Monthly Archives: March 2009

up

9 Replies

It’s to the point where I get really excited about waking up in the middle of the night if Shanna stays asleep. This is the most consistent ‘alone time’ I get.

I haven’t written about the Oklahoma trip. It was… interesting. I think I had forgotten or been unaware of just how closed minded the family is. I almost turned to my mom’s friend and said, “Have I mentioned that I’m queer. I’ve probably fucked more girls than both of your sons combined.” I wanted to do this because they had multiple books on their coffee table about the homosexual agenda and how homosexuals are ruining this great country. Great. I was asked if I was going back to work when Shanna goes to school and the response when I said I would be homeschooling was, “Well, that’s a choice.” Yup. It is. And fuck you very much as well Mr. Sunshine.

Oh, and when Shanna fell out of the bathtub and hit her head I talked to her about why I was asking her to sit down. My mom listened in and then said, “I told you too but you see how that turned out.” ?? In general as a mom you told me to do stuff and I didn’t listen? “I told you not to do things as a teenager but you didn’t listen to me and you got raped. See what happens when you don’t listen to me?” ?!?!?!?! WHAT?! Oh my fucking god. She said she didn’t understand why her comment was different than me telling a ten month old, “See honey, that is why I asked you to sit down. I’m sorry you hurt your head.” Though she did apologize the next morning–I guess that is progress.

I hate doing that quantity of driving sans cruise control. It’s crummy.

I realized recently that most of the people I’ve been spending time with are female and close to my age. This is such a bizarre change compared to the rest of my life. But you know what? I can’t complain. I really appreciate the friendships that have deepened in the past year and some. It’s really good to learn more about the people who think I’m worth going out of their way for.

Just life

5 Replies

I made steal cut oats for breakfast. We had strawberries, walnuts, whole milk, and a little bit of brown sugar mixed in. It was fabulous.

Today was a cooking day. We have tri-tip prepared as well as chicken cooked with orange and pineapple and a little bit of rum. I boiled the rutabagas and potatoes and smashed them up together with a lot of butter and milk. I haven’t figured out what I am doing with the chard yet this week. hm. We still have asparagus and artichoke to cook but I figure those can wait a day or so.

Between cooking and cleaning house I don’t seem to find/make time to sew. This is very annoying. It doesn’t help that I feel like I really ought to be studying for the comp exam. Twelve more days.

Have I mentioned that I feel growing anxiety about this test? This is my last shot. If I fuck this up I’m just done. That’s kind of stressful.

I want to have an affair with my husband. I miss having that sort of intense interaction with him.

My daughter is getting more and more kid-like every day. I find her endlessly fascinating. And exasperating. Definitely exasperating. 🙂 She is sleeping for shit these days and that’s feeling really hard.

I need to get off my ass and plan the birthday party. *sigh*

I managed to get off the acceptance letter to the roofer and the information for the estate lawyer. I met with someone (ironically–he’s my sister’s ex-boyfriend. the only boyfriend of hers that I have ever liked) today about putting solar panels on our roof. It’s looking very likely. That’s productivity. We are still waiting to hear back from the accountant. By this time next month we may well be many tens of thousands of dollars poorer.

My back hurts and I’m not getting enough exercise. There is simply not enough time in the day.

Any feminist who questions the worth of what I do with my time can kiss my lily-white-ass. Those of you who are working moms–how do you manage to sleep?! I don’t have enough time for all of my stuff and you all have to do what I do and work. Y’all must be crazy.

Want to eat!

31 Replies

I have recently heard about a few new-to-me restaurants that I want to go to.

http://essanaycafe.com is in Fremont and it sounds like a pretty interesting restaurant. The Prix Fixe menu in particular sounds really interesting.
http://www.pampaspaloalto.com/ is in Palo Alto and I really really really want to go here. I mean, meat. And more meat. And more meat. And the sides sound good too. 🙂
http://tymefortea.com is also in Fremont. I think that a girly sort of outing is in order. *cough*JennyhasWednesdayoff*cough**cough*MarkletLauraborrowthecar*cough*

It would be awesome if people read this post as: “Hey! Do any of these restaurants sound good to you? I would love to find people to go with!”

EWWWWWWWWWW

10 Replies

I just looked over and Shanna was leaning down trying to pick something up off the carpet with her mouth. It looked vaguely Cheerio shaped so I went to investigate. Nope, it was cat food. Cause my cat threw it up on the carpet. My daughter was trying to eat vomited up cat food.

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

(needless to say I pulled her away and cleaned it up.)

More erf

9 Replies

I woke up at six and can’t get back to sleep. Too much going on in my brain. Physically I’m kind of off and I can’t figure out exactly what is wrong. I’m obsessing about all the deaths that have happened in the last year and some. I feel very anxious about life. The comp exam is in 18 days. I should probably review poetry. *sigh*

I can’t get driving directions online to the place we are going in Oklahoma. All the mapping software basically knows that the road exists but that’s it. Awesome. I have to wait until a more sane hour then call them. I’m sure there are tiny little motels in the town we are going to, but there is zero online presence for any hotel there. I lived in this town for a little while as a kid. I remember feeling very superior because I was from the big city. Now I find it almost charming in a severely inconvenient sort of way.

I still haven’t decided if I am going to deal with dragging the carseat around in the airports and gate checking it or if I am ok with actually checking it. I’ve heard some horror stories about baggage handlers destroying carseats. They are somewhat delicate and if you throw them too hard they are no longer useful in a crash. And they are so fucking expensive. But I’m not going to have much in the way of help. *sigh*

They don’t sell good travel potties that fit over elongated toilet bowls. Fuckers. You’d think that this would be a reasonable thing to have given that almost all public toilets are elongated. Shanna does not appreciate sitting precariously on a grown up toilet while being held up. It makes the whole pottying experience much more stressful. I think I’m going to bring her potty and disposable anti-bacterial wipes for cleaning it out. Not my first choice, but better than not being able to potty her. At this point I’m only having a couple of misses a day and I don’t really want to back slide a lot. I think it is funny that by volume more than half of what I am bringing on this trip is diapers. People still ask me when I am going to switch to disposables (not for traveling–just in general) because “Aren’t you sick of washing diapers?” The washing really doesn’t phase me in the slightest. However I was really really really tempted to not deal with lugging the volume on this trip.

You people don’t post on lj enough. I tell you all about my life, where is the reciprocal reading material? 😛 (Essaying–you do well. 😀 And I have no complaints about Rbus.)

My house isn’t clean and I’m trying very hard not to care. It’s a struggle though. I will never again buy black furniture. Being able to see dust 15 minutes after dusting makes me feel like I am the worst, most terrible housekeeper ever in the history of the world. I really don’t need that guilt.

I had a good time at the museum on Sunday. It was nice to see people and play with kidlets. 🙂 Shanna is still not quite to the interacting large scale stage. It’s all about her. 🙂 It’s very cute.

It’s hard balancing things with Noah right now. His job is sucking the life out of him. I am trying as much as I can to be supportive and not demand much of him. I was doing ok for a while. Then I hit an emotional wall and started feeling really upset and crummmy and needing a lot more from him. I’m largely still not pestering him with those needs. He doesn’t have much extra right now. So I’m spending a lot of time crying. It’s interesting how I know this isn’t depression–it doesn’t feel that way. I’m grieving. I’m sad. It feels pretty lonely to feel like this and spend so much time alone. Shanna doesn’t count as a person in this way because she is pretty much a bottomless pit of need with not much to give. I’m ok with that–that is what she is supposed to be. But I’m having a hard time. I’m pretty sure my grieving isn’t impacting her negatively. She seems to be still very healthy and happy and delighted by life.

Oh, and she’s teething again. The diaper rash appeared instantly and is fierce. I don’t entirely understand how she can get diaper rash like that when she is barely wetting diapers at all and she never sits in pee. Babies are a mystery. Good thing they are a cute mystery. She has been asleep for more than 11 hours. This is very very good because it is going to be a long day of traveling and her naps are going to be disrupted. I’m nervous about traveling with her by myself but I’ll manage.

Wow that’s a lot of whining. And she slept through me writing it. w00t.

Cookin’

Leave a reply

Today we did our best to cook up the stuff from the farm share box. We cooked: swiss chard, kale, rutabaga, carrots, green garlic, asparagus, and broccoli. In addition to veggies we cooked a couple of chicken breasts in mustard, and put many of the veggies into a frittata (we also added the last of the artichoke heart in the frittata). We have spinach, cabbage, red leaf lettuce, and romaine lettuce for salads. Oh, and I have a little bit of celery left that we will finish up this week.

We probably made enough food for us for the whole week because I am going to be gone for a couple of days. Whereas Noah misses eating out cause it is fun and variety and such I feel pretty good about the fact that he is going to be eating a neat variety of interesting healthy foods for really cheap with basically no effort on his part.

So yeah, this cooking thing is going pretty well. 🙂 I still don’t think I could/would want to be a vegetarian I’m happy that we are eating such a variety of vegetables.

Eventful.

3 Replies

When I got up I thought today would be boring. I thought I would go to Whole Foods with my neighbor and maybe hit the nursery (for plant matter–not baby). Well, it was a starting plan.

I went to the nursery this morning and spent quite a while figuring out what sorts of veggies to put into the pots in my back yard. I selected two varieties of tomatoes (one is best for paste the other is best for being more solid like and mixes in well for sauce), squash, sweet basil, oregano, sweet peas, and a neato sounding pepper. I was planning to try and put them into pots basically immediately but when I got home I was derailed by a phone call from my mother.

It turns out that a family friend died this morning. She was 79 and in extremely poor health so I can’t really call it a shock. My mother and I had been planning to go out to Oklahoma to see them this summer at a big birthday party. It turns out that we will instead be flying out on Tuesday for a funeral. It took a while to find reasonable airfares for both of us.

Then I went to Whole Foods with my neighbor. We both had a lot of fun wandering around looking at the sheer variety of pretentious food. Of course we both spent too much money. Oy. That place is dangerous. While we were there we ran into one of my former students. It was quite lovely as she danced with joy and told her three friends extensively about how I was the best teacher ever. She was not one of my most dedicated students so we spent a lot of time together in 8th period social club getting to know one another. 🙂 It was great to see that she is trying to go to college. On the ride home my neighbor told me, essentially, that I make her feel kind of stupid because I know so many things and can answer in depth questions on such a wide variety of topics. I think that it was made even worse when she figured out that I am seven years younger than her. I don’t think she is stupid, I think she is simply asking questions about things that I have researched and she hasn’t. Oy. But I helped her realize a few things about her marriage and that’s to the good.

I came home and spent a while talking to Noah about how frustrated he is at work right now. I wish there was more I could do to help him. Then I made the rest of the arrangements for the trip to Oklahoma. Then I sat down for a few minutes to catch up on the internet and I received a phone call from Debbie! This is always exciting. She lives in Taiwan right now so I don’t get to talk to her much. I’m glad that she has been awesome about keeping in touch with me. 🙂

Noah decided that it would be a good plan for him to go to the gym for a while after dinner because it will be a break from thinking. As he was getting ready to run out the door he casually mentioned that his parents are trying really hard to come out here for Shanna’s birthday.

It’s been a day.

Hot cereal and compassion

20 Replies

Today I decided that I should probably not put my normal 2-3 tablespoons of refined white sugar on my cream of wheat. If I want my kid to eat less sugar I need to lead the charge. (In my defense: I use less sugar than my mother.) So I chopped up a couple of fresh strawberries and used two teaspoons of strawberry preserves. It was alright but not terribly sweet so I added a teaspoon of sugar. It was good enough for me. My hope is that with practice I won’t need the added sugar after a while. 🙂

As for compassion: I’m having a hard time finding compassion for a mama of my acquaintance and I don’t feel good about my lack of compassion. Her son is six weeks older than Shanna and she hit postpartum depression about a month ago. I’ve talked to her about depression in general, coping skills and vitamins/supplements that tend to help and that’s all fine. I’m having a hard time because she is on disability leave from her job and she is not spending any time with her son. She continues to send him off to his grandparents every day (they are in their late 70’s) and she stays home by herself. I have a long history of depression but I always manage to do the things that have to be done. I have never personally been so depressed that I neglected basic care for another person. On one hand, she is making sure her son is well cared for and that’s good. On the other hand: she’s not taking care of her son, her husband and his parents are. I feel guilty about judging her because I haven’t walked in her shoes and it isn’t my place. On the other hand it’s hard for me to supply the compassion she deserves when she comes to my house crying.

I feel conflicted. I almost want to tell her that being depressed in no excuse to pawn off care of her son. I wouldn’t do it no matter how depressed I was. But that’s me. I have no idea what it is like to live in someone else’s head so I shouldn’t be such a snot.

URGH!

These boots were made for walking.

2 Replies

And by boots I mean shoes. I’ve been walking further and further lately. Last week I did ten miles with my nephew. I only walked a little over two miles with DSH and Terps. Today I walked eight miles with a chick from my neighborhood. I’ve been pretty lackadaisical about following points but I’m getting smaller. My pants are more comfortable (whoo hoo!). I’m not real worried about getting down a size but I would like this size to be baggy on me so that I don’t have to move into maternity clothes at five weeks like I did last time.

I’ve been paying attention to the difference between healthy foods and low calorie/low fat foods. I’m not feeling so hot about putting all the chemicals into my body. I am slowly working through the low calorie versions of stuff and I’m not buying more. I feel really good in my body most days. My back is still sore but I’m carrying a 20 pound kid all the time. I’ve been to yoga once recently and I’m going to try and go again soon.

My goal is to not have to do the super intense gestational diabetes test during my next pregnancy. I was heavy enough that my midwife wasn’t comfortable skipping it with Shanna. I would also like to have enough fitness/energy to be able to be active and play with Shanna through my next pregnancy. I was out of shape before I conceived Shanna so I was a total slug for nine months. I won’t have that luxury next time.

No I’m not pregnant. I have no idea when I will even be able to get pregnant. This is all stuff I need to take care of in advance though and I’m most likely running out of time.

Freedom!

8 Replies

Noah is taking Shanna out for a few hours. I’m going to take a bath. I’m going to shave my entire legs instead of just the really awful part below my knee. I’m going to have a glass of wine. (I really don’t care that it is 11am.) I’m going to read in the tub until the water is freezing. I’m going to use all the lovely skin-softening bath products I own and never use. I’m going to straighten my hair.

I’m not going to do a single chore.

I could get used to this.

family

2 Replies

As it turns out Noah’s younger brother is due to have a baby. Within a week of Shanna’s birthday. I suppose there is no better way to ensure that they will never want to come out here for Shanna’s birthday.

meat.

5 Replies

This week I used two chicken breasts, five sausages (of two different varieties), and ~nine strips of bacon in cooking. That’s it for the week. Wow. I had one meat sandwich. I’m feeling massive cravings right now for red meat.

(All of that meat was put into ~34 servings of food. I need to freeze the leftovers.) (And 34 servings sounds like a lot until you think about the fact that a person eats at least/around 21 meals/week and there are two of us here.)

I’ve finished off ~ 80% of the CSA box. Next week I need to make less pasta. It’s a big filler.

not good

4 Replies

Shanna is sick. She has a fever and she is lethargic and tired. This isn’t great but it pales next to being told that someone I love tremendously was raped. I don’t know how to adequately help him. Yes, him. I feel terrible because I didn’t try harder to help him when/before it happened.

Sometimes I feel like I could joyfully take on all the suffering in the world just to protect my loved ones. I’m very strong; I know I could handle it. I don’t really know how he will truly heal.

Needs

5 Replies

As we do this ‘parenting’ thing longer I spend a lot of time thinking about balancing each of our individual needs as well as Noah’s job. It’s really hard to find a balance. It’s feeling extra hard right now because we have hit separation anxiety like a brick wall. I’m aware that it is possible to walk away and let her scream with someone else but that feels so awful. She’s not going to be in this phase for all that long, why should I make it harder on both of us? I’m feeling kind of fried though. Leaving her with Noah is a less awesome option than it could be because they don’t spend that much time together and his presence doesn’t seem to be that much better than anyone else.

Shanna is getting way pushier about night nursing right now too. In a weird way it’s like we hit a major regression with separation anxiety. She’s extra clingy all the time and sleeping more (and requiring boob attachment through all naps). I don’t think I am feeling the kind of ‘touched out’ that I hear other people talk about but I am starting to want more time to myself than I’m getting right now. Unfortunately Noah is being pushed super hard at work so he has less energy at home.

I know I can get through this. It’s not even *that* bad. I just… something. I want something to be different and I’m not even sure what.

Anxiety

16 Replies

I’ve been having a lot of anxiety lately. I feel anxious about all kinds of things. The comp exam, interactions with people, am I doing ‘enough’ in various ways, and of course my ever present internal push to be Mary Poppins. (People keep saying Martha Stewart and Hell No I think she is a wasteful twat.) I don’t keep my house clean enough. I feel confused by the barrage of information out there about health and diet and trying to be good to the planet. I feel confused by the myriad of different parenting philosophies. I feel like I am not being a good enough partner to Noah. I feel like I am not exercising enough. I feel like I must be doing Something Wrong as a parent. I don’t have any frame of reference for ‘normal’ for children so I have no idea if she is doing alright. (I think she is, but how in the hell would I know?) I alternate feeling kind of lonely and feeling like I am tired of dealing with people and it would be fine if I never saw anyone ever again. I feel frustrated by stupid interactions. I feel like I am being judged and found wanting in just about every way. I realized yesterday that my mother plans to come up here for Shanna’s first birthday party and she plans to fly to Oklahoma in July. How in the hell is she going to pay for that? Wait–is she going to expect me to? I am feeling a lot of pressure to save money and yet it seems like one of the easiest things I can do to help me not stress out all the time is spend money. (I think I’m fairly frugal but of course there are people out there who are more frugal so I feel like I am awful and terrible.) I have this problem of feeling like if I am not in the top 10% of (x) skill/ability/talent/whatever/activity then I am obviously pathetic and a loser.

That paragraph is hard to read. That’s how my brain looks right now though. I’ve never heard of postpartum anxiety but this doesn’t sound like postpartum depression. I’m not sad. I’m just anxious. I’m not happy with the fact that having a baby made it so that I don’t enjoy sex much. What the fuck happened? I enjoy the closeness and the intimate feeling, but it’s just not all that… exciting. I feel really fussy about having to be the one to initiate dates and sex when most of it is happening because it helps Noah stay cheerful. I understand that I have to be the one to initiate because I’m the one who can get Shanna to sleep most of the time, but still. I don’t feel sexy or interesting anymore. I gave a friend most of my ‘interesting’ clothes this weekend. I have weird feelings about that. On one hand I won’t be able to wear any of it for a long time (I’m too fat) but I feel like I just gave up on being interesting. I’m not worth looking at like that anymore. I’m completely de-sexed. I’m really thrilled that she is getting to enjoy the clothes though and I’m happy she is going out and having fun. So I get to feel like I’m a nice person for assisting her in fun and I get to feel like I’m just kind of pathetic and lame because I’m not having that kind of fun anymore. It’s a mixed bag.

So yeah. I feel like my brain is going close to a mile a minute lately and there isn’t much I can to do calm down and just feel content. My life is where I want it to be and that is hard. I’ve always been striving in the past and I don’t know how to stop doing that. I need to find my zen and just be happy in knowing that I accomplished (almost) everything I wanted to accomplish. It’s ok that my house isn’t perfectly clean–it doesn’t make me a bad person. Noah doesn’t care. I actually don’t care that much of the time. I worry about the hypothetical people out there who do care. I feel like they think I am pathetic because “You have all that time at home and your house is still dirty?!” It’s all about projecting stuff.

And I’m still freaking out about my therapist being dead. I wonder if that is part of the reason I have so much fuss bubbling to the top right now because I just found out that I can’t go process any of it with the person I process with. AHHHHHHHHHHHH