Choosing A Name

I know it's a bit premature to talk about naming our child, but J and I have already made our decision. We believe heritage is important and we never want our child to forget where it come from. That's why we're going to name our kid Vagina.

Unless it's a boy, of course, in which case we'll name him Fallopian.

Save me! Please.

Oh Deer!

J and I came across this model room in the Restoration Hardware Baby and Child furniture catalogue. We had no idea it was fashionable to hang a buck's head on the wall of a baby nursery. A bunny rabbit's head...a pink elephant's head...even a clown's heads, sure. But a buck? Who knew?!?

 There's so much about parenting we still have to learn. 

Anybody want to watch Bambi?  

By the way, not sure why I started receiving the Baby and Child catalogue all of a sudden. Just in case it's because someone at RH is reading my blog, let me assure you, I totally accept free products for good reviews...wink, wink. 

CONGRATULATIONS!!

My friend and Mommy Mentor, Cara, welcomed a beautiful baby girl into the world yesterday! I'm so happy for her and her husband! I can't wait to meet her!

My Feelings About Sleep Training

Even though I don’t have a baby yet, I am 100% planning on sleep-training when the time comes. For those of you who haven’t learned about sleeptraining through the Facebook status updates of friends with newborns, allow me to explain: sleep training means giving a baby a chance to figure out how to self-soothe and fall back to sleep on his own, without mom or dad rushing in to comfort him at the slightest sound of a cry or whimper.

It makes sense to me that we should learn this valuable skill as babies, because I am a thirty-three year old adult whom is desperately in need of sleep training. Once I wake up in the middle of the night, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to fall back to sleep. My thoughts and worries spiral out of control and I lay awake for two, three or four hours at a time, flailing around in my crib and sucking my thumb.

I don't know if my current insomniac issues are related to the fact that I wasn't sleep trained back in the day, but since I would like to blame someone, I might as well blame my mother.  If only she hadn't been so concerned for my well being.


So, my baby will definitely be sleep trained. As for me, I'm ready for a bottle:

Ambien: Sleep Training For Adults

In Over My Head

I visited my friend, SJ, yesterday. I haven’t seen her or her husband since my wedding a year ago, and since then, she has given birth to a second daughter who is already 3-months old somehow. I wanted to meet her and catch up with my friend. I also secretly hoped I would leave their home feeling inspired and excited about starting our own bustling family.

Instead I drove away with an amalgamated feeling of uncertainty and trepidation. The entire time I was there, SJ had that dazed-mother look on her face. You know the look. It’s the look parents unconsciously assume when they are just trying to survive the chaos and unharnessed energy that surrounds them. They are talking to you and responding to their children, but in the back of their mind they’re thinking, “I would kill for a martini right now.” I’m pretty sure I had that look on my face, too by the time I left. The difference is that I was able to come home and actually have a martini. Or two.

Don’t get me wrong, their house is lovely, her husband is wonderful and her kids are amazing! They are beyond adorable and very well-behaved. The two year old is quite bright and her spirit is infectious (much like her mother’s), and the baby hardly fussed at all. At least she surpassed my expectations of how a three-month old should behave. 

Nevertheless, both kids need to be fed multiple times a day, everyday, and bathed and dressed and entertained and coddled and soothed and it’s constant and there’s never a moment’s rest and I’m really not sure I can do it--at least not without losing my mind or having a major mommy meltdown.

Maybe it was the fact that I had stumbled into a two-kids-under-two household environment. Maybe I should play it safe for now and only visit friends with one child…learn to swim in the shallow end before diving into waters that are well over my head.

The good news is: I was pretty good with the kids. I kept up with the toddler’s TADD (Toy Attention Deficit Disorder).  And, I actually managed to keep the baby from crying by holding her and bouncing her, and I received a wonderful arm workout to boot. At least I can look forward to having nice biceps again someday.

After lunch, the two-year year old announced that she had to poop. Her mother led her to the bathroom where she sat on her miniature pink toilette for fifteen minutes and exclaimed every time she successfully squeezed a doodie into the bowl. I haven’t seen someone take that much pride in their poo since a guy in my freshman dorm left an enormous floater in the bowl for all to appreciate. It was quite moving actually.

Meanwhile, I was shuffling around the living room trying to burp the baby, when all of a sudden, she upped this enormous milky white gob of spittle. It oozed out of her tiny baby lips leaving a snail's-trail of saliva its wake and poured onto the towel protecting my shoulder. A delicate whiff of the partially digested milky substance entered my nostrils and it happened: I gagged. I gagged a few times, actually. Tears filled my eyes and I had to put the baby in her rocker before my spasms caused me to drop her. All I could think about was the fact that this liquid had recently been in my friend breasts, passed through her nipples, traveled down the baby’s throat into her nascent stomach before retracing half its journey and finally settling on my left shoulder.

Fortunately there was no one around to witnesses my embarrassingly weak reflexes, as both mother and sister were appropriately distracted in the nearby bathroom.

How humiliating. My friend Debbie swears this won’t happen with my own child. I'm hoping she's assuring me that my baby won’t burp or spittle or slobber or drool or any of these disgusting things that other uncivilized babies do, but somehow I don’t think that’s what she meant.  

The Plural of Rice is Rice

I went to the supermarket yesterday in an attempt to be a good wife and come up with some meals to feed my husband and me for a week. Does anybody else become so overwhelmed by the endless array of food options in supermarkets these days that eventually they look around, shrug their shoulders, say "there's nothing to eat here" and leave? Cause that's what I do. I was trying to find something I could serve with chicken breasts so I stepped into the rice aisle...after running back and forth the entire length of the store three times trying to find the rice aisle. There were 3,000 different types of rice! Jasmine rice, Basmati rice, saffron rice, cajun rice, long grain rice, short grain rice, black rice, brown rice, white rice, rice-a-roni, rice krispies...holy crap! I'd pick up one box, stare at it for a moment, put it back. Pick up another box, stare at it, put it back. I tried to evaluate the photographed of rice pictured on the front of each package, but I couldn't focus on anything, like I had developed some sort of adult-onset rice autism. I stood there for three more minutes hoping one of the boxes would fly off the shelf and into the cart because I could not make a decision to save my life. 


Finally I walked over to the salad bar, and filled up a plastic container with pasta salad. Done. 


By the way, isn't pasta salad a fancy way of saying cold pasta? 

Screw you, rice.

I'm bored. Let's have a baby.

When J and I were in Chicago last week, we had the entire Saturday morning before the wedding free to explore the city.  There we were in the middle of a major metropolitan area, with cultural attractions like aquariums, museums, and giant shopping malls. And what did we end up doing? Well, after walking about a block from our hotel to Millenium Park to see "The Bean," we pretty much went back to our room and watched television for the rest of the day.

"The Bean" in Chicago. Do you see us? 

Pathetic, I know. But in our defense, it wasn't the first time either of us had been to Chicago. J lived in the city for two years after college and I'd been there a few times with my girl friends. Both of us had this general feeling of "been there, done that." Being a tourist felt like it wasn't worth the money, dealing with the mid-day heat, or having to battle all those other damn tourists.

As we were lying on our bed watching television, a thought occurred to me: "We're bored. We should have a baby."

Counteracting boredom seems like the best reason yet to have a child. All these amazing things that we've been lucky enough to experience in life that now seem blasé because we're incredibly spoiled will suddenly be exciting again when seen through the wide-eyed wonder of a new human being. Creating offspring is the perfect antidote to our jaded mid-thirties malaise. What could possibly go wrong with this plan?

Then, just as we were admonishing ourselves for not being more motivated, we happened to look out our hotel window into the high-rise condominium building across the street to see this:

Procreation. Doggie style. 

Free porn!


And suddenly, we weren't bored anymore... 

A Peek Inside My Mind at 4 AM

At 4 AM last night, I woke up with the following image in my mind: a polluted, overpopulated, third world slum.

What? This doesn't happen to you?

Let me explain. I suffer from anxiety attacks in the middle of the night. They usually keep me awake for a couple of hours, although this past year there have been a few instances when I wasn't able to fall back to sleep at all. The subject of the anxiety changes. It can be anything from hyperventilating over a cell phone bill that I have yet to pay, to worrying about when the Big One is going to hit Los Angeles. (Which reminds me: I need pay my cell phone bill and organize our earthquake kit...)

The closer we get to bringing a child into this world, however, the more I've been waking up with images of our troubled environment burning in my brain: polar bears stranded on diminishing chunks of ice in the Arctic, islands of garbage bobbing up and down in our oceans, loggers slicing down giant trees in the Amazon. (Cue Earth Song by Michael Jackson).


I'm really worried about our planet. This concern began in the sixth grade, when my teacher, Mrs. Station, made us watch videos about farmland drying up due to lack of fresh water, the perils of overpopulation, landfills filled to capacity with plastic bottles that won't decompose for thousands of years, and the effects of global warming. This was way back in the late 80's (no need for specific dates here!). Needless to say, these lessons had quite an effect on me, and they're all coming back to haunt me as I wonder what kind of planet my child is going to inherit?

Sure I worry about other things too, like terrorism, the economy and the inexplicable appeal of Justin Bieber. But humans have survived wars, depressions, and bad boy bands in the past. What's happening to our environment is unprecedented.

At 4 in the morning, these concerns are powerful enough to make me question whether or not I should even bring a child into this world. But recently, they've also begun to inspire me to take a closer look at myself. Sure I recycle obsessively, run around the house turning lights off when nobody is in the room, and bring my own bags to the grocery store.

But what else could I be doing to help this cause?


 

 Frightening images of our changing planet: polar bear clinging to iceberg and Justin Bieber's hair. 

ObGyN da house

I went to my fabulous ObGyn, Dr. Tristan Bickman yesterday. Everything was just as I suspected: chemical pregnancy... very common... good sign overall because apparently it proves that J's sperm thinks my egg is hot, even if it wasn't the right match this time. An ultrasound showed that my uterus looks honky dory. As far as procreation is concerned, we are cleared for take off!

Sitting in the waiting room turned out to be an interesting experience, however. Back when I visited the Gynnie as a single gal, I would walk to the magazine rack on the wall in search of a nice InStyle or Elle to peruse while waiting for my AVI (Annual Vagina Inspection). Inevitably, the only reading material I'd be able to locate were publications aimed at parents. I knew they were aimed at parents and not single girls because they had cryptic titles like Parenting.

It became the thing I most dreaded about visiting the office. Not the stirrups. Not the clamps. The magazine rack: one giant reminder of the fact that I had yet to find someone I wanted to have a second date with, much less a baby. And now, to make matters worse, I had nothing to read. So I would look around the room at the soon-to-be moms and resent them for having moved on to this stage in life so effortlessly. What did they know that I didn't? That rack taunted me with a sense of guilt and inferiority; it might as well have been my mother hanging on the wall.

All I wanted was a cheesy fashion magazine to provide me with tips about what I should wear on a first date. This type of subscription seemed like it would be a valuable investment for the office. After all, the sooner I met a man and got married, the sooner I'd return, belly full o'fetus to give my lady-parts doctor more business. Until then, Family Circle just wasn't going to cut it.

But yesterday, I saw the plethora of proud pregnant women showing off growing baby bumps, and new mothers trying to soothe fussy infants on their laps, with a fresh perspective -- a mix of awe and wonder infused with healthy doses of envy and excitement. Knowing I was now in a position to join their ranks helped me relish an impulse I wasn't sure I would ever be able to embrace: my maternal instinct.

I stood up, strode with newfound confidence toward the rack on the wall, and, for the first time ever, reached my hand out without shame or hesitation, to pick up a magazine that was now pertinent and vital to my life:

The latest issue of People. 

False Alarm

We just returned home after being in Chicago for a week visiting my brother in-law's family and attending a friend's wedding. Lots to talk about, starting with the fact that the morning we flew out of LA, we were pretty damn certain we were pregnant. You would be too if you woke up and saw this:

Note the second, subtle pink line!

So, remember how I said we were going to wait until July to start officially trying to have a baby? Well, that's still true...with two itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny exceptions. Our duo of adult-frolicking-sans-protection sessions happened sometime in mid- to late-May. In early June, I experienced a day full of strange cramping and subtle pressures followed by spotting. Thinking I was getting my period, I ran out to buy a box of tampons, but lo and behold, the bleeding stopped. We took one test and it told us we were not pregnant.

However, when Aunt Flo still hadn't arrived by the morning of our departure, I took a second test and boom! There it was: the second pink line!

Now, during my bachelorette years, I had my share of hypochondriac mornings when I mistook an extreme bout of gas for an unwanted pregnancy and would run out to buy a little stick to pee on. Fortunately for all parties involved, never once did I see even a hint of the second line. Never! So when the faded indication of fertilization appeared that morning, I was pretty convinced we were with child. Even more so when a second stick confirmed the result.

My reaction was stunned excitement tinged with disbelief and a need to call my OBGYN and set up an appointment for further confirmation. J's reaction can best be described as shock and awe. He had this big goofy grin on his face, a hint of terror behind his eyes, and every few minutes, he'd stop packing his suitcase, walk over and hug me. It was quite adorable, really.

I threw the baby book my friend, CM, gave me into my carry-on bag for a little light reading on the plane and packed a few snacks that I deemed to be preggy-friendly. Right away, life seemed to change and my mind flooded with questions. Should I drink my morning cup of black tea if it contains caffeine? Was the raw honey I added to combat my allergies safe to consume now? Could this be the reason the dress I was planning on wearing to the wedding felt tight when I tried it on? It must be! It couldn't have anything to do with the milkshake and hamburger I had for dinner the night before. Nah. Definitely the baby's fault.

The poor girl sitting beside us on the airplane must have been ready to throw-up from our nauseating display of affection. We were all kissy-kissy and cuddly-wuddly. We'd have moments where we'd just turn to each other and exclaim how we couldn't believe this was happening, and wonder if we should tell his brother or keep it a secret, and how everyone would probably figure something was up since I wouldn't be drinking at the wedding. Or at dinner. Or at brunch. Or in the garage hiding behind the car.

We decided to take one more test the next morning to confirm. And just like that, the second pink line was gone. Nowhere to be found. Poof. No more baby. The following morning, I got my period. And that was that.

I'm going to the OBGYN tomorrow to see if I can figure out what happened. I'm not worried in the least. My guess is it was a chemical pregnancy. Totally normal, totally fine. Overall, I found the whole crazy parents-for-a-day experience to be a good adventure. First, it let us know that we are probably, on some level, fertile considering we only "tried" three times and one of these attempts resulted in some sort of babymaking-related occurrence.

Second, it let me know that we are both ready.  Sure, I was scared, overwhelmed, and panicked. But genuine excitement was the primary emotion I felt when I found out I might be pregnant. And for J, I think the idea that he was going to be a dad was a sobering and invigorating realization. Sort of like driving a car into a brick wall then going out for ice cream.

The second pink line might have been a false alarm, but it was a positive sign for things to come!

Age Discrimination

I am too young to have a baby. I am immature and selfish. I hate picking my clothes up off the floor. I don't know how to make a bed so that it resembles the fancy beds in the department stores that incorporate fluffy pillows and frilly duvets. I dread dealing with adult issues like savings accounts and insurance. I never balance my checkbooks and I don't have a good system in place for dealing with the extra change that falls to the bottom of my purse. My linen closet is abysmal. I always thought by the time I was ready to become a mother, I'd be able to maintain a neatly organized linen closet, with perfectly aligned rows of bath towels, all of which would face the same direction and stand in straight piles like soldiers. Instead, my towels lean like Pisa until they eventually fall over at which point I end up just cramming them into whatever space is available. I still can't fold a fitted sheet to save my life. I chew my tooth brush. I don't know why they call eggs "over easy." Flipping eggs over without breaking the yolk is anything but easy for me. I don't buy clothes that require ironing. I still believe a peanut butter and jelly sandwich counts as a nutritious dinner and/or breakfast. We don't own a house. I take every opportunity I can to swing on swing sets, and I will kick children off the playground if necessary to do this. I enjoy doing somersaults in swimming pools and occasionally pretend I'm a dolphin, though I won't admit that to anybody. I can't figure out how to earn a living doing what I love. I pick my lips even though I know I shouldn't cause it looks bad. I still don't stand up straight like my mother tells me to do. I don't garden. I believe there are monsters under my bed and keep my favorite stuffed animal in my closet "just in case." I prefer to evade responsibility whenever possible and procrastination is fine by me.

Which brings me to my next problem: I am way too old to have a baby. I'm set in my ways. I'm grumpy if I don't get enough sleep at night, and when I do sleep, I put cotton in my ears so sounds don't wake me up, which probably won't bode well for hearing a crying infant. I am used to being able to do what I like when I'd like to and I like it that way. I get curmudgeonly when children cry on airplanes. I think things were way better when I was growing up including music, movies, and the school system. I don't understand "kids these days." Muscle aches are becoming more and more common, especially the day after I do any physical activity that I had previously not done in a while, such as playing tennis or vacuuming. I nag my husband. Garlic Broccoli Pickles  Eating gives me gas.  If I eat too late at night, the gas is even worse. When my husband asks me if I want to take some "X," he's talking about Gas-Ex.  I like going on romantic getaways. I like luxury. I depend on naps to get me through the day. I'm inclined toward laziness. I like spending money on myself. I am way too aware of how much sacrifice having a baby is going to require. I wish I were young and stupid. That's how old I am.