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]
The Tank
This past weekend, we watched General Conference, a big fat conference our church has twice a year where the Prophet and other leaders of our church broadcast speeches and messages all over the world by internet and satellite.
We watch church on TV for 2 days at home in our pajamas. This year my mom made the kids a big tent to watch from and to be honest I slept through most of it in my sleep-deprived haze. I’m glad the talks are available online for later review because I could not keep my eyes open most of the time.
One talk I will NOT forget involved one church leader giving his solemn testimony of the Book of Mormon while holding the original copy that was read by the Prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum at the time of their martyrdom in the early 1800s. Not only was it an extremely powerful talk, but as a former librarian, I will always remember it as the talk that gave historians across the world a coronary. I wonder exactly how many seconds after he finished speaking that a team of archivists swept in with special dusting cloths and archival quality Ziplocs.
Getting ready for the conference, Magoo and I were looking at a picture of our Prophet and I asked him if he knew his name.
“Yeah…ummmm…no.”
“It’s President Monson.”
“Nope. That’s not it. It’s something with a train in it.”
“A train?”
“Yeah. The prophet’s REAL name has a train in it.”
I was dumbfounded. I tried to prove him wrong.
“There’s no train in his name. His name is Thomas S. Monson.”
“YEAH! Oh YEAH! He has a THOMAS in his name.”
So I wonder if President Monson’s other friends ever refer to him by his REAL FULL NAME, Thomas “The Tank Engine” S. Monson.
I Shouldn’t Compare
I’ve only had 2 daughters for a couple of weeks but I’m already comparing them to each other. I need to remember to look at them as individual young ladies with their own gifts and talents but it’s so hard not to compare.
The main problem I’m having is that Wanda is pathetically incapable of belching. We have to work so hard to get her to do even the smallest burp. Laylee on the other hand could belch all day long if she wanted to and sometimes does.
In the past I’ve pleaded with her to stop this but now that we’re trying to keep Wanda’s tummy troubles under control, belching has become a primo skill to be coveted and respected. Maybe Laylee could take some time and do a little tutorial for her when she gets home from school.
Passive Aggressive Prayers
In our family we say we believe in praying to God, but I’m pretty sure that fairly frequently my kids pray at each other and even more often, they use their prayers as a chance to tell me off. [Read More at Parenting.com]
Baby of Rage
I’ve written a new song for Wanda entitled “Baby of Rage.” The words are different every time I sing it but they basically consist of me singing to her in my sweetest voice about how she’s a Baby of Rage and I don’t know why.
Most of the time she’s a Baby of Sweetness but every so often, every day or two, she has a rough period of rage and physical turmoil that I assume is caused by digestational distress incomprehensible to someone whose intestines are as highly developed as mine.
We’re at the stage in her life where I feel directly responsible for any sickness she feels in her tummy. “It must have been those Swedish fish I ate yesterday. I’m so thoughtless! Tomorrow I will stick to a strict diet of steamed carrots and mashed potatoes.”
But then the next day I will eat the steamed carrots and mashed potatoes and sneak a bite of Magoo’s hot dog. At 1pm, Baby of Rage will surface and I will think, “What a feckless MORON am I?! I did this to her. Darn that meat product!”
In reality I have no idea what causes Baby of Rage to rear her pathetic head, squawking and grunting her way to burden-free bowels.
The composition and subsequent performance of the song reminded me of how much we enjoyed doing freestyle family rap battles back in the day, the rhyming, the flow, the hoodies and do-rags. When Wanda’s older, I hope she’ll be all up in hee-ya wid-it. Holla!
Alas. We need to work on getting her to freestyle her fecal matter before we proceed to anything more creative.