Cynical Mom

Custom embroidered Big/Little sister/brother t-shirts

A few years ago, I went looking for a 'classy' big sister/little sister t-shirt combo when a friend had their second daughter. I've seen plenty of them, including a bunch of ideas for home-made ones, but I wanted something professional and clean looking.

I ended up finding http://www.creationsbylisamcgrath.com/, and have been using Lisa ever since whenever a friend or coworker has their second kid. I thought I'd blog this because I love her products, and just ordered some for myself. She'll customize the hair/skin/clothing colors on many of the items and the child's name can also be custom embroidered on anything. I also like supporting a small business since I would one day like to have one of my own.

I just purchased these two:

Adorable. Can't wait until they get here.

...And on a side note, I really would like to redo her website for her. It was created in Word!

Multiple kids & photo albums in the digital age

I am the youngest of five children. My parents carefully made separate photo albums for each kid, and to this day I am still very aware (but understanding) that there is only one or two albums of pictures of me, and many many more of the older siblings. As much as I'd always wished there were more albums with just pictures of me when I was a kid (because who wants to look at pictures of other people, I ask?), I still appreciated that I had my OWN albums, where I could be assured that I was in every picture.

Fast forward near-on thirty years. I have been keeping my son's pictures on our web site in a /jared directory. Naturally, when Audrey was born, I created a /audrey and started putting pictures there. What to do when I have pictures of both kids, then?

I hadn't decided what to do, so in my indecision I then decided to make copies of those pictures in each of their directories. This means I then re-generate the HTML pages from the raw images multiple times, and I re-upload the same files to the website, and I use twice the storage for a fair amount of pictures than is technically needed.

Tonight I finally sat down to think about it, and realized that that was exactly what I wanted to do for my kids (and hey, it is only two after all). Jared and Audrey will each have their own website and they'll know they are in the pictures on that site. Disk is cheap.

The danger of two geeks in one household

Me: "Can you think of a reason why my machine would out of nowhere today say that it doesn't have a sound card installed?"

Him: "Yeah, I removed your sound card. I needed the firewire."

Me: "Were you planning on telling me about this?"

Him: "Yeah."

I'm half-inclined to come up with a reason why I need something out of his machine, let's see how he likes me gettin' all frankenstein on him, eh?!?

Then he gave me googstructions [I claim rights on all future use of that term] on how to install the driver for the one on my motherboard: "Google Dell SC400 FAQ and you'll see a link to a forum post that has a link to the FAQ in it. In that FAQ is a link to the driver you need."

Said a friend in a two-geek household, upon hearing this story: "That's why [wife] has a laptop. It's hard for me to steal bits from it."

On sleep, or the lack thereof

I have read a dozen or two books on parenting, breastfeeding, newborn care, etc. And it seems that without fail, every one of them that talks about overnight feedings will feel it necessary to throw in a comment about how really, that overnight time is a very special time for mom/baby bonding, and we'll miss it when it's gone, so we should really treasure it while we have it.

I think that those parts of the books were written by the authors when they were past that stage.

Oh yeah, and while I'm at it: for the authors who wrote books that say that cosleeping is great for breastfeeding because you get so much more rest since you don't have to get out of bed... come over and babysit overnight. I will give you a bed to sleep in. You'll see.

Do they make baby ambien?

Perspective

One of the comments in a post on Bright Red Shoes' last month about motherhood and being judgmental caught my eye:

A friend of mine is a social worker. She sees some pretty dysfunctional families. Everytime I angst over something (do I breast feed for 14 or 18 months?) I remember that some kids get shouted at their whole lives and hardly ever have a nice word said to them.

Thanksgiving is coming up soon, and this year I have a whole lot to be thankful for.

Who you callin a turkey?

I just love this ad from safeway that showed up in my inbox. "Click here for participating turkeys" indeed:

My daughter is going to be very popular in school

She's only two weeks old, and she can already squirt milk out her nose and fart with the best of them. Well, perhaps she'll be popular with the boys, at any rate.

Here's a pic of her bottle-feeding:

I call this one the "Holy shit, put down the camera mom, there's a damn BEAR behind me!!" picture:

And on a serious note, the little one with her big brother:

   

And with me:

(Yes, I agree, little baby yawns rock :-)

Thanks

Thank you all for your comments and thoughts on the last couple of posts, I have really enjoyed reading them.

The birth went about as well as you could possibly hope for - pitocin started at 4pm, I went from 2-4cm in 7 hours, and then 4-10cm in one hour, and then six pushes later, I was a mother of two. With Jared, I pushed for two hours. My OB said "One more should do it" and I almost asked out loud "What, one more hour?" because I just couldn't believe it would go that fast. And then when she came out, my first thought was "Oh no, my sisters are going to kill me" because neither of them had come close to that short of a pushing time. It cracks me up that those thoughts were on my mind while I brought my daughter into the world.

Recovery has also been great compared to last time, I was itching to get out of the house by day five (whereas I didn't want to leave the couch for three weeks last time) and have been out almost every day since. Jared is in daycare, so I only have to manage one kid during the day, which makes it a lot easier. And last night I spent the first evening alone with both kids while my husband was out, and even did bedtime for both (which, let me just say - was pure hell - but I'm proud of myself for doing it. :-).

Oh yeah and I got on the scale the day after we got home, only to find out that after giving birth to an almost 9 pound baby, I weighed 5 pounds less than I had the day that we went into the hospital.

More pictures coming up soon...

Photos

We went and got some professional photos of Audrey earlier this week, but I actually like the ones we took better as we had time to wait for those little moments:

She is just amazing. Amazing, amazing, amazing. And I keep calling her 'him' and 'Jared', gotta stop that.

Me: 1. Anyone who said boy: 0

Audrey Julia Lemson

My mother's intuition (aka my lucky guess) was right - it was a girl! Audrey joined our family this morning at 12:28 AM.