RIP

I can't go one year with the same pair of earphones. I lose them (once on the same day I bought them), or I lose all of the little earbuds which means I need to buy new earphones or stick pointy plastic spears into my ears, or in this case, I obliterate them.

We were strolling up Central Park when I feel myself kicking something. I look down, behind me, but see nothing. So I continue. Ladeedadeedah when my stroller comes to a squeaky halt. I glance down at the wheels and I see this:

My earphones! I look back up to the stroller handlebar where I had hung them minutes ago. Of course, they were not there anymore because while I was skipping along the path the earphones had slowly slid down, onto the ground, into the wheel thing and strangled the wheel.

Meanwhile, V is master crankypants, having been in the stroller too long for her taste, and is yelling. AHHHHH. AHHHHHHHHH. People are looking at me, as if to say, hey do you know your baby is yelling? YES I KNOW THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP HOW DID I EVER MANAGE BEFORE GO THE F*CK AWAY.

I drag the stroller off the path and onto the grass. I take V out and sit her next to me on the grass. The yelling stops; ah blessed silence. I crouch down and delicately try to remove the earphones from inside the wheel. After a few minutes it was obvious that the thing was really stuck in there. So I start pulling. Yank. Yank. YANKYANKYANKYANK. I realize that I'm just pulling the earphones tighter and tighter around the wheel, but I don't know what else to do, and we are half a mile from home and I can't just abandon this piece of expensive garbage here.

Meanwhile people are walking by on the path and cooing at V. "Oh she's so cute. Oh look at her." LOOK AT ME PEOPLE! I AM NOT STICKING MY FACE ON THE GROUND WITH MY ASS IN THE AIR FOR FUN! I AM NOT BREAKING OUT SOME FREAKING YOGA POSE AND DOING DOWNWARD DOG MY STROLLER HAS BROKEN DOWN AND WE ARE STUCK HERE FOREVER AHHHH!

And then I yank hard enough that the wheel falls off. Nice, glad to know that the stroller wheel can just fly off like that. Now I feel secure. I rip off the earphones, jam the wheel back on, hope it stays and scoot on home.

RIP poor earphones.

Oh and I lost my credit card. Yay saturdays!

No more noms

This is what happens when Violet finishes the last of her rice cracker and realizes that there is no more to be had:

Seeing the mess

When I was younger, I did not like to clean my room. Every horizontal surface would be covered with stuff. Tornados could drop the tons of shit they were whirling around in the funnels into my room and no one would have known the difference. My mom would go crazy. Clean your room. Clean your room. CLEAN YOUR ROOOOOOM MAWGGGRRRAAAWW. Then I would fake-clean (yeah you've all done it before, no need for an explanation). But really I didn't care because I couldn't really see the mess.

Then one day it changed. I blinked and saw dirty dishes left on the coffee table. Clothes on the floor of the closet. Mountains of sock left next to the bed. Stuff that had been left on the bathroom counter for so long that they had cemented themselves on. It sort of felt like when I first got my period (peering down, "what the f*ck!?!?"). And once you are able to see the mess, you have to clean it.

I'm not sure what triggered this. I think it is probably a part of the normal maturation process. Like second puberty. Unfortunately, Jonker is not there yet. He's a late bloomer. And what that means is that I find his used q-tips laying about here and there. Once, I found one on my side of the bathroom counter. He might as well have taken a dump and smeared it on the wall. If you could punch, strangle, stab or shoot a q-tip, I would have done all of those things at that moment. So I took those used q-tips and stuck them in his precious cufflink box. The man loves his cufflinks. Muhahaha, the ultimate revenge! I was gleeful. But the q-tips stayed there untouched for over a week. After which I couldn't stand seeing them anymore and I threw them out. HOW DOES THAT NOT BOTHER HIM?!

In any case, it's unfortunate that I am now able to see the mess. Cuz once you get a baby, the mess quadruples. It sextuples. It manymoreuples. It's hard to let go, but when baby is throwing rice crackers and yelling at you because she no longer has her rice crackers AND GET ME MORE RICE CRACKERS OR I WILL SMEAR MY POOP ON YOUR FACE, YEAH RUN, RUN FASTER YOU SLOWASS AND RIP OPEN THAT NEW PACKAGE OF RICE CRACKERS AND PUT IT IN MY MOUTH nom nom nom, then you learn to let go.

Every day at 7 when I put her to sleep, I come out to face this. And clean this. Every damn day.

Engage!

Engage! YEEAAAAHHH!

Questions? Watch Star Trek.

I saw Patrick Stewart perform in Macbeth. I fell sleep during the second act and snored. Out. Loud. There may have been a third act, but I'm not sure because I was asleep. After the show Joe told me that the guy on the other side of me was really annoyed. THANKS SO MUCH FOR WAKING ME UP AM I YOUR WIFE OR YOUR ENEMY. Then one of the partners at my firm asked me what I thought of some scene that I snored through. I was all, "Oh yeah, it was really great. Like, really, really great. Really." I suck at schmoozing.

Toga! Toga! Toga!

Why do we insist on dressing babies in miniature versions of adult clothes? Why not stick their bodies in a cloth bag, tie it off around their necks and be done with it? Dressing a baby is like engaging in a round of WWF. I win eventually.

When I do not have the strength to dress the baby, we do toga time.

That is greygoose in the nalgene bottle. I kid. It's ketel one.

Poop pose

I can never write enough about poop.

Before starting solids, I could never tell when V was pooping (unless she was sitting on my lap, in which case, I could feel the pressure of something soft and hot, like a creepy man's hand on your leg). Poop would mysteriously appear in her diaper, like some horrible gift from Satan.

Erm, hello. Merry Christmas. Here is a tree and some poop.


But I guess as babies grow older, they become more aware of their own bodily functions. E.g., a man and a woman were walking past us at the park, and the man turns around and says, "what is he doing?" I look up and there is a boy who was about 1 year old, standing with his back bent at 45 degrees, and his arms and hands hanging straight down. The woman looks and says, "That's the poop position." And then we all watched the boy poop.

The other day I was feeding V in her high chair, and she is usually very animated in it, constantly turning her head, waving her hands, etc. Then she stopped moving, looked straight ahead, and slowly curled her fingers into her palms. I thought, what the hell is this, a seizure? And then I heard it. Pffffft. Haha poop!

My girl is all grown up.

Holy crap

I almost killed my baby twice in the course of two days.

First, she fell off the bed in the middle of the afternoon. I had fallen asleep next to her, and I woke up to "THUD. AHHHH!" Two very bad sounds. She was on her back on the (wooden!) floor. She had a pink spot on her forehead, but I don't really know how she got to the edge of the bed, or how she fell, but there it is. ARGH. I took her fist and made her hit me in the face. Matching red spots!

Second, I was slicing up pears for a salad, and I gave her a chunk. There is a school of baby feeding called baby-led weaning. They don't believe in purees or stuffing the baby's mouth with food. Instead they put the food down in front of the baby, in pieces big enough to grab, and the baby picks up the pieces and sucks on it. I do purees, but I thought, hey let's try. So she's sucking on it, and then she starts coughing. And then making weird MRRRGGG sounds. I realize that the pear is getting stuck in her throat, so I try to think back to my Infant CPR class, and all I can think to do is pick her up, turn her face down and pound on her back. Which is correct, but not helping here. I tell Joe, "she's choking!" He comes over and says, "Well, if she is crying (which she sort of was, while making MRRGGG sounds) then technically she is not 'choking'." Wow, really, are we actually going to discuss whether a partial obstruction qualifies as choking right now? I said, "WTF F*CKING HELP ME!" Then he reached in her mouth and pulled out the pear.

Lessons learned: tie your baby to the bed posts if you are going to fall asleep with the baby on the bed. Or weigh her down with an encyclopedia or something else that is large and heavy. Also, don't ever try new things. Puree your child's food until she is 18.

Diaper changes

I used to think that the very fact that I have to wipe pee and poo off of someone else's butt is pretty bad. But I've recently learned that I actually had it pretty good for a while.

Because now, Violet cries everytime I lay her down to change her diaper. I have to change her diaper about 6 or 7 times a day, so this is bad. I don't know why she cries now, and why the prior 2000 diaper changes didn't upset her at all. Maybe the 2001th diaper change was the last straw? And she wriggles, turning from side to side, stiffening her legs and arching her back, all the while crying "please! please let me roll around in my poop! PLEASE! NO GIVE ME BACK MY POOOOOP DON'T TAKE IT AWAAAAAY!"

She also reaches down to touch what I'm touching. Like, her pee and poop. And then she wants to touch the wall, her clothes, HER FACE, HER EYES, HER MOUTH immediately afterward. It's very hard to simultaneously lift her legs, wipe her butt, pull her hands away from her crotch, out of her mouth, etc. I need 8 arms, but I only have 2. So she's probably ingesting bits of pee and poop regularly now.

And don't get me started with the poop getting on her clothes. Violet's day is not complete if she hasn't gotten some poop on her clothes. This world doesn't have enough Purell.

I am thinking of adding restraints to her changing pad. Little baby restraints on her wrists and ankles. Furry ones, in pink. With little bear faces on them. You know, to make them cute and stuff. We can call them "baby huggers" or something. Good idea, yes?

Caption this

"This Nigerian says he needs my help moving a large sum of money to the US. He just needs a few thousand dollars from me, and I'll reap millions! I'M IN!"

"What if I don't want to have a freaking Timeline... Ugh I hate you Facebook."

Typing into google.com: "How to crawl"

My Friday

From 12 AM to 11:59 PM:

12 AM: I engage in my night time ministrations and go to sleep.

3:45 AM: baby cries in co-sleeper (mini crib) next to me. I grab bottle from beside the bed and feed her. Half the time she drops off back to sleep after the bottle. Half the time she doesn't. She hates me today so she starts whimpering after she finishes the bottle. Ugh. She stops. Ahh. The whimpering starts again. Fuck. And grows louder. Nooo, pleeeaaase. She begins to wail. I feel around her bottom and feel wetness. NOOOO. I turn on the light and zip open her sleep sack. She has pooed and it has leaked. AWESOME. The room is too bright and now the baby is really pissed off. I try to remove a poo filled diaper from a screaming, kicking baby without smearing poo everywhere. Then I take off her clothes, wipe her down and get a new diaper on. Finally I get her to calm down, grab a clean sleep sack and lay her down next to me in the bed. I am afraid to put her too close to jonker, who would surely roll over and crush her without so much as a snore, so we lay side by side on my half of the bed. I wedge a stuffed animal between us so that we don't roll into each other, and lay stiff like a mummy to prevent inadvertent crushing of baby. The baby reaches over and pulls my hair. I twist my head out of her reach, and we fall asleep.

6:20 AM: baby cries. When I sleep like a mummy my muscles tense up, as if to remember not to loosen and roll about, and I wake up in incredible pain. My neck also hurts from putting my head at a 90 degree angle to my neck. I try to soothe the baby but she continues to cry. Jonker was in the bathroom at the time, and comes out and takes baby. I fall back into bed and drift into unconsciousness.

7:00 AM: I am woken up by whining baby who Jonker has brought back to bed. I try to go back to sleep for 30 minutes but it's like trying to ignore gentle stabbing in my ear. Jonker begs me to take her so that he can go back to sleep. UGH fine. I give baby a bottle with one hand surf the net on my iphone with the other. I prop the bottle up with trusty stuffed animal so I can go brush my teeth and wash my face. I check my email and the interwebz to find out what is going on in the world.

8:15 AM: Diaper change. I take off the sleepsack and dress her while baby tries to lunge and knock down everything within a 2 foot radius and tries to head dive off the changing table.

8:25 AM: I clean up the empty bottles from the bedroom and we play on the couch. Or, she stands next to me on the couch, gleefully pulling my hair and trying to scratch my eyes out, while I pretend to eat her stomach. NOMNOMNOM.

8:40 AM: Nap time! I put her down and watch her make out with Pengypengypengy (her penguin doll) through a monitor. I can't do anything until I know she is asleep in case she freaks out and refuses to nap.

9 AM: She falls asleep. I now have 30 minutes to do whatever I want. Oh the freedom! This is what dogs feel like when they go to the park and get taken off the leash. I consider also taking a nap but now I am wide awake. I decide to do laundry and make coffee instead. I guess I am not as awake as I thought I was because I just poured the water for the coffee into the funnel where the coffee grinds go, and have drowned my coffee grinds.

9:45 AM: The gods have shone me their favor. The baby has taken a rare 45 minute nap. I bring her into the kitchen where I sit her down on the counter, anchor her down by putting a full plastic gallon water jug between her legs, and put away the dishes and utensils on the drying racks. Baby gets another bottle and I change her diaper. I google whether it's possible to burn the nonstick coating off of a pan. What I really want to know is whether that will cause the pan to burn your food thereafter. Because this is what my pan appears to be doing. But my google skills suck and this is still a mystery to me. I google our pan to see how much a replacement would cost. Hrm, more than I am willing to spend to replace a pan that may or may not be burning my food.

10:30 AM: I stick the baby on the middle of our bed and turn on the tv so that I can vaccuum the other rooms. Yeah yeah, bad mom, whatever. But clean apartment! I retrieve baby and google dinner recipes and settle on chicken marsala.

11:30 AM: My mom calls and says she would like to come over. She'll be here in an hour. Cue me cleaning like mad. If there is one thing I can't stand, it's my mother's passive aggressive comments about the state of my apartment.

12:10 PM: Shit, the baby goes down for a nap every two hours and I am late by 25 minutes. No wonder she's been acting like a beeyotch. Down for a nap she goes. I jump in the shower, start getting ready in the bathroom, see the baby wake up on the monitor, go get the baby and plop her down on the bathroom floor so she can watch me move like jagger.

1 PM: I hear my mom at the door, go out, supervise the grandma/baby reunion to make sure the baby doesn't freak out and go back to the bathroom to finish getting ready. I go out to Subway and the supermarket to buy us lunch and come back. We eat and gossip while baby gets another bottle. My mom mentions that she changed her while I went out and her pants are wet but she didn't take them off because the baby was going kamikaze on the changing pad again. I change her pants and try not to think about every place the baby sat that now has microscopic bits of pee on it. Mom watches me feed the baby zucchini and butternut squash.

2:15 PM: Mint.com alerts me to some nonsense that AMEX is doing to me and I call and fix it. Mom leaves and I prepare for our outing to the park. I need: stroller, wallet, keys, diaper, wipes, changing pad, outdoor blanket, bottle and formula, earphones, toys, purell, plastic bags to hold dirty diapers and other garbage, hat. We get outside and I realize I forgot my water bottle. Sigh. On the way to the park we stop at 16 Handles, which after 2 PM is full of little kids. I usually avoid going after school lets out and I think from now on I will continue to do this because the place smelled like a poo diaper. The 16 Handles guy who was monitoring the froyo machines even asked me if I smelled something bad. As I wait in line the little kids with their huge buckets of froyo sit and chatter and I watch America get fat.

3:00 PM: We get to the park and go to the playground. I stick the baby in a swing and push her a little too hard and a little too high. Eff you, she likes it. The weird looking baby in the adjacent swing is staring at me. I try to ignore it. We leave the playground and start trekking down the loop headed downtown. The baby falls asleep. I stop at a grassy spot about half a mile down, spread out the blanket and collapse. I want to sleep but have to make sure that no one steals my baby. I surf the net on my iPhone until the baby wakes up 30 minutes later. I change her, feed her, she plays with her toys, she throws up on the blanket, I clean up the throw up, pack everything up and head back home, picking up groceries on the way.

5:30 PM: I try to mash nectarines up for the baby and realize that the nectarines suck and taste like shit. I give her a mum-mum (baby cracker) while I make another bottle, and grab her bath stuff. I undress her, clean the poo off her butt and put her in the bath, during which I talk to her in my fake French man voice ("ehhmmm welcome to le spa, little bebe"). Then it's lotion time, and I dress her and into the bedroom for her bedtime stories and last bottle.

6:50 PM: I put her in her sleep sack and put her down in the co sleeper. She starts wailing. She used to make out with her sleepytime friends and then just go to sleep but this stopped at some recent point and has been replaced by shrieking. I have no idea how to fix this. She cries for about 10 minutes before I go and pick her up. After she settles down I try to put her in my bed. Again, great big tears and screams, but this time she stops after 10 minutes and goes to sleep. Can't wait to sleep like a mummy again tonight.

7:30 PM: I fold laundry, clean up the bath stuff, unpack the stroller, load the dishwasher with dirty dishes/bottles. I pack the baby's diaper bag for a trip to a friend's tomorrow (change of clothes, diapers, wipes, changing pad, bottles, formula, meal of apple/pear, purell, plastic bags). I put away the folded laundry. I plan to bake a sweet potato for the baby to eat, but I get tired, eat chinese food and reluctantly watch NCIS with jonker (hate that show), read a few pages of Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (at my current rate, I will finish it in 2014), lay down on the bed next to the baby with my arms straight down by my sides and go to sleep at 11.

Being a stay at home mom

Last night (this morning?) I went to bed at 12:44 am, and was woken up at 3:45 am, 5:30 am, 5:44 am, 5:52 am, 6:04 am, 6:10 am, and laid on my back in a zombie daze from 6:20 am to 6:40 am, when I could no longer take the kicking of my ribs and the pulling of my hair.

I hated my job (is there a theme today?) but at least I got to sleep in continuous stretches. When my blackberry buzzed, I could ignore it. Or rather, I could ignore it and it wouldn't shriek and yank at me. And let me tell you. Waking up to the sound of a baby crying in the middle of the night is like waking up to someone driving a spike in your ear canal. It is piercing. It is horrible. And for some reason, although you are completely dead tired and don't want to put on pants, your baby is wide awake and wants to play. And you have no other choice but to put on pants and play (aka, obediently fetch the toys that she throws again and again and again).

Before my current incarnation, when I was a working woman of the world, I jokingly referred to maternity leave as vacation. I dreamed of being a stay at home mom, so I could sit on my ass all day and watch tv. I was joking but also kind of not. Because staying at home is so easy, right?

SURPRISE! Babies need constant attention. It's not like your job, when you can set aside your work for 5 or 10 or 45 minutes to surf the interwebz and google chat with your similarly delinquent friends. If I ignore V for 5 minutes, she will whimper, then whine, then yell, then CRRYYYYYYY. This means that if I have to leave the living room to go to the bathroom, I have to sing DO-RE-MI from the Sound of Music from the top of my lungs so that she knows I haven't abandoned her forever. If I have to go into the kitchen to wash dishes, I have to sing. If I have to go into her room to get a bib, I have to sing. You get the picture. I have sung that song 843,277 times. I am Julie freaking Andrews.

Anyhooz, being a SAHM is not all shits and giggles. Well, there are lots of both, but there is no sitting on my ass and watching tv all day. Right now for example, I am blogging and also yodeling for V. Have you ever tried typing and singing at the same time? It is hard. This is also work. It is work that is sometimes mind-numbing, tedious, and that I don't get paid enough for, but what job isn't?

Mommy, you are my bitch and you know it. Squeeee!

Modeling

I hated my job. And I'm not going back muhahah! Why should I, if I can just send my kid to work instead as a child model! Earn your keep, you chunky munkey.

We've been practicing our modeling poses.

Looking mysterious:

This was a bit too literal. We're going to work on that.


Looking fierce!

Perfect.

Surprising fact

A baby kick to the crotch hurts just as much as an adult kick to the crotch. It is unfortunate that I am familiar with both experiences, but there it is.

Caption this

"I'm wearing WHAT?!"

"This damn tricorder is not working again. I'm going to the Apple store and putting my foot up someone's ass. Get me my stroller."

"Wait, don't they put the red uniforms on the guys who are supposed to die in that episode? Get this off of me."

Felt dahlia

Burnt my fingertips last night. Warning, don't touch hot glue before it's dry!

Warning

What is it that they say about plastic bags and children? Do not let your children play with plastic bags? Or is it, DO let your chidren play with plastic bags? V and I discussed this at length, and after some debate we came to the conclusion that it is the latter. After all, they are so delicious!

And they fit so snugly around the neck. Next we are going to try household cleaners.