1 Mother 2 Another

It’s official – the new American Idol winner has been selected.

I thought I’d expand my personal Mommy Focus Group and find out what the rest of you are up to; how you do things and what your opinions are on parenting styles, nursing issues, and fun small stuff. So I’ve started a weekly poll; it’s on the right underneath all my menu tabs. A new one will be up every Monday and you can vote all week. I’ll check out the results and post them (probably with an opinion of my own!) the next Monday. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not collecting this info and selling it to Johnson and Johnson or Toys R Us. Just for my own morbid curiosity. And if you feel the need to explain your vote, feel free to email me (jennifer@1mother2another.com) with your reasons. Believe it or not, I’m actually interested!

You don’t need to be a registered user to vote; just click and submit! So check out this week’s poll and let the world know – what kind of a hiney wiper are you?

Being a mommy is one of the toughest jobs in the world, and while it has
numerous intangible perks let’s face it; the benefits package sucks. No
medical, no paid vacation, and no workers’ compensation if you get
injured on the job.

So we’ve been talking the past few days about how to take better care of
yourself. It starts during
pregnancy of course, but we’ve also looked at ways to make your
movements more
efficient (that is, healthier!) while you take care of your
little one. But there’s more to it than that.

Making sure your bio-mechanics – the way your body does something – is
not enough. You need to stay on top of your body’s physical health if
it’s going to perform effectively when called upon. This means
strengthening, and stretching, and eating right.

In an ideal world, you spent the nine months before your baby was born
staying in shape, keeping your heart strong, keeping your muscles
stretched, and learning good posture for nursing, holding an infant, and
so forth.

But let’s say we’re too late for preventative measures.

No, let’s be more honest than that. Let’s say you spent the nine months
pre-baby working 12-hour days like a maniac, convinced you will never be
a part of the paid workforce again. You ran yourself ragged finding the
exact right shade of red gingham crib sheets, walking through miles of
malls despite your aching back and swollen ankles. You reveled in the
fact that it was the one time in your life you could gain weight and no
one would think worse of you, so you stopped caring if your hamstrings
were both strong and supple; who would notice under that pregnancy
schmata? At the end of the day, faced with the choice of hitting the gym
for 50 laps in the pool or hitting the couch for 50 re-runs of Friends,
guess which one won out. When you dragged yourself home at 10 o’clock at
night, the last thing you wanted to do was spend twenty minutes
stretching. And Kegels? Frankly, you never could figure them out and
they don’t seem to matter much since you’re peeing every 20 minutes
anyway.

Stop me if this sounds familiar.

My girlfriend Abby recently went through a rough few weeks; baby Josh
hit a point where he had to be walked and rocked to go to sleep,
sometimes for over an hour. At four months old, Josh seemed too young to
his parents for sleep training, so Abby toughed it out, carrying him
around until he finally went to sleep.

Unfortunately for Abby’s back, Josh is a little sumo wrestler so it was
no surprise that Abby woke up one morning immobilized with back pain.
The pain quickly went from excruciating to near-unbearable and she was
at a loss as to how to put one foot in front of the other, much less
care for a newborn and a toddler.

Around that same time, we had Maddie sleeping in our room in a
pack-n-play while her room was under construction. The change in her
routine coupled with a developmental spurt ruined her night sleep
patterns and she began waking several times a night, so I spent almost a
week bending all the way over to the floor and dead-lifting 16 pounds
up. Again – no surprise that I, too, began feeling back pain.

Mommies everywhere have to deal with a near-impossible set of
circumstances: recovering from either major surgery (cesarean) or a
major physical marathon (labor), dealing with hormonal surges as some
hormones leave and new ones come in, learning a new physical action
(nursing) and doing it over and over again, picking a baby up out of his
crib and putting him down dozens of times a day, walking a teething
baby, and so on and so on and so on. All this takes its toll on our
bodies, which are still reeling from the “how the heck do I function
with all this relaxin and 40 extra pounds!” thing. Being a mommy is an
incredibly physical job; if it were any job in the workforce, we’d have
hundreds of hours of training before ever being put “behind the wheel”.
But it’s not, so it’s sink-or-swim, with too many mommies perilously
close to drowning.

When Madeleine was a newborn, she communicated by crying. A lot. Which made me cry.

A lot.

I felt so frustrated not being able to figure out what she needed, what she wanted, and give it to her. I couldn’t wait for the day when she’d be able to let me in on what was going on in her world.

One of the first signs we got that our conversations with her weren’t a one-way street was her name recognition. When she started turning her head towards someone who said her name, I was so proud I thought I’d burst. To see the understanding in her eyes made me feel that we were having, if not a conversation, at least a moment of acknowledgement.

From there, she moved to being able to clearly communicate her desires, but in her own language. She’d arch her back to be put down, reach for the floor to crawl, lean out of your arms to get to another person. She had no interest in meeting us on our level; Maddie was interested purely in making her wants known.

. . .was sipping water through a straw.

We’ve been trying to get Maddie to take a cup for a while now. Our
doctor’s not keen on giving baby regular supplemental drinks while she’s
still breastfeeding, but Maddie needs to learn how to drink from
something other than a bottle for those times when she’s constipated and
we’re desperately trying to get prune juice down her. (Hint for other
mommies: use prune juice instead of water or breast milk to make
cereal!) So we’ve been offering sippy cups and such for months now.

She simply has no interest. Try the sippy cup without the membrane and
it pours over her face like a fountain – which, I might add, is fine
with her. Try the sippy cup with the membrane and she gnaws on it like a
chew toy. In all fairness, we’ve never offered her juice, which could
well encourage her to drink from a cup, but we’ve made a decision not to
give her juice early on and I can’t see going back on that just to teach
the kid how to drink a glass of water.

My husband and I spent the weekend painting our living room. We’ve lived in the apartment for almost five years now, but just went from renters to owners last summer. As we were in the process of buying the place, we discussed the projects we’d like to undertake once we owned the property; from the relatively small, like painting, to the big dream ones like a bathroom makeover, no idea was too wild. We were giddy at the thought of having no one to tell us “no”, and eager to put our own stamp on the place, to go from transient renters to owners with opinions and taste.

Money, time and a newborn prevented us from taking on any new projects right away. A couple weeks ago, Brian expressed his frustration with our home, saying, “We’ve owned it for almost a year and it looks exactly the same! You can’t tell we own it at all!” So we carved out a weekend and painted the living room while Maddie spent a couple days at Grandma’s house (both of whom were in heaven: talk about a Mutual Admiration Society!). The work was painstaking – our living room has large amounts of intricate molding, and pretty much the whole room had to be hand painted. At the end of the day, though, it looks like a totally different room, one that we’ve truly put our stamp on. As Brian remarked at one point, though, “You know that the next people to buy this will come through and paint it something completely different just so it doesn’t look like us anymore.”

That got me to thinking about our need to make our mark on the world, both in achievement and in what we leave behind. More and more celebrities are having babies and television’s calling it “The Latest Hollywood Accessory”. Being a parent is the new cool thing to do, and with it comes the whole line of baby gear as people line up to find out what type of stroller Chris Rock uses, or which onesies Britney bought last week on Melrose.