Happy Birthday

Today is the baby's first birthday. Can I still call her a baby? She doesn't walk yet, so she's not a toddler, right? No toddling going on here (from her, anyway).

First birthdays are more for the mom than the baby, I'm convinced. For me, it's the biggest emotional milestone of her life so far; she, on the other hand, is a blank slate with no expectations of balloons or cake or more stuffed animals to add to the heap. I can't stop thinking about what I was doing at this precise moment a year ago; she just wonders when it's going to be lunch time.

A year ago today I was just getting to know her. She was so small, her face so pink and round, her fingers so long and languid.

I feel like there's plenty to say on this subject, but I don't want to say it. Maybe later. Right now I feel like Mary: I will take these things and ponder them in my heart.




~RCH~

Thanks for the medicine, medicine guy!

It's a good thing I married the DH I did, because I know so little about medical issues it's scary.

The toddler, ricocheting around the room like a pinball, knocked the baby really hard in the forehead last Saturday -- hard enough to give her a dent. A dent, not a bump. I freaked out and paged DH, who was on call and very busy.

Me: The baby has a dent. Is that bad?

DH: Um.... Is she acting normal?

Me: Well, yeah. She cried when it happened, but she's okay now.

DH: Put some ice on it if you're worried.

Me: But it's a dent. Not a bump. Doesn't that sound like a bad thing? Isn't a dent worse than a bump?

DH: Babies have soft heads. I'm sure she's fine and I'm sure the dent will, well, pop out. Just keep an eye on her.

After dinner that same night, I noticed she seemed warm. I took her temperature with the ear thermometer (which I don't entirely trust because her ears are too small for it to fit well) and got 100.2F. I took it with the forehead strip (which DH doesn't trust because it looks like a gumball machine prize) and got 101F. I took it under her arm and got 101.3F. I figured I could average the three results and avoid taking it rectally. (I have so far avoided taking anybody's temperature rectally, and I hope to maintain that streak.)

I paged him again.

Me: I know you're busy, so I'll make it quick. Can a concussion cause a fever?

DH: What? First put the crack pipe down, then tell me what's going on.

Me: The baby has a fever of 101. Could it be from the dent in her head?

DH: No. It's not from the dent in her head.

Me: Maybe her teeth? She has two on the bottom breaking through.

DH: That's a more likely possibility, though 101 sounds high for teething. [*Big audible sigh*] Give me a few minutes; I think I can break away. I'll come home and take a look at her.

He did and determined she had an ear infection, poor thing. He prescribed some Cephalexin, on the off chance it was bacterial. I piled the girls in the car to go pick it up from the drug store's drive-thru pharmacy. My toddler, being the very big helper that she is, repeated everything I said to the little squawk box and then after we got the stuff, as I was rolling up the window and about to drive off, she yelled, "Thanks for the medicine, medicine guy! We love you very much!"

LOL.

The baby took the Cephaluphogus reasonably well until yesterday, when a faint rash began to develop. At first I wasn't sure that's what it was -- it could have been the bad lighting in the room playing tricks on my bad eyes, or marks on her skin from being pressed against me while she nursed. But by 5pm, the rash had grown darker and spread all over her belly and back and, more faintly, onto her face.

I woke up my exhausted, post-call DH so he could look at it. He thought it looked like a drug reaction, but having been awake for nearly 36 hours and asleep for only 3, he decided we should go up to the after-hours clinic and have one of his more clear-headed colleagues check it out. Of course, that's what it turned out to be: My baby is allergic to an entire class of antibiotics. Great.

*Sigh!*

She's fine now. The dent popped back out and blossomed into a small but lovely purple bruise; she hasn't had a fever since Sunday; her bottom teeth have made it through the gum line; she's on a new antibiotic for her ear and the rash is almost completely gone. We're lucky her reaction wasn't worse.

What a crazy few days.

I have to laugh at my own ignorance -- can a concussion cause a fever? -- but really, it's such a relief to have DH around. Can you imagine me trying to take care of these girls without him? Lol. What a mess we'd be. ;-)


~RCH~

Another false start

We went through a pack of Easy Ups this week, but are no closer to potty training the toddler than we were in February when I bought her the Winnie the Pooh toilet ("Oh boy! Pooh and Pligget!").

I thought she was ready. I thought she's been ready for months, but I've been too preoccupied or lazy or daunted to follow through: She's extremely verbal; she has words to describe her various bodily functions and has (sporadically) anticipated them before they happened. She understands and can follow directions. We all know she knows how to take off her clothes.

We've had a few false starts since the introduction of her personal potty. She lost interest in the thing a few days after I brought it home, and I didn't want to push her. She'd only just barely turned 2.

Later in the spring I bought a few packs of real underwear -- pink and purple cotton panties with hearts and balloons -- sure that she'd be thrilled to leave her diapers for these. Turns out she didn't really care, and I had little interest in changing wet panties (or worse) several times a day.

Summer, people told me, is the perfect time to potty train because they can run around the house naked all day. Frankly, since I live in a house equipped with both heat and air conditioning, I'm not sure why the season matters -- but I felt grateful for an excuse to put it off again.

And now here it is, with summer half over and the toddler closer to 3 than to 2 (by like a week, lol, but still) and I feel like I'm completely derelict in my potty training duty. We need to figure this out.

I made a chart last Sunday -- crayon on cardstock; nothing fancy -- and told her she could put a Sesame Street sticker on it any time she went wet or poopy in her toilet. On Monday we broke out the Easy Ups, the training pants with the style of underwear and the ease of a diaper! I tried to force Koolaid on her all day long, an unheard of treat for a girl who's only allowed milk and water, but she didn't want any. We made frequent trips to the bathroom but nothing happened. Or rather, things happened, but they happened in her Easy Ups in between the trips to practice on the toilet. (And let me tell you, when it's poop, Easy Ups are absolutely not as easy as diapers. Blegh.) Whether deliberately or by accident, our timing was always off.

Wednesday afternoon, already frustrated with the direction of this little experiment and eager to inspire her, I let her put an Elmo sticker on the chart for passing gas in the vicinity of the Pooh potty. Hey, it was something.

It's now late Friday night and Elmo is all alone, smiling his happy vacant smile, waiting in vain for other stickers to join him.

The Easy Ups ran out today and we bought diapers to replace them.

*SIGH!*

I thought she was ready, but now I'm not sure: She doesn't seem to have any particular interest in staying fresh and clean; she doesn't mind walking around with her pants full of poop. I've read that being able to dress herself is a potty training prerequisite, and while she can tear those clothes off like a champ, she has a lot of trouble putting them on. I can work with her on that, but in the meantime.... Is it worth the stress this is causing between us? Can we take a break and try again later?

Oh! And speaking of stress! She has to be coerced into sitting on the toilet most of the day, but tell her it's time for a nap (or time to clean up, or time for *insert undesirable activity here*) and suddenly she has an urgent need. An urgent need that -- as evidenced by the emptiness of the chart -- never seems to pan out. Miiiiighty suspicious, I say. But what am I supposed to tell her? "No, you may not use the potty!" Argh.

What am I supposed to do? Soldier on despite her complete lack of interest? Put it off again until later? I worry that these starts and stops sap whatever potty credibility I had to start with (and I worry that I'm now the sort of person who writes long treatises discussing "potty credibility").

I want this to be a positive learning experience for her, but as the week wore on I found myself snapping at the slightest provocation: "Don't you touch that handle! You don't get to flush unless you actually get something in the toilet. Hands off. HANDS OFF." (Picture her with an evil grin, her hand hovering over the flusher, flinching occasionally to goad me.) If we try again later, when she's ready -- when she wants to learn -- won't it be more positive for all of us?

But she's 2-1/2 already; it's getting late. Please, someone, reassure me that she won't still be in diapers at age 15.


~RCH~

Scheming

I keep trying to find a good money-making scheme I can do from home to supplement the grocery budget. I've considered eBay, but I don't have much of my own crap to sell and I'm not convinced I could find decent enough thrift store items around here to net me a profit if resold.

They had a sidewalk clearance sale at the mall last weekend -- I saw dresses with original price tags of $125 going for $10. They were beautiful special occasion dresses; I'm sure I could have made my $10 back and then some, but I didn't have $10 at the time (or $20 or $30 or $40 to buy a few) so I missed that boat. Dangit.

Then on Sunday night, I stumbled across CafePress.com. What a perfect opportunity! They have a catalog of blank products to sell; you use your design and computer skills to whip something up and open a store on their site. They charge a base price for each item (say, $5 for product X) and you set your store's price somewhere above that ($7, maybe). When someone buys product X, CafePress prints, processes, and ships the order, keeps the $5, and sends you the $2. Opening a basic store is free; your only responsibility is to create the products and market them to paying customers.

"Hey!" I thought. "I can totally do that!" Sure, I don't have any actual design training or talent, but I do have Photoshop, lol. So I decided to try it out.

Problem is, with the basic (free) store, you're only allowed one design per product. You can't, for instance, make one onesie design in girly colors and have another of the same design for boys. You get one shot at the onesie, one for a t-shirt, one for a tote bag, one for a journal, bla bla bla.... Hmmph. So now I'm a little soured on the idea. I could pay them some money, of course, to get more variety in my store, Leonine Designs -- but I'm not willing to do that yet when money is so tight and I'm really only testing the waters.

Still. What can it hurt? All it costs me is time and I seem to have plenty of that in the middle of the night while my insomniac baby plays. So I made a journal pimping out the toddler's gorgeous lashes.

Consider this my effort at marketing.

You get a fairly decent idea of the product on the CafePress site, but their close-up pic is a low resolution version of the original that doesn't do it justice. So on the off-chance you'd like to buy this oh-so attractive journal for yourself or for a loved one (it makes a great gift!), here's a better view of what you'd be getting:




~RCH~

More music recommendations

Driving around with the girls and listening to the college station this afternoon, I heard "Welcome to Confusion" from the new album On Sleep Lab by The Stairs.

Anyone who loves me and knows my address can feel free to buy the CD for my birthday.

Another odd, but oddly lovable song off the college station: "Devil Town" by Daniel Johnston. How is it that I've never heard of this guy before?


~RCH~

The articulation of her loneliness

The articulation of her loneliness took me by surprise.

We brought a casserole and garlic bread to a woman from church yesterday; she'd had surgery earlier in the week and was just home from the hospital. I visited with her for a few minutes while the woman's 4-year-old daughter dragged my toddler from room to room, showing off her toys, the perfume in her mother's bathroom, their dog panting behind the sliding glass door to the back yard. My girl ate up the attention, and put up quite a fight when I announced we had to go.

I had finally gotten her squirmy, sulky little self strapped in the car seat when she looked down at her shoes and said, "Mommy, I want friends."

Oh!

I haven't stopped thinking about it since; it hurts me that she said that, and so sadly. I didn't know....

Though she's always been a social creature -- saying "Hi, guys! Hi, kids!" to everyone we pass at the grocery store, for instance -- she's only just now getting to the point where she will play with people rather than simply near them. But who does she have to play with? Me, day in and day out (and we don't always get along). That's it. Well, and the baby, but my toddler is so aggressive in her play and the baby is still so small (almost a year old, but barely 14 lbs) that I usually offer myself as a buffer between them.

We don't live near any family -- no adoring grandparents or cool older cousins to hang with. A bunch of moms from church meet at a park (or Chuck E. Cheese's when the weather is bad) on Tuesday mornings for play group; I take the girls as often as I can, but play group is at 10AM and I'm ashamed to say we're rarely presentable (and I'm rarely functional) at that hour. So it hasn't been real often.

We'll go religiously from now on.

I took her this evening to the indoor playground at the mall. Penance, I guess. I watched her scamper around, happily attaching herself to a group of older kids as they played tag. They didn't welcome her in; they weren't mean, but they ignored her. Maybe, in the crush of the crowd, nobody realized she was trying to play with them...? In any case, she was happy. She giggled and ran and hid behind the fiberglass elephant and popped out: "Here I am!"

I've never worried before about how she'll be received, socially. It has never occurred to me to wonder if she'll be well liked, or if she'll feel awkward and insecure the way I did all growing up. She's an amazing kid, so smart, so full of 2.5-year-old energy and hubris.... But now that I see her on the verge of that other world -- that place where she craves the friendship of peers more than her parents -- honestly, I'm gripped with a slight panic.

I want her to have friends. I want her to have good ones. I want her to never be hurt by anyone, which I know is too much to ask but I want it just the same.

I just don't want her to feel so lonely.

This is my post about race.

It's not a very well-thought out or important one, but I'm not as smart as I used to be so take what you can get. I may once have been up to the challenge of scintillating socio-political analysis. (Was I?) But these days, sadly, a long or complicated sentence is more likely to net you a frazzled "Huh?" than a coherent reply, lol.

I'm getting off track already.

So about race: One of my favorite shows recently -- *shhhhh!* don't tell -- is Girlfriends on UPN. It airs during prime time, I know, but I'm still busy with the girls at that hour: shuttling between the two, trying to nurse one to sleep (and hope she stays that way) and placate the other with tooth brushes, cups of tasty cold water having just the right number of ice cubes, extra stories, and perhaps a quick rendition of Old McDonald's (not a typo; she confuses the farmer with the fast food clown). Luckily, the baby often allows me the opportunity to see syndicated reruns of the show that air at 2:00am and 2:30am, respectively.

I hear so often that women can't (or shouldn't) be friends with one another, that some biological imperative makes us all catty backstabbers just waiting, with polite smiles, to get the upper hand. My experience in a family full of girls (I love my brothers, too, but this isn't about you!), with lifelong female best friends, and having attended a women's college tells me that just the opposite is true. I will be, to my dying day, a firm believer in the power of the sisterhood.

Girlfriends affirms this belief for me: It's about four women, all in different places in their lives, from different backgrounds, with different opinions, for whom friendship is a defining priority. They stick together. It's like Friends, but without much of the neurosis and minus, say, Joey and Ross. I don't know.... I just like it. I think they're interesting characters. I like the writing. I'm fascinated, too, by a life that resembles mine so little.

And there's where it comes in: Joan, Maya (whom I remember from Linc's on -- *gasp!* -- BET), Toni, and Lynn are all black. 95% of the cast is black; they had a token white boss for a while, and a white husband. Oh, and Lynn is biracial and grew up in an [off-stage] all-white family, so there's that.... But essentially it's an African-American show.

For some reason, I feel like I'm not supposed to watch it because I'm white. Soooooo white, lol. I don't know where that feeling comes from; I'm sure the producers want as many viewers as possible! While everyone has built-in (and often unconscious) prejudices -- I'm sure I've got my share -- I honestly don't see myself as a bigot. So why do I feel like my TV viewing habits are supposed to be comfortably segregated? Why do I feel that it would be more seemly for me to watch programs with, say, one minority character in a sea of white than this show with its all black cast?

Why is this the first time I've even mentioned my love of Girlfriends to anyone?

So tell me, is this my problem? Can I pawn it off on society? On "they" -- the infamous, nefarious, vague "they" who make all the sweeping generalizations we fall back on?

Why does race even matter? I don't think it should, but I still feel ... like an intruder, sort of. I don't know. I feel a little embarrassed.

Anyway, that's my post about race.


~RCH~

TMI, but read if you want!

Welp, my blissful reprieve has finally come to an end. I went without from October 2003 until last night -- 1 year, 8 months, 19 days -- but the Communist army has launched its invasion at last.

Cramp City, here I come!

So I guess that means I'm fertile again. :-P On the other hand, I can stop worrying that I might be pregnant and not know it! Lol.

Oh well.


~RCH~

Sleep? What's that?

I generally describe my girls as good sleepers. They've each got their quirks, of course -- the toddler has a highly elaborate bedtime ritual that has evolved over the 2-1/2 years of her life and the baby tends to be a night owl -- but they both sleep for long stretches at a time almost all the time, and they've been very good lately at coordinating naps.

Until this week, that is. Here's a sample night:

9pm - The toddler goes to bed.

12am - The baby, who had been going to bed like a good little girl at 8 or 9pm until she started teething again, has reverted to her midnight bedtime. I finally get her to sleep.

2am - After spending a couple hours puttering around the house (laundry, dishes, showering for the first time in 2.5 days), I finally go to bed.

2:30am - DH, who is supposed to be on call, has a slow enough night that he gets to come home. I wake up when he gets in.

2:47am - The toddler wakes up from a bad dream. I get her settled back in and comfy cozy, then try to fall asleep again myself.

3:30am - The toddler wakes up again, demanding her tooth brush. I get that for her and go back to bed.

4:15am - The baby wakes up to nurse ... and then stays up, playing happily (drumming on her toy box and growling, lol), until 6:30am.

6:30am - I finally get to go to sleep for good (ha, ha).

8:30am - The toddler wakes up for the day, and I drag my exhausted butt out of bed to join her.

12:30pm - The baby wakes up for the day.

1pm - The toddler goes down for a nap. Because they've just missed each other in passing, I have no chance for a nap and no time to myself....

This scenario has played out about every other day this week and it is definitely taking its toll on me. *Sigh!* I don't know if there's enough Dr. Pepper in the world to keep me awake much longer.


~RCH~

I am a stock photographer!

It's official! A photo I took is now available as stock photography. Maybe I'm not as cool as I think I am, because it's only a free stock photography site, nothing professional (or paid, dangit) -- but they do have standards! They don't just accept any old photo that comes along!

So I don't care what you say; I will persist in believing I'm cool. ;-)

Here's the pic:




~RCH~

My hand is not paper

I had a rough day yesterday: It was too hot; we had nowhere to go; my toddler devised a new game called Let's Steamroll the Baby that she would not stop playing, despite a few trips to her room to contemplate the benefits of not crushing her sister. DH said he'd eat the single remaining pork chop from two nights ago, so I didn't bother making any actual dinner. I grilled up a toasty cheese sandwich for the toddler, breastfed the baby, and sent them both packing to their beds.

The baby refused to go down, of course. Figures. It was just that kind of night.

By 9:45 I finally had some time to myself. The baby was still awake -- roaming the living room floor, blocked in by furniture and strategically placed toy boxes -- but as long as she didn't see me sneak out, she'd play happily with DH. I didn't go anywhere exciting. I hadn't eaten anything yet and didn't want to cook, so with only $4 to my name (well, $11 if you want to include the checking account balance; thank goodness today is pay day!) Taco Bell sounded like my best bet.

Did you know they stopped serving the Club Chalupa? It must have been a temporary promotional thing. In any case I felt very irritated, after a long and annoying day, not to get the one thing Taco Bell sells that sounded decent at a quarter to 10 on a Thursday night.

The weather mirrored my mood: Random lightning strikes all around, illuminating the dark open horizon of the dusty plains, with no actual rain. Nothing lilting or lovely played on the radio. I switched it on to hear hardcore Boston street punks the Unseen screeching (literally -- I wonder if or how they still have vocal chords) a cover of Michael Jackson's "Beat It" on the college station.

In lieu of the Club Chalupa, I got their newest promotional food item -- some origami tortilla concoction called the Crunchwrap Supreme. Sadly, it tasted pretty much the way you'd expect Taco Bell fare to taste. On the upside, I also ordered a large Dr. Pepper and that seemed to lighten my mood all around. ;-)

When I got home and pulled into the garage, I grabbed a pen from my purse and scribbled "Unseen / Beat It" on my palm so I'd remember to look the band up today. (Not because I want to own any of their music, but because they'd been so apropos in my weird irritated mood and I wanted to write about the moment with specificity later on.) I completely forgot about it until my toddler noticed my hand this morning at the grocery store, and the almost completely faded ink.

"Why you do this?" she scowled in a bad impersonation of me. "You hand is not paper! That's a bad choice, Mommy!"

LOL.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I won't do it again, sweet pea. (Or if I do, I'll wash it off more thoroughly before you see it.)


~RCH~