After dinner tonight, my husband took Rachel to her fiddling lesson, which left Hannah, Little Brother and I with some time alone. Hannah suggested that I give LB a bath at the same time as her, and I did. Then I got them both in their pajamas and we sat and read books together. I had been organizing my office, so I showed her a book I had found. It was a Dr. Suess “Me, Myself, and I” book that I had filled out when I was eight. On the page listing what I wanted to be when I grew up I had written: “Artist/cook/nurse/sailor/farmer/dog trainer/teacher/carpenter/mother/nun/artist/dancer.” It’s a bit weird that I put artist and dancer in there and left out singing since I can’t dance or draw, but I can put a few good notes together. And I’m not sure where sailor came from. Nun I can totally understand, since I wanted to be Julie Andrews. But get this. When I read the list to Hannah she got all flustered and “No, not a nun. They kill their children.”
Holy Moly. Who has she been talking to?; and I guess when I promised the priest who married us in an interfaith ceremony that I would raise Catholic children I lied. Big time. I’m raising an anti-nunlite.
In other news, I’ve got these big plans to write a three part series chronicling my pregnancy, labor, and post-partum period. I see though that it’s late June already and you are yawning out there thinking about it. Yes, you. But I will persist (yes, I will) with this plan, because I am weirdly ambitious about tedious things. Or maybe that’s just called compulsive. And I want to write about fluids. Yes, fluids. I don’t know how I can write about these things without including fluids.
The girls and their Dad just returned from a father-daughter camping trip with their Dad. This means that I had three days at home alone with the baby. I haven’t had this much time alone in this house - ever. Except that I wasn’t really alone. But it somehow felt like I was alone. This pretty much defines having three kids, I think. Time alone isn’t really time alone anymore. It means having one child with you instead of three. And that’s okay. Anyway, in between feedings and bonding time, I went on a huge compulsive kick. I was on an organizing frenzy. I mean, I was on fire. It was like I was possessed. I’d rock the baby and then get up and clean the garage. I’d play with the baby and then get up and clean a closet. On and on. But it was great. I soaked up baby, too. And through it all I watched movie after movie. I’ve pretty much exhausted all the good movies On Demand has to offer. I could talk movies with you for hours. (If you haven’t seen the Great Debater, see that; but don’t see Fool’s Gold, that was horrible; and the movie Fame is actually worth re-watching if you have time.)
Anyway, I was working hard until the last two hours before the fam came home. They arrived late on Saturday night and we tucked them in bed. It was great to have them home, but sort of jarring, too, after three days of not talking much. Now we have the whole summer ahead of us. I will have all three kids at home and the learning curve really gets big. It seems having three kids has made me suddenly awesome at efficiency and compulsiveness, but I feel like I have to learn how to be a good parent all over again. The only way I can describe it is that I need to learn how to juggle with the attention I give my kids. Another way to describe it is that I am a small party person (which is true) that needs to learn how to mingle at a big party. It’s quite fun, really, just a stretch, and I want to get better at it.
Because I don’t want to become a nun and kill my children or anything. (WTF?!!!)
As I reflected last week on my first forty years, despite the fact that I don’t have my cute twenty year old figure back yet (I still have the dream), I felt proud and happily satisfied as I looked back on my life. I’ve tried to live my first forty years as an adventure and by following my heart and passions. I’d like to do the same for the rest of the years I have left. One thing that stood out as I had all these thoughts was that the most important ingredient in my adult life has been my partnership with my husband, who not only is a great father to my kids, but has been my partner in a life of adventure, and who has weathered adversity with me, has made me laugh, and has laughed at my jokes when no-one else has. We’ve had fun even when times were challenging. We’ve taken many leaps of faith. These include years of living in Europe on a shoestring, going to graduate school…on a shoestring, taking a sudden change of course when we moved to California, starting a family, and having the latest addition to our family.
So I wish a big Happy Father’s Day to the man who does everything from helping make my life a life to be proud of to painting his daughters nails when the occassion demands fancy nails. (Like for a wedding las weekend).
I firmly believe that I am a better mother and a happier, more balanced human being because of his support and his understanding that life should be an adventure.
To all you good Father’s out there (yes, you!), Happy Father’s Day. La Chaim!!
This morning we had a nice Father’s Day breakfast at home.
Hannah made a homemade picture frame with a drawing of her and her Dad inside and the caption, “I like to draw pictures with Daddy.” Rachel made her Dad a beautiful bookmark.
I’ll end with Rachel’s card to her Dad:
“My Dad’s is the best. I like to go bike riding with him. He helps me tie my shoes. He’s smart at math and reading. He reads stories to me. I get to sit on his lap. He’s the best Dad ever!
Love, Rachel”
Who’s there?
Forty.
Forty?
Yes, I’m forty now. My birthday came and went without a whole lot of fanfare. Rather than have a big party, I was planning to take a trip to visit dear friends in Europe this summer to celebrate turning forty. The year my husband turned forty, we took the family to Paris for Christmas and celebrated with the same friends. We were planning to do something similar this summer, and then I got pregnant. So, we’ll wait a year or two and try again.
I had many eloquent thoughts on turning forty this week, and others that were not so eloquent, that involve the image of me aging at fast-forward speed. But instead of writing about that right now, I want to tell you a knock-knock joke that Hannah told us over dinner last Valentine’s Day. I wasn’t blogging then and it was too long to tweet.
Hannah: Knock-knock
Me: Who’s there.
Hannah: Orange.
Me: Orange who?
Hannah: Knock-knock.
Me: Who’s there.
Hannah: Orange
Me: Orange who?
Hannah: Knock-knock
Me: Who’s there?
Hannah: Cow
Me: Cow who?
Hannah: Aren’t you glad I didn’t say horse?
Maybe you had to be there, but when she told this joke I laughed so hard there were tears coming out of my eyes.
Every time Hannah says good-bye or good-night to my husband or me, the rest of my life flashes before my night. Cheerfully, she says something like this:
“Good-night. You’re the best mom/dad I ever had- I won’t forget you, even when you die-I will come and visit you when I am in college - I will live next door and I will never forget you- You’re the best mom/dad I ever had.”
+++++++
Tonight Rachel and Hannah were arguing about whether I had three or four kids. One of them (I don’t remember which) was counting Charlie, our dog. The other said, “Charlie doesn’t count, she’s a grandma.”
+++++++
I read books to all three kids tonight for the first time. Rachel held Little Brother, who was all bathed and in his pajamas. We read a book Hannah chose. Then we read a few baby books to Noah. By then, he was sleeping in Rachel’s arms, but we did it anyway.
I gained about 35-40 pounds this pregnancy, like I have during every pregnancy. For some strange reason, I lost all of it within two weeks after I had the baby. It just fell off. Weird, but a nice surprise. I think a lot of the weight gain must have been blood and fluids.
I still have 25 pounds to lose if I want to get to where I was before I became a mom. I would like to do that before Christmas.
I turn forty on Wednesday.
I’d like to lose this weight while I’m forty. I also want to get back into my old swimming/yoga/hiking routine.
If I do, what should I treat myself to? I need some ideas. A yoga spa retreat? A short trip somewhere?
If you have a goal that you want to set for this year let me know. You can try to reach it while I’m forty, too. It’ll be fun. What will you treat yourself to?
I’m sure no one has notices or cares, but I’ve missed a few days and am failing my “post every day of June” goal. It seems I have to choose between writing a post, doing housework, and getting sleep. I don’t mind getting behind on housework, but sleep has GOT to win. The baby has long stretches of sleep beginning at 7 or 8 at night. If I don’t get to bed by 9:30 or 10:00 and catch the first wave, I’m kind of screwed. After 3 am, it gets sketchy. But hey, he slept from 8:30 PM to 3:30 PM straight last night….AND I got to bed at 9:30. Sweet.
You know who else is sweet? Ms. Mary, aka Miz SShe sent Rachel and Hannah the sweetest letter accompanied by two great book and an awesome CD of children’s music. Thank you, Mary. I have an impulse to call you like I sometimes do (calling Mary seems to be the trend) but then I remembered that I’m a dork on the phone and I got shy. The girls have been carrying around the books all weekend. We were at a wedding yesterday, and had a loooooooooong dinner with no where for kids to run around, and are kids were amazingly well behaved, partly because Rachel was busy reading one of the books Mary gave her. Hannah sat for the first 20 minutes pretending to read the other book. She want to read so badly. She’s starting to be able to read words slowly, but is not a real reader. When she overheard us telling the other people at the table that she wasn’t actually reading the chapter book, she blushed behind the book and muttered, “I’m reading it in my head,” which meant, I think, that she was imagining what the words were saying. I think she’ll be reading “Dick and Jane” by the end of the summer, she wants to so badly. When Rachel was on the verge of reading, I got fed up with the “Easy Reader” books that you find in the bookstores because they are so poorly thought out, that I ordered a bunch of Dick and Jane books because they use easy words, have very few words per page, and repeat them over and over. They worked really well.
Anyway, where was i? Yes, making choices and my new commitment to sleep.
On that note, I must be off. However, I will leave you with some of my random thoughts/happenings.
- How come whenever I try to burp the baby, I burp?
- Don’t see Kung Fu Panda. Just don’t.
- Do go see a “mommy” movie with your newborn while the girls are in school. I haven’t been able to do that since Rachel was a baby and it is a real luxury. It’s also a bonus for the baby, lots of eating and snuggling and no distractions and reasons for mom to put him down.
- If you happen to see Sex and the City and your daughter asks you what you saw, lie. Tell her you saw “Clothes in the City” or something like that, unless you want to have to give an impromptu explanation of the word sex.
- Rachel did ask me how babies were made a couple of months back. I was driving with Hannah in the car. I told her I’d tell her later. That night I ordered some children’s books about the subject, for various ages. I keep wanting to sit her down and answer her question, but she hasn’t asked again. I really should make time. I’m pretty sure I learned about sex from other kids my age at a pretty early age. When I was in 5th or 6th grade, my Dad asked if I was taking sex ed in school, seemed satisfied that I was and that was pretty much the extent of what I learned from my parents. This explains my awkardness now. That and the fact that I don’t really want her to grow up THAT much…..ever….. Well, that last sentence was a bit of a lie but you hear me, don’t you?
- Why did CNN spend two hours with a camera on Hillary Clinton’s garage on Saturday morning without once giving the news, and then when i got back a half hour later, after her speech was done did not replay the speech?
- Why do people who find out I had two girls and then a boy assume we were trying for a boy?
- Boys like babies. You wouldn’t believe how many boys have asked to see the baby and then look at him in awe.
That’s all I’ve got. I’m starting to yawn and baby is sleeping on my lap. I’m calling it a night.
Night.
If someone asks me if going from two to three is as hard as going from one to two, I won’t quite no how to answer. For one, I’m very good at self-denial. I’ve got this weird survival mechanism within me that doesn’t realize something is as hard as it is until after the fact. For instance, I remember loving my time when Hannah, my second, was a baby. At the same time, I also remember that with a toddler and a newborn the sleep deprivation was off the charts. I started seeing yellow spots one day when I was driving, so some days I wouldn’t let myself drive. Weekends were the worst because there was the expectation that SOMEBODY would get to sleep in and when neither of us could, a big grump fest would begin.
With that in mind, going from two to three somehow doesn’t seem as hard. As with Hannah’s birth, I am thrilled by the shape my family has taken. I’m really enjoying it. And I am not feeling hugely hit by sleep deprivation. Yet. (Knocking on wood here.) I don’t know if I’m getting more sleep, or if I’m mentally stronger. I know that this kid will be sleeping through the night one day. At the same time, the mental game seems harder. When my girls are gone I spend my alone time strategizing on how to make things go more smoothly for the girls, especially Hannah. My mind is constantly whirring, trying to figure out the puzzle of our new normal. Where and how will we settle on a that new normal. How will I carve out alone time with each of them and for me.
And then I have to remember that this is most likely my last chance to spend a day staring at the face of my own newborn. I stop the mental whirring and take it all in, trying to put it all in my memory, knowing that I will actually remember so little–which is why I write–and keep one of those first year baby calendars.
What I am concluding is that there is only so much I can do to change our daily reality. As much as I want to carve out for Hannah what I once was, I can only do so much. I have stepped it up and started driving her to school and activities. That has helped tremendously. I try to grab her and hold her tight whenever I can, but often when she comes to me my hands are full. Therefore, my conclusion is that part of making this work is accepting what we have become. I will not have as much time alone to myself, or with them individually. Rather than simply trying to find alone time with Hannah, I need to make it more fun for her to hang out with the baby. I need to help her bond with him. Pull her of the sidelines.
It’s as if Hannah is in a No Man’s Land. I felt that way during my last two weeks of pregnancy. The present was not working. The baby was so big that I was extremely uncomfortable. Going backwards was impossible. But to get forward, I had to get through labor. I’m on the other side, and it feels great. But Hannah now has to go through a labor of her own - finding her way to her brother.
Today I put the baby down after he fell asleep. I decided to leave the mess in our kitchen and do something I hadn’t done in ages: play with the girls. I had set up a tent for Hannah earlier that day made out of sheets and chairs. We pretended the tent was my hospital room. Hannah was the nurse. She handed me a baby doll. Then she handed me a larger doll. I decided the larger would be the older sister. I put my head back in the hospital bed and tried to sneak a little shut eye. When I looked up the big sister doll was hitting the baby doll.
Later the real baby woke up and I brought him into the room. We pretended he was the big brother and was sad that his new baby brother spit up all the time. Hannah nodded a little bit, appearing to feel his pain.
Two nights ago, the girls and I were giving the baby a bath. Hannah was sitting on a stool and slipped off, stepping for a second into the little bathtub. It scared all of us because she almost stepped on the baby hard. The baby started crying. I wasn’t sure if the baby had been stepped on, so I grabbed and started examining him, probably looking scared. Then Hannah started crying, feeling awful. I had to decide whether to put down the crying baby or comfort Hannah. For about five seconds I didn’t know what to do. Then I put the crying baby back into the bath and held Hannah. I told her she had saved her brother because she tried really hard not to step on him. I asked her if she wanted to hold him and comfort him. She did. So I diapered him up, wrapped him in a towel and put him on her lap. They spent ten minutes like that. (This is where I really am grateful for the pacifier). “I feel really bad,” she kept saying, clearly wounded inside, and looking at him and healing a little bit as she was allowed to take on the big sister roll full-on. She mentioned the fall and her feeling again tonight and asked to hold him again like that after the bath. “I felt bad,” she said again. “It made me feel bad about myself.”
Hannah deserves to feel good about herself as a big sister. I have concluded that in addition to us piling on the praise and squeezing in some time just with me, the adjustment will have to come through bonding with her brother. It’s her journey and I’m going to try to document it for her, because as bad as she feels about herself at times these days, it really is a love story in the making. She has a heart of gold and is going to make an incredible sister with just a little more confidence.
It’s getting hard to have a conversation with my husband without a certain seven-year old trying to keep up.
“People were really upset about Hillary’s speech today,” I told my husband after dinner tonight.
“Why were they upset,” Rachel interjected. (She’s been following the primaries since January and knew that Hillary hadn’t conceded.)
“Well,” I started to explain, “she didn’t admit that Obama won the nomination and she started talking about everything she wants. She was acting kind of like…like…”
“…a queen!” Rachel added, finishing my sentence for me.
“Yeah. Maybe you’re right,” I answered, thinking about it.
Later I was talking to my husband about super delegates.
“How do you get to be a super delegate anyway?” I asked him.
“What’s a super delegate?” Rachel asked.
“Blah….blah…….blah…..blah……” I explained, “and they can vote for anyone they want.”
“I’d vote for Mom,” Hannah blurted out, looking up from a project she was working on.
“Are you and Dad super delegates?” Rachel asked.
+++++++++
Little brother has had some pretty good sleeping nights the past week or so, but last night wasn’t one of them. By morning I had hit a wall and at 6:30 put him in the baby swing so I could get a half hours worth of rest before facing the day. When he started fussing, my husband picked him up and I told him he could hand him over. I didn’t feed him. Instead, I laid him down beside me and looked into his face, without saying anything. He calmed down immediately and returned my gaze calmly. Then he gave me five or six calm little smiles. And I forgave him.
…with baby.
Did I tell you how much this baby likes to eat…. And when he’s not hungry he still likes to suck. I’ve always frowned on pacifiers, but we’ve been using one because he will make himself sick by eating too much. I produce way too much milk. I hear the constant feeding/sucking impulse is a boy thing. Is that true? I must admit he’s mellowed out a bit and is definitely having more time just hanging out now that he’s more alert and not working so hard at the eating/sleeping/pooping routine.
He’s very sweet, though. He looks like a combination of his two older sisters (and very much like his Dad). He LOVES the bath. Loves it. He relaxes and starts turning his head to drink the water. It’s as if he remembers what it was like in the uterus and the water reminds me of his amniotic fluid.
Did I tell you how much amniotic fluid came out of my body during labor? No? Too much information. Okay. Let’s just say that this little guy had his own swimming pool. I will write about my labor one of these days.
Right now Little Brother is sleeping on my lap and I’m having to do a yoga twist in order to type this post.
When my hands are full with baby and the girls are in school I often watch movies, Not a bad existence. I’m watching Little Women now - the Winona Ryder version.
I’ll end this with a few funnies.
–Rachel keeps asking me if we need to fertilize the pacifiers (sterilize). (There will be no more talk about fertilizing here.)
–Hannah calls premies (premature) babies, creamies.
And here is an excerpt from an e-mail sent by my older sister. Her son, Ieremy, is about 2 and a half.
“The other day we were sitting at dinner and Jeremy had cajoled himself into my lap. He then preceded to try to stand up in my lap and balance on my knees, one of his favorite games. As that kept me from my meal, I tried to convince him to sit back down. He said, “I’m a little heavy. I’m big. I’m a big boy. I’m a man. Jeremy’s a dada.” He then transferred happily into his father’s lap.”
What a cutie.
