typealice

I’ve been thinking a lot about when I should have the next baby. I have never pictured myself having only one child, never in a million years (and that’s why it was so difficult to think of only ever having one when faced with the reality of isoimmunization), mostly because my siblings are so important to me. I dream of living in a rural setting and wouldn’t want to subject an only child to that kind of upbringing because the lonliness would be overwhelming. Building a fort for just one person is lame!

So, Ash is coming up on 8.5 months now, and I am realizing that if I wanted to have two years between babies (which is what is the age difference between my siblings and I) Clive and I would have to seriously start talking about having another one soon. Wow. Part of me wants to have two years between babies and the other part wants to make sure that I can continue breastfeeding for as long as possible and enjoy Ash as an only child for as long as possible. I’m also a bit concerned that because my future pregnancy will be ultra high-risk that I should wait until Ash is quite a bit older (3-4 years old?) so that I can deal with it more easily (are four year olds really easier than two year olds? I’m not sure).

I have no idea. Clive’s not much help in this department because he’d be happy having only one kid and having him grow up around lots of other children in place of a sibling (only one more child is an option for us- that’s a guarantee).

When did you start thinking of having the next one, if you’re considering it at all?

We’re having a nice time in the US! Surprises: Went into a shoe store, there was a HUGE rack of candy. Growing obesity epidemic? Solved. Junk food is enormously cheap. I cannot get over it. Beer ads and cigarette ads are ALL OVER THE PLACE.

Yesterday I saw a cowboy. Exciting!

We took the two hour drive from Augusta to Atlanta yesterday and visited the Georgia Aquarium. Seeing the beluga whales was one of the most…. calming and beautiful experiences of my life. There were three of them, and two of them were partaking in mating rituals- the male was courting the female so there was a lot of interaction happening. I truly believe that if he wasn’t trying to mate with her the experience would have been much less magical, but because there was so much interaction (love bites, playing with bubbles etc) between them it was like being a fly on the wall and seeing something very majestic. I could have watched them for hours.

I was so taken aback by them that I completely forgot to shoot video of them with my digital camera, but I did grab lots of shots that I’m really proud of.

There are many more photos on my Flickr page.

Ash did great, and seemed to be interested in the animals. Clive, on the other hand, was like a kid in a candy store and was so so so excited to see everything. We had to tell him to slow down, otherwise he would have just ran around in circles going from exhibit to exhibit because he couldn’t see things fast enough. It was adorable.

We made it! Ash did AMAZING on all three flights, not a single tear. We nursed on all the take offs and landings and he looked out the window and tried to make friends with everyone around him. Travelling with him was so much easier than I thought it’d be. Stuck him in his sling and he was happy and I was hands free. I don’t know what I would have done if I thought travelling with a stroller was a good idea like all the other moms I saw.

Mudder’s Day is on Sunday and it’s supposed to rain. Shitty. I’ve been swamped with buying procycled fabric, sewing slings to sell there and maintaining their website. My sister designed a poster advertising the slings and it’s the first time she’s ever done work for me in return for me developing her website which sells her paintings which pays her bills. I hope the poster does not get ruined in the rain.

Clive’s off to Georgia on Sunday (we follow him on Tuesday). We had to get a Letter of Consent notarized today that gives me permission to travel with Ash. Notary Publics charge a fucking arm and a leg. $55 down the toilet in a matter of minutes for one stupid signature. We got Ash his passport and that was expensive too. We had to spend $35 for a long form birth certificate, $20 for the passport and another $30 for it to be processed quickly because of time constraints. Totally annoying. This Georgia trip had better be worth it! Our hotel has a pool, so I’m pretty sure it’ll be great.

My friend Nicole and I sometimes go shopping together, sending each other links on eBay and Etsy for like, hours. I found a dress I love for the brunch my MIL is throwing the day after the wedding on eBay and promptly bought it. It’s a Bitten (by SJP) dress which means it was cheap. It’s pretty cute.

I hope to come back to lots of mail. My wedding dress, our wedding rings (which I have to ship back to the company I bought it from on eBay), the dress above and a couple of other things should arrive.

I bought these today for our centerpieces. They remind me of old fashioned milk bottles, even though Clive reminded me that people usually put a litre of wine in them. I only found three, but I hope to find another three in the next 2.5 months. If not, mason jars will be used. Mason jars are cute.

Here is my centerpiece inspiration:

Dear Ashden,

Holy camoli, you’re eight months old today! Have I mentioned yet that you’re amazing? Let’s start of this newsletter by telling you how fantastic you are. YOU ARE FANTASTIC! AMAZING! THE BEST PERSON ON THE ENTIRE PLANET!

You’re a talking machine, my little friend. You said your first word this month, and it just happened to be on my birthday. I came home from a massage and you said, out of nowhere, “MAMAMA.” You have continued saying mama throughout the month, and I’m pretty sure you know what you’re saying and that you’re referring to me. Your favorite consonants are M and B, so we hear MAMAMAMAMAMAMA and BABABABAABABAA all the time. In the past couple of days you’ve managed to squeek out a few GAGAGAGAs and it’s pretty freaking awesome. Who would have thought I’d be so excited about consonants? We call your father Papa, but you haven’t managed to say any Ps lately, so we occasionally refer to him as Dada, but you have no idea what a Dada is so it just goes in one ear and out the other. We just hope that you’ll be able to pronounce Papa at some point soon, mostly because it feeds into your father’s ego. We are a family of bears. You are Little Bear or Baby Bear, I am Mama Bear and your father, obviously, is Papa Bear. I’m not sure when it started, but I think it’s super cute.

We started swimming lessons a while ago and they’ve become your favorite part of the week. Saturdays your father and I take you to the Dartmouth Sportsplex to their heated baby/children’s pool and we sing songs (Grand Ol’ Duke of York- your new favorite song, Wheels on the Bus etc) and mostly just swim around. You have a favorite plastic ball that once you grab onto, you will not let go of. If it comes out of your hand you frantically look around and grab back onto it. Your father and I love the fact that you enjoy swimming so much because it’s one of our all time favorite activities too. I’d be devastated if you hated swimming, just like your father would be devastated if you decide that you dislike fishing. Please don’t dislike fishing.

Your love of the pool has transferred into an even bigger love of the bath. If you even hear the shower curtains being moved, you rush into the bathroom and (if I let you), pull yourself up onto the side of the bathtub and beat your hands on it, looking lustfully at the tap to see if there is water coming out of it. If it is bath time, we let you look over the side of the bathtub and you get so excited you bounce up and down and sometimes even try to scale the side of the tub! When you’re in the bathtub I have to have an extra facecloth for you to suck on, otherwise you just try to grab the one I’m using to clean you with. We have a couple of plastic dinosaurs that are squirt toys, so I’ll fill them up over and over and squirt you in the chest and in the mouth.

You have nearly stopped your army crawling and moved up in the world into real crawling. Congrats! You’re one fast little bugger when you want to be too. You often disappear from sight and I yell, “Aaaaash, where arrrrre you?” Chances are, you’re getting into trouble. Sometime ending up in the bathroom, or your second favorite place to be, peaking into the washing machine whether it’s on or not.

On a different note, we had a rough couple of days this month when I got really sick with Mastitis. We went with Ute and Sophia to a prenatal/breastfeeding group one Tuesday and I was feeling fine when we arrived and two hours later when it was time to go home, I was overcome with nausea and feeling so faint that as soon as we walked in the door I called your dad to come home to take care of you because I could not. I had a horrible night, I had a fever and my right boob hurt enormously. My 5am I was throwing up every few minutes. By 10am we were at the doctor’s office for antibiotics and within a couple of days I was feeling normal again, but mastitis was one of the worst physical experiences of my life. I say that now, but I actually don’t have much memory of it because I blocked it out it was so bad. I was very happy that your dad was able to help me out with you because if he wasn’t able to take a day off work I would have been screwed.

We hit a big point this month Ash, and I must say that I’m happy it happened when it did and it was as painless as it has been. Glory, glory, you are SOOTHER FREE!! It just happened to coincide with stores taking BPA-riddled products off the shelves (including the kind of soother you’ve used since you were three weeks old, I’m really sorry to say). You just didn’t seem to want it anymore, and now it’s been a couple of weeks since you’ve really had it. It was a painless process and THANK GOD FOR THAT because I really didn’t want you to have it anymore, but I didn’t know where to stop and I had flashes of the future when you’re two and still needing it to sleep. Not that I’d ever allow that to happen.

I have some bad news. Not only are you allergic to cashmere (and since switching mattresses we have no more issues, luckily), you’re also allergic to banana. You had a runny nose for several weeks and it wouldn’t go away. It started with yet another cold that our family got, and I thought it might be a persistent symptom, but then I listened to my intuition which was screaming IT’S THE BANANA. I was sad for you because it was one of your favorite foods, but we cut it out and within a couple of days the congestion was completely gone. Just to make sure that it was actually the banana, I gave you about an inch of one in the morning one day and by the evening you were fully congested again, so much so that you had to mouth breathe while you were sleeping. So, no more bananas.

The food problems didn’t stop there; the day before my mastitis hit, you came down with a pretty severe case of diarrhea that ended up lasting nearly 2.5 weeks. The doctor thought it might be because of the antibiotics I was on, but it still lasted a week after the antibiotics stopped (not to mention the diarrhea started before the antibiotics). When we went to see the doctor on day 15 of diarrhea she suggested that I cut out all the vegetables from your diet (which were not being digested at all- full pieces of rice and broccoli were coming out looking exactly the same as they went into your mouth) because they had “lots of fiber.” She told me to keep up with the Cheerios (your other favorite) and rice. I wasn’t sure of her advice, and from encouragement from another mom whose child has numerous food allergies, I cut out the Cheerios along with everything else and lo and behold, my intuition was right again, and your diarrhea has stopped. I’m not sure if it’s the additives in the Cheerios or if it’s the oats themselves (likely the oats), so once we get back from our trip to Georgia I’ll try plain oatmeal and see if you still get sick. It was hard to see you so sick, even though you didn’t show any other symptoms of feeling bad. We were changing a dozen dirty diapers every day.

You learned how to pull yourself up this month and you haven’t stopped doing it. It’s incredible how quickly you learned it and how confident you are. You will bounce up and down, hold on with only one hand or stand only on one foot. The other day while I was making cookies, I had both hands full of cookie dough and you crawled over to me and pulled yourself up and hung onto my jeans. Well, then we were stuck. I couldn’t move because you would fall over, you didn’t want to move, I could pick you up because my hands were covered in cookie batter, and so there we were. Somehow I bent my knees to make it hard for you to hold on and told you to sit down (which you know the meaning of) and after a couple of minutes were able to go our separate ways. It was a close one.

You love to eat and now you basically refuse anything pureed. You love to feed yourself, so we’ve moved past the stereotypical baby food and onto finger food. It was hilarious watching you learn how to pick up food and move it into your mouth. Eating Cheerios was like playing a game of tiddly winks. You’d try to pick it up with just one finger, right on top of the O. It would often just fly off your high chair and never see the inside of your mouth.

So far you’ve tried banana, avocado, barley cereal, brown rice cereal, brown rice noodles, broccoli, beets, squash, carrots, green beans, sweet potato, apples, apples/apricot mixture, Cheerios and blueberries. You disliked all of the fruit, but nothing compared to the blueberries. I boiled them first, and you tentatively picked them up with your fingers not know what to expect, put it in your mouth, tongued it a little until WHAMO, it burst open and holy jesus, you HATED it. You gagged, you squinted, you nearly cried. I had never seen anyone have that kind of a reaction to any kind of food, even my first time eating sushi.

You’re more and more amazing. You’re learning about the world so quickly, almost too quickly. You’re 20lbs now and you don’t feel like a baby anymore. You’ve even started putting yourself to sleep. You nurse and then kick and kick and kick me until I leave the room and then suddenly, moments later, you’ve put yourself on your belly with your butt way up in the air and you’re fast asleep. You didn’t even need me to whisk you off to dreamland. I act like more of a distraction from sleep than anything else.

I love being your mom. You make me smile and laugh more than I ever have in my entire life. I love hearing your voice. I love hearing you laugh. I love seeing you smile, especially when you wake up from a nap or in the morning. I love hearing you say Mama. There is no sweeter sound than any sound that comes from you. I even love your burps.

Love,
Mama

We just came back from dinner where my brother used to be a chef. Ash did an amazing job at being a good baby even though we stayed out well past his bedtime. Not a single tear or complaint. I’d hate to be one of Those People at a fancy restaurant with a crying child.

He’s started doing this weird crinkle thing with his nose. I haven’t figured out why he’s doing it.

Oh god, the love I have for this little creature, it overwhelms me. Today he found a white jelly bean and he got his first taste of sugar. Then when I was eating them and he was sitting on my lap, he smelled the sweet, sweet smell and looked up at me, directly into my mouth and brought his nose a little closer. It was his way of asking for MORE MORE MORE.

I’m feeling better, thank goodness. Still on antibiotics, but I’m good.

I’m sewing every night to prepare for Mudder’s Day and selling my slings. When I’m not sewing I’m working on the website and soon will be making business cards.

The business name? G SLINGS! How genius. I wish I could take credit for it. Instead, it was Amanda. Thanks, Amanda!

We’re going to Georgia in two weeks, so I’m not sure how much you’ll hear from me in the next month. I’ll be around.

In a matter of two hours I went from feeling perfectly normal to feeling worse than I have since the sickness caused by my first trimester. At first I thought it was mastitis, because I’ve got several very painful clogged ducts on my right boob, but when I went to the doctor this morning she thought it might be a staph infection instead (kind of linked to mastitis anyway).

I had a sty in my eye after swimming lessons with Ash last Saturday, but got drops and it seems to be healed. But now I’ve got sharp shooting pains all over my body, am extremely weak, am throwing up (fun!) and am really, really dizzy. I slept with a hot water bottle on my extremely sore boob most of the night (when I wasn’t sleeping with it there, I was hugging it because I was FREEZING, teeth chattering and moaning I was so cold even though the temperature of our bedroom was totally normal).

On top of that, Ash has diarrhea and needs to be changed every five minutes. Clive stayed home from work to help me out. I don’t know what I’d do if I was here alone with him. Probably faint right on top of him.

I left the room for TEN SECONDS to put my underwear away, and this is what I came back to.