I must say, my daughter is a total overachiever in the booty stank department.

I was sad, thinking that maybe they just decided to go with a one-size-destinkifies-all, but today I was in the grocery store and saw the Stage 1 thingy on the shelf! I should have bought them ALL, but I only bought two. Plus, I checked the Diaper Genie website and it says nothing about going to a one-fits-all situation, so I'm confident that I can keep getting my stage 1 thingy as long as I need it.

Can I just say that I'm glad we didn't go with the cloth diapers? That shit is a lot of work, no pun intended. If we had done the cloth diapers, I feel confident that Jillian would still be wearing the same diaper she wore on her way home from the hospital. I would love to meet the new mommy who has time to deal with that particular crazy, because she is obviously taking some hard-core stimulants.

Mom genes

2006-11-19T18:06:00.000-05:00

I had to venture out today and buy myself some pants. I am still wearing my two pairs of maternity pants and the one pair of chinos I can fit in to.

Even though I am at my pre-pregnancy weight, I am still roughly forty pounds above where I think I should be, so I am in no mood to buy humungous clothing for myself. But I needed at least one pair of jeans and a pair of black pants for holiday things et cetera, so off to the store I went.

Since it's Sunday, I left The Jillian with her Daddy. Actually, I left The Screaming Beastie asleep in her swing with a "good luck, Daddy" and I fled the scene. I was in the car! With just my wallet and my phone! With no car seat! No baby who screams if the car is not moving! I could turn the radio up REALLY REALLY LOUD!

I went to the store, bought the two pairs of pants I needed (and I'm only one size bigger than I was before this whole baby adventure started, so RAWWWWK \m/), and then headed to the bookstore to maybe have a coffee and read trashy magazines.

'Course, I'm a Mama now, so instead of trashy magazines, I read Parents magazine and then checked out the various baby/parenting books to see if there was anything else I needed to know.

Then (and this is the weird part), after ONLY AN HOUR, I headed home because I missed my baby. Who, I might add, is still asleep in her swing where I left her. I'm thinking her Daddy owes me. Maybe I should go out to the bar.

Decaf baby

2006-11-17T15:35:00.000-05:00

I had this whole post in my head about how Jillian has become a perpetual motion machine over the past few days. She hasn't been napping AT ALL and when she does go to sleep, AT MIDNIGHT, it's never for more than three hours at a time.

However, based on today's observations (and screaming), I'm thinking she has a tiny ear infection. A wee fever, some crabbiness, wants to eat/doesn't want to eat, doesn't want to lay flat, won't sleep, and ear yanking? Yep, I think it's an ear infection.

So I called the doctor and described the symptoms and they agree with me. Thankfully, her doctors (we have a pediatric group, so there are about six hundred of them) are great and aren't going to instantly insist that she be put on antibiotics. They said to give her baby Tylenol and see what happens. If she doesn't show any improvement by Monday, I should bring her in.

That's great and everything, but it means that I get less sleep than I already do and she gets to be uncomfortable all weekend. Oh well - this weekend promises to be fairly quiet (no parties or other obligations), so she and I can rest and stay away from loads of germy people.

Little of this, little of that

2006-11-15T17:45:00.000-05:00

1. I am now absolutely certain that I cannot eat dairy while I am still breastfeeding. Last Friday, I broke down and had a giant calzone for dinner and spent most of Saturday coping with a gassy, screaming baby. Good times.

2. My daughter is learning how to suck her thumb, instead of shoving her whole fist in her mouth. I could not be a prouder Mama, especially since she refuses the pacifier.

3. She has refused to take a nap longer than 20 minutes for the past three days and as we speak has just woken up and is staring at me from across the room all "COME ENTERTAIN ME, WENCH!" She does sleep through the night most nights, so I cannot complain.

4. Jillian hates Daddy. For the past couple of no-nap days, as soon as Daddy gets home and attempts to take over the baby-wrangling, my pleasant little munchkin turns into a banshee. Poor Daddy feels all rejected.

5. I am a tad worried about my milk supply. I'm sure there is enough to nourish the Jillian, especially since she is growing like a genetically-modified tomato, but there isn't any extra for me to pump, so there are no bottles for Daddy to attempt to feed her and I cannot leave the house without her for more than an hour, at most. We'll be discussing this with the doctor when we go for the 4-month checkup and will, in all likelihood, be supplementing with formula. But we'll see.

6. I'm sleepy. I have laundry to fold. The husband is out tonight at some work function, so I can't make him entertain Jillian (or have her yell at him) while I fold the laundry. There is no more Lost until February and TV sucks on Wednesdays now. Wah!

Fun With A Baby Who Is Smarter Than You Are

2006-11-11T11:42:00.000-05:00

We inherited a Baby Bjorn, which means we didn't get the instructions. All we have to go by are the wacky cartoon instructions on the inside of it. Consequently, Jillian spends a lot of time looking at one or the both of us like "You people are idiots."

We decided last night that she occasionally looks like Dick Cheney when she makes these "I'm smarter than you are" faces. Hilarious!

I've been playing peek-a-boo with her, but she either doesn't get the concept or she has figured it out already. I hide behind a blanket and say "Where's Mama?" Then I pull the blanket down, hoping for Jillian's face to say "YAY! Mama went away but she's back now!"

Instead, she looks at me like "Fool! I know you're just hiding behind that blanket. You're acting silly!"

In my head, I think Jillian's thoughts sound like Mr. T.

I've been doing a lot of singing these days, too. Sadly, I only know about four songs, and three of them have the same tune. The ABC song is a big favorite, and that's good because if she's going to get into Harvard before her Bat Mitzvah, she'd better start reading in the next week or so. Next month, we're starting algebra with her, so she'll be ready for the SATs before her birthday.

We also do The Itsy Bitsy Jillian, The Hokey Pokey, BaaBaa Black Sheep, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and various other tunes that I know with whatever words come to mind. As a musician, I know a lot of simple tunes from the early days of learning my various instruments, but I don't know the words. So we make 'em up! We sing songs about Jilly's feet, Jilly's belly, Jilly's head, and Jilly's farting. It's a lot of fun. I can't wait until she hears a REAL singer and realizes just how awful and atrocious my singing actually is.

Goes to show

2006-11-10T17:40:00.000-05:00

Just when I think I've got my kid figured out, she changes the game. Feeding used to be relatively easy - feed it, then hoist it up on the shoulder for some buring and spitting up, then maybe it will sleep.

NOW, it doesn't WANT to go up on my shoulder to burp and spit up on my back. OH, NO! It wants me to carry it around like a football for half and hour while it drools on itself and yells. THEN, maybe, it goes to sleep for a bit.

Heh.

We had a bit of a crisis here yesterday. For afternoon napping, I put Jillian in her swing and she sleeps for at least an hour and a half. The swing takes 4 D-batteries, and like all modern gadgets, it eats batteries for breakfast. I did not have any fresh batteries, so I had to put her in the non-moving swing and hope for the best.

Ah, hope.

Because we didn't have a nap, we decided to stay up and party until midnight. Wacky baby!

Tied to my chair

2006-11-03T21:01:00.000-05:00

Freddie is attempting to give Jillian a bottle right now. She is screaming to beat the band, and it breaks my heart to hear it. But she needs to learn to take the bottle, especially from someone other than Mama, so I am staring resolutely at my computer screen.

It's taking a whole lot of willpower to stay put over here and not go rescue my daughter, but I'm doing it. Freddie and Jillian have to get used to each other and I have to let him do his share of parenting HIS way, not my way. Damn, this is hard.

Maybe I'll go take a shower or something.

Not for the faint of heart

2006-11-03T16:12:00.000-05:00

My daughter, who refused to sleep at all last night and most of today just went down for a nap. She's in her swing, which is all the way across the room. A few minutes ago, she made the most horrendous noise with her butt. Since she's a champion fart machine, I thought maybe that was what it was.

Apparently not. I am at least twenty feet away from her and she smells like... well, there are no words to describe this smell. I had a gyro for dinner last night so that might tell you everything you need to know. Seriously, you guys, she smells really really bad.

However, since this is the first time she has slept in oh, twelve hours or so, I am more than happy to let her marinate in her own poo and put up with the smell. It's amazing the things that moms put up with that would gross out normal people.

I used to hate people who felt like this

2006-11-02T14:37:00.000-05:00

Well. Here we are at three months and counting. Things are starting to settle down a smidge, with the sleeping through the night (mostly) and because my Mom Instincts are getting pretty sharp and I can pretty much figure out what's bothering the baby before we go to defcon 1. (Or is it defcon 5? Is WarGames on?)

The addition of the swing to our baby crap collection helps ENORMOUSLY. Long live the swing!

So now that I have some free time in which the baby is not screaming at me or barfing on me or eating, I have been catching up on some blogs of women who were due around the time Jillian arrived. It's utterly hilarious to me to see the sea change in the tone of these blogs. Before the baby, there are near-daily posts about how excited the mama is and how she's anticipating the birth and all that. Then there's a blank period of about two weeks in which the baby comes and then the posts start up again.

This is where it gets REALLY fun. For all the excited and hopeful pre-baby posts, there are a whole slew of "Holy shit - this suuuuuuuucks I haven't slept" posts. And boy, do I relate to that.

I must say, I tried to keep my expectations as low as possible, knowing my history with depression and frustration. See, with low or no expectations, whatever happened was okay with me. So far, this is working pretty well - I'm able to take the screaming and the sleeplessness in stride instead of trying to lock myself in the bathroom. I still have days when I want to run away and get plastic surgery and start a new life, but they are becoming fewer and farther between. Now I'm able to read some of these new-mama blogs and think "oh, you poor thing - hang in there."

Two months ago I would have HATED that, so I rarely (if ever) comment unless it's to say something encouraging like "Don't kill yourself - you'll make a mess."

The number one thing I see on these blogs is the sentiment of "NOBODY TOLD ME." Well, right. Nobody DID. All of the baby books and magazines I read both before Jillian and now practically have puppies and rainbows spilling out of them. If there are difficulties, they are glossed over and shoved into the "fussy" label. Even if you are forewarned about sleeplessness and exhaustion, nothing in the books and magazines can prepare you for the actuality of it.

They don't tell you that even though you put breast pads in your bra before you fall into an exhausted sleep, you will still wake up in a puddle of milk with the cat standing on your stomach sniffing hopefully at your chest (16 pounds of feline standing on a c-section scar? He's lucky I don't have a spiffy new cat-fur hat).

They don't tell you that you won't always have time to brush your teeth before you go in to feed the baby AGAIN and that you will get a certain pleasure in breathing your foul morning breath on the little screaming monster who woke you up AGAIN.

They don't tell you that three months after giving birth you will still look halfway pregnant. Oh, they'll give you exercises you can do, but they don't tell you that not only will you not have the time for them, but when you DO get some free time, you will spend it sleeping. Or want to, anyway.

They DO tell you to get your friends and relatives to help you around the house in the early days. Maybe 20 years ago, perhaps even more, people lived closer to their families and had them nearby. My parents live 400 miles away, and my mom used the last of her vacation days to come out and stay with me for a week. My MIL, to put it mildly, is not a "baby person," and although she lives less than an hour away, she's not much help, either. And all of our friends have jobs and lives - who is going to drop what they're doing and unload my dishwasher? Nobody, that's who.

They don't tell you that your brain more or less turns into rice pudding. Actually, some of them do. I know what a lobotomy feels like because I don't know what day it is most of the time and although I showered last night I can't tell you when I showered before that, but I can still provide all the answers on Jeopardy.

Maybe we should get together and write a REAL pregnancy-motherhood book. We can call it Fucked: You're Having A Baby. Sample chapters could include:

Uh Oh, I Might Be Pregnant. Good Thing I Got Good and Drunk Last Weekend.

Yep, That Looks Like A Plus Sign: Telling Your Partner

Ooh! I Can Eat Whatever I Want! Your Pregnancy Diet

Damn, These Clothes Are Ugly

Not Quite What I Expected: When The Birth You Plan Isn't The Birth You Get

Sleep Is No Longer In My Vocabulary: How To Cope With 15 Minutes of Sleep a Night

I Hate The Baby: Learning To Live Your New Life

Shut The Fuck Up, This Is How I Roll: Dealing With Other People's Advice

Celebrities Who Lose Their Baby Weight In Six Weeks Are Obviously Hitting The Crack Pipe: When You're Still Wearing Maternity Pants Three Months Later

Please feel free to add more. I only thought of these when I was in the shower at midnight last night because SOMEONE whose name rhymes with Jillian Zack would not take a nap or sit in her swing for more than six minutes yesterday.

Milestones

2006-11-02T08:19:00.000-05:00

Jillian turned three months old on Tuesday. We didn't dress her up and take her around the neighborhood because - hello - she's three months old. Besides, she spent much of Tuesday evening sleeping and I'm not about to mess with that.

Yesterday I commented over at Whoorl about how Jillian isn't a big fan of tummy time but I make her do it anyway in the hopes that she'll just get pissed off enough to roll over.

Sure enough, not ten minutes after I posted my comment, I put Jilly on her tummy and VOILA! She rolled over! To make sure it wasn't just a fluke, I made her do it three more times. YAY!

Of course, when Daddy got home, she refused to roll over and decided to just scream instead, but progress has been made.

She can roll from her back to her side, too. I know this because I put her to sleep on her back and when I go to check on her, she's on her left side all scrunched up. It's SO CUTE. And SO NERVE-WRACKING because now that she's sleeping about 6-7 hours in a row, I get all paranoid that something is wrong so I have to tiptoe in and check on her if she doesn't wake me up every four hours. So far, so good.

From one extreme to the next

2006-10-30T12:42:00.000-05:00

Awake Flavor Jillian seems to be in short supply these days. NOT THAT I'M COMPLAINING, mind you, but it is odd that she seems to be sleeping the whole day away today.

Okay, I think she has either a cold or a wee bit of reflux. For the past three days or so, after a feeding, she has this most amazing goo coming out of her nose. It's more or less clear, which makes me think it's a cold. But it's making her scream ungodly howls of rage and/or discomfort and it's accompanied by Puke Breath, so I'm also thinking it might be a wee bit of reflux.

My diet has been all right of late, so I don't think there's a specific trigger food involved, but it could be anything, really.

What it might be is a combination of things. She might have a cold, which is making her tummy upset, which causes the spit-up to come up and out through and already irritated nose. All these things together make for the Baby Who Wouldn't Stop Screaming (Except to Sleep).

Ah, sleep. Not that I want to jinx it, but for the past week, she has been sleeping at least six hours a night. This is such an amazing thing, I cannot even begin to believe it. Of course, she doesn't really nap during the day (20 minutes here, 20 minutes there), so perhaps that's why she's sleeping so much.

Yesterday, in fact, she didn't nap hardly at all and I put her down at 10:30. She awoke this morning at 9 AM only because I had to tiptoe in and make sure she hadn't climbed out the window and escaped to Mexico. So after she woke up, we did our normal routine of changing the diaper and having our morning feed. The Screaming started, as I knew it would, so I dosed her with Gripe Water, and then she fell asleep. And has been asleep since about 10:30 this morning.

This is highly unusual for my perpetual-motion machine, so I'm a wee bit worried. I'm sure she's fine, BUT I'M NOT! I should be spending this time doing something productive, like laundry or the ironing I promised to do last week, or knitting or getting all of Jillian's newborn-sized clothes boxed up or... or... well, something, anyway, but no - all I can do is sit and stare at her and make sure she's breathing.

Oh, wait. She's starting to wiggle a bit so it must be time for waking up. YAY!

If you had to choose...

2006-10-26T16:30:00.000-04:00

and APPARENTLY I DO,

would you rather have a baby who sleeps 6+ hours through the night BUT DOES NOT NAP during the day or one that wakes up every three or so hours at night and takes reasonable naps during the day?

I'd kill myself, but I'm too tired

2006-10-25T22:59:00.000-04:00

My child has been awake (aside from a few 20-minute naps) since 7 AM this morning. It is now 11 PM. If I had the energy, I would go jump out the window.

Dammit, I broke my own rule!

2006-10-25T14:57:00.000-04:00

Rule #1: When the baby does something good, DO NOT TALK ABOUT IT for fear that it will never ever happen again.

See what I just did? I wrote about her falling asleep in the swing and now she's awake and staring at me from across the room and I get the feeling that she is about to unleash the Howls of Fury.

Maybe if I stay over here at the computer, she will fall back asleep. If I'm really quiet and I don't move, she won't attack.

Oh, THAT'S why she woke up. She's farting. Some babies burp, mine tends to wait and fart it out. Seriously. She farts like an old man. Shhhh... ignore it!

This simply is not possible

2006-10-25T14:44:00.000-04:00

I'm having trouble believing that I am awake today. Jillian slept seven and a half hours last night. Yes, SEVEN.
AND A HALF.
HOURS.
IN A ROW.

Then we had a relatively pleasant day, playing and laughing and practicing sitting up.

I just fed her and put her in the swing while she was still kind of awake and she fell asleep! IN THE SWING!

Should I go buy lottery tickets?

Sweeeeeeeet

2006-10-23T17:47:00.000-04:00

Okay. So the baby woke up a little and started the squawking thing and the swing started up again (with much clicking, which I'm sure is annoying if you're trying to sleep) and Asleep Flavor Jillian stayed asleep. WOOOO!

I was afraid she would wake up with the swinging and cause a ruckus, but she went back to sleep and now I have to wake her up and feed her or she won't sleep at all tonight.

Swing kids

2006-10-23T16:01:00.000-04:00

My mom sent Jillian a swing after I mentioned the fact that the baby requires CONSTANT MOVEMENT or she'll explode. The swing itself is pretty cool - you can set it to swing for half and hour or so, then it stops. But if your baby squawks or something, the swing hears and starts up again! I may never have to parent this baby at all!

However, the swing is not a big hit with Awake Flavor Jillian. If I put her in there while she's awake, no matter how happy she is, she will flail and scream as if I were putting her in the dishwasher [again]. Asleep Flavor Jillian likes the swing just fine.

Until she wakes up, then she does the screaming thing.

Uh oh, Asleep Flavor Jillian is currently in the baby-activated swing, which has just stopped. If she wakes up enough to squawk, I have little faith that the swing will put her back to sleep. Yikes. See, this is the first time I have actually TRIED to use the baby-activated feature of the swing. The other times I managed to get her in it, I used the parent-activated feature (which is... turning it on).

SHE'S SO CUTE!

Ahem. Sorry. But she totally is!

The other interesting feature of the swing is that it has five speeds. Since speed 1 seems to be pretty quick, I'm a wee bit leery of jacking it up to 5. I'm sure we'll experiment with it eventually, but we turned the swing up to 5 yesterday with no baby in it and man, that thing FLIES. I'm afraid it will fling my baby across the room!

Hmmm. Baby is still Asleep Flavored. I'll update if she wakes up and manages to activate the swing again. Or, you'll hear a bunch of screaming coming from the direction of New Jersey and know what happened.

Babies and stuff

2006-10-20T16:10:00.000-04:00

Today Jillian and I went to our first baby group at our synagogue. As much as I am a happy hermit, I think it will be good for both of us to get out of the house at least every two weeks and hang out with other Jewish mamas and babies. For Jill, especially.

I have to learn how to be Jewish mama, and there is SO much I don't know. It's going to be interesting raising this kid.

Neurotic

2006-10-17T16:23:00.000-04:00

I never thought I'd be one of those mothers who starts to fret that something is wrong with the baby because she's too quiet. But The Jillian has been napping for roughly three hours now and I had to go check that she was still breathing because the three hour nap is UNHEARD OF in our house.

These are times when I sort of wish we had gotten the video baby monitor, too. Now that I have opened her door and checked on her, she's starting to wake up a little. Whew!

I think having all those germy people in her house over the weekend gave her a wee cold. She's not feverish or anything like that, but she's been extra-grumpy over the past two days and today was a Day of Spitting Up, which we don't normally have. Plus, she was very sweaty in the car seat, despite it being only 55 degrees outside. She was only wearing a long-sleeve onesie and pants with a light blanket over her, so it's not like she was bundled into a snowsuit. Hmm.

Baby-naming

2006-10-16T14:00:00.000-04:00

We had Jillian's baby-naming ceremony at our house yesterday. 35 people and enough food to feed twice that many!

It was very nice. I kept Jillian upstairs with me pretty much until we were ready to start, and she was just the bestest baby ever. Never mind the screaming and yelling and SCREAMING I've been dealing with for the past week or so - this baby was utterly angelic. She was awake and happy through the whole thing, didn't barf on the rabbi or scream at him, nothing. She was SO GOOD! Toward the end she pooped like she has never pooped before, but otherwise, she was the perfect baby.

We named her Gavriella Channa, for the strength and grace we hope she will have. So now she has four names to choose from! Yay! That's a hell of a monogram.

Afterwards, with all the friends and family hanging out, Jillian was still a perfect baby. Right after the ceremony, I changed her poopy diaper and fed her real quick. Then I brought her back down and started passing her to other people. Normally when she's being held by someone other than myself, she starts with the screaming, but she was the bestest baby. Little monster!

She was probably exhausted from all the super-fun partying, because she slept from 10 to 3:30 and then from 4:30 to 6. I was super happy about that.

Even better is the fact that most of our Big Events are done for the time being so we can maybe start getting some kind of rhythm going. We're going to be introducing the bottle this week, which should be SUPER FUN, since she so far has rejected any nipple that is not attached to me.

She's cute, no?

Not made by Crayola

2006-10-11T16:01:00.000-04:00

I don't think I've eaten anything unusual in the past couple of days, but something I have ingested has turned Jillian's poop a bluish-green.

No, seriously. Yellow is normal, green is unusual but not alarming, black is indicative of too much dairy, et cetera, but this is just weird. It's green with a faint blue tinge and I have no idea what might have caused it. Hmm.

It's hard to be squeamish and be a mom.

Baby's first road trip

2006-10-10T16:37:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, we packed up the baby and just about everything of hers except her crib and journeyed to Erie, PA for my cousin Kate's wedding.

Jillian did fantastic in the car. She fell asleep instantly and barely woke up when we stopped a few hours into the trip so I could feed her. We got her fed and changed and back on the road with no major mishaps!

However, all that sleeping meant that she was missing out on some serious yelling time, so later that evening, we were at the rehearsal dinner and someone started in with the screaming. And wouldn't stop. It's amazing that it seems normal to me when we're at home but when we're out somewhere and she starts up, my first instinct is to flee the scene.

She slept in her pack & play all right, but after the first wake-up and feed of the night, I didn't want to put her back in there because I was afraid I wouldn't hear her so I bunked her down on the bed with me. There's something to be said for sleeping with the baby - I was able to relax more fully and sleep more soundly (if only for three hours) than I have since she was born because she was right there. So I can totally see the allure of co-sleeping but that doesn't mean we're going to make a habit of it.

Jillian was SO good at the wedding. She slept the whole time, for which we were grateful. Unfortunately, we missed our chance to have an exorcism performed, and she screamed through much of the reception. Thankfully, it was at Le Swank Country Club so the bathroom was pretty plush, with chairs and couches and whatnot.
It was good to see the family, too. I was able to hand the baby off to one or another of my aunts and go do something - ANYTHING - for a half-hour. Good times.

On the way home, there was more sleeping, but that was the last time she did that. She hasn't slept more than two hours in a row since Sunday at 6 PM. Oh dear. We were JUST starting to get on some kind of predictable routine when we left and now it's all gone to shit.

She's sleeping now, THANK GOD, but that's only because we had to go out this afternoon. Putting her in the car seems to be the magic bullet, but unless they find a way for me to sleep and drive the car at the same time, we won't be relying on it as a sleep method. We'll keep using the drugs, which seem to be working.

I kid! We don't give the baby drugs. I take them.

So... sleep. Yeah. She normally eats every three and a half to four hours, so I should be waking her up right about now, but I'll be damned if I'm going to do that. She can keep sleeping all strapped into her car seat until she feels like waking up on her own. I'm not stupid. And besides, she is SO CUTE when she's asleep! I am too, but you'd never know it these days.

They jabbed my baby with needles

2006-10-05T12:42:00.000-04:00

So yesterday was our 2-month doctor visit, complete with VACCINATIONS. Ack. Thankfully, this appointment was scheduled for the late afternoon because if we would have done this in the morning and I would have had to deal with even MORE screaming, I don't know if I would have made it.

The doctor is very nice. Actually, I should say the doctors are very nice, since there are about 20 in our practice and we see a different one each time. This time we had a nice younger dude. I sometimes hate it when there are doctors around my age because it makes me feel inadequate. Whatever.

Anyway, Jillian was weighed and she porked out at 12 lb 4 oz, which is good since they had been worried about her weight gain. FAT BABY! Then we did a basic exam, and everything is peachy. Her left eye is starting to resolve and doesn't go walkabout nearly as much. This is good, because I don't know if I want to deal with a lazy eye.

The doctor checked her bellybutton and told me to keep an eye on it. Apparently, she's sporting some kind of hernia thing and that's why her belly button looks like an actual, pressable button. She should grow into it, but if she doesn't, it can be corrected surgically. Sweet.

So with the exam over, it was time for vaccinations. Man, did that SUCK or what? The first one was a liquid, to be taken orally, so the nurse clamped the baby's jaws open and poured the goo in. Jillian was NOT HAPPY. But then we had three shots to give and people, I didn't know a human could turn that shade of purple. Not only did she turn magenta, but she was GLOWING. Not. A. Happy. Baby.

Fortunately, she was exhausted enough to withstand a trip to Target and then we went home. THAT'S WHEN THE REAL FUN BEGAN.

We got home around 5PM, and she was still a little sleepy from being in the car, but come 6 o'clock, she started screaming and WOULD NOT STOP. Well, she stopped occasionally, to poop and eat and rest so she could SCREAM SOME MORE.

Usually, when the screaming lasts for more than two or three hours, I start to get antsy and whatnot, but this time, I knew I had to stick it out and there was really nothing I could do to soothe her except rock her and rock her and rock her. So I did.

FINALLY, at about 2 o'clock in the morning, I was starting to fall asleep sitting up, so I decided to try to put her down. I changed her diaper, and she actually fell asleep on the changing table. My first thought was to just strap her down (with the handy changing table strap!) and leave her there, but my better judgement prevailed and I gently tossed her into the crib. Amazingly, she didn't wake up and I was able to tiptoe out of there (after 8 full hours!) and get some sleep myself.

I'm still tired, but she seems to have recovered well. No fever and only a slight increase in the fussy. And we get to do it all again in two months!

SWEET!

Holy OW crap OW

2006-10-03T14:14:00.000-04:00

Note: my email has been fucked for a couple of days (possibly longer) so if you have emailed me and gotten less response than usual (Mikie - I owe you several emails!), sorry and all that. I'll get to it as soon as I can or you can email me again and tell me what a bitch I am.

That said - OW. My right nipple has decided to go on strike or something. All was peachy-keen until last night, when the Baby Who Will Neither Sleep Nor Stop Eating latched on wrong and would not let go. The pain, I tell you, the pain. I know it's not as bad as what some folks are dealing with, but e-freaking-gad. The two hours of sleep I might have normally gotten between 4:30 and 6:30 AM went right out the window with the stabbing pain shooting through my breast.

As an amateur hypochondriac, my first thought was MASTITIS! NO! but upon checking for secondary symptoms, I seem to be OK. Then I thought that maybe the milk ducts might be clogged a wee bit, but the results of my tests to determine this were inconclusive. The only thing to do was to see if Jillian would latch on CORRECTLY and boy, she did but OH MY GOD. OW does not even BEGIN to cover it. Still, I'm a total rock star and I stuck it out for about ten minutes and the pain subsided a bit but my right nipple is still a bit painful and roughly the same size as my fist.

It doesn't help that Jillian occasionally likes to grab my nipples and see how far they'll stretch.

Right now I'm alternating hot and cold packs and that seems to be helping. Before I let the baby have another go at it, I'm going to pump once or twice and see if that helps. But Holy Jebus, the pain is annoying at best and making me cry otherwise.

This breastfeeding lark is not fun. Yeah, bonding, benefits, closeness, antibodies, blahblahblah, but damn. Most moms get to hold the "I was in labor with you for four days" over their kids' heads but since I don't have that particular weapon in my Mom Arsenal, I'm going to use the pain of breastfeeding instead.

It doesn't sleep

2006-09-28T14:43:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a horrible day. The Princess awoke at 8AM, which isn't unusual, and I fed her and we had some playtime until she started yawning. At that time, I rocked her until she was asleep, complete with limp arms and legs! Because I am nothing if not an eternal optimist, I thought I could put her down in her crib and she would sleep there for a couple of hours so I could get some breakfast and maybe, JUST MAYBE take a shower.

No such luck. Well, I did get breakfast (frozen waffles!), but 20 minutes after I put her down, she was awake again. And not just awake, but SCREAMY AWAKE. Yay.

I picked her up, checked her diaper (since that's the first thing I do when I get her out of the crib), and sat down in the rocking chair to see if I could calm her down. Half an hour of rocking later, and she's asleep and drooling on my shoulder again.

Repeat the put down, SCREAM!, pick up, rock, sleep series (with the occasional feeding) until 2 AM. Yes, that's right. We were more or less awake yesterday for 18 hours. I was holding fast until about 1 AM, when I just completely lost it. I just broke down and couldn't do it anymore. So Freddie got up (after having been at work from 7 AM to 10 PM) and took the baby for awhile. But I felt bad so after about 15 minutes, I sent him back to bed and settled down for what I expected to be a LONG night with Jillian.

I fed her, and true to form, as soon as I had resigned myself to staying up all night, she fell asleep. Giving it one more try, I put her in the crib and she actually stayed asleep, so I could FINALLY get some sleep myself.

She slept until 6 this morning, woke up, had a diaper change and a feed and went back to sleep around 8. We got up at noon and things are better but damn if yesterday didn't suck.

My thinking is that she's either having a growth spurt, which is fine, or that there is something else going on. She was pulling at her left ear this morning a bit, so there might be a little bit of discomfort there. I'll have to keep an eye on her and see if it escalates.

As for me, I am definitely in no condition to be leaving the house. I cannot remember the last time I showered (might have been Tuesday morning?), I haven't combed my hair since then, and although I managed to brush my teeth, I haven't gotten anywhere near dental floss is over two weeks. Yay. My boobs have been leaking but I was too tired to change my bra and shirt before I collapsed into bed, so I smell like a dairy and I shudder to think what my bedsheets smell like. I'm sure it's attractive. I have a headache and my whole body aches from not sleeping and I'm cranky as hell.

I wonder how so many people live to adulthood when babies are so diabolical.

Reverse Psychology

2006-09-21T09:56:00.000-04:00

You know, I think I'm just going to post pessimistic and negative stuff here from now on. Yesterday I posted a bit about how Jillian and I are starting to get into a rhythm and almost as soon as I hit "publish," she threw it all out the window and made my afternoon a living hell.

We had a marathon feeding session. I don't even know how long or how much she ate because she seemed to be on the boob ALL DAY. We're talking every 90 minutes. Then we didn't go to sleep last night until 2. Then we got up at 4:30. Then we got up at 8. And now it's almost 10 and I can hear her squawking in the baby monitor.

I'm running away from home. I mean it.

What day is it?

2006-09-20T14:21:00.000-04:00

I think I need a personal assistant. I say this because I no longer know what day it is. Not having to work + wacky baby scheduling = complete absence of time-sense. The only reason I know what day it is (when I am cognizant of such things) is based on what's on TV. Monday is Prison Break day, Wednesday will be Lost day (for a short time then a giant pain in my ass hiatus), Thursday is Survivor day and Sunday is The Amazing Race Day. Other than that, it could be Friday and I would never notice.

I keep hearing something about a "schedule" that the baby will eventually get on. What is this "schedule" you speak of? You mean she will eat and sleep at predictable times and for predictable durations? Ha! Tell me another one!

Actually, we're not doing too badly. Jillian goes down for the night anytime between 10 PM and 2 AM, and sleeps for about 4 to 5 hours. Then we wake up, eat some more, sleep for another two hours or so, then all hell breaks loose.

Today, for instance. Woke up at 4 and then 7, then slept until 9:30. At that time, she woke up and I changed her diaper and then fed her. And fed her. AND FED HER. She ate almost non-stop from 9:45 to about 11:30. I think my boobs are going to fall off. I am hopeful that this is just another one of those growth spurt things and that she will eventually calm down again, because if it isn't, I'm running away from home.

The upside is that she's awake and alert more often during the day, and she has the biggest toothless grin I ever saw. Her favorite thing right now is when I push her cheeks together like a Cabbage Patch Kid. Her eyes go all wide and bright and she laughs with that big smile. It almost makes up for the screaming. She is also starting to grasp the concept of peek-a-boo, but that's only fun for about thirty seconds before something else gets her attention.

One good thing is that her eyes seem to be focusing well. For awhile there I thought she might have a lazy eye because her left eye wanted to go off in all sorts of wacky directions. Over the last week or so, that has died down, so maybe she'll be all right. I know it's still early, but the fact that this has resolved itself more or less is comforting to me.

Improving

2006-09-13T16:15:00.000-04:00

Sort of. We are nowhere near a schedule yet, which is not surprising. It would be NICE, however, if I were able to predict with more certainty when Jillian is going to want to eat (all the damn time just about covers it), sleep, and scream.

There hasn't been all that much screaming over the past few days, though. Most of it was booger-related, since the gas problem we had been having seems to have resolved itself, more or less. At least she's burping more readily now. And the farting, MY GOD, the farting.

I guess Mama shouldn't be eating refried beans, eh?

I would love to teach the baby how to pick her nose because she occasionally gets dry boogers up in there and the booger-sucker thingie can't really remove them very well. So I have to go up there with a tissue or something to get them out.

I also wish I could get her to suck her thumb or accept a pacifier because that would help me out A LOT. Alas, she hasn't yet realized that her hands are the perfect size to fit in her mouth and they're always available. And a pacifier would be nice for those 3 AM feedings that seem to last two hours or more. But she is actively rejecting the binky. I'll stick it in her mouth and she'll make all these theatrical gagging sounds accompanied by the most outraged baby face ever. So no binky, but she will occasionally chew on my finger for hours on end. Hmmm.

Excuses

2006-09-06T12:58:00.000-04:00

I owe a whole bunch of people emails and stuff, but you'll just have to bear with me here. Jillian is going through some kind of early adolescence, where she refuses to eat, sleep, play, or do anything but scream. Good times. It's not as bad as I make it sound, but sometimes it feels like it. The upshot is that once she has exhausted herself, she sleeps for up to six hours at a stretch. Can't beat that with a stick.

Besides, how can you not love this face?

Oh, ow.

2006-09-01T11:31:00.000-04:00

So Jillian is a month old as of yesterday. Hard to believe, isn't it?

But that's not what I wanted to talk about. Today I want to talk about my boobs. Specifically, my nipples, which hurt and are painful. This wouldn't be such a problem if I were able to corral the boobs, but all three of my nursing bras are in the wash since we've been slacking on the laundry over the past few days.

Rather than put on a regular bra (which probably won't fit ANYWAY), I'm hanging loose today and the nipples are rebelling against the unaccustomed friction of my t-shirt. I suppose I could just go topless, since I never leave the house and no one sees me but Jillian. Hmmm.

The other downside to this brief, bra-less existence is the LEAKING. I don't know what's normal here, but damn. I leak like nobody's business. I have taken to pumping the boobs a bit when the leaking starts, but when I'm sleeping and I wake up in a puddle of milk? THAT IS SEXY.

Oh sure - nursing pads. GOT THEM. Leak through them. I'm thinking about just sleeping in the bathtub for the next however long until this subsides a bit.

It will subside, right??

Normal!

2006-08-30T12:23:00.000-04:00

My ornery baby went to the doctor for her 1 month check-up today. She is completely normal and healthy, well within normal ranges for weight and length and head circumference. She looked at me all "the hell?" when they measured her head, which was funny.

Next visit = immunizations. I don't know how I'm going to feel about people sticking needles in my daughter. I might have to punch someone.

So, normal. Things are picking up here, in that I no longer have to do mean things to Jillian to wake her up to eat. She has finally gone to an on-demand feeding schedule, but that means I only get three hours of sleep at a time. So I sleep between 2AM and 5AM, then I might get another couple of hours at 10AM if I'm lucky.

See, this baby is not a big fan of burping. She would rather test out her lungs and cause Mama's hearing aids to send high-pitched feedback into Mama's ears. We have tried everything we can think of, from Mylicon (that shit is SPENDY) to baby yoga poses. We have even tried reasoning with the baby, but seeing as how she still can't get both of her eyes to focus in the same direction, I'm not sure how much reasoning she is able to follow.

Still, it could be worse. She DOES sleep occasionally, and when she's not Gaseous Maximus, she's really quite a good baby. She's starting to smile at me, which is just the cutest thing EVER, and she even laughs sorta when you tickle her belly.

I would post a picture of her smiling, but for whatever reason, whenever I try to take a picture, the smile mutates into Crazy Head and she looks mental on film. Just like her Mama.

And with that, I must go feed The Monster.

Poor baby

2006-08-25T21:31:00.000-04:00

Jillian has been fussy for the past few days and I think it's because of something I'm eating. I think it's tomatoes, specifically, but I have a feeling I should go on an elimination diet for a couple of weeks to see if it's something else.

Sigh. My poor baby has regular diaper rash AND what appears to be an allergy ring on her bum and it's really giving her a lot of discomfort and there is very little I can do right this minute to fix it. I hate not being able to fix it!

She spends all day screaming until Daddy gets home, then she's a model child. It would be hilarious if it wasn't driving me crazy. I do the best I can to relax with her, but it's hard when she screams ALL DAY.

We go to the doctor on Wednesday, but I am wondering if maybe we should see if they'll see us tomorrow instead. If tonight is anything like today was, then I am definitely calling them to see what they think I should do.

For the most part, this isn't really that bad and thank goodness it's temporary (I HOPE), but it certainly does suck while it's happening.

Roll on, week 4

2006-08-21T17:56:00.000-04:00

Jillian is three weeks old today! In honor of this milestone, I present you with a list of random observations.

1. My boobs leak. A LOT. Good thing I got the washable breast pads instead of the disposable ones, or we'd be creating even MORE trash than we already do.

2. I can, if necessary, change a diaper with one hand.

3. I now have the sleep skills of a doctor. I can fall asleep anytime, anywhere, and be totally wide awake in a flash.

4. Breastfeeding is REALLY HARD. I don't care WHAT they tell you - this shit is DIFFICULT TO DO, yo. We have about a 60% successful latch-on rate. The rest of the time, my nipples feel like they are going to fall off.

5. I do not like daytime TV. There are too many judge shows on. Seriously - Judge Hachette, Jude Joe Brown, Judge Judy, People's Court, Divorce Court, Judge Alex (who I secretly believe is a robot), et cetera ad nauseam. Do we really NEED this many judge shows? Why can't we have more daytime game shows?

6. No matter WHAT happens, I resolve to resist the call of the soap operas. I never, ever want to get sucked in to watching "my stories." NEVER!

7. There is no number 7.

8. The TV in the nursery has a DVD player. So far, we have watched Lilo & Stitch, This Is Spinal Tap, Dirty Dancing, Billy Elliott, Sneakers, and Amelie. We have plans to watch the entire series of Monty Python at some point.

9. I am so glad we have a baby monitor.

10. I have no doubt that this period of Jillian's life will be the easiest time, parenting-wise, that we will experience. Indeed, all we are asked to do is feed her, change her diapers, keep her relatively clean and dry, and give her comfy and safe places to sleep and play. Once the REAL parenting starts... that will be the true test.

MY child

2006-08-16T15:17:00.000-04:00

As if there were ever any doubt!

The birth story is up

2006-08-12T14:43:00.000-04:00

It's a couple posts down from this one, and slightly less coherent than I usually am, but there it is.