Am I ever going to have another blog post without a photo of Bean in it? Probably not. Not for awhile anyway. So I’ll just go on and get it out of the way now.

There. That’s better. She’s next door in that one. They have a crib that they made when their oldest granddaughter was born and it’s being taken for another spin with Bean. The oldest granddaughter took that photo. She’s going to college in the fall and majoring in photography. I told her to knock herself out taking photos of Bean since I wasn’t going to be there to do it.

I had a rough Wednesday. Bean was feeling a little yuckish and I spent about 3 hours of the late afternoon just lying with her. The whole time I’m lying there, I’m worrying about all of the shit that I need to do to get things ready to take her next door the next morning and I start to panic and have some really creepy thoughts. Sweety comes home and says something about how he’s going to eat a bite and go to the boys’ baseball games and I flip out. When he asks me what my damn problem is I start to cry and tell him that I haven’t gotten anything done and he lists off the things I’ve done that day and tells me to not worry about not doing everything. Then I wail something about how I have to get things ready for the next day so I can go to work and Bean can go next door. I think he realized that I was either going to get things ready for the next day or stick my head in the oven.

He took Bean to the games with him and I stayed at home and cleaned the house and packed her bag for the next day. Mental crisis averted. I think he likes taking her places to show her off. Sweety is a people person and she is a conversation piece.

In my enthusiasm to ensure that we have enough milk for Bean – I may have gone overboard. You open the freezer and all you can see are frozen packages of breastmilk. I’m at the point now where I pump milk one day and she gets it the next and the frozen stuff is there just in case. Never in my life would I have thought that a freezer full of my own milk would help me feel less anxious about things.

To put it mildly – I can’s sing worth a damn. But I figure I should sing to Bean. I don’t know why. It just seems like the thing to do. Usually I sing things other than nursery rhymes but thought she might like a rousing rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.

I was so wrong.

This was the face I got. Thinking that she just needed to get used to this new song, I tried to power through it but by the time I got to “up above the world so high” she was losing her shit and actually crying tears while that little lip quivered. I moved on to a favorite among the diapered set here – “Getting Jiggy Wit It” along with the leg kicks that she likes to do during the chorus.

I’ve also discovered that she likes to hear “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”. She’s usually just about asleep by bottle 75 and it doesn’t strain my voice into total unpleasantness.

I’ll leave you with a couple of nuggets that dropped out of Sweety’s mouth the other night while he was sleeping.

I just got back from the police department where I was fingerprinted. I was trying to get the ink off before I got home. I’m sorry.

Annnnd…..

Snow cones! I love snow cones. Maybe we could have a snow cone tomorrow? Shaved ice is awesome!

People, if he had said anything other than snow cones…if he’d have at least said something that we have around here? I’d have thought that he was awake. He was way too enthusiastic about snow cones. He was also way too sad about not getting the fingerprint ink off of his fingers. Does he really think if he gets taken to the police department and fingerprinted that his biggest issue at that time is getting his hands clean?

14 Comments | In: bean, conversation | | #

Yesterday at work I took advantage of using the empty office that the nurse had directed me to to pump milk in. (Wow, that is the worst sentence ever…) This was during my short break so as soon as I got in there, I whipped off my shirt, hooked up and started eating my soup while things happened.

I’m slurping away and out of the corner of my eye I see something flicker so I look over.

I look over to see that the mini-blinds are wide open and the window that I’m standing in front of is along the sidewalk that leads up to our main entrance. And look! Walking away is the back of one of my podmates! Walking by are happy people on their way to work or lunch! I quickly and awkwardly crept over to the window and closed the blinds.

I wonder how many people got a look at me during those 7 oblivious minutes? I think I’ve finally got it all down for work though. Today I managed to make it into the appropriate room and get the job done without involving anyone else.

Sweety is pretty upset. He found out tonight that his father sold his grandparents house along with all of the contents. Family photos, his grandpa’s awards, his grandma’s quirky paintings, furniture handmade by his grandpa. All that kind of stuff. After his grandparents died a few years ago, Sweety, his sister and his dad went to the house and moved a very few things out. They didn’t have a truck with them and Sweety and his sister were of the understanding that sometime when his dad was down here that they would go through stuff better. Apparently his dad didn’t want to fuck with things and didn’t think to ask anyone if they maybe wanted anything of their grandparents.

Sweety’s dad came down a couple of weeks ago and wanted to see the Bean before he went home. We played the “hurry up and wait” game while we tried to figure out when he would come over or where we could meet him. We finally got hungry on Day Two and went out to eat and called to tell him where we’d be and that he could meet us there if he wanted. Bean slept through the meeting. I was jealous of her unconsciousness.

Right now Sweety is asleep. I got in bed and turned the computer on and I guess the light from the screen woke him and I heard him mutter, “motherfucking bitch”. I picked up a remote control and just barely kept from using it to brain the living shit out of him. Instead, I shook him while clutching the remote and asked him to repeat what he just said. He screamed awake and asked me what my problem was and didn’t believe me when I told him what he’d said.

I told him that I’m almost starting to think that he’s only pretending to talk in his sleep. Then I told him to go back to sleep. He asked how in the hell was he supposed to go to sleep while worrying about taking a remote control upside the head. Heh.

He just rolled over and said, “And you came in to save the day!”. His regular snoring resumed right after.

Someone’s favorite place is the shower. Sweety’s been taking a shower with Bean almost every night since she was around 3 weeks old.

Showering with your baby. That’s one of the things that I got really excited about when I realized that she’s our baby and we can do whatever we want with her! Sweety had mentioned showering with her and I looked at him like he was crazy and told him absolutely not. What if he dropped her? And I’d never heard of a baby being in the shower. When Bekah came to visit, I told her that Sweety wanted to shower with her thinking that she too would think it was crazy. Instead, she told me that she showered with her kid when she was a baby all of the time.

Oh. Ok. Hey, this is our baby and we can take a bath with her! Yay!

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Bean really doesn’t like to sleep for Sweety. Here she is at BB’s baseball game the other night at around 8:30 p.m. I call this her “Charles Manson look”.

Note the blurry hand. If she is conscious then she is wiggling the shit out of an appendage. Sweety had retrieved her around 1 o’clock and said she’d napped maybe a total of 40 minutes in all. When I’m with her the kid sleeps. I mean, sleeps like it’s her most favorite thing.

I was telling my Mom about how Bean won’t sleep for Sweety but does for me and Mom basically said it’s because I’m lazy. “Babies pick up on the people around them. She knows you like to eat and sleep so she does that with you. She always sees Daddy going, going, going and thinks it’s time to be peppy when he’s around.” For once, I am glad that my lazy is thick in the air. Bean is mellow with me. I think it’s because she knows that I have the milk factory so it’s easy for her to spend most of the day napping and dining.

I’m pumping milk during my breaks at work. We have a lactation room there and I’ve been using it occasionally. Sometimes I don’t have enough time so I have to hide in the bathroom instead of taking the time to go downstairs and check into the lactation room.

Yesterday I decided to eat lunch while I was being milked. Multitask.

I carefully arranged my food and put on my homemade bra/contraption thingy that holds the apparatus to my nips so I can use my hands for other things, cranked on the machine and started eating soup. About 7 minutes into this, the door flies open and some dude looks at me while I’m screaming, “Occupied!!!” before retreating and slamming the door.

As I’m cleaning up the pump parts there’s a knock on the door and I shriek, “Occupied!” at it. It is the company nurse and she asks me to see her when I’m done. Great…that’s going to eat up the 5 minutes I was going to have free on my lunch break.

It turns out that the lactation room isn’t supposed to be used right now because it’s being remodeled. I thought the boxes in there were there because nobody used the room so stuff was getting stashed in it and that there was no soap or paper towels for the same reason. (I’d started bringing in my own cleaning supplies.) The nurse directed me to an empty office to use in the future and apologized profusely on behalf of the maintenance man that I traumatized.

I’m trying to get my breaks moved around at work to more evenly space out the pumping sessions. I was asked how long I’d need to have my breaks moved and when I told the person that I’d planned on breastfeeding for at least a year unless Bean decides to wean herself before then – you’d have thought I grew another eye with the weird look that I got.

And I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has said something to me about feeding her rice or cereal in a bottle (to help her sleep all night! Even after I’ve told them she is already sleeping all night…) and they look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that I’m not going to do that. We’re going to go with baby led weaning and skip the baby food for “real” food instead. When I mentioned this to Sweety several months ago, he told me that Bean was my project and I could do whatever I wanted with her. I was kind of surprised and thought he’d push back on this but he thinks it’s a fine idea.

He has had to point out to me a few times that she is our baby and as long as we don’t abuse her that we can do whatever we want with her! When she was born, I didn’t know you were allowed to dress your baby in clothes that you brought. I thought you had to keep her in the blankets the hospital provided. Did you know that make wee hospital gowns for babies? Yes, they do. That is what she is wearing in her first photo.

I almost want to have another baby so I can dress it in something other than a paper towel when it’s fresh from the oven.

Damn, I love her.

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So.

Guess which asshole didn’t know that a baby being in a wet diaper causes diaper rash?

Yeah.

When she started sleeping through the night, I noticed that in the morning her butt would be a little red but by the time she had a bath that night it was okay. It wasn’t like red and weepy or so bad that she acted like it hurt. Just a different color. I thought it was from being on her back all night.

And then, a couple of mornings ago, I opened her morning diaper and it smelled weird. When consulting Dr. Google, I realized that it was ammonia and her butt was getting chapped from it. I was letting my baby marinate in her own juices while she slept. The reason Sweety didn’t know this was happening – he didn’t see the morning diapers because I change those and by the time he’d see Bean later in the day, her butt looked okay.

I started putting more padding in her night time diaper and no red butt since then.

Say it with me…I. Am. Sofa. King. Stew. Ped. I’m glad it didn’t get crazy out of hand. After I figured out what was going on I cruised the internet looking a photos of diaper rash. Holy shit. That looks so freaking painful.

I went back to work on Thursday and so far, so good. Bean goes over to the neighbor’s house and I go to work. Sweety picks her up when he gets off of work. It seems that Bean doesn’t like to sleep or nap at all for Sweety and she’s been tired as all get out when I arrive home. The past two nights – I feed her as soon as I get home, she falls asleep, Sweety takes a shower with her (she actually slept through the shower last night), I feed her again, she passes out again and sleeps until 7 the next morning.

I’m figuring out how to tote Bean around in a sling! A couple of friends sent some to me to try out and I am LOVING it! It is so nice to be able to have Bean all snuggled up beside me not crying while I do things around the house. Who am I kidding? I also like having her close enough to sniff her head whenever I feel like it without my arms being cramped up from holding her all of the time. I wish I’d started this sooner but I was afraid that I would whack her head into a wall or the oven or something when she was smaller. Since she’s bigger now and her head isn’t wobbly, I figured she can withstand an accidental whacking. And it seems that I’m less clumsy with her than I thought I’d be.

The Bean has discovered her thumb! I think it’s cute as hell and as a mostly reformed thumbsucker, I know how soothing it is and I’ll be damned if I’m going to take that away from her. My teeth are fine (no braces needed here). If Bean gets her teeth from Sweety’s side of the family, she’s going to need braces no matter what so I’m not going to freak out over thumbsucking. We’ve offered her pacifiers and she spits them out. At least with the thumb, I’ll never need to turn the house upside down looking for one to keep her happy. Here she is chowing down on the thumb.

We went to Magic Kingdom last weekend! This was Bean’s second trip to the park. The first one wasn’t planned out very well and we didn’t stay very long. It was a learning lesson on how to do it the second time. I have got to give Sweety credit for being so very helpful whenever it was time to feed Bean. The first time we went to the park, he kind of freaked out when I got ready to flip a tit out and feed her because I was pretty awkward with the whole thing and I ended up feeding her in the bathroom while the toilet automatically flushed underneath me every 90 seconds. This time he was very handy and actually suggested that I feed her in a couple of the attractions we went in where you were sitting down for awhile. There were no feedings while a toilet flushed under me on this trip. That was nice.

She’s been working on her standing.

We’ve decided that she’s going to skip crawling and just hit the ground running. Like a baby Forrest Gump.

Oh, people…my brain is fried. I am so damned forgetful! I took Sylvie to the Post Office on Wednesday to apply for her passport. There was no ink pen available when I got inside and started to fill out all of the paperwork so I went to my truck to get one. I’d taken the truck’s key off of the key ring and had it alone in my pocket.

Later on as we’re standing in line, I panic because I can’t find the key. I realized with dread in my belly that I left it laying on the seat in the truck. I sent Sylvie out to see if I happened to leave the truck unlocked and of course it was locked.

I called Sweety and asked if he would come unlock the door for me. He did. He came into the Post Office carrying my whole key ring that was on the floorboard and I told him that the key I needed was off of the ring and it must have fallen into the seat or something. He went back out to search for the key. He was gone for quite awhile and I started worrying that he couldn’t find it.

I decided to root through my pockets one more time and found the key in my back pocket. I quickly put it back on the key ring. I called Sweety and told him to quit looking in the truck because it had been on the key ring and that I’d just overlooked it. I didn’t tell him that it was in my back pocket and he will only know that if he happens to read this far. Ahem.

12 Comments | In: bean, can't find my way out of a paper bag | | #