1. I would not like to claim the world record for “Celebrity Mom Hiding a Baby Bump for the Longest Time Ever Without Producing a Baby.” It seems that every issue of OK! or US Weekly shows a picture of some celebrity on the cover either “hiding” or “showing off” her baby bump. If she’s holding something in front of her abdomen… [read more at Parenting.com]
Archives for October 2009
McSquidgems’ Self-Infatuation
Some might call it narcissism but I like to think of it as a healthy dose of self esteem. Our baby is in love with herself. Here she is at her one-month checkup. She screamed in the lobby and again after the appointment but the entire time she was near that mirror, she was absolutely enthralled with her own reflection. She already knows how cute she is. She is her own best friend.
Wanda cries more than my other babies did. She seems to have a sore tummy a lot and she squinches up her little face, pulls in her legs and cries. We’ve tried the Mylicon drops and this weekend I took her to a craniosacral therapist who worked on her and taught me some digestive massage techniques I can use at home.
She just has trouble pooping and digesting without pain. Her pediatrician looked at the great fatness she’s become and said he’s not worried about the fussiness since she’s thriving so well. That’s code for, “Dude. Look how fat she is. If she were really sick, would she be this squidgeable?” Indeed. Dan has nicknamed her McSquidgems and although I say she cries frequently, it’s not entirely true. She cries frequently if she’s not being held at all times and so we pretty much hold her unless she’s sleeping and sometimes even then.
We’re not sure if we’ll have any more kids and I’ve decided that there are far worse things I could do with the next year of my life than spend it holding this little person. She seems to agree. I think she’d hold herself if she could but I’m the next best thing.
Great Job!
10 points go to Jen @ The Short Years for guessing that the terror alert meant only that the teacher had grabbed another stamp. When Dan asked Laylee about the stamps she said, “Oh yeah. We get some kind of stamp or sticker for every day we bring our folder to school.” There is no method to this teacher’s particular brand of madness.
Laylee loves her even if she hates her name. Before the school year started, the teacher sent home a small picture of herself so the kids would know what she looked like in advance. Laylee was smitten with Ms. Snop’s youthfulness and beauty.
“Do you think she’s about the same age as our babysitters?” she asked.
“No. She’s a lot older,” I sort of lied. She’s older. That part was true.
“I think she’s WAY too pretty to have a name like ‘Snop’,” Laylee announced.
About thirty minutes later she approached me with a thoughtful expression, “You know? Maybe ‘Snop’ is just her LAST name.”
“Yeah. I think you may be right.”
How could any parent name such a beautiful child “Snop?” It would just be wrong. And I was worried at the beginning of the year about what to expect with a first year teacher. I wasn’t sure she’d be up to the job but I have to say, we’re loving her. She is creative in her approach to teaching, she’s full of energy and the kids haven’t broken her yet. We’ll see how she’s doing a few years from now when she’s taught a couple hundred more 6-year-olds. Maybe she’ll look more like a First-Name-Snop at that point.
First Grade Terror Alert
I recently found a calendar in the pocket of Laylee’s school folder. It’s the folder that we use to send communications back and forth from home to the classroom. Her young, fun and perky teacher is always coming up with new exciting ways to motivate and reward the kids and I assumed the calendar was part of this rah-rah go-team-ishness.
Every day Laylee’s calendar came home marked with an orange stamp that said, “GREAT WORK!” I assumed all was well. Each day I’d check the folder and each day the orange stamp would appear… for the first couple of weeks. Then all of a sudden on one day she came home with a black stamp that said “good job.”
“What!?” I asked Dan. “I don’t want to be one of those parents who’s overly involved in her kids’ schooling or who freaks out when she gets a ‘good’ instead of a ‘great’ on her report card but I want to know why she’s fallen from her pedestal on the stamp scale. She’s not even getting orange anymore. Today’s stamp was black and I want to know why. I think I’ll email the teacher and get to the bottom of this.”
Dan offered some sage words of wisdom in regards to, “Do NOT do that. If you do that then you ARE one of those parents. So she got a lower level of stamp one day. It’s really not a big deal.”
“Well, at the very least I want to know what the different stamps mean. If a teacher’s going to use a complex rating system for our kids, represented by random stamps, I at least want to know what the different levels mean.
“It’s like if the government came up with a new terror alert system but didn’t tell anyone what the different colors meant. Like if they just came on TV one day and said, ‘The terror alert level is purple,’ but no one in America knew what the ‘Purple Alert’ meant.”
“You should just ask Laylee what they mean,” Dan responded.
“That’s all well and good,” I replied, “But if I want to know what a ‘Purple Alert’ is, I’m sure as heck gonna want to hear it from the administration, not from the crazy old guy waving a shotgun outside the gates of the White House.”
“So, who exactly is Laylee in this analogy?”
“The terrorist.”
Building a Bunker
Dan and I were recently watching a TV commercial about some facial lotion that claimed to renew your DNA or possibly restructure it. We were flabbergasted. What a load of… Well, if a lotion could do that, it could also likely turn you into a mutant. Maybe it could alter our DNA in a way that germs would bounce off our immune systems like little hail pellets and we’d live out our lives happy and plague-free. I’d buy that lotion. [read more at Parenting.com]
Teamwork Equals Good
We’re into Dan’s second week of paternity leave and I’ve decided that I love being half of a stay-at-home mom. [read more at Parenting.com]
The Call of Duty
I already tweeted this and put it on Facebook but I really think it needs to go on the blog. Dan is a lover of Call of Duty and I am a lover of how well he fulfills his ultimate call of duty as a dad. This picture combining the two is priceless to me. I love how his big fat gamer headphones are practically as big as the baby in his pouch.
Pride, Prejudice and Zombies
I made the mistake of blogging or tweeting a while ago that Little Baby McSquidge had slept 6 hours in a row one night. Yeah. Jinxes are real and pounding on wood after the jinx is enacted will do you no good whatsoever. It may even wake the baby.
So now she’s on a decent schedule. She sleeps for 2.5-4 hours at a stretch all night long. I go into her room and feed her, fall asleep while she’s nursing, wake up 2 or three hours later with a crick in my neck, do the other side, fall asleep, put her in bed and then head to my bed just in time for her to wake up again. It hasn’t been particularly restful. Luckily Dan’s home on paternity leave so he does pretty much everything around the house that doesn’t require mammaries.
He’s going back to work in a few weeks though and I’ve been working towards getting some sort of restful sleep schedule going. I told Dan I needed to find a way to stay awake while feeding her so I could feed her, burp her, give her a new bum, and put her away in time to get some sleep before she woke up again.
His suggestion was that I watch movies while I nurse. We have a small TV and DVD player in the nursery for that purpose but I’ve been too lazy to bring up any movies. So last night, I looked through what we had, trying to find something that could keep me awake long enough to feed but wouldn’t hold my attention so completely that I couldn’t turn it off at any point and go back to bed when she’d finished eating me.
So I started the new cinematic nursing plan last night with the short Pride and Prejudice. It was a success I think. Each feeding lasted only one hour and I was only a little bit wound up when I got back into bed. I think it took me maybe 10 minutes longer to fall asleep after each feeding, what with the drama and romance and passion and such pumping through my veins. I think this is still better than drifting in and out of unrestful sleep while sitting upright in a rocking chair.
Today at naptime I finished off the movie. Maybe tonight I’ll give Colin Firth a go. Although I still consider the BBC adaptation to be the authoritative P&P, it is a bit more mind-numbing with its slow pacing and copious discussions of gowns, propriety and fortunes.
Whatever happens, I need to find a way to feel less zombie-like. Perhaps a year or so from now, I’ll magically find the solution…
I Plan to Become a Millionaire
This morning I was spending some sweet quality time with my squishable water-filled newborn. Sunlight was filtering in through the window of my cozy bedroom and I was sitting next to her on the bed. She looked so precious and perfect except for a bright red gash, newly carved into her pudgy cheek.
“Stop scratching yourself baby!” I urged, “I think we’re gonna have to start calling you Scar Face.”
I’ve filed her nails. We’ve tried the little mittens and the pjs with the fold-over sleeves on the ends. She gets the mittens off like a fat little cross-eyed Houdini with dark duck down for hair. She spends her life trying to punch through those fold-over sleeves. They are a great burden to her.
Looking at her latest injury, I thought of the perfect solution – plastic face shields like you can buy for your PDA but made for babies! I know, right? Best idea ever. They would stick onto the baby’s face with a light, dermatologist-tested adhesive, completely covering baby’s face except for the eyes, mouth and nostrils. They would be transparent so you could still see your baby’s face, although it would look a little like you were viewing it through a window that it was being smooshed up against. But who doesn’t think it’s cute when tiny little kids smoosh their faces up against windows? Tell me. Who?
Then the baby could scratch and scratch all she wanted without doing any damage. She’d be happy and ready for her next photo shoot at a moment’s notice.
If anyone’s interested in buying this idea for mass production and sale, please email me. Serious inquiries only.
A Sense of Urgency
I’ve watched my other two kids grow and mature, and their needs seem to be slightly less urgent and immediate than are Wanda’s. Where Wanda needs what she needs 10 minutes ago, Magoo at age 4 only needs things right this second and Laylee at 6 can be persuaded to wait for sometimes as long as an hour with relative patience. [Read More at Parenting.com]