A Shopping Excursion

I went to Target today.  With Evelyn.  I'm really the luckiest new mom in the world.  I have a sister and a husband who allow me to go wherever I need to, basically whenever I need to, without a child in tow.  In the past I have generally planned all of my errands when one of them is around.  Once in a while I would take Evelyn, but it's just a pain in the butt!

Now that she's sitting up, though, I figure that it's time to start doing what most other mothers have to do on a daily basis and take my kid places.  With her sitting up, I can finally stop lugging the carseat or stroller in and out of places, and I can actually sit her in a cart.  I decided Target was going to be our first excursion today.

I planned the trip.  I made a shopping list so that I wasn't wandering aimlessly.  I even organized it according to department.  Ok, not really, but I should have to save the zig zagging I ended up doing even with a list.  I actually also planned out where I was going to park.  I know some places have parent and child parking, but in my opinion, a spot close to the door isn't the prime parking.  It's the spot next to the cart return.  You can get a cart before you even take your kid out of the car, and you can put her back in the car and easily return the cart.  I felt like a genius for figuring this out before I parked the car.  So I got to Target and found my spot right next to the cart return.

I have a shopping cart cover.  It floats around my car and the directions are in my diaper bag, unread.  I mean, honestly, you plop the thing in the cart and you go, right?  Wrong.  I felt like the biggest moron.  I couldn't figure out how to get it over the back of the child seat and line up the leg holes.  In the meantime my child was sitting in the car in the 90 degree weather.  I finally just said whatever, made sure the leg holes of the cover were lined up with the leg holes on the cart and strapped her in.  

It took about three minutes in the store for Evelyn to find the exposed cart handle.  How the heck is that stupid thing supposed to protect them if they can reach the handle?  I tried laying it over the handle, but the minute she moved, the handle was exposed again.  And whenever I stopped the cart to try to adjust the seat, she got fussy, even though I timed my trip for immediately after nap and feeding.  I got over it the fact that she was picking up every germ known to man and decided to keep moving.

At that precise moment, Super Mom rounded the corner.  She was perfectly coiffed, khakis, cardigan set, pearls, and two perfectly behaved kids in tow.  And there I was (unshowered) in my Old Navy tank, jean shorts, ponytail, and headband.  My kid was putting her hands all over the dirty cart, while hers sat in the perfectly covered cart, hands basically folded in his lap.  I tried my best to look unfazed, even confident as I gave her a look that said, "Yea, my kid touches the cart.  But it's cool because by the time she starts day care she'll be immune to everything short of the Ebola virus and your kids will be at the doctor every week with an ear infection!  Just wait, in point two seconds she's going to drop her pacifier on the ground and I'm going to clean it with my mouth and give it right back to her."  Not that her kids will go to day care, but someday they'll come in contact with another kid, and then she'll wish they had touched the germy shopping cart!

I hustled along to the next aisle, and promptly adjusted my cart cover to match hers.  It really was amazing how one little adjustment, and suddenly it fit.  I finally had a safe cart.

I swear she knows how to sit up, it's just that shopping really wears her out!

All in all, it was a successful shopping trip.  I got everything on my list, including baby food!  We're starting solids everyone.  And because I didn't know what food to start with, and there are a lot of choices, and it was on sale, I got two of everything. 

Last Week

So it's been a while.  I knew it was time for a post when even Steve commented that it has been over a week.  It isn't that nothing has happened, it's just I've been preoccupied.  I did something a little crazy.  I picked up...a book!  Not a magazine, not a child development book, an actual novel.  And I couldn't put it down.  Any time not parenting, cooking, sleeping, has been spent reading.  Both Kelly and Steve commented on my voracious reading.  Blogging just kind of got in the way of reading.  The good news is, I finished the book today during naptime.  I can resume my computer activities.

I'm going to summarize some of the highlights of the past week for you all:

1. Steve doesn't want me to share this one because it makes us seem dirty.  I assure you, we are not.  My husband is very diligent about keeping a clean house.  The problem, as I referenced in a past post about burp cloths, is that our daughter spits up all over the place, and it's virtually impossible to find all of the spots on the rug, toys, and blankets that she spews on.  Which lead to an issue last week.

I fed Evelyn and then plopped her down on her play mat so I could grab my yogurt.  I reached for her piano toy and found a swarm of ants all over the rug and toy.  I panicked.  Where should I put the ant covered toy?  Where should I put her so I could clean the ants?  She can't be on the floor, I can't put her on the couch, she'll scream in her crib.  What do I do?  How do you get rid of a ton of ants?  I finally placed her in her walker thing.  I decided to use wet paper towels to clean up the floor and went to the kitchen.  Evelyn promptly started screaming.  I ran back out to find her leg had not gone through the leg hole and was wedged under her.  I tried to pick her up, but she was totally stuck.  I just succeeded in lifting the walker along with her.  I finally managed to dislodge her leg and place her more carefully in the walker.  I took care of the ants, decided there was no way to clean the piano, and threw it out.  Amazingly, I must have done something right because the ants are gone.

2. I went out to Lancaster with some family, and managed to slam into a curb and explode my tire.  AAA came and put on the spare for me, but naturally it was pretty flat and the guy recommended getting a new tire before driving back home.  We found a shop right across the street actually and took the car over there.  But they had to have a tire delivered, so it was going to take a while.  No problem, except it was rainy and about 50 degrees and I hadn't really dressed myself or Evelyn for the weather, and now we were stuck walking around in it.  Normally a busted tire isn't much cause for concern, but when you are carting around a 5 month old, anything that should be relatively simple becomes an ordeal.  There's not a whole lot more to this story, it seemed more blog-worthy in my head.  The tire got fixed, Evelyn was a champ, and we got home safely.

3. Steve perfected diaper changing Evelyn when she is on her tummy.  We had an up the back explosion that made an absolute mess from waist to neck and he decided the best way to minimize the mess was to lay her on her tummy so that we could remove her shirt without smearing the mess all over her and in an effort to save the changing pad cover.  It worked like a charm.  Why we didn't think of this months ago, I'll never know.


4. We discovered that the key to a baby who sleeps
through the night is utter exhaustion.  Although it could be that we finally introduced rice cereal.  She even fell asleep in the tub, but I get nervous about posting pictures of her in the tub.





5.  And the most important event of all this past week is that Evelyn met her Great-Grammy Dulik and her Aunt Karyn!

Thank You

I'm crying again today, but I think there are many others who are crying with me.  These days, anything that happens to a school hits me doubly hard.  As both a teacher and a mom, I now feel these tragic events on such different levels.  So today's post isn't going to be a silly anecdote.

I follow another blog called Baby Sideburns, both on Facebook and her actual blog: http://www.chicagonow.com/baby-sideburns

She's pretty hysterical, can be kind of crude, but says oh so eloquently what so many parents are just thinking.  I really loved her post on Facebook this morning (trolls are people who disagree with what she says/does):

"A reader just brought to my attention that while I'm bitching about my kid waking up too early, there are a bunch of parents in Moore, Oklahoma who would love to be woken up by their kids this morning. She is not a troll. She is absolutely right. To those parents in Oklahoma, my prayers are with you today. I'm deleting my last post and I'm not bitching about my kids today. I'm hugging them tighter."

It's so true.  I would wake up 10 times a night for the rest of my life just to know that Evelyn's going to be okay, and I know Steve would, too.  Don't get me wrong, I am awaiting the day when I sleep until 6 or 7 without being woken up, but if it never happens, I'll survive!  I will be working closely with my cousin Janey to actually invent the Coffee IV, but I'll survive.  

I also want to take this opportunity as a teacher, and as the school year starts to wind down, to remind the parents out there to thank your kids' teachers.  I don't mean buy them something (but I know they wouldn't say no to a Starbucks or Wawa gift card, stay away from the chocolate, mugs, and candles).  I mean write them a note, have your kid draw a picture, and just genuinely let them know that you appreciate what they do.

My whole philosophy as a teacher has always been to run my classroom and treat my students as if they were my own kids.  If I were a parent of one of my students, would I be alright with how my child was treated that day?  That being said, 99% of the teachers out there think the same way.  Your child's teacher loves them, and as we have seen too much lately would put themselves in danger to protect your child.  As parents and teachers we have to hope that we will never have to experience a similar situation first hand, but you should know that your child's teacher would do anything in their power to prevent something from happening to them.  And that's why you need to thank them, even if you didn't like them, even if it wasn't your child's best year or favorite teacher.

I'll step down off my soapbox now and go back to CNN.

The Worst Part...

I'm sitting here hooked up to the pump, enjoying my morning cup of coffee, watching Regis and Kelly (because no matter how many times I watch I still can't get it in my head that the title is now Kelly and Michael), enjoying a few mindless minutes of Candy Crush while baby takes her morning nap.

As I swap those candy tiles, my mind is racing trying to come up with a good blog idea.  I have a list of ideas stored for when I can't think of what to write, but none of them appeal to me today.  All of a sudden I am tearing up and I realize that the darn college acceptance commercial is on again.  You know the one.  It's all the video clips of high school kids who are opening their college acceptances and realizing they got in.  And to me, many of those kids look like kids for whom college is going to be a life-changer, but I'm just inferring here.  I remember the release of stress that comes with that first acceptance, thank God someone wants me!  And now it's not just some tears, it's full on crying.  Their lives are going to be so much betttttttttt-teeeeeeeeeeeer-errrrrrrrrrrr!  Sob, sob, sniff.  They're so haaaaaap-ppppppy!

And I suddenly realize the absolute worst thing that has happened to me since being pregnant.  It's not the changes to my body, it's not the lack of sleep, changing the poopy messes, and the constant spit up.  It's the fact that I have turned into an emotional mess.  I have always been stoic.  I don't show emotions, I don't talk about my feelings, I used to never cry unless I was super stressed or exhausted.  In high school I actually managed to get my mom to let me go on a school trip to Costa Rica by crying about it, that's how rare my tears were.  Now I cry at the drop of a college acceptance.

If I'm being brutally honest, the college acceptance cry was actually the second time I teared up this morning.  I looked up an old YouTube video of a flash mob dance that a group of teachers is going to perform at school for the end of the year talent show this year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSOgVgM7CDc

Our version is much simpler, but you get the idea.  Once I watched the Jai Ho video, YouTube lead me to a few other flash mob videos.  And as I watched a few more, again I found myself getting teary.  It's just so awesome to me these groups that break out into dance!  And again, they're so haaaaaap-ppppppy! They're having so much fuuuuuuuuuu-uuuuuuuuun!  For crying out loud, it makes me hate myself!

The first sign that things were getting bad was probably when Steve and I started going to a new church a few months before Evelyn was born.  The church we picked has one of the most amazing choirs I have ever heard in my life.  There are anywhere from 50-100 members singing on any given Sunday.  It is beautiful.  I want to cheer and applaud every single time they sing, but I guess that isn't appropriate in the middle of service.  Every single time we went before Evelyn was born, and even on Easter when they sang the Hallelujah  Chorus, I found myself crying.  Thank goodness we had a burp cloth with us on Easter because I needed to blow my nose.

Last week I actually managed to make it through the whole service without getting emotional and I considered it a major milestone.  And when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed another woman wiping away tears after the choir sang, I realize that maybe, just maybe, it's ok to be emotional.  

Burp Cloth

When a baby spits up it is not that quintessential picture that you have in your mind.  There is no baby propped up over your shoulder with a sweet little burp cloth.  It isn't a few pats on the back and a cute little burp followed by a little residual milk.  I suppose that's what newborn spit up is like, but 5 month old spit up is totally different.  

First off, don't bother propping the baby over your shoulder.  All she is going to do is stare at everything else around.  You can try patting her gently on the back, but really, it's not going to do anything.  So instead, you sit the baby on your lap and cover her and a portion of your lap with the burp cloth.  You resume the patting on the back.  Again, nothing happens.  Maybe this time, just this time, she doesn't need to burp?  So you remove the burp cloth and begin playing.  

It is at this very moment a belch that rivals any belch you have ever heard erupts from that tiny body.  And with it comes a river of foul spit up.  The burp cloth wouldn't have done anything, anyway, because it's projectile.  It splatters all over your pants and the couch (and the stories I could tell about my husband and the spit up on the couch!).  

If you're lucky, your baby doesn't spit up after a feeding.  This does not necessarily mean you are safe.  Time passes, a half hour, an hour, a whole nap, and you go to pick up your baby and walk to the kitchen.  And maybe that's when the gurgle and belch comes.  Once again, you are covered, and now so is the rug.  This time, there is no burp cloth to help you clean up.  When there is no cloth around you can guarantee that this is the mother of all spit ups.  It's a pool on the floor.  Maybe, just maybe, if you're lucky it landed in the fold of your shirt and not on the rug.  But you're still stuck with no burp cloth to clean it up.  So you do some crazy bent over shimmy to the location of the nearest burp cloth.  This results in a path of spit up across the floor.  

No matter what you do, there is never a burp cloth when you need it.  Steve, Kelly, and I have tried to brainstorm a few ideas to assist in this problem.  A simple solution would just be to stash one in every room in the house.  On every table, shelf, and surface you can find.  That still doesn't solve the problem if you're standing in the middle of a room with nothing near you.  In this case you would need a burp cloth suspended from the ceiling.  Kelly and I almost did this this afternoon before Steve got home with some painters tape and safety pins.  The last idea we had would be to create some kind of pacifier clip for adults so you could make sure that no matter where you go you have a burp cloth with you.  Since I haven't had to use it in a while, I'll use my school ID clip for the time being:

Daddy's Girl

I wanted to let everyone reading know that there is a way to have all of my blog posts emailed right to you.  If you look to the right of this, you should see a place to enter your email.  You will get an email notification every time I post something.  Sometimes I forget to post to Facebook, but this way you will always be on top of what's going on!

This was a post I started writing a few weeks ago and then forgot about!  It's kind of applicable today, too, because we did have a good sleep night last night.  The first one in quite a few weeks.  It's also Monday, and on Monday Evelyn often turns into a different child.  I blame it on Steve going back to work after being home with us for two days.  That being said, a glimpse into a Monday a few weeks ago:

This morning I started to change Evelyn’s diaper.  I was complimenting my sweet girl on a much better sleeping night than the past few nights.  She slept until almost 6:00 and then fell back asleep until 9:00, which made it a great night sleep for me, too!  As I started to undress her I also was thinking about how spoiled I was all weekend while Steve and Kelly were both home.  It was literally one of the first diapers I had changed in 2 days.  I made a mental note to thank Steve and Kelly for being on diaper duty all weekend.  It was gearing up to be a great day!

And then I caught a whiff of that tell-tale odor and knew what I was in for.  Because my child had not pooped in about three days.  Because my child knows when it’s Monday.  And when it’s Monday, Daddy goes back to work.  And when Daddy goes back to work, my child can start pooping again because now it’s just Mommy around to change the diaper explosions.  And it’s always an explosion after three days of not pooping.  So I started taking off the sleep sack, and there it was: that bright orange smear across the back.  I peeled off the onesie that was stuck to her back from her waist to her shoulders.  I have it down to a science at this point, just the right way to fold it under to minimize the mess.  Now, instead of thanking Steve, I was cursing him and the power he has over our little girl!   

I got her cleaned up and began to rinse the poop off of everything.  My saving grace was that I had yet to start Evelyn’s laundry.  Generally, when I finally give in and do her laundry, she will poop all over herself and her clothing about 5 minutes later.  This was a good day.  I rinsed the clothes off, stain stick-ed them, and got the laundry going.  It was a good day.  Until 2 hours later when explosion number two occurred…

Mother's Day

I've been instructed to post about Mother's Day by my mother and grandmother.  I'm not really sure what to write about.  When I said that to my mom, she said, "Write about me!"

The truth of the matter is that I just don't know where I would be without my mom!  We are so lucky to have her close.  Besides the normal mom stuff of helping out with Evelyn and feeding us on a pretty regular basis, she's a great friend.  She's the person I love to hang out with and who I check in with on almost a daily basis.    I really can only hope that Evelyn and I have the same kind of relationship.

She's such an amazing mom that I think it's hard for me to think of Mother's Day as a day for myself, too.  She's the most important mom I know, so how do I celebrate myself?  Don't get me wrong, I was treated wonderfully all weekend and my family made me feel special.  I got to do anything I wanted to do, and got many special treats as well, so there was no reason to not to feel like a special mom.  Maybe it's also the newness of being a mom?  Maybe next year it will feel like my day, too.  But I think that as long as my mom is around, that she will be the mom that most deserves to be recognized on Mother's Day.  And I hope that my mom and friend is around for a very long time!