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My baby is growing up.
Every day there’s a new word or a new something. Two days ago I pointed to a duck and said, “What’s that?” expecting to hear the usual “dah-DAH!” And she said, “Duck!” I almost crumbled in a little heap right there.
Yesterday she said “more” as she signed it. She had never ever done that before, but she did it again today. (After we saw a street sweeping machine thingy. I explained to her that it was making the streets clean, and she said, “Ah kleen! More!”) What’s next? Is she going to say please and sign thank you? Just turn my world upside down, why don’t you!
It’s not like Miss M is my last child, as the roiling in my abdomen reminds me on a very regular basis. I’ll get to experience these little growing up moments again. But not with her, I guess. I feel happy and sad and proud and terrified all at once.
My profound thought for the day…brought to you by the fact that we are out of flour so I could only make one batch of muffins and had to skip the brownies, too.
Last night’s post was courtesy of borrowing someone else’s wireless connection. Vaguely icky. People probably do it to us all the time; we keep meaning to encrypt it.
But now we’re back on track. For the record, it was more than 28 hours of being disconnected. (Many hours for Taxman to make fun of me, but he could use his computer, his phone, and he spent all day with people over 3 feet tall. Although Miss M was super cute today, and entertained herself enough that I got a lot of Shabbat cooking done even before she went to bed!)
When the cable guy showed up (the problem was across our building and even wider, thanks to Con Edison), I was very happy to see him. It would have been better if he had been carrying pizza as well–hey, it was 6:30–but reconnecting me to the universe beyond NPR and the local radio stations was very appreciated!
I had just gotten used to actually plugging the computer into a router again (only when Miss M was sleeping) when all hell apparently broke loose down at our cable company. Actually, I don’t know what happened; I just hope nobody was hurt. If not, there had better be some refunds coming.
All I know is that we have not had phone (VOIP), internet (cable), or TV since at least 2pm, if not earlier. I may lose my mind.
On Shabbat I am happy to go without all these things, but then I am in the zone. Taxman is with me for entertainment. I hoard copies of The New Yorker for Shabbat. I read cookbooks. I attempt to nap.
help!
Warning, vent ahead.
In my life I’ve owned a lot of clothes from the Gap and Old Navy. I am a casual kind of person. I like denim. I like cotton. I like clothes that don’t have to be dry cleaned. I dress Miss M in a lot of (sale priced) babyGap.
But SERIOUSLY! Do I look illiterate?
I went to return a gift of Miss M’s for $18.49 worth of store credit, to be spent when she outgrows her 18-24 month clothes. Gap was heavily advertising their new petite and tall sizes. Being a petite size, I was vaguely interested. I admit I was sucked into their little poster that said, “Sign up on-line to receive e-mail updates! Coupon and free shipping from gap.com!”
So I signed up, using my “extra” hotmail account left over from my single days…where all the junk mail goes. I got a nice chatty email from Gap customer service, explaining that the coupon was not a coupon for a discount but for free shipping from gap.com…for purchases of $100 or more. Cripes. I never spend that much at the Gap at once. Maybe in three trips. Or four, if the sale racks are particularly good to me.
But it gets better! The coupon for free shipping expired on 12/31/05. When did I receive the super-mysterious coupon code? 1/16/06. Did they expect me to go back in time to use such a bargain? I fired off an email back to customer service asking something to that effect, but to no avail. Potentially because I was using my super-snarky voice. But SERIOUSLY!!!!
Then there was the Old Navy fiasco. Two years ago I bought some maternity clothes from them, and I was hoping to just add a skirt or two to my (very boring) wardrobe. So a couple of observations from the Old Navy maternity section…
1. Umm, design department? Weird shades of brown and tan are NOT the new black. There is a reason why women, at their most oddly shaped and vulnerable, body-wise, like black. It doesn’t matter that spring is eight weeks away. WHERE IS THE BLACK?
2. I don’t want jeans that ignore the fact I am pregnant. I WANT OVERALLS! Comfort over style. I couldn’t find overalls that fit during my first pregnancy either…getting annoyed here.
3. I would be out of my mind to think about plunking down $34.50 for a skirt that already makes my ass look big. I am only 29 weeks along, and I know from experience I am only going to get bigger. Buy my pre-pregnancy size indeed.
I would be much more coherent if Miss M had been sleeping better, but around here you take what you get.
Rant over….
While Miss M was sleeping I managed to figure out Haloscan (easy, easy) and BlogRolling (not quite as easy, but not hard).
But then she woke up before I could do anything more interesting….
Miss M’s new favorite spoken word, apparently, is “down.” Or “DOWN!” to be more accurate. She uses it all the time. When I pick her up from someplace interesting (the edge of the street, the floor of a public bathroom, our apartment hallway–which is a great place to lie down, apparently), when I try to strap her into the stroller, or when she falls down, either accidentally or on purpose. In the last context, “DOWN!” is slowly replacing “Ah-boom,” which is kind of a shame, I think. For two reasons: first, “Ah-boom” is really so much cuter; and second, “Ah-boom” sounds nothing like “DAMN!”*** (Unfortunately, “DOWN!” issuing from Miss M’s mouth can make no such claim.)
***I really, really, really try very hard not to curse in front of her. Or Taxman, because it bothers him.
Can toddlers be affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder? This is my pondering for the day.
Today is a day much like Saturday. (The day of the very early and very long nap.) Very grey and very rainy, and, as a special bonus, incredibly windy. I had decided during the 3am bathroom run that it was very unlikely we were going to leave the house today because a) we have that luxury and b) Taxman’s dry cleaning can wait. And I hate those plastic rain covers for strollers. I am constantly checking to make sure she is breathing.
Miss M rallied at 7:30, knocked on the bathroom door a lot while Taxman was in the potty, ate oatmeal and melon for breakfast, watched Sesame Street, got her talons (uh, toenails) cut, played with blocks, colored with crayons, colored with markers, had a snack, boogied to Laurie Berkner. An ordinary day.
But two “off” things. First, she requested to nurse during Sesame Street. The mid-morning nursing has not been popular around here for a few months. She did nurse, half lying, half sitting, and with her attention mostly on the letter of the day. P, in case you were wondering.
Then she got whiny and asked to nurse again at a quarter to 12. I thought maybe she was hungry again, so I asked if she was. More half-crying, so I asked if she was sleepy. She then signed “sleep,” and kept signing to nurse. I wasn’t expecting her to want to nap for another hour at least, but we trundled off to the bedroom…and she’s been out cold for an hour and a half.
Somehow I feel like if we had been out and about, or even if it had been sunny instead of gloomy, that she’d just be going to nap now.
Hmm….
Last night as I was nursing Miss M before bed, I noticed that I was having Braxton-Hicks contractions. She nursed for quite a long time (more than 30 minutes), and I had at least five in that time period.
Braxton-Hicks contractions are normal at 28 weeks. I know this. I also know that the uterus can’t be stimulated by nursing for a while yet. But don’t think that I wasn’t a little freaked out.
After Miss M went to bed I lounged on the couch with my hands on my belly. More contractions. I drank a lot of water. More contractions. Interspersed with increasingly frequent bathroom runs.
I finally went to bed and tried desperately to relax. No dice. When Taxman came to bed an hour later, I told him what was going on. I knew it was probably nothing…when I was 27 weeks pregnant with Miss M I had a similar incident: a full morning of frequent Braxton-Hicks. I had called my OB and, to be cautious, he had me come in for an ultrasound and an IV. Not only was I not experiencing preterm labor then, but I was almost two weeks late in delivering her….3 months later.
I didn’t especially want to call my doctor. It was very late, and I had pretty overwhelming evidence that they were not real contractions. (I could lie down. When I was in real labor, I was in excruciating pain when I was horizontal, so I spent a few nights sitting on my birth ball.) Frankly, the worst part of it was realizing that if I did call my OB and he did want me to come by the hospital that we had no plan for our sleeping sweet girl, short of me going alone. Taxman’s parents, who have been her only babysitters, are abroad for the week. Even if we did have a high school or college student on our occasional payroll, it was the middle of the night.
So now I am thinking that we should make arrangements with our close friends who live across the street that in dire emergencies they should be our middle of the night contacts. (We’d obviously do the same for them and their toddler.) Miss M would, of course, flip out if I were not there in the middle of the night, but during the day she knows them and loves them. So there would be screaming, but by the light of morning I think she’d be ok.
But I digress. Ultimately, after several more glasses of water, and the appropriate number of visits to the bathroom to compensate, I was able to get to sleep. Today was back to normal. I am guessing yesterday was a combination of too much running around, not enough rest over the weekend, and not drinking enough water.
Hopefully that will be all the pregnancy excitement for now, and I can get back to concentrating on how to convince Miss M to stop hitting me while she’s nursing. She did it tonight, and she was abruptly trundled off to bed after being warned. It is just testing limits–she has been a little rough with me while not nursing as well–but I certainly don’t want this to lead to weaning. On the other hand, I can’t allow her to beat up on me. In a few months I’ll be holding and nursing someone else as well, and hitting me/her father/her sibling just can’t be acceptable behavior. Sigh.
Back when Miss M was exclusively nursing and I was slowly admitting that someday I would allow her to enjoy solid foods, I promised myself that I would never use food as a bribe or part of a game.
Ha! What am I doing now? Getting Miss M to eat her oatmeal by plopping a dried blueberry on each spoonful as she eats it (by herself, though, so that’s good). Every three or four spoonfuls she tries to pick the blueberry out without eating the oatmeal, but that is not part of the Ema-Miss M breakfast contract. I am not ashamed…in fact I am happy to report that it works with yogurt too.
Lately, I’ve found myself at the library a couple of times a week in search of recipes, so Miss M gets a snack to keep her quiet for five minutes. But I am swearing off Shabbat guests until the kids are about 11 and 9, so the library won’t be as necessary for a while.
And of course Miss M got sesame pretzels last week when I had to take her to my OB appointment. She’s fine in the waiting room, but gets hysterical when I am being examined. The snack kept her quiet, to a point…we almost had a choking incident while I was getting my Rhogam shot, though.
Blogging, that is.
Actually, Taxman is driving his brother (the aforementioned sleepover company) to the airport, so I am home with a sleeping Miss M and a computer that can actually connect to the Internet. As soon as he returns he will have to settle down to work, so the dishes can wait.
So I wanted to ask…weather karma: do other people believe in this? (If so, what the heck did those poor people in Seattle do?) I was so thrilled earlier this week when it was in the 50s and sunny. I spent part of one afternoon and part of one morning chasing Miss M around the park. (Fun but exhausting when it is getting harder to bend over and clamber up the slide after her.) But in the back of my mind, I knew there would be some sort of karmic debt exacted from us for such nice weather in January–three feet of snow in March, average temperature of 12 degrees in February, that sort of thing. Anyway, we may be partially in payback mode right now because it’s been raining, with varying degrees of howling wind to accompany the raindrops, for 24 hours. It might be cold enough overnight to start sleeting. Fun! But it would finally justify Miss M’s boots.
Thankfully, today was the first day since Monday that I did not have to go anywhere or have an overwhelming list of cooking projects. Miss M, after a pretty darn good night–up once, at 4am, but promptly soothed with a trip to Ema & Abba’s bed and so quiet in her sleep I forgot she was there!–slept until after 8:00, which justified skipping the one block walk to synagogue. (The advantage of going to a 7:00 service is that it is over by 9!) To tell the truth, I was inordinately sleepy, probably because I was not being pulled in 40 directions. Even Miss M seemed to intuit the idea that on a day like today, the best thing to do was go back to bed. We expected her to nap late, as she often does after a good night, but she seemed tired and signed to nurse and was napping by 11:30….and slept for almost three hours. (Yes, I am very jealous. We had lunch guests coming so I couldn’t climb into bed for more than the 20 minutes I was nursing her.)
My big achievement for the day? I got to wear a dress. Because Miss M napped so early–before I got around to picking from my sad Shabbat maternity selection of clothes–I wore a dress for the first time in almost 19 months. I even spent a minute looking for a regular bra to celebrate the occasion, but I couldn’t find one. Ack!
Ah, the Taxman cometh. I must run….
