Snot fair!

Okay, anonybabe seems to be coming down with another freaking cold! If I don't want her to get colds, I gotta be a lot more careful about where I take her and what she mouths, and I have to accept that if we want to go out and be social and fly in planes and travel in trains and eat at restaurants, colds come with the territory.

I need to get this off my chest: I honestly thought that if I breastfed her and and fed her good foods she would never get sick. I feel super gullible for believing this, but the idea didn't come from nowhere, and it seems to have been implied in lots of pro-breastfeeding literature I read. That pisses me off, because then I feel like I'm doing something wrong if she gets sick. Like, not just mildly wrong, but deeply wrong. I brought this up in a Le Leche League meeting and it looks like I'm not the only one who has fallen so completely for the breastfeeding = perfect health idea. I know, I know, I'm stupid for even accepting that premise, but I did and now I don't appreciate being taken for a ride.

Listen, I like the information and support I've gotten fron from LLL, and the friends I've made there, but sometimes they piss me off with their cultlike devotion to breastfmilk. It is great to encourage women to breastfeed and to give them the tools to do so, but let's be realistic please. In the last meeting I went to, the leader read another woman's internet post about how it's unrealistic to expect every woman to breastfeed, that it isn't alwasy possible for every woman to do it and we shouldn't make those who don't feel guilty about it. The leader proceeded to pick apart and ridicule this woman's post without acknowledging any of her complaints as legitimate, just because she didn't like the conclusion this woman came to. Thank god one of my cousins told me how hard it was to start breastfeeding, because I don't think I heard it from anyone other than her and I could have gotten seriously discouraged if I didn't know other people had such a hard time at the beginning.

Anyway, I have about me the wrath of the wide eyed believer who has seen behind the curtain. God, I hate feeling so naive and inadequate!

Magic

My in-laws left yesterday; I found myself singing happily along with the teeny bopper R&B station this morning on the way to work.

I didn't think I disliked them that much but I guess the proof is in bustin' out I did in the Camry.

Through the jungle, welcome shell shock

Well, we made it through the holidays "just fine". But it was too much, I tell you.

Thursday anonybabe and I flew to Arkansas to be around my family. An estate sale, Chuck E. Cheese, and a round trip flight from Chicago on a holiday weekend ensued. Did everybody note that I flew alone with my baby? Good, just wanted to get proper credit for that.

Then, after taking the train home from the airport on Saturday, anonybabe and I got to get in a couple of meals and a nap before anonyhubby's parents descended on us. Their timing was impeccable; they arrived just as anonybaby was about to cash out for the night. Of course, then the exhausted baby was awake for another two hours. She did a lot of crying while the 'grents were around; she seemed to have developed full blown stranger anxiety overnight. I don't know if all of the travelling finally made her snap, or having some big, deep voiced man in the sanctity of her home did it, or she just picked up on my and anonyhubby's ambivalence to our visitors. Who knows. But I bogarted the baby that anony-in-laws drove 6 hours to see and they were cool about it. I will give them that. They were respectful of my choice to swoop in every time anonybaby got nervous around them.

I thought I was doing just fine with their visit and then I noticed I was having tourettes-type outbursts behind everybody's back, i.e., I would spill some water in my lap and drop a string of impassioned f-bombs, or I anonyhubby would be 5 minutes late getting anonybabe to me after work and I would think dark thoughts about his family the whole time. Couldn't journal about it so I talked to myself about it the whole way up to work this morning. Am still harboring unvented anger but when a woman in the car opposite me cut off my view of oncoming traffic I only cursed her mildly, so I think I'm getting better.

You turkey

Well, I'm off to see my mom tomorrow. And my sister and her three kids (one is hers by vagina, two are hers by marriage...all 8-10 yrs old, all very loud), my brother and his two kids (both are the product of his loins, 3 & 4 yrs old, but the four year old we just found out about this summer as he found out about it when the mother of his 3 year old was pregnant, and he didn't want to piss her off by letting her know he had a kid with his old girlfriend...anyway, both are very sweet if busy) and me and my 8 month old (alternately v. quiet and v. loud) are all going to be there.

I have a sense of resigned dread about the whole affair. Mostly because of my sister's kids. They are completely overwhelming to me, and we are going to be spending our time in a small duplex apartment in the midst of an estate sale. My mom is moving to her parents to help her father take care of her ailing mother. It was an impromptu decision that brought on an impromptu trip for all of us to see her and "help" her get ready to move.

Yeesh, this is a lot of back story just to get what I just said off of my chest: I'm not looking forward to being around my sister's kids, especially with a baby daughter in tow. When my mom took my brother's son (the only one we knew about at the time...let's call this anonynephew "Blondy") to visit my sister and her kids ("Freckles," "Sweet" & "Salty"), she basically had to run interference the whole time to keep them from steamrolling blondy and scaring the shit out of him. It wouldn't be such a big deal if I were a drill sargeant like my sister, but I'm a pushover. There has always been an uneasy tango of power in my mind, especially with my birth-nephew Freckles. I am the adult, the one with experience and authority. And he is the one with force of will and disdain for me. He's not a bad kid, but he's loud and rough and he makes me nervous. And he hates it when I tell him what to do. As do I.

And that's just Freckles. When all the kids are together they are like a tsunami of loud. If my daughter becomes loud she will be in heaven in her visits to her cousins. If she remains kinda reserved holidays on both sides of the fam will be as hellish for her as they are for me.

Thanks for letting me expose my inner librarian here.

I don't know if I have it in me to be like my sweet, spacy, Pollyanna aunt to these kids. I've more followed the lead of my other aunts and uncles, who alway seemed slightly uncomfortable around me.

Devil Baby

Do you know why my baby is demon spawn, sent from Satan to ravage my soul? Okay, she isn't at all, but I kind of needed to open the entry that way for symmetry's sake (see my last entry).



But having a baby is really hard on a marriage. I found myself actively hating my husband last night. Like, lying in bed stewing and thinking of horrible things I could say to him. Have I mentioned he's the primary caregiver? Kind of? He has her 4 days a week, I have her 2 & a half, and then we have her together one morning or evening before he goes in to work a half day. This works for us for several reasons, not the least of which because my husband is a natural homemaker and I am not. It's not like he likes cleaning, but it drives him nuts if the house is cluttered, where I could happily step over our messes for months. And he loves organizing. And he has an eye for design. My habitat has improved greatly since we moved in together. Pre-baby, when we both worked full time, the house would get really cluttered and he would sigh and bemoan the fact that the house was a mess, but he would sort of beat himself up about it as well as me. But now that he has a bit more time in the house, he cleans up when he can, and beats up on me for making a mess, and bemoans the fact that he seems to spend most of his time cleaning.



So that's part of the backdrop for last night. Which was Monday. Here's the rest: On Thursday, my husband did some major housecleaning. On Friday, I took care of our daughter and managed not to leave too much of a footprint. On Saturday, he left for work in the morning and I did some cooking, in between taking care of my daughter and getting us ready to go to the suburbs for a game night with our friend. We were spending the night, so I packed a bag light enough to carry with her to the train (a 20 minute or so walk) and took off in the evening. I left a mess in the kitchen, which I knew hubby would hate, but the time got away from me and I couldn't miss the train. I'd made beef stock and was worried that the dirty pot and other dirty implements were going to stink to high heaven by the time we got back, so I covered them best I could. I also left a food-smeared high chair tray on a kitchen chair.

We made it to our friends, had great fun playing and drinking and talking into the wee hours of the morning. Anonybabe had already been asleep for a few hours, and by the time I fell into bed I was exhausted. She wasn't sleeping well, kicking and turning and awakening every hour or so to cry out, so I didn't sleep too well. Then we spent the morning gabbing more with my friend, did a little shopping, got home, and dropped all of our stuff in the living room on top of her toys and some clean clothes that hadn't been put away. So now the living room was a wreck, the kitchen was a wreck, the bedroom was pretty messy and we were all exhausted. My husband got the baby to sleep for a short nap and took off for work, kissing me on the cheek and waving away my apologies that the house was such a mess. Then anonybabe woke up immediately with what was turning into a viscious cold. I tended to her for several hours, then got her to sleep a little before her dad got home. By this time I'm exhausted, the house is still a wreck, and I fall into bed. As I'm drifting off I hear anonydad freaking out about the stream of ants mobbing around the food that must've fallen to the floor when I fed her Saturday morning.

Anonybabe's cold makes her super restless that night, and since I breastfeed, I'm the one to get up with her. We don't get much sleep. When I get to work, I am peppered with annoyed calls from my anonyhusband as he realizes just how dirty the kitchen is. What he doesn't realize is just how tired I am. So when I get home and take the baby from him and inform him I will graciously give him 30 minutes of cleaning time before I fall into bed, he lets me have it. Which pisses me off. We do that horrible thing where we insult each other through the baby: "we're going to have to call DCFS to take mommy away for letting so many ants in the house, aren't we?" "we're going to have to tell dad to suck it, won't we?" We aren't laughing. We're mad.

So I go to bed hating him, wanting to say something horrible, wanting him to suffer. Why does he have to get so pissed off about cleaning? Yes, it's important. But the reality is that I'm not going to get to it all the time, I am not going to spend all of my precious not-work time cleaning, so back the fuck off.

*Sigh*. Then I got some sleep and loved my husband again. And I even make an effort to remember to wipe up the food that falls to the floor when she eats.

But this is kind of scary. When you don't get enough sleep or enough time together so that fights about cleaning the kitchen turn into a 2 day hatefest? I knew parenting would be hard, but the strain on my marriage is something that kind of blindsided me.

And I'm thinking of having another? Am I nuts?

Angel baby

You know how I know my daughter is a fat wee angel sent from heaven?

When her nose is full of snot, so much so that when she nurses or tries to suck on a pacifier she has to cough and sputter to breathe, and I have to suction said snot out with our baby blue bulb of an aspirator, what does she do? She lies very still and tries to contain her glee while I stick the business end up her nose and slurp out a watery load, and then she laughs like a maniac and looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to do it again. She'll do this TWELVE OR MORE TIMES IN A ROW.

I think I'm in danger of losing my best friend who has a normal baby that spits up and refuses to sleep. She's angry that I didn't tell her how hard parenting would be. It's hard...but damn. When you have a kid that loves to eat, bathe, sleep and get her nose suctioned there isn't much room for complaint. She'll probably give us hades to pay later (we wait for it as she's an Aires) but for now I'm gonna enjoy the hell out of my cushy momhood. And be sure to call my friend and complain when she has a rare sleepless night or temper tantrum.

Speaking of aspirators, I'm four and a half years older than my brother. I remember very little about his babyhood. (He's kind of forever locked in my mind as an 8-12 year old. When I dream about him, he's almost always that age. After he passed that age I was a completely self-involved high schooler and then I went away to college and never really got to know him as an adult. But I digress). How come I don't remember that much of my brother cooing and crawling and grinning, but I vividly remember the rust-colored aspirator and white pasty Desitin my mom used to use on his butt? I remember the smell of his changing table better than I can remember the fat little legs that used to kick around on it.

Fat little legs kicking on a changing table...god, I love my daughter!