Fish Out of Water

Grumble grumble

Apparently I have a "spirited child." Have you heard of this? It's one author's way of describing kids that are challenging not because they have ADD or some other medical diagnosis - they are just more of everything. More excitable, more sensitive, more emotional, just more. For the past few months I have been at the end of my rope with my older daughter. She just wears me down. My mom recommended this book called "Raising Your Spirited Child" and said the descriptions of the kids fit my daughter to a T. So I just got the book from her and I'm going to start reading it tonight.

Normally I don't read parenting books but in this case I am striking out. She knows exactly which of my buttons to push and I end up dreading the activities we have planned together because I'm afraid she is going to be a huge pain in my ass. And then I get very sad for thinking of her that way. Instead of thinking of her with a smile on my face because of what a spectacular kid she is - which she IS! - I am thinking, OY, how long is this day going to last before she's asleep and I can relax. And that is not how I want to be thinking of my daughter. I also don't exactly know when this all started. I remember it didn't use to be this way. It used to be really fun to do stuff with her, and I didn't wonder in which way we she going to annoy me this time. I hate feeling that way. I want to enjoy her again.

The other kicker is that the moms of her friends all tell me how great she is. Well behaved, great manners, so pleasant to have over to their houses. So I know this is something between the two of us. I hope this book has something intelligent to say, and that I can find some way to manufacture the patience I know I'm going to need in order to change the way I am dealing with her. Because I don't want to be her mean mom who just gets mad all the time. I also want to be her fun mom who shows her how much I love her, each day. I guess I'm a bit surprised at how hard that is. It should be easy to show your kid you love them. It shouldn't take so much work.

Oh, and guess what else happened today: I threw out my back. Good times.

Monday evening stuff

The poor baby has been a snot fountain for days. She cries at night, in her sleep, and it's hard to console her. Today I picked her up at day care and she cried the entire way home, and then cried whenever I put her down. She just wanted to be held and cuddled. Her daddy and I took turns cuddling her and then he tried to give her baby food for dinner. Mostly she wanted to go to sleep. He took her up to bed and about three and a half minutes later - just long enough to change her diaper and clean off her face - he came downstairs. She just rolled over and went to sleep. She even sounds like she has baby laryngitis. When she cries, it takes a minute for her little voice to kick in. It's all raspy. She doesn't have a fever, so I'm not worried, but it would be nice if she could breathe a little better! Poor sweetie.

Luckily no one else seems to be quite as afflicted - at least not yet - and of course now that I said that, we're all going to catch it. But everyone is fine. The big girl was telling me that today at school they went to an aquarium, got a 50-gallon octopus tank, brought back an octopus, and learned how to kill it! I am so curious about what really happened and what she's actually talking about.

Her new favorite show is Bindi the Jungle Girl. We finally did tell her that Steve Irwin died - about a year after his death - and now she loves to watch Bindi. She keeps telling me how much she wants to meet Bindi. She also told me that when she is 8, she wants to have a TV show too! Highly unlikely, since I don't follow the Lynne Spears school of motherhood.

Last night we were watching Sense and Sensibility together and she could not stop talking in a British accent. And she's actually pretty good at it! I was impressed. I was explaining to her why the Kate Winslet character gets so sad, and she was asking me in her best Queen's-English accent, "So he didn't love her?" It was so cute! Tonight I had a bit of a rough stretch with her, but I've calmed myself down and we are now happily hanging out together downstairs. She is playing with Play-Doh while I post this and do some Net surfing.

Yesterday I got to meet my friend's one-month-old baby girl. Hard to believe my giant ladies were ever that small, but the baby's already 10 pounds, so she's definitely bigger than my two were at birth. Amazing. I got to hold her and she just slept and snuggled in next to me in that sweet baby-hamster way that babies do. She had some very cute yawns, and I loved seeing her mom hold her. The mom is one of my very oldest friends so it was really special to see her with her first baby. Also she had her baby at the same birth center where my girls were born so I was proud to have told her about that place. She was as happy with her experience there as I was.

It's suddenly cold outside! The autumn came really late this year so now that it's here, it has whacked us upside the head. Not fun! Oh well, this is only the beginning........

Ugh, I'm a tired mommy

From the title of this post, you might surmise that it has to do with the middle of the night feedings with the baby. But you would be wrong! No, the reason I'm tired is because of the headstrong four-year-old who lives in my house. She is driving me cuh-RAZY.

Every encounter with her has the potential to turn into a whine-fest or a sulking session or an excuse to tell me I'm not nice. I know this is normal, and I know that every mom of a young child has experienced this, but OY. It gets on my nerves and then she's right, I'm not very nice! I have been trying SO HARD the past few weeks not to yell so much, and not to give her guilt trips or snooty attitude, but it is incredibly challenging. Tonight I got very annoyed and threw her dress on the floor after she took it off. That's how I knew it was time to step back and let my husband take over. But sometimes I don't have that luxury because he's not home, or whatever, and then it's all I can do not to run around the house screaming. I have been yelling a lot less, so that is really good progress, but it is so hard, and I see myself doing annoying things as a parent that my parents did when I was a kid - things I promised myself I would never do. That is a hard promise to keep when your kid has found your very last nerve and has settled herself squarely on top of it.

The interesting thing is that rather than make me angry at her, it makes me angry with myself. OK, maybe not totally - I do get angry at her - but in the end once I've calmed down, I'm always more frustrated with myself for losing my cool than with her for being insane. Because really, she's just doing her job as a four-year-old. I'm the adult, I know how to behave, I should be able to handle it without going ballistic. But sometimes I just can't. And I hate that.

I know I am doing well overall, and I know how much she loves me, and I have some pretty good evidence that I'm an OK mom. But it's so hard to keep that little voice from coming in. You know, the one that says, "If you can't do this without yelling, you suck!" I think that's the same voice that says, "No one at this school is going to like you," and "You have a huge ass," and "How is anyone ever going to want to marry you?" That is one mean voice, and as far as I can tell, it has been with me since I learned to talk. It doesn't seem to want to go away any time soon, so I just have to learn to ignore it. And sometimes that is a lot easier said than done. Like when there is a floppy four-year-old on the floor crying about having to wear a different dress to school than the one she wanted to wear because of the weather. Or when that same four-year-old is standing in front of the bathroom mirror, setting new Olympic records for lollygagging. Or when that same four-year-old waves things in my face as I'm trying to buckle her into her booster seat in the car. Or when that same four-year-old gives me that look as she defies me - the look that says, "Let's see how far I can push Mommy this time!" With glee!

Yeah, that's when I have to ignore the voice the most. And that's when it's almost impossible. This is how all four-year-olds make you feel, right? Like the top of the world and the bottom of the pit, all at once. Right?

Pumping................

After the eBay fraud adventure, and after the horrible time I had pumping when I went back to work after my first daughter was born, I decided to rent a hospital-grade pump and see how that went. I thought it would be good to be able to send it back anytime (the place where I'm renting allows you to go month-to-month so there's no long-term commitment), and given my body's apparent reluctance to give milk to a machine, which was the experience I had last time, I wanted something really strong.

The pump arrived yesterday and I had my first session before dinner. I got a total of 5 ounces in about 25 minutes. That sounded pretty good to me, considering the best I ever did last time around was 4 ounces in an hour. I am hoping that with increased use, my body will respond even better, so I can get 8 ounces per session, and I could actually build up a supply of frozen milk. With my older daughter, the most we ever had on hand at any given time was one day's worth for her, so I was always anxious that I wouldn't have enough. After struggling with the pump for two months, I gave up and started giving her formula while at day care. I continued to nurse in the morning, evening and on weekends, but I just couldn't stand pumping at work. So I'm hoping pumping will go better this time. It would be nice to be able to nurse exclusively for 6 months this time (last time I made it 4 months). We'll see.

Was hoping to be posting something else now!

Not in labor, no contractions, nothing.

There's really not much else to say!

Only three hours until the due date

OK, so now things could really start happening and I would be SOOOOO happy. It is getting harder and harder to walk around so maybe that's a sign! My belly feels all tight, I have what looks like 100 more stretch marks than I had this time last week, and I think the baby is even lower than yesterday. I keep waiting for that one feeling that I know is the first contraction, but maybe that's like watching a pot while waiting for it to boil. Maybe I should just ignore the fact that there is a full-term baby in my uterus and just carry on like normal, and then maybe that's what will inspire her to come out!

We are having some work done on our guest room so it will be ready for my mother-in-law and sister-in-law to visit in two weeks. It is nice to have an excuse to finally get that room spruced up. It was sort of an "extra" room for the people who lived here before us. I think they started to redo it but never finished it, so the walls and ceiling needed a lot of patching and the whole room needed a nice fresh coat of paint. The spackling and most of the sanding are done and the painting will be happening any day now. Then we have a rug coming and some new bedding, and the room will be like new. I'm of course getting a huge kick out of it because of the whole nesting thing. I go into the baby's room about once a day to make sure everything in there really is ready. With a few minor exceptions I think it is. The only thing missing is the baby!

Tonight we watched Annie Get Your Gun with our daughter. She loved it until that (extremely racist, very 1950s-ish) scene where Annie Oakley becomes an honorary Sioux Indian. For some reason that scene made her burst into tears. She is so dramatic! I'm not sure where we got this little drama queen of ours. We finally found a scene she liked and she calmed down. It is weird though - this kind of thing happens a lot with her. Often in a movie she gets struck by something and has a total emotional breakdown. Like the sad song in the Clifford movie - she has seen that movie about 1000 times, but hadn't seen it in about six months. She watched it last weekend and when the sad song started, she started crying and was inconsolable until I moved on to the next scene.

But can I say, WOW - Annie Get Your Gun is a totally weird movie! Talk about your 1950s archetypes. Holy crap. The songs are fun but you definitely have to watch it with many grains of salt. It's hard to imagine a time like that, when women were so eager to put their needs second.

Speaking of which, I read Dear Prudence today on Slate.com, and there was a letter from a woman who is engaged and is having the following disagreement with her fiance: she wants to change her name from Betty Jane Doe (for example) to Betty Doe Smith - so she wants to do what I did, which is to make her maiden name into her middle name, and then use her husband's last name as her new last name. But her fiance is dead-set against it because he thinks it's "snobbish." He thinks she should keep her middle name as Jane and just be Betty Jane Smith instead of Betty Jane Doe. Now, excuse me, but.............HELLO? First of all, I don't see how that is snobbish - it's a way of keeping one identity while also bringing in a new one - and also what the hell does he care anyway? It did strike me that if he is going to make this much of a fuss over something like this, this marriage isn't going to go very far. Prudence seemed to have the same take on it. People are weird.

Yeah, this was a rambly post, but cut me some slack. I'm 40 weeks pregnant.

OK, I'm posting every day now.....still no labor

Maybe I have this idea that if I post every day about not being in labor, the baby will finally get the idea and start to try to come out! No dice so far. But today I've been in the most pain all pregnancy, so maybe that's a sign! It hurts to laugh, to sneeze, to sit down, to roll over, to stand up. Pretty much anything I want to do is painful. I made the mistake of sitting at the kitchen table for about two and a half hours this morning working, without standing up. Good Lord, when I finally did stand up, I felt like someone had run me over with a bus. Everything hurt and I had to think about each step I took.

Last night I was awake for about three hours during the wee darkest hours while the rest of the universe was asleep. I finally came up to the office to surf the Net because it was obvious I wasn't going to fall asleep anytime soon. When I went back to bed I ran into my daughter in the hallway - she had woken up and was on her way to our bed to get in with us, as she does most mornings between 5:30 and 6 (yeah, co-sleeping with this baby is gonna be a challenge with an almost 4-year-old climbing in - haven't quite figured that one out yet). It took me until after 6 to fall asleep, and then my husband's alarm went off less than an hour later. Needless to say I was pretty tired by this evening. I conked out in our bed while my daughter played with her Cinderella dolls on the bed next to me. It was a good compromise - she felt like I was keeping her company, and I got to rest. Now I think I can stay up for the Top Chef finale! Woo-hoo!

My kitty

My dear friend Cecily was nice enough to post on her blog about how we're looking for a good new home for our cat. (Since she has a much larger readership than I do, that seemed a more efficient way to get the word out.) I adore this cat - I've had him since he was six months old and now he's eight. But the reality is he's not really happy here anymore, and with a new baby coming, I think he's going to keep feeling bummed. I think he needs to be somewhere either without kids at all or at least without really small ones. Cec gave him a really great endorsement! So leave a comment if you're interested (we live outside Philly, right near Cecily).

I am now about three weeks away from my due date. It still feels like I'm going to be pregnant forever, but the reality is starting to sink in. The baby's room is almost all ready, and I have all the tiny clothes folded up in the dresser drawers. That's always a big clue that something huge is going to happen soon. I found some of those tiny little beanie hats from when my daughter was a baby - I can't believe a person can have such a small head. And all the tiny socks and t-shirts. Baby stuff is too funny. Now if only my back would stop hurting and these hormones would calm down.....................only six crying jags today! Woo-hoo!

Oh, right, I'm having a baby!

Today I took a 3 1/2 hour nap. My husband was kind enough to let me conk out while he took care of the kid, and then when she conked out too, he came and joined me in bed for a lovely midday snooze. I am such a nap-avoider, and I've been so focused on not doing anything differently than usual while pregnant (I know, that's probably really stupid) that I haven't availed myself of the bliss that is napping. Of course, the 3 hours I slept in the middle of the day are part of the reason I'm still awake at almost midnight..........I hope I can get up tomorrow.

It's finally starting to really sink in that I'm going to be having a new baby really soon. Today is January 7 and my due date is February 2. By another calculation it's actually January 30, so I really could have this baby in about three weeks. Gulp. I'm still at work full-time, and I really need to get things ready for my maternity leave. We have someone who is filling in for me so the next two weeks will be light-speed training for her. I have a checkup tomorrow with the midwife so I get to see more horrible numbers on the scale. That will be fun.

I washed all the newborn clothes and put them away in the baby's room. I have to find the bassinet sheets and make sure I have some cloth diapers to use as burp cloths. I should dust off the old Boppy pillow. We have tiny little diapers. We're pretty much ready. It's just a matter of the baby and the uterus bidding each other farewell. And from what I hear, second kids come shooting out a lot faster than first ones, so here's hoping I'm not at work when I go into labor! Hmmm, wouldn't that be fun!!

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman..........

So today is Thursday. That means there is still a full day left in the work week. Today was kind of a crap day with tons of stupid shit going on and by the time I got home I was fully wiped. My hubby was out all day tending to our new business venture - a coin-operated laundromat! - so it was just me and the kid much of the evening. I was so exhausted the best I could muster for dinner was Kraft mac and cheese, and then we lumped around on the living room couch. She tried to get me to read to her, and I sort of did, but every few minutes I started to cry inexplicably. I couldn't get into a comfortable sitting position that didn't involve some baby body part lodged between two of my ribs, and then my daughter got too excited and accidentally whacked me in the face. Normally that wouldn't be such a big deal but it totally made me cry, which I'm sure was a bit odd for her. By the time my husband got home I was a puddle of blubbering pregnant lady. We decided she didn't need a bath tonight because neither of us could handle the exertion, and somehow managed to get her to bed a few minutes ago. I don't know how we did it, because she was full of energy.

Tomorrow I hope to get some more of the stuff done at work that I couldn't finish today, but my general feeling today was just total OVERWHELMEDNESS (yeah, that's probably not a word, but you get the idea). I just need a break, and there isn't any such thing on the horizon any time soon. I haven't even gotten my daughter any Chanukah gifts at all yet, and tomorrow is the first night. Also we have no Chanukah candles yet. I just feel worn out. I think I'm going to go to bed now.