Boys, Boys, Boys

My son is different from my daughter in every way imaginable. The two kids have exactly two things in common:

1 - Neither one has any idea what the word "shy" means or what purpose such an attribute might serve.

2 - They both obsess over shoes. I've discussed Natalie's fetishes before. Isaac is almost worse. The first thing he does in the morning is get his shoes and bring them to me, saying "toos! toos!" and trying to hold out a foot. Then he goes and finds a pair that belongs to someone else and tries to put them on, too. Once we ventured down a shoe isle at Wal-Mart, and the little guy was so excited there were tears.

The boy child never stops moving. He climbs on things only to jump off, and he goes down the stairs just to go back up them. He throws things just to make them hit the ground, and he takes things apart just to see the insides out. He loves his kitty ("ki-kee,") but somehow the kitty does not recognize all-out-mounting a show of affection.

The boy child falls asleep in the middle of the floor on his belly. He just keeps running at full speed until he crashes. He enjoys his bath until he realizes you want to wash him. He waves at every car that passes when we walk through a parking lot, but it is rare for him to wave at a person no matter how much that person waves at him.

The boy child does not speak in any language the average observer could understand - he is much too busy figuring out how everything else works to worry about his own body. It takes him exactly one time observing someone "working" something for him to figure out how to do it himself. This goes for making things vanish into the diaper champ, undoing various baby-proofing tools, and disassembling all manner of things that should not be disassembled by a baby.

The boy child gives his mama his best snot-nose kisses and wants nothing to do with daddy at bedtime. He is very careful to make sure mama is hand-fed several goldfish and some cheese each day. He always makes sure mama is wearing her best "toos" and always makes her melt when he points at her face and whispers "pitty" (pretty.)

Yes, I'm glad that this boy child has come into my life, although he has changed it so dramatically.

My daughter is also thankful for the boys in her life these days. Yesterday, walking out of the doctor's office:

Nat: Mama, there is a handsome boy behind us.

Mama: (gaping, speechless mouth)

Nat: Isaac's doctor is a little handsome, too.

Mama: uh-huh. (still kind of gapey)

Nat: Mama, when I am as old as a princess, I'm going to start looking for a husband.

A Year in Review

I’ve read that there is this blogging tradition of going back over your year at New Years’ time and linking to all the big stories of the year. Since I didn’t blog most of this year, I guess you will be saved a bunch of links to stories you probably skimmed the first time while I catch up on my need to share life.

So here it is: Mama’s 2008

January: Mama adjusted to life with a new baby and toddler. Breastfeeding did not go as well this time around and Mama turned into a one-woman dairy farm, and my firstborn got glasses.

Mama reluctantly decided in favor of an IUD. Let me just say this: If taking The Pill makes you an insane, raging lunatic to the point that your husband would rather face the prospect of never having sex again than share the unstable air that surrounds your hormone-ravaged self, ignore your doctor when he tells you that the level of hormones in an IUD is so much lower that “You’ll be fine.” You won’t be fine. You will find yourself locked in your bathroom to avoid screaming at your already terrified children while you beg the nurse on the phone to GET THIS THING OUT OF MY BODY. NOW. I can has Prozac?

February: After removal of the Foreign Offender, and some chemical assistance from a very remorseful obstetrician, the clouds began to part and I finally began the process of bonding with my precious baby. I can has The Love!

March: Mama went back to work. Mama also grew giant asparagus. I can has giant bowl of hollandaise?

April: Mama began a long, slow march back into the depths of depression. I still don’t know if this is about hormones, loss, or something else, but yeah, I’m going to go ahead and use the D word. I can has no jokes about this one, people.

May: Mama started a new blog, but it turns out that I wasn’t any more consistent over there than I am here.

June-July-August: We learned that Isaac had had what the doctor later called a “neurological reaction” to the DtAP vaccine, or at least to the “P” part. Mama and family made the tough decision to discontinue the Pertussis series, and we continue to learn what that means for us and for him. Hubby had a birthday, which will be recorded in history as The Birthday in Which the Wii Changed Our Lives. Mostly, we enjoyed the Galveston beaches and the summer.

September: Hurricane Ike left both our home and my parents cabin on the beach (The West End, for locals and compulsive news-watchers) miraculously untouched. We even had our power back on in a matter of hours, most likely because we live on the same grid as a major hospital. Unfortunately, the cold front that blew in the next night proved to be the straw that broke our municipal sewer system's back, and we woke up to several inches of water in our house. I can has a new wet-vac?

October: God is just good, people. Despite having 18” of drywall cut from the bottom of every wall in our house and losing all our downstairs flooring, the whole flood thing really brought mostly blessings into our home. We got a new front door out of deal, and we realized that we can count on our friends and family more that we could have imagined.

November: Did I leave out the part where Isaac stopped sleeping at night and stopped gaining weight around six months ago? As it turns out, my 75th Percentile Preemie hit twenty pounds at six months old and didn’t gain more than a couple of ounces by his first birthday. Between not wanting to eat anything that wasn’t served a-la-boob and raging ear infections that kept him on diarrhea-inducing antibiotics for most of the second half of his life thus far, no one was totally shocked. But we were concerned all the same. We decided to get tubes put in his ears, but the we missed the first scheduled surgery because he had The Croup. I can has Amoxicillin?

December: Isaac got the tubes in. The doctor told us he was in the Top Ten of all the babies he’s ever “tubed,” meaning there was more gunk in there than anyone had realized…and within 2 weeks he has another ear infection and has actually started sleeping less. So we’ve come full-circle and here I am back at the blog. I can has naptime? PLEEEZ?

New Year’s Resolution: Sleep more, feel better, enjoy my kids – I think it has to be in that order, but I’ll take it how I can get it.

Things are Good

Things are good. I wish I could write more, and I wish I could blame the lack of writing on the holidays or the newborn. The truth is that I am having trouble reconciling the way I feel with the way things are. I feel like I've been through some trauma and I'm not quite done with it yet, but the only traces of anything bad are the almost-healed IV spots on my arms and the hospital bills. Isaac is up to 9 lbs. and eating like a pro. Natalie is loving her new baby brother. We had a great holiday- It was the Christmas in which we learned that the "Mega" in the Dora Mega Tent is not a figure of speach.

When I try to go any deeper than that, what I say all seems overly sugar coated or so far in the opposite direction that it misses the part where we had a happy ending. I'm workng on writing Isaac's birth story in hope of sorting through it all, and in the meantime I suspect this blog will be limited to cute pictures and links. So enjoy the pictures, make a new year's resolution you have no intention of keeping, and pour yourself an extra glass of whatever you are drinking at midnight tonight for me.

Homecoming- Wordless Wednesday

Because I just don't know what to say...

Five Things...

…I wish I knew then, or that I didn’t know now…

1 - It’s a good idea to ask your pediatrician (while you are pregnant) what level of NICU babies he or she will see, and who she defers to for the higher levels. Then it’s a good idea to find out about/meet that person so you don’t end up with a doctor that you CAN’T STAND.

2- The pediatric community has a love/hate relationship with breastfeeding. They all agree it’s best, but if they can’t weigh, measure and quantify it, they don’t know what to do.

3- Every nurse has a different idea about how everything should be done with a baby. My hospital has 12 hour shifts, and the nurses work 2 or 3 a week. That means there are 5-7 different nurses every week, assuming that the same nurses take your baby each time they are on duty - which they don’t.

4 - It’s important to ask the nurses to do what you want. There are many things they can and will do upon request, but they won’t always offer. Sometimes it is because they just don’t want to do it, but usually it’s because this is every day them and they forget that it’s new to you and you might not know how everything is supposed to work.

5 - 65 mL looks like a whole lot of milk, but it is possible for a 7 lb baby to suck it down in 15 minutes - when he is ready to do it.

*Also, I added “pumping milk while going through a drive-thru” to my list of lactation experiences today. I was totally covered up, but the attendant did look a little surprised at the blanket piled up in my lap. Still, this is Houston and it was under 60 degrees today, so I’m sure she just assumed that my heater was broken.

Baby Updates - 6 Weeks to Go

I went to the doc today and got all checked out. My feet are officially too puffy for any normal work-type shoes, but thank goodness for crocs. Especially these, which I am in love with. They are like puffy clouds for my feet to travel around in. Natalie even has a pair to match. My doctor thought it was downright hilarious that I was wearing the same shoes as him, although his were the regular not fuzzy kind. So…I am as easily distractible in print as I am in real life. What the heck was I trying to say here? Diastolic blood pressure was higher than it has been but still in the range of normal, and everything else was on track. They hooked me up to the maternal-fetal monitor for a mini-NST in the office, and baby was cooperative, kicking all over the place so they could get a good reading. Again, everything looks good. We are still on track for a Dec 31 delivery. My doctor scheduled his vacation for the 21-26, so he will be back in time for my day.