1 Mother 2 Another

My daughter’s becoming quite the nature lover.  She’s always enjoyed heading outside – no temperature too cold for her – and we’ve been taking daily morning walks since she was maybe four weeks old.  As the weather’s warmed up we’ve frequently added a second walk for the day, and eat lunch out in our back garden a few times a week.  She can’t get enough of the outdoors, and is turning her considerable attention to the flora and fauna of the area.

Madeleine can identify several words by sound, even if she can’t say them.  “Tree” is one of the first she learned: she loves to lie on the couch and look up at the tree outside our big picture window.  She’ll point at it over and over, asking what it is.  Now if I say, “tree”, she’ll point out the window to her favorite sycamore.  Unless, that is, we’re reading a book, in which case she’ll point to whatever tree is on the page.

During breakfast or lunch she’ll gaze longingly out the window and occasionally point imperiously out the window – “Gah!”.  When she gets strapped into her stroller she kicks and screams until it begins to move out, at which point she settles serenely and anticipatorily in for the ride.

We cruise up and down the streets checking out all the neighbors’ front flower gardens.  We chat about what’s in season – azaleas – and what’s soon to come into season – roses.  We make note of which streets have the best (stroller) eye-level views, what lanes have buds about to open.  When the cherry blossoms were in full swing we’d stop under a huge tree and gaze in respectful silence, and the dogwood a block away from us still has a few simple but lovely blooms on it.  And whenever possible, of course, we stop so Maddie can smell the flowers.

Madeleine’s been sleeping much better at night recently.  I’ve been promising the mother of all sleep blogs and it’s coming; now that I’ve gotten some distance (and sleep) from the past couple of months I can find patterns and sort it all out and get it written.

Soon.

But first, I’ve got a new spin on the sleep problem that just cropped up two nights ago, and I’m stumped.  So been-there-done-that moms, I’d appreciate it if you’d speak up if you’ve got any ideas.

Maddie and I have ventured into new territory – the neighborhood playground.

We’ve had several days over the past week or so with incredibly heavy rain, and one morning after a particularly heavy overnight storm I decided it was the perfect time to take a crack at the swing set.

I should point out that Madeleine’s mere weeks away from her first birthday, and we’ve never gone to the playground.  We daily walk past the park and see mommies and daddies clustered around the swings and slides, chatting away, with babies younger than Maddie.  But showing up at the playground the first time is sort of like jumping into a double-dutch jumprope game; you kind of sway with it for a bit, looking for an opening and hoping your feet don’t get tangled up.

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.

As I think I’ve mentioned a dozen times in the past week or so, Maddie’s
heavy into finger foods right now; they are her favorite new game, new
learned skill to show off. Finger foods make mealtime go much more
smoothly. I’ll also confess here that I will occasionally offer Cheerios
or diced fruit if I need her to sit still while I get things done, even
though it’s not a meal time. Since the booster seat is now where she
sits when she “helps” Mommy cook, Maddie will sometimes cast her eyes
downward, expecting to see a food tray, and then look at me as if to
say, “I’m bored.” What do I do if she’s exhausted all her kitchen toys
and I’m a good 15 minutes away from being able to let her loose? (Nope,
haven’t finished babyproofing the kitchen yet.) Crack open the dried
snacks.

Now this’ll seem off-topic, but bear with me for a second. When Maddie
went for her 9-month checkup she had blood drawn to test for lead
poisoning, standard here in New York. Since we just had construction
done, I was convinced I had released irretrievable lead dust particles
into the air and permanently damaged my daughter, though there was no
factual evidence for this theory

whatsoever. We got the blood results back last week, and Maddie’s
completely clean.

So I’ve been casting about trying to find something new to worry
obsessively over and came up with the whole “feeding her when she’s not
hungry” thing. Am I teaching my child that food is a place to turn for
comfort when she’s crying and I offer her a Cheerio? If she’s bored and
I give her a fruit puff, am I setting her up for a life with an eating
disorder or an unhealthy attachment to food? Am I being a bad mommy by
using food to baby-sit my child? After all, these first couple of years
are laying the groundwork for how she views and enjoys food for the rest
of her life. No pressure.

In general, Madeleine’s been a pretty great sleeper. Right at three months, she began sleeping through the night all on her own. (Don’t hate me – not my doing at all). I had read up on different sleep theories to be ready for the decision-making I was sure would come, and she just did it by herself. I looked around smugly, shrugged my shoulders, and went to sleep.

Then she hit four and a half months, and the sleeping through the night hit a snag. I felt bewildered until I turned to Brazelton’s Touchpoints to read up on her developmental stage; right there he said night wakings would be common for babies that had up until then slept through the night. We got through a rough couple of weeks before she found her sleep groove again.

A month or so later, she hit another snag. A couple weeks, and back to normal. A month or so later . . . stop me if this sounds familiar.

While it may be true that you can't buy love, kids make a convincing
case that you can buy an insanely flattering facsimile: let's call it
buying brief bouts of obsequious adoration.

Or at least contented quiet.

Yes, finger foods are the new currency in this family, guaranteed to
capture her attention and turn her from beast to beauty.

Maddie's been going strong on finger foods for a couple weeks and it's
her new favorite hobby. Every meal I offer her must have the balanced
nutritional palate I've always done, but include enough finger foods to
satisfy her new independent streak. She'll oftentimes get only a few
bites into her bowls of fruit or veggies or meat before she starts
turning impatiently from side to side, gesturing imperiously at her tray
as if to say, "Woman! Why is my tray empty when my belly is full? Get
that spoon out of my face and bring me some CHEERIOS!"

When my husband and I were in high school (yes, we’ve been together a
long time) he turned to me one night after leaving my parents’ house and
said, “Why do your parents call you ‘Dolly’?” I looked at him blankly.
“Um, because it’s my name?”

Truth be told, it was the first time I realized my family used nicknames
with me. Dolly was just one of my names, like (don’t laugh) Tinker (as
in Bell) or Sis or Baby Girl. We’re obviously a family of nicknamers and
it’s clearly been passed on to me; ask any friend of mine how often I
call them by their real name and the answer will be shockingly small. My
girlfriend Abby is LuLu (don’t ask); Jennie is Genevieve, Susanne is
Suzette, and so forth.

How you are called is a powerful thing; it can be degrading, painful,
loving, even caressing. My maternal grandmother called me Kiddo, and
still does occasionally much to my satisfaction. Dolly was never
degrading or belittling; it was just who I was and I still answer to it.
I find names to be very defining; both your given name and your
nicknames draw an outline of who you are for everyone to see.

Although Madeleine’s been eating solid foods for over three months now,
she just started finger foods about two weeks ago; I held off giving her
finger foods until after her nine-month checkup. She’s not gotten any
teeth yet, and I was worried that you needed teeth before you started
tackling food that requires chewing. And while I was hesitant to start
with the finger foods before having an official “OK”, I was also dying
to see my adorable cherub feed herself, so our pantry was fully stocked
when we headed to the doctor’s office in anticipation of that “yes” vote.

One recent weekend an astounding thing happened.  Brian had to go out of town at the same time my mother had planned a trip, which meant that I was –

Alone.

With.

The.

Baby.

By myself, in case that wasn’t clear.

Look, it’s not as if I’m a new mommy, fresh-off-the-maternity-ward.  I still remember the panic I felt when Brian’s two weeks of vacation were up and he headed back to work, leaving me to deal with the squalling stranger spitting up in my lap.  I felt ill equipped, unprepared, and oh yeah, sleep-deprived to the point of hallucination.  Didn’t someone need to see some sort of diploma, some certificate proclaiming me to be capable of taking care of a newborn?  How was I going to make it on my own?

And by the way, my husband works from home in our basement.

That was nine months ago, though, and I’m confident now in my parenting skills, in my ability to read Madeleine and interpret her desires, and in my strength to overcome her desires when her desire is, say, eating a bag of rock salt.  I know I can do this Mommy thing.

Today’s the last installment on introducing solids, and we get to the fun stuff – spending money. 

While you were registering for your baby shower, starting your baby on solid foods probably seemed so far away you didn’t give it a second glance; you were much more concerned about picking out the right stroller and the perfect itty bitty booties.  Now the time’s come, and here’s what you’ll need.

I was changing Maddie’s diaper the other day and noticed her snappy crotch was a little harder to snap than it had been.  I couldn’t figure out why – same diapers, same clothes, same girl – until it hit me:  Maddie’s growing! 

Right at nine months now, Madeleine’s just begun comfortably wearing 3-6 month clothing.  Far from being concerned about her lack of growth, I see her diminutive size as a chance to wallow in the teeny tiny baby clothes you usually only get to use for a few weeks.  Madeleine’s been wearing some of these little overalls and onesies for several months now, and I’ve grown a bit attached to them.  I know that when the time comes to move her on to the next size up, I’ll be loath to part with much of her clothing and the memories they represent.  In addition, keeping everything’s important since we pass clothing amongst girlfriends to help keep the cost down.

So when it comes to time change out her wardrobe, how I store things becomes a bit crucial.  Fortunately, organizing is a hobby (though Brian calls it a sickness) of mine and I’ll rise to the challenge joyfully.

Let me say first off that I’m not a big fan in general of shopping outside of a gift registry; items on that list aren’t picked whimsically (or easily, in my family’s argumentative case), and the car seat and bottle scrubber are on there because they’re really needed.  Sexy and fun it ain’t, but trust me, new parents will wax ecstatic over a Diaper Genie.

Finding a nursing bra that fits can seem an overwhelming task, I know.  My friend Rebbecca Rosen, the owner of Breastchester, Inc., is an expert on the subject, and I asked her to let us poor lactating mommies in on her secrets.  Click below to get the inside scoop –

Jennifer

Finding a nursing bra that fits can seem an overwhelming task, I know.  My friend Rebbecca Rosen, the owner of Breastchester, Inc., is an expert on the subject, and I asked her to let us poor lactating mommies in on her secrets.  Click below to get the inside scoop –

The answer is yes – all of the above, plus a baby girl who is experiencing a blizzard for the first time.

I have to say that for an eight-month-old, my kid’s got a pretty impressive resume of talents.

Truly, if all of her remarkable skills were documented, Disney and the like would be lined up around the block trying to hire her.

Two of my friends moved last year, both while pregnant and raising a toddler at the same time.  I went to them to find out how they started getting plugged in to their community.  It turns out there are some great national organizations out there, as well as many easy and free (!!) activities you can do to help bring you in contact with other parents.  These may seem obvious to some of you, but I know what mommy brain can do to a girl, so they’re listed anyway.