Feets

This is something I meant to post about like 6 months ago but never got around to it.

One of the awesome things that can happen to your body when you get pregnant is that parts other than your glorious womb can swell like freaking camel humps. It doesn't happen to everyone. Only the truly lucky, such as moi. My feet and legs decided that it needed to retain every drop of water I drank starting from April till the day I gave birth, at the end of August. By the end of it my legs were starting to look like elephant legs. I would post a picture but it would sear your eyes, so I will instead post a pic from the earlier stages of swelling:



There is no treatment for this. You just live with it. If it's benign swelling it doesn't hurt; it just looks freaking gross. It wouldn't have been so bad except that it was summer, and there was no hiding my Jeezilla feet in flip-flops. Every OBGYN appointment my rail-thin non-swollen doctor would ask if anything was of concern, and I would say, "the swelling", and she would cluck empathetically and say, "have you tried compression stockings?"

I in fact did try compression stockings, which Jeezsister got me from the hospital. Voila:



My doctor would say, "the stockings are probably not too comfortable to wear in the summer." Oh really? Probably not?

Let's put aside the fact that the stockings make my legs look like gigantic tapeworms with little bloody orange mouths. What you're telling me is that the way to solve the discomfort I feel from the appearance of my swollen feet is to wear these? "Oh no one will notice the swelling now." I guess that is true, because people would be too busy wondering why I've dressed up like a giant toddler in white tights.

Suffice it to say that I did not end up wearing these. However, I do have a very nice collection of compression stockings in various sizes that you could use for a Halloween costume, as bungee cords, etc.

Vacation with a 3 month old

For some reason I thought vacation with a baby would be like going on regular vacation, the only difference being that I bring the baby everywhere. Not the case!

First of all, 99% of your luggage is devoted to the baby, and you need to bring every thing that the baby may possibly need. It was a 4 day/3 night trip to the Dominican Republic, and I brought over 40 diapers, 10 pairs of baby socks, 10 changes of baby clothes (clothes for the plane, each day, and clothes to change into on the plane or in the DR in case the baby craps into her clothes, which has happened before), a package of baby wipes, baby formula (liquid and powder), bottle parts, the [chicken] breast pump, pump parts, a device that sucks snot out of the baby's nose, baby bath products, baby carrier and other baby crap. I had like 58 lbs of baby crap in one suitcase, for which I had to pay an overweight fee of $100. I could have fed, changed and clothed an orphanage of babies. I packed like a shirt and shorts for myself and squeezed it into the corners of the suitcase.

Then you have to get your carry-ons in order. Mostly, you will need to create a mini-version of your big suitcase, in case the baby gets hungry, craps, etc on the plane. And then you also need the car seat if you bought a seat for the baby, the stroller that you will gatecheck unless you want to lug the baby in the carseat through the airport (the carseat itself is not that heavy, and the baby weighs maybe 13 or 14 lbs, but together they chemically react to weigh 100 lbs), and the stroller cover, unless you want to risk having your stroller murdered by homicidal airport luggage handlers. Somewhere in there, you have to squeeze in everyone's passport, money, and if you have room, something to read.

Don't even talk to me about going through security with a baby. You've got to get all your crap into those stupid bins, take out the liquid baby formula and let the TSA agents know that there's liquid in excess of the usual amounts in your stuff and it's baby formula, take the baby out of the stroller, fold the stroller and take yourself and the baby through the metal detectors while 3000 people are standing in line staring at you. Seriously I could understand if someone forgot/lost their baby during this process, because you are supposed to do about 23 things instantaneously, with 2 eyes and 2 arms. Dear God please make me an octopus right now please please please.

Then there is the plane ride. There is not much to be said about this. If your baby doesn't cry, it's awesome. If your baby cries, you want to take a running start at the emergency exit so that you can float peacefully amongst the silent fluffy clouds.

Then you get to the resort. Note of warning: your baby may hate and scream her head off at everything. She may scream while sitting at the breakfast table, standing at the breakfast table, being jiggled up/down, side/side at the breakfast table, sitting in the stroller by the pool, sitting in the carseat by the pool, sitting in the baby carrier by the pool, etc. She may end up spending 90% of the time being put to sleep in her carseat, under your coat, in the closet of your hotel room.



Yes, you could have done that in NYC for thousands of dollars less, but don't think about that.

In the end, you may return home paler than you were when you left. Congratulations, you have just gone on vacation with your 3 month old.

Poo 24/7

Once you become a parent, the one thing you have to get over is poo. Because there is no escaping it.

When V was first born, her first few poos were like black tar. That apparently is normal; it's called meconium and it is all the crap that she was saving up in her body during gestation, that she was now giving to me as a "hi, nice to meet you, here is some black poo" present. I would swat at it with these flimsy, tiny squares of wet tissue they called baby wipes, and it would just morph into little black peaks on her butt. A spatula would have worked a lot better.

Then once V started eating, her poo got yellow/brown and liquidy. Liquidy as in the consistency of pea soup. And lots of sharting. I'd be feeding her in my lap and I could feel the heat of each shart against my leg. At first I'd run with her at the first shart and change her diaper. I stopped doing that once I realized that usually she wasn't finished with just one. I would open her diaper and there would be MORE COMING OUT, and I would shove more wipes, diapers, whatever was in reach under her butt to contain the ever continuing spillage. Meanwhile V would wriggle and kick, sticking her feet in her poo and waving them around, and I would throw wipes at her like it was a ticker tape parade.

Once I was changing V's diaper and she shat a stream of poo that landed on my hand, the wall and the floor. For three seconds, I froze. Time stopped. All was silent. And then chaos ensued. "DON'T PANIC!" I was yelling, "DON'T PANIC!" over and over. To who I'm not sure, since it was just me and V in the apartment, and she was clearly ok with the whole situation. It's times like those when you are grateful for the fact that the baby wipes seem to have all been glued to each other, so that when you pull on one, you get a whole string of them, because I needed all one hundred fifty of those suckers.

Working vs Staying at Home

At work, I dealt with unreasonable, irrational opposing counsel, who would angrily demand ridiculous things one minute and be suspiciously nice the next. I couldn't wait for my maternity leave.

And then I found out that my baby is the same. She is unreasonable -- you want to eat now, at 4 in the morning? I was sleeping woman -- irrational -- pushing my milk jug out of her face so that she can cram her fingers in her mouth and scream about their milklessness -- and possibly suffering from a personality disorder -- going from smiles to screams back to smiles in a matter of seconds.

One thing that work did for me was to acclimate me to a routine of just-enough-sleep-so-that-I-don't-die, which has continued since I took leave. Also responding to the unreasonable demands. It's like she is sending a constant stream of high priority emails but instead of emails they are high-pitched screams that grow evermore in intensity and frequency until they exceed the spectrum of human hearing and she is fully contorted, mouth open so that I can see clear down to her larynx (hello evil vocal cords) and dogs around the neighborhood are going mad. This week she has a sore throat so I can barely hear her cry. I won't lie, I am kind of enjoying it.

Babies do really look like this when they cry by the way:



It turns out that all those cartoons are very lifelike.

Hey Fatty

You know you have to do something about your fat ass when your friend's 3 year old points to your stomach and asks, "Is there another one in there?"

Hi salad, you and I are now best friends.

Breastfeeding

The word "breast" makes me feel uncomfortable. I never use it, and whenever I hear it, I simultaneously think of chickens first, then women.

But that is not my point. My point is that I know that God is a man. I know because when he was thinking about how human beings would nourish their children, and considering the infinite options (infinite because he is God and if he decided that women would feed their children from bottle attachments that would sprout organically from their hands, then it would have happened), he decided, "oh I know, they shall feed their children from their nipples, and milk shall flow from them". Why not our feet? Arms? Foreheads? Any other part of our body besides one of the most sensitive parts?

To put this in perspective, if men were the ones who had to feed the children, it would be like making them feed them with their milk-filled penis (penii?). Ouch, right? RIGHT.

Sometimes V will take my boob and SHAKE IT BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN HER GUMS like a dog shakes its prey to break its spine. Basically she is trying to kill my boob, and she is succeeding. It's been 10 weeks now, and a truck could run over my boob, and it's possible that I would just scratch at it like an itch.

Hello from the dark side

I finally got my first comment on my blog. I was so surprised that I thought I hallucinated, but no, there it was.

What have I spent my days doing? Mostly, feeding, doing laundry, staring at the mirror at my naked self going OMFG, cleaning poo--the normal mom duties.

I only do about 4 things a day, so it is weird that I seem not to have time to do anything else. Those things are: feeding, pumping, changing diapers and doing laundry. But it's because I do them in endless 2 hour cycles. And it's a challenge to get whatever I need done in a 2 hour cycle, so that I can start the next 2 hour cycle on time. It reminds me of Battlestar Galactica, when the humans start jumping through space to escape the marauding cyclons. No matter where they jump, the cyclons are able to find them exactly 33 minutes later, so the humans live in 33 minute cycles for weeks, and look increasingly greasy and shitty because they can't sleep, eat, shower, etc. It's like V is a baby cylon, chasing me in these 2 hour cycles. When those 2 hours are up and there isn't something producing milk in her mouth, THE SHIT HITS THE FAN.

When I'm not doing those things, all I really want to do is watch tv or read a book. But then I remember that I'm supposed to play with my baby and read to her and talk to her and shit, so that she, like, develops. Sigh. So I read little baby books to her. Sometimes I read my books to her. So she's heard some Jane Eyre, Hunger Games, Sherlock Holmes, etc. Either way I'm pretty sure I sound like the teacher in Charlie Brown. "Mwa wa wa?" I sing to her too, but I've realized that I don't know any kids songs. I know Old MacDonald, but I don't know a lot of animals or their sounds. Under pressure, I said things like "giraffe" or "hippo", and then realized that I don't know what sounds they make. But it was so boring to limit myself to ducks and dogs and whatever. So now there are all sorts of shit on the farm, like rocks (which say "rock") and drug dealers (who say "pssst"). I also put V on the farm. She says "waahh" or "fart".

I've lately gotten my shit enough together to go for short trips outside. For ex, I've gone to TJ Maxx and Whole Foods for fun. That's right, a trip to TJ Maxx is a treat for me. The other day I got a pair of $35 boots of the highest quality pleather. Yeah parenthood!