We've been busy

But not really, busy, per se.  More like eating playdough. 

(Not me.) 

(Well maybe just a little, just to figure out why he's so obsessed with shoveling the stuff in.  Because he makes the most horrible "yuk" face, but then just goes to town on it again as soon as I fish it out of his mouth.  I still don't get it.) 



Playing in the backyard.



Going for long walks, drinking iced coffee. 



Running amok at the playground. 



Just life. 

For as crappy of a spring we've had here in Minnesota this year, we've been having a lot of fun.  Life with a toddler is pretty awesome. 

I'd like to get back here, hope to find time this week to write.

Vintage Gus...

...with his first girlfriend, Isla.   



Such little chubby-cheeked punkins.  I am thinking about the baby days these days, and missing them.  It just went too fast.  Life just goes too fast.

Except in the winter, after the holidays are over.  Life really slows down then, when we're all wishing for spring.  Thank God for April. 

Life... according to my phone

I could go on and on about how much my new smart phone has changed my life, it's like when we got a DVR years ago, a whole new world opened up before my eyes.  I mean, EVERYTHING is at my fingertips, I can barely comprehend what I did without it, and it's only been a few months! 

I know, so cliche.  But seriously.  I have become one of those annoying people who is always messing with her phone.  Because it is just that awesome.  I'm sure it'll lose it's appeal a little bit as times goes, and I'll get less annoying.

Well since I finally got with the times and upgraded to said life-changing smart phone, I have pretty much stopped taking pictures with a real camera.  So the tale goes, I never have my camera with me, but always have my phone. 

Anyway, thought I'd finally get a bunch of random pictures off my phone, so I'm sharing here.  They are not great pictures, obviously, but it's fun to look back and see what we've been up to.  Lots of random, but lovely moments in life that have been captured, because of my new, awesome, life-changing cell phone. 



Ok, when I was pregnant we got a huge bin of Thomas train stuff (probably worth $500+) from my old boss, and Gus is totally into them these days, as this picture from some Saturday morning a few weeks back suggests.  Really, he's just hardcore into trains of any kind. 

Big news this week is that he has finally moved on from saying Beep Beep! when referring to his beloved trains.  The back story on that is, that I think my mom taught him Beep Beep!  The same woman who also once pointed to an animal in a book that she was reading to Gus and asked me what it was.  When, incredulously, I told her that it was an, um.... giraffe, she replied, "Oh yeah, that's right, I get those and zebras mixed up!"

Yeah, we had a good laugh about that, I love my mom.  But needless to say, sometimes she gets things wrong, and while we can chalk up the giraffe/zebra mix-up to the theory that animals may not be her strong suit, I think we can also all agree that trains, decidedly, do NOT say Beep Beep!

Anyway, like I was saying, Gus now says his own toddler-ized version of chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-CHOO CHOO!  It is, without a doubt, the most adorable thing ever, and I dare you to find something cuter.  Other moms, we'll just have to agree to disagree if you think your kid does anything cuter than mine.  ;)



We've hung out at the library a couple times during this looooooong never ending winter, and Gus just loves it, they have an amazing children's section, with loads of educational toys, puzzles, and set-ups, and of course, books.  It's fantastic, though we were there on Monday, and I don't think I'll be going on Mondays at 10:30 anymore, because it was insanely packed due to toddler story-time.  As wonderful and hilarious and cute as they are, that many young children (mainly, other people's children) in one setting, stresses me out. 

As you can see, this picture was taken pre baby's first haircut, back when my boy still had a lovely little mullet. 



This girl doesn't get a lot of blog-attention these days, but she is doing just fine.  She's as sick of winter as the rest of us, but she suffers silently.  Such a good dog, and seriously, I can't say enough how proud I am of how well she's taken to having a baby, and now a toddler take over our household.  She just loves Gus, and though she certainly gets less attention from us than she did when she was considered the baby of the house, I think she prefers this life with him in it.



Oh goodness, is there anything sweeter than a sleeping child?  Usually we stay as far away as we can from Gus's room during nap time, but that day we had to wake him up to go somewhere.  I couldn't resist snapping a photo.



At the park.  Sure doesn't look like spring does it?  Whatever, so tired of feeling cooped up. 



Bucket head!  Gus plays peek-a-boo wherever, whenever he can, using whatever props he has available to him.   



In our backyard, playing fetch with Bella.



His dad came home from work last Friday with cupcakes from Cupcake! Yum.  He got Gus a Banana Fluffernutter cupcake, because it had banana in the name, and bananas are Gus's absolute FAVORITE thing in the whole wide world.  I don't think Dan realized that fluffernutter implied peanut butter filling and marshmallow frosting.  We were both a bit turned off by the combination, but Gus clearly enjoyed it.



We hit up the model train museum last Saturday, and it was a huge hit. 



Gus just kept saying, over and over, WOWWWW! when a train would go by.  We had a blast, and I have to say, doing stuff like this with your very own kid is simply, really freaking awesome.  Showing them things for the first time, watching them be amazed and excited, seeing their little pint-size wheels spinning, well it's exciting and rewarding to be a part of it.



I know, this picture is frightening, with my blurry ghost-like head in the background, and Dan's face lit up green by the sun.  But whatever, it is hilarious.  We were at Costco and, without us even realizing, Gus snatched up this unripened pear from our cart while we were shopping.  He was extremely proud of himself and after refusing to give it up, he continued to gnaw on it while we checked out, hit up the liquor store, as we got him in the car seat, and then throughout the entire drive home.  It kept him quite content actually.



Ok, these are really random, but I liked my outfit that day, was excited for my new oxford shoes, and was kind of obsessed with the fact that I was wearing a wool blazer.  For some reason I felt very 80's collegiate in my blazer and wine corduroys.  Or very Jessi Spano.  I dunno.   



Blazer!  Ok,  now I'm obsessed with saying it.

We just do

People ask me how I can stand it. The sleep deprivation. The every-other-hour wakings. I mean 18 months of this! How have you survived? I can’t believe he’s STILL NOT SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT!

I know they mean well, but that doesn’t help. The incredulousness, the pity, mixed with undertones of, they must be doing something wrong…

After really bad nights, I start to believe them. He’s a walking, talking, happy little toddler. Why doesn’t he sleep like he’s supposed to? Why can’t he be normal? And I hate that I let that crap in every once in a while, because really? For the most part, we’re cool with it. We joke around, we’re self-deprecating, and I suppose it comes up in conversation. Because sleep seems to be like, the most important topic when you have children. But whatever. This is our life, we roll with the punches, we love our son so much, and truly? It’s only been 18 months. Of a LIFETIME. His lifetime. Our lifetime. He was a baby for like what, a year? Not even. It was gone like that, before I even realized it, that bald head was covered in scraggly blonde hair and those squishy little sausages he had for legs were walking (running) him all over his little world, which was just getting bigger and bigger by the day.

I feel like toddlerhood is just the same, fleeting, and I’m not going to get hung up on trying to make him sleep like we want him to sleep, because I truly think it’ll happen eventually. I’m not going to waste these precious days on sleep training, and I’m not going to get so obsessed with having a perfect sleep schedule that I have to constantly refuse invitations for family gatherings where Gus so joyfully participates in trouble-making amongst his numerous cousins and aunts and uncles.

He’s been sleeping a lot better over the last few weeks, after pushing through 2 of the 4 eye-teeth he’s been working on. (His poor gums are big giant puffs of redness.) A few nights ago he only woke up once, at midnight, then afterwards slept six hours straight. Not going to lie, it was glorious.

For some reason, that night when he awoke at midnight, he was so alert and wide awake, his big blue eyes staring into mine. We snuggled together in the rocker, and he pointed at things throughout the dark room, his sweet voice, jabbering on, telling me things in his own little language that I couldn’t understand. But I insisted with him that it was nighttime, and we needed to go back to sleep. So he laid his head on my chest and spent about fifteen minutes trying to get comfortable, changing positions, turning his head. He would sit up and look at me, then reach his arms around my neck and pull me in for tiny kisses, then lay his head back down.

Oh the sweetness. I held him long after he fell asleep, his delicious little head in the crook of my neck, still smelling of bath time. It was one of those moments… where I thought… if this is wrong, well then screw them, no this is perfect.

Of course I wish he slept better, but no, I don’t think we’re doing anything wrong. I think I have a sensitive little boy who wants his mama or daddy when he wakes up all alone in the middle of the night. Sometimes he chooses to go back to sleep on his own, but most of the time, no. He wants one of us.

We have a little boy who doesn’t brush off things like teething or sickness like they’re nothing. No, he needs help. He demands help. On those nights he gets up constantly, and he wants someone near him when he wakes up in pain. I do not love it. And sometimes I drag my tired body into his room and grumble under my breath in frustration. But he’s only been alive for 18 months, and I’m not going to expect him to be able to handle those things on his own. Sure, it’d be nice if he could, but I’m not going to push him. And I’m his mom, I brought him into this world, and I just can’t let him fend for himself when he so clearly tells me that he needs me.

Yeah, he needs me a lot at night. But in the morning, he is an exuberant, independent, and ferociously funny little boy. He is a blur in almost every picture I take. He climbs up on coffee tables and dances and cackles until you drag him off. He jabbers on and on, tells us jokes and long stories about trucks. Dan will draw him little pictures and he tells us what they are. Bus! Stop! Aaaps (Apple)! Ask him where something is in a book, and he points, “There it is!” He dances and jumps all over the house. He laughs and laughs as you sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and then pounces and attacks you in a fit of giggles when you put your arms up in the air singing, “Out came the sun and…”. (Sometimes we do not know why he does the things he does.)



He is a normal 18 month old. And maybe there are a lot of normal 18 month olds out there who don’t sleep very well, like our little guy. Maybe people just don’t talk about it? Maybe they all cry themselves to sleep? I don’t know. Whatever. He’s happy, growing, learning, and constantly changing.  And so are we.  We’re not just “surviving”, like I think people sometimes believe. We don't deserve a "medal". We’re living and laughing and smiling and having adventures every day.  And at this point, we're quite used to doing it all on little sleep!

On my ineptitude in the kitchen

Our refrigerator is barren… and in that I don’t mean that it can’t get pregnant. I’m talking about the other kind of barren. It is desolate, bleak, and deserted (according to my thesaurus). Really, we are in desperate need of a trip to the market, but that has proven to be an impossible task this week. Between a lovely late-March snowstorm and fitting in a long-overdue oil change on our car Tuesday… it just hasn’t happened. Maybe tonight? Oh if there were only a few more hours in each day.

I hate getting home after work at 6:00 and scrambling to get something on the table by 6:30. HATE. I think it probably goes without saying, but a pretty big part of having children means you’re in charge of feeding them, and it just feels inappropriate to have cereal or ice cream for dinner. At least until Gus is a little older. So anyway, poor me, it is the cross I bear.

On days that Dan’s not around, I am so that mom who runs around putting together a balanced meal for her 18 month-old that includes multiple fresh fruits/veggies, a form of protein, and some sort of whole grain, and then sits down and eats an orange and a bag of microwave popcorn whilst he feasts.

Yeah, I know. That’s not going to fly for much longer, as Gus gets older I think he may start to revolt against a system that involves broccoli for him, and Starburst jelly beans for me.

So we try to eat meals as a family as much as possible, preferably most of the same things, and especially at dinnertime. But yeah on those three nights a week after which I’ve worked 9 hours (especially after a busy weekend that did not involve grocery shopping)? Blergh.

I must say, after this loooooong winter, (right? it has seemed exceptionally long hasn’t it?), Gus has become quite the little connoisseur of take-out. Granted, (disclaimer!) we always supplement these meals with fresh fruits and veggies from our refrigerator, but seriously the child could eat his weight in chow mein, vegetable fried rice, chicken curry gyros, saffron rice, cilantro lime rice with black beans, and mostaccioli.

I am not proud.

On the other hand, he will turn his nose up at pizza, or anything that resembles a chicken nugget or fast-food sandwich. Go figure. But I can’t really take credit for that. Toddlers are weird and they have their own ideas about pretty much everything, don’t they?

Sooooo even though I have no idea what we are going to eat with it, I will take this opportunity to brag a little that I had the where-with-all to defrost a pork roast earlier this week, and actually threw it in the crockpot (slow-cooker?) before I left for work. I had to put my cell phone on top of the crockpot last night to make sure I would actually remember to do it this morning, and that did the trick.

And it has been lovely going about my day without that sense of DREAD about what we will make for dinner. It has been decided! The crockpot is a wonderful thing isn’t it? I should really take advantage of its awesomeness much more often, but again that would involve some foresight and meal planning, which you may have gathered by now is not really how I roll.

I fear the poor dog has felt tortured all day, with the smell of onions and peppers and meat wafting throughout the house. Don’t pity her too much, though, I’m sure she’ll get her share tonight during dinner, via the tiny hands of her favorite little toddler. Oh I can’t wait to kiss his cheeks, just a few more hours…

Attachment

Gus is at Grandma's house today while Dan and I spend the day staring at spreadsheets (me) and going to countless meetings (him).  

Well, sometimes she sends us little updates.  I absolutely love them, love getting a little insight into his day, love to think about something other than sales forecasts and financial reports.   

This is today's update that she sent Dan, I hope my mother-in-law doesn't mind me sharing...

Gus is seeming to have a great day. He’s playing, happy, ate, adorable. THEN he pulled some little photo albums off the end table shelf and looked at pictures. One is a picture of you holding William when he was a baby, and it made Gus CRY. The lip, the crumple, and he came and got in my lap, weeping. I thought is he missing you? He’s so little, and he’s seemed perfectly happy! So we came in here to facebook, and he stared at the picture of you and Alicia and got all depressed again. I think we should go find a cooky and see what James is doing. Diversion time. Who knew??? Love, Mom

Oh my goodness, the sweetness.  I am verklempt. 

What a great kid.  Oh I love him so. 

A few pictures from this weekend...  It was lovely. 



It was so sunny out on Friday, and Gus was finally feeling better after so many weeks of being sick.  So we ventured outside to check out the neighborhood.  It was colder than I thought.  Unfortunately our little outing didn't last long. 



So we went inside, had a snack, and watched some Curious George.  And played peek-a-boo.  And had a tickle fight.  I hadn't seen Gus giggle and laugh like that in months.  So happy to have our boy back.



Dan bought him that hat when he was just a tiny little thing.  Came home from Target with it one random evening, proud papa, and we tried it on the little dude.  It was massive then, still a litle big now, but gosh I can't believe how much life has changed in a year.



Blurry, because they are having a blast!



Trekked out to Midtown Global Market for lunch on Saturday.  Super fun place for a toddler to explore.



Oh jeez.  Look at the way his hair wings out, I just can't get enough.  Never cutting it.



Family self-portrait.  Sorta.  (Yeah, that's Dan's blurry face up there.)

TMI Alert! Gus is Regular

I know I’ve mentioned here before that Gus had some constipation issues, and I wanted to update on that. I know. A whole post about poo? Gross. When did I become THAT mommy blogger?

I swear I’m not.

The thing is, we solved our problem, and I just want to put it out there because if, through the power of Google, I can help out anyone else that’s going through what we did, it’s worth it to talk about poo for a few paragraphs.

Just thinking about those dark days makes me stressed out. For months, from the time he was about 11 months old, until sometime after 15 months, Gus was pretty much chronically constipated. He would go about 3-7 days between. Sometimes he’d have to work so hard that he’d cry and sob. A few times we had to help him out, rub his tummy, put him in a warm bath while he screamed and grunted. His poos were like big hard rocks. Oh, and sometimes there would be blood in his diaper. Yeah.

It was really really really stressful.

We tried everything diet-related we could think of. Cut out anything that’s binding. No carrots. No bananas. We limited his dairy. We loaded the kid up with fiber, and at the same time kept him super hydrated. We even gave him about 6 ounces of prune juice every day by mixing it with his milk. He ate tons of green vegetables, fruits, kidney beans, you name it and we tried it. We got to the point where we were afraid of giving him even a bite of cheese or white pasta. Our life revolved around getting our kid to poop. I was constantly counting the days between. It was always in the back of my head, I looked at everything through the scary “Toddler Constipation” lens, and it made for really stressful mealtimes.

We had people tell us to give him Miralax, but we were pretty adamant that we wanted to treat the problem, not the symptom. We try to avoid giving him drugs if we can, I mean Dan and I are both the kind of people that, for the most part, stay away from over-the-counter cocktails. Tylenol is pretty much the extent we go to for treating our own illnesses.

So I started really doing some heavy research, and found articles talking about evidence that linked cow’s milk with constipation in babies and toddlers. It seems to be a very common problem for young children to have intolerance to the dairy protein found in cow’s milk, and usually most grow out of it by the time they’re school-aged. There were hundreds of comments on these online articles with parents just like us, who ditched the cow’s milk with their toddlers and saw an immediate change.

It was worth a try. Gus was drinking less than 12 ounces of cow’s milk a day, which our pediatrician thought was perfectly acceptable, but it was the only thing we hadn’t changed in his diet. And coincidentally (duh), it was the only thing that we had introduced into his diet at around 11 months old, when this mess started.

Then I started researching all the alternatives to cow’s milk. Soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, hemp milk… Wow. It’s sort of overwhelming how many alternatives are out there, but it’s pretty evident that Soy is the closest alternative to cow’s milk. It has loads of protein and calcium, just not as much fat as whole milk, so you have to compensate for that lack of fat in other areas of the diet.

We thought we’d give it a week.

Holy crap (literally). It was an almost IMMEDIATE fix. I am not exaggerating. Within a week we had a whole new “regular” kid. And we didn’t even realize it at the time, but he was so blocked up you could see it in his big tummy. He went from having a protruding baby pot-belly to a flat toddler’s stomach within just a few weeks.

Craziness. The most frustrating thing is that it took us so long to figure out. And now that we have, people in my life are coming out of the woodwork left and right with opinions in agreement with the research I found. My mom is a nurse, and she’s talked to a number of doctors now that shun the cow’s milk, especially for little ones, and will go on and on talking about its detractors. I guess I live in a bubble, we just always drank milk, in mass quantities… does a body good right?

It all just goes to show that we know our kid best, and we need to trust our instincts instead of waiting for someone else to solve our problems. We had consulted with our pediatrician, but she just kept telling us to do the same stuff that we were already doing. Give him more juice? First of all, juice isn’t good for kids, and I’d rather not give it to him at all, and secondly, we were already giving him up to 8 ounces a day! Then she said 6-8 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. Umm… he pretty much was only eating fruits and vegetables at that point because we were afraid to give him anything else. The kid ate broccoli and green beans and pears like he was stranded on a desert island and hadn’t eaten in weeks… shoveled the stuff in. It wasn’t until I really started to put things together, the time-frame, the fact that we had given up all other dairy yet the kid was still chugging 12 ounces of cow’s milk a day. So dairy like cottage cheese and yogurt is constipating, but whole milk is fine?

Ugh. Now I’m rambling. Anyway, there you have it. Problem solved! I have to admit, as a parent of a toddler, I don’t usually get to say that. We never seem to actually solve problems, usually solutions are only temporary, or they’re of the, “he’ll grow out of it” category. We zig, he zags. One little issue sort of dissolves over time and a new one pops up. It all sort of runs together.

But this problem, I declare, has been solved. And it is awesome. For the first month or so after we made the switch to soy, I was excited when Gus would have an uneventful, normal poo, nearly every day. This is what we were praying for during those dark days!

So the definitive sign that we are really done with that horrible problem? I now dread poopy diapers, like any normal mother who does not analyze and obsess over her kid’s bowel movements. That normalcy is extremely comforting.

17 Months

So I haven’t written for a while because if I had, it would have probably sounded a little something like this:

Wah wah wah, my poor little baby is sick again, or still, or whatever… blah blah blah, I hate winter and don’t know if I can stand one more -15 degree day… whine whine whine, my life revolves around scrambling to figure out what to do with a sick toddler and still somehow make it into the office… woe is me, in the last month I have slept in the nursery’s rocking chair more than in my bed… my life is so terrible, I have been vomited on (we’re talking insane amounts of puke) more in the last two weeks than in all four years of college.

I have tried to write here on a number of occasions, but I have just been so invested in moping about how spectacularly crappy we have had it with The Sickness (yeah, it is so bad it requires capital letters) this winter, I never got around to it. I’m just a big ole Debbie Downer these days, and I don’t want to bum everyone out. Or at least, I’m trying not to dwell on this “rough patch” that we’ve been wading through.

Now that all of that is out there, hopefully we can just MOVE ON.

You hear that universe? We are MOVING ON from this past month of boogers and missed play dates, 103 degree fevers and projectile vomiting, child care scrambling and endless streams of apologies and excuses to my boss.

Moving. On.

So my kid is 17 months old (CRAZY!) and despite being sick all the time (not his fault) he is pretty cool, and that is what I’m choosing to focus on these days.

Gus is still head over heels for books. He flips the pages, and ever so slowly and deliberately, he absorbs himself in everything going on in each page. His eyes go from the left, to the right, back left, up, down. He points at certain things, and babbles about what’s on the page. If we ask him where George is (Curious George is still just the best thing ever) he points to him and grins and giggles.

Of course he knows all the animal sounds, the typical Moo, Baa, Ooh-Ooh-Ahh-Ahh, Wow-Wow (that’s a dog), Rawrr (for a Lion, Tiger, Rhinoceros, and pretty much any animal that looks big and foreboding). When you ask him what a llama says, he does this little spitting/blowing raspberries thing. He just started saying “Me-Oww” when he sees a cat, and he does it in just the most adorable little person voice. It makes my heart flutter and soar and go ker-plunk all at the same time.

We have books stashed in every room of our house, there are piles of them in our car, in the diaper bag, he’s even got a bath-time book that he loves. He cleans the little animals with his washcloth, then washes his own body. The chicken on the last page of the book is deliberately upside down (“Silly Chicken!”), but Gus has to turn him right-side up before chicken gets the scrub down.

So yeah, he’s our little reader, and an endless supply of books keep him happy in the car, in the stroller at the mall, eating out at restaurants, everywhere.

He loves to play fetch with Bella, yells at her to “Rop” (drop) when she brings the ball back. If we ask him if he wants to play hockey, he runs over to the basket and pulls out his hockey stick and a ball. He brings Dan the little toy microphone he has, and in his own way, orders him to sing “Down by the Bay” (daddy rocks the old-school Raffi), and proceeds to dance and hop around the room, beaming from one ear to the other. The only way Dan is able to stop singing without eliciting a meltdown is if he switches to a “boring” song, like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”. Without fail, Gus promptly loses interest and moves onto something else.

17 month old Gus is also very affectionate. He hugs and kisses his little stuffed animals, he loves his doggy and tries to give Bella snuggles. (She’s not too fond of the toddler hugs, but she tolerates them, probably because it usually means she will get some love and attention from Dan and me as well.) I come home from work and he just wants to hug and love on me forever. All of a sudden he is all about giving me big wet sloppy (snotty) open mouth kisses. He holds tight on to my hair, and rubs it between his thumb and pointer finger. I think he is definitely going through a bit of a mama’s boy stage, and while that can be difficult on me, it’s also very sweet.

My little Baybee can now reach doorknobs, and can successfully open doors when he chooses. So we may be entering into a whole new ballgame of baby-proofing. Things Future Alicia and Future Dan were going to deal with are all of a sudden on the forefront. Last Friday I was in the kitchen cleaning up after breakfast, and it was suspiciously quiet in the next room. No monotonous “Beep Beep!” coming from his toy train, no sound of Gus running around the room, terrorizing the dog with a plastic bat. So I peaked in to check on him and he wasn’t there. I look in the spare bedroom. Not there. The bathroom? Nope. OMG! Then I noticed the door to the staircase was open. And I definitely closed it when we came downstairs this morning. PANIC! I ran up the super steep, slippery, wooden staircase and heard his favorite little buddy singing one of his songs. Yeah. He’s just sitting there on the rug holding Scout, reading a book, and he gave me a real nonchalant look like, “Hey mom! What’s going on? Yeah, I’m just hanging out in my room, playing with my toys, it’s allllll good.”

Gah!

So yeah, he can open doors. And he can climb really dangerous stairs. We definitely need to get that carpet guy out, like NOW, to install a runner on that staircase.

Food! Gus has become quite the little eater, we’re constantly trying to find new things for him to try, broaden his palate if you will. It is so easy to get in a rut with mealtimes, Dan and I do, so it’s no surprise that by extension that happens with Gus. We finally have just started to venture into the “raw” veggie territory, cucumbers, zucchini, bell peppers. That probably could have happened quite a while ago, but now that he has 12 teeth, including 4 molars, this first time mama feels a lot more comfortable with his food being a little more “crunchy”. He’s also finally getting better at eating things like sandwiches, which is nice, makes for finding meals that we can all eat together much easier. The kid still pretty much shuns all meat, but what can you do? I keep offering, he keeps refusing, we sneak it in there every once in a while, but whatever.

We’re still nursing. It’s usually been just at nap time if I’m home with him during the day or after work on days when I am at the office, and of course bedtime. However, over the last month or so since he’s been really sick, he wants to nurse much more. Sometimes it feels like I have a 3 month-old again, because he’ll be having a spectacular meltdown, for no discernable reason, and the only thing that calms him down is nursing. Poor little guy, The Sickness has just really taken a toll on him physically and emotionally.

I actually have been feeling some regret lately about tapering off my supply too soon, because I wonder if getting more breast milk would have helped him have a more healthy winter. If only he was being pumped with more of those breast milk immunities! I don’t know, I’m sure that’s me just being a crazy psycho guilt-ridden control freak, thinking I have anything to do with whether or not my kid gets sick.

The transition to breastfeeding a toddler has been pretty seamless actually, so I don’t have a lot to complain about. It’s a little bittersweet though, because like I said, Gus is so much more interested in nursing now than he was six months ago, and the whole thing is relatively relaxed and lovely, but I just don’t make nearly as much milk anymore and I know he sometimes gets frustrated with that. I guess it just makes me wish I hadn’t let myself get so worried about every little breastfeeding-related setback in that first year. Hindsight is 20/20 though. It IS a lot of pressure to have an infant completely rely on the milk you produce for their growth and nutrition, to be unsure of what going just a few extra hours without pumping or nursing might do to your supply, to feel like you need to be constantly offering yourself to your super distractible 9 month-old because he can’t seem to stay focused enough to nurse for longer than 2 minutes at a time. All of that pressure is just not there anymore, and it’s really awesome.

I still pumped once a day at work up until about mid-January, and I dropped the session after we went to Colorado. I have to admit, THAT has been GLORIOUS. Love to have given up the pump, being able to walk into work with just my purse and my laptop… for some reason it is just liberating! It feels like I’ve gained an entire arm or something.

While nighttime still has its challenges, I love our bedtime routine. First it’s a bath, then we brush his teeth (if he allows it), and Mama rubs him down with lotion before getting him into his bedtime diaper and jammies (usually this is somewhat of a wrestling match). When all of that business is taken care of, Daddy and Gus do “One for the Money” and/or “Rocket Ship” to get into our bed for a few books. I keep telling myself I need to videotape their little ritual, because it’s one of those perfect things that I just want to fold up and keep in my pocket to remember forever. It basically involves getting Gus sort of hyped up, right before bedtime, so yeah, maybe some of those sleep “experts” would have a problem with it. But whatever, it just pure childish fun that ends with Bella barking like a maniac and Gus soaring through the air and landing on our bed giggling and rolling around amongst all the blankets.

I have no idea when or why that all started, but it’s a perfect example of how different Dan’s relationship with Gus is from mine. I swear, dads come at this parenting thing with a different viewer on that moms do, I definitely see that with Dan. Thank goodness for Dads.

Ok, see? Life is good, when I let it NOT be all about The Sickness. Gus is as wonderful as ever, watching him become the little boy he is has been amazing.

And we are more than halfway through winter. It’s 40 degrees out there today, and we got to spend some time outdoors this weekend! Things are good.

2011

So.

2011 is officially kicking my ass. We have not had a very good year so far… luckily there is a lot of time for it to turn it around… but egh. I am just spent.

Gus brought the stomach flu home with him from daycare last week. He goes to a “kinda-sorta” daycare environment ONCE a week, so you’d think the odds would be in our favor. But yeah, it’s January, a month that tends to suck, so really I shouldn’t have expected anything less than ringing in the New Year hanging over the toilet, puking my guts out.

The Tuesday before Christmas we had decided not to send the little dude to daycare when we found out Monday evening on Facebook (via a status update) that the provider’s kids had been puking all day long. Since Dan was on vacation the next day, and was just planning on working on some on-going projects around the house, it seemed like a no-brainer to keep him home. But yeah, I wouldn’t be lying if it didn’t piss me off that I had to find something like this out from Facebook, and didn’t actually get a call from our provider to warn us that we might not want to bring our kid to her germ-infested house the week before Christmas.

We have a VERY casual thing going on with this woman, no contract, just sort of a gentleman’s agreement and a check every month for $50 per week. She’s a nice person, she only watches two little girls (the daughters of someone I went to high school with) on a full-time basis, and it was a huge relief to get introduced to her this past summer when we needed to find someone new to take care of Gus on Tuesdays.

So I’m not expecting much in the way of some professional notification, I know this thing we’ve got going with her is pretty informal, but it seems like we should have been at least told that she had a sick house. Maybe she expects me to see her status updates on Facebook? I don’t know, that’s pretty ridiculous, so I hope not.

Clearly, I’m a little annoyed.

Yeah, well I felt sort of vindicated… that’s the wrong word, I should say I was thankful that I trusted my gut… when Christmas came round and I found out that the two little girls both got sick, and gave it to their parents, and the whole family spent all of Christmas day puking and what-not. Ugh, poor dears, poor family. It sounded rough. And I was so glad that we paid $50 to keep our kid healthy for the holiday. Money well spent.

Fast forward to the week after Christmas, we thought we were in the clear to send Gus on Tuesday. And then on Thursday, Dan gets a call at work from his mom letting him know that Gus had vomited at lunch a few times.

Duhn duhn DUHN!

I was hopeful it was a fluke. Maybe the broccoli we had sent with him that day had spent more time in our fridge than we thought. Or he was eating a little too fast, causing him to gag, and that’s why he threw up.

I was in denial.

We were invited over to Dan’s grandparents house that night for an impromptu dinner, since we missed seeing them on Christmas Eve, so we scooted ourselves over there after I got home from work.

Mere moments after getting there Gus was in the corner of their living room making “that face”, so I got out the supplies for a diaper change. And yeah. Won’t go into details, but by then it was clear he was definitely sick.

Twenty minutes later, strapped in the highchair, he’s spewing all over himself.

Ok, so now he’s cleaned up, out of the chair. We’re trying to quickly finish dinner ourselves while he runs around the table, laughing hysterically. He reaches for me to pick him up, he’s on my lap, nibbling on a cookie [what idiot gave him a cookie? (it was me)], and it’s round two. All over me.

Gross. Also: my poor baby!

The amazing thing is that it didn’t seem to faze him. A minute later he was stripped down to his diaper, and again, running around the kitchen screeching and laughing and trying to jump in his own puke while we were on clean-up duty.

Dan’s poor grandparents did not have this in mind when they invited us over for pizza.

I mean come on.

Anyway, a baby/toddler with the stomach flu is actually kind of a scary thing. I was freaked out about him getting dehydrated, and he couldn’t seem to keep anything down but breastmilk and water. Thank goodness we’re still nursing, totally put my mind at east about the fact that he wasn’t getting really anything else, nutritionally, for two days. A little bit of pedialyte, but he wasn’t very into it. A quarter of a freezie-pop. A little bit of dry cereal. That’s about it.

So we survived, and on New Year’s Eve we put him to bed, hopeful that he would be on the mend the next day. We settled in for a movie. I ate a whole bag of microwave popcorn, because the holidays and my insane over-eating throughout have made my stomach the size of a dinosaur’s. I just can’t seem to eat enough.

Scratch that, I just couldn’t seem to eat enough.

Because with about 7 minutes left to go on the movie, I knew IT WAS COMING. The inevitable. I had caught it.

So I spent the night on the couch, Dan on Gus duty upstairs, and vomited off and on for about four hours. Around midnight, right after a particularly horrible trip to the bathroom, I got a text from my brother-in-law wishing me a “Happy New Year” and I was this close to texting back a big F-U. The only thing stopping me was that I knew he’d probably immediately call me back, and I didn’t have any desire to talk to anyone who wasn’t, at that moment, feeling as horrible as I was.

I woke up around 4:30 AM feeling a bit better, and went upstairs to check on my boys. By then, Dan was feeling it, so we switched places. And he had his little bout of sicky fun downstairs for the next few hours.

The next day was not pretty. Since having a child, Dan and I have never both been sick at the same time. Wow. We could barely pull ourselves together enough to feed Gus (who thankfully was feeling quite a bit better). We watched a lot of TV. There were a few instances where we both unintentionally dozed (on the couch or floor) while he busied himself with his toys around us.

A few times I started to feel really sorry for myself, mostly when Gus was being needy and a little sicky himself, wanting to nurse CONSTANTLY (which normally I would find incredibly sweet, especially when compared to that period of time when he was about 10 months old and too distracted to nurse, causing me boatloads of anxiety and engourgement), and I felt like I couldn’t even sit up without wanting to hurl.

We were hesitant to call anyone for help, because we didn’t want to put their health at risk. I mean, our house, at that point, was like a pit of despair. It smelled like sickness. But I convinced myself that Gus couldn’t be contagious anymore, and broke down and called my dad and pleaded for him and my mom to take Gus for a few hours when she got off work, so we could get some simultaneous REST.

Also, even though I was on my deathbed, the mom-guilt was still there. It is ALWAYS THERE! I could tell Gus was going a little crazy being in our house for the second straight day, and was feeling very neglected. So I knew it would do him some good to get out of the house, and my wonderful parents were up for it.

While Gus was running around at the mall and having a grand old time, we changed the sheets and did some laundry, cleaned the kitchen, and we slowly started to pull ourselves out of it, with the help of a Sister Wives marathon on TLC, and a quick trip to Subway for something bland to put in our stomachs.

Holy crap, that Sister Wives show is just… completely engrossing and compelling. I don’t really have much of an opinion about it, just that Cody and his family seem both wackadoodle and oddly normal at the same time. What a bizarre existence. But how awesome would it be to get to live with your girlfriends and your husband like that? To get to have these women right there to depend on and shop and cook dinner with, and raise your kids with. I mean, sharing your husband with them is bound to get a little weird, but I would think once you got over the initial hump of weirdness, it could be a pretty good life, no?

Any. Way.

Like I was saying, 2011 can go suck it.

We’re getting back to normal at home, but still, Gus’s sleep has been completely screwed up. He was getting a lot better, we were starting to have less and less night-wakings. We started having Dan more involved at night a few weeks before the holidays, and it seemed like the little guy was beginning to realize that his sole purpose for getting up at night (my boobs) were no longer something he could expect to be there. So for the most part, we were getting a lot more sleep in our house. Well, I should say I was getting more sleep, Dan was getting up in the middle of the night, consistently, for the first time, so short term it wasn’t necessarily a better situation for him. But yeah, we felt like we were making progress.

And then our four-day Christmas extravaganza happened, and Gus’s schedule was all outta wack.

Oh well right? C’est la vie. We were rolling with it.

Now, it is straight up horrible again. Worse maybe. He slept with us when we were all sick the one night, which was fine, probably because he was sick and actually slept, but for the most part, co-sleeping just isn’t working for us anymore. Sunday night was a prime example of that. All he did for about 2 hours in the middle of the night was roll around half asleep smacking us in the face, one second rolling on top of Dan and pinching and pulling at his facial hair, and then in the next moment he’s rolling the other way towards me, mouth open, looking to nurse and angry to end up with a mouth full of t-shirt.

Last night Dan was up with him three times between 11:30 and 1:30 AM. Between 2:00 and 3:30, he was up three more times, and I was the lucky winner who got to deal with him then. At 5:30 AM, as Dan was getting up for work… another waking.

We know he’s teething again, but also, this kid just sucks at sleeping. I hate saying that about him, because gosh I love him, but we’re getting to the point where I just can’t wait for him to grow out of it anymore. For my sanity, for his health. It’s just not working.

Last night I was helping him put himself to sleep at 2:10 AM, laying him in his crib as he scrambled to grab his blankie and stand up, reaching up to me. But I wasn’t having it. He doesn’t even want to be rocked to sleep, he can’t seem to get comfortable in that rocking chair anymore, so when he arches his back and head-butts me when I’m just trying to cuddle him and help him go to sleep, clearly that means he needs his own space.

So I’m crouched over the crib, got my hand on his back, he’s tossing and turning, but not crying, not even really fussing. This boy is tired. And not minutes later, he’s asleep. Hallelujah! I sneak back to bed, fall asleep, feeling smug. My inner monologue gushing all over the place, “See! He can put himself to sleep! We can do this, soon he will be doing it on his own and everything will get better and he won’t make my parents’ brains explode when he stays with them for four whole nights while we’re on vacation and away from him for the first time (tear!).” And then I drift off to sleep.

And then I’m awake again, he’s whining in the next room again, and I look at the clock.

2:35 AM.

Seriously. It had been about twenty minutes.

I still can’t stomach a hard-core cry-it-out approach, it’s just not for us, but I think we’re going to have to do something different. What’s that Albert Einstein quote? “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Yeah.

Also, I shouldn’t even be writing about this sleep stuff right now, because clearly we’ve had a bad few weeks, and some outside influences have been the major culprits. We’ve got like the holy trinity of sleep problem contributors happening: (1) Screwed up schedule, (2) Sickness, and (3) Teething.

So I’m totally in “that place” right now where it just all feels so dire and unbearable. It’s not always this bad. But the fact that it gets this bad is a problem. Because eight night-wakings is a problem.

Blergh.

So don’t comment and tell me how terrible this all is and how you feel bad for me. That’s not at all what I want. I’m not trying to throw a pity party, just getting it out there, purging.

Instead, if you’re looking to make a girl feel good today, tell me something sucky that happened to you recently. Come on… make it something really terrible. We can all be miserable together!

Oh oh! Something I alluded to above, the silver lining, if you will, of not eating for two days straight, is that my stomach has seemingly shrunk. I can’t eat half of what I was eating, portion-wise, a week ago. Awesome right?! Also, I don’t seem to want to really eat much of anything, since the SICKNESS it all makes me a little queasy. So if anything, the stomach flu was like a Christmas cookie/candy/cheesy-potato detox of sorts. Hopefully this will lead to my pants fitting a little better again.

Or I'll just buy something that is decidedly NOT a clog

I ditched the clog fixation. I mean seriously, what was that?

I think all the analysis I did to put together yesterday’s post really helped make it clear that none of those shoes were really what I wanted. I should put that kind of consideration into every purchase I make, write out detailed pro and con lists, ask people for advice. Just think of all the money I’d save! (Not to mention all the time I’d waste…)

My brother and I ran into Kohl’s at lunch today because he had to get a few links taken out of a watch he got for Christmas (we work for the same company, in the same department, with the same boss… if you didn’t know). While he was dealing with his little errand, I ran up to the shoe department to check out their selection, to see if they had the perfect elusive clog I was desperately searching for, at a much cheaper price mind you. And they were all ugly. Because Newsflash! Clogs are ugly.

But they did have these cute little boots on sale, for $30. And they totally fit the bill.



Cute. Flat. Not bulky. Inconspicuous. Comfortable. Easy. Cheap. Perfect.

So behold, yesterday I was prepared to embrace my inner frump and purchase a pair of $100 clogs, and today, instead, I bought $30 boots from the juniors section at Kohl’s.

Yeah, I’m pretty much THAT all over the place in the rest of my life as well. Thanks for humoring me yesterday ladies.