Up up and away

As I sat at my desk just now, loudly rattling my way into a little bag of wonton crisps to put on my Trader Joes salad - I realized I am like the poster model of the stereotypical office worker who doesn't work: I blog and check my email, interrupted by snacking and going to the conference room to breast pump while I read novels twice a day. It's a sad little game we are playing here at my workplace, where we pretend to be productive and the bosses pretend there is enough to do to keep us occupied. I suppose I could do things like micro-organize the back files, but then I'd miss out on good salad eatin' & blog writin'! And since nobody cares about the backfiles anyway, here I am.

It's amazing what a couple of nights of good sleep will do to your outlook on life. I'm very much looking forward to a trip I'm taking to Pittsburgh this weekend to see some college buddies. A couple of days ago I felt too tired to even think about it. Anonybabe is coming with; Anonyhubby has had too many sick days now to take the weekend off and we couldn't find a babysitter for the weekend. Good food and lots of wine and laughter should abound. I'm glad Anonybabe will get to see me this way, with my girlfriends. I'm glad I get to see me this way. It's a different kind of good time, of course, than being with the hubby. He...well, I was going to say he likes to laugh but I don't know that that's true. He likes to enjoy himself: going to hear a good band, watching a documentary, planning a garden, writing a song, taking a long walk to downtown or the north suburbs and back, going to a movie - these are things that fill Anonyhubby's pleasure well. Drinking wine and getting raucous and attempting to make your friends laugh, not so much. He's very wary of substances of any kind, including alcohol. I'm generally glad he's the temperate sort, but sometimes I wish he would loosen up a lot. But that's for him to sort out (or not) as he wishes. I married him as an uptight so-and-so and I love him as such.

As for me, I plan to get girly with my very girliest of girl friends: wine, food, spa time, shoe shopping, all while trying not to neglect my darling daughter as I get lost in enjoying myself.

The girl who hated bedtime

Can I do a long self-congratulating post here? A while ago, I made up a bedtime story for Anonybabe that I love love love. I tell it to her when she is exhausted and fighting the sleep (pretty much every night that she feels well). It's about a girl who hates bedtime.

It always starts out the same way: "once there was a little girl named Anonybabe who really hated bedtime. When it was time to go to sleep she would cry and fuss and kick and yell and roll around on the floor and holler 'no!' and pout and sulk and hit the bedroom wall. Basically she was a terror. Because she hated hated hated to go to bed. Why should she go to sleep when there were so many better things that needed to be done? So one day she decided that instead of bedtime she was going to have adventuretime. That night, she took her bath and brushed her teeth and when her parents went in to put her to bed, she lay calmly under the blankets in her fuzzy pajamas and gave them each hugs and said 'goodnight mother, goodnight father; I love you both and pleasant dreams!'. Her parents looked closely at Anonybabe and then looked at each other and shrugged and left the room. Maybe their daughter had finally decided she liked bedtime.

Then Anonybabe threw back the covers and took off her pj's (she had her clothes on underneath) and called to her best friend Francis (a handsome stuffed cat) and they both climbed out the window to have that night's adventure. And what do you think they saw?"

From there I ad lib anything. It's great fun. Of course right now Anonybabe could care less what I'm saying and singing works a lot better than talking at getting her to sleep. But I'm hoping someday she'll be into that story and that I can keep her body from climbing the walls by keeping her mind occupied.

Humpday

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think we're over the hump. Anonybabe is still coughing like a pack-a-dayer, but mostly she is back to her old self (complete with frantically protesting bedtime).

I can't tell yet, but Anonyhubby seems to be doing better too. After over two weeks of sickness, our tempers are short and we've had a few good and disheartening rows, but last night at least was nice and mellow. Our fights suck but lately I do seem to learn something about Anonyhub and how he ticks through them. I learn another way to make things work. I wish we had a more peaceful way of communicating, but there it is. At least I feel like we're groping our way towards a better place in our marriage - it gives me hope to know that the fighting isn't necessarily in vain.

On to happier fare: Anonybabe stuck out her tongue yesterday in response to Anonyhubby. It cracks us up. Also, she seems to have the base of a couple of words: she'll say "puh" and her face will light up when we bring up apples, and the same light bright of a face with "boo" when we talk about reading a book with her. Of course "bu, bu, bu" is kind of her description for everything right now, but it seems to me she does it with a little more joie de vive where books are concerned.

Snot and hacking and crying, oh my!

Damn it people. I want a break. A big one.

I was very mommy dearest last night. I wanted sleep and I wasn't getting any. Anonybabe would sleep only if she was in my arms and I was completely vertical. No lying in the bed, no sitting in the lazy boy, no sitting anywhere where I could actually sleep. And I wasn't happy about it. And I let this poor innocent baby know it. Plenty of "what the fuck's" to go around. Plenty of "What?....WHAT?"s.

Anonybabe has been really off of her food since around new year's, and she finally started eating in earnest yesterday, so naturally we let her set to in a big way. The result was a night of gastronomic discomfort. I would slather orajel on anonybabe's gums, thinking she was teething (by the way, I got just a little dab on my lips last night and that stuff is strong) and five minutes of crying later she would fart and quiet down.

Hubby and baby are still sick. Have been off and on since Christmas. Nothing serious, according to the pedi, just a series of one common ailment after another. I took the last day and a half off of work to care for them. Hubby was feeling better yesterday afternoon so I got an hour and a half to myself at a local coffee shop. there were three babies there playing together and it made me want to go home and see my sweeties. I'm such a sucker. I should've taken more time alone to refuel.

Sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, love bites.

Le Sigh

Man, last night was rough. Anonyhubby and I probably got 2 hours of sleep between the two of us. Anonybabe is a perfect storm of unhappiness right now, what with her nose running like a spigot, incessant sneezing, a rattling cough, diarrhea, no appetite, fever, and -- the cherry on top (or possibly the cherry of causation) -- what look to be 4 teeth coming in at once.

I'm all for letting the body do its thing, so I decided to let her sink into her fever sans Tylenol, until about 4am when she hadn't really gotten any substantive sleep, was crying inconsolably, wouldn't nurse, wouldn't make eye contact...it was scary. So we gave her a half dose of Tylenol on top of the Orajel we'd been using and she almost immediately perked up. Nursed for the first time in 8 hours and instead of her zombie-like crying, popped off of my boob to comment on the situation: "Bah!" And then gnawed her pacifier to sleep, complete with "gnyah gnyah gnyah" sound effects. The respite only lasted 30 minutes or so, she was up and down again after that.

I don't want to take away all of anonybabe's pain; I think the body has amazingly evolved ways of working things out for itself, but I gotta give Tylenol and Orajel their props; they really saved the day...er...night last night.

Baby be gone

Okay, I am addressing this to all two of my readers, but does anybody else out there have experience with IUDs?

Much as pregnancy and childbirth were a surprisingly spiritual and fulfilling experience (I'm not even being sarcastic here), as soon as they were over I was very very sure that I didn't want to be pregnant again for a long time, if ever.

So as soon as possible I got an IUD put in. Not the copper kind that just give your womb an inhospitable metallic tang, but one that releases hormones to make sure that not only will my womb remain barren, but my periods will remain light. So far, it's a little slice of birth control heaven, but there are a couple of things that creep me out about it.

1) The hormones. Not only are they leaching into my bloodstream, and thus, anonybabe's, but...it just don't seem natural, ya'll.

2) There's something living in my womb, an antifertile gadfly, if you will, always making sure that my uterus is too busy hiking up its skirts to avoid touching it to have the time to grow a lining hospitable enough for a bambino. I'm all for sticking things inside me but this smacks of holding on to your shovelled parking space in winter with a random piece of junk. A little crass and again...not natural.

3) The brochure casually mentions that about 10% of women who use this form of birth control develop cysts in their uterus. 10%!!! Supposedly a lot of them just go away when you take the IUD out, but some have to be surgically removed. These seem like neither kind nor reasonable odds for my uterus.

4) Supposedly it is very very rare for something to go wrong with these things, but when it does it goes spectacularly wrong: ectopic pregnancies, punctured uteri, embedded IUDs that have to be removed surgically.

Would I rather take an infinitesimal chance that I will lose my uterus or a larger chance that I will accidentally gain a lifetime of love? When I put it that way....

Anybody got any horror stories about IUDs? Even fourth hand accounts? The part of me that really really doesn't want to be pregnant right now is battling it out with the part of me that thinks I should be a little more natural in my birth control selections.

Touche, Mr. Not Brian

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/ibreeder/archive/2007/10/12/breeder-reader-.aspx