One Perfect Mess

Archive for August, 2009

Ten things that make my Monday:

10.) Peanut only waking up once last night. And then slept in a little this morning!

9.) Getting a package from Wubbzy in the mail today!

8.) Watching the two babies have a shriek off and crack each other up.

7.) When Peanut gets the giggles while nursing.

6.) Upcoming three day weekend

5.) Finally getting around to washing the car seats. Whooo FTW!

4.) Nothing has gotten peed on so far today… This is HIGH on the list my friends.

3.) Managing to stay on points two days in a row.

2.) Cooler weather – less humidity

1.) Summer veggie dinner *nom nom nom*

Andrew decided we should take the kids to the playground this morning since it wasn’t eleventymillion degrees for once. It turned out to be an awesome trip. The Weebles’ really got into it for the first time. Running up the steps of the big kid! play structure and going down the slide by herself. There were lots of other kids there in her age range and the dads all sort of worked together. Andrew manned the top of the slide and other dads hung around the bottom. I managed to give the van a good baby wipe detailing.. heh. Sigh.

Andrew wanted me to blog about my near adventure at lunch but I’m still feeling super grossed out and its almost dinner time. Let’s just say that Japanese salad dressing looks not totally unlike something you might find, oh let’s say, in my son’s diaper now and again. And that when you pick up your baby who has NEVER had any sort of blow out it might still be worth checking your hands before continuing to eat your salad. I came THISCLOSE people. Oh my hells.

Four. Four o’clock. Not six, not five FOUR A FUCKING CLOCK. A.M. This is when my son woke up this morning. He has always been a champ at sleeping as long as it is dark outside. For months and months he only got me up once to nurse during the night. Bliss. Now all of a sudden he’s waking every two hours again. Last night Weebles’ woke up and threw a gigantic temper tantrum in the middle of the night and kept us up for nearly two hours. So I’m already exhausted. I’m already frazzled. So to go upstairs thinking I’d be nursing him and hopefully tucking him in for the last time tonight (shit at this point is it last night? hell i don’t know) only to have him stay wide awake and start rolling around and babbling… oh.hells.no. I put him back in his crib, that lasted a few minutes until he got bored of crawling around in there. I tried rocking him, nope. I tried nursing him again, no thank you mama. I was so groggy I knew I couldn’t even stay awake with him up there so I brought him downstairs and put him in the bouncy and tried to turn on the TV. Somehow I hit the wrong button and not only turned the menu information to Spanish instead of English but also turned on picture in picture. I couldn’t have done that if I’d fucking wanted to.

When you have a newborn you’re ready for this kind of sleep deprivation. Sure, you’re tired but you have a newborn and at least for the first few weeks you get by on sheer excitement. It is the sleep regressions that hit when you least expect it that really knock you on your ass. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go find the Tivo remote… Classical Baby needs to be restarted…

Okay seriously. I get that I am still in a “way too many babies and way too little of me” fog. But I just don’t get what the BFD is with this whole Dooce thing. I guess maybe because I’m not out to make money or get free stuff or sell ads or do reviews yada yada yada bullshit I just don’t see it the same way. There are people all over the internet that bitch about Maytag.. and front loaders in general. I know because I recently spent about two weeks googling front loading washing machines to figure out which ones to buy. And it seems that the two main complaints are a.) musty smells and b.) error codes and a bitch of a time getting them fixed, even new. So when I saw her original tweets I knew what the problem was. I didn’t need her to explain it to me. And even if I didn’t does she really “owe” me that information? I don’t care if everyone on the planet follows Dooce, it shouldn’t matter. We can all use our brains and our typing fingers just like anyone else to research something. I’m not going to choose a washer and dryer solely based on what she said in 140 characters… or even 1,400 characters if she tweeted 10 times about it. And even if I was that much of a lemming.. them’s just the breaks. Too bad for Maytag. If they fixed the problem for her like they should do for any customer, then I would hear about that also and then maybe I’d be all impressed with them. Whatever. I happen to have ended up buying a Maytag, one a hell of a lot less nice than Heather’s. It works just fine, as a matter of fact I lurrrve it. Some days more than my kids cause they refuse to sleep at the same time.

I’m not sure what I’m missing here. If Michael Jordan can go out and pimp Nike and get paid for it no less shouldn’t Reebok have the same argument? It’s just not fair that somebody so popular isn’t liking our brand. But in Heather’s case she’s actually telling us her experience with it… and she isn’t getting paid to do so. Not to mention for Chrissakes’ it’s TWITTER people. I know there are people out there that tweet all this nonsense about “hey buy my seminar” and “hey shop at my online business” but for the most part I thought God intended Twitter for pure time wasting and bullshitting. I really think people are getting their “no specific brand” of undies in a bunch over this for nothing. And for their sakes I hope they have functioning washing machines.

I just can’t decide on furniture for the Weebles’ room. It is killing me. I have a lovely quilt that I had made for her room and I know what color we’re painting the walls.. if I can ever get the motivation to actually paint it. But the furniture is proving to be a sticking point. We don’t have much in the way of local places to choose from. Ashley furniture and Rooms to Go (not even a Rooms to Go Kids..) is all that we have close by. Neither had anything that really jumped out at me at first glance. I guess part of my problem is that I’m torn between something super cool like bunk beds which she is way too small for and doesn’t have the space or need for anyway and just your basic furniture. I guess I know we’re going to go with basic furniture but it is hard to let go of the idea of something like a fairy princess castle bed or the like. I found some furniture, on sale no less!, at Pottery Barn Kids that I liked online but when I went in the store I realized that the dresser was teeny tiny. So it would only be functional for her for a short time and that seems silly. There is a set at the Land of Nod I like also and I’m pretty sure that’s what we’ll go with but $350 in shipping alone is hard for me to come to terms with. That’s more than some of the furniture! This isn’t the only thing I’m having a hard time with. It is like my ability to make a decision has completely left me and it drives me nuts. But today I am motivated. Since handing down (or handing over really) the nursery furniture to her little brother last week, the Weebs has been bunking exclusively with us. I love co-sleeping. LOVE IT. But I don’t particularly love it exclusively. So, this weekend it is. Painting, furniture to be ordered.. I can do this. Right?

The Peanut pulled up to standing today. So that wasn’t terrifying or anything. He’s not even eight months old! I cannot believe how much faster he is progressing at the gross motor skills than his sister did. Today was the first time I’ve ever seen her jump with both feet. Something she no doubt learned from watching me play EA Sports Active. He still is behind where she was on fine motor skills but I hope he’ll turn his focus to those soon. Sleeping in the full size crib isn’t going well. He was up the first night three or four times and up every hour last night. I think we must be in the midst of a sleep regression for both kids at the same time. I’m too tired to figure out if it is better to get two over with at once or if it would be easier if at least one of them was sleeping. Last night I was tempted to just turn the TV on and plop them in front of it and go back to bed. I’m going to bed while I can.

I don’t think it really sunk in before I had kids exactly how little time there would be in the day to do anything “kid free”. I love my kids to pieces but in order to stay sane I really do need some time to just zone out guilt free. For those readers that see me twice a week at Johnny, understand that sometimes that is the ONLY time I spend that entire day (as in a twenty four hour day here people) without a child within arm’s reach. Today was one of those days. The Peanut napped right before I got home. He didn’t so much as close his eyes again until he went to bed a little after seven. That is a really long time for someone as little as he is. I spent in the neighborhood of three hours today trying to get one or the other of them to sleep. I hate it when that happens. I feel like I spent the entire afternoon trying to get Peanut to nap and therefore all my energy for him went to that instead of to fun stuff like reading books with him or playing. And I just don’t know what to think about Weebles’ sleep these days. Things have improved a little bit in that she isn’t waking every couple of hours crying anymore but it takes an act of congress to get that child to sleep. She is happy at least, singing and telling stories and snuggling around under the covers and pillows but lying in the dark with her for an hour plus each night is seriously eating into the two hour window I am generally left with at the end of the day. Plus, it is kind of hard to get up and do things after snuggling in bed forever that late in the day. At that point I feel like going to sleep. And to top it off she is in our bed all night now, Andrew had quit even trying to move her to her room so that sort of takes a lot of options off the table for me. Like reading in bed, or twittering in bed, or blogging in bed.. you get the idea. Now of course her room is a shambles so we couldn’t put her up there even if she would sleep up there. Hopefully we can make some good progress this weekend on getting it back in order. Going to bed when she does would make a ton of sense in that I could finally catch up on some sleep but I find when I go days without an hour or two to do something totally non-kid related my morale takes a serious hit and when dealing with the PPD that can be a treacherous place to go. Luckily I get to go to work in the morning, heh.

We finally got around to moving the Weebles’ crib down the hall into Peanut’s room. He had been sleeping in a mini crib but he’d started to pull up on the railing into a sitting position and so it was only a matter of time before he decided to take it one step further. Plus Weebles’ hasn’t allowed us to so much as set her down in it (even completely asleep) in a month or two so really there wasn’t any point in waiting. We’re coming up with a plan to transition to her to a “real” bed sometime in the near future and she can just continue to co-sleep until we get that figured out. I’m happy to finally have his nursery pretty much put together. He’s only eight months old after all. Poor second children.

Today was the big day for Gypsi and Derek’s engagement party. I endlessly debated what would be best in terms of a get together. I thought I had settled on having it outdoors on my parents’ brick patio and had even set the menu with a caterer and ordered invitations. Then at the last minute I chickened out on the idea. How would I be sure how many plates to rent? What if it was a million degrees? What if it rained? All of that plus the fact the bartending company never got me a final quote led me to return to my original idea, having it in a restaurant somewhere. There are surprisingly few restaurants in the area that would work I found. I worried a sit down dinner would be a little too stuffy for the crowd we were inviting. As it turned out a reception at a restaurant seemed to be just the thing. Everybody appeared to have a good time and you’d better believe I was breathing a sigh of relief that we weren’t outside when it ended up storming all day. Now on to the bridal showers!