Load up the virtual U-Haul!
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!
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
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!
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!
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
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
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
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
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
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!
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?
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
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.
Labels: baklava, lemur spit, monocles
Talky talky, so much talky
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.
Labels: iguana's eyelashes, koala hair, napkins
The Weather Channel's next big star?
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.
Labels: Ed McMahon, Hungarian anime, spokes
