The happy threesome. Where did it go wrong?
I hate dogs. That didn’t feel loud enough. Let me say it again. I HATE DOGS! This is a fairly new aspect of my personality. You know how some people are cat people or dog people. I’ve always been a dog person. I grew up with a beloved mutt named Lucy who lived for 13 years. We got her when she was five weeks old. I was ten and so excited to finally get a puppy that I walked around our neighborhood literally holding Lucy above my head to show her off. I was in grad school when she finally had to be put down and it was a sad sad day.
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Original movie poster, taken from Wikipedia
Amelia has recently taken to wearing only dresses. To be more specific, only pretty dresses. In the morning before thinking about peeing or eating or even leaving her crib, she points to the closet, commanding that I or daddy get her the party dress, not the cute summer dress (even though it is February), not the cute play dress, but THE dress, the one with red flowers on non-machine washable fabric covering three layers of tulle petticoat.
I purposely didn’t bring THE dress to Sacramento and she has managed to survive without it, but she still insists on wearing a dress every day. She is not a fashionista because of me. If I put on jeans I consider myself dressed up. If I wear the sweatshirt with the ruffly front, I’m ready for a night on the town. If I adorn my feet with TOMS rather than with nothing, I’m living large that day. No, Amelia is not fashion forward because of her dear mother. She has gone toddlers and tiaras on me because of Ann Margret. To be more specific, Ann Margret as Kim from Bye Bye Birdie.
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Driving 500 miles with a two month old, a 21 month old, and a German Shepherd is about as much fun as a root canal. I think. I’ve never had a root canal (and hope not to), but I’m sticking with the cliched saying despite my dental inexperience. My parents live in Sacramento. We live in San Diego. Sacramento seems close because we used to live on the East coast, but every time we make the drive up North I’m reminded that eight to ten hours in a car is actually a really long time, and when you factor in breastfeeding, diaper changes, screaming children, and a smelly dog, the trip can seem like an eternity.
But we had a bright idea, a genius way around this nightmare. We would simply drive at night, the time when the kids usually sleep, and they would rest peacefully in their car seats. We’d stop for bathroom breaks and night-time feedings, but Henry can go 3, sometimes 4, hours at night between feedings, as opposed to the 2 hour day-time schedule. Meanwhile, Dave and I would quietly listen to podcasts and congratulate ourselves on our picture perfect all-American family.
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I took a long long hiatus from this blog and almost stopped paying my liquid web fee because I had no time, energy, or inclination to talk about myself and motherhood. I started this blog because it was fun and it stopped being fun, what with the morning sickness, the transition to toddlerhood, the difficult delivery and birth of my luckily not as difficult as Amelia baby boy, and the NO SLEEP that comes with having a two month old. I have no illusions of blog grandeur and figured my online echo chamber could disappear forever, but the blog bug bit me at 2 in the morning (because I’m up at 2 in the morning on a regular basis. Did I mention I don’t sleep? I told Dave my only fantasy is to check into a hotel room by myself, eat cheesecake, and sleep until I can’t sleep anymore). This isn’t a viral blog, so like a good diet (ahem eating plan), I shouldn’t fall prey to the all or nothing syndrome. Just because I fell off the posting and recording wagon, doesn’t mean I’m gone forever.
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Amelia switched rather ungracefully from two naps to one around 16 months. Her first nap was becoming really short and I knew, based on too much research, that the average child will switch to one nap around 15-18 months. I figured getting the transition out of the way before Baby Number 2 arrives was a good idea, and it has been…mostly.
The only major problem I have had with this transition is shower time, as in, mommy like needs to shower before noon and baby can’t be trusted alone in the house while I am out of commission. This is the plight of the stay at home mom, and probably the working mom as well, a plight I imagine gets more complicated the more kids you have. How does one actually shower with a toddler around?
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I’ve noticed a few differences between a first and second pregnancy. These differences undoubtedly are obvious to anyone with more than one kid, but like with all things kids and kid making related, they have to be learned anew by each not so new mom.
With my first pregnancy, I blogged the entire thing to my family (starting at 11 weeks), morning sickness and all. As anyone who still reads this outgrowth of my inaugural blog might have noticed, this isn’t happening so readily with number two. Baby number one is the obvious cause of this plummeting word count, combined with sporadic morning sickness that has lessened, but doesn’t seem to want to disappear for good.
Speaking of morning sickness, you wretched bane of my existence, my current experience started out extremely similar to the puking horrors of ’09, leading many to believe I was having another girl ( side note: extreme morning sickness with girls is actually an old wive’s tale with some merit in science, with a 56% versus 44% ratio of girl to boy births). But I’m not. I’m having a boy and although I suspected this a little– I had a 50/50 chance of being correct after all– for the first 17 weeks of the pregnancy I could not tell a single difference between my ’09 horror and the ’11 variation.
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