Mama Eats, Baby Eats

Recently I got to enjoy a rariety: a lunch at home with my family. I'm a working mama, so my lunches are spent at work with office mates or on a bad day, at my desk while typing notes. While I used to do extensive meal planning, these days I'm eating pretty healthy and when I'm eating healthy, I tend to eat the same meals over and over again. I keep it simple- lots of chicken and fish, fruits and vegetables. This day, decided to change it up just a bit (hint- this mama is totally a creature of habit).

Here's what's on the menu:

Hamburger made with 97% lean ground beef. I added some feta cheese and some random spices. Used a whole grain tortilla as a "bun" to cut out some extra empty calories. 

Sauteed mushrooms and asparagus. After cooking the hamburger in a cast iron skillet, I added the veggies and then sprinkled some Parmesan on top while they were still hot (can you tell I'm a cheese addict?). Threw in some strawberries and lunch was served!

Mama's plate

Babies' plate

We're working on using utensils!

The "Stuff I Swore I Would Never Do" Files

In the fourteen months since Cash was born, I've learned that being a mama means that you are wrong. A lot. And that's alright. Cash has taught this former teacher that you can read all the parenting books and talk to all the doctors you want, but he's gonna set the course and you will follow as best you can. The hubs describes parenting as a hurricane- you know it's coming and can prepare all you want, but you never really know the impact it's gonna have until it actually happens.

So I bring you some selections the "Stuff I Swore I Would Never Do" files:

1. Have a C-Section (it was even scheduled!). I started out my pregnancy at a free standing birthing center. I planned on a natural childbirth with as little intervention as possible. Oh, and I was totally one of those, "women have been doing it for years..it's the most natural thing in the world..." annoying types of women. And I was worse, because I hadn't *actually* given birth yet. Meaning, I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. Then my birthing center screwed up royally and missed cues that my health was deteriorating. And in the middle of my second trimester, I became high risk and transferred to a hospital for care. Because of my health problems, I ended up having a scheduled c-section, an idea that would have horrified me just a few months earlier. It was the best decision I could have made. I learned just how quickly things go from awesome to really, really wrong and it made me thankful I was in a hospital so I could be cared for. Now I realize I don't really give a shit how Cash made it into the world, I'm just blessed that he is here.

After C-Section Bliss

2. Let my Kids Watch TV. When I was pregnant, I said I didn't want my kids to watch TV. To be honest, I'm not really that into TV and didn't even had one until the hubs moved in with me (living in a TV free house without football and Monday Night Wrestling was just not going to work for him). Now I watch occasionally, but I could take it or leave it. Sad to admit, but when I do watch TV, I watch terrible TV. Think Jersey Shore and anything with a Kardashian in it. Even after Cash was here, I argued with the hubs about it. I didn't want the TV on when Cash was around. And then we were introduced to the wonder that is Yo Gabba Gabba. I don't know what homeless writer on an acid trip created this show, but God bless him. Cash is like an addict when it comes on. His eyes light up, he smiles really big and is just transfixed. If he could talk, I'm pretty sure he would ask if DJ Lance Rock could be his Daddy. So now add it to the reasons why I'm a terrible mom. Because I will totally turn that sucker on so I can get some stuff done around the house. Or just fuck around on TMZ.com for a minute.

Yo Gabba Gabba is on, Mom! Leave me alone!

3. Bed Share. Although I live in a very attachment parenting friendly community, that's not my style. I had zero interest in cloth diapering, wearing my baby was a giant pain in the ass and I swore I didn't want babies sleeping in my bed. Then I had my third straight night of zero sleep after we brought you home from the hospital. I was breastfeeding at the time and was tired of getting up every two hours to feed him, so I stuck him in bed with me. And the strangest thing happened....he slept. He slept great. And so did I. The husband, not so much. Some nights he stayed in bed with us, some nights he hit couch city. But Mama was getting sleep, which meant Mama was happy, which meant the hubs was happy. And if the hubs hadn't put his foot down to get Cash in his crib last month, he'd still be in bed with me.

Looking pretty comfy sleeping next to Daddy in our bed.

And those are just a few! Let's not forget letting Cash CIO and eat junk food!


 




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This week's Toddle Along Tuesday topic is things you never thought you'd do! Did you ever say "I'll never do this or that..." before you had kids? Or are there things about being a parent that have totally surprised you? There are no rules here, except that you link up a relevant post (old or new) rather than your whole blog.

Talkin Bout My Mama!

This is my mother with Cash, when he was about 6 months old. I don't have that many pictures of my mother, because she tends to slap the camera away while saying something like, "get that freaking (she usually says the real deal here, folks) camera outta my face!". But when it comes to Cash, she will do anything, so I manage to snap away without too much protest.

My mom isn't like other grandmas. She doesn't do needlepoint, she doesn't bake cookies and loves to chill out on the couch watching RuPaul's Drag University. She loves Cash more than anything on the planet and one of my greatest joys in life is watching my mother with my son.

My mom has taught me to be brave, even when I don't feel it. To be strong always. That family means everything and to give all of yourself to your family. That life is short and you should find happiness where you can and hold on to it. To find something you love to do and work hard every day at it.

My son taught me to be strong. To have patience. That life is beautiful and only as hard as you make it. To let go and let God. To take time to stare at the sky, build a tower of blocks and dance when the music hits.

So happy Mother's Day to my son, who honored me by choosing me to be his mama. To my mother, who has always been there for me. And to my husband, for being an awesome father to my son, which helps me to be the best mama I can be. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got breakfast in bed to eat!

(Almost) Fourteenth Month Update

Stats:
Earlier this week you had your first doctor appointment since you got sick all the way back in January. Because of the move and insurance changes, we were a bit late for your twelve month appointment. You are 31 and 3/4 inches (big growth spurt!) and around 26 pounds. You are in the 75% for both height and weight and the umm....97% for your head size (your Grandpa would say you have a lot of brains!).

Teeth:
A mouthful! Two on the top front and four on the bottom front. You have molars that have popped through in the back on both the top and bottom. You are really getting a lot of teeth all at once right now and your finger is always stuffed to the back of your cute little mouth. So much that you make yourself gag multiple times per day.

Movement:
You started walking a little bit before you turned one year old and you haven't stopped since. Now you tend to break out into a run whenever given the space and opportunity. I'm glad I have video of you crawling because that period is pretty much over. Now we're working on holding your hand and helping you to cross stairs.

Off and running at the park.

Feeding:
The doctor asked at this week's appointment if you ate baby food and I must have looked at her like she was from Mars. You haven't eaten baby food in so long now. You pretty much eat what Mama and Daddy eat and so far haven't really turned your nose up at anything. Your favorites are yogurt and cheesesticks and bananas. I make blueberry pancakes every weekend, which you love. You also love chomping on frozen fruit. You still get two bottles of warm milk a day- one at night before bed and one first thing in the morning. Your Daddy (who doesn't have the Mama touch) tends to bring you cold milk in a sippy cup first thing in the morning, which you promptly grab and throw across the room until Mama brings you the good stuff. Next up we'll start trying to let you drink from a cup and have you use a spoon yourself. Messy goodness!

You discover the wonder of chocolate milk.

Talking:
You chatter up a storm! You get that from your mother....You say Mama and Dada and BaBa and Bye. We're working on hi, but you just stare blankly at me. I hate to tell you this, but we've sort of got you like a trained monkey. When I yell touchdown, you throw your little arms way high in the air. We also taught you to stick out your tongue and to high five.

Sleep:
Since we moved to Nashville almost two months ago, you have been back in the bed with your Mama and Daddy. You are sleeping through the night, though. You go to sleep around 8 and then will wake up for a bottle at 6.30 and will go back to bed. Last night was the first night we really made you sleep in your crib. It was a long hard night, but we made it and hopefully it will get better and better. 

You look pretty comfortable in our bed, huh?

 Likes:   
* Yo Gabba Gabba still reigns supreme in this house. TV you don't really pay attention to (yeah!) but you've started paying more attention when cartoons are on (you were transfixed by Toy Story this morning) and you love music. The other day we turned on the music, you stopped playing with your toy, dropped your sippy cup and started to dance.


* You love being around other kids. At the library the other day you had so much fun running and playing with the bigger kids.



* Your lawnmower toy and your Mickey Mouse train toy from your Aunt Lisa and cousin Katie. It makes a bunch of noise and you like to push the buttons to make the music come on and then you dance. You also like pushing it all around the living room and if Buster isn't paying attention, you try to smash it into him.

* Going on rides in your little red wagon, a birthday present from your Grandma and Grandpa. It has a cup holder for your sippy cup and snacks and we put your Brobee doll in the other seat.

Dislikes:
*Being held when you are out and about. You want to be off and running.

* Having your hair washed in the bathtub and in general, you aren't crazy about tub time. Your Mama loves the water and hopes you like swimming. We bought you a new swim suit and want to get you in the pool soon.

Adventures we've been on lately:
We moved to Nashville less than two months ago, so we've had a fun new city to explore. We go to the library a lot and also spend a lot of time at the park. So far we've had one playdate where we went to the Opryland Hotel (I took you and your Daddy back there a week later) and you had a great time. We tend to go, go, go on weekends to explore our new town.

Spent an afternoon at the main library downtown. Hoping to get there for storytime soon.

One of our first weekends here. We played around downtown and found out you really can rock a cowboy hat.

The Nashville Zoo. Much like our experience at the Kansas City Zoo, you mostly like watching the other kids and didn't pay too much attention to the animals.

More Shit I Swore I Wouldn't Do: The CIO Files

Chalk another one up for the bad mama files. Along with letting Cash watch TV, and letting him eat junk food, I've now done CIO- something I swore I would never do. Although we did bed share for the first eight months, for a blissful four months after that, Cash slept just fine in his crib. Then we moved. Too much change combined with him entering his clingy to Mama phase (a phase I not so secretly love) add in some major teething and all that equals us not being able to pry him out of our bed to save our lives. I'll freely admit it: I loved it. I love bed sharing and wasn't really ready to transition him back into his crib. The problem? The hubs HATES bed sharing. My marriage centered family was going to crap and I knew I needed to change it, even if I wasn't ready.

So I Googled. I talked to anyone with a kid. I flipped through some really bad books. I called Cash's doctor. Then I called his old doctor back in Lawrence (I'm just a little bit neurotic). And after everything, I came to the same conclusion. It was time to try CIO. When I transitioned him from our bed to the crib originally, he was 8 months old and I did sleep training with him. I taught him to fall asleep by himself, then began the transition from our bed to his crib. I got up with him forty times a night to soothe him, put the nook back in, get him a bottle, etc. But he's almost 14 months old now. Nothing I read about sleep training referenced a child as old as Cash. And all the advice I saw that was anti-CIO didn't actually offer any help other than to let him sleep in our bed and he'll let us know when he's ready. Which wasn't going to work for us.

I made up my mind that we were going to do it tonight and had our plan. We did our bedtime routine. He got a bath and some milk and Mama rocked him for a bit and sang Cee Lo Green to him. Snuggled him good and told him that it was time to sleep and he needed to sleep in his own bed. Cash fussed throughout the whole bedtime routine because he knew something was up. Stuck him in his crib and before I could even leave the room he started to scream.

Seriously. Look at that face. Sir Baby Rage a Lot in action.

And we let him scream. I kept myself busy with super awesome chores like cleaning the cat litter and bathroom while the hubs checked on him every 15 minutes. It's now an hour and a half later and he's no longer screaming, but not yet asleep. He's up there sitting up in his crib while I'm down here, waiting. Waiting for him to fall asleep. Waiting for it to settle in with him that the crib isn't so bad and that it will be okay. Waiting to feel better about listening to my son scream for an hour. Waiting to see how the rest of the night goes.

The Big Head Files or Why I Shouldn't Google

What is it about taking your kid to the doctor that makes you feel like a terrible parent? Am I alone in this? I can remember when he was around 4 months old taking him to the pediatrician. We were meeting with the nurse and I'm not sure if I was already in a bad mood,  but everything she was asking me was just pissing me off left and right. She scribbled away in her little file, asking me question after question and then getting irritated when I didn't know the answer immediately. When she asked me "approximately" how many wet diapers he had per day, I about lost it. Who the hell knows that kind of information. I told her "enough", but that wasn't the answer she was looking for, so she pushed me and pushed me until I made some smart ass response that pissed her off enough she left to go find the doctor. Maybe there are some awesome moms out there complete with charts and graphs who can tell you how many times their kid peed during the day and documented the consistency of the poo, but this Mama ain't one of them. As the hubs likes to say, he isn't on fire, so we've done our jobs. Yeah, sign us up for parent of the year.

Yesterdays doctor visit had the same results. New town, new doctor, so of course we had about oh..... 40,000 forms to fill out. It's apparently very important for them to know exactly how old he was when he sat up for the first time, rolled over, etc. And I'm sorry to say, I have no idea. I may or may not have filled that out in his baby book, but off the top of my head, I honestly have no idea. I just know he did it on schedule. After meeting with our new doctor (whom I don't like, but I can't remember any doctor I actually did like), and she asked me a million more questions that I didn't know the answer to, she made sure to let me know that Cash has an incredibly large head. 97 percentile large. Then she asked me if anyone has ever spoken to me about it. Like who, strangers on the street? "Excuse me, ma'am....Your son is beautiful! He does have a rather large head, though!". Of course I go into panic mode (after wondering how we went from talking about vaccinations- anyone else think the chicken pox vaccine is a bit of overkill?- to the bulbous size of Cash's head). I get home and immediately start Googling (why oh why do they allow mothers to Google?) and see flashes of things like Autism, fluid in brain, etc. and the panic sets in. I spent the first two months of Cash's life convinced he had Autism....I didn't have post-partum depression, I was just nutty for a few months after his birth! I'm lucky the hubs didn't go out for Poptarts and never come back (this is a running joke in our household).

My kid and his enormous, but incredibly beautiful, head....

After calling my mother and hearing that my head was in fact, apparently so enormous they had to cut my onesies to fit over my bulbous head (not only was I 9 pounds 7 ounces and bald at birth, but apparently my head was also huge. I was not being entered in any baby pageants, folks), I felt some relief. Maybe Cash just inherited that huge noggin from his Mama. It's still a pretty damn cute big head......Now waiting for a call back from the new doc to tell me that Cash is fine and order me to stop Googling.....

Man Candy: Nostalgia Style

The idea for this post is shamelessly stolen from my friend of a friend Krista from The Brighter Writer.

I have always been ridiculously (can anyone spell that word without spell check?) boy crazy.

The first crush I ever remember having was......George Michael back in his Wham days. For all you young pups, Wham was a band in the early 80s that liked to dance around and sing and wear day glo pink and no one had a clue they were gay.....Or at least I didn't. But I was smitten. Later he shed his boy band image for a leather jacket and really tight jeans. Meow, baby.

He's the one on the left. And yes, he really is a man and not just a really ugly girl.

Then came along a little show called The Wonder Years and it's hard to remember who I had the bigger crush on, Fred Savage or Olivia d'Abo, who played his older hippy sister, Karen.....I was obsessed with Fred Savage. I watched his (terrible) movies involving red headed girls and video game competitions. I was president of the Fred Savage Fan Club and once the boys at school found out about this, I became known as Savage....Great nickname for a 12 year old girl, don't you think?

Could any 12 year old girl resist him in the 90s? I think not.

Right around this time there was a little movie that came out called Dirty Dancing. A movie that like all other 12 year old girls at the time, I was obsessed with. What was this dirty dancing and how dirty did it get? Every girl could relate to Jennifer Grey (at least before the nose job) and thought Patrick Swayze was just the shit (for an old dude, that is....). I'm pretty sure I wrote him a fan letter that embarrassed me horribly. I'm pretty sure my dad read it and was kind enough not to tease me.

What's that baby? I'm mesmerized by your eyes...

Enter the teenage years and enter one very fine ass Black man named Lenny Kravitz. I loved his dreads, I loved his music, I wasn't 100% sure what humping was at this point (hey, this was before the Internet and we didn't have cable), but I knew I wanted to give that a try with him.

Do I even need to explain this one? I mean, damn. Look at him!

Later high school years I started hanging out with a bunch of hippies, skipping school to smoke pot (sorry, Mom) and trying my best to avoid the damn jam bands they played all the time (I still HATE Phish!). I had been listening to the Black Crowes for a while (they were my first concert) and Chris Robinson was my idea of a perfect man at this point (my, my, how my tastes have changed).

Back then I liked men who looked like Jesus.

These days I am smart enough to know what I want and have to admit, I like a man to look like a man. Thick and strong, looks like he could take down a bear, and cowboy hats are always a plus. I used to have a friend who said she wanted to marry a lumberjack who also wrote poetry and I heartily agreed. Then a few years later, I was lucky enough to find him.

In case of the hubs getting hit by a bus, I'll settle for some Jakey Poo....