Category Archives: Parenting

>Trashing the Place

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Today our good friends and neighbors returned from their first of many summer vacations and called to say, “Are you going to the park today? We’ll meet you there.” But what I heard was, “Please come over and let me cook dinner for you and your family while you break things and bleed everywhere.” I said, “I’ll bring the french fries!”

My knife is dull, which may have caused it to skid off the potato and cut my finger. Or maybe the dullness prevented the tip of my finger from being chopped off. Who knows?

We almost reached a new milestone: Meat for the baby! From a jar! (Organic of course.) But instead of opening the jar of baby food, I picked it up and then dropped it on the floor where it shattered. Sorry, it’s sweet potatoes again for you, little baby!

Then as we discussed how plastic is slowly killing us, and how we are slowly getting rid of our plastic plates in favor of plates that could kill us with lead, (or other unknown ways) Little M dropped her ceramic plate on the floor and it shattered and cut a gash in Luke’s toe. I was right there, so I probably caused that to happen as well.

That may have been a graceful time to just leave and hope to be invited back again someday, but we decided to wait until Luke had been bitten by the puppy twice. Just nips, no blood.

Yea! Welcome back from vacation! I hope we (and by this I mean you) got all the glass cleaned up!

(The picture is just another example, in case I wasn’t clear, of how messy Jack gets when I feed him. Of course the rice cereal is hard to see in the picture, but it covers 87% of his exposed skin.)

>Blog It Out

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Monday night I was live blogging our first attempt at crying it out while simultaneously googling “crying it out”. Who knew that allowing your baby to cry causes most of the problems in our society today? Probably lots of people. Of course it wasn’t as easy as letting Jack cry for 10 minutes, as I reported, and the next day I sighed, and rubbed my eyes, and commiserated at work with my fellow mommies about how I was up until 12:45, when I finally gave in and nursed my little baby to sleep. And then we were up again at 6am. Poor me. And then I was banished from the club, stripped of my complaining rights, and that was that.

Since other people have it worse, I did not volunteer the fact that Tuesday night, Jack slept from 8pm to 6am. So it seems that our evening of crying it out was totally effective, just what the doctor ordered, and the answer to everything! (Probably not.) Or maybe Jack was just having a hard time adjusting to the crib after sleeping so close to his mom and dad and brother all weekend on our camping trip. (Oh, the guilt.) Regardless, the damage has been done and Jack is now as ruined as his older brother.

In other sleep related news, I will now begin getting a lot more of it because we watched the last episode of Deadwood this evening. That makes 36 episodes in about 6 weeks. I will now go into withdrawal, and to get through it I think I’ll try to get to sleep before midnight a few time a week.

Now to sleep – last night I dreamed of a skunk eating all the vegetables in my garden. Possibly as it was actually happening. Darn that skunk and it’s zucchini, melon, and pumpkin leaf eating!

>We Try, Not Very Hard, But We Try

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I took a picture of this little tableau before our dinner on the way to Wyoming for our camping trip this past weekend. We try to eat healthy meals as often as possible, but we can’s seem to get it together when we are frantically leaving work and heading to some camping destination on a Friday evening. Since we have been camping about every other weekend… blah, blah, blah, the guilt, etc.

So I tried to feed Jack his whole grain, organic, baby oatmeal and his organic, strained carrots while I ate my crispy chicken sandwich. It didn’t work out for many reasons.

1.) Gross high chair – had to be wiped down with two wipes before we started and I still shudder to think of it.
2.) Hmm, in what, and with what should I mix the organic, whole grain oatmeal? In a tiny paper ketchup holder? With ice water? Yeah, that’ll work! Except Jack wasn’t too happy with the freezing oatmeal. And when I left the spoon in the tiny paper cup it tipped over. And when I accidentally dipped one of my fries in the carrots I gagged a little. But Jack loved it when I fed him ketchup by accident. (Kidding!)
3.) I am not sure if I have posted enough pictures of Jack eating to get the point across, but let’s just say his very involved in his meals. So we both got sort of covered in food.

Here’s an aside – When you have a baby whose face, hands, arms, bib, and high chair tray are covered in food, where do you start the clean up? My strategy is to do the face first, then the hands and arms. Then I whip off the bib and use it to get the majority of the tray. Is there a better way? Where do you start and finish? I guess I don’t really finish at all right now, because I sometimes find a spoon stuck to a bib stuck to a tray about 5 minutes before I am about to serve dinner, and that is the worst.

Anyway – back to fast food. We are going on a big road trip soon and we are planning to avoid fast food as much as possible. Wish us luck!

>Cry Baby Cry

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I wish I was in the middle of writing a wildly creative post right now, but Jack and I are crying it out. Well, Jack is. I am just madly searching google for reassurance that I am doing the right thing. And feeling like I should be crying, but eh, I am ready for this baby to start sleeping more. Dave is acting blasé . Luke is sleeping. I hear Bean checking in on Jack and can feel him silently reproaching me from upstairs. So are you deaf or what Bean? I’m on to you.

I put Jack on notice last week that he had 7 days in which to get it together and start sleeping through the night. He did it once. OK, I am sure we messed up his schedule with our camping trip, but seriously! So after the 17th time that Dave and or I went in to soothe him this evening, it was time to get down to business.

I went in and said, “Jack, I love you. It’s time to go to sleep.” And I turned on his aquarium and hoped that would do the trick. I set the timer for 10 minutes and went downstairs.

After 10 long, agonizing, google searching, ferber reading minutes the timer went off. Dave said, “That was 10 minutes?” No, it was an eternity.

I went back in to his room and put my hand on his tummy. I put the pacifier in his mouth, and I said, “I love you Jack. It’s time to sleep.” Then I wiped the little tears from his tiny, furrowed brow. I left his room and I set the timer for another 10 minutes. But I guess that was unnecessary because he stopped crying right away and went to sleep! Time for a Pear of Panties! And then straight to bed because I haven’t yet figured out exactly what I am going to do in half an hour when he starts crying again.

>Rolling, Rolling, Rolling Part 2

>Tuesday the daycare poured out a bottle of Jack’s milk because they tried feeding it to him and he fell asleep. When he woke up the milk had expired. I have milk issues people! You can’t just feed the milk to other babies or pour it down the sink! I furiously turned to the internets for backup, but the internets seem to think that the milk needed to be poured out or else it would be spoiled. This never happened when Dave stayed home with Luke! Oh, yeah, he probably did not concern himself with milk storage guidelines and that was fine with everyone.

I left work at 3:15 to nurse Jack. Another baby was being fed when I got there, and I kid you not, the bottle had 10 ounces in it. I struggle to eek out three 4.5-5.5 ounce bottles a day. 10 ounces? Are you kidding me? It turns out there is this stuff called formula. All the babies drink it. All the babies except Jack that is, which may be why they don’t realize I’ll have a minor heart attack if they waste any milk. Long story short, I am awesome.

But the point is, after I fed Jack, the oldest kid in the infant room, who is anxiously awaiting a space in the toddler room, kept coming over and putting a big cube on Jack’s lap. Then Jack pushed it off, then the kid put it back and I realized: It’s time to start teaching this kid to play ball!

So, after dinner Jack sat on my lap, and Luke rolled us a ball. Jack picked it up, and threw it back. It was the greatest thing ever! Except when Luke got tired of rolling and felt the need to toss it so it landed exactly on Jack’s legs where he’d have an easy time picking it up. OK, that was fine, but when Luke missed it got a little worrisome. Luke was also constantly correcting my method of teaching Jack to roll a ball. I finally said, “Do you know how to roll a ball? Who do you think taught you? Yeah, that’s right, I did. I know how to teach someone to roll a ball. Do not question my methods.” Then when Jack spit out the pacifier in favor of gumming the ball, it was all over. You know, for someone who has had everything he ever wanted all to himself for 5 years, Luke isn’t that great about sharing his toys. Oh. Yeah. Got it. It’s only gonna get worse, kid.

>Rolling, Rolling, Rolling

>As you can see in the milestone section, Jack recently started rolling from his back to his stomach. Dave noticed it Thursday or Friday when Jack rolled off the jiminy. Crazy! He moved a foot! Time for the gates to go up. I noticed Friday when I was doing the dinner dishes and Jack really started yelling. He hates tummy time and I usually cave after about 30 seconds and flip him back over to his back. I was very strict about the frequency and length of Luke’s tummy time and he was crawling at 6 months. I’m not going to make that mistake again. So when Jack started yelling on Friday, I stopped doing the dishes and helped him back onto his back. By the time I got back to the sink and got my hands wet again, he was back on his tummy and he was yelling. At this point I decided it might be time for some tough love. (Consistency is the key to parenting.) He can roll over from front to back, he just needed to remember how. “It’s OK, Jack! Just roll over silly boy!” Sigh. Fine. I went back to help him roll over because I thought the dog might be blocking his progress. Well, that was part of the problem.

“Wah wah wah! I hate being on my tummy!”

“But I appear to be stuck!”

And if you think that consciously trying to delay my son’s crawling is an example of bad parenting, what do you think when I see he is struggling to roll over and can’t because he is straddling the jiminy and my first thought is, “Wait! Where’s the camera?”

It’s OK, the camera was right there.

>Memory

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No, don’t worry, I am not going to sully this blog with some boring American Idol commentary about how bad the dread lock guy’s rendition of Memory was this week, and how he said, “A cat sings this song? I had no idea.” (More bad use of quotes since that is just what I vaguely remember him saying, and not what he actually said.)

No, I want to write about memories of real people that I actually know, like my children. I was putting Jack to bed last night and he fell asleep in my arms. He really snuggles into the crook of my arm, with one arm around my waist and the other grabbing the neck of my sweater with his fist. He has quite a grip, and today I started calling him Pinchy. His cheeks were rosy, eyes were closed, and he smelled sweet. I noticed all of this out of the corner of my eye because, while I was holding him with one arm, I was holding my book with another. I tend to read a lot. When I turned 16, I sat in the driver’s seat of my parents minivan and looked out the window for the first time. I didn’t know how to get around town, but I had gotten a lot of reading done over the years.

I can remember painting a sign with my grandma that she hung on the door for my mom to see when she came home from the hospital with my baby sister. I was three and my job was to paint little evenly spaced lines of green across the bottom to represent grass. My lines got bigger, longer, spaced further apart and, in general, messier as they crossed the page. My grandma said, “Oh no! Paint the grass like this.” I looked at her grass and my grass and thought, “It looks easier than it is.” The point of this story is that I have a great memory. I am the official expert on everything that ever happened. I am so good at remembering things that some people think I just make stuff up.

So you’d think that I would not need to worry about whether or not I am going to have vivid memories of everyday life with my baby. But my worrying skills rival my memory, I’m that multi-talented. Currently, when I try to ingrain a tender moment into my brain, I also think of memories of Luke. I probably have 3 or 5 or maybe only 1o vivid memories of nursing Luke. So I worry that I am doing too much reading and not enough memorizing of every moment with Jack. Pictures help, but this morning when I tried to capture the look on Jack’s face when I went in to get him in the morning instead of capturing 1000 words I got maybe 5. Those 5 words were “Oh. there’s the camera again.” What I was trying to capture was that his eyes are still blue, with a glint of joy, a little devil, that he was happy to see me, but also that he had been content to look at the mobile before I got there, and maybe wants to glance back at the mobile right this second; a shade of worry passes over his brow, but then it’s gone as he breaks out into a big smile, which is also fleeting, and then he’s overcome with the joy that one can attain only by seeing how much blanket can be crammed into ones mouth, and then I snap the picture. OK, words aren’t going to do it either. But the process of trying to come up with the words or the picture may be what helps me with the memory.

And I guess if I have 10 vivid memories of Luke five years later, that’s pretty good. And I did a lot of reading when he was a baby too.