Date Night December 27, 2008

So my sister and her husband, who are visiting us from Portland, offered to babysit for us and let us get out of the house together… for a date!  My other sister, Adrienne, had also offered to do this for us when she visited a few weeks ago, but we weren’t able to pull ourselves together in time to take advantage of her offer… and frankly, I don’t know if we were ready.  Maybe the issue of readiness was just with me.

But we got our plan on this time, and went and saw a 2:30 movie and then had an early dinner.  The earliness of the date was due to Amelia’s tendency to be fussy during the “happy hour” period of 6-8 pm.  I couldn’t, in all fairness, leave April & Jason with our daughter at Top Fuss.

I had a nice time, being a grown up with my husband in public, but frankly the whole thing was rather disorienting.  It didn’t help that the movie I chose, The Spirit, was so hideously awful that I kept falling asleep.  Dinner was quite nice, though the service could have been better and I am restricting my dairy and high-acid food intake to see if that was giving Amelia painful gas.  My breasts started hurting from engorgement around Hour 3, and I was really sleep – more so than I realize when I’m at home.

We had some nice conversation over dinner – though granted it was about things like getting our wills written and what we’ll do if the flex-time work arrangements we’ve rigged with our employers fall through, so not very cheerful per se – and I had some gelato (OK, dairy, yes, sorry) as we walked back to the car.  Amelia did great with her aunt & uncle, and ate a lot while we were gone.

I came home wondering about balance – and not just foremilk-hindmilk!  I suppose in time I will learn how to be a mother, a wife, and an adult woman concurrently without any jerkiness in the shifting of gears.  Or perhaps I’m approaching it all wrong and it’s not a matter of changing my face but blending the roles?  Anyway you slice or mix it, I’m still wobbly in this learning process; I have arrived to the point that I’m not terrified by the amount I love my daughter, but I’m not sure how to care as much about everyone else as I do about Amelia.  Wish me luck on that…

ok, here are some pictures December 26, 2008

Dad, Adrienne & Amelia

Deep thought

Becky & Amelia

Tom's magic football hold

Angry Shaolin monk baby

Peaceful Shaolin monk baby

Isn’t she getting big?  Look at those rolls of fat!!!  She’s out of Newborn clothes and now wearing 0-3 month!  Also, we’ve gone from newborn-sized cloth diapers to infant-sized ones.  My daughter is an infant now!

Boxing Day December 26, 2008

Happy post-Xmas everybody!  I apologize for the long delay between posts, but I simultaneously got cable and started having family in town visiting, along with being accosted by the holiday, and also getting active on Facebook again (wow, what a time sink!).

My sister Adrienne came in for 5 days, with her visit overlapping my father’s 6 day visit.  We stared at the baby a LOT, and bought & decorated a tree.  Also enjoyed were cooking, watching the new 42″ flat screen that my dad bought us, and general lazing about.

Then Amelia had to put up with just Mom and Dad for a while, until my sister April and her husband Jason arrived on Xmas Eve.  We had a lovely day yesterday: menu included prime rib, yorkshire pudding (my 1st time!), twice-baked spuds and English trifle, the latter of which I made myself.  Everything was scrumptious, and everyone’s were fabulous.

The other reason that my voice has been off the interwebs of late is that the kid’s sleep patterns have been ALL OVER THE PLACE, and thus my sleep has been intermittent at best.  We think she might have a bad reaction to my eating either dairy or citrus/tomatoes or both, so I’m eschewing much of the delicious leftovers from yesterday and going dairy and acidic food-free for a coupel of days to see if Amelia lets go of the fussing for a while.  Also, her poop is very green, not the best of signs in Exclusively Breastfed Babies (whose poop, for the uninitiated, should be mustardy-yellow.)

It’s hard to come up with tasty things to eat that have neither dairy nor tomatoes nor citrus, at least for me, but I came up with a few menu items  this morning and Tom ran to the grocery store WITH Amelia, which allowed me to go back to bed and get 90 minutes uninterrupted sleep.  Yay!!! It helped my menu planning that I got two HUGE cookbooks for Xmas – The America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook, and Mark Bittman’s Best Recipes in the World.  I am now equipped, cookbook-wise, to cook EVERYTHING.  Which I love about me.

Seriously, though, the fussiness associated with my daughter’s digestion is really getting impressive.  I won’t say colic, because it’s not like she’s crying for hours at a time (knock wood), but it’s quite disturbing when your breastfed baby pushes the nipple out of her mouth to scream.  The nipple!  This has been the automatic Crying Off Switch for 6 whole weeks!  It can’t fail us now!  Hence our taking the drastic measure of separating me from cheese, milk, butter, tangerines and ‘maters.

I must say that it’s been SO wonderful to have family here and see the love they have for my daughter; I don’t know why it is so moving – it’s not like I was expecting them not to like her or anything – but I just melt when I see my loved ones staring at Amelia with the same besotted look that I must have on my face most of the time. (Sorry – 2 AM Screaming Amelia is loved just as much as 2 PM Cooing Amelia, but the former doesn’t get all the adoring looks that the latter soaks up.)  Maybe my mild level of surprise come from the assumption that no one could love Amelia as much as Tom and I do, and it’s really touching to see how wrong that notion is, and watch Amelia being embraced into our family by so many adoring pairs of arms.  Everybody loves everybody – hurray!

More pics and things soon, pinkie-swear.

seriously December 23, 2008

It is a special infant-flavored style of perversity that every time my daughter has an OH-MY-GOD-I’M-STARVING-TO-DEATH-RIGHT-NOW screaming meltdown in the car seat, I am driving the last 10 miles to the house and stuck behind someone going 10 miles under the speed limit.

Every. Damn. Time.

what a racket! December 13, 2008

Amelia has been finding her voice lately, and now makes all sorts of adorable noises when she is nursing, straining to poop/fart, or just generally feeling squirmy. Some of the more popular noises are:

1.) The Piglet Grunt

2.) The Grackle (I swear she makes that squeaky crumpled-paper sound just like a grackle.)

3.) The Urgent Hum – in which she is not precisely grunting, but rather kind of playing the kazoo on the boob.

4.) The Screeching Brakes Squeak – these are long sustained squeaks that come out when she is stretching or straining.

5.) The Whisper Sigh – in which, after nursing her little belly all full, while being burped she turns her head in toward your ear and sighs very softly. Very Rare.

errands December 11, 2008

My sister and I ran four errands today, and it was… a little strenuous! Lessons learned: don’t run around with the baby in the late afternoon when she likes to cluster-feed.

We did Michael’s first, and I finally got the perfect fit on the Moby wrap – Amelia was high on my chest and fell asleep right away, so I didn’t have to stabilize her little bobble head. Shopping went well and she only woke up once, in order to switch the cheek she was resting on my chest.

In the diaper change between Michael’s & Lowes, I learned that the backseat diaper change is a great way tokill your back, and nursed my baby some in a 20 mph headwind.

At HEB, Amelia got sick of the Moby once and for all while the slowest deli counter guy on the planet sliced me a pound of oven-roasted turkey and muenster cheese, on a one. Luckily, Adrienne agreed to go through the checkout line for me while I took the baby back to the car to nurse some more. REALLY need to figure out hoe to go from the newborn chest wrap to a nursing wrap in that Moby.

Finally, to Gold’s Gym to get a swipe card because I lost mine, and this way Adrienne can work out while she’s here. Amelia cried for much of the drive home except while Adrienne jiggled her car seat. Yes, I know the car seat shouldn’t jiggle. I think Tom needs to check the installation of my car seat base…

Anyway, I’m slowly edging toward SuperMom, at least when my sister’s got my back. It’s very touching to see how much Adrienne loves Amelia – her tenderness and enthusiasm with the baby is so sweet! Also, Adrienne makes truly superb macaroni and cheese, which we really enjoyed for dinner tonight.

Texas weather December 10, 2008

It was 75 degrees yesterday afternoon when Lloyd the cable guy came to hook us into the hive mind.  This morning:

My poor sister Adrienne is flying in from Oregon today and probably thought she was going to get a break from cold, dreary weather.  Well, it’ll be 70 degrees again in a few days.  Welcome to Texas, Adrienne!

Currently watching Dharma & Greg reruns.  Yay, cable.

That’s a wrap December 9, 2008

If I say so myself, we are getting a LOT better at babywearing around Chez Amelia. It used to be that she’d SCREAM when we tried to sneak her into any kind of wrap or sling or Ergo Infant Insert. But yesterday I took a nice long walk with Amelia in the Moby, and today we did some tidying up of the house and prepared baked acorn in squash and lemon-rosemary roasted chicken while she nodded off into my cleavage, all snug in the green fabric.

Some things I’ve learned about wearing my baby:

1.) HOT. Don’t dress her in fleece PJs and wear two layers yourself and then exercise or slave over a hot stove. She’ll get all red in the face and mama will get some interesting sweat stains.

2.) Wearing a baby is a lot like being pregnant again – one’s arms immediately shrink about 6 inches and it’s difficult to manage dishes in the sink.

3.) Amelia likes being wrapped up high on my chest, though after 15 minutes of walking around she’ll sink down into the wrap and be OK with it.

4.) I need to tie the wrap tighter than my instinct tells me to. Invariably, 30 minutes into having her wrapped, I’m hitching her up to a more comfortable position.

5.) Taking her out the wrap and trying to nurse her around the wrap is not a workable option.

I still need to figure out how we can nurse in the Moby, but I’m finally not bummed we bought it. This will definitely make a big difference in my functionality while Amelia’s too small for the Ergo. Aimee, thanks for the lend of your sling, but those are sized (kin dof like clothes) and I’m too big for it.

The only thing that bums me out is that one can’t, of course, wear the baby in the car. Thus one must strap the baby into the car seat and then, if one wishes to wear the baby once one arrives at one’s destination, one must pull baby OUT of the car seat and wrap her up in another restrictive device… I guess that’s not as bad as it seemed, before I wrote it out. Maybe I’ll try that at the grocery store next time. I know I can put the car seat in the cart, but locking the seat into the top of the cart freaks me OUT, and putting it into the cart itself really limits what I can purchase. Calibrations..

4 weeks December 8, 2008

Amelia was born 4 weeks ago, today.

Here’s a photo update:

the decline and fall of western civilization December 7, 2008

We’re getting cable.

Probably we should have made this decision a month ago, when I STARTED maternity leave, but whatever.

Some backstory: I lived without a TV for most of my 5 years in Mexico and without cable or broadcast TV for about 4 of my 5 years in the Virgin Islands. When Tom & I moved to Austin, we got his TV out of storage but didn’t get cable, and only watched Netflix DVDs. Abotu a year ago, we started watching broadcast TV. In the last month, I’ve watched more than my share of TV and Instant-Watch Netflix.

Last week, we caved.  The reality is that we’re going to be stuck at home for a long time, caring for the baby. I’m not proud, but I’d rather not spend a large part of the next year watching reruns of Knight Rider and Airwolf.

Thus, we embrace popular culture with both arms, exposing ourselves to the blinding light of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless American Mind.

On a more intimate note, Amelia has been learning how to be fussy in the last weeks, hence some of my absence on the blog.  She really hates being put down for very long, and is unwilling to be boxed in to any one soothing method or sleep pattern. All the people who told me that babies are unpredictable were not whistling Dixie, my friends.