When you don't have anything nice to say..

>steal something. I saw this on a message board I frequent and the person who posted it was also just passing it on, not the author. I got a huge kick out of it. Enjoy!

Sleep Training Advice From a Baby to a Baby:

OK, here's my situation. My Mommy has had me for almost 7 months. The first few months were great-- I cried, she picked me up and fed me, anytime, day or night. Then something happened. Over the last few weeks, she has been trying to STTN (sleep thru the night).
At first, I thought it was just a phase, but it is only getting worse. I've talked to other babies, and it seems like it's pretty common after Mommies have had us for around 6 months.

Here's the thing: these Mommies don't really need to sleep. It's just a habit. Many of them have had some 30 years to sleep--they just don't need it anymore. So I am implementing a plan. I call it the Crybaby Shuffle.

It goes like this:

Night 1--cry every 3 hours until you get fed. I know, it's hard. It's hard to see your Mommy upset over your crying. Just keep reminding yourself, it's for her own good.

Night 2--cry every 2 hours until you get fed.

Night 3--every hour.

Most Mommies will start to respond more quickly after about 3 nights. Some Mommies are more alert, and may resist the change longer. These Mommies may stand in your doorway for hours, shhhh-ing. Don't give in. I cannot stress this enough: CONSISTENCY IS KEY!! If you let her STTN (sleep through the night), just once, she will expect it every night. I KNOW IT'S HARD! But she really does not need the sleep, she is just resisting the change.

If you have an especially alert Mommy, you can stop crying for about 10 minutes, just long enough for her to go back to bed and start to fall asleep. Then cry again. It WILL eventually work. My Mommy once stayed awake for 10 hours straight, so I know she can do it.

Last night, I cried every hour. You just have to decide to stick to it and just go for it. BE CONSISTENT! I cried for anyreason I could come up with. My sleep sack tickled my foot. I felt a wrinkle under the sheet. My mobile made a shadow on the wall. I burped, and it tasted like pears. I hadn't eaten pears since lunch, what's up with that? The cat said "meow". I should know. My Mommy reminds me of this about 20 times a day. LOL. Once I cried just because I liked how it sounded when it echoed on the monitor in the other room. Too hot, too cold, just right--doesn' t matter! Keep crying!!

It took awhile, but it worked. She fed me at 4am. Tomorrow night, my goal is 3:30am. You need to slowly shorten the interval between feedings in order to reset your Mommies' internal clocks.

P.S. Don't let those rubber things fool you, no matter how long you suck on them, no milk will come out. Trust me.

Out of Order

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So this morning, I was taking a shower and I am sure there are many of you out there like me in that you have a routine in the shower. I for one, have very few routines in general and the fact that I actually stick to one in the shower is seriously saying something about how important it is for me to stick to it.

Logan does not even have a solid routine. I've tried. If I cannot commit to it, then it won't happen.

Anyway, I woke up completely exhausted. Logan had a super rough night with his cold, waking up every 2 hours or so crying. (And then this morning, B reminded me that we never fed him dinner, just a bottle before bed last night. Cue guilty mommy tears!) Poor kid is so stuffy he can't even suck on his paci.

I hopped in the shower and kept cranking up the heat. I love a hot shower on cold mornings. For whatever reason, I grabbed my lufa to scrub down first without even thinking. SO NOT APART OF MY ROUTINE! Because I did that, I almost forgot to even wash my hair. And now my whole day has been screwy all because my morning shower routine was screwed up. WTF? I am never like that.

So what is my routine, you ask? I'll tell you:

1) Get in, rinse down

2) Lather and wash hair, rinse

3) Lather and condition hair

4) Wash body, rinse conditioner out

5) Wash face

Now here is where it's okay to do things differently. I absolutly hate shaving. It is by far the biggest waste of time and for what? Two days of softies. Not worth it to me OR B. I'm lucky like that. However, this is the time when I would shave, if I felt inclinded to. And if not, then I might just stand in the shower a minute or two longer warming up before turning the water off and stepping into the brisk, steamy air. I almost always make the mistake of forgeting to turn the heat off so that when I get out of the shower dripping wet I am not met by a breeze of air coming through the vent. AND I hate leaving the vent on in the bathroom. For one, it is too loud. It freaks me out to think that it might muffle a noise I should be listening for (what noise? a burgler or my crying baby, of course!). And two, it makes me cold. Once I pat down, I then brush my teeth and my hair, naked of course, and proceed to get ready for my day.

All this to say that when the one thing I practice routinely is out of whack, my whole day follows. It's not been bad, just off. So tonight we are going to spend the night in and, fingers crossed, we'll all get good sleep tonight. I just have to remember to feed Logan dinner... ;)

This one time, on Thanksgiving Day...

>

So yesterday I worked all day. It was actually fun. And I was able to eat some yummy food. Our plan, after I got off work, was to go to Denver to my aunts house. We arived around 4:30 and we had a great time.

My cousin is 17 and OMG I cannot believe how grown up she trying to be. I say trying because she's still a kid people!! Anyway, she and her best friend had apparently been hitting up the bar all night long under the supervision of their parents, of course. Both B and I were shocked, to say the least. I was not allowed to drink AT ALL with my parents until I was 21. The first time I got drunk I was 20! So needless to say I never drank in high school.

So around 7, the girls started to talk about how the get TPed all the time. We pulled up and there was TP all over their yard. My cousin was still pretty drunk and really wanted someone sober to drive them to the store to buy TP so they can go get their neighbors back. She, however, was not 100% certain that her neighbors were the culprit, but screw it. Let's do it anyway!

So my uncle (not her father) drove them to Rite Aid and they bought 40 rolls of TP! Mind you, it was barely 20 degrees outside! B was drunk as well at this point and he was in no way going to miss out on the fun. So they ran across the street at 7:30pm(!!!) and proceded to TP this house with huge trees. B did not inform me until we were on our way home that he had my camera all along but did not take one picture. Bummer. It was a fine job. I won't lie. The best part was that we (the more mature, sober adults) could see everything they were doing right out the front window. At one point, a car slowed down and yelled at them. B said they were just giving them high fives for doing such an awesome job. LOL

They were not home from the escapade for 20 minutes before the mother called my aunt up and proceeded to tell her that her girls had been in Chicago all week. OOPS!

What to do when you don't have a diaper...

>So I know I have not updated on Michigan and I will, in parts. On Thursday night, we were hanging out in the Grand Rapids airport and Logan needed a change. He was leaking out of his diaper so I went in search and realized I only had one diaper in our bag for the next 7 hours. I said a silent prayer that he would only need this one change and we would make it to Denver without any fuss. Cue prayer unanswered! Not ten minutes later, Logan had a giant poo in his diaper. And now that he is in serious teething mode, his poo is not so...together. It's total yuck. I tried to save the diaper and that was a lost cause. We had diapers in the bag we had to check, something we were not expecting to do but our bag was too big. So B begins to beg someone to get our bag for us so we can get some diapers. Meanwhile, I had to do something. So I had some pads on me and yes, ladies and gents, I stuck it in Logan's onesie until I could find a fellow momma with a baby the same size as Logan and beg for an extra diaper. She was so kind, giving us two. Logan only had to shame his daddy with a pad in his pants for about 20 minutes before I found the diapers. Needless to say, funniest moment all week.

Lemon Face

>July 27, 2010

This little man LOVES lemons. I merely gave him the lemon just so I could get a puckered face reaction of my little love bug. Well, he said “HA!” and loved the sour juice. In fact, he whined when I took it away for fear he would suck up a seed.

I wish the sour, puckered feeling I have right now was from a lemon and that either way, this sweet face would make it all go away. But it’s just not that easy.

The Parenting Manual

>May 14, 2010

“Boy do I have a treat for you! A FREE manual to parenting! Honestly, it will tell you eeevvveryhing you need to know when it comes to caring for that new little one of yours. Spit up? Weird poop? Inconsolable crying? Just use the index and you’re on your way!”

Now, wouldn’t that be wonderful, to have a hard copy that says yes do this, no don’t do that, and why they hell would you think of something so crazy! I mean really, parenting is supposed to be easy! OMG, I wish y’all cloud see me smiling and laughing right now. I’ve only been a parent for a little over 3 months now and I am already eating words I voiced months before I became a parent of “I will nevers” and “This is the only ways” and so on…

Well, the other day while eating lunch with a few coworkers, they were asking me how things were going. Three of the four people sitting with me were mothers. The forth person, bless her heart, has been trying to have a baby for next to 4 years now. I pray for her often and have made suggestions to her try certain things BEFORE doing any fertility treatments and I think she is having a hard time taking me seriously since the first time we officially tried to get pregnant, we did. This is one of those things you don’t tell someone who has been trying to have a baby for so long. So I didn’t, but she gets to sit and listen to me talk about how amazing my baby is…

Anyway, I am not sure of the specifics of our conversation at the time, but somewhere in there she started to tell us (the mommas) about this parenting manual she and her hubs have about how they are going to raise the children the have someday. I could hardly contain myself, as I laughed, thinking of all the things I said I would never do and how I would do certain things one way. And now, now that I am that parent, how breaking those so called rules is so easy to do, especially out of sleep-deprived desperation. She was a good sport as we all laughed and said “Good luck with that!”.

It just made me reflect on so many things I would talk about pre-baby. Even regarding our birth. As a first time mom, it was hard for me to take anyone seriously who was trying to tel me to be open-minded about our birth plan, about sleep habits, breast-feeding vs. formula feeding, etc. For example:

• While I was totally aware of my lack of pain tolerance, I was determined to have a pain meds free birth and well, back labor is a bitch so bring on the epi!
• I swore up and down that if I was hungry during labor, I was going to eat. Well, come labor you’re really not hungry anyway and that cherry Popsicle was the best damn Popsicle I had ever had!
• Never was I ever going to let my baby sleep in a swing at night. Well, when it is the only position baby is comfy in and you’re running on 2 hours of sleep, the kid is gonna sleep in the swing!
• People told me to sleep when the baby sleeps and I kept thinking, ha, I won’t be thattired…ha, I have never been so tired in my life!
• I would never take my kid to daycare, and I still haven’t, however I considered it when we were two weeks away from my going back to work and we still had no sitter. We would have paid more for childcare than I would have made working so…not worth it.
• Vaccines. A very loooooooonnnng time ago, even before B and I were married, I believed vaccines caused autism and that has since been totally bunked (and if you disagree with me, sorry). Well, in the last year I went from thinking I would not be vaccinating my babies to feeling strongly about doing so, only on a slower more drawn out schedule. Reasoning here deserves a whole other post all on it’s own.

There’s more, but these are the things I can remember. All I know is that there is no such thing as a parenting manual and even if there was one, it would not work on every baby. It may even work one night and not the next. Babies are so unpredictable and our thoughts and believes, while with good meaning, can become unpredictable too. I love what I am learning as a parent.

A lack of control, kinda.

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• I was walking the dogs this afternoon while wearing Logan in the front pack, something which makes this kid giggle like nothing else, when another momma walked by with her dog and stroller. My 75 pound greyhound and 45 pound mutt, both being held in my left hand, proceed to yank on the leash so hard I pee my pants. Yep, I did. I guess I was using my ab muscles to keep myself from falling over, to keep Logan from going anywhere, and to prevent all three dogs from getting tangled up and they failed me. No amount of kegals or ab workouts can fully repair the damage done to my bladder. Oh dear.
• Logan had a popsicle for the first time tonight, grape, to be specific and he LOVED it. I took his shirt off and plopped him in the high chair. I held onto the stick while he sucked and eventually bit off small bites and boy did that create all kinds of faces!! He loved the cold, the flavor and the drool. I quickly stuck him into the bath to wash off the purple stripes running down his chest.
• Tonight, B brought home the most beautiful wild sunflowers. A resident where I work (he takes care of the landscaping) gave them to him and I am just beside myself with wonder. I love that he surprised me and I love that I have two huge sunflowers to peek at out of the corner of my eye.
• This weekend, I literally did NOTHING. I started laundry and most of it is done, none of it is folded and I have cloth diapers in the wash that need to go in the dryer but that probably won't happen before I go to bed.
• Today Logan was so pissed off. Like, I have never seen a 6 month old become so frustrated with his lack of skills. The kid wants to crawl so badly! His legs know what to do, but his arms are stuck in place. He was whining at me all day long like he does when his teeth are bothering him and after a few hours it finally hit me that the kid is just pissed off. I kind of giggled when I figured this out and tried to accommodate him but to no avail.
• I am so excited to go back to school! It is all I can do to just wait around for the acceptance and for my references to get their letters done. I don't start until May and it feels like forever from now. I am just going to soak up all the time I have with my family now as I can, which I know will change once I am full time at school.

How's that for random? Happy Monday!