Jeezmommy: The New Chapter

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.

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?