I just discovered that my exceptionally nice next door neighbor ALSO HAS A BLOG. I knew she was a designer, but had no idea until I looked at her blog how talented and accomplished she is. She and her husband also have A CRAZY-CUTE LITTLE BOY.
Look how wonderful HER WORK is.
When we brought C. home from the hospital, she was a teensy little thing. She was a month early and weighed less than 6lbs.
Our bed is size full - not a big bed. And neither Jon nor I felt comfortable putting this incredibly minuscule baby into bed with us. This sort of surprised me, as I co-slept with my other babies and am a huge supporter of it and have written extensively about its many benefits. But my gut told me that my baby, this baby wasn’t ready to actually be in the bed with us. Plus, with her underdeveloped larynx, she seemed unable to nurse lying down anyway.
So for the past 17 weeks, she’s slept in the mini-crib we have right next to my side of our bed, and when she wakes to nurse, I sit up with her in the rocking chair and nurse her. She’s been right at my fingertips, but not actually in our bed with us.
These days, C. is a healthy, apple-cheeked 4 month old. She weighs about 15 lbs (we’ll find out when she goes for her check up on Monday), and she nurses just fine in any and all positions. So for the past few nights, I put her down to sleep at bedtime in the little bed right next to ours, but when she wakes to nurse, I pull her into bed with me - between me and the bedrail on my side of the bed - and nurse her back to sleep. And we nurse and snuggle and both get a full night’s sleep. It’s awesome, and it now feels right.
I am reminded yet again that one of the great pleasures of mothering a new baby is the tactile comfort of sharing sleep with her. I love the way she smells, and the way she nestles in next to me. And as a mama who works full time and has to be away from my baby 40-plus hours each week, it’s a wonderful bonding time.
Me likes.
I really like this guy’s blog (his baby is crazy cute and I love the photos), and now he’s started a new one: “A COMPENDIUM OF ALL THINGS RELATED THE THE REARING OF OFFSPRING.
Yesterday Jon asked me if I’d cut my hair. “It looks really different,” he mentioned.
I told him it looked so flat and weird because I’d tried a new conditioner. In fact, however, it mostly looks so flat and weird because, well….all my hair is falling out.
Yes, it’s coming out in big clumps whenever I wash it or brush it, and apparently this rather disturbing development is a DELIGHTFUL POSTPARTUM SYMPTOM I’d been lucky enough to avoid in my previous pregnancies, but have this time.
It’s really terrible. It just started about a week ago and now I definitely have half the hair I had last month. It looks awful and feels even worse. Apparently, however, I can count on it growing back within the next six months. Until then, I will be wearing more hats than usual…
Oh wow! Amanda Ward is SPOT ON IN THIS ESSAY about how “mommy brain” makes it almost impossible to read.
I’ve mentioned this before (and it seems a lot worse with baby #4 than it did with my previous babies), but ever since I got pregnant with C., I’ve been almost paralyzed by an inability to read a book for more than a few pages, and even then, my attention is so scattered.
…as articulated by Fran Healy, lead singer of the band Travis (quoted in the LA Times):
“You realize that throughout your life these things come and go, these moments. We just don’t die at the end of life and everything stops — bits of life are constantly leaving you along the way and that’s kind of dying a little at a time.”
Sez me: word.
I am a big, huge Katha Pollitt fan, and my affection for her writing grows the older I get and the more I get what she’s saying. I can’t wait to read her new essay collection, and I really enjoyed this INTERVIEW WITH HER IN BABBLE TODAY in which she talks about helicopter parenting, gender equity between new parents, and lots of other interesting topics.
My friend Spike BLOGGED TODAY about how some blogs (mine maybe?) make it look like the blogger’s life is all sunshine and puppies.
I’ve been keeping this blog for more than five years. When I started it, I had one life, and I’ve continued to blog as my life has meandered and wound its way into an entirely different place. I’ve blogged through separation, divorce, dating again, the deaths of several people I love, remarriage, miscarriage, pregnancy, and birth.
When I began blogging, my children were quite young and I felt more comfortable sharing more of the details of our lives together. Now, however, they are much older and they read what I write, so I choose to be much more careful about what details I share. Often, I now ask them before I write anything about them at all. So that certainly has made it less likely that you will read about the specific details of my parenting trials and tribulations here. The same is true of the other adults in my life - they read the blog, too. So some level of circumspection has become necessary - more than was necessary five years ago when no one read it but my mother.
But you must know — surely you must — that I do have parenting trials and trubulations. I mean, come on! I have a 16 year old, a 12 year old, a 9 year old and a baby! I’ve written a little bit about how challenging I am finding parenting a teenager (and suffice it to say that this continues to be a huge challenge.) We struggle to get homework done and to everyone fed. The laundry pile grows ever more enormous. The dog has some kind of nasty rash on his rear end, and the cat is still peeing all over everything. Supporting a family of six is no picnic, and my beloved grandmother is fading away. I continue to navigate the sometimes rocky waters of co-parenting with someone to whom I am no longer married, as well as with the other adults who have come into my kids’ lives via remarriage.
All of this is real - just as real as the good stuff I write about more frequently lately.
Aside from privacy concerns, another primary reason you may find a heaping helping of sunshine and puppies here is that in spite of all of this stuff, I am pretty damn happy these days. I am more aware and grateful than ever before of the good stuff I have in my life.
My children are healthy - if not always easy. We have a roof over our heads. I am loved, and I love. Life is good.
So indulge me in my happy ramblings of late. If you want a dose of something different, read back through the archives from years past, when things were a bit dicier. Then come back to 2007 and pat the puppy on its head.
Note the very pretty post-Christening dress C. is wearing (thanks Georgia!!)
An e-mail from my mom today (she was at THE COW PALACE because her band, The Dell Coeds, had a West Coast hit single and they were opening for Chubby Checker and Ike and Tina that night):
I just read a long James Wolcott article in Vanity Fair about The Twist and how important it was in American culture in the early 60s. I was flashed back in time to the night at the Cow Palace when I did The Twist with Chubby Checker at a post-concert party. He asked me to dance with him. How cool is that? I remember thinking that g’ma and g’pa would not be happy - not because I was doing The Twist, but because CC was a Black man.
As those of you who read my blog know, I favor a complete overhaul of the U.S. health care system, probably with some version of a single-payer model (although I believe there may be other possibilities that could work as well).
So for those of you who say the system we have works pretty well, WHITHER THIS?
Tell me what this man could have done differently? Should have done differently? Should do differently now? Are you okay with him losing everything he has and/or dying because he cannot afford the medical care he needs?
This is BABY TACKY EXTRAORDINAIRE.
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