Watch out Ben and Jen - Dax and Kristen are quickly becoming my favorite celeb couple.

Baby Book for Milo!

Click here to view this photo book larger

Create your own personalized photo books at Shutterfly.com.

Three Months

My little bubble is 3 months old today.  Here are some notable achievements as of late:
- He sleeps from around 7pm - 5am (insert enthusiastic high five between Cam and I)
- He talks a lot, loudly and with serious eyebrow participation
- He wears 9-12 month clothing and continues to be a little hulk with multiple chins
- He can lift his head quite well during tummy time
- He now sits at the dinner table on my lap during family dinner which somehow makes him feel much more real as a forever member of our family

Here are some favorites from the last month:

He's growing out of his newborn baby look and looking like a reallll boy.

 

His hair is growing in, we're praying for blonde!

 



 



Sometimes he's still a little lazy during tummy time.

 

 

 

 And just a picture of his sweet little hand.

 

 

And for historical purposes, in my quest to get my pre-baby bod back will post my progress.  I'm 3lbs away from my pre-preg weight but definitely still more squishy than I was before.  I'm fully aware that eating healthy will only take me so far and sooner or later I'm going to have to figure out how to work exercise into my week.  Meanwhile, I'm working on a time machine that can freeze time for everyone but me.

 

 

 

Her power is her own.

"We have a secret in our culture, and it's not that birth is painful. It's that women are strong."

Milo waves and talks and stuff

A Particular Type of Cold Day

It's a particular type of cold day in Phoenix today and in a moment that I closed my eyes to appreciate how beautiful a cold day sounds and feels I was totally thrown into a memory of my childhood.

With my eyes closed, the warm sun, the biting cold wind and the sound of windchimes swirling around me I am immediately 7 years old, laying on a hammock on the front porch of my cabin. As if it were yesterday, I can feel the net of the hammock pushing against my clothes, I can smell the wooden deck beneath me. I can smell the crisp cold air of being in the forest in elevation. I can hear the wind in the very tops of the pine tees. I can imagine opening my eyes to see the dark blue sky that seems higher than the sky in the city. With no clouds in the sky I can imagine the jet lines criss-crossed throughout the sky. I can feel the warm sun on my skin balancing the cold wind blowing. I can feel my cold fingers pulled inside the arms of my sweatshirt. All in this moment I can almost hear my mom and grandma talking while making sandwiches inside getting ready to call us in. I can hear the sound of my grandpa's van crunching up the gravel of the dirt road as he gets closer. I hear various birds chirping messages through the trees. I can picture the tulips growing in the red dirt along the driveway. All in this moment I feel like I could draw from my memory any sensory detail of those summers at my cabin. The feel of the firewood peeling, the smell of the carpet, the way the TV pointed in the living room, just out of eyes reach at the dinner table. The hard woven rope of the cushions on the wooden chairs. The sound of the forest outside. The sound of the VCR playing old tapes like Heart and Souls. I can even feel how cold the toliet lid is every time I sit down.

There is nothing sweeter and sadder than nostalgia. Drawing on the happiest memories of childhood with the weight of that moment being impossible to recreate.

Crazy Pills

Those that followed my blog in the tumblr days will remember my dance with the crazy pills.  To summarize, although I had a happy uneventful childhood with no trauma, I started getting wicked anxiety after having kids.  I didn't recognize it as anxiety as it just kind of crept up and became who I was.  I started getting physically affected by the stress I was under constantly so the doctor prescribed me my first dose of anti-anxiety/anti-depressants.  I hadn't realized how far I'd stepped from feeling like myself until I was on the medication.  I happily popped that pill every day until I decided to try for a baby with Cameron.  I spent a fun-filled 3 months coming off the medicine and then had a predicted roller coaster of emotions during the pregnancy but I felt pretty normal.  I felt confident that maybe I didn't have to get on the pills again.  Everything in my life was perfect, what did I have to worry about?  Turns out you don't need anything to worry about to still be crazy.

Around 6 weeks postpartum I started to get irritable.  I started to cry more.  Pick fights more.  Expect more from everyone to insane levels and then blow small events out of the stratosphere of proportion.  The biggest victim in this story is Cameron, followed closely by the older kids.  I could feel a physical shadow coming over me.  Like there was a layer of thickness over my brain that was exhausting me and making it impossible to reach happiness and joy.  Just like before, my body physically responds to stress.  My body hurt and my head ached.  I wake up in the early morning feeling like I'm in fight or flight mode without any reason.  My brain swirled over topics to find things to worry about.  Even stressful things that get resolved left an aftershock of stress reverberating through my subconscious.  So I spent several weeks winding myself tighter and tighter with emotional breakdowns several times a week .  My husband could somehow bring me back to the surface each time, even if just for awhile.  Finally I made the call to the doctor.

I'm three weeks in on crazy pills and feeling much better.  It's always so glaringly apparent how much I need them once I start them again.  I'm not preparing myself for the death of everyone around me anymore.  When my mom hadn't called me after her plane landed, I managed to not check the news for airplane crashes.  When I forgot to send an email at work, I convinced myself that no major harm would come from sending it in the morning.  When the voice told me "if you don't worry about it, it will happen..." I was able to remember that what will happen will happen with or without my worry.

Coming out of this and back into myself again, I can't help but feel totally overwhelmed with love for my husband.  He loves the parts of me that I can hardly stand to live with. I'm so incredibly lucky to have such a rock when I'm so spinny and crazy. With some Cameron love and a little bit of zoloft, I think I'll make it.

A Lesson in Tolerance for the Ignorant

Today on the world wide web, I ran across this picture of US currency folded up to depict 9/11 events. 

The caption to this picture read:

"Although it's difficult to accept, 9/11 was almost certainly an inside job. There is a ton of evidence available to support this being true. This includes the blatant placement of symbolism/ signs right in front of our eyes! Years ago I was shown that you could see the twin towers on fire if you folded a $20 bill right.. thought that was crazy, but this right here takes that to a whole different level! Starting with the lowest denomination and going up in numerical AND also sequence order....the $5 bill shows the twin towers, the $10 is after the planes hit them, the $20 shows the towers collapsing, the $50 is the dust and smoke from the rubble & the $100 is after the smoke has just about died down. I'm not trying to spread fear.. but rather awareness, we need to wake up! This is the time of the apocalypse... which is not doom and gloom, but in greek means a revelation of something hidden (revelations)"

I have started and restarted this sentence four times.  I'm speechless.  What are they insinuating?  That in the 1800s the US Treasury started laying plans for an ultimate government conspiracy?  And that to lay those plans they hired people to draw out designs for the dollar that could be folded in such a way that future government officials would stumble upon and understand their purpose?  Or maybe it was an ancient scroll of folding how-to directions that was passed on president to president until the right moment.  Then I found this:

You can even fold the $20 to say OSAMA!

Need even more proof?

9+11 = 20!

With just 2 more folds your $20 bill turns into a airplane!

COINCIDENCE? YOU DECIDE!

What the whaaaaaat?  So now our ancient US Treasury department was in cahoots with Osama's great great great great grandparents and they agreed to name their future great great great great grandson Osama so that their folding dollar bill prophecies could come true.

I AM SHAKING MY HEAD.  The people that come up with this stuff need a smack in the face and a new life.  I can just imagine the nerd that was hunched over his money, feverishly folding and refolding his dollars until he found the signs he was looking for.  It just is so ridiculous that I can't spend another minute talking about it.

The 4th Trimester

"When babies are first born, they don't have the brain maturity to deal with the outside world," says Jennifer McArthur, co-director of the Northwest Association for Postpartum Support. "They depend on their parents for basic survival, but also for soothing, because they just don't know how to soothe themselves until they are about 4 months old."

For this reason, some experts say human babies need the first three months of life to give their brain and central nervous system the time needed to mature. In the course of those three months, an infant develops into a baby who is able to respond to the outside world. Breathing starts to regulate. She becomes able to lift her head, smile, coo, develop social interactions, and begin to soothe herself. This time between birth and the end of a baby's third month is a unique stage of life that many now refer to as the "fourth trimester."

********************************************

Milo will be 3 weeks tomorrow. I read on my baby boards of women that also had December babies that we are all having similar experiences, but how we respond is quite different - or people are lying. Personally I hope they are lying or I feel like a really shitty new parent for not celebrating every sleepless night. I remember one day I opened up one of my December 2012 baby boards and a woman wrote, "In the middle of a 3 week growth spurt! Bubbs has been attached to the boob all day and won't stop crying if I put him down - I couldn't be happier getting a chance to snuggle my baby all day!"

Meanwhile.

My son was in that SAME growth spurt. I too had a child attached to me for days and felt starved and exhausted from the event. I was crying in showers and this woman was remarking these as blessed days. Am I an asshole or is she dellusional? Don't say both.

While I can't say she was lying, I can say that her truth is definitely not everyone's. Surely isn't mine. In the spirit of honesty, I wanted to share my realities for you during this 4th trimester of my child's life. For me it's a tiring, stressful, pushed to the limit period of time where you are infatuated with your babe but totally miserable in life. A strange juxtaposition, for sure. So here are my truths:

I spend most of my days breastfeeding. I now totally understand why when I asked new Moms how often they breastfed during the day, they looked at me like I asked them how many breaths they took that day. All I know is after 2 hours if he's not on my boob they are leaking like crazy, so that must be his average.

When I'm not breastfeeding, I'm trying to fashion him comfortable enough to sleep solidly for at least 30 minutes so I can walk away and do something for myself - sometimes that means just time to eat. One day I spent literally 2 hours having to poop - no kidding. It was getting close to carrying him in there with me and pooping together, lucky for Milo he picked the right time to accept his swing and chill for a couple minutes.

Our bed sheets are covered in body fluid - not the fun kind. We spend days covering pee, vomit and the tiniest bits of poop smear with receiving blankets so that we don't sleep on wet spots. Luckily there has been no major poop situations that would force my hand to actually wash the sheets. We're not monsters people, we would definitely probably wash the sheets if he pooped on them. Maybe. Realistically, I'm going to be honest here and tell you the sheets have been changed 3 times in the two months he has been alive. Judge away people! I know I would! But try and remember we have 6 people in our family generating laundry, requiring food and requiring care. It's not for the weak of spirit.

Showers are my sanctuary and I've never been more clean. I spent 30 minutes in a hot shower, even shaving my legs - just cause! To be more specific, I shower because there is no baby in the shower. And there times I would pay someone for that religious 30 minutes of me time.

I'm so goddamn tired that I don't even realize how sleep deprived I am. I wake up between 2-4 times a night and then my days are spent trying to take care of myself and other family duties in the periods where he allows me to put him down while he's sleeping. I'm a 10 hour a night person. How I'm not dead yet totally escapes reason.

I still don't know everything. I'm a baby person, so not only did I grow up babysitting, but I've had two babies of my own. At this point, you go into this like "I've got this, right?" and are continuously reminded that each baby comes out wildly different. Cameron and I still ask each other nightly, "When should we feed him? Does he seem hungry or is this his tired cry? Should we put him down now? Should we put him in the swing or the bed?" It's a game! A terrible, terrible game where when you lose - your baby cries for hours straight causing you to question the existance of your sanity.

I've gone mad. My crazy pills and propensity to anxiety is a post for another day, but let's just say this isn't my first rodeo. And what do you get when you take an already high strung person and add a new baby, no sleep, lots of responsibility and little control? A dumpster fire of emotions. Specifically you get a seriously hostile woman who sends loving text messages all day and then boils in hostility all night. A woman that cries in the shower. It's been fun.

In spite of all the madness, and the hypershowering and negligent laundering, I'm truly so infatuated that the hard moments pass without memory. It sucks in the moment when your baby has been fussy and nursing all day, you haven't eaten and it's been weeks since you slept. And sometimes I see these women on boards that act elated with every moment, and I just feel like a giant ungrateful asshole when I read it. My hope is that NORMAL people - yes I'm classifying myself as normal - will read this post and appreciate that they are not crazy for feeling dark and miserable after sitting on the couch all day, or after day 3 of your baby eating every hour at night, or for being lonely as shit for adult interaction as you sit at home watching Maury and Law and Order all day. These things are normal, and you are normal and it's okay to want to call your baby an asshole after they've been crying all day. I know you don't mean it, and sometimes they kinda act like one.