The Gods are out to get us!

For the first time since August, Len had two days in a row off for Christmas. So we left town on the 23rd for Goderich, and wouldn't you know, by the time that we got home, he had the flu. Poor Len spent the 24th and much of the 25th in bed, before driving back to Toronto to lay in bed there and return to work the evening of the 26th.
So, the wee babe and I have elected too stay in Goderich for an extra five days where we have two willing slaves, I mean, grandparents, at our disposal. It's been glorious being fed, having laundry done and the baby taken from me whether I'm tired of her or just feel like not holding her for a while. Thanks mom and dad, you're the best!
We also got to see Adara's cousin Liam, who was awesome with her. When I"m not on dial up I'll post a picture of him showing her how to play with his legos. Kristen and Greg (Aunt and Uncle) where also fantastic.
In really good news, Adara (dare I write it) seems to be establishing a bit of a schedule. To bed at 10 or 11pm, up at 4 am, up from an hour, sleep from 5 am until 7am, up for half an hour, back down for an hour. Not bad, all in all.
Adara was also spoiled rotten with lots of beautiful clothes and things from her aunt's and uncles far and wide, thanks everyone!

Uh, a little help, please people?

I think that i like this....?

Getting better, dare I say?

Ok, so yes, once again last night my sweet baby daughter refused to sleep until 11:30pm.  Yep, my two month old stays up from 5 pm until 11:30pm straight every night. However, last night she ate at 10 pm, went to sleep at 11:30 and slept until (wait for it) 5AM!!!!!! What?  Unfortunately, her poor father wasted this potential lovely sleep time 'cause he was sitting up waiting for her to wake up for her 1 am bottle.  Damn!  Foiled by a two month old again!  On the upside mommy got to sleep from midnight until 6:45am straight through.  Whoo hoo!  On the downside, (WARNING BREAST FEEDING REFERENCE AHEAD, IF YOU ARE SQUEEMISH ABOUT THIS PLEASE DO NOT READ!!! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED...)  all bed sheets must now be washed cause mommy might have slept but the milk factories didn't!  They just emptied themselves into the bed!

Yesterday was good too.  We went out for a holiday lunch with the Cahoots folks downtown at Dundas and Spadina.  I got to eat while Jovanni played with the babe, he got to eat while Dennie played with her, and then she got to eat while we all drank green tea.  Pretty much the perfect set up which I'd like to repeat every time that I go out for a meal.  This was her first meal with me in a restaurant and it went pretty stellar, all in all.  Plus, PHO 88 where we went had easy big wide doors to get the stroller in, space for the stroller to sit, and while no change table in the bathroom, plenty of room on the counter to change her.  All mothers, know that PHO 88 is baby friendly!

It was also great talking shop with the Cahooters.  Funny how easily I fall back into talking marketing strategies, next years programming, casting, etc.  So thanks guys, I had a lovely lunch!

Today Jenn and Griffin are coming and are going to try and help me figure out my sling woes.  For those of you who don't know, the amazing Gretel Meyer-Odell made us a beautiful sling for carrying the babe in.  Unfortunately, she refuses to be put in it, ever. For any reason.  At all.  She cries until she pukes all over herself.  Leave it to my baby to hate what every other baby loves, and something that would make her mothers life substantially easier.  I wouldn't have to carry the big lug all of the bloody time!!!  Anyway, Jenn's going to try and fix our issues.  It's like counselling for babies. 

This weeks visitors

This week, Adara and I had a visit from superstar Ms. Lisa Norton and knitting goddess and partner, Amy Stewart and James.  Lisa came and helped to decorate the Christmas tree,thank heavens, cause it wasn't happening all on my own!  We drank some hot chocolate, sang some carols, ate some pad thai; a very traditionally tree trimming party!

Amy and James came by with baby leg warmers for Adara to try on.  Amy's knitting them so that we can take her out in the front pack without her legs getting cold.  Adara was fascinated with James, who, as you can see, has a beard.  Adara's Poppa (grandfather) has a beard, and they have a lot of fun playing together, so I think that she was wondering when Poppa was going to start making his funny faces!  Either way, she liked James pretty well.

Trying to save the environment,one diaper at a time

Today, I finally decided to try the cloth diaper thing. I've committed to doing one cloth diaper a day to start. I kept putting it off because doing 100 hundred percent cloth diapers when my baby is colicky and I'm alone 14 hours a day was pretty overwhelming. Today I realized the obvious: that one cloth diaper a day is 365 less in the landfill. Saving the world, one diaper at a time!
*Please note that I bow down to all of you mothers who are doing all cloth; you are goddesses!

Hanging out with my sister

Visiting Cahoots

We went yesterday to visit my old workplace for the first time. In the course of twenty minutes, she smiled, cooed, wacked herself in the head, pooed so much it was in her armpits (not kidding), got entirely naked in the office to get changed, got the hiccups, got fed (my breast out in my office, not high on my list of things to do), screamed when put in the carseat and fell asleep.  Pulling out all the tricks for the Cahooters!

I Love this swing!

Ok, I realize that it seems like a bit of a parental cop out, but she truly loves this swing!  She's happiest spending long periods of time sleeping in her swing.  Really, I'm not making this up!  

And this is the hundred dollar piece of equipment that I swore that I didn't need and would never purchase, cause it's ugly, takes up space and is "completely unneccesary".  

 I think that the gods mock me sometimes. 

My Sense of Humour?...

I find that my patience is wearing a bit thin with people's who's young babies sleep through the night.  I started out all nice, like "Wow, good for you, that's wonderful" (all sincere smiles and truly happy for them.  After two months of Adara only sleeping maximum three hours at a time, I've gotten a bit "Yeah, great.  Good for you.  Fanbleepingtastic what a wonder your child is! "(all sarcasm and thinly veiled annoyance).   

What the heck!  What is the magic formula here to get this kid to sleep???  I asked my  doctor and he said that when his four year old slept entirely through the night, he'd let me know what the magic formula was.  He said that when patients used to come in saying "My baby doesn't sleep through the night and I've tried this method, and that book, and this system and nothing works"  he'd find himself mentally writing down the names of the methods and books that they tried, in order to look them up later, instead of helping the patient.  Not the most reassuring.  I'm convinced that she is capable of sleeping longer if she'd just eat more at once.  Is it wrong to force feed your two month old baby? :)  Me: "C'mon dammit, just one more suck!!"  Adara: "No mommy please, my little belly is so full!"  Me: "Do it, darn you, or else!"

What a borderline violent fantasy world I occupy on occasion! :)

Please immunize me against innoculations

We took Adara for her first innoculations yesterday. It took two of us to do it.  Let us just say that with an inconsolably screaming baby who went blue in the face yesterday afternoon I questioned why we do things that cause our babies pain.

Nuff said about that...

Mammapalooza

I went to a great little event last night that Gretel threw. It was a group of mom's getting together at the Rhino to hang out and have a nosh and a few beers. Since I'm still mostly doing this solo (Len's working like mad, and barely sleeping 'cause of the baby, poor love!) , the baby came with. Suprisingly, she is an awesome bar baby! The level of noise suits her need for white noise quite nicely, plus it covered up when she screamed for about four minutes before falling asleep in my arms. This was much less stressful then her screaming in a quiet coffee shop where everyone's trying to read the paper. Everyone in the bar was screaming at each other to be heard, so she fit right in!
I really enjoyed myself for the hour and a half that we attempted it. Adara happily played with the other women for a good thirty minutes, and then conked out.
On the way home, we stopped to pick up Len from the theatre. This was a mistake. The traffic was insane (hockey game, two shows getting out, etc.) and the baby got hungry. She was crying her little heart out for twenty minutes until we finally pulled over on King street and I jumped in the back and fed her. I felt so bad!!! She was such a superstar all day. She got her passport photo taken, went shopping, hung out with Auntie and mom in Tim Hortons, had two very long naps and went to Mammapalooza. And I paid her back by making her wait twenty minutes at 11pm to be fed... poor little babe!
The passport photo thing was a bit crazy. Did you know that for the passport photo, infants must have their heads square to the camera, their eyes open and their mouths closed, without any interference from other hands? I have never seen this state of being on my eight week old babe. If the eyes are open, the mouth is open, and her head is absolutely never square, it's always cocked to the right. Anyways, we got close ish and hopefully the stupid government will suck it up and accept the photo. Now, I just have to find a guarantor to sign her passport application who has known her for two years...

Congratulations to me, congratulations to me!

It's sunday at noon and I've managed to feed and bathe the baby, eat, shower, clean the bathroom, sweep and mop the house, do the dishes and write two Christmas cards. I've decided that I'm totally a rockstar, so there!!! There's no one in the world (other then other mothers) who understands what an accomplishment this is, so no one to congratulate me. So, congratulations to myself and to all the other mothers and fathers out there who are managing to stay relatively clean fed and sane!

Hurry up Dad, I got places to go!

Here's Adara doing her "zero to sixty in two seconds flat routine"  She finishes off a three ounce bottle in four and a half minutes!  How she breathes is a mystery to me.

Half Way There

So last night I went to the Bon Jovi concert with my mystery date.  She must remain mysterious as she was kinda playing hooky from work, and who the heck knows who's reading stuff online these days.  We've wanted to go and see Bon Jovi forever, so this time we sucked up the ridiculous ticket prices and did it! It was awesome.  I did my hair in huge pin curls so that I was looking all eighties and off we went to the ACC.  

It was a pretty standard concert, some guys singin' and playin'; none of this fancy pants "Celine Dion flying through the air on a bow of a ship" crap.  Just good tunes and a super hot Jon Bon Jovi.  Len and I agreed long ago that if he ever had the chance to sleep with Angelina Jolie and I ever had the chance to sleep with Jon Bon Jovi, we should totally do it!  I mean, who could resist and you'd kick yourself for the rest of your life if you said no.  Len recently pointed out that I'm the one who picked Angelina Jolie for him and she actually wouldn't be his choice for his "get out of Jail Free infidelity".  But, c'mon, she's hot!!  Anyhow, so is Jon Bon Jovi!!!!  

The music was awesome, we danced up a storm and got stupidly drunk on these king size over the top beers that they sell, with really handy lids so that you don't go all spilly on folks.  Although, somehow, that didn't stop my date from gettin' all spilly, silly girl!  It was pretty cool because there was lots of teens and twenties and also old folks like us and lots of people who had brought there 10 and 11 year old kids.  One guy had a two year old with him, which struck me as slightly odd, but hey, to each his own!

At 5:30 am I was maybe kinda regretting all the liquor when I realized that I could not successfully navigate my stairs with the baby in my arms. It's the first time that I've been drunk since last new years. But, Len was super cool about taking care of her and so was Cynthia who came to babysit while we are at the show.  Thanks Cynthia!

Feeding the babe at 5:30 am (liquor well and out of my milk at this point) it was like she was a new person to me.  I've never gone that long ( 10 hours) without seeing her before.  I felt like we were meeting again, and she was awfully sweet!  All in all, a good  night and the fulfillment of a small town hard rockers dreams!

Stupid Government, Part II, AKA the nice lady

I had a call today from the woman who tried to help me yesterday to untangle the ridiculous web of getting Adara's passport. She called the birth registration offices for me, found out that I should have my birth certificate in the next 10 days and that I should never have been sent to get a travel letter. Then,she took down the confirmation number of my application, and is now calling the office back to see exactly when I'll get it in order to guarantee that we can travel.
She didn't have to do this. Her job is just to issue travel letters,and tell me when she can't. I'm completely impressed that she not only took down my number, but called me the next day, and then called herself to check up on our application, even though I have the number and could have done it myself. The government may be stupid, but they still have some awfully nice people working for them. So thanks Gail, this was very un-Toronto and un-government bureaucracy of you. It makes me feel really good that there's people like you out there!

Stupid government

Ok, so five weeks ago I did Adara's live birth registration. I was told that I had to wait for it to come back until I could apply for a birth certificate, so I did. After four and a half weeks, I checked on line and found out that if I had done the whole process online it would have taken 15 days; but since I did one piece by mail it would now take 16 weeks. So, I applied for the b certificate and called the hotline to ask what I could do since I have to fly with her at the end of January. He said go to East York Civic Centre and get a travel letter. Meanwhile, the live birth registration form arrived. So I went to East York today, where they haven't performed this service (travel letters) in over five months. Off to Scarborough Civic Centre, in the middle of nowhere. They can't issue me a travel letter, because I have the registration of live birth form. I can't get her passport without either a b certificate or travel letter. Ok, so now what? Stupid bleeping government!!!!! I totally knew that this would happen!!!!! The nice lady at the desk agreed with me and she's" going to make some calls and call me back, cause dammit,this is stupid!"
I quite agree.

Hiding from my baby

I'm currently upstairs in the spare room "hiding" from my baby. Why? Because she's completely exhausted and every time I pick her up she gets excited and wound up and wants to eat and snuffles like mad through her nose until she pukes. If I set her down in the swing she gets very calm and starts to head to sleep, which she really needs right about now. However, If I walk around or sit downstairs anywhere within a mile of her, she picks up on my stress and screams. Thus, I hide. Don't worry she's perfectly safe, all nicely strapped into her happy place swing. It's like hide and seek, only for a very little baby.
Tomorrow, we are off to do a little talk for the Canada Council. I'm excited to get to use that part of my brain, but seriously hoping that she doesn't scream at all the nice theatre folk! Heather's being a champ and is going to come and help, so we'll see how it goes.

Morning Glory

So, this morning I brought the baby into bed with us and she fed and slept on and off from 9 am to 11:30am, a pretty lovely start to the day.  This is how the rest of the day went:

noon: feed

1pm: diaper change results in pee everywhere including in her hair

1:15pm an unscheduled bath to deal with above mentioned pee-a-thon.  In the midst of poor Len trying to clean the house, so dishes and food etc where unceremoniously pushed out of the way for the pee covered babe

1:20 new diaper and outfit

1:25 mommy has the bright idea to give a nice tummy massage

1:28 the hugest, most liquidious poo ever seen on earth

1:30pm new diaper with daddys help, change pad number two into the laundry

1:32pm hiccups, dammit!

1:33 pm feed

1:34 pm throw up on mommy including her clothes

1:35 mommy dries off

1:37 feed

1:40 puke down mommy's back (we're now 40 minutes late for a playdate)

1:50pm finally leave the house

2:30 pm feed

3:15 pm feed

4:15pm feed

5:15pm the screaming attack from the blog below, both baby and mommy are screaming for no apparent reason, other then all the crazy liquid explosions of the day

5:20pm an attempt at feeding, but mommy is empty, tears from mommy and baby

5:25pm  blessed nap time for all

8pm blogging as we have recovered somewhat

I shall call this day "Attack of the Bodily Fluids"!

Why are we shouting?

It's a really fine line between talking loudly over a screaming baby in order to be heard, and shouting at each other over a screaming baby.  I think that I kinda crossed it today.  Ah well, after four years of marriage, I guess a little shouting was inevitable at some point. :)

The only picture of us all together

'Kay, so life has been so busy that this is the only photo in existence of all three of us.  You can't see Adara, it's 7 am before Len goes to work and none of us have had a shower or bath.  What does this say about my parenting skills that I can't manage to get clean and take a picture in one day?  It's one or the other people, one or the other!

Escape artist

So, this is the point where we decided that maybe the baby didn't need to sleep in her little basinette anymore.  Once she started pulling this escape artist routine we were pretty much done.

"If I can just throw my legs over the side of the bassinette, toss myself onto the floor and crawl to the door, I can go get that frickin' latte that no one will bring me! Bastards, I will escape from you all yet!  (wha ha ha ha... )

Oh God, I ate way too much!

The yellow poo at the end of the tunnel

In the first few weeks of life, Adara's poos where always green instead of the much desired healthy yellow.  There was long conversations with midwives and doctors about why this had happened.  The conclusion was that she wasn't getting enough of the good, high fat hindmilk from me, so I needed to force feed her a bit (anyone else sense an eating disorder to be in this tale? :)  ).  So, for several weeks everyone was diligently staring at Adara's dirty diapers, discussing if it was more or less yellow then before, waxing poetic about what yellow vs. green really means and generally discussing these remarkably close colours on the colour wheel.  

One particularly bad day, Len and I decided that we were just really hold out for "The yellow poo at the end of the tunnel!"  Who knew how quickly parenthood could turn you into a critic of poos?

A lovely afternoon at the theatre

Yesterday I went to the pay what you can matinee of the Drawer Boy at Theatre Passe Muraille, while mom and dad watched the babe.  It was a lovely afternoon.  Strangely, I'm about the only person left on the planet who hasn't seen this 10 year old play.  I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It's set very near my home (Goderich) in Clinton, ON, a small town in southwestern ontario.  I loved the play and felt really transported by the afternoon at the theatre, by myself entirely for a change.  I can't think of the last time that I enjoyed an afternoon at the theatre that much.  Perhaps I'm less cynical about theatre when I'm not involved in it or currently making it.