john's mom works

so much has happened these past few days, not least of all: my name is bella. bella is a not quite 3-year-old lab we just adopted. her former family kept her outside in a nice big fenced yard, and she had a nice shed to stay in for nighttime, but the family recently had a baby and they haven't had enough time to play with her lately, so they elected to find her a new family. enter the heids. she's a doll of a dog, and we can't wait until she gets a little more settled into her new home. our biggest obstacle right now? she's not fixed yet. we'll be fixing her very soon, but right now, she's in heat. thus: have you ever seen such fashionable panties on a lab? i grant you it's a temporary solution, but the heat is a temporary situation, so we'll make do! she's otherwise very sweet, albeit unused to living in a house and so needs some training. she's smart and sweet tho, so i think we'll do just fine. in sleep news, john ha...

  either another dr. seuss character or a little convict. i'll let you guess which description i prefer.  i didn't say anything yesterday because i didn't want to jinx it. but last night it happened too ... john slept through the night! 9pm to 6 or 630am both nights! ::doing a little energetic dance:: on wednesday night, he cried for a while when i put him to bed - i had to check on him twice. and last night came with a few little whimpers but no wailing. i woke up around 3am both nights, but it was me waking up, thinking, ok, he's going to cry any moment now ... but he didn't. and i fell back asleep. it was awesome. as an aside: john's grammy (my mom) is in town. (that shouldn't be an aside but it's own post - more tomorrow perhaps?) and today is grammy's birthday. so - HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GRAMMY! tomorrow is a big day: meeting a potential new fur baby, trip with grammy to the zoo, grammy's birthday party in the evening. hop...

9:15 p.m.   into the crib while awake. no crying ... out cold in a few minutes. 2:06 a.m.   woke up crying. 2:11 a.m.   mom soothed for 1 minute 2:19 a.m. crying stops 2:20 a.m. - 2:35 a.m.    occasional yelps, but mostly sleeping 2:36 a.m.    out cold 7:35 a.m.     my very own little dr. seuss character   

ok, let's get this straight right off the bat: i don't know if i am literally following dr. furber's methods of sleep training. there are so many versions out there. but saying we're furberizing john is WAY more fun than saying that i'm letting him cry his little lungs out in an attempt to teach him to sleep on his own. it's night two of our efforts. he went right to sleep last night, which was great. and he slept for 5.25 hours (!!!!) before waking up at 2:30 a.m. when he woke up crying, i let him cry for 5 minutes before going in to soothe him. (the soothing barely works at all, by the way, but it's what i'm supposed to do ...) then i let him cry for 10 more minutes before going in to soothe him again. next on the agenda was a 15 minute stretch of crying - but he fell asleep after 8 minutes. so a sum total of 22 minutes of crying. not too bad for night two. i've heard night three can be the worst ... so we'll hold on to our hats tonight. mean...

my husband and i are on a gazelle-intense plan to pay off our consumer debt, so we've been pretty tight-fisted lately when it comes to our money. we recently got great news, though, about a huge promotion that my husband just received ... so we decided to take ourselves out to dinner on saturday night. nothing fancy, just a little treat to celebrate! we packed john up to head to pimanyoli's . we'd never been there, but their barbecue got rave reviews (well-justified, by the way. if you're in baton rouge and want some tasty meat, pay them a visit!) after a lovely dinner with a very well-behaved baby boy, we hauled our satiated selves back out to the car. a few steps away from our car, there is a baby sock laying in the middle of the parking lot with tire tread marks on it. "oh, look," i said in a pitying way, "some poor baby is sockless!" then my husband and i looked at each other. john is a pro sock remover. but surely - SURELY - i would have...

poor john has been sick all week. nothing too major, just that cough/cold combination that makes adults feel miserable - and i'm sure from his seven-month-old perspective it's even worse, since he doesn't even understand why he's so miserable. and i suppose he doesn't know if it will ever get better! he went to daycare on wednesday and did ok, but yesterday he was running a fever so they sent him home. (his first-ever fever, it's worth noting.) the great news is that i think that little bit of fever was what he needed to kick the cold - he was playful and energetic all evening, happy and not coughing and sniffling nearly as much. the bad news is, being sent home with a fever means he can't go back to daycare until monday. so today we're taking shifts - i'm here with john for the morning, and my husband works a half-day on friday so he'll be home with him while i run to work for the afternoon. this whole cold thing, by the way, has not helped ...

so i'm on vacation! ok not really. but i'm using paid time off (pto) to stay home with a sick baby boy, so i'm trying to make it sound more awesome. poor kiddo has been sick since thursday, tho he got much worse overnight last night. good news is, doc says he just has a virus and we can keep an eye on him and he'll be ok. bad news is, he's fussier than i've ever seen him, and so congested that he can hardly sleep or eat. poor wee man! on sunday, we left john with his auntie to have an adults-only afternoon at the couples wedding shower for some friends of ours. it was actually pretty great to to interact with other adults without a child on my hip - don't get me wrong, i love having him along at these types of events and he does great, but i'd sort of forgotten how nice it is to just have a glass of wine and chat with everyone else. of course, i then let john stay up way past his bedtime that night, so i could spend some time with him. i missed t...

i am not a singer. if you've sat behind me in church, you know this to be true. (and i'm sorry.) a musician, yes. a singer no. and yet i find myself singing to john almost nonstop. and the beauty is, he seems to actually like it! (there's no accounting for taste. he also thinks i'm the most beautiful woman in the world. i'm no ogre, but i'm certainly not winning any beauty contests outside of my son's brain!) and actually, i've written some lullabies for john that are pretty nice. and it made me think: did your parents sing to you? do you remember what they sang, and better yet, if you have kids, do you sing the same songs to them? reply in the comments!

that's how long i got to sleep uninterrupted last night, thank you baby john!! and after so many nights of sleepus interruptus, that was an incredible luxury. i actually had to wake john up later this morning after he'd gone back to sleep. and while he wasn't happy to wake up, soon i had this: come on mom, let's go for a run if you're so well-rested! it's too early to hope last night was any more than a fluke. but i'll take it!

scene: 7:15pm. driving home from the gym. inconsolable baby in the backseat, just out of reach, not being comforted by mom's attempts at singing. having an even tougher time because his tried-and-true-paci has been replaced by a "grown up" paci made for 3+ month old babies. a mere mortal might be reduced to tears. might turn the radio up as loud as it goes and hope to get home quickly. (and in fact, some days, i am that mere mortal.) tonight, fortunately, john's intrepid mom is no mere mortal. she thought, what better time to answer a friend's request for career advice? especially when said friend is in fact still at home on maternity leave with her not-quite-four-week-old baby? so over john's wails, i dialed, thinking he might still settle in and fall asleep. and as soon as she answered, i explained to my friend that if she was willing to ignore the screaming lad in the background, i'd be happy to talk to her about the career path she's crafting...

so there is a silly somewhat funny website called " dear blank please blank ." it includes short supposedly-pithy notes to random people or things, from random people or things. some of them are very funny. some of them are ... ehhhh. one of them today got me thinking. it goes like this: "dear mothers, when your child is 23 months old, it would be easier and less annoying to just say it's 2 years old. sincerely, regrets asking" aside from referring to the kid as "it" (come on - even if you don't like them you have to admit their human!) this raises an interesting point. yes, those months matter to ME, john's mom. and when he was just weeks old, those weeks mattered. but i can't imagine very many other people really care for that level of precision. and really, i think this is only one symptom of a my-child-centeredness that i'd like to avoid. does that sound silly, coming from a gal who blogs under the psuedonym of johnsmom? ...

gunter and john when john was born, he came home to an awesome big brother named gunter. gunter was a 100lb+ lab mutt we adopted from a rescue agency back in 2005 in arizona. his age was never definite, but he was somewhere around 10 when his baby brother came home from the hospital. gunter was a hale and hearty old man, though, with no health problems and plenty of energy, so we had visions of john learning to walk by pulling up on the puppy. every day when john and i came home from work and school, gunter would come lick john's face and john would giggle. unfortunately, back in early november, gunter fell suddenly drastically ill. he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, and eight days after he first got sick, we had to put him down. fortunately he didn't suffer much - in fact, he was in great spirits and did pretty well that week. he spent his last day on the planet laying in the backyard in the sun with his family. it was terrible to say goodbye to this furry membe...

it's like senior-itis. you remember, when you were *this close* to being done with high school (or college) and it was soooooooo hard to get motivated to do the things you knew you needed to do? so this blog entry is dedicated to friday-itis (and senior-itis) sufferers everywhere. i am blessed in so many ways. today, i'm specifically thinking about how i have a job that i truly enjoy doing, with people who i genuinely like. i don't wake up and have that dread of going to work - though i am familiar with that dread, having had it at other times in my life. so why, today, did i so badly not want to leave the house??? it may have had something to do with this muss-haired kookaburra: (just for reference, i just googled kookaburra to see what they look like. and they're muss-haired too! check out the one on the left - see the resemblance?) i digress. (i do that a lot.) (i also use too many parenthetical references.) john slept much better last night. one wake-up for ...

i am a firm believer in comeuppance. (/kə'məpəns/ noun: a punishment or fate someone deserves) maybe you call it karma? whatever it is, i'm getting mine. i've bragged on john's sleeping ability since he was born. he was never that baby who was up every hour. he slept great even at a few days old. starting out, he'd sleep 3-4 hours at a time. not too bad for a new baby. then he graduated to 5-6 hours. by three months old, he was only waking up once a night, at about 3:30 a.m., for a feeding and snuggle session. he's never really napped much, just a few minutes at a time, but at night - great! "not too shabby," i thought. "my kid is a sleeping pro," i said aloud. enter comeuppance. john has forgotten how to sleep. i don't know if he's going through a growth spurt, or finally working on those teeth his gums have been promising, or suffering from some of his man-sized gas in a wee little belly, but for some reason, he's up ...

so one of the blogs i follow is a lovely lady known to the internet as c. jane . she rocks my socks. and today she has a guest blogger, her neighbor janna. janna is a social worker who has worked with all kinds of eating disorders and body image issues, and her post is on body image, etc. it has triggered quite an interesting conversation in the "pieces of opinion" comment section. all my life but especially post-baby, body image is a major struggle for me (like most everyone, i think, when you get right down to it.) so whether you agree or disagree with janna, c. jane, or me, i think this is an awesome bit of conversation to hear and be a part of. go here to read c. jane's blog.

needless to say, after pumping three times a day in my office (or in a janitor's closet as the case may be!), that milk is a precious commodity. i've heard some moms refer to it as liquid gold, and i'll be honest with you here: it's not far from the truth. except it's gold that you extract from your own body every single day, so there's a certain extra attachment to it. so one bleary-eyed morning, running late as always, i was i transferring milk into john's bottles to send along to school that day. rushing, i got ahead of myself, and i knocked over a bottle. a full, five-ounce bottle of milk splattered everywhere in my kitchen. first of all, you have no idea how much surface area five ounces can cover. trust me, you're better off not trying this experiment at home. second of all, all i could do was stand transfixed in the puddle i'd created. i was soaked to the skin (thinking "i'm even later now, gotta go change clothes ..." and...

  he killed me with cute earlier so i repaid him by sucking his brains out. the hardest   part of mommying, by far, for me, is when i have to do something to john that i know is in his best interest, but that in his undeveloped worldview amounts to torturing him. it started when we went back into the hospital for his jaundice - getting his little heel pricked 2-3 times a day so they could check the bilirubin levels, while he screamed bloody murder ... we got a little used to it, eventually: fewer screams and more whimpers from him, fewer tears and more grimaces from me. and he's never liked having his nose cleaned out. can't imagine why - surely every newly sentient being should look forward to having a strange plastic bulb jacked into his unsuspecting nostril, and suction being applied to pull snot forcibly from his sinuses. that sounds like my idea of a day at the park, for sure. and it only gets worse. now that he has more control over his body, he bucks and kicks, he ...

i mean, i am on twitter. @JohnsMomWorks follow me if you like!

i am looking at a calendar in total shock right now, wondering: where on EARTH did 2010 go? oh, i know a good part of the answer. it went into the little man who's currently sitting on his daddy's lap enjoying the saints football game on tv. (cute moments abound!) but despite all i have to show for the last year, i still can't quite wrap my brain around the fact that a new year has begun. i don't really go in for new year's resolutions, but i am making one this year: don't be surprised by daycare holiday closures in 2011. it's sorta funny, because i try hard to plan ahead for all contingencies. and if you know my husband, you know he's the king of plan ahead (thank god). and i certainly value all the fine ladies at daycare that take such awesome care of my bug while i work - and i definitely think they deserve to spend the holiday season with their own families! so why did it not even cross my mind that maybe, just maybe, the daycare would be close...