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The Nurser

The lactation consultant at the hospital said each mother and child have their own nursing style. I was thinking ours would be mommy bunny and baby snuggle bunny. Did this happen? Hell, no. The real truth is that the baby is 100% in charge of nursing, and because of this our nursing styles are:

Puppy With a Chew Toy, which is self-explanatory, and usually evolves into Sleepy Doberman, when she falls asleep while latched but actually growls when even slightly disturbed.

Lollipop is when she simultaneously sucks super hard, grabs a fistful of boob and pulls the nipple out of her mouth, producing both a loud "pop" sound and pain.

Taking It To Go involves nursing while at the same time trying to roll and/or crawl; The Restaurant Critic takes one or two sips then screams in irritation at some culinary offense, and The Boxer just lays there and whacks at me.

Bits of bits

The very awesome proprietor of themommyhood.com did a little feature on The Baby Sucks! See it at http://themommyhood.com/wordpress/2011/03/25/my-new-favorite-blog-other-than-mine/

ALSO after a bit of over-relaxing, a new drawing will be showing up this Sunday.

Accident (or, Too Much Information)

  

 What happened was I was driving back to Long Island from New Jersey, where I had reluctantly spent the day test driving a delivery van for your uncle the art dealer whose old van had been stolen by idiots who later tried to sell him back the paintings ending in a police shootout and one of the thieves getting his femoral artery ripped by a police dog but later escaping from a jail in a wheelchair.  ANYWAY, I was driving through Brooklyn at night in a rainstorm during the transit strike all pissed because the rush hour traffic sucked and I hadn't eaten all day when I got majorly rear-ended and there was a huge pile-up. We think this wreck jostled some ingredients put in place the previous day by your dad and I. He lived in Seattle at the time but had flown out for the weekend to ask him to marry him and in the festivities we didn't exactly take precautions because I'm 35 and it was his 40th birthday, so we had been figuring for quite a while it'd be pretty hard to get knocked up. But then there was the car accident and that sucked but now we know it was the luckiest day of our lives because that's how we got pregnant with you.

Oh no! You've got MOM HAND

- Baby birthstone ring can't be worn due to rash caused by constant handwashing, though, mysteriously *

- Snot trail. Maybe mine, maybe not. I don't remember.

-* After nine out of ten diaper changes, poop ends up exactly here and is not noticed for hours

- Remnants of indoor play gym hand stamp, a reminder of Saturday when both girls threw a massive screaming fit right in front of the @"&%^! bouncy

- Yogurt. Why does yogurt always end up here?

Favoritism

The right boob has always been the overachiever, and has embraced breastfeeding as a glorious triumph, a sacred destiny. Which seems natural, but the left one strongly disagrees, is offended by the idea of such mammalian disrespect. The right boob has goals and dreams; the left stays up all night watching dating reality shows.

The baby loves the right boob and has a strained relationship with the left, causing the right to swell with pride while the left just shrivels in annoyance. The baby can't be blamed; if the food is exactly the same at two restaurants, who wouldn't choose the one with the most enthusiastic and attentive waitstaff?

But, people are starting to stare, and we're going to a party tonight. At the last minute, teddy-bear augmentation is a lopsided nursing mom's only choice.

Work: Parts of a breast pump

1) Pulsating motor, which the people in the office next door to the "lactating room" will suspect is really a vibrator 

2) How-to-book, which will press against the "on" button when you walk into work, making your coworkers think it's a (see above)

3) Rubbery part attracts cat hair (low nutritive value)

4) Good for a playdough mold

5) Nipple shield, which will warp and be unjustly blamed for a nipple blister

6) Sanitize this before stepping on it

7) THE MILK: a) shake before serving; the nutrients are in the gunk, b) this will never be as much as you want it to be, c) you need to replenish lost calories with ice cream

TIP: Chanting "boob-boob-boob-boob-boob" in time is NOT helpful

TIP: Even if you don't work out of the house, you'll need a pump when your hormone-caused sack-of-marbles gallbladder explodes, so you can pump-n-dump the milk, which is frothing with narcotics (take these)

What's in the garbage today?

- "Taweenie," aka Lightning McQueen, big sister's all-time-favorite toy

-DIAPERS, infinity

- Earrings, pulled out of auntie's delicate ear

- Cutest pants ever, soaked in crap

- Expired motorcycle license

- Something that should be washed, crushed & recycled

- Sex life

-Stickers peeled off new coffee table

- Lots and lots of coffee grounds

- Season ski pass

Literature: A Guide for New Parents

Make your own book! Free!

Cover:
Why is the baby crying?

Page 1:
Q: Why is the baby crying?

Page 2:
A: You are doing something wrong

Back page:
$525 (copay)
www.youmightaswelltakeanap.com

Recreation

The Boston Children's Museum has a gigantic climbing structure that looks like God spilled her whole sack of Fritos and they froze in mid-air. The girls go wild at the mere mention of it.

The only problem is that in a place so full of kids you'd hope to see a bunch of exhausted, disheveled parents exuding a vaguely familiar stink, the kind of parents that could boost a similarly-tired person's self-esteem. But the opposite is true: the place is teeming with ridiculously zesty parents – young, clever, muscle-y, rested like they just got back from a weeklong retreat in Moorea for hot childless people. Could there be a magic beauty compound in the bubble room? We'll never know, because the girls will never climb down from the Frito structure.

The flesh heap

I should have taken a picture of myself naked before I had kids.  Now I have no proof that my stomach hasn't always looked like the underside of a geriatric man's ball sack when I bend over.


Last week during the gallbladder ruckus, the ultrasound tech said, "what's this huge scar on your stomach?" Why, it's the leftover dark line that ran stem to stern during pregnancy, thank you, that should have gone away months ago but now has lingered long enough to threaten permanency.  Then the gall bladder surgeon said, "your belly button is herniated." Why, yes, also thank you, that belly button used to be quite charming but now looks like an flabby eyelid drooped over an empty eye socket.


Maybe the problem is not that my parts have been trashed, but that I'm still holding on to some kind of vanity about them. I need to remind myself that kids or no, at some point in life my bikini days would have been over, though probably not so emphatically, so quickly. All and all, it was more than worth it to give up those few extra years to have those awesome little girls. 


But I still wish I had that naked picture.

I used to think I had a high pain tolerance

Mandie, the anthropology goddess, and my sister-in-law, Tory, both had their babies at home. It's funny how with my first it was really important to me to do it without any drugs*, but by the time #3 Daisy came along I was all, "can I start the epidural if I'm only dilated 3 centimeters?" Each birth was way easier than the last, but I became increasingly a wuss about it. The natural-childbirth God is now punishing me for that by smiting me with a nipple blister, which is unbelievably painful. A nipple blister! Who could even have imagined that such an awful thing even existed? I'll be writhing in pain on the kitchen floor and Jeff will panic and I'll gasp "the ... blister's ... almost ... too ... small ... to ... see ... where's ... that ... %#*&% .. epidural ... doctor?"
(*This attempt was an unqualified failure)