Category Archives: Life

Three years and counting

Three years ago, we promised to be together forever.

Two years ago, we camped on the beach with our pup and climbed to the top of a pretty tall lighthouse.

One year ago, we celebrated our second anniversary in the Paris, the City of Love. We toasted with orange juice, because I was 11 weeks pregnant.

Tonight, after our baby is sound asleep, we’ll open the bottle of wine we bought on our honeymoon and toast to three wonderful years together.

Everything has changed so much since our wedding day. The only thing that’s stayed the same is how much I love the man I married.

A mouse in the house

I’ve made no secret about my struggles with anxiety. I worry. Constantly.

Less than two weeks after moving into our new home, and I’ve come to the conclusion that homeownership, while wonderful, has extended my list of worries by about a mile.

At the top of my list? A MOUSE. In my kitchen. At least one, probably more, likely living behind the dishwasher. Tony came face to face with it last night before it scampered under the counter behind the dishwasher.

After the mouse encounter, I seriously considered packing up and moving in the middle of the night like the family in “The Amityville Horror.” Because seriously. IT WAS A MOUSE.

So far it’s been suggested that we get a cat or set up traps. But the idea of finding dead mice freaks me out way more than a live mouse. I mean, I used to have hamsters when I was a kid. This is no different, right? Except he feeds himself. And doesn’t require a cage.

I’m not sure a cat would help anyway. My parents live in front of a corn field, and they used to get field mice in the basement in the fall when the weather started turning colder. We had a cat — a very lazy cat who didn’t seem to mind the mice. In fact, my bedroom was in the basement, and I distinctly remember waking up to see a mouse getting into the cat’s dish while the cat lazily slept next to me.

I like the alternative even less. A cat who actually hunts mice? When I was a kid, I had a neighbor whose cat was a skilled mouse hunter. It wasn’t uncommon to find a random mouse head on the porch. No thanks.

Not to mention, my husband is deathly allergic to felines, and it stands to reason that our son will be, too.

I don’t suppose there’s any magical, humane solution, is there? Because I was just kidding about letting the thing roam my kitchen as a pet.

Please, help, Internet! I don’t want to move again. But I also don’t want a mouse for a roommate.

Judah and the oatmeal

We started introducing Judah to some solid foods this week, which has been exciting for everyone. His first food — mashed bananas — was a big hit. The oatmeal we tried today? Not so much.

Learn first aid to save money and avoid trauma

Let me start this by saying I would never condone risking the health of yourself or anyone in your family to save money, no matter what the cost. My family’s health is our top priority, and we will spend whatever is necessary to keep all of us well.

That said, emergency room visits are outrageous. Even with good insurance, our copay is $200 for an ER visit. If we were uninsured or paying 100% out of pocket until we hit our deductible, a single trip to the ER for something simple could easily cost over $1000. Not to mention, you’ll often sit in the waiting room for hours. Before spending that kind of time and money, you need to know that the injury really does warrant a trip to the emergency room.

Last Friday while packing some glasses, Tony accidentally broke a glass in his hand, and it cut him. It was deeper than the average “put a Bandaid on it” cut, but it didn’t look deep enough to require stitches. Again, if I really thought he was seriously injured, I wouldn’t have questioned taking him to the hospital. But we just didn’t know.

Judah was already in bed, and we were in the middle of packing and moving. The last thing either one of us wanted was to sit in an ER for hours for him to be bandaged up and sent home.

Both of our moms are nurses, so I put a call in to each of them. The consensus seemed to be that based on where the cut was on his hand and the fact that it wasn’t terribly deep, he would probably be okay with some butterfly bandages.

I’d never done anything like this, and I was incredibly nervous. The last thing I wanted to do was screw it up. My husband is better at this sort of thing than me, but he couldn’t do it one handed, so it had to be me. We put pressure on it with a clean towel, and he sat with his hand elevated for about 30 minutes to stop the bleeding. We cleaned it well, applied the butterfly bandages, and put Bandaids over it to keep it clean.

I think the bandages could have been applied better by someone with more experience, but it seemed to be good enough, because a week later it’s healing well. He will probably have a scar, because I didn’t get the butterfly bandages quite tight enough. But because of where it is on his hand, it won’t be easily visibly.

Would they have given him stitches? Maybe. Now that it’s healed, it looks a bit deeper than we thought. But it seems that in most cases, the only reason a clean cut with no jagged edges or increased risk of infection would need stitches is to stop bleeding or minimize scarring. If you can get the bleeding to stop and it’s not in a place where a scar would be noticeable, a butterfly bandage will fix the problem most of the time. If you’re skilled at applying butterfly bandages, scarring can sometimes even be reduced with a butterfly bandage because there are no jagged Frankenstein lines from the stitches.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I need to take a first aid class. Part of our problem is that we were clueless. We could tell the wound wasn’t too bad, but we still weren’t sure if stitches were necessary. I can see how that doubt and fear would be even greater if the wound had been on our young son.

I’m sure we’ll encounter many bumps and cuts as Judah gets older. I want to know more about first aid not only so I can know whether professional medical care is required, but so I can provide him with basic first aid instead of rushing to the ER for every little thing.

When I was a kid, my dad was excellent at patching us up. He was an expert butterfly bandager. When I was 7, I busted my chin on the side of a dresser when he was out of town on a business trip. He later said he probably wouldn’t have bandaged it himself, because the chin is such a tough place to heal without stitches. My mom rushed me to the ER. We waited forever, and I was panicked and scared after my sister jokingly told me they were going to stitch me up under a sewing machine. She was trying to make a joke, but I took it literally, and I was terrified.

I think in most cases, getting first aid treatment from a parent at home is less traumatic and scary for a kid than a visit to the hospital. If I can learn to provide that basic care for Judah myself, we can avoid putting him through a traumatic ER visit unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Learning first aid can also prepare you to provide first treatment for serious issues that require professional medical care. Driving to the hospital or waiting for an ambulance takes time, and it’s important to be able to take the right steps immediately after an injury.

I’m looking into first aid classes now. Even if we pay a good chunk of change to learn these skills, I think it’s valuable beyond the money we’ll save in ER visits.

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What I learned about parenting from my own mom

For new moms, today is pretty much like every other day. Wake up earlier than you’d like, change diapers, feed the baby, step over the boxes in your living room, pack your entire house, deal with your husband’s wounded hand after he sliced it on a broken glass. What’s that? That’s not what you’re doing today? Well, that’s what I’m doing. And it sort of stinks. The parts about the moving and the flesh wound, that is. I don’t mind the baby stuff.

But it’s okay, because today is a day for reflection, too. As much as today feels like any other day, it’s the first Mother’s Day since I became a mother myself. My own baby is too young to express his gratitude (though he did sleep for 7 hours straight last night for the second night in a row!), I can be grateful for my own mother and reflect on what she taught me about motherhood.

This is my mom, Peggy.

And here are a few things she’s taught me about being a mom:

Don’t feel intimidated. My mom has four children, and we’re all about two years apart. She was pregnant or caring for an infant for about a decade. And it only got crazier as we got older. I can see how it would have been easy for her to hide out at home until we were old enough that we wouldn’t make her crazy in public. She didn’t, though. She got up, got us dressed, and got us out of the house. She carted all four of us to the grocery store while my dad was at work. We went on fun outings in the summertime. She was counting heads constantly to make sure she hadn’t lost anyone, but she never let herself feel too intimidated to live life with four children.

Play. We were always doing arts and crafts, playing games, and having fun. It helped that there were enough of us — including the neighborhood kids — that our house felt like a small daycare. It was never boring, and she was always right there with us playing and having fun.

Foster independence and individuality. None of us ever had an interest or hobby that my mom didn’t encourage. But she never pushed us. She gave us space to figure things out for ourselves.

Understand. Looking back, I realize that my mom never forgot what it was like to be a kid (or a teenager), and she tried her hardest to relate. She understood that we were going to make mistakes and get into trouble, and while there was discipline, she didn’t overreact.

Respect. My mom never talked down to us, even when we were small. She’s always said that you should talk to children like little adults, and it stuck with me. She never used baby talk, which is part of the reason we all ended up with an above average vocabulary, I’m sure. There was no idea or concept that we were “too young” to understand. If we had a question, she had an answer.

Trust your kids. My mom recognized that I was a good kid, and she gave me a lot of freedom and privileges because of that.

You don’t have to be irresponsible to be a “cool” mom. We’re all familiar with the cool mom stereotype. The immature, irresponsible mother who flirts with her daughter’s boyfriends, serves alcohol to minors at parties, and thinks being an irresponsible parent is a good way to hang on to youth. That was definitely not my mom. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t cool.

She remembered what it was like to be young, and I could always depend on her for understanding even when it came to things that most other parents wouldn’t get. There were rules, and she didn’t make it easy for us to break them, but she did know that we probably would. She gave us room to make our own decisions and mistakes. When we made the wrong choices, she taught us about real world consequences without being overbearing or unyielding. She understood that breaking the rules is part of growing up, and she gave us room to make those mistakes, but she always held us responsible for our own choices. Most importantly, she knew how to have fun.

Let your kids grow up. Now that we’re adults, my mom still offers advice and guidance, but she really is more of a friend than an authority. This seems like a simple obvious thing, but I know there are parents out there who can’t let go of their authority role over their adult children. Now that we’re grown, she doesn’t admonish or judge or push her advice. She recognizes that we’re adults who are free to make our own choices without her interference. She let our relationship grow as we did, and I’m thankful for that.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Home

In the past eight years, I’ve lived in seven different apartments in five different cities. Each time I moved, I squirreled away my stash of moving boxes. I stuffed them under the bed, used valuable closet real estate, hid them behind the washing machine. You see, if there’s one thing I hate more than moving, it’s finding moving boxes. Once I found good ones, I didn’t want to let them go, because I always knew the next move was imminent.

For four years of college, I moved every year. Then Tony and I moved to North Carolina — another temporary home that we planned to leave as soon as Tony graduated. When we came back to Indiana, we spent a year in flux. Two weeks in Europe, six weeks at Tony’s parents’ house while he searched for a job, six months in an apartment in northern Indiana where he accepted a temporary teaching job, and now almost four months in an apartment here in southern Indiana after he accepted his full-time position.

I’ve struggled to make connections with people, knowing we’d be moving on soon. I never really felt settled. And through it all, I hung on to those moving boxes, because I knew I’d need them again soon.

After all that, I can’t tell you how good it felt to sign on the dotted line today finally securing our permanent home. Will we live here for the rest of our lives? Probably not. But we’ll be here for the foreseeable future, nestled in our adorable brick ranch on an acre of peaceful land in the country.

We’ll roast turkeys at Thanksgiving and trim Christmas trees in December, grill hot dogs on the back porch and roast marshmallows at backyard bonfires in the summertime. We’ll celebrate Judah’s birthdays, sign him up for Little League, and send him off to kindergarten. Hopefully we’ll find a community that we can call our own. And I’ll finally send my pile of moving boxes to the recycling center.

We are home. Finally.

Because the past 12 months haven’t been crazy enough

I figure, we’ve already moved three times in the past 12 months. We might as well might it a nice even four!

Based on the topics I’ve chosen for my last few blog posts, I’m sure you’ve figured out that we’ve been in the market for a house. Well, we found one. Much faster than we anticipated.

It’s a gorgeous little brick house, completely renovated in the past year, sitting on almost a full acre of beautiful land with lots of trees. Wood floors, whirlpool tub, and a fireplace.

When we used to dream about the kind of house we’d live in one day, I used to tell Tony that all I wanted was a whirlpool tub, a fireplace, and enough land in the backyard for a garden. I didn’t imagine the first house we bought would have all of those things, but it looks like that’s what’s going to happen.

We’re currently under contract. The inspection went fabulously. Now we’re just waiting for the bank to do its thing before we close in the next 30 days. I can’t wait to move in!

One year ago today

Since Judah was born, time has been on warp speed. But man, this moment still feels like a million years ago.

It’s true that a lot has happened since the day I found out I was pregnant — we moved three times, Tony has started two different jobs, we traveled to Europe. But more importantly, I have changed so drastically, I don’t even recognize the girl holding this pregnancy test.

Last year on April 2, my office was closed for Good Friday. I should have been sleeping in. But I was wide awake way too early.

I had reason to believe I could be pregnant, but I doubted it. It had only been 3 weeks since we officially decided to start a family. Just a few weeks before, I was thrilled at the possibility that I could get pregnant right away. On April 2, I was ambivalent.

Two weeks before that morning, I had received a call from my dream job. I was already pregnant at that point, even though I didn’t know, but I did know that if I was pregnant, it had already happened. I started the interview process anyway, thinking to myself how unlikely it was that I could be pregnant after just one month.

The interviews were going well. It came down to me and one other candidate, but I had a feeling that the woman who would be my primary supervisor favored me. I felt 99% certain they would offer me the job.

We knew we were moving back to Indiana in just over a month. Neither one of us had a job yet. We made the decision that if they offered me the position, we’d temporarily stall our plans for a family so I could accept.

It’s so hard to explain my feelings about it now, as I hold my sleeping baby. I can’t imagine feeling anything but absolute joy and excitement to have him in my life. But for two weeks before I found out he would be born, I hoped I wasn’t pregnant. I hoped I’d have the opportunity to take my dream job.

I took pregnancy tests on March 31 and April 1. Both negative. I became convinced that I wasn’t pregnant. I scheduled a final interview with the board that would make the final hiring decision (via Skype, since I still lived in North Carolina). I daydreamed about the exciting career ahead of me. I didn’t know how long I’d wait to have a baby. Maybe a year. Maybe two.

And then I took a third test on April 2. Positive. I was going to have a baby.

Never before in my life have my feelings so dramatically and instantly changed. In one moment, I was hoping the test would be negative, hoping I would be able to take a job in Indianapolis. The next I was consumed with excitement and anticipation and joy, because, OMG, I’M HAVING A BABY. In that moment, I went from focusing on my career and myself to thinking about nothing but the little person I was incubating. Suddenly nothing else mattered.

To this day, even after experiencing the rush of emotion while holding him in my arms for the first time on the day he was born, I remember that moment as the moment I became a mother. Even then, I realized what a strange feeling it was to experience such a drastic, life-altering change in a split second.

The following week, I removed myself from consideration for the job. I made the decision for a number of reasons. I knew it wouldn’t be fair to begin a new job knowing that I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom when the baby was born. We also worried that moving to a particular city would limit Tony’s job search too much, and he wouldn’t be able to find anything. It was essential for him to find a job if I was going to stay home. We decided it would be better to keep our options open so we could move anywhere with an open position. I knew it would be difficult to turn down a job offer even though I knew it wasn’t right for us, so I decided to drop out before they had a chance to make me an offer.

From the moment I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t regret our decision to start trying that month. I was so so happy to be pregnant. But I did wrestle with the decision to give up the job. I toyed with the idea of being a working mother. I wouldn’t have considered it for just any job, but for this one, I strongly considered it.

In the end, I knew it wasn’t the right choice for our family or for me. My biggest fear was that I would someday regret my decision.

When I think about the way everything fell into place after that, it amazes me. No, it wasn’t ideal to be touring Europe with morning sickness, but I’m glad I wasn’t 9 months pregnant when Tony was offered his current job. If I’d waited even a few months to get pregnant, I wouldn’t have been able to have my baby at one of the most natural-birth-friendly hospitals in the state. Or worse, we wouldn’t have been able to accept the job, because I would have been too pregnant to consider undertaking a 300-mile move in less than two weeks.

One year later and four months into my little boy’s life, I know everything worked out exactly the way that it should have. I wouldn’t change a single thing. In the end, it turned out that being Judah’s mama was my real dream job. I know it’s trite, but it’s true, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Counting my blessings through bleary eyes

I mentioned last week that we’ve begun working with Judah on his sleep schedule. Now that he’s four months old, I think he’s ready for a routine. Because he’s still so young, I want to be gentle in its implementation. Unfortunately, gentle for the baby is still pretty brutal for his parents.

He’s responding incredibly well to his bedtime ritual. He gets his reflux medicine first, then in his dim room I change his diaper, give him a sponge bath with some nice smelling baby wash, put some nighttime baby lotion on him, dress him in pajamas and a sleep sack, nurse him, turn on his white noise machine, and put him down in his crib. Then I stay by his crib until he’s asleep. For the past few nights, it’s taken fewer than 5 minutes for him to drift off.

He sleeps well after that for about 2 to 3 hours in his crib. When he wakes up hungry at 10:30 or 11, I bring him into my room to sleep in his bassinet, and we go to bed. The problem we’re having is that he continues to wake up every 1-3 hours throughout the night. It’s not because he’s hungry. He does nurse, but it’s generally just for under 5 minutes, which makes me think it’s more a comfort thing than a hunger thing.

Now that I’m trying the methods in “The No Cry Sleep Solution,”* I’m tracking his nighttime waking schedule. I’ve found that he’s waking up completely during the normal “brief awakening” periods that we all experience throughout the night. The problem is that I’ve always nursed him to sleep, so he doesn’t know how to put himself back to sleep. So he wakes up fussing, I nurse him (typically for only 5 minutes), and he goes back to sleep. I’m not sure how to break this cycle, and I’m not willing to let him cry it out, so I don’t know what to do. I haven’t finished the book, but I’m hoping it’ll have some ideas.

The bigger problem is naps. Judah isn’t on a predictable nap schedule. He generally sleeps 15 to 30 minutes at a time here and there throughout the day, only if I’m holding him and only when he’s utterly exhausted. As soon as I try to put him down, he wakes up and starts to cry.

For the first four months, I didn’t mind holding him during his naps. The problem is, he understandably wants to be held and engaged when he’s awake. That means I’m holding him all day. This was fine in the first few months, but now I’d like to get him on a napping schedule so I can get to the laundry and the dishes and the other chores that pile up during the day.

He loves his sling, and I can run errands and shop while he’s in it. Household chores like laundry and dishes? Not so much. The jostling wakes him up, and he’s even more grouchy. Not to mention any bending with him in the sling is brutal on my back, which occasionally suffers post traumatic stress syndrome since the pregnancy. I’m also not very efficient with 13 pounds of baby right in front of me.

My first plan was to put him down every time he fell asleep in the hopes that he’d eventually get used to it. The problem with that is that he wakes up when I put him down, and then he doesn’t go back to sleep. So I end up with an extremely crabby, exhausted baby.

After a restless day yesterday, he fell asleep at 6:30 in the evening. Then he kept me up from 4 a.m. to 5:45 a.m. I nursed him at 4 a.m., and he fell asleep. When he woke up again 15 minutes later, I put my hand on his chest and soothed him from my bed, but I left him in the bassinet. It took 30 minutes, but he finally went to sleep. Usually when I try that, his crying escalates, he wakes up Tony (who I try not to disturb on weeknights, because he has to get up at 6 a.m. to earn the money that pays our bills), and Judah and I both end up upset. That method never works when he wakes up during daytime naps.

On top of all that, ongoing (minor but annoying) health issues for Judah and me have led my doctor to put me on an extremely restrictive diet. No sugar, no dairy, no gluten, no caffeine, and no artificial sweeteners for at least a month. So basically I’m starving and tired, and I can’t even drink a caffeinated beverage to perk me up.

Anyway, between my extremely restrictive diet and our recent sleep struggles, I woke up feeling pretty bleak. I’m frustrated. I’m exhausted. I’m starving all. the. time. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, as I have a tendency to do.

Then I read this article in the Chicago Tribune about how crib bumpers are more dangerous than we think. It broke my heart and reminded me how lucky I am to have a healthy baby. I decided to take a break from nap training so I can hold my baby today, listen to his quiet little snores, feel the gentle rise and fall of his chest, and remind myself cherish every moment, even the challenging ones, because some parents aren’t so lucky.

I also wanted to share it, because crib bumpers are one of those controversial items that aren’t recommended, but most people believe to be harmless. The truth is, they serve absolutely no purpose, and if there’s even a slight risk, they’re not worth it.

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