well that was fast

The nanny quit. Or maybe I fired her, I'm not entirely sure.

Yesterday was a big day - I had a six hour test and LD had a demo for a potential client. It was suppose to be a trial day before I go back to work, time for her and Wow to get acquainted when it would be just the two of them.

But she didn't show up. We both left voice and text messages. Almost 3 hours later she called LD to say that she was sorry and thought we were scheduled for tomorrow. And that she had had her headphones on and hadn't heard the phone ring. Or seen the text messages.

By then LD had asked our neighbor Marcia to watch Wow for the time period of his demo. He told her I would call her later in the afternoon.

When I called her to discuss, she apologized again. It sounded like an honest mistake. But when I reminded her of the job situations of the four adults involved and that we really needed to know if was interested in the position, she said something vaguely noncommittal. I immediately accepted her resignation and wished her the best.

It didn't feel good. Mistakes happen. I liked her, and even more importantly, I liked how she interacted with my son. But LD was a little freaked out and Ana even more so, after just having found out that she either had to start her daughter in daycare now or wait until September. In other words, no provisional period. This is no small issue if you understand how difficult it is to find childcare for children under 24 months. When I found put I was pregnant I made two phone calls - one to my mother and one to the director of Munch's preschool so she would put a spot on hold for the little tadpole in a year's time.

I did what anyone would expect me to do - I called my mom and begged her to come for what had been the "provisional period" prior to Wow's being able to start daycare. I didn't need to beg.

With my mom here, the transition back to work will be easier. And as an added bonus, she always provides colorful material for this blog. She has recently shared a certain theory of hers, one that sheds light on how it is that perfectly functional cell phones, computers, remote controls, and any other technology developed after 1970, do not, in fact, function in their professed roles when under her command. The details aren't worked out yet, but the overall arc involves perturbations unique to her electromagnetic field.

I do love my mom.

munch's room

I was putting Munch down for a nap in Jo's room, her friend from school and the daughter of one of my friends from work. She looked around and said "MAMA, CAN I HAVE A ROOM LIKE THIS ONE?"

It kind of broke my heart.

Jo's room is full of large, white furniture that is part of matching set. On her full-sized bed is a plush quilt and a white duvet covered in pink and green flowers that also match the accent pillows. There are large prints of whimsical fairies framed on the wall. The room is feminine and etherial, as tasteful as it is beautiful.

And very different from Munch's room. In Munch's room, LD painted three large murals of koi that hang above her twin bed and opposite an oversized map of the world that I got at Ikea. I chose the bedspread because it was the same color as the water of the map and LD put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. There are two items I brought back from Mozambique - one is a wooden wall hanging of carved animals and the other is one of the two mobiles of hand-carved fish that hang from the ceiling. The other mobile I found near our home in Pacific Beach.

There are two smaller framed paintings - one also of koi that was painted by my very talented friend Fiona, and the other is of Peter Rabbit that was painted for Munch by a friend of my MIL. Above her bed and near the door are small canvases covered in smudges of bright colors that she did herself. The bookshelf has large giraffes on either side.

Nothing in the room was expensive, and with the exception of the paintings that were done especially for her, none of it is of any value. But I love this room. Absolutely love it. To me this room says "your parents adore you and think you are capable of great things", and I realize it is stupid to think a room could say as much.

But truthfully her room is far more "me" than it is "Munch". I am the one who loves the color blue, fish, and travel.  (And now after having just purchased a blue couch I realize I have to stop giving my mom a hard time about the purple thing.) She is 3 years old and loves pink and lace and fairies and dress up clothes and princesses. If Jo's room had a canopy bed she might have never left.

I've blogged before about the pretty pink princess issue and can honestly say that I am now fully at peace with it. I've even embraced it, harnessed it for my own purposes. She has princess counting cards and reading games. We've talked about about the role of jealously in Snow White. She needed a new pair of sneakers for school, I found one that happened to also be covered in brown sequins. I get it. It's just a phase, one that we can work in and through together.

But I really love that room.

preparing for reentry

My nanny doesn't have a Facebook account. What 26 year old doesn't have a Facebook account? I worry I've hired a weird nanny.

She isn't technically my nanny as we are doing a nanny-share with one of my co-fellows whose daughter is the same age as Wow. We hired the nanny on a five week provisional basis when I go back to work. "Provisional" largely so that she can bow out gracefully if the care of two 3 month olds is a 3 month old too many.

I don't really think she's weird for not having an FB account. And of course I looked her up. She's cute and young and I was far more worried that I would find pictures of her doing kegstands than to find nothing at all. Yes, I googled her too.

Tying to hire someone that I trust with my very small and floppy son has been moderately stress-provoking, probably because, aside from the few times Marcia has watched Munch, we've never had a childcare provider who wasn't also a blood relation. You will have to forgive me if the FB thing seems creepy.

We've been making other preparations for the end of my leave, the least fun of which has been cracking down on Munch - part of the reason for all the yelling I mentioned in Munch's bday post. LD and I worry about how this family is going to function when I go back to work. "Function" as in the daily routines that involve breakfast, getting ready for school/work, pager going off, Skypes coming in, drop offs/pick ups, dinner, clean up, packing lunches, call nights, and weekend work days. And that was pre-Wow. (A shout out to single parents. Respect, yo. And nothing but it.)

The conclusion we came to was that we needed Munch's help in keeping all members of the family fed, clean, happy, and employed. She needed to grow up a bit.

So we've purposely become less tolerant of some behaviors. She has more responsibility for cleaning up her toys, eating what's served to her, not spilling food, using an indoor voice, doing what is asked the first time, etc. etc.

Disciplining your kids sucks, especially a kid whose most frequent transgression is that, with breakfast on the table, she's practicing her pirouettes in the living room despite repeated requests to get your butt back in the kitchen and finish your cheesy toast Now.

When the tears well in her eyes and she pleads to NOT-BE-IN-TROUBLE-I-JUST-WANT-A-HUG-DO-YOU-STILL-LOVE-ME? I am painfully reminded that, by forcing her to grow up even faster than she already is, we are also shortening this magical period where LD and I are her everything. Her sun, her moon, and her stars. Everything. This fact is never as obvious as when she thinks she has upset us.

Having recently discovered the parent-swing. I don't know what to say about the headband. 

 A running start

 Launched!

For the record, I suspect Wow is ready for a change of pace. I think the little guy is tired of certain someone repeatedly yelling in his face That's my chin! My chin on a little man! How did you get my chin?OOooooo Your mama loves you. Mah mah mah.

ok fine

Remember when I wrote I had no intention of traveling during this maternity leave?  I revised my position.

LD found out on March 9 that he was needed at a client site as soon as possible. He wanted to make it into a family trip that would include his parents, who had expressed a desire for my grand-baby time. Thankfully they were on board as I didn't think I could keep Munch safe in and around the water while also caring for Wow. 

One problem. Someone was not ready for international travel. 

Semi-urgent trip to the post office on March 9

Thanks to his big sister, we had other provisions already covered. 

There were further preparations to address, the most pressing of which involved a certain postnatal muffin top. Somewhat reluctantly, I got out the Garmin and prepared for a beat-down. 

And am very proud of this. 

Ignore the pace, obvio. I think I ran 5:18/mile for miles 6.97-7.00. 

I am pretty stoked to have busted out 7 miles in 52 minutes, less than 10 weeks from giving birth and with an unknown* quantity of lbs around my midsection. There is still a lot of work to be done, but it's a good start.

*Unknown because I threw out my scale a few weeks ago. Its crime? Treason.

Can you guess where we are headed? The first picture is only part of the country, destination number two after LD finishes at the client site. 

the latest in home decor

This, my friends, is a geode.

Take note that I did not describe it as the "hottest" or the "chicest" in home decor. No, I wrote "latest", because it is the latest addition to our home decor.

I think the geode hit its height of popularity sometime in the late eighties, early nineties, and I think that because I am pretty sure I was about 11 when I decided my dolphin carved out of volcanic ash was waaayyy cooler than my miniature-sized dinosaur that was fixed to a purple crystal. Ash was in, crystals were out. I still have both the dolphin and the dinosaur in my bedroom at my parent's house and so wish I had them here so I could take a pic to post along side the geode.

LD and Munch had arrived home from the rock museum just before Wow and I got back from our walk yesterday afternoon. I can't say I was particularly enthused to find this displayed on the mantle.

When I pointed out that, while it was very nice and all, I didn't think it needed to be displayed so prominently in our home as um, fancy rock didn't really go with what we had going on in the living room and just maybe we could put it in Munch's room.....

He didn't buy it.

First, we don't have much of anything "going-on" in the living room. Unless you count bad wall color. Second, LD immediately assumed my prejudice against his geode stemmed from a general dislike of that which can be categorized as "trinkets", which is partly true. And furthermore, he went on, how can something that has been around for "millions of years" be dated?

So I moved it here, to the bookshelf, where, you know, the light is better.

wow at 9.5 weeks

Wow deserves some reflection too.

First, I have to say that in regards to the babies, as Munch was my n = 1 and with Wow I am now n = 2, it is difficult to avoid comparisons.  When Munch was born I'd spend hours staring at her wondering Who are you, you unknowable little creature? With Wow, it's more like You know who you aren't, my little love? Your sister. And thank goodness.

This is not to say I think of him as any less unique than his sister.

As I wrote in my last post, Munch was intense from the start. She wanted to be held and snuggled - and nurse (sigh)- every minute of every day. She wasn't very tolerant of strangers, long before true "stranger anxiety" should have set in.

Wow, just like any other baby, also loves to be held and snuggled, but as nursing and sleeping are discrete, independent activities, I find myself with the freedom to do stuff like pee without upsetting the baby. He transitioned to the crib earlier, and with less drama, than did Munch.

When I would try to put Munch down, she'd whimper as if to say oh Mama, please no! and I couldn't help but pick her back up again. Wow doesn't seem to require the same amount of constant cuddling. Which brings me to the strange realization that I feel less needed by Wow than I did by Munch. This is a bizarre feeling to have towards the vulnerable and dependent little love lump next to me. It also makes me worry that I am subconsciously treating my son differently than I did my daughter. I worry about this a great deal actually, having read somewhere that people are more likely to describe girl babies as "affectionate and loving" but would describe girl babies dressed in boys' clothing as "difficult". But the thing is, I don't feel I relate to Wow as a boy, really. He's my baby, far more than he's my boy.

Although Munch was a very expressive baby, we were never sure if those expressions represented feelings. A smile might express delight or, just as likely, she might be pooping. Wow started showing a responsive smile when he was just a few weeks old. His smile is a gummy, ear-to-ear stunner that is both easy to elicit and hugely rewarding for the lucky recipient. My dad was here this past weekend for Munch's birthday and to meet his grandson. As with my sister, I worried as Munch had also not been very receptive towards her grandfather upon during her first few months. And again as with my sister, it took only a few minutes of cooing before that easy smile was unleashed and it was obvious that both parties were completely in love.

The smile does not, however, make him any less strong-willed than his sister. LD most aptly described him "a pretty happy guy when he isn't totally pissed off". When he's had enough of the cooing, razzing, and incessant high-pitched requests to smile for your mama give your mama a big smile a big smile now your mama loves you do you know how much your mama loves you smile for your mama smile smile smile he will squawk and pull a face that expresses both annoyance and Enough Mama. Just wait till I've myelinated.

the big 0h-3

I was sitting next to Munch and a small birthday guest, each of us happily eating our respective slices of cake on the picnic table in the front yard. The other kids had returned to the trampoline or were making "bubble soup" with the vat of children's bubbles and my Tupperware.

Now gradually winding down, I was ready to call this party a great success. The eight preschoolers had played together without incident and the two babies had slept blissfully through the merry shrieking of children jumping on the trampoline or making full use of Munch's numerous percussion instruments. The bricks of the walk-way leading to the front door were covered with sidewalk chalk. Although storm clouds were gathering above, it hadn't rained.

I received many compliments on the food selection, and briefly considered not sharing that the chocolate croissants had come from the frozen section of Trader Joes. But those were too good a find to keep to myself. I did omit that I had used a bit of cream in the baked french toast where the recipe had called for milk. The kids had been happy with bagels, chicken sausage, and a huge platter of cut up strawberries, oranges, apples, and nectarines.

This is about half the food. I highly recommend those croissants. Seriously TJ. You rock. 

I'd been a bit nervous about this party, having invited four families that we didn't know. And that was in addition to the five that we did. Munch, very much aware of the plans in progress for her upcoming day, had asked that her friends from school be invited as well- friends whose names we knew but whose parents we'd never met. It was clear we couldn't do what we had done for her other parties, which was invite our friends and throw a primarily adult party featuring a little person with a cone on her head. Last year I had gotten her a small pinata and filled it with individually wrapped prunes. That wasn't going to fly this time around.

Munch had been ecstatic to see her friends from school and I loved seeing her so comfortable with the other kids that were mostly a few years older than herself. I also got to know four other moms, all of whom I liked very much. And now I was enjoying real buttercream frosting next to my happy birthday girl and one of her little buddies.

The girl's mom turned around from the conversation she was having, told her daughter that she'd had enough cake and to go play with the other kids, then returned to her conversation. The girl put down her fork and joined in on the destruction of my Tupperware.

It is difficult to describe how improbable that exchange and outcome would be in our family. First, as I have never walked away from a half slice of birthday cake in my life, it wouldn't occur to me to order my daughter to do so. Second, any attempt to separate Munch from her confection would have escalated into an all out war. We don't keep sweets in the house (except my hidden stash of dark chocolate - my nightly "antioxidants") because both she and I like them too much. 

Munch and I have had a pretty intense relationship since the OB plopped her onto my chest three years ago. She started at me with impossibly large eyes that were as wide as she was silent. It was as if she was grappling with the fact that the equally as terrified-looking face staring back was going to be in charge of her well-being for the next 18 years.  You? Oh no. 

She's been strong-willed and opinionated since the beginning, traits she could have inherited from either one of us. My parents think she is far louder and more vocal than I was at that age, and so I blame LD for the amount of yelling in this household. Yelling, that while exhausting for us, is neither emotionally-charged nor seems to bother her much. Take this morning for instance. LD handed her a dress to pull on as they were getting ready for school. NO I WILL NOT WEAR IT. I WILL THROW IT IN THE GARBAGE AND I WILL NOT WEAR IT. LD told her she was going to wear it, she again refused, he repeated himself in a louder, more insistence (but not angry) voice and she put it on. Every Single Morning we do this.

She then went into the bedroom where she heard Wow fussing. She pulled the blanket up to his belly and razzed his belly a few times, a technique she seen us use to get him to smile. MY LITTLE BABY LITTLE BABY ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? (razz).

So that's Munch at three - intense and willful, affectionate and empathic, with her mama's insatiable sweet tooth.

Happy birthday, my love.

the once-ler

When we moved here we were promised fruit. A lot of fruit. We were told the quantity of peaches, nectarines, apricots, figs, apples, pomegranates, oranges, pears, and persimmons produced by the trees in this neighborhood would be so great that people would leave crates of the excess on the curb for others to help themselves. That residents would invite volunteers from the food banks to come in and harvest the fruit so that it wouldn't go to waste. Our neighbors Marcia and George (the source of this information) described the apricot production by the two trees that provide shade for their back deck in terms generally reserved for warfare. It would be a time of "invasion" when they could not comfortably sit on the deck without suffering an aerial blitzkrieg of hailing fruit, which would then spread across the wooden planks in a thick jammy residue that would adhere to their shoes and be tracked through the house.

We moved across the street, pledged our alliance, and bought a food dehydrator.

We arrived in August 2010, just in time for the late season stone fruit, and for the first time I ate peaches that were still warm from the sun. The summer fruit came and went quickly, having produced a volume much smaller than our expectations.

The winter fruits - oranges, persimmons, and pomegranates were more plentiful. LD spent a morning pruning Marcia and George's pomegranate tree and was rewarded with about thirty poms that we made our way through in the following weeks. The wooden kitchen table, stained nightly with pomegranate juice, started to look like a crime scene and I had to explain my dark fingernails to a few patients who appeared to question my personal hygiene.

This past summer the peach, nectarine, and apricot trees produced almost no fruit. There were literally less than twenty apricots harvested from Marcia and George's two trees - and we were given six of those twenty. The peach and nectarine production was as abysmal and we passed the entire season without eating a single fruit from the trees that lined the street.

I don't know enough about fruit production to speculate myself as to what happened, others suggested a slightly earlier than usual blossoming left the fragile flowers vulnerable to high winds and heavy rain that came later in the season. A declining honey bee population (which, of course, has its own scientific-y name- colony colonization disorder or CCD, making it sound like a mental illness from the DSM) seems to be invoked as the etiology for everything from shrinking crop yields to the impending collapse of the US agriculture economy.

A few weeks ago those peach and nectarines started blossoming. And although the streets are absolutely beautiful, the temperature is dropping and the rains are coming again.

LD, after suffering the loss of two of the tomato plants that went in a few weeks ago, has transformed our back yard in preparation for the coming storms.

In general I am not a fan of plastic sheets in the backyard, but this is a relatively small price to pay for a season's worth of veggies.

Munch has a different explanation for the vanishing fruit.

THE ONCE-LER

(If you don't have kids, you probably don't get that joke. And that's ok because 1. it's not that funny and 2. the picture doesn't project that well - those are branches from the peach and nectarine trees, but the blossoms are faded so it is difficult to tell. But get it? She thought they looked like truffula trees.)

LD took Munch to her first movie this past weekend - Dr. Seuss's The Lorax (the once-ler, trufulla trees... see, it comes together eventually), which is currently one of her favorite books. This is likely due in no small part to its length as much as its content. After leaving the matinee, she asked her daddy if she could plant something. Despite the fact she was hours overdue for her afternoon nap (smart, that one - anything to delay nap or bedtime), LD, beaming with pride, took her to the nursery at ACE hardware (favorite store, remember?). She picked out some small flowers. 

We are hoping the rain and wind stay away for little longer, both for the sake of the blossoms and for Munch's upcoming birthday party this weekend. We had planned on juicing up the small attendees with copious amounts of sugar before letting them loose on Munch's new trampoline (a surprise bday present from her grammy and umpa that LD plans to assemble Saturday night). We will have to rethink the outdoor activities, and definitely the sugar, should it rain as is now predicted. 

tiger mom, revisited

I read Jeannette Wall's The Glass Castle when I was pregnant with Munch. Not since Sybil (which I guess was actually made up?) had I read a story of such unfit parents. I thought to myself well hell's bells I can do better than this and lost no further sleep fretting over my potential inadequacies as a mother.

(That last part is 100% not true)

A year after its controversial debut, I finally picked up (or rather downloaded the audiobook) a book on the opposite end of the motherhood spectrum, Amy Chua's The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. This book was a hot topic of both the media and blogosphere last year and I am very late to the table. But I just finished listening to it and find myself saddled with all manner of weighty thoughts, so I'll share too.

When I first heard about the book I wrote this snarky blogpost and anticipated, that while listening to the account of how she tortured and berated her daughters into achievement, to be awash in that warm, fuzzy feeling of moral superiority.

So I was surprised by how much I initially agreed with Dr. Chua. I also believe that children don't become competent or confident by being praised, they do so by proving to themselves they can achieve at a level they previously thought impossible. If your mom isn't able to tell you that you can do better, no one will. I think the idea of "natural talent" is utter nonsense. Talent is practice. And I loved that she taught her daughters to never mock a foreign accent because an accent was a badge of courage.

Even though her writing was bombastic at times, I definitely understood where she was coming from. I looked up the Suzuki method and thought about getting Munch started in piano lessons. She stayed home from school in the morning so we could go over numbers.

My feelings towards Dr. Chua changed the more I listened. I got annoyed when she described, quite proudly, how she would ruin family vacations when her daughter didn't practice their instruments with the same intensity and duration as when at home. The part about her tearing up homemade birthday cards and the description of her behavior on the day of her mother in law's funeral were pretty bad. The treatment of her younger, more rebellious daughter, actually made me nauseous. Ironically, the more Dr. Chua tried to explain the difference between how she was raising her children as compared to how she was raising the family dogs, the more obvious the similarities became. Or even worse than dogs, she was raising circus animals.

To her credit, Dr. Chua doesn't try to make herself look good. She includes every detail of her cruel behavior and specific insults she inflicted upon her daughters. The story concludes on a conciliatory note- the rupture of her relationship between herself and her daughter over the issue of the violin causes the author to rethink her parenting strategy (I refuse to call this "the Chinese method" as Dr. Chua does as that seems insulting to about a billion rationally minded people). But whether she would have second guessed herself has she not been forced to flee a cafe in Moscow when her daughter started throwing glasswear is not entirely clear.

So, she went too far. Just like my 5% parenting rule, although it's obvious to anyone who knows me that I was kidding. But it's fair to point out that at least she was honest about how important her children's achievement was to her, whereas I have a tendency to pretend I am more laid back than I actually am. I'd like to say I came full circle with Dr. Chua, that, having temporarily expanded my thinking on the subject of extreme mothering only to have it exposed at the thinking of a soulless control freak, I've retreated on my Tiger Mom efforts. No piano lessons. But that wouldn't be as honest as she was towards the end of her book.

Perhaps I should admit to having just purchased this and this for Munch's upcoming third birthday.

Ahhh. There it is..... warm and fuzzy moral superiority.

in-laws, ashley, nicknames, and paper products

My in-laws were in town last week, and I was again reminded how good Munch is at identifying those adults in her life who might have only a passing familiarity with house rules. Once my FIL texted to ask what it was Munch usually ate for breakfast as he was being told "vitamins" - a reference to the Omega 3 gummies that she gets if she finishes all of her morning meal. She also learned that she could stretch what is typically twenty minutes of bedtime stories into almost an hour by demanding Grammy read only the longest books in her collection. She has tried the same trick on her mama, but it doesn't work as well as mama will occasionally paraphrase parts of her longer and less interesting books. Seriously. Anyone else been subjected to Tootle? It's mind-numbing, even for a children's story. I am almost certain Munch shares this assessment, but chooses to prioritize word count over character development, visual charm, literary appeal, or didactic merit.

LD dropped off his parents and picked up my sister during the same trip to the airport. I was worried about how Wow would receive my sister, and she him, as the initial meeting between Munch and Ashley had not gone well. Munch treated my sister with the same contemptuous disdain she'd show anyone who wasn't actively breastfeeding her, and I think Ashley, not accustomed to the-small-floppy-people-who-cry-and-poop-without-warning, took this personally. It was an inauspicious start to a relationship that has mended well.

In contrast, after only a few minutes of cuddling, Wow rewarded Ashley with gummy grins and happy cooing. Ashley, immediately and wholeheartedly smitten, bestowed upon our little man a barrage of nicknames I considered unbefitting his station in life.

Ashley loves a nickname, and I seem to have chosen a name for my son that is easily contorted into names that range between the short-and-very-dull to the mildly offensive. I think that was also a Simpson's episode - after rejecting a few names on the basis they would be warped into undesirable nicknames, Marge asks Homer what he thinks of the name "Bart" for their unborn son. He audibly considers the derivations - Cart, Lart, Mart, Vart, etc - and after finding no objectionable nickname (having missed the obvious) deems it a winner. Ashely and I had to find some middle ground.

The short visit went well, with Ashley able to spend some QT with both her niece and her nephew. She did mange to comment, unsolicited, on our household's conspicuous use of disposable paper products. This observation in no small way reflects the social ethos of both her law school and city of residence. I think I muttered something about the fact I have children (a claim that doesn't hold much weight when the item in question is disposable diapers), but thought to myself whatever.. I drive a Prius.

First Contact...

Now.