The Decision

Growing up, I never had a desire to have children. I never babysat, I never changed a diaper, I never was around children. I am the youngest of three. I played with Barbie dolls and not baby dolls. I never felt very "motherly" and didn't have any sort of deep down reactions when I would see babies. When I was 18 I discovered I had ovarian cysts. One of the doctors I saw for this told me if I didn't have surgery to remove them, I may never have children. I didn't want to do the surgery and that was a risk I was willing to take.

When my husband and I started to get serious, I decided to tell him my feelings on the subject and was hoping he understood-I didn't care either way if we ever had children. Him and I both decided that if we were ever to have children it would have to be an accident. I took the birth control pill and never missed it, so it looked like we weren't going to be parents.

We had 2 dogs and that was fine for us. A Chihuahua and a French Bulldog. When the French Bulldog turned 3 he suddenly became paralyzed from the waist down. My husband took him to the vet and decided to do surgery on his spine. We were told he would have a 90% chance to walk again after 2-3 months. 3 months rolled around and no progress. We were even taking him to physical therapy sessions 2x a week. Now just to put this into perspective: The dog couldn't walk, he couldn't control his bladder or his bowels, and could no longer use his doggy door. He was wearing diapers which resulted in a severe rash. My husband and I both worked full time, so the dogs were alone while we were working. I couldn't stand making the poor thing get such a nasty rash, so we stopped with the diapers. Needless to say, we were mopping the floors at least three times a day. After 6 months of this we decided to surrender him to the French Bulldog Rescue Network, and have him fostered. He has since been adopted by a nice couple who lets him run in his wheelchair on a farm all day. I am sure he is much happier.

This leads to "The Decision". After we surrendered our dog, there was an emptiness in our lives. We no longer had something to "take care of" as my husband put it. We still had the Chihuahua but he was pretty self sufficient. My husband asked me if I would be willing to try to have a baby now, because we knew we could handle whatever the child would throw at us. At this point in my life I was willing to try. I had a man I loved, trusted, and respected, and I knew if he was willing to have a baby with me, he would help me out and support me through the whole process. I was nervous about the whole idea (what if I turn out to be a terrible mom, what if I find I don't love my child like a mother should, what if I get my hopes up about becoming pregnant to find I am not able to have children) but decided to jump in and go for it. We tried for only 3 months and I was pregnant! I took the pregnancy test and was a ball of nerves waiting for the results. Once the test was finished and I saw that ominous word "PREGNANT" on the stick.........well, I can't put all my emotions into words. The most important and prominent one though---Pure JOY and EXCITEMENT. I was actually thrilled to become a mom. Me- the woman who never wanted kids. The one who could barely take care of a dog was now going to be responsible for a human life. Hot Dang!

Socially Awkward, Socially Aware

I don't get people. I'm really not very good at seeing what motivates them and to what they relate. I've always had this disconnect, where it takes some embarrassing event for me to see that I've hurt someone's feelings or missed some important social cue. Therefore, I'm shy and often awkward. I say inappropriate or down right stupid things. At times I talk about myself or my views an inordinate amount in an attempt to excuse or explain myself.  I turn people off, sometimes right away and other times after a while. I'm also a disorganized, flakey, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person. Some people love me because I'm a wacko, others love me despite it, and most people that figure it out steer clear, or I steer clear of people, I'm not sure which.

The trouble is, I'm socially aware enough to know that I'm not a good friend, good acquaintance and an overall socially adept person. I've tried to remedy these things, particularly my propensity for flakeyness and disorganization (which oddly enough are qualities specific to my social life, not my work life), as I want to be a better friend. However, I always find myself back where I was, and now that I'm a parent I don't much have the motivation to pump energy into self improvement.

Aye, there's the rub. I'm a parent; an example. How do I raise a socially adept, timely thank-you card writing, empathetic person when I am not that way?

Introduction

Hi, let me start by introducing myself. wow, I'm nervous.... :) I have never been good at speaking in front of groups, and the funny thing is, to me this is one and the same. I feel as if I am standing in front of each and every one of you, sweating and choking. You may be wondering what is up with the name "SunShoe" It is not my real birth given name. It came to me in a dream.--
I was living in a big house on a hill. Looking down the hill was a red barn attached to the house by a Zip Line -my favorite mode of transportation. I took the Zip Line down to the barn where there was a gnarly tree with a cubby hole hidden among the knots in the wood. I opened the cubby and grabbed a set of keys for my car. Since the barn was down hill from the house, I had to walk back up. On my trip back, I encountered a large group of Japanese men walking across my yard. I had intended on squeezing through their procession, but they stopped me. Come to find out this was the Yakuzaa (Japanese Mob). They kept calling me SunShoe and saying they were kidnapping me.--
Sadly I woke up and never discovered the fate of SunShoe. I would like to think she kicked butt and ran them over with her giant Hummer Alpha (I pictured the car belonging to those keys as a massive tank/spaceship of a car.)

Dakota has asked me to contribute what I am able to this blog, seeing as I just recently had my first baby in December. He is now 6 weeks old and I can share the perspective from the newborn stage. I better start soon for I fear I have already forgotten the beginning of my story. He is slowly becoming more and more alert. Every day he does something to make me fall deeper in love with him. He is quirky and gassy (the soundtrack of my life is now grunts and toots) and has the cutest voice I have ever heard (even if it is only crying at this stage). When he cries he actually says "Waaaahh!" I am not kidding you, there is a definite "W" on the beginning of "Waaaahh!" His lip pokes out and everything. He prefers to have his socks off when he nurses, and he is the master at flipping me the bird. Though I am pretty positive he doesn't get the meaning of this yet. I hope.

There is the introduction to me and my story. I will visit again soon.

Big Food

MLO has begun to eat chunky foods. I started by scooping the butternut squash and sweet potato out and just mashing it a little and processing his green beans to a relish consistency instead of a puree. I also chopped his banana into matchstick width cubes. Our pediatrician suggested we start meats at 9 months and told me not to bother pureeing them. His words were, "Would you want to eat that stuff? Ick. Just chop it up fine, and feed him what you're eating that night."

MLO has always been a robust eater, so the change in consistency didn't phase him. I try to mix things into his cereal to expose him to different texture experiences, but I've heard many people say that method works well for getting a picky eater to progress out of purees. MLO has since tried chunked up green beans (which he ate with his hands and to which he seemed to have a topical allergy), chopped and steamed baby carrots and broccoli. I get a kick our of letting him feed himself; it allows me to do some dishes while he enjoys his meal. He enjoys playing with the food and carefully chooses different veggies from his options. He seemed to prefer the carrots to the green beans.

Today we will try pork. He has eaten chicken plenty and had some ground beef before the crazy allergy scare, but I haven't reintroduced it. A few days ago I introduced mandarin. I've heard conflicting things about when to introduce citrus, but I had it, and some sources say 10 months is fine, so we tried it. I have these nifty feeders that allow baby to suck and chew on food in a little mesh holder. I stuck a few wedges of mandarin in the bag and let him go at it. At first he made a face, but he persevered. Yesterday he looked blissful, chomping and sucking on that thing. I also tried a new recipe with him yesterday that he seemed to love:

Pear Yogurt
1. a few good sized globs of pasteurized plain whole milk yogurt (no sugar added)
2. half a semi-ripe pear, shredded
3. a pinch of cinnamon

I had some and it tasted delicious. I want to raise a child with a broad and experimental pallet. MLO's love of food should make that a simple task; it's really up to me to introduce unique textures and flavors. Speaking of which, I made chicken for him the other afternoon that was pretty damn spicy. I used my father-in-law's patented Spicy Southern Seasoning and thought I had significantly dulled it with flour. Not so! MLO ate it no problem mixed with his cereal or beans while I was gone. Surprisingly, it didn't seem to bother him coming out the other end, either. When I returned I tried the chicken and found myself nearly breaking a sweat. That's my boy! 

The Break

I just returned from my first baby free weekend. The inspiration came from Hubby. MLO is now well over the 10.5 month mark and I've been feeling really isolated, overwhelmed and generally sad, so Hubby suggested that I get away for the weekend. My sister lives in San Francisco, so I packed up on Friday and headed up.

I spent the preceding days doing laundry and prepping food so that MLO would be clothed and more easily fed. I didn't have any breast milk stored up, so Hubby fed MLO a bottle of formula in the mornings and late afternoon in addition to the baby's usual meals of solid food. I wanted the experience to be as easy for Hubby as I could make it.

As I got into my car on Friday I had a substantial knot in my stomach. What if I hadn't made enough food? What if MLO threw a fit about the formula? What have I forgotten? What am I going to do without him? Though I wanted to have a weekend to myself, complete with the luxuries of sleeping past 6am and allowing myself to get a good buzz on before 6pm, I really hated the thought of being away from my baby. I've been kind of a wreck lately, though, and knew that making some space for myself and what I wanted to do, giving very little thought to catering to someone else, would help me refresh and regenerate.

So off I went. I arrived in the city mid-afternoon and proceeded to have a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. We ate good food, went climbing, had a fabulous yin yoga class, ate more good food, shopped and ate still more good food. Hubby and I talked a couple of times a day on speaker phone so that MLO and I could hear each other. He sent me multiple pictures a day, so I didn't feel completely out of touch. I ached for my baby, but not nearly so badly as I thought I would. My sister and her husband made me feel like I was on a luxury vacation so that helped me relax and just enjoy the moment.

 MLO was a good boy for his daddy, and they had fun watching tractors and hanging with grandma, grandpa, aunty and uncle over the weekend. While I was away, MLO started to take some independent steps. This morning I got to witness his fledgling attempts at walking. The weekend went so well, in fact, that Hubby suggested I do this more often. I think I'll take him up on it. A nice monthly (or every other month)trip out of town to visit friends would be a grounding experience, while allowing me to reconnect with the friends I miss so much. It's hard for me to stay connected to people when I live far away (I loath the phone and online social networking) and I find it even more challenging now that I'm a mom. I remembered this weekend that I'm more than wife and mom and I would like to give that other part of me some attention, too.

Baby Love

First of all, I have to say "thank you" to Dakota for inviting me to post on her blog. It's been great fun getting insight from her on daily baby life, whether through talk or reading her blog. It truly helps to confer when you become a parent, especially to help keep your sanity - with not just your husband, but family and friends, too.


My baby, J, is 6 months old now, and since his birth I have just been in utter baby love. I never knew such a love. He was a surprise in every way - unplanned pregnancy and we didn't know that we were having a boy either. I like surprises as my hubs would say. My pregnancy was bliss, but my labor not so much. It was long, but I got through most of it without pain medication, which is what I wanted. After about 17 hours of hard labor with no change and just an hour and a half of sleep in 34 hours, we decided that I would get an epidural. Once I received the light epidural, my hubs and I got 2 hours of what felt like really deep sleep! Even better, once I woke up I was ready to go!! Then came our reason for living. We brought J home a day later and I just wanted to kiss him all over. Seriously, I wanted to kiss him non-stop. Perhaps, the overwhelming amount of hormones rising and falling in my body pursued me to want to make out with my son? This never-ending experience has made me feel so fortunate and I will continue to each and every day for our sweet boy.


J has been a pretty happy and mellow baby for us - easy to nurse and smiling early on - but when it comes to sleep he let us know early on what he wanted and that was to be walked and held to sleep. At about 3 months he soothed himself to sleep a few times in his crib, and had also been sleeping up to 9 hours at night, which was fabulous of course. Then that bubble burst and he was waking up 2-4 times a night screaming out of hunger. It wasn't until his 4 month well visit that we found out he grew 3 inches in length in 7 weeks. That was a vaild enough reason for me!


As parents, my hubs and I knew that we wanted to keep doing the things that we loved pre-baby, so we did and are continuing to do so. When J was 3 months old we started to do some small travels, like overnights not too many hours a way. We even took him to his first concert when he was just under 4 months, which was fortunately an accoustic show, and he wore sound-out headphones. He was amazing throughout and just slept as I carried and swayed him in the Ergo - all amidst windy and rainy whether. He was such a sport for his mom and dad. And right after that we did our first camping trip as a family - pretty much where it all began as it was the place where hubs and I got engaged. It was extra special because the campground had just reopened after a big fire 2 years prior.


The second bubble burst a little while after his first big growth spurt. He was indulging in longer night sleeps, until the week of Thanksgiving. I drove J, my dog, and I (poor hubs had to work) to Southern CA to my parents for the night before driving to Arizona to see J's great grandmother for the week. Driving what normally is 3 1/2 hours ended up being 7 hours for nursing stops and J was just plain lonely in the back seat when our dog wasn't standing up to look at him. That night was the first of many more disrupted sleeps, and driving to Arizona the next day was an even longer haul. So, for the past 2 months J has been waking up several times a night to nurse and be held. I thought it was all from travel and that this was the forefront to getting stuck in a rut that could possibly last 10 years (believe me, I am kidding!), but at his last well visit he did have another growth spurt - his head! Yaaa, for his growing brain! I am not worried about his constant night waking, though, and just keep telling myself that I will one day get a full night's sleep. So what if I am half awake when we are having productive bonding and nurturing time! I will miss it someday because they really do grow fast. And I now understand why my dad always told me, "Don't grow up. Stay how you are now," when I was little. I truly want J to stay a baby and in my arms forever. Then again, I miss having more than a glass of wine, and getting up and go for selfish reasons. So perhaps he can stay a baby 6 days a week and then give me one day to not have any responsibilities. If only we could pick and choose in our lives. But he is forever my little boy and I don't want to miss one second of him either.

New Year, New Faces, New Insanity

Exciting news! I've invited a friend of mine to contribute some of her experiences to the site. I will let J's Mama introduce herself, but suffice it to say she's a wonderful mom and a great friend. I would probably have gone crazy if it weren't for her friendship and understanding! Stay tuned for her first post!! (No pressure JM ;)

Speaking of new faces, MLO has moved into and possibly out of the stage of making this hilarious Klingon face. It is in response to everything from happiness to frustration. If not for the myriad weirdos on the internet, I would share it with you. Much like the fearsome Klingons, MLO has begun to yell and scream. He mostly shares this over-vocalization when things simply aren't going his way. Remove him from the dog bowl? Ear-splitting shriek. Take the time to cut up his banana? Repeated angry yelling. Change his diaper? Both. It's really lovely to be yelled at for meeting his needs... all day long... every day.

He finally mastered coming down the stairs, though I would never allow him to do this unsupervised. He moves down feet first, backward. We decided early on that we didn't want to tempt him with gates. Gates present a challenge, and MLO loves nothing more than to do exactly what he knows we don't want him to do. Since I recently noticed him getting a foot up on the middle of a panel of Alcatraz, I decided that our decision was a good one. The last thing we need is a baby taking a header from over a gate at the top of 13 steps. I sometimes wish we had a gate at the bottom so that he were relatively penned in downstairs, but oh well. It keeps me on my toes. He actually took a spill from a few steps up the other day. I was standing a couple of feet from the bottom of the stairs, going over his list of tried solid foods when I glanced up and caught him tumbling down head first into our wood floor. We both freaked out. He was fine, scared but uninjured. I felt like a terrible mother. Of course I know better than to let my 10 month old play around the stairs; he's a fast little bugger and it doesn't take long for him to get much higher up the stairs than one might expect.

He has also begun to wave. This motion is somewhat rudimentary as it mostly consists of a fist in the air with perhaps the addition of a single finger or splayed hand in the direction of whomever's attention he is trying to get. His friend (2-weeks younger than he is) already has waving, clapping and head shaking down, and she has for months.

I've also made what, for me, is a big move. I have officially stopped the regular pumping I've been doing 2-3 times a day for the last 2 months. I hated it. It was restrictive, isolating, and increased the difficulty of caring for MLO when it was just me and him, because I had to pump when I had to pump regardless of whether he was asleep or not. This made tending to his needs and keeping him out of trouble especially challenging. The problem with this decision is that I don't have milk with which to make his cereal, which means that he isn't getting the high calorie, and ultimately nutritionally complete meal he was getting in the past. With his low weight and height I worry that I'm selfishly keeping him from breaking that 5% mark on the growth curve, though he isn't a hungry baby and he is already eating yogurts and cheeses.

Ah, the trials and triumphs of motherhood.

Well, that's the news from Lake Wobegon...

Parenting is not all sunshine and bliss...

and that's ok. I came accross a link to this on Offbeat Mama. These people have it right and say it in a way that is concise and sensical. This video will make you smile. Watch it.