Blueberries and Other Wonders

How lucky are we?

When Aeli woke up this morning, we got him a bottle and watched an episode of Shaun the Sheep in our bed because it was only 7 and Mom wasn't quite ready to meet the day full-on.  Then we cooked and ate eggs, played with some puzzles, and Aeli woke Nicole by tenderly placing the book "Goodnight Goodnight" on her face.

Then we went out to do some gardening.

Amber sunflower

Papayas!

Bed #1 with monster summer squash vine

Giant heirloom tomato volunteers-- growing from a soil that is mostly coffee grinds, beneath a trellis Nico made from bamboo (harvested from the sidewalk patch down the street) and old bicycle tubes.

Bamboo-and-bicycle-tube trellis by Nico.

This is a magical part of the day.

Aeli follows the hose, occasionally insisting on holding a part of it himself, and visits every corner of the garden with us.



He knows where the strawberry plants are, and points eagerly whenever he sees a berry- whether it's green or red.  Once in a while he accepts when I try to dissuade him from going after the green ones, but more often he just keeps pointing more emphatically and making a questiony-cooing sound until he finally works up the nerve to just pick and eat the thing.  Yesterday he climbed over the halves of pallets that make the border of one raised bed and stood among the pine mulch, helping himself.

I am so happy that our baby is growing up garden literate.  While I marvel at the five baby papayas on our first papaya tree, Aeli picks chickpeas, then shells and eats them.  He sees the burn-your-mouth-up-faster-than-magma jabenero peppers and whispers "Haht haht haht!" He lifts himself up on his tip-toes to harvest the red cherry tomatoes.  I just think it's the coolest thing.

And the thing is- he's learning the city way too.  He's getting really good at sitting on the stoop and just waving at the people going by.  He doesn't walk off the sidewalk on his own, and doesn't seem to find it strange that sometimes men walk by wearing booty shorts and lipstick.



He points at every large truck and says "WOW!"

Similarly, for dogs playfully teething each others' ears while growling, A points and calmly says, "WHOA."



He's my little zen master, sometimes.

Adventure at the Doc's!

At the KIPP baseball game

I called Aeli’s doctor from work; he had stayed home with aunties Tara and Nicole since he hadn’t been feeling well (read: a bit of barfing and slapping at his ears).  The appointment was at 2:30, and at 2:05, I called the ladies on my way home to get him.  They were still walking around in the French Quarter, so I decided to meet them wherever they were and swoop Aeli to get him to the appointment on time. 

He was strolling with Tia Tara on Bienville, so I instructed them to get to Governor Nichols to avoid the madness often induced by finding yourself trapped in a mess of tourists or abundant lefts because of all the one-way-streets.  By the time I pulled up, it was 2:15 and I was feeling stressed about making it to the doc’s by our scheduled time.  We executed a fabulously fast Chinese-fire-drill-style handoff of the baby, and even with the Quarter traffic, A and I were pulling into the doc office parking lot at 2:28.

He had fallen asleep in his seat.  I gently and hurriedly woke him up.  He rubbed his eyes, but didn’t cry.  Just reached up to hug my neck and clung to me like a baby monkey.  It was then that I noticed I hadn’t grabbed the diaper bag from Tia Tara in our frenzied pass-off.  “Oh well,” I thought.  “We won’t be here that long.”

But the dipe was already full.  I spent about forty seconds feeling like a bad mom, but what could I do now?  We walked into the office and signed in.

Waiting for the doctor was fine.  They don’t really have toys in all the individual exam rooms, and although I’m typically quite the opposite of a germaphobe, it just seems like babies shouldn’t be playing with things that other sick babies probably stuck all up in their mouths.  So I let him crawl around on the table, covered with that butcher paper, and he gets a kick out of tearing and crumpling it up. 

At last the Dr. L enters, and I feel validated in my concern when she peeks in his ears and sees that one is definitely infected.  She continues to examine him, listening to his breathing and heart, and prodding his abdomen.  To do this last part, she undoes his diaper, and she’s struggling for some reason.  She starts to just pull it down over his legs like underwear, and I’m like, “Oh, you can just unstrap it,” (as if she wouldn’t know the regular way diapers work, being a pediatrician), and I reached down to help, and found I couldn’t find the straps either.  Then I saw the giraffe’s tail and the number “4” and realized his diaper was on backwards. 

So we got it off so she could poke his belly more thoroughly, and realized that the current dipe was chock full of pee. 

“So we should throw this one away; we don’t wanna put this one back on,” she said.  “Do you have another one?”

“No, actually,” I sighed shamefully, and explained I had managed to forget the diaper bag in the hurry to pick him up earlier.

“Oh well,” she said, “Let’s just put his shorts back on.”

So we did and as she’s explaining the antibiotic prescription, Aeli proceeds to pee.  On the floor.  All over his shorts. 

So now I have a diaperless baby who is also pantsless, and nothing to change him into.  How am I going to put him in the carseat?  Just buckle right over his bare penis?  What happens when he pees in his seat?  Oh my gosh.  I was beginning to feel a surge of mom-failure.

Then the nurse had to come in and give him a shot that he was due for.  Fortunately, she’s probably the sweetest person on staff, and she doesn’t give me any sort of judgey look at all when she learns of the no-diaper-nor-pants situation. 

“Hmmm, I think we might have one,” she says.  “I think we only have itsy bitsy ones, though.  Let me check.”

So she comes back with a size one diaper.  (Size one, as you might have guessed, is suitable for newborns.  Aeli is almost 30 pounds.) 

“Maybe we can cover one cheek?” she jokes.  But that’s actually the truth.  We can get the strap around one leg- and one leg only- and the whole thing only comes up high enough to cover half of his crack.

Walking out of the doctor’s office, through the waiting room, past all the other actually prepared parents was akin to leaving a dorm room on the other side of campus wearing a slutty dress from the night before.  Maybe with a little vomit on it.  Like, “Yeah.  I know this is not ideal.”  I just kept my eyes on the door and my head held high, and strapped Aeli into his carseat with the mini-dipe positioned under his butt as best as I could. 

You know.  Momhood.

The W(hoa!)onders of Weaning

 
Note: It is quite likely that this post will be TMI for many of you (Tim), but I wrote it because whenever I looked up advice about weaning on the internet everyone seemed to be talking about it like it was a piece of cake, and to me: it was not.  Enjoy at your own discretion!

It was so nice and gradual at first.  As Aeli began to eat more and more regular human food, he naturally nursed fewer times a day, and it was pretty easy to go from multiple feedings a day to only breastfeeding at night.  I felt that this slow, steady decrease in milk demand was perfect: the pace was being set by Aeli, and it was convenient for me to oblige.

However- going to fewer feedings a day is not the same as stopping completely. 

Whoa, boy.

I would sometimes try to go through the whole night without nursing, but I was usually woken up by the painful ache of a breast the size and shape of a dimpled pomelo.  Stefin would go get A, and even just nursing for three minutes would ease the pain.

But how do you erase those three minutes?  I just couldn't wrap my brain around it.  Even if Aeli ate less and less, one feeding would always tell my body to keep on producing one feeding's worth of milk- so how do you totally cease?

The doctor said to put frozen peas on my boobs a few times a day and wear the tightest sports bra I could find.  She assured me that in a few days it would all be done.  "They'll get the idea," she said.

A few days schma schmew days!  Seven days, is more like it.  And pain was part of the process.  Some people wear lots of lacy lingerie on their honeymoon; I wore frozen vegetables and a sports bra.

But now- at last- (hurrah!) I am wearing regular chest support!  Not nursing anymore (bittersweet), and feeling my hormones and appetite get back to pre-pregnancy levels for the first time in 16 + 9 months!  Pretty amazing.  (Sidenote soon-to-be-mommies: if you like to eat: NURSE!  I thoroughly enjoyed my 600 extra daily calories.  Now, though, I can enjoy not becoming famished during a 4 hour shift at work.)

 So we're all growing up around here.  Aeli says "eee u" (p.u.- on the changing table); "uh-oh" (after he throws something on the floor and then shrugs his shoulders); "hot" (always whispered- with a hand gesture at fire, candles, pans on the stove, barbecues...), and follows a surprising number of verbal directions... I'm feeling more like a regular human and less like a clogged faucet... and Stefin and I had our WEDDING!  Though it's been a legal union for quite some time now, we finally made it ceremonially official with the presence of our family and friends.  (That week deserves a post of its own.)


One more hip hip hooray for boobies (and babies)!