Stares of Disbelief

Our Landlady is crazy. We own our house but rent the property, shitty yes, but at least we can do what we want with the house. Helen isn't crazy in the mentally ill "Shutter Island" kind of crazy way, but she recently had neck surgery and is on a high amount of pain killers which makes her, interesting, to converse with.
Yesterday I was taking Mr. Pants out for our daily walk and she approached us.

Helen: "Look at that big boy! He's almost a year now right?"
Me: "Yes, well in December, he's nine months on Friday"
Helen: "I knew it, almost a year. Is he walking yet?"
Me: "no,but he's pulling himself up to standing and he's getting stronger"
Helen: "How many teeth does he have?"
Me: "Oh, none yet, but he's teething like crazy"
Helen stops talking and stares at me like I'm this terrible person for not caring that my baby doesn't have teeth yet. She turns around and walks away. True story.

Vernacular

The New Modern Dictionary as According to the Clendenniak family.

Boppy: A U-shaped pillow ideal for nursing a baby on, resting a crossword puzzle on, or a laptop.
Use: "Honey, would you grab my boppy?"

Nipple: A nipple-shield used to facilitate breast feeding for a woman with "flat nipples"and her baby with a tiny mouth"
Use: (said loudly in public situations) "Oh crap! I forgot my nipple"

Turdles: Poo
Use: "Guess who laid down some turdles in his unnawears today?!"

Unnawears: Singular of underwear
Use: "Guess who laid down some turdles in his unnawears today?!"

Booghas: boogers
Use: "Hold still and let me pull these boogahs out of your face"

Gentle: Do the opposite of what you are doing with the cat right now.
Use: "gentle with Stella, baby, no grabby, gentle gentle"

Grabby: What you are doing with the cat right now.
Use: "gentle with Stella, baby, no grabby, gentle gentle"

Alone, But Not Really

The baby is on the floor, looking up at me and kicking his feet on the floor. Bonk. bonk, bonk. The fish tank is making it's "I'm peeing" sound and the computer is humming. Otherwise, the house is totally quiet now because I am home alone. I would go to the park, or the library or just for a drive. But the car is with H-Man and H-Man is up in the mountains working.
I'm thinking about mountains and how people used to consider them little more than large, dangerous warts on the surface of the earth. This was before modern vehicles and Sir Edmund Hillary, apparently.
When we were in New Zealand we were walking around Castle Hill, a place where giant bare rocks jut out of the earth. A little boy cam running up the hill and shouted "I'm Sir Edmund Hillary" and started to climb the rocks. What do kids say in America? "I'm Neil Armstrong"? I kind of doubt it.
I watched "The Right Stuff" not too long ago. Interesting how the space race was the most interesting and exciting thing in the world at that time, and today very few people care about or think about space travel. It was a good movie. I really enjoyed it, even though it had Dennis Quaid in it.
I was driving this morning and pulled up the stop sign at the bottom of our street. There was a sign there it said "Wait here for Pilot Car" So I waited, but there was no one around. No construction workers, not car, nothing. So I turned right, without this alleged pilot car , and pulled up to the stop light 100 yards are so away. There was a construction worker there, holding a slow sign in the middle of the street. He shouted at me "You need to wait for the Pilot Car at that stop sign" I responded "Where was the pilot car, I didn't see anything!" and he said "you just have to wait for it. But you can go now" I looked at the cross traffic speeding past and looked at him and said "the light is red and there are cars going, how can I go now?" and he said "you need to wait for the light to turn green" I considered suggesting that they could have hired a traffic cone to do his job of holding a slow sign and spouting ridiculousness, but since I'm not too clear on the union guidelines of traffic cones, I kept my mouth shut.

6 months later....

So, it turns out that having a baby takes up a lot of your time. Even when he's asleep on my lap, the clickety clackety of the keyboard as I type wakes him up, so updating this blog has been difficult, nay, impossible until recently when the man-child began to sleep through the night. In his own bed.
Having not slept for six months, at least for more than 2 hours at a time, I can definitely say that sleep is a valuable commodity in this house. Many mornings I wake up with the baby, take him for a walk and run errands while Husband man sleeps in and gets ready for work. H-man, by the very nature of his job, doesn't get home, sometimes until 2 or 3 am. So bless his heart, he gets to sleep in. But often I find myself rolling over to my beloved husband and whispering into his ear,"I will give you a million dollars if you wake up with him today" before I collapse back into the warm fuzzy arms of sleep.
Motherhood is wonderful, of course, and our little Mr. Pants is the light of our lives and the center of everything that we live for. Also, he just may be the cutest baby who has ever existed in the history of the world.
Before Mr. Pants I never could understand why people talked about their kids so much. Now I get it. I used to not really care about babies, then I had one and I find myself "Oohing" and "Awwwwwing" over someones baby pictures or some baby at the store. It's rather disgusting, and startles people close to me to find out that I do, in fact, have a soul somewhere in this cold squishy body of mine.
Speaking of cold and squishy. If I read one more quote from a celebrity about how they lost all their baby weight by breastfeeding, I may lose it. I'm still at the the weight I was when I popped out the little guy, and that little guy eats more than you could imagine.

Life These Days

Baby Baby Baby.
No excuses, but I haven't updated for a while because I'm bad at math, even worse at acrobatics and haven't figured out the equation of how to juggle a baby and type with two hands at the same time. Furthermore the frustration of typing with one hand, blindly is greater than the joy of writing.
A few moments of freedom can be had by placing said baby in a play pen with toys and putting on music, this works for about 20 minutes. Long enough to eat breakfast and type a little.

Zen and the Art of Breastfeeding in Public

We went to the zoo. Mom and H-man walked around while I found a quiet bench near the mountain lions. I whipped out the boob and the baby chowed down. It was as simple as that. Until the people came. Lots of people, most who avoided my general bench area. Many who did not notice me, and several who commented on what I was doing (all positive).
It's getting easier every day. The mountain lions seemed to enjoy watching us, or they were eying the delicious morsel I had cradled in my arms.

One month and 3 days

I get as much sleep as I need. I go to bed around midnight and get out of bed around 1:30 the next afternoon. This, by no means, says that I am sleeping 13 and half hours a day. We wake up every two to three hours for about an hour to feed the baby and change pee-pee diapers. On good nights he'll sleep for three hours, wake up to eat for 20 minutes and then go back to sleep. On bad nights he'll sleep for an hour and eat for and hour.
Thank god for my wonderful husband. I don't know how single moms do it, and I don't ever want to find out.

Going out is getting easier. No longer does it take an hour to get him ready, and the car seat is a snap. The hard part is feeding in public. I suppose after labor and every nurse and doctor at the hospital seeing my poonanner and boobs I should be less modest.

Motherhood

I have managed to keep a human baby alive for two whole weeks now. This is no small feat as I often lose interest in projects very quickly (see also: violins, telescopes, knitting, writing the great American novel.) I suppose it helps when the project literally demands your attention every two hours at least and is so cute and cuddly that you don't want to let the project out of your sight.
Sure I'm tired, but it's worth it. Anyway I get 8 hours of sleep, eventually, through the day.

A few gripes:
Breast Pumps: Obviously designed by a man. I sit on the bed pumping and watching the dairy cows in our backyard and feel their plight. The cows and I, we are sisters.

Frequency of Diaper Changes:
The baby pees, you want him to feel comfortable so you change him. He then feels comfortable enough to poop. So you change him again. Then he pees while you're changing him. It's insane.

Hormones: While I was still in the hospital, that movie "Overboard" came on TV. I watched it up until the part where Goldie Hawn remembers who she is, I had to turn it off because I was crying too hard.

But really, everything else is pure joy. So sorry, fellow panda mothers, I shall not be joining your ranks.

Thursday part 2

Looking back on Thursday December 3rd now, it's a little difficult to remember every detail and even more exhausting trying to describe everything. We went to the hospital that morning, fully not expecting to leave with a baby. In fact, I tell H-man now that even when I was pregnant, the concept of having a child was totally lost on me.
We arrived at the hospital at 7 a.m. and five hours later I was begging for drugs. I have never felt so much pain in my life. I had a rock dropped on my head when I was 10 years old, but I barely felt that. The pain can't really be described. As I was laying there, being hooked up to an iv drip that would soon bring sweet relief, I concentrated on the sensation, attempting to describe to myself what it was like. The closest I think I can come to explaining what the pain was is that it felt as if I was being squeezed around my belly by a large snake and that its fangs were pumping hot acid into my lower back.
The drugs brought fleeting relief, and and hour later, gripping the sides of the bed, voice shaking and tears running down my face I whispered the fatal word I swore I would never utter: "epidural". You see, a natural birth was extremely important to me. In child birthing class we did an exercise where we layed out in flashcards what would be the most important aspects of childbirth, for example: natural tear vs. being cut, cesarean vs. vaginal delivery. The top of my list included no pain medication and for H-man to be with me.
I got the epidural, and I'm glad I did. My pain level was near the top of the scale, a 10, but quickly dropped to a blessed, sweet 0. As the anesthesiologist placed the needle in my spine, my water broke and labor really swung into full gear. Thank God for pain management. I may have asked the anesthesiologist to father my next child. I love that man, he does wonderful things.
Hours later, H-man ran home to get a few things, that very moment a doctor I had never met came in, shook my hand hello, looked at my cervix and broke out the stirrups and three nurses in green wheeled in a "delivery table". As the nurses bickered among themselves on the lay out of the tools on the table, I plead with the doctor to please wait for H-man to come back, "please he will be right back, please!"
"push!" the doctor responded. I began to cry, "no, no, I can't yet, please can we wait!?"
"Push!" he replied, but I wouldn't. Nothing was coming out of me without my husband in the room, goddammit.
Moments later my beautiful, wonderful husband came back, looking quite stricken that I had my feet up in the stirrups and this doctor was telling me to push. I took his hand and then I pushed.
Pushing out our son is the most incredible thing I've ever done. Looking at it now, and reflection of that day I still can't picture myself doing these things but after an hour of pushing, and pooping in front of my husband, a doctor I had just met, and three nurses who I will never remember, our baby was born.
I often read about women giving birth and feeling this rush of love and light flow over them as they see their baby for the first time. In all honesty I felt I would be more like a panda bear that rejects their cub. I was wrong. When they put our son on my chest, all gooey and gross, that wave of warmth and love washed over me. I touched his tiny, slimy body with my fingers and stared at his swirls of dark hair. Incredible.
Our baby was born at 8:46 pm on Decemeber 3rd 2009. Four full weeks early, 5lbs 11 oz and 18 1/4 inches long.