The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

I’ve been trying so hard not to be annoyed with Ella today, but seriously? It’s 3:30 and I have been trying to get her to nap since noon. Child! You need to sleep! Why do you hate your mother so?!
Ever since Tom came home and his work schedule is different (he works from 3pm to 11) her sleep schedule makes no sense, and we are all worn out by it. We’ve never been a set-in-stone-schedule family, but we’ve always had a routine that worked, and we could always count on a few hours of downtime in the middle of the day. Lately though, our routine (park, lunch, books, diaper, nap) has lost it’s magic, and life got a whole lot harder. No nap until 3 means that she won’t fall asleep tonight until at least 10, and really ya’ll, that is the best case scenario. I’ve seen 1am with this kid more than once this week (which has no bearing on when she wakes up though, of course. 7am it is! A full day of crankiness for all!)

Today, after two hours of laying with her and trying to get her to sleep, I finally stuck her in her room, put up the baby gate, and went outside to vent my frustration at the neighborhood cats. I thought she went to sleep a few times, but no, she was just playing quietly, reading or dressing her dolls. When she sees me though, she bursts into tears, so tired and angry that she is not asleep. I feel all of my mamamojo draining out of my ears, and all I can do is hand her back her water she threw over the gate and then sit out of sight in the hallway until she stops yelling and goes back to happily ripping pages out of books. I can’t be mad at her – it’s not like she is doing this to spite me, but it’s hard to remember that sometimes.

What it really comes down to, is that I need her to have a scheduled nap by the time baby comes. I need her to go to bed before 9pm. I need her to be able to fall asleep with someone other than me. None of this felt so far away a few weeks ago, but right now I feel like it is never going to happen.

I know she needs it too. If she will take a nap for her dad before he goes to work, and she will go to sleep for me at night, then not only does she get special time with each of us, but she will also have a stability that she will need when baby gets here. And that I need now. But if it does not happen soon, any progress we make before baby comes will be forgotten, not enough of a habit to survive the chaos of Hurricane Newborn.

I just let her out of her room because she was asking for her “Boots! Boots!” which we happily put on, and then she promptly laid down next to my desk, and went to sleep.

I don’t think I am ever going to understand her.

PS: Anyone commenting over on the RSS feed, I just realized that after 5 posts or so, the old ones are purged, and I lose your comments. I went through and copy/pasted the ones I could still grab, but  am bummed that I lost a bunch before. Boooo.

Spontaneous purchase of the week:

New glasses. Okay, just new frames, since my prescription changes to much when I am pregnant, but come January I’m rockin’ the new glasses.

Tom had to stop and pick up some new contacts, and I never pass up an opportunity to look in mirrors, so I went in with him. Within two minutes I had picked these out and asked if we could buy them. Lucky me they were already discounted (discontinued style) AND the shop was having a 50% off frames sale, so they were ridiculously cheap (for glasses frames).

And since I also never pass up an opportunity to take stupid pictures of myself and post them on the internet:

A short (and incomplete) history of my glasses.

First, it cracks me up that this picture has been viewed on Flickr 4X as often as the ones uploaded at the same time. I can only imagine the “WTF is that?” expression on your faces when you clicked on it. So yes, that is my family circa 1996ish, in Bartlesville Oklahoma. I am the only one you can snark here, since it IS my glasses we are supposed to be laughing at, people, not our awesome western themed shirts. Besides, my mom is freaking beautiful and I am angry I did not get her chin.
Annyways, check out these glasses.

Gah, it is hard to look at pictures of yourself as a preteen. I am 12 or 13 here, and finally convinced my dad that not being able to see the TV from 3 feet away IS a problem. No one in my family had glasses until they were old, so my dad assumed I was just lazy and was not opening my eyes wide enough or something. So these were the first glasses, which I wore for much too long, and then just gave up wearing them at all when they stopped working. Imagine our surprise that you had to go get new glasses every few years. Stupid eyes.

More after the jump…

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Wow, yesterday sucked. I’m not usually one to write off an entire day, since the little blue bird on my shoulder reminds me that *every day is a good day if you make it one*, but apparently little bird knows when to save his feathers and was no where to be found. My first trimester nausea was back, I cried off and on all day long over ridiculous things (no celery in the house? WHYYYY?!) and then, around 4, I started spotting.

Spotting, for the non-pregnant-lingo crowd = bleeding from the vag, but not heavily enough to soak through anything, just enough that every time you wipe, it’s pink. For an hour or two I could shrug it off, but Ella chose yesterday to test her plans to take over the world with whining (Operation “No More Nap”) so I could not lay around and eat popsicles waiting for baby to move and make me feel better. Eventually I called my midwife, who knows me well enough to know to make me laugh, because really, I just needed to relax. The little bit of contracting I had was not progressive, or anything more than I had been feeling for a few weeks. Baby had been moving all night, indicating a good strong placenta. I had major bleeding with Ella, (and spent 6 hours in Labor and Delivery to be told nothing, and to be insulted a number of times) and she is perfect. A little bit of spotting is actually normal, and I tell people this all the time on pregnancy boards, but it sure doesn’t feel normal when it happens to me.

Tom came home around 11 and took Ella off my hands (because she was STILL AWAKE) and I laid in bed and talked to Cricket, telling him that I loved him, and that he was freaking me out a little. He started wiggling around, thumping on my cervix, kicking me when I poked him, and telling me, in his best imitation of my teenage voice, to “Chill out mom. It’s not like I was out doing heroin.” True. But you are grounded.

(What Ella and I think about yesterday)

Oh there’s my blue bird.

Okay, enough sappiness. I actually avoided commenting on a few new-to-me journals yesterday because I knew the first thing they would see if they clicked over was my love-letter-to-the-guy-who-makes-me-bacon and as true and lovely as it is, it’s not really my freshest face. Instead, how about a lazy list? Yay!

An undetermined number of things that you probably don’t know about me:

1. All time favorite comfort food: Raw potatoes (peeled and sliced, with salt). Tom wrinkles his nose and says they taste like dirt, but.. um.. that’s kind of why I like them. Just thinking about them makes my mouth water (even though they are a contraband food, right up there with pie. See, pie=potatoes=yum.)
2. Ella owes her existence to a lucky throw at a hockey game, which won Tom and I $500 and paid for a week at the coast. Where it rained.
3. I worked at this summer camp the first few years of college, both because I had been telling people for almost 10 years that I was going to be a Speech-Language Pathologist when I grew up (and even chose my university for their program) but also because I needed the money to bum my way around the NW, living in a tent for the rest of the summer.
4. I host a knitting club every other Sunday, though I rarely knit. Really I just like the girls, Ella likes their kids, I have the space (MIL’s shop) and occasionally I am inspired to pick up my needles (but not this week, I’ll be working on:)
5. This quilt top I both started AND finished today!

   

    I picked up the fabrics on a whim a while ago, and thought the colors would work for either a boy or a girl (what do you think?) I am still wishy washy about whether it will be the baby blanket, but I think it will be a baby blanket. I am also debating adding some small embroidery before I pin and quilt it, but if I am going to do that, I have to do it tomorrow since I want to have it ready to quilt on Sunday. That will make the quilt turn around time less than a week (if I give myself a few days to do binding.) Whooo me! (Also note Ella’s camouflage tactics. I see you kid, and this blanket is reserved, so don’t try to steal it yet.)

6. Ella is still nursing.
   

   

   
   I really thought she was done there for a while, only nursing once a day or so, but she is back with a vengeance, and I am (for the most part) okay with that. There are days where I do more distraction than others (What, you want ninny? Look over there, it’s Charlie Chaplin!*sneak out of room*) but I read up on tandem nursing when we found out that I was pregnant again, and I don’t see any reason to wean her right now. Obviously some people are squirked out by a 20month old nursing, but the truth is I’m not really interested in impressing those people. Live and let live and all that jazz.

7. I am a pirate (who really wants to cut off all of her hair). Arrrrrr.
   

   

In one of the online communities I read today, a soon-to-be father asked how he could stand by and watch his wife go through a natural labor, because “I can’t imagine a more unpleasant experience than standing helpless while wife has to go through excruciating pain.” I wish Tom was home so that I could ask him how he felt during labor, but I know we have talked about it before. His journey from “Stand outside and hand out cigars” to “Sit behind Ivory in the bathtub and let her push with all of her strength against me, while telling her she is beautiful even though she is crying” was not a short one. One day I will try and create the narrative of it, but for now, I am just in awe of how much I love my husband. After I commented to the poster, I dug out the photos of the labor (which were thankfully saved on a disk, since I have had three blue-screens-of-death since then) and couldn’t help but cry – sure, some of it is the pregnancy hormones, but really, I am just amazed that he took that leap of faith and completely left his comfort zone to give me the comfort I needed. Looking at these pictures, I do not remember the pain, the effort, the fear – I just remember feeling so loved.

To support someone, even when you are scared, because you trust them and know that they need you – that is love. To wrap your body around theirs, and give them all of your strength – that is love. Tom and I walked away from Ella’s birth not only suddenly a family, but also a stronger couple. I have no fear about this coming birth, because I trust my body, and I know that I will not be alone.

(Just because I could not end this post without proving that we are sometimes kind of cute (though Tom does always need to shave.))

For months, this pregnancy was something I could just add to my to-do list. In fact, my list looked something like this:

• Graduate
• Get married
• Take care of toddler
• Clean my house
• Be crafty
• Direct a play
• Grow a human in my abdomen.

A few months (and a few anxiety attacks) later, and my list looks more like this:

• Try to train toddler to make me a sandwich
• Groan and breath heavy every time I sit down or stand up
• Eat something
• Complain that my guts feel squished (ya think?!)
• Wonder why I don’t remember it being like this last time.

For the most part, I love being pregnant. I love sharing my body with my child, I love the warm smiles from strangers, I love feeling powerful and creative in a way that is not possible otherwise. But you would never know this if you live with me. I’m afraid I am a bit of a whiner (hahahahaha. A bit. Whew, that’s a lie) and poor Tom and Ella are ready to ship me off to a sunny beach (where I would complain about the sannnndddd in my cracks that I can’t reaaaaccchhhhh) just to be rid of me. Tom takes it in stride and reminds me that two pregnancies in two years isn’t easy on the back, or hips, or skin (WTF skin, get glowing already) and Ella just scoffs and demands I get her a damn popsicle.

One of the perks of Tom’s new job is that I can fly off to a sandy beach, and I am weighing the perks (Sand! beach! Yay!) against the negatives (Would have to go alone with Ella, since Tom works all the time. No margaritas. There is no such thing as a sexy maternity bathing suit. I’m lazy. Sand in cracks, people!) Instead, I am considering flying to Arizona to see my dad and sister, because I have this insane habit of visiting deserts in August. It would have to be a 2 or 3 day trip though, two of which are spent flying with a toddler, and then driving to BFE Arizona, so we will see if this actually pans out.

But in the mean time? Can you hand me that glass of water? I know I am closer, but you see, I am pregnant, and lazy, and oh, oh, I think I may be having a contraction, I really should drink more water. Ahh, thank you. Now, if you are not busy…

Ps – ALSO! I keep forgetting to thank Mamabub for sending us some barely in need of repair fuzzibunz! Yay internet friends!  I’ve been meaning to shout out a big THANK YOU! for a week or so, but um… am lazy. I think we’ve established that.

We are alive, I promise. Sure, my eyes do not focus, and my walk is rather shakey, but undead = alive, right? I’m really feeling the effects of being alone with a toddler for two weeks now that Tom is home and I am able to sit down for a minute, and youch -  let’s not try that again any time soon, okay?

I really do not have a lot to say (which is code for: I am going to go lay down and take a nap, suckers) so here is quick proof that, while I may be a zombie, you still can not pry the camera from my boney hands.

I posted this entry over in a closed community on LJ, but wanted to have a place that I could refer non-community members to, since I feel like I am giving this information out all the time.

Oh the wonder that is Gestational Diabetes!

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Dear girl at the crappy coffee stand in the supermarket -

When a pregnant woman dragging three kids around, asks for a 12oz Breve, don’t ask “Are you sure? I can make that a nonfat decaf if you want (whispers) since you, you know (looking at belly).” Because that is a sure way to get .. well, nothing. I am a wuss. But here is how it makes me feel:

Why have you got to be like that crappy coffee stand girl? I know you are young, and did not mean any harm, but here is a secret – when someone orders something, make it. Implying that I am fat, or do not know that caffeine will apparently kill my unborn child, is rude and in bad taste. My midwife recommends I try a cup of coffee when I have a headache, and hey – I like the sound of that. I didn’t notice a medical school diploma hanging next to your “Same special of the day that we always have” sign, so you should probably avoid giving out medical advice. And if you were oblivious to the fact that I am pregnant (not just into the circus tent look that is ‘in’ right now) and just think I could use some dieting advice, first, f-off. Second, I have not gained a pound at 24weeks pregnant, and struggle to get in enough calories for my nursling and my fetus, so if I want my drink made with fucking butter, you do it with a smile.

But hey – I do not need to justify my choices to you. But just in case YOU want some unsolicited advice: This is not cute. Oh, and your boobs are lopsided, and people do notice.

Love, Me.

(Picture from today when I told Ella that she could not eat cat food.  Because I am a fat jerk who hates babies.)