It Does Get Better

Wil has always been very good about giving me a break especially on the weekend. He gets up with Chase in the morning, gets her into a clean diaper, and spends a few minutes goofing around with our happy baby before bringing her to me in bed to nurse. After we are done, he whisks her away for a few hours of playtime/college football and kindly gives me a few extra hours of sleep. Today I told him that I had a day off and spent all day sewing. I would nurse the baby and handed her off to play with her Papa after we finished. Granted, I was about two feet away, but for the first time I realized that I was completely at ease with the situation. It's not like I didn't think that Wil wasn't an excellent father--he was a natural from the start and this had nothing to do with his parenting ability. It's all about my my own feeling about being a good mom to my baby. Now that Chaster is about to turn 7 months old, I can look back and see how difficult the beginning was and how horribly depressed I was at times. The combination of postpartum hormonal whack, the I-can-do-it-all attitude and the subsequent reality check, sheer exhaustion, and fewer showers than the normal acceptable frequency were all unexpected to me. My pregnancy was such a pain in the rear, literally, and I thought that once the baby came all would be fine again. Everything was fine again but I was too out of it to notice our new "normal." I didn't know how to ask for help even from my very own willing husband. I think about all those months that I spent crying on the couch with our tiny bundle of joy in my arms convinced that I was a horrible mother because I felt everything but joy. Now I want to grab every pregnant first-timer I see and tell them my story, so that they won't feel so alone here as I was. They all are going to have an even harder time than me with their husbands downrange. NOTHING was harder to me than having Chase so far away from our family, but Wil was by my side the whole way and eventually we figured it all out together. I want to tell all these mothers-to-be that I will babysit while they shower. We will sit down to have dinner, which I would bring, together, and I will do the dishes afterward. I will tell them that breast feeding hurts like hell the first few months and it will be very hard. As a reward, they will get to worry endlessly about whether or not their babies get enough to eat. I will tell them that I don't know it all but I never want another mom to go through what I went through to find out that I didn't. I wish someone would have told me all of this. It would scare the crap out of me, but at least I would have been armed with the information. It helps to know that it gets better. One day I wake up and my baby is almost 7 months old. She eats/naps every 4 hours. While she's down for her 2 2-hour naps a day (plus an extra cat nap in the late afternoon), I can shower, eat, sleep, watch tv, clean the house, love on the boys, or do nothing at all and not feel guilty about it. I can ask for help and graciously accept. I can say "I need a break RIGHT NOW" and know that a baby is in good hand. I know that I am a good mother. It really does get better. Now I'm working on becoming a better wife. That's a big project if I ever see one.

P.S. We got our first snow last night. It's freaking cold and I'm not leaving my house until next Spring.

ARGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!

Sorry for the light update this week. I've got the same excuse: we have a 6-month old baby. This week, in addition to her usual 3-4 A.M. feeding, Chase decided that she also wanted to eat around 9:30-10 P.M. as well. The Baby Whisperer would say that it's because she's getting too much solids and not enough milk. I really don't know what else to do since she fights with me tooth and nail while nursing during the day and suddenly develops a great dislike for formula and wouldn't take the bottle either. I'm still experimenting with the time of her dinner (solids), so it would not interfere with her last nursing session before bed. Who knew adding real solids to her routine would consume ALL of my free time. It really feels like my life just revolves around cooking (for us, the baby, and now Brutus because he's got an upset stomach AGAIN!) and cleaning (after the boys, the baby, especially after each solid meal, and Wil's combat boots...). Ok, I'm done whining now.

In other news, I've been a touch obsessive about sewing and making something after FINALLY completing my first pair of drapes for our bedroom and hemming another pair that had been picking up dog hair on our living room floor. It only took a year and a half and I don't know why Wil complained so much about it. In hindsight, trying to juggle 3-yard long fabric panels in between baby wrangling probably wasn't ideal or going to add years to my life, and my husband probably would have been just as happy had I gone to Ikea to pick up a pair. Wil got me a sewing machine as a Christmas present years ago after hearing me wishing out loud for one--repeatedly. My delicate nature and subtlety are two of my prized qualities. Anyhoo, I didn't know how to sew, didn't know what a bobbin was or why I needed it, didn't even know how to thread the thing. So, after letting the shiny new machine sit in our spare room collecting dust for a year, I signed up to take a beginner's sewing class at a local community college after work. The problems were that I was working 70 hours+ a week and that I was the only true beginner in the class. When I could make it to class, other students, who needed the teacher's help with their duvet covers and totes, pretty much took all her time and attention and I didn't learn much after walking away with a pair of pillow cases. Thank God for all the tutorial and DIY videos on the internet. I hadn't spent much time decorating our apartment since moving here because I kind of felt guilty about spending the money that I wasn't bringing in. Wil found this puzzling, but I'm sure those of you, who used to work and are now choosing to stay home with your babies, understand. But now that I got those monstrous yardage under my belt and my creative mental blockage cleared, I feel like I can make anything again. I'm walking with an IND spring in my steps ;).

Also, if you live in our neck of the woods and happen to see my husband enjoying any kind of junk food, you have my permission to body check him. Wil just found out that he had high cholesterol and had to set up an appointment with a nutritionist. Ironic considering he's married to a food scientist, to whom he does not listen. He insists that he's not a picky eater, as long as the meals that I prepare for him does not include dark leafy green vegetables, any kind of mushrooms, chick peas, tofu or soy-anything, polenta, whole wheat pasta and couscous,...etc. You see where I'm going with this? Anyway, to be fair, he does eat what I make most of the time. The problem is that he hits up the vending machine and Burger King while at work and gets rid of the evidence before coming home. So I'm putting this out there in the spirit of "Don't Feed Phil" Day. It's going to take an internet village to keep his body from turning completely solid before getting to meet his grandchildren.

I'm off to steaming some pears for the Spawn's breakfast. If she lets me have any down time today, I'll post some more cute videos. Wish me luck!

Monday Mess

I'm making an effort in posting more videos. So here's the one from today. This baby-led weaning thing is fun although royally messy. I have to remember to start filming before she tears things into bits.

P.S. The stalk was a big hit but not the florets.


Broccoli from UMA STEINHAUER on Vimeo.

Hmmmm....Bread

It's Gotta Come Out Sometime... from UMA STEINHAUER on Vimeo.

Capucine

I've been in extraordinary foul mood these past few days, and singlehandedly this child has lifted the dark gray cloud in my mind. Bless her. I want to learn French.


Too much candy from Capucha on Vimeo.

Happy Birthday, Wil!

Enjoying his birthday kiss.

Maybe now that he's also 30, he'd stop telling people that he married an older woman (by 6 months).

Big Brother, Sort Of

I really do enjoy stalking people's blogs in a non-creepy way and love how the internet has connected me to many fellow bloggers, whom I now consider good friends. Lately, however, I have been pondering whether I'm putting too much of our lives, and especially of my precious baby, too out there for the world to see. I know this sounds ridiculous because I just posted our family vacation pics on here about a minute ago. I think it started when my sister Kwan told me that a photo place in Bangkok, where my mom sent all the pictures of Chase she downloaded from our blog here to be printed, actually used one of my kid's pictures as their computer screen saver. My mom apparently was there to pick up her order and saw Chase's picture on their screen. The attendant was understandably embarrassed and my mom felt too weirded out to talk to them about it. I know it's harmless and am flattered that they think my kid is cute. It was one of those pictures that was taken in Heidelberg of her laying in a pile of beautiful fallen leaves, a rarity in the tropical Thailand. So it was probably more of a cute kid + cool and different scene combo than a creepy situation, although it's still very weird to me. But this got me wondering who else was seeing my kid's pictures and reading our blog besides the usual suspects of friends and fams. So that's the long explanation of why I put up the feed monitor, even though I really detest the thing. Sorry. I'm trying to get an idea of how to approach this without being irrationally overprotective of Chaster and just making the blog private altogether. At some point though, the Kid would probably demand that I stop talking about her pooping face and posting her naked pictures. I will shed a silent tear that day.

In other news, I fear my breastfeeding days are going to eruptively end very soon. Since Chase started back on solids, it's been a chore for me to feed her. The only time she wouldn't put up a fight is the middle-of-the-night feeding. A girl after my very own heart, she's so incredibly excited to try new things and just LOVES to eat. I became a whole lot more relaxed about feeding her solids after talking to my mom and reading about baby-led weaning. To be clear (because otherwise I'd get a frantic phone call in the middle of the night about this. Yes, I'm looking at you, MOM), I'm not trying to wean her right now. I was pretty proud of myself that we stuck with it and made it past my goal of 6 months and was aiming for a year. Then she started acting like a big girl on me and just wanted everything but milk. You should see this funny kid. If there's food anywhere within her view, the child would open her mouth and start panting like a little bird waiting to be fed. I'm still giving her puree and cereal and just started letting her feed herself a bit, too. So far, it's a freaking mess and the boys have never been happier. I would love to hear from you guys out there with the experience. What should I do?