bethysmalls

Yesterday marked the 1 year anniversary of my marriage to Ryan Keith Hoagey or as you know him, Hoagey. For this occasion we decided to call in our Christmas present from my brother and his girlfriend which included a gift card to Starr Restaurants and a night of babysitting. This would be the first time since Bruno was born that we spent any amount of time together with out him. I mean, he does sleep very well and most nights when we put him down we can hang out together do what we please but our ears are always keen to catch any hint of a whimper from him should he require our attention.

BH and CH reported for duty just after 6 to learn such topics as What To Expect When  You’re Babysitting Bruno and Changing a Diaper. We showed them a basic wet diaper change and just as we finished Bruno decided they should learn how to do a not-so-basic dirty diaper change. Yowser.

So everything was set and everyone had clean bums and fresh clothes. I asked the room if I’d need a jacket and everyone agreed that it was very nice. Suspiciously nice. We headed out towards the subway dressed to the nines (an aside: I wear nice clothes so infrequently that whenever I do anymore, I get the feeling I look like a little girl playing dress-up. I get the feeling I walk that way, too). At about 3 blocks away the skies got a little dark and the wind picked up a bit. We weren’t worried for some reason and just sort of ignored it. Then the big raindrops started hitting the ground in spurts and we walked a little faster, still 5 blocks from the subway. A marble sized piece of ice hurdled through the sky and landed squarely on the top of my head followed by several dozen of his closest friends. Then their watery cousins started splashing on and around us by the hundreds. “What do we do?!” I shouted over the roar of the downpour. “Go into Not Just Pizza!” Hoagey shouted back. The rain was coming in sideways so by the time we made it into the shop, our left sides were a little soggy.

The storm took maybe 10 minutes to pass. Workers and customers in the pizza shop stood near the doorway with us agape at the sudden and violent storm. Hoagey and I kept looking at each other with “holy shit” looks on our faces. It finally started to let up. A bit. The girl who works behind the counter came to the door way and said as much and no sooner had the words left her mouth than a bone rattling clap of thunder sent her a foot and a half into the air.

“This is Bruno’s first thunderstorm!” I said as the thunder echoed. “I hope he’s okay!” As I said this, I went to get my phone out and my brother had texted me, “I hope you didn’t get caught in that.” And then he called to see if we needed an umbrella or to use their car. We declined as the rain really was settling down at that point and by the time he could have gotten to us, it might have been all over. I didn’t hear any baby screams in the background so that put my mind at ease.

As Hoagey and I deliberated as to whether or not to leave at that point, the NJP people offered us an umbrella that had been left a few weeks ago. A super nice one with one of those collapsible plastic covers and a curved, wooden handle. We thanked them profusely and headed back out into the rain that lasted only a few more minutes. I kept using the umbrella for the water that was blowing off the trees and telephone lines and to shield my already downtrodden hair from the furious wind.

Hoagey and I already exchanged gifts earlier in the week because we suck at waiting. The day his gift came in the mail I wrapped it and gave it to him that night. It was a reprint of the front page of the Inky when the Phillies won the World Series to keep with the Paper Anniversary theme. He gave me a gift certificate for a spa day at a swanky downtown salon. He’s always trumping me in the gift department. For my birthday I got an iPhone. For his birthday he got a Kettlebell. I don’t know how he puts up with me.

I finally put the umbrella away as it was no longer necessary and Hoagey spent the rest of the evening’s alternating between seeing how many times he could twirl it around in a row and trying to imitate Dr. Gregory House’s cane walk. “For our wooden anniversary, I’m getting you a cane.” He’ll probably get me some sort of antique jewelry box with gold inlay and Swarosky crystal accents. By then, he’ll have come to terms with the fact that I’m not the champion gift-giver in this relationship. I hope.

It has been a truly wonderful year and it’s almost spooky how awesome it’s been. Awesome wedding. Pregnant on the VERY FIRST TRY. Kick-ass honeymoon on a tropical island.  World Series!!!(!!!) Another room in the house finished. Fairly easy pregnancy. Bruno. Bruno. Bruno! I hope we haven’t set the bar too high.

My BFF Catie texted me with well wishes, “Happy Anniversary! Try to slow down this year, you guys were wayyyy too productive last year ” I can agree with that. Maybe by our wooden anniversary we can try for another year like that. Whenever that is.

So cute! And we just got hailed on!

Yesterday’s post was not intended to be all about tragedy. I originally thought I could mention it and go on to other things (which I’ll get to momentarily) but by the time I’d said most of what I wanted to say (I could have said much more) the post was already so long that I knew I wouldn’t read to the end. And really, that was the kind of thing that deserves its own post.

But TODAY! Today is a new day! And I can tell you what I’ve actually been busy with for so long. You might remember how my darling baby boy was sleeping for incredible chunks of time at night. Well he’s doing that. Again. Because he stopped for a while and his zero wakings turned into 2 (two) a night and since he was all out of wack anyway, I decided to move him to his own room for sleeping.

It’s not as simple as that, however. I came across an article on babycenter.com that gave ‘tips’ on getting your baby to go to sleep! Oh tips are so fun and easy! They are totally not intended to make me question every single parenting decision about naps and sleeping I had made up to that point! They’re just tips! Well I started freaking out. That lead to me finding my Happiest Baby on the Block book to find justification for the way I’ve been doing things but that made me even more flustered. I can’t even remember the exact ‘tips!’ that were getting me so worked up at the moment and I just tried to find the email and came across some other stuff and… whatever. I should just stop reading.

Long story short, after being reassured by my wonderful husband that I’ve been doing a splendid job at parenting thus far, I ignored most of what I read and the next day decided it was time to move to his own room. I was worried about this for a few reasons. 1) his room has a skylight that does not have a shade and 2) we had a routine with his pack n’ play bassinet that involved rocking it until he got a little doze-y. What were we going to do to get him to sleep? Well I must be the biggest moron on the planet because hello, you can pick those things, you know, ‘babies’ up and rock them in your arms. They’re like totally mobile. And one upside to all the crap I’d been reading is that I came across some information that told me that having the room light, ie sans blinds, is fine for day time naps because it lets the baby know it’s okay to wake up when they, well, wake up. (My approach to parenting literature is I read everything I can find and whatever makes sense to me, I use… after I freak out about it first)

So last Friday, I bundled up the baby and laid him down in HIS crib in HIS room, put the bink in his mouth, kissed him on the head and walked out of the room. My plan was to go back in if he fussed but he, like, didn’t. He went to sleep. And then that night, we put him down and turned the light off and he DID IT AGAIN! When he slept in our room, we’d been leaving my bedside lamp on when he went down for the night and left it on until we went to sleep. Turns out that was probably waking him up, go figure. So we moved all his gear into his room. Noise machine (set to steam train), Green froggy humidifier and  his perspective frog. All relocated to his pad.

Oh hai! Dis mai crib.

And THEN! on Tuesday! He rolled over. Totally by accident but still freaking kick-ass.

i wuz jus on mah bellay!

You’re right, he is very impressive.

Hey! Remember me? Sorry I’ve been neglecting you, little blog. I’ve been busy, I swear.

Busy is maybe not the right word. I mean, it is and it isn’t. A week or so ago, an old friend of mine from high school died. She and I weren’t very close even back then but her death affected me a great deal. I am sad, of course, as she was so young but also because of how she died.

The discovery of her passing happened as I’m sure news like this is oft to these days: on Facebook. Another old friend’s status message read “coping” and beneath that were some messages of condolence from people I knew from back then and they mentioned Lindsay’s passing. I did some searching around the site and found another message wondering “why people take their own lives.” I didn’t want to jump to the conclusion so I sent a message to a friend asking for clarification. It said, “I know it’s been, like, forever since we have talked or even seen each other. I’m piecing together from FB that Lindsay died. Was she in an accident? I hope you’re doing well.”  No accident. I sent messages of sympathy to her two best friends and began thinking about it constantly. Like I said, we weren’t very close. I don’t think I ever had her phone number. We sat at the same lunch table during middle school, played on softball and field hockey teams together and I know we had conversations but there was no strong bond. And yet realizing that a young, beautiful, successful person who you thought was happy and healthy was actually fighting a secret battle and losing is heartbreaking.

Her last update before that Tuesday was about a CD she was really loving on the Friday before. The next message is a Happy Paddy’s day wish and the next is a message of condolence. It seems to have shocked everyone she was close to, on FB anyway, and that is the worst part about it. I don’t know for certain that she was depressed and I don’t know for certain if anyone did or didn’t know but I do know that people don’t end their own lives unless something is really wrong and it seemed like she hid it from everyone.

I have never suffered from clinical depression. I have been going to therapy, on and off, for years though. Situational depression was what I once suffered from. Now my diagnosis has to do with identity and it’s apparently common in children of divorce. I don’t ever try to deliberately hide that fact. If something I’ve been working on comes up in conversation, I’ll casually mention my therapist’s take on it. It’s my small attempt to take the stigma out of mental health and its issues. Dealing with, fighting a disease that you’re afraid to talk about for fear of judgment must be, as my therapist would put it, crazy-making. Crazy is not what you are but what you become from the perceived need to keep your struggles silent. As another Facebook friend of mine will tell you, people don’t kill themselves. They die of mental illness. It’s comparable to losing a battle with cancer. You fight as hard as you can and sometimes you can’t win. The odds are better if you have doctors and treatments and friends and family helping you through. It’s rare to beat any disease if left untreated.

If this applies to you, get help. There is no shame in going to the doctor if you’re sick. If it doesn’t apply to you and you have prejudgments about people with mental illness, just stop it. Stop it right now.

Bruno had his 2 month check up yesterday and he’s now only at the top of the growth charts, not off them completely. That’s good, right? 14 lbs 3 oz and 24.5 inches.

The whitish spot on his back left gums was NOT a rogue molar coming in but something called an inclusion cyst. It’s basically a pocket of saliva (weird) from all the sucking he’s been doing, mostly on his fists. I still think he’s going to pop out a few teeth any day now.

This week he had his first non relative baby-sitter. I was stressed to no end. The woman helping us out is a friend of ours and she has a little girl who is almost 2. I got there about 9:15 and had to leave by 9:30 giving me only 15 minutes to teach this person how my baby works! (I had planned on getting there around 9 but yadda yadda, babies make you late) I guess my worry was because I have no problem telling my mom and MIL how I want things done but it felt kind of jerky coming into our friend’s house and explaining how to take care of my baby. Would she be offended? Annoyed? Obviously she can take care of a baby so who was I to give her ‘guidelines?’ Well it turned out that she was eager to get the rundown and I guess I should have given even more information. When their baby was a baby, she never slept more than 15 minutes at a time as they remember so when Bruno conked out for 2.5 hours (he’s been known to take 3 hour naps during the day) her and her boyfriend were shocked! I also forgot to mention that he usually gets swaddled for naps and that I usually burp him halfway through a feeding but at the end of the day, Bruno was his smiley normal wonderful self and the ‘inconsistencies’ of care were no big deal at all. I guess I didn’t give him enough credit for being resilient. Or I gave myself too much credit for ‘figuring him out.’

In case you missed my UPDATE, let me fill you in! Holy crap my baby has slept through the night 6 days in a row! We’re talking like, 9-12 hours of sleep at a time. Please don’t be furious with me for having the most perfect child. I don’t know how I got so lucky and this may be a phase.

Freak out!

This frog is for scale!

That was my baby at 1 month old. I read in a book called The Rookie Mom’s Handbook that you should take a picture of your baby every month next to the same stuffed animal to show scale. This way you can see how your baby changes and after a year it will be a nice little photo journey to look back on. That was from January 30th.

Does the blue sheet throw you off?

This is the 2 months picture and I’m annoyed that the sheet is a different color cause I feel like I can’t tell how much he’s grown. I KNOW that he is HU-YUGE but these pictures don’t give me much of a sense of that. Maybe I’m just hard of seeing. I do like that his left leg is blurry in both of these pictures. I mean, that’s what it looks like in real life, it’s not because he’s moving it. He just has a fuzzy leg.

I want to thank the ladies and gents who have commented and offered suggestions in my search to do this thing right. My mom is a great resource and she is always willing to offer her experience and advice but sometimes it’s nice to get some Other Mothers’ and Other People’s perspectives. As a way of saying thank you, I’d like to offer up the cutest frickin’ picture of a baby. Ever.

Can you even stand how cute I am?

That gushing noise you hear is either your heart melting or you peeing your pants over my incredibly adorable baby.

This child. This lovely little darling baby, who has been known to sleep from 6-12 (TWELVE!) hours at night, decided last night that he would require a feeding every 3.5 to 4.5 hours. We put him down around 8 which has been our normal and then we rolled into bed around 10:30. Bruno up at 11:30 inconsolable! “No soothing necessary, folks, I’m freaking hungry!” So feed him I do. I must have fallen asleep after his second timer went off although I didn’t realize it until Hoagey pointed out that the time was now 1am. Woops.

At least he’s prolly good and full! Back to sleep almost immediately which figures because Hoagey did it (it’s so early, you can get lots of sleep before you have to get up so it’s cool!), and I figured that he would stay asleep at least until the 6am alarm but alas, he was up again for his usual 4am feed. We didn’t believe it and both took a turn at rocking him back to sleep which only worked for about 10 minutes total and it soon became apparent that this baby needed food! Again! So here we were. I decided that I might as well stay up this time so as not to feed him for an hour and a half again. He’s back down at 5:30. Hoagey gets up at 6am and is out of the house by 7:25. BRUNO UP AT 8! YAY! So I deduce from his furious sucking on the pacifier and subsequent spitting out of said pacifier followed by crying that he was indeed hungry aaaaaagggggaaaaaiiiiiiiiiinnnnnn!!!! I start to worry that perhaps I’ve dried up! Maybe he’s not getting enough! I don’t remember seeing a poopy diaper since 3pm! Ask and you shall receive, sista, cause as soon as we finished, he pooped. through. his sleeper. A fairly THICK FLEECE sleeper. Yah, he’s getting plenty.

The true tragedy in all of this is that at 8am I was so tired that I did not take him out of his swaddle blanket (the only swaddle blanket that fits him) and when he pooped through his thick fleece sleeper he also pooped on his swaddle blanket. This kid cannot sleep without his swaddle! Luckily his old one, sized for regular 9 week-olds, still works as long as only his arms are swaddled. Phew. So now the baby is back to sleep. Do I dare attempt a nap?

UPDATE! On Friday my mother reported that Bruno was VERY gassy and that night he slept for 9 hours. I figured this would stop on Sunday night. Bruno has a tendency to sleep through the night when we don’t have to get up early in the morning. But for the past 3 nights, Bruno has slept at least 8 hours and (ohmyfreakinggoshknockonwood) this morning I actually had to wake him up so I could feed him and take him to the babysitter. Holy Crap, RIGHT?! Cross your fingers, dear readers.