Don't Hate Me Because I'm Lazy

Hate me because I have the cutest damn babies in the universe.

Letter to my Mother

I sit here some nights, once the chaos of the day is fading, rocking and nursing my girls before putting them down for the night, and I let my mind wander. Some nights I reflect on the day, some nights I think about Sophia and Olivia and all of the potential they possess that I hold in my arms, but more often than not my mind wanders back to you, my own mom, and how many nights you must have sat in a dim room at the end of a challenging day and hummed to me and thought about what my future would hold. Tonight I tried to look at my life through your eyes, through the eyes of a mother who loves her daughter. I thought about little me, curled in your arms as the day ends, I thought about school-aged me, full of enthusiasm for the world and all the possibilities it held. Of course, I thought about the me that hurt you, that broke your heart and alienated you and did my best to push you away despite the sacrifices you made and the love you had. Always, always, you were there when I came to my senses, and if you held a grudge, if your love for me ever wavered, I never knew it. Maybe that was why I could rebel, maybe that was why I could take risks good and bad, because I knew at the end of the day you would always be a soft place to fall. Nuzzling my daughter’s peach fuzz covered head tonight I could understand how deeply my ingratitude, my selfishness and insensitivity must have cut you, but I could understand, too, how you could love me anyway. These babies, my daughters, your granddaughters, will live dimensional lives and be their own people. As much as I wish I could sing them to sleep every night, the time will come, probably all too soon, when they won’t need me in that way anymore. They will struggle, they will suffer, they will excel and they will fail, and through it all if my love for them falters for a moment, they will never know it. Thank you for setting an example of unconditional love, thank you mothering me the way I hope to mother my little ones, and thank you for always, always, being there for me at the end of the day.

Did I Tell You the One About...

how I almost killed my cat? See, I have this cat, who is more of a decorative than functional pet. She really likes me alone, and I am pretty much the only one in the world who really likes her. She is lovely to look at, but even I have to admit that she can be a bit devoid in the charm department. So here's the thing. I bought a bag of food for the cat. It was not the same kind of food I usually get her. Not off by miles, not like she was eating Iams and I bought Meow Mix or something, just that she was eating Science Diet Indoor Senior Hairball Control and I bought Science Diet Indoor Senior Sensitive Skin Care or something. I mean MINIMAL difference we are talking here. In my defense, this was back when the babies were up pretty much every two hours all night, so things were, to say the least, a bit hazy here and there. Anyway, I bought the wrong food. But whatever. I usually feed the cat on my way to bed at night. But it was great since obviously, because he knew I was not firing on all 8 cylinders, Dearest was feeding the cat and letting me off the hook. I KNEW he was feeding the cat because there was always food in her bowl! So after he had clearly been feeding the cat for about a week I was all, "Honey, I wanted to thank you so much for feeding the cat! I really appreciate it!" And he looked at me like I had three heads and was all "Why in the hell would I ever feed that awful animal? I hate that cat." So then I was like, "Um, does this mean that you haven't been scooping her box either?" because I had just figured that since he was feeding the cat he must have been scooping the box too, right? And I don't think he even responded to the question about the box because he's pretty much willing to forgo ever having a son because me being pregnant would mean another 9 months of him having to deal in cat shit. Anyway. So I realized that the cat had neither been eating nor crapping for like 6 days. My immediate deduction was that she certainly was dieing of cat anorexia or probably some kind of tumor that made her go off her food that will require thousands of dollars of medical interventions. Dearest must have had the same thought, because he was all, "I am not spending one more penny on health care for that damn cat, the best I can offer you is seventy bucks to have her put down." (Like it was my fault that it cost $400 to have her teeth cleaned.) We both looked at the cat, who happened to be laying on the kitchen floor (how long had she been laying there, I wondered in a panic? Had we been stepping over her rotting carcass for 5 days and had not even noticed?), and Dearest reached down and picked her up. You have to understand that prior to this incident, it was never a simple case of Dearest scooping up said cat off the floor- it generally would have involved chasing and cursing and flailing and probably bloodshed. But this time, the cat was just kind of limp, and she did not flail, and she didn't even hiss when he put her down. "This cat is fucked," was Dearest's official thought on the matter. Then I thought about the subtle difference in the food I bought a week ago. "You don't think..." I mused, "that the cat would starve herself instead of eating that different food, do you?" "Probably she would," he said, "and if we wouldn't have noticed for a few more days, I would have been through with that idiot cat forever." So I offered her a treat, and she ate it like... well... like a cat who had not eaten for a week and who was really damn hungry. I gave her some turkey and cheese from the fridge. Ate it. More treats, ate those. She immediately started to perk up. That dumb cat would sooner DIE than eat the wrong food. Wonderful. Anyway, I bought the right food the next day, threw the remainder of the $20 bag of Science Diet Indoor Senior Sensitive Skin Care in the trash (seemed a shame, when there are LEGITIMATELY starving cats in this world) and all's well that ends well. For everyone except Dearest, who would have only considered the cat's demise to be a happy ending. The end.

Facebook Ate My Blog

Or at least it's trying to. I admit it- I'm a little sucked in to Facebook. It has been a super easy and slick way to stay in touch with friends and family, and I really enjoy it. It is, however, a bit like the fast food of the internet... a quick fix certainly fills you up, but it is far from a gourmet meal you can savor. The other day I read my friend Genny's blog, which talked about her regrets over having not blogged or otherwise journalled certain life events and it made me think. Dammit, I am not gonna let that happen to me. What I am experiencing now is too heightened, too terrifying and exhilarating and precious to let it fade into memory's abyss. I must get back on the blogging horse, even if it means I do that instead of sleeping. (What's the difference between 4 hours of sleep and 4 hours 15 minutes, really?)

The only problem is, I feel a certain obligation for my blogs to be somewhat interesting, or compelling, or at a bare minimum amusing, and I'm just not sure I have that right now. Blogs are meant to be read, right? Otherwise it is just kind of an online diary, and that's not what I want. My life is so chaotic and disjointed right now, and I am terrified that people in the real world are going to catch on to that by reading my blog. If there is one thing this control freak fears, it's other people sensing her loss of control. So that's part of what has kept me from writing too.

Thankfully, things are starting to come together. I am getting comfortable, in a strange way, living with these 2 little hand grenades, and I am no longer just waiting for one of them to explode at every moment.

So if anyone is still out there, bear with me. There may be a few posts that sound like I wrote them a month ago (I did!) and there may be a few that sound like they are written through a sleep deprived haze (they are!) but hopefully I will get back on track, because Facebook is not satisfying my need for a fix anymore.


Ow! Mom, she's hitting me!


Saturday Morning with the family

Happy Birthday to Us!

One Month!


One Month... the Sequel

And Now, a Message From Our Sponsors

3 Week Time Warp

(Olivia shot poop 5 feet across the room about 2 minutes before this picture was taken)


OK, people. I need to get back on the blogging horse or I will become one of those mom bloggers who posts once a week to put up a few pics, report on runny noses, complain about lack of sleep and declare my love for the kids. Not that there won’t be posts like that from me, not that those kinds of posts are not interesting to people who care about the girls, just that those posts don’t call for a lot of reflection and insight. And if I get in the habit of taking the easy route, I am afraid I will get stuck there.

So.

First a real-time update.

The kids are doing great.

There is very little sleep occurring in the household at night.

I am off the percocet but the hardest thing about weaning off of it was my nipples. Oh, my tender tender nipples. There are not words.

And the love. Oh, the love. I love loving these babies. I love watching Dearest, my mom, my in-laws loving these babies. I am so proud.

So there is your “the kids are great, I am exhausted, God I love them” post that I just said I was not going to do. Um, maybe I just needed to get it out of my system.

Having my mom here was incredible, and I had a mini panic attack every time I think about the fact that she was leaving this week. I literally do not know how I am going to survive without her. She has taken on all aspects of running this household, from cooking to cleaning to laundry to walking the dog to caring for the girls to being my full time psychologist and cheerleader. Having her here has allowed me to really focus on the babies, and specifically on breastfeeding, which I am doing about 8 hours a day and therefore should qualify as a full time job. It is immensely satisfying to watch the girls starting to get chubby cheeks and to think that I did that, my body is feeding them and giving them all they need.

The girls are really starting to show their personalities. I know a lot can change, and I will be curious to see if our initial impressions prove to be accurate over time. Sophia (Baby A) is… intense. Can a baby be intense? Absolutely. Everything she does and needs is with a certain urgency. She goes from zero to screaming in a single breath, nurses like a frantic barracuda, and stares at you like she is really studying your soul. Olivia (Baby B) is a little more easy going- her cries tend to ramp up instead of going straight over the top. She seems a little more social, already she is trying to coo and turning her head when she hears familiar voices. Yesterday we put the girls on the floor next to each other and they made eye contact with each other for the first time that I am aware of. It was kind of a special moment, even though I can’t really articulate why.

We have been going to weekly pediatrician’s appointments, and the girls are growing right on schedule and passing every test with flying colors. They were 5-12 and 5-13 when they were born, both 5-5 when we brought them home from the hospital, 6-4 and 6-2 at their 2 week checkup and about 7lbs when we weighed them at the hospital Wednesday. Amazing how quickly they are growing.

One thing about the 2 week visit to the pediatrician. We had been watching their little umbilical cords dry up, but they had not yet fallen off. No big deal, as far as we were concerned, right? Well, we went last week and the OTHER pediatrician there (NOT the warm fuzzy Ghandi guy we selected) said “I need to remove these umbilical cords or they are going to have nodes there and will have to have surgery when they are older.” Oh my God, right? Absolutely! Remove them! How bad can it be? “It will sting a little,” she said, “when I cauterize them.” Uh… cauterize? Like burn off? “Well, it’s a chemical cauterization, it is quite simple.” At this point I look at my mom, but what can we do? No one wants them to have surgery. What even is a node? I thought I had read every book about every possible thing that could happen to my kids during the first month of life. Belly button nodes? Did I skip that chapter? Shit shit shit. As much as I am reluctant to unconditionally trust doctors, I didn’t know what else to do. So I let her do it. And within 30 seconds I wanted to jump out the window with my precious babies and never look back. The babies SCREAMED. They screamed until they had the silent screams and turned purple. I couldn’t even stand there next to them. I stood in the corner and bit the inside of my cheek trying not to cry. My mom talked to them and tried to soothe them while they protested. It seemed like hours, it was probably 5 minutes, and she was done. But the kids were not right all day. And I felt absolutely sick about it.

So there’s my first parental high holy drama.

The babies are fine. I cry every year when I have to get my cat vaccinated, so maybe I’m just hyper sensitive and protective. But I HATE feeling helpless. And I have a feeling that a lot of parenthood is going to be about feeling helpless. And I would be lying if I told you that doesn’t freak me out a bit.

Stay tuned for the preface to the birth story. I have to do it a little bit at a time or it will never get done. But I don’t want to wait too long or the memory will get hazy. Also- gory c section pictures or no gory c section pictures? You tell me, dear readers, if you are horrified by bloody babies.

My girls at 2 weeks: