Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Are You Cut Out For Motherhood?
1) You have to love repetition! Think running laps around a track is boring? Telling a child not to climb on the furniture over and over is no picnic either. Or my personal favorite, "get your finger out of your nose!" (said while at a restaurant, a wedding, or any other equally embarrassing place).
2) You need pipes! Not the kind in your bathroom. I'm talking about big arm muscles. You have to lift strollers into and out of your car several times a day. Carry a baby around in one arm while using your other arm for various things. If you have one of those infant car seats that snap into your stroller, you'll need extra arm strength to carry said baby and car seat around. Those things are heavy! And god forbid stairs are involved. You'll need a body like Arnold Schwarzenegger to lift your baby in a car seat up stairs.
3) Patience like you've never had before! Those little bundles of joy will test you over and over again. You'll notice the "testing" around the time your baby has his or her first taste of cereal. After a few weeks the cereal will not be as exciting to the baby anymore and he'll chuck the bowl off his highchair. This will be amusing to him, especially if he gets a reaction from you, and this new skill will continue on until at least 18-months. Which brings me to my next quality.
4) The broom is mightier than yelling! You'll have to clean like you've never cleaned before (reread #1 about repetition for full effect). Breakfast - baby throws food on floor, chucks bowl, spoon etc., takes off bib and messes up clothes, rubs hands full of cereal all over her head (and creates the "Something About Mary" look), discovers spewing is more fun than swallowing etc. Lunch - more of same but now you've probably served foods that stain a bit more AND you've spent most of the morning getting the highchair, baby, utensils etc. cleaned up for lunch. Dinner - you've spent more time preparing the meal that will be thrown, mushed, squished and are a little less patient about the mess. You've also cleaned up the mess twice already. Snacks - in between meal messes (squishy banana is a favorite to clean up).
5) Spatial skills! If you don't drive a mini-van or large SUV, you'll need to figure out how to contract your stroller and fit it in the back of your car quickly. If you live in a cold or wet climate, you'll need to do this lightning fast. Good luck with that one. And forget about putting together baby toys, cribs, high chairs, strollers, installing car seats properly etc. Hire professionals for all those things. Avoid anything that says, "light assembly required", if you do not possess spatial and/or mechanical skills. I don't think there is a course to take for any of those skills but I could be wrong.
6) A bright and sunny disposition! We were thrilled when our little girl peed on the potty the first time around, and the second, and the third time. We threw a party. We were overjoyed. She's been potty-trained for almost two years now and she still expects a marching band every time she goes. It's hard to throw a party when she has to go in the middle of the night and wants mommy or daddy. Oh please let it be daddy tonight. Please. You get my drift.
Okay so that's all for now. If I haven't scared you enough to increase your birth control methods (try them all), you are one of those people that is brainwashed into thinking your child will be different. It's probably the hopeful grandma-to-be doing the brainwashing so there's nothing you can do about it. That is how the species continues on, I guess.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
"I don't like daddy!"
Friday, September 12, 2008
First Week of School Blues...
Saturday, August 30, 2008
The Olympic Meltdown (and I'm not talking about the kids)
Thursday, July 17, 2008
What to Expect When You're...
To the pregnant woman, you need to buy the mother of all pregnancy books, "What To Expect When You're Expecting" or as my mid-wife calls it, "What To Expect When You're Paranoid". And yes, I was paranoid while pregnant with my first and second babies. Who wouldn't be? It's not like billions of women have had babies throughout the centuries. So if you have a copy of said book and you are, admittedly, paranoid, you need to avoid the section in the back entitled "When Things Go Wrong". This section is not for you. You have already imagined the worst and don't need reinforcement. For instance, I was over the proverbial hill when I had my second baby (over 35) and was asked if I wanted to have an amniocentesis. The 'amnio' is for people who used old and crusty eggs to conceive. The procedure involves sticking a rather long needle into your womb and extracting some of the amniotic fluid. When I first considered this test I thought to myself, "there is a certain amount of fluid in my womb for a reason & maybe I need ALL of it. What will happen if they take some out? Will the little needle hole turn into a bigger hole & all the fluid & the baby will leak out?" Needless to say, I declined this test. I also declined every test that had a high false positive result. So what tests were performed, you ask?
I had a lot of blood tests including the HIV test. I knew I didn't have HIV but being paranoid I wondered what would happen if it said "declined test" on my chart. I pictured something going wrong and the doctor looking at my chart and stopping to put on gloves or worse, a bio-hazard suit, before helping me and the baby out. Clearly paranoid, I know. So I had the HIV test twice. Once for my first pregnancy and once for my second. Another test I had is the glucose test. This is where you drink a sugary drink and then have blood extracted to see if your blood sugar is within a safe range. Unfortunately for me I decided to eat breakfast too close to the test. I had peanut butter and jam on toast and a banana before this test. And then I flunked it. When you flunk this test, they call you right away to schedule a follow up three-hour fasting test. This was not good for me. I was riddled with worry from the time I heard my first results until I got my second test results back. This was 4 days but it seemed like a century. I'm also not very good at fasting. Fasting to me is not snacking in between meals. This was a difficult time. I ended up not having gestational diabetes, or anything equally as worrisome, but I did think if anything was going to give me gestational diabetes, it was the sugary drink pregnant women have to drink for the test. That drink is worse than the McDonald's orange soda I remember having in the Happy Meal when I was a kid. Now you can at least get apple juice or some other fruit juice. Maybe someday pregnant women will have a choice of sugary products for the glucose tolerance test. Maybe even chocolate or better still, a chocolate muffin. Muffins are a pregnant woman's friend. Muffins are just glorified cupcakes but for some reason, they can be eaten guilt free. But I digress.
Most of us really look forward to the ultrasound test to get a sneak peak at our little one. If you aren't considered high-risk, you will get one of these tests at around 4 months and will not need one again unless your health care practitioner has concerns or needs a weight estimate. You'll get print outs of your growing baby and can show them off to all your friends and family. At this time you can find out the sex of the baby, if you choose. For the people that are able to find the image in those 3D Halogram pictures, you may even be able to figure out the sex yourself. Both my babies were doing some sort of gymnastics moves so we really couldn't see much except maybe a head and some feet. We took the practitioners word that all the necessary parts were present.
And present they were, especially the vocal chords. So after surviving more than 9 months of utter paranoia, we became the proud owners of not one but two baby girls (two years apart, of course). Neither of which came with instruction manuals. I'd tell you to pick up the book, "What To Expect In the First Year" but, truthfully, we didn't read it and after a while, your baby will stand on it to reach all your breakables. So next week I will cover the topic "What To Expect In the First Year When You're Paranoid". Not that there's anything wrong with being paranoid.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Itching for a Jock...
baseball bat & ball - check
soccer ball - check
football - check
running shoes - check
mini golf clubs - check
skates - check
bike - check
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Update from the Trenches...
Friday, June 27, 2008
Message in a Bottle...
Today I had to try and get my 3.5 year-old fusspot to pee in a bottle. I don't wish this task on anybody. I'd rather try and milk a raging bull. At least you can reason with a bull. The whole task went downhill when she announced she had to go potty and her daddy yelled (more like shrieked) from upstairs, "GO GET THE BOTTLE, SHE HAS TO PEE! HURRY UP!!!!!. Needless to say, she was screaming by the time I made it upstairs with the bottle. My poor husband has no prior experience dealing with little girls. He didn't have a plan in place or anything. He thought he could just spring the whole idea of peeing in a bottle on her and still have her cooperate. Boy, was he wrong!
You see my husband was an athlete and he thought he could tell her a story about how he had to pee in a bottle in front of somebody to get drug-tested. Talk about trauma for a little girl. She plugs her ears in public washrooms because the flush is "too loud!". And her daddy thought a good ol' drug-testing story would do the trick. I'm booking the therapist now.
So tomorrow, on my birthday, I have to get her to do "the deed" and get the sample to the lab. I used my motherly charm to get her to at least agree, in principle, to the concept of me holding a bottle under her while she pees. I even told her she could pee all over my hand & she thought that was funny. But that was today, tomorrow is a whole other day. Sometimes her brain resets itself at night and she has no recollection of the agreement we made the night before. Translation: I'm expecting more screaming tomorrow.
As for my motherly charm, I told her a lab technician would look at her pee under a big microscope (she kept saying telescope but that's okay, it is sort of "moon" related). She thought it was funny someone actually had a job to look at pee under a microscope. And then she seriously asked me what they would be looking for. How the heck should I know, was my first thought. And then I remembered my official title: CEO of the Why Question Answerer. So I launched into this whole spiel about internal organs, specifically the kidneys, lungs, liver etc. She seemed happy enough after that but only time will tell.
Wish me happy birthday tomorrow and don't judge me if I bribe her with a birthday cupcake or two. It's almost midnight and I still haven't figured out how to get the pee in the bottle. I'm off to google land.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The Skinny Gene...
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Bringing Monster Home...
Our little angel is now 3.5 years old and if you turn your computer off and listen very carefully, you should be able to hear her screaming. Even if you live in outer Mongolia. She's done brushing her teeth and is getting ready for bed. Bedtime has been a challenge since she came out of the womb. Even the nurses at the hospital knew something was different about this little, dare I say, monster. They kept referring to her as an "alert" baby. We didn't know what that meant until a few days after we brought her home. Alert = screams her head off
No, she didn't have colic. She had something worse. It's called "curiosity". We realized something was up with her when she was a couple months old and she was screaming her head off in her crib one night. It had just snowed and the snow plows were clearing up our street. We thought maybe the noise woke her up and it did but that's not why she was crying. She wanted to SEE what was making the noise. And from that day on we realized it was easier to show her what was making the noise instead of trying to put her back to sleep for several hours (while enduring the aforementioned screaming).
Needless to say, we've made some mistakes along the way. Sometimes I wish we could have kidnapped our midwife and forced her to live with us. No judge with kids would have put us away for that one. At least not one that heard the screaming. I stumbled upon a little gem a few months ago that would have helped us greatly. It's like having a midwife in your own home (except without the kidnapping charges). It's a parenting DVD called "Bringing Baby Home". Notice how they use the word "baby" and not "monster". Anyways, it's from a production company (read: two moms with 6 kids between them) called "Liandrea". It's like a prenatal class that never stops giving (if you put it in constant loop on your DVD player). Try it, you may end up slightly better off, if not much better off, than me.