the one in which i indulge my first world whine...

so, i don't like my job. i like the work that i do, but not my job. because i'm a government slave i can't just quit like i'd very very much like to. no, i have slightly less than 2.5 years left (but when cl comes back it will only be 2 yrs).

two years! t w o y e a r s. 2 yrs. holy hell.

i know that it's really a short amount of time overall. after all, when that date passes it will also mark two years already gone at this same job. and since i don't like it and don't care about advancement and have no reason to think i'll ever get a raise, it doesn't leave them that much leverage over me except, i guess, vacation time (which, actually, they've been pretty good about so far). i can ask for and may get schedule changes that would help me not hate it so much. i can leave ON my last obligated day and not look back.

and, it's alot better than alot of people's jobs. i do like the work. i'm not in a textile factory in bangladesh sewing soccer balls together 9 hrs a day 6 days a week until my fingers bleed and my lungs explode for $0.35 cents a day. and there's things to be said for the location...i like the house that i'm renting, i like my son's daycare, the lack of traffic is nice, the cost of living is somewhat lower than what i'm used to.

i have to try and keep that stuff in mind or the next t-w-o YEARS will drag by interminably. i have applied to other jobs, but the interest has been somewhat muffled. it's out of my control, so i just have to let it be. i can't force another job and i'm limited in what i can do to make my current situation better so i just have to remember that it isn't that bad, and two years isn't that long.

right?

dubious achievement awards

filed under parenting advice i don't intend to follow:

my stepmom to me: "you have to bite HIM to show him that biting hurts!" um...i'm not prepared to bite the baby, but thanks just the same.

my pediatrician to me: "don't give him a snack until he asks for it by name" ...considering little e's got a speech delay, i'm not prepared to starve him as well.

random stranger in the supermarket when e is twisting to get out of my arms: "well, on supernanny..." ok, but that is a TELEVISION show. they have editors and $hit. it's not literal truth just because you see it on tv. (and that goes extra-special double for YOU jenny mccarthy fans)

filed under no, seriously, why would you say that?
my mom to my sister regarding her twin boys: "one of them looks like robert d.owney jr., and the other looks like john g.oodman!" someone, get the lady a filter for the love of god!

fridays

fridays are a tough day. E is frazzled from a long day at daycare, and i'm frazzled from a long day at work. he gets upset and cries in the car on the way to the house, and then is testy and mercurial once we get home. meanwhile, i'm so tired myself that it's hard to parent as my best self or even a reasonable facsimile of my half best self.

i'm reminded of this poem by ph.ilip lar.kin (seriously, how many of you reading are close to your parents now?)


This* Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery* to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as* you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.


(and i havent heard re: the interview yet, but my plan is to contact them next week)

10% improvement--at what cost?

so, the interview at the hometown clinic went ok. you know how sometimes you leave an interview with a warm fuzzy feeling? well, that didn't happen. i think some things would be better than my current clinic: for instance, i didn't get the impression that upper management was beyond-the-pale-insane. i can't even tell you the dread i feel even at opening my work email just to see what new and crazy thing is going down.

on the other hand, the resources to do the job i do are not as available at the new place. the support from other people would be less available. even computer support would be less available. and, just like where i am now, my feet would be to the fire over the great god of productivity. that won't go away.

and, some things would be worse. traffic is much much worse in the hometown. where i live now, i travel 20 min in one direction on the most heavily traveled road in the area to drop E off at daycare, and then turn right around and come back down the same road to go to work, twice a day. i can't even imagine traveling the beltway 4x a day, i would never have any life outside of the car. just going one direction today what should have taken 25 minutes took almost an hour.

so, overall i think the improvement would be about 10%-15%. is that worth moving everything, pulling e out of a good daycare, and doing it all while cl is gone? i don't know...right now it's an academic question since there's no offer on the table. but i guess one thing i know is that all clinics of the same type of one where i work are bad: the salient question is how bad?

good gracious, i know she MEANS well...

so today was a hectic day to say the least. in town for 24hrs for a job interview (wish me luck, fingers crossed). poor ez has been running a not-insignificant temp for >48hrs. i took him to the dr's before the plane ride (ear infection: his third in 3 mos, plus the reactive airway disease) and made the plane by the very skin on my teeth. yep folks, i was still going through security, watching e's motrin get strip searched and otherwise violated, with 10 MINUTES to go until takeoff. the plane did not take off without me, and i stopped feeling like i was going to vomit from exertion from sprinting through the terminal about 15 minutes into the flight. good times, good times.

anyway, my dear mom (mdm) is supposed to pick me up from the airport at noon. my thought was we'd then go home and put poor sick baby to bed. i get off the plane, walk through security to baggage claim and no mdm. i call and she assures me that she's no more than 5 min to the airport. pause. was she supposed to bring the carseat?

*beat*

um, you are kidding me, right? seeing as how 22lbs doesn't meet the requirement for unrestrained seating in this or any other state (not even kansas, and we know how crazy them folks are), how about YES. YES i WAS hoping you brought the carseat so i wouldn't have to leave the baby in an airport locker. so, we ate lunch in the airport while stepdad drove back home, picked up the carseat and drove back to the airport to get us.

she means well, and she raised two children to competent adulthood, but ai-yai-yai! last time i visited she watched e for me so i could sleep in which is very nice of her...and when i got up to take him he was still in his pajamas (ok) but also still in his night diaper (ewwwww). oh well.

picky eaters?

thanks for the responses on the previous post. :)

moms who have picky eaters, how do you get your babe to try new foods? e will eat most carbs, but very little else consistently. a glance at his daycare food sheet shows that most of what he ate today was oyster crackers and quartered grapes. there are about 15 foods he will reliably eat--thankfully one is a meat/bean stew--but i'm having trouble branching off from it. because he'll eat baked beans with meat, i tried a pot roast tonight and nada. i remind myself that toddlers need very little by way of nutrition or protein to keep going (which is somewhat helpful because if e is getting a consistent protein intake, i'll be darned if i know what it is) or the lot of them would have died out long ago.

mama's boy syndrome?

e had his 15mos checkup yesterday, where he was diagnosed as being a little bit behind developmentally and a little bit of a mamas boy. specifically, he isn't walking or standing independently, and he only really has one spoken work that he uses in context: 'hi' (though he uses that word effusively and frequently). he does cruise on furniture and crawl at lightening speed, and he does point, grunt and gesture to communicate. but there is no escaping the fact that at 15mos, most kids are walking and have about 5-10 words.

the doc said it was a combination of e being who he is and him being a mamas boy. he thought that as a mamas boy. he advised me to carry him less, and to force him to ask for what he wants using words rather than rely on gestures and grunts. if he is still not walking at 18 mos or not really using speech we will get pt/speech therapy referrals.

even though it was what i expected to hear, it was still a hard checkup. no one likes to think that THEIR kid is going to be the kid on the other side of the slope--where things come later and with more difficulty vs the kid who picks things up quickly and easily. also, no one wants to think that they are inhibiting their kid and preventing them from reaching their full potential.

on the other hand, i am most likely going to ignore advice regarding not carrying him if he wants to be carried, or pretending i don't understand a gesture/grunt combo if i do. i feel like i know plenty of mamas boys/mamas girls and those kids walked and talked at younger ages than e. the motivation was intrinsic, not because teh parent forced it. i think that by pretending i don't understand him when i do it will just make both of us crazy. i don't really care if he walks at 16mos or 18 mos as long as he gets there. if he wants to be picked up i don't mind doing it; my feeling is that most kids at that age want to walk. i'm not sure that ignoring him when he wants to be carried will encourage walking so much as encourage crying.

but, i don't know. maybe i am preventing e from reaching his full potential. this is the very hard part about parenting: it's hard to know what you should have done until after the fact. maybe in a year i'll know that as i typed this he was 2 wks from walking so no big deal. or maybe i'll have a non walking/talking two year old and realize i should have done things completely different.

and then there's the question: does it matter later on? does the slow walker turn into the clumsy kid? the late talker into the dull child? or can you look at a group of 4yo children and not be able to tell the difference?

tired! (possibly a recurring theme)

today was our first "real" day back home. i had to work and e went to daycare. it looked like this:
630a: get up
700: leave house, drive to daycare
730: drop e off at daycare, drive to work
8a-5p: work
530: pick e up at daycare, drive home
6p: home, feed e, read books, get ready for bed
7p: put baby to bed, shovel the gazillion inches of snow in driveway
730p: dishes, picking up
8p: "relax"
9p: realize i've fallen asleep in front of the computer.
930p: realize i've fallen asleep again in front of the computer, give up, go to bed fer realz.

home, home again

well, we survived the trip back home from sarasota. e was a ham on the plane, and thankfully we weren't seated next to anyone who really wanted to be left alone--because that wasn't happening. e targets people in the area and says 'hi' with increasing urgency and frequency until he gets a response. he's not above flinging a hand onto your arm and saying hi really really loudly if more conservative attempts to get a return 'hi' haven't worked out.

the plane ride sucked a little besides the obvious because i'm now home for the duration sans hubby. and traveling alone with the baby inevitably leads to some kind of 'where's the husband type question' usually it came up this way:
well meaning person--where are you flying back from?
me--sarasota. was lovely.
WMP--oh, what were you doing in sarasota?
me--i went to a conference.
WMP--OH, how did the baby do at the conference/who watched the baby during the conference etc.
me--blarg.
don't feel like getting into hubs just left but was around during the conference, but the lie would be so extensive. so i did get into it, and it went fine but was tiring.

tomorrow is back to work and e's first super long day at daycare.
tue he has his 15mos checkup which is good because he's somewhat behind his age peers with both language (one word--'hi' though lots of babbling) and gross motor skills (not standing independently, but will cruise holding onto furniture). it'll be nice to either hear not to worry about it, or get an early intervention referral.

pictures

today went somewhat better. for dinner he had oyster crackers because he would.not.try. the chowder that he would have greatly enjoyed. seeing has how he had mac and cheese the last 4 non-breakfast meals i thought i'd at least attempt something else. mind you, we had to leave the beach two days ago because he wouldn't stop eating sand. and today i had to fish both mulch and rubber playground chips out of his mouth. so for those of you keeping score at home: sand, he'll eat. sweet potatoes/corn chowder/hamburger he won't. what a weirdo.

they know more than they let on?

either demons possessed E this afternoon, or he sensed something was up. his daddy left around naptime, and E woke up from his nap like a baby possessed. when he wasn't whining, he was hitting (a troublesome new "skill" he's picked up this week) and when he wasn't doing those he was screaming or wailing. of course, it rained today during our sunny fla vacay no less, so our go-to-the-park plans were scrapped in favor of just crawling around the hotel. of course, i had grand plans for myself tonight after e was asleep (gym, hot tub) and executed a grand 0 of those. all i did was hang out in the darkness of the hotel room plunking away on my computer. computer:1 me:0. maybe i'll do things tomorrow.

resurrected

well, after a long hiatus i may be recharging up the old blog. my hubs just left for a stay over in the desert, and i thought this blog would be a good way of keeping in touch with our day-to-day life in addition to everything else: email, skype, carrier pigeon, etc.

i guess not much is new and everything is new. baby is napping and i'm blogging to keep my heart from breaking. how do you look into the face of a 6mos separation and keep going? well, right now i'm not. i'm kind of looking at it sideways and an hour at a time.

am contemplating big job change: move to maryland! another fqhc, but hopefully better than the one i'm at currently. second interview is next week, wish me luck!

pictures to follow, i promise!

a question for any random person that might happen to read and have some tech savvy: this blog is associated with my yahoo email, and i want to change it to be linked to my gmail. blogger will not allow. any ideas why?

should i move?

we currently rent a house in a neighborhood we greatly enjoy. we're about 2 blocks to the library, 4-5 blocks to the local Y, and maybe 4-5 blocks to a big playground. during the summer we walk to the park every day, and take ez to the library play group twice a week. we've lived here almost a year and i'm just starting to make friends with other local parents with baybeez. the problem is the house. for one it's old (built in 1917) and dark--the carpet here is dark green and there's lots of dark wood trim. the house is also in need of repairs which our landlord is too broke to accomplish. some are annoying (i.e. none of the doors to rooms stay shut when you close them, incl the bathroom; our fence is falling down), some are even more annoying (some genius prior tenant nailed shut all of the windows on the first floor and then painted them closed for good meaure. so, we can't open the windows on the first floor). and some are downright blecchy (the sink and shower drains are reaally sluggish; drano has not helped).

there's a house for rent near here that i found out about through work. the house is beautiful. it was built in 2003, has three (THREE!) bathrooms (current place has one), three big bedrooms, all the doors stay where you put them, all the windows open, the drains function like drains ought, etc. it has a two car garage attached to the house which will be a great benefit in winter for lugging in the baby and groceries and it has tons of closet space. it has a second floor laundry room! the problem is the house doesn't have a neighborhood. it's like the developer was drunk when he drew up the plan. there's no sidewalks. the house has barely any yard, and there's no playground anywhere within walking distance. the closest library is only 1.8mi away but you'd have to drive to it because it's off a main highway. the closest park isn't that far away but you'd have to drive to it. the closest Y is five miles away.

i just keep going back and forth. on the one hand, in the winter when it's two degrees, it's better to have a nicer house because you have to drive everywhere anyway. and the house is so loverly. otoh, it has been so nice just to plunk ez in the stroller and go for long walks...there's no where to go in the other neighborhood and we'd have to walk in the road.

rent for both houses is the same.

to contracept or not to contracept? that is the question...

so, firstly i'd like to point out that ez has recovered from the manhandlings of yesterday. he spent his day today as normal: drooling copiously, jamming his hands and anything else unlucky enough to cross his path as far into his mouth as possible, and practicing his new skill--shrieking. his mama, i fear, has PTSD. oh well.

anyway, as a veteran IVF'er, now post baby, i find myself in the odd position of deciding whether to proactively contracept. on the one hand, i would like another, but i'd like to wait until this one is no longer up 3x/night, every night. if the next one is also up 3x a night...well, that's 6x a night, at which point you might as well just give up entirely and enjoy the sleep-deprived visual hallucinations that creep in around the edges of your non-functioning state. maybe keep a thick pot of coffee on hand at all times. i believe i'd go slightly mad in relatively short order. so: yes to a second and yes to not now please!

but actively trying to prevent pregnancy seems odd to me right now. essentially, using bc means one believes that random, untimed, non-charted, unknown CM, non-ovarian stimulated, no-turkey-baster-in-sight type of s.ex could get them pregnant. and i'm not too sure about that. could random s.ex get me pregnant? it never has before. hell, even lots of timed/turkey baster style s.ex didn't do the job. using bc seems wasteful at best and smack full of hubris at worst. so, i dunno.

and i'm still waiting around to get the first baby AF yet, so who knows?

poor ez

about an hour ago i was upstairs in the bathroom doing stuff. i had ez seated on the countertop/sink area facing me. he's not an independent sitter yet, so i was holding both of his hands in one of my hands to provide sitting support while i futzed with things with my other hand. of course, ez decided to suddenly arch backwards while aiming the back of his head at the mirror and i put ***SLIGHT PRESSURE*** on his hands to keep him from ramming his noggin into the glass.

i think i felt a little pop, but what isn't in dispute is that ez started screaming. panic crying. tears falling. wailing. i scooped him up and started singing to him and walking him but he just kept crying. i thought somehow i may have broken his wrist. when i was able to get my wits about me somewhat, i realized that i must have given him a nursemaids elbow. and, it did pop back in when i reduced it. and he did stop crying shortly thereafter. but, i feel like a giant shithead.

i guess on the upside, i broke him, but i fixed him, right?

the astounding thing is how little pressure it took both to cause the nursemaids and to fix it. i mean, most ER nursemaids i get are 3yo's who decide right then and there to either take off into traffic or unweight their bodies at target while mom or dad has them by the hand. you know, a significant force. oy. it was so easy to cause it makes me wonder why there aren't more 6mos olds with nursemaids. or maybe their mothers have more common sense than i have.

mmmm...ducky...


hey! who turned out the lights on the baby??


so we survived The Colic. mamas of colicky infants, don't despair...it ends. we started seeing the light about 3mos and by about 4mos it was mostly dissipated. i'm happy to report at 5mos, ez is a mostly happy, fairly mellow baby. most days. and NO he doesn't sleep through the night. so, there's still improvement to go.

as a total aside rant: i *hate* when cashiers comment on my purchases. nothing makes you feel more like a tool than hearing 'WOW, those are EXPENSIVE batteries!' while sliding your ener.gizer li.thium 4pack across the scanner. so, cashier lady, not that you give a crap but i MEANT to pick these up far cheaper at ta.rget at least 3 different times over the past few weeks, but i keep forgetting, so it's down to get them here, now, or don't get them at all. so i made the painful decision to buy the overpriced batteries at your expensive little tienda here, can we let it go at that? i don't mention that however much you've spent on toothpaste, it wasn't enough.

emerging from the morass

so, don't let anyone tell you different. the newborn period is very very tough. ez is a beautiful lovely baby, but he is NOT portable. he tends to be a bit screamy, especially in the evenings. so, cl and i don't go out in the evenings unless, maybe, the house is on fire.

we've also recently learned how important his regular daytime naps are...consequently we don't go out during the day much either. compounding this is the fact that ez's favorite nap spot is *on us.* sweet, yes, but incapacitating as well.

it is getting better though. now, at 8w, we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.