What else I've been up to

Because believe it or not, it's not just all baby, all the time. I have big gardening plans for this year, very exciting. (To me.) In what was last year's vegetable garden, we're putting in raspberries. It's a bed along the south edge of the backyard, about 18' long. Raspberries are pretty much my favorite fruit (hard to say as I love them all but definitely up there in the top five) and they're always expensive, even in season. I'm so excited about having my own! According to The Garden Primer, once they're established I can expect "up to a quart of berries per foot of row". Eighteen quarts of raspberries! Not this year, of course, but still. Along the back (eastern) edge of the yard, we've* built a raised bed that's about 35' long and 30" wide, that will be this year's vegetable garden. (Next year, I'll be planting asparagus there.) Nothing fancy, just the basics like tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, salad greens, herbs, and flowers. Lots of flowers. To decide what to plant, I thought about what we bought the most often or spent the most on at the Farmers' Market last summer; we were always buying salad greens, zukes, and bouquets of flowers. So, in addition to edging both raised beds with alyssum, nasturtiums, and marigolds, I'm planting zinnias, cosmos, calendula, ageratum, and sunflowers for cuttings. No more spending $7 for a handful of zinnias this summer**! Don built me a plant light so that I could start seeds inside for the first time. I'm starting all the flowers ahead, since they're expensive to buy as plants, and I wanted a lot of them. I plan to buy some plants still, especially tomatoes. My logic is that I only want about six tomato plants, but I don't want all six to be the same variety. So I could either buy 3-4 different seed packets and use maybe 2 seeds from each one, or just buy the plants themselves from the Farmers' Market and get all the variety I want, with no waste. Right now I have 144 seed cells started, two trays of 72 that I'm running alternately under the light.

This is the first tray, three days after planting.

And here it is after one week. At least a few of everything has sprouted so far, and they're growing fast. I had one little problem with the marigold seeds I ordered from Seeds of Change, as the website described this variety as growing 2-3" tall. Turned out to be a typo as they meant 2-3', which luckily was correct on the seed packet itself. Since I wanted to use them to edge my garden, I had to buy more seeds from Lowe's, and use these elsewhere. No big deal really, although I'm still kicking myself for believing that any marigold could be only three inches tall. (I sent them an email in case someone else makes the same error, and they wrote back saying they'd fix it.)

The girls are doing wonderfully well, even after one of the snowiest winters in old-timer recollection. They seem to be perfectly healthy and happy, which reinforces the fact that chickens don't need much pampering to get by. Their house is unheated, and a bit airy (I was more worried about ventilation than insulation when we built it) but it's dry and out of the wind. I took this picture from the kitchen window, which is upstairs and many feet back from the backyard. I really like my new camera, and its 10X zoom feature. Gimpy Girl (to the far right) seems to have finally hit chicken sexual maturity, as her comb has grown larger and turned red, and she has laid at least two eggs. One was this tiny little thing, like a robin's egg but brown, but the other was a small-ish but normal chicken egg. The other day when I went to collect, there were four eggs nestled together, simple as that. She may have laid more than that, it's hard to tell since they all lay in the same place. We get anywhere from none to three, generally, with two being the median.

If I keep on with the blogging, expect many more boring posts about gardens and chickens.

*i.e. I design, Don builds to my specifications. Except when he doesn't, and I end up with something funky. Like the raspberry bed that's about 16" wider than I wanted, which is OK because I'll plant a row of onions in there too.

** Don't look too deeply into what the garden itself is costing... These things should be amortized over a few seasons anyway.

10 Months Old Today

Pretty cute, if I do say so myself. This is his "Oy, enough with the camera already, paparazzi lady!" expression. It used to be so easy to take his picture... most of our early photos look like this one, from when he was about four weeks old:

He slept a lot. And even when he was awake, he couldn't really move around but stayed where he was put. Of course, as he gained in mobility, he also developed a bit more expression; now, I get a lot of pictures like this one:

... which wasn't cropped at all. "What's that? A camera? Let me see! Is it for tasting?" (He seems to say, as it all sounds like AHHHHhhhh to me.)

All in all, I think he's a keeper. Only two months until he's a year old, who can believe it?

Arrgh looking through his newborn pictures has me thinking about teensy tiny little newborn babies. Bad Mara. Stop that.

Baby Food

We're feeding Robert a mix of store-bought baby food and homemade. Most of the homemade is just whatever we're eating, cooked down more and pureed. Easy, except that he's still scared of the food processor.

Chicken and carrots cooking in scratch chicken broth.

Salmon and kale.


Portioned out for the freezer.

Sometimes, it's even simpler: his favorite food, cut up and saved for later.

He approves mightily of the chicken blend.

I also blend up a lot of fruits, and mix them into either his infant cereal or plain, whole-fat yogurt. Bananas or applesauce with blueberries or raspberries, stuff like that. They taste good enough to add to my own yogurt or oatmeal. Regarding the infant cereal (an organic, heavily fortified wheat/oat blend), I've got mixed feelings. His pediatrician recommended using it at "two or three of his meals" for the iron, while explaining that many infants (especially breastfed infants) start to have lower iron levels at this age. I personally don't think that grain cereals are a very desirable food at this age, since without the added vitamins, they don't have much going for them. I'd rather he be eating fruits and veggies; meat, fish, eggs; and a little dairy (I mean other than the mama-dairy, of which he still takes copiously.) Having oatmeal three times a day seems excessive, so I compromised and included it in one meal per day. Then the doctor called back with the results from his blood work* and his iron was perfectly satisfactory, and that was before he'd been having any kind of cereal or fortified foods so it seems he was getting plenty before. (I guess my diet is satisfactory, too.) By then I was seduced, though, because with this stuff you just add plain water and stir! So easy! But something he was eating was making him sort-of constipated. I say sort-of because it didn't seem to be causing him any discomfort, but he was pooping very hard golf balls every few days, which just didn't seem right. I nixed the yogurt, nothing. Nixed the cereal, it got a little better. Finally went on a 24-hour all-breastmilk fast, which got him pooping like a baby again, but left me exhausted. Geez but this kid can eat. Now we're going to slowly reintroduce the cereal to see if it creates rock-poop again.

*This office checks iron levels and for the presence of lead as part of their nine-month routine. Robert turned up positive for lead (!) but that's another post.

I'm still here.

So hey! Hi! It's only been like three months since I last posted anything here. That's not a long time or anything, no. Apparently, writing in a blog is like working out: the longer you go without doing it, the harder it is to just get up and do it. I guess there are many reasons for my long absence, including but not limited to Robert's short nap times, my own insomnia, a bout of depression somewhere in February, and the beginning of gardening season. Not that any of those are real excuses, of course. But they add up. It's not like I don't spend plenty of time on the computer; I do. But it's all little chunks: read a blog, play a game, update Facebook. Nothing that requires any real time, thought or energy. Often when I'm laying down with Robert, I'll think of things that I'd like to write, start drafting in my head, but when he's finally asleep... I don't know, I just don't. And I'm sorry about it, mainly because I think I'll regret having let a big chunk of my baby's first year gone undocumented.

As always, his sleep is all over the map, but I think it's slowly, slowly starting to improve overall. His naps have sort of coalesced from many little sleeps into two long-ish sleeps, or at least into sandwich-style naps (i.e. he sleeps for twenty minutes and when he wakes, I nurse him or otherwise convince him to return to sleep, putting him down all over again.) We have an official bedtime routine now that goes dinner--bath--bed, hitting the bed part right around seven. Sometimes, he sleeps all evening and night, only waking to breastfeed. Other times, he bounces up at 8:30, wide awake. Or, worst of all, at 4:00am. But, as I said, it's ever-so-slowly getting better. I think the amount of people foods in his diet is helping, as is all the crawling. I've completely given up caffeinated coffee, which helped some, too. Plus maybe just getting older.

He's crawling like crazy, can get from room to room no problem, gets into everything. When he's on a mission, he crawls very fast and makes this funny "eh-eh-eh" sound to himself. It's quite amusing but I haven't been able to capture it on video yet. He pulls himself up to standing. He waves hello-goodbye, says 'mama' (or 'mamba', depending), is still toothless, but has had a lot more hair come in. He has made the predictable shift from social butterfly to shy mama's boy. At his nine-month doctor visit, he was declared the picture of health, as well as still enormous-- 85th percentile for weight but off the chart still for length. He is wearing size 18-month onesies. He nurses maybe six times a day still, as well as eating three people-food meals. His favorites are avocado, anything mixed with mango or apricot, and a chicken-carrot combination I made, but he'll tolerate pretty much anything. He likes egg yolk, but only from a fried egg, not hard boiled.

I have become a master at over-easy eggs, and as Don says, if you can do a good over-easy, you can do any kind of egg.

I am not making any promises about posting more, but I am going to try.

Angel Fire 2009

Where we were:

What we did:

... a wonderful week.

How Engineers Wrap Presents

Oh hey look! A blog!

Yeah. So... um. It's always difficult to come back to something more or less abandoned but I shall try, regardless. My friend Becca is staying with us right now, and somehow having a person to do things with (like yard work, or baking*) really cuts down on computer usage. So does this current stage of babyhood, in which Robert both notices and intensely dislikes being left on his own for any amount of time. His mantra seems to be, 'hold me, play with me, feed me, dance with me, just don't put me down!' On the bright side, he is so much fun right now, what with the giggling, making faces, and overall responsiveness. His sense of object permanence is developing right on schedule, so that when Don leaves the room, Robert stares at the doorway for awhile; or if I remove a non-suitable toy from his hands (like the DVD remote), he cranes his head to see where it went. Further complicating matters is the fact that his average nap is about 45 minutes. If he sleeps an hour, I feel lucky; more than an hour and I get worried. At night, he is still up to nurse every 2-3 hours. We haven't exactly started him on solid foods yet, but have tried giving him little bits of a few things-- some sweet potato on Thanksgiving, some avocado, and banana. I think once he's fully able to sit up on his own, we'll get a high chair and begin the solid foods in earnest; that will probably happen by the time he and I get back from New Mexico after Christmas. To be totally honest, I'm kind of hoping that as solids begin to make up more of his diet, he'll start sleeping longer.

We had his six-month pediatrician visit at the end of November, and he is still absolutely perfect in every way, as well as still hovering at the very top of the growth charts for both length and weight-- 20 pounds some ounces, and 28.5 inches. So much for my confidence that, as a fully breast-fed baby, he would gradually stop being so big for his age! Nope. His vaccines have all been fine so far, bolstering my decision to space them out across more visits.



*What, you didn't know vegans can bake? They can. They make wonderful cookies, and cupcakes...**

** hint, hint.

Quick catch-up

Parenthood does not create much time to blog, it seems. Lately, Robert sleeps very lightly, and not for very long at a time. He might nap for twenty minutes or half an hour, then be up again. Regular noises like the kitchen faucet running, my cell phone ringing, the vacuum cleaner, or even typing are enough to startle him awake again. Don and his mother have suggested that I keep it too quiet in general, that we need more background noise*. I think it's probably too late to really change that, though. I'm a quiet person by nature, and he's been experiencing that since he was in utero. Even if I have the radio on, it's generally NPR or classical. If I lay down and take a nap with him, he'll sleep for much longer. Since he's still up every few hours at night to nurse, I need the rest too. When he's awake, he doesn't like to be alone anymore, or to sit by himself. I used to sit him in his car seat, on a kitchen chair while I would make dinner or clean up the kitchen; he doesn't like that now. Now he craves movement, motion. Wants to be tossed around, bounced, jostled. He's on the verge of being able to crawl, and his inability to move on his own seem to frustrate him.

I feel more than a little frustrated, myself, by my inability to get anything done. Don says not to worry about it-- who cares? I'm home to be with the baby, not to keep house. But I do. We have a friend coming to stay in a few days, and my 'to-do before she gets here' list is shrinking dramatically: not because I'm finishing tasks but because I'm having to pare it down to what I can actually get done. I'm at the point right now where I'm pretty sure I can vacuum the guest room and change the sheets before Thursday... On the bright side, once she's here we'll be able to do all kinds of things just by virtue of having another pair of arms to hold him.

That said, we've had a few really great days lately. Don took a Monday off, and for some reason Robert decided to take a two-hour nap that afternoon. I was able to help with the yard work and rescue all the grass clipping and leaves in the front yard.** And on Halloween, Robert and I went apple-picking with some friends, and he was absolutely perfect; just fell sound asleep in the carrier for pretty much the whole time. Gee, baby, is that all it takes-- me carrying you up, around, and down a mountain-side for a few hours, in the fresh, cool apple-orchard air? I'll try to fit that into our daily routine somehow.

All in all, it's hard to do more than throw a photo up here. This short post has taken me all morning!

It's okay to eat the apples.

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

*Mother-in-law: when Don was a baby, I'd always have the radio or TV on, just for the noise!

Me (under breath): and it just did wonders for his attention span, huh?

Don: Hey, what are implying, that...wait, what are we talking about, again?

** We bag the back yard for the compost heap. The front yard, though, is up a hill and far away from said heaps, so it takes too long to bag and haul. Its clippings just gets mulched. But we have built raised beds that I'm filling lasagna-style for next spring, and I wanted that good stuff to fill the beds. Don would empty the bag into the wheelbarrow, I'd run it down to the backyard. I've also been stealing bags of leaves from all over our neighborhood. It's not really stealing, since they're on the curb for pickup already...

When it rains

Announcement:

The world's most wonderful, loveable, amazing baby is now five month old.

Granola Cost/Benefit Analysis

I made this granola recipe today, with a few changes: left out the sunflower seeds (because trail mix is trail mix, and granola is granola!), replaced the wheat germ with ground flax seed, used half coconut oil, half butter for the specified "vegetable oil", left out the brown sugar. I was hoping that making it from scratch would prove cheaper than buying the boxed stuff. It isn't and it is, depending how you look at it.

Notes for next time: add cinnamon to the dry stuff, not the syrup. Use food processor to chop the nuts. Buy already-ground flax. Lining the sheet pans was overkill. Use something besides raisins-- dates, maybe. Think about getting everything set up and prepped, but not baking the granola until the evening when Don comes home; it was really difficult to keep an eye on it in the oven while taking care of the baby.

Overall, it turned out delicious, and it made a lot. I'm probably set for breakfast for a month. I added up the cost of everything as best I could, and compared it to the cost of boxed granola, it actually came out more expensive, bowl-for-bowl. This is disappointing, BUT. The problem with the comparison is that there isn't actually a comparable product on the market. Or, if there is, it's probably in the bulk-bins area of Whole Foods, and not in a box with a picture on it. For one thing, this recipe is really, extra nutty. Three cups of nuts total, a mix of pecans, walnuts, and almonds. Nuts are expensive, pricier than anything else in the cereal, but are really healthful. No prepackaged cereal that I looked at has as much nuttiness. Butter and coconut oil are more expensive (and again, a lot healthier and yummier) than, say, sunflower oil. Same thing with the maple syrup and honey: pricier than sugar, healthier than sugar. If there were a cereal for sale made with the ingredients I used, in the same proportions, it would probably cost the moon.

There's a real comfort in knowing exactly what's in what I eat, which is why I generally make oatmeal or eggs in the morning instead of cold cereal. Why, in the example cereal, is sugar the second ingredient? Second? Really? The proportions in the recipe I used are like this:

Oats-- 8 cups
Other grains/seeds (oat bran, flax)-- 3 cups
Nuts (pecans, almonds, walnuts)-- 3 cups
Fruit (raisins)-- 2 cups
Sugars (maple syrup, honey)-- 1 cup
Fats (butter, coconut oil)-- 1 cup
Flavorings (cinnamon, vanilla, salt)-- 2 1/2 tablespoons

Even so, it was plenty sweet, almost too sweet. I guess having so much fruit and nuts adds its own sweetness, too. As the MasterCard commercials would say, making your own cereal: $18.29 per batch. Knowing that there's no vegetable oil, no white sugar, and--God forbid-- no soy protein isolate: priceless. (I'm looking at you, Kashi.)

Stress-- or lack thereof

(obligatory baby picture)

A little while ago, my dad asked me whether I found motherhood to be stressful, and if I was handling it OK, or something like that. It reinforces this theme that I've noticed again and again, in books, magazines etc; that adding a baby to the family creates major stress. I'm sure this is true in a lot of cases, maybe even most cases. But I haven't found it to be true in mine. Certainly, the baby itself makes a difference; Robert is a fairly easy-going, manageable baby. We've had a few bad days here and there, maybe even a bad week or two. And those first six weeks or so of breastfeeding were pure hell, no doubt about it. But if he were an intense, high-needs, colicky baby, I'd probably be writing a different post... assuming I'd have time to write at all. As it is, I have to say that I feel less stressed right now, than I have in years.

One overlooked factor in this equation has to be, what came before? What did life pre-baby look like? Maybe it's the couples living their ideal lives who-- poof!-- add a baby on top of it, that have their ceiling fall in. Their lovely relationship that had never been severely tested, suddenly is. Their happy, not-too-stressful lives, changed forever. But I am coming to motherhood from two years of infertility, four miscarriages, and a job that really stressed me out. In a way, I traded two very stressful things (my fertility/miscarriage saga and the job) for one, much-desired and much-less-stressful thing: Robert. Seems a good trade in my book. The major questions that used to keep me awake in the wee hours, like: Are we ever going to have a baby? Is this ever going to happen? What's wrong with me/us? How many miscarriages is too many? How many am I willing to go through before saying, 'enough, no more'?, are gone. Their offspring are smaller and quieter. I worry a bit about the next one, but having one successful pregnancy under my belt makes it so much easier. (I can do this. Look, we did it. It may not be easy, but there's a precedent now.) I used to know, without even trying to think about it, exactly where I was in my cycle. Four days until I ought to be ovulating. Three days. Nine days ago. Too early to take a test? If I was pregnant, I knew exactly how many weeks and days along I was, even as I knew that it didn't mean anything. Really, the first fourteen weeks of my pregnancy with Robert was probably the most stressful time of my life, as I could do nothing but wait helplessly as the days ticked along, waiting for the inevitable cramping and bleeding to start. If I start thinking too much about how I felt then, it still brings tears. Honestly, compared to that, how stressful is waking up to feed a baby, or pacing the house with a crying infant, or changing a poopy blow-out diaper? Not at all, that's how. It's not life-and-death.


Of course, I didn't experience all that alone, and Don and I have been tested hard. The guilt and self-blame, trying to comfort one another when so miserable ourselves, the endless doctors' appointments and rounds of tests... Not to say that we're iron-clad and that nothing can affect us now, but I would have a hard time envisioning that the daily stresses of parenthood could damage our relationship when the major trauma of losing our babies, again and again, didn't. To use the old cliche, it didn't kill us and so we're stronger.


Not working, after working in a job that didn't suit, is of course a smaller matter than having a baby after dealing with infertility. But in its own way, it's also a big relief. Those small things-- the sales goals not met, the endless meetings, the corporate double-speak, the coworkers one likes well enough in small doses but that drive one nuts with constant exposure-- they all add up. I hadn't liked my job in a long time, but didn't feel able to leave. It was dreading Monday morning, hating the alarm clock, never having enough time to do the things I wanted to do, always holding my tongue. A little baby is a whole lot less demanding than a corporate job, and I'm lucky as hell to be able (so far) to stay home with him. I get more sleep now, than I did then. If Robert keeps me up during the night (or even if he doesn't, but my old friend insomnia does), I can sleep late in the morning, or take a nap later. I eat better, too. Partly this is because I had fallen into the deadly cycle of I'm stressed, I deserve a Snickers bar. After that customer, I need another Starbucks. What a day-- we need to go out to dinner. I'm too tired to pack a lunch; I can buy one at work. With a convenience store across the hallway, a coffee shop next door, and the student cafeteria nearby, temptation was close at hand and I had the cash to indulge myself. Now that I think about it, probably some of the weight that I've lost since having Robert is simply the effect of not having multiple caramel macchiatos, candy bars, fast-food lunches, and restaurant dinners every week. I've not been making a special effort to cook healthy meals (working more on the look, isn't it nice to have a partner at home? aspect, which involves more butter) but pretty much any home-cooked lunch and dinner is going to be better than Pizza Hut for lunch or Chili's for dinner.


This is not to say that I am never stressed out, or that being a stay-at-home parent doesn't have its own challenges; rather that, given where I was before, I personally am experiencing much less stress now.

Good grief, 4.5 months old already!

Amazing: no matter how much I try to slow down time, Robert keeps getting older at an astonishing rate. Despite my best efforts, he is already four and a half months old. Not a newborn anymore... not even still in the "fourth trimester". This rate of change is impossible to adapt to. As soon as I think I have "it" down, it changes. For example, Robert used to be able to sleep pretty much anywhere, any time. I didn't have to worry about whether he got enough naps because he could nap in the stroller, in the car seat, in the Mei Tei. He also slept fairly soundly, once he got to a certain point. Now, for the most part, he sleeps much more lightly and it's much harder for him to fall asleep. I didn't realize how much of what I did was dependent on that sound sleep until it changed! Our routine used to be that we'd put him down to sleep in the middle of our big bed, then (usually) move him to his bassinet when we went to bed. I used to trim his fingernails during his naps, and do the dishes. For the last week, though, he's spent every night in the bed, his nails are terribly long and scratchy, and the kitchen is a wreck.

People keep asking me "how he's sleeping", and I don't know how to answer that. He usually goes to bed around 7-8pm, and stays in bed until 8-9 in the morning. During that time, he gets up to nurse three or four times. So, he's certainly not "sleeping through the night", but it's not very disruptive, either; it's not as though I have to haul myself to the kitchen and make up a bottle four times a night. If he's in bed with me, I don't have to get up at all.

Robert learns something new practically every day. Actually, it probably is every day; most likely some of the things he's learning aren't obvious to us. He's so interested in everything around him, even stuff that seems trivial to us, like the red numbers on the alarm clock. Nursing during the day is becoming difficult as well, because he wants to stop every thirty seconds and look around. For one thing, he doesn't really "unlatch" to do this-- he stretches me to the breaking point instead and suddenly 'pops' off, which is painful. Also, this is impeding my fledging efforts to feed him outside of the house more often (to facilitate our being out and about), since it leaves me rather suddenly exposed. More importantly, though, his distractedness is keeping him from eating enough at any one time, so he's hungry again very quickly. I think I'm nursing him more often during the day now, than I was when he was a newborn.

The most obvious new things right now are his interest in his hands, and the new squeak. He's transitioned from batting impotently at interesting objects, to actually reaching for and grabbing at them. He can hold his rattle, bring it to his mouth, and only occasionally smacks himself in the head with it. He can grab our faces, to scratch us with those sharp little fingernails. He reaches for the cat and dog. The squeak is basically awful. He's replaced all of his previous noises with the new one he's discovered, which falls somewhere between 'bats leaving the cave' and 'nails on chalkboard'. Sometimes it's a happy squeak, sometimes demanding or fretful. Don and I are hoping that it's a short phase.

For the record: at his four-month doctor visit, Robert weighed 18 pounds and was 27 inches long, which puts him in the 95 percentile for weight, and "officially off the chart" for length, according to his pediatrician. She also declared him the picture of health, and was very impressed with him overall. I like her. At four and a half months post-partum, I've lost all of the 50 pounds that I gained during his pregnancy, plus an extra few. Being the sole source of nutrition for a baby this size is a better fat-burner than any workout DVD: most breastfed babies don't get to this weight until they're closer to 6-8 months old, at which point solid foods would most likely be a part of their diet. I am, however, expecting him to slow down pretty soon, based on this quote from Kellymom:

Healthy breastfed infants tend to grow more rapidly than formula-fed infants in the first 2-3 months of life and less rapidly from 3 to 12 months.

For comparison, a picture of Robert at four months, and a very early one taken on the same pillow:

Grandma's Visit

I know they're all blurry. I need to learn to better use my camera. But the scenes were cute, even though the documentation sucks.

Aaaaack!

Mother-in-law coming here less than two weeks' notice must clean house. (Breathe. Breathe.) Also, must think of things to do besides sitting around staring at baby, running errands, and similar. Nothing strenuous. Must unearth and display various gifts from same. This blog will probably suffer in between now and then, for obvious reasons, as one cannot dust and write simultaneously, or take boxes of stuff to Goodwill and post photos. Goodbye, sweet computer. I will miss you for awhile.

Here's some pictures, in the meantime.

Sometimes, when the baby is napping, I try to spend quality time with the dog and tell her I still love her. I don't think she buys it though. And yes, I seem to take all photos lately on the same unmade bed.

Random Observations

On the bottom of my sugar bowl is a sticker that says, "dishwasher safe, microwave safe". Since I have neither appliance, it is of no matter to me, but I do want to know WHO is microwaving their sugar bowl, and why. Is one supposed to remove the sugar first?

Looking at my stove, I realized that it would make much more sense for the pot to call the kettle "stainless", since they're both steel. I don't have a black pot. I don't have a black kettle. All I have is one black cast-iron frying pan, and it doesn't communicate much with the rest of the cookware.

Because Don can still eat only soft, mushy things, we've been on a pretty weird diet lately. Pea soup. Mashed potatoes, as entre. Canned soup. Pudding. Pea soup again. The invalid diet is making him grumpy; he craves steak or a pork chop. I'm rounding mine out with salads and such, but I can't wait until chicken is back on the menu. Tonight, I'm baking some winter squash.

Eating My Cake

When Robert was younger, it was easy for me to read while he slept or dozed. At three months, he's a bit more awake and interactive, and it's harder to justify ignoring him to read a book. So, I've been reading whatever I'm reading, out loud to him. He seems to enjoy it: he seems to like just watching my face make words. It's good for me, too; reading aloud forces me to slow down a little and pay attention to words rather than paragraphs. So far we've read quite a bit of the Earth's Children series (skipping the smutty parts), and a lot of Dorothy Parker, although I can only read her in small doses without getting depressed. I know that in not too much time, we'll be reading children's books, Sandra Boynton, Dr. Seuss. I'm making time with adult literature while I still can...

Tooth

For three weeks, he thought it was a sinus infection. Don gets those fairly frequently, and deals with them in the time-tested way: wait it out and maybe it will just go away on its own.

For the last two weeks or so, I've been telling him-- gently, at first, then less gently-- that his breath was bad, that something was wrong with his mouth, and that he might need to see a dentist. It was that sickly sort of halitosis that lingers even after brushing.

For about the last week, he noticed what felt like an earache, but contributed it to the sinus issue.

Tuesday evening, he came home with his face all puffy, and said that it seemed to be a tooth, after all. I agreed and called him Ed for the rest of the night, because with his chubby cheek he looked a bit like Ed Norton. He decided that he would try to get to a dentist Friday morning and asked me to find one for him the next morning. Preferably one of those that specialize in anesthesiology* and are willing to put patients under for any and all procedures. See, Don, who is afraid of basically nothing, has a fear of the dentist. Although details are scarce, this seems to stem back to his service days and the removal of his wisdom teeth by an unkind army dentist. I think it's safe to say that he hasn't been to a dentist since, and that was twenty years ago.

Yesterday, Robert, Alice and I took our usual morning walk and when we returned, I started my search for a dentist for Don. I had only gotten as far as bringing up the Google page when his truck turned into the drive: he had been sent home from work with instructions to go to the doctor that day. His cheek had morphed from cutely chubby to scarily swollen, and the pain had become unbearable**. I found a dental surgery place, loaded the baby into the car, and we spent the rest of the morning driving and waiting, breastfeeding and waiting, walking about the waiting room, and waiting, while they did who-knows-what to Don's mouth.

Needless to say, after being neglected for so long, the tooth was not salvageable and had to be 'extracted'. There is also quite a bit of other work that needs to be done ASAP in order to keep this from happening again soon. So let this be a lesson to you procrastinators and those fearful of various doctors and dentists. Go. Just go. Otherwise, you will eventually be forced to go while in tremendous pain, and it will be much worse.

Don insisted that I drop him back off at work after the procedure, instead of taking him home. I'm not sure if this was sheer stupidity, badass-ness, or some combination. I reminded him not to lift anything heavy, climb ladders, or operate machinery, and to call me when he was ready to come home. He's actually in a very good mood... I'm not sure if this is because he finally did what he'd been dreading and got through it, or because for the first time in almost a month he didn't have a bad headache, toothache, or earache, or simply because of the hydrocodone he's on.

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*I spelled that right on the first try. Am so proud.
**Don bears pain incredibly well, so that is saying something. Unbearable for him means "anyone else would have passed out by now".

She's Lightning McQueen, I'm 'Mater

Last night I tried to make one of Rachel Ray's "30 minute meals" for dinner. The pasta was yummy (yum-o?), but the timing... 30 minutes MY ASS. I guess cooking is like getting your tires changed. Technically, your tires could be replaced in like 30 seconds if you were a race-car driver with your own pit crew. But most of us have to go to Sears and wait at least an hour. Rachel Ray is the race-car driver. Her Food Network set kitchen is the pit crew. I'm the poor shmuck wandering around the mall, waiting for Sears to call me and tell me my car is ready. I mean, in my kitchen it takes 20 minutes just to bring enough water to a boil to cook a pound of pasta, not to mention the 10 minutes to boil the noodles themselves. That's half an hour right there, not including mixing it into the sauce, pouring the whole shebang into a casserole dish, topping it with the Special Crunchy Topping, and putting it into the oven for awhile. Assuming that you have everything together enough to get the sauce and the topping done while the pasta is cooking, it's still more like a 45-minute meal.

I think her water must be pre-heated, because she turns on the stove and-- BAM!-- water is boiling just like that. She chops her veggies, but the onions and garlic are already peeled, everything is washed, and somehow she magically takes exactly the amount of everything she needs from the fridge-- no searching for a Tupperware to house the leftover frozen spinach or the other half of the chopped onion. Little things, but sure makes a difference when you're trying to replicate her results.

I don't know whether to be annoyed at her efficiency, or to try to turn my kitchen into my own speedy pit crew...

On a similar note, I made a banana-cream pie from scratch, that I'm very proud of. I haven't made a pudding not out of a box since maybe high school. The eggs came from our own back-yard flock-- all three of the non-lame girls are laying now. The yolks were bright orange and made the filling the same color as the additive-filled Jello stuff. Kind of makes me think that if those folks used higher-quality eggs, they wouldn't need to add yellow food coloring to their vanilla pudding. Anyway, it was easy, and delicious. If I could find a way to nix the Nilla wafers and their evil ingredients, I'd be really happy, but apparently it just isn't a banana-cream pie without either a wafer or a graham-cracker crust...

I don't even own an apron

It's official: I no longer have a job. I quit the bank last week, turned in my keys and alarms. I am now, for lack of a better description, a stay-at-home mom. Really, you'd think the house would be cleaner. A few people have expressed interest in how we can afford to make this decision, but to be honest, with what I was making and the cost of daycare, it wouldn't put us that much ahead if I kept working. (It would be different if I were in a job that I loved, that spoke to me or fulfilled me in some way-- in that case, it would be worth it to go back to work even if we just broke even with it. But that is not the case.) The real bank-breaking decision is not my staying home, it was to have a baby in the first place. Since having a baby was non-negotiable, we'll make this work out, somehow.

In other news, Robert is three months old as of yesterday. Three months feels significant to me, not least because it marks three successful months of breastfeeding. Successful, as in, we're still doing it. Robert has had nothing but the boob-juice (as Don and I so elegantly call it) since coming home from the hospital, and it seems to be working OK as far as keeping him alive and growing, as he's still resting comfortably on the highest line on the growth charts. I've grown a prize pumpkin, or perhaps a lumberjack. Breastfeeding is better than it was, almost to the point of being good. The last bout of thrush seems to have cleared up, although I'm still doing the vinegar rinses, pro-biotics, and garlic supplements to keep it that way. We don't have a feeding pattern, the way we did earlier when he would nurse every two-three hours. Now, sometimes he goes five or six hours between feeds, only to make up for it later by nursing every hour for awhile. It's unpredictable. Word has it, though, that everything regarding breastfeeding is easier after three months. Here's hoping! At the very least, I hope it will never again be as awful as those first six weeks or so.

(I want to sell him to Gerber or Pampers, but Don won't let me.)