Cynical Mom

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.

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...

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.

The evil things I do to my progeny

I'm sure there's more than one, but this sticks out in my mind, since I just did it an hour ago:

Order a chocolate malt at a restaurant, but ask the server to keep it in the silver tin so that my two year old can't see what I'm drinking.

Some pictures of POTUS

OK, now baby can come... we did some more pregnancy shots tonight at home and I really like the way they turned out. So now that this final task is completed, there's nothing stopping potus from showing up. So... any day now, right?

For some reason I think of Blythe Danner when I look at my expression in this one:

 

The frog in this picture is POTUS', I thought it'd be cute to get a "before" and "after" shot. Of course, Jared has also taken a liking to the frog, but hopefully I convinced him today that it's a special treat that he can give the frog to the baby...

What are you judgmental about?

I've written often enough about the various parental debates and how we all judge each other, blah blah can't we get along etc etc warm fuzzy I'd like to teach the world to sing. But I carry around a dirty secret. As I posted on another blog a few weeks ago:

I used to pride myself on my non-judgmentalness, if there is such a word. How I'm all "whatever works for you" and whatnot.

Then I found out about elimination communication (i.e. newborns without diapers) and I just... well... I judged.

I've come to realize that I really am not as laid back as I'd like to think, and that I do have strong opinions that I think are "right" and that there are other opinions that I think are "wrong". Namely, I judge.

My only solace is that I am capable of changing my opinions and feeling remorse, and recently I've found myself coming around on a few issues I used to be more judgmental on. The reason I bring this up now is that while rereading a recent post from Half-Changed World about sleep today, I realized that the area I am a strong judger is about sleep.

I read many sleep books when my son was young, and the one that stuck with me the most was Weissbluth's Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. And the most important takeaway from that book (which really could be much much thinner, it gets repetitive) was how important sleep is to health. I saw this in my son and myself: the less sleep I get, the less human I feel. The less sleep he gets, the more annoying he is.

So whenever I hear a parent say that their six month old just won't nap, I have a knee-jerk reaction of concern, because I truly believe in the importance of sleep to health (both mental and physical, of the parent and the child) and that surely, nearly every child is capable of getting more sleep, you just have to find the way to encourage it that works for your family.

But what I don't know is where to draw the line of what is me having an opinion and what is me being judgmental of others' opinions? Is it possible to disagree without judging? If you believe the dictionary is a useful tool in defining the meaning of words, judging is merely the forming of an opinion, so you can hardly avoid it. Or is the important thing not what I feel but what I say - keep your mouth shut unless you're asked for your opinion?

Of course, as a blogger, that whole "keep your mouth shut" thing is a mighty tricky balance... :-)

Reading too much out of the tiniest things

I had my 36w checkup today. We've been clear throughout the pregnancy that we didn't want to know the gender, but I wasn't 100% sure that the gender wasn't on my chart somewhere. I know that with my firstborn's chart, my OB didn't know his gender until he was born, as the sonographer specifically didn't put it in the report from our ultrasound; this time around we went to a different place for the ultrasounds and they didn't specifically say it wasn't in the chart...

Anyway, the nurse was taking my blood pressure (I nailed that test! A+ for me! Wahoo! I rawk!) and checking the baby's heartbeat. I was chatting with her and I used 'she' to describe the baby a couple of times, such as "She's very active" and "Do you think she's sunny side up?" when she was finding the heartbeat. I just get tired using he/she or "the baby" or "it" all the time so I swap between he and she randomly.

The nurse then said something where she also described the baby as 'she', and then she covered her mouth and said "Oh! I didn't mean to say she! I mean... I don't even know!"

So now I'm wondering. Was that last bit a coverup? Why would she have been so upset at calling the baby she, since I used the pronoun first?

Ahhh, the 9-months-pregnant-brain and the completely useless things it chooses to obsess over!

P.S. Although I know there is no true meaning in my dilation, effacement and station numbers, it is comforting to know that my body is actually making progress. And I choose to believe that these numbers (1.5/50%/-2) and the differential in them from two weeks ago (0/0/-3) mean that I'm going to have an October baby. So maybe I will get to use those (two!) halloween costumes I have in the 0-3 month size and have that photo shoot I've been planning for six months of the two of them.

P.P.S. Except it occurs to me that earlier this evening, I promised Jared that we'd go trick-or-treating later this month, and now I'm worried I won't be able to live up to that commitment.

P.P.P.S. Screw it! Jared will live. Get this baby out!

P.P.P.P.S. Except not for two more weeks, I have some really important things at work to get done first.

Reflection of who we once were

This post on blogging baby about one woman's lust for a stroller that would help her maintain her old image of myself set me a-thinkin'.

When I'm out and about with my kid, I do catch myself looking at younger, obviously child-free folks with a twinge of envy. They roam the mall with no apparent "Must be back before toddler is up from nap"-type deadlines. They drink caffeine with abandon, not worried about the risk of not being able to sleep until late and thus being more exhausted than usual when baby wakes you up at 6 the next morning.

It's hard sometimes to not feel jealous, to not wish I could return for a day or a week or a month to when that was what my life was like. But by that same token, I can't help but feel glad that I'm beyond that age. I have a good career with coworkers I respect and whose company I enjoy, a stable marriage, own my own home and while I don't have as many friends as I once had, I have enough to make me laugh and to make laugh in turn. Plus there's this really freakin funny little bundle of energy and cuteness to remind me how fast time passes and not to take things so seriously.

I don't mean to say that those things are goals everyone has or should have, but they were something I had envisioned in my future ten years ago. Reaching each one of those involved a long journey, with a variety of painful stops along the way. Since I'm through them now, I can acknowledge that I learned something important from each of those stops -- yes, even The One That Totally Sucked. And this helps give me the perspective to realize that the next time I hit a painful stop, I can look beyond it to see how "This too shall pass".

And for all I know, those people are looking at my insufferably cute toddler and looking forward to some day when they might have their own.

<snicker>

Suuuuure.

On not finding out

In this pregnancy, like the first, we opted to not find out the gender (I think the first time around it was mainly me who made that decision and David went along, but this time he seems to be as into it as I am, because he got to be the first one to say "It's a boy!" 28 months ago and I think he digs that).

When I get The Inevitable Three ("When are you due?" "Boy or girl?" "Is this your first?") and the asker finds out that we don't know the gender, the responses seem to be completely polar - either "Oh my, I could never have waited to find out, I just had to know!" or "Good for you - we didn't either! Seems like nobody waits anymore...".

It's interesting to me that of those who choose not to find out the gender until birth, there's a sort of "pat myself on the back" feeling to it. It seems like a faint shadow of the feeling of someone talking about giving birth without drugs. Not intentionally or necessarily judgemental, but the person considers their accomplishment something to be proud about. In both cases, I'd agree - it takes a lot of will power not to find out the gender, and it takes a whole lotta cojones to go through labor and birth without drugs that are so easily available. Since I have absolutely no will power in other arenas of my life such as those involving ice cream, it's a small matter of pride to me personally that I have been able to not find out.

As we round the corner towards the end (due one month from today), I've started to get a little antsy about it, wanting to know, but looking forward to the surprise. I imagine this is probably what moms who do find out in an ultrasound feel like in the weeks leading up to the ultrasound. So I started googling around, looking for a list of old wives' tales about gender guessing as I thought it'd be fun to go through them and put together a list of what gave me which result.

That's when I stumbled on this page on childbirth.org. It starts out all sciency-n-stuff, talking about what the various ways are to determine gender for sure. Then it lists reasons to find out (with a very smart "Why not?" on the list, I like that they include that as it is a perfectly valid reason) and then there's my favorite part: under the "Reasons to wait" is:

To annoy relatives.

Bahahahaa.

OK, that one hit close to home.

Sorry guys, you'll find out in a month.

Love you all. :-)

P.S. I also need to point out the irony in that my decision to not find out is partly a result of my mother's influence, she who taught me the value in delayed gratification. Yes, that's the same woman who has thrown a couple of "Well, if only I knew the gender, I could..." my way.