So, after promising no more long hiatii (also promising to find out what exactly the plural of hiatus is), I took another long one. If anyone had ever explained to me just exactly how tired you can get if you work 10 hours a day and have a toddler and are 21 weeks pregnant, I never would have believed them. I also would have quit my job and never had sex again.
Needless to say, nobody ever explained it to me, and here I am, as you see me now, hauling my ever-increasing ass around behind me in a sling. Yes, Internet, I am dumb. Trust me when I say that I will never, ever do this again. Husband is going to take up residence on the couch until I hit menopause. And he better take one of the babies with him.
So much has happened - blah blah blah school, blah blah blah work, blah blah blah grading, blah blah blah going to the hospital to have a drinking straw shoved into my kidney in a feeble attempt to keep the softball that lives there from plugging it up and killing me. Those are the small things.
Then there are the *big* things. Super big. Huge! The Bear now walks. On two feet. Like a human! (And it only took her 15 months, for those of you who are counting and secretly gloating that your child is more developmentally advanced than mine. And to you, I say, "Bite me.") She also has a vocabulary of more than 20 words and several signs. Her latest words include "rocker" (she got a Bear-sized rocking chair recently) and "oh, no!" which she uses whenever something doesn't quite suit her (can't find daddy, all out of bananas, dropped the toy, etc.) It's pretty cute - she sounds very distressed when she says it. She stacks blocks (and various other things - sliced carrots, for example) and then knocks them down. She is obsessed with keys and locks. If the lock is big enough, she will stick the key into it. If not, she will still try diligently for ages to make it work. She also likes tools. A lot. And books, and playing the piano. She actually pokes one note at a time with her pointer finger, rather than banging her fists on it, which is nice. Husband plays, and sometimes they play little duets. Very charming, if I do say so myself.
So, here's a little story which pretty much illustrates what life is like at my house. Husband dresses the Bear and takes her to daycare in the mornings. He's on a late shift, so they play for a few hours and have breakfast when she gets up, which is very cool for them. Then he goes to work, and I pick her up when I get off. Being a man, his taste in little girl clothes is not always what it should be. The other day I went to pick her up only to find her dressed in a plaid flannel shirt. The daycare ladies were singing the lumberjack song and she was dancing to it. (Since she is still bald, she totally looked like a boy. Rar.) Then, when it got cold, I left a note reminding Husband to put a coat on her. When I picked her up, she had a coat in a 6 month size, which covered hardly any of her belly - and a hood that only covered the back of her head. THEN I picked her up just yesterday and saw that her shirt was on *backwards*, with buttons up the front and a little tag sticking out under her chin. I wrote a very snotty note to Husband about how he should take the same care in dressing her that he does in dressing himself - make sure it fits, put it on the right way. I was a little superior-sounding, in that whole I'm-the-mommy-and-only-I-can-do-it-the-right-way tone that we mothers can get. Then, after watching the last game of the Series (yay, Sox!) I went upstairs to bed. As I fumbled around for my jammies, I took off my maternity pants only to realize that I HAD BEEN WEARING THEM BACKWARD. ALL. DAY. LONG. Big fat maternity elastic? In the back... I had to erase my note because I didn't want to be a hypocrite. No more getting dressed in the dark for me! Also? I need more sleep!
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Sunday, October 02, 2005
A series of unfortunate... well, you know.
My family is in the clutches of a man named Murphy... you know, the guy with the law. This weekend was supposed to be a time of family togetherness, a chance to get away, a mini vacation. Alas, that's not quite the way it turned out.
We (Husband, Bear, and I) were supposed to go to my cousin's wedding. It was in another state, and so we were going to make a weekend of it. We both took off on Friday so that we could drive down, and we planned to come back on Sunday. This was a fairly big deal to us, since we don't get out that often. We bought a new dress for the Bear to wear, since she only ever wears jeans and t-shirts. With the dress we had to buy tights and shoes, since she had neither. Husband had to get a new suit, since he's, um, grown a bit since our marriage. I had to get a dress, since all my dresses are for skinny people, and I definitely don't qualify for that right now (18 weeks today - the belly is definitely making its presence known). Then we had to get a gift, a card, fill the car with gas, buy snacks for the road, etc. Let's just say that we had invested some serious resources into this trip.
Well, Wednesday at about 3:30 the Bear's daycare calls me at work to tell me that her temperature is over 101 and we need to come pick her up. We give her Tylenol, let her run around naked, push lots of water, and put her to bed at about 5:30. She wakes up intermittently during the night, and her fever fluctuates between 102 and 103.6. She still eats and seems happy, so we're not extremely worried. Thursday morning her fever is down enough that we can legally take her to daycare. I bundle her up, give her more Tylenol, and hope she'll make it for at least an hour, long enough for me to whip up some sub plans. Husband ends up having to go get her around 10 because her fever is up, and she spends the rest of the day sleeping and running a pretty high fever. When I come home after school, we call the doctor and make an appointment for Friday morning. I've pretty much decided by this time that we aren't going to make it to the wedding, because who wants to spend 7 hours in a car with a sick baby, and what if she got sicker, it's really not fair to her, etc. etc. etc. I'm already off on Friday anyway, so I can just stay home with her.
Thursday night around 1 a.m., she wakes up and her fever has spiked to 103.8. We're very worried, but we give her more water and medicine, and put her back to sleep. She's up again at 5, and as soon as I walk in the room I can smell her. She has had the most explosive poo I think I've ever seen her have. It was like something died in there - way worse than normal poo smell. Anyway, we end up changing her, her clothes, her sheets, her blankets, you name it. We had to throw her onesie away... up her back, up her tummy, in her belly button... It took us half an hour together to clean her and get her back in bed. Then, when she woke up at 8, her temperature was back down to 98. She was happy, normal, she ate a good breakfast. We thought we were out of the woods, so I called the doctor, cancelled her appointment, and we started packing up to leave. It took us all morning to pack and get the three of us ready for the road. By the time we finally got going, it was after noon. We drove and drove and drove, and stopped for gas in The Middle Of Nowhere. And I mean Nowhere.* When we stopped, I changed the Bear and checked her temperature again. And lo and behold, it was back up to 102.
So, we turned around and drove *back*. Four hours and half a tank of gas later, we ended up in the exact same place we started from. We put the Bear down to nap at 4:30, and she slept for 16 hours straight. (Well, we woke her up once to make her drink something and give her more medicine.) Since then, the Bear has followed a pretty predictable routine. Her temperature breaks in the early morning, she's ok until after lunch, and then by 2 it spikes back up again, and stays high for the rest of the day/night.
At any rate, I'm pretty bitter by this point. I know it's not the Bear's fault that she's sick, but I had really wanted to go to this wedding, plus now we're out several hundred bucks for nothing. Grrr. So, most of my weekend was spent growling at people.
Then, Saturday night, as I'm sitting on the couch in my jammies, grading papers, my dad calls. My 86 year old grandmother fell down on the dance floor at the wedding and broke her hip. So now she's in the hospital and has to have a hip replacement, since they apparently can't just patch it up. And that worries me, because she's old and fragile, and we're very close. It worries me a lot.
So, instead of dancing, eating cake, and hanging out with my family, my weekend has been spent wrangling a grouchy sick Bear, eating junk food, and sitting on the couch in my jammies, feeling sorry for us. Yeargh.
Well, I had more to say, but the overall tone of this is so negative and making me feel sorry for myself all over again, that I'll have to save it for another day. Although I do feel slightly better for having vented.
Next time: my thoughts on the new Cub - boy or girl?
*Oh, and in my wanderings, we stopped at the only McDonald's in North America without a changing station in the ladies' room. I was so incensed by this that I went out to the front, berated the manager, and threatened to change the Bear on the front counter, right between the cash registers. Ok, their food is bad for you anyway, and they're poisoning America's children, but this was the last straw. I refuse to ever patronize one of their establishments again. And, if you have children (or know someone who does), I encourage you to do the same. These morons should know that most of their business comes from moms with small kids anyway, what with the Happy Meals, what with the PlayPlace. What self-respecting business wants to alienate its core demographic by forcing them to change sick babies in the backseats of cars in the middle of their parking lots in the hot sun? Not to mention the oh-so-bad-for-you food. McDonald's = pure evil.
We (Husband, Bear, and I) were supposed to go to my cousin's wedding. It was in another state, and so we were going to make a weekend of it. We both took off on Friday so that we could drive down, and we planned to come back on Sunday. This was a fairly big deal to us, since we don't get out that often. We bought a new dress for the Bear to wear, since she only ever wears jeans and t-shirts. With the dress we had to buy tights and shoes, since she had neither. Husband had to get a new suit, since he's, um, grown a bit since our marriage. I had to get a dress, since all my dresses are for skinny people, and I definitely don't qualify for that right now (18 weeks today - the belly is definitely making its presence known). Then we had to get a gift, a card, fill the car with gas, buy snacks for the road, etc. Let's just say that we had invested some serious resources into this trip.
Well, Wednesday at about 3:30 the Bear's daycare calls me at work to tell me that her temperature is over 101 and we need to come pick her up. We give her Tylenol, let her run around naked, push lots of water, and put her to bed at about 5:30. She wakes up intermittently during the night, and her fever fluctuates between 102 and 103.6. She still eats and seems happy, so we're not extremely worried. Thursday morning her fever is down enough that we can legally take her to daycare. I bundle her up, give her more Tylenol, and hope she'll make it for at least an hour, long enough for me to whip up some sub plans. Husband ends up having to go get her around 10 because her fever is up, and she spends the rest of the day sleeping and running a pretty high fever. When I come home after school, we call the doctor and make an appointment for Friday morning. I've pretty much decided by this time that we aren't going to make it to the wedding, because who wants to spend 7 hours in a car with a sick baby, and what if she got sicker, it's really not fair to her, etc. etc. etc. I'm already off on Friday anyway, so I can just stay home with her.
Thursday night around 1 a.m., she wakes up and her fever has spiked to 103.8. We're very worried, but we give her more water and medicine, and put her back to sleep. She's up again at 5, and as soon as I walk in the room I can smell her. She has had the most explosive poo I think I've ever seen her have. It was like something died in there - way worse than normal poo smell. Anyway, we end up changing her, her clothes, her sheets, her blankets, you name it. We had to throw her onesie away... up her back, up her tummy, in her belly button... It took us half an hour together to clean her and get her back in bed. Then, when she woke up at 8, her temperature was back down to 98. She was happy, normal, she ate a good breakfast. We thought we were out of the woods, so I called the doctor, cancelled her appointment, and we started packing up to leave. It took us all morning to pack and get the three of us ready for the road. By the time we finally got going, it was after noon. We drove and drove and drove, and stopped for gas in The Middle Of Nowhere. And I mean Nowhere.* When we stopped, I changed the Bear and checked her temperature again. And lo and behold, it was back up to 102.
So, we turned around and drove *back*. Four hours and half a tank of gas later, we ended up in the exact same place we started from. We put the Bear down to nap at 4:30, and she slept for 16 hours straight. (Well, we woke her up once to make her drink something and give her more medicine.) Since then, the Bear has followed a pretty predictable routine. Her temperature breaks in the early morning, she's ok until after lunch, and then by 2 it spikes back up again, and stays high for the rest of the day/night.
At any rate, I'm pretty bitter by this point. I know it's not the Bear's fault that she's sick, but I had really wanted to go to this wedding, plus now we're out several hundred bucks for nothing. Grrr. So, most of my weekend was spent growling at people.
Then, Saturday night, as I'm sitting on the couch in my jammies, grading papers, my dad calls. My 86 year old grandmother fell down on the dance floor at the wedding and broke her hip. So now she's in the hospital and has to have a hip replacement, since they apparently can't just patch it up. And that worries me, because she's old and fragile, and we're very close. It worries me a lot.
So, instead of dancing, eating cake, and hanging out with my family, my weekend has been spent wrangling a grouchy sick Bear, eating junk food, and sitting on the couch in my jammies, feeling sorry for us. Yeargh.
Well, I had more to say, but the overall tone of this is so negative and making me feel sorry for myself all over again, that I'll have to save it for another day. Although I do feel slightly better for having vented.
Next time: my thoughts on the new Cub - boy or girl?
*Oh, and in my wanderings, we stopped at the only McDonald's in North America without a changing station in the ladies' room. I was so incensed by this that I went out to the front, berated the manager, and threatened to change the Bear on the front counter, right between the cash registers. Ok, their food is bad for you anyway, and they're poisoning America's children, but this was the last straw. I refuse to ever patronize one of their establishments again. And, if you have children (or know someone who does), I encourage you to do the same. These morons should know that most of their business comes from moms with small kids anyway, what with the Happy Meals, what with the PlayPlace. What self-respecting business wants to alienate its core demographic by forcing them to change sick babies in the backseats of cars in the middle of their parking lots in the hot sun? Not to mention the oh-so-bad-for-you food. McDonald's = pure evil.
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