I’d win more awards but my stupid life is holding me back

So on Tuesday I was working hard in the ol’ home office (stop laughing, I totally was) when my finger accidentally slipped and instead of continuing on with the writing of the Most Boring Report Known To Man I somehow found myself on Bejewell’s site.  Look, I don’t know how these things happen.  Must be sun spots.

Anyway, I read all about how she had won an award and I was all, “well la di da, look who’s the fancypants” when I then saw that she had then kindly passed the award on to me.  It was for bloggers that show “creativity, design, interesting material, and also for contributing to the blogging community, no matter what language.”  I’m guessing she chose me for my mad design skills.

And I was so excited because finally!  My greatness is recognized!  I began writing a little acceptance speech but then I realized that I was late for a conference call.  So I picked up the Buddha and slung her into the crib, hoping that she wouldn’t notice it wasn’t quite naptime.  Then I ran downstairs and grabbed the phone only to realize that I left the call-in number upstairs.  I ran back upstairs to get the number, which is about when the Buddha realized it was not, in fact, naptime and started screaming.  I stopped by the nursery and flung a few toys into the crib, closed the door to muffle the screaming, and headed back downstairs.  By this point the dogs, jazzed up by all this upstairs-downstairs action, were prancing around on the stairs and I managed to trip over not one but BOTH of them on my way back to the phone.  Limping and sweaty, I lumbered into the kitchen and called in only a few minutes late.  And immediately everyone was like, “Who’s doing all the heavy breathing?”

The point is that I got a little distracted that afternoon and never acknowledged Bejewell.

And I spent all of yesterday at a work retreat and I’m sorry, but eight hours spent bonding with my colleagues pretty much is all I can take in one day, so I didn’t get around to accepting the award yesterday either. 

But it was very kind of her to pass it on, so here I am, saying thank you.  I’m late, but then all my thank-you notes are late so, you know, par for the course.

Oh, and I’m supposed to show the award:

And link to the original site that started the whole she-bang, which is Arte y Pico.  That site is in Spanish, and I only tell you that because I clicked through and was all “What the…” so I’m trying to spare you that. 

I’m not passing on the award because I am selfish.  No, really, it’s because I have the Most Boring Report Known To Man Runner Ups One and Two looming on my to-do list. 

Now that I’m an award-winner do I get an assistant?

What should I call this: the BlogHerNotNot?

So, like, BlogHerNot is totally over which means that it’s time for me to arrive because if there is one theme that runs throughout my life it is that I always MISS THE PARTY.  Always.  Without fail.  If there’s a good time to be had, I will miss it by one week.  Or one night.  Or five minutes, as happened one horrifyingly awful New Year’s Eve when I chased a party across a large American city for four hours, spending nearly $100 in cab fare and just missing the happenings every single time.  The scene, it is always better before I get there. 

So I missed the call for BlogHerNot instructors and didn’t prepare a post and now I’m all I WANT TO PARTICIPATE but everyone involved is hungover and saying, “Oh, baby, you should have been here a few hours ago.  Now that was a good time.”

Such is my life.  But don’t miss out.  There’s good stuff to be found.  Over there.  Not here.  I ran out of time to write good stuff because I was too busy reading their good stuff.  The good stuff that’s over there.  I mean here.

Right.

Alias Mother + 5:30 AM = 2GETHER 4EVER

Why oh why won’t my child sleep past 5:30?  She used to sleep later.  Oh, how fondly I remember the glory days of 7:30: those lazy, hazy, halcyon mornings gone by.  If I’d known they would be so fleeting, I would have taken more time to enjoy them.  More time to snuggle into the blankets, more time to hit snooze on the alarm clock, more time to wedge my cold feet into my husband’s calves as punishment for his snoring…

Alas, those days seem to be gone forever.

My sweet old boyfriend Mr. 7:30 has been beaten up and kicked out and in has swaggered the new man in my life: Mr. 5:30.  I’m trying to appreciate his good points.  The morning sun is extra peaceful at 5:30 and the birds are extra chatty.  Being up so early gives me a chance to pick up the house so I don’t have to do it at night.  Breakfast, especially coffee (COOOFFFFFEEEEEEEEEE), tastes better then.  Most importantly, it gives me more time to snuggle with the Buddha before I have to get ready to go to work. 

See?  I am really, really, really, really, really trying.

But…

No.  Every morning when I hear that “a ba ba ba BA BA BA BAAAA BAAAA” coming down the hallway it becomes abundently clear that this is something I can only tolerate, never love.

Mr. 5:30 and I are just never going to have anything but a begrudging relationship.  I’ll politely smile at his jokes, but I will never wash his socks.

You can hook this nightowl up to a main-lined IV drip of coffee, but you cannot, ever, under any circumstances, make her love 5:30.

I don’t care how chatty his birds are.

(Did that sound dirty to anyone else, or have I just had so much coffee that I’m hallucinating?)

The Postpartum Body Post

The New Girl started a series on health/wellness/healthy humping (don’t look at me like that.  She said it).  It’s a good post and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to talk about my post-baby bod.  So, hey, if she’s going to throw out an opening, I’m all about it!

I lost the baby weight in two days and I look fabulous, folks.  I’m the poor man’s Nicole Ritchie.

The End.

Ha!  I kid. 

Sort of.

Here’s the deal.  I am back to the weight I was when I got pregnant.  I attribute this fact, by the way, purely to the miracle of breastfeeding calorie burn and not at all to any semblence of heroic self-control on my part.  Not everyone sees a weight loss from breastfeeding, but I did and I am forever grateful.  After the immediate post-baby water release, when I lost 35 pounds of my 60 pound weight gain in a week(!!!) (wait, one more time: !!!), I lost about a pound a week, steadily, until I got back to my standard weight of around 145.

There were a lot of numbers in that last sentence.  Let me unpack that for you.

Starting weight: 144
Weight gained: 60 pounds
Weight lost within 7 days of giving birth: 35
Time to lose remaining 25 pounds: roughly 6 months.
Ending weight: 145 (or so.  Our scale is notoriously unreliable and is best used for rough estimates only)

I seem to have stopped losing weight, which in my mind confirms the theory that we all have inborn weight “set points” that we settle at whenever we are eating and exercising normally and not eating our weight in ice cream.  

So all’s well that ends well, right?  Mmmmm.  Sure.

Here’s the thing: my weight is the same, but my body is different.  Things have shifted a bit.

My waist is two inches bigger.

My stomach is considerably poofier, except where it nips in at the c-section scar.

My boobs are considerably lower.

So things are the same, but at the same time they aren’t.  I’ve had to ditch some of my old clothes because they just don’t fit right anymore.  The waist and stomach situation has tweaked the fit of my pants and skirts.  Some of my shirts are too short now because of the boob rearrangement (I don’t know how that works either.  But it definitely is true).  I’m relearning how I look, how I need to dress, how I move.

But it’s okay.

My body is different.  It should be different.  It grew, birthed, and fed the Mutant Baby of Doom.  You don’t get through something like that without some changes. 

But here’s the thing.  I don’t mind.  I really don’t.  And I don’t mean that I don’t mind the changes because I have a beautiful little girl that’s totally worth it, although that is true.  I don’t mind because when I look in the mirror and I see a wider waist, squarer hips, and lower boobs, I realize that I look like many of the older women that I know and admire.  I look like a grown-up.  I look like a mother. 

Being sad about that would be foolish.

I think the phrase we are all looking for here is “sufficiently chastened”

Remember when I was all, “My husband is the best and he totally never does stupid things and I’m super nice to him and why do we stereotype women as mean and men as stupid anyway”?

Yeah.

************************

Sunday, 9:00 AM

Me: I’m trying to decide if I should go to yoga this morning.
Him: You should go.  We’ll be fine.
Me: But I’ve got a lot of work to do around the house.
Him: You like the class, so you should go.  I’ll take care of the baby.  The house will be fine.
Me: You’re right.  Thanks, babe.

(Two hours later)

Me: How is everything?
Him: She’s really cranky this last little bit.  I can’t figure out what the problem is. 
Me: Huh.  Weird. Has she eaten recently?
Him: You didn’t tell me to feed her.
Me: She got up at 6:30!  She hasn’t eaten in almost FIVE HOURS!  Why would I have to tell you to feed her?
Him: Do you think that could be her problem?

************************

Sunday, 11:30 AM

Him: You were right.  She was hungry.
Me: Imagine that.  Did you give her banana with the cereal?
Him (totally exasperated): NO.  You didn’t tell me to feed her banana!  It’s just cereal!  I can’t keep up with your complicated feeding schedule!
Me: She eats, like, FOUR THINGS.  How complicated can this be?

*********************

Sunday, 2:00 PM

Him: I thought you said that you were cleaning the bedroom.
Me (in the bedroom, clearly in the midst of cleaning): Um, I am?
Him: But there’s cleanser in the toilet.
Me: Oh, yeah.  I put it in to soak while I’m doing this and then I was going to go scrub the toilet.
Him: But I have to pee.
Me: So pee in the cleanser.
Him: Ew.  I can’t do that.  I’ll go pee outside.
Me: You know there is a third option.  One that doesn’t involve indecent exposure.
Him: What’s that?
Me: You could take that stick with the bristly bits that sits right by the toilet, swish it around the bowl a few times, flush, and then pee.
Him: You mean clean the toilet?
Me: I mean clean the toilet.
Him: You know, that didn’t even occur to me.
Me: This just isn’t your day, is it?

And yet I still can’t let go of the fact that he loads the dishwasher incorrectly

The fabulous Miss Zoot linked to this Wall Street Journal article a few days ago. It’s about how wives undermine their husband’s attempts to help out with the children by complaining nonstop about their husband’s performance of child-related tasks.  Go on and read it; it’s not very long.

You back?  Okay.  I thought the whole discussion was very true, with small one caveat.  Which will be at the bottom of this thoughtful, insightful post.

I spent a lot of the early days of the Buddha’s life catching myself either being critical of the Alias Father’s attempts at infant care or painstakingly explaining my 18-point system for properly changing a diaper.  After just a few weeks, I made the conscious…wait, let me emphasize that…CONSCIOUS decision to not do so.  And by CONSCIOUS I mean that the insides of my mouth were nearly bleeding from being bitten so much as I withheld criticism.  But it was the right thing to do.

I mean, I’d had the advantage of physically gestating this little bugger.  To me, she’d been very real for months and months and I’d been thinking about this baby-care stuff the whole while.  Plus, at the time I was home with her all day AND handling all feeding duties 24 hours a day. Meanwhile, until her birth she’d been an abstract to him.  And once she was born, he rarely had much time to directly interact with her.  I wanted him invested in this effort.  I wanted him to have a caregiver relationship with her.  I wanted him to have the time to (dare I say it?) bond with her.

How was he supposed to do that if he constantly felt like an interloper into some arcane, babycenter.com-influenced world I’d created?

So when he asked how to do something, I’d smile, shrug, and say, “However you want to do it, babe.”  He’s a smart guy.  He wasn’t going to do anything that would threaten her life, so what did I care if she wasn’t wearing what I would put her in or if she was in a disposable diaper instead of cloth or if he gave her a bath differently than I would?  Did it matter?  Really matter?  Really, reeeeeeaaaaally matter?  If the answer was ‘no,’ then I let it go.

And you know what?  It worked.  Within days he’d stopped timidly asking me how I wanted the bottle heated.  He just went ahead and heated the damn bottle.  And dressed her.  And invented games to play with her.  And lo, Father of the Century was born.

But what really cemented things was having the Alias Father stay home with the Buddha one day a week once I went back to work.  One day a week is his day, to figure out how to entertain her, to find the best way to feed her, clothe her, diaper her.  I don’t care how any of it gets done.  It is not my problem.  I am not there.  This, for us, was the true path to an egalitarian marriage.  There’s nothing like trial by fire for getting the message across superfast.  Hi.  Welcome to fatherhood.  Here’s a baby.  Gotta run.

In short (say it together: TOO LATE), yes.  I agree.  Ladies, if you want your husband to help out, lighten up on the self-righteous martyrdom…I mean “maternal gatekeeping.” 

And now you’re all nodding and smiling and wondering what is my beef with the article, exactly?  And I will tell you because heck, it’s not like I have work to do or anything. 

I think we, and by “we” I mean the American Media Industrial Complex and its associated Media Consumers, play into the “Mean Wife vs. Silly Husband” schtick a little too often.  Could wives lighten up once in a while?  Hells yes.  Look at some of the comments on that article if you doubt me.  How many of them are some variety of this: “Well, I’d stop picking on him but the stupid man always does it WRONG”?  On the flip side: could husbands put on their (to paraphrase an over-used modernism) big boy panties and grow up?  Hells yes.  Again, look at those comments and at some of the truly hair-raising things some fathers have done.  Those guys are 90% checked out and I refuse to blame it totally on nagging wives.  It’s a two-way street here, folks, and there’s plenty of wrongs to fill up both lanes.

And thus endeth Alias Mother Solves The World’s Problems, Volume 728.

Now.  Let’s talk about plates and their proper location on the bottom rack of the dishwasher….

File this one in the overflowing “WHOOPS” folder

Our cat is a true cat.  By that I mean she’s pretty intolerant of us humans unless we happen to be refilling the food bowl.  She finds us pesky annoyances, only good for serving as victims for her sadistic entertainment.  She has two specialties: the hide-behind-the-door-and-ambush-the-ankles trick and what I refer as the “Venus Flytrap” maneuver.  For this little beauty, she lies on the floor, belly up, luring unsuspecting visitors with her sweet, wide-eyed ”rub my belly, please” face.  As soon they reach a hand down to her soft, soft fur,  she latches onto their hand and arm like a vice with claws and rips them to shreds.  Which explains why, whenever we have people over, we spend a lot of time shrieking, “NO! DON’T TOUCH THE CAT!  FOR GOD’S SAKE DON”T TOUCH THE CAT!” (Guest: AAAH!  My arm!”) (Wanna come over for dinner sometime?)

Her third major hobby is laying across our faces during the middle of the night.  We can only assume she’s trying to kill us in our sleep.

Given all of this, we’ve been a bit cautious about the baby and the cat.  We don’t leave the baby on the couch when the cat is nearby.  We shoo the cat away when the baby is on the floor.  And we absolutely, under no circumstances, no-way-no-how, uh-uh, EVER let that devil cat into the nursery when the baby is in there.

So it was mighty exciting when I opened up the door to the nursery this morning and the cat came waltzing out.  Because I’d accidentally shut her in there ALL NIGHT LONG.

The Buddha was fine.  I gave the cat extra kibble as a reward for not Venus Flytrapping her face at 2AM.

Update

Things are just a little crazy these days.  Time is just a little on the short side.  Which means that this post will be just a little on the bulleted list side.

• The Buddha Baby has decided that semi-solid food in the form of cereal is not her mortal enemy after all.  I’m grateful for this, because it gives me hope that I someday will no longer have to be her personal milk buffet.  (It’s not the nursing I mind; it’s the %#&##$% pump.)
• The Buddha continues to play SMASH/LEAN peekaboo as well as a variation involving the burp cloth.  She also continues to steal beer whenever possible.
• She sits unassisted and is frequently seen doing little baby crunches trying to get herself into a sitting position.
• Yet she still cannot roll over. 
• Nor is she interested in trying.
• My haircut is looking less Republican Wife and more Earnest Christian Homemaker.  Which is okay, except that I’m not earnest.  Or Christian.  Or a homemaker.
• The company car will cost almost $3,000 to fix.  I continue to thank the moon, stars, and Earnest Christian Homemakers everywhere that it was not my fault.

Apple, tree

Are you ready for this?  I am about to take my bad mothering to a whole new level.  A possibly negligent level.  A level that could get some people’s panties in a giant wad and get me reported to child protective services. 

But…

but…

but…

…it’s funny.

You see…

Well, lately…

The Buddha has a new habit…

Oh, never mind.  This is one of those occasions where a picture truly is better than words.

That’s my daughter (can’t you tell by the cheeks?).  That’s me she’s strapped onto (can’t you tell by the fact that you can only see about two inches of my hair and yet you already know it looks like hell?).  That’s us at the bowling alley about a month ago.

And that’s my beer bottle she’s sucking on.

(As an aside: yes, it is totally possible to bowl with a baby in a Moby.  In fact, it improved my score.)

(Another aside: nobody I was with saw fit to tell me that the Moby had gotten hitched up and my baby was riding around in a Moby thong.  I noticed shortly after this point and fixed it.)

(Yet another aside: I don’t usually drink Budweiser but people, I was bowling.  When in Rome and all.)

(Have all these asides sufficiently distracted you from the fact that my baby is drinking a beer?*)

I don’t know what to tell you.  The girl has a thing for beer.  She repeated this grab-and-suck maneuver at home a few days later with a Guinness.

And then there was the Cinco de Mayo party:

Look at the face.  She isn’t even remorseful!  She’s all, “Whatcha gonna do about it, huh?  HUH?”  Such a bad attitude so early.  Where could she have gotten it from?

(And yet one more aside: do you think I should branch out from the black shirt + cardigan fashion statement, just maybe?)

I think we may have a problem developing.  Or should I say brewing?  Ahahaha.

Ahem.

Now, I know that some of you are all, “Well, the easiest solution would be to stop drinking beer around the baby, you dumbass.”

And to them I say:

You really don’t know me at all, do you?

*Okay, really, don’t get upset.  I wiped off the bottle each time.  She wasn’t getting any alcohol.  Really.

Your final chance to plan my life!

Any last votes?  Polling closes tomorrow at…um…whenever I get around to posting!