The Go-To Girlfriend for New Mommies
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I know Halloween’s tonight, and
I’ll have lots of exciting photos and stories to share next
week, I’m sure. But first I have to share this –
Yesterday the family went to the King Tut exhibit currently in our
hometown; Brian took the day off and we went to celebrate my
birthday. I hadn’t specifically needed the girls to come, but
I dind’t want to make an adult miss the exhibit to stay home
with Maddie and Cora, so everyone came.
Two things –
First, there’s an email going around about a
target="_blank">candy recall. Sherwood brand Pirate’s
Gold Milk Chocolate coins, sold in bulk in Costco and other stores,
are being recalled because of levels of melamine found in them, a
toxic chemical found recently in several Chinese exports.
I don’t know what I did to deserve
it, but the girls and I had a pretty fantastic day yesterday, all
things considered.
Cora’s still doing her imitation of an insomniac and getting
up waaaaaaaaaay too early, but I’m not hopping out of bed in
the middle of the night any more, and that seems an almost fair
trade. So I’m functioning on a bit more sleep, which always
helps my outlook considerably. Maddie woke up in a good mood, and
we all got ready relatively painlessly.
Monday was playgroup day, and at first Maddie was resistant to it,
begging instead to go someplace “fun” like the mall.
But once she realized playgroup was at a new house with new toys to
check out, she quickly came on board. We all bundled up against the
mild cool breeze, and strollered over to playgroup.
Play dates with Maddie’s good friend
Maxum have had an unintended –and, I’m afraid,
potentially expensive – side effect: namely, the girl’s
fallen in love with Thomas.
As Maddie entered toddlerhood and I saw all my girlfriends with
sons spending big bucks on Thomas the Tank Engine stuff, I smiled
smugly and thanked my stars I had a girl with no interest in those
big, endless sets with bin upon bin of pieces. Even when Maddie saw
a few trains at church in the nursery, she never seemed interested
and I thought myself safe. But when Maddie saw Maxum’s big
Thomas table, with bin after bin underneath it filled with trains
and tracks, she was intrigued. And after she checked out a Thomas
video from the library, she was hooked.
A friend of mine recently brought her new
son – born seven weeks early, and fresh from the NICU –
home amidst much joy and celebration. The celebration was
short-lived when she had to return to the hospital a few days later
because of blood in his stool. After a few tests, they determined
the cause: a dairy allergy.
Newborn food allergies are surprisingly common, though many people
don’t know about them. Babies subsist wholly on breastmilk or
formula, of course, but we all know how much can be passed through
breastmilk to a baby, and foods that may cause allergies are no
exception. Something like ninety percent of newborn
“colic” is caused by a food allergy, usually a reaction
to dairy or soy.
Cora’s learned a new word recently
that’s almost as bad as the “mine” she picked up
in recent months: “Cora”.
Yes, the child has learned her own name. And of course, she’s
known it for a long time – she responds when she hears her
name called, and so forth. But pronouns such as “she”
or “he” or “I” are still a little beyond
her, which is why Cora’s discovery of her own name has come
in handy.
My thanks to Fats Waller for the title -
As I mentioned earlier, I weaned Cora (sort of accidentally) over
the weekend, and there I was agonizing over my tender boobs and
getting all teary-eyed at that fact that my baby no longer needed
me. And then I realized –
Hey, I could have a margarita right now.
When I first began looking at motherhood
and making decisions, I knew I wanted to breastfeed. I decided
I’d nurse for a year, and then begin weaning naturally. By a
year, nursings had tapered off to snuggle times like early morning
or naps or bedtime, and both girls were getting most of their
nutrition from food.
With Maddie, I went easy on the weaning. I had a nebulous goal of
18 months, but didn’t want to force the issue since I
didn’t have to. At 15 months, I forced the nap weaning
because we had a big trip coming up, but otherwise let everything
end naturally. Right around the same time Maddie dropped her
morning nursing, and we were down to once a day by the time I was
pregnant with Cora.
As Maddie progresses to chapter books,
lowering herself deeper into the well of literature, Cora hurtles
headlong down the same path. She’s shown an interest in books
for a long time, but has begun to memorize her favorites and will
request specific books when she decides it’s time for a
snuggle and a read. And it should come as no surprise that her
current favorites have already been well broken-in by
Maddie’s toddler fingers.
In some ways, Cora has different taste in books than Maddie;
we’ve tried a few old favorites of Madeleine’s that
Cora simply isn’t interested in. But there are several places
where their tastes in books overlap, most notably in the animal
kingdom. Specifically, bears.
About a month ago we returned from a trip
to the library to discover we’d picked up a chapter book by
mistake; Maddie always grabs great piles of books and I try to sift
them down to something manageable, but somehow this one had escaped
me. Up to this point we’d brought home board books, picture
books, and easy reader books only, as I’d been concerned
Maddie wasn’t ready for a book without pages and pages of
pictures.
Silly Mommy.
I don’t know what’s happened,
really I don’t; one minute Maddie’s happy in any
kid’s company, and the next she’s saying she
doesn’t like boys and refuses to play with them on general
principle. Great.
Before everyone starts laughing and talking about the cootie thing,
let me tell ya, that ain’t it. Maddie’s become
genuinely fearful of boys, worried they’ll hurt her during
play or be mean to her on purpose. I see her cower and shrink a bit
every time we approach a park and there are multiple boys on the
equipment, then physically steel herself to “get through
it”. I think it all started a few weeks ago, when a couple of
older boys (seven or eight) were playing on the playground. Maddie
was in her own world, happily oblivious, until she tried to go down
the twisty slide the boys had commandeered for themselves.
I know most toddlers are explorative and
messy in general, but I think Cora’s going for an exhibition
at the MOMA – Mixed Media: Mud and Sand.
Seriously, this girl’s favorite thing to do is sit down and
dig. If we’re in the back yard playing for any length of
time, she rather quickly abandons the swingset and heads round the
corner to the side yard, with its hidden pile of wet sandy dirt,
and rapidly gets going. At the playground she’ll frolic on
the twisty slide for a few minutes before settling down with the
playground wood chips, trying to see just how far down that layer
goes before she hits dirt.
It’s State Fair time here in Texas,
and for those of you who don’t live here, it’s quite a
big deal. The Texas state fair is the biggest in the country, and
kids in town are given a free ticket and a day off of school to go.
Many companies hand out tickets to employees – everyone gets
in the spirit. Brian and I grew up going, and we were eager to go
again and introduce our girls to the coolness that is the state
fair. We picked a date, Brian took a vacation day, and last week,
off we went.
We’d been talking it up to Maddie for a long time, and so by
Fair Day she was at fever pitch. One of the famous things about the
fair is the statue of Big Tex; it’s a really large (think
stories tall, not feet) Texan dressed in a cowboy shirt and boots,
standing there greeting fairgoers at the main entrance. Every few
minutes Tex speaks, waving his hand at everyone. Maddie was
particularly keen to meet Big Tex, and on the morning of the fair
she picked a specific hair ribbon “so Big Tex will see
me!”
Yes, I'm still here - just comatose. The
girls have given me a break the past couple of nights and I'm
getting a good six or seven hours a night. Yeah! But I'm fighting
Cora's monster cold and sleeping every spare minute.
All that to say - see you Monday.
Well wouldn’t you know it –
after a day of nearly clawing the walls to get away from my girls,
I had a rather sweet and eminently manageable time with them.
You know the state of mind I was in as I approached Tuesday –
if you don’t, see yesterday’s sob story – er,
entry. And I was wary of Tuesday right off the bat since it was All
Mommy All Day – no Gamma, no play dates, nothing. Just me and
the Clingy Monsters.
Cora’s down with another cold, which
seemed to morph from bad allergies last week, which came on the
heels of a tooth, which . . . . and so on. In the past six weeks
Cora’s slept eight hours in a row approximately twice,
meaning in the past six weeks I’ve slept five hours in a row
approximately twice. Cora’s cold has ratcheted the clinginess
factor way back up, and she’s now firmly stuck to my hip any
time I’m in the vicinity. And of course, she’s up every
hour or two at night, whimpering and crying for Mama, and I either
go in and comfort her or lie there staring sleeplessly at the
monitor, second-guessing my tactics and browbeating my mothering
skills.
As if this weren’t enough, Maddie’s begun requesting
that I, rather than my mother, put her down for naptimes. So far
I’ve held strong and said no; she’s offered to wait for
her nap until I’m finished putting Cora down, or begged me to
put her down first, but I’ve refused. I could, of course, do
both girls by myself; when Mom’s out of town or working I
always do, and Maddie simply sits and plays quietly by herself
while I deal with Cora. But as I look at my oldest daughter,
clinging to my leg and refusing to let go, and my youngest
daughter, clinging to my hair and refusing to let go, I want to
scream, “Can’t SOMEONE in this house get to sleep
without me?” And since I haven’t weaned Cora from
naptime yet, Maddie’s always the odd-man-out, getting
shuttled off to Gamma instead. Cue the Mommy Guilt.
Is there anything cuter than a child
trying to master a new skill?
Maddie’s been working on skipping for a long time now;
probably six months easily have been spent in hard labor on the
whole skipping thing. And that doesn’t include the year
before that, when she would see skipping and demand an explanation,
a demonstration, and (yet another) lesson. The past several months,
though, she’s been really applying herself, and Sunday
afternoon it finally paid off.
With the cost of energy rising and the
state of the economy crashing, I’ve finally taken it upon
myself to get out there and actually shop for an energy plan.
I’m in one of those de-regulated areas and so am inundated
with electrical companies vying for my dollar, and as we prepared
to move from New York to Dallas I couldn’t cope and simply
picked a month-to-month plan with a popular provider.
This week, though, I forced myself to dig
through the pages and pages of different types of offers, finding a
way to comparison shop and figure out what everyone’s really
offering. And in the end we had it narrowed down to two plans: one
was with a solid company and probably the cheapest rate I’d
found anywhere; the second was with a smaller but still good
company, cost a half-cent per kilowatt hour more, and was
electricity generated from 100% renewable resources.
We’re trying to get our monthly bills down to the bone, but
Brian and I both agreed this was a prime place to put our money
where our family mouth is, and signed up for the
“clean” energy contract. And I gotta tell you,
it’s about eighty bucks a year more, but I’m jumping
around the house for joy at the thought of living coal-free, using
sustainable, low-pollution electricity for the next twelve
months.
October is Children’s Health Month,
and one of my favorite sites, target="_blank">Healthy Child, Healthy World, has created a
calendar of tips for the month. It’s full of
easy-to-implement suggestions like, “Have your kids try a new
dip like hummus or guacamole”, or “Turn down your
thermostat”. Just the sort of small things that don’t
seem like too much effort to tackle, but which, at the end of the
month, will make you realize you can really effect a change in your
lives with baby steps.
So check out their
target="_blank">calendar - print it off and get started.
And if you’re really interested in learning more, buy their
book,
target="_blank">Healthy Child, Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner,
Greener, Safer Home, and delve deeper.
Think we can’t make start our kids our right from the
beginning? Every time I hand Maddie something to throw away, she
asks, “Trash can or recycling, Mama?” And every time I
clean our showers with baking soda and vinegar instead of the
strong chemical sprays for soap scum or mildew or whatever (you
know the kinds – you’ve got to wear a mask and keep a
window open) and notice that our house doesn’t smell like a
chemical lab when I’m finished, I know I’m making a
difference in my kids’ lives. For the better.
Just try the calendar – baby steps.
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