Mamma Bear’s Baby Blog

Well we will be on the plane once again at 0800 heading for Oklahoma.  I do not want to go, but this is the most cost effective plan really.  Besides which we have to tie up loose ends for the custody issue.

This evening we took the kids on an outing that was arranged for the soldiers attached to Walter Reed.  Chris had lots of fun and he even introduced the old man as his dad instead of his step-dad twice.  This is a huge deal, normally he corrects anyone who calls my husband his dad with, "He's just my STEP Dad".

My D.H. said that the boy was very well behaved today while they were at Walter Reed, I was at Bethesda Naval for the baby's appointment.  This evening lots of people complemented him on his manners and pleasant conversation.  Chris had a very good day today.

Poor Brian had to get immunizations, so he was a little cranky, but manageable. 

I am supposed to be packing right now.  I am tired and just want to go to bed.  However the baby woke up so my choices were to either let him yell and wake everyone up or stop packing until he went back to sleep.  So I let him nurse for a little longer.  He still seems twitchy.  I really need to finish packing though so that I can get some rest.  We are just bringing one large suitcase and the car seat.  Also two carry on bags, book bags really, one of which will hold the assorted diapering items.  Not really heavy packing for a visit that will be a month or possibly more.  I cannot seem to find all of Christopher's shirts.  I guess that is not the end of the world.

While getting ready to go to the beach today it occurred to me that I expect bad things to happen a lot.

I think I should be so happy to be taking my children to the beach.  Neither has seen the ocean before.  It will be a bigger deal for Christopher because he is old enough to understand that it is a new thing to do, but I am sure that the baby will have fun as well.  He inherited my love of water.

While getting dressed I realized something.  My body image is really horrible.  I was always aware that my body image is not fantastic, but it really is a problem.  When I tried on this suit last night I looked so lumpy, and I had the skirt cover up on with it.  I could not imagine being in public without covering my thighs.  Today I put the suit on with out the cover up.  It actually looks better that way.  For some reason the skirt just does not lay right on my body and it makes my hips look about three or four inches bigger on each side!  Despite the fact that I am pale and my thighs are quite honestly a bit dimpled and scarred by stretch marks it still looks better if I do not cover them.  It is mind boggling.

Honestly I am not sure why I am so concerned about it.  I am not a teen age girl.  I am a mother.  I have a ten year old son and an eight month old son, and I am pregnant yet again.  The fact that I worry about what random strangers will think or say about my body bothers me.  I should not care.  My husband obviously finds me attractive and we have fantastic sex.  Clearly I am not totally disgusting.

My body image issues are worse when I am pregnant.  I don't get the nice round belly that everyone can clearly see is a baby.  The baby invariably shoves my internal organs upwards leaving me with a lump on bottom which is the baby and a lump on top which is my squishy bits.  Towards the end I do look more pregnant than fat, ok both...  but until then I feel like the whole planet is staring at me and thinking wow she's grotesquely fat.

I have got to work on this.

On Valentine's Day I was at the pediatrician's office and they of course had the obligatory pamphlets on pretty much everything baby and child related.  One of them was on potty training and it listed several words that you should not use when training your child because they could create feelings of shame.  Words like stinky, and yucky.

Now I am a bit torn on this one.  I do realize that some children are more sensitive than others.  However, poop does not smell nice, and judging purely on my little monster's very vocal reaction to a dirty diaper it does not feel nice either.  So I think this may be a case of, "Its not what you say, its how you say it."  In the case of the aforementioned dirty diaper I typically squint my eyes, wrinkle my nose and exclaim, "Ew stinky!".  Here is the thing though, I am usually also giggling.  I do not want to make changing the diaper less fun than it already is, and my baby takes his humor and safety cues from my laughter.  He knows that when I bring him to the bathroom and laugh and get him cleaned up, he is going to feel better soon.

There are some words which I think are not redeemable in this fashion, such as Stupid and Lazy.  I am not really a big fan of Shut Up either.  These are words which my parents used daily.  Along with other words that are a lot less borderline such as Bitch, Failure, Slut, Useless, Worthless.  These go beyond simple, "depends on how you personally take them" and into abuse clearly...

So what are some words that you personally think are ok/not ok/really bad to use? (Not just limited to potty training of course... or children, just in general.)

I worked very hard to eliminate "Stupid" from my parental vocabulary after a lifetime of hearing it applied to me, and am currently diligently weeding out "Shut Up".

A while back before I had my youngest I posted the I Love Eggs video.  There are a lot of other food related ones, and even quite a lot of egg ones, but this morning one in particular caught my attention.

"This Yod Hunt runs until 11:59 PM PST on Tuesday. Yes there is a prize. As a bonus prize you get to pick which one of the backlogged prizes will go out this week. Only three topics this week to get everyone warmed up...

1. Take a picture that fully expresses how you feel about President George W. Bush. Your picture cannot contain words or humans.
2. The US Dollar has taken a beating lately. Show us a new use for your now relatively worthless 1 dollar bill. If you live outside of the US, show us your currency's superpowers!
   
3. Like LOLcats? Show us some LOLfood!"

Evdis

I didn't take this one, but I firmly believe that had he got his way more often our environment would be much worse than it currently is.  I am not liberal either, I am a moderate independent, think Libertarian but without the pot and crazy weapons stock piling.   I like McCain though.

Ready for class?

Here we have a dollar as a bookmark (That's Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose*), as well as my book bag and my husband's (In)famous Leather Pants.

Ruler

Dollars are also handy as rulers.  They are six inches in length.  This could prove embarrassing depending on what you decide to measure with it.

I R Hawt!

We actually went to this appointment on Valentine's Day.  Not the most romantic activity in the world, but it needed to be done.

My only concern was that he does not sit up by himself, though he will sit if I sit him up, for a little while.  I did mention to the doctor that I thought it might be more a matter of motivation than anything else... he is far too busy working out how to escape his designated play areas to be bothered with sitting.  The doctor said not to worry.  Apparently sitting on their own is only important as a show of their strength and my little monster has plenty of that.  His muscle tone is great and his weight gain and length/height are still a head of the curve.  Since he is such a good eater I've been cleared to let him try fruits.  I am using Del Monte's all natural baby food so there is nothing in it but the fruit or veggie in question and possibly some water as in the case of their carrots.

So far he likes carrots, and sweet potatoes, but does not care for squash.  He will eat that also, he just makes a dreadful face.  I do not blame him, it smells ghastly.  It also makes for a foul smelling surprise later on... just bad all around.   That seems rather strange to me, I'd never noticed any odd smell to squash before although it is not one of my favorites anyway.

The little one also got his immunizations which I think he takes rather well considering.  He yells, very angrily, until they give the oral vaccine and then suddenly he is fine again.  I fed him afterwards and he stayed very happy and quiet most of the way through dinner at the Pub.  Once we got home however he was not a happy camper.  It took a lot of comfort nursing and cuddles to get him to go to sleep, but sleep he did... just before the Old Man passed out.  Which means we had the few hours left of Valentine's Day all to ourselves.

I thought that since my infant was trying some limited solids, and was wanting to hold the cups when we allow him sips of water or baby juice (or coffee... with two parents who can take caffeine and be mellowed out, we are not concerned about giving him a few sips), that I could try out sippy cups.  I figured that with a soft sip part it would be nice for him to gnaw on, and he could practice holding a cup and drinking.  It seems that he just does not care for the sippy cup.  I thought, "Maybe he is just having a hard time getting the juice out", so I decided to put some in a bottle for him to try...  Bottles are not food to him, or drink either.  Bottles are toys.  He likes to watch the liquid swish around and he likes to chew on them, but he isn't getting much drinking done and he never has.

Yesterday I reached the end of my rope as far as trying bottles.  Every time I try to get the baby to take a bottle he is just not into it.  It also gives him problems switching back to the breast for sometimes up to a week afterwards.  A bad latch is just too painful to put up with for the "convenience" of being able to hand him a bottle so that he can drink on his own.  So while he likes juice if we help him drink from a regular cup, the bottles and sippy cups are a no go.

Another fun issue:  If he can reach the breasts while I am sleeping he will feed himself.  Now this would not be that bad if I always slept in the same position.  Unfortunately I occasionally roll onto my back when I sleep.  This morning I awakened to this horrible pain in my chest, more specifically in my right nipple.  You see, he had raised himself up on his forearms so that he could reach my chest which was just out of reach as I was on my back.  He latched on, and then proceeded to hang from my breast like some sort of leach.  I really cannot stress enough that this was not at all comfortable.  At least not for me, it did not seem to bother him at all.

I had hoped that we could possibly get him on more solids and have breast feeding done by eight months, but while he does like solids, and even likes to drink different things it just doesn't seem that it will replace me as a food source.  As excited as he gets about carrots, he still gets more animated and happy when it is time to nurse.

H. O. B.

                                                                                                                                     House of Bliss
                                                                                                                                     In My Pants**
                                                                                                                                     February 6, 2008

To: My Darling Baby Boy
From: B. R. B
Subject:  Today's State of Events

Today we had a full day planned.  We were to go to the Courthouse and retrieve more certified copies of my official name change paperwork.  Then we needed to mail off the amendment paperwork for my birth certificate so that we can get the birth certificates for your brother and yourself amended.  We also needed to mail off some money orders to take care of a ticket that is nearly as old as your brother.  Instead we seem to have accomplished very little beyond finding out that I had the wrong paperwork to make the amendment to my birth certificate in the first place.

I want you to know that while I am very proud of your new accomplishments, and I am very glad that you love me so much, I really need you to be more cooperative.  This new lunge technique of yours is quite impressive, although I must admit that I cannot share the fascination that both your father and yourself seem to have for throwing yourselves head first off of things like beds*** or mountains.  It is great that you will probably be crawling very soon though, very exciting.  Sometimes it does seem that your daddy gets all the fun time, and that you like him better.  On days like today I can see very clearly that you do love me greatly after all, because you cannot seem to bare to be apart from me for even thirty seconds.  In fact even if you are in my arms you would prefer to hold my full attention even if you are busy looking at something else entirely.

Brenna (AKA Mommy)

Copy to:

Dad

*If you are interested, you can read the first memo here.
** "In my pants" is explained in the first memo.
*** He has only made if off of the bed once, he landed on his father's vibrating massage pad, which was folded in half.  It was very worrying for me, but he just looked around as if to say, "Hmm... I've never been here before.  Right then, time to explore!"

We did a lot of running around at Walter Reed yesterday and after we got off the shuttle home, we picked some things up from the commissary.  We ended up back home around 1800, put the groceries away and went to bed around 1830.  I just woke up an hour ago.

I slept for ten hours!

Going to have to get dressed soon because we are going back out again today.  I am waiting on the kettle to boil so I can have some tea.  Probably should have had some cereal, but my mind is not so clear this morning.  I am awake, but not really...  My mind normally branches like a spider web, the points all connect at one point or another you see, it just takes someone with a good eye for patterns.  Only right now it is more like a web from a slightly deranged spider.  Just need some caffeine. 

I usually only get sick about once a year... I might get an ear infection, or two, in addition to that, but the "Holiday Season" generally finds me finally succumbing to some weird sinus infection.  I think the depression compromises my immune system.

I thought I had skipped this year.  It was just a different illness.  Twenty four hour stomach thing... haven't really been able to eat much because it does not stay down.  I'm sure this is not good for nursing.  Pretty much restricted to 7up.  I am kind of hungry today, I may try a sandwich in a little while, turkey and swiss, something nice and mild.  I ate part of a graham cracker an hour ago and so far no problems.  Last night even that lost all of my 7up.  *snickers*

I still feel a little woozy off and on.  I went to the commissary yesterday and then had to cut my shopping short because I felt I would pass out at the store.  I made it home ok, but exhausted and husband took care of me and the baby all night.  I lay down on the bed as soon as I got home and he had to go rescue the baby from his stroller for me.  I did not want to chance picking him up and falling.

Hopefully by tomorrow I will be completely back to normal.