We moved the baby cradle out of our bedroom today.
I remember the day we moved into our house, only about 2 months before the baby was born, and my biggest goal was to get the cradle ready. With my nesting instincts in full effect, I set it up in the corner next to my side of the bed. For the next two months, it sat waiting, with newly cleaned sheets and a swaddle inside. As time went on, and my larger than average newborn grew at quicker than average rates, it became clear that my idea of keeping him within arms reach for 6 months was not going to happen. When he was 2 months old we moved him across the hall to his own room. So yes, that means that it sat empty next to me for almost 2 months. In my head I just kept thinking, we will try having him in his room, and when I decide that he still needs me, I will just bring him back. But one night at a time, I put him to bed in his room, thinking it would just be for one more night, until he showed me that he still needed me. Clearly he does still need me, but little by little I´m starting to see that he needs me a little bit less. He didn´t need to come back to his cradle. and I surprised myself by deciding we all slept better with him across the hall. So when my husband came down the stairs carrying the cradle today, it made me feel a lot of things. I thought about how long it sat waiting for our greatest adventure to begin, for our baby to come home. Then I thought about how he spent his first nights home in it. I thought about how I learned to be a mom with him laying close by each night, and learned to respond to what he needed, starting to understand each of his cries and grunts in the middle of the night. This early stage of his life just came and went in the blink of an eye. Our little wooden cradle has served its purpose for this baby, and will go into storage in the basement until, maybe someday, we need it again. And if that day comes, with all the same anxiety and excitement, but maybe a little less mystery, we will set it up again to wait for someone new.
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My poor boy has his first cold. It has been a great fear of my first-time-mom heart, and somehow we have made it over 3 months even in cold and flu season, even with both parents being teachers.
Even though it seems to be a minor cold, it is brutal to see him not feeling his best. As is the usual for him, he is handling it really well and is mostly his happy and cheerful self. He always impresses me when I am ready and expecting for him to throw terrible fits and be cranky and dificult, he just isn´t. We seriously got lucky to have such an easy going, laid back soul. It is quite possible that I am more upset by him being sick than he is, really. I know some of the anxiety of little things like this will fade as time goes on, but right now I´ll be sitting on my couch, snuggling my snotty little babe and being so grateful for his good health up to this point. I´ve explained before how important pizza is to our family.
Ever since the baby was born, our ¨pizza Sundays¨ have become pizza Fridays instead. This is mostly due to the fact that I am absolutely brain dead and can barely get myself in the door after work on Fridays, and pizza instead of cooking is just perfection. While I was pregnant, I had gestational diabetes. Some days, I would have cut off my right arm to be able to have pizza, but all for my baby, I was able to control my blood sugars without medication. Once I was able to eat pizza again, our weekly pizza nights were back in action. Until we found out that my kiddo has some kind of allergy. Again, my diet would need to be restricted. For a while there I was dairy, soy, nut, and egg free in addition to already being vegetarian. Luckily I´ve been able to add some other things back in and now I am only dairy and soy free. Sadly, though, those are two ingredients that are in a vast majority of all pizzas. Then I found Papa Johns. Now, I will not lie and say that this is great pizza. It´s generic, it´s cheap, but...it´s decent pizza. Their original crust is dairy and soy free, and they have saved my life on Friday nights. We order the pizza without cheese, I add my own vegan cheese, and throw it in the oven for a few minutes. For cheap, generic pizza, it sure makes my week. Thanks to Daily Dose of Dennis we are now on day 2 of eMeals and it is seriously amazing.
The app plans your meals for the week, is customizable for dietary needs (AMEN), and loads the ingredients of the meals you choose to your cart to pick up at the store. So this week I started my free two week trial. I chose the vegan plan, and read through all of the ingredients in my meal choices, loaded them to my cart, and had husband stop at Walmart to pick them up. DONE. I should mention that I signed up for the plan that feeds a family of 4-6...for just the 2 of us. I was thinking that it would allow for extras for lunches after we´ ve eaten dinner. Today the meal was a sweet potato and black bean salad. I roasted up the vegetables, made the dressing, chopped the cilantro, and emptyed the bag of spinach into the largest bowl we own. I quickly realized that although this bowl was our largest, it was not made for meals for a family of 4-6. As I added ingredients the bowl began spewing extra spinach leaves onto the counter. With some quick thinking, I dumped the contents onto the pan that I used to roast the veggies. I figured I could mix it up on there and then transfer it to the bowl. Wrong. Chunks of sweet potato with curry powder fell between the grates of the stove. Trying to poke underneath the metal bars, I scooped them back onto the pan. I stared at it, realizing I was no better off with this pan than I was the bowl. Pasta bowl! That will work. I scooped piles of the salad into our pasta serving dish thatś normally only for use when we have company (so, naturally itś never been used). Wrong again. Apparently all of our dishes are the exact same size. At this point I recruited the help of husband, who probably hates me for the smears of salad dressing now covering the counter in two different places, the stove, and several of our largest dishes, and who definitely thinks Iḿ insane. He held dishes as I slowly and carefully mixed it to the best of my ability. As I worked he picked up the stray spinach that continued to drop onto the floor. After all of this, though, it is so delicious. Moral of the story: Sign up for eMeals, and if you sign up for a family of 4-6, and plan to make meals for a family of 4-6, make sure you have dishes that hold food for a family of 4-6. Driving home this afternoon, I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw the reflection of my sweet babe, sitting in his car seat in the back of the car. Sometimes I think back to the days before he was born, and I almost have to pinch myself that it is real life. That he is here and he is mine and I get to love him forever and ever. I still marvel at how recently he was just a thought. How I didn't know he was a he, and I didn't know his name or his face. I think about how quickly that face, that little laugh, that amazing human that I didn't even know has become the one I know better than anything.
My two favorite things that happened today:
I had a span of a few years where I became somewhat of a nomad.
The Oscars being on tonight makes me wish I watched movies.
When I was a kid, we watched so many movies. But now, as an adult, I can count on one hand the number of times I have been to a movie theater in the last 5 years. I think about Wednesday mornings in summer when I would be in my bedroom, hear the hum of the Honda starting in the driveway, and I would race down the stairs. "Patsy! Where are you going?" I would yell out the front door. Nine times out of ten she would turn the car off, I could hear the dinging chime of the keys still in the ignition when she opened the door, and she would come back into the house to invite me, and wait for me to get ready to join her for the day. My Aunt Patsy was my pseudo-grandma; an aunt, but a third parent. An aunt who lived with us since I was only a few years old. Patsy was always full of adventure, full of creativity, full of stories, and full of that grandma-like instinct to spoil my siblings and me. Now it has been years since she left this world. Brain cancer took her from us when I was in college. She had an affinity for all things movie related. On Wednesdays and Sundays, she didn't work at the bank, and that was always her schedule as long as I can remember. At least one of those days, if not both, she would head to the movie theater. Many times my brother, my sister and I would join her, but if there was something she wanted to see and we were busy, or maybe I didn't happen to hear the Honda starting that day, she would go see it by herself. Large popcorn and a diet coke, she would order, every time. The popcorn is my lunch, she would explain, as though I would judge her for eating the whole thing. The craziest part to me, as a kid, is that she got it with NO butter. She was always so concious of her health and wanted to avoid all of the extra additives and calories in that "fake stuff." She would order a separate popcorn for us kids, and would make us little cone-shaped cups out of napkins so that we wouldn't argue over who got to hold the popcorn. One of my greatest regrets is that as I got older, those rare days she would go to the movies alone became more and more common. We were busy. We were teenagers. Maybe the reason I don't go to more movies now is because I know it wouldn't be the same. Maybe it's a little thought of the guilt I feel about all of those times she turned off the car, came back inside, and invited me to go with her, and all of the times I got in my car as a highschooler, and left her behind. Maybe part of it is the realization that now that I know better, now that my priorities are straight, I wont have the opportunity to invite her to a movie, or to tell her how much it meant that she always had an open invitation for me. It's such a strange thing, but that sound of the Honda starting in the driveway outside my bedroom window is so distinct and so vivid. When she got too sick to drive and sold the car to my brother, I remember the sting of hearing it and how seeing my brother drive it meant she was declining even further. I never watch the Oscars, only partially because I never know any of the movies. Saturday naps are like a race against the clock. It's like "Minute to Win It" except it may be an hour and a half, it may be 30 minutes. No one knows. And once you do know it's too late. So as soon as I lay the baby down, I have to sprint through as many of the neglected chores from the week as I can.
When I was 16 I got my first job working at Best Buy as a cashier, and then a "financing specialist," which really just means making returns and pushing credit card applications. I got this job as a requirement from my parents in order to get my driver's license. Their rule was that I had to get a job to be able to pay for car insurance before I could drive. So at this time I was still saving for my own car, and was driving my dad's Silverado to work in the evening.
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Author5th grade teacher, wife, mama to my 3 magical babies, ally, advocate, doggy foster mom... just stumbling on. Archives
March 2022
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