LizaWasHere

One Month

Dear Josie, Today you are one month old. You came home from the hospital 4 weeks ago today, and you and I moved upstairs from sleeping on the couch the day before yesterday. (It isn't that we dislike being near This Mommy or your big brother Noah -- at first I was recovering from the c-section, and then we were painting upstairs.) So far, you are a mostly wonderful baby. Developmentally, you've mostly unfolded from the tiny little fetal position you preferred in the first couple of weeks. You open your eyes and look around quite about when you're awake. You have the strongest neck I've ever seen on a newborn, and I love to carry you such that while you lift your head to look over my shoulder, I can whisper in your ear about what a strong, healthy girl you are. You also make lots of very funny noises, including seemingly random squeaks and gurgles. You passionately dislike both waking up and going to sleep. Both of those transitions are usually accompanied by cries and drama. This Mommy thinks you love music and hate having clothes on that cover your feet. I think she might be right about the music, but I think you don't mind wearing clothes, you just don't like the process of getting dressed or undressed. Unless you're asleep, you seem to hate your car seat. Noah loves to tell us what you want. We can't wait to find out if he's got a good read of your desires or not. So far, we think he might be on track when he suggests that you want to eat or to cuddle, but maybe not so much when he tells us that you want to play with his fishing rod or to play baseball. But he loves you very very much -- that part is completely clear to everyone who sees the two of you together. Although you have no idea what this means right now, your mommies will be putting our house on the market tomorrow. It's been a crazy, chaotic month in our family, full of crazy debates about what diapers and diaper containers are least smelly, and the frantic cleaning of the house. But the up side of this drama is that we hope you will never even remember living far away from your Milwaukee grandparents. We love you, Josie. And we are so glad you've been in our family for a month already. love, That Mommy

Open Letter to Comcast

Dear Comcast: Please leave my Internet access on long enough for me to post this! (Updated, before posting, to note that no, of course that didn’t happen. This was originally written at 6:30 am on 9/30/08. By 6:50 am, the Internet was no longer working at our house.) And then, if you read this, please help me. For the love of God, I am a new mother with an infant and a toddler. I'm trying to sell my house, and I got laid off when I was 7.5 months pregnant. I NEED INTERNET ACCESS. And I need it for all of the 10 minute windows that I get when the baby is sleeping and willing to be asleep other than in my arms, and no one else is in need of something from me. Seriously. I'm losing my mind here. Having access for 4 minutes at a time SO doesn't work for me. That's enough time to read my mail, but not answer it. Or to type 1 answer, but not send it. It isn't enough time to post to my blog. Or read my friends' blogs. Or update my LinkedIn profile, search job sites, or otherwise connect with potential jobs. It is FAR from enough time to reconnect with my friends in online forums. As a new mom, a mom of a 1 month old baby, those social connections are the difference between sanity and meltdown. Please, Comcast. Help me stay on the side of sanity. Some days, having to troubleshoot my home network instead of connecting with friends and family or productively trying to get my and my family's life working is quite literally more than I can cope with on top of everything else. If you could please find a way to keep my cable Internet access from going down between now and when we sell this house, I would be incredibly grateful. Truly. (I would even, in the future, restrain myself from making snarky remarks about what it is that I'm supposedly paying you for, or mocking the "word" "Comcastic." But I do have to tell you that right now I'm tempted to go in and edit the Wikipedia entry for "Comcastic" to mean something like expensive, unreliable, and extremely frustrating.)

Top 10 Things to Avoid While Selling Your House

• Having a potty-training toddler
• Who will sometimes poop in the potty at school, but not at home
• Even if he is wearing Big Boy Underwear instead of a diaper
• Twice during the week before your first showing, including the night before
• Without telling anyone
• On the rugs
• And everywhere else he wandered before the smell gave him away
• Having a newborn
• Who cries unless she is actually being held (well, most of the time)
• And who is moving toward the poopsplosive stage herself
• Using your kitchen
• Going to awesome kids consignment sales (The woman in front of me had a Britax Regent for sale at $30 -- WAH! As Noah would say, "I want some!")
• BONUS: Having the entire economy, starting with the housing sector, begin to collapse completely.
• BONUS BONUS: Having a gasoline crisis in the metro area, in which almost no gas stations have gas, and those that do, have 2 hour lines and $20 purchase limits.

Other than being extra exhausted because most of my house stuff has been done while Josie sleeps after her last middle of the night feeding -- which starts between 2 and 3 am -- I'm doing ok. Of course, if I don't find an open gas station that has gas by Monday afternoon, that will no longer be true. Jill found one at 6 this morning, but by the time she left, the line was insane. At 6:30 am. On a Saturday. At least I got the laptop functional. I hated HATED HATED not having Internet access for the last 2.5 days. Not even the little bit I've been getting since Noah was born. Ok, time to join the rest of my sleeping family.

Big Blue Triceratops

This costume is supposed to fit toddlers aged 2-4. As you can see, the legs fit fine. But that halter neck? That's actually the costume's SLEEVES. By the way, I also have an action shot of this costume. Last year, Noah was scared of his Halloween costume. He wore it for 4 seconds and then demanded that we take it off. So I figured we'd start early this year. Last week I asked Noah what he wanted to be for Halloween. "A dinosaur!" he answered, and then clarified, "A BLUE dinosaur!" Thank you, Internet. And how lucky that the only blue dinosaur costume I could find was a triceratops. If only it actually fit. Incidentally, after putting it on yesterday, Noah also explained to us that Baby Josie wants to be a little bitty dinosaur for Halloween. Too bad. She's going as a pea pod. If the costume fits.

Liza Who?

Sorry for all the radio silence. We are still in the phase of newborn development where more than 80% of Josie's sleeping takes place while physically on top of me. Or maybe being held in the crook of my arm next to me. That makes blogging surprisingly challenging. On top of that, we are in the midst of real estate crazyness. The goal is to officially list the house on 10/1. There has been an almost ceaseless stream of painters and contractors in and out of the house since Josie was born. Both Noah's room and Josie's room are being painted today. And tomorrow. We have no idea where Noah is going to sleep. Our room can't be gated effectively. Also, our Internet access has been completely spotty recently. Can I tell you how happy I am at the idea of leaving Comcast? There is good news! According to my favorite midwife, I am officially in good health and have lost 22 of the 30 lbs I gained this pregnancy. And the little one I have to thank for that is waking up and demanding to be fed again, so let's see if I can keep up that weight loss pace for a little while longer. (Not that I don't have some mixed feelings about this post-partum body of mine.)

Boo-Yah! I am the Queen!

I am the Queen of finding awesome deals at our local kids and baby mass consignment sales! In fact, those sales make the Top 10 list of things that I will miss when we move. Today, I wasn't even planning to go to the really good one this weekend. I'd forgotten about it. But I was going downtown to buy a birthday present for one of Noah's classmates (Angry, if you're wondering!). I saw the sale signs posted all over downtown. So I dropped by, just to see if they had a few warm items in size 3-6 months. Then I saw it. A tripp trapp chair. The $250 chair I've been coveting since the first time I saw it. The perfect chair for my refuses all booster seats son. For $50. Having only $42 in my wallet, I continued browsing, pretty sure I was going to go find an ATM and return for my tripp trapp chair, but wanting to check and see if there were any other amazing finds. There were. Someone had also put up an Ameda Purely Yours breast pump in good shape for $50. They retail for $150 with no frills. They are my favorite pump ever. And I killed the one I got from Dr. Madelaine. Fortunately, no one snagged either item while I was at the ATM. And in Josie news, she has entered a seriously high maintenance phase. Cute, but high maintenance. Speaking of which, she calls.

It Has Come to My Attention

I think that last post might be worrying you. And I\'m not saying there is no cause to be worried, but on the whole, my family and I are doing ok. Some days are hard, some days are really hard, and some days are fine. Today Yesterday was fine. The car issue turned out to be just a completely dead battery. Jill replaced it, but she didn\'t realize that there was an insulator thing on the battery itself, so we were convinced it was something more serious. Fortunately, the car repair shop caught it, and the full cost, including towing, of fixing my car was...$107. The house has been full of pre-selling-it handypeople who have fixed every little ding and nick. It looks amazing. I\'m so glad they are done, because I miss having privacy. We met with the real estate agent today yesterday and outlined our final list of stuff that needs to get done before we put it on the market. The list seems manageable. They were amazed by everything we\'ve already gotten done. (And by we, I mean Jill and a team of paid professionals.) We also went over comps in the neighborhood and city, a timeline, our goals and priorities for selling the house, set a price, and signed a contract. Whoo-whoo! And in other good news, since Josie has become a championship eater -- gaining not the needed 1 oz/day to keep the pediatrician from freaking out, but almost 2 oz/day to reach an even 8 lbs at 13 days old -- I have lost 18.5 of the 30 lbs I gained this pregnancy. (Yeah, there was a 4 lb surge the last week. Thank you Publix Chocolate Trinity ice cream.)

Saturday Roller Coaster

There were some great things about today. Our dear friends Mikki & Claire came into town yesterday, and spent the whole day helping us work on the house. They transformed the yard, and were fabulous with Noah "helping." I wish I had a picture of Noah trying to use his foot to dig the trowel into the hard red clay the way Mikki was pushing on the shovel. The exterior of the house now looks amazing. And they were so reassuring about the things we've done and the things we haven't done -- which was especially nice coming from people with their real estate experience. And. Josie was fussy and exhausting and draining. And. Mikki & Claire brought with them a gargantuan duffle bag full of Clothes Swap Part One from Jen & Cait. It was like a huge baby shopping spree for no money. They have a beautiful daughter, Natalie, who is a couple of months younger than Noah, and a newborn son, Teddy, who is a week younger than Josie. After unpacking the awesome windfall of adorable baby girl clothes, I repacked it with a similar volume and size range of Noah's outgrown baby boy clothes. At some point in the future, we'll be doing round two, where we swap the 12 month + sized clothing. And. It kind of hit me today how different my time at home with Josie is going to be from how I imagined it. My official layoff date was Friday. When I was first pregnant, my plan was to spend 12 weeks home. Eight of them were going to be covered by short term disability, and the last 4 were going to be covered by saved up vacation time. (I would have been ~3 hours short.) And. My car was going to work. And. I was going to deal with those middle of the night feedings on the ugly sofabed in the baby's room. The ugly sofabed that should really be removed sold to stage the house for sale. We certainly weren't going to be dealing with selling the house, long-distance job hunting, or moving. Or assessing whether or not it is worth fixing my car, and if not, how to manage our transportation needs. I thought the biggest stressors would be helping Noah adjust to having a new baby in the house, and sleep deprivation. Instead, those are the challenges that we're having the easist time managing. Oh yeah, and I guess I did think "baby blues"/post-partum depression might be a problem. It obviously is right at the moment, although on the whole, I'd have to describe it as one of smaller problems on the plate. On the positive side, I have this snuggly girl by my side 20+ hours per day:

Stupid Car

Hopefully the reason it won't start or in any other way react to the electrical system is because of a dud battery. Right now, it's a giant paperweight occupying space in the driveway. Ugh.

Two Years and Seven Months

Dear Noah, Today you are 2 years and 7 months old. You continue to surprise and delight your mommies -- and sometimes to frustrate us and make us wonder if we were crazy to have a second child. But mostly the first.

You love to sing, dance, and "rock out" with your musical instrument toys, especially the guitar, harmonicas, and accordion. I think you like the last two especially because they are loud! You also love to read, and sometimes insist that instead of me or This Mommy reading to you at bedtime, you read your own book and we read a different one of your books. You've been sweet and charming with Baby Josie so far -- you like to play with the toys that dangle above her changing table while we change her diaper, and to gently touch her and whisper "tickle tickle." You light up when she looks at you and announce, "Mommy! Baby Josie looking at me!" You also tell everyone you meet that you are a Big Brother. We couldn't be more proud of you. It obviously isn't always easy for you, though. When she cries or fusses, you join right in with her. You've gotten a little more aggressive at day care, so we talk a lot about not hitting or biting. Or headbutting. And you haven't slept very well since she and I came home from the hospital. I think that it's helped having each of your Grandmas' visit this month, and doing some extra adventures with This Mommy. But I look forward to being more physically recovered so that you and I can do some special activities together too. I missed you while I was in the hospital, and I still miss our having special time together. Even though there's a new member of our family who needs a lot of attention right now, know that we love you more than ever. Having more people in our family to love doesn't make everyone's share smaller -- it makes the love exponentially bigger. love, love, and more love, That Mommy